Fear Nothing

like Johnny Mathis singing ‘Silver Bells.’”

I closed my eyes to try to picture the kitchen on that Christmas Eve — but also to have an excuse to shut out Angela’s haunted stare.

She said, “Rod was due home any minute, and we both were off work the entire holiday weekend.”

Rod Ferryman had been her husband.

Over three and a half years ago, six months after the Christmas Eve of which Angela was speaking, Rod had committed suicide with a shotgun in the garage of this house. Friends and neighbors had been stunned, and Angela had been devastated. He was an outgoing man with a good sense of humor, easy to like, not depressive, with no apparent problems that could have driven him to take his own life.

“I’d decorated the Christmas tree earlier in the day,” Angela said. “We were going to have a candlelight dinner, open some wine, then watch It’s a Wonderful Life. We loved that movie. We had gifts to exchange, lots of little gifts. Christmas was our favorite time of year, and we were like kids about the gifts….”

She fell silent.

When I dared to look, I saw that she had closed her eyes. Judging by her wrenched expression, her quicksilver memory had slipped from that Christmas night to the evening in the following June when she found her husband’s body in the garage.

Candlelight flickered across her eyelids.

In time, she opened her eyes, but for a while they remained fixed on a faraway sight. She sipped her brandy.

“I was happy,” she said. “The cookie smells. The Christmas music. And the florist had delivered a huge poinsettia from my sister, Bonnie. It was there on the end of the counter, so red and cheerful. I felt wonderful, really wonderful. It was the last time I ever felt wonderful — and the last time I ever will. So…I was spooning cookie batter onto a baking sheet when I heard this sound behind me, an odd little chirrup, and then something like a sigh, and when I turned, there was a monkey sitting right on this table.”

“Good heavens.”

“A rhesus monkey with these awful dark-yellow eyes. Not like their normal eyes. Strange.”

“Rhesus? You recognized the species?”

“I paid for nursing school by working as a lab assistant for a scientist at UCLA. The rhesus is one of the most commonly used animals in experiments. I saw a lot of them.”

“And suddenly one of them is sitting right here.”

“There was a bowl of fruit on the table — apples and tangerines. The monkey was peeling and eating one of the tangerines. Neat as you please, this big monkey placing the peelings in a tidy pile.”

“Big?” I asked.

“You’re probably thinking of an organ grinder’s monkey, one of those tiny cute little things. Rhesuses aren’t like that.”

“How big?”

“Probably two feet tall. Maybe twenty-five pounds.”

Such a monkey would seem enormous when encountered, unexpected, in the middle of a kitchen table.

I said, “You must have been pretty surprised.”

“More than surprised. I was a little scared. I know how strong those buggers are for their size. Mostly they’re peaceable, but once in a while you get one with a mean streak, and he’s a real handful.”

“Not the kind of monkey anyone would keep as a pet.”

“God, no. Not anyone normal — at least not in my book. Well, I’ll admit that rhesuses can be cute sometimes, with their pale little faces and that ruff of fur. But this one wasn’t cute.” Clearly, she could see it in her mind’s eye. “No, not this one.”

“So where did it come from?”

Instead of answering, Angela stiffened in her chair and cocked her head, listening intently to the house.

I couldn’t hear anything out of the ordinary.

Apparently, neither did she. Yet when she spoke again, she did not relax. Her thin hands were locked clawlike on the cordial glass. “I couldn’t figure how the thing got inside, into the house. December wasn’t overly warm that year. No windows or doors were open.”

“You didn’t hear it enter the room?”

“No. I was making noise with the cookie sheets, the mixing bowls. Music on the radio. But the damn thing must’ve been sitting on the table a minute or two, anyway, because by the time I realized it was there, it had eaten half the tangerine.”

Her gaze swept the kitchen, as though from the corner of her eye she had seen purposeful movement in the shadows at the periphery.

After steadying her nerves with brandy once more, she said, “Disgusting — a monkey right on the kitchen table, of all places.”

Grimacing, she brushed one trembling hand across the polished pine, as though a few of the creature’s hairs might still be clinging to the table four years after the incident.

“What did you do?” I pressed.

“I edged around the kitchen to the back door, opened it, hoping the monkey would run out.”

“But it was enjoying the tangerine, feeling pretty comfortable where it was,” I guessed.

“Yeah. It looked at the open door, then at me — and it actually seemed to laugh. This little tittering noise.”

“I swear I’ve seen dogs laugh now and then. Monkeys probably do, too.”

Angela shook her head. “Can’t remember any of them laughing in the lab. Of course, considering what their lives were like…they didn’t have much reason to be in high spirits.”

She looked up uneasily at the ceiling, on which three small overlapping rings of light quivered like the smoldering eyes of an apparition: images of the trio of ruby-red glasses on the table.

Encouraging her to continue, I said, “It wouldn’t go outside.”

Instead of responding, she rose from her chair, stepped to the back door, and tested the dead bolt to be sure it was still engaged.

“Angela?”

Hushing me, she pulled aside the curtain to peer at the patio and the moonlit yard, pulled it aside with trembling caution and only an inch, as if she expected to discover a hideous face pressed to the far side of the pane, gazing in at her.

My cordial glass was empty. I picked up the bottle, hesitated, and then put it down without pouring more.

When Angela turned away from the door, she said, “It wasn’t just a laugh, Chris. It was this frightening sound I could never adequately describe to you. It was an evil…an evil little cackle, a vicious edge to it. Oh, yes, I know what you’re thinking — this was just an animal, just a monkey, so it couldn’t be either good or evil. Maybe mean but not vicious, because animals can be bad-tempered, sure, but not consciously malevolent. That’s what you’re thinking. Well, I’m telling you, this one was more than just mean. This laugh was the coldest sound I’ve ever heard, the coldest and the ugliest — and evil.”

“I’m still with you,” I assured her.

Instead of returning to her chair from the door, she moved to the kitchen sink. Every square inch of glass in the windows above the sink was covered by the curtains, but she plucked at those panels of yellow fabric to make doubly sure we were fully screened from spying eyes.

Turning to stare at the table as though the monkey sat there even now, Angela said, “I got the broom, figuring I’d shoo the thing onto the floor and then toward the door. I mean, I didn’t take a whack at it or anything, just brushed at it. You know?”

“Sure.”

“But it wasn’t intimidated,” she said. “It exploded with rage. Threw down the half-eaten tangerine and grabbed the broom and tried to pull it away from me. When I wouldn’t let go, it started to climb the broom straight toward my hands.”

“Jesus.”