Ellen Datlow - The Best Horror of the Year – Volume One

However, right at that very moment, a monkey jumped up onto the hood of the car. It knuckle-walked to the windshield, then sat scratching its bottom and peering at me with benign interest.

I seized the opportunity thus offered. "Look, Harry! A monkey!"

Harry's mouth shut with a click of teeth. His eyes widened, then he scrambled forward, pointing at the windshield. "Monkey! Monkey! Daddy, monkey!"

The monkey yawned, showing yellow and rather alarmingly long teeth, scratched its rump, then ambled up the windshield and onto the roof, leaving a trail of muddy little pawprints up the glass.

Harry watched it go, then stared at the roof intently, as if he could see through the metal. After a few moments, he looked at me, then pointed to the roof and said solemnly, "Monkey." Then, in case his mother didn't understand, he helpfully translated it into Thai for her, "

Ling."

For the rest of the day, Harry was easily distracted. Any sign of grumpiness, and I'd point at some random location and say, "Harry, look! The monkey! Can you see the monkey?"

Harry would spring to his feet, quivering with excitement and peer in the direction I'd pointed. If there did actually happen to be a monkey there, he'd stare at it, then shout, "Monkey! Monkey! Monkey! Daddy, monkey!" If there was no monkey there (as there most often wasn't), he'd look at me and ask where it had gone. So I said that he'd have to be quick, as monkeys were very shy and didn't like people staring at them.

But as it turned out, that last part only really applied to me, and not Harry.

This really is a true story. What comes below is from the Bangkok Post, Saturday November 10, 2007:

IN-DEPTH: MISSING CHILDREN

In 2006, more than 46,000 children were reported missing in Thailand, according to the two-year-old National Missing Person's Bureau. But as staggering as that number is, yet more alarming is the fact that this represents a year-on-year increase of 6% over 2005.

46,000. Now you think about that for a moment.

Monkeys creep me out. Really, they're just… horrible. First, monkeys have very large teeth relative to the size of their head. Imagine a human whose canines are as long as the distance from the nose to the chin-about one third of the length of the head. Now imagine what it looks like when this person yawns.

Yes. Exactly. Just like that.

Second, monkeys have that whole almost-human-but-not-quite thing going on. Like their hands. They're almost human, but… deformed. Yes, I know that they're not really deformed, but as a human, my frame of reference for non-deformed is human. Dog's paws? No, they're not deformed. They're not close enough to trigger the human interpretation. But monkey's paws, that's a different story. Close enough to human so that your mind goes click, and instead of looking at them as an animal, you're interpreting in terms of the human. And from that perspective, monkeys are deformed. Freaks. The thumb's all wrong, and the joints are off, and they've got that depressed forehead with dead little black eyes peering out from underneath. You look at their feet, and they're almost human.

Almost… but not quite.

The Bangkok Post, Tuesday July 10, 2007

Samut Sakhon-Police announced they were scaling back their search for a missing 5-year-old girl yesterday, saying they would focus instead on tips on the girl's location. Sirikul Siriyamongkol was last seen on Sunday morning playing in the soi in front of the house her parents live in near Om Noi. More than 100 police officers and neighbors searched for the girl on Monday, making house-to-house enquiries as well as posting signs asking for help in locating her.

Like I said: it's all true. If they've found the little girl, there hasn't been a damn thing about it in the

Bangkok Post. Of course, maybe the editor just decided the return of the kid wasn't newsworthy.

Maybe.

Om Noi is about five klicks from my house.

When I was young, my father had something called the "doolally." When he wanted to get rid of me and my brother, he'd go to the kitchen door, stare down the garden-sometimes shielding his eyes with his hand, as if staring off in the far distance-and he'd slowly say, "You know, I think that's a doolally down there." He'd pause, then he'd say to me and my brother, "Quick! Go and get him! The doolally's eating our apples! Quick! Run!" And off my brother and I would toddle, down the garden to the apple trees, there to search fruitlessly for the fabled doolally, which I always pictured as some variety of fat pink bird, rather like a dodo, only squawkier and with a silly-looking head.

My father fooled me for years with the doolally. To me, it was real, and it was my sacred duty to stop it from nibbling on our apples. I could see its foolish head, its watery eyes framed by long curling lashes, and I knew it had wobbly legs like a chicken. We tried everything, my brother and I: traps, sneaking down the garden rather than running, even building a hide and concealing ourselves in it as we waited for the doolally to arrive (I was unclear as to whether it flew-clumsily, of course, shedding feathers and veering wildly to and fro-or stalked along like a heron, high-stepping over the fence from the neighbor's garden).

And, as all men turn into their fathers, I ended up doing the same thing to Harry as my father had done to me. Only, instead of a rather silly looking bird, Harry went chasing after a monkey.

I want you to picture a scene: It's a warm Saturday afternoon in the suburbs of Bangkok, the mango trees are whispering to themselves in the lazy breeze blowing through their leaves, kids are riding past my yard on their bikes whooping and hollering, and I'm sitting on my porch drinking a cold beer. Harry bimbles out of the house behind me and starts poking me with a fat finger. I look up, peer into the garden, then say slowly, "You know, I think I see the monkey over there." Harry runs to the porch rail, grips two of the railings in chubby hands, and peers into the garden. "There he is!" I say, pointing at the mango. "Harry! Go and get the monkey! Quickly!" And Harry races off, little legs twinkling as he runs to find the monkey, which apparently hides behind the largest of the three mango trees in our yard.

This goes on for months before things start to change.

The first change was small. My wife-the long-suffering Fon-had bought a huge bag of live king prawns, and we were going to barbecue them. The prawns were sitting in a bowl of water about a foot away from me, and I was getting the barbecue ready. Right at that moment, Harry came up to the bowl, looked down, then squatted next to it with an expression of intense interest on his face.

Every parent knows that expression: It's the one that kids get just before they try and stick the fork in the electrical outlet. I tried saying "no," but Harry took no notice, and poked one of the prawns experimentally. I knew what was coming next, so I pulled out the big guns: "Harry! Look over there! The monkey! Go and get him!"

Harry glanced over his shoulder at the mango tree, then shook his head. "Monkey mai mi," he said. (The monkey's not there.)

"Yes he is!" I said. "Look! Oo! The bugger's eating our mangos! Go get him, Harry!"

"Monkey mai mi," Harry repeated. Then he pointed behind me. "Monkey yu ni." (The monkey is here.)

I turned round. Behind me was the

Caryota mitis-the Clumping Fishtail palm-I'd planted near the house. The Clumping Fishtail isn't a neat palm tree like the ones you see lining roads in Beverly Hills. This palm is more like a messy explosion in a frond factory. It's got dark green leaves that sprout from numerous subtrunks, and although I kept this particular Clumping Fishtail trimmed, it still had a thick collection of foliage, and mostly obscured the low wall behind it.