Growing Things and Other Stories Read online

  Dedication

  For the (not so) little ones

  Epigraph

  Tears water our growth.

  —William Shakespeare

  What terrified me will terrify others . . .

  —Mary Shelley

  Daddy’s gonna show me the monsters.

  Mummy’s gonna show me the creeps.

  —The St. Pierre Snake Invasion, “Sex Dungeons & Dragons”

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Growing Things

  Swim Wants to Know If It’s as Bad as Swim Thinks

  Something About Birds

  The Getaway

  Nineteen Snapshots of Dennisport

  Where We All Will Be

  The Teacher

  Notes for “The Barn in the Wild”

  _________

  Our Town’s Monster

  A Haunted House Is a Wheel upon Which Some Are Broken

  It Won’t Go Away

  Notes from the Dog Walkers

  Further Questions for the Somnambulist

  The Ice Tower

  The Society of the Monsterhood

  Her Red Right Hand

  It’s Against the Law to Feed the Ducks

  The Thirteenth Temple

  Notes

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also by Paul Tremblay

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Growing Things

  1.

  Their father stayed in his bedroom, door locked, for almost two full days. Now he paces in the mudroom, and he pauses only to pick at the splintering doorjamb with a black fingernail. Muttering to himself, he shares his secrets with the weather-beaten door.

  Their father has always been distant and serious to the point of being sullen, but they do love him for reasons more than his being their sole lifeline. Recently, he stopped eating and gave his share of the rations to his daughters, Marjorie and Merry. However, the lack of food has made him squirrelly, a word their mother—who ran away more than four years ago—used liberally when describing their father. Spooked by his current erratic behavior, and feeling guilty, as if they were the cause of his suffering, the daughters agreed to keep quiet and keep away, huddled in a living room corner, sitting in a nest of blankets and pillows, playing cards between the couch and the silent TV with its dust-covered screen. Yesterday, Merry drew a happy face in the dust, but Marjorie quickly erased it, turning her palm black. There is no running water with which to wash her hands.

  Marjorie is fourteen years old but only a shade taller than her eight-year-old sister. She says, “Story time.” Marjorie has repeatedly told Merry that their mother used to tell stories, and that some of her stories were funny while others were sad or scary. Those stories, the ones Merry doesn’t remember hearing, were about everyone and everything.

  Merry says, “I don’t want to listen to a story right now.” She wants to watch her father. Merry imagines him with a bushy tail and a twitchy face full of acorns. Seeing him act squirrelly reinforces one of the few memories she has of her mother.

  “It’s a short one, I promise.” Marjorie is dressed in the same cutoff shorts and football shirt she’s been wearing for a week. Her brown hair is black with grease, and her fair skin is a map of freckles and acne. Marjorie has the book in her lap. All Around the World.

  “All right,” Merry says, but she won’t really listen. She’ll continue to watch her father, who digs through the winter closet, throwing out jackets, itchy sweaters, and snow pants. As far as she knows, it is still summer.

  The vibrant colors of Marjorie’s book cover are muted in the darkened living room. Candles on the fireplace mantel flicker and dutifully melt away. Still, it is enough light for the sisters. They are used to it. Marjorie closes her eyes and opens the book randomly. She flips to a page with a cartoon New York City. The buildings are brick red and sea blue, and they crowd the page, elbowing and wrestling each other for the precious space. Merry has already colored the streets green with a crayon worn down to a nub smaller than the tip of her thumb.

  They are so used to trying not to disturb their father, Marjorie whispers: “New York City is the biggest city in the world, right? When it started growing there, it meant it could grow anywhere. It took over Central Park. The stuff came shooting up, crowding out the grass and trees, the flower beds. The stuff grew a foot an hour, just like everywhere else.”

  Yesterday’s story was about all the farms in the Midwest, and how the corn, wheat, and soy crops were overrun. They couldn’t stop the growing things and that was why there wasn’t any more food. Merry had heard her tell that one before.

  Marjorie continues, “The stuff poked through the cement paths, soaked up Central Park’s ponds and fountains, and started filling the streets next.” Marjorie talks like the preacher used to, back when Mom would force them all to make the trip down the mountain, into town and to the church. Merry is a confusing combination of sad and mad that she remembers details of that old, wrinkly preacher, particularly his odd smell of baby powder mixed with something earthy, yet she has almost no memory of her mother.

  Marjorie says, “They couldn’t stop it in the city. When they cut it down, it grew back faster. People didn’t know how or why it grew. There’s no soil under the streets, you know, in the sewers, but it still grew. The shoots and tubers broke through windows and buildings, and some people climbed the growing things to steal food, money, and televisions, but it quickly got too crowded for people, for everything, and the giant buildings crumbled and fell. It grew fast there, faster than anywhere else, and there was nothing anyone could do.”

  Merry, half listening, takes the green crayon nub out of her pajama pocket. She changes her pajamas every morning, unlike her sister, who doesn’t change her clothes at all. She draws green lines on the hardwood floor, wanting their father to come over and catch her, and yell at her. Maybe it’ll stop him from putting on all the winter clothes, stop him from being squirrelly.

  Their father waddles into the living room, breathing heavily, used air falling out of his mouth, his face suddenly hard, old, and gray, and covered in sweat. He says, “We’re running low. I have to go out to look for food and water.” He doesn’t hug or kiss his daughters but pats their heads. Merry drops the crayon nub at his feet, and it rolls away. He turns and they know he means to leave without any promise of returning. He stops at the door, cups his mittened and gloved hands around his mouth, and shouts toward his direct left, into the kitchen, as if he hadn’t left his two daughters on their pile of blankets in the living room.

  “Don’t answer the door for anyone! Don’t answer it! Knocking means the world is over!” He opens the door, but only enough for his body to squeeze out. The daughters see nothing of the world outside but a flash of bright sunlight. A breeze bullies into their home, along with a buzz-saw sound of wavering leaves.

  2.

  Merry sits, legs crossed, a foot away from the front door. Marjorie is back in the blanket nest, sleeping. Merry draws green lines on the front door. The lines are long and thick, and she draws small leaves on the ends. She’s never seen the growing things, but it’s what she imagines.

  The shades are pulled low, drooping over the sills like limp sails, and the curtains are drawn tight. They stopped looking outside after their father begged them not to, and they won’t look out the windows now that he’s not here. When it first started happening, when their father came home with the pickup truck full of food and other supplies, he stammered through complex and contradictory answers to his daughters’ many questions. His knotty hands moved more t
han his lips, removing and replacing his soot-stained baseball cap. Merry mainly remembers that he said something about the growing things being like a combination of bamboo and kudzu. Merry tugged on his flannel shirtsleeve and asked what bamboo and kudzu were. Their father smiled but also looked away quickly, like he’d said something he shouldn’t have.

  Outside the wind gusts and whistles around the creaky old cabin. The mudroom and living room windows are dark rectangles outlined in a yellow light, and their glass rattles in the frames. Merry stares at the wooden door listening for a sound she’s never heard before: a knock on her front door. She sits and listens until she can’t stand it any longer. She runs upstairs to her bedroom, picks out a pair of new pajamas, changes again in the dark, and carefully folds the dirty set and places it back in her bureau. Merry then returns to the nest and wakes her older sister.

  “Is he coming back? Is he running away, too?”

  Marjorie comes to and rises slowly. She lifts the book from her lap and hugs it to her chest. Her fingers crinkle the edges of the pages and worry the cardboard corners of the cover. Despite the acne, she looks younger than her fourteen.

  Marjorie shakes her head, answering a different question, one that wasn’t spoken, and says, “Story time.”

  Merry used to enjoy the stories before they were always about the growing things. Now she wishes that Marjorie would stop with the stories, wishes that Marjorie could just be her big sister and quit trying to be like their mother.

  “No more stories. Please. Just answer my questions.”

  Marjorie says, “Story first.”

  Merry balls her hands into fists and fights back tears. She’s as angry now as she was when Marjorie told all the kids at the playground in town that Merry liked to catch spiders and rip off each leg with tweezers, and that she kept a jar of their fat legless bodies in her bureau.

  “I don’t want to hear a story!”

  “I don’t care. Story first.”

  Marjorie always gets her way, even now, even as she continues to withdraw and fade. She leaves the nest only to go to the bathroom, and she walks like an older woman, the joints and muscles in her legs stiff with disuse.

  Merry asks, “You promise to answer my questions if I listen to a story?”

  All Marjorie says is “Story first. Story first.”

  Merry isn’t sure if this is a yes or a maybe.

  Marjorie tells of the areas around the big cities, places called the suburbs. How the stuff ruined everyone’s pretty lawns and amateur gardens, then started taking root in the cracks of sidewalks and driveways. People poured and sprayed millions of gallons of weed killer, Liquid-Plumr, lye, and bleach. None of it worked on the stuff, and all the chemicals leached into the groundwater, which flowed into drinking-water reservoirs, poisoning it all.

  Like most of Marjorie’s stories, Merry doesn’t understand everything, like what groundwater is. But she still understands the story. It makes a screaming noise inside her head, and it is all that she can do to keep it from coming out.

  She says, “I listened to your story, now you have to answer my question, okay?” Merry takes the book away from Marjorie, who surprisingly does not resist.

  “I’m tired.” Marjorie licks her dry and cracked lips.

  “You promised. When is he coming back?”

  “I don’t know, Merry. I really don’t.” With the blankets curled and twisted around her legs and arms, it’s as if she’s been pulled apart and her pieces sprinkled about their nest.

  Merry wants to shrink and crawl inside one of her sister’s pockets. She asks in her smallest voice, “Was this how it happened last time?”

  “What last time? What are you talking about?”

  “When Mommy ran away? Was this how it happened when she ran away?”

  “No. She wasn’t happy, so she left. He’s going to get food and water.”

  “Is he happy? He didn’t look happy when he left.”

  “He’s happy. He’s fine. He isn’t leaving us.”

  “He’s coming back, though, right?”

  “Yes. He’ll come back.”

  “Do you promise?”

  “I promise.”

  “Good.”

  Merry believes in her big sister, the one who once punched a third grader named Elizabeth in the nose for putting a daddy longlegs down the back of Merry’s shirt.

  Merry leaves the nest and resumes her post, sitting cross-legged in the mudroom, in the shadow of the front door. The wind continues to increase in velocity. The house stretches, settles, and groans, the sounds eager for their chance to fill the void. Then, on the other side of the front door, brushing against the wood, there’s a light rapping, a knocking, but if it is a knocking, it’s being done by doll-sized hands with doll-sized fingertips small enough to find the cracks in the door that nobody can see, small enough to get inside the door and come through on the other side. The inside.

  Merry stays seated, but twists and yells, “Marjorie! I think someone is knocking on the door!” Merry covers her mouth, horrified that whoever is knocking must’ve heard her. Even in her terror, she realizes the gentle sounds are so slight, small, quiet, that maybe she’s making up the knocking, making up her very own story.

  Marjorie says, “I don’t hear anything.”

  “Someone is knocking lightly. I can hear them.” Merry presses her ear against the wood, closes her eyes, and tries to finish this knocking story. Single knocks become a flurry issued by thousands of miniature doll hands, those faceless toys, maybe they crawled all the way here from New York City, and they scramble and climb over each other for a chance to knock the door down. Merry wraps her arms around her chest, terrified that the door will collapse on top of her. The knocking builds to a crescendo, then ebbs along with the dying wind.

  Merry rests her forehead on the door and says, “It stopped.”

  Marjorie says, “No one’s there. Don’t open the door.”

  3.

  Marjorie hasn’t eaten anything in days. They are down to a handful of beef jerky and a half-box of Cheerios. In the basement, there are only two one-gallon bottles of water left, and they rest in a corner on the staircase landing. Flashlight in hand, Merry sits on the damp wood of the landing, plastic water jugs pressing against her thigh. It’s cooler down here, but her feet sweat inside her rubber rain boots. The boots are protection in case she decides to walk toward the far wall and hunt for jars of pickles or preserves her father may have stashed.

  Merry has been sitting with her flashlight pointed at the earthen floor for more than two hours. When she first came down here, the tips of the growing things were subtle protrusions; hints of green and brown peeking through the sun-starved dirt. Now the tallest spearlike stalks stretch for more than a foot above the ground. The leafy ends of the plants would tickle her knees were she to take the trip across the basement. She wonders if the leaves would feel rough against her skin. She wonders if the leaves are somehow poisonous, despite never having heard her sister describe them that way.

  Earlier that morning, Merry decided she had to do something other than stare at the front door and listen for the knocking. She put herself to work and rearranged the candles around the fireplace mantel, and she lit new ones, although, according to her father, she wasn’t old enough to use matches. She singed the tips of her thumb and pointer finger watching that first blue flame curl up the matchstick. After the candles, she prepared a change of clothes for Marjorie and left the small bundle, folded tightly, on the couch. She picked out a green dress Marjorie never wore but Merry not-so-secretly coveted. Then she swept the living room and kitchen floors. The scratch of the broom’s straws on the hardwood made her uneasy.

  Marjorie slept most of the day, waking only to tell a quick story of the growing things cracking mountains open like eggs, drowning the canyons and valleys in green and brown and drinking up all the ponds, lakes, and rivers.

  Merry runs the beam of her flashlight over the stone-and-mortar foundation walls bu
t sees no cracks and scoffs at the most recent tale of the growing things. Marjorie’s stories had always mixed truth with exaggeration. For example, it was true that Merry used to hunt and kill spiders, and it was true all those twitchy legs were why she killed them. Simply watching a spider crawling impossibly on the walls or ceiling and seeing all that choreographed movement set off earthquake-sized tremors somewhere deep in her brain. But she was never so cruel as to pull off their legs with tweezers, and she certainly never collected their button-sized bodies. Merry never understood why Marjorie would say those horrible, made-up things about her.

  Still, Merry initially believed Marjorie’s growing things stories, believed the growing things were even worse than what Marjorie portrayed, which is what frightened Merry the most. Now, however, seeing the sprouts and stalks living in the basement makes it all seem so much less scary. Yes, they are real, but they are not city-dissolving, mountain-destroying monsters.

  Merry thinks of an experiment, a test, and shuts off the flashlight. She hears only her own breathing, a pounding bass drum, so big and loud it fills her head, and in the absolute dark, her head is everything. Recognizing her body as the source of all that terrible noise is too much and she starts to panic, but she calms herself down by imagining the sounds of the tubular wooden stalks growing, stretching, reaching out and upward. She turns the flashlight on again, surveys the earthen basement floor, and she’s certain there has been more growth and new sprouts emerging from the soil. The sharp and elongated tips of the tallest stalks sport clusters of shockingly green leaves the size of playing cards, the ends of which are also tapered and pointed. The stalks grow in tidy, orderly rows, although the rows grow more crowded and the formations more complex as the minutes pass. Merry repeats turning off the flashlight, sitting alone in the dark, breathing, listening, and then with the light back on, she laughs and quietly claps a free hand against her leg in recognition of the growing things’ progress.