Cookies For A Monkey, Part I

It seems that it's Girl Scout cookie time again, so I thought I'd offer up a few thousand words I've written on the subject. Maybe I'll send them to an actual publisher one day. Hope you enjoy Cookies For A Monkey.


The house stood, as creepy places tend to do, at the end of a long street, cut off from its nearest neighbors by a small marsh. The marsh was fed by a narrow, sluggish stream whose black waters took the stubborn and most un-streamlike attitude of standing still as much as possible. covering only an acre or so, it stank in the summer, and changed to a gooey, half-frozen muck in the winter. Only after a heavy spring rain did the stream move, usually managing to flood the street in the process, staging a damp rebellion at being flushed from its misery. The stream had grown quite comfortable with its misery, and resented any intrusion, which made it the perfect neighbor for the dwelling that stood near the edge of the marsh.

To say the house was creepy was giving it the benefit of the doubt. Creepy places make the hair on the back of your neck tingle, and your skin crawl with the urge to take it somewhere else, quickly. The house at the end of Elm Street (so named for the giant trees that lurched over the sidewalks) found the Creeps a nice place to start, but lacking in overall menace. The nearer one got to the house, the Creeps began to rub shoulders with the Willies and the Shakes, until standing at last in front of the cracked, uneven concrete path that led to the front door one was greeted by the Heebie-Jeebies, with their red bulging eyes and great grinning fangs. The unfortunate few who actually made it this far found their skin doing its level best to tear away from their bones and hot-foot it back the way it had come, leaving its owner to the mercy of the monsters and the elements.

The house itself was drab and rickety, sagging under its age until the windows and doors had settled well out of their original alignment. It had the look of being about to fall over at any minute, but the walls leaned together in a way that suggested the house couldn't decide which way to fall, so it would be best to remain upright until its mind was made up. There were five stairs, each slanted at a different angle, that led up to a front porch as wide as the house. The rails of the porch pitched and swayed like a madman's roller coaster. The windows on either side of the scratched and blotchy oaken door were perpetually blacked out by heavy velvet curtains gone grey with dust and fading. Their original color remains anyone's guess. The windows of the second story and attic were less fortunate, having either no shade at all or being draped in tattered white rags, liberally stained yellow and brown from years of neglect, hung upon bent brass rods. Any paint on the house had long since peeled away, a bit still clinging in odd corners and under eaves, leaving the whole outside to settle into a slimy, mushroom-grey color, broken only by the muddy film covering the ground-level basement windows that had been painted black from the inside. The house completely failed to please the eye.

This effect suited the owner of the house just fine. He was a busy man and had no time for interruptions. The last thing he wanted was a neat, well-kept abode that would invite strangers to disturb him with encyclopedia sets, aluminum siding, or free samples of Tibetan floor wax. The effect also held at bay the endless stream of fund-raising urchins that prowled the neighborhood, selling everything from magazines to coupon books to sickly sweet globs of sugar that only passed for candy because the boxes they came in said that was what was inside. The Doctor (as he called himself) had once tested a piece of said candy in his laboratory. After igniting it with a welding torch, because the glob had been resistant to lesser degrees of heat, the resulting fire not only scorched and cracked the marble table-top, but melted a pair of stainless steel tongs and burned for two days before finally smoldering out. The Doctor had considered further research, but in the end decided that acids, volatile chemicals, and high-voltage electricity were hazardous enough.

As for The Doctor himself, no one knew his real name. Even The Doctor had forgotten: it had been lost long ago amid strange scribbles and noxious fumes. He didn't miss it, and it didn't miss him, glad to be rid of the lanky, reed-thin oddball that never went to any fun parties. No good being a name, it reasoned, if you were never introduced to anyone. Some of the bolder townsfolk had badgered the mailman for his name, but found no help. All of the mail was addressed simply to "The Doctor", in care of the Marmoset Preservation Society, which was an obvious but unquestioned front: The Doctor hated marmosets, and most other furry critters to boot.

Oddly enough, the MPS had to date received $138.25 in donations, sent by people with more money than common sense and precious little of either. Not one penny had gone to the preservation of anything other than The Doctor's coffee addiction.

Today, like most days, found the scientist in his lab, fine-tuning his equipment for the day's experiments. The only thing missing was Steve, the assistant The Doctor had built by morbid arts from body parts collected in nefarious ways. Aside from one arm being longer than the other, The Doctor had done a decent job of it.

At the moment, however, Steve was crumpled in a gangly heap at the base of the far wall. He had been thrown there yesterday by a power switch that had chosen an unfortunate time to surge. After flopping around like a spasmodic tarantula for a few minutes, Steve had finally collapsed and gone still. The Doctor had left him there: Steve would come around eventually. He was reliable that way.

With his apparati finally to his liking, The Doctor lit several burners on the tables and got to work. He was currently experimenting with a formula that not only had tripled the brainpower of his lab rats, but gave them the ability to shoot heat rays from their eyes. This had come as a pleasant surprise to The Doctor, and a frightful shock to the mangy, one-eyed cat that slunk through the hidden places of the house. The cat had seen his seventh life vanish in a raging crossfire of the scorching beams; thereupon he took his remaining lives and retired quietly to the seashore, to live off whatever dead fish and seaweed the tide washed in.

The Doctor had been pleased with the initial results, but after three days the rats brainpower not only returned to normal but dropped far below it, without the loss of the heat rays. The rats now sat mindlessly in their cages, occasionally zapping off their own tails and starting random fires throughout the laboratory. Several had also gone obviously insane, but The Doctor hardly noticed. He had been insane for many years now, and regarded his madness as another man might regard a comfortable sweater. But the loss of brainpower would not do at all.

When a large vat had begun to bubble nicely, The Doctor went to a small, locked cabinet and took out a short, fat bottle. Bringing it back to the table, he set it down, then pulled on heavy, black rubber gloves that came nearly to his elbows. The bottle was made of a heavy red glass and strengthened by a web of brass wires wrapped around it. A metal label attached to the front held the letters of a long-forgotten alphabet, which said, had anyone been able to read it, "Put This Bottle Down NOW!" The Doctor would have ignored the warning in any case. He was that kind of person.

The Doctor unstoppered the bottle, releasing an odor that would have been unpleasant on a garbage scow. He was just about to pour a few drops into the now-boiling vat, when his concentration was shattered by a loud knocking on the front door. Standing bolt upright, The Doctor flung a single drop of the purple-red liquid high into the air, which came down on the head of one of the rats, and promptly dissolved it.

The Doctor shook his head in amazement. No one ever knocked on his door. It was a practice he soundly discouraged, often in violent and unhealthy ways. But just when he was certain he'd imagined it (he was crazy, after all), the knock sounded again. Louder, longer, more insistent. He re-corked the bottle and set it slowly and deliberately on the table. This was unacceptable. How did people expect a Serious Man of Science to take over the world with an army of intelligent, pyrokinetic rats when he is constantly being interrupted?

Now the knocking was accompanied by the distinct thuds of kicking. At this point The Doctor normally sent Steve to get rid of the intruder. But seeing that Steve was still piled in an unconscious mound on the floor, he would have to take care of it himself. The Doctor smiled thinly: it had been a long time. He would enjoy this.

(continued)