The Weekly Screed (#652)

The monkey’s smoke alarm
by David Benjamin

MADISON, Wis. — Anyone who’s had a normally traumatic childhood knows several versions of The Monkey’s Paw — not one of them remotely similar to the original short story by W.W. Jacobs. It’s been passed down through numberless generations of kids, usually told with the intention of scaring the bejesus out of the littlest brother or sister in the room (or better yet, in the tent).

In most iterations, the original monkey has no role, nor does the tale normally explain how the paw got separated from said monkey. The ape’s dead. The paw is not. Nor can it be killed. The severed hand of the irrelevant monkey, as the story goes, has powers to somehow, preternaturally, re-animate itself with the sort of persistence that one associates with vampires and crabgrass.

The Story of the Monkey’s Paw, passed down willy-nilly as it has been from millions of kids — some vividly inventive, some dumber than a crusted nutbar — to millions of other, smaller, more frightened kids, has been spun into endless variety. For decades, the story has been the grist and pinnacle of kids’ slumber parties, sleepovers and camping trips — especially camping trips. Ideally, it’s told in the dark, on a damp night in a claustrophobic pup tent, outside of which the wind whistles, trees rustle like the folds of a blood-stiffened shroud, and animals make sounds that suggest insatiable hunger for the tasty balls of little boys.

The Monkey’s Paw is an infinitely malleable tale of horror that both measures and expands the lengths and depths of the 12-year-old imagination. The disembodied paw — sprung to inexplicable life and ravenous for blood, flesh and atrocity — has committed every conceivable outrage against the human body. Eyes gouged from their moorings. Throats ripped open. Heads split open like cantaloupes. The testicles of grown men squashed like fat grapes and shoved into empty eyeholes. Virgin sisters violated in ways so unspeakable that only their brothers are capable of describing every icky surgical detail.

The story never ends, of course. Like all good monsters, the monkey’s paw is immortal. It always disappears, wounded perhaps but never dead — shot, stabbed, smashed, defingered, torched, pulverized, pounded to a pulp, disfigured beyond recognition, hideous to behold and yet, somehow, able to barely skitter under a door, into a crease, behind a rock or into the ocean, there to rest, recover, regenerate, re-finger and emerge again, healthy, fully digital, blessed with supersimian strength and desperate for nourishment on the blood, guts and genitals of the innocent and unsuspecting.

I was reminded of the monkey’s paw on a recent chill November morning, when I woke to the relentless beeping of the smoke alarm high on the bedroom ceiling. It pressed into my eardrums like the rigid finger of a bodiless primate.

The maker of the alarm, the building super, any reputable electrician will testify that the constant, shrill, ear-shattering beep of the alarm is a friendly (but incredibly annoying) reminder to change its battery. Simply plug in a new 9-volt, and the noise — as maddening as Raymond Chandler’s red wind — will stop.

This is perhaps the most vicious lie in all the great, mendacious tyranny of technology. Anyone whose smoke alarm has suddenly, insidiously ceased its customary silence, replaced by that steady reprise of nerve-grating beeps  — which are separated just long enough to maximize the irritation — knows the truth.

It’s never going to stop.

Still, you have to do what you can. Else, it will beep on, and on, burrowing into your brain, wrecking your sleep, setting every nerve on edge as your whole being freezes, tightens, tenses to the snapping point as it awaits — aargh! There it is — the next beep, like nails on a blackboard, like a needle through your temple.

So, you climb, teetering, up the ladder, clawing at the wall or a door lintel to keep your balance, reaching awkwardly, one-handed, struggling to wrench open the balky battery nook, pulling and twisting at the jammed battery, finally freeing it from its grip. As you hold the battery in your hand, it comes again, digging gibbon-fingers into your sanity.

Beeeeep.

While you’re up there, you unscrew the entire assembly (beeeeep). You study its entrails. Two main wires, one red, one green. If you were to detach both (beeeeep), would it stop? But you leave them now, screw it back up (beeeeep), almost tipping the ladder and plunging face-first to the hardwood floor.

With the supposedly dead 9-volt (beeeeep), you flee, to the hardware store, where the battery display proudly guarantees each 9-volt for five years of cathedral silence. You laugh cynically. Who records the date of a battery replacement? Who remembers how long a battery lasted? Was it five years or five months?

Back home (beeeeep). Back up, ever so carefully (beeeeep), the ladder. You jam in the new 9-volt, crisply. You snap the battery nook shut. You sway atop the ladder. You cling. You stare. You wait, your body as rigid as a rake-handle.

Beeeeep.

You know you’ve lost now, but you keep (beeeeep) fighting. You try the battery the opposite way, to no avail (beeeeep). You unscrew, you glare at the red wire, the green wire (beeeeep). You rip both wires free. You hold the alarm, cut off from its power source, in both hands. You stare at it hatefully. It stares back.

Beeeeep.

As you fire it at the wall, the ladder tips, you crash to the floor, dislocating various joints. You crawl to the cracked remains of the alarm, its wires dangling inert and lifeless from its underbelly, like the tentacles of a seemingly dead alien.

Beeeeep.

If you had a cellar, you would bury it there (beeeeep), under cement. Instead, you try the balcony, inside the gas grill, where it achieves a sort of echo effect (bee-bee-beeeep). It does the same — with increased volume — inside the washing machine, then grows louder in the closet beneath a pile of blankets (BEEEEEP). Even in the trunk of the car, from the parking garage, eight floors below (bmmmmmp), it somehow creeps between the walls, worming upward ‘til, as your head hits the pillow, it’s there — in your mind, if not your ear (beeeeeep).

Near now to your breaking point, you rush back down, snatch it (beeeeep) from the trunk. You fling it to the concrete floor and you jump on top of it, reducing it to bits and pieces, splitting is turtlelike carapace into a dozen (beeeeep) shards until, from deep within the guts of the tireless device, it crawls free — a disembodied monkey’s paw.

With an agility and speed that paralyzes you with terror, it leaps. Strong, dexterous and merciless, its icy fingers scurry up your pants, bound for your testicles…