The Best Horror of the Year – Volume One

Harry and the Monkey by Euan Harvey

Urban legend: a modern story of obscure origin and with little or no supporting evidence that spreads spontaneously in varying forms and often has elements of humor, moralizing, or horror:

Are there alligators living in the New York City sewer system, or is that just an urban legend?

Also called urban myth.

[Origin: 1970-75]

Based on the

Random House Unabridged Dictionary,

© Random House, Inc. 2006.

This is a true story.

I have three kids, all boys. Son number three is Harry. He's younger than the others by three years (he is three and a half when this story begins); he looks more like me, and he's a devious and unscrupulous manipulator-like all youngest children. He laughs a lot, cries a lot, breaks things a lot, and fights with his brothers a lot. He goes to kindergarten with all the other kids, plays football (well… runs after the ball flapping his arms and howling with glee, anyway), enjoys twisting the arms and heads off his collection of cheap plastic action figures, and gets cranky when he's tired.

The reason I'm telling you this is simple: Harry's a perfectly normal kid. Average and unremarkable.

If you think about it, that makes what happened even more unsettling.

What if it's not only him?

What if it's all kids?

You've heard of the crocodile in the sewers, right? Kid gets reptile for present, reptile grows (as they do), kid gets bored, flushes it down toilet. Only… the croc doesn't die. It stays down there, preying on rats and swimming around in the pungent dark. Getting bigger. And perhaps, as it grows, it tires of rats. Then one day, when it's down in the fetid gloom, just its evil little eyes above the surface of the water, it sees a splash of light: a man holding a flashlight. Next thing is a little v-shaped ripple, and the eyes draw closer to the puddle of light and the man wearing his bright yellow rubber boots. Closer, and closer…

A nasty little image. And one that's recognizable to anyone from the West. The story may not be true-but it resonates.

But in Thailand, where I live, that particular myth isn't part of the culture. No resonance. Mention it in conversation, and you'll get a WTF? look. No crocs in the sewers here. At least, no stories about crocs in the sewers-but we'll come to that later.

There are urban myths in Thailand, though-just not the ones we have in the West. And like all urban myths, they've got a very nasty little core to them, a little splinter of horror embedded in the story, something that festers in your mind so that you absolutely must tell someone else.

The nastiest one I've heard is the rot jap dek.

See, there's this van. A black van, with shiny windows so you can't see in. And this van cruises round the main roads, and into the sois, and through the moobahns, and it's looking for children. What happens is this: the van follows a kid, and if the van sees that the kid is alone, then it silently (because the engine in this van is specially made to be very quiet) pulls up next to the kid, and the doors to the van quietly slide open, and a pair of very long and very thin arms snatches up the kid, and pulls him (screaming, kicking) into the thick darkness inside the van. Then the doors close, the van purrs off, and no one ever sees the kid again.

Unpleasant, right?

The trimmings to this story vary. Some versions sound plausible-if horrific. There's one that says the van is driven by Chinese organleggers, and the kids have their hearts, lungs, kidneys, and all the rest chopped out and sold on the black market. Less believable versions say it's Cambodians, the Khmer Rouge stealing Thai kids to raise them as guerrillas, Janissary-style. I've even heard it's a luk-chin factory, which has found out that human flesh makes its meatballs more delicious.

But though the semiotic crud the story has accumulated varies, the central element remains the same: a black minivan that steals children.

This is the

rot jap dek.

Remember this. It's important, and if you're very unlucky, there may be a test. Black van:

rot jap dek.

The most famous monkey colony in Thailand is in Lopburi. There, as in Delhi, monkeys scamper through traffic, beg (or steal) food, execute primal snatch-and-grab raids on unwary tourists, swarm over the Angkor-period ruins in the town center, and generally make a bloody nuisance of themselves.

There are however numerous other monkey colonies in urban areas in Thailand, some surprisingly close to Bangkok. One of these is at Don Hoi Lod in Samut Songkhram, about two hours drive from my house. Don Hoi Lod is on the coast-but if you're getting an image of palm trees and white sand, bin it. Just south of Bangkok, the coast of Thailand is swamp and mangrove forest. The "beach" at Don Hoi Lod is mud. Lots of mud, with masses of mangroves. So why go?

Well, crabs like mangroves. A lot. And so, it turns out, do other edible sea creatures. Which in turns means that Don Hoi Lod is famous for cheap seafood: crabs, oysters, tiger prawns, and fish-they're all there in abundance.

And so, for some reason, are monkeys. Whether the monkeys lived there before and the restaurants at Don Hoi Lod just encroached on their habitat, or whether the monkeys moved in to scavenge off the seafood leftovers, I don't know. What I do know is that Don Hoi Lod is crawling (scampering?) with monkeys.

So there I was, driving down the narrow road that leads from the Thonburi-Paktho highway. It's a holiday-the Day of Vesak, if I remember right-so the traffic's fairly heavy and we're just bimbling slowly along, not quite in a traffic jam, but not moving very fast, either. Hunger is making the boys grumpy, the air-con is giving me a headache, and the sun keeps catching the back windscreen of the car in front, making me wince.

And then Robert (son number one) does something unpleasant to Harry. I can't remember what exactly; I think it had to do with sweets and the denying thereof. Harry starts squalling, and tugging on my shirt from behind demanding that I intervene. Fon (my wife) snarls at Harry (she's got a worse headache than me). In response to this, Harry starts yelling, and the other two boys in the back start squabbling loudly.

In short, we're right at that stage familiar to every parent, that point just before you crack and start doing all the things that parenting books tell you not to.

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.

If this was an M. R. James story, there'd be some kind of smooth monkey face poking out of the foliage, probably with its eyes tightly shut. After a moment it would withdraw, quite possibly with a sinister rustle. If it was a Stephen King story, then maybe the monkey would step out from behind the palm and BITE MY FACE OFF!

But this is a true story. There was no monkey. Or rather… I couldn't see a monkey.

From that point on, the routine was that I would point out the monkey, and Harry would tell me I was wrong and tell me where the monkey really was. This was amusing for a while, and then Harry changed it again.

So there I am, different afternoon, a couple of months later. I'm on the verandah. I hear the door slam and the lines of shells above it tinkle-this means Harry is coming.

I wait for a moment, and soon enough I become aware of a solemn presence beside me. I look down, and there's Harry, blanket over one shoulder, half-drunk bottle of milk in one hand.

"What?" I ask, when Harry says nothing.

With immense dignity, Harry points to the Clumping Fishtail palm next to the verandah.

There is a short silence as I wait for Harry.

"Yes?" I say finally.

"Daddy, monkey," Harry says. "Monkey yu ni."

I blink. "What?"

Harry suddenly laughs, points to the palm tree, and says, "Daddy! Monkey yu ni! Monkey! Daddy, run!"

When I realize the cheeky little bugger has stolen my lines, I can't stop smiling. I rush after Harry, arms outstretched to tickle, and he shrieks in delight and runs indoors, waving his half-drunk bottle of milk above his head.

As I recall, I didn't actually look at the palm tree.

The very last change-right before the fecal matter hit the fan-was the most important. Some time after Harry had started pointing out the monkey to me, and suggesting that I run after it (little blighter), he had a nightmare.

My fault-he'd been watching a ghost movie, a rather nasty one, and now he was convinced that the headless ghost was coming for him. In fact, according to Harry, it was hiding behind the curtains above his bed, just waiting for me to leave so it could creep down and eat him. As it was a headless ghost, I attempted to point out the problems it would encounter in this endeavor (lack of teeth or mouth seeming to be the primary ones), but alas, Harry wasn't persuaded by my faultless logic.

I took him into our room (my wife's and mine), put out the small spare mattress and made a nest for him. He wouldn't settle though. (The ghost had apparently followed him in, the nasty little sneaker.) After twenty minutes or so of bleary-eyed comforting, I hit on what I thought was a brilliant solution: I told Harry that the monkey would protect him. Harry went very round-eyed at this. I asked him where the monkey was (it being well-established by now that only Harry knew the location of the monkey), and without hesitation Harry pointed to the door of the bathroom.

"Monkey yu non," he said. (The monkey's in there.)

I said I wouldn't go in the bathroom, as I knew the monkey was shy, and I didn't want to scare him away. Harry agreed that would be a good thing, and I said that the monkey could protect him from the ghost, couldn't it?

Harry nodded, then promptly went to sleep.

I lay awake for some time, listening for… something. I don't know what. I didn't go into the bathroom.

I sometimes wonder if things would have turned out differently (horribly) if I hadn't told Harry that.

The Bangkok Post, Saturday November 10, 2007

Samut Prakarn-Deputy Social Development and Human Security Minister Poldej Pinprateep called yesterday for a special task force to trace missing children by coordinating information from relevant agencies. He said that the authorities lack the resources to find missing children, many of whom are snatched by human traffickers and forced into working as beggars, laborers or sex workers.

Ekarak Lumchomkhae, head of the Mirror Foundation's information center, said that more than 650 cases of missing children have been reported to the center this year. The missing children have ranged from newborn infants to toddlers to children aged 9-12.

Mr. Poldej said a task force should be set up to supplement the activities of the National Missing Person's Bureau, which lacks sufficient staff to find missing people quickly. The task force must be able to find people quickly, he added, noting that the more time that passes, the slimmer the chances of finding missing people become. He was speaking during a visit to seven families of missing children in the Om Noi district of Samut Sakhon. Cholada Siriyamongkol is the mother of Sirikul, or Nong Yui, 5, who has been missing since July 8th. She says she has not lost hope, and believes her daughter is still safe.

Four months, and she says she hasn't lost hope. Now imagine it was your kid.

How long would it take you to lose hope?

My university shuts down from the first week in December until the first week in January. One week after my holiday started, Harry caught a cold. Fon and I talked about it, then decided to send him to school. It wasn't that bad a cold, just a sniffle.

A little after midday, when I was just settling down to my lunch (chopped papaya salad, minced catfish salad, steamed sticky rice, and a cold beer), I got a phone call from Fon. The school had phoned her saying that Harry was running a temperature and could she come pick him up? As Fon was having her hair done (again), I was volunteered to go and pick Harry up from the school. I pointed out that I was just sitting down to lunch. Alas, her hair proved to be of more importance than my lunch, and for the sake of continued domestic harmony, I ended up driving to the school.

I picked Harry up, drove back home, planted him in front of the TV with a bottle of milk and the DVD of

Monster House, and went back to my lunch, which was now rather soggy and dispirited.

My house has an open-plan ground floor. Sitting at the dining table, you can see into the lounge where the TV is. You can't see it all-the stairs get in the way, but there's a clear view of the end of the couch and the sliding doors leading onto the verandah. The way I'd put Harry onto the couch meant I couldn't see him. I could hear the TV, but I couldn't see Harry at all.

I sat down and ate my lunch. I drank two bottles of beer-the large ones. A large bottle of Heineken contains 750ml of beer, with an alcohol content of 5.6%. This comes to 8.4 units of alcohol, about the same as four pints of lager in a pub. (Real pints here, not your midget U.S. pints.) I'm not going to deny I'd been drinking, because I had. You can judge for yourself how much difference it made.

So the TV's on. The sound is going (

It mocks us with its… house-ness!), I'm reading war-porn from Baen, the mynah birds are squawking in the papaya tree outside the back door, and although I can see clouds building up over the roof of the house next door, all is generally good with the world. I have a distinct 8.4-units-of-alcohol-happy-buzz thing going on.

Except when I get up to go to the bathroom, Harry isn't on the couch.

I look on the verandah. No Harry. I step out onto the verandah and look in the front yard. No Harry. Feeling a little nervous now, I walk round the left side of the house, round the back yard with the washing machine and the sink, continue round the house and back to the front yard.

No Harry.

I go to the gate-which someone has slid open. Not very much, but wide enough for a small boy to slip through.

Now I look back on it, I'm almost certain I shut that gate. Normally, I slide it shut every time, because if I don't the soi dogs get in and mangle my lawn. And besides, keeping the gate shut means Harry stays in the garden.

Maybe he opened it. Maybe I left it open.

Stories like this need a sin, don't they? It's the moralizing part in the urban legend. Don't sleep with your boyfriend. Don't speak to strangers. Don't steal. So maybe leaving the gate open was my sin-or Harry's sin.

Or maybe it was opened by… someone else.

I go out on the soi, look left and right. The soi dogs are sleeping at the far end of the soi. A couple of cars are parked: my neighbor's dark blue Kia, and the lawyer's silver Corolla. Clouds are dark to the west, above the sleeping soi dogs. Thunder rumbles.

I can't see Harry.

You can probably imagine my state right at that moment. If you have kids, I know that you know exactly what I was feeling. All parents have horribly vivid nightmares about nasty things happening to their kids.

I ran to the end of the soi and looked down the large road that runs through my moobahn. I couldn't see Harry. I ran to the entrance to the moobahn, ignoring the dogs barking at me over fences, and the looks I got from my neighbors. When I reached the security guard on duty, I asked him if he'd seen a little boy going out of the moobahn. He said no, and for a moment I relaxed, thinking Harry had to be somewhere in the moobahn and all I had to do was find him.

And then, as I looked along the entrance road-around two hundred yards long, leading to the main road beyond-I saw a black minivan waiting to turn left: indicator flashing, sunlight gleaming off the solar film in the back windows, thin puffs of blue exhaust as the engine burbled.

I'll be honest with you: I can't be sure quite what happened next. Strong emotion has a way of warping memory around it. I know I ran along the entrance road toward the van-not shouting, just running.

The van turned off onto the main road before I got within a hundred yards of it.

I didn't stop, of course. The next clear memory I have is reaching the end of the road and looking left, with that kind of hollow feeling you get when adrenaline has drowned everything else in your head.

The van was pulled over to the side of the road about fifty yards away, engine idling. It had stopped next to a huge clump of bamboo by the edge of the rice paddy. The bamboo rustled as the wind shook it.

Harry was standing behind the van, holding a half-drunk bottle of milk and bawling.

I ran to the van, still incapable of coherent thought, snatched Harry up and hugged him hard enough so that he yelled and hit me with his bottle of milk on the side of my head.

Then I thought about who was in the van and I turned round, clutching Harry hard. The sun was bright, and I couldn't see anything of the inside of the van except a slice of the floor near the door-even though both the mid-section door and the passenger door were open.

I took a half-step toward the van. I know it doesn't make any sense, but that's what I did. And you know, I wasn't thinking about crazed Chinese organleggers, or cannibal luk-chin makers, or wild-eyed Khmer Rouge straight out of the jungle.

No, what I was thinking about was the fact that the handle of the sliding door in the middle of the van was bent round like half a pretzel, and that in front of the door was a large footprint, squished into the soft mud in the side of the road. I looked hard at that footprint. Believe me.

And then three things happened at the same time. The first was that I heard a snap from behind me, the sound of a length of bamboo cracking. One of those thick stems of bamboo. The second was that Harry said, "Monkey! Look, Daddy! Monkey! Monkey!" The third was that I saw a spot of bright red liquid just inside the van, glistening crimson against the steel floor where the sun caught it.

I didn't turn round. I was looking at the footprint, and thinking about big yellow teeth, and how I'd told Harry that monkeys didn't like to be stared at.

"Monkey!" Harry repeated. He bounced against me. "Monkey! Monkey! Monkey! Daddy, look!" Then he laughed in delight and hit me on the side of my head again.

The bamboo rustled. There was a sound like something dragging against the ground.

"Monkey, bye, bye!" Harry said. "Daddy, bye, bye, monkey!"

I waited, then turned round. One of the bamboo stems on the side of the road was broken, snapped in half and crushed-what you'd expect if something heavy had pressed on it. There was a pair of footprints in the mud nearby. Two more footprints led down the bank of the rice paddy, heading toward the bright green rice and muddy water. Between the footprints were lines in the mud, like you'd get if you dragged something behind you. On the far side of the paddy, the thick brush waved. The top of a wild banana tree quivered. It might have been something pushing through the brush. (Something big.) But then again, it might have just been the wind from the approaching storm.

Then it started raining.

The police never identified the van, or traced its owner. The plates came from a Toyota Camry that had been stolen a month before, and the serial number on the engine block apparently belonged to a van scrapped six months before. The blood traces didn't lead anywhere either. The lead cop told me afterward the spots in the back came from at least six different people. The gaffer tape could have been bought anywhere, and the same went for the child-size Ultraman t-shirt.

They kept asking me about the door handle. But after they'd checked my prints against the ones they found, I stopped getting suspicious looks. I didn't touch the handle-but someone did. And whoever it was, they gripped it so hard they bent the metal like it was hot plastic.

I didn't tell the police about the footprints, and as they didn't ask me anything about them, I assume the rain must have washed them away. I think I'm glad about that.

You see, those footprints weren't shoeprints, or bootprints. They were footprints, and they looked almost exactly like the footprints of a very large, barefoot man with long toes.

Almost… but not quite.

Some years ago, I read a story in the

Bangkok Post. It's dropped off their archive pages now, but if you contacted them directly, they could probably send you a copy. (I told you this was a true story.)

I can't remember the exact wording, but the story itself and the accompanying photo are still very clear in my mind. The photo showed a small crocodile in a pen at the Samut Prakarn Crocodile Farm and Zoo. The croc was basking in the sun, managing the difficult task of looking both lazy and vicious, and a local government official was standing close behind it-but not too close. The official was beaming, and pointing to the croc's head with a length of rattan.

They'd caught the croc in Ayutthaya -a city about thirty klicks north of Bangkok. It must have escaped from one of the crocodile farms around there, and rather than head for the Chao Phraya, it decided to swim into a storm drain under a large market in the center of the tourist area of Ayutthaya. And there it lived for several years, eating rats, monitor lizards, snakes, and all the garbage washed into the drain from the market. A word about Thai storm drains here: they're square concrete ditches about two/three feet on an edge, and the top is covered with concrete slabs. At my university, the monitor lizards use them for running around the campus. And this croc had been using one to crawl around under the marketplace. For years.

It's not a sewer. Not quite. But it's close as damnit.

Urban myth:

A modern story of obscure origin and with little or no supporting evidence…

Only sometimes, you know, they're actually true.

So here we are at the end. Kind of inconclusive, you may be thinking. And that's understandable, but this is a true story, and like Margaret Atwood says in

Happy Endings, the only authentic conclusion to true stories is John and Mary die.

But though Harry could have died (or worse, just vanished forever), he didn't (and hasn't). As I sit here in the bedroom typing, the door to the room open behind me, the sound of him fighting with his brothers drifts up the stairs, and that's conclusion enough for me.

One last word: when or if you have children, and you're playing a game with them in which an invisible creature (be it monkey, doolally, or something entirely less ordinary) is an essential component, just make sure the invisible creature is one that has teeth.

Preferably large teeth.