The Best Horror of the Year – Volume One

Oily night flooded the forest. A boy cried,

Mommy, mommy! Amid the plaintive notes of the whippoorwill. Da

Da

She said, -Can we leave it for now? Just for now. I'm tired. You have no idea.

Dr. Green removed his glasses. His eyes were bloodshot and hard, but human after all. -Da

– Am I?

– Miles to go before we sleep, and all that jazz. But yes, I believe so. You want to open up, and that's very good. It's progress.

Da

– Next week we can discuss further treatment options. There are several medicines we haven't looked at; maybe we can get you a dog. I know you live in an apartment, but service animals have been known to work miracles. Go home and get some rest. That's the best therapy I can recommend.

Da

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.