The Mandrill Exhibit

Part 3: THE MANDRILL

All things considered, his fall could have been worse. For starters, it could have killed him. A low canopy of wide-leafed trees slowed the drop, and a thick, gnarled branch damned near stopped it. He took the limb clean off the tree on his way down, but not before it had snapped his arm around at an unnatural angle. The wrist of the same arm was the first thing to hit the ground, and that had broken with a sickly crunch beneath his following weight. Now he lay, as crumpled and wrong as his wrist, huddled on the ground in a petrified state of shock. The hat lay some ways away in a bush.

One thought sprang into his mind suddenly, so abruptly and with such clarity that he winced. That, of course, drew a wounded grunt from his dry lips as his entire arm flared up with pain, but it wasn't enough to get rid of his horrible revelation.

The mandrill. That damn animal had wanted him to fall, had made that unholy noise to get him to make the plunge. He was sure of it. John dragged himself to his unsteady feet, using a nearby tree as a steadying crutch. The dry earth clung to his jeans, and he silently thanked Janice for making them all wear long pants on such a hot day– 'for ticks,' she had said, 'You don't know what these animals can carry.' At that moment, though, only one animal in particular mattered to him. A primal urge for survival within his very soul needed to know where the mandrill was.

His heart was beating very, very fast in his chest, and it wasn't just due to the pain. He had once seen a children's movie with his son, based on the Curious George books Robbie loved so much, and he remembered the scene at the beginning where George met the Man in the Yellow Hat. The playful monkey had landed on his human friend's shoulder, then set about chittering and scurrying around the man's great pointy hat like a furry beetle. John and Robbie had laughed and laughed, but now he didn't find the idea so funny. He didn't like the thought of the mandrill landing on his shoulder from one of the taller trees, didn't like that at all. His phone had busted in the fall, and his family had been the only ones at the exhibit, so there was no use calling for help. He was trapped in a man-made jungle, his every moved being stalked by the evil creature that called this hell home.

John began to hyperventilate and forced himself to remain calm. Despite the steadily worsening pain in his arm (and ankle, now that he put weight on it– twisted for sure, hurrah), he found that all he could focus on was finding the mandrill. As if seeing it would eliminate it from existence somehow, would make the entire hellish experience but a bad dream. And there it was, standing in the same clearing it had inhabited before he'd fallen in, watching his every move with those golden eyes. It seemed somehow smaller now that he was down here, about the size of his old golden retriever, Rusty. It was standing stock-still, which had to have been why he hadn't noticed it immediately. Robbie had been pretty wrong about the camouflage; he would have to tell him when he got back up.

Gee dad, but how did you know that they can blend in to their surroundings by staying still?

Well, son, it's just a matter of falling twenty feet into their cage and observing them in their natural habitat. Truly interesting creatures, really, and now would someone GET ME THE FUCK OUT OF HERE PLEASE

The mandrill still would not move. Very slowly, John bent down and picked up a smooth rock from the dry ground. The monkey's eyes followed his hand as he did this.

"Git."

Nothing. The mandrill remained completely motionless, still as a statue as it continued to regard him. He threw the rock without much force, and it bounced harmlessly off the ground to the mandrill's left. The monkey's head turned in the slightest way to watch it fly, then it swiveled back to him. The yellow points of long tusks protruded from its bottom lip.

"I said git!"

The mandrill smiled at him, smiled showing all of its many long teeth. The black lips peeled back like a latex mask, widening the grin to freakish proportions, and the blue stripes around its cheeks wrinkled and cracked to accommodate it. It was a humorless grin, and an evil one. He hated it, hated it more than anything else in the world. It was not a natural creature, there was simply no way; no organism aside from a human could harbor that malicious intent in their features.