The Demon Chimp

By Nathan Godwin

Alex Grisham comes back home from work one day and discovers something very strange. On the dining table are a scattered pile of papers that his pet Chimpanzee has typed on with the typewriter. Of course, they are all filled with meaningless nonsense. Just as he is about to get rid of the papers, Alex accidentally sees, in the midst of one of the papers the following words:

"I am going to kill Alex. I shall never be blamed for it for I am only a chimp."

He is stunned and baffled, unable to understand how that sentence got there or how the chimp could possibly have typed those words even by accident. Surely this must be the result of a prank played on him by someone who had somehow gained access to the house in his absence, and someone who knew about his chimp's habit of banging onto the typewriter.

But was it really someone else that typed it?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Nathan Godwin
• Release date: Oct 6, 2022
• ISBN: 9798215184431

Book preview

The Demon Chimp

by Nathan Godwin

Copyright © 2018 Nathan Godwin

All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher or author except for the use of brief quotations in a book review or scholarly journal.

Contact address: [e-mail]

When a million monkeys type forever...

Each on its own typewriter...

At some point...something must happen...

And it may or may not be sudden.

It may be an entire work of Shakespeare...

Or it may be the sentence of an imbecile.

It could be a story you love or fear...

Or it could be the diary of the devil.

Table of Contents

Prologue

July 21st 1992 - The Writing on the Paper

Chapter 1

July 22nd - The Psychologist

Chapter 2

July 25th - Jane

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

July 26th - ‘Him’

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

July 27th - The Bride

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

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The Visit

Prologue

Somewhere in the world , in an old quiet dusky neighborhood, there is a constant clicking sound. It is rapid, repetitive, interrupted only occasionally by a metallic sliding sound.

Sometimes it appears to stop completely...and then, after many seconds, it begins again.

The creature making the sound is fascinated...Fascinated by the apparent fact that it can produce a continuous and ever-changing stream of objects seemingly out of nowhere...Even if they are just tiny little symbols...And even if, for humans at least, they are completely devoid of meaning.

Somewhere, somehow, deep within it, it has long grasped that this activity is fundamentally representative of what makes humans what they are that makes them superior to it, and others like it – human intelligence.

Somewhere within its mind, it grasps that fact. And it is what makes this activity all the more fun...and emotionally uplifting...Like a status symbol.

July 21st 1992 - The Writing on the Paper

Chapter 1

The bristling humming sound of a Chevrolet pullinginto its garage reverberates through the warm dry air on this late summer afternoon inGossem Street.

Mr. Alex Grisham gets out of the car with two bags of groceriesand his brown portfolio bag. Then he closes the garageand walks to the door of the house.

Inside the house, a rapid pitter-patter of feet... and knuckles...makes its way to the door as he unlocks it.

The door opens and the knucklesleave the ground as the animal rises up toits feet to meet him as he enters.

Hey, buddy. How you doing? he says as he strokes the animal’s fur while it hoots up at him in pleasant, happy greeting.

The animal escorts him all the way to the kitchen where he puts the bags on the cabinet. It remains in the kitchen inquisitively fiddling through the bags while Alex goes to his bedroom. He knowsthe animal is well behaved, and it won’t mess with or ruin any of the things he had bought. He’ll only look at them.

About twenty minutes later, Alex has changed clothes, and he is at the dining table, casually clearing it of pieces of A4 paper strewn all over it. The papers are filled with words...nonsensical words. What he calls ‘gibberish’. The ‘words’ are of various lengths, some of them almost stretching entire lines. Most of the ‘words’ contain numbers and even punctuation characters.

The papers are all filled with nonsense.

Alex places each in his hand carefully, as he often does when he comes back home, because he might later make use of their blank backsides. He doesn’t like the wastage of paper, but he tolerates it anyway. He tolerates it because it helps to keep the animal occupied and, thus, out of mischief. And, most of all, he tolerates it because he finds it very amusing. He once filmed a short video footage of the animal on the typewriter six months ago and showed it to his friends at work. They were all tickled by it:Tom, wearing his red boxer shorts, sitting at the dining table, as he loves to do everyday, hammering away with his sturdy fingers on the keyboard of the machine. It was priceless. The only thing missing was spectacles.

One after the other, he places the papers in a small pile in his hand.

Variousthoughts and musings swimthrough his mind:thoughts about his day at work, thoughts about his girlfriend, when she’ll return from her parents’ home in Clarksville, where he should take her to...and so on.

Causally, slowly and absentmindedly, he places the papers. There are only seven of them.

The time is 5:32pm.

He is about to place the last paper over the pile in his hand when he stops suddenly. Slowly, his hand lowers the paper back onto the table as he stares at the one at the top of the pile he is holding.

Something odd about ithad caught his eye.

At first, he isn’t sure what it is...or where it is. But a few seconds later, his eyes are looking at the bottom part of the paper...somewhere in the middle.

His heart and his body freeze cold.

He feels that he must be inside a dream. He cannot possibly be seeing what he is seeing. It simply isn’t possible.

Right there on the paper he is looking at, tucked in the midst ofendless meaningless strings of characters, are two actual sentences:

I am going to kill Alex. I shall never be blamed for it for I am only a chimp.

He feels a bizarreand eerie dizziness,such as he has never felt before in his life. He feels he is about to fall. Yet he manages to stand. He wonders if he is suffering some kind of hallucination...a weird product of his tired mind from a stressful day at work and, perhaps, deep, irrational fears and imaginations in his subconscious.

Yet, when he looks again at the paper, the words are still there.

He raises his eyes, blinks hardand turnsthem back to the spot several times as if to make sure the words are really there and that he really isn’t just seeing things. Yet, he still sees the words...exactly as they were the first time.

He suddenly realizes that Tom is also at the dining table. He is busy drinking the remaining juice in his plastic cup and playfully tapping on the keyboard of the typewriter. Alex stares numbly at himas if in a trance.

Heslowly places the