Monstrous Affections (13 page)

“Well?” said Mr. Natch. “Recognize anybody?”

I shook my head.

“Those pictures,” said Mr. Natch, “are from one year ago today.”

“Wow,” I said.

“Yes.
Wow
.” He put his hand on my shoulder. It felt like a tree
branch. “And it’s nothing, I fear, compared to what’s in store this
year. Now, Stan. Look more closely.” And with that, he pushed me
closer to the computer screen. “Recognize anybody?”

“I am not comfortable with you touching me, Mister Natch,” I
said. This is what I had been told to say if anyone touched me in a
way I didn’t like, and it had the effect I was looking for. Mr. Natch
took his hand off my shoulder and apologized with a grunt.

But I barely heard him.

Because I did recognize somebody in the picture. Not any of the
five kids — they could have been anybody. But standing just in the
background was a boy, wearing oversized jeans and a baseball cap.

And he was moving.

I leaned closer. The kid was far enough back that he was just a
collection of pixels — I couldn’t make out his face or even what was
written on his baseball cap. I certainly couldn’t see his teeth. But I
could see that he was sort of moving from side to side, like he was
walking. He was also getting bigger.

“You do recognize someone,” said Mr. Natch. “You can identify
him.”

The kid walked past the kid with the lighter, patted him on
the shoulder, and came up right to the camera. He smiled — right
at me — with those shark teeth in his mouth that looked just so
cool on Mr. Natch’s laptop screen — and he opened his mouth, and
whispered, like it was right in my ear:

“
Dude. Use the water
.”

“Which one,” said Mr. Natch. “Which one is Fezkul?”

“
On the power bar
.”

Those teeth . . . They were so cool.

“Him?” said Mr. Natch.

“
It will totally rock
.”

That was when things got kind of foggy. I remember grabbing
the water bottle, which was about half full, and sort of pouring it —
yeah, probably on the power bar that was right beside the laptop.
There were some sparks, and some yelling, and the air smelled
sharp. I remember being under the desk for a second, then opening
a door, then running up stairs. I might have been in a kitchen for
a second and I might not have. The next thing I knew for sure, I
was leaning against the dumpster out back of the grill house. I was
laughing and grinning and I don’t think I’d ever felt better. It was
like I was a little kid again, with the summer holidays and Christmas
and Halloween — especially Halloween — all spread out before me.

“You rock, kid.”

“I’m not a kid,” I said and looked up.

The kid with the shark teeth was looking back at me. He was
standing not two feet off, hands in his pocket and hat cocked high
on his forehead. He was grinning.

“Fezkul?”

“Maybe not,” he said. “Maybe sure. Whoever I am, one thing I
know: you want to get out of here. Soon as old Natch finishes up
with his fire extinguisher, he’s going to be after you.”

I pushed myself off the dumpster and it made a bong and a
rattling sound.

“That dumpster hasn’t been right for a good year,” said Fezkul
appreciatively. “A propane explosion can do a lot of damage.” He
clapped me on the shoulder. “C’mon, kid. I like your style.”

And then he took off for the trees. Without even thinking about
it, I followed him. Sure — part of me was worried about leaving my
sister and her boyfriend without saying anything. About following
this shark-toothed kid who’d talked to me from a JPEG on a
computer screen. But you know what? That wasn’t the part of me
that was in the driver’s seat. It was the part that was responsible for
my curiosity attacks.

He was hard to keep up with. He scrambled up a tumble of
bedrock like he was a mountain goat, then took off through some
low ferns at just about a sprint. The woods got dark quickly beyond
the Fun-Park, and the closeness of the trees made it very quiet. Soon
we were running over bare earth, with just a couple of rocks here
and there to trip me up. Fezkul finally stopped, in a little circle of
trees. I pulled up, gasping for breath.

“I like your style,” he said again, nodding as he spoke. “You’re big . . .
big for a
kid
.”

That, I have to admit, got me going. He was starting to sound like
my sister Lenore, who wouldn’t tell me about
The Sopranos
or let me
ride in the front seat. I glared at him. After all, Oliver Natch had just
got finished strongly implying I was too old. “Don’t call me a kid. I’m
going to be in Grade Nine tomorrow.”

Fezkul grinned, put his fists on his hips. “‘I’m going to be in
Grade Nine tomorrow,’” he mimicked, making his voice all high.
“Maybe tomorrow you will. But today — ” he smirked at me “ — today
you’re here. You heard me, and you saw me. So live in the moment,
Sammy: you’re a kid. Yet — ” and here, his grin got wider, “you’re big.
Big as I got, today.”

He started walking around me, nodding and nodding, and I kept
glaring at him until he got behind me and I couldn’t see him. “Yeah,”
he said. “You’re big.”

“All right,” I said. “so I’m a big kid. Who are you? What’s with the
teeth?”

I waited for him to come around in front of me. “What’s with
the teeth?” I looked over my shoulder. Fezkul wasn’t there. I looked
around in front of me again, in case he’d hurried there, then back
again.

“Fezkul?” I hissed. “Kid? Whoever you are? Where are you?”

There was nobody. He’d taken off. Where, though? My curiosity
was getting seriously cranked. The trees here were huge. I counted,
and saw that five of them made a circle around this space that would
have been a clearing if it weren’t for the long branches of those five
trees. They made kind of a dome in here.

“So the thing you got to wonder,” said Fezkul, who suddenly
appeared at my elbow, “is what can you do before you stop being a
kid?”

“How did you do that?”

Fezkul wiggled his fingers in the air and said, “‘What’s with the
teeth?’” in that high voice of his. Then he laughed. “So you’re big —
you’re also bright enough to ask me questions. This I like. See most
of these kids — you show them the way, they just get all giggly and
stupid. Do what they’re told. Cut loose.”

“You tell those kids to cut loose. You take me to this place. What
are you — ” I looked around, putting it together “ — some kind of a
forest spirit?”

Fezkul snorted. “You watched
Lord of the Rings
one time too
many, kid.”

“Well — ” I motioned at his freaky teeth, waved at the canopy
“ — come on! Look around you.”

Fezkul put his hands in his pockets and sneered. “‘Some kind
of forest spirit.’ How
imaginative
. Ummmm — no. Look. Let’s cut to
the chase. You’re big. You’re smart. You were good in there with the
water and the power bar and you’re pretty fast on the run. I repeat
my question: what can you do before you stop being a kid?”

It’s funny. The first time he asked me that, I just let it roll off me.
The second time, though, got into me:

What
was
I going to do?

Tomorrow, I’d start Grade Nine, which was at the end, really, of
my kid-ness. The teachers in Grade Eight at William Howard Taft
Elementary School were forever reminding us of this:
You get to
Grade Nine, boys and girls, it’s a whole different world. You’re going to be
expected to start acting like young men and women. You’re going to have
more homework and you’ll be studying for exams, and the things that you
do will have consequences that will carry on for the rest of your lives
.

Consequences. The rest of your lives.

They didn’t even get to the whole question of cliques, and already
most of us were pissing ourselves with fear.

And for all that, they never asked us the basic question:

What will you do with the rest of your childhood?

And when you’re done with it, what will you be left with? A world
like Lenore’s? All your days spent tense and fretful, thinking about
getting married and having kids, believing Up With People is cool,
finding the trouble with
everything
?

“Makes you dizzy, doesn’t it?” said Fezkul. “It’s like a — what
would we call it? A tween-life crisis. But it’s not like middle age. You
can’t exactly buy yourself a sports car and get yourself a mistress,
can you?” I swore at him, and he said, “Oh, very adult, in an NC-17
way. That won’t cut it, but this might.”

“What might?”

Fezkul leaned forward, took a breath and opened his hands.

“Set fire to the grill.” Fezkul grinned wider. “Don’t let anyone
escape.” His eyes took a fire to them — that mischievous fire that Mr.
Natch had seemed so interested in.

“Kill Natch,” he said. “Kill him dead.”

“What?” I took a step back. Those teeth were so
sharp
, and they
seemed like they were getting sharper. “No way.”

Fezkul shrugged and laughed. “Just kidding, kiddo.”

But I could tell that he wasn’t. And looking at me, I think he could
tell I could tell that he wasn’t kidding, because his smile went away
and he got a strange, desperate look in his eye that put out the fire
like a splash of cold water.

“Really, dude,” he pleaded. “Big joke. No one’s going to burn
down — hey!”

I was already running. I’m curious, sure — but curiosity has its
limits. One of those limits was meeting a strange kid with pointed
teeth who tried to talk me into burning down a crowded restaurant
and killing the man who built it.

So I ran. I took off through the trees in the direction I thought
I’d come. At that point, I figured there was nothing better than
for me to get back with my sister and Nick, get into Nick’s car and
get back home in time for school. I’d deal with the cliques and the
consequences and the possible loss of my precious childhood — which
I was getting pretty tired of anyway, truth be told.

I was also scared. This forest was pretty thick, and if Fezkul was
some kind of forest spirit he could probably get me turned around
so I’d be running in circles around the same tree until I fell down
and died. But as I went further I could see that big highway overpass
through the trees, and I realized: getting me lost wasn’t Fezkul’s
game. Fezkul wasn’t the kind of forest spirit that got you lost in the
magic wood.

Fezkul was the kind of forest spirit that made you do bad. Sort of
like a gangsta-rap Pied Piper. He’d almost gotten me — no, scratch
that: he
had
gotten me, for a minute there when I spilled the water
on Oliver Natch’s power bar, then ran out of the door.

He’d gotten me, and I’d gotten away.

At least that’s what I kept telling myself as I ran through the woods,
towards what I hoped was the noise of Natch’s Grill and Fun-Park, and
not some evil forest trap for boys who didn’t like Fezkul’s tune.

It was some noise. There was a sound of shouting and screaming
and laughing — a lot of laughing. It sounded like a lynch mob on a
sugar high. There was a loud cracking sound, like timber snapping —
then silence, and a big giggly cheer, followed by an even louder crash.

With that, I stopped running and started sneaking. The cheers
following crash number two had a sound to them that I didn’t like —
they were high and hysterical and maybe just a little bit crazy. It
was the kind of cheer that could take pleasure in anything — even
burning down the grill house and murdering Oliver Natch.

I was coming up to the ferns through which I’d chased Fezkul
then, and crouched down behind a big boulder all covered in lichen.
There was more noise coming closer. I could hear cheering and
shouting — most of it high-pitched — but one voice that was a little
lower. It sounded like this:

“Help! Toddlers! Ravening horde! Gah!”

Like that.

And then, crashing through the ferns like a rogue elephant,
came the person I was least hoping to see (next to Fezkul and Oliver
Natch):

Officer Tom Wilkinson.

He was a bit of a mess now. His shirt, which had been a perfect
black, was now slick with different kinds of stains and colours:
ketchup, mustard, what looked like chocolate milkshake. It would
have been funny looking at the mess on him, but that wasn’t all of
it. He was holding a cloth to the side of his head, and the cloth was
soaking through red, and he was stumbling.

I stuck my head up. I could hear his pursuers, but I couldn’t see
them yet. I thought about it for just a second, before I waved at him
and said: “Hey. Over here.”

He stopped at that, then his eyes narrowed as he saw me and
figured out who I was.

“You,” he mumbled. “You are in a world of trou — ”

He never got the “ble” out. Because having stopped, he got really
unsteady on his feet. Then he fell over into the ferns.

Even if you’re big for your age, like I am, let me tell you this: it’s not
easy pulling a 200-pound-plus security guard through ferns and in
behind a set of boulders, particularly when there’s a ravening horde
of toddlers on his tail. You can do it. But easily? Ha. I laugh. We’d
barely made it into the rock’s shadow before the ferns started to
shake and quiver and the horde came through.

From where we were crouched, you couldn’t see more than the
tops of their tyke-y heads, and the two-by-fours and golf clubs and
baby canoe paddles that they were waving around like banners.
With their little legs they were slow — which explained how Officer
Tom had gotten away from them, injured as he was — and being
pre-schoolers, they weren’t particularly thorough. A couple of years
older and another foot higher, and one of them might have spotted
the trail of broken ferns I’d left dragging Officer Tom to the boulder.
As it was, they made their way past us and into the deeper woods
chortling and gurgling and swinging their sticks in the air.