Pontypool Changes Everything (19 page)

Greg is standing pinned against the wall, facing the back of the dumpster. The Higher Power is prepared to be forceful. To launch him toward the street by his collar. He reaches out, holding two fingers over Greg’s shoulder, and he looks over his back. He blinks once at what he sees, freezes for a second and then bolts up the alley and turns the corner at full tilt.

A face is a marvellous thing for those who possess it. It is really the only thing that distinguishes us. Not quite enough to recommend us, just a trickster feature of our anatomy that makes everyone appear famous. But still, the face is beautiful. A sensitive sign of obscure integration. And every once in a while that integration is challenged.

Like now, behind the dumpster. A man is lying back against the garbage bags piled there. His face is mask-like sad, with worried eyes and eyebrows angled in an anxious incline. His mouth is pursed in a whistle, sucking saliva noisily as if through a straw. In fact, he has been sucking through straws. He has made straws out of the left cheek and upper lip of a woman who is lying across him, her head cradled in the crook of his arm, protected gently from falling loose on its broken neck. The flesh of her face is raised in turrets, sucked into bloody spouts that are white and new at their tips. Like infant mouths, blind and despairing, they open and close on her frail, dying exhalations. When the man looks up, registering Greg with tiny flecks of light across his black eyes, he gathers the straws in his hand and folds them over, sealing the woman’s mouth. She bucks once, kicking an old coat at her feet, and dies.

Julie pulls the hair offher brother’s face.Jimmy squirms a little trying to get comfortable against her thigh. Julie reaches around his front and puts her hand on the glass he holds while he moves around on the floor between her splayed knees. She squeezes her eyes while he puts a little too much weight on an elbow that is pushing just below her hip. Once settled, Julie removes her hand from the glass and Jimmy slurps hard once, clearing the purple ice of colour. They have been sitting on this floor in a tiny clubhouse in the backyard, built by their father, for three days. Their unusually warm spring break had been restricted to the activities of penitentiary inmates seventy-two hours ago when a gang had invaded the Wheelers’ cottage. And on this day their parents had joined Jimmy in his silence, making Julie feel isolated by her willingness to talk. She exercised this willingness by telling Jimmy stories that lasted six or seven hours.

While she speaks Jimmy listens; but he also watches. He watches for germs squishing at the corners of her mouth, or viral clouds near her cheeks. He doesn’t exactly know what he’s looking for, except he thinks with certainty that at some level these tiny invaders must wear pointy leather shoes. White pumps. They’ll have dozens of fat, scrambly legs encased in thick white nylons. He keeps his fingers caged around the straw that he seals tightly with his lips.

Julie is thinking about where she left off. The story is about the Wheelers in the afterlife. Over the course of many hours they have been the rulers of the world. They are the first married superheroes, driving through space in a flying monster truck. They have been reincarnated as fish, teachers, metal detectors and horseflies.

Most recently Julie has, out of boredom, brought them back to Earth as giants who enact a terrible revenge on the living.

“Mrs. Wheeler’s huge head is as big as a truck and her arms are like trees. She stamps on the ground, squashing people. She holds them under her giant shoes, leaning against their heads until they pop like those plastic bubbles of air used in packing crates. She finds this addictive and heads toward the city centre, growing agitated because the population is finite. She finds a main intersection and, grabbing handfuls of waiting commuters, begins to snap open their tiny craniums with her thumb. She moans small satisfactions to herself. Mr. Wheeler, whose hands are as big as horses, is trying to dig the biggest hole in the world. Each scoop of dirt that he drags out of the earth could fill ten dump trucks, and when he tosses them over his shoulder they pass in the sky over people’s heads like giant black clouds. After a full day of digging, Mr. Wheeler is standing in a hole that reaches up to his chest. Around him are tall, tall mountains. Since his day is about a thousand of our years long, people have moved from the dangerous cities away from the maniac head squeezer and have begun to live in caves in the side of the mountain. As night approaches, Mrs. Wheeler
returns from the city, wiping her jammy fingers on the front of her dress. She crouches down against the mountain to help her husband out of his hole. In the process they cause a landslide that kills all the people. They decide that it’s time to get some dinner and they wander off. They find a country near the equator that is composed entirely of ruffage and they start grabbing giant handfuls and stuffing their mouths. The salad contains tiny stalks that get caught between their teeth, and they discover that if they clench them hundreds of monkeys, frantic to escape, push the trapped food free. They smile at each other, their lips streaming a dark green juice that carries the bodies of squiggling monkeys off their chins.”

Julie looks up. A car is approaching the cottage. She stretches her neck so that she can see above the windowsill to where the road appears between the trees. The car is going very fast and it sprays stones as it brakes dramatically at the foot of her parents’ driveway. Julie slips out from under Jim. He drops his elbows against the wood floor. Unable to speak, he rolls his glass angrily across to the wall.

“Shhh. There’s somebody coming to see Mom and Dad. Come on.”

Julie grabs her brother’s hand and they sneak out of the clubhouse. Jim resists her. He’s frightened of his parents, more than usual.

He thinks that they’re sick, and he’s right.

The children crouch behind a large green wheel of hose that hangs on the side of the cottage. They hear a door open and a man emerges. Very serious. Mud on
his clothes.
Is that mud?
Julie pushes her brother down and she covers his back with crossed forearms.
Listen.
She hears an animal, a bird maybe. Something crying across the lake. No. Not across the lake.
Nearer.
Julie turns her head, her face an inch from the side of the cottage.
From in there?

The sound becomes shrill. Louder.
It
is
in there.
Julie drags her brother into the bushes across the path. The front door opens and Julie can hear a man yelling. Pursued. She keeps her eyes trained on a small patch of the front yard that she can see through the leaves. The man running. Mom. Dad.
After him.
She leaps from the bushes to the edge of the cottage. Mom and Dad are chasing him into the lake. The man dives in from the shore and Mom and Dad fall on each other, howling. Slapping each other. Biting each other.

Mom has a piece of Dad’s cheek between her teeth, and when he turns from the lake she doesn’t let go. Suddenly they stop.
They see me.
Dad punches Mom under the chin, knocking her teeth from his face. She trips her tongue under the piece of flesh and snaps her mouth forward, catching and swallowing in one movement. With his eyes steadily on Julie her father pushes his wife to the ground and steps toward her. His cheek has a hole where her mom bit him. His eyes are huge and black. Mom springs from the ground, knocking his limp arm out of her way as she breaks into screaming flight. Julie grabs Jim by the arm and they run down a path that goes behind the clubhouse.
Where is that tree? Where?
Here. She pushes Jim up first on a ladder of tilting sticks nailed to the trunk, and she
follows him, trying to force the rungs out with her heel as she climbs.

Something crashes against the side of the clubhouse. A grunt. Growl. It pushes back and something else falls through a bush. Julie covers her brother’s mouth. Her mother steps out of the bushes near the base of the tree. She doesn’t look up. Her husband follows, in a stupor, walking very poorly. He approaches his wife, tries to lean against her, and falls. He lies on his back almost directly under where Julie and Jim are holding each other on the branch of a tree. One of his eyes has been pricked by a twig and the other blinks. His lips slap against the violent, soundless air that he’s forcing through them. He reaches up to point at Julie, but his hand fails, and he grabs his wife’s wrist, yanking her down on top of him. She hunches her shoulders down to his face, and with a single snap breaks both of their necks.

Julie can feel her brother shaking. In fact, she can see it in the leaves around them.
Weapon. I need a weapon.
She reaches to a small leafless branch and pulls it back. The branch splinters but doesn’t break. Mom rises from her husband. Listening. She turns to find the noise, and her head flops on its broken neck.Julie yanks once, hard, but the branch holds. Mom twirls to face the tree. She lifts her head off her chest and holds it, controlling it in her hands like a remote device. She spots her children. Julie freezes in the monster’s glare.

The mother tries to make a word with the torn skin of her mouth and falls to her knees. She lowers her head in her hands and little sobs pump in the broken pipes
of her neck. Julie looks down at the matted leaves clinging to the back of her mother’s bathrobe. She feels a sudden compulsion to reach out.

“Mom? Mom? What’s going on, Mom?”

The sound of her voice, the identification of this savage creature as mother, opens a flood of pain. Julie suddenly feels a panic of responsibility. She leans her brother against the branch and hovers her foot down to a rung. She scrambles to where she can begin lowering herself. One leg. Another. A hiss. A hand snatches her ankle.

“Mom?”

She feels something hot and wet slide across the soul of her foot.

“Mom!”

Teeth biting. Not biting.
Teething.

“Jimmy!”

A form falls past her. Jimmy drops from the branch onto his mother’s head. Julie springs off the ladder to the ground and lands in a confusion of bodies. Jimmy is sitting on his mother’s chest and, with his eyes closed, he slaps wildly at her face. The woman drags her dark angel wings through the leaves, frantically touching the ground beneath her.

Julie drives in the stake. It rides a groove of tongue and drips to a point through the base of Mom’s skull. Like a canoe gliding onto sand it rests in the fresh opening behind her, followed by a wake of lake blood. The woman shudders softly under her children and closes her perspiring body with an invisible sheen of pearls. Dead.

The woods around Lake Scugog are not a jungle. Dragons do not stalk deer up and down black hillsides. Siberian tigers do not sulk over the torn body of a villager. There are no monsoons, no undiscovered species of spider, no diamond mines. There is a snake, however, hanging, quite contrary to its known behavior, high in the top of a tree. This snake, a common garter snake about twenty-six inches long, has coiled the length of its body around the thin, bending tip of a Birch. The snake holds its strong neck and powerful jaws out away from the tree. Its tongue oscillates in the sun like a skipping rope. At a dizzy distance of fifty-five feet below is the body of a woman nailed to the ground through her mouth. Beside her is her husband: still alive, though insensible. His only movement is in his hands. They repeat a broken tap at the ground beneath him. A ceaseless investigation that will go on for days. The snake, whose eyesight is poor, cannot see these minute twitches; its tongue, however, touches a picture so complex that something closer to the future than the present shimmers on its fork. Two children run into the woods along separate tapered paths and, when the tongue slips back to refresh itself against the cool bones of the snake’s mouth, they disappear.

Greg can see Grant at his desk. Steve and his girlfriend are standing on either side of him. To Greg they look like a family. Grant flips the tip of a pen at the girl. She looks across to Steve, who shrugs. She looks back and nods seriously. Grant writes in a pad, tears off the sheet, and hands it to Steve without taking his eyes off the girl. Steve folds the paper and tucks it in his shirt pocket. He reaches across and takes his girlfriend’s hand. She exhales visibly and follows Steve around Grant’s desk. They walk directly toward Greg. Greg jumps.
I’ve been watching you. Uh oh.
Steve doesn’t look up as he passes. His girlfriend looks directly at Greg. He can see fear in her clapped-open eyes. She passes him and he thinks:
Those eyes have seen something. Something horrible? No. No, those eyes are hiding something.
Greg turns, and she has hesitated at the office door.
Hiding something she wants to show me. What? Why me?
Greg feels his skin lift in scales around his neck.
She hasn’t told anybody yet. She’s sick. Like me. Like the guy in the alley.

“Greg?”

Greg jumps a second time. Grant is touching his elbow, drawing him through the brightly lit office to his desk.

“You alright there, buddy?”

Greg is momentarily confused by the word
buddy.
He senses the fraudulence first, then something a little deeper, something true.