by Nick Cutter
Sudden thunder arose. A helicopter breasted the latticework of trees. Black and muscular looking: not a traffic or sightseeing helicopter.
The boys’ faces broke into delighted grins. They waved. The chopper climbed into the sky and rotated around with its nose tilted down, then dropped abruptly. The pulse of its blades burred painfully inside the boys’ skulls. Kent could smell the frictionless grease the mechanics used to lubricate its rotors: a little like cherry Certs.
The helicopter lifted up with predatory grace, swung round, and fled into the open sea. Squinting, Kent could just make out a series of squat dark shapes strung across its flight path.
“Ships out there,” Newton said. “Looks like they’re anchored. The military does maneuvers out here sometimes . . . but I mean, that’s an awful lot of ships.”
“Maybe they’re whaling ships,” said Kent. “You better watch out, Newt—they’re coming to harpoon your fat ass.”
As the boys’ riotous laughter washed over him, Newt’s eyes returned to the water. Kent felt better; the equilibrium reestablished and he was in control again—Newt was always good for that—but still, a bitter alkaline taste slimed his tongue, as if he were sucking on an old battery.
* * *
EVIDENCE LOG, CASE 518C
PIECE T-09 (Personal Effects)
Counseling Diary of Ephraim Elliot
Recovered from SITE T (5 Elm Street, North Point, Prince Edward Island) by Officer Brian Skelly, badge #908
Okay so Dr. Harley here it is. One page like you asked. Who knew a psychologist would give me homework!!!
So you wanted me to tell a story. Just a story of why sometimes, out of nowhere, I get real angry. Like really REALLY angry and get in fights. Why I want to punch my fist in a wall or in some stupid jerks face. At first I got angry at you for asking WHY I was angry. FUUUUUNY! But then I think, okay, your just doing your job (sorry for my spelling and all that). So here goes.
First, I KNOW I get angry. Mom says its my dad in my blood. My dads a real bad guy ok? Shes scared Im going to be like him. Which makes me angry (shocker!). Anyway I TRY to stop the anger. Like when I get real pissed Ill do something to push it out of me. Cat walk my bike off the seawall or climb up to the schools roof. And ok those things are RISKY, I could break my fool neck mom says . . . but the anger goes away. Maybe the fear pushes it away? I dont know why. Im not a scientist. Max calls me a dare devil but thats not it. To me its like a person taking a pill cuz hes got a headake, or that pink stuff cuz his tummy hurts. Medisin, right?
But thats just what I do when I GET angry. You asked WHY I get that way.
Remember the circus came? Maybe two years ago? Everyone at school was stoked. It NEVER comes. So we all buy tickets and go and its the saddest thing. The animals were all sick and skin-and-bones and stuff. Their hair was falling out in big chunks. The elefants were droopy, trunks in the dirt. Newton Thornton even started to CRY, can you believe? What a WUSS.
Remember how one of the animals got away? A tiger. Broke out of the cage and escaped into the fields. Everyone FREAKED. Kents dad was driving with a gun hanging out the policecar window. The cat was gone like 3 days? People started to figure it drowned in the sea or like that. But then one night Im pullin the trash can into the back yard and its there. The tiger in my yard.
It was so beautiful. Fatter and more hair like it was eating good things. MEAT. Its eyes were shiny like marbles, CAT EYES, that kind. It was hiding in the bush near the shed but it cant hide, its a TIGER. Looking at me too. I smelled its breath. Like raw liver, like mom left in the sink on liver night (also: I HATE liver).
Maybe it will kill me? Im thinking this. Rip me up. But Im happy too see it. Its wild and very special. More special than the birds or deers or coydogs around here. It doesnt BELONG here. It’s a special kind of wild. And . . . ok, doc, this is where it gets weird, but you ASKED . . . I feel like that tiger must have felt. Like, LOST. Like I dont really fit this place . . . the earth? Maybe just North Point. And I love my mom & my friends. Max mostly. But I feel like the tiger some days. Not ALL days but some. And thats when I get mad.
The tiger looks at me in my eyes and SOUL and then it yawns like its sleepy and jumps over the fence like you step over a curb.
I hoped it would live, be happy, have tiger babys (HOW? No tigers on the island). I hoped for that . . . but Kents dad shot it and it died. Fucking Kents dad. I cried. I think that was ok too. Right?
* * *
10
“JESUS . . . JESUS Christ . . . what is that?”
These six words cracked over the walkie-talkie clipped to Kent’s belt at four o’clock that afternoon.
“Tim?” Kent said. “Tim, what’s wrong? Do you copy?”
The boys stood in a loose circle, waiting.
“It’s nothing, guys,” came the reply. “Just sat on this goddamn thing accidentally.”
Kent glared, his eyes squeezing to slits. “What’s the matter, Tim? Come in, Tim.”
Tim’s voice—ragged, frustrated: “Why do you have the walkie-talkie, Kent? I gave it to Max. Anyway, how’s it going? Fulfilling your merit obligations?”
Ephraim snatched the walkie-talkie. “Kent almost walked us off a cliff.”
Kent made a grab for the walkie-talkie; Ephraim stashed it behind his back, his chin assuming that challenging jut again.
Silence from Tim’s end. Then: “I hope you’re joking. Where are you now?”
Newton gave Tim the compass coordinates. Tim said: “You’re a bit off-track, but it’ll be fine. Follow the path from here on out, okay?”
The sun hung low in the western sky. Its reflective rays turned the poplars and oaks into pillars of flame. The boys had rounded down from the cliffs around the northern hub of the island. Newton used his compass to keep them on track.
“None of this would’ve happened if Tim had come,” Kent sulked. “It’s his job, isn’t it?”
“Oh, bullshit.” Ephraim vented a harsh, barking laugh. “You wanted to play King Shit, Kent. Well, you played it. Now wear your crown of turds.”
The muscles humped up Kent’s shoulders—a defensive, kicked-dog posture. They walked in silence until Shelley said: “Kent’s right, the Scoutmaster should’ve come.”
Kent gave Shelley a look of pathetic gratitude. Next he was storming to the head of the line, which Ephraim was heading, elbowing the smaller boy aside to assume the lead. Shelley smiled fleetingly, nothing but a slight upturn of his lips—not that anybody noticed. Shelley had this way of hiding in a permanent pocket of shadow, that spot at the edge of your vision where your eyes never quite focused.
The boys came upon a large rock pile covered with spongy moss and decided to play King of the Mountain. It was a game they played often, but today it achieved a particular intensity—less a game and more of a fight. They played hard to dispel the jitteriness that had invaded their bones, a feeling whose root could be found back at the cabin. If they shoved and sweated and wrestled, it might just break the fear amassing inside of them, same way a good thunderstorm could break the intolerable heat of a summer afternoon.
Kent took command of the hill and repulsed their halfhearted attempts with hard shoves. He shoulder-blocked Max’s anemic challenge and flexed his biceps, his budding linebacker’s body set in a defensive stance. Dying sunlight petaled through the tree branches, glinting off his dental braces.
“Bring it on, Eef! I double-dog dare you!”
Ephraim stood at the base of the hill, arms crossed over his chest, hands cupping his elbows. A thin boy—so skinny he could slip down the drain hole, as his mom said—but his limbs were roped with powerful fast-twitch muscles, elbows and kneecaps hard as carbon. He thought about the mantra of his counselor, Dr. Harley: Don’t be a slave to your anger, Ephraim.
It was so hard. It bubbled inside him like that stupid geyser at Yellowstone Park, Old Faithful—except the geyser was, like, faithful: at least you could time it. Ephraim’s anger rose out of nowhere, this giddy charge
zitzing through his bones and electrifying the marrow. His rage was a dark cloud passing over the sun where just moments before the sky had been clear blue.
“You chicken?” Kent flapped his arms. “Chicken-chicken brock-brock!”
Lips skinning from his teeth, a feral growl rising in his throat, Ephraim sprinted up the pile to tangle with Kent. He saw it in Kent’s eyes: this desperate, crawling fear. Fear of losing partially, but also fear of how far Ephraim might take it. And Ephraim saw how easily it could happen. His fist coming up over Kent’s clumsy arms, his fist hammering Kent in the mush, flattening his thick drool-flecked lips against the barbed braces, cutting the flesh open as the big boy toppled like a sack of laundry, Ephraim following him down, fists pumping like pistons to destroy the crude symmetry of Kent Jenks’s fuck-o face . . .
Ephraim saw all this in the elastic instant they were perched atop the pile—a silly prize, really; a mossy heap of rocks—and the possibility of violence, his easy capacity for it, drained the strength from his limbs. Kent took advantage, flinging the smaller boy down. He copped a bodybuilding pose, the flexed double crab, face set in a caricature of a despotic monarch.
“I . . . am . . . invincible!”
Ephraim frowned and rubbed his elbow—the skin torn, blood weeping sluggishly to his wrist.
“Not cool, big K.”
Ephraim found Newt scraping moss off a log. Newt was always wandering off to press stupid leaves into his stupid notebook, cataloging everything with a black Sharpie. Eastern Sumac. Indian tobacco. God, so dorky!
Ephraim wound up to give Newt a kick in the ass, feeling sort of guilty—Dr. Harley wouldn’t approve; nor would his mother—so he delivered a lighter kick than usual.
“Where’s the first aid kit, numbnuts?”
Newt rubbed the seat of his pants. “I got ears, Eef. Don’t have to kick me.”
“I figured your ears were in your ass, Newt. Looks like everything else is—I was just knocking the wax out of them. Aren’t you gonna thank me?”
Sighing, Newt dug the kit out of his knapsack.
“Sit down, Eef.”
This was Newt’s role: the nurturer, the motherer. He had a natural affinity for it, and the boys sporadically accepted his ministrations—accepted them, then returned to making Newt the object of their torments. And Newt allowed it, because it had always been so.
He tore open a peroxide swab packet, pressed it to the wound on Ephraim’s elbow. Ephraim hissed between clenched teeth.
“It’s just fizzy,” Newt said. “Shouldn’t hurt.”
Ephraim slapped Newt’s hand away. “I’ll do it.”
Newton’s eyes drifted to the sky. His nostrils dilated.
“What are you doing?”
“I think that storm’s coming,” Newt said. “You can smell it. Like, an alkaline smell, like when you rip open a bag of water-softener salt.”
“We don’t have a water softener, Richie Rich.” Ephraim bared his teeth in a mock-snarl. “We like our water haaaaard.”
“You can spot it in the water, too. See?” Newt pointed to the sea. “The water always turns red before a storm. Not quite bloodred, but close. The electricity in the air as a storm brews, right, it causes plankton protozoans to lift up off the seabed; these tiny little creatures—like, the tiniest living things on earth—inflate with oxygen and turn deep red, covering the whole sea and making it red, too.”
Ephraim slapped a butterfly bandage on his elbow.
“Holy shit, dude. Your brain’s too big. Why doesn’t it ooze out your ears?” His eyes went wide. “Actually . . . fuck me! I see it oozing out right now!”
Ephraim licked his finger and went to screw it into Newt’s ear—a classic Wet Willy. His finger stopped just short, though, a runner of saliva clung to a whorl of his fingerprint. It seemed a heartless thing to do, considering.
He wiped the spit on his pants, bounded to his feet, and raced off to join the other boys.
“Saved your life, Newt! You owe me one!”
THE TRAIL descended to a pebbled shoreline lapped by the ocean. The boys doffed their boots and rolled up their pants, wading in the icy October sea. Their ankles turned pig-belly pink. They hunted for the smoothest stones and had a skipping contest, which Kent won with ten skips by his count.
“Hey, guys,” Ephraim said. “Check this out.”
He directed them to a deep cut within the shore rocks, fringed with sea moss. The boys gathered round. Flashes of shining skin made oily in the guttering light; unknown shapes humping over one another. Silky sibilant esses—husssss, husssss.
“It’s a snake ball,” Newton said.
How many snakes? Impossible to tell. Their bodies were entwined, a writhing network of tubes like an elastic-band ball. Their bodies were dark—sea serpents?—and wet like living, livid oil; that peculiar reptile smell met their noses: wet and fetid like a dewy field spread with dead crickets.
“What are they doing?” said Ephraim.
“They’re . . .” Newt’s face went pink. “ . . . y’know . . .”
“Fucking?” Ephraim made a gagging noise. “That’s how snakes fuck, all twisted up in a ball? Like . . . a snake orgy?”
Kent and Max laughed. Ephraim was so perverted. A snake orgy. Inevitably someone tried to push Newton into the snake ball, make him touch it—Shelley in this case. Newt squirmed free of Shelley’s long simian arms, out of his smooth rubbery grip—almost like tentacles without the suction cups—and screamed at him to stop.
“Quit it, Shel! Lay off!”
The other boys watched idly. There was something off-putting—sickening, really—about the scene. A bit like watching a blind boa constrictor pursue a plump mouse around a cage: the chase might go on a while but the snake was dogged, plus it was a natural predator. Sooner or later it’d eat the fat little fucker.
“Stop it, Shel,” Kent said in a bored tone. “You’re gonna make him piss his pants again.”
Shelley quit abruptly, turned, and wandered toward the shore. Newton smoothed his untucked shirt over his pendulant belly, turned to Kent all stiff-spined, and said:
“Thanks, Kent . . . but I only did it the one time, and I was six years old and we were on that bus trip to Moncton that went on forever and okay, I drank too much McDonald’s orange drink but—”
“Shut up, tinkle-dink,” Kent said. “Don’t get too excited or you’ll piss your pants, remember?”
WHILE THE boys horsed around, Shelley waded into a shallow tidal pool. He found a crayfish. It fit perfectly in his palm. He studied it closely. It looked weird and funny. He tried to imagine the world as seen through the black poppy seeds of its eyes, sitting on spindly stalks. What a stupid creature. What were its days like—what was its life? Crawling around this dreary itsy-bitsy pool, choking on fish shit, eating garbage. It had no clue about the world outside its filthy puddle, did it? Dumb is as dumb does, as his mother would say—which had always struck Shelley as a dumb expression, something only a dumb person would say.
How would it feel to pull the crayfish apart? He didn’t mean how would the crayfish feel—he didn’t care about that, and anyway, with its piece-of-lint brain and elementary nerves, it may not feel anything. Distantly, Shelley considered that possibility: that this creature could watch itself be shredded like paper and feel nothing, caring not at all.
Oh, there goes my leg. Never mind. And there goes my other one. Ooops—now I can’t see. My eyes must be gone.
Shelley was something of a sensualist. He relished touch—pressure. How would it feel, physically, to take this creature apart? Would its pincers snap at his fingers as he pulled? Would its stupid crustacean anatomy fight its own dismemberment—that wonderful tension as he pulled each limb off, the sucking pip! as this or that part detached from the whole? The crayfish could fight, yes—and dimly, Shelley sort of hoped it would—but it wouldn’t matter: he wasn’t scared of being bitten or clawed, plus he was so much bigger. As usual with Shelley, if he wanted to do something—and
if nobody was watching—he simply did as he liked.
He pinched one of the crayfish’s comical little eyes. It ruptured with a mildly satisfying pop. The texture was grainy—a tiny ball of honeycomb candy coming apart. The remnants were stuck on his finger like the shards of a very small and dark Christmas tree ornament. The crayfish spasmed in his palm, jackknifing open and closed. Shelley was transfixed. His eyes took on a hard sheen. Saliva collected in his mouth, a gossamer strand of spit rappelling over his quivering lower lip.
He burst the crayfish’s other eye. He carefully pulled off one of its pincers, relishing that thrilling tension. Pip! The pinky-translucent claw continued to open and close even when separated from the body. He dropped it and watched it sink, opening and closing.
“Hey, Shel,” Ephraim called over. “Newt’s going to light the one-match fire. We need you as a windbreak.”
NEWTON WAS in charge of the fire. The boys were content to let him take the lead. Besides, Newton was best at almost all the basic survival skills: firecraft and orienteering and berry identification.
Newton lit the pile of old man’s beard and nursed the fledgling flickers. Fingers of flame crawled up the bleached wood. They crouched around the fire to soak in its heat. Sunlight painted a honey-gold inlay on the slack water between the waves.
“My grandma died of cancer,” Ephraim said suddenly. “Liver cancer.”
Max said: “What?”
Ephraim gave him a look: Just listen to me. “Her skin went yellow. All she could get down were those meal replacement things that old people drink. Ensure. Her hair came out because of the radiation chamber they stuck her in to kill the cancer.” He exhaled heavily, blowing his dark locks off his forehead. “When I saw that guy this morning, the first thing I thought about was Grandma.”