Pontypool Changes Everything

by Burgess, Tony

  17

  Dealey Plaza Bums

  A hurricane is visible as a spiralling structure of cirrus clouds. Torn from the far corners of the sky and gathered, these clouds ravel like cotton candy around a paper cone. The eye of the hurricane, famously calm, looks down the cone, its view descending and dry, onto a farmer’s field. Four cows and a calf gnaw at the ground in this pasture and near them a light has found its way under sea-fed walls, illuminating the animals from below. The pupil above them, darkened in a child’s pink fist, dilates to absorb this tiny remote light. It locks perfectly, developing an image of the circular patch. Five figures are visible, standing across from each other on the points of a pentagram. They are held here, less by the geometric pattern visible to the eye than by a series of physical arguments that have suspended them at equal distances from each other. A combination of these arguments acts as an attracting hub and they stand, in a quiet rage, facing this hub, unable to move or speak. The strongest zombie, a tall blond man in jean overalls, takes advantage of a momentary imbalance caused by an interfering calf and leaps growling on the upper body of a teenage girl to his left. Their argument began sometime earlier, when she bit down, weeping, against the back of his armpit. Now she is under him, shaking her sharp teeth up into his throat. He throws his head back to howl and releases a glaze of blood onto her face. The other zombies, spinning off their points on the pentagram, collapse toward the battling couple and fall. They strike back angrily, with swinging fists, at the invisible world that sucks at them. The zombies stop in a pile and lie still. The blood escaping from the large man they’ve fallen on wicks up through their clothing, darkening the flannel. The calf flees in quick light hops until it encounters the eye-wall, which rotates at one hundred and eighty-five miles per hour. The young animal is driven under the descending hurricane. It scores a circle in the ground before being tossed off a boulder into a chaotic cross-current trip, up into the corner of the eye. The eye blinks on the irritant long enough to clear the sky, and the calf falls from a height of nine miles through a perfectly clear blue afternoon. It lands, like a drop of wax, splashing at three o’clock in the circle its body had previously tore open.

  Grant pulls the car over beside the field near Pontypool. He reaches into the back seat, sliding an open briefcase onto the floor. He fishes a pair of binoculars out from between two sacks full of fresh corn.

  “Right over there. Holy Christ! Those are goddamn cannibals! I can’t believe it.”

  Grant reaches down and pops open the trunk from the dash.

  “Get the equipment out of the trunk, Greg. Let’s shoot some of this stuff.”

  Grant opens the car door without removing the binoculars from his eyes. They bump against the door frame as he rises from his seat.

  “I don’t know, buddy. This just might freak me out. Look at those bastards. Real-life wackos. Zombies. Killers. I’m a bit freaked out. Hey! Where’s the camera?”

  Greg walks around the car, scanning the farmer’s field. He can see four cows in a far corner. And about halfway back from them, near an overgrown pile of collected stones, there’s a dark shape. He can’t quite make it out. Then he sees what is clearly an arm lift up and fall against the side of the mound.

  “Woo-hoo! Holy shit! Those suckers are alive! Greg! Greg! Did you see that?”

  Greg opens the trunk and lifts out the camera case. His hand hovers over a plastic gas container. He touches the handle, lifting an oily film onto his fingertips. He slides his thumb across the ends of his fingers. He feels sound between the surfaces. Sound? He leaves the trunk open, just in case, and hauls the equipment around the car, placing it in the tall grass that grows along a ditch where Grant is standing, still looking through the binoculars, his mouth hanging open. He looks out briefly to locate Greg and the camera. He speaks in a whisper.

  “OK. OK. Let’s keep our voices down. Those suckers are alive out there. I don’t know how safe we are. These are predators. Hmmm. I’ve never seen . . .Jesus . . . let’s … uh … let’s get back in the car.”

  Grant reaches behind and flips open the car door. He lowers himself, slowly, still looking through the binoculars. He lifts his legs, carefully, one at a time, up off the shoulder of the road.

  “Put the … uh … equipment in the back seat and get in the car, Greg. I don’t wanna do anything stupid.”

  Greg follows the order, running his hands uncertainly across the surfaces of things before he moves them. He walks to the back of the car. The trunk is open and he looks at it, feeling a momentary confusion at the fact that he can’t open it. Open it. When it’s open. It’s open for him to open it. He lays his hand on the trunk. The weight brings it down. Greg looks self-consciously through the rear window and closes the lid. When it clicks he has to pull his hand off with force. He feels the effort as a kind of pain. He has the powerful sensation that he has had to do this, to lift his hand from the closed trunk, in contradiction to some obvious sign. As he walks up the passenger side of the car his face flushes. He feels that he has acted perversely. He pictures, as narrowly as possible, the series of actions that will return him to the passenger seat.

  “I don’t get it. These freaks aren’t doing anything. What the hell are they doing?”

  Grant reaches down to a panel beside him and flips a switch that locks all the doors with four simultaneous plunks.

  “Maybe they’re playing dead. I can see you, you bastards. I know you’re not dead. So, c’mon, let’s see some action. Do something. Maybe it’s a trap.”

  Greg looks up across the road and squints his eyes. He’s afraid. He feels the need to comprehend something complex. Anything. He tries to picture a car on the highway. Its four tires. They rotate. The weight of the car bearing down. The weight that doesn’t stop it. Of course, it doesn’t stop. The wind rises up over the windshield. The air pressure above the hood of the car is higher than at its sides. Greg feels a rush of relief. Something is coming back to him. He tries to picture the driver. An easy one. Someone he knew in high school. Dead now. Heart failure. I’m remembering him.

  “Maybe we should’ve brought a gun. Damn! Look at these fools. These sacks of shit are harmless. What the hell are they doing? Havin’ a siesta?”

  Greg’s relief is short lived. He feels his heart rate speed up with questions: What was that? What’s happening to me? I may not be able to even ask these things in five minutes, what the hell do I do? His heart begins to bang in his throat. This is the disease. I’m finally getting sick. Do I tell Grant?

  “Awright, Christ, let’s move on. Maybe we can find some zombies with a little more life, eh?”

  The car starts and eases up a hill, slowing and stopping at the top. Grant hands Greg the binoculars.

  “Here, buddy, you keep an eye out with these. Let me know if you see anything.”

  Greg takes the binoculars and rolls down his window. He raises the binoculars to his face and holds his breath. A light orange fuzz hovers in two connected egg shapes. In the left egg shape a tilting oblong of white floats in the orange. He moves so that both egg shapes share the oblong and he adjusts the focus. A tiny pattern of red diamonds rises sharply and disappears into a field of tall corn. The oblong is a house, back off the road at the edge of a heavy forest. A dog — a German shepherd — is jumping and barking, straining against a tether. Beside it is a fuel drum mounted on a concrete platform. On the small lawn, at the front of the house, are four silhouetted figures. They all have pipes stuck in their mouths. Wisemen? Dwarfs?

  The view through the binoculars is cool. The lemon-coloured leaves on the undersides of branches are crisp. The sky is fixed through the trees in an ice-blue lattice. A refrigerator. Greg shivers.

  Greg turns the wheel between his eyes and loses the field. It blurs and he lowers the binoculars.

  “Hey, you know where we are?”

  Greg’s left arm is swollen from the sun and he tries to brush the heat off with a cool palm.

  “Well, I’ll tell ya. I’ll tell
ya. This is Pontypool comin’ up.”

  Grant lowers his forehead toward the windshield.

  “There is something in Pontypool that I can show you. I shouldn’t, but I’m gonna anyway.”

  “Uh, what is it?”

  “What is it? What is it? OK, I’m gonna show you one of the little hiding spots that puts a shape to every fuckin’ thing you know. What do you think of that?”

  Greg lifts the binoculars again and his vision sprays across the road. The white sky drives its tines through the hood of the car.

  “I gotta remind you of one thing first, and I don’t want you to take it the wrong way.”

  Grant pulls the car over beside an overgrown road that disappears down a dark green throat in the woods.

  “You are already an accomplice to a major crime. Do you know what I mean?”

  Greg hears himself respond from somewhere other than his mouth, somewhere other than his head. His left shoulder knots.

  “OK. OK. I just want to point that out, because that’s your licence to see what I’m gonna show ya. Got it?”

  Greg feels the whisks of a broom shaking at his insides. The disease is emptying me out; is that what’s happening?

  “OK. I’m gonna rock your world now, little buddy.”

  Grant turns the wheel and releases the brake, allowing the car to fall down the weeded ramp. He ducks his head, as if the low branches are in the car. The sunlight dries in dark streaks across the windshield.

  “Pontypool. Now, Pontypool changes everything.”

  A yellow field opens up to the left and Grant pulls up onto a flattened patch of gold. The field is broken here and there by sand dunes that crest through the grass. A picnic table sits just outside the shade of a birch tree at the field’s southern border. Grant takes the binoculars from Greg’s hands.

  “We leave everything in the car. C’mon, let’s go.”

  The picnic table is cracked and yellow, with tufts of moss capping its saw-cut ends. Grant sits facing away from the tabletop and he slaps the bench beside him. Greg sits down.

  “See that bit of ground right there?”

  The corner of a small grey shack is visible beyond the birch tree. Along its side is a large rectangle of sod. The grass is cut and maintained, though the strips of green are all different. Some strips newer. Some slightly yellow.

  “Know what’s in there?”

  Grant hovers his hand out in the direction of the quilted lawn and rolls his fingers in a trill.

  “Dead people.”

  Greg presses his thumbs hard against the wood. A button to press. I need a Higher Power. He presses the button again.

  “Murdered people, Greg.”

  Grant is whispering, not so much to avoid being heard as to keep respectful of this place. Greg feels confusion in the pew of the bench. A church? A funeral?

  “You know the headline? House of Horrors. Well, that’s one right there.”

  Greg looks at the corner of the shack. A white stone foundation. Weathered boards, cupped by the sun, meeting in rough gaps at the edges. Not good. Not good for people. I’m scared.

  “In fact, you’ll probably read about this one sometime in the fall. In the meantime, it’s a bit of a wholesale outlet. People are brought here, not by the guy who lives here, but by people who need to do a little intimidating. It’s used by several organizations who don’t even know each other. Who leave, not knowing where they’ve come to. A lot of big business. You want to make sure something goes your way, you just give the right person a tour of the shack and, man, things start going exactly the way you want them to. Some organized crime, of course. Some government. Not always Canadian, either. Some military. This little shack is very busy.”

  Grant plucks a shoot from the wet sleeve that holds it in the ground. He sucks on the juice leaking from its slender trunk.

  “Yessir. And when it gets a little too crazy, somebody sends in the cops. And, ta-da, they arrest some demented little individual in a House of Horrors. Everything is accounted for. No leftovers. The simple answers. The world needs a little something extra to keep it eager. Something that nobody would ever believe.”

  Grant gets up and walks toward the graves. He steps up on the lawn and turns, with his hands on his hips, to face Greg. Greg closes his eyes. Out of the darkness a pair of snapping teeth rush toward him. He opens his eyes and lays his hands on his pounding chest.

  “Your buddy Steve and his girlfriend are in there right now. You can’t hear them. It’s soundproof. But I betcha it’s godawful noisy in there right now.”

  A blackbird with tiny crimson shoulders falls from a tree and swoops into the light around Grant. He steps away from the shack. He huddles his back and rises to the tips of his toes. He crosses his lips with a finger and holds out an upraised hand to Greg.

  Greg hears himself through a broken staccato of words. I’m thinking this is a lie. Grant stops halfway to the picnic table.

  “Hey, you alright? You don’t look so good.”

  Intimidation. He wants something from me. Why doesn’t he just ask?

  18

  As Fluids Go, This One’s . . .

  On the wall are four long filleting knives. Three of them are as shiny and clean as the corner of an eye. The fourth hasn’t been cleaned at all and has a crust of blood along its blade, concluding at the tip in a tiny black ball. Fingers have splashed up to grab these knives over and over again, leaving a heavy encaustic of blood on the wall behind their handles. A spotted bare lightbulb is suspended over the bench below the knives. Strips of newspaper are permanently plastered to the wood surface, dozens of bright corners crossed by black angles. Most of what has been done here has been done quickly and sloppily. Some of what has been done here has been carefully executed, caught before it rolled to the floor and wrapped. To the left of the bench along a back wall sits a long white freezer. Its top edge is browned by a dragging apron and the knuckles of a large man, like faint hinges, have stained the seal.

  Jimmy is sitting in a corner behind the door on an overturned bucket. He has been staring directly at the lightbulb, trying to blind himself. The light has long stopped hurting his eyes. The brightness eating at the centre of his vision is no longer white. Long green wires whip and shrivel across its surface. Patterns of black zeros rise to the top and blot out the light in a throb before sinking back to burn off. Jimmy hears a scrape on the floor beside him. He looks down and his vision is as solid as a jelly bean. He thinks it must be an animal. What kind? Rat? The door opens, and he turns his head to face it. A dark green tower leans off the shattering scales of a gold river coming through the door. Towards him. Jimmy looks down, blinking. No light. Darkness.

  “Jimmy? Are you OK?”

  Julie walks over to the bench and drops a bucket of raspberries on the corner. She swings a hatchet up to rest between the two nails that hold its neck to the wall. Jimmy blinks in a frenzy, trying to find his feet on the floor. The scales that exploded through the room when Julie entered have now fallen to the ground. They lie around him in a carpet of dull orange. Jimmy extends the toe of his running shoe, pushing the scales. A large fly lands in the pile like a fat bomb and vibrates against Jimmy’s foot. Its energy tickles the undersides of his toes. Jimmy presses down, killing the fly.

  “It smells in here, Jimmy. Ugh. Fish guts.”

  She looks at her brother. Behind him on the wall hangs a wooden board with the prices of fresh fish written in felt pen. Jimmy has an empty space in his saucer-sized pupils. Julie walks over to him and squeezes his little shoulders against her side.

  “We can clean this place up. There’s a stove, a freezer. Everything we need, Jimmy. I don’t even care if you never talk again. What’s there to say anyway?”

  Jimmy hangs a fistful of shirt off his sister. Colours are returning to the room.

  Over the next few days the children are busy, sweeping fish scales from the floor, soaping down the dried blood and creating a pantry of wild foods on shelves over the freezer. They
self-consciously copy their parents, and Julie occasionally calls her brother by his father’s name — “Good morning, George.” Even Jimmy’s silence begins to resemble his father’s. His blunt jerks of the head — “No,” “Yes.” They become a way of telling his wife that Yes, I am my father. And by the end of the week they have created a veritable homestead out of the fish-cleaning hut.

  One thing, however, is beginning to pose a serious threat to their survival. Their diet is lacking certain food groups, and because of this they are growing weak. By the fifth day Jimmy returns to his bucket. He no longer responds to his sister. A hungry fear has made her frantic. She has begun to hear things and has taken to running outside every five minutes, only to return, asking: “George, did you hear that?”

  A few days later, in the afternoon, Julie rose from the floor beside Jimmy and dashed to the door for the sixth time. It opened on a man who had been listening.

  Grant Mazzy stood, surprised, looking down at the girl with the burnt, skinny face. He opened his mouth to call out for Greg, when a hatchet whacked his knee, cleaving the cap into free halves. He reached up into the air as the cap halves rolled under skin to meet at the back of his leg. A second whack of the hatchet released a sandwich-sized pair of intestinal loops. He reached down, gloving his hand inside the base of his abdomen. A deep and desperate flex of muscle, still clinging, bent his fingers back. A third whack cleared the hand from his arm, dropping it, like a coin tossed from a balcony, deep into his torso. The hand turned backward off the bottom of his heart and sprang back up from a mattress of lung, landing, finally, to rest, partially clenched, in a rack of ribs. These ribs lay across the threshold at the front of the hut. The ribs were protecting the hand as best they could as blows reigned down from above, but soon they too collapsed under the silver eye of the hatchet.

  Jimmy looks through the fingers that cage his face. Julie’s body is dripping with the blood of the now nearly liquid intruder.

  “C’mon, George, gimme a hand here.”