The Bewdley Mayhem

by Tony Burgess

  “Jesus, I’m tellin’ ya, Robert. No wonder criminals use this stuff.”

  The Mayor inhales desperately through his clear mouth. He goes to speak but he has sprained his tongue badly from pushing against the tape. As he closes his mouth to test it for spit, a long needle pierces from his mouth to his shoulder.

  Brent reaches down and drags him out of the trunk by his belt.

  “OK, everybody! Hey, people! The Mayor’s here!”

  Several people look over and some step forward.

  “He’s here to cut the ribbon!”

  The crowd sends up a few whooping sounds as more people begin to make their way over to the cruiser. As they get closer, the Mayor can see that some of them have dark stains on their knees. They are closing in and he steps back. Brent squeezes his arm hard. A short chubby man with a goatee, wearing overalls, bends around Robert to look into the trunk.

  “Officer Brent, are those heads in your trunk?”

  Brent sidesteps to obscure the view.

  “What are you lookin’ at?”

  “There’s heads in there! Human heads!”

  “Shut up, Ed!”

  “What the hell’s goin’ on here. Brent?”

  Ed looks around, frightened. He dashes back through the crowd and runs across the field into the woods.

  Looking back upon the scene he’s fleeing, Ed, like the Mayor, realizes that areas of the field are tangled in violence: others, however, seem oblivious. One woman watches another dragging a dead teenage boy by the wrists. Frightened, she looks to Ed. It’s dawning on her: some parts of the fair are utterly different. Brent closes the trunk.

  “Alright folks, it’s ribbon-cutting time. Anybody got a pair of scissors?”

  The woman who was at the carving table steps forward.

  “Yeah, I’ve got a pair, but one of my little students got it stuck in a head, can’t get it out.”

  “Surely somebody’s got a pair of scissors for the ribbon cutting. Anyone?”

  The crowd of people look to each other with opens hands, shaking their heads.

  The carving woman wipes her hands against her apron.

  “What are we cutting a ribbon for, Brent?”

  “Gotta cut a ribbon. Always cut a ribbon.”

  “Well, I don’t see a ribbon either.”

  Brent lets go of the Mayor’s arm and looks across the gold field.

  “Christ, don’t tell me we ain’t got a ribbon.”

  A man calls out from the back of the crowd.

  “Not to be, Brent. It just ain’t to be.”

  Brent drops to a knee and picks up the duct tape he discarded.

  “Hang on now. This duct tape’s a bit like a ribbon.”

  The man calls out again.

  “That ain’t a ribbon, Brent. Face it. Ya got no scissors and ya got no ribbon.”

  Brent drapes the tape across his hand and fingers the hairs caught in its glue. He’s thinking.

  “Could be a ribbon.”

  Another woman steps forward.

  “Officer Brent Poole, this is a damn farce and you know it. There isn’t even anything to cut a ribbon for. There’s no new school er nothin’! I think you better just forget this and let us get back to our craft show.”

  As the woman turns Brent points his gun into the air and fires. The crowd jumps to the ground as one.

  “Alright. You’re pushin’ me now.”

  The carving woman lying on her stomach is panting, frightened.

  “What are you doing, Brent?”

  “I’m gonna have a ribbon-cutting ceremony even if it means I gotta shoot somebody to do it.”

  A man laying face down whispers. “He’s crazy. He’s crazy. What do we do?”

  Brent hears him and stomps his foot down in his back.

  “Now everybody shut up while I think.”

  Brent kicks the back of the Mayor’s legs, forcing him to his knees. He looks at the tape in his hand as he taps his bottom lip with the muzzle of his gun. A young woman calls out, crying into the grass, trying to bury her mouth.

  “Shush, I said. Everybody shush. I’m thinkin’.”

  Brent lowers the gun, and it smacks off the Mayor’s chin. Robert can see a man, fifteen feet away, drawing himself up slowly to a crouch.

  “OK. OK. I’m getting’ an idea, now. Somethin’s comin’ to me.”

  The man has risen to a position from which he can run. Brent, who is looking down at the Mayor’s face, cannot see him. Brent abruptly stuffs the tape back into the Mayor’s mouth.

  “There we go! There we go! OK, Robert, you’ll be the goddamn scissors.”

  Brent slaps the top of the Mayor’s head, hard. The man behind him has now broken into a run and is nearly upon him.

  “Bite that ribbon, Rob. Come on, you can do it!”

  The man has leapt into the air directly behind Brent and is going to land on his back.

  “Ah you stupid piece of shit, you’ll never get through that!”

  Brent lifts his gun, resting its tip against the Mayor’s teeth. He fires.

  As the Mayor dies, an animal that had been sleeping in his brain awakes and drops its massive shoulders, down, away from a shadow that flies across his skull.

  ★

  Ed is lying on his side beneath a wide fan of yellow-green ferns. Parallel to his body is the single rut of a bicycle path. It runs past him, flying down through the forest, vanishing at points beneath shining poison ivy. The trail reappears as it ramps up across a large flat stone. It breaks at the end of the rock and starts again, some feet below, continuing along the edge of a riverbank.

  The river is small, shallow and quick. More like a stream, so clear that its pebbled bottom is perfectly focused on its surface. As the path rises off the bank and into the darker blinds of the woods, the stream slows and broadens. Its bed tilts to break the surface, then drops suddenly, hiding, black and nearly still. Dark green pads close in from the edges. They balance white flowers that look exactly like egg cups, with slick orange yolks. The current is visible as it rolls like a heavy collar around a black log rising out of the centre. Beyond this the water seems little more than an earth tone, a cadence of rock. That it could have weight, or be cold, almost seems impossible.

  But it does.

  And is.

  As the stream deepens over its spring the temperature plummets and the small trout that spend their entire lives there, in a slow endless circle, like bright pink candles on a cake, are made almost entirely of coloured ice. The spring is forced up from below through a slit in the rock. It travels upward, at an angle, from a distant source beneath the earth. This water has risen silently and lightlessly for over a million years.

  Ed stumbles to his feet and begins to walk the bicycle path until he reaches the stream. He looks over his shoulder, afraid that he is being followed, then he steps into the water. He believes anyone following him will lose his trail if he walks up the middle of the stream.

  No scent. No footprints.

  He feels the cold water penetrate his shoes and travel like an electrical charge along the sole of his foot. He stops and turns once more to see if he’s being followed. His eyes are large and white. His mouth is open. There are people back up in the woods who have lost their minds. Or, at least, one person. Ed can’t quite put together what he saw back there. The Mayor was tied up. And Brent was waving a gun around. And in the trunk of his car — what exactly was that?

  For a second Ed thinks he should go back and confirm these things.

  And then there was something else. Something that he thought just couldn’t be the way it appeared. Could it? It seemed so unimportant. So minor. But now, as he slips his foot out of the cold clay to make his way further up stream, Ed thinks, if it is nothing, it’s sure the strangest thing I’ve ever seen.

 
; The Mayor was smaller.

  Ed hears a voice ahead.

  He starts, and takes two quick strides toward the bank, then stops. His feet splash too loudly.

  The voice. A woman’s. Closer. It sounds like it’s coming over the water. From the bottom of a hallway.

  She appears. A woman, sitting on the edge of the bank with her feet in the water. She wears thick grey socks, and as she raises one foot, the heel swings heavy, drenched, below her foot. She lowers the foot again and looks at Ed, who stands motionless in the centre of the steam.

  “Ed?”

  He shakes his hands as if warming them over a drum fire.

  “Hi there. Uh, do I know you?”

  It’s her. The woman whose boyfriend was murdered. What’s her name?

  “Oh. You’ve seen me around. My name’s Kathy.”

  Kathy extends her hand over the water. Ed stares at it as a large red and yellow dragonfly, attracted to Kathy’s fingertips, whirrs toward her, then turns on its giant black head and rolls in huge leaps up over the trees.

  “C’mere Ed. Sit down.”

  Ed steps forward, then spins to face where he’s been.

  “Now’s not the time. There’s some terrible doin’s at the fair.”

  He swats another dragonfly that hammers at the light around his elbow.

  “Terrible doin’s? What are ‘terrible doin’s,’ Ed?”

  Ed stumbles over stones, kicking up water. He reaches the bank and sits beside Kathy.

  “Jesus. I don’t know how to explain. But I think something right sinister is going on.”

  “You mean the Mayor?”

  Ed nods and can’t say more.

  “OK, Ed. You’re right. And I’ll tell you what happened. It’s just this: a while ago I walked with the Mayor up to his front door, because he was afraid to go home. And he showed me something through his window. He showed me why he couldn’t go back inside. And, it’s not what you’d expect.”

  Ed pulls at his beard, pretending that he’s listening when in fact he’s waiting for Kathy to start acting strange.

  “The Mayor couldn’t go home because he was already there. He was already sitting inside. Get it? Oh, and another thing: the Mayor inside was about four feet tall.”

  Ed slips off the bank and lands in the water.

  “That’s what I saw! I saw him like that! He’s smaller!”

  Kathy reaches down and helps Ed back up.

  “That’s right, Ed. It’s like there’s an extra Mayor. He may be smaller, but that doesn’t matter, you see. ’Cause no matter what size he is, he’s too much. He’s one too many. He’s extra. So that day when the Mayor stepped through his front door to meet the smaller Mayor, something happened. Something very strange. I don’t know why I was the only one to see it, but everything shifted. ’Cause there, at the centre of things, was this extra person, this extra Mayor. I began to notice there were other parts of town where things were different. Outside Bletcher’s Video, for instance, everyone who walked by started laughing and talking quickly. And down on the beach — the waves changed. They have little saw teeth now. You have to look real close, but they do.”

  Ed feels the wind chilling his wet legs. He begins to shiver and holds his hairy chin in his hand to keep his teeth from chattering.

  “That’s just the beginning. The Mayor isn’t the only one. I went home this afternoon and when I opened the door I was already there, too. Just sitting there. Tiny. Skinny-looking. So I ran off. But I think there must be others. Others who didn’t get away, Ed.”

  “Well, God, shouldn’t we go back there? Shouldn’t we warn people? It’s true. I believe you. I saw the little Mayor. I saw crazy stuff happening.”

  “I don’t think we can, Ed.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I don’t think we can go back there.”

  Ed rises from the bank on trembling legs.

  “What do you mean we can’t go back there?”

  “I don’t think it exists anymore.”

  Ed steps off the shallows and walks into the current, pulling his thighs against the deeper water.

  “When you get to the other side, Ed, tear me off a branch.”

  Ed looks back, frightened. Struck by the oddness of the request, he reaches the other side of the river and, nearly falling, grasps at the limb of a small tree. But there’s really nothing to hold; instead, his four fingers hit a surface and his knuckles are pushed back. To his horror, the surface tears under his nails.

  This part of the forest is literally an image on a wall. Ed pushes against it with the flat of his hand and the surface moves slightly. The stones beneath the tree, its forked branch, and its needles, wrinkle like wallpaper.

  There is no depth, nothing is close. There are no things in this forest.

  Ed peels at the score left; by his fingernails, and, lifting a tag of what feels like paper, pulls the corner back. Another surface is exposed: a hideous pinkness, flat and dull. Ed feels a shriek coming.

  Behind the forest there is only rubber. He lays a hand on it and pushes. Strong, horrible rubber. In a panic he lifts the paper flap back into its place, frantically trying to rejoin the edges, but it buckles and falls open again like a terrible wound.

  The corner, he thinks, pin up the corner.

  He holds the tip in place and scoops water up to plaster it, but the torn piece hangs like a rag, barely concealing the fissure. Ed howls and squeezes the patch in his fist. He falls over in the river and tears open an even wider strip: it concludes dangerously close to his feet. He releases the flap and it lands like a long, ragged frond on the top of the water.

  It rolls over once in the current and disappears.

  Above Ed, above the entire forest, sunlight falls in long spears of gold — erasing as it burns and rolls, binding the trees to their shade and the shade to a vast hole of light that shines up off everything.

  Kathy flips a stone across the water toward Ed. She makes a cone with her hands and calls across to the opposite bank.

  “It’s all like that, Ed! Except for me. Except for Ed.”

  Hearing her voice, Ed rolls over and grabs his face. He rises to his feet and begins plowing through the river toward her.

  “Are you sure?”

  He pulls grotesquely, violently at the skin of his cheek.

  “Are you sure?”

  Kathy stretches her arms out, beckoning.

  “I wouldn’t test it too hard, Ed.”

  Ed stops and looks up, suddenly quiet. He pats his face.

  “Is it OK? Does it look OK?”

  “It looks fine.”

  Ed reaches her and collapses on the bank. Kathy puts her arm around him and he starts to cry.

  “I don’t understand. I don’t understand. Do we die now? Are we gonna die?”

  Kathy kisses the corner of his eyes and flicks a tear back into her mouth with her tongue.

  “Maybe. I don’t know. I think we just live a little posthumously for a while.”

  Ed is confused by this remark. Hurt by it. When Kathy kisses him on the lips he doesn’t close his eyes right away. Instead, he looks at the orchids, growing just up the bank. Deep red cups with scoops of flame tossed back from their rims. Close by, a lime stick with vibrating black wings lifts off the ground. And, higher, Ed sees a small house on a distant hill. He can just make out the sounds of a dog barking in the yard as Kathy’s tongue reaches his.

  And then, finally, Ed closes his eyes.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Michael Holmes! Gary Pullin!

  Thanks to all at ECW, past, present and future … I’m grateful for this.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  writes fiction and for film. He lives in Stayner, Ontario with his wife, Rachel, and their two children, Griffin and Camille.

  Copyright © Tony Burge
ss, 2014

  Originally published as The Hellmouths of Bewdley, 1997; Pontypool Changes Everything, 1998; Caesarea, 1999. All copyright © Tony Burgess.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any process — electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise — without the prior written permission of the copyright owners and ECW Press. The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Published by ECW Press

  2120 Queen Street East, Suite 200 Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4E 1E2

  416-694-3348 / info@ecwpress.com

  LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION

  Burgess, Tony, 1959–

  [Novels. Selections]

  The Bewdley mayhem : the hellmouths of Bewdley, Pontypool changes everything, Caesarea / Tony Burgess.

  Contents: The hellmouths of Bewdley — Pontypool changes everything — Caesarea.

  Issued in print and electronic formats.

  ISBN 978-1-77041-216-3 (pbk.)

  978-1-77090-623-5 (PDF)

  978-1-77090-624-2 (ePUB)

  Cover design: Gary Pullin

  The publication of The Bewdley Mayhem has been generously supported by the Canada Council for the Arts which last year invested $157 million to bring the arts to Canadians throughout the country, and by the Ontario Arts Council (OAC), an agency of the Government of Ontario, which last year funded 1,681 individual artists and 1,125 organizations in 216 communities across Ontario for a total of $52.8 million. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for our publishing activities, and the contribution of the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Media Development Corporation.