Ventriloquists

by David Mathew

  ‘Are you okay?’ the man asked, and Shyleen remembered his name.

  ‘Yasser.’ She said it with relief, her voice groggy. ‘Am I a worm?’

  ‘No, babe.’ Yasser had misheard her –or had wrongly decoded her slur. ‘We’re nowhere near home. This is Weirdsville, Arizona.’

  ‘Always wanted to visit America,’ Shyleen answered… and then her mind closed down once more and the world darkened.

  3.

  They sat on a rock and compared memories, wondering aloud what they would do for food. They tried not to panic: they even told each other to try not to panic, which of course made them both nervous. They defecated at the same time, their hands linked together.

  Eventually they slept. The air had turned chilly, but if they snuggled up tight it was warm enough. For a brief few minutes, listening to Yasser’s heart before her eyes drooped, Shyleen felt comfortable and secure. Somehow they had weathered the storms of temptation and returned to each other; they had found one another, quite literally, in the wilderness. Did it matter if they never went home? she wondered. Maybe not; not once they’d decoded the mysteries of this place.

  Perhaps in this place she wasn’t ill.

  4.

  ‘How did you sleep?’ he asked her.

  ‘…Weird dreams… The light’s no different,’ Shyleen observed, sitting up.

  ‘It didn’t change all night – night’s the right word… Tell me what you were dreaming.’

  ‘You were awake all night?’

  ‘No; I nodded off a few times, no idea how long for…’ Yasser held up his left arm; he had removed his jacket at some point to reveal a white t-shirt that looked grubby. ‘Notice anything?’ he asked.

  ‘Your t-shirt’s filthy.’

  ‘About my wrist?’

  ‘Oh. No watch.’

  ‘No watch. It didn’t make it through.’

  ‘Mine did.’ Shyleen mirrored Yasser’s mime, lifting her right arm and stretching until her shoulder clicked.

  ‘Yeah. The time being?’

  She looked at her watch. ‘Oh.’

  ‘Stopped, right?’

  She nodded.

  ‘A time out of time,’ Yasser told her; ‘and just you and me, babe.’

  ‘How romantic.’

  ‘Yeah: until we need to eat.’

  ‘Speaking of which…’

  Yasser nodded. ‘Wagons roll? You fit?’

  Standing up with her cousin’s assistance, Shyleen told him that she felt peculiar. You mean sick? No; not sick exactly… as if I’m dreaming and I know it but I can’t get out.

  ‘You were muttering some madcap shit when you were dreaming, I tell you that.’

  ‘I remember… I was trying to protect you… Yass… do we know someone called Maggie?’

  ‘Not that I know of. Why?’

  For a second or two, Shyleen was silent as they walked on. The glimpses of her vision were maddeningly elusive… but the crumbs were present to trail if she wanted to do so.

  She remembered the dread that she’d felt – the sensation of being watched; of being controlled, perhaps. By higher powers. By deities. By God.

  ‘Maggie was touching your brain,’ said Shyleen. ‘In the dream.’

  Although she hadn’t intended it to be a joke exactly, she was downbeat at the way that Yasser took the information. All of a sudden he was moody and anxious; when Shyleen glanced to her left, she saw his forehead scrunch up like a cornflake.

  ‘What?’ she asked him.

  ‘I heard her talking to me,’ Yasser answered. ‘She was telling me she’s sorry.’

  ‘…For what?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  Aftermath

  1.

  All through the following day, Don Bridges was conspicuous by his absence. Vig and Dorota had needed scant discussion before arriving at a decision to postpone a planned day out to Cambridge; however, they had both assumed that the other would have cancelled the taxi that was to have chauffeured them there and back (it was Curtis’s day off). When the car arrived, as arranged, at nine-thirty in the morning, the driver pressed the intercom buzzer at the front gate, repeatedly, and also made such a racket with his horn that Vig felt obliged to stroll down the long driveway in his dressing gown, the wind pinching at his groin through his boxer shorts, and to pass on the news of the cancellation face to face. Although the driver was not happy, he was partially mollified by the fifty-pound note that Vig waved in his ill-shaven face, and by the promise that they would re-schedule the trip when Dorota felt better. (Vig lied that she had caught a cold.) Then it was time to tell Don that he would have to start looking for alternative employment – or consider a retirement package, which was Vig’s idea of a compromise, one that had been criticised by Dorota… But all through the day, Don Bridges would be conspicuous by his absence.

  ‘His hut’s empty,’ said Dorota.

  And Vig replied, ‘The birds haven’t been fed.’

  ‘Where’s he gone?’ they both wondered aloud.

  So they searched. Dorota drove to the farm shop where Don bought birdseed and provisions like game and carrots; she made enquiries, but Don had not been seen or served. The same story was true when she called in at the post office.

  Vig, meanwhile, kept his eyes peeled in the woods. Leaves crackled under his boot heels and every sound was like a different sound, which was typical of a walk among these trees.

  Nothing.

  Don had run away – or he’d been taken by aliens – and he had left his home, his birds and a cooled chicken carcass; he’d left his bicycle. He had even left behind his pouch of rolling tobacco and a packet of papers – the most sinister piece of evidence of all.

  Don was gone.

  2.

  As dusk approached, Vig took it upon himself (he was the lord of the manor, after all, however unwarranted the status happened to be) to feed Don’s birds. How hard could it be? Vig had watched Don go through the motions a hundred times.

  Walking along the path to the aviary, however, Vig experienced a sense of mingled loss and dread that he couldn’t explain. The sensation changed into a kind of vertigo, even though his feet were squarely on terra firma gravel. He had to stop. There was nothing for him to hold on to; the best he could do for a few seconds was stand still, straighten his back and breathe deeply until the nausea subsided.

  We have to face this, Dorota had said an hour earlier. What if he’s killed himself? The shame of it all; Charlie Eastlight…

  No, Vig had answered – a refusal that he did not feel in his bones. He’s not the type.

  And what type would that be? Dorota had demanded. Even when he’s not here he’s causing trouble!

  A trouble-maker is not the same as a suicide.

  No. No of course the two things were not the same; they were not so much as close. Nonetheless, Vig believed that when he reached the cages this time he would find Don’s body inside, dead, a new perch for his beloved birds. Either he’d finished a bottle of something with a strip of painkillers, or – who could tell? wonders never ceased! – the stress of it all had summoned up a good old-fashioned heart attack.

  The wave of nausea rolled past, and within a few seconds Vig could see straight again. He picked up his pace, ready to meet Don in the aviary.

  However, Don was not there.

  Nor were the birds.

  3.

  ‘He’s let them all go,’ Vig explained. ‘Every single door was open.’

  ‘That wasn’t Don. It couldn’t have been – that’s not…’

  ‘You mean Charlie?’

  Dorota nodded. ‘Charlie makes more sense. Why would Don…?’

  ‘Because he’s saying goodbye,’ Vig replied, shrugging.

  Dorota was not impressed. ‘I wish he’d say it faster,’ she said.
r />   4.

  Deep in the woods, proximate to the property’s eastern boundary – a densely-forested area into which Vig had never had call to venture up to this point – was where Don Bridges was eventually discovered on the second day after his disappearance. Ironically enough, it was the sound of foxes that gave the game away.

  Having spent another rough night, feeling bitty from a lack of quality sleep, Vig had climbed from bed early and had gone downstairs to pull on his wellies. He could not believe that Don had simply gone. There had to be more to the old man’s disappearance. Surely Don would not have left without a goodbye – a vituperative goodbye, perhaps, but a goodbye all the same – or a note, a letter… Even a threat of future legal consequences would have sufficed. But no: not Don. He had followed a script of his own composition; remained obstinate to the last.

  To the last?

  Was Don dead?

  The possibility had circled around Vig’s mind, on a loop. Say he’d perished in the woods, of natural causes. The very least that Vig could do, as the man’s employer, was find him and report the demise, the mishap… whatever it turned out to be.

  So it was, with this in mind, that Vig strode out into an early morning, chilly but bright, armed with little more than an indistinct sense of justice needing to be done… and the awful guilt that had long since become commonplace: the guilt that he had taken on this cause – as he would have taken on any other cause if it had presented itself – because he was bored (bored and lonely), a miserable millionaire, oh woe is me! – and he wanted something constructive to do with his time. Money had made him ache; had made him desperate.

  Vig chose to stroll further from what could be called (very loosely) the beaten paths. Before long he was deep into the trees, getting scratched by horrible thorny growth that seemed not to want him to progress further. He didn’t care. After the first scratch to the back of one hand, what was another scratch to the other, or to the face? It didn’t matter and he didn’t care. If Don was in his beloved trees somewhere, Vig was going to find him. Vig promised himself this… and he made the same promise to Don. So he quested on. And after a while, it had even become fun: it felt like being a child again – an adventurous child.

  He’d been exploring for less than an hour, and had started to wish that he’d told Dorota where he was going, when he heard the foxes.

  His ungloved fingers, pricked and bleeding, were attempting to pull some sticky adhesive grass from where it clung to his jeaned thighs, when the noise stabbed a space into his consciousness. All at once the thought of Dorota slipped his mind, as did the prediction of how cross she was going to be when he returned as the Human Pin Cushion. Similarly, Vig’s thoughts about Don’s birds were shattered. (Vig had expected to see the birds among the trees, at least one or two of them; so far he’d seen none.) The distant but gathering doubt that he would be able to find his way home again when this Boy’s Own adventure had climaxed – this also was deleted from his mind.

  ‘What the hell’s that?’ Vig said.

  He cancelled any movement. He waited. What had he heard? And where had the sound come from? Vig knew well that acoustics in the trees were treacherous, but it had seemed to come from a matter of metres away.

  Again! There it was!

  High-pitched; like babies crying… like babies crying? And scratching noises, sounded wooden. A creature carving claws into a tree? Then a growl, a series of growls… How many of them were there? Playtime was over; it sounded angry.

  Turn back.

  The voice in his head was not his own; it was not Dorota’s either. Of all people to enter his consciousness at this moment, it was the voice of Phyllie Reydman.

  ‘Why?’ he asked his friend in English.

  Trust me. Don’t go on.

  ‘I have to see,’ Vig replied. ‘Please understand.’ And he wrestled his legs free of the adhesive weed, his fingertips throbbing and raw.

  He walked on.

  A line of fierce-looking bushes stood directly in front of Vig, too tall to peer over and too dense to stare through any gaps in the branches. Vig turned to his right and strolled the seven or eight metres of required detour – and then he was able to see what was making the squeals and the growls.

  Foxes.

  A litter of five baby foxes was scratching at a patch of open ground. No adult fox was in sight, but Vig was wounded enough already not to wish further abrasion from an angry or over-protective parent; he approached with caution. More than anything else he wanted to know what was making that noise; surely it wasn’t the normal sound of animals pawing at dried earth. It sounded like a fork on a chopping board.

  Making clear signs of protest at the indignity of this human invasion, the foxes watched Vig get closer, step by wary step, and they growled. As soon as they’d stopped pawing at the wooden thing on the ground, the noise that had so befuddled Vig ceased too: there was no doubt about the connection between action and audio; but what had the animals discovered that had intrigued and excited them so?

  Vig shouted: ‘Yaah!’ In the one long second that followed, he hoped that the foxes were not tough enough to face up to a human – especially not foxes this young, and with no mother or father present to offer support.

  The tactic was successful. The five foxes scattered off in three different directions, all of them heading for undergrowth and safety.

  Vig moved into the space that they’d vacated, raising one bloodied hand to cover his nose partly against the stink that was lifting from the earth. The smell of fox piss, presumable: there was no excreta on the ground for Vig to see… Or maybe not urine either, he realised.

  Maybe the smell was coming up from the door in the ground.

  5.

  It was a trapdoor… and its basic, sturdy design had Don’s name written all over it. The trapdoor was similar to the one the man had dug into his own kitchen floor, although there were some minor modifications.

  Vig’s stomach rolled. The smell from what was hidden beneath his wellies – it surged up in waves. Down there… down there in the hole – down there beneath a heavy wooden trapdoor, with its hinges bolted down into concrete slabs embedded in the earth; with its two bolt-locks on the door’s opposite side, fastened into concrete in a similar way – down there in a hole that Vig could not see…

  …something was rotting.

  Yes; yes, Vig – you are seeing this for what it truly is. A trapdoor. A door leading into a trap… Are you going to open it up?

  …rotting…

  Or are you going to run away, crying like a girl? Because it’s dead. It’s got to be dead; it can’t harm you if it’s dead – and it’s got to be dead, right? The foxes wanted to eat it, so it must be dead in there, right? Well, right?

  Vig spoke aloud. ‘It’s their mother,’ he said. Bending at the waist to unfasten the bolt-locks, he added: ‘She fell in the hole, the door was knocked down by accident…’

  Why are there locks on the door, Vig? asked Phyllie.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  It’s a prison, Vig, and you know it… You do know it, don’t you, Vig?

  ‘Yes I know it, Phyllie…’ And Vig snapped back the first lock. It moved smoothly – a recent dousing in oil, grease or WD40?

  What about in chicken fat? That would do the trick too…

  ‘Yes it would.’

  Vig stood up to his full height and drew deeply of as fresh a breath as he could find (which was not very fresh). Then he bent at the waist once more, his imagination splintering. In the blink of his eyes –

  He flicked the second bolt-lock.

  – he saw Phyllie, standing nearby at the barbecue that he’d held, with one hand over her pregnancy… the pregnancy that he wished he’d co-created;

  – he saw Dorota, waking up in their bed and silently cursing his name.

  And he opened the trapdoor.


  6.

  Vig took a step backwards, grabbing hold of his belly as if he was pregnant himself.

  ‘Oh God,’ he whispered. Now that it had been released into the open air, the smell was stronger. Vig turned aside and tried to vomit, but all that climbed the ladder of his gullet was an arsenic-flavoured drool.

  He had to make sure… Taking two steps towards the trapdoor allowed him to check his first impressions, and they’d been true.

  Charlie Eastlight. Trapped in this oubliette, naked.

  The only matter to decorate his skin was mud-and-blood. It would seem that he’d put up a fight, but it took Vig a few more seconds to deduce what the struggle might have been against.

  It was only when an early-morning cloud shifted slightly that Vig was able to make out the shape at Charlie’s bare feet.

  An adult fox.

  Vig wondered, stepping backwards once more, which creature had killed which. And which had eaten more of the other.

  7.

  Vig found a spot to sit down, his back against the wide stump of a plum tree. He inhaled and exhaled, like someone suffering from an asthma attack. In his mind the pieces refused to settle, let alone fit into the correct spaces; Vig waited for a few flies to light on his hands and then fly away again. He did not have the heart to shake them off.

  ‘Vig!’

  A distant shout. His name, from across the sea of trees. Although Vig knew that the caller must be Dorota, the distance had distorted her voice: she might have been phoning from Atlantis.

  He shook his head. Time to wake up and smell the embalming fluid. There was work to do. He stood up.

  No.

  Vig’s knees wobbled. He had caught sight of something across from the trapdoor – something in the next phalanx of trees and growth – and his first reaction was not one of shock or horror. It was one of confusion.

  ‘Why didn’t I see that before?’ he wondered aloud. His voice suggested that he’d just been struck a blow to the brow.