Perijee and Me

by Ross Montgomery

  Perijee took my hand and we stood up. Dad walked towards us, slow and careful, like the floor was made of the most beautiful flowers. Then he and Perijee stood facing each other. They were almost the same height.

  ‘Those … those markings,’ Dad whispered.

  I leaned forwards, trying to get between them.

  ‘He’s always had them,’ I said. ‘Even when I found him, just after the meteor shower. He was only the size of a prawn back then.’

  Dad’s face drained. ‘… He’s grown that fast?’

  ‘He learns fast, too!’ I said. ‘I’m the one who taught him how to speak.’ I swallowed. ‘I – I called him Perijee. I got it from one of your books …’

  Dad stumbled away from me, a hand on his head.

  ‘I have to get everyone here,’ he said. ‘Right now.’

  He pulled his phone out his pocket and started dialling. I grabbed his arm.

  ‘No!’ I shouted. ‘You can’t!’

  Dad stared at me in shock. ‘Caitlin, what are …’

  ‘You can’t tell anyone about him!’ I explained. ‘They’ll take him away! I promised you’d get him back home!’

  Dad laughed and pulled away. ‘Caitlin, come on – this may be the most important discovery in history, I have to—’

  ‘No you don’t,’ I said, desperate. ‘You can study him here by yourself. He’s your discovery – no one else’s. I … I’ll show you everything I know about him. We’ll do it together – just the two of us.’

  Dad said nothing. I clutched his arm.

  ‘Please,’ I begged. ‘Please don’t take him away from me.’

  I could see Dad trying to work something out, right at the back of his eyes. Then he put away his phone.

  ‘Fine,’ he said quietly. ‘I won’t tell anyone. I’ll have to go back to the mainland though – to pick up some equipment. I’ll be back tomorrow morning.’

  ‘You WHAT?!’

  We spun round. Mum was holding on to a chair for support.

  ‘Have you gone mad?’ she cried. ‘You can’t keep an alien in the house with your DAUGHTER!’

  ‘We don’t have a choice,’ said Dad, his voice hard and cold. ‘Caitlin’s right. I’ll need a few weeks to study him before deciding on the best course of action – that’s all.’

  Mum was beside herself. ‘A few WEEKS …?’

  Dad didn’t listen to a word she said. He grabbed his briefcase and marched out the door. Just before he left, he turned back to face me. He was smiling. My heart glowed.

  Then I realised that he was looking at Perijee.

  ‘Beautiful,’ he whispered.

  There was the sound of car wheels speeding across gravel, and then nothing.

  Me and Mum were left standing in the kitchen. We seemed miles apart somehow. Perijee stood between us, his head nearly touching the ceiling.

  ‘The animal in the guest room.’ Mum sighed. ‘It was him, wasn’t it?’

  I shuffled my feet. ‘I did try to tell you.’

  When I looked up, Mum wasn’t looking at Perijee. She was looking at me, like I was the one covered in letters that made no sense.

  I walked into the kitchen the next morning and Mum was fast asleep on a chair. We hadn’t talked much after Dad left – I’d wanted to celebrate the fact he was coming back, but Mum was refusing to see the positive side. She didn’t even want Perijee in the house. I think she was afraid of him. That was probably why she was holding a pickaxe.

  ‘Mum?’ I said.

  She jerked upright, her eyes wide open.

  ‘Jesus!’ She clutched her chest. ‘Don’t walk in on me like that, Caitlin! I thought you were …’

  Perijee walked in behind me – he’d spent the night curled up on my beanbag. Mum flew to her feet and the two of them faced each other across the room, bristling. I shuffled nervously.

  ‘Er … pancakes, anyone?’

  I strolled over to the oven, humming merrily. So long as I act like nothing is weird, I thought, then it will all be fine.

  I hit the oven with the poker until it worked, then turned back round. Perijee was sniffing the spice cupboard and Mum was slowly creeping towards the knife rack.

  ‘Mum?’ I said. ‘Pancakes?’

  She swung round, her face tight. ‘Yes! Pancakes! Lovely!’

  I grinned. ‘Great! What about you, Perijee?’

  He didn’t answer. He was completely still, staring at a wall. He was changing. His eyes had become big and blurry, flashing between colours. His skin twitched and flickered like hair in the wind.

  Then, just like that, he stopped.

  ‘Seventeen,’ he said.

  I didn’t even know he could count that high.

  ‘… You want seventeen pancakes?’ I said. I looked at the cupboard. ‘I don’t know if we have enough butter …’

  All the doors were kicked in and the next thing I knew seventeen soldiers with gas masks and rifles were stood in a circle around us.

  ‘GET HER OUT OF HERE!’ bellowed one, pointing at me.

  Before I knew what was happening Mum had thrown me over her shoulder and was running outside. The last thing I saw was Perijee, his face a mask of fear as the ring of soldiers closed around him. His body was already starting to grow.

  ‘Perijee, no!’ I cried.

  The whole island was swarming in helicopters. The house was surrounded by barbed wire. Everywhere I looked there were soldiers aiming rifles at the kitchen.

  ‘What are they doing here?’ I said. ‘Mum, what’s happening?’

  Mum just kept running. Through the kitchen windows behind us I could make out flashes of light, bodies being thrown around like rag dolls. I could see Perijee’s arms flailing in the smoke.

  ‘Mum, they’re hurting him!’ I cried. ‘Make them stop!’

  Suddenly soldiers were racing out the kitchen door, smoke pouring out behind them. Something inside the house was screaming. It wasn’t a human scream. It was growing louder and louder, until soon it was so loud that it shook the ground and made the air tremble. I hammered at Mum’s back.

  ‘Let me go!’ I shouted. ‘I have to get back to him before …’

  BOOM.

  The house burst apart in a cloud of bricks and dust. We hit the ground. Eight giant tentacles were crawling out the smoke, each one thick as a tree trunk, heaving Perijee into the daylight like a bird from a shell.

  Only he wasn’t Perijee any more. He was a hundred feet tall, covered in eyes and teeth and tentacles. I leapt to my feet.

  ‘Perijee, don’t be afraid!’ I cried. ‘I’m right here! I—’

  The army all attacked him at once. Perijee screamed with fear and charged across the garden, smashing helicopters out the air and scattering the soldiers around him like flies. In one great leap he flew over the trees and came crashing down into the cove, crushing the jetty into splinters and hitting the water like a bomb going off.

  And just like that, he was gone.

  The garden was silent. The tower of water he had sent up behind him disappeared. Seaspray fell around us like rain.

  ‘Caitlin,’ Mum was shouting. ‘Caitlin, are you all right? Caitlin!’

  I didn’t answer her. I was watching Perijee’s enormous shadow disappear from the island like a torpedo. A great white wave was rising up above him, growing bigger and faster with every second.

  It was heading towards the mainland.

  They put me and Mum in a helicopter with two soldiers.

  I sat in silence with a blanket around me. I had no idea what was going on – every time I tried to work out what had just happened, none of it made any sense. All I knew was that Perijee had gone.

  A TV in the back of the helicopter was showing the news. You could see the towns that had already been destroyed on the mainland, and people being evacuated from their homes all over the country, and soldiers herding people into enormous shelters. Mum just sat there, shaking her head.

  ‘It’s like the end of the world,’ she whispered.

/>   Suddenly the report switched to a man at a desk.

  ‘We interrupt this broadcast with breaking news,’ he said. ‘The alien invader has just launched an attack on our capital city.’

  Everyone gasped. The camera cut away and when it came into focus all you could see was a sky filled with smoke.

  Below it lay the city – or what was left of it. There was a river, and what used to be a bridge, and that was it. Everything else was on fire.

  Somewhere through the smoke you could make out a huge body snaking up from the water, so large it crushed whole streets beneath it, and a giant head roaring with anger.

  I could have cried.

  ‘Oh, Perijee,’ I whispered.

  He was a monster now. There was nothing left of him that I could recognise. Nothing of the sweet, loving alien I’d known. The one I’d taught to read, the one that I’d shown the stars to … he was gone.

  … And then I saw him.

  ‘Miss,’ the soldier next to me said, ‘you can’t stand up in the helicopter.’

  I didn’t listen. I pressed myself up against the TV, my hands shaking.

  ‘Miss, please sit down.’

  There, right on top of the monster’s head – so small you could easily miss it – something was sticking out. Like a fin or an antenna.

  Or a person.

  A person wearing a bobble hat.

  ‘It’s him!’ I cried. ‘It’s Perijee, there at the top, look …!’

  The soldiers were already dragging me back to my chair. Mum was screaming at them to let me go. I didn’t care. I just kept staring at the screen and laughing.

  There was Perijee, right on top of the monster’s head. It wasn’t really him doing all those terrible things – it was something else, something that had grown out of him when he was so frightened that he had no other choice. But deep down he was still there … still alive. Still Perijee.

  I turned to Mum, my eyes shining with tears.

  ‘He’s wearing my hat!’

  The way the camp worked was like this:

  It wasn’t like a real camp. Real camps have tents and campfires. This was just a massive room with hundreds of beds separated by sheets on bits of wire. Kind of like a giant sleepover, but with guards at the door who shot you if you tried to leave.

  The camp was for keeping people safe. There were camps all over the country, and everyone had to live in them until the army got ‘The Monster’ under control. That’s what they called the thing that grew out of Perijee. There were other names for him too, much worse ones than that, but I can’t tell you what they were. 84

  There were loads of rules. You had to stay in bed after lights out. You couldn’t leave the room, ever. Some people tried to escape because they wanted to go home, but the guards always caught them.

  You only got to use the showers once a day, which was a pity because they were amazing! The doors were sealed all around the edges, so if you plugged the drain up with towels and left the water running for about half an hour the cubicle became a big hot bath you could stand up in, or a tropical whirlpool if you ran around in circles. You had to do it early though because some IDIOT kept using up all the hot water.

  There was nothing else to do except sit around all day. They played the news once in the morning and once in the evening, and that was it. The rest of the time you were left alone with your thoughts.

  I thought about Perijee. Obviously.

  ‘… Caitlin?’

  I’d been awake for hours. Mum sat up in the bed opposite, rubbing her eyes. When the helicopter had dropped us at the camp a week before, they’d made sure that the two of us had our own cubicle. Mum said not all families were so lucky – there were people I knew from school who were sleeping on the floor by the toilets. But I still didn’t feel that lucky.

  ‘I’m amazed anyone can sleep in this place,’ said Mum. ‘Not exactly the Hilton, is it?’

  She smiled at me.

  ‘Hey – maybe when we get out of here, I’ll treat us to a night in the real Hilton. Just the two of us. That’d be nice, wouldn’t it?’

  I said nothing. Mum’s face fell.

  ‘Caitlin,’ she said. ‘Please. I know you’re upset, but you can’t just stop talking to me …’

  She’d said it all a hundred times before, ever since we first got here. I could say it along with her word for word. Especially the next bit.

  ‘I had to do it!’

  She held out her arms to the room around her.

  ‘I mean, just look at what it’s done in seven days! It’s torn the country apart! Your father was out of his mind, suggesting we keep it at home in the first place … Can you imagine what might have happened if I hadn’t phoned the police?’

  I stared at Mum in disgust. She was the reason the army had shown up. The reason Perijee had been attacked. The reason the Monster had grown out of him and carried him away. The reason we were now stuck inside the camp, with no idea where Dad was.

  Dad.

  He’d agreed to help Perijee. The two of us were going to do it together – find out where he came from, get him home. But it was all ruined now. He had no idea where I was. He was probably wandering the country right now, trying to find me. And it was all Mum’s fault.

  ‘I’m going to watch the news,’ I said.

  I left before she could say anything else.

  There was a massive crowd around the TV, as usual, watching in silence. I pushed my way to the front. Onscreen was the city. The river had burst its banks days ago and all the streets were under water. It looked like an ocean now, dotted with broken buildings and shattered planes.

  And right in the middle of it, like a huge white island …

  ‘Look at him,’ someone in the crowd muttered beside me. ‘I could swear he’s grown bigger since yesterday.’

  The Monster was huge. His mouth rose out the water like an ancient cavern, fifty rows of teeth fading into darkness. His body stretched so far into the distance the cameras couldn’t pick him up any more. You could just about make out the strange symbols carved into his sides that no one could understand, and the marks where bullets had hit him and done no damage at all.

  And if you looked hard enough – though no one ever did – you could see a little white dot, right at the top of his head.

  ‘Perijee,’ I whispered.

  Mum had made me promise not to tell anyone about what had happened – she said it wasn’t safe. I hadn’t breathed a word, of course, but not because she’d asked me. Because that was just the way I wanted it. Perijee was my secret – no one else’s.

  ‘An absolute disgrace!’

  A woman shoved her way to the front of the crowd. I recognised her from back on the mainland – she’d got footballs banned from the school playground because they kept landing in her ornamental pond and upsetting the fish.

  ‘Look at those so-called “warships”!’ she spat. ‘An alien invader’s sitting right in front of them, and what do they do? Nothing!’

  She jabbed a finger at the TV. A blockade of boats circled the Monster’s head like a ring of toys. They were all tied together with chains to stop anyone from going near him.

  ‘A few pathetic attempts to attack him, then they give up!’ she cried. ‘And they expect us to just sit here and wait … We won’t have any homes to go back to at this rate!’

  The crowd cheered. The woman was getting more and more fired up.

  ‘Well, I’m sick of waiting!’ she screeched. ‘If the army’s not going to do anything about him, it’s time we did! It’s time we …’

  She glanced at the guards beside her. They were too busy pushing the crowds back from the TV to take any notice of her. She drew everyone around her into a tight huddle. I pushed my way in – not because I was interested in what she had to say, but because in camp you took any gossip you could get.

  ‘It’s time we took action,’ said the woman in a hushed voice. ‘We’ve all seen the footage of towns and cities on the news – there are still thousan
ds of people on the outside! The army’s too busy dealing with the Monster to try and force them into camps any more. There’s even rumours of …’

  She leaned forwards to whisper, and everyone huddled closer.

  ‘Rumours of people … coming together,’ she hissed. ‘Taking charge for themselves. There’s a big meeting in a town called Wanderly planned for the day after tomorrow – it’s a hundred miles south of here. Everyone from the mainland is going to be there – they’re going to fix this whole mess!’

  Everyone in the crowd started muttering in excitement. The woman glanced round at them, her eyes flashing.

  ‘I say we join them,’ she said. ‘I say we break out of here and get to Wanderly before it’s too late … before there’s nothing left to save!’

  It was like someone had lit a fuse in the room. Everyone started talking all at once. For the first time in days, people looked happy – like they had hope again. And I knew exactly how they felt. Finally, things were going to go back to normal! I could get out of here and find Dad, and then together we could get Perijee back home and …

  ‘That’s right!’ said the woman. ‘Who needs the army? We’ll destroy the Monster ourselves!’

  My heart almost stopped.

  ‘NOOO!’

  Everyone turned to look at me.

  ‘You can’t kill the Monster!’ I said. ‘You’ll kill Perijee, too!’

  This was met with a sea of blank faces.

  ‘… Peri-what?’ said the woman.

  I almost stopped myself – but I had to tell them. This was too important.

  ‘He’s an alien that’s living on top of the Monster,’ I explained. ‘You don’t know him, but he’s good, honest! He …’

  ‘That’s enough,’ said a voice.

  A dinnerlady was pushing through the crowd towards us. She had a big frilly hairnet on her head, and a smaller one over her beard.

  ‘Frank!’ I cried.

  Everyone in camp had to have a job – it was supposed to stop people from worrying too much about the Monster. It worked! The day Frank got made a dinnerlady everyone stopped complaining about the end of the world and started complaining about how disgusting his food was instead.