“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.