Les has never seen his son. He doesn’t even know his name. He’d moved to Pontypool, to work at the farm and the school, the summer before the boy was born. Les feels calm as he returns to the driver’s seat of his truck. The events of the day have guided him out of crisis, and he rolls the vehicle toward Caesarea, where he’ll telephone the OPP. He feels the safety and the sadness of this decision drop his gearshift from neutral to drive.
At a breakfast table in Caesarea a couple sit across from each other. Their mouths are opened and liver coloured. She tries to lick her bottom lip but misses, catching her tongue in the slippery well of skin at the base of her gums. The tongue pushes to a point in this pocket until the O of her lips reaches its limit and the tongue springs out, releasing a full pouch of liquid down her chin. Her husband mimics this, but he extends his tongue directly through the O, clearing its edges, missing the point. Like all the other zombies, the only expression that these two can achieve is one of supernatural failure. Like gargoyles, they frown in exhausted masks of hopelessness. Her eyes rise into the bridge of her nose and tunnel up beneath her brow; the lashes have fallen into the tails of goldfish that fan across her cheeks. His eyes are the same, but for heavier lower lids that scoop out like wading pools, vividly red and beating with vulnerable membrane. This couple, unlike the Killings, will never act out the tiny story that brought them together. Instead, they are doomed to suspension, to act out a compulsion that has never been fully explained. But as Les Reardon steps up to their front door the compulsion will be given another opportunity to shock and revile.
No one answers the door, so Les pounds it harder, knocking it back under his knuckles. Les steps through the opening and immediately understands, by the choir of animal sounds coming from within, that the killer is here. How does he know? Who is this? Les steps backward outside, but too late. Two people in dressing gowns move into the hall like vampires and with surprising swiftness they stuff their hands across the frame just as Les slams the door. He looks down at the fingers he’s grinding. Wiggling zombie pawns. Sacrificed, they break and snap. The things are relentless, and as he repeatedly bangs the door on their hands they manage to stuff their arms through, up to their elbows. They will get through.
They are getting through. Les lets go of the door and tears down the driveway. The zombies grab at the flesh of his buttocks and the backs of his legs. Dozens of clumsy pincers spring him into the air. They are just below him, still pinching the ghost of his ass, but out of reach. Les has never flown before and when he notices that his feet are flailing at the tops of bushes he collapses. He waits for the shale to hit him, but it doesn’t, not until he drops through two feet of frigid water. Les looks up across a lake. The shore behind him holds the zombies at a distance of two metres. Les dunks his head below the surface. He removes his shoes and lays them side by side on the bottom of Lake Scugog. A layer of slush hangs just beneath the surface and it bites, cold, into Les’s ribs. Within seconds he feels his own death in this water. He sees a small boat down the shore at a dock and begins a mad dog paddle.
8
It’s Only to Be Expected
If his illness is acting up a little bit, it’s only to be expected. It does not really compromise his ability to discern much of his immediate physical dilemma. In fact, he dismisses the delusional worms gathering in each of the cottages he can see with far firmer resolve than any historically sane person could. The sky is harmlessly transformed into the underside of a table, and the clouds lengthen and thin into the wicked webs of spiders. The sun flattens and hardens into a round seal of pink gum pressed under a corner of the table. Les does not think that the menace his atmosphere represents is overstated, and he rightly thanks his illness for peeling back at least one layer from the hideous stop of the sky. Underwater he can hear the shuffle of feet beneath a table, the tapping of a signal, the little music of coins in a pocket. Since he feels he has the option, he rises from the water to Handel.
As he flops onto the dock, Les decides that, whatever it eventually means, for now at least he is a fugitive. Uncurling the rope holding the boat, he drifts in it, on a current that will take him to Port Perry. The sun is warm enough to break the ice in his veins into painful throbs. The card table has dissipated and a less likely blue sky has taken its place. Les lies in the bottom of the boat.
I have never been an organized man. I will never know what the inner life of other people is like. That can never matter again. In Port Perry I will steal a car. I’m going to Parkdale.
From the shore a loon offers Les both its name and its Haunting Cry. He turns his head in the bottom of the boat, bunching his cheek against aluminum rivets, and smiles.
None of you has anything for me anymore. I am Ed Gein. I want my wife and child.
At his nose is a dead worm, glossy and hard; it forms an almost audible S. Les flicks the brittle lower loop, creating a question mark. Stupid. He flicks the upper loop, creating a bar of worm that appears to have shot off its ends in a centrifugal action. Better. Better question.
For the next four hours Les lies freezing in the drifting boat, turning away from, and then back to, his worm. He pictures his son in little screens that open up in the aluminum just above the watermark. He names the child. He changes the name. The baby has a face like a walnut, a uniform surface of wrinkles, and Helen wipes yellow food from his chin. Les tilts his jaw toward the bait-littered bottom of the boat, and Helen reaches up and cleans three tiny crayfish legs from the side of his face. Her hand slips back beneath the brackish water an inch deep beneath Les. They live in an inch of water. No air. They can’t see. The fins of pickerel and the snouts of summer frogs hide the light. A rusted fish hook has just fallen in the baby’s food.
9
More Calming Effects
Detective Peterson pulls a rental car up into his driveway. He sits with his face in his hands. When he asks himself What’s happening? he’s not thinking of cannibal drama teachers and their flying passengers. Peterson is thinking about the difficulty he has had all afternoon. I can’t seem to speak properly. An understatement. I don’t feel any different. I can think clearly. At least I think I can.
He’s right. There is nothing detectably wrong with his thoughts; however, he has struggled all afternoon with a strange inability to control the words he uses. At the car-rental outlet the young attendee didn’t want to give him a vehicle. Peterson limited himself to single-word prompts: car, rent. But even these simple words betrayed him. He could find them but couldn’t repeat them easily — car, cove, tummy… It was only when Peterson showed his detective’s badge that the teenage boy proceeded, silently, suspiciously, to rent the car.
Peterson lays his hands on the dash and says, “Dash.” He grips the steering wheel with both hands and says, “Messy car.”
Messy car? Messy car? He looks at the steering wheel. The image of a car is on the horn bar. A sort of medallion of the rental place. Messy car? Is that it? The steering wheel is messy with a car? Peterson attempts to slide a key into this and says, “Bad boy Walt Whitman.” His heart sinks. Yes, he thinks clearly, there is a mess in the car. I just can’t say it.