12F – The Beast

I sat down next to the kid and waited. He was pale, and his foot was jiggling, causing a slight ripple of movement through the rest of his body. He had fixed his gaze on a tiny speck in the middle of the floor and held it there, refusing to move.

I didn’t want to sit here and babysit some kid. But there was a slight chance he might be able to help. And slight chances being all we had to go on, I tried to get him talking.

“You and Matt are pretty good mates, yeah?”

He waited a second, shrugged, kept staring at the floor.

“He’s pretty crook in there”.

I waited for a reaction to this, got none. It was something of an understatement. None of us had seen anything like it. The patient was vomiting, gagging, temperature soaring, bleeding from everywhere. In a weird way it was fascinating, his immune system turning itself inside out, chasing after some ghost, like a dog chasing its own tail. Unfortunately it seemed like we were doing that ourselves. No one could pin it down.

“I know this is hard, but Matt is in a pretty serious condition. Anything you can tell us about the last few hours can really help us out. I need to find out when he first started feeling sick, when he…”

He half sobbed, half coughed out a response.

“I did it”.

“You did… what?”

“I made him sick.”

I wasn’t looking for a confession. There wasn’t time for it.

“Look, it’s only natural to have feelings like this when someone’s hurt…”

He ignored me, kept talking.

“We started three years ago. At school. They wanted us to grow bacteria in those dishes. So we did. But we didn’t let them throw ours away. We took it home.”

I stopped for a second.

“Took what home?”

“No one else goes in Matt’s garage much since his dad left, so we had the perfect spot to hide it. We left it there for a few days, and it got pretty rank. Then we decided to see what happened when we sprayed it with some Exit Mould. We sprayed the crap out of it. We thought it was dead. A few days later, Matt calls me up. Says that something is still growing on the edge of the dish. So we swipe some more dishes from school. And we transplant the bit that’s still growing into the new dish.”

We didn’t have time for this. I took a breath and another stab at getting the conversation back on a meaningful track.

“What about the last few days? Do you know if Matt went swimming in any lakes, creeks, anything like that?”

But he kept on rambling.

“So we tried it again. We grew it back, hit it with some kind of cleaner, and a little bit survived again. So that’s when we decided to make something of this thing.”

He stopped, looked at me for a second. I was thinking about the kid in the other room, wondering if he was still alive.

“We called it the Beast. Every week we would meet up, and do the same thing. We split the Beast in two, and see if we could use something to wipe it out. We tried bleach, detergent, soap, anything we could find in the laundry… A lot of the time, the Beast would die, so that’s why we kept the spare half. As a backup. But sometimes it wouldn’t die, not all of it. And we’d take that bit and grow it, and that would become the new Beast”.

I was listening now.

“We kept this up for three years. After a while, we got bored with cleaners. We tried a few other things to see what would happen. We started on Matt’s medicine cabinet. There were a ton of old pills and things in there, so we mashed them up, dissolved them, sprayed them on. Lots of these didn’t seem to have much effect, but a couple of them almost killed the Beast”

“Do you… do you think this had something to do with Matt getting sick?”

He was staring at the floor again.

“It was stupid. We’ve always been careful with it, used gloves, did it properly. We never wanted anything to happen to it. But yesterday, we…”

He coughed again. His eyes were wet.

“Matt was being a tool. We hadn’t worked on the Beast for a couple of weeks. He said he was bored of it. Said he wanted to chuck it, that it was a waste of time.”

He swallowed awkwardly.

“But we’d worked on it together for years. It was growing faster. It had colours we’d never seen before. But he was over it. So he took a hammer off the wall and he smashed it. I wanted to hit him or something. But instead I scooped out a corner of what was left of the Beast and I flicked it at him. It copped him in the eye. He screamed, then ran inside to the shower. He wouldn’t speak to me after that.”

He was looking back at the floor, avoiding my gaze now. Something in my face had scared him. His hands grabbed the edge of the seat, and his knuckles were white.

“Next thing I knew he was down here, and I…”

The kid stopped, and broke in to an uncontrollable spasm of coughing. His hand came away. I saw some specks of blood on his hand. I stood up, crossed the room and quietly locked the door.

11F – Remember Me

He stood there in his Bata Scouts, his grey shorts and shirt, went over his lines, thought about everything that made him who he was. He was grade four or so. He was still in uniform because it was the tail end of a school day. He rocked back and forth on his feet, and wondered if things would ever get going. The counter was empty, and entirely unresponsive to the occasional hopeful glances that he allowed himself in that direction.

Bits of the mall were vague, but there were some things, like the automatic doors, that seemed tangible, almost real. The sides of the building gave off a hint of obsolescence, superseded by more modern concepts of what was modern. He could look harder, but the walls lost detail the more that he stared at them, blending into an edgeless stretch of beige.

Around him things were a little more concrete, and he found this comforting. There were the rows of the toy department shelves, and even though he couldn’t quite make out what was on them, there were occasional flickers of reality. The furry arm of a bear. A shiny strip of hardened plastic. The vinylish texture of a soccer ball. Most of all, there were colours. Unlike the rest of the building, the toy department was exploding with colour. Every colour he could think of, but lots of pinks, he noticed, pinks and shiny things.

There was an unmistakable smell, too, a slightly dusty smell that coated everything, probably more real than anything else in the building. He could even feel the dust touching his hands, clogging the pores in his skin. He hated the dust.

He waited at the counter, holding a small plastic toy, some kind of action figure. It was black, he was pretty sure, or maybe grey, but it was hazy, slightly shapeless, and he couldn’t quite make it out. He stared through the plastic window and looked at the figure trapped inside, watched as it stretched and changed, searching for a form but never finding one.

His lines. His delivery would be perfect as always, but he still liked to rehearse. He stood there, mumbling them to himself, repeating.

“Can I…”

“Keep the change.”

“Can I…”

“Keep the change”

He looked up. She was standing behind the counter.

He might have called her beautiful, if he’d known what that meant. He felt himself tingling all over. He took another step closer to the counter, handed over the toy and said the words.

“Can I…”

Her hand, her incredibly detailed hand, with bright red nails and knuckles and tiny hairs, took the toy from him and zapped it with the scanner.

“You want this? That’s $4.98”

His hand slipped to his pocket and produced the five dollar note. He stared at her face, the most fascinating thing he’d ever seen. It shifted here and there but for the most part it was clear, so incredibly clear. Her eyes especially, they were blue, and pinpoint sharp. He knew he must be quite blurry in comparison, and for a moment he felt slightly ashamed.

But he couldn’t look away. He didn’t have long, and he wanted to absorb every detail, every nuance of her face. Her amazing hair, a shimmering curtain that occasionally shifted from straight, to curled, to tied back, but always honeyed, golden, brighter than anything else in the room. The tiny little upturn to the tip of her nose. The line of her neck. The mole at her collarbone. And behind all of this, the unmistakable sense that she was real, that somewhere, she existed. He searched for something new, something he hadn’t noticed before. A little detail for him to treasure.

But his time was up.

“Here you go.”

She dropped the toy into the plastic bag, and reached over to hand him the receipt and the stray two cents.

He sucked in air for a second, and gave the performance his all.

“Keep the change”

She laughed, and he would have closed his eyes if he could. Anything to make this moment last longer. Her laugh was one of the few sounds he knew, and it never faltered, never changed, never failed to grab something inside of him and make it explode.

She turned to him, gave him the advice he already knew by heart.

“You hang on to it. You should save them up, might make you rich one day”.

And then she smiled at him. And then she was gone.

Now the beige would return, and everything would fade back to normal.
And he would wait.

He looked at the toy. Something was wrong. It was bending within the bag, slipping, folding into itself. The bag started to drip, melted through his fingers, slipped onto the floor.

He looked up at the shelves. The colours faded, seeping into the air.

Afraid, he reached out to grab the counter. The countertop bent and twisted in his grip, dripping, scattering like droplets of water. He yanked back in surprise and watched his arm burst in the air and slowly begin to drift away.

It was all around him. The walls were bending slowly, collapsing. The toy department was gone. He couldn’t smell the dust. He opened his mouth as the last of him fell away and he scattered, crumbled and disappeared.

She glanced around the pub, surrounded by smoke and noise. Someone was yelling at her, tapping her on the shoulder. She turned. God, she hated it when she got vague like this. She remembered something about working at the mall. Something funny had happened. Something about a kid. She groped for the thought, but it wouldn’t come to her.

She shook her head. It was gone now, whatever it was. She took another sip of her pint and tried to stumble her way back into the conversation.

10F – If It Falls

It was still hard to imagine that there had been anything remotely powerful about the little brown package. He’d jumped up and down behind Tim, desperate to grab a glimpse of the thing, and a glimpse was about all he got. He would have thought that explosives would have looked much more impressive, but Mick had been convinced it would do the trick.

Mick had some say because he’d supplied a lot of the gear. But it was Tim’s little brown package. And Tim’s remote. And Tim’s idea.

Now they were on the kerb, brushing the edges of their world. The 327 had taken them about as far they could go under their own steam.

“Do you think we’re far enough?”

“We’re not there, are we? What more do you want?”

Tim looked at his phone. They were running out of tape.

“Ok, time to get this show on the road.”

They all huddled around the mobile, the screen a fraction brighter in the shadow of their coats. The message waited for them, pulsing quietly, desperate to be sent. Tim took one last look around the group, looking for their silent approval. Then he hit send.

A few brief moments, and then Message Sent.

There was no bang, no sign that anything had changed. But the explosion ruptured the silence in their minds, four individual flameclouds, orange blossoms and heat distortion, each one sparking them, spiking adrenaline, pushing them miles away and bringing them back down to earth in an instant.

“Timecode!”

“One… Thirty-two… Twenty-Eight!”

They were already running. The return bus found them waiting at the shelter, breathless. They piled in.

It was the slowest bus in the world. Each stop, each lane change, each light, each quarter turn of the wheel was a special kind of torture. Everything stretched outwards, out of reach, beyond anything that made sense. He leant against the glass, letting the vibration of the road bump and shake things loose in his head. Maybe this was what an explosion felt like, for the first millionth of a second. Maybe there was this tiny rumble, a flicker in the air before you felt everything else, like a warning, or a murmuring in the air. Maybe there was a thing that was an explosion, and a thing that wasn’t the explosion, and maybe there was something else in the middle.

He felt a tiny wish tug at him. He wanted to be there to see it. Somewhere else it was all over and done with already, but it wouldn’t be real until they got there. Not really.

The bus was getting faster or closer, he wasn’t sure. Tim had unfolded his arms and was studying his checklist, looking at his watch and ticking off every landmark – the sports centre, the old farm at the edge of the greenbelt, the gate. With each passing marker, he was reaching forward, stretching, willing the bus closer to its destination.

And then they were there. They dropped out of the bus and crunched into the rough stones and bitumen. The door slid, groaned and shuddered itself back into position, resisting the movement all the way, straining against itself. There was a pause, a slow pop, and the door was shut. And the wheels started to roll, spitting one, two, then a handful of broken stones back at the boys. They watched as it gained momentum, pulled itself away, rolled lazily down the hill, and was gone.

They waited a moment. And then they ran.

They sprinted into the high grass. The way was easier now – the old fence with the strips of wire, the boulders, over the ridge. They’d prepared, retraced their steps, left nothing up to chance. One by one they came down the ridge, through the pines and into the clearing.

There was a large, blackened hole waiting for them. The force of the blow had knocked down a massive pine, which lay stretched and broken across the clearing. The boys stepped slowly around the tree. Tim reached a hand down to touch it, felt the bark give to his fingertips. He looked up.

Mick was already at the borrowed recorder, huddled over, headphoned, pushing buttons. He broke the silence.

“Timecode!”

“One Thirty-two Twenty-Eight!”

They were all around him now, waiting for the answer.

Mick jammed his eyes shut, listening. Then his eyes popped open.

“There’s the explosion! Then…”

They waited. He stopped, rewound, played again. He squinted at the plastic box, played the recording again. No one dared disturb him. Eventually he breathed out an entire lungful of air, looked up and slid his headphones off.

“Nothing.”

They waited for something more, some kind of confirmation.

Mick raised his voice.

“It didn’t make a sound!”

Then he packed the tape recorder and the microphone back into the bag. He was already well into the forest before the others began to follow him.