The Grimscribe's Puppets (30 page)

The traffic slows to a stop that doesn’t start again. They abandon their car just like everyone else.

They walk on the highway with hundreds and thousands of others. Zane tries to get his father to stop, to explain, to refute, to reject, to turn around. He doesn’t.

Zane follows his father, finally giving in. The clear and focused will of everyone else around him is too much to deny.

There’s no buzz or drone of conversation. No one talks. There are only the collective sounds of footprints, expelled breaths, groans of exertion from those having trouble walking such a distance. They walk for hours.

The sky is more purple than blue, more grey than purple. An inkblot sky, it’s the color of static. Zane has lost track of time. He thinks the sun should be higher than it is, which is presumably hidden somewhere behind a strip of clouds that rings the horizon they’ll never reach.

Eventually, the crowd veers off the highway, heading east. They don’t use an exit ramp. Instead, they pour through the knocked down sound-proof barrier fencing, which has already been crushed and broken into pieces that will never be put back together again.

The ravenous crowd tosses aside parked cars like the afterthoughts they’ve become. They march over and through swing sets, storage sheds, and amateur gardens. Only the biggest trees and structures serve as obstacles in the inexorable path eastward.

This great migration cuts a swath through small woodlands, through suburban back and front yards, through industrial parks and strip mall lots. Manicured landscaping, fences, and other flimsy man-made delineators of land, property, and culture are destroyed, ground into the ground, rendered to be nothing more than the dead skin of history.

Zane struggles to keep pace with his father. He stumbles a few times and grabs his father’s hand. His father doesn’t acknowledge that his son is still there. He mumbles and sways left and right to some secret rhythm.

Zane is not tall and he cannot see above or beyond the people surrounding him without jumping up, without dowsing the increasingly infrequent gaps of space between swaying heads and bodies. The crowd continues to swell. Zane can’t see its end in any direction.

There are very few landmarks with which to determine direction, position, or place. They could be anywhere. They could be nowhere.

Eventually, the air changes. It’s no longer the stagnant air used and discarded by the thousands of pairs of indiscriminant lungs. This new air moves. An insistent wind blows in their faces and over their heads, out of the east. The wind brings the unmistakable smell and taste of salt and brine. The ocean is very close.

The ground under Zane’s feet has gone soft, not that he can see his feet anymore while in the thick of the crowd. The people ahead of him are slowly making their way up a large hill. Sand dunes, perhaps.

Zane reaches to his left, for his father, and grabs hold of his sleeve. Only, that sleeve belongs to someone else: a tall, thin woman with a sharp nose and wearing glasses and a black overcoat.

He thinks of his mother and feels guilty for not having looked for her. He is heartbroken, and he quickly apologizes to the woman for grabbing her sleeve. She doesn’t say anything, doesn’t even look at him.

Zane yells, “Dad!” and scans the crowd. There are too many people to focus upon any single one. Zane is weak-kneed with panic, even after he thinks he sees his father ahead and above him, near the top of the dune.

Zane tries to pass and squeeze through the people ahead of him, but the sledding, as his father used to say, is tough. Walking uphill in the sand has become supremely difficult. The constant pushing and pressure from all sides challenges his equilibrium.

Zane finally crests the dune, and while standing at the top, in its windy lofts, there’s an explosion of sounds. There are the crashing waves, yes, but there’s also the low and warbling thrum of the surrounding mass of humanity, of their moans and cries.

And below that wall of sound, underneath it all, Zane faintly hears what sounds like the high-pitched, discordant whine of microphone feedback. He tries to focus on it, and gets the sense there’s a pattern there, somewhere, but it’s elusive. He can’t track it.

While on the top the dune for the briefest of moments, his vision isn’t blocked or obscured. The people directly in front of him are now all below him. And below him, there is no beach, no jetties, only people: people up and down the coastline, people thrashing about in the choppy and icy water like greedy parasites in blood.

Zane has lost sight of his father again. There’s a massive push from behind. He lurches forward and is pinned against the back of the person ahead of him. He looses his breath in a rush; his chest constricting with each attempted breath.

The pressure breaks when the person he’s pressed up against falls and is swallowed up by the advancing crowd. Zane quickly bends and reaches down in an attempt to help, and he sees a terrible glimpse of the beach that is not the beach. The
soft
he’s been walking upon is not in fact sand.

Zane is caught in a competing tide and is again rushed forward. The great, cascading roar is just ahead of him: the pounding surf, last breaths, lost breaths, and a fragmented chant of
there. There
.

Frigid water licks his ankles. He tries to lift his feet out of the water, but there’s nowhere else to put them. He screams for his father. Everyone pushes and converges from every direction.

In water up past his knees, his feet go numb. The people ahead of him never turn around or away from the sea. There’s no mass desperate, lizard-brained attempt to keep from drowning.

A large wave crashes through Zane’s section of the crowd. He manages to remain standing, others topple like bowling pins. Some get up. Some don’t. The woman in the black overcoat is gone.

Zane scrambles around and presses his back into the remaining people in front of him for leverage. Now that he’s turned around, he’s face-to-face with the crowd. Their identical sets of unblinking eyes look through and beyond him.

The undertow tugs at Zane’s legs and feet. He stumbles backward and comes precariously close to falling face-first into the water. There’s someone directly beneath him. He can’t see who it is.

Zane stops looking at their faces. He can’t do it anymore. He reaches out, plants his hands on someone’s shoulders, and he jumps and kicks and pulls himself up. He scrambles out of the water, above the water, using their flesh as hand and foot holds. He’s out of the water and on top of the crowd.

Zane fights upstream. The wind buffeting him helps as he kicks and pulls. The crowd bears his weight like he’s not there, like a river carrying a log. However, his muscles quickly burn with exhaustion.

He rolls onto his back and finds that he hasn’t progressed very far. The sea continues to gather its dead. Still on his back, resting and watching, Zane doesn’t dwell on any single floating body too long for fear he’ll find either of his parents, for fear that he’ll decide to join them.

Zane looks out past the static-colored sky and toward the edge of the darkening horizon. The color of it all seems wrong. And now there are inky, oblong-shaped shadows coloring the ocean swells and gliding beneath the water’s surface. Those shadows are the size of submarines.

He flips onto his stomach. There are large splashes, or breaches in the water behind him; they sound like detonations. And then there’s screaming and the microphone-feedback sound changes pitch and volume.

Zane does not turn around again. He is determined only to fight for his life, to scrabble and crawl his way back up the beach, to the dunes, and then away. He daydreams of crawling back in time, somehow; going all the way back to the day of his first meeting with Dr. Colton and its night filled with moths. Zane has always remembered that day (and night) so vividly, it’s as though he must surely know the way to get back there.

The morning after, there will be a dark purple sunrise, and the sky will remain that color for the length of the day. The tide will be coming in, the surf swelling well past its usual heights. The water will be blood red. The water will still be thick with countless bodies and the large shadows underneath.

Zane will return to the beach. He will clear the dead off the top of the tallest sand dune; rolling bodies down into the crashing waves. He will be alone. He will remember his father telling him about how it was good that his brain was different than everyone else’s. Then, in the new silence of the world, he will sit and listen for the high-pitched, feedback sound, the one that will continue to be just beyond his reach.

By Allyson Bird

Twins. Non-identical but both with silver hair. Their mother named them Gerda and Kay after the characters from Hans Andersen’s
The Snow Queen
. Her favourite story, she had told them, when they had been old enough for her to read it to them. Born old they were, and acted like it, too. There was no laughter in their lives, just the drudgery of poverty day after day, living in a cabin in the woods.Trees overhung the dwelling, which had once been in a clearing. The mother had died giving birth to them, but on having her fortune told by a wanderer who told her what fate lay in store for her, she put aside two gifts for them. To be given to them on their eighteenth birthday. Her father hid them.

The father worked in the sawmill and would come home tired and worn out—his hands sometimes bleeding. One day he didn’t come home at all and his children did not care.

The daughter did what most daughters might do in such a situation, cleaned the cottage in the woods, and cooked the supper each night.Mould grew on the walls—and no amount of scrubbing would get rid of it. She served mostly unappetising food.Beef was quite cheap but no amount of seasoning and herbs could disguise its taste. Nothing that came into the house, once cooked, looked or tasted quite right. The son declined to take his father’s work and took employment as a gardener of the house belonging to Dr Jaspers. He had kept the land that had been in his family for years and let young Kay look after it now. Kay tried his best but lately canker and disease attacked most of the plants and recently a red weed had established itself in the pond near the old bridge. No matter how he cleared and cleansed the bright red weed still took hold week after week, escaping the pond and moving further towards the house. The doctor muttered and discussed the problem with his neighbours, but they shook their heads, thankful that it hadn’t happened to them.

The house was in re-claimed swamp, a wooden structure with an old tin roof, and very little warmth of any kind in it at all. Sheep wandered close to the place and one had died recently, at the back near the windswept manuka tree. It had not been removed and the falcons fought over it.Above the carcass a small canopy of totara trees, their brown bark stripped away to the bleached bone colour. Flayed. Black fungus covered the older trees and the wasps hung around all the time. Gerda thought of those trees as if they were capable of movement and it seemed to her that they stealthily fixed themselves closer to the house each year, their branches reaching out to her, begging her for something she didn’t understand. In the autumn, birds hung around the seeds attached to the succulent crimson parts of the tree.

As a child, even in the summer months, when the wind threatened to take the roof off the house, Gerda would climb one of the trees—an enormous gum. She hauled her old dusty pink blanket up there, too. She would sit with her skirt firmly between her knees, as the leaves lashed her arms, and her grip became weakened by the strength of the gusts. If she flew from a tree her head would be dashed against the boulders in the field. Would her blood make the crops grow better, she thought? High winds on sunny day. That was when she would look out at the far blue horizon and wonder what was beyond it—what great secrets there would be to discover and what treasure to find. A child’s hopeful thoughts. Long gone. The creatures which once dwelt in those trees occasionally returned to breed but they never stayed long and preferred Lake Poukawa amongst the willow and raupo even though it was frequented by duck hunters who were less than stealthy and threw empty beer cans into the lake to use as target practice. Everything was a target to them—stationary or moving. Gerda knew one of them. She liked the way he looked at her, but he was a giant of a man and he towered above her. Now and then he brought a brace of birds for her and laid them on the porch. Kay didn’t like him at all but chose to ignore what he did— thankful for the extra food. Gerda often checked at least three times that she had locked the doors of the house at night, but knew really that she might just be locking trouble in. She didn’t feel anxious but just kept doing it anyway, and was not sure why. The man was called Peter and he lived in the cramped space of an old shipping container two fields away. A tight fit. He had painted it dark green and had placed skulls of wild boar on the roof. And once, not far from her home and his, she had found the heart of a large animal nailed to a tree. It hadn’t been there long and a trail of blood ran down the trunk onto the soil and pooled. It looked to Gerda that the earth had rejected it.

The trees were a great place to put a hammock, but as the canopy became denser it blotted out the blue sky so Gerda spent less and less time in it, until she had quite forgotten that she had it at all. The undergrowth claimed that, too.

She would sometimes camp out in an old army tent found in a giveaway once. People in New Zealand often reused things over and over—some even straying from their original use. A car as a chicken house, for example. Gerda was afraid of nothing. She hardly felt anything, although she tried to feel fear by climbing the highest trees and being alone in the dark. Nothing. Nothing to be afraid of at all. Once, when bitten by her own dog, which her father uncharacteristically had given to her on her seventh birthday, she didn’t cry. She just washed the wound in the stream and ripped some of her dress away to bind it— tearing at the cloth with her teeth. Her father felt nothing for her, either. To add insult to injury, sandflies bit her skin around the wound. She must not scratch, she told herself, and managed not to, but only just. She liked books, though, and felt for the characters in them—their joys and trials, but she believed in her non-existence as a person, that nobody would ever notice her.She didn’t really have a place in the world. Animals did. She didn’t.