by P. J. Fox
8.
Medicine hadn’t changed much in two hundred, or two thousand years.
Ned loved the scene in Master and Commander where they amputated their littlest sailor’s arm. The doctor told him, rest, and the body will heal itself. Ned had been told much the same thing when he’d had his appendix out the year before. He’d half expected them to produce a copper pan of leeches, next, or maybe start feeling the lumps on his head.
Oh, doctors told you to trust them, but they couldn’t really fix anything.
Baker—who’d gotten the rundown from Ned’s teachers—thought Ned was having a breakdown, an unfortunate side effect of an extremely stressful summer. Maybe he was right.
Ned pushed the school doors open and breathed in the scent of fall. Summer was barely hanging on; today, he could taste winter in the wind. He stepped out, pulling on his jacket—now slightly too large—as he took the front steps two at a time. He hadn’t bothered to tell anyone about the jacket. There was no point.
He hadn’t told anyone about the hat, either.
These days, Ned half expected everything he touched to break down on him.
He’d spent a few tense nights wandering around the house, locking and relocking the doors, but there’d been no point in that, either. Days—even a whole week—had gone by with no changes, nothing suspicious, and then all of a sudden he’d come home from school and find his new copy of The Lord of the Rings on the bed, when he’d left it on the chair, or his pen cup moved two inches to the left. He could tell, because the dust ring was still there on the wood. His backpack kept appearing and disappearing, too.
The weather was turning chillier day by day, and Ned was still alone with his problem.
His growing problem.
He was halfway home before he started feeling the first prickles on the back of his neck.
It started slowly, so slowly he didn’t notice anything at first. Preoccupation gave way to general unease. He couldn’t put his finger on it, but something felt wrong. Ned kept walking.
The sense of wrong kept growing.
I won’t look behind me, he told himself. I won’t.
Then he realized: this was how he’d felt right before he’d almost been mowed down.
An event that, now, felt like it had happened a thousand years ago.
But today, he wasn’t trapped in the gloomy tunnel of Beacon Street. Like he’d been…then. Harbor Drive was bright, sunny, and full of people. They were mowing their lawns, weeding their flower beds, and walking their dogs, cheerfully oblivious to the wider world. Dogs barked, children cried. A bass voice cursed a recalcitrant lawnmower.
Harbor Drive, that connected to Beacon Street.
Beacon Street, that endless tunnel, which stood between him and his house.
He’d say safety, but his house wasn’t safe—was it?
Had it ever been?
But Ned wouldn’t think about that now. Let him—him, it—try something when he was surrounded by people. So far, the attacks, if you could even call them that, had only occurred when he was alone. Either outside, like the other day, or inside his house. But alone. Eve slept like a log and Camilla didn’t even sleep so much as fall down into a mindless stupor.
That same man was now calling his lawnmower a son of a whore.
Ned turned, expecting to see the man, and instead saw a white Honda.
Inching along. Just inching. Not pulling into a driveway. Not passing him.
His sense of security shook, but held firm. He can’t get me here. Not in public; not in broad daylight.
He just had to avoid the trees.
The prickles had become needles.
Think of something else.
A fat woman in a muumuu was levering herself out of a green minivan. Her three kids were already running around the lawn, using assorted grocery items as missiles.
An old man with a cap that read Korea Veteran was stumping along down the road. He leaned heavily on his cane. Ned felt sorry for the poor bastard. Here he was, trying so hard to get outside and get some exercise, and he had no wife to keep him company.
A girl in a pink dress pushed her doll along in a carriage.
The car was still there.
A woman tried to comfort her screaming toddler.
And then Beacon Street loomed before him. It crouched at the end of Harbor Drive, a dark tunnel to nowhere. Ned glanced behind him; the car was still there, idling now.
Glare flashed on the windshield, hiding the inside of the car from view.
Ned clenched and unclenched his fists. What would happen if he called out? Would the car speed off? And even if it did, what would prevent it from coming back? He was half-tempted to turn around and walk up to the window. Maybe bang on the glass, Cops-style.
Then what?
With his luck, he’d probably get arrested for disturbing the peace.
Oh, he knew that other people saw the car, but nobody really saw it. Not the way he did. They weren’t suspicious; they weren’t looking for any reason to be suspicious. Ned was half-convinced that a body bag could drop out of the trunk and nobody would do more than blink. People saw what they expected to see, and heard what they expected to hear.
And that was that.
Which was when the realization came to him, utterly and finally: he was alone.
He was perhaps the most alone around other people.
He could talk to one of the neighbors, he supposed. Walk right up to a total stranger and announce that someone else—another total stranger, including to Ned—was trying to kill him. For absolutely no reason at all, because that just happened. Random, Honda-driving people tried to kill teenagers all the time. Teenagers with 2.0 grade point averages and no friends. What next, he’d tell the guy with the lawnmower that a cybernetic organism had been sent back in time to prevent him from some day uniting the remains of humanity?
Gee, Ned, would you prefer to be institutionalized now or later?
9.
It must’ve washed ashore overnight.
The smell was appalling; it made sitting on the porch, a good hundred yards away, impossible. Now, the noon sun beating down on her head, Eve stood above it on the rocks. It lay nestled in a messy bed of black seaweed. She’d been in a bad mood since the afternoon before, when Ned had forced her to come and pick him up from their town’s only Starbucks. Where he’d walked, supremely disgusted by his own cowardice in not confronting the driver, the Honda following along behind.
The Honda had waited there, too, almost seeming to watch him through the plate glass of the coffee shop, until Eve arrived.
She reached out and gave it a tentative poke with her stick.
Oh, there was no doubt that it was dead—but what was it?
The thing sighed and rolled over. She leapt back, brandishing her stick, but it was still dead. Another noxious cloud belched into the air, and rolled back in the opposite direction.
Ned made his way carefully over the rocks. Eve had her stick pointed at the thing like a wand. It looked disgusting, like an overfilled sausage casing. Pink flesh was pulled so taught, it looked like it’d explode any minute. The surface was shot with thousands of red streaks, like some cruel god had turned it inside out to expose its veins. Along its limbs, the color graded to a marbled greenish-white. The lower part of its stomach was the color of moss. At least, Ned thought the pendulous sac was its stomach.
The wind shifted direction, slamming them full in the face with a wall of horror. Eve bent over and hurled. The thing in front of them smelled like mixture of sour milk and rotting meat that someone had dumped perfume over.
Ned took a step forward and bent down to examine it more closely.
“I think it’s a pig,” he said.
Part of what made the stench so disgusting was the fact that it almost smelled like food. Sweet and musty, like a delicious treat. He bent closer. Some enterprising fish had eaten out its eyes, leaving two ragged, gaping holes. Behind him, he heard retching noises.
“Eve, do you think it’s a pig?”
His sister didn’t answer. Too busy, he supposed. Well, he didn’t care. Served her right for being a bitch.
“It’s a dog,” said an unexpected voice.
Ned turned. “What?”
Peter was standing a few feet behind him.
Ned turned back toward the thing. It was huge, round, and completely hairless. Its empty eye sockets stared accusingly at the sky. A sweet treat. “It really doesn’t look much like a dog,” Ned pointed out. Rather generously, in his opinion. “Dogs generally have hair, and aren’t hugely round and fat like pigs.” Which any moron could plainly see.
“Yes,” Peter agreed, “but not after one’s been floating in salt water for a week—or more.”
He picked up Eve’s stick, now forgotten as she stumbled down the beach, and gave the thing a poke. Another belch of foul-smelling gas filled the air. “When something dies,” he said, “it swells. And see, here, how the pores are enlarged?” He prodded his stick against the thing’s spine, which was mottled by thousands of tiny craters. “Once it’s been under the water for awhile, all the hair falls out.”
His eyes met Ned’s. “Same with people, you know. Everything swells…and then everything floats.”
Ned swallowed.
“What…do you think killed it?”
Peter shrugged. “Who knows. Being in the wrong place at the wrong time, most likely. Seeing something it shouldn’t have. Something that perhaps might not mean much at the time, taken out of context but that…remembered, later, might present itself as a clue.
“An alibi, perhaps, disintegrated in a moment.”
“An alibi for what?”
“People get sick of their pets, you know. Take them out on a nice sea cruise and then toss them overboard. Let nature do their dirty work for them…absolve themselves of guilt.”
Ned looked out over the fog-bound horizon. He could picture it well: paddling furiously, heart pounding and lungs straining, trying to call for its people. Believing that they wouldn’t have sailed away on purpose, and then only wanting to believe.
There were so many things he wanted to believe.
So many things they all did.
Camilla, who’d joined them at some point, surprised everyone by speaking. “I found a dead body, once, on this same beach. I was very little. The Coast Guard came, and told us he was a soldier; he’d fallen off his ship, somehow. Now, this was during the last war, of course, so I can well imagine how he’d fallen off, but my parents wouldn’t discuss that with me. They thought I didn’t know what was going on, of course.”
She reflected for a moment.
“Parents think children are so stupid,” she added.
Peter nodded slowly, a thoughtful expression on his face. “Indeed.”
AFTERWORD
This short story also appears in the compilation I, Demon but what some readers might not know is that it’s also taken from the first manuscript I ever completed. In a modified—and highly edited—form, of course. My first few manuscripts weren’t very good, which is why they’ve never been published. Even though I could go back and publish them now, they’re more an ode to effort than anything worth reading.
I look back on them and feel nostalgic or, sometimes, I cringe. Or sometimes I do both.
To recall high school as an unpleasant experience would be…an understatement. I was Ned. And, in creating Ned’s character, and the dilemma in which he finds himself, I was attempting to access those feelings with which I still wrestled. I was eighteen when I finished the first draft of Paranoia. I subsequently rewrote that draft, and edited it, and edited it again, and ultimately even wrote a sequel. Again, none of which was very good.
When I decided to publish a compilation, I found myself reviewing some of my older stories. And there, waiting for me, was Ned. Ned, the alter ago of my teenage years, filled with an anger that I no longer related to but that, in my adulthood, I much more fully understood.
I decided that his time had come.
Winnowing down 85,000 words into 10,000 wasn’t that difficult. A testament to how far I’ve come as a writer—or, if you prefer, to just how bad the original manuscript was. Somewhere during the two million words I’ve written since, I’ve learned how to say more with less. A statement that certain readers of The Demon of Darkling Reach may find hard to credit. But I realized, in rereading those long ago words, that the essence of what I wanted to convey lay, in totum, in a very small section.
I edited that section, winnowing it down even further, as I also expanded on it. As I, with adult eyes, reviewed the thoughts of my childhood. No one believes me was a common feature of life, back then. People tend to, as Ned observes, see what they want to see. That a child is being abused, or neglected, is a truth most would rather ignore.
Sadly, this seems to be the case with most uncomfortable truths.
At the time, I didn’t know if anyone would ever believe me. I couldn’t conceive of a life where that didn’t matter; where I wasn’t beholden to adults, to protect me. Where I was the adult, and could protect myself—because I, finally, had the freedom to act according to my own conscience.
And although Ned’s anger is something to which I no longer relate, his frustration at injustice still feels very immediate. Tempered with my adult’s understanding that things do get better is my empathy for children, and teenagers, everywhere who suffer at the hands of an uncaring world. Who are forced, by circumstances, to rely on others—others who prioritize their own concerns, like what if speaking up makes me unpopular, over doing their duty to their fellow man.
This story, I realized, meant a lot to me. Which was what motivated my subsequent decision to, after the release of I, Demon, release it as a stand-alone work. It’s both a good story and, on a personal level, it shows how far I’ve come. Both personally and professionally.
In I, Demon, I introduce it with a quote: “being slightly paranoid is like being slightly pregnant; it tends to get worse.” I thought about using another quote as well, one with which most of the world is familiar: curiosity killed the cat. Because, you see, as much as we recite the first half of the couplet we tend to forget the second. Which tells us that satisfaction brought him back. The only cure for Ned’s paranoia is, in the end, to face it head on.
Ned faces Peter and he wins, not because he defeats Peter—the ultimate result of that confrontation is, to some extent, left to the reader’s imagination—but because he defeats his own fear. His paranoia grows worse and worse, ultimately becoming crippling; until he fights back. His birth, as it were, is a terrible one but it allows him to release a burden. And, in so doing, find his true self.
Which, I like to believe, we’re all still doing. At least on some level. Perhaps not as dramatically as Ned, at least not outwardly. But is any birth, or rebirth, less traumatic?
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
P.J. Fox is the author of several novels, as well as the nonfiction writing guide, I Look Like This Because I’m a Writer: How to Overcome Sloth, Self Doubt, and Poor Hygiene to Realize the Writing Career of your Dreams. She published her first story when she was ten. Between then and publishing her first novel, The Demon of Darkling Reach, she detoured to, in no particular order, earn several degrees (including a law degree), bore everyone she knew with lectures about medieval history, get married, and start a family. She realized, ultimately, that she had to make a go of this writing thing because nothing else would ever make her happy. She invites you to visit her at her website, www.pjfoxwrites.com.
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