by Kim Foster
Save her. Hurt her. Both of those things were in him.
His legs were running. He was going to her house.
Josie followed the monster.
✽✽✽
Ms. Doris Kippelibby couldn’t sleep either, and when Doris Kippelibby couldn’t sleep, neither could her dog, Moo-Moo.
Doris Kippelibby was large, round to the point of extreme roundness, a beach ball with legs and arms. Something was making her nervous. The night seemed off to her, unsettled.
She padded down the hall to her dimly lit kitchen, in her flowered housecoat and ratty slippers. She had a head full of pink plastic curlers that clacked together whenever she moved her head, which was a lot. She sat at the kitchen table and talked to Moo-Moo, while they ate leftover pork chops and apple-sauce.
“Something’s off tonight, Moosey.” she said, patting the little ratty dog’s head and tossing it a greasy bit of pork from her disgustingly greasy fingers.
“Must be full moon, or Venus in retrograde or some malarkey like that.” Doris Kippelibby used old-fashioned words like “malarkey” and called her refrigerator an “ice box”.
She finished off a chop, gnawing the meat very close to the bone, getting a slime of grease across her fat cheeks and lips, and headed out to look out the front window to see what she could see.
Nothing, just blackness. The trees bent in the sea breeze, which was a quite a bit stronger than usual, and whipping around the corners of her cottage.
“The weatherman never said anything about a Southerly Buster coming in,” she told Moo-Moo. “Always getting the weather wrong...what good are they?...Weathermen, Schmeathermen.”
Then, she saw it. It was a blur at first, so she got up closer to the window.
A boy running across the street and into Gerty's yard. That next door boy.
The quiet, weird one.
“Joe, Joey...Jonesy. That was his name, right? Moo-Moo?”
Moo-Moo growled a little.
Doris Kippelibby was pretty sure all young people were deviants, and had a great deal of trouble remembering their names or distinguishing between them. And she was quite sure all of them, equally, were up to no good.
“What’s Jonesy doing in Gerty’s yard? Probably going to steal the TV or heading out to smoke The Drugs down there at the beach...They’re all on The Drugs, Moo-Moo.”
She looked down at her dog.
“And the quiet ones, Moo-Moo, you can’t trust the quiet ones.”
Moo-Moo whined, yawned and dropped to the floor with his head on Doris Kippelibby’s slipper.
“Well, I’ll have to tell Gerty about it tomorrow. Tell her not to trust that Jonesy boy.”
And then she bundled Moo-Moo up in her fat, pig knuckle hands and pushed him right into the big pillow of her chest. She checked the front door lock twice, and jiggled the handle several times.
“Let’s go to bed, Moosey,” she grumbled.
“This neighborhood is going to pot.”
She kissed Moo-Moo on the head. Turned off the lights and plodded up the stairs.
Doris Kippelibby slept in her big bed, with Moo-Moo on the pillow next to her. But she didn’t sleep well. She had a bad, bad feeling she just couldn’t shake.
✽✽✽
Getting in the window was easy. It had been busted open, the glass blown out almost entirely.
Was it the wind? Josie wondered. Or Bangkok?
The wind had started to gust hard and heavy.
Haunted. The word lodged in his head.
This was no ordinary wind. Josie saw the trees bending over, branches swooping over the ground, a newspaper left in a mailbox, flapping and flying down the street like a deranged kite. A kid’s bike folding over on itself, tumbling, all that clanking metal, across a driveway.
His cap flew off into the bushes.
He moved fast, but in his brain everything was slow motion. He felt he had been running through fog for miles. His chest heaved.
One foot, then the other, he pushed himself up on the sill. He knew it was Trinket’s room because of the curtains flapping like flags in the window, a pale lavender. He could see there were dolls, stacks of board games, a pile of stuffed animals. It looked like lilacs exploded in her room.
Josie noticed a photo of Trinket, flanked by Gerty and Frida. Their life looked perfect. They were smiling, holding her, loving her.
He fell into the room with a heavy thud. He knew for sure he was not alone with the girl. Bangkok was there, too. He heard eels thrashing, and tentacles sliding their way over the play tables, toy boxes and night stands, and in and out of the canopy of her bed. He smelled the rotting fish, and took a deep breath, letting all of it swirl and wind its way inside him, fill him.
The part of him that wanted to help shrank into a speck, silent and impotent. His brain throbbed, and he felt himself falling, plummeting through darkness, falling farther and farther away.
Josie walked over to the bed and looked down at the sleeping girl, her hair splayed out across her pillow like the legs of an octopus. She sucked on her dummy, or a dummy as they called in American TV shows. She looked so vulnerable, so fragile. If he picked her up gently enough, she wouldn’t even fight. She’d be his.
He reached down, crumpled her into his arms.
He put his face in her hair, inhaled. If he bit into bone and skin, he knew, on some primal, animal level, that it would change him. A small part of him resisted, tried to move his body away, tried to release Trinket from his grasp, but whatever had his mind, silenced those thoughts and crushed them to dust.
He opened his mouth and sunk his teeth into her flesh. Felt the drops of blood rush through his body.
Then, a shock of electricity, blazing white light, eels snapping all around him, the tentacles slamming him, surrounding him, squeezing, a chorus of hissing that seared his ears, covering him in black oily slime.
Everything went black.
✽✽✽
He woke up on Trinket’s bedroom floor. Sun was streaming through the broken window. He could smell the ocean, hear gulls. He was covered in blood, food and black, slimy ink.
Josie couldn’t remember what had happened, nor how he came to be there. And then he did, and he frantically jumped to his feet and looked around for Trinket.
The bed was empty, the glass smashed everywhere. The mattress and all the bedding was shredded. The photo of Trinket and her parents was broken, mutilated, in pieces.
He heard footsteps. It was Frida standing in the doorway.
At first she said nothing. She had to take it all in – the empty bed, destruction, the bed pulled apart, tuffs of mattress stuffing and feathers from the shredded pillows floating through the air, like a Christmas snow.
“What’s happening?” she said, her eyes darting about the room.
"What are you doing here?”
“Where's Trinket?"
She looked at the bed again. Josie had never seen such stunned confusion.
Then, Gerty ran in. She was wearing her robe, her hair a tumble of red curls.
“You,” she said, looking at Josie.
Gerty didn't need time to piece everything together.
“Yesterday, you were hurting her, in the street and … oh, oh, oh my God.” Gerty covered her mouth in horror, and sprinted to the bed, looking under it, under covers, pulling everything apart, frantic and more desperate at every second.
The noise she made was a shrill whistle, thin, muted, a thread of her terror. Josie watched her face the very moment she realized Trinket was truly gone. She came undone, as if the ribbon holding her together was pulled, and she fell out of her own body.
“Trinket!...TRINKET!” she screamed. Frida ran over to her and pulled her into her arms.
“We’ll find her....We’ll find her, darlin’...We will,” Frida whispered into her hair, holding her together, rocking her.
“TRINKET!...TRINKET!”
But the more Gerty called for her, the more she realized the most important th
ing in their lives had vanished. There when they went to bed, gone by morning.
“Trinket! No. NO! NO! Please...”
Frida tried to hold her, harder, but Gerty jerked free and lunged toward Josie. She looked at him, but did not see him.
She only saw a monster.
“WHAT HAVE YOU DONE TO MY BABY!?”
✽✽✽
Next door, the new girl in the neighborhood, Emerald Phan, also awoke to sun streaming through her windows. She heard a truck loading crates of trout, herring and sardines into the Organic Food Shop across the street.
Then she heard the forlorn, aching, desperate screams of a mother whose only child had disappeared forever.
And that’s when Emerald Phan knew for sure she had finally found him. Found Bangkok. And just in time. Because he was becoming unstoppable.
five
TICKER
“Emerald! Emerald, have you seen my scuba gear?!”
Emerald listened to her Dad from deep under the covers. She pictured him pushing a swoop of hair off his forehead, only to have it fall right back again over his glasses. His hair was always flopping into his eyes.
Howard trawled through boxes in the living room, over-turning clothes and dishes packed in newspaper. They hadn’t quite unpacked, although this was nothing new.
Since Emerald’s Mum went missing somewhere on the Great Barrier Reef the year before, home had been disheveled, disjointed and sad.
Arataki had been a squid researcher and marine biologist. She was Maori, from New Zealand, and Howard was Australian by way of Vietnam. They met somewhere off the coast of Papua New Guinea, protesting shark finning.
Finning is when fisherman catch sharks and cut off their fins – shark fins are used in the very prized delicacy, Shark Fin Soup – and throw the living sharks, finless, bloodied, maimed and dying, back into the ocean, where they can’t swim, defend themselves against predators or find food. It was a miserable death for the sharks, and Howard and Arataki found the practice appalling. Howard boarded the boat, watched Arataki free a shark before it could be finned and thought she might be the most beautiful and strong woman he had ever seen. There and then, he decided he would stop at nothing to make her happy every day of her life. When Arataki went missing, Emerald and Howard spent every moment searching for her. They let the dishes pile up in the sink, let the vegetables go rotten in the bowl on the counter, let the mess run up on their house. They just wanted her back.
They missed her in all the big and small ways, every day.
“Emerald, I know you’ve been out diving….I’m also missing my salinometer, my chemical test kits and my oxygen probes….I know you know where they are!”
Emerald glanced at her closet. She knew where it all was. But she needed to make one more dive in the afternoon. She was sure Bangkok was in the area, feeding on schools of small fish. She was sure if she could take one more dive, she’d find him. And to do one more dive, Emerald was going to need the extra equipment. She needed to observe him, get a better idea of his powers.
Emerald heard her father’s footsteps and sunk under the blankets, playing dead.
The door creaked open. Emerald held her breath.
Howard stood there in the mess that was his daughter’s room, scouring the debris for any sign of his equipment. Then he walked over and kissed her blanket-covered head.
“I love you,” he said it so softly, and with so much meaning, it was a feather that weighed 1,000 pounds.
Then he left, closing the door behind him.
He didn’t like her talk of sea monsters, and a giant killer squid that could live on land. It went against everything he believed in his completely logical, scientific mind.
Howard thought Emerald had gone a little berserk after her mother had gone missing. But that was understandable. He had too, in his own private way.
“There’s no monster,” he thought, “it’s global warming, our pollution killing sea life.”
That was why he had moved them to Tamarama, to study the sudden disappearance of small fish along the coast. And he thought the change would be good for her. Emerald needed a new adventure, one not connected to her mother.
Emerald’s obsession with a sea monster named Bangkok was simply a manifestation of her grief. Howard Phan was sure of it.
But he wanted Emerald to be okay, more than anything, and he knew Arataki would’ve supported her, believed in her, helped her. His wife was equal parts scientist and dreamer. So he decided he would support Emerald no matter how crazy it seemed. Whatever Emerald needed to make peace with the loss of her mother, whatever she needed to get through it, he would provide it.
And if what she needed today was his salinometer, well, he’d let her have it.
Howard Phan packed his gear – the parts he could find – and tossed his pack in the backseat of his Jeep. He pulled away from the curb, thinking of his daughter, of his missing wife, his broken and hurting family.
✽✽✽
“I saw it with my own two eyes.” Doris Kippelibby was wearing her fanciest frock, a tent-like number, with matching salmon-color lipstick. She had Moo-Moo tucked under one arm.
“Moo-Moo saw it too. That boy from down the street, Jonesy, his name is J-O-N-E-S-Y, that’s how you spell it….sneaking across the yard, sneaking like he was up to no good.”
She talked right into the microphone of Botany Cook, the infamous television journalist. Botany who had gotten down to Tamarama Street the second she heard about a missing child. Her cameraman and sidekick, Horace, had a big camera and light trained right on her face.
“Tamarama Street has become a very dangerous place,” she said, her mouth turning into a wet, salmon-colored frown.
“Idle minds.” Doris Kippelibby said, thumping a fat finger against her temple.
“But did you actually see, um, the alleged perpetrator...” Botany Cook checked her notes, “....um, Josie Brown?”
“Jonesy? Oh yes, saw him running across the lawn.”
“Was that his yard or your yard?” Botany Cook pushed her glasses up her nose.
“His yard.”
“So you saw him in his own yard?”
“Well, at first it was his own yard but then I saw him slither, like the snake he is, into Gerty’s yard...Gerty, that’s the victim’s mother, she thumped a big fat finger across Botany’s notebook.
“You know the girl has two moms, right?....Doris Kippelibby asked, “young folks these days do things different than when I was coming up.”
‘Um yes, thank you, Mrs. Kippel…
“Kippelibby. K-I-Double P-E-L-I-Double B-Y…”
“What time did you see all this, Mrs. Kippelibby?”
“I’d say around 10.”
“That isn’t terribly late for a boy to be out in the neighborhood. That couldn’t have been what made you suspicious?”
Horace and Botany glanced at each other, deeply disappointed there wasn’t more to her story.
Horace dropped the camera from his shoulder.
“Oh no, that’s not all….there’s more!”
Horace hoisted the camera back up and turned it on. The spotlight shined on Doris Kippelibby’s round, shiny face.
“I heard, from Mrs. Fockerson at the Organic Food Shop...you know, she told me while we were buying some kiwi they just got in....well, she said, Jonesy tried to abduct Trinket right out on the street last night. Almost killed her with his malicious teenage-boy-hands.”
She said "malicious teenage boy hands" very mischievously.
Botany Cook took notes furiously.
“Attempted abduction last night....” she scribbled, then looked at Horace.
“Look’s like we got ourselves a story.”
✽✽✽
The police picked up Josie and took him to the police station on Bondi Road.
He didn’t speak when they came for him. He knew they would come. They said it was for them to ask a few questions, but Josie felt their seriousness, the weight of the whole proc
ess, and he knew there was more going on. He knew he was in some kind of trouble. He just didn’t know how much or what kind.
He had been at the station for what seemed like hours, with different detectives coming in and out, asking questions, bringing him cups of water, offering him potato crisps from the vending machine. Some detectives were gruff and short with him, accusing him of taking Trinket, or killing her, or working with someone else to abduct her.
Other detectives were softer, kinder, chatting about bands with him. They said they understood, that there was probably a logical explanation and Josie should just share it with them.
But he shared nothing.
Josie believed all the police thought he was a child killer. No matter what they said, he could see it in their eyes. And maybe they were right, he wasn’t sure at all.
He faced down every detective with small, curt, unhelpful answers, as he tried to search the vaults of his memory. He didn’t actually know what had happened to Trinket, although he remembered standing over her, the hunger for her flesh sweeping over him, like a tide pulling him under the ocean.
He had been powerless to all of it. But it was all so murky, the details so far away.
He didn’t think he was capable of hurting anyone, ever. Yet, even to him, his murky memories seemed damning. He remembered the crush of her blood in his mouth. He remembered feeling invincible.
He’d look clinically insane and guilty if he told them anything. So he told them nothing.
Until his parents burst through the door.
✽✽✽
Phyllis and Portland nearly knocked Josie over, hugging him.
“Oh sweetie, sweetie, you poor thing. Officer, what is he doing here?”
“Josie is being held for questioning in the disappearance of Trinket Parsnips,” the detective said in a hard, un-yielding voice.
