by Kim Foster
“How?...How do you know about Bangkok?”
“I’ve been following him. My mother, her name was Arataki...she went missing…” she walked up to the board and pointed to a newspaper clipping about her mother’s disappearance. Arataki was boarding a shark finning vessel in the photo.
Josie thought she looked determined and brave, very sure of what she was doing. Unlike him. His whole life was uncertainty of purpose. He was nothing like Emerald’s mother. He could never be that brave.
“I think Bangkok is behind her disappearance. It’s connected somehow. I’m going to get to her before he kills her.”
Josie looked at her face, the small lamp on her nightstand showered her with the glow of yellow light, even though she was quite tiny, she was formidable.
“How do you know she’s alive?”
“I just know.”
That was all she said, and he half thought she was crazy. How could Arataki have saved herself from the monster all this time? If she were alive, wouldn’t she just come home? Wouldn't she call? Surely, she must be dead and Emerald was in some kind of denial. Surely she just wanted to believe her mother was still alive.
And yet, he was sure Trinket was still alive.
Josie saw one particular newspaper clipping. It was yellowed and torn at the edges, a black-and-white photo of a man and a woman being hung from a gallows. A mob of people stood around watching them die. Josie moved the tack and took the clipping off the board.
A chill rain the length of his spine and down his legs.
“That's Petros and Ana Papadopoulis. That photo was taken in 1952. It’s just one of the stories…”
“Stories?” Josie asked, watching Emerald’s eyes get thin and intense.
“There are dozens of stories," she tapped and swiped her tablet and showed him news story after news story, "people who’ve been accused of killing children, that never laid a hand on them.”
“Like me?”
“You are just one of them. This guy, Petros, came to live on the coast. He was from Greece and he came here with his wife, Ana, and baby son, Clio. They settled into a small house near Maroubra. One day the boy was playing by the sea, and then disappeared. All they found was his white sailor hat with little blue anchors embroidered on it.
Josie bent in to look at a black-and-white newspaper photo. It was the baby from the Organic Food Shop.
"They searched for days and never found Clio's body. The police blamed the parents, said they abused the boy and killed him, drowned him in the sea when no one was looking."
Emerald touched the photo of the hanging.
"They said Ana and Petros had gone mad, talking of monsters and giant squid, and nightmares. They were plagued with nightmares,” Emerald said, tacking the photo back on the board.
"All of Sydney showed up to see it." Emerald told him, all hushed and quiet. "While they strangled, people watching said Petros and Ana kept crying out for 'Bangkok'...
They were both quiet for a moment.
“When they died, the crowd cheered."
"That's going to be me, isn't it?" he asked.
Josie thought he might be suffocating. An invisible cord tightened across his chest.
"They won't hang you," she said, matter-of-factly, "They don't do that anymore...But they'll let you rot in prison."
“Trinket is alive,” he blurted out. "In the Organic Food Shop."
"How do you know, Giraffe Boy?" she was looking at him now. He could see her out of the corner of his eye. She believed him.
"The same way you know your mom is still alive."
Emerald didn't know what to say.
“....And Bangkok is out to sea,” he added.
Then, Emerald was off running about her room, furiously rummaging through boxes and bins for supplies. She threw torches, rope, a crow bar and box cutters into her pack.
“What are you doing?”
“If Bangkok is gone, and Trinket is alive in the Organic Food Shop, we have to get her out of there...tonight.”
"Us? No, not us....are you crazy?"
There was no way he was going to break into the shop. The news crews were parked out front, the police, what they all wanted was for him to screw up. He was crazy for even being in her house. Why had he risked it all for this crazy girl who wanted to break into a building and play the big hero? He was so mad at himself. He should've just stayed in his room. Bad things happened when he ventured out into the world, outside the ear buds (OTEB) all kinds of conflicts with other people, messiness.
Josie Brown hated messiness.
"This is stupid," Josie said, although what he really thought was that she was stupid.
All he wanted was to run back home and pull the blankets up around his head and wait for all of this to go away.
And that's what he decided to do.
"I'm out of here." Josie told her, and put the hood up on his jacket and walked out of her room.
seven
PLUCKED
It was not lost on Josie that the girl everyone wanted to find was right next door to his house.
But he guessed that the same haunted spirits that made a giant squid with eel tentacles come to life and live on land and water, was probably the same haunted spirits that would make Trinket completely inaccessible to anyone trying to save her.
Josie was pretty sure Emerald would never get to Trinket. There was no reason to try.
He slipped out the back door and stood in the shadows of her side porch, watching the news vans, looking for any sign of movement.
He was about to crouch down and run out into the grass, past a frangipani bush, and take another look to see if anyone was lingering around on the street, when something came whipping out the door behind him, grabbed his hand and pulled him through the yard.
"Agh!"
"Sssh! Be quiet!" the voice said, and he knew it was Emerald. They scrambled behind a lime tree in her front yard.
“Keep your head down,” Emerald ordered.
Josie looked at her and could see that she had changed clothes. She was wearing narrow black jeans, a black sweatshirt. Her hair was tied into a bandana and she had smeared some kind of mud across her face.
She looked fierce. And a little crazy. But still fierce.
"Why'd you do that?" he glowered at her.
"I'm not going."
"Yes…” she said matter-of-factly, and scanned the neighborhood with her father's high-powered binoculars.
"You're going."
Even behind the big lenses of the binoculars he could see that she was serious and unwavering. She was sure of herself in ways he had never seen before. He both liked her and hated her at the same time.
"If they find me out here..."
"If they find you, they are going to lock you up in juvie..." she explained, putting down the binoculars and looking straight at him.
"And if Bangkok eats her when he comes in from the sea, then you will be known as a child killer no matter whether you go to jail or not...your life will be over."
Josie was trying to think up a rebuttal, but nothing had formed in his brain. Not that Emerald noticed.
"And really, Giraffe Boy, don't you care at all about that kid? I mean think about someone besides yourself....Geez."
Emerald put the binoculars up to her face again and looked in the direction of the Organic Food Shop.
“The little alley between your house and the shop is dark. We can go there,” she said pointing, “...and get in the side window, the one right across from your bedroom window.”
Josie swallowed hard. He closed his eyes and tried to get a hold of himself. Emerald kept talking.
“No one will be able to see us in the alley...but we’ll have to be quick.”
Emerald pulled a crow bar from a side pocket on her pack.
“This is happening,” Josie thought and the air in his lungs turned to lead.
"It's happening and there's nothing I can do to stop it," he thought, and wondered why he got in
volved, why he went to her house, why he didn't just stay at home. Alone.
He could tell that everything Emerald tackled happened just this way. She was a two-ton steam roller barreling down the road 80 miles an hour and everything in front of her had to jump out of the way or perish under the weight of her.
Josie looked over at her, she was zipping up her pack. There was no doubt in her face at all. Emerald was sure.
Josie was not sure at all.
He was not the type of kid to save missing toddlers, or break into buildings, or risk going to jail while news vans camped outside his house. He didn’t take big risks. He didn’t, for instance, stand up for Little Berty Fockerson, a pudgy kindergartner who was always getting picked on at the beach, usually by Grotty Greg.
Grotty and his friends sometimes took Berty’s boogie board and threw it out into the ocean, or played “Monkey in the Middle” with his sand toys. Sometimes they kicked down his sand castles. All the while his bikini-wearing babysitter ignored the whole scene and kept on flirting with her lifeguard boyfriend.
Josie would watch Berty sitting on the sand, silently crying to himself on many afternoons. He wanted to grab Berty’s board out of the water, hand it to him, and tell him he was okay, that it sucked to be the butt of the world’s joke, that he understood.
But he never did. Mostly because he was sure that if he got involved, Grotty would focus his attention on him.
No, better to just stay out of it.
Josie would dig his toes in the sand, put on his dark sunglasses, put in his earbuds and turn up the The Jezabels so high it drowned out the waves, and Berty, and the big bad world.
And now, he was crouched behind a lime tree hoping he didn’t get thrown in jail. This was not what he wanted to be doing. And it was as if Emerald read his mind.
“Look, you gotta buck up here, Giraffe Boy. It’s not just about you and whether you are branded a child killer. It’s about Trinket. And my mother. And it’s about all the children that are going to be fish food if Bangkok keeps going,” she stood up.
“Anyway, we don’t have a choice,” she said.
She started out from the tree.
“Well, you coming’?”
And that’s when Josie found his feet moving, although his head was still behind him, somewhere in that lime tree. And he was watching himself move from car to car, bush to bush and then the two of them crouching low and scrambling across the street. He saw himself get to his lawn and run as fast as he could, disappearing into the pitch black of the alley.
A light went on in the van. He heard people moving around.
“Quick! We gotta get outta here,” Emerald whispered and took her crow bar and wedged it between the sill and the window of the Organic Food Shop. She half expected she wouldn’t be able to force it open. It probably hadn’t been opened in years, but as soon as she pushed on the bar, the window sprang open.
She stood back surprised.
“They’re waiting for us,” Josie said.
He didn’t mean to say it, it kind of gurgled out of him, but he knew as surely as he knew anything, whatever was in the Organic Food Shop wanted him to come in.
Emerald shot him a panicked look.
He cupped his hand and Emerald stepped into it. He pushed Emerald up into the window. She worked herself up over the sill and hit the floor inside with a thud.
“Who’s out there?” Someone grumbled, as they poked their head out of the news van and moved a beacon of light from a torch around the yard.
“Josie jumped up, grabbed the sill and hoisted himself up into the window.
“Hey! Who’s over there?” he heard a scuffle, people murmuring and putting on clothes and shoes. He slipped through the window, just as a beam of light caught him.
“I think someone is breaking into that building,” he heard someone say as they came tripping out of the news van.
“Do you think it’s Josie Brown?”
“Is he trying to escape?”
“Maybe he’s going to take another little kid…”
“C’mon! Let’s get him!” the voices said as a rush of people stormed towards the building..
Josie reached up to grab the window and pull it down.
But before he could, the window, all by itself, slammed shut. The lock bolted itself. And a set of iron bars came rattling and crashing down over the windows.
They were locked inside.
✽✽✽
Josie felt something boney stabbing him in his butt.
He was about to ask Emerald for a torch, but she handed him a head lamp before he could get the words out.
“So annoying,” he muttered, adjusting himself.
It was both awesome and irritating that she was always just a little ahead of him.
“What’s annoying?” Emerald said, busy putting on a headlamp.
She had been called annoying before. She knew she was different, that she wouldn’t win any popularity contests at the schools she attended, that no girls her age wanted to lay around her room talking about a giant killer squid and looking at ocean maps that might help her find her dead mother. Making masks from famous horror movies was not right up there with talking about kissing. And boys, well, they acted like her hair was engulfed in flames.
She had always been like this. Her father called her “gloriously-intense,” and said she got it from her mother. Her mother told her she could save the world if she put her mind to it, but that some people would find her to be "too much" and that she would have to find friends who were strong enough to appreciate her.
"And if they don’t..." Arataki told her, with one arm around her shoulders, “tell ‘em to go to hell.”
Still, Emerald had come to find out not many people were strong enough.
Josie, it seemed, was no exception.
“Are you always like this?” he asked her, trying to pull himself off whatever pointy thing was poking into his butt.
“Like what?”
“Like this!” he said, exasperated. "Getting people to break into buildings and knowing what they need before they need it and just, just...being bossy and...frankly, a little bit of a know-it-all?”
“You’re upset because I handed you a head lamp?”
“You’re annoying,” he said, putting on his head lamp and switching it on.
“That’s all, just annoying.”
“You’re sitting on a skeleton.”
“What?....aaaah!” Josie jumped up.
Sure enough, the thing poking him in the butt was a skeleton, a very small skeleton. It was propped up against the wall. Josie had been sitting on its lap. It was old, but not that old. The skull cap had not completely disappeared and it still had tufts of hair protruding out the skin that was left over.
It wore a beaded ankle bracelet and it’s hands were held together with thick rope. It’s jaw had been broken, so the lower half of the face, sat off-kilter from the rest of the head and gave the skeleton a weird cackling expression, as if it were insane.
“Oh God, who is that?” Josie started to panic a little and whirled around in circles, pointing his head lamp around the room to get his bearings.
Even Emerald seemed unhinged by the skeleton and bolted to the other side of the small room.
“I don’t know if we should stay here,” she said, shining her head lamp around the room.
A mob had formed outside the window. They were banging on it, shouting Josie’s name and trying to pry it open, but he knew they weren’t getting in.
The Organic Food Shop wouldn’t let them. He and Emerald were inside for a reason.
Emerald pointed with her head and shone the beam of light at a creaky old door. The room was blasted with cobwebs and a thick cover of dust lay like new fallen snow over everything.
Josie took one step toward the door and a mop pail, holding a clutch of brooms, mops and dust pans, clattered noisily to the floor.
“Guess we’re in the broom closet,” Josie had gotten his sneaker caught in
a dustpan and was scrambling around the room, clumsily trying to dislodge it.
“Keep it up...” Emerald said, rolling her eyes and opening the door, “and you’ll wake the dead.”
And that is precisely what happened.
✽✽✽
A blast of cold air smacked Emerald in the face.
“What is this place?”
It’s a cooler,” Josie said. “The shop must keep its meat here so it won’t go rotten.”
“Here,” Josie said, handing her a black coat hanging near the entrance. “Put it on, the butchers use these coats when they come into the cooler to work with the meat.”
The two bundled themselves in the quilted jackets and walked into the cooler. It wasn’t freezing, but it was colder than what was comfortable, exactly like standing in a gigantic refrigerator. They shined their beams along the room, until Josie found a small switch and flipped it. The cooler room glowed and flickered an eerie blue from an overhead fluorescent. It was dim, but enough to see clearly. They switched off their headlamps.
The shelves of the cooler were chock full of meat, lamb necks, and rib, loin and sirloin chops. Shanks piled up in high pyramids. There were boxes of stew meat, beef, pork and veal, boxes of bones, a bathtub with nothing but chicken livers, and another bathtub of fat waiting to be rendered. It was pale and jiggly, like a tub of snot. There were strings of sausages hanging from the ceiling. One whole shelf was dedicated to nothing but the heads of butchered animals.
Josie walked over to inspect them. A cow head looked directly back at him, its eyes were glassy, empty. Just heads lying in a heap.
Josie touched the snout of a pig head. It was cold and leathery and rubbery.
He thought the heads were both gross and cool.
He turned to walk away, and banged into something.
And that something was obviously pissed about it, because it came back at him and whacked him across the cheek. Out of the corner of his eye he could see it was large and dangerous, although he had no idea what it was. It came at him again, and smacked him hard across the face.
He was thrown back, but he tried to reclaim his brain, get his bearings, but before he could steady himself, the thing, all yellow and slimy, slapped him hard him across the cheeks, sending him flying backwards.
