by Kim Foster
She squeaked a little when The Barrel burst through the door, and that surprised him. It knocked him off kilter.
“Um, Dad!...you and your friends should knock. I’m not dressed.”
The Barrel looked away and around the room. He was oddly stiff and obviously uncomfortable.
“I’m not your Dad’s friend. I’m Detective Angus Louden. I’m looking for Trinket Parsnips and Musa Kadoura...uh, sorry, uh…didn’t mean to barge in.”
“I heard,” Emerald said, dashing behind the curtain that covered her board, pretending to find clothes as she talked to him, peeking around the curtain now and again.
“Um yes, I heard, Dad and I were just talking about it, so sad.” Emerald said.
Howard noted something he didn’t know about his daughter - she was a convincing actress. This both pleased him and worried him.
“Do you have any leads?” she asked, as though she were just some normal girl in the neighborhood.
“Um no, could you come out?” The Barrel asked, trying to be polite, but still suspicious.
“Sure, just getting on some jeans.” She pulled jeans on and a hoodie and came out, she pulled the towel off her head, letting her wet hair fall down over her shoulders. She toweled it dry as she spoke. Howard was amazed at how cool she was acting and that she thought to wet down her hair. It was genius. She never failed to surprise him.
“You can look around, Detective. We have nothing to hide. Trinket and Musa aren’t here.”
“What about this guy?” The Barrel said, holding up the photo.
“Oh, I think he lives across the street,” Emerald said vaguely.
“We just moved in so….”
“Uh, yeah! I got that…. we know where he lives. He’s missing.”
“So many disappearances on this street...you think they’re connected?”
Emerald was enjoying acting completely clueless. It was a new thing for her.
“Uh, no, Miss Phan he wasn’t abducted. We think Josie abducted the kids….you don’t know anything about that, do you?”
The Barrel was looking around the room now, turning over different books and boxes. Emerald couldn’t help that her eyes drifted a little to the pile of papers and an iPad that she pushed under the bed and were sticking out just a little.
Howard saw the pile too, how close The Barrel was, how all he had to do was look down. Howard stepped forward.
“There’s no one here, Detective. You should be focusing your efforts on finding the children elsewhere. You are wasting precious time.” Howard pushed the glasses up on his nose.
The Barrel looked at Howard and his mustache twitched. The Barrel moved closer to the nightstand, pretending to look out the window, but his eyes moved over every surface. He was clearly searching for any sign that they were hiding something.
His boot hit the iPad, and he looked down and frowned.
Emerald sucked in a breath and held it. She and Howard stared at each other, frozen.
Then, The Barrel turned, stepped over the iPad and papers and walked over to the closet.
Howard looked at her, trying to figure out if Josie was in the closet.
The Barrel jiggled the knob. It was locked.
“Have a key for this?”
Emerald did her best to sound scattered.
“Uh, oh yeah, somewhere here. I thought I saw them in this box here...No, nope, not here...Maybe in this drawer…”
She was tearing through her drawers pulling out strips of paper, twine, compasses, and odd pieces of gear from her scuba equipment.
“I’m sure it’s here somewhere,” she said, smiling meekly.
Howard marveled at his daughter. The girl who was always composed transformed herself into a train wreck, flustered, scrounging through boxes and drawers, as if she might know where the key is. Howard could see that The Barrel had fallen for her act.
“Hurry up,” The Barrel shouted impatiently.
“I know it’s here...it’s a little chaotic...Sorry.” Emerald said, putting on her most pathetic, worried face. She moved to the table full of monster heads and proceeded to rummage through boxes of make-up, plastic fingers, and tubes of fake blood.
“I think I found it,” she said, sticking her fingers way deep into a tin box.
“Woopsie-daisy, not that!” she shrieked pulling out a severed ear, dripping with bloody pus.
The Barrel was not amused.
“Oh forget it, I’ll get in myself.”
Emerald’s eyes flashed fear and Howard realized Josie was in the closet.
Howard jumped in front of The Barrel.
Now, Detective, you can’t destroy our house because you think…”
The Barrel took one hairy, beefy arm and pushed Howard into the wall and made his glasses fly off his face and streak across the room like a paper airplane.
“Ooof” Howard hit the wall and sunk to the floor.
“Dad!” Emerald screamed and ran to her father.
The Barrel grabbed the door knob to the closet and shook it hard, and then with fists like ham hocks, pulled at the wooden door until the whole thing came off its hinges, busting open, plaster and dust falling down around them.
“Are you in here you lily-livered, kid-stealing, no-good delinquent…”
The Barrel jumped into the closet and tore at everything inside. He flung shoes, and blankets and clothes out onto the floor.
“Stop it!” Emerald cried. “You are a terrible man. There’s no one here!”
But she knew it was only a matter of time before he found Josie. She hid him under a pile of blankets on the floor in the way-back of the closet. No matter how quiet and still he was, The Barrel was going to find him.
Emerald and Howard watched The Barrel tear through the closet, upending shoe racks and scuba gear. Sending books and ocean maps, rolled into long tight logs, pitched this way and that, out onto the floor of her room. A globe slammed onto the floor, and cracked open like an egg.
Then, The Barrel saw it.
A lump of blankets. Quilts piled on top of quilts in the way-back of the closet.
He leapt onto the pile. Emerald closed her eyes. Howard grabbed his daughter and hugged her.
It was over. Josie was going to juvie. Howard would most likely get carted off to jail for hiding him. God only knows what would happen to Emerald. And who would go after Bangkok when they were the only ones who knew? How many more children would be taken before the stupid adults of Tamarama Street wised up and realized they had a monster among them?
Emerald glanced through the window at The Organic Food Shop. It stood stark, and white, and still. People rushed this way and that way, right past it, searching for the missing kids, talking to reporters, crying in huddled crowds. A gang of kids ran by, their fists raised in the air. But the Organic Food Shop was hiding in plain sight. No one suspected it was haunted. Yet, she was sure now, it, like the monsters it housed, had a life of it’s own.
An ugly, evil life.
She felt it laughing at her. Mocking her for being stupid enough to hide her friend in such an easy-to-find place. It wanted more children inside. It wanted to fuel and care for the creatures there. It wanted to hurt the children. It wanted more children to feed on.
Emerald looked back to the closet. Tears stinging her cheeks.
Emerald watched The Barrel tear through the quilts, and knew her whole, new life was about to fall apart.
eleven
BLIND
Rasha could barely breathe.
It wasn’t that she had been skateboarding non-stop through the streets in her neighborhood, or that she had screamed his name 1,000 times into air that didn’t answer her back. It wasn’t the crush of reporters and police detectives who wanted her to sit with them in their bleak rooms and recount everything she knew.
It was the constricting feeling of having lost something essential to keeping her alive.
Rasha loved her brother more than anyone. He was cinched to her by an invisible thread, so
that even when they were apart, doing their own things, each of them felt the other, as if he was a ghost and always lingering behind her, and she was the shadow, under his feet.
And with him gone, she felt untethered, her insides just vapor, like she might simply float away, never to be seen again.
It was in this vaporous, directionless haze that she wandered the beaches, the streets, the shops, the skate parks looking for him.
The police had told her the boy down the street probably took Musa, and that he might be still alive, maybe in the same place where Trinket was.
"Might be still alive,” that’s what they said.
The words made her throat close up.
She had seen the video of the boy down the street fleeing school. All the kids had. It had popped up on their phones in unison. And all the kids stopped to text and comment on it.
He was always a little weird.
I had a feeling about him.
FREAK!
I hope they string him up and make him pay for hurting those kids.
Psychopath
Poor Musa & Trinket!
If I see him, I’ll kill him, just rip him to shreds.
Guilty as hell.
Guilty.
Freak. Child killer.
Josie Brown, dangerous freak.
Poor Trinket and Musa….
Freakety FREAK.
Loser.
She had seen Josie in the neighborhood and around school. But she didn’t make friends, or speak to him, or look his way. She didn’t need anyone who lived on Tamarama Street nosing around her house or showing up at her door, asking why her parents didn’t live there, and who was taking care of her and Musa.
No. When you have secrets, it’s easier not to be entangled.
But that meant she also didn’t know who he was or what he was capable of doing. Did this kid hurt children? Why? Was Josie Brown some sort of psychopath? A serial killer living right down her block? And if he wasn’t guilty, why did he run?
"People who run away are guilty," she heard herself say in her head.
If she found Josie Brown she decided she would wrap her fingers around his neck and squeeze until he told her where Musa was.
She was thinking all this and walking hard down the sidewalk on Tamarama Street, skateboard under her arm, Bacon loping along behind her. The dog, too, was confused and drenched with her worry, the way dogs who are greatly loved, take on the feelings of their owners. And before she knew it, she and Bacon were standing in front of her house. Just standing there looking at the door, unsure of whether to go in, or whether they should go back out looking for Musa.
Bacon looked up at her and whined a little. She knelt down, cuddled his ears. She kissed him right on the mouth. She was never afraid to kiss Bacon right straight on the mouth because she loved him too, and always wanted him to know it.
He licked her cheek. She wished she had an answer for him, for herself, but she didn't.
She didn't know what to do next.
That’s when she laid down, her face in the cool grass, and Bacon came in and stuck his fat face into her neck and nuzzled her. And they stayed there, just like that, the girl and her dog, a lump on their front lawn, crying, nuzzling, crying, nuzzling, for Musa, for the invisible thread that had been cut, for their own sorry selves, and their wounded family.
There was nothing to do, but cry and nuzzle.
✽✽✽
Josie was not at all sure why he was standing in the middle of Rasha's living room. But he was.
He and Emerald had thought the closet was a good idea, but once he heard The Barrel coming at them down the hall, he knew he couldn't stay there.
He slipped out the closet door, while Emerald was stuffing research under the bed and wetting down her hair, and assessed that none of the cops were searching for him on the other side of the house. He slipped out Emerald's side window and fell into her bushes.
She hadn't even seen him leave. And he didn't have time to tell her.
From there, he ran from one bush to another, over neighbors fences, leaping over a bird bath, slipping through a briar patch and under a wooden fence, and it was there he found himself standing in the backyard of a little grey clapboard house.
The house was plain. It was Rasha's house.
It was weird that Rasha lived here. She was so flamboyant, everything about her was loud, and colorful and intimidating. But the house was meek. It blended in. He had lived nearly his whole life on the street, thought he knew every lot and mailbox by heart.
But not this one.
It didn't want to be seen.
He slumped through a thick bramble of unkempt vines and a lime tree that was hung over with fruit that no one ever touched. The grass was high and thick, and the yard was full of untamed Lantanas and Frangipane and a crooked, sloping banana tree that seemed to reign as Queen over the whole yard.
He had planned to sneak through the bushes and houses at this far end of Tamamara, coming out onto Birrell Street, and then making a run for Cross Street. From there, he planned to take the long steep stairs that led down to Tamarama Beach and lose himself in the surfers, and tourists and sun worshippers.
He would have time to gather his thoughts and plan his next move.
But the house stopped him.
Just like the Haunted Organic Food Shop pulled and tugged at him, so too did The Plain House, just in a different way
It whispered in his ear to come in. It wanted to take care of him.
And so, his feet moved up the chipped and worn back stairs, and onto a small but tidy screened-in porch. It was filled with plants and vines, and clay pots brimming with bright colored flowers and long wooden boxes over-flowing with deep green vines.
There was a rocking chair with a hand-made afghan throw over it, a basket of yarns and needles, a stack of old books on a little table next to a half-drunk china tea cup.
The windows were filled with crystal sun catchers and pots of plants hung from the ceiling in macramé plant hangers. It was the opposite of the outside of the house, as if on the outside the occupants wanted to blend in to the background, but inside there was this joyous, loving, thriving home.
Josie walked through the doorway into the little house. It took his eyes a second to adjust but when he did, he saw the coziness of the porch spilling into the house.
Granted, there was some dust and nothing was super-kempt, but the house had a warmness. Like soup was on the stove, and sunlight was slanting in, and someone was going to grab your hand and drag you in and make you tea and tell you stories.
Which is weirdly what happened.
Before Josie could stop it, or be afraid, or put up any kind of fight, two hands reached out and grabbed his face and squeezed his cheeks, hard.
He was sucked into the warmness of a stranger, someone who had her hands around his neck, pulling him into her, and talking to him in words he had never heard before. She was an old woman, withered wrinkled skin, high cheek-bones, a craggily smile over old yellowing teeth.
Josie pulled himself away.
"Who are you?" he said it kind of angry, but knew he had entered her house. He didn't have much of a position to be angry.
She spoke quickly and softly in what he believed was some kind of Arabic, although the only time he ever heard Arabic was on TV. Her eyes were milky and she was obviously blind, but her hands felt the counters and chair backs as if they were a Braille alphabet. She was quick, and moved through the kitchen and then around the kitchen counter and into the living room with agility and sureness.
She wore a scarf over her head.
It was red.
"Like blood," Josie thought, but he wasn’t sure why.
"I don't understand," he said, and the woman made him sit in a plush love seat, filled with pillows. She handed him a cup, then went to get a tray, filled with little sachets of tea. She poured, and without speaking, lifted the milk pitcher. Josie shook his head no, and the same to a cube of sugar. Weirdly, even
though he hadn’t used words, the old blind woman seemed to have understood him, and she handed him the warm little cup, just as he liked it. Then, the old woman made her own tea and sat back in her own large chair, straight across from Josie.
He could hear people out on the street, heard the sirens of police cars, but they seemed to exist in another world, so far away.
The old lady looked at him a long time without speaking. He didn't know exactly what to do, but it seemed clear to him that she meant him no harm.
"The monster has Musa..." she said.
Josie was surprised she spoke such clear English, even though her accent was thick and seemingly-ancient.
"Uh, uh...what?"
"The boy is in trouble. Rasha does not understand..."
Josie took a swig of the tea, and gulped a little too loudly.
"You know about the….monster?”
"Yes, I do…..And you can call me Teta," she said, her eyes like full moons shining down on him. "I am Rasha's grandmother. They think I'm crazy, an old woman with her brain gone..." she tapped the side of her head with two old wrinkled fingers.
"Maybe I am a little...." her voice dropped off into thin air.
"But I can feel Bangkok coming closer."
This last statement floored Josie. That she knew his name was a complete surprise and that she knew he was coming was an even bigger one.
Josie could always tell when Bangkok was coming in from the sea. It was a tingling feeling in the way back of his chest, then moving like a hot mist of swirling anxiety through his arms, legs, his chest, then into his brain, where things got fuzzy and he could no longer think straight.
Just remembering how it felt made him rub his forehead. But he didn't feel him coming yet. The old lady knew more than he did.
"You have to fight him, and bring Musa home."
Josie thought about what the old woman was saying. Whatever powers Bangkok had over him, he couldn't fight it when the monster was near. Bangkok took over his brain, made him do things, black out, have nightmares, try to kill his friends, take children out of their beds.
He was powerless when the monster had him. He didn't really think that would ever change.
