Monstrous Affections

by David Nickle

  But I barely heard him.

  Because I did recognize somebody in the picture. Not any of the five kids — they could have been anybody. But standing just in the background was a boy, wearing oversized jeans and a baseball cap.

  And he was moving.

  I leaned closer. The kid was far enough back that he was just a collection of pixels — I couldn’t make out his face or even what was written on his baseball cap. I certainly couldn’t see his teeth. But I could see that he was sort of moving from side to side, like he was walking. He was also getting bigger.

  “You do recognize someone,” said Mr. Natch. “You can identify him.”

  The kid walked past the kid with the lighter, patted him on the shoulder, and came up right to the camera. He smiled — right at me — with those shark teeth in his mouth that looked just so cool on Mr. Natch’s laptop screen — and he opened his mouth, and whispered, like it was right in my ear:

  “Dude. Use the water.”

  “Which one,” said Mr. Natch. “Which one is Fezkul?”

  “On the power bar.”

  Those teeth . . . They were so cool.

  “Him?” said Mr. Natch.

  “It will totally rock.”

  That was when things got kind of foggy. I remember grabbing the water bottle, which was about half full, and sort of pouring it — yeah, probably on the power bar that was right beside the laptop. There were some sparks, and some yelling, and the air smelled sharp. I remember being under the desk for a second, then opening a door, then running up stairs. I might have been in a kitchen for a second and I might not have. The next thing I knew for sure, I was leaning against the dumpster out back of the grill house. I was laughing and grinning and I don’t think I’d ever felt better. It was like I was a little kid again, with the summer holidays and Christmas and Halloween — especially Halloween — all spread out before me.

  “You rock, kid.”

  “I’m not a kid,” I said and looked up.

  The kid with the shark teeth was looking back at me. He was standing not two feet off, hands in his pocket and hat cocked high on his forehead. He was grinning.

  “Fezkul?”

  “Maybe not,” he said. “Maybe sure. Whoever I am, one thing I know: you want to get out of here. Soon as old Natch finishes up with his fire extinguisher, he’s going to be after you.”

  I pushed myself off the dumpster and it made a bong and a rattling sound.

  “That dumpster hasn’t been right for a good year,” said Fezkul appreciatively. “A propane explosion can do a lot of damage.” He clapped me on the shoulder. “C’mon, kid. I like your style.”

  And then he took off for the trees. Without even thinking about it, I followed him. Sure — part of me was worried about leaving my sister and her boyfriend without saying anything. About following this shark-toothed kid who’d talked to me from a JPEG on a computer screen. But you know what? That wasn’t the part of me that was in the driver’s seat. It was the part that was responsible for my curiosity attacks.

  He was hard to keep up with. He scrambled up a tumble of bedrock like he was a mountain goat, then took off through some low ferns at just about a sprint. The woods got dark quickly beyond the Fun-Park, and the closeness of the trees made it very quiet. Soon we were running over bare earth, with just a couple of rocks here and there to trip me up. Fezkul finally stopped, in a little circle of trees. I pulled up, gasping for breath.

  “I like your style,” he said again, nodding as he spoke. “You’re big . . . big for a kid.”

  That, I have to admit, got me going. He was starting to sound like my sister Lenore, who wouldn’t tell me about The Sopranos or let me ride in the front seat. I glared at him. After all, Oliver Natch had just got finished strongly implying I was too old. “Don’t call me a kid. I’m going to be in Grade Nine tomorrow.”

  Fezkul grinned, put his fists on his hips. “‘I’m going to be in Grade Nine tomorrow,’” he mimicked, making his voice all high. “Maybe tomorrow you will. But today — ” he smirked at me “ — today you’re here. You heard me, and you saw me. So live in the moment, Sammy: you’re a kid. Yet — ” and here, his grin got wider, “you’re big. Big as I got, today.”

  He started walking around me, nodding and nodding, and I kept glaring at him until he got behind me and I couldn’t see him. “Yeah,” he said. “You’re big.”

  “All right,” I said. “so I’m a big kid. Who are you? What’s with the teeth?”

  I waited for him to come around in front of me. “What’s with the teeth?” I looked over my shoulder. Fezkul wasn’t there. I looked around in front of me again, in case he’d hurried there, then back again.

  “Fezkul?” I hissed. “Kid? Whoever you are? Where are you?”

  There was nobody. He’d taken off. Where, though? My curiosity was getting seriously cranked. The trees here were huge. I counted, and saw that five of them made a circle around this space that would have been a clearing if it weren’t for the long branches of those five trees. They made kind of a dome in here.

  “So the thing you got to wonder,” said Fezkul, who suddenly appeared at my elbow, “is what can you do before you stop being a kid?”

  “How did you do that?”

  Fezkul wiggled his fingers in the air and said, “‘What’s with the teeth?’” in that high voice of his. Then he laughed. “So you’re big — you’re also bright enough to ask me questions. This I like. See most of these kids — you show them the way, they just get all giggly and stupid. Do what they’re told. Cut loose.”

  “You tell those kids to cut loose. You take me to this place. What are you — ” I looked around, putting it together “ — some kind of a forest spirit?”

  Fezkul snorted. “You watched Lord of the Rings one time too many, kid.”

  “Well — ” I motioned at his freaky teeth, waved at the canopy “ — come on! Look around you.”

  Fezkul put his hands in his pockets and sneered. “‘Some kind of forest spirit.’ How imaginative. Ummmm — no. Look. Let’s cut to the chase. You’re big. You’re smart. You were good in there with the water and the power bar and you’re pretty fast on the run. I repeat my question: what can you do before you stop being a kid?”

  It’s funny. The first time he asked me that, I just let it roll off me. The second time, though, got into me:

  What was I going to do?

  Tomorrow, I’d start Grade Nine, which was at the end, really, of my kid-ness. The teachers in Grade Eight at William Howard Taft Elementary School were forever reminding us of this: You get to Grade Nine, boys and girls, it’s a whole different world. You’re going to be expected to start acting like young men and women. You’re going to have more homework and you’ll be studying for exams, and the things that you do will have consequences that will carry on for the rest of your lives.

  Consequences. The rest of your lives.

  They didn’t even get to the whole question of cliques, and already most of us were pissing ourselves with fear.

  And for all that, they never asked us the basic question:

  What will you do with the rest of your childhood?

  And when you’re done with it, what will you be left with? A world like Lenore’s? All your days spent tense and fretful, thinking about getting married and having kids, believing Up With People is cool, finding the trouble with everything?

  “Makes you dizzy, doesn’t it?” said Fezkul. “It’s like a — what would we call it? A tween-life crisis. But it’s not like middle age. You can’t exactly buy yourself a sports car and get yourself a mistress, can you?” I swore at him, and he said, “Oh, very adult, in an NC-17 way. That won’t cut it, but this might.”

  “What might?”

  Fezkul leaned forward, took a breath and opened his hands.

  “Set fire to the grill.” Fezkul grinned wider. “Don’t let anyone escape.” His eyes took a fire to them — that mischievous fire that Mr. Natch had seemed so interested in.

  “Kill
Natch,” he said. “Kill him dead.”

  “What?” I took a step back. Those teeth were so sharp, and they seemed like they were getting sharper. “No way.”

  Fezkul shrugged and laughed. “Just kidding, kiddo.”

  But I could tell that he wasn’t. And looking at me, I think he could tell I could tell that he wasn’t kidding, because his smile went away and he got a strange, desperate look in his eye that put out the fire like a splash of cold water.

  “Really, dude,” he pleaded. “Big joke. No one’s going to burn down — hey!”

  I was already running. I’m curious, sure — but curiosity has its limits. One of those limits was meeting a strange kid with pointed teeth who tried to talk me into burning down a crowded restaurant and killing the man who built it.

  So I ran. I took off through the trees in the direction I thought I’d come. At that point, I figured there was nothing better than for me to get back with my sister and Nick, get into Nick’s car and get back home in time for school. I’d deal with the cliques and the consequences and the possible loss of my precious childhood — which I was getting pretty tired of anyway, truth be told.

  I was also scared. This forest was pretty thick, and if Fezkul was some kind of forest spirit he could probably get me turned around so I’d be running in circles around the same tree until I fell down and died. But as I went further I could see that big highway overpass through the trees, and I realized: getting me lost wasn’t Fezkul’s game. Fezkul wasn’t the kind of forest spirit that got you lost in the magic wood.

  Fezkul was the kind of forest spirit that made you do bad. Sort of like a gangsta-rap Pied Piper. He’d almost gotten me — no, scratch that: he had gotten me, for a minute there when I spilled the water on Oliver Natch’s power bar, then ran out of the door.

  He’d gotten me, and I’d gotten away.

  At least that’s what I kept telling myself as I ran through the woods, towards what I hoped was the noise of Natch’s Grill and Fun-Park, and not some evil forest trap for boys who didn’t like Fezkul’s tune.

  It was some noise. There was a sound of shouting and screaming and laughing — a lot of laughing. It sounded like a lynch mob on a sugar high. There was a loud cracking sound, like timber snapping — then silence, and a big giggly cheer, followed by an even louder crash.

  With that, I stopped running and started sneaking. The cheers following crash number two had a sound to them that I didn’t like — they were high and hysterical and maybe just a little bit crazy. It was the kind of cheer that could take pleasure in anything — even burning down the grill house and murdering Oliver Natch.

  I was coming up to the ferns through which I’d chased Fezkul then, and crouched down behind a big boulder all covered in lichen. There was more noise coming closer. I could hear cheering and shouting — most of it high-pitched — but one voice that was a little lower. It sounded like this:

  “Help! Toddlers! Ravening horde! Gah!”

  Like that.

  And then, crashing through the ferns like a rogue elephant, came the person I was least hoping to see (next to Fezkul and Oliver Natch):

  Officer Tom Wilkinson.

  He was a bit of a mess now. His shirt, which had been a perfect black, was now slick with different kinds of stains and colours: ketchup, mustard, what looked like chocolate milkshake. It would have been funny looking at the mess on him, but that wasn’t all of it. He was holding a cloth to the side of his head, and the cloth was soaking through red, and he was stumbling.

  I stuck my head up. I could hear his pursuers, but I couldn’t see them yet. I thought about it for just a second, before I waved at him and said: “Hey. Over here.”

  He stopped at that, then his eyes narrowed as he saw me and figured out who I was.

  “You,” he mumbled. “You are in a world of trou — ”

  He never got the “ble” out. Because having stopped, he got really unsteady on his feet. Then he fell over into the ferns.

  Even if you’re big for your age, like I am, let me tell you this: it’s not easy pulling a 200-pound-plus security guard through ferns and in behind a set of boulders, particularly when there’s a ravening horde of toddlers on his tail. You can do it. But easily? Ha. I laugh. We’d barely made it into the rock’s shadow before the ferns started to shake and quiver and the horde came through.

  From where we were crouched, you couldn’t see more than the tops of their tyke-y heads, and the two-by-fours and golf clubs and baby canoe paddles that they were waving around like banners. With their little legs they were slow — which explained how Officer Tom had gotten away from them, injured as he was — and being pre-schoolers, they weren’t particularly thorough. A couple of years older and another foot higher, and one of them might have spotted the trail of broken ferns I’d left dragging Officer Tom to the boulder. As it was, they made their way past us and into the deeper woods chortling and gurgling and swinging their sticks in the air.

  When they were gone, I leaned over Officer Tom Wilkinson. He was blinking groggily, his hand back over the little cut in his cheek.

  “You,” he said.

  “Me,” I agreed.

  “Mister Natch,” he said, “told us to shoot you on sight.”

  “Shoot me?”

  Even for Oliver Natch, that seemed extreme, and Officer Tom confirmed it: “Figure of speech. We don’t get guns. Just these — ” he slapped at his belt “ — stun wands.”

  I looked at his belt. There, in the loop, was a gleaming black wand, about a foot long.

  “It’s got a battery,” he explained, “and it gives you a little electric shock — well, a pretty big electric shock. Completely non-lethal, but it stops you dead. Well, not dead. But you know what I mean.”

  I looked at the wand and the wound on his head. “So why didn’t you use it to protect yourself?”

  Officer Tom gave me a pained look. “I know,” he said. “But what was I going to do? They were little kids!”

  I shook my head. Pathetic, I thought, and he nodded. “This was not my first career choice, you know.”

  “Didn’t make it into the police academy?”

  Officer Tom snorted. “You think that was it? Of course you do. Fat loser security guard working Labour Day at the Fun-Park. Must be a frustrated police academy wannabe because who else would be enough of a loser to get a job like this.”

  “No no,” I started, but I must have sounded as insincere as I felt, because he said:

  “It’s okay. I get it a lot.” He sat up and leaned against the rock.

  “So what did you want to be?” I asked.

  “You’ll laugh,” he said, and when I promised I wouldn’t, he reached into his pocket and pulled out a business card. It had a picture of a dragon, and an email address, and the title: TOM WILKINSON: GAME CONSULTANT. I raised an eyebrow, and he nodded.

  “A game designer.”

  “What — like Monopoly?”

  “No.” He looked at me solemnly. “You ever play Dungeons and Dragons?”

  I grinned. The dragon on the business card made sense, and all of a sudden I liked Officer Tom a whole lot better. “I, ah, have some friends who do.”

  In fact, what few friends I had played Dungeons and Dragons and so did I. That year, I had a 10th-level paladin named Honorius Pyurhart who in June had single-handedly mopped the floor with the green dragon guarding the time portal at the bottom of the Labyrinth of Flies. I hadn’t played since my family had headed off to the cottage, and I despaired of ever running old Honorius again: the dungeon master, Neil Hinkley, was going into Grade Seven and so wouldn’t be joining me at high school for another year. “Are you a gamer?”

  Officer Tom nodded miserably. “Yeah,” he said. “I was voted best dungeon master two years in a row at GenCon.”

  “Cool,” I said. The weekend convention at GenCon was the Las Vegas for Dungeons and Dragons. One day, one day . . .

  “I even got one of the game designers at Wizards of the Coast to look at
my dungeon,” he said. “But they said it was too — what was the word? Avant garde. That was it. Avant garde. Can you believe it?”

  “Shocking,” I said.

  “So I work security. The only magic wand I got — ” he slapped his belt “ — is this one.”

  “That sucks,” I said.

  “And how.”

  We sat quietly for a moment, him pushing his handkerchief against his cheek, me leaning against the rock.

  “What’s going on out there?” I finally asked. “In the Fun-Park?”

  “Pandemonium. That’s what. The kids are everywhere. About a dozen of them managed to push over a swing set. They’re shouting and swearing and knocking over garbage cans, and just like always, their parents don’t do a thing. I tried to stop them, and they just formed into a posse.” He lifted one foot and pointed at it. The boot, I saw, was undone, and one side of the lace had a broken bow on it. “Two of them tied my bootlaces together. I fell over and that’s when I hit my head.”

  “And their parents didn’t do a thing.” I thought about little Blair, who poured a milkshake on her brother’s fries and her father, who wouldn’t do anything about it. I thought about the photographs that Mr. Natch had on his computer, of kids blowing up garbage cans and knocking over signs and vandalizing cars. There weren’t any parents in those photographs.

  “That,” I said, figuring it out, “is the other part of Fezkul’s powers. The kids — what they do — they’re, like, invisible to parents.”

  “Maybe to their parents. But not to me,” said Tom, fingering the wound in his head. “That’s one of the reasons Mr. Natch keeps me on — I can sort of see when kids are getting ready to misbehave here. Most people can’t. Even if they’re not parents. Not on Labour Day.”

  “What’s so special about Labour Day?”

  Tom sighed. “It’s the day that everything goes crazy here,” he said. “For the past five years. Ever since Mr. Natch put up that walkway over the highway. I only came on last year, but I hear it’s been getting worse every year. Last year, some kids blew up the garbage dumpster. And this guy — Fezkul — is behind it all. God knows what he’s got planned this year.”