The Quarantined City

by James Everington

  Alexia had taken to the model carousel, with its cheap plastic horses and metallic tune, more than anything else he or Alana had ever bought her. The one and only time Alicia had played with it there had been a total meltdown, screaming from both girls as Alexia had tried to take it back. He’d felt like screaming himself, by the end.

  Hurriedly, before Alexia could see, Stefan went over. “Now Alicia,” he’d whispered, “you know you can play with other toys belonging to your sister, but not that one.”

  “But it’s not hers Daddy.”

  “Alicia...”

  “It’s not hers. Echo made it for me.”

  “Now look...”

  “He did!”

  Stefan closed his eyes briefly. Had Alana been right and ‘Echo’ was symptomatic of some deeper issue? He took the carousel from Alicia’s hands ready to take it back to her sister and then blinked in surprise.

  It wasn’t the same.

  For a start it didn’t move, the model was made all of a single piece. And it didn’t look right: the horses, which should have had bright eyes and flaring nostrils, were more lumpen things, their mouths toothless slits. They had stumps not hooves, and the poles of the carousel looked fused into their bodies... Stefan didn’t know what to make of it. Had the model somehow fallen into the fire and the plastic melted? There was a certain slick congealed texture to it that might suggest so, but that hardly explained the clammy feeling he had holding it...

  “It’s a bit wrong but he says he’ll get better,” Alicia said; he realised she had been ‘listening’ again.

  Behind him he heard a familiar, tinny music; Stefan turned to see Alexia playing with her carousel, which looked exactly as it should as its white horses turned. He looked again at the model in his hand.

  “Alicia,” he said, “where did you get this?”

  “I told you, Echo made it,” she said.

  He couldn’t get any other answer from her that day.

  The Mackenzies had invited him round for dinner; they’d arranged for a ‘babysitter’, which actually meant one of their staff on overtime: a dark, curly-haired girl who ten years before Stefan would have been attracted to. Or maybe the years themselves weren’t the issue, but the numbing loss and grief with which they’d ended. If it could all end so suddenly—one old man’s lack of attention for a single second—Stefan didn’t want to be close to anyone again. The thought of his girls grown up made him nervous, as did the stories on the news of what kind of world they might be growing up into. He knew that with today’s weapons, a moment of confusion as brief as that of the old man behind the wheel from someone in charge could damn them all.

  The meal at the Mackenzies was as he expected: delicious, expensive, strained. He knew he shouldn’t dislike them so, they were kind people in their own way, the gap between their lives and his one they no doubt genuinely regretted (especially by the third glass of wine). Stefan didn’t know if he’d said too much or too little, or just the wrong things either way. He brooded over it walking back to the bungalow, the silence broken by what was either a thunderstorm or a jet overhead.

  “Any problems?” he said to the babysitter; he’d told her to let the girls stay up until he returned. Since the accident they’d taken a long time to settle at night.

  “Oh no, good as gold,” she said brightly—too much so, all the staff knew about Alana. “They were playing with their toys all night. God, the music from those carousels is enough to drive you mad isn’t it? Especially Alicia’s; I think the batteries are going.”

  Confused, Stefan gave her an extra tenner over and above what the Mackenzies had paid her, and went into the lounge. Alexia was playing Twister by herself, still full of energy at this late hour. Alicia was sitting in front of the TV despite the fact it was switched off, playing with her carousel. Stefan could see the unformed, misshapen horses, so it definitely was the weird toy Alicia had obtained from somewhere. But the horses were turning and to an alien version of a familiar tune, the notes as ill-formed as the horses themselves. It couldn’t be the same toy as the one she’d had the previous day, surely?

  “Honey where did you get that?” Stefan said.

  “Why’d you get her such a cheap one?” Alexia shouted from a contorted pose on the Twister mat.

  “It’s not cheap, Echo made it!” Alicia shouted. “It’s better this one Daddy, look. He said he didn’t realise it was allowed there could be two of things as long as they’re different slightly.”

  Stefan felt his tiredness stifle any coherent response to this, and after all it was just childhood nonsense.

  “It’s not as good as mine!” Alexia shouted, her head hanging between her knees and her hands planted on two ink-blue circles.

  “Yes it is!” Alicia shouted. “Echo gave me it!” The twins could go from friendly to argumentative (and back again) quicker than Stefan could react. Especially if he had an evening’s worth of drink inside of him.

  “Well Mummy gave me mine!” Alexia said, springing up onto her feet like a jack in the box, and the carousel’s distorted tune was lost beneath the resulting sound of tears. It was gone midnight by the time Stefan got to bed.

  The next day Stefan had to spend working; a group of protestors had breached the walls of the Mackenzies’ estate and planted food and crop seeds in the flowerbeds and lawns. The protestors believed that at times like this all available land should be used for food. Stefan couldn’t say he disagreed with them in abstract, but protected by Mackenzies’ walls and further protected by the sea and closed borders, it was hard to believe what he saw on the news could affect him. He tried to stop the girls from watching it, they’d had enough to cope with since the accident, but he couldn’t supervise them twenty-four hours and he wondered how much of it they’d absorbed.

  He replanted the roses and orchids and forsythia, and wondered if he was a hypocrite.

  “Alicia, we need to talk,” he said when he went back inside.

  “I’m not Alicia,” Alexia said, pouting.

  When he found her, he saw Alicia was playing with more of the strange, melted looking toys, all again made of a single piece of plastic (if plastic it was), all warped and inaccurate. First drafts, he thought, not quite sure where the thought came from. As he watched, Alicia picked up what was presumably meant to be a doll—he’d always hated dolls, with their smooth featureless faces, their blank orbs that he still felt the urge to make eye contact with. And this one...

  Alicia held the ‘doll’ out to him; the way its limbs hung was as if it were crippled.

  “Spot the difference!” she said.

  He shuddered as he took it and put it into the toy basket. How could Alicia calmly tend to something so, so horribly inaccurate? And just where were these new toys coming from? Could it somehow be linked to the protestors? The idea seemed ridiculous, and he decided the main thing was to focus on Alicia’s mental wellbeing.

  “We need to talk about Echo,” he said.

  “Okay.” Alicia picked up a book—a book in which all the pages were fused together like candle wax—and avoided Stefan’s eye.

  “Now you know he’s not real don’t you? Not really real?”

  “He is real, he’s making all these things.” Alicia gestured at her new collection of toys.

  “Now I know sometimes when we’re lonely it’s nice to pretend a person...”

  “Oh I know Echo’s not a person,” Alicia said airily. “Echo says calling him a boy isn’t really right too. I don’t understand all he says,” she added in a quieter voice.

  “Can he... Can Echo hear me?” Stefan said. He wondered if pretending to talk directly to Echo rather than Alicia would help. Like an exorcism.

  “Of course he can Daddy.”

  “Okay. Hello Echo.”

  A pause. “He says Echo’s not his real name. But you can call him it too.”

  “Thank you, Echo. Where do you live, Echo?”

  A longer pause. “He says across the border.”

  “The bo
rder? You mean abroad?”

  “No he says... I don’t understand all the words, Daddy. But not that kind of border.”

  “Okay. So, why is he... Sorry, why are you, Echo, making these strange toys?”

  “He says to take back.”

  “Take back? Across the border?”

  “They’re not ours Daddy, I’m just borrowing. That’s okay isn’t it, borrowing?”

  “Yes honey, of course. But why toys?”

  “He says it doesn’t matter what they are, he wants to take one of everything. To... I don’t understand Daddy. He says they’ll be in his head, like dreams, but real too.”

  “But why?”

  “So when it’s all gone he’ll be able to remember. That’s his job. To tell people. Like, like stories in his head.”

  “When what’s all gone?”

  “The world, silly,” Alicia said with a grin. “Bang!”

  Later that night, drinking wine and trying to find a channel not showing the Special Broadcasts, Stefan pulled out the Spot the Difference! book. Every one of the fifty puzzles was completed, in a hand that looked steadier than Alicia’s.

  The next morning he found it hard to concentrate on his work; he felt like there was a faint noise constantly on the edge of hearing. It wasn’t the constant squeak squeak of Alexia on the swings, although he pretended that it was. Have to oil them, he thought.

  There were other noises too: a disturbance at the gates to the Mackenzies house curtailed by the police, a military helicopter overhead. But none were the noise that tormented him.

  About noon, he heard the servants’ door at the back of the house open; he straightened from his gardening half-hoping it would be the curly haired girl, but he saw it was Mister Mackenzie, clutching the daily newspaper in his hand. (Stefan didn’t read the papers but he was aware that they’d recently become more like he remembered in his youth: slimmer, black and white, sombre headlines with all hysteria edited out.)

  “Eh, no need to work today Stefan,” Mister Mackenzie said; Stefan felt his heckles rise. Was he never to be allowed to forget the accident?

  “I’m fine,” he said tightly. “If I don’t get these pruned back they’ll be no growth next year...”

  Mister Mackenzie gave a short, hollow laugh that caught in his throat; when he coughed Stefan could smell alcohol.

  “No need to work today,” he said. “Go and spend time with your family.” Stefan could hear a new sound: the paper in Mister Mackenzie’s ink-stained hand was rustling, because the man was trembling.

  Another helicopter as grey as the sky roared overhead.

  Stefan went back to the bungalow.

  Later, he refused to put the TV on; what would be the point in knowing? And besides, Alexia was asleep on the couch in front of the TV and he didn’t want to wake her. She must have finally worn herself out on that swing, he thought.

  “Hello Daddy,” Alicia said coming into the room.

  “Hello sweetheart. Shhh, don’t wake your sister.”

  Alicia looked at him for a second as if he’d said something stupid, then shrugged.

  “Echo says he’s got to go soon. He says goodbye.”

  “Over the border?” Stefan said.

  “Yes.”

  “Can he take us with him?” Stefan said, with a sad smile.

  A pause. “No, he says there’s too many differences. He says sorry, he says he tried.”

  “He tried?” Stefan said, but he wasn’t really listening. He’d become aware of a sound outside—the rusty squeak of the swing. He turned and looked at Alexia on the sofa...

  Outside, it darkened perceptibly, like time-lapsed photograph of the night falling.

  And maybe it was just the new shadows, but Stefan wasn’t sure he could see Alexia’s chest rise and fall as she slept on the sofa; wasn’t sure if she was asleep because couldn’t he see two eyes staring at him? Eyes staring at him in a face that was oddly still, and whose flesh hung oddly, as if its raw material was wrong...

  He heard Alexia come bursting into the house, fleeing from the newly fallen dark outside.

  The eyes of the thing continued to stare at him as everything darkened, unblinking as if they couldn’t move.

  In the hallway, Alexia was shrieking.

  Stefan couldn’t look away from the thing on the sofa.

  “Spot the difference Daddy!” Alicia said excitedly.

  ~

  Fellows finishes the story and hands it back to Jaques with a shrug to hide his unease, not wanting to give the man the satisfaction of seeing it. He feels like a kid who has done something wrong but has yet to know if he’s been found out; will there be consequences?

  “Well, a deal’s a deal,” Jaques says. “Boursier lives in the old town, above a liquor shop.” He scribbles down the address for Fellows, who takes it along with his bag of Boursier stories. The last thing he wants is these crazy bastards reading them.

  “You’re mad you know,” he says, wanting a parting shot. “Stories can’t lift the quarantine.”

  “Then nor can they change whatever you wish,” Jaques says as Fellows opens the door. “Nonetheless I wish you luck; I think you’ll find we’re actually on the same side.” The man’s smugness would annoy Fellows, apart from the fact that Leianna leaves with him. Without looking at him, and with an air he can’t quite decipher, she takes his hand to lead him out the house, as if he didn’t know the way himself. The excitement he feels is nostalgic, for he hasn’t felt it in years.

  “He’s a posh idiot,” she says, and Fellows knows she wouldn’t have said that thirty minutes ago; she is saying it just to agree with him.

  Leianna leads him down the stairs, still thronged with silent readers, and back towards the servants’ door at the back of the house. She pauses before she opens it, turns to him blocking his exit.

  “Maybe I could come with you when you go to find Boursier?” she says.

  “Sure,” Fellows says off-balance. “I mean... you’re interested in him too?”

  “No,” Leianna says, smiling at him.

  The words Fellows knows he should say next seem to come from far away, for they are words he has only ever said in other years, in other cities.

  “We could go for a drink afterwards, maybe, or food...?”

  Leianna closes her eyes and gives a brief nod; she steps aside from the door and opens it. As Fellows steps through and turns round to face her, he sees her arch her back and close her eyes as if she has just finished doing something unpleasant or tedious.

  “So when...?”

  Leianna sighs and steps outside the house with him. “Oh you poor sod,” she says, her voice different.

  “What?”

  “Look, don’t you understand what goes on in here?” She gestures to the gloom of the corridor behind her. “Reading stories, it’s all stories when you’re inside, those are Jaques’s rules, or whatever he’s calling himself today.”

  “I don’t understand,” Fellows says. “What does this have to do with us going to see...”

  “It was a, a script. I tried to memorise it but Jaques can’t write for shit.” Leianna holds up her hand; it is covered in short-hand symbols and prompts, somewhat smudged. When he glances down at this own hand that she had held, it is smudged with a mirror-version of the same story.

  “A script?”

  “Well semi-improvised. A story, you silly sod. It’s all a story in there. A first draft. I mean did you really think...” She stops herself.

  “Go on,” Fellows says.

  “Oh Christ, look. You seem nice, okay, you tip well at the Carousel, I get that. But I’m twenty-five and you’re... however old. I have a son, a cripple as you’ve no doubt been told...”

  “I...”

  “And he needs medicine and care,” Leianna says, suddenly angry, “and this fucking quarantine is stopping me getting them for him. And you... you treat this whole thing as a joke. And maybe it is but nobody else is trying to lift it, are they? So fuck you; we haven’t
all got the luxury of swanning around looking for stupid books, Fellows. Maybe if things had been different... but no, the answer to that pathetic question in your eyes is no. This story isn’t coming true.” She spits on her palm to rub the ink from it, before slamming the door in his face.

  Face flaming, Fellows turns away and walks down the drive, the crunch of the pebbles loud in his ears. He almost slips they are that deep, and the gulls holler their amusement from the roof of the house. He resists the urge to pick up the stones to throw at them, or at the windows of the house. Bloody lunatics! he thinks. But what if they’re not, what if they’re capable of changing things, of warping things, as much as he?

  Sod them, he thinks, sod them.

  Sod her.

  He steps into the street, past the strange boundary stone, and is immediately stopped by the same two Guardia, who appear to have been lurking just round the corner. In his frustration it is an effort not to say something to them he would no doubt be made to regret.

  “You didn’t last long,” the male Guardia says. “Sacked by the toffs already?”

  “There’s no toffs in there,” Fellows says. “Well maybe one,” he adds, thinking of Jaques.

  “What do you mean? Now look, move along...”

  “The owners aren’t there, you idiots!” Fellows shouts at them. “They’re somewhere on the other side of the quarantine! You’re patrolling out here and all the while letting people past who aren’t real servants! They’re protestors.”

  “What?” The female Guardia steps forward.

  “This is where they meet. Who knows what they’re plotting in there?” Fellows says. “That’s why I left, to tell you.”

  The Guardia aren’t listening to him anymore but looking at each other, they don’t react as he turns away so he puts his hands in his pocket and starts walking. When he reaches the corner of the street he hears the sound of footsteps sprinting up the pebble driveway.

  Sod them, he thinks, sod...

  A short time later he hears shouting, but as he keeps walking away from the Enclave, the angry cries are lost to the sound of the sea.