Yet.
By her second weekend in town she knew it was a mistake to live so near Commercial Drive. Though it was showing signs of the money creeping east through the city, the Drive was still a funky blend of radicals and free spirits, granola and grunge: city life growing wild outside the sober structure of the business center. Too lively in every sense of the word.
By Saturday night, she was unable to sit quietly waiting at home. The air was warm and dry, the smell of summer pavements still strong under the smells of coffee and garbage. Trolley buses whirred by, their cables snapping sparks like the city’s neural network there for anyone to read if they could. It was more than Millennium could do—more than she wanted to. But she had other senses and she knew the city was aware of her, watching her as surely as the shaved boy on the corner with steel piercing his lip.
“Spare a quarter? Spare a loon?”
Millennium shook her head and walked on. At least out here with the people and the streetlights all around her the Small Ones could only watch from hiding. But she had to go home eventually, and when she did, they were waiting.
The house was dark, the other inhabitants either asleep or still out. Oversized rhododendrons made black heaps at the edges of the shaggy lawn. A windless night, but leaves and dry grass rustled as she walked to the front door. More than that, there was the sense of eyes, many eyes, down low and watching.
She meant to go in, daring them to risk the inhabited house, but they came out before she could even get the key in the lock. Rustle and the patter of tiny feet. She spun, put her back to the door. A streetlight lit the lawn like a three-in-the-morning stage.
First came a creature the size of a pug dog, a thing of segmented legs that threw themselves over as much as they scuttled forward, like a spider caught in surf. A junkyard spider: the dim light gleamed off the twisted tin of its limbs, the tarry rags of its joints. It scuttle-tumbled to the edge of the walk between the street and the house and stopped with its legs bunched under, ready to pounce. A pause, in which Millennium heard her heart beating loud. Then another came, and then a handful more.
Scrapyard, trash heap, back alley beings. There was, despite the aggravation, something touching in their shyness. They were like children left too soon alone, torn between vengeful pranks and the desire to please, wanting attention and fearing it. A cautious slither of wire and springs to the left, a hesitant leap-frog bound of old shock absorbers and bicycle tires to the right, the eerie two-legged stalk of stick figures made from rebar and broken cement: the detritus of the city, gathered on Millennium’s lawn. After a pause, they began to dance.
One of the harmless times. Relieved, resigned, she sat on the step to watch.
Young, half-formed and awkward, the Small Ones danced like marionettes with half their strings cut—and resented their own clumsiness, or so it seemed. One of the rebar stickmen fell over the tumble spider, and when it climbed to its feet it sent the spider rolling with a stiff-legged kick. The shock absorber frog didn’t understand the figure at all and bounced about at random until the others shoved it to the periphery. In fact, the whole mood of the dance was more determined than celebratory, as if they were fulfilling an order to dance even though they weren’t very good at it, and knew they weren’t, and would rather be doing something else. Of course, they had no music beyond the throb of car speakers and the whine of buses on the Drive.
Millennium put her chin in her hands and asked them wearily, pointlessly, “What do you want from me?”
She had never known why they chose her, nor what they needed her for. Maybe for an idol, if it was a kind of worship to drive her half mad with irritation and fear, or maybe a model of how to live in the world—but sometimes she thought she was no more, and no less, than their audience, the observer that proved their existence was real.
And sometimes—more and more often in recent years—she just plain didn’t care.
Her question was ignored, of course. Two of the rebar stickmen collided and began to fight, stiff arms and legs beating against each other with a racket of steel bars banging. The tumble spider tried to intervene and was kicked into the wire snake, which tangled its legs. The shock absorber frog bounced excitedly in place. A voice from the sidewalk said, “Wha’ the fuck?”
Like cockroaches surprised by light, the Small Ones leapt up and were gone.
The owner of the voice, one of Millennium’s housemates, said, “What the fuck—”
Caught out and thinking fast, Millennium cleared her throat and said, “Raccoons. Baby raccoons. Playing. You scared them away.”
Her housemate shambled hesitantly up the walk. He was tall, thin, named Dave, and, luckily, drunk. “Raccoons? They didn’ look— Is that Paula?”
“No, Em.”
“Oh, hi, Em. I don’ think those were raccoons.”
“Sure,” she said flatly. “I’ve been sitting here half an hour watching them. What else would they be?”
“Hum,” he said, thoughtful. He stood swaying there a moment, then yawned. “Shit am I bagged.”
Millennium got up and pulled out her key.
Tired, she nevertheless stayed awake staring at the lines of streetlight on her ceiling. The Small Ones would be angry at the interruption. If they were angry enough, they might wake one of the Larger Ones. She lay in a cold sweat, waiting, but the rest of the night was as quiet as it ever was that near the Drive. When she went down at noon, she found the rest of the household speculating about the vandals that had taken all the doors and the front hood off of Paula’s car and left them lying neatly on the lawn. The neighbors to either side had suffered similarly. Someone called the cops. On Monday, an opinion piece about imaginative hooliganism on the Drive appeared in the Province.
Two days later, Millennium, riding home from the supermarket on Broadway, saw the Nerd sitting in a cafe window, scribbling in a book.
She spent the night in a seething tangle of fury and fear. Bad enough to be stalked by a geek, but at a level she couldn’t articulate, she knew that what he wanted from her was not her body, not her being, but the beings that gathered to her wherever she went. When she went to get her bike from the back porch in the morning, she found they had garlanded it with a tangle of unspooled audio tape. Gift, prank, or commentary on her situation—who knew? She stripped the shiny black stuff away and said between her teeth, “Enough.” She knew of no way to get the Small Ones to leave her alone.
But the Nerd—the Nerd was something else.
Of course, when she wanted to see him, he was nowhere to be found. Three times over the course of the week she thought she glimpsed his soft pear shape waddling down the Drive or overflowing a coffee shop chair, but every time it turned out to be a stranger. His absence began to seem as irritating as his presence had been. And the Small Ones were active as well, almost as active as the Ones in Kelowna. Maybe, she was starting to think, maybe that activity hadn’t been so much the place as the time. Maybe the Ones everywhere were coming more alive, creating more of their own. How long, she thought one night, before her secret was no longer hers alone to keep, or even a secret at all?
When she saw him at last the next evening, staring myopically at the posters on the Chinese theater’s door, she jumped her bike onto the sidewalk and braked at his back.
“Hey, asshole.”
He spun, off balance, and gaped. Blue eyes made huge by the glasses, a little nose, a rosebud of a mouth. Thinning hair, though he couldn’t have been that much older than she.
“You have something to say to me?” Millennium asked him, voice hard.
“Do I know you?” he said. His voice was right, but he spoiled it by shoving at his glasses while his magnified eyes blinked.
“No, you don’t,” Millennium replied, showing her teeth. “Which is why I wonder how come I keep seeing you. First Edmonton, then Kelowna, now here. So what’s up?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said, and squeezed past her onto the sidewalk.
She spun her b
ike and pushed off at his side. “Oh, come on. You’ve got my attention, isn’t that what you wanted? Or did you really think I hadn’t noticed?”
He ducked his head, clutched his notebook, and scurried, jiggling. “I think you think I’m someone else. I’ve never seen you before. Leave me alone!”
Other pedestrians were glaring at her for having her bike on the sidewalk.
“Aw, come on. Aren’t you even going to ask me out?”
The Broadway skytrain station was in sight. He gulped, shoved at his glasses and broke into a run. The sight of his fat bum bobbing down the sidewalk made her laugh. A knot of people waiting for a bus cut her off. She deked out into the street, pissed off a bus driver, jumped the curb again at his side.
“Hey, asshole,” she said.
He stared at her, blinking. For a split second she thought she had it wrong, that he was the wrong guy, or it was all some weird coincidence. But past thick lenses and flickering eyelids, the blue eyes watched. Watched. Yeah, he knew who she was, all right.
“Well, if you’re not gonna give me a date,” she said softly, grinning with rage, “how about a present?”
Before he could react, she snatched the notebook from under his arm and dove into the traffic. Rush hour on Broadway. He didn’t have a chance.
Guilt almost caught up with her as she wound her way home. But once in her room, still sticky with sweat, she opened his notebook and the guilt blew off her like dust. Outside, a blue spiral-bound book, the cover bent, peeling, and stained by coffee cup rings. Inside, Millennium’s life.
A yellowing newspaper article was taped to the first page. Agricultural Vandalism said the headline. It was a short column from the back page of a small town Ontario paper. She knew the town, and the story, and the events of which it spoke.
London, ON. A new kind of vandalism has struck London’s farming communities this week, resulting in thousands of dollars in damage.
One sentence, and memory cast her back. It had been a strange, restless night and she had awoken early in her room across the hall from her parents. Her window looked out through the branches of an old pear tree to the green expanse of the canola fields. She glanced out to check the weather and saw the line of humped earth like a mole’s burrow magnified a thousand-fold, leading to a huge black mound in the far corner of the field. She heard her father stirring in his room as she slipped out of the house and ran barefoot across the soft young growth.
For the last several nights someone has been turning farmers’ agricultural equipment into works of “art”, doing irreparable damage in the process. “I’m actually kind of impressed,” sad John Goodman, the farmer most affected. “Whoever’s doing this is very creative.” Goodman’s neighbors are not so philosophical.
Millennium could remember how he laughed when he saw the spiky hedgehog-mole creature his harrow had become. He hadn’t understood—and she couldn’t explain—either her terror or her guilt. The pranksters, the invisible friends who’d been transforming her toys and playing jokes on her since childhood, were getting out of hand. Way, way out of hand.
Written in blue ink underneath the article, in a tiny exacting script: Millie (Millennium!) Goodman, 16 yrs old. First occurrence on record, but probably not really the first.
It was nearly dark. She put the light on, got a drink of water, paced. All she wanted to do was burn the book and flush the ashes down the john. But eventually she sat down again and turned the page.
Agricultural Vandals Turn Dangerous. Pranksters who have been vandalizing farmers’ agricultural equipment are prime suspects in an assault case, police said today. Last night local farmer John Goodman, whose farm has been the main target of the vandals, was seriously injured in a bizarre attack.
The memories came, vivid and confused. Her father’s steps, late, on the stairs. Creeping after him in her pajamas; listening at the kitchen door to the snick-snapping and metallic groans from beyond the barn. Hearing her father’s shout—then his scream—then running, running—
Mr. Goodman interrupted his assailants and they attacked him with the harvester they were vandalizing, police said. His youngest daughter heard the assault and scared them off.
There was no “them,” no one there at all except for Millennium and her father. No one, unless you counted the combine harvester, alive, deranged, tying itself in knots, a being trying to birth itself out of its own inanimate body. It scarcely even knew her father was there, but it knew her. It knew her.
Millie Goodman, 16, was too upset to talk to police, Constable Griffin said. “We hope when she calms down she’ll be able to give us a description of the perpetrators. This was a very serious assault.”
And on the facing page, with her high school photograph at the side:
Local Girl Missing. Local girl Millie (Millennium) Goodman, 16, has been listed as a missing person. She was last seen three days ago in the London hospital where her father, local farmer John Goodman, is recovering from an assault suffered on his farm outside of London.
When asked whether Ms. Goodman’s disappearance could indicate involvement in her father’s assault, an Ontario Provincial Police spokesperson said, “That’s one possibility that must be considered.” Ms. Goodman is a key witness in the case.
And it went on from there. Headlines from the back pages of newspapers in Toronto, Montreal and Ottawa, and then progressively west: Winnipeg, Calgary, Victoria. Edmonton, Kelowna, and finally Vancouver. Some of the articles were grainy photocopies, as though the Nerd had found them in libraries; some of them were on glossy fax paper; some had nothing to do with the Ones. But most of their acts were documented in the Nerd’s book, the times their play had come to public attention: the car snares on the 401 outside of Toronto, the park bench alligators in the Rideau Canal, and on, and on.
And although Millennium’s name never appeared in the news after London, in city after city that tiny blue writing made note of her address, where she worked, how long she stayed. There was a blurry Polaroid taped on the same page as the Winnipeg incident, her on her bike in a yellow slicker. That was when he must have found her, she thought. That was when the addresses started to appear, and other pictures. Her on her bike. Her shopping for groceries. Her drinking coffee by the kitchen window of the apartment in Edmonton.
Her stomach heaved.
She barely made it to the bathroom in time.
Midnight, and the Small Ones were dancing on the roof.
She heard them, their hard feet like hail beneath the rain that had finally come, and somewhere in the dark space between that awareness and her rage a plan began to form. She showered and dressed, and switched off the light.
And then she opened the dormer window. Heart beating hard enough to shake her bones, she called softly into the night, “Hello? Hey, you guys. Come down here for a second.”
Silence fell with the rain.
“Hello? I need—” A breath. “I need to ask a favor.”
A deeper silence yet.
Then the scrape of metal claws on the eaves.
The misty night rain cleaned the air and cooled Millennium’s face as she jogged down the alley on the Small One’s trail. She could feel every block of that day’s ride burning in her thighs, but she didn’t want to lose the tumble spider leading her on this chase. It was hard enough to see already, half a block ahead and looking like so much trash blown by a nonexistent wind. She almost missed it when it scrabbled up a wooden fence and fell into someone’s backyard. She hesitated, wondering if this was just another prank. It was crazy to try this, crazy to think the Ones could ever be anything but a nuisance and a terror.
But then, her whole life was crazy. And what if—she couldn’t help the lance of excitement in her gut—what if it worked? What if they learned to take her commands?
She put her hands on the top of the fence, jumped with legs strong from riding, and hopped over. The Small One was waiting on the other side.
Through a side yard, across an empty street, through a ga
p in a plywood fence that tore her jeans but let her through. Around the edge of a construction pit black with shadow where something stirred. The Small One skittered lightly by, a tin can tumbleweed in the dark. Millennium followed on her toes, breath locked in her throat. The something was big, one of the Largest Ones, but only half awake. She wished it sleep and crept by, silently cursing her guide. Under the fence through a ditch of wet weeds, across the street, another side yard. The Small One disappeared into the shadow of a house, and didn’t come out again.
Millennium hunkered down in the damp shelter of a hydrangea. “Hey,” she whispered. There was no streetlight near, but a window on the second floor showed a glow behind a thin blue blind. Otherwise the darkness was almost perfect. Rain hushed in the leaves, a car hissed by on the street. Then something moved on the lighted window’s sill. The Small One raised a twisted limb and knocked on the glass.
A minute passed. Millennium realized she was clutching handfuls of wet grass in her tension. She let go, wiped her hands on her jeans. The Small One tapped again. This time, a shadow moved behind the blind. A hand appeared, then the blue paper scrolled up to reveal a familiar bulbous bulk. The tumble spider slipped aside to cling to the wall. Millennium wiped her hands again and stepped into the light from the Nerd’s window.
Another minute. The tumble spider waved a few legs in the air like a sea anemone groping after a meal. It was eerie even to Millennium, who had sent it. The Nerd pulled up the window’s sash and bent to stick his head out into the rain. The Small One reached two legs pincer-like within a few inches of his ear. He stared down at Millennium.
“What do you want?” he whispered like a shrill hiss of steam.
“I want to talk to you,” Millennium said. She spoke aloud, calmly, admitting no doubts.
The Small One reached an inch closer. “I don’t know you,” the Nerd hissed, oblivious. “Leave me alone.”
“That’s a good one,” Millennium replied. “I bet the cops’ll get a laugh out of that when I show them your book. What do you think? A guy who stalks somebody across half the country. You think I should go to the Vancouver cops or the RCMP?”
In the Palace of Repose Page 7
