TWO: Little Fingers
"But I just want three crabs, "Mrs. Kippelibby explained urgently, her arms flapping like in the air like the wings of an angry turkey.
After school let out, Josie walked the long winding path along the cliffs, overlooking the endless ocean. He liked the sea wind, the smell of salt and gulls. He walked slowly, listening to Chet Faker. There was no reason to hurry.
He stopped across the street when he heard Mrs. Kippelibby freaking out at the totally weird Ludivine Dorkely. An old lady brawl outside the Organic Food Store could be entertaining.
"I don't think so. These are spoken for," said Ludivine Dorkely, in a very taut way that signaled, at least to Josie, that she didn't want to negotiate.
He pulled his ear buds out of his ears.
There was a massive truck parked outside the Organic Food Store, with the words, "Huxley's Fish & Crustacean Emporium" written across the side. Three muscley guys were dragging flats of live blue crab off the truck and dumping them on wheeled carts used to stock shelves inside the market.
"There must be 500, 800 crab here," continued Mrs. Kippelibby, exasperated.
"You can't spare three of them for my dinner?"
"There's 1,100 blue crabs to be exact, Mrs. Kippelibby....And no, I cannot spare even one," said Ludivine, looking completely un-phased by Mrs. Kippelibby's needs.
"But we have some lovely broccoli rabe. Have some of that."
Ludivine tossed a bunch of broccoli rabe Mrs. Kippelibby's way, where it smacked her in the left cheek. Ludivine barely noticed and did not apologize.
"Well, I never!" Mrs. Kippelibby, flushed and irritated, rubbing her cheek.
And then Ludivine packed the last of the crab onto a cart and started for the front door of the store, leaving Mrs. Kippelibby alone on the sidewalk, crab-less with a handful of broccoli rabe, and a smarting left cheek.
As she pushed the cart into the store, Ludivine turned around and looked across the street at Josie. Although her lips never moved, and her face didn't change, Josie distinctly heard her crisp, unwavering voice rush through his ears.
"Want to come to the feeding, Mr. Brown?"
And then even though her face was a stone, Josie knew that Ludivine was smiling at him.
&&&&
Josie was so freaked out, he barely noticed a moving van pulling up to the curb.
He could still hear Ludivine's voice clamoring through him, a current of electricity bouncing around his brain.
A girl about his age hopped out of the truck. She was small and thin, but her eyes were intense and sharp. She wore her long dark hair in a braid, trailing down her back. Josie thought the braid looked like a serpent, connected to the back of her head. He half expected the thing to jump up and slink around with a life of its own.
The girl looked at him for a moment, and then looked toward the Organic Food Store. She had an old leather portfolio stuffed with papers, photos, under her arm. She clutched it closely to her side, as if someone might leap out and try to steal it.
She lingered there, just staring at the store, and then she turned back to Josie.
"Hi," she said.
Her face was open and kind, but not so friendly that he felt uncomfortable. There was something very serious about this girl, maybe even a little sad, although she was holding that as tightly as she held her leather case.
He smiled a little back at her, but not so much that it invited her to come over and talk to him.
Josie saw a man get out of the driver's side, her dad, he thought. And they went into the little house on the corner of Farrelly and Tamarama.
Josie had a new neighbor.
&&&&
Josie sat on the stone steps, that led up to the little porch of his house, for what was, he figured, the better part of the late afternoon and now early into the evening.
He didn't want to be in his room, or inside his house alone, in case he saw some new ghost baby or something.
He was eating a vegemite sandwich, listening to Vance Joy, waiting for his parents to come home. But they rarely came home before 8pm.
His parents, Phyllis and Portland Brown were CFO's (chief financial officers). They handled the money for a laxative company (Portland) and a company that makes an ointment for hemorrhoids (Phyllis). They worked endless hours, often at their offices in the city proper, and just as often at home, locked up in their dens, typing away on their laptops, sometimes arguing and speaking some weird financial language, pouring over spreadsheets and numbers, at the kitchen table.
He loved them because, as a child, he had to love them, and he assumed that they loved him, because, as parents they had to, but he didn't know them in any real way or understand them, and he was quite sure they didn't know or understand him.
Josie ate the last crumbs of his sandwich and watched kids racing by on their bikes, and kicking footballs in the street, playing hard while the evening's light still lasted.
Manhattan Khoudura ran behind her little brother, Marty, as she taught him tricks on the skateboard. Her dog, Bacon, a thick-headed, stubby-legged French bulldog ran behind them, occasionally veering off to pounce on a blowing leaf, or to sniff around a tree, and then pee on it.
"That dog is the stupidest looking thing," he thought.
It was one big black head, on legs like chicken drumsticks. The idea of a dog running around on drumsticks made him smile, even though he knew the joke was dumb and he was telling it only to himself.
Josie watched them until they disappeared at the end of the street. Manhattan did not turn to look at him, or wave hello. She had no idea he even existed. He was scenery. His blandness, he imagined, bleached into the background, so that he couldn't even be seen by someone like her.
A part of him burned with a little anger over the unfairness of his invisibility. Another part simply accepted it as fact, and moved any more thought of it out of his brain.
Josie turned away from the beautiful girl, and looked to the house across the street.
There was a little girl standing in the middle of the street, in front of her house. Her name was Trinket Parsnips and whenever Josie saw her, he thought her hair, which was flame red, and a heap of curls, looked like a halo of fire around her head.
Usually she played on the front lawn, while one of her mom's, either Gerty or Frida, kept a close eye on her. Trinket was a runner. A hopper. A jumper. A skipper. She was a constantly moving, tumbling, twirling little kid. But now, Trinket was in the middle of the street, and Josie noticed, she was still.
Completely still.
Her body had gone slack, off-center a bit, like she was a mangled doll. And that's when Josie saw her eyes. He got up off the steps and walked down the path to the sidewalk.
The closer he got, the more he could see that her eyes had rolled up into her head, and her neck looked bent, her head lolling to the side. She was on her tip toes, like she was hanging from an invisible rope from her neck.
"Trinket!"
He yelled at her, although he didn't think he had ever talked to the girl or used her name before.
"Trinket!" he screamed again.
This time the head slowly turned toward him, her white eyes boring into him.
He looked around to see if anyone else could see what he was seeing, but life was going on as usual. No one noticed him or the child in the street.
He looked over to her house and saw Gerty washing dishes in the kitchen window.
"Ms. Parsnips!" he yelled, but she seemed to notice something behind her and left the window to attend to it.
Trinket was moving now, her tip toes scooping the ground, but her legs soft and dangling, were not supporting her. She drifted toward Josie, her body spastic and pulling to the left, as if her back bone had been broken and bent.
Josie sucked in his breath.
It was like the ghost baby all over again.
Trinket moved right up to him, near his face, so he could smell the fish and the sea coming off her breath. Her eyes were white globes. She opened her mouth to speak to him.
"He's coming for me...."
Her voice was the same, the little girl. The one he heard giggling and shouting in the front yard. Ludivine was not in this child.
Josie grabbed Trinket by her shoulders.
"Who's coming?...Tell me. Who's coming?" he shouted at Trinket, shaking her shoulders.
"He's coming for me...."
"Who? Who?" he shook her again, trying to bring her back or force the information out of her.
"You'll help me, Josie...Right, Josie?"
It seemed strange to him that she knew his name. They had never spoken. But then he remembered Ludivine knew his name, too.
"Who's coming? You have to tell me...I need more information!" he screamed at the girl.
What was happening to him? Why was all this happening? His mind raced but nothing made sense. He was sure he was going mad.
Then, as quickly as it started the girl fell into his arms, limp as if someone had sucked out all her bones and nothing was left but tissue and blood, and her held her there on the sidewalk.
That's when he heard the screaming.
Gerty Parsnips was running across the street, screaming something, but he wasn't quite sure what it was. His mind was foggy, saturated, thick.
"Get away from my baby!" Gerty screamed at him and gathered the lump of the child's body and her being into her arms.
"Don't you ever touch my child again, pervert, or I'll call the police!" she screamed at him, and gave him a look that made him feel so low and small, he thought he might melt away, and vanish into the sidewalk.
Then, she was gone. Strutting across the sidewalk and out into the street, angry, patting her baby on the back. Little bunches of curious people gathered and watched Josie and chatted amongst themselves about what they thought they saw.
That's when Josie saw Trinket's head rise up just a little off her mothers shoulder, her curls tumbling down over her face. And without opening her mouth, Josie felt her sweet voice, tumbling over him.
"Don't forget me, Josie. When Bangkok comes....don't forget me."
Bangkok. That name again.
The screen door of the Parsnips house swung closed, and they were gone. It was nearly dark, the sun had scooched down low behind the Sydney skyline. A red car pulled into his driveway.
Josie was never so happy to see his parents.
&&&&
Phyllis and Portland were in the middle of a discussion. Some kind of accounting kerfuffle. One saw it one way, the other had different ideas.
"Oh please, those numbers were way off," his mother said, pulling her briefcase with one hand out of the back seat of the car.
"Guy's probably stealing money from the company."
Portland was texting someone with his thumb.
"Who knows?....But if Blister (George Blister was his boss and the head of the company) finds out he is being accused of skimming money off the top of the charity drive at his kid's school, well, that will be the end of him, you know." He said, it half-listening.
That firm of yours, so many crazies"
"For Pete's sake, Phyllis, our company has a no-tolerance policy for bad press. You get your name in the paper, you lose your job, plain and simple. What more can Blister do?"
"Oh, hi Josie," his mom looked up and saw him.
"Hey kid," his dad ruffled his hair as he walked up the steps.
"Hi," he said, standing in a daze on the sidewalk.
"Watcha doin' out here? You know there's a bag of fish nuggets in the freezer if you're hungry?" his mom asked, completely unaware that her son was having any problems at all.
"I know. I just wanted to wait for you..." Josie said, pulling himself back to reality and moving down the path toward his house. His parents met him there.
"Okay kid, c'mon in." Portland said, sort of pushing Josie though the door. "You know, I gotta make one call to London before business opens there. Diarrhea is HUGE in Britain!...then we can hang out."
Josie rolled his eyes. He was pretty sure his dad had never just "hung out" in his life.
"Um, something happened....Can we talk?" Josie didn't normally turn to his parents for anything, but he felt so unsure of what was happening, he needed to do something.
"I'm going to get dinner and after write a budget for a new hemorrhoid cream, this one will smell like lavender, very exciting product....do you want to talk about something special, honey?
"No, just...I've been having these nightmares," he started.
"And weird things have been happening..."
"Well everyone has nightmares, sweetheart," his mother interrupted, pouring herself a wine from a big box in the fridge.
"I know, but these are different. And this thing just happened with the little girl across the street..." He took a deep breath.
"I-I-I feel like there's something wrong with me..."
"There's nothing wrong with you, Josie." she said, taking a big swig from her glass.
"You just need to spend less time alone. You should go to a cricket match with some of the boys in your class or go surfing after school at Bondi or Tamarama."
I know. I'm fine...I mean, the dreams. They're..."
"You should take yoga," his dad said cheerfully, as if that wasn't the stupidest idea Josie had ever heard.
"Uh, thanks dad, but these dreams, they're connected to the Organic Food Store next door, I think..." Josie started.
His mom was pulling boxes of prepared food out of the freezer with one hand and throwing them in the microwave. He talked and followed her around the kitchen.
"Ooh, you know Trudy Hosselbaum broke her leg in there yesterday. She said an octopus, or an iguana, or something grabbed her ankle and tripped her, " she told Josie, and then laughed.
"That woman is nut-bag, you know what I mean?...Humph, an octopus tripped her."
"Mom..." Josie interrupted.
"I-I-I know it sounds crazy, maybe I'm crazy, but weird things have been happening..."
"Like what honey?" his mom asked, shoving a cracker in her mouth and taking a swig of wine.
"There was a rotting baby in the aisle of the store, and then there was this dream about me drowning, and then just-just-just now, Trinket Parsnips passed out in my arms..."
"Oh, Gerty and Frida are such lovely people, aren't they?" his mother interjected.
Phyllis was especially proud that she knew a family that had two moms, as if this made her seem cooler. She told everyone they were great friends, although Josie was quite sure she had never actually had a conversation with either Gerty or Frida.
"We should have them over for dinner next week!" she said excitedly.
"Yeah, yeah, sure," he said, quickly, realizing how truly incapable his mother was at just staying on topic.
He was going to have to be blunt before he lost her.
"Mom, I think something bad is going to happen to Trinket, like a monster is going to take her, or do something bad..."
There. He got it out. Now they knew. He felt better. They would call Ms. Parsnips and warn her, or talk to the police.
"Monster? Oh honey, you've always been such a creative spirit." she said, pulling the hair out of his eyes and looking at him.
No matter how hard she looked, she didn't see him.
His father, resting against the kitchen counter, chuckled, and scanned his phone for emails. Josie realized he was laughing at something he read. He wasn't even listening.
"Can we do this after my budget?" Phyllis interjected, taking a long gulp of wine and pulling a tray of food out of the microwave.
"I'm going to be up for hours if I don't get a start on it," she said.
"Um, uh...."
His dad's cell phone buzzed and Portland palmed it to his ear.
"G'Day Bob! How are ya?....Yeah, I got it right here...." he juggled the phone against his ear and papers from his briefcase and gave Josie a five minute sign with his finger.
Then he was gone. Talking to Bob in the other room, and his mom, shuffling through papers in her briefcase, eating salisbury steak with her fingers out of a plastic tray, her mind on lavender-smelling hemorrhoid cream.
He stood in the kitchen, watching his family spread out in all directions like glassy, hollow marbles rolling in a maze.
He was all alone.
&&&&
Josie didn't want to go to his room.
The further he was away from the Organic Food Store, the better.
And there wouldn't be anymore confessions to his parents. They were impenetrable, staring into their screens like bleary-eyed zombies. He decided to watch TV in the living room.
He flipped on Walking Dead, because he liked those kinds of zombies. It amused him that humans were so stupid. They were always freaking out, running away from the lethargic, clumsy zombies that chased them, hiding in stairwells that led to locked doors, or rooftops with no way out, and then acting all surprised when the zombies found them, weaponless and helpless, and cornered them and ate them.
Josie would never hide in a place with no way out. And if he survived the apocalypse, he would carry a weapon, a saber, a knife, a pipe, something. He was sure of that.
And that was what he was thinking when a giant moray eel burst through the television screen and vomited itself onto the floor in front of him.
Josie jumped up, tried to hurl himself over the couch, but it was too late, the eel was large and meaty and fast, it slithered through the room, as if the air were its sea. The eel was black, with a huge mouth of rasping, biting, teeth. Its face was convulsed into an ugly death grin, It hissed while it slithered toward him, over the coffee table and chairs and then around the couch until it was inches away, tripping him up and sending him flat on his back with a wallop.
He scrambled to hold on to the furniture, but the eel pulled him into the TV set. He felt the glass pieces scraping his back as he was dragged across the rug. A second eel smashed through the hole in the TV and grabbed his other leg. He tried to grab the coffee table, the big chair his father often sat in, tried to scream for his mother who was sitting at the kitchen table typing into her laptop, oblivious.
Why didn't she answer? Or look up? Couldn't she hear him?
But it was too late anyway. His feet were in the TV, his body half way hanging out. He saw his own blood streaking the floor behind him, hot oily streaks of black sludge, covered him and the floor where the eels had been. He braced himself against the TV, holding his body fast, not letting it get sucked into the set, but he knew it was only a matter of time the beast would pull him in two.
So, he let go, and he was sucked into water. He knew where he was, just below the rocks at Tamarama. He had surfed there when he was younger. But this was different. He was under-water. Drowning.
He tried to keep from panicking, held his breath, looked for the light, the surface. He searched for something to hold onto to propel himself upward. But there was nothing. No rocks. No edges to step off. Everything alive had scattered. Every sea creature had already been eaten or scared off. It was just him and the thing.
Bangkok.
That was its name. He was sure of it.
He couldn't make out exactly what it was, but it had maybe 30 tentacles, possibly 50 tentacles, each with the head of a moray eel. It looked at first like an octopus, or a squid, or maybe both. But he knew the eels were just the brawn. Bangkok was the brain.
Josie kicked through the water, propelled himself toward a small patch of light above. He let some of his breath go, but he only had a few seconds. His chest was tight, small, caving in on him. He swam hard and kicked until he hit the surface of the water, sucked in a huge gulp of air, and felt something grab his legs and yank him back under.
He tried to hit the surface again, but he couldn't. An eel wrapped around his leg, slapped him through the water and drove him to the bottom. The light went dimmer and dimmer, and the water more shadowy, cold and evil.
He kicked hard, struggled, thrashed, but it was no use.
The beast had him. He fought with everything he had, tried to pull himself free, but his breath was running out. Even if he could get free, he doubted he would get to the surface before running out of air.
So, he gave up. He let go. He let the last remaining breath out into the water. He watched the bubbles, the last alive part of him, drift up in front of him. He let the eel pull him closer to the monster, let the others fold in around him, twist their bodies, start to squeeze.
Josie prepared to die.
And that's when he saw her.
The red curls, the pale face, the terrified eyes of a tiny child laying in the mouth of one of the eels. She was about to lose her breath. But when she saw him, she saw her last chance.
He was her last hope.
She threw her arms out for Josie to grab her. She begged him to scoop her up and save her, the way her mother had scooped her up earlier that day on the street, and made everything bad go away.
He lunged for her, his chest heaving, feeling light-headed, and nearly gone. It took more energy than he thought he had, but he shot toward her. He pushed himself out of the grasp of the eels, his hands reaching out, Bangkok slamming itself into the water in protest.
He felt her hand, her little fingers twining around his. He felt, for a minute, like he could save them both. Like they might get out together.
And then, Bangkok reared up toward the surface, breaking them apart, like pieces of bread. He watched an eel open its mouth and swallow the girl whole.
She was gone.
Josie Brown shot up in his bed, naked, soaked, sucking air into his hurting, aching lungs, his bed, wet, his sheets covered in black slime.
Another nightmare.
But he knew one thing for sure, either Trinket Parsnips was already dead or she would be very soon.