Fairy of Teeth

  Chapter 12

   

  A shovel blade hit dirt inches from Paulie's head.

  Instinctively, he tried to get out of the way, but he couldn't. His stomach was a mess of butterflies and water. He coughed, expelling liquid and accidentally swallowing topsoil.

  He'd been buried alive.

  After drowning.

  Naked.

  The shovel blade hit again, a little more carefully this time, carving out enough space to expose Paulie's face to moonlight.

  Moonlight and its face. "Blink," it said.

  Paulie blinked several times with his right eye. The left was still holding up three feet of dirt.

  "Good," it said. "You are still living. Close your eyes. Be still. I dig you out."

  When Paulie was free, it pulled him out of the hole, undid the gag, tied it around his wrists held together in front of his crotch, and pushed him backward until he felt tree bark sandpaper against his spine. Goosebumps had spread themselves across the entirety of his skin. He saw his ruined clothes laying in a bloody pile by the hole.

  It slid three straps around Paulie's body, securing him to the tree: one over his neck, one over his chest, and one just below his knees.

  "Tell me how to do it," it said.

  "How to do what?"

  "Tell me how you drown."

  Although its clothes were black, Paulie began to discern patterns on it, shapes, as if someone had applied spray paint over...

  "I don't know. I didn't do my homework," Paulie said.

  A Vancouver Canucks jersey. That hideous orca was unmistakable even under black paint.

  It slapped Paulie in the face. "Tell me everything about it, you imbecile boy. Such sublime knowledge is wasted on you."

  "I die," Paulie said. "All I do is die."

  "There is no other trick?"

  "No trick."

  It reached down—metal clanked against metal—and produced a pair of needle-nose pliers. "It is just the tooth, then."

  The mesh on its face didn't just look like Miss Collins' panty hose. It was panty hose.

  Its fuzzy paw was a winter glove.

  It took the glove off, revealing a hairless human hand, to better handle the pliers.

  "Doctor Mizoguchi?" Paulie said.

  "Silence. Open your mouth."

  "Ichi?"

  It brought the pliers close to Paulie's mouth. "Shut up, open up and let me take what's rightfully mine."

  When Paulie didn't comply, it forced the pliers inside.

  "Which one is it?"

  Paulie bit down and tasted metal.

  The pliers closed on whatever tooth was closest. "Is it this one?" They tugged. "If you don't tell me, I'll simply take all of them, you fool. Resistance is pointless. Give me what I deserve and go on with your pitiful life."

  "No," Paulie said.

  It pulled on the tooth.

  "No," Paulie cried. He knew it was right. If it wanted to, it could pull all his teeth, one by bloody one. "Not that one. Upper row, left side, the one behind the fang. That's the one that's been hurting."

  "Since you fell into the lake?"

  "Yes, since."

  "I don't know if I believe you. Do you swear you're telling the truth?" It released the wrong tooth and gripped the right one. "I may start with this one, yes. But I think I shall do them all, just in case. I'm sure you understand. You would do the same in my place, Paul."

  "I swear it's this one."

  Dr Mizoguchi took off his other fuzzy glove and using both bare hands to get a stronger plier grip on Paulie's tooth ripped it clean out of Paulie's mouth.

  Blood sprayed onto his panty hose mask.

  Paulie felt a surge of pain, followed by immense, immediate relief.

  Dr Mizoguchi dropped the tooth into his palm, observed it for a few seconds in the pale moonlight, and shoved it into his pocket. "One down." He came forward. "Thirty one to go."

  "Hey, motherfucker. I don't what kind of fucking freak you are but if you don't want me to beat you to death you better back the fuck away from that tree," a voice boomed.

  It belonged to George.

  He walked into the forest clearing wearing his Boston Bruins jersey and flanked by Pinder, who was in a vintage Maple Leafs sweater. Both of them held hockey sticks and looked like they were ready to go full McSorley on anybody unwise enough to get in their way.

  Holding the pliers, Dr Mizoguchi spun and stared at the two teenagers.

  "This be some perverse occult shit," Pinder said.

  "You OK, Paulie?" George asked.

  Paulie nodded. He didn't quite believe what he was seeing. He tongued the empty space where his tooth used to be.

  "Get on your fucking knees, freak," George said.

  Dr Mizoguchi laughed. "You're too late, you idiots. It's you who are already on your knees, you..." His deep, distorted voice became a stream of static. He clawed at and ripped the voice distortion box off his neck. In his altogether normal voice, he continued, "You pathetic mental deficients, fated to drown your inconsequential lives in sex, beer and your beloved NHL. As for me"—He threw his pliers at George.—"I'll be exploring the Ninetieth Degree for eternity!"

  George ducked.

  The pliers smacked a tree trunk.

  Dr Mizoguchi took off past Paulie and bolted into the forest, where he vaulted nimbly over a downed cedar before being utterly and completely consumed by the deepest darkness.

  "Let him go," Paulie said. "He's not coming back."

  "Are you sure you're OK?" George asked.

  "I'm sure."

  Pinder picked up Dr Mizoguchi's pliers and used them to cut through the three straps binding Paulie to the tree.

  Freed, Paulie shivered. It was a cold winter night and he was as nude as a newborn.

  George glanced at the pile of Paulie's bloody clothes.

  "Believe me, there's a lot I have to explain," Paulie said. He was about to go on and start the explaining when George raised his hand.

  "And we do believe," he said. Pinder nodded. "That's why, like I said before, there's some shit we just don't want to know, understand or ever see again."

  "Let's get you home," Pinder said.

  They started to trudge through the forest, toward the girls' football field.

  "And don't worry, all we'll tell your parents is that bullies followed you after school and chased you into the forest—where we were waiting to wreck their faces so that they'll never bother you again," George said. "Because that's what friends do. They wreck faces for each other."

  Paulie smiled. Although George had now saved his life twice, and despite how grateful he was for that, Paulie was also jealous of George and Pinder's ignorance. They could choose not to understand, they could refuse to know. Paulie no longer had that luxury. He had visited the Ninetieth Degree. He knew it existed and how amazing it was, and how dull their lives must be in comparison: moving uniformly along three separate line segment conveyor belts until, one day, each of them would reach his point D and go head first into the abyss...

  Paulie touched the razor wound on his neck.

  He also knew what it was that Dr Mizoguchi had confirmed as a result of tonight's harrowing experiment. For a drowning body, time stops. Drowning creates its own time within Earth time, but that time is the result of entanglement. To an outside observer, it does not exist. The drowning body, actually two dynamic bodies, appear as a single static one. Tonight's conclusion was that this static body is indestructible. Everything done to it, whether natural aging or a thousand razor slices, is reset when the drowning ends. The body returns to Earth time in the exact physical state as it left. Dr Mizoguchi could have put Paulie through a wood chipper, and once the drowning was over Paulie would have come back whole. In other words, one could drown, and therefore explore the Ninetieth Degree, in perpetuity.

  "How did you find me?" Paulie asked.

  "We'd been keeping an eye on you for a while," Pinder said. "
You were acting really weird. Everyone was worried."

  "We knew most of your hiding places. So when we found tracks leading from the bleachers into the forest, we followed them," George said.

  They stepped onto the football field.

  "You should probably stay here, unless you want to walk nudies through town," Pinder said.

  "I'll borrow my brother's truck and pick you up," George said.

  "And where's Akira?" Paulie asked.

  "He wasn't at school today and he's been offline for hours. With all due respect, he's been acting pretty nuts lately, too."

  "Just nowhere near as nuts as you."

  "Plus he's weird."

  Morbid thoughts flooded Pinder's mind, most involving a boy's dead body stashed: under a bed, in an oven, in a massive safe hidden behind one of Dr Mizoguchi's prog rock posters. "We need to stop by Akira's house," Paulie said. "Before you take me home."