His own thing. Jesus. Give me a break. With that kind of crap to look forward to at home, who wouldn’t take off first chance they got? Though wouldn’t you know it, no sooner did he get free of them, than the booger latched on to him, following him around, skulking in the shadows.
At first, Reece never got much of a look at the thing—just glimpses out of the corner of his eyes and that was more than enough. But sleeping on the beaches and in parks, some nights he’d wake with that sewer smell in his nostrils and catch something slipping out of sight, a dark wet shadow moving close to the ground. After a few weeks it started to get bolder, sitting on its haunches a half-dozen yards from wherever he was bedding down, hot coal eyes fixed on him.
Reece didn’t know what it was or what it wanted. Was it looking out for him, or saving him up for its supper? Sometimes he thought, what with all the drugs his parents had done back in the sixties—good times for them, shit for him because he’d been born and that was when his troubles had started—he was sure that all those chemicals had fucked up his genes. Twisted something in his head so that he imagined he had this two-foot high, walking, grunting booger following him around.
Like the old man’d say. Bummer.
Sucker sure seemed real, though.
* * *
Reece held his hurt to himself, ignoring Ellen as she approached. When she stopped in front of him, he gave her a scowl.
“Are you okay?” she asked, leaning closer to look at him.
He gave her a withering glance. The long hair and jeans, flowered blouse. Just what he needed. Another sixties burnout.
“Why don’t you just fuck off and die?” he said.
But Ellen looked past the tough pose to see the blood on his shirt, the bruising on his face that the shadows half-hid, the hurt he was trying so hard to pretend wasn’t there.
“Where do you live?” she asked.
“What’s it to you?”
Ignoring his scowl, she bent down and started to help him to his feet.
“Aw, fuck—“ Reece began, but it was easier on his ribs to stand up than to fight her.
“Let’s get you cleaned up,” she said.
“Florence fucking Nightingale,” he muttered, but she merely led him back the way she’d come.
* * *
From under the pier a wet shadow stirred at their departure. Reece’s booger drew back lips that had the rubbery texture of an octopus’ skin. Row on row of pointed teeth reflected back the light from the streetlights. Hate-hot eyes glimmered red. On silent leathery paws, the creature followed the slow-moving pair, grunting softly to itself, claws clicking on the pavement.
* * *
3
* * *
Bramley Dapple was the wizard in “A Week of Saturdays,” the third story in Christy Riddell’s How to Make the Wind Blow. He was a small, wizened old man, spry as a kitten, thin as a reed, with features lined and brown as a dried fig. He wore a pair of wire- rimmed spectacles without prescription lenses, which he polished incessantly, and he loved to talk.
“It doesn’t matter what they believe,” he was saying to his guest, “so much as what you believe.”
He paused as the brown-skinned goblin who looked after his house came in with a tray of biscuits and tea. His name was Goon, a tallish creature at three-foot-four who wore the garb of an organ-grinder’s monkey: striped black and yellow trousers, a red jacket with yellow trim, small black slippers, and a little green and yellow cap that pushed down an unruly mop of thin dark curly hair. Gangly limbs with a protruding tummy, puffed cheeks, a wide nose, and tiny black eyes added to his monkey-like appearance.
The wizard’s guest observed Goon’s entrance with a startled look, which pleased Bramley to no end.
“There,” he said. “Goon proves my point.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“We live in a consensual reality where things exist because we want them to exist. I believe in Goon, Goon believes in Goon, and you, presented with his undeniable presence, tea tray in hand, believe in Goon as well. Yet, if you were to listen the world at large, Goon is nothing more than a figment of some fevered writer’s imagination—a literary construct, an artistic representation of something that can’t possibly exist in the world as we know it.”
Goon gave Bramley a sour look, but the wizard’s guest leaned forward, hand outstretched, and brushed the goblin’s shoulder with a feather-light touch. Slowly she leaned back into the big armchair, cushions so comfortable they seemed to embrace her as she settled against them.
“So…anything we can imagine can exist?” she asked finally.
Goon turned his sour look on her now.
She was a student at the university where the wizard taught; third year, majoring in fine arts, and she had the look of an artist about her. There were old paint stains on her jeans and under her fingernails. Her hair was a thick tangle of brown curls, more unruly than Goon’s. She had a smudge of a nose and thin puckering lips, workman’s boots that stood by the door with a history of scuffs and stains written into their leather, thick woolen socks with a hole in the left heel, and one shirttail had escaped the waist of her jeans. But her eyes were a pale, pale blue, clear and alert, for all the casualness of her attire.
Her name was Jilly Coppercorn.
Bramley shook his head. “It’s not imagining. It’s knowing that it exists—without one smidgen of doubt.”
“Yes, but someone had to think him up for him to…” She hesitated as Goon’s scowl deepened. “That is…”
Bramley continued to shake his head. “There is some semblance of order to things,” he admitted, “for if the world was simply everyone’s different conceptual universe mixed up together, we’d have nothing but chaos. It all relies on will, you see—to observe the changes, at any rate. Or the differences. The anomalies. Like Goon—oh, do stop scowling,” he added to the goblin.
“The world as we have it,” he went on to Jilly, “is here mostly because of habit. We’ve all agreed that certain things exist—we’re taught as impressionable infants that this is a table and this is what it looks like, that’s a tree out the window there, a dog looks and sounds just so. At the same time we’re informed that Goon and his like don’t exist, so we don’t—or can’t—see them.”
“They’re not made up?” Jilly asked.
This was too much for Goon. He set the tray down and gave her leg a pinch. Jilly jumped away from him, trying to back deeper into the chair as the goblin grinned, revealing two rows of decidedly nasty-looking teeth.
“Rather impolite,” Bramley said, “but I suppose you do get the point?”
Jilly nodded quickly. Still grinning, Goon set about pouring their teas.
“So,” Jilly asked, “how can someone…how can I see things as they really are?”
“Well, it’s not that simple,” the wizard told her. “First you have to know what it is that you’re looking for—before you can find it, you see.”
* * *
Ellen closed the book and leaned back in her own chair, thinking about that, about Balloon Men, about the young man lying in her bed. To know what you were looking for. Was that why when she went out hoping to find Balloon Men, she’d come home with Reece?
She got up and went to the bedroom door to look in at him. After much protesting, he’d finally let her clean his hurts and put him to bed. Claiming to be not the least bit hungry, he’d polished off a whole tin of soup and the better part of the loaf of sourdough bread that she had just bought that afternoon. Then, of course, he wasn’t tired at all and promptly fell asleep the moment his head touched the pillow.
She shook her head, looking at him now. His rainbow Mohawk made it look as though she’d brought some hybrid creature into her home—part rooster, part boy, it lay in her bed snoring softly, hardly real. But definitely not a Balloon Man, she thought, looking at his thin torso under the sheets.
About to turn away, something at the window caught her eye. Frozen in place, she saw a dog-like fac
e peering back at her from the other side of the pane—which was patently impossible since the bedroom was on the second floor and there was nothing to stand on outside that window. But impossible or not, that dog-like face with its coal-red eyes and a fierce grin of glimmering teeth was there all the same.
She stared at it, feeling sick as the moments ticked by. Hunger burned in those eyes. Anger. Unbridled hate. She couldn’t move, not until it finally disappeared—sliding from sight, physically escaping rather than vanishing the way a hallucination should.
She leaned weakly against the doorjamb, a faint buzzing in her head. Not until she’d caught her breath did she go to the window, but of course there was nothing there. Consensual reality, Christy’s wizard had called it. Things that exist because we want them to exist. But she knew that not even in a nightmare would she consider giving life to that monstrous head she’d seen staring back in at her from the night beyond her window.
Her gaze went to the sleeping boy in her bed. All that anger burning up inside him. Had she caught a glimpse of something that he’d given life to?
Ellen, she told herself as she backed out of the room, you’re making entirely too much out of nothing. Except something had certainly seemed to be there. There was absolutely no question in her mind that something had been out there.
In the living room she looked down at Christy’s book. Bramley Dapple’s words skittered through her mind, chased by a feeling of…of strangeness that she couldn’t shake. The wind, the night, finding Reece in that doorway. And now that thing in the window.
She went and poured herself a brandy before making her bed on the sofa, studiously avoiding looking at the windows. She knew she was being silly—she had to have imagined it—but there was a feeling in the air tonight, a sense of being on the edge of something vast and grey. One false step, and she’d plunge down into it. A void. A nightmare.
It took a second brandy before she fell asleep.
* * *
Outside, Reece’s booger snuffled around the walls of the house, crawling up the side of the building from time to time to peer into this or that window. Something kept it from entering—some disturbance in the air that was like a wind, but not a wind at the same time. When it finally retreated it was with the knowledge, in what passed for its mind, that time itself was the key. Hours and minutes would unlock whatever kept it presently at bay.
Barracuda teeth gleamed as the creature grinned. It could wait. Not long, but it could wait.
* * *
4
* * *
Ellen woke the next morning, stiff from a night spent on the sofa, and wondered what in God’s name had possessed her to bring Reece home. Though on reflection, she realized, the whole night had proceeded with a certain surreal quality of which Reece had only been a small part. Rereading Christy’s book. That horrific face at the window. And the Balloon Men—she hadn’t thought of them in years.
Swinging her feet to the floor, she went out onto her balcony. There was a light fog hazing the air. Boogie-boarders were riding the waves close by the pier—only a handful of them now, but in an hour or so their numbers would have multiplied beyond count. Raking machines were cleaning the beach, their dull roar vying with the pounding of the tide. Men with metal detectors were patiently sifting through the debris the machines left behind before the trucks came to haul it away. Near the tide’s edge a man was jogging backward across the sand, sharply silhouetted against the ocean.
Nothing out of the ordinary. But returning inside, she couldn’t shake the feeling that there was someone in her head, something flying dark-winged across her inner terrain like a crow. When she went to wash up, she found its crow eyes staring back at her from the mirror. Wild eyes.
Shivering, she finished up quickly. By the time Reece woke she was sitting outside on the balcony in a sweatshirt and shorts, nursing a mug of coffee. The odd feeling of being possessed had mostly gone away and the night just past took on the fading quality of half-remembered dreams.
She looked up at his appearance, smiling at the way a night’s sleep had rearranged his Mohawk. Some of it was pressed flat against his skull. Elsewhere, multi-coloured tufts stood up at bizarre angles. His mouth was a sullen slash in a field of short beard stubble, but his eyes still had a sleepy look to them, softening his features.
“You do this a lot?” he asked, slouching into the other wicker chair on the balcony.
“What? Drink coffee in the morning?”
“Pick up strays.”
“You looked like you needed help.”
Reece nodded. “Right. We’re all brothers and sisters on starship earth. I kinda figured you for a bleeding heart.”
His harsh tone soured Ellen’s humour. She felt the something that had watched her from the bathroom mirror flutter inside her and her thoughts returned to the previous night. Christy’s wizard talking. Things exist because we want them to exist.
“After you fell asleep,” she said, “I thought I saw something peering in through the bedroom window…” Her voice trailed off when she realized that she didn’t quite know where she was going with that line of thought. But Reece sat up from his slouch, suddenly alert.
“What kind of something?” he asked.
Ellen tried to laugh it off. “A monster,” she said with a smile. “Red-eyed and all teeth.” She shrugged. “I was just having one of those nights.”
“You saw it?” Reece demanded sharply enough to make Ellen sit up straighter as well.
“Well, I thought I saw something, but it was patently impossible, so…” Again her voice trailed off. Reece had sunk back into his chair and was staring off toward the ocean. “What…what was it?” Ellen asked.
“I call it a booger,” he replied. “I don’t know what the hell it is, but it’s been following me ever since I took off from my parents’ place….”
* * *
The stories in Christy’s book weren’t all charming. There was one near the end called “Raw Eggs” about a man who had a Ghostbusters-like creature living in his fridge that fed on raw eggs. It pierced the shells with a needle-fine tooth, then sucked out the contents, leaving rows of empty eggshells behind. When the man got tired of replacing his eggs, the creature crawled out of the fridge one night, driven forth by hunger, and fed on the eyes of the man’s family.
The man had always had a fear of going blind. He died at the end of the story, and the creature moved on to another household, more hungry than ever….
* * *
Reece laid aside Christy Riddell’s book and went looking for Ellen. He found her sitting on the beach, a big, loose T-shirt covering her bikini, her bare legs tucked under her. She was staring out to sea, past the waves breaking on the shore, past the swimmers, body-surfers and kids riding their boogie-boards, past the oil rigs to the horizon hidden in a haze in the far-off distance. He got a lot of weird stares as he scuffed his way across the sand to finally sit down beside her.
“They’re just stories in that book, right?” he said finally.
“You tell me.”
“Look. The booger it’s—Christ, I don’t know what it is. But it can’t be real.”
Ellen shrugged. “I was up getting some milk at John’s earlier,” she said, “and I overheard a couple of kids talking about some friends of theirs. Seems they were having some fun in the parking lot last night with a punker when something came at them from under the pier and tore off part of their bumper.”
“Yeah, but—“
Ellen turned from the distant view to look at him. Her eyes held endless vistas in them and she felt the flutter of wings in her mind.
“I want to know how you did it,” she said. “How you brought it to life.”
“Look, lady. I don’t—“
“It doesn’t have to be a horror,” she said fiercely. “It can be something good, too.” She thought of the gnome that lived under the pier in Christy’s story and her own Balloon Men. “I want to be able to see them again.”
Their gazes locked. Reece saw a darkness behind Ellen’s clear grey eyes, some wildness that reminded him of his booger in its intensity.
“I’d tell you if I knew,” he said finally.
Ellen continued to study him, then slowly turned to look back across the waves. “Will it come to you tonight?” she asked.
“I don’t kn—“ Reece began, but Ellen turned to him again. At the look in her eyes, he nodded. “Yeah,” he said then. “I guess it will.”
“I want to be there when it does,” she said.
Because if it was real, then it could all be real. If she could see the booger, if she could understand what animated it, if she could learn to really see and, as Christy’s wizard had taught Jilly Coppercorn, know what she was looking for, herself, then she could bring her own touch of wonder into the world. Her own magic.
She gripped Reece’s arm. “Promise me you won’t take off until I’ve had a chance to see it.”
She had to be weirded out, Reece thought. She didn’t have the same kind of screws loose that his parents did, but she was gone all the same. Only, that book she’d had him read…it made a weird kind of sense. If you were going to accept that kind of shit as being possible, it might just work the way that book said it did. Weird, yeah. But when he thought of the booger itself…
“Promise me,” she repeated.
He disengaged her fingers from his arm. “Sure,” he said. “I got nowhere to go anyway.”
* * *
5
* * *
They ate at The Green Pepper that night, a Mexican restaurant on Main Street. Reece studied his companion across the table, re-evaluating his earlier impressions of her. Her hair was up in a loose bun now and she wore a silky cream-coloured blouse above a slim dark skirt. Mentally, she was definitely a bit weird, but not a burnout like his parents. She looked like the kind of customer who shopped in the trendy galleries and boutiques on Melrose Avenue where his old lady worked, back home in West Hollywood. Half the people in the restaurant were probably wondering what the hell she was doing sitting here with a scuzz like him.