Pontypool Changes Everything

If his illness is acting up a little bit, it’s only to be expected. It does not really compromise his ability to discern much of his immediate physical dilemma. In fact, he dismisses the delusional worms gathering in each of the cottages he can see with far firmer resolve than any historically sane person could. The sky is harmlessly transformed into the underside of a table, and the clouds lengthen and thin into the wicked webs of spiders. The sun flattens and hardens into a round seal of pink gum pressed under a corner of the table. Les does not think that the menace his atmosphere represents is overstated, and he rightly thanks his illness for peeling back at least one layer from the hideous stop of the sky. Underwater he can hear the shuffle of feet beneath a table, the tapping of a signal, the little music of coins in a pocket. Since he feels he has the option, he rises from the water to Handel.

As he flops onto the dock, Les decides that, whatever it eventually means, for now at least he is a fugitive. Uncurling the rope holding the boat, he drifts in it, on a current that will take him to Port Perry. The sun is warm enough to break the ice in his veins into painful throbs. The card table has dissipated and a less likely blue sky has taken its place. Les lies in the bottom of the boat.

I have never been an organized man. I will never know what the inner life of other people is like. That can never matter again. In Port Perry I will steal a car. I’m going to Parkdale.

From the shore a loon offers Les both its name and its Haunting Cry. He turns his head in the bottom of the boat, bunching his cheek against aluminum rivets, and smiles.

None of you has anything for me anymore. I am Ed Gein. I want my wife and child.

At his nose is a dead worm, glossy and hard; it forms an almost audible S. Les flicks the brittle lower loop, creating a question mark. Stupid. He flicks the upper loop, creating a bar of worm that appears to have shot off its ends in a centrifugal action. Better. Better question.

For the next four hours Les lies freezing in the drifting boat, turning away from, and then back to, his worm. He pictures his son in little screens that open up in the aluminum just above the watermark. He names the child. He changes the name. The baby has a face like a walnut, a uniform surface of wrinkles, and Helen wipes yellow food from his chin. Les tilts his jaw toward the bait-littered bottom of the boat, and Helen reaches up and cleans three tiny crayfish legs from the side of his face. Her hand slips back beneath the brackish water an inch deep beneath Les. They live in an inch of water. No air. They can’t see. The fins of pickerel and the snouts of summer frogs hide the light. A rusted fish hook has just fallen in the baby’s food.

9 More Calming Effects

Detective Peterson pulls a rental car up into his driveway. He sits with his face in his hands. When he asks himself What’s happening? he’s not thinking of cannibal drama teachers and their flying passengers. Peterson is thinking about the difficulty he has had all afternoon. I can’t seem to speak properly. An understatement. I don’t feel any different. I can think clearly. At least I think I can.

He’s right. There is nothing detectably wrong with his thoughts; however, he has struggled all afternoon with a strange inability to control the words he uses. At the car-rental outlet the young attendee didn’t want to give him a vehicle. Peterson limited himself to single-word prompts: car, rent. But even these simple words betrayed him. He could find them but couldn’t repeat them easily — car, cove, tummy… It was only when Peterson showed his detective’s badge that the teenage boy proceeded, silently, suspiciously, to rent the car.

Peterson lays his hands on the dash and says, “Dash.” He grips the steering wheel with both hands and says, “Messy car.”

Messy car? Messy car? He looks at the steering wheel. The image of a car is on the horn bar. A sort of medallion of the rental place. Messy car? Is that it? The steering wheel is messy with a car? Peterson attempts to slide a key into this and says, “Bad boy Walt Whitman.” His heart sinks. Yes, he thinks clearly, there is a mess in the car. I just can’t say it.