Pontypool Changes Everything

She lowers Les into a chair in her office and he tells her his story. His back aches and his eyes water as he recounts the horror of what he’s seen. The scene has grown slightly bloodier now that it has taken possession of him, and he feels the bowling ball holes of the hunter’s eyes slipping behind his own sockets as he speaks. Looking down at his hands retracting between his knees, Les knows that he has changed. He feels that this person he’s becoming is not reliable, and of course he’s right. He’s attempting to absorb a great deal of unrelated material into a fairly primitive emotional machine. As the spinning blades descend into the febrile jar, what is going to be made of it all? An enlarged estranged lover, a son so new he’s still in orbit, a dead man’s cuttlefish face — and the cuttlefish himself, out there, scrubbing blood from his hands in the snow. He can’t help but make mistakes. I am at the centre of this. I am somehow made of this now. Ashamed, he confuses Mary’s hand on his shoulder with Helen’s.

Something she never did. She never let me soften. Not like Mary does.

He gives Mary a look so sodden with feeling that she turns away.

This man is in shock, Mary thinks, and she asks him to wait while she goes to get the nurse.

Shock has made Les dull. He looks automatically to his wristwatch, but is unable to distinguish the time as being any different from when he had sat waiting for the detective. He rocks the face between his thumb and forefinger, feeling the tightness of the band around his wrist. A swirl of fake snow, distributed up from the base of the watch, covers the front of a dark church, and falls again quickly, frosting the little plastic cemetery on its grounds. Les shakes his hand, stirring up the scene as he winds his watch. He peers at its face and this time he can see a tiny robot, clad in a torn hunting vest, mechanically dipping and lifting a shovel in the cemetery. Les scours the icy black forest behind the church, looking for the killer. It is no surprise, then, that he does not understand that there is more than one killer on the loose.

The first killer, whose work Les has already seen, is now burrowing his upper body in the snow, thrashing his open mouth against the frozen ground. He is soon going to die a death like no other. Another killer is brandishing the same open mouth at a nurse, not thirty metres from where Les now sits. This killer has the nurse’s lips in his mouth and, with enough power to break both their necks, he shakes her face until its muscles pop from their moorings. The nurse falls against the cabinet, just out of reach of Les’s wild sight, and slides onto the floor. The killer’s neck is broken and he stands over the nurse with his head dropping to his chest. His mouth is open, a bright red gasket through which the bleating of animals can be heard. The sound he makes isn’t human; the message, however, is unmistakable. He’s saying: This doesn’t work, I’m failing.

The killer flees up the hallway, led by his own open mouth. Distended by its searching, it now flails forward. When Mary arrives in the nurse’s room she stops at the door, going no further than the single bloody hand wrapped around the door frame. Murder scene, she thinks. Get Les, get out of the building.

She runs down the hall, back to her office. Les looks up, calm and blind. He makes a child’s resistant face when Mary drags him up by the arm. She doesn’t explain, leading him through the gymnasium toward a side door that exits onto the parking lot.

Mary pulls Les back, swinging his slightly stupid body behind her.

There he is.

The killer is sitting against the wall beside the door. He is rocking his upper body, his arms bowing at his sides. At their ends are upturned hands. Dead hands. Dead legs. His extremities, face, fingers and feet, are creased with jellied blood. Mary takes a step back, knocking into Les. He trips in a fall that brings Mary down with him. The killer is stirred and he sways his torso backward, turning his head to see them. Mary takes a four-legged step away. The killer tilts his body in her direction, as if he is part of her movement. Mary freezes, knowing that this man isn’t thinking, that he’s responding to his environment automatically. She sees his eyes. His eyes. Like split thumbs they rise in his sockets and turn in their glue of prehensile clots. Towards her. Looking. The thing coils slightly, and Mary knows exactly what it will do.

It jumps across the floor.

6 Things That Begin with “O”