The Troop

PART 3 CONTAGION

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EVIDENCE LOG, CASE 518C

PIECE F-44 (Personal Effects)

Preliminary Advertising copy for Thestomax (internal document only; never published)

Recovered from SITE F (Ariadne Advertising, 364 Bay Street, Toronto, ON) by Officer Stacey LaPierre, badge #992

34

“FIRE’S BURNING, fire’s burning; draw nearer, draw nearer; in the gloaming, in the gloaming; come sing and be meeeer-rrrrry…”

Shelley had moved back to the cabin, where he curled up under the shattered bed frames. He’d heaped the soaked mattresses into a sloppy teepee and lay in the mildewy darkness, singing. Anyone within earshot would have noted his lovely voice. It hit each register purely.

“Kumbaya, my Lord, kumbaya; kumbaya, my Lord, kumbaya; kumbaya, my Lord, kumbaya… O Lord, kumbaya…”

His voice dipped to a weak warbling note. He went silent. His body tensed. He loosed a tortured moan—the sound of a sick animal. His hands rose to his face. His nails dug into the creases of his forehead. Slowly, he dragged them downwards. His ragged fingernails tore trenches through his flesh. Blood wept from the wounds, though not very much. The sluggish trickles stopped quickly, like spigots being shut off.

In the silence, he could hear it. Them.

A tight, slippery sound like a Vaseline-coated rope pulled through a tightened fist. Coming from inside of him.

Things had turned out very bad for Shelley.

More than the other boys, Shelley was a realist. He understood how the world worked—bad things happened to good people, bad people died happy in their beds. It happened every day. So why bother being good? The word itself was attached to a series of behaviors that was, at best, an abstraction.

A person profited nothing from being good.

It wasn’t as if Shelley had a choice. Ever since he could remember, he’d seen the world this way. People were things to be used, peeled back, opened up, roughly dissected and dismissed. All creatures on earth fell under the same cold scrutiny.

The boy in the moon. That had been Shelley’s nickname; he’d overheard the teachers calling him that one afternoon as he’d lingered around their lounge. Although for a while it had been the Toucher.

He’d earned this moniker for his behavior during recess, which he spent haunting the edges of the school yard. He watched the girls play. Sometimes he’d sidle up alongside one of them—Trudy Dennison was a favorite—and reach out his arm to gather up her long, soft hair, letting it fall tricklingly between his fingers.

He did not find this arousing. Shelley was rarely aroused by anything. Girls did not excite him as they did most boys his age. Boys didn’t excite Shelley either. Not in the traditional manner, anyway.

When girls felt Shelley’s fingers passing through their hair, a look of teeming disgust came into their eyes. That disgust often shaded into an unease that held a gasping edge of fear: as if they were thinking that the world might be a better and safer place were he, Shelley Longpre, not a part of it.

Shelley was aware of their revulsion, but it did not trouble him. He enjoyed it, actually—as much as he enjoyed anything at all. Last year, Trudy Dennison squealed on him. He had to sit down with the principal, Mr. Levesque. Shelley’s father, a tire salesman, was also there. And his mother in her watered silk dress.

Shelley had been sternly warned that touching anyone without that person’s permission was bad. Shelley nodded and smiled his sullen, empty smile. On the way out of the office, he heard his father tell the principal: “It won’t happen again. Shelley’s just… he’s slow.”