Monstrous Affections (14 page)

When they were gone, I leaned over Officer Tom Wilkinson. He
was blinking groggily, his hand back over the little cut in his cheek.

“You,” he said.

“Me,” I agreed.

“Mister Natch,” he said, “told us to shoot you on sight.”

“Shoot me?”

Even for Oliver Natch, that seemed extreme, and Officer Tom
confirmed it: “Figure of speech. We don’t get guns. Just these — ” he
slapped at his belt “ — stun wands.”

I looked at his belt. There, in the loop, was a gleaming black
wand, about a foot long.

“It’s got a battery,” he explained, “and it gives you a little electric
shock — well, a pretty big electric shock. Completely non-lethal, but
it stops you dead. Well, not dead. But you know what I mean.”

I looked at the wand and the wound on his head. “So why didn’t
you use it to protect yourself?”

Officer Tom gave me a pained look. “I know,” he said. “But what
was I going to do? They were little
kids
!”

I shook my head.
Pathetic
, I thought, and he nodded. “This was
not my first career choice, you know.”

“Didn’t make it into the police academy?”

Officer Tom snorted. “You think that was it? Of course you do.
Fat loser security guard working Labour Day at the Fun-Park. Must
be a frustrated police academy wannabe because who else would be
enough of a loser to get a job like this.”

“No no,” I started, but I must have sounded as insincere as I felt,
because he said:

“It’s okay. I get it a lot.” He sat up and leaned against the rock.

“So what did you want to be?” I asked.

“You’ll laugh,” he said, and when I promised I wouldn’t, he reached
into his pocket and pulled out a business card. It had a picture of
a dragon, and an email address, and the title: TOM WILKINSON:
GAME CONSULTANT. I raised an eyebrow, and he nodded.

“A game designer.”

“What — like Monopoly?”

“No.” He looked at me solemnly. “You ever play Dungeons and
Dragons?”

I grinned. The dragon on the business card made sense, and all
of a sudden I liked Officer Tom a whole lot better. “I, ah, have some
friends who do.”

In fact, what few friends I had played Dungeons and Dragons
and so did I. That year, I had a 10
^th
-level paladin named Honorius
Pyurhart who in June had single-handedly mopped the floor with
the green dragon guarding the time portal at the bottom of the
Labyrinth of Flies. I hadn’t played since my family had headed off
to the cottage, and I despaired of ever running old Honorius again:
the dungeon master, Neil Hinkley, was going into Grade Seven and
so wouldn’t be joining me at high school for another year. “Are you
a gamer?”

Officer Tom nodded miserably. “Yeah,” he said. “I was voted best
dungeon master two years in a row at GenCon.”

“Cool,” I said. The weekend convention at GenCon was the Las
Vegas for Dungeons and Dragons. One day, one day . . .

“I even got one of the game designers at Wizards of the Coast to
look at my dungeon,” he said. “But they said it was too — what was
the word?
Avant garde
. That was it.
Avant garde
. Can you believe it?”

“Shocking,” I said.

“So I work security. The only magic wand I got — ” he slapped his
belt “ — is this one.”

“That sucks,” I said.

“And how.”

We sat quietly for a moment, him pushing his handkerchief
against his cheek, me leaning against the rock.

“What’s going on out there?” I finally asked. “In the Fun-Park?”

“Pandemonium. That’s what. The kids are everywhere. About a
dozen of them managed to push over a swing set. They’re shouting
and swearing and knocking over garbage cans, and just like always,
their parents don’t do a thing. I tried to stop them, and they just
formed into a posse.” He lifted one foot and pointed at it. The boot,
I saw, was undone, and one side of the lace had a broken bow on it.
“Two of them tied my bootlaces together. I fell over and that’s when
I hit my head.”

“And their parents didn’t do a thing.” I thought about little Blair,
who poured a milkshake on her brother’s fries and her father, who
wouldn’t do anything about it. I thought about the photographs that
Mr. Natch had on his computer, of kids blowing up garbage cans and
knocking over signs and vandalizing cars. There weren’t any parents
in those photographs.

“That,” I said, figuring it out, “is the other part of Fezkul’s powers.
The kids — what they do — they’re, like, invisible to parents.”

“Maybe to their parents. But not to me,” said Tom, fingering the
wound in his head. “That’s one of the reasons Mr. Natch keeps me
on — I can sort of see when kids are getting ready to misbehave here.
Most people can’t. Even if they’re not parents. Not on Labour Day.”

“What’s so special about Labour Day?”

Tom sighed. “It’s the day that everything goes crazy here,” he said.
“For the past five years. Ever since Mr. Natch put up that walkway
over the highway. I only came on last year, but I hear it’s been
getting worse every year. Last year, some kids blew up the garbage
dumpster. And this guy — Fezkul — is behind it all. God knows what
he’s got planned this year.”

I thought about my conversation with Fezkul just a few minutes
earlier: Burn down the grill, he’d said. Kill Natch.

“Something pretty serious,” I said. “Do you have any idea why
he’s doing it?”

“According to Natch,” said Officer Tom, “he just hates people
with the gumption to succeed. He just hates America.”

“So, no idea.”

Officer Tom smiled. “No idea.”

“Why doesn’t Natch just shut down? It’s just for one day. He could
open up again on Tuesday.”

“You met him,” said Officer Tom. “You think Oliver Natch is the
kind of guy to back down? He just hires more security every year. It’s
like a holy war for him.”

“That’s just whacked.”

“Tell me about it.”

We sat there quiet again. Officer Tom peeled some lichen off the
rock and sniffed it. “So you really don’t have any parents, Stan?”

“Sam — that’s my real name. Not Stan. And I do have parents. I’m
just not here with them. I’m here with my sister and — ”

I stopped.

I was here with my sister Lenore and her boyfriend Nick. They
were waiting at the picnic table for me to come back from the
washroom.

And they had been waiting a very long time, and I’d barely spared
them a thought since I got hauled into Mr. Natch’s basement office,
and with everything that was going on at the Fun-Park, who knew
what kind of trouble they were in.

“Crap!” I said. “I completely forgot about them!” I turned to
Officer Tom, desperate. “Are they okay?”

He dabbed at his cheek. “Should have told me about them. Should
have told me your real name. I could have saved you a whole lot of
trouble.”

“What do you mean?”

“Just after I left Mr. Natch’s office, this girl stopped me. She was
pretty, yay high, kind of light brown hair down to here, wearing low-slung jeans and an Up With People T-shirt. Sound familiar?”

“Yeah, that’s Lenore. You nailed everything but pretty.”

“Well,” said Officer Tom, “she was looking for a kid called
Sam
.
Not Stan. When I told her I’d picked up a kid called Stan she just
threw up her hands and ran off.”

I slumped against the rock, feeling like a first-class jerk. Who
knew what kind of trouble she was in?

“We have to find her,” I said. “And Nick. Come on.”

Officer Tom held up his hands. “No way. I got an injury.” He
tapped his cheek. “And there’s no way I’m going back
there
. We
should stay here. Wait for things to settle down.”

I looked at him. “You know,” I said, “Sam and Stan sound alike.
You could have figured out that a missing kid you thought was Stan
could have been called Sam. Then you could have told my sister what
happened, and I’d be safe with her.”

He glared at me. “You saying that this is my fault?”

It was some glare Officer Tom could muster. But I wasn’t about
to back down.

“It sure is your fault,” I said, “if you just sit here staunching your
wound when there’s trouble that you could have prevented.” He
didn’t say anything, so I went on: “A real gamer wouldn’t spend the
whole adventure hiding behind a rock. That wound’s not more than
one hit point’s worth if that — ”

Officer Tom held up his hands one more time. “All right,” he said.
“Don’t pull that Lawful Good guilt trip on me. I get. I get.” He sighed,
and cautiously stuck his head up over the edge of the boulder. “Okay,
hero boy. Looks clear. Let’s go.”

It wasn’t much farther to Natch’s. But it seemed like we’d travelled
to another country when we got there: the Sovereign Nation of
Junior Kindergarten.

The place was a sea of little kids . . . if that sea were being kicked
up by a monster big hurricane — the kind of hurricane that knocked
over garbage cans and turned big picnic tables on their sides. The
little kids ran this way and that, they screamed in high-pitched
voices, and they tore at each other and property like wild beasts.

But inside that country, there was another nation that the
hurricane didn’t touch. A proud, oblivious nation: the Country of
Parents. They sat around what tables hadn’t been overturned,
drinking their lattes and munching on their curly fries, talking to
each other about the things that parents talked to each other about:
getting back to work on Tuesday and the start of school and
do you
remember last summer when there was too much rain
or
it was so hot
or
as bad as this one
, and hopefully winter wouldn’t be too long this year
so they could get going on another summer soon . . .

We were crouched low on the top of the rise, and had a pretty
good view of it all. But it wasn’t good enough to spot Nick or Lenore.
It didn’t seem as though they were in either country.

“They wouldn’t leave, would they?”

“Your sister?” Officer Tom shook his head. “She seemed very
responsible.”

“
Responsible
.” I huffed. “That’s my sister all right.”

“Don’t give her a hard time,” said Officer Tom.

“
You just think she’s pre-tty
.”

“Shut up,” he snapped.

I swallowed and looked around. “That,” I said, “wasn’t me.”
Officer Tom looked at me, then drew a breath and put a hand on his stun wand. “Where?” he whispered.

“I don’t know where,” I said, “but I think I know who.” That sing-song, high-pitched taunt was unmistakable.

“Fezkul,” I said. “Quit dicking around.”

“Who’s dicking around?” Some ferns rustled about a dozen feet
away. “I’m just saying. Officer Tom there just thinks
she’s pretty
. It’s
all pretty pervy, you ask me.”

“Hey!” said Tom, aghast. “I didn’t — ”

“Don’t worry about it,” I said to him, still looking for Fezkul.
“Where are you?”

“Where am I? Why, right in front of you, Poindexter.” There was
a chuckle at my ear. “Whatsamatter? Can’t see me?”

I squinted. Nothing. I couldn’t see him — no matter how much I
wanted to, there was nothing.

Then he laughed. “Of course you can’t see me. You’re losing
it — growing up. Becoming dull. Right before my eyes. Already, you
can’t see me any better than Officer Tom here. Soon as you give up
Dungeons and Dragons for bridge or canasta or something, you
won’t be able to hear me either. Oh, I’m tearing up at the thought of
it.” Somewhere, Fezkul sniffed loudly. “You had such potential, kid.
Such potential.”

“Where — ” I said, but he went on:

“Ah well. Maybe you can go on that Up With People tour with
your loser sister. Know any good show tunes, Sammy?”

As he spoke, I thought I could see a shimmering, on top of a boulder
that was shaped like a curled-over rabbit. I started toward it.

“Or should I say, Samuel. That sounds — so much more — adult.
Samuel.”

“I’m not Samuel,” I said, and as I did, the shimmering started to
resolve itself, and I felt another kind of shimmering in my belly. It
was the feeling I got the first time I went to the end of the dock at
the cottage, looked into the cold water that was deep over my head
and thought:
There is
no way
I can jump into that
; younger, when my
mom told me it was time to unplug the night light; and today, when I
thought about the prospect of going into Grade Nine, friendless but
for Neil and the rest of the William Howard Taft Elementary School
Dungeons and Dragons gang who wouldn’t be in high school for one
more year . . .

“I’m Sammy.”

And with the words, the shimmering came into focus: on the top
of the rock, into the form of a kid: first, wearing something right out
of a Dungeons and Dragons game — what looked like a doublet and
hose, and for a second, with wings coming out of his back, and then
in the baggy jeans, baseball cap and shark-teeth of Fezkul.

Fezkul clapped twice and grinned, teeth fanning out like a deck
of cards.

It was not one of my proudest moments. I leaned over to Officer
Tom and whispered: “I think I see him,” and I put out my hand and
whispered: “Give me the wand. I’ll zap him,” and Officer Tom fell for
it. Why wouldn’t he? After all, I’d just saved his life from the crew of
psycho toddlers. And hadn’t we just bonded over our mutual love of
Dungeons and Dragons?

So he was completely surprised when I flipped the switch and
jammed it into his thigh. With barely a qualm at having tricked
poor old Officer Tom, I switched the wand off, stuffed it in my back
pocket and said to Fezkul: “I am ready, oh master.”

Or at least I think that’s what I said. I felt like I’d just eaten a
whole birthday cake: the kind that little kids get, with the white
sugar icing that’s about two inches thick and the soft sugary cake
underneath. All my nerves were humming; the world seemed to be
vibrating; I felt like I had to pee except that I didn’t have to pee at all.
So it is possible that what I said was “Glar worngo. Foo.” However it
came out, Fezkul seemed pleased. He held up his hands, shook them
in the air and laughed like a midget mountain man.