Part Five - Seth

Seth was enjoying being a father. If he’d only had himself to look after he doubted he would have held onto sanity at all. Having kids was a lot like owning a pet or having a job. He was required to be certain places and provide certain comforts, regardless of whether he wanted to or felt capable. That regimented activity was forcing him to keep his fingernails dug in to the edge of reason, forcing him not to let go and fall in the abyss.

The kids didn’t talk and that was OK. They barely blinked but he could ignore that. They would spend hours staring at the ocean from the safety of the hills, and that was something he shared with them. When it grew dark and the panic started rising inside him Seth could usher the children back into his hilltop apartment, switch on every light, huddle close with them and listen to the sounds of helicopters and planes and bulldozers in the distance. At first he’d tried using the radio for company but there was something strange about the voices, something between the words which worried him. The children didn’t seem to mind, in fact they’d stared intently at the speaker, their eyes wide and their lips moving soundlessly.

The radio had gone into the trash. The television too.

Three weeks had passed and the city had swelled with uniforms and machines and tent cities. Seth and the children had wandered through the desolate streets, past work crews digging through rubble and trucks laden with corpses, and had stood in Frank Kitts Park looking up at the twisted green figure on the top of Mount Victoria. It was sad somehow, the way the giant limbs twisted into the ground and one arm reached up toward the sky. Seth’s eyes had begun to water as he tried to focus on the creature and he had to blink, to look away. Out in the harbour police boats surrounded the crumbling spires that jutted up out of the sea. Seth had turned his back on the ocean, on the mountain, and stared at the heart of the ruined city, taking comfort from the illusion that something as innocent and simple as an earthquake or bomb had wrought the destruction. Something familiar, something safe.

More time, more frantic activity, and then the ceremony. The dawn service for the victims of The Event.

Seth stood quietly on the stairs of the National War Memorial, the Carillon tower stretching up above him. There were cameras and pink faced people and politicians crowded onto the steps but somehow he’d managed to push through to the front of the crowd, his two silent children forging a path ahead of him. People seemed to instinctively shy away from the children, from Seth too. It wasn’t hard to find a space.

“Ladies and gentlemen, we are gathered here today to pay our respects to the men, women and children whose lives were tragically cut short…”

The words washed over Seth without stirring a response. He’d come because it was expected, because he and the children were survivors, because this was supposedly for them. He’d come because he hoped to leave some measure of his guilt behind on the steps of the War Memorial. He’d come so that he could look into the faces of other survivors and see if his own emptiness was echoed in their eyes.

“…terrible, inexplicable events of that night…”

Seth flexed the fingers of his left arm and glanced down. The skin of his hand was smooth, pale, almost translucent. He’d been frightened enough when he’d woken up in the bucket fountain with the rapidly decomposing, naked corpses of Mark and the fish woman. When he’d realised that the gun he’d used to kill them was nowhere to be found, that the torn, shredded flesh of his left arm where Mark had bitten him had closed over and was almost healed, and that the shattered bones beneath no longer hurt he’d closed his eyes and tried to disappear. He knew that the blood and pus and filth of the fountain would have swallowed him if the children hadn’t come back.

He reached up with his good hand and ruffled the boy’s hair. Alex, that was what the girl had called him. Wherever they’d been, whatever they’d seen above the clouds, they’d come back and found him and pulled him out of the fountain. They’d dragged him up into the hills and waited patiently for him to come back from whatever place inside himself he’d gone away to, and when he was back they’d let him take care of them.

It was good to have family.

The service droned on and Seth watched the crowd. It was obvious who’d been in the thick of the horror and who’d been safely distanced. The pity and disbelief were obvious too. When the sun rose and the shape on Mount Vic was silhouetted by the dawn Seth was surprised to find himself smiling.

The service ended and the crowd dissipated, journalists pouncing on politicians and survivors, civilians retreating to the safety of the suburbs, military personnel returning to their duties. Seth and the children remained on the steps of the War Memorial, standing silently and watching the people go. They were in no hurry. They had nowhere to be.

“Seth?”

The voice was unfamiliar. Hell, after the silence of the past few weeks even the name felt unfamiliar. Seth turned and saw a smooth skinned, dark haired woman wearing a black jacket and skirt, low heels and sunglasses. Behind her stood a tall, broad-shouldered Maori man in a sombre suit. He wore sunglasses too.

“Seth, it’s good to see you,” the woman said, extending a hand.

Seth felt the skin of his left arm convulse and the blood drained from his face. Something cold crept into the pit of his stomach. He thought he had forgotten the taste of fear.

“Who, who are you?” he asked, ignoring the proffered hand.

“People who want to help,” the woman said with a smile. Her teeth were worryingly sharp. “People who know a lot about you.”

“Friends of Mark,” the man behind her said, raising his eyebrows slightly and rocking his head back.

Seth’s eyes darted from the two figures in front of him to the stairs behind him. He could run, but what about the children? Would they follow, or would they stand there and wait for whatever it was these people wanted to do, uncomprehending, blissfully unafraid, and doomed.

“Mark’s dead,” Seth said slowly, pulling the children closer with his good arm.

“We know,” said the woman deliberately, raising a hand and pointing a finger to her temple, thumb raised like a gun. “Dead.”

“We know,” echoed the man, his lips pulling back from his teeth in something between a smile and a sneer.

“And you’ve been touched,” the woman said, leaning closer and reaching out for Seth’s arm.

He found himself unable to resist and raised his left arm, held it out. The translucent skin, shot through with blue veins, was strikingly like the woman’s as she took his hand in hers, caressed it gently.

“We’re starting something. For orphans,” she pointed with a subtle nod of her head towards Mount Victoria. “There aren’t many of us, but we have big plans.”

Seth tried to pull his hand away but the muscles refused to move. He could feel the coldness of alien tissue in his arm, could feel it whispering to this woman. He could feel her whispering back to him, up through the arm and into his mind.

“I can’t, I don’t…” he began, but the woman lowered her glasses with her free hand and stared into his eyes. A tide moved in the depths of those eyes, a tide he could not resist. “I…”

Abruptly the woman screamed. Alex had raised a curious finger and touched the back of her hand. Seth felt the shock of it through her palm like a physical blow and staggered back, his arm throbbing. The woman had fallen back into the arms of her companion, her sunglasses clattering to the ground, and the two of them shared a worried glance. Seth felt his arm burn for a moment as the girl leaned down and took his hand. Her face was calm, blank, and as the burning sensation in his alien skin subsided Seth felt a serene numbness flowing into his arm. The boy, Alex, was slowly walking down the steps, one hand outstretched. The woman and the man backed away as he came, their mouths drawn tight and their movements nervous, frightened. At the base of the stairs they turned and ran.

Seth cradled his left hand in his right, the girl’s small fingers still wrapped around it. As he sat dazed on the War Memorial stairs, looking out at the devastation of the city, the girl stood beside him and held his hand, ran her fingers through his hair. The boy, Alex, returned and sat beside him. In silence they watched over him as his shoulders shook and the early morning sun warmed his tears.

Part Four - Seth

Seth’s ears were throbbing. A shop window had exploded beside him, and the shouts of panic and the scream, the echoing unending scream of the mob was driving him out of his senses. At least, it would have done if he hadn’t already been beyond reason. The lights were out and something was moving through the city, tearing buildings down and crushing people and cars in its wake. Seth felt unaccountably drawn to it, whatever it was. When it had overtaken him, stepping over the Circa Theatre building, lurching into Te Papa and crushing half the building as it steadied itself, then wading through the streets of central Wellington, Seth had been intoxicated. It was beautiful, a perfect image of destruction on a scale that was at once incomprehensible and a perfect incarnation oif his childhood love of monster movies.

He was sure he was batshit out of his mind. The drugs had ruined him, or the madness he’d always feared had finally caught up with him. Whatever the case he was out to lunch. No point trying to interpret the world any more, no point trying to sift the real from the imagined. He was along for the ride now.

He hadn’t lost hold of the gun.

He picked his way through the detritus and waste, trying not to look at the corpses littering the street. For all he knew they were rubbish bags awaiting pickup. Hell, for all he knew he was still at home in the bath.

When he reached Te Aro park he paused, climbed up onto one of the intact sculptures and looked around. The panicked crowd from the waterfront had clearly passed this way. The ground was wet, innumerable footprints merging together. The scream was a distant echo now, the mob having moved further inland. There was an upturned shopping trolley and inside it two children, probably not more than seven or eight years old, huddled together. They were shaking, obviously terrified, and Seth looked around desperately for someone to help. Beside the trolley lay the body of a woman in her thirties, a sling over her shoulder, sprawled face down on the slick tiled stairs at the centre of the park. Her right hand lay limp against the side of the trolly, two fingers hooked through the spaces in the steel mesh. There was something under her body, something propping her up slightly on her right side.

Then Seth saw the ooze.

It pulsated rhythmically as it slid towards him, spreading out from the corner of Taranaki street, first flooding the intersection then creeping in waves up the gentle slope of Manners street. The ebb and flow of the ooze was hypnotic, as was its casual ignorance of the laws of physics. It was about a foot deep, clearly highly viscous, yet seemingly able to crawl uphill and maintain a cohesive edge.

It had almost reached the children before Seth decided to act. Shaking his head and tearing his eyes away from the advancing liquid he slid down the side of the sculpture and crossed to the shopping trolley in two quick strides.

“Come with me,” he said, surprised by the human sound of his own voice. Somehow the distant howl and the corpses around him and the roar of car engines and sirens were distant now, were the remnants of a civilization lost to him. He was alone in the heart of a suffering city, but there were children here. Someone had to look out for them.

He reached down and lifted one side of the trolley, the action made more difficult by the handcuffs and the gun in his right hand. He heard one of the children whimper and knew how terrifying he must look, a handcuffed madman waving a gun around. He tried to smile, but knew that this too would be terrifying.

“Get up,” he commanded, abandoning any hope of convincing the children he was friendly. If he could get them moving that would be enough.

The two small forms uncoiled from around each other and a pair of grubby faces, a boy and a girl, looked up at him. The ooze was close now, lapping around the edges of the stairs behind the children. Seth could see dead bodies in the water, lifted gently like broken rag dolls and carried back and forth, swaying in the water’s strange tide, but moving inexorably back toward the sea.

“Move!” he yelled, and he brandished the gun at them. He felt bad threatening kids with a gun, but what else could he do?

They moved slowly, stumbling past him towards Cuba Street. Seth caught sight of a figure in the water, a face bobbing close to the moving edge of the ooze, and he felt the blood drain away from his face as he saw it blink. Beyond it, further back in the foot deep liquid, he saw another body move, curling up into a ball and drifting on the current. Corpses brushed past these living forms unheeded. The ooze was sliding up into Te Aro park, up the stairs, sliding up the edges of the statue where Seth had perched. He took a few halting steps backwards, his vision blurring as tears threatened to well up, then he dragged a hand roughly across his eyes, turned and ran.

“Alex!” the girl ahead of him screamed, reaching out to grab at the little boy’s foot.

They were only ten feet ahead of Seth, only just out of reach. The little boy was rising into the air slowly, gently, his fragile little body bent double at the waist, a tendril of bright, flashing green wrapped around him. A droplet of light fell from the tendril and splashed onto the road, glowing faintly.

The boy did not look scared. He smiled sweetly at the girl as he swung up into the darkness. Seth lunged forward but before he could reach her the little girl was snatched up too, another tendril snaking down out of the clouds above. Looking up Seth saw flashes of light above the clouds, saw hundreds of tendrils reaching down into the city.

Right. Don’t look up.

He rounded the corner into Cuba Street and began to fight his way towards home. There was a mass of people here, a sudden explosion of sound and activity. There were police officers trying to control the crowd, screaming men and women and children, a howling mass of rioters in Manners Mall. People with bags and suitcases and bottled water and knives clutched tightly in hand jostled against each other, fought to get away, wherever that might be.

The bucket fountain loomed out of the darkness, a strangely comforting landmark amid the chaos. What a ridiculous thing it was, colourful and random and oddly delightful. Seth fought his way to the edge of the fountain and paused to rest a moment.

The crash of a collapsing building was enough to make the crowds panic, scurrying like cockroaches when the light is turned on, clambering over each other to find shelter. It was close, right behind Seth. Out of the corner of his eye he saw the huge figure of the rampaging giant slope past. He saw its pale foot come crashing down, saw the people scattered and crushed in its wake. Watching it move by he saw the sores on its skin, the suppurating craters which oozed and gaped. Its body was covered in erupting pustules and as Seth watched one such pustule on its shoulder ruptured, spat forth a huge mass of puss. It tumbled through the air, growing more spherical as it fell, then splashed to a halt in the bucket fountain in front of him.

Seth raised a hand to shield his face, expecting to be showered in goo, but the pustule held together in spite of its fall. It wobbled and settled in the basin of the fountain, a huge greasy globule of jelly. At the heart of the globule he saw two forms, coiled around one another. For a moment he remembered the axolotl eggs he’d watched growing as a child, the hundreds of little clear blobs with dark shapes inside, tiny curled things that twitched and grew slowly, hatched and devoured each other. He leaned closer to the fountain, closer to the bulging bubble of jelly, and peered into its heart.

Mark peered back at him.

His eyes wide and unblinking, the fish woman from the bar clinging to him, Mark stared out at Seth from inside his bubble.

Seth took a deep breath and let it out in a long, ragged sigh. He scratched his eyebrow with the barrel of the gun and chewed his lower lip for a moment. The Mark in the bubble was almost identical to the Mark he knew. He didn’t blink, which was odd, and he was a little smaller, though he was growing imperceptibly in front of Seth. The fish woman singer was much as Seth remembered her, the sallow skin and haunting stare. She lifted her head from Mark’s chest, hair waving gently in the goo, and looked at him.

Seth sighed again.

The giant man staggered and lurched at the edge of Seth’s vision, stumbling into one of the tall buildings up on Willis Street. Seth glanced over at it and saw that it was loping its way up towards the University, its movements slow and uncoordinated like a drunk at the end of the night or a clumsy child. Delicate strands of glowing green drifted around it, lifting tiny shapes up through the clouds to the flashes of light beyond. The enormous figure seemed to be ignoring them, pressing forwards, upwards.

Mark and the singer. Seth turned back and considered them for a moment, the gun heavy in his hands. The air was growing cold despite the mass of panicking people moving around him. He was weary, bone tired, and sick of seeing things. He was sick of fighting to stay on top of the rising tide of despair he felt inside himself, at the very core of his being.

He heard the cracking sound of bone breaking before he registered the pain or had any idea of what was happening. His cheek hit the rough, wet surface of the ground and the wind was knocked out of him and he realized he was lying down, was in pain, was under attack.

His left arm was useless now, a heavy burden of pain that dragged at him, pulled him to the ground, shouted to his brain to curl up and lie still. He fought it, grunting with the effort of rolling over. A baseball bat crashed into the ground where his head had been and was lifted again. Looking up Seth saw a young man, probably not more than twenty years old, a look of wild panic in his eyes. He was standing over Seth with the baseball bat raised, his blue business shirt torn and bloodied and wet.

Lift the dead weight, drag it by the handcuffs, get your hands up enough Seth told himself. Slow and painful as it was difficult Seth raised the gun in his right hand, dragging his shattered left arm up with it. He screamed, the exhaustion and confusion and terror coming out of him in a mindless, terrible howl, and pulled the trigger.

When he opened his eyes the man was gone. The sound of buildings collapsing in the distance and screams and sirens flooded back in. And the ooze was close.

Seth looked around desperately, the ooze closing in on him on all sides, only a few feet away. He could feel the warmth radiating from it, could see the bodies living and dead suspended in it. He pushed himself backwards, his arm screaming at him, and felt the hard edge of the fountain against his shoulders. Glancing over his shoulder he saw Mark and the woman staring serenely at him, their bubble of goo subtly different in colour to the ooze that was even now lapping against Seth’s boot, warming his toes through the leather.

“Fuck,” Seth muttered, hauling himself to his feet. “Fuck.”

He turned as the ooze reached the edge of the fountain, began to flow around it, and dived head first into Mark’s arms.

Part Three - Seth

Seth was in the water, his hair swaying gently in the ebb and flow of the icy sea foam that pooled around his head then retreated rhythmically. When the water slipped away the roof of the car was covered in stars.

No, not stars. Tiny squares of broken glass. Safety glass. And blood.

It had all been so beautiful on the wharf, the city crouched behind him expectantly, the dark waves in front of him, a mass of cheerful people around him peering into the water. Faces had leapt out at him, their cheeks glowing with joy, their eyes sparkling. The detail and depth of the world had been achingly beautiful, richer than it had ever been before.

A piece of glass rolled towards his eye as the foam lapped a little higher and Seth coughed, choking slightly as a drop of seawater went up his nose. No time to remember, better get moving.

He turned his head as best he could, surveyed the car. It was upside down, that much was obvious. It was in the water but not under the water. He was propped up, his legs pinned under the driver’s seat and his shoulder against the door. His hands were cuffed. The guy next to him looked pretty dead, in that his neck was twisted at a weird angle and he was slumped face down in the bloody water. The metal grate that separated the back seat from the front had buckled, and Seth could see one of the cops who’d arrested him in the front. He looked even more dead than the guy in the back. His window was broken and the jagged rock which had apparently shattered it had also made a mess of the cop’s head. It wasn’t pretty.

Seth pulled his legs free of the seat and collapsed in a heap on the roof of the car, safety glass crunching under his weight. The more he came into contact with the water the greater his sense of dread and panic grew. Got to get out. Get free.

He swung himself round and began to kick the metal grate, forcing it loose enough to allow him to clamber into the front seat. He did his best to avoid the dead cop but couldn’t help brushing against his shoulder. He twitched at the contact, a shudder running up the length of his body. His hand closed on something cold and he dragged it with him past the driver’s seat and through the windscreen. With a final effort he pushed himself out through the shattered windscreen and into the space between the bonnet and the rocks. Sea foam swirled around his hands and legs as he knelt for a moment breathing heavily, relieved to be out of the car but still far from safe.

The cold thing in his hand was a gun. The cop’s gun. The one he’d tried to grab earlier.

The voice had been whispering to him, unintelligible but alluring. Then someone had grabbed him, spun him around, nearly thrown him into the water. The voice had become suddenly clear, insistent. “Gun. Get the gun.”

The crowd around Seth had faded into dull grey except for one figure, a police officer in a crisp blue uniform, leaning against his car at the edge of the wharf and watching the crowd. The gun at his hip had glowed and pulsed with a reassuring light and Seth had been drawn to it, had to have it.

It wasn’t long before he was being manhandled into the back of the car, in cuffs. He'd watched helplessly as people began to throw themselves off the wharf, into the water. People disappeared under the waves, between the shadows, then after an impossible time they surfaced, walked out of the water and back through the crowd, dripping and sloshing and smiling their way into the city. Then… then something had happened. The car had lurched and slid and flipped into the water, bodies flying around it, and the screaming had started.

There was no screaming now.

Seth lifted the gun and inspected it briefly. It was just like the ones he’d seen in movies, safety on the side, sliding action with the top bit to get a bullet into the chamber, cool as all hell. And reassuring. Definitely reassuring.

“Gonna be a writer… working on a script…”

The low voice wasn’t the whisper, wasn’t in Seth’s head. It was out on the rocks somewhere out of Seth’s line of sight, and worse it was familiar. They were his own words, words from the night before floating back at him on a watery girl’s voice.

“Spare a drink for a lost soul?”

A different voice, the same taunting repetition of his words from the previous night.

Seth inched forward, peered out from under the bonnet of the cop car. He was at the water’s edge, large rocks jagged beneath him, the water spilling over them insistently. Behind the car was carnage, broken wood, twisted floating bodies, and the city watching silently in the failing light. People were moving, sirens were wailing in the distance, but it all sounded far away, unimportant. Sounds heard from beneath the water.

“Let me guess, no ID?”

Seth turned slowly, cliché from a horror film in action, knowing that he didn’t want to see what was behind him, didn’t want to know, should run, but he had to look. Had to see.

Beyond the boot of the car, out in the water where the rocks fell away into swirling depths with deceptive speed, three girls in school uniform were watching him. They were standing knee deep in the water, their scarecrow bodies made up of odd angles. The water was far too deep for them to be that high up. Their heads hung limply and their eyes were overlarge, shiny, their skin pale. If they hadn’t been repeating his words Seth would not have recognized them as the sirens from Aro park. They were schoolgirls? Seth felt suddenly dirty, as though his sleazy old man routine was the worst of his problems.

“Come and join us,” one of the girls said, raising a stiff arm like a marionette. Her index finger curled and relaxed in a series of jerks, beckoning Seth toward her.

“Shouldn’t have taken the acid,” Seth mumbled, looking around and biting his tongue, trying to spot an inconsistency that would show this whole sorry mess to be a hallucination. Nothing changed.

“Joooiiinnnn usssssss….” The three girls chorused, rising another six inches out of the water. Their calf-high white socks were stained with mud and muck and blood, and their limbs dangled loosely.

Seth began to scramble backwards up the rocks, out of the water, stumbling and slipping as he fought for purchase against the handcuffs and the bulk of the pistol in his hands. As he did so he saw the three girls waver for a moment, then suddenly rear up out of the water and into the air. Running up the back of each girl’s legs and under her clothes was a tentacle, dark and pulsating and impossible to focus on. Seth found tears springing into his eyes as a dark shape in the water lurched forward, flinging the girls toward Seth like a child throwing rag dolls. He closed his eyes and screamed, his finger squeezing the trigger of the gun.

When nothing happened, Seth opened his eyes tentatively. He was warm, which was a pleasant change, and it was sunny. The creature in the water was frozen, still difficult to look at. Through a pulsating shimmer Seth could make out tentacles and eyes and fangs or horns or barbs of some sort. He blinked away his tears, tried to focus.

The water was still, waves half crashed but not moving. The three girls hung in mid air, their limbs askew, tiny drops of water halted in mid-air around them Behind him the distant bustle and activity had stopped. A break in the clouds above had let a single shaft of dying light through and Seth was bathed in its warmth. The world was silent.

“Don’t fight now. Just run,” the whisper in the back of his head instructed. It was close now, intimate, warm. Seth looked over his shoulder at the ruins of the wharf and saw with sudden clarity a path through the chaos, a twisted but ultimately safe way through.

He felt the tension in his finger returning, felt the trigger of the gun pull back. In a sudden rush the gun roared and bucked in his hand and the middle of one of the tentacles exploded in a cloud of green mist. The three girls crashed into the rocks around him as the severed tip fell into the sea. Seth scrambled up the rocks and into the remains of the wharf, leaping from broken support pole to pile of corpses to dangling support cable, putting as much distance as possible between himself and the things in the water.

Abruptly the terrifying sound of a city in chaos closed in on him, the sirens and cries and groans of torn steel and wood, and all around the sound of breaking glass, car alarms, heavy impacts and screaming.

The light was gone.

Part Two - Seth

Bed wasn’t cutting it. The bath had been hot enough to drive the chill from Seth’s muscles and the curtains were drawn tight, but he couldn’t sleep. Achingly tired but wide awake.

Seth gave up, got up and made toast. Flicking on the waterproof radio that was suction cupped to the wall above the sink Seth let the buzz of background noise drown out the voice in the back of his head. It had been there since he’d woken up, whispering away, sometimes too distant to make out, sometimes so close he’d had to fight the urge to look over his shoulder. It had kept him from sleep with its insistent words.

“Up, out, into the world.”

He was up now, damnit, but the voice hadn’t shut up. Eat toast, get dressed, get back out into the world. Maybe that would do it.

He probably shouldn’t have taken the acid. He’d heard all the stories about people walking off the top of buildings or eating broken glass or doing some other self-destructive idiot thing while high, but then he’d met a lot of people who’d taken acid and had a good time. He hadn’t met any of the dead people.

“Not yet,” the voice whispered.

Seth turned up the volume on the radio. It was shaped like a flower, bright yellow and green plastic, and sounded terrible. Its sole virtue was that it resisted the damp and the mould and the splashes from the sink. The DJ was talking about the weather and the harbour, rabbitting on long enough that Seth eventually tuned in to the words.

“…the water, not exactly glassy out there and a few more clouds than we like to see but I’m telling you it’s the best…”

Whatever that DJ was taking sounded a lot better than the after-effects of Seth’s night. He fumbled the lid back onto the peanut butter and began chewing his toast thoughtfully, walking out into the hall and pulling his boots on.

“…dozens of people down here at the waterfront watching the waves, a couple even daring to…”

They’d be giving away prizes soon, no doubt. Show up at the station’s broadcast van and win a free t-shirt. First five women to swim topless win a CD. Seth could just about hear the foam coming out of the DJ’s mouth.

“…this thing waterproof? I’m not gonna get electrocuted, am I? If I’m gonna go, I guess live on air is the way to do it…”

Seth left the radio blaring as he stepped out of his apartment. In the relative quiet of the building’s grimy staircase the whisper came to him, gentle this time, placated.

“Up, out, into the world.”

It sounded so happy that Seth couldn’t help whistling to himself as he headed down the hill into the valley. A walk through town would be just the thing.

part 1

This post contains the first part of The Event - introducing 5 characters by 5 authors.

Seth

It was the fish lady’s fault. Seth woke up aching and thirsty and freezing cold, his cheek pressed against the mud and grass of Aro Valley’s small park, his limbs leaden with the chill of the night. The underside of his jacket was soaked through, as were his jeans. He rolled over with a groan and blinked the mist out of his eyes.

It was light. Early morning light, the hour of the walk of shame. Wellington was a terrible place to sleep outdoors, even on its warmest nights. It was a town where people brought woollen hats, gloves and blankets to the outdoor Summer Shakespeare performances.

Passing out in a corner of a park at this time of year was somewhere between reckless and suicidal. If that damn half-breed Deep One singer hadn’t been giving him the eye Seth would never have left the club alone, been set upon by sirens, and ended up half frozen to death.

At least his boots had kept the worst of the cold from his toes.

Seth dragged himself to his feet and stumbled down the slippery path onto Aro Street. He wasn’t far from his flat, no more than fifteen minutes at his current shuffling pace. His legs were wobbly but he was confident that they’d see him home. They always did.

Less reliable was his memory of the night before, but that was to be expected. The plan to drop half a tab of acid and go see a gig at Bodega had seemed entirely reasonable when Mark suggested it, and it had started out fine, but there was something about being in a bar that eroded Seth’s ability to resist drinks. He hadn’t taken enough money to get himself into any real trouble, but trouble had a way of finding him. The more he drank the louder and sillier he got, and for some reason he’d been able to find people to buy him drinks all night.

Then the acid kicked in, the space between the tables distorting and the top of his head slipping away from him. Mark was grinning away and loving every second and Seth was right there with him until he uttered the fateful words.

“That singer. Look at her. Do you think she’s really a fish?”

The Innsmouth look. Straight out of Lovecraft. And damn if she didn’t look like her ancestry was a blasphemous mix of the human and the Piscean. Once the idea was planted in Seth’s brain he couldn’t shake it, couldn’t look away from her cold, dead fish eyes. Her skin was sallow, loose on her bones. Her lips were over-large, never moist, her hands wrapped in gloves to cover the webbing. The band was a kind of fusion jazz group, and the more they played the stranger their music became. There was madness in the music, messages from below the waves that called to Seth, warned him of the return of a great evil.

Too much fucking Lovecraft, that was the problem. And the acid.

He’d left in a state of restrained hysteria, his heart pounding and his jaws clenched. He didn’t utter a word, did his best not to look anyone in the eye. They were probably all in on it.

The streets outside were strangely bright, the streetlights and traffic signals shining out in the crisp air. There were dark shapes of people out on the streets but they were human shapes, nothing monstrous about them. The more he walked the slower his heart beat and as Seth walked past the Aro Valley kindergarten he felt a sense of calm returning. It was just the drugs, nothing to worry about.

The teenage girls with their alcopops, cigarettes, too much eye makeup and lack of fake IDs were an unexpected feature of the park. There was nowhere that would take them, not looking as young as they did, and they were bored. It was the work of a minute to pry liquor from them. In exchange Seth provided a stream of near-nonsensical talk, some of it littered with references to the curse of the subhuman, some of it the usual bullshit about his artistic ambitions. Smiles and further drinks were forthcoming and all was as it should be.

And then he must have passed out and spent the rest of the night soaking up the cold.

At least they hadn’t taken his wallet.

A delivery truck rattled past and pulled into the carpark of the dairy. A young guy in a suit and sneakers power walked past Seth, a scowl on his face and the tinny sound of music spilling from his headphones. Seth shuffled on, dreading the hill that would end his walk home. Lean into it, let the fear of falling convince the legs to move. He’d done it with his eyes closed enough times to know that no matter how hung over he was, no matter how tired, there was always a gutter to throw up into and a warm bed waiting in the end.

Mark was nowhere to be seen when Seth finally made it home.

- Matt



* * *

Michelle


“Sure you don’t want to stay for coffee?”

“I’d better get going.”

“OK,” Richard’s eyes flicked up and down her body. It was a casual, fleeting assessment but it made her self-conscious nonetheless. “I’ll see you later at work then.”

Michelle nodded. She felt embarrassed at the prospect but it was unavoidable. She bounced on her toes, the momentum helping her squeeze back into her jeans. She didn’t know why she had let Siobhan talk her into buying skinny leg jeans. They might be the latest thing and look good on gym-toned bodies but no part of Michelle’s body could be described as skinny, least of all her legs.

“You don’t regret last night, do you?” he asked from the bed, the sheets only just covering up the lower half of his body.

Michelle wondered why he asked. She doubted he really cared what she thought. Maybe he was trying to fill in the silence.

“Of course not,” she forced a smile, hoping her voice sounded light and natural.

She shoved her feet in her boots and once she was safely outside his apartment door, she bent down to pull up the zips.

There was a short flight of stairs to descend before she was back out in the light and safety of the street. She hurried away, making a beeline towards Cuba Mall. It was after nine and the shops would all be open now. If she bumped into anyone she could say she was shopping if they happened to wonder what she was doing at the opposite end of town from her flat on a Tuesday morning.

Michelle cursed herself for overreacting. So she had slept with her boss. Big deal. Heaps of people had done the same thing, if not worse. Why was she so afraid of someone discovering her dirty little secret?

The red don’t-walk light flashed up as she reached the crossing and the waiting cars revved up and lurched past. A handful of sparrows were still meandering in the middle of the road, pecking at invisible crumbs. Michelle flinched as the cars sped towards them. She felt a painful certainty that the birds were too unaware of their impending demise to move. To her relief, the sparrows flew out of the way as the cars were almost on top of them, some unconscious instinct propelling them to save themselves at the very last second.

The light flashed green. Walk. Her feet responded to the signal before she registered it herself.

Flashbacks of the night before spun up in her mind as she crossed the street. She tried to edit the images into a more glamorous Hollywood sex scene but the raw footage didn’t give her much to work with.

She had thought about what sex with Richard would be like before. She wouldn’t go so far as to say that she had fantasised about it, it wasn’t like she fancied him or anything, but Siobhan and the other girls at work had been descriptive in their accounts of what their experiences with Richard had been. When she listened to them, it was easy to picture the movie version. Passionate, impatient kisses; heaving, sweaty bodies pressed against each other; desperate tearing at clothes; then urgent sex on his office desk or up against a wall in the back corner of the bar after closing time.

She had secretly hoped that if she slept with him too she might be able to join in the conversations about what a bastard he was.

Michelle had started picturing Richard as a villain in a Victorian bodice ripper. He was like the dark, heartless lord who ravished every virginal serving girl that crossed his path. She had anticipated being used and discarded once he had seduced her. She hadn’t expected that the seduction would be quite so, well, dull.

If anything, he had been nice. He bought her dinner first. That was unexpected. When he had asked her if she wanted a drink after work, she had thought she was up for a torrid encounter in his office, not a date. Then afterwards when they’d gone back to his apartment, he’d been awkward. Not as clumsy and unsure of himself as she was but not the artful seducer she had thought him to be. He’d slept with every girl that worked at the bar, you’d think he’d know what he was doing by now.

Once he’d abandoned the script for the evening, Michelle wasn’t sure how to act. She couldn’t bring herself to put on the full Hollywood screaming and moaning fake orgasm. She felt too self-conscious in front of him. In the end, she’d just closed her eyes and made a few soft groans when she saw that he was ready to come and was just holding back to make sure she did first. That had been enough of a cue for him and he’d gone straight to sleep when he was done.

Sleeping with the wrong man was meant to have dramatic consequences. Either he should end up falling in love with you, despite you being one of his less glamorous conquests, or you should feel so hurt and used that the whole experience would trigger some empowering and heart-warming journey where you quit your job to travel to some exotic place and ‘found yourself’. Michelle knew that neither of those was likely. She’d feel uncomfortable around him at work for a while, and everything would go back to how it had been before.

Instinct drove her towards Courtney Place and sanctuary. The shops had been far from busy at this time but the zealous sales assistants had pounced on her as soon as she’d set foot through their doors, determined to offer assistance or strike up some meaningless conversation. In the end it had been too much effort to shrug off their advances and then casually wander around pretending to browse through the clothes, so she’d abandoned the charade.

The first movie sessions of the day would be starting soon. Only a handful of people ever showed up to watch movies early on a weekday morning. If she was lucky, she might even get a whole theatre to herself.

There probably wasn’t anything showing that she hadn’t already seen but it didn’t matter. Rewatching a film for the second or third time was just as powerful. Even when she knew what was going to happen, she got so sucked into the story that it didn’t matter. Watching films was the only time she ever felt in the moment, not distracted by what had happened in the past or trying to predict what would happen next.

Her old drama teacher had once said that she needed to draw on the raw emotions from real life experiences. How could she explain that she never experienced any intense or passionate emotions in real life? It was movies that had taught her how to feel. With films she could fall in love in a heartbeat and she could cry so hard that she was convinced her heart would break from the pain. When Michelle watched horror movies, she became paralysed with fear. She wondered if she would be capable of feeling the same terror if the deranged killer on the screen was coming after her in real life rather than the movie’s heroine.

Movies made her feel alive and through them she had lived a vivid spectrum of human emotions and experiences.

It was only real life that left her numb and disconnected.


- Debbie



* * *

Margaret


It had been going on for weeks.
There was a car and inside there were four young people driving into a forest, they were trying to find a party or a rock concert. Two men and two young women.
(You could tell that one of the women had “been around”. Also, that one of the men was a homosexual.)
They were lost. They drove down a road and there was a closed gate with a sign: “KEEP OUT PRIVATE”. There was the skull of an animal on the gate.
The nice girl said: 'I don't like it here.' And her boyfriend who was driving, he agreed, he drove backwards along the road. And you thought that would be the end of it. That they had had a “close call”, they would get out of there and go back. They would decide they didn't want to go to the party after all, they would drive back to the town and admit they had lied.

('Mother I'm sorry, I lied, I wasn't at Susan's house I went out to go to a party.' they would say)

But there was a trap on the road.
And their tyres burst.
And they walked through the woods where more skeletons of animals hung from the trees. And you knew - even though they were scared, they were in worse trouble than they thought.

Margaret stood beside the exit, her torch dangling limp from her hand, light dancing across her spectacles.
Mouth pursed into a frown.

Because the Man had found them. As always. He always did.
At first he told them lies, tried to befriend them but the young people were not stupid. They noticed the inconsistencies in what he said.
But then it was too late, because they had walked into the cellar of the house and he locked the door.
Then he was above them, looking down. He trapped them into different parts of the cellar, cages. They could all see but they couldn't help each other when the Man started doing things.
She swayed on her feet, stared at the screen. It made her light-headed. The first time when the man climbed down into the cage with the girl who'd “been around” and _____ ___ Margaret had fainted. She'd fallen down against the wall and a patron had come over to her.
'Are you okay' he had said.
'Yes,' she had said.
She didn't faint this time, because it was the thirty fourth time she'd seen it.
She had found that when things were too ugly or nasty to watch (such as now, because the Man was in the cage with the homosexual and he ___ ______ ___ ___) she could limp a little further into the cinema and look at the audience.
Their faces were lit up in blue. Some of them were looking away, some were curling up in their seats but many others seemed hypnotised. Men and women both (but mostly men). They stared ahead and their faces didn't move, they didn't even frown. They didn't blink. They just watched.
She hated them sometimes, the people.
Sometimes she imagined that the light on their faces came from an enormous blue wave, sweeping towards them to smash them into pieces.

Her manager said:
Rock music was playing overhead, Margaret didn't hear. Her manager had to repeat herself.
'Margaret. Can you work a late shift?'
Practically shouting at her, this girl of no more than twenty.
'I can't. I'm expected –'
'Okay, no, forget it.'

They treated you badly, insulted you and spoke as if you were stupid. The hours were long. Sometimes you had to do awful things, like clean up popcorn that people had spat out, or sometimes vomit.
What made it easy was that it was always the same. Five years at this new place, she'd established a routine. Before that it had been five years at Mid City, nine years at the Regent Centre.
The Kings One and Two.
The Cinerama – she had started there, in nineteen eighty one. The manager had said: 'You're older than the other girls, but you'll do.'
(He had meant 'I don't like you,' – but Father had known the owner)
('It's the most we can hope for her' he'd said to Mother)
The routine: riding the escalator down into the food court. A bag of McDonalds take away. Wait at the bus stop for the 14, and ride back home with the warm bag in her lap, and with the earphones on. And then two hundred metres along the cold street, limping.

Limping fast. Unlocking the door, hurrying in, hurrying to the door of her room, but it was part of the routine that she never made it in time.
Shona said:
What had she said? Something about the rent.
'It's fish,' she added.
'I've got it,' said Margaret.
'What?'
'I've got the rent.'
'I don't understand.' Always this way. Part of the routine. 'It's dinner I mean. The rent's not due for a week.'
Margaret controlled her breathing.
'I've got it. I will give it to you now.'
She unlocked the door of her room, threw the McDonalds on the floor – she had quite lost her appetite thank you. She rummaged through her dresser until she found the sock, took out the rent money, counted it.
Back in the hall she said: 'Here.'
Shona laughed, actually laughed at her.
'But I don't need it.'
'Here.'
'Margaret keep it, it's not due 'til next week.'
'Please,' said Margaret.
She wouldn't take it.
She said:
And:
But she wouldn't take it, she was playing her games again. How could someone go so long without forgiving?

The rent had been late only once, it had been three years ago, but they would never forgive it, never.

Unable to sleep, she listened to them walking around the house, beside her and above her. She sat on the floor and pulled the bedclothes down.
Margaret imagined her parents were watching her, telling her to get back into bed, that everything would be all right.
She was hungry after all. She shifted sideways, reached into the bag, pulled forth the McDonalds sandwich in its cold yellow box.
She ate furtively, like a prisoner. She looked around her little room. Footsteps over her head now. She imagined him up there, the Man, staring down through the ceiling. He'd trapped her.
It was a bad position, uncomfortable. Her leg ached. And then suddenly there was a cramp. Such pain. She was in a cage and the Man would climb down and ____ and ____ ___ and ____ _______ ___ ____ and ____ ___ and her parents would watch and scream but they were in a cage, there was nothing they could do.
Only watch, and the terrible pain. Her face pressed against the threadbare rug.
'Oh God,' she said.
She slept.

She dreamt that the wave came.


- C G


* * *

Robin

There was a wrong thing about the doors to the Central Library.

It was a wrong thing that bugged Robin every time she went in there, fighting the urge to walk in the lefthand side and jump over the turnstile, giving the security guy apoplexy, or at least making his eyes bug out a bit. It was OK at Vic, over there they hed the Entry and Exit doors arranged the right way, the proper way, so you go in and walk out like the turning of a clock. Deosil.

It was crowded today, and after Robin had taken her books back, gone out through the not-really front doors (on the wrong side), turned left and walked up to Clark’s, the queue along the food counters was legion. By the time she’d got to the end of the queue and collected her pot of tea, she thought she’d have to perch at the bar at the back, but it turned out that Claire had arrived before her and staked out one of the long wooden tables and had her offspring staged strategically around it.

She waved at Robin hurriedly. “Come and take the spot at the end, Robin – I don’t want to have one of those old biddies asking if she can sit here because there’s no room.”

“It’s not too bad,” Robin said, shrugging. “I shared a table once with a couple of ladies from the Women’s Institute. They were here for a conference.”

“Are there Women’s Institutes in New Zealand?”

Robin nodded. “Yep. They told me about their opening night revue – from the way they talked about it I figured that a bunch of them stripping off for a photo shoot isn’t nearly as far out as that movie about the calendars wanted us all to think.”

Claire rolled her eyes and started grilling Robin about the job search (unfruitful) and her love life (challenging) while she helped cut up sausage rolls for the nevvies and niecelings. “The thing is,” Robbin said, “the thing is, it’s all very well listening to those pep talks you get in school and university about changing the world and all that, but, the thing is, once you actually start working, it turns out to be a whole lot of making lists and talking about mortgages in your teabreak.”

“It isn’t all like that – “

“Maybe. But I’m supposed to sound enthusiastic when I write application letters and I just can’t.”

“And that guy you were seeing?”

“Oh. No, that was over a couple of weeks ago, which is just as well because he was pretty smelly in the mornings, or at least his breath was, and he had tongue studs, two of them, which aren’t actually that great when you’re trying to kiss someone.”

“What’s a tongue stud?” Christie asked, her face covered in grease. Robin poked her tongue out and wiggled it.

“No, really,” Claire added, “come to dinner on Friday, there’s a chap I want you to meet.”

“He’ll only want to talk about mortgages,” Robin said glumly, “or rugby, or some band I don’t know anything about.”

“It won’t be like that,” and, la, she was all packed and the offspring were tidied, and she was gathering her bag ready to go.

“Enjoy your haircut,” Robin said, and hustled the nevvies and niecelings out through the other door that didn’t leave her grumbling about lefthand and righthand, and they walked out through Civic Square and over the bridge, and to the Sea.

Today they were going to Oriental Beach, Robin had decided, and did she some more hustling to get them all walking along the waterfront without being sidetracked into Te Papa or Waitangi Park, but they got there in the end, and ran about with bare feet and gritty imported sand between their toes, and they raced ankle deep into the scudding sea, and out again, shrieking, and then Robin sat on the wall huddled into her jacket against the wind, with little Aroha asleep in her sling breathing her little milky sighs, while Christie and her brothers played with someone else’s dog.

THEN. Then this guy Robin didn’t even know sat down next to her and started chatting about the weather, and were they her kids, and what it was like out on the South Coast this time of year, and they were 10 minutes talking before Robin wondered if maybe he was hitting on her. He wasn’t too bad looking, in a middle aged, balding kind of way, but all of a sudden Robin couldn’t talk like he was just this guy on the beach, because she kept wondering did he think that she was flirting with him? Like, when some guys think that when you’re smiling at a joke, really that’s code for ‘ask me out to dinner,’ and they come up with weird stuff like if you say one thing you’re interested and if you say another you hate their guts, when really, you’re just wombling on about what you want for lunch. That, really, truly, really, was why she had trouble dating – she couldn’t work out the code and she never knew what everyone thought they were saying and expected her to just know.

So she got up and collected the children and said they were going to keep walking, and just when she’d got everyone’s shoes back on, THIS GUY came up to her again, and he started apologising, except there wasn’t anything he really had to apologise for, which made it even more awkward. “Look,” he said, “I didn’t mean to freak you out, and I’m not some weirdo who likes to perv at children. I just get lonely sometimes, and I like to talk to people.”

“Oh sure,” Robin said back, nodding in that fake friendly way, “absolutely. It’s just we’re meeting someone in a bit.”

“Right,” he said. “Well, anyway, if you decide sometime that you’d like someone to chat to – any public place of your choosing – give me a call or an email or something. It isn’t good to be lonely.”

“Sure,” and Robin pocketed his card, expecting to ditch it when they were out of sight. “Absolutely. Have a nice day.”

And then they were walking around the edge of the sea, under the great bulk of Mt Victoria, looking out at the great bulk of Miramar that’s a peninsular, but used to be an island, but really is Whataitai, a taniwha that got stuck making a break for freedom.

The thing is, the thing is, Robin knew that all that stuff wasn’t real – that you don’t need to throw salt over your shoulder, that widdershins isn’t a bad thing, that the mountains and islands she lived on won’t some day get up and walk around. She knew it wasn’t like that, she really did, but she wished it were, just a little.

- Steph


* * *

Adam

The alarm went off at 6.15 am and Adam rose slowly out of the dream he was having. It was another strange one. He saw people running down the street, away from the ocean and screaming. He was watching from the window of his flat and taking notes. He wasn’t sure of the significance of that. But he was slowly realizing that he was in bed, it was time to wake up and go to work. Again. Adam tried to remember what day it was. He had a blissful half minute when he thought it was Friday and then realized he hadn’t had a Thursday. No it was Tuesday. Freaking Tuesday. There is nothing good about Tuesday. And he felt like Tuesdays were coming around way too fast, like every time he woke up it was to a Tuesday.

He hauled himself out of bed and stumbled to the shower. Getting up this early he was guaranteed hot water, but it turned out that this Tuesday he didn’t have a dry towel. His towel had slipped off the towel rack, was now a musty pile on the floor half covered with his flatmate’s sweaty gym gear. Swearing under his breath, he pulled it out and took his shower.

It took him 20 minutes to get ready. He had it down to the smallest possible time so that he could sleep as late as possible. He got dressed and ate two pieces of toast. His shoes were near the door so he could slip them on as he walked out. Out on the street it was bitterly cold at that time in the morning, so he hunched up in his jacket, took some deep breaths and tried to wake up. He didn’t actually wake up until he had his morning coffee. He always went to the Mojo on the corner because there was this cute little redhead that worked there and she knew his usual order and he liked to think that she had been flirting with him and that someday he would get up the courage to ask her out. He figured the day to do it wasn’t a Tuesday though. No one was happy on Tuesday morning.

This Tuesday the redhead wasn’t there. He looked around for her and the blonde German girl who had only been at the Mojo for a couple of weeks (she was backpacking) took his order. She noticed him trying to lean and look into the meager kitchen space.

‘She is not here today, she called in sick.’

‘Oh, I uh,’ he said. ‘I wasn’t-’

‘It’s OK,’ she gave him a toothy smile. ‘She should be back in tomorrow I think.’

‘No, I mean, I’m not looking for anyone.’

‘Oh sure,’ the blonde German girl said, ‘you are here each morning making eyes at Gretchen, it’s very sweet.’

‘I really don’t know what you mean,’ he started, but he could see it wasn’t going to work. Adam felt his cheeks going hot. He couldn’t believe he’d been so obvious. All this time he’d been coming in and checking out the redhead, who it turned out, was called Gretchen which he hadn’t known. And he’d been really obvious about it and everyone knew. He was such a jerk.

‘We call you hopeful latte guy,’ she whispered over the counter. Adam took his coffee with horrible finality. He could never come back to this Mojo.

His walk to work took ten minutes; it was quick because was still too early for rush hour to have started. He walked into the building and mentally added today to the tally. Six thousand, seven hundred and forty three times. ‘I really need a new job’ he thought to himself again, that was his mantra. Another routine just like counting the number of times he walked into this awful dead end job.

He swiped his card in the lift, went into the office.

‘Morning,’ he said to Sarah, who sat next to him.

‘Morning Adam,’ Sarah replied. ‘We’ve had an outage, the phones have been really busy.’

‘Grand,’ he said, and he logged into the phones for another day of technical support for an internet company with a middle to large sized client base, depending on their rates.

‘I’m very sorry that you were affected, but the service has resumed now.’

‘That’s not good enough, young man. My granddaughter set me up with a computer and I was bidding on an antique vase on Trade Me and I didn’t win it because the internet went down. What are you going to do about that? That was the only one in the country!’

‘Look, as I said, I’m sorry that you were affected, but we don’t guarantee that we’ll be able to provide a constant service. Our servers broke down, they were fixed and now they’re-’

‘That’s not good enough. I am seriously considering changing to another company.’

He talked the lady down from leaving with a small discount on her monthly bill and got off the phone. He logged out of the queue and took his break. The open plan office was pretty small but the view was stunning. They were right on the waterfront, so on a good morning they had a view over tug boats and ferries coming in and going out you could look across to Oriental Bay with the fountain and the people walking. He made an instant coffee and went and stood out on the balcony.
The harbor was relatively calm for Wellington. The sun was shining and he watched the tourists walking the waterfront path with envy.

He tried to think about the future, but anything interesting seemed too out of reach. He had experience in I.T. and customer support but that’s all he had, and if he thought about it, there were something like 600 other guys with the same experience in this city. That wasn’t even including all the people who moved to Wellington from other places.

He had a good track record in this job, but the thing was, he’d never really excelled at it. Once again he wished he knew just what it was he wanted to do with his life. His friends from school were getting married and having kids, buying houses, becoming managers some of them. He spent his days between the office and his scungy city flat which he shared with two skeezy flatmates. The best thing he’d done lately was beat his previous high score playing ‘Carry on my wayward son’ on the expert guitar on Rock Band.

Adam lingered on the balcony five minutes longer than he should have. This small rebellion would keep him going till lunch time at least.

- Jenni