Tony Burgess - Pontypool Changes Everything

Greg opens the trunk and lifts out the camera case. His hand hovers over a plastic gas container. He touches the handle, lifting an oily film onto his fingertips. He slides his thumb across the ends of his fingers. He feels sound between the surfaces. Sound? He leaves the trunk open, just in case, and hauls the equipment around the car, placing it in the tall grass that grows along a ditch where Grant is standing, still looking through the binoculars, his mouth hanging open. He looks out briefly to locate Greg and the camera. He speaks in a whisper.

“OK. OK. Let’s keep our voices down. Those suckers are alive out there. I don’t know how safe we are. These are predators. Hmmm. I’ve never seen… Jesus… let’s… uh… let’s get back in the car.”

Grant reaches behind and flips open the car door. He lowers himself, slowly, still looking through the binoculars. He lifts his legs, carefully, one at a time, up off the shoulder of the road.

“Put the… uh… equipment in the back seat and get in the car, Greg. I don’t wanna do anything stupid.”

Greg follows the order, running his hands uncertainly across the surfaces of things before he moves them. He walks to the back of the car. The trunk is open and he looks at it, feeling a momentary confusion at the fact that he can’t open it. Open it. When it’s open. It’s open for him to open it. He lays his hand on the trunk. The weight brings it down. Greg looks self-consciously through the rear window and closes the lid. When it clicks he has to pull his hand off with force. He feels the effort as a kind of pain. He has the powerful sensation that he has had to do this, to lift his hand from the closed trunk, in contradiction to some obvious sign. As he walks up the passenger side of the car his face flushes. He feels that he has acted perversely. He pictures, as narrowly as possible, the series of actions that will return him to the passenger seat.

“I don’t get it. These freaks aren’t doing anything. What the hell are they doing?”

Grant reaches down to a panel beside him and flips a switch that locks all the doors with four simultaneous plunks.

“Maybe they’re playing dead. I can see you, you bastards. I know you’re not dead. So, c’mon, let’s see some action. Do something. Maybe it’s a trap.”

Greg looks up across the road and squints his eyes. He’s afraid. He feels the need to comprehend something complex. Anything. He tries to picture a car on the highway. Its four tires. They rotate. The weight of the car bearing down. The weight that doesn’t stop it. Of course, it doesn’t stop. The wind rises up over the windshield. The air pressure above the hood of the car is higher than at its sides. Greg feels a rush of relief. Something is coming back to him. He tries to picture the driver. An easy one. Someone he knew in high school. Dead now. Heart failure. I’m remembering him.

“Maybe we should’ve brought a gun. Damn! Look at these fools. These sacks of shit are harmless. What the hell are they doing? Havin’ a siesta?”

Greg’s relief is short lived. He feels his heart rate speed up with questions: What was that? What’s happening to me? I may not be able to even ask these things in five minutes, what the hell do I do? His heart begins to bang in his throat. This is the disease. I’m finally getting sick. Do I tell Grant?

“Awright, Christ, let’s move on. Maybe we can find some zombies with a little more life, eh?”

The car starts and eases up a hill, slowing and stopping at the top. Grant hands Greg the binoculars.

“Here, buddy, you keep an eye out with these. Let me know if you see anything.”

Greg takes the binoculars and rolls down his window. He raises the binoculars to his face and holds his breath. A light orange fuzz hovers in two connected egg shapes. In the left egg shape a tilting oblong of white floats in the orange. He moves so that both egg shapes share the oblong and he adjusts the focus. A tiny pattern of red diamonds rises sharply and disappears into a field of tall corn. The oblong is a house, back off the road at the edge of a heavy forest. A dog — a German shepherd — is jumping and barking, straining against a tether. Beside it is a fuel drum mounted on a concrete platform. On the small lawn, at the front of the house, are four silhouetted figures. They all have pipes stuck in their mouths. Wisemen? Dwarfs?

The view through the binoculars is cool. The lemon-coloured leaves on the undersides of branches are crisp. The sky is fixed through the trees in an ice-blue lattice. A refrigerator. Greg shivers.

Greg turns the wheel between his eyes and loses the field. It blurs and he lowers the binoculars.

“Hey, you know where we are?”

Greg’s left arm is swollen from the sun and he tries to brush the heat off with a cool palm.

“Well, I’ll tell ya. I’ll tell ya. This is Pontypool comin’ up.”

Grant lowers his forehead toward the windshield.

“There is something in Pontypool that I can show you. I shouldn’t, but I’m gonna anyway.”

“Uh, what is it?”

“What is it? What is it? OK, I’m gonna show you one of the little hiding spots that puts a shape to every fuckin’ thing you know. What do you think of that?”

Greg lifts the binoculars again and his vision sprays across the road. The white sky drives its tines through the hood of the car.

“I gotta remind you of one thing first, and I don’t want you to take it the wrong way.”

Grant pulls the car over beside an overgrown road that disappears down a dark green throat in the woods.

“You are already an accomplice to a major crime. Do you know what I mean?”

Greg hears himself respond from somewhere other than his mouth, somewhere other than his head. His left shoulder knots.

“OK. OK. I just want to point that out, because that’s your licence to see what I’m gonna show ya. Got it?”

Greg feels the whisks of a broom shaking at his insides. The disease is emptying me out; is that what’s happening?

“OK. I’m gonna rock your world now, little buddy.”

Grant turns the wheel and releases the brake, allowing the car to fall down the weeded ramp. He ducks his head, as if the low branches are in the car. The sunlight dries in dark streaks across the windshield.

“Pontypool. Now, Pontypool changes everything.”

A yellow field opens up to the left and Grant pulls up onto a flattened patch of gold. The field is broken here and there by sand dunes that crest through the grass. A picnic table sits just outside the shade of a birch tree at the field’s southern border. Grant takes the binoculars from Greg’s hands.

“We leave everything in the car. C’mon, let’s go.”

The picnic table is cracked and yellow, with tufts of moss capping its saw-cut ends. Grant sits facing away from the tabletop and he slaps the bench beside him. Greg sits down.

“See that bit of ground right there?”

The corner of a small grey shack is visible beyond the birch tree. Along its side is a large rectangle of sod. The grass is cut and maintained, though the strips of green are all different. Some strips newer. Some slightly yellow.

“Know what’s in there?”

Grant hovers his hand out in the direction of the quilted lawn and rolls his fingers in a trill.

“Dead people.”

Greg presses his thumbs hard against the wood. A button to press. I need a Higher Power. He presses the button again.

“Murdered people, Greg.”

Grant is whispering, not so much to avoid being heard as to keep respectful of this place. Greg feels confusion in the pew of the bench. A church? A funeral?

“You know the headline? House of Horrors. Well, that’s one right there.”