Pontypool Changes Everything Read Online Free PDF Page A

notices that his feet are flailing at the tops of bushes he collapses. He waits for the shale to hit him, but it doesn’t, not until he drops through two feet of frigid water. Les looks up across a lake. The shore behind him holds the zombies at a distance of two metres. Les dunks his head below the surface. He removes his shoes and lays them side by side on the bottom of Lake Scugog. A layer of slush hangs just beneath the surface and it bites, cold, into Les’s ribs. Within seconds he feels his own death in this water. He sees a small boat down the shore at a dock and begins a mad dog paddle.

8
It’s Only To Be Expected
    If his illness is acting up a little bit, it’s only to be expected. It does not really compromise his ability to discern much of his immediate physical dilemma. In fact, he dismisses the delusional worms gathering in each of the cottages he can see with far firmer resolve than any historically sane person could. The sky is harmlessly transformed into the underside of a table, and the clouds lengthen and thin into the wicked webs of spiders. The sun flattens and hardens into a round seal of pink gum pressed under a corner of the table. Les does not think that the menace his atmosphere represents is overstated, and he rightly thanks his illness for peeling back at least one layer from the hideous stop of the sky. Underwater he can hear the shuffle of feet beneath a table, the tapping of a signal, the little music of coins in a pocket. Since he feels he has the option, he rises from the water to Handel.
    As he flops onto the dock, Les decides that, whatever it eventually means, for now at least he is a fugitive. Uncurling the rope holding the boat, he drifts in it, on a current that will take him to Port Perry. The sun is warm enough to break the ice in his veins into painful throbs. The card table has dissipated and a less likely blue sky has taken its place. Les lies in the bottom of the boat.
    I have never been an organized man. I will never know what the inner life of other people is like. That can never
matter again. In Port Perry I will steal a car. I’m going to Parkdale.
    From the shore a loon offers Les both its name and its Haunting Cry. He turns his head in the bottom of the boat, bunching his cheek against aluminum rivets, and smiles.
    None of you has anything for me anymore. I am Ed Gein. I want my wife and child.
    At his nose is a dead worm, glossy and hard; it forms an almost audible
S.
Les flicks the brittle lower loop, creating a question mark.
Stupid.
He flicks the upper loop, creating a bar of worm that appears to have shot off its ends in a centrifugal action.
Better. Better question.
    For the next four hours Les lies freezing in the drifting boat, turning away from, and then back to, his worm. He pictures his son in little screens that open up in the aluminum just above the watermark. He names the child. He changes the name. The baby has a face like a walnut, a uniform surface of wrinkles, and Helen wipes yellow food from his chin. Les tilts his jaw toward the bait-littered bottom of the boat, and Helen reaches up and cleans three tiny crayfish legs from the side of his face. Her hand slips back beneath the brackish water an inch deep beneath Les.
They live in an inch of water. No air. They can’t see. The fins of pickerel and the snouts of summer frogs hide the light. A rusted fish hook has just fallen in the baby’s food.

9
More
Calming Effects
    Detective Peterson pulls a rental car up into his driveway. He sits with his face in his hands. When he asks himself
What’s happening?
he’s not thinking of cannibal drama teachers and their flying passengers. Peterson is thinking about the difficulty he has had all afternoon.
I can’t seem to speak properly.
An understatement.
I don’t feel any different. I can think clearly. At least I think I can.
    He’s right. There is nothing detectably wrong with his thoughts; however, he has struggled all afternoon with a strange inability