Trigger Warning: Short Fictions and Disturbances (14 page)

         
16)     German measles, mumps, and I think Pryderi had chicken-pox when he was staying in Melbourne with the grandparents.

         
17)     In a small pot. It looked a bit like a jam jar, I suppose.

         
18)     I don’t think so. Nothing that looked like a warning label anyway. But there was a return address. It came from abroad, and the return address was in some kind of foreign lettering.

         
19)     You have to understand that Mum had been buying colors and dyes from all over the world for five years. The thing with the Day-Glo bubbles is not that someone can blow glowing colored bubbles, it’s that they don’t pop and leave splashes of dye all over everything. Mum says that would be a lawsuit waiting to happen. So, no.

         
20)     There was some kind of shouting match between Nerys and Mum to begin with, because Mum had come back from the shops and not bought anything from Nerys’s shopping list except the shampoo. Mum said she couldn’t find the tanning cream at the supermarket but I think she just forgot. So Nerys stormed off and slammed the door and went into her bedroom and played something that was probably Britney Spears really loudly. I was out the back, feeding the three cats, the chinchilla, and a guinea pig named Roland who looks like a hairy cushion, and I missed it all.

         
21)     On the kitchen table.

         
22)     When I found the empty jam jar in the back garden the next morning. It was underneath Nerys’s window. It didn’t take Sherlock Holmes to figure it out.

         
23)     Honestly, I couldn’t be bothered. I figured it would just be more yelling, you know? And Mum would work it out soon enough.

         
24)     Yes, it was stupid. But it wasn’t uniquely stupid, if you see what I mean. Which is to say, it was par-for-the-course-for-Nerys stupid.

         
25)     That she was glowing.

         
26)     A sort of pulsating orange.

         
27)     When she started telling us that she was going to be worshipped like a god, as she was in the dawn times.

         
28)     Pryderi said she was floating about an inch above the ground. But I didn’t actually see this. I thought he was just playing along with her newfound weirdness.

         
29)     She didn’t answer to “Nerys” anymore. She described herself mostly as either My Immanence, or the Vehicle. (“It is time to feed the Vehicle.”)

         
30)     Dark chocolate. Which was weird because in the old days I was the only one in the house who even sort of liked it. But Pryderi had to go out and buy her bars and bars of it.

         
31)     No. Mum and me just thought it was more Nerys. Just a bit more imaginatively weirdo Nerys than usual.

         
32)     That night, when it started to get dark. You could see the orange pulsing under the door. Like a glowworm or something. Or a light show. The weirdest thing was that I could still see it with my eyes closed.

         
33)     The next morning. All of us.

         
34)     It was pretty obvious by this point. She didn’t really even look like Nerys any longer. She looked sort of
smudged
. Like an afterimage. I thought about it, and it’s . . . Okay. Suppose you were staring at something really bright, that was a blue color. Then you closed your eyes, and you’d see this glowing yellowy-orange afterimage in your eyes? That was what she looked like.

         
35)     They didn’t work either.

         
36)     She let Pryderi leave to get her more chocolate. Mum and I weren’t allowed to leave the house anymore.

         
37)     Mostly I just sat in the back garden and read a book. There wasn’t very much else I really could do. I started wearing dark glasses, so did Mum, because the orange light hurt our eyes. Other than that, nothing.

         
38)     Only when we tried to leave or call anybody. There was food in the house, though. And Stuffed Muffins™ in the freezer.

         
39)     “If you’d just stopped her wearing that stupid tanning cream a year ago we wouldn’t be in this mess!” But it was unfair, and I apologized afterwards.

         
40)     When Pryderi came back with the dark chocolate bars. He said he’d gone up to a traffic warden and told him that his sister had turned into a giant orange glow and was
controlling our minds. He said the man was extremely rude to him.

         
41)     I don’t have a boyfriend. I did, but we broke up after he went to a Rolling Stones concert with the evil bottle-blond former friend whose name I do not mention. Also, I mean, the Rolling Stones? These little old goat-men hopping around the stage pretending to be all rock-and-roll? Please. So, no.

         
42)     I’d quite like to be a vet. But then I think about having to put animals down, and I don’t know. I want to travel for a bit before I make any decisions.

         
43)     The garden hose. We turned it on full, while she was eating her chocolate bars, and distracted, and we sprayed it at her.

         
44)     Just orange steam, really. Mum said that she had solvents and things in the laboratory, if we could get in there, but by now Her Immanence was hissing mad (literally) and she sort of fixed us to the floor. I can’t explain it. I mean, I wasn’t stuck, but I couldn’t leave or move my legs. I was just where she left me.

         
45)     About half a meter above the carpet. She’d sink down a bit to go through doors, so she didn’t bump her head. And after the hose incident she didn’t go back to her room, just stayed in the main room and floated about grumpily, the color of a luminous carrot.

         
46)     Complete world domination.

         
47)     I wrote it down on a piece of paper and gave it to Pryderi.

         
48)     He had to carry it back. I don’t think Her Immanence really understood money.

         
49)     I don’t know. It was Mum’s idea more than mine. I think she hoped that the solvent might remove the orange. And at that point, it couldn’t hurt. Nothing could have made things worse.

         
50)     It didn’t even upset her, like the hose-water did. I’m pretty sure she liked it. I think I saw her dipping her chocolate bars into it, before she ate them, although I had to sort of squint up my eyes to see anything where she was. It was all a sort of a great orange glow.

         
51)     That we were all going to die. Mum told Pryderi that if the Great Oompa-Loompa let him out to buy chocolate again, he just shouldn’t bother coming back. And I was getting really upset about the animals—I hadn’t fed the chinchilla or Roland the guinea pig for two days, because I couldn’t go into the back garden. I couldn’t go anywhere. Except the loo, and then I had to ask.

         
52)     I suppose because they thought the house was on fire. All the orange light. I mean, it was a natural mistake.

         
53)     We were glad she hadn’t done that to us. Mum said it proved that Nerys was still in there somewhere, because if she had the power to turn us into goo, like she did the
firefighters, she would have done. I said that maybe she just wasn’t powerful enough to turn us into goo at the beginning and now she couldn’t be bothered.

         
54)     You couldn’t even see a person in there anymore. It was a bright orange pulsing light, and sometimes it talked straight into your head.

         
55)     When the spaceship landed.

         
56)     I don’t know. I mean, it was bigger than the whole block, but it didn’t crush anything. It sort of materialized around us, so that our whole house was inside it. And the whole street was inside it too.

         
57)     No. But what else could it have been?

         
58)     A sort of pale blue. They didn’t pulse, either. They twinkled.

         
59)     More than six, less than twenty. It’s not that easy to tell if this is the same intelligent blue light you were just speaking to five minutes ago.

         
60)     Three things. First of all, a promise that Nerys wouldn’t be hurt or harmed. Second, that if they were ever able to return her to the way she was, they’d let us know, and bring her back. Thirdly, a recipe for fluorescent bubble mixture. (I can only assume they were reading Mum’s mind, because she didn’t say anything. It’s possible that Her Immanence told them, though. She definitely had
access to some of “the Vehicle’s” memories.) Also, they gave Pryderi a thing like a glass skateboard.

         
61)     A sort of a liquid sound. Then everything became transparent. I was crying, and so was Mum. And Pryderi said, “Cool beans,” and I started to giggle while crying, and then it was just our house again.

         
62)     We went out into the back garden and looked up. There was something blinking blue and orange, very high, getting smaller and smaller, and we watched it until it was out of sight.

         
63)     Because I didn’t want to.

         
64)     I fed the remaining animals. Roland was in a state. The cats just seemed happy that someone was feeding them again. I don’t know how the chinchilla got out.

         
65)     Sometimes. I mean, you have to bear in mind that she was the single most irritating person on the planet, even before the whole Her Immanence thing. But yes, I guess so. If I’m honest.

         
66)     Sitting outside at night, staring up at the sky, wondering what she’s doing now.

         
67)     He wants his glass skateboard back. He says that it’s his, and the government has no right to keep it. (You are the government, aren’t you?) Mum seems happy to share the patent for the Colored Bubbles recipe with the
government though. The man said that it might be the basis of a whole new branch of molecular something or other. Nobody gave me anything, so I don’t have to worry.

         
68)     Once, in the back garden, looking up at the night sky. I think it was only an orangeyish star, actually. It could have been Mars, I know they call it the red planet. Although once in a while I think that maybe she’s back to herself again, and dancing, up there, wherever she is, and all the aliens love her pole dancing because they just don’t know any better, and they think it’s a whole new art form, and they don’t even mind that she’s sort of square.

         
69)     I don’t know. Sitting in the back garden talking to the cats, maybe. Or blowing silly-colored bubbles.

         
70)     Until the day that I die.

        
           I attest that this is a true statement of events.
Jemima Glorfindel Petula Ramsey

W
HAP!

“Is it always like this?” The kid seemed disoriented. He was glancing around the room, unfocused. That would get him killed, if he wasn’t careful.

Twelve tapped him on the arm. “Nope. Not always. If there’s any trouble, it’ll come from up there.”

He pointed to an attic door, in the ceiling above them. The door was askew, and the darkness waited behind it like an eye.

The kid nodded. Then he said, “How long have we got?”

“Together? Maybe another ten minutes.”

“One thing I kept asking them at Base, they wouldn’t answer. They said I’d see for myself. Who
are
they?”

Twelve didn’t answer. Something had changed, ever so slightly, in the darkness of the attic above them. He touched his finger to his lips, then raised his weapon, and indicated for the kid to do likewise.

They came tumbling down from the attic-hole: brick-gray and mold-green, sharp-toothed and fast, so fast. The kid was still fumbling at the trigger when Twelve started shooting, and he took them out, all five of them, before the kid could fire a shot.