Pontypool Changes Everything полностью

There is another system, more beaded than weather or murder, that is moving up into the province. As Les leaves the chair to investigate his son’s crying a thousand zombies form an alliterative fog around Lake Scugog and beyond, mouthing the words Helen, hello, help. This fog predominates the region; however, other systems compete, bursting and winding with vowels braiding into diphthongs so long that they dissipate across a thousand panting lips. In the suburbs of Barrie, for instance, an alliteration that began with the wail of a cat in heat picked up the consonant “Guh” from a fisherman caught by surprise on Lake Simcoe. The echoing coves of the lake added a sort of meter, and by the time these sounds arrived in Gravenhurst, the people there were certain that a musical was blaring from speakers in the woods. All across the province, zombies, like extras in a crowd scene, imitate a thousand conversations. They open and close their mouths on things and the sound is a heavy carpet of mumbling, a pre-production monstrosity. In minutes the Pontypool fog will march on the town of Sunderland and over the barriers south of Lindsay.

If Les were to remove his shirt, turn his broad back to a light source and allow a map to be drawn there, sharp metal flags could be used to mark the progress of his dead wife’s name, while the top of his underwear could be used to absorb blood as it flows past his belt. The curved red stain that dips over the cleft of his buttocks resembles the smile that has yet to become important to him.

He stands over his son, a little pink twitching man, and he shrugs out our pushpins as he lifts the infant in his blanket. The baby spits out the pill. Les has to insert it into the baby’s throat across the tongue with a finger. Les holds the tiny body against himself; it resists like an insect would, kicking with limbs that improvise. Les holds on in a crush, waiting. Waiting. Waiting.

Soon the baby slackens, the way that babies do when they give up, and Les realizes that he is alone in the police station. Alone with his son and, lying beside a jar of Dilaudid, on the desk, both his gun and the keys to his car. Les puts the keys in his pocket and, juggling the jar and baby like twins, thinks: not mine, really, nobody’s.

He leaves the empty station and finds his car. Driving it from the small pound, he feels a little less excited about his escape than he had about his capture. The objects he carries cling together in inventory. They are only designed to go full circle and he feels them moving beside him. He hears them: “How can we stay meaningful in this, the loose wing of your adventure?”

Les looks down at the son he renames Ernie in desperation, and he cries because a mighty army of questions is bursting in on him from somewhere. I am too small. A tear, followed quickly by another, hangs off his upper lip and turns to a salty drizzle on his tongue. I want to be him. Les lays his hand across baby Ernie’s tiny forearm and he feels the cool chiaroscuro of the tubular limb in his palm — a peaceful place, a narcotic baby world.

I want to drive my car in there.

One of the circles that remains for Les to complete is made round in Caesarea. Les pulls the grey Datsun up into a driveway over an oil stain that drops like a tumbler beneath the car, clicking into place midway along the chassis. The house is a long lakefront structure with wide windows. He steps out of the car. He doesn’t recognise this place, though he has been here before. He does hear the distant jungle thrum of his wife’s name distorted and repeated by a relay of zombie mumbling. He can’t distinguish the word as he stands searching the white air for the source of what he thinks, with alarm, must be a very loud noise somewhere. Some kind of crazy tree bugs. Les scoops his inventory out of the car and sneaks like Santa Claus around the house, into the backyard that slopes its fine yellow lawn down to Lake Scugog.

“Hello!”

The voice is deep and torn; booming out around him it scrapes the water.

“Helen!”

What the hell? Les turns from the boat he’s loading with guns and drugs and babies. The Knockouts. The woman he had struck earlier, still in her pyjamas, is lying on her back, tucked under the hedge that Les has just walked by. She waves a hand that’s missing two fingers and bangs her knees together in what sounds like an attempt to strike out the consonant L.