“Helen!” The little bald man appears through the sliding door. He is not Helen. He is also in pyjamas that bear a long stripe of mud. He grabs the doorframe and launches himself, on hips that pop audibly, into a surprisingly quick flight across the yard. In seconds he is on the dock driving his open mouth at Les’s face. The zombie’s mouth is now telescopic in its reach, and migrating birds take off and land through a hole that opens on his cheek. Les clamps onto the fiend’s arms and propels him into the water. He then jumps into the boat and hauls on the rip cord. The Knockout emerges waist high at the rear of the craft. He has been screaming under water and his voice pierces the air, exploding past sluggish submarine vibrations. He leaps up into the boat, locking his teeth on Les’s knee, and grabs the gun from the seat. With a dorsal fin flip of his arm the gun flies up onto the shore. Les pulls on the cord again, knocking the zombie’s head from his knee with a speeding elbow. The engine finally blathers to life.
The propeller, it should be said, is entering the zombie’s stomach. It releases an underwater ticker tape parade around the man’s waist. His intestines blow their contents out into the lake like party favours unravelling and filling with breath, marking and limiting the excitement. A school of perch, with pointy hats that fall drunkenly over their eyes and straps that pull at delicate gills, is circulating through the loose ambergris. The zombie caves in over the cannon ball in its middle and folds in half on the bottom of Lake Scugog. The boat, something of a paintbrush now, is still tied to the dock. As it extends itself it floats a long feather boa of blood on the clear water. Les scrambles to the front to untie the boat, and after some jagged manoeuvring, made complicated by the interfering scalp of the zombie, the boat is soon cutting the lake into one of the infinite number of wakes that water places under all vessels. Les and his son are finally carried away, on a silver tray, out from Ontario’s zombies towards and horribly close to a fierce little island that is caught in a discrete destiny, one that’s strange to the rest of the province.
Ellen Peterson is not a zombie. She is standing in the dark, at the edge of a pool. She is not entirely sure whether she has walked here or whether magical inward steps have led her here to a place that she makes of herself. The surface of the pool reflects the full moon, and, Ellen thinks, it looks like a large plate in the centre of a satin tablecloth. Ellen drops to a crouch and places the tips of her fingers into the cool, still water. She wriggles her fingers and watches the reflected moon. It soon breaks into diamonds on the surface — diamonds she feels against the back of her hand. Ellen stops moving her fingers and the moon collects itself as white filings haloed over a magnet. Then it breaks again. This time clear in half. Someone is in the water. Ellen shrinks back from the edge. She focuses in the dark and silhouettes start to appear. A fallen tree lies across the bushes. This is familiar. A boulder, now lightly glowing, sits in the water at the far side of the pool.
“Hello there.”
Ellen stands on the bank, closing the front of her bathrobe: a reeve in a bathrobe is better than no reeve at all. The person in the water stops and turns toward her with a splash.
“Excuse me, hello, is everything alright in there?”
“What do you mean?”
The man’s voice is whiny and defensive. There is something disturbing in the question.
“I’m Ellen Peterson, the reeve of Pontypool. There’s a great deal of trouble in the area tonight, and I’m asking if everything is OK with you in there. Aren’t you cold?”
Another voice to her left.
“Why, if he’s cold will he freeze?”
The voice, so tremulous, makes her shiver. The question somehow hasn’t been put to her rhetorically.
“Well, no, I don’t think he’ll freeze.”
A third voice in the bushes behind her.
“Are you lying to him? Is he going to freeze?”
The voice is so frightened that Ellen covers her mouth.
The man in the water has slipped behind the boulder and he holds its sides with his hands.
“If you’re lying to me then you could hate me.”
Ellen drops her hand. She feels the pull of sadness in the light that has emerged on the surface of the tree hiding these people.
“I don’t know you; I couldn’t… hate you.”
The head and shoulders of the man to her left glide into view at the centre of the pool.
“You don’t hate him yet. But if you don’t know him will you stab him with a knife?”
