Pizza Cheese Monster, a FINISHED story. ^^
I've had this story in my head for a while, and a few days ago, when I didn't have anything better to do, I started writing it. And you know what? I also FINISHED writing it, which is pretty much unheard of when it comes to me. Yey! I'm pretty pleased with how it turned out, but I leave the judgement to you, Oh Readers.
There hasn't been any beta readers of this, so if you find any wonky spellings and such, don't hesitate to report it.
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”Hiya, kids!”
”Hey Grandpa! We brought you some flowers -
“And liquorice!”
“ - and liquorice too, yes. Here.”
“You’re too kind! Come here and give an old man a hug.”
The old man smiled as he hugged each of his four grandchildren: Luke, 16, Donna, 14, Clayton, 10, and little Katja, 7. It was a pleasantly warm Saturday in April, and Grandpa, David Rogers, was enjoying the weather from under one of the blooming cherry trees in the garden of the retirement home.
“Now what have we here - oooh, Allsorts! I guess Junior’s back from England then?”
“Yeah, he came home last night -“
“He gave me a teddy bear, look!”
“Now that’s a fine bear, miss Katja, and with a yellow dress just like yours too!”
“He maded it himself you know, in the same store where Santa’s elves makes their toys, he said.”
“Really? So it’s a real pedigree bear then. And what did the rest of you get?”
“An mp3-player.”
“A Daler-Rowney watercolour kit.”
“A signed copy of Night Watch by Terry Pratchett.”
“My my, you’re lucky Christmas is so far off, you’re spoiled enough as it is! But you’re also lucky to have a father who knows how to give things, mine used to give me his old tools, even though I neither asked for nor used them. Is Junior coming to visit today?”
“He said he’d drop by later, he has some paperwork to do first.”
“Working on a Saturday, huh. I guess that’s the price you pay…”
“Grandpa?”
“What? Oh, sorry, I drifted off for a moment. So! What are your plans for this fine day?”
“Dad said we’d go to Alfredo’s after this, ‘cause the pizzas in the UK sucks.”
“Alfredo’s, eh? Did I ever tell you about the Pizza Cheese Monster?”
“Sounds like a bad ad campaign or something. A mascot?”
“If only! No, the monster was real, and if the rumours that floated around when it appeared were true, it was born from a pizza made by Alfredo himself.”
“Get out of here!”
“I swear upon my own name that it’s true! Do you want to hear the story?”
“I don’t like monsters…”
“Don’t worry, miss Katja, it was a nice monster, though most people never realised it. Now, imagine this town, fifty years ago. It looked pretty much the same as now, only those ugly buildings downtown weren’t there yet, the colours were brighter, the women prettier, every car was a work of art, and nobody spent their days indoors staring at a computer or tv screen.
It all started with a girl called Augustine Flinch.”
*
She was always on the heavy side, that Augustine, and when you added a shy disposition and a name like that, well, it was a recipe for getting picked on. She often left school early to comfort herself with a pizza, which wasn’t really helping her cause, but I guess it made her feel better. She always ordered the same thing: thin crust, a smidge of tomato sauce, extra cheese times two. However, if the stories are true, Alfredo was preoccupied by something on that fateful day, and as Augustine grabbed the first slice on her way home she found that some salamis had found their way onto her pizza.
Now, I didn’t see this myself, as far as I know there were only a few witnesses, and they weren’t really paying attention, but what I’ve heard is that, upon discovering the salami, miss Flinch felt as if the whole world was against her, and dramatically tossed the untouched pizza into the stream over by Beaker Road. These days you see kids swimming in that stream, but back then it was an outlet for some of the plants upriver, and not even fish swam in it. It was more a ditch full of green sludge than a natural waterway, and into that the pizza sank.
After that there were a few days when no one noticed anything out of the ordinary. The school ended, summer started, and the gangs started hanging around in their usual places. The Firebirds and the Hot Sparks were the rivalling cool guys, the Cats were the tough girls, the Stitchers were a mixed gang from the Mills, and so on and so forth. I was in a gang too, but though we kept coming up with cool names for ourselves we were never called anything other than the Leftovers, and to be honest that’s exactly what we were.
There were five of us: Bernard, probably the only black kid in town who didn’t live in the Mills. Simon, a short, skinny, bespectacled kid, I’m sure he’d be an IT billionaire if he hadn’t been born a few decades too early. Karl, huge guy, could’ve provided some muscles to one of the tougher gangs, if he hadn’t been the gentlest person on the planet. Adrian… he was just weird, I think he only started hanging out with us because his mother thought he needed some friends, and then stayed ‘cause he didn’t have anything better to do, but we didn’t mind. And then there was me, and I was, well, just average. No interesting physical traits, no particular interests or plans for the future, no stories worth telling about myself or my escapades, which at the time were nonexistent.
We used to hang by an abandoned maintenance building that we called the House, situated right where the railroad crosses the stream. We’d say we liked it there, but in reality we only used that because all the good hanging spots - Alfredo’s, the café, the gas station, the school’s parking lot - were taken. The good thing about the place was that we didn’t get bothered by anybody, the bad thing was that the stream stunk whenever something disturbed it, which was every time a train went by. As it were, we were the first to notice that something was happening in it.
It was a couple of days after the school had ended, a hot day with no wind whatsoever. We were decked out on the platform in front of the House, too warm to speak, trying to keep our Cokes cold by keeping them in the barely existent shade. The only sound to be heard came from the occasional car in the distance, all birds and insects were silent. In hindsight I’d say it was like everything was holding its breath, waiting, but at the time I just wondered vaguely if it was going to rain at all during the summer months. Bernard was the first to break the silence.
“Train’s coming.”
“How can you tell?” I asked, since I couldn’t hear the usual tell-tale whispers of the rails.
“Stream’s starting to smell.”
“Oh yeah…”
I closed my eyes, looking forward to the draught of the passing train, while thinking of how to minimise exposure to the odour of the stream.
“It’s not a train.”
Adrian was sitting at the far left end of the platform, overlooking the bridge and the stream below. I was just about to ask how he knew it wasn’t a train when I heard it.
Gloop. Gloop. Schplouf.
Intrigued, I got up and walked over to Adrian, with Bernard and Simon following, Karl was asleep. At first we didn’t see anything unusual, and I thought that maybe a duck had landed, sunk, and stirred up the sludge, but then I saw it.
A mass of thick, yellowish slime, rising up like the back of a severely diseased whale, then disappearing under the green surface with another gloop. The smell of the thing was ten times worse than that of the stream itself; it was a stench, much like old, sweaty socks and rotten food combined.
“What the hell was that!?”
Simon looked at us as if we were supposed to know the answer, but we didn’t. Different explanations rushed through my head - it could be garbage, some new type of sludge from the plants, or a corpse - but I didn’t know, so I guessed.
“It must’ve been some kind of fish, maybe a mutated one.”
Adrian turned his head to look at me, and in his piercing blue eyes I sensed a question.
“It was going against the stream, right, so it must’ve been something alive… Right?”
He nodded, smiled ever so slightly, but didn’t say anything. It was Bernard who spoke instead.
“Whatever it was, it was creepy, and it stunk up the place big time, so what do you say about getting the hell out of here?”
“Good idea”, Simon said, and they went to wake Karl and gather up the remaining Cokes. I stayed behind for a moment, scanning the surface of the stream, but nothing stirred.
“I wasn’t a fish”, Adrian said, so quietly I could barely hear him. I stared at him, waiting for him to continue, but he just smiled his weird little smile again, got up, and started walking.
“Where are you going?” I called after him.
“Home”, he said.
“Oh, ok. See ya tomorrow, then?”
No answer, just a wave that could’ve meant anything. I shrugged and followed the others, who were debating whether we should go to the café or Alfredo’s. In the end we wound up going to Simon’s place, since his parents had left a load of Coke in the fridge before going to visit some relative in Castor or wherever it was. The mysterious thing in the stream was soon forgotten, but not for long.
*
Darkness.
Sweet, cool darkness. So much better than the heat and glaring light of earlier. Above the surface, above everything, a silvery disc hung in the velvet blackness, surrounded by tiny lights. Its mind was only a few hours old, and it knew no words, but what it felt was the joy and tranquillity of anyone who’s ever gazed upon beauty.
A lone night bird called among the trees, piquing its interest. Both the light and the dark hours of its life had so far been relatively quiet, and the melancholic cry of the bird made it realise that there might be other living things in the world apart from itself.
It left the stream.
*
The next day me, Karl, Simon and Adrian were sitting in the café, drinking milkshakes and waiting for Bernard. Some of the Cat girls were sitting at the centre table, telling us with mere looks that while we were allowed to use the café like any other citizens, we’d be in deep trouble if we started showing any signs of hanging around, so at least I felt a slight bit of relief when Bernard finally arrived.
“Sorry I’m late, ma made me search the whole house.”
“What for?”
“She said there was a dead rat somewhere, ‘cause there was this weird smell, but then we realised it was worse outside, so she decided someone must’ve messed with the stream or something.”
Bernard lived on Beaker Road, overlooking the stream and the forested area known as the Rough on the other side.
“It’s just that…” Bernard said, poking at a cigarette burn on the table, frowning. “The smell was the same as yesterday, you know when we saw that thing by the House. Only much stronger.”
“Did you see it?” Adrian said, fixing Bernard with a stare that could’ve cut diamonds.
“No, but I don’t really want to see it again, so I wasn’t looking too carefully.”
“Should we tell someone?” I asked, realising as I said it that we’d probably be laughed out of the police office if we tried to tell them there was a stinking monster in the stream.
“Maybe we should find it first”, Karl said. “See if it’s something danger -“
At that moment a piercing shriek shattered the heavy summer silence outside. Everybody in the café got up and ran to the windows or through the door, just in time to see a young girl, maybe twelve years old, come running with tears streaming down her face, her dress torn and twigs in her hair. Mr Samuels, a skinny police officer who’d been enjoying a coffee by the counter, ran across the street, caught the girl in his arms and tried to calm her down, asking what had happened. With a glance at my fellow Leftovers I started crossing the street as casually as I could, trying to look as if I’d meant to do it all along. As I approached them I could hear what the girl was telling Mr Samuels.
“- w-was in the R-Rough with Felicia, playing, and papa said we sh-shouldn’t g-go, but we did, and there was this smell, like garbage, and F-Felicia said ‘What’s that?’ and I t-turned, and there was - there was -“
The girl dissolved into sobs, and Mr Samuels lifted her up to carry her into the police house next to the café. As he turned I saw, stuck to the hem of the girl’s pink dress, a large blob of yellowish goo, as if a stray elephant had sneezed on her. But I don’t think any bogey in the world ever smelled like that.
“So… should we tell someone now?” Bernard asked quietly as the two disappeared into the police house and the café guests returned to their milkshakes.
“No”, Adrian said, looking in the direction the girl had come from: Clamdyke Street, which lead almost straight to one of the rickety bridges that crossed the stream. “We should look first.”
“Are. You. Insane? What if that thing was trying to eat the girl?” Simon stared at Adrian, his brown eyes magnified to twice their actual size by his glasses, but Adrian paid him no heed. He crossed Main Street without waiting for us to follow. We looked at each other, and with a couple of shrugs and an exasperated sigh we started jogging to catch up with Adrian.
The Rough was not very big, as forests go, but it was incredibly dense, and the often thorny undergrowth was littered with pieces of cloth that had gotten snagged and torn from the clothes of visitors over the years. Children played in the sunlit fringes of the Rough, youths went further in to have their first, nervous tries at cigarettes, booze or sex, and the occasional wandering hobo would sleep in the dark shade under the tall trees in the middle. Narrow paths, made by animals or people and sometimes both, criss-crossed through the undergrowth, seeking out little glades and half-finished tree houses. It was said that there was an actual house, abandoned and derelict, somewhere near the centre, but the only ones that ventured that far in where the hobos, and they rarely stopped to chat.
There were two bridges crossing the stream between Beaker Road and the Rough, although calling them bridges was rather generous. Wobbly assemblies of scrap wood and rusted nails was a more accurate description, and every spring they had to be reinforced to keep them from collapsing. At some point someone had made signs, naming them Westbridge and Eastbridge, and it was Westbridge we had just crossed, following a path into one of the larger glades.
“Damn, it stinks! And ma’s gonna kill me if I get any of that yellow crap on my clothes.”
“Looks like it came out of the stream here… We could probably find it if we follow the trail.”
“Trail? What trail? The stuff’s everywhere, man! It must’ve been oozing around here for hours at least.”
“Or somebody’s just joking around.”
Three pairs of eyes turned to look at Karl, who was looking thoughtfully at some of the goo that was draped like lace over a bramble bush.
“Have you looked at it closely? It’s cheese.”
“What!? But we saw it move yesterday, and what about that little girl? She was terrified!”
“Maybe someone’s made a cheese suit, I don’t know. But it’s cheese, and cheese doesn’t move around on it’s own.” Karl shrugged and put his hands into his pockets, apparently at ease now that he’d decided that no unknown beast was going to leap out at him. I looked at the goo, wondering how I’d missed the connection. Of course it was cheese, it looked exactly like the strands and lumps you got when pulling out a warm slice of one of Alfredo’s pizzas.
“Mystery solved, then?” Simon chuckled. “Some fool’s running around in a cheese suit, for whatever reason, scaring the crap out of little girls.”
“But what was he or she doing in the stream yesterday?”
“I don’t know, adding eau de stink to the suit? I don’t care, I’m going back to the café to pay for my milkshake.”
“Oh yeah, we didn’t do that! I’m coming too, what about you guys?”
I looked at Bernard, and we both shrugged. Personally I wasn’t 100% convinced by the solution - why would anyone go running around in a cheese suit? - but I couldn’t think of any better answer myself. And I did need to pay for that milkshake, or the Cats would make sure we’d never dare to set foot in the café again. I followed the others towards the Westbridge, but stopped as I realised Adrian was still in the glade, looking like he had no intention of going anywhere.
“Adrian? Are you coming too? Hey, Adrian!”
He looked up, seemed to consider his options, then he tossed me some coins - just enough to cover the milkshake - and started walking along the path to Eastbridge, which was closer to his home. I rolled my eyes and set after the others, thinking that while Adrian was nice enough when he wanted to, he could also be a bit annoying at times.
*
In silence it watched the boys leave. All night and all day it had tried to make contact with all manners of creatures, but the birds had fluttered away, the small mammals that inhabited the Rough had scampered off as fast as they could, and the girls… At first it had thought it was some kind of game, catch me if you can, or that it needed to do something special to gain the trust of other living things, but when the girls had looked at it, and screamed, it had learned of a new emotion.
Fear. Everything feared it, and it didn’t know why. So when it heard the boys approaching it had stayed hidden, and just watched. It learned that humans communicated with a whole array of different sounds, and it realised that that was the special skill it needed to not be feared. In the silence of the Rough, it practiced.
“Ah… drriann…”
*
In the police house Mr Samuels stared at the drawing made by Caroline Gatwick, the girl that had come running screaming down the street half an hour earlier. He couldn’t make sense of it: a bloblike, yellow body, a gaping, toothless maw, and red, irregular eyes. The other girl, Felicia Hawthorne, had given him the same description over the phone, since she had run straight home instead of following Caroline. He looked at the drawing again, and found himself thinking that perhaps a jellyfish had strayed up from the sea and gotten mutated by the polluted waters of the stream, but then he shook his head and decided that it was time to cut down on the comics, his guilty pleasure.
After some considering he put the incident down as a prank, and as he felt it was way too hot to go stumbling through the Rough in search of some mischievous youth, he closed the case. Little did he know that it was just the beginning.
*
Hours later, the night bird called, and found itself answered. Its tail twitched in annoyance: so another male had dared to enter its territory? It called again, and when the reply came it flew towards it. In a moonlit glade it stopped and looked around; it was sure that the rival call had come from here, but there was no other bird in sight. There was just that big, shapeless thing it had seen oozing around the forest the night before.
The bird called once again, and to its surprise it was the ooze-thing that replied. The bird sat still, confused for a moment, then it flew off. If birds had been able to snort disdainfully, go hmpf, it would’ve done so.
Satisfaction. That’s what it felt. It had heard the call, answered, and the bird had arrived. Of course, it had flown off again, but not in fear, like the small, twittering birds of daytime. It sat in the glade, muttering to itself, trying out the different sounds it had learned and wondering what they meant, when it heard the sound of footsteps approaching the glade.
It was too late to try to hide; the slightest move would rustle the old leaves and dry grass surrounding it, so it made itself as flat as it could and hoped that the human would pass by without noticing it. The footsteps stopped, then they came again, quieter, more cautious this time, stopping right in front of it. It looked up.
Pale skin, silvery white in the moonlight, hair as black as the sky between the stars, and eyes… During the day they had been the same shade of blue as the sky, now they seemed to glimmer from within. Hesitantly, it spoke.
“Ahdriann…?”
Adrian smiled.
*
The next morning I got a phone call from Adrian’s mother, Mrs S, asking what we’d been doing during the night. Apparently Adrian had arrived home early in the morning, exhausted, smelling like garbage, and very happy about something, though he wouldn’t say what. I told her I didn’t know what he’d been up to, and asked her to let him know I wanted to talk to him when he woke up.
After that I called Bernard, Simon and Karl, arranging to meet at my place in half an hour, bring some Cokes. However, Bernard came barging in after just a few minutes, saying he’d heard of another Sighting just after I’d called, and this time it was Madame Grey who’d seen what she’d described as “a moving pile of rotting flesh, churning with maggots”.
Madame Grey was a old widow who lived alone with an indefinite number of cats in the last house on Beaker Road, and though that might sound like a recipe for cackling madness it was generally agreed that she was as clear as a day, and sharper than a razor. She spent most of her days lurking behind her lace curtains, waiting to pounce on any kid that seemed to be plotting mischief, although rarely, very rarely, she’d give a lozenge to a kid that had been nice for a longer period of time. In short, the adults liked her, everybody under 20 feared her.
And now she’d seen the moving cheese thing. As soon as Karl and Simon arrived Bernard told us the story.
“So I was eating breakfast, and the window was open, right, and suddenly I hear her voice outside, and she’s not happy. I thought she’d caught some kid again, so I went out to see who it was so I could make fun of them later, and I see she’s talking to, whatshisface, the fat cop?
Miller, right. So she’s talking to Miller, and she actually sound scared, which I didn’t think was possible, and she’s telling him she was just coming back from buying cat food when she noticed this really bad smell, looked up, and saw some big, pale yellow lump moving on the other side of the stream. And she was absolutely convinced it was the corpse of a drowned person, or something, though how it could be moving about she couldn’t say.”
Bernard fell silent, draining his Coke in a few gulps, while the rest of us stared at everything except each other.
“So… it wasn’t a prank then”, said Simon at last. “Madame Grey would’ve seen through that right away.”
We nodded, and I was just about to say I don’t know what when the phone rang. I suddenly remembered what Adrian’s mother had told me earlier, and I rushed downstairs and grabbed the phone just as my father was reaching for it.
“Rogers.”
“It’s me.”
“You were expecting a call?”
“Yes, dad, it’s Adrian. Off you go.”
“Heh.”
“When I was young I respected my elders, that’s all I’m saying…”
“Yeah yeah, I know. Hey Adrian, were you in the Rough last night?”
“What makes you think so, Davey?”
“Your mum told me you came home smelling like crap this morning.”
“…So like her to snitch. Yeah, I was. Why?”
“You know Madame Grey? She saw the, er, cheese thing, less than an hour ago. Bernie heard her talking to the cops.”
Silence.
“Adrian?”
“I’m coming.”
Twenty minutes later we were sitting on the street side bank of the stream, at a point were both the Westbridge and the Eastbridge were in clear view. We were not alone; Madame Grey had made sure the whole street knew what she’d seen, and now the town’s whole police force, which consisted of Samuels and Miller, stood by the bridges, preparing to enter the Rough.
A couple of hysterical kids was one thing, Madame Grey quite another.
“This is wrong”, Adrian said, looking anxiously into the gloom of the forest.
“Are you going to tell us what happened last night?” I asked him.
“I… I went in. I found it”, he replied, quietly so that a bunch of kids nearby wouldn’t hear.
“And what was it?” Karl asked, his eyes wide with disbelief.
“I don’t know, but it was made of cheese, the kind you get on pizza. I named it Charlie.”
“Charlie!?”
Bernard, Karl and Simon nearly fell into the stream laughing, but I was looking at Adrian, and he wasn’t sporting that crooked smile he usually had when joking. Instead he looked uncharacteristically grave.
“It’s true…?”
Adrian nodded, and the others stopped laughing.
“It - he’s not mean, he’s just… lonely. And everybody’s afraid of him, for no reason. I mean, pizza cheese isn’t evil, right?”
“Right”, Bernard said, looking like he was about to start laughing again, but was distracted by a whistle that signalled the police men’s entrance into the Rough. Adrian stood up, his eyes ablaze.
“I can’t let them find him”, he said, then he turned around and crossed the street. I was just about to ask where he was going when he turned again, started running, and leapt over the stream with the ease of a gazelle, leaving the rest of us gaping like fish on land.
“How’s - that’s must’ve been - Adrian! How come you’ve never tried for the long jump team!?”
No answer, he had already disappeared among the trees. We scrambled to our feet and ran towards the Eastbridge, which was closest, but as we approached an unexpected hindrance came into view: a shining black car, with deep red flames covering the from half. A number of guys dressed in black and red leather sat in or stood around the car, and I groaned inwardly; the Hot Sparks had come to watch the spectacle.
“Well well well, look what we have here!”
“What are you running from, Leftovers? Afraid the monster’s gonna catch you?”
“Nope”, I said, slowing to a walk, trying not to pant. “We’re going into the Rough to find it.”
“Ah, but we can’t let you do that, now can we? The cops wouldn’t want anybody barging in on their search -“
“We’re not barging in, we’re going to help!” Simon snarled, glaring at Guy Rotchet, the leader of the gang, who sniggered unpleasantly.
“Oooh look, the four-eyed shrimp’s going to help! Such a model citizen, ain’t he?”
“Cut the crap, Rotchet”, I said, attempting to sound braver than I was. “This is our area, in case you didn’t know -“
“What did you say to me?” Rotchet’s voice was suddenly a deadly whisper, and in his hand I saw the menacing gleam of a small, but no doubt very sharp knife.
“I said, would you like me to rearrange your face for you? You might end up ugly instead of hideous, if you’re lucky.” Karl had stepped in front of me, towering a head taller and far more muscular than any of the Hot Sparks, most of whom suddenly looked like they’d rather be somewhere else. Rotchet opened his mouth to say something, but closed it again when he couldn’t think of anything snappy enough. Instead he jerked his head towards the bridge, indicating that we were free to go, this time.
We didn’t need telling twice, and within a minute we were in the woods, breathing heavy sighs of relief in a glade festooned with strings of cheese.
“Don’t ever, ever, let me do something like that again. I thought he was going to gut me with that knife!” Karl said, sitting down on the spot where his shaking knees had given in.
“He wouldn’t”, said Simon, who was actually Rotchet’s cousin, though both of them pretended the relation never existed. “He talks big, but he’s a coward, really. He wouldn’t be anything without his cronies.”
“A comforting thought, too bad he has them -“, Bernard started, but fell silent as calls came echoing from deeper inside the Rough.
“You think they found it? Charlie?” Karl whispered.
“Or they found Adrian, come on!”
We ran, as fast as we could while dodging trees and getting tangled in the undergrowth. The calls were getting stronger, and soon we could hear what was being shouted.
“- are you, Miller? I need backup, there’s something big here! Miller? Miller! OW!”
We slowed down and crept as quietly as we could towards the spot where Mr Samuels stood. Or had been standing, for as the trees cleared we saw Mr Samuels on the ground, unconscious, with Adrian standing next to him, holding a large branch like a club. And behind them, hiding under the lowest branches of a pine tree, was Charlie the pizza cheese monster.
“My god, Adrian, what have you done…” I whispered as the impact of the scene hit me.
“I can’t let them find him”, Adrian said, and I saw that he was crying. “They’ll take him away, cut him up, and he - he doesn’t deserve it!” He walked over to and knelt in front of the pine, gesturing for Charlie to emerge. It was like watching a cross between a caterpillar and a jellyfish move; great ripples surged through the mass of living cheese, forcing it forward into the light. Its eyes were dark red with specks of white, and I was just about to comment on how they looked just like salami, when the distant sounds of an approaching person reached us, making Adrian blanch.
“That must be Miller”, I said, thinking fast. “Ok, Adrian, you and Charlie get out of here as fast as you can, we’ll stay and say Samuels was hit by a branch falling from a tree, and that we were just trying to help with the search. Is that ok with you guys?”
They all nodded.
“I’ll head him off a bit, say I was looking for him and then pretend I can’t find the way back”, Simon said, and dashed away. Karl reached up and pulled a large, dry branch from a tree next to Mr Samuels, placing it next to him so that the fresh break area was obvious. The branch Adrian had used was stowed away under a large, thorny bush by Bernard, and I watched anxiously as Adrian tried to convince an unwilling Charlie to move deeper into the Rough. Slowly, ever so slowly, they disappeared among the trees, and as I heard Simon and Miller coming they were finally out of both sight and hearing. I knelt by Mr Samuels, hoping to look like I was caring for him, and I was relieved to find that the branch had only left a small cut on the back of his head. He stirred as I adjusted his position to make him more comfortable.
“Shit, are you ok Kevin?” Miller asked as he entered the clearing.
“Uh, I think someone hit -“
“It was a branch that fell, this one, see? We were just behind you, we saw it happen, right guys?” I babbled desperately.
“Damn hard branch, that one… Gimme a hand, Mill, I think I might have a concussion.”
Mr Samuels struggled to his feet with the help of his colleague, and an uneasy silence settled. The cops knew the members of all the gangs in the town, soon they’d ask where Adrian was, and maybe Samuels saw him before he hit, and what if he’d seen Charlie - wait, he had, hadn’t he? He’d said there was something big, maybe he realised we were hiding it -
“I think we’d better get back to the station, I’m not up to any more cavorting around in here today. And besides, I saw what we were looking for just before I got knocked out, and I’m pretty sure it was just an albino badger covered in cheese.”
“A badger? Are you sure? Ol’ Grey said it was pretty big.”
“Yeah, it sounded like one, and they’re bigger than people think. I guess Alfredo must’ve been dumping old cheese somewhere, ‘cause it was covered in it.
“Huh, all this fuss for a bloody white badger in cheese. I tell ya, there’s not enough going on in this place, people have to make things up. Ok, let’s go. You kids better come along, we wouldn’t want the phantom badger to get you, right?”
A meek chorus of agreement, and we were off, not daring to look back in case it seemed suspicious.
*
Deeper and deeper into the Rough they went, moving with increasing ease as the trees grew taller and the undergrowth lessened. Here and there they saw the remains of hobo camps, but as the woods grew even darker they, too, disappeared. Adrian looked around curiously, wondering why no one went this far in even though this cathedral of trees with its soft carpet of moss was so much nicer than the dense, littered shrub forest nearer to the stream. Perhaps they found it frightening, the way the dusk reigned even in the middle of the day, or they were afraid of getting lost, but Adrian found the shaded silence soothing. Confident that no one could hear him he started whistling, then he laughed as Charlie, after a few tries, mimicked the sound perfectly. And so, whistling silly little melodies together, they found the house.
It stood in what had once been a clearing, surrounded by the remains of a garden, its few surviving flowers making out-of-place splashes of colour in the gloom. The house itself was made of roughly hewn stones, with a small doorway and small windows, the frames painted with a faded and peeling blue. The roof had probably been thatched once upon a time, now it was open to the skies, making the remaining brick chimney look even taller than it was. The floor inside was covered in smooth flagstones with big piles of leaves in the corners, and the fireplace was big enough to sleep in, which was exactly what Adrian intended to do.
The garden continued on the backside, with unkempt shrubs full of raspberries, bramble, gooseberries and blackcurrant. Strawberries grew wild in the grass, and when he looked closer he found carrots, potatoes and onions as well. Hollyhocks grew taller than any he’d seen before, and a white rambler rose that covered most of the house spread a divine scent over it all, though it didn’t completely mask the smell of old cheese. A small spring bubbled by the roots of a great oak, its clear water as unlike the sludge of the stream as it could possibly be.
Adrian closed his eyes, breathed deeply, and smiled. Despite being on the run with a, for want of a better word, monster, and having clubbed an officer of the law, he felt happier than he could remember ever feeling before.
“Welcome home, Charlie.”
*
“Good afternoon, Alfredo.”
“Ah, gooda afterenoon, Signor Officer! Woulda you lika pizza, eh?”
“Maybe later. I came to ask if you’ve been throwing away any old cheese, in the Rough for example?”
“Throw awaye olda cheese? Noo, not me! I maka many pizzas, use all my cheese, nothing gets olda!”
“Hmm, are you sure?”
“Absoluta, Signor Officer!”
”Huh. I guess someone must’ve dumped it off the interstate on the other side of the Rough, then. Beats me how so much wound up here. Oh well, I thank you for your co-operation, Alfredo.”
“Anytime, Signor Officer!”
“Uh, excuse me, Mr Miller, sir?”
“Yes? Miss Flinch, isn’t it?”
“Uh, yeah. Thing is, uh, I tossed a pizza in the stream the other day, and, uh, it had double extra cheese on it… um.”
“Oh? Don’t worry, miss, you’d have to throw a hundred pizzas like that to get the amount of cheese that’s littering the Rough right now.”
“Oh, ok. Sorry for, uh, wasting your time.”
“Don’t be, it’s not like there’s much to do anyway.”
*
A gentle breeze dislodged a few rose petals, and it, Charlie, watched as they floated down and settled on the boy sleeping in the fireplace. On the third night of its life, it learned what love felt like.
*
Two days went by, and the town was growing restless. There had been no more sightings of Charlie, but Madame Grey had gotten furious when her vision had been explained as a mere badger (“I know what a badger looks like, and what I saw was not one!”). She spent hours stomping up and down Beaker Street, telling parents to keep their kids indoors, and trying to organise a search for that lost boy, Adrian Sanders.
Needless to say, Adrian’s mother wasn’t too pleased with the police either, and she posted notices all over the town, asking if anyone had seen him, but no one had, since no one had dared to enter the Rough since the last search, despite Mr Samuels’ reassurance that there was no monster.
And so, three days after Adrian had vanished, a larger police force arrived from Bardon County, bringing flamethrowers to please the ones that had been clamouring the loudest for something to be done, though they assured anyone who asked that they wouldn’t use them unless they met King Kong. Rain was pouring from steel grey clouds, thunder was rolling in the distance, and an ominous feeling of foreboding had the whole town in its grip.
We were sitting in Bernard’s kitchen, watching the cops milling around on the other side of the rain splattered windows. We had offered to help with the search, but been rejected, and now we were sitting in silence, trying to think of ways to find Adrian and Charlie before the cops did. Police dogs, spaniels for searching, German shepherds for attacking, barked in the rain, omitting any possibility of outrunning the searchers. Both the Westbridge and the Eastbridge were guarded, and would remain so during the search, and none of us felt capable of jumping over the stream like Adrian had done.
“It’s hopeless, isn’t it?” Simon said forlornly, speaking for all of us even though we didn’t want to admit it.
“There must be a way… Didn’t someone build a bridge at the end of the street a couple of summers ago?”
“Yeah, but Madame Grey had it torn down, she said it ruined her view.”
“Bloody old witch…”
We all nodded in agreement, and silence reigned again. Outside, the cops disappeared into the Rough. The search was on. Unable to sit still any more I got up and started pacing around the kitchen.
“There must be a way! Or - hey! What if Adrian isn’t in the Rough any more!?”
“What are you on to, Davey?”
“The House! He can’t be out in the woods when it’s raining like this, right? He, and Charlie, could’ve gone there early in the morning, ‘cause I’m pretty sure no one’s been there today!”
“Well, it’s not like we have anything better to -“ Bernard started, but was interrupted by Karl.
“The railroad bridge! If Adrian’s not in the House we can get into the Rough that way!”
“Genius! Let’s go!”
We dashed out without even grabbing our jackets, and ran all the way to the House, which turned out to be empty. We waited impatiently for a freight train to pass, then we went over the bridge, stepping carefully on the slippery sleepers. From this side there were no paths leading into the Rough, so we had to fight our way through massive thickets of bramble, but no one complained. We could hear the dogs barking somewhere ahead of us, and I hoped that there were too many trails to follow for them to find the right one.
We moved in a roughly northern direction, and sooner than I expected we arrived at the glade where Mr Samuels had been clubbed. It was now full of muddy tracks, and the dogs were still ahead of us, in the direction Adrian and Charlie had taken when they escaped. We were all exhausted, out of breath, but there was no time to rest. We moved on.
We caught up with the search party as they stopped, surrounding a roofless old house. All the dogs were barking like mad, and their handlers had to fight to keep them from rushing into the ruin. We stayed back, unnoticed, and listened to what was being said.
“- must be something else in there, they wouldn’t behave like this if it was just a person.”
“How ‘bout a white badger covered in cheese?”
“It’s weird, there’s stinkin’ cheese all over the place, I’ve never seen anything like it - oh, look, the chief’s going in.”
Mr Samuels approached the house cautiously, with dry twigs sticking out of his boots. Bits of shrubbery, old vines, and even a rambler rose in bloom had been dragged over the empty windows and doorway, shielding the interior of the house from view.
“Adrian Sanders, are you in there? This is the police.”
Thunder rumbled, closer now, but there was no answer. Mr Samuels was just about to pull the plant cover apart when Adrian appeared, pale, resolute, and soaking wet, in the doorway.
“What do you want?”
“To get you home, your mother has been worried sick -“
“She knows I can take care of myself, and I have everything I need right here. I was just going to camp out for a while.”
“Come now, without any notice? You don’t even have an umbrella!”
“The fireplace is dry.”
“But you’re not, and I didn’t drag a bunch of officers from Bardon County all the way here just to go back empty-handed, so you’re coming with us now, young man, or there’ll be a reckoning!”
Mr Samuels grabbed Adrian’s arm, pulled him out of the house, and was halfway across the clearing when lightning struck the chimney with a blast like cannon fire. An unearthly howl went up from the inside of the house, and before anyone recovered from the shock a partially charred Charlie came galumphing through the door, heading straight towards Adrian.
“No! Charlie, get back, get ba - NO!”
With a roar one of the flamethrowers lashed out, then another, and a third. Charlie twisted and shrieked in agony, his back on fire, and Adrian screamed with him, trying to free himself from Mr Samuels’ grip. Anyone who’s ever failed at cooking knows that cheese burns fast, and within a minute all that remained of Charlie was a bubbling puddle with a black crust, and an acrid smell that mingled with the scent of the white roses.
Adrian fell to his knees, shaking, and abandoning all caution I ran forward, knelt down, and put my arms around him. He wasn’t crying, he just stared at the remains as if he couldn’t comprehend what had happened.
“Ok… Can somebody tell me what the hell that thing was?”
One of the cops from Bardon County was the first to speak, and the sound broke Adrian’s paralysis. He got to his feet, slowly, looking at the police men and the howling dogs as if trying to decide whom to tear apart first, but when Mr Samuels put his hand on Adrian’s shoulder he trembled, and with cry like a wounded animal he broke free and ran, not back towards the town, but even further into the woods. A couple of cops looked like they were about to follow, but Mr Samuels gestured at them to stay, then he looked at me, Bernard, Simon and Karl.
“You boys better explain what just happened here”, he said, quietly, and so we did.
*
Adrian returned home late that evening, locking himself in his room without a word to anyone, and there he stayed for almost two weeks. Meanwhile the town buzzed with rumours, though it soon died down, as none of the people that knew what had really happened there in the Rough would speak of it. The white badger in cheese explanation was maintained as the truth, and eventually Madame Grey learned to live with it. Adrian, however, was suddenly viewed as weird and antisocial, possibly a bit off in the head even, so it was perhaps not so strange that when he finally emerged he had adopted a mostly nocturnal lifestyle, avoiding people as much as he could. It was therefore another week or so before I got to talk to him.
We were sitting on the platform outside the House, just the two of us, gazing at the stars, listening to the chirps of crickets and the distant call of a lone night bird.
“I’m moving next week. Mum found an apartment up in Castor, she thinks it’ll be good for me to start over where no one knows me.”
“Will it?”
“Dunno. We’ll see.”
Chiiirrp. Chiiirrp. Chiiirrp.
“Adrian?”
“Mm?”
“When you… when you first met Charlie, how did you know he wouldn’t, you know, eat you or something?”
Chiiirrp.
“I just knew.”
“Oh. Will you be coming back here sometime?”
“… We’ll see.”
*
“There were moments, when I was older and in Castor for business, when I thought I saw him, but I was never certain. I never got to speak to him again after that last night, that’s for sure.”
“That was a sad story, Grandpa.”
“Yes it was, miss Katja. I had managed to forget that, somehow.”
“It was a good story, though. I didn’t know the woods by the stream used to be like that.”
“You wouldn’t know, master Clayton, as they were tamed just a couple of years after the pizza cheese incident. The undergrowth was razed, proper tracks were made, and if I recall correctly the old house and its garden was turned into a picnic spot. They started calling it the Green instead of the Rough. I never went there again though…”
“What happened to Charlie, did somebody bury him?”
“Not that I know. I heard Guy Rotchet saying he’d seen people in protective clothing carry something from the Rough to an unmarked van parked on the interstate, but I don’t know how much truth there is in that -“
“Old man, are you telling your tall tales to the kids again?”
“Hi dad! Grandpa just told us about the pizza cheese monster!”
“Oh, that old story. I hope you didn’t believe a word of it, ‘cause I don’t want you to start throwing food into the stream.”
“Ha, it wouldn’t work now anyway, the way I figure it was just the right combination of chemicals that made the cheese mutate -“
“Oh please, spare me! Anyway, did these rugrats give you the Allsorts?”
“Indeed they did, and it was as delicious as always, thanks.”
“Ok. Now, apologies for the short visit, but I promised we’d visit Alfredo’s for dinner. I’ll come by tomorrow, is that ok?”
“You know it is, Junior. See you then, then. Bye kids, thanks for the visit!”
“Bye Grandpa!”
*
Epilogue.
Clayton woke early the next morning, and couldn’t go back to sleep. He had dreamt that he was walking around with a pizza on a leash, like a flattened chihuahua, and he giggled when he remembered it. He turned away from the bright window, and his eyes fell on the Daler-Rowney watercolour kit his father had given him. Suddenly wide awake he got up, dressed, ate a bowl of cereal, made a note saying where he’d gone and that he had his cellphone with him, put his on shoes, and went outside with the kit under his arm.
Beaker Road was just a couple of blocks away, though it didn’t look much like his grandfather would’ve remembered it: most of the old houses had been torn down to give way for new, fancy villas as the stream was cleansed and the untamed Rough became the safe, boring Green. There was still only two bridges, though they were now built by professionals instead of kids with nothing better to do.
Over the Westbridge Clayton went, humming to himself. Signs pointed towards a picnic area somewhere ahead, and he followed the wide, sunlit path into the green twilight under the tall trees. The house came into view: several trees had been cut down around it, making the clearing much larger than it had originally been. The white rambler rose was still there, and a few hollyhocks, but the berry shrubs were gone, as were the vegetables. The oak that had cradled the spring was replaced with a basin in ugly, turquoise mosaic, and right in front of the house there was a large table with attached benches. Random bits of rubbish was littering the uneven lawn of the clearing, despite the trash cans attached to a couple of trees, and several old beer cans was floating in the spring.
Clayton bent down a peered under the table. The grass had been worn away by thousands of feet over the years, but he suspected that no grass would grow in that spot even if the table was removed. He straightened up and looked towards the doorway. There was a small pile of garbage just outside it, as if someone had cleared out the house without bothering to toss the trash in the cans. He went inside, and backed out almost immediately.
Someone was already in there.
“It’s ok kid, I was just leaving.”
A tall, skinny man with almost pure white hair ducked out through the doorway, brushing soot from his pants as he went. He’d been sitting in the fireplace.
“Aren’t you a bit young to be out on your own?”
“My dad knows where I am.”
“Right. You’re an artist?”
“Well… My grandpa told me about this place, and I thought I’d see if it was as nice as he said, maybe try to paint something, but…”
“It used to be nice, when I was young. Not many people knew about it then. I come back here every now and then, but it’s never the same…”
The man fell silent, his gaze lost in a distant past. Clayton hesitated, then he asked, because he had to know.
“Excuse me mister, do you know someone called David Rogers?”
The man stared at Clayton, his brilliant blue eyes wide in surprise.
“David Rogers? Yeah I knew him, is he still around?”
“He’s my grandpa. He told me about you, and - and about what happened here.”
“Ah…” A shadow fell over the man’s thin face as he looked towards the ground under the table, but then he shook his head and smiled.
“Good ol’ Davey. I meant to visit him, but somehow it never happened. Where does he live now?”
“In the Red Oak retirement home, right next to the Clandestine Bar on Main Street. I think he’d be happy to meet you again.”
“You know, I might just go and see him right now. Thanks for letting me know.”
And with that, Adrian left the abandoned house for the last time.
There hasn't been any beta readers of this, so if you find any wonky spellings and such, don't hesitate to report it.
*******************************
”Hiya, kids!”
”Hey Grandpa! We brought you some flowers -
“And liquorice!”
“ - and liquorice too, yes. Here.”
“You’re too kind! Come here and give an old man a hug.”
The old man smiled as he hugged each of his four grandchildren: Luke, 16, Donna, 14, Clayton, 10, and little Katja, 7. It was a pleasantly warm Saturday in April, and Grandpa, David Rogers, was enjoying the weather from under one of the blooming cherry trees in the garden of the retirement home.
“Now what have we here - oooh, Allsorts! I guess Junior’s back from England then?”
“Yeah, he came home last night -“
“He gave me a teddy bear, look!”
“Now that’s a fine bear, miss Katja, and with a yellow dress just like yours too!”
“He maded it himself you know, in the same store where Santa’s elves makes their toys, he said.”
“Really? So it’s a real pedigree bear then. And what did the rest of you get?”
“An mp3-player.”
“A Daler-Rowney watercolour kit.”
“A signed copy of Night Watch by Terry Pratchett.”
“My my, you’re lucky Christmas is so far off, you’re spoiled enough as it is! But you’re also lucky to have a father who knows how to give things, mine used to give me his old tools, even though I neither asked for nor used them. Is Junior coming to visit today?”
“He said he’d drop by later, he has some paperwork to do first.”
“Working on a Saturday, huh. I guess that’s the price you pay…”
“Grandpa?”
“What? Oh, sorry, I drifted off for a moment. So! What are your plans for this fine day?”
“Dad said we’d go to Alfredo’s after this, ‘cause the pizzas in the UK sucks.”
“Alfredo’s, eh? Did I ever tell you about the Pizza Cheese Monster?”
“Sounds like a bad ad campaign or something. A mascot?”
“If only! No, the monster was real, and if the rumours that floated around when it appeared were true, it was born from a pizza made by Alfredo himself.”
“Get out of here!”
“I swear upon my own name that it’s true! Do you want to hear the story?”
“I don’t like monsters…”
“Don’t worry, miss Katja, it was a nice monster, though most people never realised it. Now, imagine this town, fifty years ago. It looked pretty much the same as now, only those ugly buildings downtown weren’t there yet, the colours were brighter, the women prettier, every car was a work of art, and nobody spent their days indoors staring at a computer or tv screen.
It all started with a girl called Augustine Flinch.”
*
She was always on the heavy side, that Augustine, and when you added a shy disposition and a name like that, well, it was a recipe for getting picked on. She often left school early to comfort herself with a pizza, which wasn’t really helping her cause, but I guess it made her feel better. She always ordered the same thing: thin crust, a smidge of tomato sauce, extra cheese times two. However, if the stories are true, Alfredo was preoccupied by something on that fateful day, and as Augustine grabbed the first slice on her way home she found that some salamis had found their way onto her pizza.
Now, I didn’t see this myself, as far as I know there were only a few witnesses, and they weren’t really paying attention, but what I’ve heard is that, upon discovering the salami, miss Flinch felt as if the whole world was against her, and dramatically tossed the untouched pizza into the stream over by Beaker Road. These days you see kids swimming in that stream, but back then it was an outlet for some of the plants upriver, and not even fish swam in it. It was more a ditch full of green sludge than a natural waterway, and into that the pizza sank.
After that there were a few days when no one noticed anything out of the ordinary. The school ended, summer started, and the gangs started hanging around in their usual places. The Firebirds and the Hot Sparks were the rivalling cool guys, the Cats were the tough girls, the Stitchers were a mixed gang from the Mills, and so on and so forth. I was in a gang too, but though we kept coming up with cool names for ourselves we were never called anything other than the Leftovers, and to be honest that’s exactly what we were.
There were five of us: Bernard, probably the only black kid in town who didn’t live in the Mills. Simon, a short, skinny, bespectacled kid, I’m sure he’d be an IT billionaire if he hadn’t been born a few decades too early. Karl, huge guy, could’ve provided some muscles to one of the tougher gangs, if he hadn’t been the gentlest person on the planet. Adrian… he was just weird, I think he only started hanging out with us because his mother thought he needed some friends, and then stayed ‘cause he didn’t have anything better to do, but we didn’t mind. And then there was me, and I was, well, just average. No interesting physical traits, no particular interests or plans for the future, no stories worth telling about myself or my escapades, which at the time were nonexistent.
We used to hang by an abandoned maintenance building that we called the House, situated right where the railroad crosses the stream. We’d say we liked it there, but in reality we only used that because all the good hanging spots - Alfredo’s, the café, the gas station, the school’s parking lot - were taken. The good thing about the place was that we didn’t get bothered by anybody, the bad thing was that the stream stunk whenever something disturbed it, which was every time a train went by. As it were, we were the first to notice that something was happening in it.
It was a couple of days after the school had ended, a hot day with no wind whatsoever. We were decked out on the platform in front of the House, too warm to speak, trying to keep our Cokes cold by keeping them in the barely existent shade. The only sound to be heard came from the occasional car in the distance, all birds and insects were silent. In hindsight I’d say it was like everything was holding its breath, waiting, but at the time I just wondered vaguely if it was going to rain at all during the summer months. Bernard was the first to break the silence.
“Train’s coming.”
“How can you tell?” I asked, since I couldn’t hear the usual tell-tale whispers of the rails.
“Stream’s starting to smell.”
“Oh yeah…”
I closed my eyes, looking forward to the draught of the passing train, while thinking of how to minimise exposure to the odour of the stream.
“It’s not a train.”
Adrian was sitting at the far left end of the platform, overlooking the bridge and the stream below. I was just about to ask how he knew it wasn’t a train when I heard it.
Gloop. Gloop. Schplouf.
Intrigued, I got up and walked over to Adrian, with Bernard and Simon following, Karl was asleep. At first we didn’t see anything unusual, and I thought that maybe a duck had landed, sunk, and stirred up the sludge, but then I saw it.
A mass of thick, yellowish slime, rising up like the back of a severely diseased whale, then disappearing under the green surface with another gloop. The smell of the thing was ten times worse than that of the stream itself; it was a stench, much like old, sweaty socks and rotten food combined.
“What the hell was that!?”
Simon looked at us as if we were supposed to know the answer, but we didn’t. Different explanations rushed through my head - it could be garbage, some new type of sludge from the plants, or a corpse - but I didn’t know, so I guessed.
“It must’ve been some kind of fish, maybe a mutated one.”
Adrian turned his head to look at me, and in his piercing blue eyes I sensed a question.
“It was going against the stream, right, so it must’ve been something alive… Right?”
He nodded, smiled ever so slightly, but didn’t say anything. It was Bernard who spoke instead.
“Whatever it was, it was creepy, and it stunk up the place big time, so what do you say about getting the hell out of here?”
“Good idea”, Simon said, and they went to wake Karl and gather up the remaining Cokes. I stayed behind for a moment, scanning the surface of the stream, but nothing stirred.
“I wasn’t a fish”, Adrian said, so quietly I could barely hear him. I stared at him, waiting for him to continue, but he just smiled his weird little smile again, got up, and started walking.
“Where are you going?” I called after him.
“Home”, he said.
“Oh, ok. See ya tomorrow, then?”
No answer, just a wave that could’ve meant anything. I shrugged and followed the others, who were debating whether we should go to the café or Alfredo’s. In the end we wound up going to Simon’s place, since his parents had left a load of Coke in the fridge before going to visit some relative in Castor or wherever it was. The mysterious thing in the stream was soon forgotten, but not for long.
*
Darkness.
Sweet, cool darkness. So much better than the heat and glaring light of earlier. Above the surface, above everything, a silvery disc hung in the velvet blackness, surrounded by tiny lights. Its mind was only a few hours old, and it knew no words, but what it felt was the joy and tranquillity of anyone who’s ever gazed upon beauty.
A lone night bird called among the trees, piquing its interest. Both the light and the dark hours of its life had so far been relatively quiet, and the melancholic cry of the bird made it realise that there might be other living things in the world apart from itself.
It left the stream.
*
The next day me, Karl, Simon and Adrian were sitting in the café, drinking milkshakes and waiting for Bernard. Some of the Cat girls were sitting at the centre table, telling us with mere looks that while we were allowed to use the café like any other citizens, we’d be in deep trouble if we started showing any signs of hanging around, so at least I felt a slight bit of relief when Bernard finally arrived.
“Sorry I’m late, ma made me search the whole house.”
“What for?”
“She said there was a dead rat somewhere, ‘cause there was this weird smell, but then we realised it was worse outside, so she decided someone must’ve messed with the stream or something.”
Bernard lived on Beaker Road, overlooking the stream and the forested area known as the Rough on the other side.
“It’s just that…” Bernard said, poking at a cigarette burn on the table, frowning. “The smell was the same as yesterday, you know when we saw that thing by the House. Only much stronger.”
“Did you see it?” Adrian said, fixing Bernard with a stare that could’ve cut diamonds.
“No, but I don’t really want to see it again, so I wasn’t looking too carefully.”
“Should we tell someone?” I asked, realising as I said it that we’d probably be laughed out of the police office if we tried to tell them there was a stinking monster in the stream.
“Maybe we should find it first”, Karl said. “See if it’s something danger -“
At that moment a piercing shriek shattered the heavy summer silence outside. Everybody in the café got up and ran to the windows or through the door, just in time to see a young girl, maybe twelve years old, come running with tears streaming down her face, her dress torn and twigs in her hair. Mr Samuels, a skinny police officer who’d been enjoying a coffee by the counter, ran across the street, caught the girl in his arms and tried to calm her down, asking what had happened. With a glance at my fellow Leftovers I started crossing the street as casually as I could, trying to look as if I’d meant to do it all along. As I approached them I could hear what the girl was telling Mr Samuels.
“- w-was in the R-Rough with Felicia, playing, and papa said we sh-shouldn’t g-go, but we did, and there was this smell, like garbage, and F-Felicia said ‘What’s that?’ and I t-turned, and there was - there was -“
The girl dissolved into sobs, and Mr Samuels lifted her up to carry her into the police house next to the café. As he turned I saw, stuck to the hem of the girl’s pink dress, a large blob of yellowish goo, as if a stray elephant had sneezed on her. But I don’t think any bogey in the world ever smelled like that.
“So… should we tell someone now?” Bernard asked quietly as the two disappeared into the police house and the café guests returned to their milkshakes.
“No”, Adrian said, looking in the direction the girl had come from: Clamdyke Street, which lead almost straight to one of the rickety bridges that crossed the stream. “We should look first.”
“Are. You. Insane? What if that thing was trying to eat the girl?” Simon stared at Adrian, his brown eyes magnified to twice their actual size by his glasses, but Adrian paid him no heed. He crossed Main Street without waiting for us to follow. We looked at each other, and with a couple of shrugs and an exasperated sigh we started jogging to catch up with Adrian.
The Rough was not very big, as forests go, but it was incredibly dense, and the often thorny undergrowth was littered with pieces of cloth that had gotten snagged and torn from the clothes of visitors over the years. Children played in the sunlit fringes of the Rough, youths went further in to have their first, nervous tries at cigarettes, booze or sex, and the occasional wandering hobo would sleep in the dark shade under the tall trees in the middle. Narrow paths, made by animals or people and sometimes both, criss-crossed through the undergrowth, seeking out little glades and half-finished tree houses. It was said that there was an actual house, abandoned and derelict, somewhere near the centre, but the only ones that ventured that far in where the hobos, and they rarely stopped to chat.
There were two bridges crossing the stream between Beaker Road and the Rough, although calling them bridges was rather generous. Wobbly assemblies of scrap wood and rusted nails was a more accurate description, and every spring they had to be reinforced to keep them from collapsing. At some point someone had made signs, naming them Westbridge and Eastbridge, and it was Westbridge we had just crossed, following a path into one of the larger glades.
“Damn, it stinks! And ma’s gonna kill me if I get any of that yellow crap on my clothes.”
“Looks like it came out of the stream here… We could probably find it if we follow the trail.”
“Trail? What trail? The stuff’s everywhere, man! It must’ve been oozing around here for hours at least.”
“Or somebody’s just joking around.”
Three pairs of eyes turned to look at Karl, who was looking thoughtfully at some of the goo that was draped like lace over a bramble bush.
“Have you looked at it closely? It’s cheese.”
“What!? But we saw it move yesterday, and what about that little girl? She was terrified!”
“Maybe someone’s made a cheese suit, I don’t know. But it’s cheese, and cheese doesn’t move around on it’s own.” Karl shrugged and put his hands into his pockets, apparently at ease now that he’d decided that no unknown beast was going to leap out at him. I looked at the goo, wondering how I’d missed the connection. Of course it was cheese, it looked exactly like the strands and lumps you got when pulling out a warm slice of one of Alfredo’s pizzas.
“Mystery solved, then?” Simon chuckled. “Some fool’s running around in a cheese suit, for whatever reason, scaring the crap out of little girls.”
“But what was he or she doing in the stream yesterday?”
“I don’t know, adding eau de stink to the suit? I don’t care, I’m going back to the café to pay for my milkshake.”
“Oh yeah, we didn’t do that! I’m coming too, what about you guys?”
I looked at Bernard, and we both shrugged. Personally I wasn’t 100% convinced by the solution - why would anyone go running around in a cheese suit? - but I couldn’t think of any better answer myself. And I did need to pay for that milkshake, or the Cats would make sure we’d never dare to set foot in the café again. I followed the others towards the Westbridge, but stopped as I realised Adrian was still in the glade, looking like he had no intention of going anywhere.
“Adrian? Are you coming too? Hey, Adrian!”
He looked up, seemed to consider his options, then he tossed me some coins - just enough to cover the milkshake - and started walking along the path to Eastbridge, which was closer to his home. I rolled my eyes and set after the others, thinking that while Adrian was nice enough when he wanted to, he could also be a bit annoying at times.
*
In silence it watched the boys leave. All night and all day it had tried to make contact with all manners of creatures, but the birds had fluttered away, the small mammals that inhabited the Rough had scampered off as fast as they could, and the girls… At first it had thought it was some kind of game, catch me if you can, or that it needed to do something special to gain the trust of other living things, but when the girls had looked at it, and screamed, it had learned of a new emotion.
Fear. Everything feared it, and it didn’t know why. So when it heard the boys approaching it had stayed hidden, and just watched. It learned that humans communicated with a whole array of different sounds, and it realised that that was the special skill it needed to not be feared. In the silence of the Rough, it practiced.
“Ah… drriann…”
*
In the police house Mr Samuels stared at the drawing made by Caroline Gatwick, the girl that had come running screaming down the street half an hour earlier. He couldn’t make sense of it: a bloblike, yellow body, a gaping, toothless maw, and red, irregular eyes. The other girl, Felicia Hawthorne, had given him the same description over the phone, since she had run straight home instead of following Caroline. He looked at the drawing again, and found himself thinking that perhaps a jellyfish had strayed up from the sea and gotten mutated by the polluted waters of the stream, but then he shook his head and decided that it was time to cut down on the comics, his guilty pleasure.
After some considering he put the incident down as a prank, and as he felt it was way too hot to go stumbling through the Rough in search of some mischievous youth, he closed the case. Little did he know that it was just the beginning.
*
Hours later, the night bird called, and found itself answered. Its tail twitched in annoyance: so another male had dared to enter its territory? It called again, and when the reply came it flew towards it. In a moonlit glade it stopped and looked around; it was sure that the rival call had come from here, but there was no other bird in sight. There was just that big, shapeless thing it had seen oozing around the forest the night before.
The bird called once again, and to its surprise it was the ooze-thing that replied. The bird sat still, confused for a moment, then it flew off. If birds had been able to snort disdainfully, go hmpf, it would’ve done so.
Satisfaction. That’s what it felt. It had heard the call, answered, and the bird had arrived. Of course, it had flown off again, but not in fear, like the small, twittering birds of daytime. It sat in the glade, muttering to itself, trying out the different sounds it had learned and wondering what they meant, when it heard the sound of footsteps approaching the glade.
It was too late to try to hide; the slightest move would rustle the old leaves and dry grass surrounding it, so it made itself as flat as it could and hoped that the human would pass by without noticing it. The footsteps stopped, then they came again, quieter, more cautious this time, stopping right in front of it. It looked up.
Pale skin, silvery white in the moonlight, hair as black as the sky between the stars, and eyes… During the day they had been the same shade of blue as the sky, now they seemed to glimmer from within. Hesitantly, it spoke.
“Ahdriann…?”
Adrian smiled.
*
The next morning I got a phone call from Adrian’s mother, Mrs S, asking what we’d been doing during the night. Apparently Adrian had arrived home early in the morning, exhausted, smelling like garbage, and very happy about something, though he wouldn’t say what. I told her I didn’t know what he’d been up to, and asked her to let him know I wanted to talk to him when he woke up.
After that I called Bernard, Simon and Karl, arranging to meet at my place in half an hour, bring some Cokes. However, Bernard came barging in after just a few minutes, saying he’d heard of another Sighting just after I’d called, and this time it was Madame Grey who’d seen what she’d described as “a moving pile of rotting flesh, churning with maggots”.
Madame Grey was a old widow who lived alone with an indefinite number of cats in the last house on Beaker Road, and though that might sound like a recipe for cackling madness it was generally agreed that she was as clear as a day, and sharper than a razor. She spent most of her days lurking behind her lace curtains, waiting to pounce on any kid that seemed to be plotting mischief, although rarely, very rarely, she’d give a lozenge to a kid that had been nice for a longer period of time. In short, the adults liked her, everybody under 20 feared her.
And now she’d seen the moving cheese thing. As soon as Karl and Simon arrived Bernard told us the story.
“So I was eating breakfast, and the window was open, right, and suddenly I hear her voice outside, and she’s not happy. I thought she’d caught some kid again, so I went out to see who it was so I could make fun of them later, and I see she’s talking to, whatshisface, the fat cop?
Miller, right. So she’s talking to Miller, and she actually sound scared, which I didn’t think was possible, and she’s telling him she was just coming back from buying cat food when she noticed this really bad smell, looked up, and saw some big, pale yellow lump moving on the other side of the stream. And she was absolutely convinced it was the corpse of a drowned person, or something, though how it could be moving about she couldn’t say.”
Bernard fell silent, draining his Coke in a few gulps, while the rest of us stared at everything except each other.
“So… it wasn’t a prank then”, said Simon at last. “Madame Grey would’ve seen through that right away.”
We nodded, and I was just about to say I don’t know what when the phone rang. I suddenly remembered what Adrian’s mother had told me earlier, and I rushed downstairs and grabbed the phone just as my father was reaching for it.
“Rogers.”
“It’s me.”
“You were expecting a call?”
“Yes, dad, it’s Adrian. Off you go.”
“Heh.”
“When I was young I respected my elders, that’s all I’m saying…”
“Yeah yeah, I know. Hey Adrian, were you in the Rough last night?”
“What makes you think so, Davey?”
“Your mum told me you came home smelling like crap this morning.”
“…So like her to snitch. Yeah, I was. Why?”
“You know Madame Grey? She saw the, er, cheese thing, less than an hour ago. Bernie heard her talking to the cops.”
Silence.
“Adrian?”
“I’m coming.”
Twenty minutes later we were sitting on the street side bank of the stream, at a point were both the Westbridge and the Eastbridge were in clear view. We were not alone; Madame Grey had made sure the whole street knew what she’d seen, and now the town’s whole police force, which consisted of Samuels and Miller, stood by the bridges, preparing to enter the Rough.
A couple of hysterical kids was one thing, Madame Grey quite another.
“This is wrong”, Adrian said, looking anxiously into the gloom of the forest.
“Are you going to tell us what happened last night?” I asked him.
“I… I went in. I found it”, he replied, quietly so that a bunch of kids nearby wouldn’t hear.
“And what was it?” Karl asked, his eyes wide with disbelief.
“I don’t know, but it was made of cheese, the kind you get on pizza. I named it Charlie.”
“Charlie!?”
Bernard, Karl and Simon nearly fell into the stream laughing, but I was looking at Adrian, and he wasn’t sporting that crooked smile he usually had when joking. Instead he looked uncharacteristically grave.
“It’s true…?”
Adrian nodded, and the others stopped laughing.
“It - he’s not mean, he’s just… lonely. And everybody’s afraid of him, for no reason. I mean, pizza cheese isn’t evil, right?”
“Right”, Bernard said, looking like he was about to start laughing again, but was distracted by a whistle that signalled the police men’s entrance into the Rough. Adrian stood up, his eyes ablaze.
“I can’t let them find him”, he said, then he turned around and crossed the street. I was just about to ask where he was going when he turned again, started running, and leapt over the stream with the ease of a gazelle, leaving the rest of us gaping like fish on land.
“How’s - that’s must’ve been - Adrian! How come you’ve never tried for the long jump team!?”
No answer, he had already disappeared among the trees. We scrambled to our feet and ran towards the Eastbridge, which was closest, but as we approached an unexpected hindrance came into view: a shining black car, with deep red flames covering the from half. A number of guys dressed in black and red leather sat in or stood around the car, and I groaned inwardly; the Hot Sparks had come to watch the spectacle.
“Well well well, look what we have here!”
“What are you running from, Leftovers? Afraid the monster’s gonna catch you?”
“Nope”, I said, slowing to a walk, trying not to pant. “We’re going into the Rough to find it.”
“Ah, but we can’t let you do that, now can we? The cops wouldn’t want anybody barging in on their search -“
“We’re not barging in, we’re going to help!” Simon snarled, glaring at Guy Rotchet, the leader of the gang, who sniggered unpleasantly.
“Oooh look, the four-eyed shrimp’s going to help! Such a model citizen, ain’t he?”
“Cut the crap, Rotchet”, I said, attempting to sound braver than I was. “This is our area, in case you didn’t know -“
“What did you say to me?” Rotchet’s voice was suddenly a deadly whisper, and in his hand I saw the menacing gleam of a small, but no doubt very sharp knife.
“I said, would you like me to rearrange your face for you? You might end up ugly instead of hideous, if you’re lucky.” Karl had stepped in front of me, towering a head taller and far more muscular than any of the Hot Sparks, most of whom suddenly looked like they’d rather be somewhere else. Rotchet opened his mouth to say something, but closed it again when he couldn’t think of anything snappy enough. Instead he jerked his head towards the bridge, indicating that we were free to go, this time.
We didn’t need telling twice, and within a minute we were in the woods, breathing heavy sighs of relief in a glade festooned with strings of cheese.
“Don’t ever, ever, let me do something like that again. I thought he was going to gut me with that knife!” Karl said, sitting down on the spot where his shaking knees had given in.
“He wouldn’t”, said Simon, who was actually Rotchet’s cousin, though both of them pretended the relation never existed. “He talks big, but he’s a coward, really. He wouldn’t be anything without his cronies.”
“A comforting thought, too bad he has them -“, Bernard started, but fell silent as calls came echoing from deeper inside the Rough.
“You think they found it? Charlie?” Karl whispered.
“Or they found Adrian, come on!”
We ran, as fast as we could while dodging trees and getting tangled in the undergrowth. The calls were getting stronger, and soon we could hear what was being shouted.
“- are you, Miller? I need backup, there’s something big here! Miller? Miller! OW!”
We slowed down and crept as quietly as we could towards the spot where Mr Samuels stood. Or had been standing, for as the trees cleared we saw Mr Samuels on the ground, unconscious, with Adrian standing next to him, holding a large branch like a club. And behind them, hiding under the lowest branches of a pine tree, was Charlie the pizza cheese monster.
“My god, Adrian, what have you done…” I whispered as the impact of the scene hit me.
“I can’t let them find him”, Adrian said, and I saw that he was crying. “They’ll take him away, cut him up, and he - he doesn’t deserve it!” He walked over to and knelt in front of the pine, gesturing for Charlie to emerge. It was like watching a cross between a caterpillar and a jellyfish move; great ripples surged through the mass of living cheese, forcing it forward into the light. Its eyes were dark red with specks of white, and I was just about to comment on how they looked just like salami, when the distant sounds of an approaching person reached us, making Adrian blanch.
“That must be Miller”, I said, thinking fast. “Ok, Adrian, you and Charlie get out of here as fast as you can, we’ll stay and say Samuels was hit by a branch falling from a tree, and that we were just trying to help with the search. Is that ok with you guys?”
They all nodded.
“I’ll head him off a bit, say I was looking for him and then pretend I can’t find the way back”, Simon said, and dashed away. Karl reached up and pulled a large, dry branch from a tree next to Mr Samuels, placing it next to him so that the fresh break area was obvious. The branch Adrian had used was stowed away under a large, thorny bush by Bernard, and I watched anxiously as Adrian tried to convince an unwilling Charlie to move deeper into the Rough. Slowly, ever so slowly, they disappeared among the trees, and as I heard Simon and Miller coming they were finally out of both sight and hearing. I knelt by Mr Samuels, hoping to look like I was caring for him, and I was relieved to find that the branch had only left a small cut on the back of his head. He stirred as I adjusted his position to make him more comfortable.
“Shit, are you ok Kevin?” Miller asked as he entered the clearing.
“Uh, I think someone hit -“
“It was a branch that fell, this one, see? We were just behind you, we saw it happen, right guys?” I babbled desperately.
“Damn hard branch, that one… Gimme a hand, Mill, I think I might have a concussion.”
Mr Samuels struggled to his feet with the help of his colleague, and an uneasy silence settled. The cops knew the members of all the gangs in the town, soon they’d ask where Adrian was, and maybe Samuels saw him before he hit, and what if he’d seen Charlie - wait, he had, hadn’t he? He’d said there was something big, maybe he realised we were hiding it -
“I think we’d better get back to the station, I’m not up to any more cavorting around in here today. And besides, I saw what we were looking for just before I got knocked out, and I’m pretty sure it was just an albino badger covered in cheese.”
“A badger? Are you sure? Ol’ Grey said it was pretty big.”
“Yeah, it sounded like one, and they’re bigger than people think. I guess Alfredo must’ve been dumping old cheese somewhere, ‘cause it was covered in it.
“Huh, all this fuss for a bloody white badger in cheese. I tell ya, there’s not enough going on in this place, people have to make things up. Ok, let’s go. You kids better come along, we wouldn’t want the phantom badger to get you, right?”
A meek chorus of agreement, and we were off, not daring to look back in case it seemed suspicious.
*
Deeper and deeper into the Rough they went, moving with increasing ease as the trees grew taller and the undergrowth lessened. Here and there they saw the remains of hobo camps, but as the woods grew even darker they, too, disappeared. Adrian looked around curiously, wondering why no one went this far in even though this cathedral of trees with its soft carpet of moss was so much nicer than the dense, littered shrub forest nearer to the stream. Perhaps they found it frightening, the way the dusk reigned even in the middle of the day, or they were afraid of getting lost, but Adrian found the shaded silence soothing. Confident that no one could hear him he started whistling, then he laughed as Charlie, after a few tries, mimicked the sound perfectly. And so, whistling silly little melodies together, they found the house.
It stood in what had once been a clearing, surrounded by the remains of a garden, its few surviving flowers making out-of-place splashes of colour in the gloom. The house itself was made of roughly hewn stones, with a small doorway and small windows, the frames painted with a faded and peeling blue. The roof had probably been thatched once upon a time, now it was open to the skies, making the remaining brick chimney look even taller than it was. The floor inside was covered in smooth flagstones with big piles of leaves in the corners, and the fireplace was big enough to sleep in, which was exactly what Adrian intended to do.
The garden continued on the backside, with unkempt shrubs full of raspberries, bramble, gooseberries and blackcurrant. Strawberries grew wild in the grass, and when he looked closer he found carrots, potatoes and onions as well. Hollyhocks grew taller than any he’d seen before, and a white rambler rose that covered most of the house spread a divine scent over it all, though it didn’t completely mask the smell of old cheese. A small spring bubbled by the roots of a great oak, its clear water as unlike the sludge of the stream as it could possibly be.
Adrian closed his eyes, breathed deeply, and smiled. Despite being on the run with a, for want of a better word, monster, and having clubbed an officer of the law, he felt happier than he could remember ever feeling before.
“Welcome home, Charlie.”
*
“Good afternoon, Alfredo.”
“Ah, gooda afterenoon, Signor Officer! Woulda you lika pizza, eh?”
“Maybe later. I came to ask if you’ve been throwing away any old cheese, in the Rough for example?”
“Throw awaye olda cheese? Noo, not me! I maka many pizzas, use all my cheese, nothing gets olda!”
“Hmm, are you sure?”
“Absoluta, Signor Officer!”
”Huh. I guess someone must’ve dumped it off the interstate on the other side of the Rough, then. Beats me how so much wound up here. Oh well, I thank you for your co-operation, Alfredo.”
“Anytime, Signor Officer!”
“Uh, excuse me, Mr Miller, sir?”
“Yes? Miss Flinch, isn’t it?”
“Uh, yeah. Thing is, uh, I tossed a pizza in the stream the other day, and, uh, it had double extra cheese on it… um.”
“Oh? Don’t worry, miss, you’d have to throw a hundred pizzas like that to get the amount of cheese that’s littering the Rough right now.”
“Oh, ok. Sorry for, uh, wasting your time.”
“Don’t be, it’s not like there’s much to do anyway.”
*
A gentle breeze dislodged a few rose petals, and it, Charlie, watched as they floated down and settled on the boy sleeping in the fireplace. On the third night of its life, it learned what love felt like.
*
Two days went by, and the town was growing restless. There had been no more sightings of Charlie, but Madame Grey had gotten furious when her vision had been explained as a mere badger (“I know what a badger looks like, and what I saw was not one!”). She spent hours stomping up and down Beaker Street, telling parents to keep their kids indoors, and trying to organise a search for that lost boy, Adrian Sanders.
Needless to say, Adrian’s mother wasn’t too pleased with the police either, and she posted notices all over the town, asking if anyone had seen him, but no one had, since no one had dared to enter the Rough since the last search, despite Mr Samuels’ reassurance that there was no monster.
And so, three days after Adrian had vanished, a larger police force arrived from Bardon County, bringing flamethrowers to please the ones that had been clamouring the loudest for something to be done, though they assured anyone who asked that they wouldn’t use them unless they met King Kong. Rain was pouring from steel grey clouds, thunder was rolling in the distance, and an ominous feeling of foreboding had the whole town in its grip.
We were sitting in Bernard’s kitchen, watching the cops milling around on the other side of the rain splattered windows. We had offered to help with the search, but been rejected, and now we were sitting in silence, trying to think of ways to find Adrian and Charlie before the cops did. Police dogs, spaniels for searching, German shepherds for attacking, barked in the rain, omitting any possibility of outrunning the searchers. Both the Westbridge and the Eastbridge were guarded, and would remain so during the search, and none of us felt capable of jumping over the stream like Adrian had done.
“It’s hopeless, isn’t it?” Simon said forlornly, speaking for all of us even though we didn’t want to admit it.
“There must be a way… Didn’t someone build a bridge at the end of the street a couple of summers ago?”
“Yeah, but Madame Grey had it torn down, she said it ruined her view.”
“Bloody old witch…”
We all nodded in agreement, and silence reigned again. Outside, the cops disappeared into the Rough. The search was on. Unable to sit still any more I got up and started pacing around the kitchen.
“There must be a way! Or - hey! What if Adrian isn’t in the Rough any more!?”
“What are you on to, Davey?”
“The House! He can’t be out in the woods when it’s raining like this, right? He, and Charlie, could’ve gone there early in the morning, ‘cause I’m pretty sure no one’s been there today!”
“Well, it’s not like we have anything better to -“ Bernard started, but was interrupted by Karl.
“The railroad bridge! If Adrian’s not in the House we can get into the Rough that way!”
“Genius! Let’s go!”
We dashed out without even grabbing our jackets, and ran all the way to the House, which turned out to be empty. We waited impatiently for a freight train to pass, then we went over the bridge, stepping carefully on the slippery sleepers. From this side there were no paths leading into the Rough, so we had to fight our way through massive thickets of bramble, but no one complained. We could hear the dogs barking somewhere ahead of us, and I hoped that there were too many trails to follow for them to find the right one.
We moved in a roughly northern direction, and sooner than I expected we arrived at the glade where Mr Samuels had been clubbed. It was now full of muddy tracks, and the dogs were still ahead of us, in the direction Adrian and Charlie had taken when they escaped. We were all exhausted, out of breath, but there was no time to rest. We moved on.
We caught up with the search party as they stopped, surrounding a roofless old house. All the dogs were barking like mad, and their handlers had to fight to keep them from rushing into the ruin. We stayed back, unnoticed, and listened to what was being said.
“- must be something else in there, they wouldn’t behave like this if it was just a person.”
“How ‘bout a white badger covered in cheese?”
“It’s weird, there’s stinkin’ cheese all over the place, I’ve never seen anything like it - oh, look, the chief’s going in.”
Mr Samuels approached the house cautiously, with dry twigs sticking out of his boots. Bits of shrubbery, old vines, and even a rambler rose in bloom had been dragged over the empty windows and doorway, shielding the interior of the house from view.
“Adrian Sanders, are you in there? This is the police.”
Thunder rumbled, closer now, but there was no answer. Mr Samuels was just about to pull the plant cover apart when Adrian appeared, pale, resolute, and soaking wet, in the doorway.
“What do you want?”
“To get you home, your mother has been worried sick -“
“She knows I can take care of myself, and I have everything I need right here. I was just going to camp out for a while.”
“Come now, without any notice? You don’t even have an umbrella!”
“The fireplace is dry.”
“But you’re not, and I didn’t drag a bunch of officers from Bardon County all the way here just to go back empty-handed, so you’re coming with us now, young man, or there’ll be a reckoning!”
Mr Samuels grabbed Adrian’s arm, pulled him out of the house, and was halfway across the clearing when lightning struck the chimney with a blast like cannon fire. An unearthly howl went up from the inside of the house, and before anyone recovered from the shock a partially charred Charlie came galumphing through the door, heading straight towards Adrian.
“No! Charlie, get back, get ba - NO!”
With a roar one of the flamethrowers lashed out, then another, and a third. Charlie twisted and shrieked in agony, his back on fire, and Adrian screamed with him, trying to free himself from Mr Samuels’ grip. Anyone who’s ever failed at cooking knows that cheese burns fast, and within a minute all that remained of Charlie was a bubbling puddle with a black crust, and an acrid smell that mingled with the scent of the white roses.
Adrian fell to his knees, shaking, and abandoning all caution I ran forward, knelt down, and put my arms around him. He wasn’t crying, he just stared at the remains as if he couldn’t comprehend what had happened.
“Ok… Can somebody tell me what the hell that thing was?”
One of the cops from Bardon County was the first to speak, and the sound broke Adrian’s paralysis. He got to his feet, slowly, looking at the police men and the howling dogs as if trying to decide whom to tear apart first, but when Mr Samuels put his hand on Adrian’s shoulder he trembled, and with cry like a wounded animal he broke free and ran, not back towards the town, but even further into the woods. A couple of cops looked like they were about to follow, but Mr Samuels gestured at them to stay, then he looked at me, Bernard, Simon and Karl.
“You boys better explain what just happened here”, he said, quietly, and so we did.
*
Adrian returned home late that evening, locking himself in his room without a word to anyone, and there he stayed for almost two weeks. Meanwhile the town buzzed with rumours, though it soon died down, as none of the people that knew what had really happened there in the Rough would speak of it. The white badger in cheese explanation was maintained as the truth, and eventually Madame Grey learned to live with it. Adrian, however, was suddenly viewed as weird and antisocial, possibly a bit off in the head even, so it was perhaps not so strange that when he finally emerged he had adopted a mostly nocturnal lifestyle, avoiding people as much as he could. It was therefore another week or so before I got to talk to him.
We were sitting on the platform outside the House, just the two of us, gazing at the stars, listening to the chirps of crickets and the distant call of a lone night bird.
“I’m moving next week. Mum found an apartment up in Castor, she thinks it’ll be good for me to start over where no one knows me.”
“Will it?”
“Dunno. We’ll see.”
Chiiirrp. Chiiirrp. Chiiirrp.
“Adrian?”
“Mm?”
“When you… when you first met Charlie, how did you know he wouldn’t, you know, eat you or something?”
Chiiirrp.
“I just knew.”
“Oh. Will you be coming back here sometime?”
“… We’ll see.”
*
“There were moments, when I was older and in Castor for business, when I thought I saw him, but I was never certain. I never got to speak to him again after that last night, that’s for sure.”
“That was a sad story, Grandpa.”
“Yes it was, miss Katja. I had managed to forget that, somehow.”
“It was a good story, though. I didn’t know the woods by the stream used to be like that.”
“You wouldn’t know, master Clayton, as they were tamed just a couple of years after the pizza cheese incident. The undergrowth was razed, proper tracks were made, and if I recall correctly the old house and its garden was turned into a picnic spot. They started calling it the Green instead of the Rough. I never went there again though…”
“What happened to Charlie, did somebody bury him?”
“Not that I know. I heard Guy Rotchet saying he’d seen people in protective clothing carry something from the Rough to an unmarked van parked on the interstate, but I don’t know how much truth there is in that -“
“Old man, are you telling your tall tales to the kids again?”
“Hi dad! Grandpa just told us about the pizza cheese monster!”
“Oh, that old story. I hope you didn’t believe a word of it, ‘cause I don’t want you to start throwing food into the stream.”
“Ha, it wouldn’t work now anyway, the way I figure it was just the right combination of chemicals that made the cheese mutate -“
“Oh please, spare me! Anyway, did these rugrats give you the Allsorts?”
“Indeed they did, and it was as delicious as always, thanks.”
“Ok. Now, apologies for the short visit, but I promised we’d visit Alfredo’s for dinner. I’ll come by tomorrow, is that ok?”
“You know it is, Junior. See you then, then. Bye kids, thanks for the visit!”
“Bye Grandpa!”
*
Epilogue.
Clayton woke early the next morning, and couldn’t go back to sleep. He had dreamt that he was walking around with a pizza on a leash, like a flattened chihuahua, and he giggled when he remembered it. He turned away from the bright window, and his eyes fell on the Daler-Rowney watercolour kit his father had given him. Suddenly wide awake he got up, dressed, ate a bowl of cereal, made a note saying where he’d gone and that he had his cellphone with him, put his on shoes, and went outside with the kit under his arm.
Beaker Road was just a couple of blocks away, though it didn’t look much like his grandfather would’ve remembered it: most of the old houses had been torn down to give way for new, fancy villas as the stream was cleansed and the untamed Rough became the safe, boring Green. There was still only two bridges, though they were now built by professionals instead of kids with nothing better to do.
Over the Westbridge Clayton went, humming to himself. Signs pointed towards a picnic area somewhere ahead, and he followed the wide, sunlit path into the green twilight under the tall trees. The house came into view: several trees had been cut down around it, making the clearing much larger than it had originally been. The white rambler rose was still there, and a few hollyhocks, but the berry shrubs were gone, as were the vegetables. The oak that had cradled the spring was replaced with a basin in ugly, turquoise mosaic, and right in front of the house there was a large table with attached benches. Random bits of rubbish was littering the uneven lawn of the clearing, despite the trash cans attached to a couple of trees, and several old beer cans was floating in the spring.
Clayton bent down a peered under the table. The grass had been worn away by thousands of feet over the years, but he suspected that no grass would grow in that spot even if the table was removed. He straightened up and looked towards the doorway. There was a small pile of garbage just outside it, as if someone had cleared out the house without bothering to toss the trash in the cans. He went inside, and backed out almost immediately.
Someone was already in there.
“It’s ok kid, I was just leaving.”
A tall, skinny man with almost pure white hair ducked out through the doorway, brushing soot from his pants as he went. He’d been sitting in the fireplace.
“Aren’t you a bit young to be out on your own?”
“My dad knows where I am.”
“Right. You’re an artist?”
“Well… My grandpa told me about this place, and I thought I’d see if it was as nice as he said, maybe try to paint something, but…”
“It used to be nice, when I was young. Not many people knew about it then. I come back here every now and then, but it’s never the same…”
The man fell silent, his gaze lost in a distant past. Clayton hesitated, then he asked, because he had to know.
“Excuse me mister, do you know someone called David Rogers?”
The man stared at Clayton, his brilliant blue eyes wide in surprise.
“David Rogers? Yeah I knew him, is he still around?”
“He’s my grandpa. He told me about you, and - and about what happened here.”
“Ah…” A shadow fell over the man’s thin face as he looked towards the ground under the table, but then he shook his head and smiled.
“Good ol’ Davey. I meant to visit him, but somehow it never happened. Where does he live now?”
“In the Red Oak retirement home, right next to the Clandestine Bar on Main Street. I think he’d be happy to meet you again.”
“You know, I might just go and see him right now. Thanks for letting me know.”
And with that, Adrian left the abandoned house for the last time.