The Turning

10

10

“Where in the f**k have you been?” his father boomed from the recliner. He was holding a glass of beer which had spilled as he had reared from his chair to shout at him. Through the living room and into the kitchen, he caught sight of his mother talking on the phone. When her eyes landed on him, she allowed an immense sigh of relief to rush from her lips.

“Yeah, he just walked in. He’s here now.”

Ben flicked off the television and sat the glass down on the coffee table.

“Come ‘ere, you.”

He was a towering man, greying hair pushed up from the back of his head in the exact fashion the pillow had left it that morning, still clad in his work clothes. Kyle, fidgeting with his fingers, reluctantly approached his father with an air of somber expectancy. His mother was hurrying her conversation to an end, desperately eying the two of them with caution. She didn’t know what Ben was about to do but she couldn’t remember a time when he had looked so angry.

Kyle arrived at his father's side. Brett's eyes were glazed and dark with fury. Ben's hand shook slightly, the muscles in his jaw working as his molars ground together. Then he swallowed a dry click that seemed to cut through the silence of the house. Outside, Sage was still barking.

Suddenly he reached out, grabbed Kyle's shirt and pulled him close, his big tanned arm neatly cradling the boy's frame. As always in the company of his father, Kyle felt minuscule and fragile despite the fact that he was the biggest boy at Wilton Public. Beth took a step into the living room.

“Ben....” she uttered. But Ben didn’t look at her. She turned to Kyle.

“We were pretty worried, love, we didn’t know where you were,” she said, her voice breaking with tears. “You’ve never done this before, why did you do it now?”

Kyle, a little rattled with confusion, said nothing. What could he say? He was too busy grappling with the expressions on their faces, expressions of pure angst and concern, to think of anything at all. He'd never seen them like this before, or any other adult for that matter. It petrified him, to think that a grown-up could be vulnerable and possess emotions he had assumed that children eventually grew out of. He couldn’t understand what they were worried about, nor articulate the full gravity of what he had done to upset them. Sure, it was late, but it was a small town and sooner or later he would have come home. Didn’t they understand that?

But then something else began to dawn on him. Was it that they had finally suspected the insinuations of the townsfolk to be true? Had they thought that he had been out doing graffiti on walls or breaking windows? Had they been scared because they had thought they had lost him to a life of negligent behavior that would foreshadow armed robbery and gaol time for the foreseeable future?

If they do, then they’re right. Because I know what I was doing, I was breaking into Brett Stephen’s yard.

Now he could feel the burning ball of sick guilt welling at the back of his throat. He swallowed, his chin quivering. “Sorry,” he managed, shakily. His father loosened his grip.

“Apologise to your mother,” said Ben quietly “And after that go up to bed. I don’t want to see you again tonight.”

Somehow his father's words, what had come out as something like statement, seemed to hurt the worst.

He did as his dad had asked and then wandered towards the back of the house where his room was. The sound of their conversation, commencing soon after he had left the living room, drifted down the hall.

“I dunno what to do with him.” His mother, in tears.

“He needs to pull his head of his arse otherwise there’s not much we can do,” His father, his voice tired and indifferent, the recliner creaking as he sat back down.

“I’m sick of constantly having to deal with his s**t. It’s like day after day with him.”

“It’s not,” She had managed to control herself enough to allow her anger to creep out. “I doubt it’ll happen again. You scared him, Ben. Don’t ever grab him like that, ever.”

“Yeah good, I won’t. I’ll never talk or touch him ever. And then we’ll see where he winds up.” “Don’t be like that...”

He closed his bedroom door quietly and flopped onto the bed, peering up at the ceiling. Now the tears came, hot and fresh, spilling down his cheeks, free to flow in the privacy of his room. It wasn’t that his parents had been mad, or that his father had grabbed him. It was because they too expected the worst in him now as though it were a virus that everyone was catching and nobody was able to shake. Despite the animosity in his father and his mother’s deep, brooding concern for his safety, it was plain as day that they had been worried about what he had been up to as opposed to his well-being. Because they were well aware that Wilton was a safe place, a place where nothing even remotely bad ever happened, especially to kids.

After his sobs had ebbed away and he had dried his eyes, he wondered if his mother would now enforce a curfew and perhaps limit his ventures into town on his bike. They would try and control what he got up to, and perhaps they would even get him a mobile phone for the sake of being able to call him if he was ever running late. To him, owning a mobile phone would be like having a slave bracelet strapped to his ankle.

He rolled over to face the open window. The curtains were fluttering, the air cooling his hot face. He could see the faint outline of the common, the crooked sprawl of trees that formed the forest. He imagined people walking around out there, dull shapes, darting in and out of trees. Whispering.

As his eyes began to droop, his breathing steadying to match the gentle, rhythmic thump of his heart, he pictured not people but tall, stick-like figures, dark shapes peeking out from behind trees, enormous heads and huge diamond-shaped eyes. Eyes that glowed. He imagined them out there, watching his house and peaking into windows. Waiting for them to fall asleep so they could... so they would...

His eyes closed and in teh dream that followed, he was following a group of people on his pushbike as they headed down Tiffard Street. The dream fast-forwarded and he was cycling slowly by his house, approaching the entrance to the common. He turned and stared through the windows of his home where darkness peered back. There were dark stains on the fibro walls and somehow in his incoherent state, he understood that it was blood.

Someone started screaming and the sound wailed away like a child being snatched into an elevator.

Setting a foot inside the common, his bike having now vanished, he turned back to the house and saw his father peering out at him from the kitchen window. He was grinning, his eyes like two fog-lamps.

There was something fluttering in his father's mouth. Something moving, edging its way out. His father's neck was bulging, as though something inexplicably large was working its way up after being constricted for so long. Kyle found himself stepping forward to see better and in the process his father's jaw fell open and his eyes rolled up into whites. Spiders began to burst of his mouth, running up his face and down his chest in a frenzy, spiders the size of dinner plates, hundreds of them, legs like a thousand furry fingers, like lengths of old dusty rope left in the back of sheds, dancing, covering his fathers face almost entirely, thousands of bodies coming together to create a single pulsating creature.

And then he awoke with a jolt, bed sheets strewn onto the wooden floor. He heard country music, soft and low and harmonious, drifting from the kitchen. His father was up and making breakfast, so it was either five-thirty or six in the morning. He’d be getting ready for work, the sun a faint spark on the edge of the world. Birds chirped outside the window as the land began to brighten.

Eventually, he managed to fall back to sleep but for a while he was afraid. Later, he would look back on it and think how stupid it had been that he had been afraid of his own dream, as though he was still six or seven. But right then and there it seemed terribly important that he stayed awake. He kept glancing out the window at the common and after the third or fourth time, he pulled the curtain across and rolled over.

Just before his eyelids drooped and finally fell, he reached out and turned on his lamp. This way he could see the room and everything in it.

There were no spiders. None that he could see anyway.