The Turning

13

13

Bernadette Morrison was regarded as something of a pretentious snob in Wilton. It was perhaps due to the fact that she had the mentality of a city person and never left the house without one of her trendy outfits, or it could have been that she owned a little short-haired Maltese crossbreed named Trixie, an out of place dog for a rural setting where most breeds were either blue Heelers, sheepdogs, kelpies, or some other variety of large, energetic animal.

But if it had of been about the dog she owned or the fact that she liked to dye her hair depending on her mood, or that she wore big, thick chained necklaces and hula-hoops from her earlobes, the townsfolk probably wouldn't have cared. What mattered to them was how little she interacted with them. Although she lived in Wilton, her lack of appearance at public gatherings like Anzac Day or the annual Show or the monthly Sunday street-stalls held outside the post office, and her unwillingness to befriend Wiltonites was what had led them to the consensus that she didn't really belong out here in the sticks. She was, as many put it, ‘too precious,' to survive adequately out here. Moreover, because of her eccentric nature, she was also regarded as strange. Some of the men in town would put the finger on it whenever the subject turned to her. They assumed she was gay.

Bernadette was fifty-four, but an array of dieting plans, pricey facial scrubs (ordered from America) and anti-wrinkle creams, had kept her appearance at thirty-five. Before Trixie, she had been a divorcee, living in relative squalor with no money and a despondent spirit. Her depression had led her to cry wolf on distant relatives and when they had finally gotten sick of worrying about when the day would arrive when she would get serious about what she’d contemplated doing for so long, they had finally banded together to buy her the Maltese pup as a Christmas present. Despite the fact that she had actively told them that dogs and cats carried germs and that she needed one like she needed a hole in the head, she had quickly grown fond of the pup. It had, as her sister had said, been a splitting image of her, and the family had snickered at this behind Bernadette’s back, hoping in the back of their minds that the dog would allay any aspirations of suicide so they could go back to ignoring her for eleven months of the year. If they had been able to dismiss her from Christmas gatherings they would have in an instant.

Although there had been a time when she had felt a deep-seated concern and regret at the fact that she had never had children with the ‘monster' she had been married to, in her middle years she was beginning to come to terms with it better. In an earlier time of her life, she had been adamantly sure that she would never have kids (she had been a young, hip material girl in a material world during the early 90s), and then by her late twenties it had seemed that people her own age she knew through her husband, had had kids at some point and thus the impossible had happened: she had discovered she got along with children very well. Perhaps it was because kids were as eccentric as she was, and she was never afraid to be immature around adults for the sake of making kids laugh. Soon she had started pestering Simon, her husband, about children and he had told her plain and simple that he was not going to father anything substantial except for maybe some pet goldfish. Simon had been a barrister at the Tormon Courthouse and a heavy drinker, but she had fallen in love with him because he had liked Bach and Mozart and the finer things in life despite his not so fine drooling slurs when he'd had a few or the smell of his breath in the morning. He had told her that he had a career to think about, that he had no time for children, and this (he had reminded her) had been one of the agreements they had made to getting married in the first place.

But then, of course, he had had his car accident. He'd been coming home drunk one night after a day of playing golf in Tormon and had rolled his Toyota into a ditch. The result had been impeded speech and the total immobility of his legs and arms. Confined to a wheelchair and having to resign from his job as a result, he had been stuck at home and through this, she had gotten to know him better than she ever had before.

An ugly, bitter resentment had begun to take hold of him, especially at the fact that he could no longer drink- the wine messed with the medication he took to keep his lungs from slowly but surely dying. His misery had worsened with each passing day until finally, she had been unable to put up with him. They had both agreed on a divorce although she had been the one to make the first move and his reaction had been nothing short of relief.

He had stuck around in Wilton for two years and she had grown inwards and reclusive in order to avoid him as much as she could. Then all at once, he had shifted up north to live with his parents as his health had begun to deteriorate. Last she had heard he had been on life support and his family had asked if she could come up and see him before things got any worse. That had been two years ago and she still had the email, printed and pinned to the fridge, a daily reminder that had become forgotten.

Despite what her relatives thought of her as the girl who cried wolf, by the end, Bernadette really had been on the verge of ending it all, her mind turning more and more sanely to an image she had conjured of herself standing at the railing of the Euroley Bridge out near Yanco, a brick tied to her foot, getting ready to jump. But that of course had been just before Christmas and she had thought she would do it afterward in order to save spoiling everyone's holiday. But as soon as they had brought the dog into her Aunt's house and had laid it on her bed beside her while she had been sleeping and the mutt had licked her nose, her thoughts of death had been put on hold, at least temporarily. Gradually it had become a permanent fixture. It had taken her a few weeks to warm up to the dog, to see Trixie as something more than just a pet, but by the end, she was downright obsessed.

The brick she had nicked from the Winton tip for her dark purpose had become a doorstop in her bedroom and sometimes she found herself looking at it and wondering if it was finally time to throw it away. Not just yet it seemed.

Never quite yet.

Her house was at the far-east end of Giles Street, three doors down from the Leeton/Tormon turn-off sign and where the rusted, ancient railway tracks were piled in steel throngs. The railway had ceased operation in 1964 and soon after, houses had begun developing closer to the lines. Hers was something eccentric of course, awash with bright colors, the front deck-veranda covered with plants which lined the floor and hung from the guttering on chains. She had designed the pots herself. Her furniture in the house had been ordered online, the style known simply as ‘African village': rustic and simplistic, comprising of bamboo shoots and planks of carved wood.

Bernadette was more than happy having her world reduced down to just her and Trixie. It didn't seem to matter to her much these days that she had no man and that her child-rearing years were so much dust on the wind. She had Trixie, and Trixie was her own little family.

Normally in the mornings, she would go running to keep up her figure (although anyone to look at her could tell she was far too scrawny as it was). She adhered to a strict routine, always setting off around eight o' clock with Trixie bounding along like an oversized rodent. Today, though, she hadn't. Instead, she had awoken that morning, had made her berry smoothie with yogurt as per her routine, and had gone to the front door in her skins and sunnies, her peroxide blonde hair pulled back tightly from her scalp, sipping her breakfast. She would fetch the mail, return to the house and grab the leash for Trixie before setting off on Giles Street. It would by then be eight on the dot.

But the first thing she saw after pulling open the door was Trixie, standing there with her ears pulled back, shivering uncontrollably. Bernadette's face had fallen at the sight of the animal. A small puddle of vomit sat on the dogs front paws.

“Oh love," she'd cried, her voice loud and shrieking as was her habit. It had been something Simon had complained about a lot, the high pitch of her voice, but Bernadette was partially deaf in one ear, and on some days when it was bad enough she could sometimes be heard along the main street from her house. The men would scoff and shake their heads at the sound. By Jesus, they'd think, what was that crazy dike up to today.

“You poor, poor thing,” she had cried, bending low to scoop Trixie up and carrying her to her basket. The smell of her vomit wafted through the house, sour and unpleasant. As she carried the dog, the animal whimpered and squirmed unhappily. She stopped, noticing the dog's bloated belly for the first time. It looked as though she had swallowed a football. She put the dog down in her basket carefully and contemplated washing her hands. But instead, she rolled Trixie over to examine her. She had the look of a b***h that was well overdue for pups, which was impossible; not only was Trixie desexed, but she hadn’t noticed the abnormal bulge the day before when picking her up.

The dog rolled onto its back, exposing her engorged, vein-streaked underside and Bernadette covered her mouth with a shaky hand.

"To the vet with you, love," she said, hurrying into the kitchen and plucking the phone from the cradle on the wall. She searched google on her iPhone for the Leeton VET clinic and then dialed the number. A receptionist slotted her in for three that afternoon. Bernadette thanked her and hung up.

When she returned she saw that the dog’s basket was empty.

“Trixie!” Bernadette called, making her way to the open front door. “I hope you’re not outside again!”

She stepped out onto the veranda and scanned the immediate vicinity, eyes running over pot plants, the veranda steps, the dying lawn and the front gate, the fence and then the street beyond. A Riverina Milk truck lumbered past the house. She whistled a pathetic, almost soundless note which the dog would not have recognised and come trotting towards in any case. There was no movement from the bushes where the dog liked to sniff and scratch, much to Bernadette’s dislike. She regarded Trixie as a clean, indoors animal.

“Trixie!” she called again, this time agitated. Bounding down the steps and rounding the corner of the house where the hot water system stood, she realised she was worried now but not entirely sure of just what.

The yards and houses across the road were eerily silent, and although the tranquil noiselessness had never bothered her before, it did then. Because even Wilton wasn’t this quiet at eight o clock in the morning. She wandered about the yard aimlessly, scanning bushes and dropping onto her knees to inspect beneath the house. She tried to whistle again and then made her way back to the front door.

“Trixie,” she called again, mounting the steps and crossing the veranda into the house. She stopped cold when she heard the low, guttural gurgling accompanied by excessive whimpering, sounding from down the hall.
She began to make her way inside and then stopped when another sound, a hollow, croaking, like the sound her own stomach after consuming nothing but bottled water all day. A frantic note rose up in her mind, one she had not heard for a very long time, not since the days of her depression. It was an awful, mournful rendition of her own voice that froze her with fear, as though she had heard the voice of some long dead relative whispering in her ear:

She’s probably eaten something bad, she was out all night and probably was playing with some frog and had bitten it and it had poisoned her and you should probably take her to the vet now if she’ll last that long because dog’s don’t last long after being poisoned and it could have been anything, something left out the back that she had eaten at the back of Davis’s grocer or a snake bite or anything. She could be dying, she probably is dying, dogs belly’s don’t just swell up like that when they’re well.

"Trixie, come here" she shouted but suddenly recoiled, startled by a high pitch squeal that filled the house. But it wasn't this that unnerved her; she knew it was the dog. It was what was underneath it. Something wet… something plopping. Something squishing on the bathroom tiles.

Something moving on the tiles.

Bernadette drew a deep breath and darted down the hall, ignoring the pulse drumming in her ears and the way her entire body seemed to jerk as though unwilling to move, ignoring the voice in her mind, telling her that sometimes it was best not to look, not to see, not to find out.

The first thing she saw after bursting into the bathroom was the blood. It was splattered across the glossy tiles below the bathtub and spread towards the opposite corner of the room. When her eyes found Trixie she didn't recognise her. The dog was frantically licking her ruptured privates as though something grotesquely large and violent had forced its way out of her.
 "Oh my god…” she moaned. Trixie peered up, whimpering, glassy-eyed and feverish and Bernadette could hold it no more. She drew back the shower screen and vomited into the cubical. As she did, the dog began to drag its way towards her and now she could smell it too, coppery strangely fishy, like the smell of some old wharf after the sea has been churned up.

“Trixie, oh my god, oh no…what have…”

And then she heard the dog scream one final time. She pulled her head out of the cubical and turned, the blood draining from her face. Her eyes grew, watching as the thing that had come out of Trixie’s body reared up on its back legs, front legs splayed as though to embrace her in a grotesque, bristly hug. The dog lay nearby in a tattered heap.

A single, high note of terror escaped her lips as well as the gasping, wheezing sound of the monstrous thing on the floor. One moment it was there, looking at her and in the next it had sprung up on her, pincers snapping downwards and busting her skull in an instant. The creature began to feed hurriedly, yanking at limbs and tossing wet scraps of flesh in every direction like the earth from an excavation site

It didn’t stop until it was full and by that time, the knocking on the door had already begun.

#

Davis stood on Bernadette’s veranda, rocking on the balls of his feet. Someone passed by the house and honked their horn. He turned and offered a thumbs up. The driver returned the salute and turned right at the end of Giles Street in the direction of Tormon.

Davis knocked again, waited a moment and then tried the knob. He stepped over the puddle of Trixie’s spew on the way in, humming a tune, his spirits high. He made his way through the living room and down the hall. When he came to the end he stopped and peered at the thing in the corner. His eyes glazed over to whites and then darkened. The thing was huddled there, the remains of its meal scattered across the bathroom in bleeding, torn fragments as though Bernadette Morrison's body had been nothing more than a roast chicken, pulled apart and feed upon piece by piece.

“Feel better now?” Barry asked.

Barry could hear the thing struggling to breathe, a deep wheezing issuing from within itself. A primitive part of Davis mind, the new part that was quickly beginning to take over, realised that the creature was dying. It simply could not deal with the heat.

It will die, he thought, panicked. He glanced down the hall momentarily as though someone had spoken his name. Then he thought of the freezer at the shop where he kept all the frozen goods, and a smile began to form.

“I know” he muttered.

He darted out of the house, crossed the road and entered the shop from the back door. His wife was serving customers at the front bench, each of the locals smiling but silent. When they saw him poke his head out, they nodded knowingly. His wife glanced over her shoulder at him and smiled. Her eyes were black marbles, her grin revealing nothing more than gums.

It would be a new moon that evening and they would proceed to the town common at sundown as the land began to cool. There weren’t many Wiltonites left anymore, and by tomorrow night he reckoned there would be none at all. Which was good. It was the necessary part of the next step.

He slipped his ute keys off the hook and then made his way out into the shed. The bright blue tarp was folded and on a high shelf. He reached up, snatched it, a scattering of black insects fluttered from it. He carried it to his ute, climbed in and drove across the road back to Mrs Morrison's. There, he backed the ute up into her driveway until it was beside the house. The fence on this side was high, rusty corrugated iron and at the top, the tangle of the neighbour's grapevines reached over. No one would see a thing.

He led the creature out the back door, and though it was reluctant at first, it followed. It knew what was out there, the sun, and it didn’t like the sun very much at all. It didn’t like the heat or the arid weather of this place. It had never thought the climate would be so inconvenient for its survival, but it was too late now.

Davis pulled the tarp back and it climbed in under the welcoming darkness. He tied the tarp down, climbed back in and drove out again. He would return to clean the bathroom and lock the door. For all anybody knew she had gone away for the weekend, not that they would need to hide anything soon enough.

It was midday.