DIVINATIONS 
MAGAZINE

My mother has just recovered from the flu, but her voice sounds faded and crackled over the phone. Or maybe that’s the phone line. “We haven’t seen you in months. Couldn’t you work out a date now, while we’re on the phone?”

She says something else and it’s lost to a sudden roar on her end, like she’s standing on a beach and the tide has rushed in. I wait, then ask her to repeat herself. She sighs, and says, “There’s something strange going on.”

“Yes, it sounds like you need to replace your phone.”

“No. Well, phone calls have been harder lately, ever since…” she trails off, and I say, “pardon?” thinking she’s been lost to the bad service again. “They’ve been harder,” she raises her voice, “since this odd thing that’s been happening to me. And your father now too. We really wish you’d come visit so we can talk about it.”

I pause, look to the calendar above my desk. So many dates have been scribbled over. A friend’s engagement party next weekend, which I obviously can’t miss. Then, halfway through next week, a dinner with an old friend. Then the weekend after, a work training session, compulsory. “Maybe the 30th?” I speak.

Through an eerie crackle, I hear my mother agree. We say goodbye, and I head to the bathroom to brush my teeth before bed.

*

My bedside lamp gives a dim yellow glow, just enough for me to read, but my concentration is broken by a thump outside my bedroom, sounding like it’s come from the unit below. My breathing stills as I listen. Seconds lapse, nothing. A one-off, accidental sound.

The sudden noise from below isn’t unusual here; suburbia is full of strange sounds, incoherent, disjointed music. Not like my parents’ place, the place I grew up, with its growls and calls of nature, trees and twigs rustling in the wind. Here, the noises are contrived, which, for the first few years of living here, frightened me far more than any creature’s snuffle or croon at my parents’. One night, I got up to take a piss, and in that narrow space, sitting on the toilet in the dark, I heard clear as day in that deep night the wretched roar of a thing outside. Animalistic, primal, but not animal, definitely human, somehow—the ripped roar from the throat of a very peculiar, abject existence.

I sat, gooseflesh ripping across my bare thighs, and listened. Listened. My hearing, like an animal itself, travelled through the walls of the apartment, stretching, trying anyhow—and I listened for this human creature. It let out a long, low groan, for a few strenuous seconds, before raising into another roar, like a felled beast slowly dying. Then it stopped. And I waited for far too long to hear it again. Whatever was out there, perhaps it had died, or it had stumbled on.

My part of the suburb is partially gentrified. Just east is the train station, and beyond that, housing commissions. The land itself gets visibly filthy as you go on. But in the immediate blocks around me are small houses and units, where elderly folk live, and a few young families. I eventually got used to the sounds of people, in their various states. I was already used to the sound of the dogs. The elderly man below me would often throw his flyscreen door open and scream at the yappy terrier next door to shut up. It really didn’t bother me though. If humans can carry on all the time – and that they do, and relish – why shouldn’t a dog? They are only absorbing their environment.

Hearing the neighbours’ dogs filled just a little of that hole in me that missed Frankie, my parents’ dog, a ten-year-old border collie. Always grinning, always pawing you for a ruffle.

*

I find myself at a networking event on the weekend I’m supposed to be at my parents’. Standing by a glass window that spans the entire wall, I am thinking of that old Talking Heads refrain: How did I get here? My project supervisor at the uni had insisted that I go. So, I’d called, and when Mum answered, I was met with viscous crackle and spit, worse than before. I managed to piece together Mum saying, “Of course you need to go.”

I said, “Get your phone fixed.”

When the choppiness got too much, mincing any and all words, I hung up, and texted Dad, realising he would be at work: can’t talk to Mum on the phone, it’s so garbage. She says something weird is going on, any ideas?

Dad said: Hard to explain. Spooky stuff, happening to me also. Probably we’re just going senile, haha.

I replied: How’s Frankie?

Good dog, as always.

So here I am, in this mildly crowded room, trying to work out if I’m the vulture my supervisor thinks I should be. The one person I recognise I am not inclined to butter up to. Carlyle Ryan, an up-and-coming producer who has made a name for himself with a low budget TV show that explores urban legends — he’s surrounded by several others, vultures, asking him about his endeavours, trying to weasel into his projects. My attention has been snagged at the moment that an onlooker, standing from the side, a tall man with a dark rusty beard, says that he doesn’t think Ryan’s new project is a good idea.

“I think that you can’t please anyone,” Ryan says, and his fans appear to nod and agree.

“Right, but that’s only applicable if you’re doing something that must be done. Entertainment never comes under that. You don’t have to focus your movie on this incident. Particularly if you’re not even going to talk to the bus driver.”

Somebody asks for the full story.

Before Ryan can speak, this red-bearded man explains that there had been a story last year, in a wealthy town 2 hours south of the city; a bus full of teenagers being taken to a party had crashed, killing most of them, and the driver was locked up. Swiftly, it had come out that the bus driver had had some sort of vendetta against the kids, in particular the birthday boy. This kid had been something of a menace in the town; he liked to go hunting with his dad and had his own makeshift short bow, with which, as he sat in a tree outside of the driver’s home, he used to shoot the driver’s dog. Killed instantly.

The crowd mutters, eyes wide; it doesn’t escape me that Ryan seems to glow and stand straighter. He’s invigorated, inspired by this nastiness.

“I think it’s a bit of a dickhead move,” says the redhead. “These are real people, and the story is too fresh. I get you’re into morbid true crime and all, but you’re just recreating some peoples’ grief for amusement.”

“That’s your opinion,” says Ryan, coolly. “I will not be recreating it. I will be creating it. It’s too fascinating a story, too full of depth. And it’s juicy. Really, if the driver didn’t want a storyteller to snap it up, he shouldn’t have done what he did.”

Merely something to take advantage of, I thought. Much like the point of me being here, in attendance to be a vulture, something I was not actioning, something I would not benefit from. But as Ryan’s perturbed opponent went to the bar for a drink, I thought I should follow, should talk to him.

I order a vodka and lime, and say, “You don’t think Ryan should take advantage of the story?”

He says, “I think Carlyle is a creep and should come up with his own sordid tales.” He takes a swig of his beer. Says, “I think he’s a predator for the woes of others.”

“That’s… damning,” I say. “I suppose the least he could do is talk to everyone involved, get permission, make sure it’s respectful. My supervisor would say that I should ask him if there’s any writing I can do… horror is my interest. But, well. Maybe I should write about him,” I laugh.

“He’d deserve it,” he says, with a slight smile. “Tit for tat, right?”

*

I’m suspended in time, in a tremendous traffic jam. My foot has been pressed on the brake for so long now that it aches. I huff, pull up the handbrake. I’ve never seen this road so packed. I text Dad: going to be 2 hours late I think. traffic’s fucked.

Checking my GPS again, the expected duration of the trip has only gotten longer. It makes no sense. It must be factoring in the traffic through the mountains and the valleys, all the way north to my old family home, but how, why is there so much traffic? Various horns are sounded. Otherwise, we all just sit here. Waiting. It’s a Sunday, midday. The world should be hungover, indulging in sleep-ins.

I loose the handbrake, crawl forward. Then we’re stopped again.

My phone buzzes. Dad: I’ve been having trouble getting to work last week, like it takes twice as long though no traffic…  It’s part of the spookiness I mentioned…. I took Friday off because I feel like I’m losing it. Same thing happening to you?

I stare at this message, then bring the phone to my face, unlock, and read the words over and over again. A sudden beep behind me makes me jump, and I roll the car forward while old mate keeps his palm to his horn. The thought bites me: what if my parents are going senile? So much so that they need someone to take care of them? I’m an only child—is it expected of me, despite my career, my aches to achieve something?

I do my best to ignore the eerie anxiety, besieging me, that the road to my parents is somehow going to be far longer than it should be.

*

I wake. I’m in a bed; I can stretch my legs and roll over. A window by my left. The room is dark, grey, like there’s static across my vision, but I realise that I’m in the bedroom of my childhood.

Outside, out past my window, I can hear the high, frenzied cackling of something.

I breathe. My thoughts are too clear for this to be a dream. But I know that I have to be asleep in my car. I know that I had to stop, that it had gotten dark, and I was only halfway… Though I know this, I feel that perhaps my entire life as an adult thus far has been an odd dream, that I am in fact still seven, still tucked into bed, and fearing, irrationally, people—creatures, people-creatures—coming into the house to hurt me. In my fears they would go straight for my parents, murdering them in their beds, leaving me totally to their final devouring.

Raging laughter ripples in the air outside. Something zips.

A grasping sensation. I feel something wet, the semblance—or expectation, of a feeling, perhaps—on my back. I turn, and I look into the big brown eyes of Frankie. He is pawing at me, tongue kept in his mouth, jaws tight. The look you don’t want to see on a beloved dog’s face. I stare at him, as though staring can implore. He whines and jerks his head back. Towards my parents’ room.

I know I am asleep. But I can feel his ears, that baby fur that never roughened. There’s no logic to this—and no logic to his being inside, not leashed to his kennel by the garage. Then I see it. Coagulated blood, blacker than the blackness around me, matted against his side, where something long sticks out.

He whines again; I hear the roar of imbecilic, adolescent laughter.

I grip Frankie’s fur between his ears. It hits me. My parents are vulnerable. They need another dog.