Interlude 4 Gwen, Under Attack
Fourth Interlude
Gwen, Under Attack
Robin Fellows took a pull off her e-cig, filled her lungs with a dizzying hit of sweet vapor—she thought it tasted a little
like a Wispa bar—and said, “You must be right out of your head, bitch,” then got out of the car, into the rain.
It was coming down at a slant, falling in white needles through the headlamps, a freezing November shower that tore leaves
from the wych elms and the yews. She checked her phone for a signal, there in the desolate pasture, standing next to her positively
ancient Land Rover. She had two bars—enough to pull up Twitter if she so desired. At some point in the last two months she
had realized she no longer read newspapers. There was no point. Every story they published was already hours old, and hours
felt like weeks now—whatever the breaking news, she had already read about it, and the backlash, and the backlash to the backlash,
on social media, in real time.
Twitter was where she had come across the video of the man devouring the goat.
Twitter had a weird app—it was a dumb novelty really—called Vine, where users could share six-second loops of video.
Vine produced an endless stream of irresistibly stupid clips: here was a dude in a wet suit, snorkeling in his bathtub; here was a guy swallowing a cigarette, then coughing it up, still lit; here was a teenage cheerleader doing her baton-throwing routine with a raw turkey.
Part of Robin thought those videos were the end of the human attention span, that soon no one would want to think about anything that required more than six seconds of focus.
She hated them. She watched about forty a day.
The clip had turned up a few days ago and swiftly racked up a couple hundred thousand views. It had been filmed by a Camelford
teenager who went by the handle @onepurrfection and whose Twitter bio read: Saving It For Marriage Or Harry Styles, STAY AWAY FROM MY MAN Taylor. Or at least that had been the information in her profile right up until she deleted her account, earlier that morning.
@onepurrfection had gone down through the reeds to the river at dusk for a sneaky smoke. Only there had been a man on the
far side of the River Camel, in a black tracksuit and a white bucket hat—@onepurrfection described him as a “Liam Gallagher
looking weirdo”—petting a goat with one hand while he drank a can of Newcastle. He had seen her looking, offered a little
wave, called out cheers. She asked the name of his goat, and he said Second Breakfast, and then he said he’d show her a magic
trick if she’d get her tits out. She said go on then, let’s see the trick first, holding her phone low to film through the
reeds.
In the six-second clip the derelict was a little out of focus—the air had a fine mist in it and water drops had caught on
the lens of @onepurrfection’s camera. The sun was down but the sky was still a lurid shade of crimson; the phrase “blood-dimmed
tide” occurred to Robin’s literature-tuned mind. He was a lanky guy, stringy black hair, cheeks corroded by old acne scars,
filthy high-top sneakers unlaced. He didn’t look anything like the man Robin had seen from a distance under Slaughterbridge,
almost ten years before. That guy had been blond, and anyway, would be in his fifties by now. This guy looked thirty.
The bloke in the bucket cap stroked his goat’s ears .
. . and then bent forward and his jaw distended, came unhooked, opening more, and then more still, stretching grotesquely, impossibly wide, and he swallowed the goat’s head.
It tried to kick its way back and away, to escape, its hooves tearing strips out of the soft earth, but the derelict had it by the nape of the neck, and then he was forcing its whole upper body into a mouth as wide as a laundry chute.
His upper body deformed, mushrooming and swelling like an image in a fun house mirror.
His head cocked back, eyes staring at the sky, mouth open like a manhole.
The goat’s back legs kicked and it disappeared into that impossible hole in the man’s face and then the clip was over, leapt back to the beginning.
Responses varied, but generally fell into one of three essential categories:
@scoresesescores: whooooo look who just got Adobe After-Effects for her birthday and thinks she’s George Lucas. Note: leaving
key elements of the image out of focus is what really marks this as amateur hour stuff. You might not be ready to send your
CV to ILM just yet, LOL LOL ??.
@foreverrea11: this goat has been disbudded to remove his horns do you have any idea how fucking cruel that is they scream
while theyre horns are burned off. Their not pets, their not food, and their NOT PROPS, you c**t. #animalcruelty #getthefacts
#PETA #vegan
@svangur_bro: so *did* you get your tits out? Make that your next video, my luv. Or I could pop by your house on 63 Lankersham
Lane & see em for realsies.
@onepurrfection hung in there for about twenty-four hours before posting a last distraught thread of her own.
@onepurrfection: The vine I shared yesterday was 100% real, but in the last 24 hrs I have been doxed, accused of lying, teased,
bullied, and creeped on.
@onepurrfection: I gave the raw video file to Cornwall law enforcement & was told I could be charged for wasting police resources. My mother slapped my face because I won’t admit it’s fake.
@onepurrfection: Fck this site, my life, and every troll here who got off on harassing me. Goodbye thx.
Six hours later her account was gone, although her video lived on, mirrored by other accounts, and often digitally reedited
and reinvented. A popular version showed Hillary Clinton bloating and swelling to eat corporate money. In another, minor presidential
candidate and reality show host Donald Trump distorted to devour Hillary, gulped her down with a belch, and wiped his mouth
with a silk napkin. The trolls had to have their fun. It seemed there were more and more of them online every day.
Robin had watched the original Vine probably sixty times. Half the time she hardly looked at what was happening to the goat.
What captured her attention was the derelict’s T-shirt, visible when the unzippered top of his tracksuit bulged open. It showed
a black knight standing on one leg, his arms and the other leg lying in a pile of severed limbs beneath him. A slogan in Gothic
print read, ’tis but a scratch. The last time she had seen that shirt, Stuart Finger had been wearing it and Arthur Oakes had still been alive.
She pulled up the hood of her slicker and started toward the bridge, her wellies splashing in the puddles. Wellies and a slicker
always made her feel she was sixteen again, walking home from school in Orpington. Even now, her definition of happiness remained
a rainy day, an Ursula Le Guin, a strong cup of black tea, followed by a nap. A sweet, dreamless nap, with the rain tapping
on the roof tiles.
There hadn’t been much in the way of sweet, dreamless sleep in the years after BA 238 made its emergency landing at Narsarsuaq Airport.
For a long time, no sooner had Robin closed her eyes than she found herself on the plane again, the aircraft rattling with turbulence, the lights stammering furiously overhead.
These dreams always played out the same, with only the tiniest variations.
Papers flew as the 747 dropped. Passengers wailed.
Some of them were craning their heads to see out the windows, and Robin herself leaned across Van in an attempt to glimpse whatever was out there.
Rain streamed across the glass and black clouds churned.
Van took her hands in his, his slender freckled face gone almost bloodless.
“Allie,” he whispered. “Why did I let Allie get out of her seat? She isn’t safe. She should be with us.”
“I’ll find her. I won’t let anything happen to her,” Robin promised.
She unbuckled her belt and came to her feet. The 747 lurched. She fell across the aisle, grabbed a seat back to steady herself,
and Frank Heck, sitting in the next row, turned his head to look at her. His face was swollen and black in death, the blood
vessels burst in one eye so one cornea had turned a milky scarlet.
“What part of remain in your seat don’t you understand, babe?” he asked her.
Robin reeled up the aisle, her heart thudding high in her throat. The thought that Allie might be hurt—small, lovely, foolish,
kind Allie—was so terrible it overpowered all other notions. But the girl was nearby, Robin could sense it, and if she could
get a hand on her, it was still possible to save her life. Allie was just on the other side of the curtain drawn across the
waist of the plane, Robin knew it. But when Robin ripped aside the curtain, there was no front of the plane at all. The 747
had been sheared in two. Beyond the curtain was only the roaring black night, the pelting rain, the shriek of the wind. Everything
in front of the wings was gone.
Robin opened her mouth to scream and the dragon screamed first. The dragon erupted from the clouds, great golden jaws open in a nerve-freezing howl, a sound terribly like steel grinding on steel.
That hideous, awful cry always shocked her awake and became the sound of steel wheels keening on iron rails.
The tracks out of Waterloo East curved past her apartment, not forty feet from the windows, and in those days, the scream of the last train often drew her shouting from sleep.
It wasn’t so bad, waking at 1:00 a.m. from a dream like that. Allie, at least, was still awake, on the East Coast, where it
was only eight in the evening. In the dream, Robin was trying to rescue Allie, but after she woke, in the early hours of the
morning, Allison was Robin’s parachute, letting her gently down from terror to calmness.