My
father warned me to always be vigilant, to never let my guard down, not even
for a blink. Because danger can arrive in a split second – without warning or
sign posts, and certainly without guard rails to deflect the swift and bloody
death that inevitably follows.
By
age fifteen, I had learned this lesson well. Learned and relearned it, in fact,
five times: when I was seven, eight, nine, eleven, and fourteen-years-old. I
was tormented by the memory of each near-death incident, escaping each time by
only the thinnest of margins. But it was the incident at the age of nine which
proved to be the most harrowing. It’s the memory I’ve tried hardest to fling
from my mind, but which, as if tied to me by a thick elastic band, returns to
my mind again and again like an unrelenting tide.
The
sky was cloudy that evening but the weather forecast had made no mention of
lightning. Or even of rain, although a pre-downpour dankness mugged my skin as
I stepped out of the school building. A few teachers gazed up at the midnight
sky but their expressions were more of glancing concern than alarm. Students,
released from the school cafeteria and energised by lunch, walked with
springing, yet orderly, strides.
It
was school photo night. The younger classes went first, little munchkins whose
parents had brushed and gelled their hair at home earlier so it looked just so,
and from whose chins teachers quickly wiped away blood stains left over from
lunch. You’re adorable, the teachers would coo, and some of them really were
with their chubby pale cheeks and large innocent eyes.
The
kindergarten class went first, followed by the first and second grade classes.
They stood directly before the school’s front entrance on steps which led down
to the sports fields. The skies grew darker with each succeeding class shot,
and the photographer and his assistant muttered curses as they undertook the
time-consuming task of changing mercurial flashbulbs. Only when the clouds
turned the sky black and menacing – everyone had by then removed their
SunShades – did the teachers look up with growing and genuine alarm.
But
we were too close to wrapping it up to end there. Only three more class groups
to go. The teachers hurried us along, shuffling one class onto the school steps
before the previous one had barely vacated them. In their haste, a little girl
– her hair done up in plaits – was jostled and fell a short way down the steps.
She shot back up with embarrassment. A few boys in her class scratched their
wrists in derision, pointing at the white scrapes raked on the girl’s left leg,
their faces bland but their voices tinged with ridicule.
The
girl retreated quickly into the crowd, and my eyes, for a reason then unknown
to me, followed her with curiosity. She blended into the crowd, and
disappeared. Now it was my class’s turn. “Come along now,” the teacher said,
glancing at the sky. We stood in a perfect square, sixteen students standing
prim and proper on four rows. It was so dark now, I couldn’t even see the
photographer.
“You
in the third row,” the photographer’s voice rang out from the sea of blackness
in front and below me. “Don’t look around. Keep your eyes on the camera lens.”
He was addressing me. He had to be. I was the only one who couldn’t see
anything or anyone in the darkness – not the photographer, not the camera. My
classmates, on the other hand, could spot a grasshopper a hundred metres away.
Visibility in this blackness was perfect for them.
“C’mon
now, stop wasting time,” the voice said again. “Look at the camera.” I could
not see him. But his voice was enough of a guide. I planted my eyes directly at
the point in darkness from which his voice emanated. “Hey!” the voice rang out
again. “Not at me. At the camera!” That is when it dawned on me. The person
speaking was not the photographer but his assistant who might – or might not –
be standing a distance away from the photographer. And now a couple of students
were turning around to gaze at me. Panic started to thrum in me.
Don’t
attract attention, my father told me yesternight. It was one of his golden
rules, spoken at least once a week. No matter what you do, don’t attract
attention. More students turned to stare at me, their faces as bland and dull
as a grey ceramic plates. Never widen your eyes, never sweat, don’t bite your
lower lip, he’d reminded me that very morning as he checked my fake fangs, as
he’d filed my nails. Never show emotion. But even now, I could feel fear about
to bubble through my mask of blandness.
I
knew what I had to do. “Hey,” the assistant said, “what’s the matter with you?”
My father’s voice now: Zero. Make your mind a zero, eyes a zero, emotions a
zero. You, a zero. That’s how you get to zero. Because any emotion x zero =
zero. Simple maths. A blank, an emptiness, a vacuum.
So
that is what I did. I felt nothing, thought nothing, was nothing. “Look at the
camera!” the assistant cried out at me. Only when I knew my voice had achieved
emptiness, did I speak. “Can you see my face clearly? Isn’t the student
standing in front of me blocking my face?”
“Nobody’s
blocking your face!” said another voice – the photographer’s – with annoyance.
There, five metres to the right from where the assistant had spoken. I
swivelled my eyes with forced slowness to that spot in the dark pool.
The
camera clicked, the mercurial bulb flashed, glazed and dull. My class sauntered
down the steps onto the field. The next class moved in, was posing on the steps
when the first raindrops landed on us. All heads shot up. Not with panic or
fear, not yet. With annoyance, curiosity, concern. A few more drops, then
nothing.
Somebody
came to stand next to me. I turned slowly to look. Even before our eyes met, I
knew who it was. The raked skin on her left leg was still visible. We were the
same height, and her eyes were gazing sideways at me. She wore an odd
expression on her face, as if waiting for an answer to a question she’d asked
me. I fought the urge to arch my eyebrows.
No
further raindrops fell. All heads turned back down. We stood in orderly
silence, eyes watching the group of students on the steps. When the lightning
cracked open the night sky, it was with a jarring violence; a pitchfork of
razor sharpness that bleached the fields white around me.
Instantly,
everyone crouched down into a foetal position, eyes scrunched shut. A few
kindergarten students screamed out in pain, their young eyes the most sensitive
to the (for them) blinding light. They would not regain vision for nights.
A
strobe of mercurial light flashed rhythmically. It was coming from the camera –
the photographer, blinded by the lightning, had dropped it and the camera’s
impact with the ground had somehow set it to continuous-auto shoot mode.
Rain
poured down like a celestial bucket of water overturned. Stinging us, like a
hundred, a thousand fingers jabbing. But it wasn’t the rain that threw everyone
into a panic. It was the lightning.
“Get
inside!” a teacher screamed, her voice torqued in terror. She grabbed a few
children, pushed them towards the steps, trying to usher them into the school
building. They were all crying now, tiny wails of anger.
Another
peal of lightning. A harsh, illuminating flare which rendered the scene in the
reverse black-and-white of a photo negative. I saw frozen looks of panic and
distress ripple through the crowd, eyes crunched shut, bodies cowering. The
thunder that followed pummelled the night air like two buses crashing. Students
yelled in acute physical pain, hands clamped over eyes. Bodies tumbled in panic,
crashing into one another.
Five
seconds later, the sky blazed with a hot sear of lightning. The brightest flash
yet. Screams intensified, despite the donned SunShades.
My
head snapped around, SunShades still pocketed, eyes wide, alert, watchful. The
danger to them was the lightning; the danger to me was their panic-stricken
arms swinging about, razor-thin nails slashing about the air.
The
tiniest cut on my skin, the smallest bead of blood escaping through the gash,
and their fear would suddenly, horrifically, be turned into lust-filled hunger.
They
would soon forget their own fear and pain. They would turn into a tidal wave of
desire and longing. I could run, but I wouldn’t get far. Ten metres, maybe
twenty, and then they would be on me, ravaging me like a wave of acidic saliva,
leaving nothing behind after the tide of fangs and incisors retreated, not even
my bones.
I
moved off to the side, away from the masses of swinging fingernails. Retreated
back into the school building. I slipped on my SunShades once I was indoors, to
avoid any questions, to avoid drawing any attention as the only person not
donning a pair. And then everyone was back inside school, the students, the
teachers, the photographer cradling his recovered camera, everyone calmed and
stilled. All danger had safely passed away.
Except
the danger never really retreated. Not for me, anyway. It swelled in the dark
sea of night. Only two hours later, in the frail safety of my own home, the
danger reared its head in a more nefarious, chilling manner.
News
of the lightning attack made the television news. Second story item, in fact,
after the lead story about the Ruler’s most recent charitable donation. The
news anchor went live to a reporter at the school, and as she reported from the
front steps on which I’d only earlier stood, photographs of the incident filled
the screen.
Initially,
there were shots of several classes, the photographed students orderly and
aligned. Then the photographs suddenly went askew: these were the shots taken
when the camera had fallen to the ground and had snapped on auto-mode, a
sequence of the unfolding horror. The camera was fortuitously well-positioned,
and, even more luckily, had snapped a few shots right as the lightning had
struck. These photographs – about three of them – were horrifying displays of
group panic. Students crouched, heads tucked into chest, eyes clenched shut
against the brutal glare of the flash of lightning.
I
could not sleep that day. Something about those photographs bothered me. Close
to dusk, I rose, turned on the computer. As I’d suspected, the photographs had
gone viral by then. But for an altogether unsuspected reason.
It
was the girl. The one with the plaits and the raked skin on her left leg. She
was in many of the photographs, never front and centre, not obvious at first
glance, but in the background, on the margins of the photographs.
And
now, on blog after blog after blog, circled, arrowed, highlighted, blown up.
It
was her eyes. In shot after shot, when everyone else had their eyes squeezed
tight or covered by SunShades, when everyone else was screaming in pain, when
virtually everyone else was crouched in a tight ball, she was standing upright.
With open eyes. With a serene, happily-surprised smile on her face.
It
was never clear from the photographs why she was smiling. For weeks afterwards,
people debated: some attributed it to a weird heper happiness at being
outdoors, in the thunderstorm; others believed it to be a sick kind of heper
joy at people’s pain. Most thought it was a vacant gaze; and it was that
erroneous conclusion that saved my life. Because only I knew the truth. It wasn’t
a vacant gaze. It was a specific, direct look. Because if you followed her
eyes, you could just make out at the edge of the photograph, the half-crouched
posture of someone with his back to the camera.
It
was me. If you strained hard enough, if you blew up the photograph enough, you
could see the slight bulge of the SunShades still in my pocket. Only the angle
of my body concealed from the camera my opened eyes, gleaming under the bright
crack of lightning. Nobody ever connected the dots.
In
the middle of the thunderstorm, she was smiling at me. I know why. She’d
thought she was all alone in this dark, forsaken world. And then she saw me, my
opened eyes under the flash of lightning, and realised she was not. She was not
alone. And that was why she was smiling.
They
ate her at dusk. Seconds after the sun dropped below the horizon of the Vast,
her neighbours tore out of their still-shuttered homes and rammed through her
front door. Hundreds of others, waiting with bated breath for the sun to set,
raced along the streets towards her home. But they were too late. By the time
they reached her home, she’d long been ravaged. Even her clothes, ripped to
pieces, nibbled and sucked on.
