The Follower by Odile Mori

Her cousin Dean’s voice was so hushed that Katie could barely hear him over the buzz of insects and the scrunch their sneakered feet made on the haphazard gravel track. He lengthened his stride as he spoke, and Katie had to stretch her legs as far as they would go to keep up. She shot a glance at his thin face and wondered why he looked anxious under the splotched mask of freckles that stood out against his fair skin, his mouth moving as if he was biting the insides of his cheeks. The faint shadows that lurked under his pale blue eyes like the hint of an impending thunderstorm seemed even darker than usual.

The scorched menthol smell that the bush always released after a blazing summer day usually made Katie smile about the weeks of holidays still ahead, but now it settled around her like the exhalation of an ancient reptile that had laid its eggs in her chest. The urge to look back was enormous, but Dean was older by four years and disobeying him when he sounded so serious was unimaginable. Her heart thumped roughly beneath the hand-me-down Transformers t-shirt that had been his until he outgrew it or tired of the cartoon, or maybe both. It was still too big for her, its sleeves hanging almost to her elbows and the hem ending not far above knees covered in scabs from falling off Dean’s skateboard the week before.

Dean, who taught her swearwords and rode his BMX so fast over the ramp he’d built in Nan and Pop’s backyard that he would fly into the air before landing with a clatter of pedals and chain and shouts of glee, wasn’t afraid of anything. Even last holidays when kids were pushing him around outside the takeaway shop that made the best caramel milkshakes she’d ever tasted, taunting him about how his mum had run off, he’d just pushed them right back.

He ended up with a bloody nose and black eye, and Nan had fits over that when they’d gotten home. She’d still given each of them a warmed up jam doughnut and an extra serve of homemade chips later that night, even though she grumbled while she was doing it. Dean stole some of Katie’s chips and whispered that he didn’t care about his Mum being gone because he got to live with Nan and Pop now. He liked it better with them, he told her, his hand stealing out to grab another serving from her plate. Katie wished she could live with Nan and Pop and be with Dean all the time, rather than have to put up with her annoying little sisters.

Only now, with nothing around them but the trees, he looked scared and much younger than the thirteen years that she envied. The late afternoon sun slipped through the eucalyptus leaves high above them to cast twisted shadows across his features and Katie thought suddenly of the grasping fingers of some deformed creature. She hunched her shoulders and screwed up her face, squinting into the tall ferns that pressed in on the track. She had never thought about how dense they were, or how they looked like they should be soft but whipped across your skin like verdant cat o’nine tails and left stinging marks if you tried to push through them too quickly.

Dean rode his bike up and down this track whenever Pop was working on his boat, which wasn’t today because there was an auction in town where Pop hoped to pick up a run-down truck to do up and sell for a profit. He took Pop the thick sandwiches and sugar-coated biscuits that Nan packed in a battered tin lunch box, passed tools and echoed Pop’s curses at the faulty engine that blew diesel smoke whenever it started up, and dragged his hands in the river so that the long strands of kelp that sometimes rose close to the surface played over his fingers. He knew the sounds and smells, the dog walkers, the other kids who played there, the fishermen who parked back near the road and walked down to the tiny beach next to the rotten tar-smelling jetty where Pop moored the boat.

Most of all, though, Dean couldn’t make things up the way Katie could, and he teased her endlessly about how she let her imagination run away with her. When Katie told him she wouldn’t go near the sides of Pop’s boat because the half-glimpsed fronds of seaweed that swayed in clumps were searching for bodies to drag under and feed on, he hadn’t let up for a week. It was only after she sneaked a look at his final report card for English class last year – a C minus, and Nan was still in a state over that – that Katie had started to suspect he made fun of her because his own world of mechanical problems and tools and things he could do with his hands was all he had.

In that world, when something was wrong, it was real.

“What is it?” 

She tried to keep her voice as low as Dean’s, choking back the need that rose in her to scream just to drown out the cicada cacophony that was burrowing into her brain.

“There’s a man following us. I think it’s him,” he muttered through gritted teeth. His attention was fixed rigidly on the track ahead of them, as if his head was held in place with one of the rusty metal rods, thicker than her thumb, that Pop drove into the ground to hold up his tomato bushes.

Katie pulled in a ragged, terrified lungful of air so clotted with dogwood pollen that her tongue felt coated in tiny spines. It had been all over the news before she came to Nan and Pop’s. A man had been following kids after school and trying to drag them into his car. Her parents muted the television in the lounge room and sat her down, one on either side of her on the red floral-patterned couch they kept talking about replacing. Then they told her if that happened to her she should shout loudly for help, run away as fast as she could, and try to find a nice looking lady or a policeman. The way Dad took off his glasses and twisted one arm between his fingers like he always did when he wished he was doing something else, and Mum’s too-brisk, matter of fact voice, told Katie that what would happen if she got caught by the man was so bad they didn’t want to think about it.

That scared Katie, but not as much as the black and white police identikit drawing that had filled the entire TV screen for several seconds. Its odd incompleteness reminded her of the unsettling blank faces on dummies in clothes shops, the ones she sometimes had nightmares about, where they turned their heads knowingly and stretched shiny plastic hands towards her. She didn’t utter a single complaint when Mum started dropping her off and picking her up from school instead of letting her walk the three blocks with her friends.

“We should run,” she croaked, her throat tightening until she could hardly force out the words.

“Don’t be stupid. He’s an adult. He’ll catch up. Anyway, you can’t run fast, and it’s probably you he’s after because you’re a girl.”

Dean knew best, as usual. She was always last when there were races at school, and any grownup with their long legs would be onto her before she could even get started. She should have thought of that.

“Well, what do we do?” she pleaded. Her fingers writhed from the impulse to hook around Dean’s tatty old canvas belt so that he could haul her along, lending her some of his own strength. She clenched them into fists and swung her arms by her sides, instead, trying to drive her body faster.

“Just walk as quick as you can,” he instructed her.

“And play along.”

He raised his voice, something he rarely did now that it was liable to crack and change mid-sentence. He spoke much less than he had last holidays, and more often than not just grunted at her rather than bothering with words. But this time, he showed none of his usual signs of embarrassment, and that told Katie how much trouble they were in.

“Hurry up – we’ll catch up to Pop in a minute, he’s not far ahead.”

Of course. Dean always had clever ideas. The weirdo would think their Pop was nearby, and maybe then he’d leave them alone.

“OK. Let’s catch Pop,” she agreed, almost as loudly as when she called him to come up from the far end of the overgrown paddock that backed onto Pop’s shed. She caught Dean’s satisfied nod from the corner of her eye and his approval seemed to briefly dull the terrible ache of exertion that was spreading through her legs.

Dean sped up even more, and Katie tried to hide her panting as she struggled to match his pace. She wanted to ask what their plan was if the man came closer, but Dean frowned sidelong at her when she opened her mouth so she said nothing. They walked in silence except for Katie’s heavy breaths until they passed the hacked off gum tree trunk that sat almost exactly halfway between the river and the road. Globs of sickly orange fungus sprouted from the disintegrating timber like pus exuding from a wound, and a jagged splinter, longer and wider than Katie’s hand, stabbed up from the weathered stump as if the tree had made one final effort to impale whoever had cut it down.

“Oh shit, I think I left my cap back at Pop’s boat!”

Dean slapped his head in a pantomime of annoyance, leaving a faint greasy smear. His fingers were black from fiddling with the motor of the weathered fishing trawler that Pop said would be his someday. All he had done was remove one of the oily metal caps and inspect it with a sigh before screwing it back on, but when he wiped his hands on the jeans that flapped around his bony legs he still managed to transfer grimy streaks onto the faded denim.

He shot a casual glance back over his shoulder, as if he was trying to decide what to do, then looked at his watch for longer than he needed to.

“Oh well, I’ll go back for it tomorrow. I don’t want to miss Batman.”

Katie stared at the beaded bracelet on her wrist, a craft project from when she had been bored yesterday while Dean was off at football practice. She hoped it looked like she was wearing a watch too.

“Yeah, Batman’s on really soon.”

“He’s still there.”

Dean’s tense murmur barely rose above the din of thousands of scabrous insect legs rubbing together frantically.

“I saw a flash of blue shirt. Don’t look.”

Katie’s knees wobbled. She had asked her parents what would happen if the man caught her, because that was the part that the news reporters never talked about. They glanced swiftly at each other before telling her that sometimes adults, very sick adults, hurt children. That was all they told her, and she somehow grasped that the look between them meant it had to be kept from her at all costs. She thought Dean must know, from the way his eyes had narrowed when he said she was a girl.

His gangly teenage legs easily outpaced hers and she started to lag behind. Her mouth filled with the thick gush of sour tasting saliva that always came before she vomited. She spat clumsily, spraying her own shoes and leaving damp blobs on the glittery red laces. No wonder Dean told her she was no good at spitting.

“Slow down!”

He shook his head, not looking at her, and made a show of checking his watch again as he began to jog.

“No, you hurry up, I don’t want to miss Batman!”

Katie understood. He was secretly telling her she should run, and as she obeyed, she thought how lucky she was that he always knew what to do. Maybe if the man caught up to them, she would have enough of a head start that Dean could fight him while she got away. He’d done karate lessons last year and she told her friends at school that he’d bash up anyone who picked on her. Certain she could feel the man’s eyes crawling over her, Katie tried to run faster. She briefly entertained the hope of finding some dormant speed that had lain hidden until it was needed, the way superpowers did. Instead, her legs seemed to be moving more and more sluggishly, like they were filled with the sandy, oozing muck that came out of the bilge on Pop’s boat.

She had been tired when she followed Dean down to the river in the first place, worn out from a day of trying to beat him at bike races. He told her she should stay home with Nan, but sometimes walking seemed to put him in a generous mood and she wanted to ask him whether she could play on his computer tonight. She should have done what he said, instead of thinking she could keep up with him. She tripped over her own feet and stubbed a toe painfully on the hard packed earth beneath its slippery layer of tiny rocks. Forgetting she was meant to be quiet, she called out to Dean to wait. It felt like sandpaper was stripping her lungs. Her cry must have been too faint to carry because he jogged even faster.

The bumps and whorls in the tree trunks she hobbled past looked like cunning eyes that gauged her flagging steps and mouths that leered triumphantly as she fell further and further behind. Her shaky breath roared inside her ears, strange and hollow. Over that, she was sure she heard sly steps grinding on the dead leaves behind her. They were slow and deliberate, with the unhurried ease of somebody who knew they simply had to wait until the boy in front of her was completely out of sight.

She lurched, arms flailing as she tried to keep her balance, her legs tangling and uncooperative. She pressed one hand against the sharp cramping in her side that pulled her intestines with every movement and hunched over, her steps shortening to half-hops to try and lessen the pain. She lifted her head for a split second, desperately hoping that Dean would have realised she had fallen behind, and turned back. She was alone. She limped along, waiting for the man to grab her, and tried to think of Dean returning to save her but instead remembered the fish she’d caught when Pop took them fishing.

She’d been allowed to use a proper fishing rod instead of the hand line she’d always been given before. When she felt a furtive jerk at the bait she twitched the rod to hook the fish before winding it in smoothly, just like Dean had shown her. She leaned out over the muddy water as she wound, trying to see what she’d caught, and finally a twisting shadow appeared, whipping frantically as it tried to free itself from the hook. She swung the dripping, gleaming body onto the deck, and her triumph vanished when she saw its flaring spines and mouth gulping for oxygen as it thrashed. She had to free the hook from its mouth and throw it back. As she started to stretch her hand towards it, Dean flicked it onto the scratched chopping board anchored to the seat next to him and casually drove his knife through the back of its head. By the time Nan served up their day’s catch that night, fried in breadcrumbs with salt and pepper, Katie had forgotten the way it looked at her while it died.

The bushland ended with the abrupt bluntness of a severed limb. Dean’s hand shot out and grabbed her t-shirt’s flapping sleeve a second before she stumbled in front of the cars passing by. A line of potholed black asphalt ran right alongside the bush, uneven and cracked, as if it had tried to lift itself defiantly from the ground before giving up and surrendering to its task of marking civilisation. She finally risked a glance back over her shoulder. The track was empty.

“He’s gone,” she forced out through heaving gasps. Her legs gave way and she crumpled like a bouquet of tissue paper flowers discarded in the rain, dropping onto the miserable strip of scratchy, scrubby grass that flanked the road. She felt warm clamminess in the crotch of her terry towelling shorts. A reek like stepped-on ants told her that somewhere back along the track she had wet herself without knowing. She tried to fold over so that Dean wouldn’t see what she’d done.

Dean was doubled over. To start with, she thought he had a stitch, too, until she saw that he was quivering with laughter. He slapped his knees and shook his head.

“You’re so gullible. I told you I didn’t want to miss the start of Batman and that was the only way to make you hurry up. I told you not to come.” He trotted across the road, still laughing, not bothering to see if she followed.

“I’m telling!” she tried to scream after him, but her voice was thin and powerless and the wind dragged her words back into the trees.

Odile Mori

Image by junebab from Pixabay – Path between huge tree trunks in the forest.