Table Of ContentPONTYPOOL CHANGES EVERYTHING
other books by
TONY BURGESS
The Hellmouths of Bewdley
Caesarea
Fiction for Lovers
Pontypool Changes Everything
A Novel by Tony Burgess
Copyright © Tony Burgess, 1998, 2009
Published by ECW Press, 2120 Queen Street East, Suite 200, Toronto, Ontario,
Canada M4E 1E2
416.694.3348 / [email protected]
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a
retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any process — electronic,
mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise — without the prior written
permission of the copyright owners and ECW Press.
LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION
CIP data available upon request.
ISBN-13: 978-1-55022-881-6
ISBN-10: 1-55022-881-1
Edited for the press by Michael Holmes. Cover design by Rachel Ironstone.
Cover photo and author photo are taken from Pontypool, directed by Bruce
McDonald, courtesy Maple Pictures and Shadow Shows. Printed by
Transcontinental.
The publication of Pontypool Changes Everything has been generously
supported by the Canada Council for the Arts, which last year invested $ 20.1
million in writing and publishing throughout Canada, by the Ontario Arts
Council, by the OMDC Book Fund, an initiative of the Ontario Media
Development Corporation, and by the Government of Canada through the Book
Publishing Industry Development Program ( BPIDP ).
PRINTED AND BOUND IN CANADA
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Rachel Jones, who makes everything possible. I love you.
Everyone at ECW and Shadow Shows. My brother Bruce McDonald.
Griffin, who laughs at Camille. And Camille, who loves boobs-stickin’-out
Barbie.
Importantly, for support: Jane, Kate, Tim, Barb, Andrew, Kelly, AJ, Jesse,
Krista, Susan, David, Pia, John & Edith, Pat, Bruce, Erica, Paige, Emily, Jake,
and my dear mother, Audrey, gone now but remembered fiercely.
And thank you to superheroes Derek McCormack and Malcolm Ingram.
Michael Holmes for insisting we do this and, as always, for being willing to re-
friend me on the way down and the way up.
For my girls Camille and Rachel
with gratitude to Bruce McDonald
PART I
AUTOBIOGRAPHY
This is a love song for John and Leisha’s Mother.
It wasn’t easy. I might not write another.
— Chris Knox
That night I had terrible dreams I was killing people. When I awoke it
took some serious self-examination to convince myself that I was not
repressing real acts of murder. So completely vivid was my sense of
guilt that I felt nothing short of running through a full account of my
life could provide me with the peace of mind I needed to fall back
asleep. In spite of the three hours I spent combing over the details, I
have, to this day, a very persistent certainty that hidden inside me is
the revolting knowledge of days when I wasn’t quite myself. I now
suspect that my inexplicable bouts of exhaustion are due to the massive
effort of keeping those days behind me.
1
The Nervous Population
Down in the strange hooves of Pontypool’s tanning horses scratches one of
Ontario’s thinnest winds. Cold as a needle and far too complicated to ever leave
the ground, these picks of air snap at fetlocks, blackening the legs of horses. The
anonymous wind gathers its speed in turns around a cannon bone and tears
across the ice of a frozen pool. It feels the behaviour of more famous systems
and is consumed by the complexity of its origins, breaking into mad daggers and
splintering into the phantoms of horses. These horses, vacancies now, or maybe
caskets, are places for the wind to rest. And when a wind rests, its heart stops
and it is dead forever. The horses on the ice, built from the corpse of a breeze,
skate towards each other, not breathing, but intelligent. They leap inside their
crazy minds and begin to make plans.
On the shore of the pool the other horses, ageing and brown, unglue their
heels from the burning snow and align their bodies with the grain of the sun,
counting the minutes, eight in all, until the first warming rays fall from the star’s
coat and drape across a horse’s back, raising its withers and bathing its dark
crest. The horses of leather and bone and cheek and thigh climb towards an open
gate in the cedar fence that surrounds the pool. On the southern post claps the fat
orange mitt of a man in a bulging white coat. In his other hand he swivels a
bucket, clanging a metal dish against its sides.
The horses, five of them, roll in a line through the gate and are swallowed by
the south shadow of the barn before they disappear into an open door. The man
closes the gate and, swinging the bucket, follows a shallow gully of mud
wending through the snow to a beige truck parked at the side of the road. He
walks around the vehicle kicking the heavy ice that juts out, like teeth, from its
underside until it loosens and falls, intact and old, onto the soft shoulders of the
road. After circling the truck twice, swiping and kicking at random, he tries the
tread of his boot in the access step and climbs into the driver’s seat.
Beside him on the passenger seat is a copy of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Its
leather cover is striped with road salt, the tar spine is pot-holed. The inner lining
and mulling have surfaced through ruptures. Books X and XI are marked by
curled strips of pink paper that would open to the story of Orpheus. On these
Description:The dark side of humanity is explored in this electrifying science fiction thriller in which an epidemic virus terrorizes the earth. Causing its inhabitants to strike out on murderous rampages, the virus is caught through conversation and, once contracted, leads its host on a strange journey—i
