Haunted Organic Read online

  Haunted Organic

  Kim Foster

  Copyright © 2020 Kim Foster

  All rights reserved

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  ISBN-13: 9781234567890

  ISBN-10: 1477123456

  Cover design by: Art Painter

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2018675309

  Printed in the United States of America

  To Lucy & Edie.

  We wrote this together on walks in Sydney. Some of the best days. Thank you.

  one

  GHOST BABY

  All Josie Brown wanted was chicken nuggets.

  He had it all planned out. He was going to run into the Organic Food Shop next to his house, get the nuggets, and eat them while lying on his bed, listening to Sleater-Kinney blaring through his earbuds. It was going to be a perfectly uneventful night.

  Except it wasn’t.

  When he got to the Organic Food Shop, he could see the problem immediately. There were great tubs of rutabagas and potatoes, aisles of star fruit, passion fruit and rock melons, but there was scarcely any meat, even though they advertised their great butcher shop, finest cuts of meat, and fresh-from-the-sea fish counter.

  Josie didn’t see any chicken breasts, or lamb chops, or chunky stew beef, nor any whole monkfish, barramundi, or lobsters squirming in the big tank. There was scarcely a rump roast or a pork butt. There were rows of empty meat fridges and there were heaps of ice on the fish counter, but nothing sitting on top, not a single clam or mussel.

  And, certainly, no chicken nuggets at the deli counter.

  He hated this shop. Nothing about it felt right. But it was next door and, as usual, his parents weren't home and he was hungry.

  “Excuse me,” Josie said to the back of a tall, thin woman, with a weirdly short bob of jet-black hair.

  “Yes,” she said, pivoting sharply around to look at him.

  She was transparently pale, had a long thin nose balancing little, round wire-rimmed glasses. Everything about her was crisp. And tight. When she spoke, the slight smell of fish wafted just a bit in the air, as if she had just eaten pickled herring and burped it out into the air.

  She looked into him, deep into his face, which was hiding inside his black hoodie.

  “Uh, chicken nuggets. You have any chicken nuggets?”

  “No.” she said, tight like a wire, pivoting back around. She went on adjusting the cheeses in a refrigerator case.

  “Um, anything like chicken nuggets?...Fish sticks, chicken fingers, turkey even? Anything like that?”

  The woman pivoted around again, peeved this time, and stared at him over her glasses.

  “No. And I'm quite sure of it, Mr. Brown,” she said, rather annoyed.

  He hadn't realized she knew his name. It freaked him out.

  “....but if you must persist in this chicken nugget compulsion, you can check the freezer compartments,” she said, her long, thin bone of an arm pointing toward the far wall.

  “There might be something left over from the feed…ing...” her voice dropped, like she had said the wrong thing.

  “The what?”

  And then, Ludivine Salt, manager of the Organic Food Shop, decided the chicken nugget conversation had ended. She pivoted, one final time, back to her cheddar and manchego.

  “Sure, got it,” Josie muttered, and turned to go to the other side of the shop. He stuffed his earbuds in his ears, Waxahatchee was next on his playlist.

  Josie walked through the heirloom tomato aisle, past the freshly baked breads, past the pastries, and left into the battery and hardware aisle.

  He was approaching the freezer and refrigerator cases, when he felt a rush of wind blast past him, knocking him into a display case of canned beetroot.

  The whole thing thundered down, a crashing column of cans pummeling his head, his body, and then rolling like crazy, psycho wheels, spinning this way and that, through the shop. He tried to catch himself, stepped on a tin, and his feet flew out. He slammed onto his back on the floor.

  “Ouch!” Josie wailed, and felt to see if his spine hadn’t exploded into tiny pieces.

  When he looked up, a crowd had formed around him, all staring down at him. He pulled the ear buds out of his ears.

  “Hard time walking?” Mrs. Kippelibby asked, her lipsticked red lips right in his face.

  “You young boys nowadays, never watch where you’re going,” spouted Tula Fockerson, Mrs. Kippelibby's dearest friend and most fervent gossip partner.

  “Got that crazy serial killer music playing in his ears,” Mrs. Kippelibby said, her jelly arms waving in the air.

  “Rude. Just rude,” Tula added, shaking her head disapprovingly.

  “Probably texting or doing that picture thing with his phone,” added Mrs. Kippelibby, sure that the texting, and the Internet in general, would bring down the world.

  “Oh, young people today, they don't know how to listen to each other, it’s all just...” and Mrs. Kippelibby walked away, pushing her shopping trolley and doing her best impression of a teenager thumbing the keyboard of a phone, her nose pressed up to the imaginary screen.

  “Crazy old bats," Josie muttered.

  Josie hoisted himself up and began picking up the tins. He was doing a good job of it when he happened to look over and see something staring at him from behind a rack of toilet paper.

  It was a child. A baby, really. Just sitting on the floor in aisle 2.

  The baby had plump little cheeks, a nearly bald head, just two little tufts of hair sprouting out, a shirtless belly that spilled out over white sailor pants, with little blue embroidered anchors on the cuffs. The baby had been crying. His eyes looked puffy and rimmed with red. But at that moment he seemed calm.

  Josie looked around for a parent or babysitter. No one seemed to come with the baby. In fact, no-one seemed to even notice the baby. A woman pushed a stroller by, but she ignored Josie and the baby as if they didn't exist, and went about searching for twine to tie-up her roast chicken.

  Josie looked around for someone who might know the kid, who might have simply gone to the next aisle for paper towels, and would be coming right back.

  No one seemed to notice they had lost a baby.

  This sucked.

  Josie hated when life required things of him. He simply wanted to get his chicken nuggets, go home, listen to music, and be blissfully alone. Finding a baby – not to mention, becoming his guardian – was not at all what he had in mind.

  “You know what?...You’ll be fine.” Josie said to the baby, who looked back at him bewildered.

  “Your mum will be back soon. Okay? ...bye.”

  He put in his ear buds, shoved the last tin back on the display, and started for the freezers.

  The baby would have to be someone else’s problem. And he comforted himself by remembering he knew nothing about babies, and this baby would be better off with someone who knew what to do for him.

  There. That was settled. He only had to find something to eat and get out of there.

  That’s when he heard the squeal.

  It was sharp, kind of off, like the baby had been pinched or stepped on. The sound made him sick. He could hear it even over the music drumming in his ears.

  He walked back to aisle 2. The baby hadn’t moved. It was throwing its chubby little arms into the air.

  “Crap. Crap. Crap,” he muttered.

  He pulled out the ea
rbuds and lowered his hood so the baby could see his face.

  He made a new plan. He would entertain the baby for a minute, turn him over to an adult, find something for dinner, and get out of there.

  Josie squatted down, still a safe distance from the child, and smiled at him.

  The baby smiled back.

  Josie moved a little closer.

  The baby slapped the floor, and a wide grin moved over his face.

  Josie came closer.

  “Hey kid, you okay? Where's your Mum?” Josie said in his lightest, friendliest voice.

  The baby broke out into curls of bubbling laughter. The sound was melodious, like the tinkling of chimes in wind. It was babyish and then again, Josie thought, weirdly not babyish at all. The giggles seemed to echo off the walls and also the sides of his brain, like they weren’t from the baby at all, but something much bigger and more sinister.

  Josie reached out his hand. He somehow knew this was a mistake, but he couldn't stop himself. He felt compelled to touch the baby, the way small children need to touch a burning flame. And as soon as his hand clasped the hand of the boy, he felt the insidious cold creep from the baby hand into his own body.

  The baby laughed harder now. He rocked back and forth, his fat little body slamming forward and back, his mouth opened wide and the tinkling chimes became more boisterous laughs, less happy and more terrified, more like some crazy person, until what was coming out of the baby’s mouth was shrieking, terrified shrieking.

  And then it became clear to Josie, as clear as anything he knew, that what he was hearing was not even human, not at all. It was the cackle of hyenas on the hunt, the caw of crows, the baying of donkeys, the squalling of eagles in death spirals. The baby’s mouth was splayed open, sounds pouring out, as if it had no choice, as if it were only a vessel for something much more awful.

  Josie tried to pull his hand away. He pulled with his entire body weight, but the baby held on with an other-worldly strength.

  Josie watched as the baby’s whole body changed, his eyes sank into his head like marbles in soft mud, his skin grew scaly and mossy green. The baby was ice cold to the touch. His skin decayed, one patch at a time, drying and sucking inward, boils popping up, and sores forming in deep pockets. He lost his chunky baby fat, and turned to skin and bones, ribs poking through scant, flimsy, papery skin.

  The baby wasted away right in front of him.

  Then, the baby’s shrieks turned to wails. Desperate, awful, hungry wails. And Josie noticed the baby’s wrists and ankles, just flaps of skin over bone now, had scars from being kept in chains. Josie looked into the baby’s eyes, into sadness and a great empty aloneness.

  The baby opened his mouth and tried to make a different sound come out.

  The baby was trying to talk to him.

  Josie leaned in, the baby’s whisper blew into him like a winter storm.

  "B-B-Bangkok-k-k wants-s-s....you." The baby hissed, snake-like.

  And then his little body heaved, and convulsed. The baby began to vomit, first seawater, then strings of seaweed, covering the floor. The stench of rotting sea plants filled Josie's nostrils.

  Tiny fish, mostly anchovies, spiraled out of the baby’s mouth, and landed on the floor, flopping about in the throes of death. The baby shook and convulsed harder, and his whole body spasmed and jerked and out poured a spray of black ink that covered Josie and an entire half-aisle of groceries.

  It stunk of mackerel and sea algae and sprayed like a fountain out of the baby’s mouth until everything Josie could see was covered in inky slime. It dripped off shelves and slicked in puddles on the floor.

  “Better now, Mr. Brown,” the baby said, and burped and giggled, but this voice was not his own, it was Ludivine Salt’s.

  Josie recognized her taut voice immediately, although he had no real understanding of how her voice got inside the baby. But he had no time to think of it. The baby was changing again.

  Like a candle burning down into wax, the baby got loose and jelly-like and, before Josie could stop it or figure out what was happening, he melted into a puddle on the floor, and disappeared through the floorboards, and with it all the black ink and the seaweed and the thrashing, angry anchovies.

  Josie sat there. Dumbfounded. Reeling.

  His neighbors were getting out of work and filling up the shop. They rushed by him, hustling their trolleys around him, staring through him, paying him no mind.

  He sat there for a while, then got his legs to move him up. There wasn’t the faintest sign that anything had happened.

  Had he imagined it all?

  Had it really happened?

  Was he going crazy?

  He moved to the freezers. He turned into the aisle, half expecting another baby, and then letting out a huge breath of relief when the aisle was clear. He opened one of the freezer doors and saw a box of frozen mushrooms coated in breadcrumbs. He read the box. Microwaveable.

  He found a check-out with a short queue, paid for his mushrooms and made his way out.

  It was there, out in front of the shop, on the sidewalk of Tamarama Street, that he saw Ludivine Salt, sweeping. She looked up at him. He didn’t stop, but it was as if they had entered a slow motion universe. He felt her eyes, staring at him, piercing him, he smelt the faint wisp of fish coming from her mouth, he sensed the low hum of anger emanating off her, like a radiator throwing off heat.

  “Good night now, Josie Brown,” Ludivine said with a tight, crazed smile. “See you...later.”

  He pulled the hoodie over his head, stuck the ear buds in his ears, and walked quickly next door to his house, about twenty steps away. The farther away he got, the better he felt. He didn’t look up at anyone. He didn’t speak to anyone on the street.

  He went right to his room, closed the door, shut the window that faced the Organic Food Shop, and fell, face first, into his bed.

  He forwarded his playlist to Metallica. The music came on sublimely loud and angry in his ears and blocked out the shop, the baby, the world, his life, everything.

  Hours later he fell asleep just this way. The song Moth into Flame crashing in his ears.

  That’s when the first nightmare started.

  ✽✽✽

  Tamarama Street could almost be any street anywhere in the world, except it was only in Sydney, Australia.

  The street was short, just 10 or so houses on each side, small but neat, housing nice families. There were mailboxes with letters waiting to be picked up, kids riding their bikes up and down the road, flower beds filled with hot, pink, wild-flowers, cars in driveways, banana trees in some yards, passionfruit vines climbing fences in others, lime trees in some more.

  Tamarama Street had the good fortune to be located on the cliff overlooking Tamarama Beach, a beach noted for it’s gnarly, rough waves. After school, the kids of Tamarama Street grabbed their Boogie Boards for a surf, or looked for blue-ringed octopuses in the rock pool, or drank a berry soy-smoothie at the beach cafe.

  But Josie Brown didn't go to the beach anymore. Nor did he hang out with the kids on their bikes. He spent his time alone, hidden behind loud music, just him and whatever he was thinking.

  He liked it that way. Or this is what he told himself.

  Josie was fourteen years old. He was tall and skinny. He mostly wore holey, faded jeans that seemed to be falling off his boney hips. He had longish, thick brown hair, down to his shoulders, which curled in ringlets stubbornly. He often threw it up into a bun so he didn’t have to deal with it. His skin was naturally caramel, even though he never hung out in the sun. He wore a cap and sneakers, usually with a black band t-shirt. He scoured the web for new bands, from Reykjavik to Adelaide to Williamsburg. He was open to all music, but not so much to people.

  That was why he told no one about what happened at the Organic Food Shop. Or that he had woken up the following morning screaming.

  He forgot the dream almost the moment he woke up, but some pieces of it lingered. He was in the Organic Food Shop, or wa
s it a gigantic fish tank? No, it was the shop, but water was everywhere, as if it were being filled like a pool. And there were tentacles, pulling him under the water, kids crying, and the suffocating feeling of drowning, drowning, being pulled under.

  Dying there.

  He woke up naked, sweating, wet, gulping air, screaming out the name of something, something...what was it? It was all too hazy and his brain was as thick, like wet cement.

  Josie got up, put a towel around his waist, and moved to the window. He opened it, felt a warm, morning sea breeze rush in, saw the white wall of the Organic Food Shop right in front of him, so close that if he stretched his body as far as it moved in his skin, he could touch it.

  And so he did it, although he wasn't sure why. He leaned across the windowsill, reached his arm as far as it would go, until the tips of his fingers touched the wall of the shop. But only for a second, and then he pulled his hand back in and pushed his fingers into his armpits to warm them.

  The shop was piercing cold in a hot Australian summer. And damp, like the building was covered in a soft, slimy, jellyfish skin. It seemed completely impossible and yet, there it was.

  He stood for a moment, looking out at the shop, and realized he must be the biggest loser on the planet for even thinking about this stuff.

  “I’m going crazy,” he muttered, and rubbed his head furiously.

  “Argh!”

  He had to let this go.

  He showered. He dressed and packed his backpack for school. He turned up the volume on Allison Crutchfield then moved onto RadioHead, loud enough to drown out the crazy thoughts in his head, that dream, the ghost baby in the shop.

  He grabbed his mobile phone from the charger.

  “No texts,” he noted to himself.

  Not a big surprise. When did anyone text him? He checked Twitter, then Instagram. Snapchat. The usual school drama.

  China and Nick, Nick with the fake blonde highlights in his hair, broke up for the like the hundredth time.

  “Idiots.”

  Grotty Greg beat up poor Melvin Fockerson, again, and dumped him head first in the garbage can in the girls’ P.E. changing room.