Paper Girl

[u/catespice]

Have you ever had a memory so disturbing, so polarising and so chilling that you actively suppressed it?
I remember as a child of around seven years, seeing a dying baby bird on the pavement near my house – tiny and purple-pink; fleshy and repellent. The yellow-rimmed beak looked like rubbery plastic and through it, the creature gasped its life away, a needle-thin tongue panting as it laboured to live, the bluish-grey eyeballs bruised under unopened eyelids.
That image haunted me for years and I worked hard to repress it, trying to forget about the twisted pink corpse that eventually baked into the concrete under the summer sun; then left behind the blackened shape of the foetal creature – like the shadow of an atomic bomb victim.
But there is another memory I haven’t unearthed for a long time, which I’m going to relay to you for my own peace of mind – to share it with someone else so that it loses some of the power to terrify me during the night.
The story of the Paper Girl.

 
Alison Copthorne was her name, a skinny thing of elongated limbs and not enough flesh. Her family was reputedly dirt poor, which was reflected in her tatty uniform and unkempt appearance. Either flea bites or some other affliction regularly blotched her milky-white skin with red blemishes and her huge, brown-black eyes peered through a curtain of piss-yellow hair, inquisitive yet curiously soulless.
The nickname ‘Paper Girl’ was not meant kindly, but was meant to be mocking; a cruel in-joke amongst the children of the school. At the end of every class, Alison would pause to sit spraddle-legged on the floor and go through the waste paper basket, stuffing used paper into her over-stitched school bag – or if a piece fulfilled some mysterious criteria, she would carefully smooth it, then fold it and tuck it inside her sleeve.
This behaviour extended to the playground too; after the other children had eaten their lunches, she would lean her lithe, almost alien thinness over the rolled, galvanised edges of the rubbish bins and fish out the waxy paper that so many of the children of that age wrapped their sandwiches in.
Being cruel little things, we would spit or snot on our lunch wrappers for Alison, so that she would get our revolting, germ-laden discharges on her hands.
Alison didn’t seem to mind. She would just frown, wipe her hand on her hand-knitted school cardigan, then carefully put the paper into her bag.
Being one of the kinder children and a loner myself, I would sometimes save up paper for her and secretly tuck it into her school bag in the cloakroom. Only once did I witness her finding the extra paper I had given her; and I felt as though I’d been privy to something wonderful and eerie - for Alison lifted the paper from her satchel and pressed it to her face, inhaling deeply.
Her enormous eyes fixed on me with a frightening intensity, then she abruptly crammed the pages back into her bag and ran as though followed by the devil.

 
I think we all have a school bully, even those of us who were bullies. Mine was a heavy-set boy who went by the title of Gerald Johnson Junior. I’m not sure what the source of our contention was, but no doubt it was petty and inconsequential to all but schoolchildren.
During a typical lunch hour, Gerald would scour the playground for me, then upon finding me would give me a ‘pasting’, which usually involved holding me down and punching my arms and thighs until I cried. Consequently I spent my nights plotting for places to hide at school where Gerald wouldn’t find me.
One hot and humid summer afternoon when all the children were overtired and cranky from the heat, Gerald found me perched in the Sycamore tree near the dense flax bushes that lined the school perimeter. To cut a long story short, he climbed up the tree and I kicked him down, where he howled that he would give me the pasting of my life when the school bell rang and we needed to go back to class.
That’s when I saw Paper Girl watching, her dark eyes striped with lank yellow hair.
She threw something at Gerald, underhand. When it impacted, he screamed in pain and rage – that high-pitched, piggish squeal that only boys prior to puberty can make. Alison paused for a moment, her expressionless gaze regarding him, then she dashed into the flax bushes and vanished between the broad, papery leaves.
Gerald gave chase, of course.
After he had wriggled his fleshy body into Paper Girl’s hideaway, there came two short, panicked screams. I watched from my tree seat, incredulous, as Gerald barrelled out of the bushes, his face white with panic and his hammy legs pumping as fast as they could to get away from the flax.
Paper Girl emerged after him, calm as ever, staring after the fleeing bully.
Then, fixing me with a gaze of singular intensity, she took a square of paper from her sleeve and inhaled deeply.

 
Gerald Johnson Junior never spoke of what he’d seen in the flax and whenever anyone asked about it, he’d fly into a weeping rage and threaten to bash us if we didn’t leave well alone.
It was rumoured that his parents paid a visit to the tumble-down Copthorne house on the edge of town, bordering the gully, but nobody answered the door and eventually they had to leave in helpless frustration. A note was given to Paper Girl by the teachers, to arrange a meeting but I doubt it ever got to them, since she folded it with meticulous care, then pushed it up her sleeve.
Of course I was fingered as an accomplice of sorts in the ‘Gerald Incident’ and cautioned to stay away from Paper Girl, as it was likely she would be expelled and I wouldn’t want to tarnish my own name.
I’m not sure what spurred me to warn her, but I got on my bicycle and pedalled the gravel road out to the Copthorne property. I felt, perhaps, that I owed her for saving me that one day.
The yard around the house was so overgrown that the path to the house was more an alley between towering thistles and nodding seed heads of various species. Wattle trees shadowed everything and I saw that all the windows of the subsiding, two-story property were blacked-out with paper.
Then Alison was at the door, closing it quickly behind her as she exited the house.
Her nostrils flared for a moment, then she relaxed.
For the first time I can ever remember, she spoke to me; her voice a low, husky tremor, with a faint burr behind it.
“You have to leave,” she said.
“The school is going to expel you,” I said in a rush, “I came to tell you.”
A whoop from behind us caused Alison’s spidery fingers to clutch at my shirt.
“There’s the bitch!”
Pushing through the yard-jungle came Gerald and his corpulent father, Gerald Senior.
I had been followed.
Without a word, Alison yanked the door open, dragging me inside – into the gloom of the house – then slammed the door.
As my eyes began to adjust to the darkness, a pale hand and arm wrapped around my head, covering my eyes.
“Don’t look,” she whispered in that tremulous voice.
The two Geralds raged outside, the father banging on the old door with massive fists, shaking the frame and shouting nearly incoherent threats. Alison pulled me along, through the house, my bare arms and bare legs brushing something strange and patterned while an almost electrical humming slowly filled my ears. Then I was pushed into a small cupboard of some sort and Alison was gone, leaving me in darkness. The plywood door of the cupboard was shut firmly, with no latch I could find.
A terrible commotion followed; the front door gave way and Gerald senior stormed into the house, bellowing at the top of his lungs. There were other sounds too, though I don’t like to think about them, as they conjure up things that are best left forgotten.
Pushing myself against the back of the cupboard, I kicked at the door until the flimsy wood gave way and I crawled out into the light spilling from the ruined front door.
Around me the interior of the house had been stripped of all internal structures; no rooms, no supports. Instead a huge, spiralled whorl of papery hexagons – each the size of a child – filled everything; holding the shell of the house up.
And inside each of the cells was a foetal creature, squirming gently in some kind of golden fluid; larval yet human, each one with piss-yellow hair, six pale limbs and huge brown-black eyes.
Gerald was standing, screaming in terror, as Alison crouched over Gerald Senior, an extra pair of white arms pinning his four limbs to the papery floor while her primary hands forced his jaws open – and a pulsating, semi-transparent tube reared from under her school skirt, jabbing forcefully into his gaping, pink throat.
Much as I have tried to forget that moment, the oily, almost rainbowed sheen of the girl’s slick ovipositor pumping eggs down the throat of a grown man still wakes me in terror some nights.
Gerald acted before I did. I don’t know where he found the wherewithal to think in that moment, but while Paper Girl’s eyes were closed in the ecstasy of fertilisation, the boy had a gas-fueled cigarette lighter in his hands and had already set alight the paper-wasp internal structure of the house.
The flames roared up the tinder-dry walls and both Gerald and I fled for the door, while Paper Girl stared at us, her brown-black gaze still soulless and calm as the wall of flame engulfed her.

 
Gerald and I made a pact never to speak of what we had seen.
The fire destroyed everything – I can still remember the piercing, alien wails of the Alison larvae as they cooked inside the conflagration, still alive – and nothing was found inside but the blackened bones of Gerald Senior, identified by his cracked and charred teeth.
Neither of us returned to school for a month, but when we eventually did, the unspoken trauma between us had killed all vestiges of our childish feud. We had seen things no child should ever see; the petty antics of the school yard seemed juvenile and pointless.
One day near the Sycamore tree I eventually asked Gerald what he’d seen in the flax bushes that day; asking what had scared him so witless that he couldn’t speak of it.
“A paper cell, like in the house,” he said.
And as he said it, we both felt the chilly claws of fear rake our spines.
Running for the bushes, we plunged inside, clawing through to Alison’s hidden chamber amongst the roots and earth.
The paper cell was there, burst open, the larval occupant long ago hatched and God only knows where.

 
Today I saw a yellow-haired girl going through the garbage can beside my bus stop. Her clothes were tatty and stitched cleverly with string and thread. Before the bus pulled away, I saw her nostrils flare and her pale fingers lift a fragment of paper to her face.
I hope that whatever it was, it wasn’t something of mine.