Wild Fell

by Michael Rowe

  And then, as if the omnipresent fog had abruptly thinned or parted in the gloom, Brenda could see. Not clearly, but at least she could see outlines: the bulk of Blackmore Island, darker than the water surrounding it, the edges looking like smaller pine scrub islands of smooth, rounded granite layering in the lake, grey on grey on black.

  A sudden subtle shift of shadows on the surface of the lake drew her eye to a place maybe fifteen yards offshore where a figure stood pale and unmoving in the murky starlight. Brenda drew a sharp intake of breath, covering her mouth with her hands to keep from screaming. As she watched, the figure moved deeper into the lake. This time there was no splash, just a susurrating displacement of water. Brenda saw that the figure was male, and nude. Of course it was Sean. Who else would it be? Before tonight, she might not have been able to recognize his body in the dark, but at that moment she still felt its ghost-imprint on her own and she knew it was him.

  Again, the impression of cancellation came to her. While she could see Sean through the fog, in the water, she could not feel Sean. Whatever he was doing in the lake at night, he wasn’t swimming. Or if he was swimming, he didn’t know it. She could see the tips of his elbows rising whitely out of the surface.

  The thought came to her, as clearly as if a voice had spoken in her brain: Sean is drowning himself. He’s committing suicide in the lake, right in front of your eyes.

  Another step deeper, the water now just at his shoulders. The fog began to thicken again, sweeping across the surface of Devil’s Lake from the direction of Blackmore Island, the island itself now hidden from sight.

  Then she saw the woman strolling across the water.

  Brenda blinked, and looked again at what must surely be a trick of the fog, or the residual starlight, or her own exhausted imagination.

  Her first instinct was to call out to the woman to save Sean, to pull him out, to wake him up if he was sleepwalking. She was right there! But she knew the woman could not be right there, because what she was seeing could not possibly be real, because nobody ever walked on water except maybe Jesus Christ a long time ago, and there was no way in hell this was Jesus Christ. Not out here, not at night, not in this godforsaken place in full sight of Blackmore Island and the house behind the small forest of windswept white pine.

  This is not happening, she thought. I’m not seeing this.

  “Sean! Sean! Stop!” Brenda screamed his name over and over, waving her arms to catch his attention. “Sean, no! Come back!” She picked up a piece of driftwood at her feet and threw it as hard as she could into the lake in his direction, hoping to hit him with it, to shock him, to wake him up. When she looked again, Sean was alone in the lake. The driftwood landed uselessly in the water not far from where she stood. The sound of the splash was weak, absorbed by the fog.

  Then Sean’s head disappeared beneath the water.

  Brenda screamed again, taking five lurching steps into the water, kicking up waves as she ran. She would swim to him, to where he had disappeared. There was still time. She realized the folly of that as soon as the water reached her knees. It was cold. Terribly, terribly cold. Not August-cold, but cold like it became in late fall when you realized you’d taken one late-season swim too many and the ice of it shocked your heart and made you scream in a high, warbling voice that seemed to come from the top of your throat because everything below your throat was impaled by the chill coming up from the sediment of the lakebed.

  She stumbled backward out of the water and fell, twisting her left knee painfully. White-hot bolts of pure agony shot up from her kneecap, pinning her to the ground as surely as if she’d been nailed to it.

  The fog came alive around her in a whirling swarm. Something landed on her face. Then another something. Then another, until her entire face was covered with what felt like tiny scabrous feathers crawling across her nose and eyes. Frantically, Brenda scrubbed her face with her hands. They came away covered with moths, some crushed and broken by the movement of her fingers, others still fluttering, crawling with dreadful insectile determination across her wrists and up her arms. They came in relentless numbers till it was impossible for Brenda to tell the moths from the fog, or where one grey miasma ended and the other began. They swarmed across her mouth, crawling inside. The dry, dusty body of one of the moths caught in her throat. She gagged, coughing and spitting, with her fingers in her mouth, scraping the moths from inside her cheeks and along her gums, the roof of her mouth. Her world was reduced to the chirruping sound of what seemed like the thunder of a million insect wings. She swatted them away with her hands. Her only thought was to get the moths off her body. Then it came to her—she would drown them in the lake. She would swim out to where she’d seen Sean, where the water was deep enough, and she would drown the disgusting things. They couldn’t swim, but she could.

  A good plan, she thought, crawling laboriously across the ground towards the water’s edge, feeling lightheaded and weak and teetering on the edge of a different sort of blackness. The edge of her palm struck the water and sank into the sedimentary mud, grainy with ground rock and sand that oozed between her splayed fingers. Pulling her weight with her arms alone, dragging her injured knee behind her, she launched herself into the lake. She fell face-forward. Lake water and sand surged into her nostrils and her mouth, but she still felt the moths wriggling on her wet skin.

  When Brenda reached deep enough water, she flopped forward into it weakly, scrubbing herself with her hands beneath the surface. Then she coughed. And coughed again.

  That thing is still in my throat, she thought. Oh sweet Jesus.

  She coughed again and again, trying to dislodge the carapace of the moth that had lodged in her windpipe, or at least swallow it down. Her throat filled with water on the intake. She rose to the surface, and then slipped below again, taking in water through her nose and mouth. Frantically, she clawed her way up, treading water to stay afloat, coughing and inhaling more water involuntarily as she rose, retching. Her larynx constricted, sealing the oxygen channels to her lungs as water entered her airways, driving out consciousness, and Brenda began to drown.

  Suddenly, the scent of camphor and dried violets was everywhere. The fragrance reminded her of the sachets in the drawers of her grandmother’s mahogany vanity dressing table, in her bedroom at the top of the old house in Stayner. It was the extract of dim hallways with shuttered windows and high ceilings; of dresses of silk and long woolen coats; of sun-warmed wood panelling, candlewax, unwound clocks, years spent indoors—in essence, the attar of time itself sleeping.

  Brenda had a sudden, vivid impression of her grandmother’s fine and white hands, smooth as bone, gently brushing Brenda’s hair out of her eyes as she tucked her in under the duvet and reached over to turn out Brenda’s bedside lamp.

  The thought was a comforting one, and it even distracted Brenda from the realization that she was dying. It made her smile, even as she felt her grandmother’s hands grasp her ankles and pull her beneath the surface of Devil’s Lake, her body spiralling downward, her lungs taking in one final deep breath of lake water, driving the last bit of life out of her in a fine spray of bubbles that floated to the surface, then disappeared.

  Two days later, accidentally succeeding where volunteer trackers from Alvina and the RCMP had failed, an out-of-town day boater from Toronto named Denis Armellini found the bodies of the missing teenagers everyone had been searching for.

  Armellini was coming around the leeward side of Blackmore Island in a Pacific Mariner Stiletto borrowed from the owner of the cottage he was renting. He caught sight of a bright red bag on a deserted stretch of rocky beach. He cut the motor. Through binoculars, he spied a pile of clothing near an overturned rowboat, and the remnants of a campfire. Barely keeping his excitement under control, he made a note of the approximate location, then pointed the Stiletto’s bow in the direction of Alvina.

  Before he could start the outboard again, Armellini heard the rap of knuckles a
gainst the hull of his boat—a sound not unlike a request for entry. He was startled enough to drop his binoculars into the water, cursing his clumsiness and skittishness. He lurched over the side of the boat, scrabbling madly to retrieve them before they sank, and found his fingers entwined with those of Brenda Egan.

  At first, Armellini hadn’t been sure what he’d touched—poached driftwood perhaps, or a tree branch bleached white by the sun. When he realized it was the waterlogged and puffy hand of a teenage girl he held, the sound of his screams ricocheted across the water, cracking against the smooth rocks and boulders of Blackmore Island like rifle shots. Sufficient gas from bacterial decomposition had built up inside the girl’s bloated body to make it buoyant. She floated face down in the water, half-submerged, as though she were the searcher in a game of Fish Out of Water.

  Armellini wrenched his hand away and rubbed it frantically against his jeans, but not before noticing that bits of the girl’s hand had been torn away, as if by needle-sharp teeth that had been small, vicious, and unrelenting.

  Fucking northern pike will eat anything, Armellini thought, then vomited.

  The girl appeared to be wrapped in a white gossamer veil but Armellini realized he was looking at the sodden husks of what seemed to be thousands of drowned moths, legs and wings intertwined, clinging one to the other and to the girl’s body like a shroud, woven into her hair like interlaced garlands of white graveyard flowers.

  Legends begin in small northern towns on the edge of places other people only drive through on their way to somewhere else, in station wagons and vans full of summer gear: Muskoka chairs in bright summer colours, coolers full of beer, canvas bags bursting with swimsuits and shorts and t-shirts, and dogs who slumber on blankets in the back seat and are bored by the entire process of long car trips.

  Towns pass by that are the sum of their parts, and their parts are bridges, barns, fields, and roadside stands where home-baked pies or fresh ice cream are sold in the summer, and pumpkins, sweet corn, and Indian corn in the autumn. These towns are for gas stations that are distance markers for exhausted parents, where the kids can have one final bathroom break before the last stretch of highway leading to driveways that in turn lead to front doors and lake views.

  But of the lives of the citizens of these towns—the men and women who live and die in them, who carry to the grave entire universes of their history and lore, and the happenings of the century—these urban and suburban transients know nothing, and care even less.

  The towns they pass might as well be shell facades, their residents merely extras in a movie called Our Drive Up North to the Cottage, a movie with annual sequels whose totality makes up a lifetime of holiday memories.

  In 1960, the drowning deaths of Brenda Egan and Sean Schwartz tore Alvina apart and destroyed two families, each of which blamed the other’s child for inadvertently luring their own child to his or her death through irresponsibility, wantonness or malice. There was no peace for either side. The psychic wounds each sustained through their losses and their lack of forgiveness would fester for decades, never fully healing. The funerals had been on separate days, and a lifetime of grudges and feuds would spring from jaundiced notations of who in town attended which funeral, not to mention those traitors who attended both.

  The tragedy briefly made newspapers across the country, though the story was a smaller and smaller news item the farther away from Georgian Bay it was written or told. After two days it had disappeared from the news altogether. The deaths of two teenagers in a town in northern Ontario no one had ever heard of weren’t going to hold anyone’s imagination for long.

  In Alvina however, the fact that Sean had been found nude, washed up on the landing beach of Blackmore Island, lent a salacious note to the tale, one that ensured its longevity through gossip—at least behind the backs of anyone from the Egan or Schwartz families.

  Had the girl been a secret slut in spite of her goody-goody veneer? Had the boy tried to rape her, drowning them both in the attempt? God only knew. Anything was possible. Besides, it happened out there, near that place.

  The police had apparently searched Blackmore Island. The big house up there had been locked up tight and shuttered, and it looked like it had been so for a very long time. The grounds had been wild and overgrown. No one had been living there, and there was no evidence that anyone had lived there for decades, much less that either of the two had been on the island the night they died.

  Still, nothing good had ever happened near that place. Not ever. It might not be a haunted island, but it sure was a goddamned unlucky one.

  In 1962, Brenda Egan’s aunt, a martyr to the deepest possible grief over the loss of her niece, accidentally set herself on fire on Blackmore Island. Gossip had it that she had rowed out to the island to lay flowers there in Brenda’s memory, and had died trying to build a campfire to stay warm while she drank herself into a stupor.

  The Egan family prevailed on the local newspaper not to print the details due to the grief they had already endured. The editor, a family man who had seen the gruesome media feeding frenzy that had resulted from the original tragedy, took pity on the Egan and Schwartz families and kept the story out of his newspaper, reporting the woman’s death only as a heart attack, thereby ensuring that most of the gossip would be stillborn, except for local word of mouth.

  After a time, people in town stopped telling Brenda and Sean’s story, because it could only be gossip, and it seemed cruel to gloat about the deaths of anyone that young, no matter what they’d been up to out there in the dark when they were supposed to be watching the moonrise on the town beach.

  Tom Egan died in 1972, and his wife, Edith, moved back to Selkirk, Manitoba where her people were from. The memories of what she had lost that terrible night were too much to bear alone.

  John and Gladys Schwartz lived quietly in their house in Alvina. They kept Sean’s room as a shrine. Gladys dusted his wrestling trophies daily and never passed a photograph of her son without touching it. John never set foot in Alvina United Church again after Sean’s memorial service. He maintained that no god who’d seen fit to take his beautiful boy was worth more than the shit straight out of his arse, and wouldn’t get any worship from him, not in a hundred years of frosty Fridays in hell.

  Gladys, on the other hand, became devout. She brought her grief to the Lord and laid it on his shoulders, putting her faith in the comforting notion that there was a plan that she didn’t understand yet, and that she would see Sean again someday.

  They died within a year of each other, in 1990 and 1991 respectively.

  By 1995, thirty years after the tragedy, the story had passed into children’s campfire lore, no more or less real than all the other stories about the haunted island “near here,” stories of drowned children, mysterious flickering lights in the water, sudden fires, dark ladies, covens of witches and devil worshippers, and so on.

  By 2005, Brenda and Sean had become “the boy and the girl” who went skinny dipping after having sex in the woods and had met their deaths at the hands of demons, or a serial killer, depending which version was being told at any given time. Apparently, the house was still out there somewhere on that island, but there were tens of thousands of islands. It could be any one of them, assuming it even existed. Besides, it was almost spookier not to know. In town, no one remembered their names, which most of the old-time residents of Alvina would have said was just fine had anyone asked them. But no one ever did.

  Life moved on, and it had all been so very long ago.

  And this is how legends begin in small northern towns on the edge of places other people only drive through on their way to somewhere else: with a scream in the dark, and half a century passed in waiting.

  Plume moths remove remembering.

  Their feathery snowtouch on the eyelids

  sifts out thought and will,

  leavens facts until they rise

  into the air a
nd pop

  into oblivion.

  Moths’ delicate footprints

  on the skin, invisible

  as sorrows, chase away

  longing and desire, chase

  knowledge of things.

  Of self, of trees and acorns,

  glass jars, death and daisies,

  gazelles and geodes.

  All of it, gone.

  —Sandra Kasturi, from “Moth & Memory”

  Chapter One

  AMANDA IN THE MIRROR

  “I will relate to you, my friend, the whole history, from the beginning to—nearly—the end.”

  —Diana Maria Mulock, “M. Anastasius” (1857)

  I want to teach you about fear.

  I want to tell you a ghost story. It’s not a ghost story like any ghost story you’ve ever heard. It’s my ghost story, and it’s true. It happened here in the house on Blackmore Island called Wild Fell, in the inland village of Alvina, Ontario on the shores of Devil’s Lake. Like any ghost story, it involves the bridges between the past and the present and who, or rather what, uses them to cross from the world of the living into the world of the dead.

  But I’m getting ahead of my story. I did say the bridge is between the past and the present. Although I’ll tell you this story in the present, I would be remiss if I didn’t start with the past—specifically my past. Time is, or ought to be, linear. Sometimes it’s anything but linear, which brings us back to ghosts.

  Still, one thing at a time, right?

  By the time he was gone, my father, a gentle, loving man with a fierce intellect and great wit, had already been gone for a very long time. He had forgotten everything about what had made him my father in the first place. He didn’t know himself and he didn’t know me. The erasing had been the hardest part for me to watch, harder even than the sure knowledge that he was going to die, and that it would be soon, if not quickly.