Wild Fell

by Michael Rowe

  “I don’t believe in ghosts, Mrs. Beams.”

  She shut the main door. I heard the lock turn, and the porch light was switched off. I stood on the sidewalk in front of Clarence Brocklehurst’s home and watched the lights turn off in the living room until the house was blind.

  I spent an hour cruising slowly through Alvina’s darkened streets searching for the place I’d turned off the highway and onto Main Street—the mid-century Main Street I’d seen yesterday afternoon, the one with the brass lampposts and the boxes of geraniums, not this new Main Street of convenience stores and souvenir shops.

  At one point I was sure I recognized the corner down which I’d turned to Mrs. Fowler’s office. But when I found what I thought was the place, there was only an office machine repair shop. The storefront was dark; the door locked tight, the street empty.

  Later in the bright moonlight on the edge of town, I pulled over to the side of the road and tried to call Hank again. The line rang and rang, but again, no one picked up. There was likewise still no answer at the MacNeil Institute. The mechanical whirring of the ringtone in my ear seemed to go on forever.

  Then, already knowing what the outcome would be, I stood in the road beneath the moon—that bright autumn moon which shone on everything but illuminated nothing—and dialled again.

  Chapter Eight

  JAMESON IN THE MIRROR

  If necessity really is the mother of invention, then perhaps desperation is the father of memory.

  The only proof of my sanity was back at Wild Fell, in Rosa Blackmore’s bedroom—the manila envelope from Mrs. Fowler with her handwritten list of services and contractors, and her written instructions on how to drive between Alvina and Blackmore Island. When I went to turn on the GPS to find my way back to Wild Fell, it refused to boot up. As I had neither instructions nor a working GPS, I would have to find my way back to Wild Fell relying only on my own memory and the moonlight, which was now, at least, very bright. The place at which the road leading to Blackmore Island began, was at the turnoff near the supermarket where I’d bought supplies this afternoon.

  I found the turnoff and began to drive back toward the house.

  In the light of the moon, the roads were easy to follow and I was able to navigate them with relative ease. One road led to the next in an organic way. My subconscious had clearly recorded more in the way of recognition than my conscious mind would ever have thought possible.

  As I drove, I replayed the events of the past twenty-four hours in my mind trying to make sense of them, but of course, none of it made sense. There was only one way it would ever even begin to make sense, and it was the one thing on which I pinned all my hopes for sanity.

  I realized that even if I left Alvina that night and never came back, I would still need to see and touch Mrs. Fowler’s envelope. I’d left it in my bag, on the floor of the yellow bedroom. I needed it. When I had the folder, I would leave and never come back. It was that simple.

  That the house had been repaired and tended was not a question: I had been there. I had built fires in the fireplaces. I had slept in the yellow bedroom. I had gone downstairs to the cellar and I had seen the oil portraits of the family—portraits whose likenesses had matched the photocopies I had seen in the bright daylight of the Alvina Town Library.

  Photocopies I had been handed in a file folder by Mrs. Beams herself.

  This last thought cheered me immensely. Whatever was in question here, it wasn’t my sanity. If all of this had been in my mind, if I had been suffering some sort of psychotic break or other, I would not have recognized the faces of the individual members of the Blackmore family in the copies of the photographs retrieved from the burned church. But I needed the file folder. It was the only concrete evidence I could show Clarence Brocklehurst that proved I had met and spoken with Velnette Fowler or, at the very least, someone pretending to be Velnette Fowler with the intention of swindling me out of a great deal of money.

  I had to speak with Mr. Brocklehurst again. But if he still wouldn’t speak with me, I would push the envelope through the mail slot in his front door on my way out of Alvina as I drove home to where I belonged: the city, with my father and Hank.

  At the edge of Devil’s Lake, I untied the Bass Tracker from the dock and climbed into the bow. I turned the key in the ignition and guided the boat back into deeper water. When I’d reached a good depth, I opened it up and pointed it towards Blackmore Island.

  A full sturgeon moon had risen, large and low and red-tinged in the night sky behind Blackmore Island. As the Tracker swept to the rocky beach, I felt I could see every stone, every shimmer of the shallow water that had pooled around the larger boulders and recessed areas of the beach.

  I tied the boat up, then found the stone staircase leading from the landing beach to the house and I began to climb, using the flashlight I’d bought earlier that day at the supermarket as secondary illumination, though it was a poor substitute for the moonlight.

  A thought occurred to me as I climbed, a wild thought. It was not a thought that would have occurred to me yesterday, perhaps not even as recently as this afternoon.

  At the summit, I crossed the overgrown tangle of ruined lawns and trees, playing the flashlight across the copse of pine I’d seen struck by lightning last night, searching for the branch I’d watched burn and the place where I’d seen the figure of the woman standing in the rain. I kept my light trained on the ground until I found it, found what I realized I knew I’d find there.

  Two gravestones, each the twin of the other, rose out of the flinty soil of Blackmore Island in the protective shelter of the white pine grove. I shone the light on the first stone and read Malcolm Alexander Blackmore 1833-1928.

  The second stone, his sister’s, read Rosa Amanda Blackmore 1833-1928. Inscribed beneath it was the motto, I will always find you.

  Rosa Amanda Blackmore. Rosa Amanda Blackmore.

  “Amanda,” I said aloud, suddenly nine years old again. “Amanda.”

  The front door stood open.

  I walked up the wide cement stairs of the veranda, and then crossed the threshold of Wild Fell. My house. Of course it was my house. Of course it was real; of course it was solid. This was no ruin. I felt the hardwood floors and Oriental carpets beneath my feet, the wood panelling beneath my fingers. I could even smell the house: mahogany, silver, camphor, and dried violets.

  Ruin, my ass. Fuck you, Mrs. Beams.

  When I flipped the light switches back and forth, nothing happened. I waited for my eyes to grow accustomed to the dark. Once they had, I turned the flashlight back on and walked slowly down the hallway. I played the light on the carving of the Blackmore coat of arms on the soaring archway. From outside, the full moon lit the stained glass windows in the hallway, casting it into a lurid jewel-toned diorama.

  I climbed the stairs to the yellow bedroom.

  Now and then came the fluttering of moths. When I shone my flashlight in the direction of the sound, they descended in small clouds, attracted to the light. Then they fluttered away to the higher, darker recesses of the house.

  Like the front door had been, the door to the yellow bedroom—a door that I’d closed before leaving the house that afternoon—was wide open.

  The moonlight through the windows was bright enough that I didn’t need the flashlight to see the contours of the room. I could clearly make out the furniture: the dressing table, the bed, and the full-length mirror reflecting the room behind it. It was in the glass of that mirror that I was able to see that the marquetry box, which I’d replaced on the mantelpiece that afternoon, was now sitting open in the middle of the bed.

  I walked slowly to the edge of the bed and sat down. I placed my hand inside the box to see what latest gift I’d been offered by my invisible hostess. I found something cold and dry, like finely dressed leather.

  From inside the box I withdrew the torn and mangled body of a tiny midland painted turt
le. In the light of the flashlight, I was able to make out the yellow plastron with the butterfly markings. Two of the turtle’s legs had been torn off. Its carapace was punctured with deep bites and the neck dangled from a greenish tendon, or perhaps just a stringy strand of the turtle’s neck. It had been dead for a very, very long time.

  Since 1971, I guessed.

  It was Manitou, of course, the turtle I’d stolen from its home and brought back to the city, to its brutal death in the jaws of the neighbour’s dog—a death that had been aided and abetted by my mother. All of which was shown to me on that terrible night when I had been nine and had returned to my bedroom from emptying my bladder only to find a candle lit beside my bed and Amanda, my secret friend, the little girl who lived in the glass, ready to show me any manner of horror, to threaten any manner of violence. That is, until I’d smashed my mirror, driven her away and erased the memory of an entire part of my childhood in the process.

  Like everything else I could now remember, I recalled Amanda’s parting words to me, the same words I’d found carved into the grave of Rosa Blackmore almost a century before I was born: I will always find you.

  From the shadows of the yellow bedroom I heard, or imagined I heard, a soft, cruel giggle.

  My hand stank of pond carrion. I dropped the turtle’s tiny body on the floor. It landed on the carpet with a soft, tragic little thud, and lay there in the moonlight beside my bag. Furiously, I wiped my hand on my thigh, desperately trying to scrub away the stench.

  Then I saw the edge of Mrs. Fowler’s manila envelope extruding from the unzipped opening.

  The relief I felt at that moment wiped away every other fear and made my senses swim. Oh, thank God, I thought. Proof! Whatever the rest of this madness was about, here at last was proof that someone real had sold me this house and brought me here to this island. At that moment, I didn’t care if I’d been the victim of a world-class real estate swindle. I would have paid the money a hundred times over for the relief of knowing I was not insane. Nearly weeping with joy, I plucked the envelope out of the bag and shone the flashlight at the papers I had withdrawn. Then I looked closer and tried to make sense of what I was holding.

  It was a sheaf of perhaps twenty closely handwritten pages tied with purple ribbon, a sprig of dried violet tucked beneath. The flower was so old that the very act of bringing the paper up into the light of my flashlight caused it to crumble away to dust before my eyes. The paper was likewise ancient, parchment-thin, browned with many, many decades of exposure to the air. The ink had likely been deep blue once, but it was now pale and faded. I tugged at the ribbon; it, too, turned to powder at my touch.

  The document was written in a feminine hand, the letters small and beautifully formed in the way young ladies from good families had been taught to write a hundred years ago.

  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.

  I shook my head. What I was reading was gibberish. There was nothing here about Alvina Power, or the phone company, or the names and numbers of any of the contractors or cleaning companies that had been engaged by Mrs. Fowler in the preparation of Wild Fell for sale. There were no directions to and from Alvina. Furthermore it was old gibberish. These pages must have been written in the heyday of Wild Fell, in the nineteenth century.

  Why had Mrs. Fowler—or whoever was pretending to be her—taken the time to put them in a folder she’d claimed was full of practical information, only to have it be the preamble to an elaborate practical joke involving what appeared to be a fledgling nineteenth-century authoress’s attempt at a ghost story—an attempt that had somehow survived almost a hundred years, likely in some drawer or trunk in this old house?

  And then, in the trembling light of my flashlight, I saw my own name in the ancient violet handwriting, and I felt my heart shudder in my chest.

  My name is Jameson Browning. In the summer of 1971, when I was nine, I went to Camp Manitou, the summer camp deep in rural eastern Ontario where edges of towns yielded to woods and marshes and rolling farmland hills.

  I hadn’t wanted to go at all. I deeply distrusted boys of my own age, all of whom had proven themselves to be coarse and rough and prone to noise and force. It would be tempting for anyone reading this to imagine a socially isolated, lonely boy with no friends—a loner not so much by choice, but by ostracism or social ineptitude. But the conjured image would be an inaccurate one. I wasn’t a lonely boy at all, not by any stretch.

  I read the words again.

  “No,” I said aloud, reasonably. “No, no.” I read the paragraph twice more, then laid it down on the bed beside me. “Not possible. This is not about me. I am not in a ghost story written a hundred years ago. This is a trick. Someone is tricking me.”

  The hysteria felt like jubilation, as though the fact that someone would take such an enormous amount of care in setting up this elaborate ruse to drive me insane was a proof of love beyond anything I had ever experienced in my life. Perhaps I really was extraordinary at long last, extraordinary enough to warrant the time it had taken to execute this cruelty.

  “GREAT TRICK!” I screamed into the darkness of the house, laughing at the echo that skipped across Wild Fell like a stone.

  And then I heard the most welcome sound in the world: the one sound that represented any possible chance I might have at salvation. I heard the front door open with a bang and the heavy tread of work boots on the hallway floor.

  “Jamie!” Hank’s voice blasted up from downstairs. “Jesus fucking Christ! Jamie! Where are you? You scared the shit out of me! I got your message from yesterday and I came right away. I’ve been driving all night!”

  I shouted, “Hank! I’m up here! Stay there! I’m coming down!”

  I swayed on my feet when I stood up, dropping the flashlight to the floor. It rolled beneath the bed, the light vanishing beneath the dust ruffle, then winking out altogether.

  I’m going to pass out from sheer relief, I thought giddily. Sweet God in Heaven, thank you.

  I laughed as I stumbled out of the yellow bedroom into the darkness of the hallway, high on narcotic relief and thundering adrenaline. In the air above me, I heard the fluttering of the moths. They circled my head; they brushed against my face and hands with fairy skeleton bones of legs and wings like strands of milkweed in the wind. They alighted on my forehead; they caressed my eyes, their touch like dry snowflakes against my skin. I brushed them away, pinwheeling my arms in the air and swatting frantically to keep more from landing.

  At the edge of the hallway I looked down over the banister and shouted, “Hank! Where are you? It’s so dark—shout so I can follow your voice!”

  Hank yelled something encouraging in reply as I continued to descend the staircase, feeling my way in the feeble light from the moon behind the stained glass windows, but Hank’s voice was fainter now, as though she had moved deeper in the house. I heard a door slam—the kitchen door?—and I staggered down the hallway toward the sound. There were brief bursts of moonlight through the windows as I passed the empty library and the parlour.

  “Hank!” I shrieked. “Where the fuck are you? I can’t find you!”

  I heard another crash, this one coming from the dining room.

  Oh
Jesus, finally, I thought as I ran down the hallway. Then a dreadful thought followed that one. What if she’s hurt? Maybe she hurt herself coming here to save me, and now she can’t call out anymore. Oh please, God, let her be all right. Let us both be all right, and let us both get away from this place tonight.

  Hank was not in the dining room, either, but I saw the door of the servants’ entrance slowly swinging back and forth. The sound I had heard must have been Hank crashing into it on her way to . . . the kitchen? I ran through the doorway into the kitchen.

  It was empty. But at its far end, the doorway to the cellar stood ajar. No, not ajar. It was wide open.

  In a voice not much louder than a whisper, I called out, “Hank? Are you there? Where are you? Answer me,” I pleaded. “Please, Hank.”

  And then from the cellar, I heard Hank’s voice. It was clear and wonderfully calm and strong—the most calming voice I knew.

  “Jamie, I’m here. I’m downstairs. Come on down.”

  “Hank, can you come up?”

  “Jamie, come on,” came the mocking-but-still-loving-bro voice in the cellar. “Don’t be such a goddamn girl! You’ve got to check this out! Then we’ll go. I’ve got a boat on the beach. I’ll take you back to the city. We’ll drive all night and make it a road trip. I’m going to need a Timmy’s double-double before we hit the highway. Come on, hurry up!” It was Hank’s warm, joyful laugh—the essence of all things Hank—which finally made my decision for me.