by Michael Rowe
“Dad tore off his own shirt and tied it around Emory’s shoulder in a clumsy tourniquet. He said, ‘We need to get Emory to the hospital right away.’ We picked him up as gently as we could, then carried him, half running, all the way back to the camp. Once there, we lay him across the back seat of the van and drove down the hill as fast as possible to the doctor’s office. Thank God he was in. The doctor said it looked like Emory had been hit with an axe, or some sort of ice pick, in the shoulder.
“By that time, Emory had regained consciousness, though he was in terrible pain. The doctor gave him a shot of something strong— morphine, maybe? My father asked him what had happened, and Emory said that Elliot had been hiding behind one of the rock walls, and had jumped out and attacked him with the chisel end of an archaeological hammer. Emory said something else before the drug knocked him out cold. He said that Richard drank his blood.”
“Drank his blood?”
“Yes, that he’d attacked him with the hammer, and drank the blood from the wound. That he’d pressed his mouth against it and sucked it. He also said that Richard had told him that ‘the voice’ had told him to do it, and that the voice was coming from ‘the caves.’”
“The caves?” Thomson said. “What caves?”
“He claimed there were caves in the cliffs,” Billy replied. “Are there?”
“Well, yes. There are caves. Parr’s Landing is a mining town. The ground underneath it is full of tunnels. Some came about when the mine opened a hundred years ago, but one of the reasons the mine opened was that there were caves and gorges there in the first place. Combined with the gold they found, it made for ideal conditions. But that’s something that Richard could have discovered all on his own, without a ‘voice’ guiding him. So—he was plain crazy the whole time? Some kind of breakdown?”
“Emory was picked up by an ambulance plane and taken to hospital in Sault Ste. Marie. In addition to the blood loss, he’d suffered severe nerve damage from the wound. The RCMP caught Richard a couple of days later. He’d been living outdoors in the area around Bradley Lake. I saw him when the cops brought him in. He looked like a monster out of a horror movie. His clothes were torn and filthy. His face and hands were scratched, and his face was smeared with Emory’s dried blood. His eyes looked like an animal’s eyes, but even wilder. He didn’t seem to recognize either my father or me. He claimed he didn’t know who Emory was.”
Billy stood up and walked across the room to where his suitcase lay open at the end of his bed. He rummaged through his clothes, and then withdrew a thick manila file folder encircled with a plastic band. He brought it over to where the two policemen sat and put it down on the table between them.
“What’s this, then?” Thomson said. He looked down at the file and read the handwritten label. It said Richard Weal case: Clippings and Notes in faded blue ink.
“It’s the story,” Billy said simply. “It’s what happened. They arrested Richard and charged him with assault and attempted murder. He was still raving about voices in the rocks when they took him away under police guard. He was declared unfit to stand trial and was incarcerated in a mental institution outside of Montréal for fifteen years.” Billy tapped the folder. “It’s all here—everything. My father’s notes. Newspaper clippings. The arrest, the trial, everything. My father made a copy of this before he died, and mailed it to me. He said he was working on a book about what happened—and what had happened before.”
“What do you mean, what had happened before? Before what? You mean, with Richard?”
“Not just with Richard,” Billy said. “There’s a history of violent incidents associated with this place. That history stretches back almost two hundred and fifty years. What happened with Richard and Emory has happened before, and right around here.”
“Again, Dr. Lightning,” Thomson said in a pained voice, this time not even trying to cover up his impatience, “this is all very interesting. I’m sure your father’s book would have been fascinating. Forgive me for repeating myself again, but you still haven’t answered my question about why you’re in Parr’s Landing now.”
“Because I think Richard Weal murdered my father in Toronto six weeks ago, Sergeant Thomson.”
“Do you have any evidence of that, Dr. Lightning?”
“Nothing that would likely convince you, Sergeant.” Billy sighed. “It didn’t convince the police in Toronto.”
“Humour me,” Thomson said. “Why do you think he killed your father?”
“My father was killed with a hammer blow to the head. The police say he may have known his killer, because there was no sign of forced entry, but the house had been ransacked, from top to bottom. Nothing of any apparent value was taken—things like my mother’s Georgian tea service and some fairly expensive art was left where it was. Given that the vast majority of valuable objects were left behind, the police concluded that it was likely some sort of drug-related break-in.”
“You said ‘the vast majority of valuable objects’ were left behind. Were the police able to ascertain what was taken, if anything?”
“The originals of these notes,” Billy said, picking up the folder, “were missing from his study. What was also missing was a translation from the French he’d been working on. An obscure document from the Jesuit Relations—the letters written by the Jesuit missionaries to New France and sent to the Society of Jesus in Rome in the seventeenth century.”
Thomson looked dubious. “These papers were ‘missing,’ you said? I doubt they considered that a motive for murder. Was any money taken?”
“My father had always kept some emergency money locked in his desk,” Billy said. “The desk was unlocked when the police went over the place, but the money was still there. He might have kept some money elsewhere, but I couldn’t confirm or deny that to their satisfaction. The case is still open, technically, but they seem to have made up their minds. They said that there’s no evidence that it was anything other than what they said it was.”
“It sounds like a tragedy, Dr. Lightning,” Thomson said. “But the police were likely correct. Had Richard Weal been in touch with your father? Had he made any threats?”
“No,” Billy admitted. “Nothing he shared with me. But the missing documents—”
“Dr. Lightning,” Thomson said, rising, “we’re sorry to have bothered you at this difficult time. You’re, of course, welcome to travel anywhere and do anything. I don’t think I would have chosen Parr’s Landing as a place to recover from the death of my father, personally, but to each his own. Constable McKitrick and I will be on our way. Thank you for your time, sir.”
“I’m telling you, Richard Weal killed my father. And he’s coming here. I know it. He has my father’s papers. He believes something is speaking to him in the rocks.”
“Afternoon, Dr. Lightning,” Elliot said. He opened the motel door and held it open. Before stepping through, Thomson turned to Billy again.
“Dr. Lightning,” Thomson said. “You never told us what happened to Richard Weal. Did the police ever find him to question him?”
“No,” Billy replied. “They didn’t. He’d been released from the institution a few years back, according to the information I was able to acquire on my own. If he was getting outpatient treatment somewhere, there weren’t any records immediately available, and since he wasn’t seriously considered a suspect, no one looked very hard to find him.”
“I see. Well, that settles it, as far as we’re concerned, I think. Thank you again for your time, Dr. Lightning. We’ll be on our way now, I think.”
And they were on their way. Billy Lightning closed the motel room door behind them. The silence of the motel room embraced him. He sighed, as much in relief as in frustration. Eventually the relief overtook the frustration. He hadn’t expected them to believe him, but he realized that he’d bought himself a bit of time, if nothing else.
Billy picked up the file folder of his father’s notes and went back to the bed. He sat down, opened the file, and be
gan to read what he’d already read hundreds of times before. Maybe this time, it would say something new. He felt a pang of sharp longing at the sight of his father’s handwriting on the smudged carbon. The unfathomable sense of his loss returned to him like a plaintive, restless ghost.
Elliot McKitrick and Dave Thomson rode in silence for the first few minutes of the ride back to the police station. Then Elliot spoke.
“What did you make of that?” he asked. “That was some story. Do you think he’s telling the truth?”
“Easy enough to check it out,” Thomson said. “At least the part about his father’s murder. The rest of it happened more or less the way he said it did, but I think it was pretty much an open and shut case back then of a guy who had a nervous breakdown and got locked up for it.”
“What about the Doc? Do you think this Lightning might have had anything to do with it?”
“I’ll run his name by the RCMP and see if anything comes up,” Thomson replied. “But I don’t think it’s going to add up. I think what we’re looking at is a series of tragedies, starting with this poor Weal kid going off his rocker and being packed off to the bughouse. Then the old man gets murdered years later, and his son connects the two worst events of his life and comes up with an answer he can live with. No more, no less.”
“What about the rest of it? The spirit voices and the weird stuff?”
Thomson shrugged. “You grew up here. You know how many stories there are. Those Wendigo stories, for one. Local legends. Every town has some. As for the rest of it, well, life was tough here a couple of hundred years ago. Winters were long. Things happened. People probably did go crazy, as much from the isolation as anything else. If this Weal fella read about this stuff in some history textbook in school, it’d be in his head already when he went off his head.”
Elliot looked doubtful. “So, you don’t think Weal might have anything to do with what happened up in Gyles?”
“On the say-so of Dr. William Lightning, he of the crazy story we just heard? I don’t think so. As far as anyone knows, Weal could be dead.” Thomson snorted. “I think Chief Bill’s headdress is on a bit tight. He’s a bit cocked-up about his father’s death, that’s all. That’s got to be hard for anybody. But do I think some possessed crazy hobgoblin has driven thousands of miles from God knows where just to come back here to live out of doors by Bradley Lake and eat people?” This time, Thomson laughed out loud. “No, I don’t think so.”
“It’ll be Halloween in a couple of weeks,” Elliot said. If he were an older man, and more seasoned, let alone more secure in himself, he likely would have been readier to admit to being more relieved than disappointed to hear Thomson dismiss the Indian’s story. “Maybe we’re due for a new spook tale to add to all that Wendigo bullshit we’ve been hearing for years up here in God’s country since forever.”
“God’s country,” Jeremy Parr said wistfully to Christina. He closed his eyes and breathed deeply. The air was wonderfully cool, but not too cold for comfort. It smelled of autumn—fallen leaves, the scent of cooling earth and the flowering of benign rot, the sleepy prelude to winter. The morning had started out cold, but the day had warmed again. They had parked the car a few miles out of town, past Bradley Lake, on the old logging road. They sat on a red flannel blanket. Above them, the sunlight streamed down through the cathedral of orange-leafed trees, turning everything around it the colour of caramel apple glaze. “Elliot always called it ‘God’s country,’” he said by way of clarification. “Today I can see what he meant.”
Christina’s eyes were closed, her face in the sun. She sighed. “What are you going to do, now that you’ve seen him? And he probably saw you, too. If he didn’t see you, he’s heard that you’re back. Are you going to go see him?”
“What would be the point? It was ten years ago, and the way it ended, it was like a bad dream that we had ten years ago. He’s probably married, probably has kids. It was one of those things that was never meant to happen at all.”
“But it did happen,” Christina said kindly. “He was your first love.
And it didn’t end the way it was supposed to end.”
“Maybe it did end the way it was supposed to end. Have you noticed that love doesn’t flourish in this town? You have to leave it in order to keep it. Especially,” he added bitterly, “my kind of love.”
Christina started to say something conciliatory in reply, something to suggest that Jeremy was being melodramatic or unnecessarily dour, but she didn’t. It occurred to her that her own story more or less proved his point, and she couldn’t think of any love stories off the top of her head that had blossomed and flourished in Parr’s Landing. Her own parents more or less tolerated each other, focusing the love they’d obviously once had for each other on their children. The house where Christina grew up was full of pictures—her jubilant parents on their wedding day, photos of the two of them on picnics, her mother sitting on the back of her father’s motorcycle, the two of them on a Ferris wheel at a country fair.
In those pictures, their love for each other had been nearly tangible, but once Christina and her brother entered the montage of images on the walls, a certain steeliness had set in. In later photographs, her mother seemed detached, her father more stoic than loving. It was as though the diffusion of that young love, its dispersal into the larger world of children, mortgages, church, work for subsistence wages in a northern mining town—survival, really—had damaged the love in transit, alchemically transforming it at a cellular level into something else, something greyer. Christina tried to remember her parents ever embracing, but nothing came to her.
The cancer had taken her mother when Christina was fourteen. Christina tried to remember her parents ever embracing before her mother got sick, but nothing came to her. She wondered if that gradual distancing would have eventually happened to her and Jack, and even as she wondered it, she had her answer: No, of course not. Because, as Jeremy said, they’d gotten away.
To change the subject from her own memories, as well as to distract Jeremy from his, she asked, “How do you think it’s going with your mother?”
Jeremy shrugged. “So far so good, I guess. I don’t think she’s all that happy to see either of us, but she seems happy to see Morgan, at least. Did you see her last night? She couldn’t keep her eyes off her. And this morning, she was quite testy when you said you wanted to drive her to school yourself.”
Christina laughed. It was not a happy laugh. “I think that had everything to do with her not wanting me to be seen around town with Jack Parr’s daughter—even if she is my daughter, too—more than it did any great grandmotherly love, don’t you?”
“Not sure,” he said. “I hadn’t realized how much Morgan actually looks like Jack—I mean really looks like Jack—until I saw all the pictures of him as a kid that Adeline has around the house. For her, it must be like having his ghost come back to haunt her. I think that’s why she’s trying too hard to make friends with her. The rest of us are just an inconvenience to be dealt with.”
“I don’t know,” Christina said. “I have a bad feeling about it somehow. Then again, when it comes to your mother, I’ve only ever had bad feelings. So this is nothing new.”
“I wonder how Morgan is doing in school today? First day in a new school—hell, and not just any new school. Our old school.” Christina sighed. “I’ve been trying very hard not to think about it, Jeremy. Thanks so much for bringing it up.”
“Sorry.”
“No, it’s all right.” She picked up a yellow leaf beside her and held it between her fingers, examined it, and then flicked it away. “This is probably the hardest part. I can protect her from almost anything else but this. In Toronto, at Jarvis Collegiate, she had her friends and her routine. She wasn’t anything special. Here, God only knows.”
“Hey, she’ll be fine,” Jeremy said in a soothing voice. “This is Morgan you’re talking about. Also, besides being our wonderful girl in her own right, she’s Jack’s daughter.�
�
“Everyone used to worship Jack, but it wasn’t because he was a Parr, it was because he was—well, Jack. Morgan isn’t Jack. She doesn’t have the experience of growing up here with that name and getting used to what it means. She doesn’t have the . . . the . . .”
“The antibodies?” Jeremy said, suppressing a smile. “Is that what you mean? She hasn’t been inoculated against being a Parr in Parr’s Landing? She doesn’t have the antibodies to the virus?”
Christina threw a pile of the yellow leaves at Jeremy. He laughed, covering his head. He threw a handful of the leaves at Christina, provoking answering laughter in return.
“Yes,” she said, brushing the leaves out of her hair. “That’s what I mean. Exactly. She doesn’t have the antibodies for this town. Morgan is a city girl.” She grew serious again. “These kids can probably smell it on her. They always could smell difference. They’re terrible when they find it, too. You know that better than anyone.”
“Yep,” he said quietly. “I do.”
“See, that’s what I’m worried about. We don’t belong here—either of us. And Morgan really doesn’t belong here. She belongs at home in the city, with me there for her every afternoon when she gets home from school and wants to cry over her dead father, or talk about how she feels about it.” She began to cry, at the same time thinking, Jesus, enough with these waterworks, already. I can’t keep doing this. “I’m failing her. This isn’t what Jack would have wanted. I just know it.”
Jeremy rolled towards Christina. His expression was so sad that she instinctively reached for his hand and squeezed his fingers before he even had a chance to speak. When he did, his own voice was thick. “Christina, I’m so, so sorry,”