by James Bow
Peter and Rosemary faced each other. Rosemary took a sip of her eggnog and watched Peter over the rim of the glass. He reddened and looked at the floor.
“This is good eggnog.” She took another sip. “Faith’s recipe?”
“Mostly. I added some rum when she wasn’t looking.”
“Peter! If Faith finds out, she’ll kill you!”
He grinned. “I don’t see how she could complain. It’s traditional.”
She smiled sadly. “Yes, it is.”
“Missing your family?”
She nodded. “But I have family here, at least.” She looked up at him.
Peter took a deep breath and raised his glass. “Well, to us, whatever happens.”
“To us.” Their glasses clinked. Each took a sip. Then they kissed each other warmly. They had barely pulled back when they leaned in again. And again.
They stopped, breathing heavily. Peter’s throat was dry. “So ... What do we do now?”
Smiling, Rosemary set aside her drink. She took Peter’s drink and set it next to hers. Then she clasped his hands and stepped back, tugging playfully.
Peter grinned, and followed her.
Rosemary dreamed she lay submerged in water, gazing up as the last hole of light was bricked over. She reached for it, full of longing and regret, but she couldn’t see her hands anymore. She clasped them to her chest and drifted off, as though to sleep.
She felt the current tugging at her feet, herself slipping through the dark tunnels. Then light began to glow, rising from her ankles. She tried to look toward it, but she was sluggish and lethargic. The light rose above her, and she felt herself surrounded in welcoming warmth, just as she faded from existence.
She slipped awake. The faint early morning light was just bringing shadows out of darkness. She blinked once, and took a deep breath. “Of course.”
She slipped out of bed and wrapped herself in one of the quilts. She shook Peter awake.
He snorted. “What? What are you —,” he yelped as she yanked the covers away. “Hey, it’s cold!”
She let the quilt drop and started pulling clothes from the chest of drawers. “Get dressed and pack.”
“What?”
Rosemary tossed over some trousers and began wrapping a couple of small keepsakes in a blouse. “Take a change of clothes with you. I know where the last portal is.”
Peter rolled out of bed and got dressed.
Minutes later they sidled into the hallway, each dressed and carrying a bundle of clothing. Rosemary passed hers to Peter. “Go down to the kitchen and wait there.”
“Rosemary, what —”
“I’ll catch you up.” She waited as Peter clopped carefully down the stairs, then she eased herself to Faith’s door and turned the knob.
Faith was in bed, covers pulled around her, arms draped across the bedspread. She breathed deeply, and didn’t quite snore.
Rosemary tiptoed to her side and set an envelope on the bedside table. She paused and smiled down at Faith in her sleep.
“Good luck in your studies, Dr. Watson,” she said, and she leaned over and kissed Faith’s cheek.
Faith murmured, and rolled onto her side.
Holding candles, Rosemary and Peter clopped down the basement steps. The place was clear of crates and full of scuffed footprints. Faith had thrown up her hands and left it undisturbed.
“Are you sure this isn’t a wild goose chase?” asked Peter.
“If it is, then I’m sorry,” said Rosemary. “But we have to try. I had a dream.”
“That’s inspiring.”
The trap door had been locked with a simple wedge of wood and an admonition from a police officer not to touch it until the construction crew came to seal it up. Rosemary pried out the wedge and lifted the door. She shone the candle down the steps. “There’s a boat down there. The police must have left it after they cleared the basement.”
“You can’t be serious,” said Peter.
Rosemary took his hand. “Come on.”
They climbed down the stairs to the boat, lit the lanterns, and untied the boat from the jetty. Peter took up the pole while Rosemary guided the rudder. They floated forward in silence.
“The portals have all closed,” said Peter. “You said so. So where are we going?”
Rosemary shrugged. “I said the portals were flowing downstream as the river died. We forgot: there’s one last place for a portal to exist. And after all the weird things that have happened to us, I’m giving this a shot.”
They slipped further downstream. The tunnel widened. All the passing branches were dark.
Peter dipped his pole into the water. “You know, if we make it back, we’ll have been gone four whole months.”
“I know.”
“We’ll have missed a term of school, not to mention our scholarships.”
“We’ll just have to reapply.”
“And explain our four-month absence?”
“I know,” said Rosemary. “We’ll have a lot of catching up to do.” She chuckled. “It’s almost easier just to stay here.”
They drifted on silently in the dark.
“Well,” said Peter. “There is hot, running water to look forward to.”
Rosemary grinned. “And central heating.”
“And television.”
“And the Internet.”
“And your science degree,” said Peter. “And your career.”
“And our friends,” said Rosemary. “And our family.”
He frowned down at her. “What are we going to tell everyone?”
“I don’t know.”
“What are we going to tell your parents?”
“The truth.”
“The whole truth?”
“Yes.”
They floated further in silence. After a long while, they rounded a curve and came out into Aldous Birge’s ruined port. They passed the broken jetties, the gouged walls where the gaslights used to be, and the scorched and blackened bricks. The door to the warehouse was bricked over.
Rosemary tugged at Peter’s sleeve. She pointed.
At the mouth of the underground river, where the tunnel gave way to open sky, a boat passed across the horizon. Its rigging was lit up like a Christmas tree. It let out a belt of its horn. The image faded and flickered before resuming, strong as before.
“The last portal,” said Rosemary. “At the mouth of the river.”
Peter drew a shaky breath as he pushed toward the portal. Rosemary looked up at him. “You scared?”
He laughed. “Can you believe it? Yeah. I can’t think why.”
“We have a lot of questions to answer, a lot of things to do, and a lot of decisions to make,” said Rosemary.
“I was all set on being a construction worker,” said Peter. “Now I have to decide whether to go back to journalism school. But I can’t go to London; that would be too far from you. It’s all too much, too soon.”
“Peter?”
He looked at her. She let go of the rudder and stood up. The boat coasted. “Whatever happens, whatever we face, if the last few months have taught me anything, it’s this.” She reached up and kissed him. “We’ll face it together.”
“I love you, Rosemary.”
“I love you too.” Then she sat back down and grabbed the rudder. “Now.” She pointed. “Forward!”
Peter pushed the pole, and the boat slipped forward and vanished into the future.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
I spent most of my childhood years growing up in Toronto living in a townhouse on McCaul Street. The street was on the edge of the downtown core, with the fronts of its houses staring east at the rising towers of the hospital district and the Ontario Hydro headquarters. It is an old residential street being transformed by the city’s expanding core. Our townhouse, we believe, was originally built in the 1890s on a site that was once cricket grounds, but more significantly, before that, a peculiar old creek bed.
Two blocks from my house is a short stub
of a street, mostly a delivery lane for the University of Toronto, known as Taddle Creek Road. This street is one of the few reminders of a significant river that used to flow through Toronto’s downtown core. Taddle Creek started life in the neighbourhood of Wychwood near the Bathurst/Davenport intersection and meandered southeast through the university grounds, possibly even beneath our house, before reaching Lake Ontario near where the St. Lawrence Market is today.
By all accounts, the creek was a treasure. The University of Toronto was originally built with prime views of the creek and its associated wetlands, but encroaching development polluted the Taddle, and gradually the City of Toronto built over it, transforming the creek into a series of bricked-up storm sewers. The stretch through the university grounds, a great portion of which is known as Philosopher’s Walk, was the last to be covered over in 1884.
There is a mystique about this buried river. Garrison Creek was longer, and still has a greater impact on the city’s topology, but Taddle seems to capture the imagination, much like the Fleet in London, England. Perhaps because of its downtown course, the Taddle is a symbol of both the folly and might of industrial progress. For locals, we remembered the Taddle with a strange pride: here was a river we built over. Here was a great watercourse that we killed. Urban legends built up around the Taddle. I was told that there were caverns associated with the buried river beneath Queen’s Park. I was told that the University subway line made use of these caverns during construction. Most of these tales are probably apocryphal, but they are a part of my identification with this river.
And at the back basement of our house on McCaul Street, there was a small hole in the concrete foundation, and a strange patch of floor that sounded a little hollow. We had no idea what this was. Could it have been a secret chamber that was used when the house was owned by bootleggers during the 1920s and ’30s? (My father has a pretty good idea that the house was used as such during Prohibition because, during his childhood in the ’50s, after his father had bought it, it was amazing how many drunks showed up at the door at the middle of the night asking for a bottle). Or was it one of the caverns associated with the Taddle?
Of course, it was probably nothing. But the idea that there was something under my place stayed with me in the years after we moved to Kitchener. And as I tackled the tale of Peter and Rosemary at eighteen, these elements decided to make their contribution. What if Peter and Rosemary, helping Theo move into that basement apartment, fell through that floor, fell into the Taddle, and walked through the storm drains back into time, emerging on the university grounds in 1884, just as the Taddle was being buried?
My story probably takes several artistic licences. The size and shape of the storm sewer tunnels in this book are probably larger than what reality calls for (although given that some people have little difficulty in exploring the storm drains of Toronto, perhaps I’m not that far off). And the cavern Peter and Rosemary fall into probably doesn’t exist. But it’s still a part of the city’s collective imagination. And I hope that this lends my story the validity it needs. This is a fantasy, after all — an urban fantasy. And if I can’t take some liberties with reality to tell a fantastical story about my childhood city, what’s the point of being an author?
Today, the Taddle is remembered in plaques and in flooded basements. There has been talk about exhuming the water course, though it seems unlikely given the cost. But various groups are coming together to remember the many rivers that Toronto has buried.
HAVE YOU READ ALL
THE UNWRITTEN BOOKS?
Take a step back in the series and check out other books by James Bow
Fathom Five
978-1-55002-692-4
$12.99, £6.99
On the surface, Peter McAllister has a good life: a good school, good friends, good times — even if his best friend is a girl, sort of a geek, and maybe even more than a friend. But it’s been years since the death of his parents landed him in this small town and he still feels as if his life in Clarksbury is just an inch deep. Does he really belong? Only Rosemary seems real. Then a mysterious woman named Fiona appears who tells him he’s a changeling — a fairy child left to live in the human world — and that it’s time to come home. Can Rosemary convince him that Fiona is lying? Or is it possible that Fiona is telling the truth?
The Unwritten Girl
978-1-55002-604-7
$12.99, £6.99
Years ago Rosemary Watson’s brother, Theo, suffered a nervous breakdown, and Rosemary, now entering junior high, is constantly teased about it. She tries to hide in books, but even there she’s uneasy: she can’t stand to see characters suffer. Rosemary and Peter — the new kid in school with issues of his own — are thrown together and soon find themselves on a life-or-death quest to rescue Rosemary’s brother, who has lost himself in a book. With the help of Peter and her guide, fairy shape-shifter Puck, Rosemary must face the storybook perils of the Land of Fiction and learn to open her heart before it is too late.
Available at your favourite bookseller.
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