A new rush of tingling travelled from my legs up to my neck. I stammered my thanks to V. and we promised to get together soon for a hike in the mountain trails like we used to. But, as I watched his silhouette shrink in my rear-view mirror, I was certain this hike would never happen. I would see V. again, but for other reasons that somehow, confusedly, I knew were linked to the man with the gun.
* * *
While P. was making dinner and John Coltrane’s sax doing all it could to drown out Andy Williams’s voice, which had insinuated itself into every corner of the house, I looked up Ferland and Casgrain’s addresses in the phone book with every intention of going to the neighbouring village in the morning to see what these men looked like. Then I wrote out, on a blank page, the names of all my ghosts — from characters in my novels to flesh-and-blood people buried in the village cemetery situated in the hollow of the green or white rectangle, depending on the season, that I could see from my childhood bedroom. Then I reconstructed their faces, one by one, but none matched that of the man with the gun. Not a single one.
* * *
Heather, back now at her departure point, has proceeded down the hill to take a closer look at the houses around the crossroads. The little girl she saw the other day is still there by the barn, playing hopscotch and humming a nursery rhyme, quite as if she’d been invented to live in the scene eternally. As she jumps, she endlessly repeats the chant, “One, two, buckle my shoe,” wearing red sandals that vault her toward the sky in a few jumps, then, “Three, four, knock at the door,” after which she walks back around the rectangle she’s traced in the gravel to begin again, “One, two, buckle my shoe.”
Heather stays some distance back, worried her presence will frighten the child and break the spell that somehow keeps her alive. Then she sets off on the section of road that leads to the foot of the mountain.
Initially, she has the impression she’s in an unknown territory, but then, little by little, the landscape clears up, branches part, and the tall grass bends flat to reveal hidden aspects of the scene. She recognizes the copse to the left of the road, although the trees in it seem bigger to her now, and a larch has appeared to the right of the birch among the cherry trees. The embankment on which the trees are growing haphazardly is less visible, and it looks more like a natural hillock than a pile of stones heaped up in the middle of a field by means of a plough and sweaty horses, whose glistening muscles must have exuded a strong animal odour mixing with the smell coming off shirtless men puffing and panting behind them. As for the many potholes in the gravel road, they sink even deeper where underground water loosens the ground. A bank of wild roses has moved closer to an old rail fence, and will end up invading the road if nobody prunes it.
The set has shifted, thinks Heather, though the landscape is mostly the same. If she were able to run, she’d sprint down the slight slope ahead of her and end up by a river — that, she suspects, would be lined by bigger trees, new bushes, and new grass — but her injured leg stops her.
She mumbles, “What if time got away from me when my car shot into the forest? What if, imperceptibly, I’ve moved with the set and am not who I think I am?” Then she sits down on a rock and stares at the mountain, which, at the heart of this moving scene, is its only immutable element. “I come from there,” she tells herself. “I come from that mountain.” But from her vantage point, she can see no house or building to indicate that anybody actually lives on the mountain.
* * *
My first intention, when I got up this morning, was to head to the next village and lie in wait for Ferland and Casgrain as they left for work, but I’d forgotten I had to help P. make fiadoni, a specialty of the Italian side of his family, for Christmas dinner. My little reconnaissance mission would have to wait until people arrived home from work — assuming, that is, that Ferland and Casgrain worked outside the house and weren’t on holiday the day before Christmas Eve.
I spent a portion of the day smearing butter on baking trays, breaking eggs, putting fiadoni in the oven, and then paced back and forth as the smell of flour and cheese permeated the house. At four thirty I pretended I needed to run an errand and set off down the road. Darkness had already fallen, which could be an advantage overall, since Heather and I had only seen the face of the man with the gun in the dead of night, suffused with moonlight as the glowing clock in the Buick showed half past twelve. The sight of his face exposed in full daylight would likely scramble his features forever.
I started with Casgrain, who lived at the edge of the village, and whom it would be easier for me to monitor without appearing suspicious. His house was in total darkness. The curtains were drawn, the red and white bulbs running along the roofline were turned off, and an air of desolation peculiar to empty houses surrounded the stucco walls. Except for the driveway having been completely cleared of snow, everything pointed to Casgrain’s having been away for some time. Nonetheless, I parked on Main Street — as far away from a streetlamp as possible — and sank back in my seat after I’d turned off the engine.
I was about to light a cigarette when a red truck pulled into Casgrain’s driveway. A burly man with sagging shoulders jumped out and went around to help his passenger, a small woman who was even more bent over, navigate the footboard without tripping. As he leaned over to hold the woman’s arm I was able to discern Casgrain’s head and scrutinize his face for long enough to know that he wasn’t my man. I felt vaguely disappointed, because the coldness of this house seemed to suit the solitude in which I imagined the man with the gun ought to live.
It was nearly five thirty when I came to Ferland’s property at the end of the 6th Line. As I drove past the house, which was flanked by an enormous pine decorated with multicoloured bulbs flashing in the darkness, I noticed his truck was still in the drive and a silhouette was pottering about in what must have been the kitchen. I did a U-turn, drove back with my lights off, and parked a few metres away from the front door.
Aside from the multicoloured pine tree, the only source of illumination in this isolated corner was from the lamppost installed near Ferland’s garage. Waiting for Ferland to show, I pondered the deserted fields where dark tracks left by the passage of a few deer stood in the brilliant whiteness, as if the snow were somehow reflecting the light it had absorbed during the day. The memory of winter nights when I’d distance myself from the village in order to better feel the silence of those hours when the snowy owl soars, to think tranquilly and at my leisure, superimposed itself on the deer tracks. Numbed by the cold slowly creeping into the car, I lapsed into dreaming.
I was walking through the powdery snow when I was wakened from my light reverie by three knocks on the car door vigorous enough that some field mice, their shadows elongated by the full moon, bolted away. Framed in the middle of the window was the heavyset face of a furious-looking man. I let out a cry, more like a strangled sigh, and my first reflex was to lock the doors and drive off in order to put as much distance as possible between me and the sinister-looking giant and save myself. But then I remembered: Ferland, the man had to be Gilles Ferland.
I sat up straight in my seat and adjusted my coat, trying to hide my astonishment and unsure of what attitude to take. The man whose enormous fist was now banging on the roof looked exactly like one of the snowmobilers of La Languette. He was like one of those husky guys whose features I’d imagined one winter evening as I was laying out the foundations of a never-written novel in which a young woman is brutally murdered. I knew Gilles Ferland, and Gilles Ferland was not the man with the gun — but he was one of the La Languette murderers.
We stared each other right in the eyes for a few seconds, and then I lowered the window, not knowing yet whether I was going to apologize, find some way of justifying my presence at the end of the 6th Line of Saint-Vital in the bitter cold, or simply ask Ferland what he was playing at.
I didn’t have to wonder for long, because before I’d had the chance to say a wo
rd, Ferland told me to get the hell out of there and never come back: “I never want to see you here again, is that clear?” No, it was not clear, but I was too upset to protest, and all the more so as a teenager and a slightly older young man were watching me from Ferland’s big living room window, their gazes as piercing as Ferland’s. There was also a small woman with black hair, no doubt Ferland’s wife, arms crossed defiantly under her bosom.
I turned my head away, so much did the scene seem unreal to me, pressed on the gas pedal, and drove a couple of kilometres before stopping, alone in the darkness and in the middle of the icy road, and murmuring, “You aren’t who you think you are, you aren’t who you think you are, you aren’t who —”
Then I opened the car door and went to throw up in the ditch.
* * *
The cat is sitting in his armchair, one half of his body illuminated by the lamp. Our second cat, a three-legged alley tomcat nobody wanted and whom we took in before moving away from the city, has just come downstairs for the night. He’s emptied the first cat’s dish of food, as usual, and has come to lie down on the mat by the door in my study that leads outside. Both of them are gazing at me, perhaps wondering why I’m so still and pale, or maybe they detect some anomaly in the human aura that cats can apparently see. Mine probably does have some unusual colour or glow — because I’m still caught up in my encounter with Ferland, as P. also perceived. When I got back home, P. was beside himself with worry, as I’d ostensibly gone out just to pick up a few croissants for tomorrow’s breakfast. But when he saw my face he understood that something had happened.
As I’d been too stunned on my drive back from the 6th Line to consider that P. might be worried, I hadn’t prepared an excuse. I told P. that I’d had car trouble, that there’d been an alarming flapping sound under the hood — the fan belt, which urgently needed to be replaced — but he didn’t believe me. Just as the cats don’t believe me even when I keep telling them everything’s fine, when I tell them to sleep soundly instead of staring at me as if they’ve just seen a person returned from the dead. The place I’ve been is one they don’t know, one of those lands of the real that only exist by virtue of fiction.
How to explain this to a cat? How to explain it to P. without him starting to wonder about the extreme states triggered by fatigue, or the long-term effects of fiction on the fertile imagination, when I don’t know myself if I’m losing my mind, or whether I might have invented the man sharing my life and, in so doing, affirming that I am mad?
* * *
It’s night again in Heather Thorne’s universe. Around her, otherwise silent trees occasionally let out a sinister creak, and then everything quietens down again but for the insistent voice of the girl ahead of her — “one, two . . . one, two . . .” — the voice of the girl playing hopscotch, hammering its beat into Heather’s thoughts with unrelenting regularity: one, two . . . one, two . . .
Heather tries to ignore the voice and takes a few small steps forward, afraid of waking an animal, of prompting some roaring maw, or one of those pale faces from her nightmares, to come surging out of the darkness. All the while she’s wondering what possessed her to want to climb the mountain at all when the light was fading. She notices a rocky outcrop ahead of her and decides to stop there and wait until dawn before setting off again, but the voice wants to draw her further on, past the rock and to the higher reaches of the mountain, where its echo reverberates in the damp air.
“Enough,” she mutters, “enough,” but the little voice keeps on. “One, two . . . one, two . . .” Enough. Then Heather starts to sing too, she sings anything, singing just to drown out that crystal clear voice. And the shimmering voice rises further away, “One, two . . .” and the rhyme becomes no more than a barely audible chirping before it finally disappears on the far side of the mountain.
Heart pounding, Heather kneels behind a bank, convinced she’s awoken the animal she was afraid of, but she hears nothing. At this hour, the forest seems to be populated only by its smells, of pine and fir needles, damp cedar wood, and she inhales them the way you would some nostalgic memory. Then she feels a hand slip into her own; it’s rough, a man’s hand, that of her father leading her into the woods. She tries to hold on to it, but the hand slips away again just like the face that appeared briefly along with the scent of the cedars.
On the verge of tears, Heather Thorne closes her eyes and focuses. She concentrates with all her might, and tries to conjure up a smile around which a face might materialize, but the face remains in a foggy cloud of unknowing, like that which, in certain television reports, accords anonymity to both criminals and victims.
With the passing of this vague recollection, Heather Thorne’s father, in her erased memory, ceases to exist, but for the remembrance preventing her from disappearing into the black abyss of the man with the gun — a simulacrum of memory ensuring her survival and fragmented identity.
Her eyes are wide open now. She wipes her forehead and tries once more to remember, but all she can see is a hand and a veil of fog.
In the distance, a little girl sings, concealed by the darkness that eventually silences her.
* * *
Day is breaking and I haven’t moved. All night I wondered if my nerves had deluded me, if Gilles Ferland really did resemble one of the two attackers who emerged out of the snow in La Languette. Exhausted, I tried to interpret the meaning of his words, and figure out exactly whom he was talking to. When he’d ordered me never to return, had Gilles Ferland addressed the stalker shamelessly spying on his family through the windows of his house — or the author who’d endeavoured to turn his life upside down?
I try to convince myself that my first hypothesis was the right one — that Gilles Ferland resembled one of the two snowmobilers from La Languette: a coincidence impossible to explain. Perhaps, not long after I’d moved back to the area, I’d seen this man at the Saint-Vital post office or grocery store and had been struck by his appearance, the intensity of his gaze — enough so, that when I wrote the character of one the men from from La Languette,
I’d subconsciously given him the features of the stranger I’d come across on the very day that, without being aware of it, I was about to start a new story.
I ask the cats what they think. They dozed off a few hours ago and are only now beginning to rouse themselves. The first answers me with a yawn, and is amazed to see me still at my desk. The second pads upstairs to take refuge under my bed, and is just possibly still under the impression, perhaps, that I am not who I think I am, but a ghost who has returned from the dead to take the real A. A. M.’s place.
In a few moments, P. will come downstairs. First I’ll hear the squeaking of the floorboard he steps on every morning after he wakes, followed by the sound of the toilet flushing, and then the creaking of the stairs. P. will appear in his red and black checked dressing gown and come to kiss me and ask if I had a good night. I won’t admit that I didn’t sleep a wink, and that a ghost — on reflection I’m sure it must have been a ghost — invaded my life yesterday. No, I’ll pretend nothing is bothering me, and eventually I’ll haul myself out of my chair to feed the cats, make coffee, and hustle us along in our holiday preparations — for tonight, December 24, is to be our night of festive celebration and disingenuous fake good cheer.
* * *
Heather left the mountain, because nothing seemed to want to keep her there, with the idea of finding shelter as she waited for some unanticipated event to disrupt her wanderings — for a flock of geese to cleave the air, or for some cold wind hinting at snow to show her fall is coming to an end.
Just as she was on the point of giving up, having let herself drop to the foot of a tree, planning to wrap her arms around it until morning to shield herself from fear, she noticed a cabin with an ATV parked outside it. Instinctively, she hid behind a stand of alder trees, while a voice coming from she didn’t know where superimposed itself over the little girl’s,
Tabarnak, tell me we didn’t just do that, Gilles, tell me. A moist warmth trickled down her temples as if two wet hands had just been placed there. Heather pushed the hands away, “Jesus Christ, just leave me alone,” and curled in on herself, adopting the position fear demands when you feel vulnerable.
After a few minutes a man came out of the cabin, making Heather curl up even more tightly, mounted the ATV and started down a trail that must have led to the road. Heather waited a little longer, both to calm down and to be sure the man wasn’t coming back, and then she went into the cabin, which still smelled of sweat and the dry wood stacked in a corner. Quickly she found a first-aid kit containing what she needed to tend to her injured thigh. She took some bandages, ointment, and peroxide, slipping the whole lot into a big backpack along with crackers, almonds, and a few tins of soup.
The sun is about to set and Heather, returning to her car, examines the bandage around her thigh, which has a little red stain that shows the blood hasn’t yet coagulated. She covers the spot with the wool blanket she also stole from the cabin, and then stretches out on the back seat and shivers. The night wind muscles its way into the old Buick and, as the light drops, she can hear the creaking of branches and the little noises made by animals beginning to hunt.
* * *
Holy and Crappy Junior, their feathers ruffled, swing above the table where the remains of the meal are piled up with the empty glasses and dirty dishes. Our guests left a few moments before, to the sounds of “It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year,” and the place seems oddly empty. Unaware of my discomfort, Holy and Crappy are still chattering on, keyed up from the excitement of the meal. P. has gone out to help our friends clear the driveway, because for the entire evening, fluffy snow that might have been specially created for Christmas has been slowly falling. I am alone with my coffee.
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