by Gemma Files
Abbott: (After 72-second pause) I’m afraid I’m still not—
Devize: (Cuts him off) I know. But there she is, right there. Just about to take shape.
Abbott: Not fly-the-lights?
Devize: Emma had fly-the-lights, like mice or roaches, except mice and roaches don’t usually…anyway. But Madach, and that poor little spoon-bender wannabe Barbie of his? By the end, what they had…was Emma.
—
Conclusion:
With Imre Madach in jail, Emma Yee Slaughter and Eden Marozzi dead, and the official files closed on all three, the discovery of the preceding photographic array would seem—though, naturally, interesting in its own right—fairly extraneous to any new interpretation of the extant facts of the case.
Recommendations
• From now on, access to/possession of library books on the Freihoeven collection’s “hazardous” list must obviously be tracked far more effectively.
• In the initial screening process for evaluating prospective Freihoeven employees, whether contracted freelancers or in-house, far more emphasis needs to be placed on psychological mapping. Issues thus revealed need to be recorded and re-checked, rigorously, on a regular monthly basis.
• Similarly, fieldwork teams should be routinely broken up after three complete assignments together, and the partners rotated into other departments. This will hopefully prevent either side of the equation developing an unhealthy dependence on the other.
• Finally, the Institute itself needs to undergo a thorough psychic cleansing, as soon as possible; lingering influences must be dispelled through expulsion or exorcism, and the wards must be redrawn over the entire building. outside experts, rather than Freihoeven employees/experts, should be used for this task (Dr. Abbott suggests consulting Maccabee Roke, Nan van Hool, Father Akinwale oja S.J. or—as a last resort—Jude Hark Chiu-wai as to promising/economical local prospects).
• Photographs #1 through #10 will be properly re-filed under #FI5556701 (cross-referentials: Madach, Marozzi, Slaughter).
Filed and signed: Sylvester Horse-Kicker, March 5/06
Witnessed: Dr. Guilden Abbott, March 5/06
GUISING
When I was a kid, out in the woods on the Dourvale Shore, I saw faces in the bushes, sometimes: wizened like nuts, smooth like peeled birch, smiling, snarling, but always with holes—small or large, dark or empty—where you’d expect their eyes to be. Sometimes, at night, I saw wavey little versions of those faces looking out of my bedroom walls, from the spaces in the pattern of the wallpaper.
You probably think I’m speaking metaphorically. Everyone else did, for years—said it was just hypnagogic imagery, a kind of waking dream, a manifestation of the trauma going on around me. And after getting tired of attempting to persuade them otherwise, I eventually managed to kind of convince myself they were right.
But I really wasn’t speaking metaphorically then, and I’m sure not doing it now.
I remember trying to draw the face I saw most, then having that drawing taken away from me by my grandmother, who burnt it in her iron-bellied kitchen stove. I remember she and my Dad arguing about it, later on, when they thought I couldn’t hear.
This was just after my parents broke up, when Dad took us home to Overdeere, to stay with his mother until he got a job that’d support us. He’d been a late baby, and as a result, my grandmother was the single oldest person I’d ever seen. Her heavy braid of hair was the dull brownish-yellow of nicotine stains, matching the DuMaurier cigarettes she was always chain-smoking, her hands wrinkly-soft and peppered with age spots. She kept her teeth in a jar and her own “eyes” in a case—they were contact lenses, really, but that didn’t stop my Dad from telling me, when I asked once where Grandma was: “oh, she’s upstairs, sweetie, taking her eyes out.”
“I’ll be out of here by Christmas,” Dad told her, to which she simply sniffed.
“You’d better be,” she replied.
Dad and Mom just didn’t get along anymore, was how he’d eventually explained it, and I’d nodded as though I agreed—though, looking back, I found I couldn’t really remember when they had. They were different people, to say the least; she came “from town,” which in this case was Barrie, and had hoity ideas about what constituted decent living standards. Dad, on the other hand, was a Lake of the North boy, born and bred—managed to bull his way through a Forestry degree, but not quite to find a place in his preferred area. She’d stood there with a disapproving look on her face, watching him slip down into a Rona Gardening job (“You’d be a glorified florist, Kieran!”) which eventually became unbearable, after which he got his trucker’s license and began to do long-haul, gone three weeks out of every four. Her own stuff she could do from home, at night—she’d majored in Computer Tech, with a Design minor, which kept her busy building other people’s websites. But it wasn’t enough.
I don’t blame her, I guess—not now, anyways. But I did then.
Most days, in fact, I can barely remember her face, aside from that one photo the papers found, reduced to newsprint or LCD pixels. All I have left of her is her scent, a celebrity perfume they don’t make anymore, and the memory that the day she finally took off, she was wearing her favourite set of green ribbons trimmed with silver foil in her long, dark hair. Just gone, out the door and down the road in a cab to meet the boyfriend we’d never known she had. And the next day, Dad’s car pulled out of our former driveway in the exact opposite direction, with me riding shotgun and everything we had in the back.
A week later, we were setting up in my grandmother’s spare room, where the air stung with dust and the furniture hadn’t been updated since 1973. Its single window looked straight out into the top sections of a British-style boundary-setting hedgerow whose roots her own grandfather supposedly laid, but which had been left to grow wild since the Korean War. Before that, however, the old man had done his work well—the fruit of his labours grew ten feet high and three feet deep, forming a close-knit lattice of stick-bone bars in winter, a mulch-fed mini-forest every other time of year. What light seeped through was green, and when you stood right next to it, your hands and face turned pallid, bruisy, veins gone suddenly delicate under leaf-thin skin. The shadows it cast made you look as though your blood had turned to chlorophyll.
“Best to stay out of the woods, kiddo,” Dad told me, that first day. “It’s an obstacle course back there—deadfalls everywhere. A kid I knew growing up fell down a crevasse once, broke his leg, didn’t get found for almost a week. Never was right in the head, after that.”
“Don’t forget the Hell Holes,” my grandmother called, from the kitchen.
“Yeah, that’s right.” To me: “There’s Hell Holes, too—sudden falls, straight down, nobody even knows how deep. The limestone forms bubbles, just gives way underfoot.”
“It’s because of the swamps. That’s where the sulphur gas comes from, too.”
“Hydrogen sulfide, Mom. It just smells like sulphur.”
“Same difference! That stuff ’ll knock you out, and it catches on fire, you aren’t careful. So no mucking ‘round with matches!”
“She’s not gonna do that, Mom. You’re not gonna do that, honey, are you?”
“No, Dad,” I lied.
—
It was hard to find a way under the hedge, but I finally managed it. I had to dig around at the bottom, where the stakes holding the ethers in place had started to break down, ‘til I found a place so damaged by underground digging, frost and blight that a pathway large enough to crawl through had opened up. It was narrower than me, but I wriggled through, like a worm—emerged on the other side covered in juice-stains and dirt, with cobwebs in my hair and bugs down the neck of my sweater. When I slid it off to scrub my face, a grasshopper fell out, still kicking.
Beyond, the woods began in progress, with no clear line of demarcation. You just looked up, and there they were; there you were, more to the point. Where the trees came in so close they shut out the sky, ferns gr
ew so deep you couldn’t see where to step, and every weed you brushed past left part of itself behind—clinging, scratching, stinging. The only way out was up, through the underbrush, the terrain getting steeper until weeds gave way to moss and the hill beneath emerged: a massive, pinky-grey blister of granite scored with hand-deep gouges where fresh acorns collected, cushioned on a rotten mush of old ones.
When I got up high enough, the rock flattened out, forming a little shelf, maybe three feet by six. And on that shelf I found an equally tiny camp-table centre-set, haphazardly nailed together from wood, stripped grey by weather. The hill went up behind it, so slant it formed a sort of seat, so I plumped myself down and looked at the table-top, where a word had been carved, in strangely beautiful script: SARACEN.
“That’s my cousin’s name,” a voice said from behind me.
Another little girl had come up, so silently I’d never heard her. She was literally leaning out of the brush above, hanging in over my shoulder, so close I couldn’t even jump; denied room to react, my heart just gave a little knock, and I looked at her, swallowing.
“Oh?” I managed, finally. “Uh...that’s cool. I never heard of a guy named Sara...”
She corrected me: “Saracen, his name is. They’re folk from away, unbelievers in Turkish climes, on the other side of the world. My mother says his mother liked the sound of it, when she was carrying.” She peered down at the carving with interest. “Must be he played here too, once, though I can barely credit it.”
“They live nearby, your family?”
“All around. We’re many, hereabouts.”
“We just moved here. Well, Dad and me.”
“Aye, I ken. You’re Jess Nuttall’s boy’s girl.”
“My name’s Nuala. What’s yours?”
“They call me Leaf.”
She had a high, hoarse voice, not much wind to it, and rough, though that might have been the rhythm of her speech. I was too young to know her accent—it all just seemed strange to me, foreign somehow, with no clear idea beyond that. Years later, it occurred to me that she sounded as though she’d learned English from someone with a thick Scots burr, but spoke it with most of a North Ontarian honk, aside from certain differences of pronunciation.
“How old are you?” I asked. “I’m nine.”
She struck a theatrical pose and told me, deadpan: “Oh, I am old, old. I have seen five forests come and go, but never before have I seen beer brewed in an eggshell.”
I goggled at her. “You’re kidding, right?” And she laughed, high and sweet, a child’s laugh like any other, save how I immediately wanted to hear it again.
“Cert,” she said. “I’m...kidding, only. I have nine years as well, myself.”
Looking back, I can see that she said the word “kidding” as though she’d never heard it before, but liked it. It made her grin, wide, which in turn showed how charmingly gappy her teeth all were, not to mention larger than you’d expect given her size. So much so that when she put her jaws back together, I swear I saw her bottom canines slightly dent her upper lip.
“Do you guise?” she asked me, a moment later. Then explained, spurred by my obvious bafflement: “Put on a face, I mean—make masks, pretend.”
“Like...play dress-up, is that it? or like for Hallowe’en?”
“Aye, that: all Hallows. Samhain Night.”
“Well, sure, I guess. Don’t you?”
“Aye, ever. We call it the glamour.”
“The glamour?”
“So I said.”
Leaf and I played for what didn’t seem like hours, but when I realized the sun was going down, I started back. “You could come for dinner,” I offered, not actually knowing if that would be okay with my grandmother or not. But she just shook her shaggy head, solemnly.
“I’m wanted home,” she said. “And besides...no, better not.”
“You can come anytime,” I said. “Tomorrow, maybe.”
“Or you, up here.”
“I’m starting school soon. Will I see you there?”
“Not too likely.”
“...Tomorrow, then. Here.”
She laughed again. “Aye,” she said. “If I don’t see you, first.”
—
You’re wondering why I’m telling you all this, no doubt. Like, what’s the damn point, Nuala? And then you maybe remember what I let slip about my mother, back there—what I grazed over, more like, without explanation—and think, annoyed: More about that, that’s what I’d like to know. Not all this backwoods Stand By Me crap—“it was the best of summers, it was the worst of summers...” I mean, Jesus.
Well, at the time, for me, my mother had already disappeared. None of us would know anything more until six months later, when two nice officers from the Ontario Provincial Police came asking whether or not we’d had contact with her since a month previously. We were as surprised as anybody else to discover she’d apparently left that boyfriend of hers the same way she’d left us, except far more precipitately: without warning, in the middle of the night, leaving all of her stuff behind. None of which kept the OPP from making him their primary suspect; he had a record, after all, though most of it was for minor drug charges and public intoxication.
A year after that, some hikers exploring the fens around Chaste found her purse nestled high in a tree. Inside was her wallet, most of her hair and a few of her teeth, fresh enough to get DNA from the pulp and roots. My mother’s boyfriend was arrested, protesting vociferously. The Crown argued that he probably threw her down a Hell Hole, of which there are several in Chaste’s vicinity, though why he didn’t do the same with her purse was never explored. That they found a thriving grow-op inside his garage probably didn’t help.
He’s been in jail for over ten years now, up at the Kingston Pen. I was asked to make a victim’s statement at his first parole hearing, but I told them it would upset me too much, which they accepted. I was later informed that he did not, in fact, make parole, because he’d been caught multiple times holding drugs for other inmates.
These are the facts. The truth, so far as I’ve since been able to figure it, is rather more slippery, and difficult to prove—as it often is. But here, in particular...
Much like beer brewed in eggshells, what came next is definitely odd enough to merit comment, no matter how old you might be.
—
At school I soon fell in with a little group of kids my age. Still, I always found a reason to sneak off and meet up with Leaf, at least a couple days a week. She showed me paths I could never find again on my own, taking us all around the area: to the Lake, the dumps out back of the Sidderstane cannery, even that overgrown ghost village by the Dourvale Shore my new friends talked about in whispers. one afternoon in October, we sat together inside a saltbox house whose interior had fallen to ruin, leaving only the outermost portions: four windowless walls, crooked and rickety, held together mainly with vines. Two trees grew up through the middle, where the floor used to be, and their branches made a sort of roof.
“And where’s she now?” Leaf asked.
“Don’t know,” I replied. Then added, quickly, as though to convince myself: “Don’t much care, either. She never bothered to call since we got here, never even bothered to write...I mean, not like she doesn’t know where we are. She just doesn’t give a heck, so screw her.”
Leaf nodded. “Mothers shouldn’t leave,” she said. “It’s not right.”
I laughed, bitter. “I’m okay without one, I guess,” I said. “So, what about your Mom? She nice?”
“Oh, I love her dearly. Her, my brothers and sisters, our cousins...”
“No Dad?”
“Somewhere,” she said. “We don’t make ourselves, aye? But he’s no part of us, really.” Since I didn’t know what to say to that, we sat a few more minutes in silence, watching the trees move overhead—comfortable, somehow, even in our discomfort. I could hear her breathing, a faint, sighing song, same as the wind which scattered dead leaves at our feet.
“I’d help with your sorrows, Nuala, if I could,” Leaf told me, eventually, putting her cold little hand on mine, with an odd gentleness; I remember how overlong her nails were, black at the broken tips, and that they scratched just a bit, for all her restraint. Looking up at me under the shaggy fringe of her hair, her eyes ever-so-slightly a-gleam, and asking: “You know so, don’t you? For you’re my friend, my only.”
“I know, Leaf.”
“Though you have friends elsewhere, now, I hear.”
“What, Grace and Milton, Heather? They’re just kids in my class, like—somebody to eat lunch with, or hang at recess. You’re my best friend.”
“And you, for me, always.” She nodded at the sky, like she saw something floating up there, coming closer. “Will be All Hallows soon. Do you think to guise that night, and walk out begging?”
“Um, not so much. I mean, there’s that thing at school, the costume party. But we’re all a little old for trick or treat, right?”
Her face fell. “I’d hoped you would,” she said, at last. “For my family celebrates that night, and I’d have you meet them, if I may. ‘Tis a great rout, always.”
“Well...” And now I felt bad. “Where do they have it, usually?”
“Oh, hereabouts. The Shore’s ours, to do with as we please.” She gave me a shy glance. “I could come meet you, the night of, at your school. Bring you here.”
I hesitated. “You do that, the guys’ll want to come along too.”
“Then let them. All will have safe passage, so long as I’m near.”
In the trees, a bird sang; the sun was sinking, colours changing. The wind blew a little colder, and I shivered, even in my jacket.
“Sure,” I said, finally. “That’d be good.”
—
Dad was out on a run Hallowe’en week; he’d gotten his passport updated the month before, so it probably involved crossing the border. Which left my grandmother and me rattling around together, me working on my costume, her doing the stuff she usually did.