Monstrous Affections (18 page)

For their parts, the miners weren’t half as annoying. Their claws
made a noise like branches as they caressed the side of the van, but
they stayed clear of the windows after I made it clear that I was quite
willing to shoot the next one that tried to smash its way through
the glass of the front windscreen, or tried to jimmy the door locks
with its long talons. They kept clear of me to the extent that when I
finally did nod off, at about 6:30 in the morning, it was Paul and not
the miners that woke me up.

“Rise and shine, young Graham!” he hollered. “The sun’s almost
up, and it’s time to get to work!”

I snapped alert, hefting the shotgun from where it had slid down
between my legs. I looked out the front window and confirmed it
was safe. Dawn was a thin wash of rose watercolour on the flat grey
sheet of November cloud.

“You’re not still mad at me, are you?” Paul stepped into view
outside the windscreen. “Come on, Graham, at least give me the
Coleman and the cooler — the guys want some coffee.”

I let go of the shotgun with my right hand, flexed my fingers;
I could barely feel them. My feet were similarly numb. And the
prospect of hot coffee was impossible to resist.

“I’m still mad at you,” I said, and set the shotgun down on the
floor. “Yes, you could say that.”

I made the fingers of one hand into a claw around the handle of
the side door; the thumb of the other hand pushed up the lock. The
door slid open, and the fresh morning cold pushed the stale chill of
my first night alone in the van into the vaults of memory.

I don’t know why I stayed on the week. Harry, neck swathed in
gauze and looking perversely healthy, better than he had in years,
apologized for the troubles. He offered me a lift into town, even to
pay for my bus ticket home if I wanted.

“The painter’s life isn’t for everybody,” said Jim, still relishing
his new artist’s eye as he peered at the trees and hills through the
“L” of his thumb and forefinger. “No shame in admitting that now
rather than later.”

Paul crouched against the wheel of Jim’s Buick and stared at the
pit-heads. They were black as coal in the scant morning light.

“No.” I rubbed my hands together — feeling was beginning to
return to my fingertips, and I figured that by my second cup of
coffee I’d be able to hold a brush again. “I came up here to paint
some pictures.”

“Suit yourself,” said Harry.

And so I fell into the ritual of genial artistry that the three of
them had established a decade ago and I had joined three years past.
After an early breakfast, we all readied our paint kits, slung them on
our shoulders and set out in different directions, to find our spots
for the morning. Then it was work, about five hours straight, and
back to the camp to compare notes and share some lunch.

In the afternoon, we’d go back to work — sometimes in the same
spot as the morning, sometimes we’d swap. We tried to avoid one
another while painting — there was no point in two of us working
the same view — but we’d occasionally wander by between panels,
just to see how the other fellow was doing.

As the week wore on, I found that I was doing most of the
wandering. After finishing a half-dozen so-so studies of the pit-heads, the lake below them, the remains of a fallen spruce tree that
lay smashed across the back of a boulder bigger than Paul’s van, it
seemed as though I’d exhausted the possibilities of the place.

So I wandered. And I watched, as Jim and Harry, even Paul, found
their art in the skies and the soil of the Royal minehead, and turned
out some of the most accomplished work of their lives.

Harry painted the pit-heads almost exclusively. At first, he chose
the highest vantage-point, and worked in tight series’ of sketches
that took my breath away. He used primarily shadow in preference
to line to define form, spotting nuances in the light that I, with my
art-school trained eye, could only see in the land after studying one
of Harry’s panels.

Jim did a couple of studies of the pit-heads, then moved off
downslope to the lake, where he watched the ice as it spread its
crystals, submerging and cracking here and there as winter struggled
to solidify its hold on the mine lands. His paintings were abstracts,
eggshell whites and stipples of grey and blue — November ice was
personified there. It was a complete departure for Jim that was no
less shocking to him than it was to the rest of us.

Paul stayed with the pit-heads too. But unlike Harry, who circled
them almost daily, Paul remained in a single position, and worked
a single canvas, three feet on a side. In the past, Paul’s work had
always been characterized by a broad brushstroke, form suggested
rather than stated. Colour had always been his medium.

With this canvas, Paul had discovered detail. And with his
nightly visits to the pit-head with the other three, he had found the
art with which to convey it. As I watched the intricate tapestry of his
painting take form, the realization came to me:

Paul Peletier wouldn’t need to teach art lessons in Cobalt any more.
With work like this, he’d be able to write his own ticket.

None of the three were very good company when I visited them.
Part of that no doubt was my fault; I’d been staying in Paul’s van —
alone, awake most of the night and with a shotgun on my lap. It
was clear that I made them uncomfortable. And they, frankly, had
better things to do than pass the time with me — they moved brush
between pallet and panel with the hungry compulsion of newfound
genius.

In my sleep-starved state, I compared badly against them. My
outlines were tentative, frequently poorly drafted; my colours
became muddy and indistinct as I tried again and again to correct
them, make them match the land there, the sky.

On the fifth morning at the pit-heads, I knew I couldn’t put it
off any longer. When we finished breakfast and split up for the
morning’s work, instead of getting my paint-kit, I went back to
Paul’s van and picked up the shotgun, a box of shells, his flashlight,
and a coil of yellow safety rope. As stealthily as I could, I made my
way back up to the pit-head.

The cloud had broken that day, and the mineheads were bathed in
clean sunlight for the first time since we’d arrived. But as I stepped
inside, it was as ever, dark as midnight.

I tied the rope off against one of the larger beams supporting the
tower. The shotgun had a strap, and I hung it over my shoulder
while I wrapped the flashlight string around my forearm. It dangled
aiming downward as I lowered myself into the pit.

By this time, I’d stopped being angry with Paul. I still wasn’t
about to come around to his way of thinking, but I realized that he
hadn’t been lying to me — he was only thinking of my best interests
as an artist when he brought me here. He was doing me a favour,
opening a door.

And he was, in large part at least, right. The destination beyond
was a place that I very much wanted to be. It was just that Paul’s
door was not the route I wanted to take to get there.

I wrapped the rope twice around my waist, looped and tied the
end, and, kicking the last vestiges of snow off my boots, lowered
myself into the shaft.

I only lost my footing twice, both times near the end of my
descent. The walls had become slippery with ice, and the first time I
managed to recover my footing perfectly. The second time came just
before the opening of the topmost tunnels, where rock had given
way and crumbled around the tunnel’s edge. I clutched the rope as
it burned against my mittens, swinging free in the narrow shaft.
Eventually I propelled myself inside.

The smell I’d first noticed at the top of the pit was stronger here:
Heated metal and smouldering engine oil, an underlying
badness
that pervades old industrial sites — or, I guess, mineshafts that’ve
gone dry.

I slung the flashlight in front of me, lowered the shotgun to my
side, and peered ahead.

At the time, I don’t think I knew precisely what it was that I was
looking for. I certainly wasn’t there to let the miners — the creatures,
the
vampires
— feed on me; I didn’t want to cement any transaction
in that way. I still like to think that, had they been given a choice,
Jim and Harry would have come to the same conclusion.

These miners had something, all right. But they weren’t only
doling out art lessons — those miners took something different
away in return for their blood. And simply because they had so far
only bestowed in exchange for blood was no reason to assume that
blood was the only coin they understood — or that trade was the
only way to draw the genius out of them. I hefted the shotgun to
remind myself of that possibility.

The tunnel was wider than it was high at first, and I had to stoop
under lips of shale and thick, tarred cross-beams as I moved along.
After a time, the tunnel widened out to a space that must have been
used as a lunch room when the mine was active. I played the light
over the few artefacts that the miners had left: a metal-topped table,
surrounded by four folding metal chairs; a stack of more chairs,
leaning against an oblong wooden box — an oblong box! — which I
pried open with shaking hands only to find it empty but for three
badly corroded car batteries.

Sitting on the table was a fabulous anachronism — an ancient
oil lamp, with a single crack snaking up from its base. Layers of
soot made the glass nearly opaque. It would make a good still-life, I
thought, and laughed quietly.

I should have brought my paint kit down.

Beyond the lunch room, the tracks ended and the tunnel took a
steep downward slope. There were no steps, but long stems of cedar
had been bolted to the rock wall on either side, making banisters.
I descended the staircase, such as it was, and at the bottom found
a room filled with buckets, made of wood slats and iron hoops and
filled with a black liquid that was, after all, only water. The tunnel
continued beyond that, and as I followed it I noticed that the long
wires and wire-mesh lighting fixtures that had been stapled to the
ceiling had been replaced by ornate lamp shelves, such as one might
have found in a home around here, before the advent of electricity.

I had stopped for a moment, resting against the wall between
two of these low sconces, when the miners found me.

Three of them stepped into the light, and stood frozen there as I
hefted my shotgun. Unlike the first creature I’d seen in the pit-head,
these wore nothing but a few rags over limbs that were taut with
sinew. Their eyes were round and reflected back the flashlight beam
like new pennies. The hair on their scalps and their chins was thin,
and shockingly white.

“Don’t come any closer,” I said.

In response, the tunnel filled with a low chattering. I caught
fragments of thick Quebecois French, mixed with other sounds:
whistles, clicking; a pig-grunt; a wet, bronchial wheeze.

I don’t think they understood me any better than I understood
them. But they understood the shotgun all right. The trio watched
me for a moment longer, then one of them turned and vanished into
the dark. When the other two followed, I was after them.

We ran deeper into the mine. If the floor had been rough as the
upper tunnels, I don’t think I would have been able to keep up. But the
rock down here was so smooth it seemed to have been carved, not dug.

The creatures finally escaped me in a wide room — so wide that
its walls were beyond the reach of my flashlight. It had a low slate
ceiling, supported with thick wooden posts at regular intervals. I
stopped, scanned my flashlight across the shadows around me.

“
Bonjour, mon petit.
”

It was the same voice we’d heard in the pit-head. The one that
had spoken to Paul, with such familiarity.

Paul had called it, what?
Monsieur Tevalier. Mon père.

Father.

“Show yourself,” I said.

Monsieur Tevalier’s breath made a frosting on the hairs of the
back of my neck.

I whirled, barely in time to face him. But I couldn’t get the shotgun
up as well. The flashlight fell to the ground and I felt his talons dig
into my coat. I only caught the barest glimpse of his face as he lifted
me into the dark. The mutton-chops had darkened, and the flesh on
his cheeks had reddened, plumped out with the new blood.

“
Vous étudiez avec le maître,
” said the vampire — then, in thickly
accented English: “
I show you the way
.”

How was it for Paul, the rest of them? How was it for the miners, for
that matter — who made their own dark bargains here in the earth
beneath Cobalt?

I can’t say for sure, but it must have been different than the
darkness was for me. The twin punctures of the vampire’s teeth
would have been an utter shock to them — until the moment it
occurred, they would have had no reason to expect such a complete
invasion as the vampire would have perpetrated.

I was prepared for the attack, though. Where five days earlier
I might have looked away — forgotten the assault — as Monsieur
Tevalier pierced the flesh of my throat in the rooms beneath Cobalt,
I did not lose myself.

Tevalier spoke through my blood, and I was attentive.
He and his kind had been in the land here for as long as the mines
had been in Cobalt, moving between the great rocks that remained
when the world last thawed. As my blood pulsed down his throat in
clicking gulps, he showed me: the earth pulsed too, and that essence
that moved through it also flowed through Tevalier, through me. If
Tevalier drained me, swallowed all my blood, then the earth’s pulse
would be all there was. The clarity would be absolute, because I and
his land would be as one. In the early days of Cobalt I wondered at
what the miners, the prospectors, would have made of that clarity.

Because that was the secret of Tevalier’s gift. It dwelt in the razor-line between my heartbeat, absolute insularity — my life — and the
earth’s simpler rhythm, a final subsumation to the external — my
death.