Wild Fell (20 page)

The effect was disorienting. I shook my head in an attempt to clear it, but the sense of travelling down an otherworldly, lightless corridor persisted. Then, just as suddenly, the trees thinned and the light returned.

Mrs. Fowler parked the Chevy in a flat clearing. Beyond it there was a glimmer of blue through the thick curtain of trees, and I realized we were at the top of a hill leading down a winding path to what I had already come to think of as “my” beach, with “my” dock. There would be an outboard motorboat tied up to it, the boat that had been included in the price of the house, and which would have a full tank of gas.

It’s finally real
, I thought.
This is where it all begins
.

Wild Fell. My house.

Mrs. Fowler stood beside the Chevy, staring out in the direction of the lake, her back to me. When she turned at my approach, I saw that she held her handbag tightly against her chest, almost like a shield.

She gave me a forced smile and asked me if I’d had any trouble keeping up. “I hope I wasn’t going too quickly for you,” she said with no discernible irony or sarcasm. “I was trying to go slowly enough that you’d be able to get your bearings. Do you have a sense of where you are in relation to the town? Did you take mental notes?” Before I could answer, she added, “Never mind. In any event, it’s all in the papers. We followed the exact route out here that I wrote down on that sheet of paper. You should have no trouble getting back and forth from this point.”

“Well, it might take me a bit longer,” I replied. “Perhaps when we get out to the house, you can show me where the town is. I imagine the highest point is the tower room, right? I believe I saw a balcony in the photograph. That will probably orient me best.”

She looked at me blankly. “When we get out to the house? What do you mean?”

“What do I mean?” I laughed. “I mean, when we get out to Wild Fell and you show me around the house. I assume the boat is just down there.” I gestured in the direction of the water. “I’ll run you back across afterward, of course, and walk you to your car.”

“Mr. Browning, you know how to operate the boat, don’t you? Most men do. You don’t need me. I don’t really have time to take you out to Blackmore. It’s just right over there. You can see where it is. Here,” she said, fumbling in her purse before extracting a heavy iron key ring to which several keys were attached. She handed it to me. When I didn’t take it from her, she jabbed the set in my direction again. “Mr. Browning, these are the keys to Wild Fell. They belong to you. The house is yours now. You don’t need me to go out there with you. It’s self-explanatory. The various keys have all been photocopied and I have noted which rooms they are for. It’s in the packet of notes in the manila envelope.”

“Mrs. Fowler, you have
got
to be kidding. You’re my real estate agent. You
have
to show me the house. I’ve never been there before. I have no idea where anything is.”

“It’s all in the notes,” she said stubbornly. “As I said, you can drive an outboard motor, can’t you?”

“Yes,” I said. “But that’s not the point. This is your job. It would be extremely unprofessional for you to leave me stranded out here. You’re my real estate agent,” I said again, wondering if somehow she hadn’t heard or understood me the first time.

High spots of colour had risen on her powdered cheeks and sweat beaded at the base of her hairline. When she answered me, her voice was suddenly shrill. “I am
not
your real estate agent. I am the
house’s
real estate agent. That is to say, I represent the family selling the house. Your choice to not engage a real estate agent of your own was your choice. And I’m telling you, I’m not going out to Blackmore Island with you. Not now, not ever. I’ve been out there. I took the pictures. I got it ready for sale. You bought it. It’s yours—the house, and everything in it.
Everything
. Now, take the keys.” Again she jabbed the key ring in my direction.

Again I refused to take the keys. “What the hell is wrong with you, Mrs. Fowler? This is the most unprofessional behaviour I have ever seen in my life, from anyone in any job. If you don’t accompany me, you leave me no choice but to report you.” Even as I said the words I realized how ridiculous they sounded. Who would I report her
to
?

“I said
take the keys
.” She flung them at my feet where they landed in the soft earth, leaving a dent and sending up a small cloud of moss spores and pine needles. “And as for reporting me to anyone, Mr. Browning, I think you’ll find that it will be my word against yours. I’ll simply tell people that you behaved lewdly toward me out here, and that I was frightened. You’re an unmarried man, and I’m a widow. I’m
of
this place, through my marriage to Mr. Fowler. His family has lived here for almost as long as this town has existed. You are from away. No one in Alvina is going to begrudge me my unwillingness to set foot on Blackmore Island for one minute longer than I have to, let alone stepping across the threshold of that house. You’re not back in Toronto now, sir. Please don’t presume to threaten me with reports. You bought this place. No one local would have it, you know.
No one
.”

“This is absurd. Are you mentally unbalanced?”

For a moment, Mrs. Fowler looked as though she were about to say something else, but thought better of it. She straightened up and smoothed the blouse of her pantsuit. Her eyes squinted at me from behind the thick harlequin glasses, but when she spoke, her voice was once again flat calm.

“I think you’ll find everything inside the house to be as you expected,” she said. “As I may have mentioned, it has been professionally cleaned, and the furnace is running. It’s not new, but it works. I assume you brought your own bedding, but in case you didn’t, there was some left in the linen closet. It, too, has been cleaned. Three of the bedrooms have been made up—all three on the second floor. If you prefer, you can sleep in that bedding, or use your own sheets.”

“Unbelievable,” I marvelled. “Just. Fucking. Unbelievable.”

“Charming language.” She turned and walked toward her car. Before getting in, she said, “Enjoy your new home, Mr. Browning. Good day.”

I had barely heard the Chevy’s door slam before the car started up and spun around in the direction of the road to Alvina. This time, Mrs. Fowler wasn’t driving slowly. I followed the cloud of dirt and rock the Chevy left behind as it sped away until it was lost inside that strange stalled-time alleyway of pine trees and darkness leading to town.

I bent down and picked up the keys. They were made of iron, big and old-fashioned—the largest of them most likely the key to the front door. I brushed them off even though they weren’t dirty, but because the thought of the lunatic real estate agent having even touched them was offensive to me at that moment.

I tucked the keys in my pocket and trudged down the hill through the trees and underbrush to the water. The path was overgrown, but there was evidence to indicate that the various tradesmen who had been engaged by Mrs. Fowler at the previous owners’ behest had used it lately. The ground was compacted where feet had walked. In any case, the path could only go in one direction: down toward the water and the dock.

As I walked, I made a mental note to send an email to the family in England about the real estate agent’s horrendous and unprofessional behaviour, but even as I thought it, I dismissed it. There wouldn’t be any point.
Caveat emptor
. They had my money and the house was mine, lock, stock, and barrel. What had she said?
And everything in it.
If it was a white elephant, it was now
my
white elephant.

On the other hand, if the house was not as it had been represented—to wit, if the safety inspection had been fraudulent, or if the house was not as it had been described in the contract, or something other than how it had appeared in the photographs, I might theoretically have a case against the vendors. But even then, I could easily imagine a judge calling me an idiot for having bought it sight unseen and laughing me out of court.

On the other hand, the woman was obviously unbalanced. I thought of her prattling away in the office about cooperating with each other in terms of sharing tourist prospects as either paying guests for my guesthouse, or potential clients for Fowler Real Estate. I thought of her invasive questions about my marital status and my family, and her rambling about ghosts of drowned couples and haunted houses and small-town legends.

Maybe she had serious mental health issues or maybe it was just general small-town insularity and strangeness. In any case, I felt calmer. Whatever a fool I had been in buying the house, if she were actually crazy, I would only sound sane and reasonable next to her, in court or anywhere else.

And then I pushed around one more copse of trees and Blackmore Island revealed itself to me. At that moment, all thoughts of suing anyone tattered away like smoke, as I stood stock-still and stared at the swath of pine-crowned granite set in the grey inlet, tiered like a stone staircase covered with russet trees. Above the tops of the highest trees, the towers of Wild Fell grasped for the sky.

At the edge of the water was a small wooden dock. On the beach beside it was a Bass Tracker motorboat half-covered with an olive canvas tarp to keep it dry.

A wave of dizziness passed over me and I swayed on my feet. An image stirred somewhere inside my brain, not a memory, exactly, but something more vivid than ordinary
déjà vu
. I had been here before, as a child, I was sure of it. Right here, right on
this
precise spot. I had stared across
this
expanse of water at
this
island. An amorphous vision of my nine-year-old self eddied through my mind, but even as it did, I knew it was impossible. I had never been this far north in my life, not even on infrequent cottage weekends with friends while I was still at university, and certainly never as a child. I shook my head to clear it, but the vertigo, or whatever it was, lingered.

The air had grown very still and heavy. Even the cool, damp wind that had been making the treetops dance and toss their scattering cull of dead maple leaves had stopped blowing. It was as though nature itself was subject to the strange cone of silence that had descended on the spot. Again I shook my head. I swallowed, trying to make my eardrums pop, to hear again, because there was no sound at all, and that was impossible.

And then I was conscious of someone standing directly behind me.

The hairs on the back of my neck stood up, and a prickly flush crept across my shoulders and down my back. I turned around quickly, expecting to see Mrs. Fowler, having come to her senses, finally, and having realized that it was her job to see me directly to my front door.

But when I looked, the beach was empty, as was the path leading up to the flat place where my car was parked.

I called out, “Hello?” but there was no answer. I took a few tentative steps toward the path, unable to rid myself of the notion that there was someone there, that I was being watched. “Hello? Mrs. Fowler? Is anyone there?” And then, boldly, in my new role as the owner of Blackmore Island and Wild Fell—and although it sounded ridiculous to me even before I said it—I shouted, “You’re trespassing on private property!”

From somewhere high above me, a bird screamed, shattering the silence. The shrill caw ricocheted across the flat water of Devil’s Lake. A few seconds later, I heard the flap of wings in the branches and saw something black fly away into the thicker trees beyond the clearing. I felt the wind off the lake on my face again, and I heard its susurration in the treetops.

Almost immediately, the feeling of being watched vanished. I exhaled my relief. The prickling sensation between my shoulder blades had turned to a trail of sweat that stuck my shirt to my skin under my windbreaker.

I was very conscious that the area was remote and isolated, far from town. While my city-dweller’s paranoia about human predators was hard to shake in itself, the companion fear of
non
-human predators was fuelled by the same urban self-preservation instinct. I tried to remember everything I had ever heard about bears and their seasons, about coyotes, wolves, wolf-coyote hybrids and other scavengers of the northern Ontario woods. As it happened, I remembered nothing about any of it, and chastised myself for having been spooked by what was most likely nothing more than a crow.

It was a
crow
, for God’s sake. Get it together, Jamie. Cut this bullshit right now.

Damning Mrs. Fowler again for exacerbating my sense of isolation, as well as a growing fear that I was so far into the bush that my cell phone wouldn’t be able to get a signal, I pulled it out of my pocket and punched in Hank’s number. I told myself that I was just testing it to make sure I was still in cellular range.

I was convinced at that moment that I was entirely cut off from the human world. After a minute passed, I heard the phone ring. After a few rings, it went directly to Hank’s voicemail. I forced a note of joviality into my voice.

“Hey, Hank, it’s me, Jamie. Guess where I am right now? I’m standing on the edge of Devil’s Lake, looking at my new place. You wouldn’t believe how beautiful it is. In a few minutes, I’m going to get into my new boat and cruise on over and check it out. I wish you were here with me. I’m leaving this message because apparently cell reception out there isn’t great and I wanted you to know I got here in one piece.” I paused. “If you have a minute, would you mind giving Nurse Jackson at MacNeil a call and check in on my dad? I’d appreciate it. I’ll call again as soon as I have my bearings, but don’t worry, it’s all good. And come out here and visit in the next few days. Can’t wait to show it all to you. Take care, love you, bro.”

I walked down to the boat and pulled off the tarp. Then I took the keys out of my pocket and located the smallest, newest one on the ring. A quick examination confirmed that it was the ignition key to the Bass Tracker. I checked the seats to make sure they were dry. When I was satisfied that the boat would carry me safely across the inlet to Blackmore Island, I climbed back up the hill to where the car was parked.

I opened the Volvo and withdrew the two suitcases of essentials I had brought with me. Carefully I tucked Mrs. Fowler’s folder into the side of my overnight tote. These I carried down to the water’s edge and loaded into the back seat of the Bass Tracker. The boat was tied to the landing dock, so I leaned my shoulder against the hull and pushed it into the water. When it was floating in enough water to not scrape the bottom, I stepped back onto the beach and then onto the dock. I had soaked my feet in the process, and my shoes left wet footprints.

I untied the boat and climbed in quickly, put the key in the ignition and started up the engine, gradually edging the boat away from the dock and into deeper water. Then I revved the engine to drive-level throttle and pointed the bow toward Blackmore Island. The Tracker pulled away from shore, leaving a wake behind it. I found the mechanical noise of the engine comforting after the lonely silence of the beach.

The boat sliced through the water, bouncing along on its own waves. I looked around me at the corona of forest and the rocky shore that planed around the island like a granite horseshoe, stretching far past any line of demarcation I could see. But while the terrain around Blackmore was vast, the island, now growing closer and closer by the minute as the boat headed to shore, was undiminished by it. Indeed, the island loomed. There was no better word for it. It had seemed large from the shore, but up closer it was majestic.

I cut the engine before landing, and was guided by the orange flags atop a sequence of floating buoys doubtless left by the workmen during the recent back and forth between Alvina and the house.

The boat cruised easily into the berth adjacent to the dock off the rocky shore. The Blackmore dock was older than the new one back on the shore, though it seemed to be in excellent repair. I tied the bowline around one of the posts and stepped onto the beach. I stood there for a moment taking the measure of my surroundings. The dock from which I had launched the boat was a small spot on a shoreline I could barely see. Beyond it, up the hill, hidden completely by the trees, would be my car and the road back to town.

In front of me was a steep stone staircase that appeared to have been carved into the cliff itself, leading up to the house. Also built into the cliff and flanking the staircase on either side was a massive gothic archway, intricately carved with a faded garland of baroque bas-relief Victorian renderings of classic Canadian motifs: roses, trilliums, pine boughs, and what appeared to be wild northern birds of prey—owls, eagles, and ospreys, the latter in flight. In the centre of the archway, cut deeply into the stone, faded by more than a century of violent weather were two words:

WILD FELL

“Home,” I whispered to myself, testing the alien word on my tongue. Finding it oddly comforting, even familiar, I said it again: “Home. I’m home.”

I began climbing the staircase to the house just as sheet lightning lit up the bruise-coloured sky and cold rain fell—lightly at first, then with increased force.

To steady myself, I kept one hand on the ornate iron bannister running alongside the staircase, which proved to be old but solid, festooned with delicately twisted strands of thick copper that had been welded into the shape of ivy vines, complete with filigreed iron leaves that curled around the slats as though alive. The effect was doubly striking because the copper had turned green with age in places, lending vivacity to the effect that may or may not have been the original intention when the railing had been built.

Looking down from the vantage point of the stairs as I hurried up, I wondered how many accidents had occurred here over the years, and what the Blackmore family had been thinking when they constructed it this way. There were wide, empty spaces between the railings, certainly wide enough that a dog, or even a child, could slip through and fall, perhaps fatally, to the rocky beach below.

The wind picked up a new violence, and the clouds descended in earnest, bringing more rain, and near-complete early-evening obscurity settled on the entire island in a matter of minutes. I put my head down to keep the rain out of my eyes and kept climbing. My suitcases—one slung over my chest by a long strap, the other clutched in my left hand—seemed unbearably heavy. My right foot slipped on a patch of murderously smooth wet step, and for a horrible moment I was sure I was going to fall. I righted myself and put my foot carefully on the next step, then the next.

And then, suddenly, I was at the top of the staircase, standing on the edge of a two hundred acre plot of land bordered with still more trees and surrounded by overgrown gardens and wild, tall grass. Even wild and untended, there was a sense of formality and symmetry to the grounds: elegant bones beneath the untidy riot of unkempt vegetation and trees. They had obviously been carefully planned at one point and must have been exquisite.

The rain was surging now, frankly a gale by any standard of the word, and it was through this translucent wall of water that I saw Wild Fell for the first time, separated from the gloom and general obscurity of the deluge by two successive flashes of lightning that lifted it away from the storm’s darkness, creating the illusion of the house appearing to step forward to greet me.

I ran toward it as yet another bolt of lightning shattered the sky in a jagged streak that left a bluish afterimage seared behind my eyelids as it struck a tree twenty-five yards from the front of the house. There was a loud, sharp crack as the tree burst into flame and crashed to the ground. I felt rooted where I stood, gaping at the fire, but the rain was quickly dousing it, leaving only the smell of woodsmoke.

Before the last bit of flame went out, I saw something that must have been a trick of wind and rain making the trees sway.

A figure was standing fifteen yards from the far end of the house under a copse of white pine, not far from the burning tree, as though warming itself by the fire. The figure appeared to be female, though aside from its slight stature, I would have been hard-pressed to say exactly what it was that had communicated gender, since I could make out no details, such as body shape, face, let alone clothes.

I squinted into the shadows, trying to focus on the figure, but when lightning flashed again in the next few seconds, there was no one standing under the white pine and the doused fire from the burned tree was smoking in the rain, which continued to fall, even harder now than before.