Wild Fell (4 page)

No, Brenda knew two things clearly, internally, on a primal level that did not require external verification. Firstly, she knew Sean was nowhere nearby. She sensed he wasn’t hiding, playing a trick, or anything else. He was simply
not there
. His presence had been
cancelled
. Brenda’s conscious mind may not have been able to ride that particular horse but her subconscious mind had already processed it. Secondly, she knew just as strongly that she wasn’t alone, that whatever she felt peering at her through the fog wasn’t Sean.

Brenda groped on the ground at her feet till she found her pedal pushers and her sandals. She dressed herself blindly, frantically, feeling for buttons and zippers. She knew her panties were somewhere nearby but she couldn’t find them, and didn’t care if she ever did, or if anyone else ever did either. She briefly flirted with feelings of concern for Sean’s well-being, but they dissipated as she remembered that this whole stupid idea had been his from the beginning. And if he
was
playing some sort of trick on her, then he deserved whatever he got for getting her in trouble with her folks. All she wanted was to be dressed, to find the keys for Sean’s truck, and to be away from Devil’s Lake.

She remembered that she couldn’t drive the truck, but discarded that realization as quickly as it came to her. She could
try
to drive it, at least. She’d watched her father drive.
Insert the key in the ignition. Turn the key. Press the gas pedal. Reverse. Drive
. How difficult could it be? Or she could sit in the cab and blow the horn until someone heard her. She could lock the door,
both
the doors, and make so much noise with that horn that they’d hear her all the way back to Alvina and send someone to rescue her. She would blow the horn till
God
heard her.

But Brenda knew she was a long way from Alvina, and it was late at night now. No one was coming for her. No one knew where she was. She’d told her parents she was going for a drive with Sean to the town beach with a group of their friends to watch the moon rise. That’s where they would look for her, not here. Not wherever
here
was. She remembered her delight in her disorientation as they’d driven to Devil’s Lake, her triumphant pleasure at feeling lost, at the absurd notion of travelling without leaving her town.

Weeping, Brenda stumbled, feeling for branches. The branches would mean the edge of the path leading
up
, away from the shoreline, back to the truck, back to safety. Blindly, she flailed her arms, meeting nothing but the empty fog.

And then she distinctly heard a muffled splash behind her. She pivoted on her heel.

“Sean, is that you? Sean?”
It must be him! Who else could it be?
The relief that washed over her nearly brought her to her knees. Another splash came, louder this time. “Sean? Sean! Answer me! I can’t see!”

Brenda took a few halting steps towards the sound, then stopped. Her feet were wet. She had been nearer the edge of the shore than she’d realized. Cold water engulfed her toes across the tops of her sandals. She squinted across the water, willing herself with every fibre of her being to be able to see. The ciliary muscles of her eyes tightened and strained, and her temples throbbed with the effort of focussing.

And then, as if the omnipresent fog had abruptly thinned or parted in the gloom, Brenda
could
see. Not clearly, but at least she could see outlines: the bulk of Blackmore Island, darker than the water surrounding it, the edges looking like smaller pine scrub islands of smooth, rounded granite layering in the lake, grey on grey on black.

A sudden subtle shift of shadows on the surface of the lake drew her eye to a place maybe fifteen yards offshore where a figure stood pale and unmoving in the murky starlight. Brenda drew a sharp intake of breath, covering her mouth with her hands to keep from screaming. As she watched, the figure moved deeper into the lake. This time there was no splash, just a susurrating displacement of water. Brenda saw that the figure was male, and nude. Of course it was Sean. Who else would it be? Before tonight, she might not have been able to recognize his body in the dark, but at that moment she still felt its ghost-imprint on her own and she knew it was him.

Again, the impression of
cancellation
came to her. While she could see Sean through the fog, in the water, she could not
feel
Sean. Whatever he was doing in the lake at night, he wasn’t swimming. Or if he was swimming, he didn’t know it. She could see the tips of his elbows rising whitely out of the surface.

The thought came to her, as clearly as if a voice had spoken in her brain:
Sean is drowning himself. He’s committing suicide in the lake, right in front of your eyes.

Another step deeper, the water now just at his shoulders. The fog began to thicken again, sweeping across the surface of Devil’s Lake from the direction of Blackmore Island, the island itself now hidden from sight.

Then she saw the woman strolling across the water.

Brenda blinked, and looked again at what must surely be a trick of the fog, or the residual starlight, or her own exhausted imagination.

Her first instinct was to call out to the woman to save Sean, to pull him out, to wake him up if he was sleepwalking. She was
right there!
But she knew the woman could not be right there, because what she was seeing could not possibly be real, because nobody ever walked on water except maybe Jesus Christ a long time ago, and there was no way in hell this was Jesus Christ. Not out here, not at night, not in this godforsaken place in full sight of Blackmore Island and the house behind the small forest of windswept white pine.

This is not happening
, she thought.
I’m not seeing this
.

“Sean!
Sean!
Stop!
” Brenda screamed his name over and over, waving her arms to catch his attention. “
Sean, no! Come back!
” She picked up a piece of driftwood at her feet and threw it as hard as she could into the lake in his direction, hoping to hit him with it, to shock him, to wake him up. When she looked again, Sean was alone in the lake. The driftwood landed uselessly in the water not far from where she stood. The sound of the splash was weak, absorbed by the fog.

Then Sean’s head disappeared beneath the water.

Brenda screamed again, taking five lurching steps into the water, kicking up waves as she ran. She would swim to him, to where he had disappeared. There was still time. She realized the folly of that as soon as the water reached her knees. It was cold. Terribly, terribly cold. Not August-cold, but cold like it became in late fall when you realized you’d taken one late-season swim too many and the ice of it shocked your heart and made you scream in a high, warbling voice that seemed to come from the top of your throat because everything below your throat was impaled by the chill coming up from the sediment of the lakebed.

She stumbled backward out of the water and fell, twisting her left knee painfully. White-hot bolts of pure agony shot up from her kneecap, pinning her to the ground as surely as if she’d been nailed to it.

The fog came alive around her in a whirling swarm. Something landed on her face. Then another something. Then another, until her entire face was covered with what felt like tiny scabrous feathers crawling across her nose and eyes. Frantically, Brenda scrubbed her face with her hands. They came away covered with moths, some crushed and broken by the movement of her fingers, others still fluttering, crawling with dreadful insectile determination across her wrists and up her arms. They came in relentless numbers till it was impossible for Brenda to tell the moths from the fog, or where one grey miasma ended and the other began. They swarmed across her mouth, crawling inside. The dry, dusty body of one of the moths caught in her throat. She gagged, coughing and spitting, with her fingers in her mouth, scraping the moths from inside her cheeks and along her gums, the roof of her mouth. Her world was reduced to the chirruping sound of what seemed like the thunder of a million insect wings. She swatted them away with her hands. Her only thought was to get the moths off her body. Then it came to her—she would drown them in the lake. She would swim out to where she’d seen Sean, where the water was deep enough, and she would drown the disgusting things. They couldn’t swim, but she could.

A good plan
, she thought, crawling laboriously across the ground towards the water’s edge, feeling lightheaded and weak and teetering on the edge of a different sort of blackness. The edge of her palm struck the water and sank into the sedimentary mud, grainy with ground rock and sand that oozed between her splayed fingers. Pulling her weight with her arms alone, dragging her injured knee behind her, she launched herself into the lake. She fell face-forward. Lake water and sand surged into her nostrils and her mouth, but she still felt the moths wriggling on her wet skin.

When Brenda reached deep enough water, she flopped forward into it weakly, scrubbing herself with her hands beneath the surface. Then she coughed. And coughed again.

That thing is still in my throat
, she thought.
Oh sweet Jesus
.

She coughed again and again, trying to dislodge the carapace of the moth that had lodged in her windpipe, or at least swallow it down. Her throat filled with water on the intake. She rose to the surface, and then slipped below again, taking in water through her nose and mouth. Frantically, she clawed her way up, treading water to stay afloat, coughing and inhaling more water involuntarily as she rose, retching. Her larynx constricted, sealing the oxygen channels to her lungs as water entered her airways, driving out consciousness, and Brenda began to drown.

Suddenly, the scent of camphor and dried violets was everywhere. The fragrance reminded her of the sachets in the drawers of her grandmother’s mahogany vanity dressing table, in her bedroom at the top of the old house in Stayner. It was the extract of dim hallways with shuttered windows and high ceilings; of dresses of silk and long woolen coats; of sun-warmed wood panelling, candlewax, unwound clocks, years spent indoors—in essence, the attar of time itself sleeping.

Brenda had a sudden, vivid impression of her grandmother’s fine and white hands, smooth as bone, gently brushing Brenda’s hair out of her eyes as she tucked her in under the duvet and reached over to turn out Brenda’s bedside lamp.

The thought was a comforting one, and it even distracted Brenda from the realization that she was dying. It made her smile, even as she felt her grandmother’s hands grasp her ankles and pull her beneath the surface of Devil’s Lake, her body spiralling downward, her lungs taking in one final deep breath of lake water, driving the last bit of life out of her in a fine spray of bubbles that floated to the surface, then disappeared.

Two days later, accidentally succeeding where volunteer trackers from Alvina and the RCMP had failed, an out-of-town day boater from Toronto named Denis Armellini found the bodies of the missing teenagers everyone had been searching for.

Armellini was coming around the leeward side of Blackmore Island in a Pacific Mariner Stiletto borrowed from the owner of the cottage he was renting. He caught sight of a bright red bag on a deserted stretch of rocky beach. He cut the motor. Through binoculars, he spied a pile of clothing near an overturned rowboat, and the remnants of a campfire. Barely keeping his excitement under control, he made a note of the approximate location, then pointed the Stiletto’s bow in the direction of Alvina.

Before he could start the outboard again, Armellini heard the rap of knuckles against the hull of his boat—a sound not unlike a request for entry. He was startled enough to drop his binoculars into the water, cursing his clumsiness and skittishness. He lurched over the side of the boat, scrabbling madly to retrieve them before they sank, and found his fingers entwined with those of Brenda Egan.

At first, Armellini hadn’t been sure what he’d touched—poached driftwood perhaps, or a tree branch bleached white by the sun. When he realized it was the waterlogged and puffy hand of a teenage girl he held, the sound of his screams ricocheted across the water, cracking against the smooth rocks and boulders of Blackmore Island like rifle shots. Sufficient gas from bacterial decomposition had built up inside the girl’s bloated body to make it buoyant. She floated face down in the water, half-submerged, as though she were the searcher in a game of Fish Out of Water.

Armellini wrenched his hand away and rubbed it frantically against his jeans, but not before noticing that bits of the girl’s hand had been torn away, as if by needle-sharp teeth that had been small, vicious, and unrelenting.

Fucking northern pike will eat anything,
Armellini thought, then vomited.

The girl appeared to be wrapped in a white gossamer veil but Armellini realized he was looking at the sodden husks of what seemed to be thousands of drowned moths, legs and wings intertwined, clinging one to the other and to the girl’s body like a shroud, woven into her hair like interlaced garlands of white graveyard flowers.

Legends begin in small northern towns on the edge of places other people only drive through on their way to somewhere else, in station wagons and vans full of summer gear: Muskoka chairs in bright summer colours, coolers full of beer, canvas bags bursting with swimsuits and shorts and t-shirts, and dogs who slumber on blankets in the back seat and are bored by the entire process of long car trips.

Towns pass by that are the sum of their parts, and their parts are bridges, barns, fields, and roadside stands where home-baked pies or fresh ice cream are sold in the summer, and pumpkins, sweet corn, and Indian corn in the autumn. These towns are for gas stations that are distance markers for exhausted parents, where the kids can have one final bathroom break before the last stretch of highway leading to driveways that in turn lead to front doors and lake views.

But of the lives of the citizens of these towns—the men and women who live and die in them, who carry to the grave entire universes of their history and lore, and the happenings of the century—these urban and suburban transients know nothing, and care even less.