PRAISE FOR THE WRITING OF MICHAEL ROWE
Wild Fell
Finalist for the Shirley Jackson Award
“The mysteries of love and time haunt the beautifully wrought pages of Michael’s Rowe’s superb ghost story.... Wild Fell is supernatural fiction of the highest order.” —Clive Barker
“An atmospheric ghost story that grips from the first page.” —Tim Lebbon
Enter, Night
“Skillfully brings to mind the classic works of Stephen King and Robert McCammon. But the novel’s breathtaking, wholly unexpected and surprisingly moving conclusion heralds the arrival of a major new talent.” —Christopher Rice, author of Burning Girl
“With Enter, Night, Michael Rowe does the near impossible and rescues the modern vampire novel from its current state of mediocrity with his dead-on portrayal of the gothic small town, rich characters, and deeply frightening story.” —Susie Moloney, bestselling author of The Dwelling
October
“Michael Rowe’s talent shines through in this terrifying story of social persecution [and] black magic.” —Lee Thomas, Lambda Literary and Bram Stoker Award–winning author
“Michael Rowe is one of those writers who can swing from the eloquent prose of a Peter Straub to the brutality of a Richard Laymon. His novels Enter, Night, and Wild Fell were excellent examples of pushing the envelope while holding onto what makes the genre so good. October is the best of Rowe’s writing yet.” —MonsterLibrarian.com
“The kind of horror novel a lot of adults needed when they were kids. Michael Rowe understands that while it gets better for some people, not everyone can afford to sit back and wait if they want to survive. A powerful and powerfully frightening tale about making hard choices in the name of survival, and what those choices cost.” —Bracken MacLeod, author of 13 Views of the Suicide Woods
Wild Fell
A Ghost Story
Michael Rowe
For Victor Kleinschmit, the keeper of my ghosts.
And in loving memory of Mark Richard Braun.
Home is the sailor, home from the sea,
And the hunter home from the hill.
—Robert Louis Stevenson, “Requiem”
“The following events occurred on a small island of isolated position in a large Canadian lake, to whose cool waters the inhabitants of Montreal and Toronto flee for rest and recreation in the hot months. It is only to be regretted that events of such peculiar interest to the genuine student of the psychical should be entirely uncorroborated. Such unfortunately, however, is the case.”
—Algernon Blackwood, “A Haunted Island”
“A house is never still in darkness to those who listen intently; there is a whispering in distant chambers, an unearthly hand presses the snib of the window, the latch rises. Ghosts were created when the first man woke in the night.”
—J. M. Barrie, The Little Minister
“Of all ghosts the ghosts of old loves are the worst.”
—Arthur Conan Doyle, The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes: Volume 3
Contents
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Author’s Note
About the Author
Prologue
NIGHTSWIMMING, 1960
“Have you ever seen a ghost?”
Sean “Moose” Schwartz glanced into the rear-view mirror at the dark road behind them, lit only by the red gleam of his taillights and the occasional burst of moonlight when the trees on either side of the road thinned out, then across the passenger seat at Brenda. He half-smiled. “Well, have you? Have you ever seen one?”
Brenda said, “There’s no such thing as ghosts.” She hesitated. “Have you?”
“Have I what?”
“Have you ever seen a ghost?”
“I thought you said there was no such thing?”
“There isn’t,” Brenda said. “There’s no such thing.”
In the road, wisps of late-summer mist spiralled in the yellow headlights and the fecund curve of the full orange moon had slipped out from beneath a quilt of dark blue clouds, clearly visible in the upper left-hand corner of the windshield, shining through the white pine. Brenda had seen the moon when he picked her up at her parents’ house and remarked that it was pretty. Not as pretty as you are, he’d said as he opened the Chevy’s passenger side door for her the way her father always did for her mother. She was wearing tan pedal pushers and a rose-print mandarin collar blouse. The blouse was her favourite because it brought out her tan and colour to her cheeks, and made her blue eyes look bluer. She felt pretty tonight. Brenda had blushed at Sean’s words. She climbed into the truck, but said nothing.
As they drove, Sean and Brenda made small talk about the summer that was coming to an end, about their friends, about how Brenda’s parents weren’t crazy about letting her drive around Alvina in Sean’s truck because, they said, it was “dangerous,” and he was a seventeen-year-old boy and older than she was. The way they said it, he might as well have been a forty-year-old pervert instead of a boy just a year older than she was, an Alvina boy at that.
Sean had asked her out in June, the first week of the summer vacation. This had surprised Brenda, but it also gave her some hope that she wasn’t the brown-haired, blue-eyed, plain, unremarkable girl she’d always secretly believed herself to be, the one she’d seen every morning in the mirror over the dresser in her bedroom.
In truth, Brenda Egan was neither pretty nor plain. She hovered in that sphere between those two determinative aesthetic polarities that defined so much of adolescent social life. Her features were regular and even, and when she smiled, people tended to smile back. She had friends, but was not part of any large group. She got good grades, but had no illusions about her curiosity or her intellect. She thought of herself as average, and while she might have wished she were prettier-than-average, or smarter-than-average, she wasn’t the sort of girl who lost much sleep over it. When she started noticing boys, however, she was surprised to find herself disappointed that they didn’t notice her back right away.
That is until this summer, when Sean Schwartz asked her if she wanted to go swimming with him. She had known of him all her life, in the way of small towns that form their own particular circles within concentric circles, though she didn’t know him well. He was a grade ahead of her at Alvina Collegiate. She knew he played hockey all winter with the Alvina Eagles. He was no star, but she’d heard him described as dependable. His primary athletic fame derived from wrestling. He’d been on the junior varsity or varsity team every year since he started high school. From late spring till early October, he worked at his family’s marina, pumping gas for the summer people’s powerboats, and working on dock repairs with his uncle Vic.
When Brenda first told her mother about Sean Schwartz, Edith Egan had pursed her lips and said, “Schwartz? What kind of a name is that? Is he a Jewish boy?”
Brenda said she didn’t know. Edith pursed her lips again and frowned.
Brenda heard her mother make a phone call late that night. She heard her mother mention Sean’s name. The conversation wasn’t a long one. Whatever Edith Egan found out must have satisfied her, because she never asked if Sean was Jewish again and she seemed to have no particular objection to Sean asking Brenda out, so all was well that ended well.
Alvina, Ontario was the year-round home to some 3,205 souls, a population that nearly doubled in the shimmering blue and green days between the end of
May and the end of August, when summer people from the cities drove north to lake country and temporarily took up residence in their cottages and summer houses on the rocky beaches and promontories around Devil’s Lake, which was not actually a lake at all, but rather a lake-sized basin of Georgian Bay, itself part of Lake Huron.
Alvina people tended to keep to each other’s company, except when they had to move beyond it. It wasn’t a question of hostility, mutual or otherwise. It was just the way things were done, the way they had always been done during the more than a century that Devil’s Lake had been a destination for the rich from Toronto and Montreal—or even farther, as far away as the United States. The people of Alvina had provided the labour for the building and the service in the various businesses that catered to the summer people. It was a relationship that suited both sides admirably and had never been questioned.
Every once in a blue moon, some ill-fated teenage romance embarrassed the families on both sides of the equation, but these instances were rare, and even more rarely discussed when the dust settled afterwards. It was common knowledge, for instance, that sometime in the ’40s, some snobby girl from Toronto had a summer fling with one of the local Alvina men and had gotten herself knocked up. That had been the Toronto family’s last summer on Devil’s Lake. By the next summer, the cottage had been sold to new owners, and the young man in question had bought an expensive new truck, even though he never had two pennies to rub together and hadn’t worked in months. Eyebrows were raised, but no one talked about it, except to say what Brenda had heard her own mother say at the beginning of every summer season since Brenda was thirteen—when Alvina people mixed with summer people, nothing good ever came of it.
Sean was a classic Alvina boy, one who had moved through his seventeen years as unobtrusively as Brenda had moved though her own sixteen. In Brenda’s eyes this made him more desirable than any movie star because it validated her own place in the natural order of things as a classic Alvina girl.
During the hot weeks of the summer, they’d gone swimming in Devil’s Lake after Sean’s shifts at the marina were finished. They’d gone to the movies in Collingwood, taking the long route home through the fragrant summer dark. When Sean had kissed her that first time, she marvelled at how soft a boy’s lips could be, because she’d always imagined they would feel rough and hard and foreign. Brenda had returned his kisses, clumsily at first, but then with an ardour that surprised her as much as her discovery of the softness of Sean’s lips. She explored the bulk of his body, the planes of his chest and back muscles beneath the t-shirt, inhaling the scent of cotton and warm skin that smelled like soap and light, clean sweat.
The night he had reached up under her shirt and touched her breasts, she had told him she wasn’t ready. He had acquiesced with a grace that relieved her, and it occurred to her for the first time that perhaps being in love meant feeling safe. Sean never tried again, though even with all her inexperience, Brenda could tell he wanted to, and this sure knowledge thrilled her.
Beneath the wheels of the Chevy, the crackle of gravel and country dirt sounded almost like footsteps in the dark. Sean had skirted Alvina’s outer limits and turned onto one of the many dirt roads that led to the shore of Devil’s Lake. But he’d kept driving. After a while, Brenda lost track of the number of roads onto which they’d turned and admitted to herself that if she’d had to find her way home by herself, she likely wouldn’t be able to do so. But she was with Sean, so who cared? Still, it was odd.
I’m lost in my own town, she thought. How weird.
Then, out of nowhere, Sean had asked that bizarre question about whether or not she believed in ghosts.
Sean said, “Well then, if there’s no such thing as ghosts, let’s get my uncle’s boat and row out to Blackmore Island. Let’s spend the night there. Let’s go to the house.”
“Yeah, right. My parents would kill me if I spent the night anywhere with you. And if my dad found out that you’d even suggested it, this town would have a new ghost story—yours.”
“Chicken,” he mocked softly. “Bawk-bawk-bawk.”
“You’re such a jerk.” She frowned. “I thought this was a date. I thought we were going down to the lake to watch the moon? Why are you talking about rowing out to that place? If there is any such house on any such island, it’s almost a mile offshore. If this is what you were planning, you should probably take me home.”
“It’s not a mile offshore from every point in the county. You just need to look for the right spot.” He paused. “Have you ever been out there?”
“No,” she admitted. “Besides, I don’t believe there’s any such house. It’s probably just a wreck of an old cottage. It’s just a story grownups—adults—” she corrected herself, “tell little kids to scare them. And I’m not a little kid, Sean.”
“Bren, do you really not believe in ghosts? Or do you just not believe in them during the day? Do you believe in them at night?”
Brenda ignored the question. “My mom isn’t going to let me keep going out with you like this once school starts, you know.” She was trying to sound bored and was almost succeeding. “Are you sure you want to waste our last Saturday night of the summer this way, acting like an idiot? Or do you want to go down to the beach and watch the moon with me?”
She laid her hand on Sean’s leg and caressed it, feeling the thick muscles tense beneath the soft cotton of his chinos. His thighs shifted, spread slightly apart. He leaned back in his seat, gripping the steering wheel tightly. She flexed her grip almost imperceptibly, using her nails this time, running them lightly along the inside of his thigh. Now it was Brenda’s turn to smile. She knew what she would find if she slid her hand higher up his leg, to the place where the fly of his khakis was now straining against the cotton fabric. She’d heard all about it from other girls. She was grateful for the darkness inside the pickup’s cab. This power was new and unfamiliar to Brenda. She was still testing its boundaries, but didn’t move her hand any higher.
She was likewise conscious of rising warmth in her own body. That warmth was no longer unfamiliar, though still new, still uncharted.
But at this moment, she was more than prepared to use that power or any other to make Sean forget about his stupid idea to row out to some old ruined house on Blackmore Island at night, a house she’d heard about her whole life but had never actually seen.
They drove in silence through the dark for a while under the full orange moon.
Finally Brenda spoke. “There’s no such thing as ghosts.”
“Are you telling yourself, or are you telling me?”
“There isn’t. Aren’t,” she corrected herself. “There aren’t any such things as ghosts.”
“There are, too,” Sean said. “I’ve seen one.”
“Oh, pull the other one. You have not.”
“I have. I’m serious.”
“Okay,” she said. “When?”
“When I was about nine. I was riding home from Midland with my uncle Vic. It was October, not too long before Halloween—”
Brenda sighed. “Of course it was. Of course it was just before Halloween.”
“Do you want to hear this or not?”
“I’m listening.”
“So, I was falling asleep in the back seat, not asleep yet, but dozy, you know? I was nine. I was just this little kid. Uncle Vic had an out-of-town roofing job and my folks said I could go with him if I wanted to and if he didn’t mind. So he took me. The people he was doing the job for were nice. They let me watch TV inside while he worked, and the lady fed me dinner. When the sun went down, it got cold, and it got really, really foggy. I mean, this was fog like I’ve never seen before.”
“Where does the ghost come in?” Brenda said, bored. “Is there a point to this? Because in case you’re wondering, I’m not scared yet.”
Sean was silent. Then he said: “Never mind.”
“No, tell me. Really. I really w
ant to hear.”
“No, you don’t, Brenda. Forget it.”
“I’m sorry. Please tell me.”
He relented. “We were just past the Bartleby town line, close to Noack. Not far from home. It was about ten at night.” He paused again, a beat longer than Brenda expected. The cab of the pickup was suddenly very quiet. She heard Sean take a breath and found herself taking an involuntary one of her own.
“What happened?”
“A woman,” Sean said, exhaling. “A woman ran across the road, right in front of us. Right out of the fog. Uncle Vic shouted Holy shit! He slammed on the brakes. The car fishtailed right across the road through the fog, and swerved into a ditch.”
“Oh my God!” Brenda said, forgetting for a moment that she didn’t believe any part of Sean’s story. “Did you get hurt? Did you hit the woman?”
“When he was sure I was safe, Uncle Vic told me to stay in the car. He went out to the road to check on the woman. Neither of us had felt her hit the car, but there was no way we could have not hit her. We just didn’t feel a thump.”
“Did he find her body? Was she all right?”
“There was no body.” Sean’s voice sounded hollow. Brenda didn’t think he was putting it on for effect. “Uncle Vic didn’t find anything. The road was completely empty. There was no one there. Nothing. Just fog.”
“That’s impossible,” Brenda said. “You must have imagined it.”
“How could we both have imagined the exact same thing? We both saw her.”
This time it was Brenda’s turn to be silent. She waited for him to go on.
“But the thing was—and I’ll never forget this—I could have sworn I saw her face in the headlights through the windshield when the car swerved. The thing is, I couldn’t have seen it. There’s just no way. I was in the back seat. We couldn’t have been that close, or she would have come right through the glass. But I saw it clearly. It was an old lady. Her hair was all around her face, like it was blowing in the wind or something. But there was no wind. The fog was like a wall that night. She was wearing a blouse with some sort of lacy collar, like one of those you see in the old pictures at the United Church in town—high, buttoned up. But her face . . .”
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