“There is no record of what those men did that night,” my uncle continued briskly. “That’s the only merciful part of this story. After they’d done what they’d done, they left.”
Billy said, “They didn’t burn the house?”
“They left it intact except for the two people inside. The men disappeared back into the darkness. None of them were ever found or brought to justice.”
My uncle’s flat, unfeeling tone only made this fact more terrifying: that there could be men like that out there, circling the burning fires of civilization, waiting for us to step away from the light.
“The man and woman were still alive. Why they’d been left that way was and is another mystery. But the woman was badly hurt. Bleeding and…and other things. The man waited as long as he could—he wanted to make sure the men were gone—before carrying his wife to the car. The battery wires had been cut, but the man knew how to fix them. Still, it took time. He stood in the cold, his numb and blood-oiled hands frantically braiding the wires while his wife lay in the car, getting colder and colder.”
Lex made a small movement, and I wondered if he would protest that the story was too much for me and Billy. But he only braced his palms on his knees, as if to stem some deep internal pain.
“He got the car started,” my uncle went on, “and down the little laneway right there, I guess”—he pointed vaguely—“and out to the road, which would have been narrower back then, unlit by street lamps. He drove as fast as he could. Faster than was safe. He got into town, and to the hospital, but it was too late.”
“She died?”
“It was too much, Jake.” Uncle C looked up, the starlight filling his eyes. “What they’d done to her was…well. And it took too long to get her to the doctors. So yes, she…died.”
“But the house?” Billy said questioningly.
“After the funeral, the man moved back in,” Uncle C told him. “His friends and family said it was a bad idea, like drinking from a poisoned well. But he could still see his wife’s shape in everything in that house. It must have given him strange comfort. He had the rooms cleaned out and tried to get on with his life. But sleep came with difficulty. He kept being jarred awake by an awful sound—it went tap, tap, tap, tap, tap.”
Uncle C tapped notes in the air with his finger.
“The sound of a knife tapping the window, signalling the other men to come in. The taps echoed throughout the house, and inside the man’s head. He’d get up and go down to the kitchen window, and in the sink he would find three drops of blood. No more, no less. Still wet. He’d wipe them away but the next night—again the tapping, again the blood.”
“His own wife was haunting him?”
“No, Jake,” my uncle said. “His wife—or the psychic remainders of her—was trapped. Houses hold on to things. Grip fast the violence and terror, sponge them up until the wood and concrete is saturated with it. The house was her prison, you see? And so…so…”
“The man burnt it down,” Lex said softly.
My uncle gave a curt nod, as if thankful to Lex for finishing the thought he’d been struggling with. “One night he couldn’t bear it any longer. He lit the curtains, the mattress, lit all the boxes he’d never bothered to unpack that held the remnants of their old life together. It was the only way to release the woman he loved. The wind blows strong up here—you feel it? He watched it go up. His wife, his dream of the life they were meant to live together. Gone. When the roof caved in, he got into his car and drove away. Nobody ever saw him again.”
My uncle stood and walked the beam into the torched kitchen. He outlined a square in the air with his fingers. “This was where the window used to be. Looking out over the water. The most calming, restorative view, don’t you think?”
“Go on, boys,” Lex said, watching my uncle. “Take a walk for a few minutes, will you?”
The long grass raked my legs as Billy and I picked our way down to the reservoir. The sky was pricked with stars. The grass gave way to a sandy shelf fringing the water. The wind was cool now, laced with the taste of autumn.
“Your uncle is a sad man, Jake.”
I didn’t know what to say. Uncle C had never seemed sad before that summer—if anything, he had seemed unusually delighted by the mysteries of our world.
“Everyone gets sad sometimes,” I said.
“Do you get sad?” asked Billy.
Sadness was always looming in me at that age, and I expected Billy would bring it out before long, once the school year started and he abandoned me.
“I guess so. Do you get sad?” I asked.
Billy picked a dandelion and blew on it, scattering fluff. “I miss Slave Lake…the good parts. Miss my setsuné. But I like it here. I never had a white friend before.”
“I’ve never had an Indian friend.”
“Métis. Dene, on my mom’s side.”
“Oh,” I said. “I’m Irish. Like, one-quarter, I think.”
After a while we tromped back up the hill. As we drew nearer, Lex and my uncle came into sight. They were both sunk down on their knees. My steps faltered until Billy collided with my shoulder.
My uncle Calvin was weeping. Starlight silvered the tears on his cheeks. Lex’s arms were wrapped around him, as if, should he let go, my uncle might shudder to bits.
“My fault,” Lex was saying to my uncle. “I never should have allowed us to…”
A dark stone pressed somewhere beneath my lungs, making it hard to breathe.
Uncle C’s shoulders heaved, arms jerking at nothing. Lex smoothed down his hair with one hand, then turned to see us standing there.
“Go to my van and get the blanket and pillow,” he said.
I remember the blanket was extra-thick, made of horsehair. Lex draped it around my uncle’s shoulders and tucked it under his legs.
“Are you okay?” I asked Uncle C.
When my uncle didn’t respond, Lex said, “He’ll be okay. It’ll all be forgotten by the morning. He’ll reset.”
I remember thinking that the word “reset” was strange. It was the word my father used when a blackout swept through the neighbourhood and all the clocks in our house stopped. Lex went to the van and returned with a jug of water and a sandwich wrapped in waxed paper. He placed them next to my uncle.
“Get your bikes,” he told me and Billy.
“But—”
“No buts. Your uncle’s gonna be fine. I promise. I’ll come right back after I drop you off at home. For now, just let him…Let’s go.”
We put our bikes in Lex’s van. Its headlights washed over the house, pinning Uncle C in their glare. He stared back hollowly, his pupils so dilated that his eyes appeared jet-black.
Lex drove Billy and me into town. I felt stunned, unsure what had transpired—even though I could sense the outline of the evening’s horribleness. It was like seeing things squirming under a silk sheet and knowing instinctively that if you were to pull it back you’d see thousands of centipedes crawling over each other.
Lex pulled up at Billy’s house. We said our wordless goodbyes.
“Do me a favour, will you?” Lex said as he drove me home. “Don’t tell your folks about tonight. It would just make them upset. Your mother especially.”
What could I say to my folks anyway? “Okay, Mr. Galbraith. I won’t tell.”
“Good lad.”
Lex patted my shoulder. I left him chewing his lip and staring through the windshield with a look on his face I couldn’t read.
I know that look now, having seen it often enough in the mirror. It’s the look of someone who feels helpless, unable to care for someone close to them.
6.
BLACK AGNES
My tenth surgery, my third unassisted, addressed a tumour in the brain of a thirteen-year-old boy. Though benign, his tumour was enrobed by blood vessels, one of which burst during the operation when my sucker wand pushed a micron too far into its venous wall. I tried clipping the torn vessel, and I even cut the flow of blood
to the patient’s brain to apply a microdermal stent. When it failed to hold, I cauterized the tissues—a messy last-ditch effort—while my anesthetist injected coagulant in hopes of stopping the flow of blood from the boy’s skull.
The boy was jarringly handsome, with ebony hair: Dove Yellowbird’s hair, I recall thinking with dry horror. He bled to death on the table. I forced myself to stitch his scalp afterwards, a task usually given to a resident after a successful operation. I was beset by a soul-sickening serenity. I imagine it must be similar to the cold-eyed calm a drunk driver feels upon realizing that the thump against the side of his car was, in fact, someone’s body.
I left my car in the parking lot, took a taxi home and slipped into bed beside my wife.
“How did it go?” she asked from her cocoon of sleep. She knew the operation had been nagging at me the past few days, as they all did back then.
“Fine,” I lied, not wishing to disclose my massive failure to her.
Her lips found mine in the dark. “Love you, handsome.”
No sooner had I closed my eyes than the screams began. They came from our two-year-old son. By then I’d learned to differentiate his screams: the scream of pain, the grouchy screech.
This one was different. It was a scream of primal fear.
My wife and I raced blindly down the hall to find him standing on his bed, arms thrashing as though he was covered in stinging ants. For an instant, my panicked impression was that he was covered in ants or cockroaches or earwigs that had crawled up through the vents. I flicked on the light and saw his face—his flesh a scalded red, eyes full of confused terror.
My wife gathered him into her arms and calmed him. As I had the following day off, we agreed I’d sleep with him. I carried him into the spare bedroom. “Just a bad dream, sport,” I said. He was too young to articulate his nightmare, but isn’t that often difficult even for adults? He tucked himself against my stomach. I draped an arm around him as his breathing settled into limp sniffles. As he drifted off, safe and warm, I thought, I won’t always be able to protect you from the things that can really hurt you, buddy.
I knew there would be nothing I could do to protect him from cancers, cars driven by drunks, men in vans lurking down dark alleys—or, worse and more likely, the very human failures of the sort I’d fallen prey to that evening. No, I couldn’t save my son from the as-yet-unknown elements of his own genome or disposition that could lead him down dangerous roads. I wouldn’t always be there to steer him down the safer path—and anyway, there would come a time when he might not accept my guidance.
i.
The summer would end with my dad and me slumped together on a docking bench at the Niagara Regional Police station—my father with an eye swollen shut, me sporting a mottled bruise on my neck and a split lip.
The trouble started innocuously enough the Thursday after our last Ghost Club. Billy had showed up at my place. He was off to Woolco to buy school supplies for the upcoming year. We rode to the store together and walked its picked-over aisles. Billy bought all no-name or economy brands: a plain blue binder instead of a Trapper Keeper, Hillsbro coloured pencils instead of Crayola. He bought last year’s pencil case, with a picture of Sloth from The Goonies—Hey, you guuuys!—and loaded everything into an olive canvas backpack.
On the way home, we sat on the curb so Billy could sharpen his pencils. He did so meticulously. The shavings accumulated between his legs, Billy blowing on each pencil-tip before slotting it back into the case. The process gave him immense satisfaction.
Phiff!
The sound came from behind us. I craned my head to spot a slender metal tube jutting from an upstairs window in the house at our backs.
Three facts collided in my head:
Fact 1: Percy Elkins lived in that house. How had I not recognized that?
Fact 2: Percy Elkins was the sort of boy who’d own a BB gun.
Fact 3: Percy Elkins did own a BB gun, and he’d just shot at us with it from his bedroom window.
Grabbing Billy, I ducked behind an oak bordering the sidewalk. I was still processing the fact that anyone, even a soul as vile as Percy Elkins, could be shooting at us in broad daylight.
“What?” Billy said when I finally spat out what was happening. “Wait, who?”
“Percy Elkins. He’s the worst.”
Billy’s jaw set in the same hard line I’d seen back at the scrapyard—then he blinked, and the hardness smoothed out.
“Let’s just go, Jake.”
Phiff!
A BB ricocheted off the tree. Trollish laughter drifted from the window.
“Okay, but we better run super-quick.”
We came out from behind the tree with our backs hunched so as to present as small a target as possible. I’d picked up my bike and was hopping on when—
Phiff!
The BB hit me in the throat. My flesh went cold before the pain receptors blinked on. My hands flew to my neck. I was sure the BB had gone right through—and soon blood would start to fountain out of my throat, turning me into a gruesome human sprinkler.
Billy pried my hands away from the wound. “No blood—wait, sorry. A little.”
Staring at my blood on Billy’s hands suffused me with an anger more intense than I’d ever known. Mindless and hungering, that breed of blinding rage that makes people murder one another. Taking two steps onto the grass, I grabbed a loose brick from the edge of the Elkinses’ cobbled driveway and hurled it. It sailed end-over-end and hit the bay window of casa de Elkins.
The glass imploded with a weird inhalation, as if the window frame had taken a deep breath. This was followed by a musical tinkling as broken shards fell onto the floorboards. The wind picked up, blowing the curtains back into the Elkinses’ living room, catching on points of glass glittering in the frame.
“Holy shit,” said Billy.
The front door opened. Percy stood in the doorway with his pellet gun. Terry Vreeland loomed behind him.
“You’re going to pay for that,” said Percy.
At first, I thought he was threatening to beat me up. Then the truth dawned: he wanted me to pay for a new window.
“I’m not,” I surprised myself by saying. “You shot me.”
A sneer from Percy. “Where’s your proof?”
I tilted my neck towards him, showing off the bloody redness.
“Could’ve been a bee, you big fat shit.”
Billy steadied my head in his hands. When I flinched, he told me, “It’s okay, steady.”
Gingerly, he dug the BB out of my neck and squeezed it between his thumb and forefinger. He turned to Percy, displaying it. Percy put the gun down and stepped from his house.
“Gimme it.”
He held his hand out for the BB.
“Why would I?” said Billy.
“It’s my property.”
Even as kids, we understood that once an object had been lodged in someone else’s skin, its ownership transferred to the afflicted party. Billy put the bloody pellet in his pocket.
“Give that here, stupid,” Percy said. When Billy refused, Percy appealed to me. “Tell him to give it over, fat ass.”
“Don’t give it to him, Billy.” My voice was remarkably calm but I felt as though my skin was about to burst into flames.
“Go get it, Terr,” Percy said.
Terry took a tentative step towards Billy…but something in Billy’s demeanour, the way his head was cocked as if to say, Come on if you’re coming, stopped the bigger boy.
“Dunno, Perse,” Terry said. “You did kinda put it in Jake’s neck.”
“You were on my property,” Percy sniffed at me, turning lawyerly. “I was protecting my…my land.”
What was he, a farmer? I said, “You can’t shoot us for that.”
“Can too. I can do anything I want on my property.”
As absurd as such an argument would sound to an adult, as kids, faced with Percy’s slick legalese, we were almost hoodwinked.
“The oa
k tree isn’t your property,” I said, uncertain now.
Percy walked to the edge of the curb and raked his heel across the dirt, the way you did in the schoolyard to etch the base paths for stickball. “Everything inside this is my property. I can do whatever I want.”
Billy said, “We were just sitting here sharpening pencils.”
Percy shrugged as if that made no difference. “You looked suspicious. I was protecting my belongings. Now you have to pay for my window.”
He drew himself up to his full, if underwhelming, height. He even hooked his thumbs under his armpits, as I’m sure he’d seen crafty lawyers do in TV shows.
“If you don’t fix my window, I’ll call the cops and they’ll take you away to juvie.”
I hated how Percy appended my to everything: my property, my window. Meanwhile, I stood with my blood dripping down my neck while Percy preened, now standing with his arms smugly crossed.
“You’re lying,” I said, emboldened by another jolt of rage. “You shot me in the neck. You’re lucky it wasn’t my eye. I busted your window. Even Steven. Let’s go, Billy.”
Percy’s face soured. He stepped off the curb and slugged me in the face.
His fist made a flat smack on my nose. I staggered back on my heels but didn’t fall down. I straightened, blinking the water out of my eyes, and saw Billy getting ready to jump in. He could have flattened both Terry and Percy, though I didn’t know it back then. But this wasn’t Billy’s fight. All the fear and rage—the lingering sting of the BB, every casual torment I’d suffered at Percy’s hands—came together in my arms and shoulders, a thousand strings tightening towards a point of intent.
Percy stood there with his hands down, unaware. I put my not-insubstantial weight on my forward leg, torqued my hips and slung my fist around—
I hit him in the nose. And it exploded. That’s the only word for it. Percy’s nose had a sharp point, so when my fist struck the bridge, the cartilage…blew up.
Yes, Percy’s nose shattered like his window had, but with a buckling sound like the dent popping out of a garbage can lid. He toppled back on his lawn, hands flying up to his face. When he saw the blood on them, he shrieked like a seagull and fled inside.
The Saturday Night Ghost Club Page 13
