“No shit. Suits us, doesn’t it?”
† † †
The Spookleton Our Lady of Grace Church, abandoned, was more cracked and cobwebbed than the set for a grade three Halloween play. And the set designers seemed to have fled, leaving all their tools scattered on the floor.
An asthmatic stained-glass window wheezed crimson over Lor’s head. “Al. What are all these books?”
“Don’t know, Buckshot, haven’t had a chance to look.”
Lor removed a dusty, dimpled tome and opened the cover. It was part of a series of books, all lined neatly in an ornate hardwood bookcase.
“What’s theodicy?”
“Special branch of theology, vindicating God’s ways to man. But mostly, a personal definition here, the special theology dealing with God’s silence.”
“Silence?”
“Hell yeah. His unwillingness to connect with us, his sons and daughters.”
Lor put the tome back on the shelf, eyeing an older and more tattered book at the case’s end. He peeled it out by the spine. A small pouch tumbled after and plopped on the floor.
Lor stared. He replaced the book. It fell sideways.
“Looks like somebody hid some small treasure in the bookcase.” Alistair leaned in, set the tattered book upright. It fell again. “Maybe some of Franklin’s old drugs, if we’re lucky, still magically preserved and—”
“I’m finished with that shit.”
Alistair righted the book again. It fell. “Well, open the pouch, dixie, see what we got.”
“I don’t care.” Lor picked up the pouch by the drawstrings and tossed it to Alistair, tried again to right the tattered book. Could not. “Al. Hand me something to prop up this old book, before it falls apart.”
“What’s the title, ’migo?”
Lor looked. “Something about some other Franklin Expedition, whatever that was.”
“Dude, another sign!” Alistair clapped his hands, pouch spinning around one finger. “That’s all ’bout the northward journey, dig? That’s the analogue, the precedent, the fuckin’ Ur-text. Here, prop th’ tome with this. We’ll finish the ritual.”
He handed Lor the tiny, empty, wooden box. Lor stared.
“Lor, dudette, the space ’migo, remember?”
“You want to part with that? I thought it was your symbolic—”
“It’s a perfect fit.”
Lor took the box, wedged it tight beside the old book.
Alistair grinned, nodded. Then he stilled the pouch still swinging on his finger, opened the strings. “Well, nothing in here, like, drug-wise. Just some kind of sparkle-ass blue powder.”
Lor’s hand fell from the bookcase. His heart knocked an extra beat. His toes tingled, his vision hollowed.
“Here.” Alistair closed the pouch and threw it back.
Lor caught it. His fingers twitched; his arm hairs rippled all the way to his shoulder. He shuddered and stared, then spilled a bit of powder into his palm. It was pure granulated colour, sea-blue salted with deep emerald, exactly like the spilled grains in the Underwood museum.
Alistair squinted. “Very Neptunian.”
“It’s nothing, nothing,” Lor blurted. “Just junk.” He sifted the dust. He tubed his hand and carefully poured it back in the bag, then slipped the bag into his shirt pocket. For no good reason, he felt like punching Alistair in the teeth, then sprinting into the night.
† † †
Somewhere, a phone rang.
“Why do people go to church?” Alistair said. “Church is all about the visuals and the music, dig? Hymns, holy attire, icons, stained glass: crimson tide, deacon blues, light and sound—”
Lor crouched in the corner, stewing, tapping his pocket. His nerves were suddenly zippered, teethed, and rusty. Something jangled.
“Jesus, Al. Isn’t that a phone?”
“Fucking-A.”
“In here? Like an old phone on the wall, with a dial?”
Alistair shrugged.
Lor felt like he could almost taste the light, stained-glass windows pressing sunshine, squeezing the visible spectrum until the essential oils of colour beaded on his tongue. “Al. You going to get that phone?”
“The hell for?”
“Maybe it’s Dawn Cherry.”
“Exactly.”
“Did you two ever. . . ?”
Alistair developed a twitch in his eye. He reached up to tug his eyebrow. “So, you kept that li’l bag of Franklin’s, didja, punchinello?”
“No. I threw it away.” Lor reached into his pocket to make sure the drawstring pouch was still there. He turned to face the wall, pulled out the pouch. A bit of glimmering dust smoked out.
The phone continued to ring. Alistair stomped out, found the payphone behind a rotting nativity set.
“Hello,” he said, after thirty rings. Muffled jabbering on the line’s other end.
“Ahhh.” He smiled. “If it isn’t our own lady of grace.”
† † †
Alistair couldn’t stop smiling after he hung up. “Dawn Cherry got us a gig, so’s we can tighten up ’n maybe even get that Rusty some basic chops before we leave you and march up into the White.”
“Gig?”
“Gig.”
“Where?” Lor felt his gut twist.
“‘Member the old Carpenters’ and Joiners’ Union Hall in Galt Gardens?”
“How could I forget?”
“We’re back.”
“When?”
Alistair grinned. “Christmas Eve.”
Lor frowned. “Cabaret?”
“Fucking-A.”
“Fucking-A indeed. Alberta Blues.”
Alistair frowned. “I sense a bit of sarcasm there on your part, buckster, a smitch of bitterness, makes me wonder: is there a problem here, ’sides your determination to get your old friends out of town?”
Lor grimaced.
Alistair shrugged. “All a sudden you seem kind of distant, monsignor, kind of cold, schizophrenogenic, mean, a complete one-eighty, dig? What you do, take an ugly pill?”
Lor hunched on a dusty, rolled-up carpet. He patted the pocketed pouch. “You know the problem.”
“Fuck, come on, crapehanger, that was ten years ago. It’s not even quite the same building any more.”
“He lost it, man. Right on stage.”
“Yeah, sure, he went batshit, so what?—nobody’s seen the fucker since. And, like, when did you get all superstitious?”
Lor jumped up, discharging a cloud of dust.
“I’m kidding, okay?” Alistair stepped backward. “Criminy, take an Ativan.”
Lor glared. “We’ll be up there. Again. With his kid brother. That doesn’t freak you out at all?”
“Sure, dude, but we need the practice. It’s not like history’s going to repeat itself.”
“Why Christmas?”
“Just pretend it’s the Pagan version.” Alistair smiled. “You probably won’t have to pretend.”
The phone rang again.
Lor jumped.
† † †
As soon as they rode the bus out of Spookleton and back into Lethbridge, Lor began to smell glass. Bus windows. The bus was full of plump kids in striped T-shirts, most of them white, slapping the wheels of their skateboards, swinging earbuds, munching ripple chips, burping obscenities.
“Do we have to go back into town?” he said, rubbing sore sinuses.
“Yeah, pookie, how do you propose we do a gig without instruments? You smash the fuck out of your guitars—don’t give me that look—’n god even knows whether anyone’s got any sort of gear, so’s, like—”
“This is going to end up a punk thing, isn’t it?”
“So?”
“I’ve given it up, man. And why are we going to the Kresge’s?”
Alistair laughed before Lor even finished the sentence.
“Well, ’migo, this is entertaining, ’cos Kresge’s is the only place in this town that sells instruments. Used to be a proper music store over on Wh
oop-Up Drive, but some overzealous CSIS agent closed it down, rumour tells—so now you not only can but basically have to chow a greasy breakfast, get your guitar, pick up some third-rate oscillating fan made in China in the sixties, and get your bag of year-old pink Lucky Elephant Popcorn all under the same fucking leaky-ass roof.” He grinned. “It’s called capitalism.”
The bus rattled. Lor’s head thrummed. One of the juicy kids stared, bobbing in headphones, shaking a mittful of coloured chalk. Over the kid’s head, a sign for Canadian Airlines: two flights north daily—Edmonton, Yellowknife, Norman Wells, Inuvik. . . .
Lor turned to stare out the window.
“Al.”
“Yeah?”
“Isn’t that Galt Gardens out there?”
“Yeah.”
“Where’s the Carpenters’ Union Hall?”
“Can’t see it, granger, ’cos it’s hidden somewhere in all that foliage. The place is treed up the hooey, ain’t it?”
The park was studded with cottonwoods and tacamahacs, still green and leafy, crackled with frost.
“What’s with the ice?” Lor said.
“Fuck’d, man. A cold fusion of winter and summer. ’Slike the place follows a different climatic logic, devised somewhere in its own leaf-curtained heart.”
Some of the branches were still flexed with icicles, dripping to misty roots and underbrush.
“Man, that place is creepy,” Lor said.
Al grinned and nodded, hat bobbing. “Lethbridge’s Mirkwood.”
Under the Canadian Airlines sign the kid nodded and rattled bits of chalk. But whether he was eavesdropping or keeping time with his own music would have been anybody’s guess.
Right now neither Lor nor Alistair was guessing, drawn as they were by the dark pulse of the trees, steaming chill just beyond the fragrant, rattling bus windows.
† † †
In Kresge’s, with the creaking floor and the permanent smell of—what was that, popcorn?—they saw the freak, the kind that zaps norms like a bug trap cracking flies. He had long greasy hair, beard rooted to oversized pores, a Toronto Blue Jays baseball hat decked with curly pink ribbons. Tight jeans with strands peeling over eggy hip bones, fly unzipped, cuffs dangling threads. He was being railed at by a white man in a bow tie.
The bow-tied man stopped, turned his gaze to the band, then beyond.
“Hey!” he said. “Thought I told you two shavetails to stay out of my store.”
Lor followed the man’s gaze down the aisle, where two punks rattled Smarties boxes. One had a crackle-red Mohawk, the other a sapphire porcupine and “Smash the State” T-shirt.
“A pox on you, Mr. Shemp,” said the Mohawk, with surprising articulation. He spilled his Smarties on the floor and stomped them, then knocked over a stand of Tupperware.
“That’s it.” Shemp, clearly the manager, waggled a finger at the freak, then strode away. “I’ll call the police. And you boys—” He squinted at Lor, over his shoulder. “Don’t touch any instruments.”
“Boys?” Lor said.
The porcupine gave Shemp the finger, then sauntered for the door with friend in tow. Lor gazed after them, suddenly sad. They were younger incarnations of himself, going nowhere, on a collision-course with thirty and breakdown. And for what? For a poverty of ideas: resist everything, believe nothing, smash, smash, smash. There was nothing rational about it. Who was the Man anyway? Shemp? Fuck. Shemp was a self-important twit with a vanilla wife, maybe a small chip on his shoulder. The Man was nothing. The Man was a ghost.
“Lor,” said Alistair. “Come on, dude, our friends have arrived. We got some shopping to do here.”
They browsed the guitars, which were, in Fatty’s words, supreme pieces of shit.
Alistair tapped his foot. “Well, like, what do you propose we do, Fat-ster? Make some instruments out of balsa wood and Silly String?”
“Why don’t we make ’em out of my nuts?” said Fatty.
“Too small, amigette.”
“Least I got one.”
Rusty, who hadn’t said a word so far, suddenly yelped. The freak had snuck up behind him and pinched his ass.
Close up the freak was a delicious sight—fluorescent blue scarf around each ankle, white stilleto heels, too high for comfort, too tight, pink skin bulging at the straps. In one hand, a twisty poplar branch, ragged at the end, probably chewed off, possibly by the freak himself. He moved in close to Lor, pointing with the stick, one eye closed tight.
“You have it,” he whispered. His breath was musty, not unpleasant. A bit like grandmother’s attic, hinting at cobwebs, weird old-world boardgames, bright marbles.
Lor crossed his fingers in his pockets. “Have what?”
“Do not give it to him.”
“Who?”
“Are ye all from the island?” the freak said, louder.
Alistair, suddenly grinning, stepped forward. “No, but we’re on our way to an island, Methuselah, name of—”
“The House of Fog,” the freak said, shaking the stick. “Where the demon dwells.” His eyes liquified. “Though his spirit wanders, I am told.”
Alistair laughed. “Are you crazy?”
“Ha! By your graces, if ’twer only true. Nay, I have my own reunion on the island. I am under the spell of the slotted spoon, and crave your misgivings.”
“Well, you got ’em,” Alistair said. “Are you sure you’re not mad, grandfather?”
The freak opened his eye. It was creamy blue, without a pupil. “The soul of the world is itself mad. The question, then, is superfluous.”
Alistair chuckled. “You are a delight, old man.”
The freak turned to fix his gaze on Lor. He pointed the stick at Alistair. “This one loves chaos.” He pointed the stick at Fatty. “This one searches for a song.”
He pointed the stick at Lor. “And you. . . .”
“Well,” Alistair interrupted. “I’m sure you have some kind of fuck’d-up wisdom there, dude, but we’re going to the House of Fog, hell or high water.”
“Do not expect me to endorse your mystagogic apperceptions.”
“Wouldn’t dream of it, greybeard.”
They moved off to check other gear. Lor stayed behind, momentarily rooted to the floorboards. The freak leaned in close, jiggling the poplar wand.
“You have the scent of blue dust upon you.” His breath was alarmingly cold. “He wants it dearly, every single grain. You must flee him.”
Lor tried not to laugh. “The demon?”
“Nay, fool, the accursed one. The chaser and thief. The thrower of knives.”
“I don’t know any—”
“Flee north. Creep in stealth, lose yourself. Do not stay overlong in one place.”
Lor sniffed.
“I will build a snowman, as a warding charm against him. He will not pass. I will help you hide.”
“Thanks, no,” Lor said.
“A snowman, do you hear?” The freak moved even closer. His knuckles whitened on the stick. “Do you fathom my counsel? The dust is a great power. He needs it to dash the fires of hate, to restore the bonds of love.”
Lor stepped back. “All right, grandpa. How about I just burn it?”
The freak’s knuckles cracked around the stick. “Rattlepate. Fool. It can never be destroyed, only scattered, dispersed, transferred, endlessly given away, freely or not. The demon himself cannot be made whole again.”
Lor took another step back. “O-kay. All-righty.”
“Hey!” Shemp, creaking along floorboards, wielding a pen. “I told you to leave the premises.”
The freak closed his corroded eye. “And watch for flies!”
He clattered away in those wobbly pumps, wand dowsing for trouble, and disappeared behind a high stack of Lucky Elephant Popcorn and Buttercrunch.
The manager squinted after him. Then jumped and hollered. The freak had doubled back to poke that stick at Shemp’s tightly clenched bottom.
“Woo!” Fatty’s marble eyes popped from
their lids. “Yeah!”
The freak giggled shrilly and galloped down the aisles, heels clicking like satyr hooves.
“That’s it,” Shemp said through clenched teeth, pulling out a phone. “We’re phoning the police.”
“Fuck tha po-leeese.” Alistair seized the phone from Shemp’s hand, then grabbed a red Ibanez Destroyer by the neck.
“Hey!” Shemp cried. “Hands off the guitar. No merchandise is to be—”
Too late.
Alistair lobbed the phone into the air, swung back the Ibanez, and thwacked a fly ball. The phone flew up and chopped into a ceiling fan, which tore free and tumbled in a plastic cascade.
“Wo.” Fatty was already at the food bar, glass eyes wide. In seconds he was tossing gobs of porridge and poultry at another ceiling fan, till it rained chopped oats and chicken.
“Stop.” Lor held up his hands.
Shemp flushed, quaking.
“Stop,” Lor said.
Alistair shrugged and signalled Fatty with the Ibanez. Fatty wound up and threw his best chicken-leg slider, which Alistair read perfectly and smacked foul into the bra section. The guitar twanged with glee.
“Stop?” Lor said, spattered with gravy.
“I’m calling the police from my office.” Shemp’s voice quivering.
Alistair whistled for another pitch. But Fatty was at work on bottles of Pepsi, which he was shaking violently and spraying in sizzling arcs at a rack of old Harris Tweeds. Meanwhile, the stunned Rusty munched a fan-chewed drumstick, head tilted, shoulders drooping.
“Burger Frisbees,” Fatty called.
One splatted Rusty in the cheek. He didn’t blink.
Soon the walls and ceiling were spackled with grease. Wobbly prisms of flying red Jell-O. Pock pock pock of the guitar hitting chicken, punctuated by the odd grotesque chord or wang bar dive. Then a siren, red lights.
“Shit,” Lor said. “Time to fly.”
“One more,” Alistair said, holding up an honest-to-goodness Celtic harp and pointing at the Jell-O. Fatty wound up and delivered a perfect strike, which diced itself through the strings and into oblivion.
Fatty stared in wonder. “Wo. Greasy gunk explosion.”
“Run,” Alistair said, hanging the harp gently on the arm of a mannequin. “The Man has arrived.”
Lor felt sick to his stomach. There was no Man. How could Alistair persist in these delusions?
Arctic Smoke Page 9
