“You belong to someone here?” a nurse asks after I’ve been standing in the doorway five minutes or more.
“Marion Percy.”
“Family?”
“No.”
“Then the church must have sent you.”
“Is Mrs Percy here?”
The nurse was just warming up—she looks about as lonely as any other Spruce Lodger—but she can tell I’m not in the mood. She points out a woman sitting on her own next to the room’s only window. “That’s Maid Marion, right over there.”
Who knows how old she is. Marion Percy has reached that post-octogenarian stage of life where any numerical expression of age doesn’t do justice to the amazing fact that she is still here, still a blinking, Kleenex-clutching being. A living denial of odds who is at the moment staring out at the tangled woods that surround the rear of Spruce Lodge’s lot.
“Mrs Percy?”
I’m not sure she’s heard me at first. It’s the turning of her head. A twitch that takes a while to become something more intentional.
“You’re new,” she says.
“I’m a visitor.”
“Not a doctor?”
“No.”
“Too bad. They could
use
a new doctor.”
She might be smiling. I can see her teeth, anyway.
“I know your daughter,” I say, watching for whatever effect this announcement has on her, but
nothing changes in her face. A waxy stiffness that might be a reaction in itself.
“Oh?” she says finally.
“We were friends.”
“But not any more.”
“We haven’t seen each other in a while.”
“Well she isn’t here, if that’s what you’re thinking.”
“
Was
she here?”
The smile—if it was a smile—is gone.
“Are you a policeman?” she says.
“Just a friend.”
“So you said.”
“I don’t mean to pry.”
“You haven’t. But you’re about to, would be my guess.”
“I’m here to ask about what happened to your husband.”
She looks at me like she hasn’t heard what I just said. It forces me to speak again, louder this time.
“His accident.”
“Accident?” She reaches out to touch my hand. “Would you
accidentally
run four miles half-naked into a snowstorm?”
Her hand returns to her lap. I step between her and the window. She looks through me anyway. Studying the small square of world outside the window she’s come to memorize in such detail she needn’t look at it to see it.
“Do you believe he was driven into those woods? Mrs Percy? Please?”
“I’m old. Why are you asking me this?”
“I know your daughter, ma’am. I was just interested—”
“But this isn’t about her. Is it?”
“No.”
“Then what?”
“My son.”
“Your son?”
“He’s missing.”
Maybe it’s the sound I make trying to sniff back my show of emotion—a reddening, moistening attack that strikes within seconds—but she sits up straight. Her knuckles white and hard as quartz.
“You’re looking for
him
.”
“Yes.”
She nods. Sucks her bottom lip into her mouth. “What were you asking me?”
“Your husband. Have you thought that perhaps he was pursued into the woods?”
“He wouldn’t have left her alone like that. Not unless he thought he was trying to save her.”
“Angela.”
“Your friend,” she says, her eyes clouding over. “Our daughter.”
Mrs Percy tells me how in the days before her husband died—and before she went into hospital to have her gallbladder removed—he confessed to hearing voices. David Percy believed someone was coming into the house and tormenting him, nicking him with knife cuts, moving the furniture so
that he would trip over it. And a presence he felt, outside but looking in. Waiting. He wondered if he was losing his mind. By the time Marion made it home, her husband was gone. And Angela wasn’t talking.
“Do you think it could have been her?”
“Beg pardon?”
“Whatever drove your husband into the woods. Could it have been your daughter?”
The old woman wrinkles her nose. “She was only a child.”
“Still, who else could—”
“
Our
child.”
Marion Percy may be old, but she is clearly more than able to hold the line. In this case, it’s the question of her adopted daughter’s involvement in the events of the night that changed everything for her. She has
ideas
of what happened. But that doesn’t mean she’s about to share them.
“Does she ever come to visit?”
Mrs Percy squints at me through the smudged lenses of her bifocals. “Who
are
you?”
“My name is Patrick Rush.”
“And you say you know our girl?”
“Yes, ma’am. I do.”
She nods at this, and I’m expecting her to inquire as to Angela’s whereabouts, the events of her intervening years, her health. But she only returns to staring out the window.
“What happened to your farm?” I ask. “After you retired?”
“The land took it back. Not that we ever made much of a claim on it. No good for growing more than rocks and trees. Potato mud, David called it.”
“Who owns it now?”
“She does.”
“Angela?”
“That’s the thing about children. Without them, there’s no one to say you were ever even here.”
I start out toward the Percy farm directly from Spruce Lodge, the afternoon light already showing signs of giving up. Although described by Marion Percy as only “a few miles—a dozen, or maybe a baker’s dozen—outside town”, there are moments when I wonder if the old woman has intentionally led me astray. Her directions are free of road names or numbers, and involve only landmarks (“right at the stone church”) and subjective distances (“a bit of a ways”, “straight for a good while”). After an hour, I crumple the page of notes I’d made from her telling of the route and toss them into the back seat.
It leaves me to make every turn on instinct. Eventually I’m headed down a private lane with branches scratching to get in on either side. “You won’t see a farm, or a house, or anything to make you think anyone ever lived in there,” is how Marion Percy described the entrance to her place. Well,
this
certainly qualifies.
It is by now the beginning of that stretched period of a northern autumn day that lingers in
almost darkness
. Almost,
almost
—and then it suddenly is. I turn on the headlights but it makes little difference, the snarled trees ahead flashing orange before clipping off the Toyota’s mirror. The lane continues, but does not yield to any sign of habitation. No fence, no gate, no rusting equipment enfolded in the forest’s weeds. I’m wrong: this isn’t a lane at all, and it doesn’t lead to anything. But it’s too tight to turn around, and too boggy to risk trying to reverse the whole way. The sole hope is that there is an exit on to some other road at the end.
I turn on the radio. Right away I get the weather forecast: the first storm of the season is coming in. Snow squall warnings overnight for the whole county, with accumulation of up to forty centimetres. Overnight lows of minus twenty. Road closures anticipated. If travel outside the home is not strictly necessary, all are advised to stay indoors for the duration.
Too late for me.
The cold licks in around the windows and brings with it new imaginings of where Sam might be. Inside or out? Tied up, hooded? Have they given him food? Can he see any light? Is he cold?
Is he still alive?
No. I won’t allow this one.
My attention must remain on the
doing
of things. Going forward—this alone might bring me to Sam. Or, in my case, going backwards. Because
now I’m taking my foot off the gas, slapping the gear shift into reverse, turning around in my seat to see how I might slither out the way I’ve come—
An opening ahead. There just as I turn my head to start an inching reverse.
I shift back into drive, taking a run at the last branches drooped over the lane. There’s a thud as one hits the front windshield, splintering a web of cracks through the glass. I keep my foot down and the car fishtails sideways into the mud. The tires glued a foot into the earth.
Not that it matters now. Because I’m here.
A square, red-brick farmhouse barnacled with leafless vines. A lopsided barn off to the side. Beyond these structures, an open space that was once a cultivated field but would now go by the name of meadow, or whatever one calls land midway in its return to chaos.
I step out of the car and take in the farmyard as though a location from my own memory. It is not exactly as I imagined it while listening to Angela read, but this doesn’t stop it from being instantly recognizable. The wrought-iron weather vane atop the farmhouse roof, the buckled swing set in the yard, the partial log fence unsuccessful in holding the brush back from a one-time vegetable garden.
I start toward the house. The first flakes falling slow and straight as ash. I hold my arms out in front of me and there is already a thin layer of white over my coat, my shoes. Ghosting me.
An electric thrum travels up my legs from the earth. Is there an opposite to sacred ground? I suppose certain fields and farmyards in Poland and France store this kind of energy, the memory of horror held within the soil. I know it’s only my own apprehensions—however this is going to turn out, it’s going to happen here and now—but as I lift my feet up the farmhouse’s front steps the history of this place rushes to possess me.
I look skyward. Tongue out, eating snow like a child. But it’s to see if anyone stands in the upstairs window to the right. The window where the young Angela once stood, looking down at her father.
The door is open a crack. Something prevents me from touching the handle with bare skin, so that I enter by shouldering it wide enough for me to slip through. The new air rolls dead leaves and vermin droppings over the floor. It’s still not enough to hold back the rank odour of the place. Backed-up plumbing. Along with something sweeter, animal.
A smell that soldiers and surgeons would recognize
.
“Sam?”
My voice silences the house. It was quiet as I came in, but now some previously unnoticed activity has been stopped. The plaster and floorboards held in the tension of a held breath.
I try to leave the front door open but the angle of the frame eases it almost shut each time.
Although it is not yet dark outside and the curtains that remain are limp ribbons over the glass, the interior holds pockets of shadow in the corners, around every door and down the length of its hall. It is hard to imagine as a building that sunlight ever freely passed through. Bad things happened here because they were always meant to.
The main floor is arranged as rooms that open off a narrow central hallway that leads straight into the kitchen at the rear. A few feet in, the living room opens on the left, the dining room on the right. Both slightly too small for their functions, even now, unpeopled and with most of the furniture missing. In the living room, signs of a stayover: a trio of wooden chairs, a broken whisky bottle on the floor between them. The fireplace and the brick around it black with soot, charred logs too big for its hearth still teepeed on the grate. I bend to touch them. Cold as the snow collecting on the sill.
The house has darkened further still when I return to the hallway, so that I proceed half-blind down its length, hands sliding over the walls. David Percy must have negotiated this route in much the same way on the last night of his life. Old, his sight gone. Tormented by what he believed to be some demonic intruder.
I turn to see the front door standing open. As the gust from outside loses its force, the door retracts once more.
Only the wind
. But David Percy would have had such thoughts too.
Explanations that didn’t quite hold all of his mind together.
The smell is stronger on the way upstairs. Warmer, humid. It makes each step a fight against being sick.
Something happened here
.
And not just eighteen years ago.
Something happened here today
.
At the landing I see that I’m right.
Blood. A line of dime-sized circles leading to the room at the front of the house. Angela’s room.
And a book.
Lying face down on the landing, its spine broken as though to bookmark the page. I know the title before I’m close enough to read the text on the cover. I know what it means before I lift the brittle paper to my eyes and see that it is a paperback from my own bookshelf, a hand-me-down that Sam had chosen for his nightstand pile.
Robinson Crusoe
. The book he brought with him to the Mustang Drive-in the night he disappeared.
“Sam?” I try again, and will his voice to answer. But there’s only the squeak of the floor as it makes note of the book dropped from my hands, my shuffled steps toward the front room’s partly open door.
My boot kicks the door open wide. It lets the smell out.
A single bed with Beatrix Potter rabbits painted on the headboard. A wooden school desk. Animal stickers—a smirking skunk, a giggling giraffe—on
the cracked dresser mirror. And blood on all of it. Thin lines crosshatched over the room, as though squeezed from a condiment bottle. Not so much that it is evidence of a butchering, but of a struggle. Something half-done and then interrupted. Or halfdone to be finished elsewhere.
And then I notice the chains laid out on the mattress. Four links attached to each of the bedposts with metal loops at the end. Shackles.
I’m not sure what I do in these next moments. They may not be moments at all. All I know is that I’m tracing the lines of blood and looping a finger through a rusted link of chain. Everything still. Everything falling away.
That’s when I hear it.
Faint but unmistakable in the distance. From somewhere within the woods beyond the fields.
A voice calling for me.
The snow has gained weight over the last hour. The wind throwing it into my eyes. Dusk a black umbrella opened against the sky. My legs seem to know where to go. Out of the farmhouse yard and into the frozen ruts of the abandoned field.
Sam doesn’t call out for me again as I make my way toward the woods. It doesn’t stop me from hearing him.
Daddy!
Daddy, not Dad. His name for me when he was little, the second syllable dropped a couple years ago in favour of the more grown-up short form.
The reversion only happens now when he’s been hurt. Or when he’s scared.
The trees close in. Nightfall arrives at the same time as the bare limbs overhead deny what little moonlight there might be. The relatively even earth allows me greater speed here than over the furrows, but there is also more to hold me back. Interlocked branches. Stumps rising out of the gathering snow to crack my shins. Buried stones.
A hand swiped across my eyes comes away wet. Cut.
The weather forecast was right. Not just about the squall, but the cold. The temperature has dropped to whatever level it is that freezes your nostrils closed. Tightens the skin over your cheeks until it feels like the bone could rip through.
I stop and try to tell myself I’m determining which course to take, that it’s not the cold and the panic that has freeze-dried all oxygen out of the air. Which way is north? If Sam is out here, this is where he’d be. And only Sam would know how to get out again. He could read the stars. Through momentary pauses of the snowfall I can make out some of the brightest constellations, but I didn’t listen when Sam tried to explain how they could show you the way. The thought that I may never have the chance to let my son teach me this doubles me over. Puking a stain into a creamy drift.
Sam’s shouted name is lost in the blizzard. A new inch of snow on the ground with every count to twenty in my head. In the creek beds it’s already up past my knees.
The struggle now isn’t against the cold but my desire to lean against the nearest pine and go to sleep. Forty winks. It would be a nap of the forever kind, I know. But it’s how David Percy exited the world. Who’s to say I have any greater reason to live than he had? A pair of fools who thought good intentions alone might find them a way through.
I’m bending down to curl into a nice spot when I see him. A human form against a tree in a clearing ahead.
“Sam.”
A whisper this time. Louder than any of my shouts.
But as I get closer I see that the figure is too large to be Sam. And that whoever it is, he has long since frozen. Not that freezing was how he died. Iced blood pooled in his lap. Stiff hands plugging the wounds. Lashed to the trunk with wire that has sliced deep through his last struggles to free himself.
The man’s chin slumped against his chest. I lift his head so that his lifeless eyes, still open, look up.
It’s strange to see Ramsay’s face showing anything but his wry cockiness. There is nothing of the kind about it now. A mask of terror waxed
over the self-certainty he maintained over all the preceding years of his life.
Whatever was done to him in Angela’s room took some time. And then he was brought out here. Aware of what was coming, but clinging to the possibility of escape nevertheless. Isn’t that what the detectives in his detective novels did? Wait for a lastminute opportunity just when things looked their worst?
I regain my feet. Ramsay already halfway to buried. In half an hour, you would never know he’s here.
There isn’t a reason I keep walking but I do. Sam isn’t out here, if he ever was. It’s more probable that what I heard came from within my own head, or was Ramsay himself, instructed to find the right pitch with the assistance of the wire around his throat. It doesn’t matter. The point is what it’s always been: the determination of beginnings, middles and ends. Stories like symmetry, and my fate is to act out David Percy’s concluding moments. I carry on now only to see the place they’ll find me whenever they do.
Maybe it will be here. Out in the open of the Percys’ field. An unintended circling back to where I started.
A single light appears through the snow. The bulb over the farmhouse porch.
Someone’s home.
I fall to my knees. Across the field, a looming shadow takes its time coming to me. A darkness
on its way to swallow me whole. Behind it, emerging from the house, what may be a smaller figure looking on.
Something about the two of them suggests they have always been here. Not just today, but forever. They have all the time in the world.