We Will All Go Down Together (57 page)

“A while.” She stared at him, and he sighed. “I just can’t take having it with me, having it
around
. I feel too much. Out here, it’s okay, weirdly enough—but I don’t live here, I live in Toronto, and in Toronto, I can’t walk down the fucking
street
, some days. It kind of feels like it’s killing me.”

Carra shook her head, neck-cords abruptly taut, nose stinging. “
Drama,
” she said, voice harsher than she’d intended it to be. “You’re telling
me
it hurts to not be able to keep anything out? To have no skin?
Me
?”

It occurred to her that she might be shouting, or close to. People were looking around, and her throat hurt. Jude—once-Shadowless Jude Hark, the GTA’s hierarchical magician supreme—actually flinched.

“You’ve done it longer, Carra,” he said, softly. “And you’re stronger than me, too. You’ve always been stronger.”

“You’re wrong.”

“Then we’re
both
wrong. What now?”

They paused, and Carra found herself reaching out, hesitant, to knit their hands together. And while the accompanying surge of sensation
was
difficult, it was also—familiar. Bearable.

This is how it can be,
she tried to tell him.
You just have to—learn to take it.
Try
to learn.

Jude shook his head, slowly. But he didn’t move away, and that was something.

“I
will
talk to you, Jude,” Carra told him, out loud. “If it takes me years, I’ll make you understand why you need to have part of you that’s weak enough,
open
enough, to hurt. To feel.”

Jude’s voice, in her head:
No.
And hers, in his—

(
Yes.
)

“We’ll see,” Jude said after another pause. Then walked to the van, shadow following two steps behind, as ever. As he slipped in beside Galit, Carra saw it make an odd, truncated gesture in her direction before melting into the van’s darkness—one hand thrown back, fingers fluttering.
I see you,
perhaps.
Thank you for trying.
Or even:
goodbye.

Ignoring it, Jude turned to Elver, smiling. “Do you like magic?” The boy shook his head, solemnly. “Oh no, I’m sorry—not
real
magic; tricks, that’s all I meant. Do you like tricks?”

Looking up at Galit first, for permission. Eventually reaping the barest nod, long hair falling to shroud the child’s face.

“Sometimes,” Elver said, quietly.

“Perfect,” Jude replied, smile deepening. “Let me show you something.”

Carra felt Sy’s hand on hers yet again before she heard his approach, that reassuring clasp calming her, anchoring her. Gripped him back without turning, wanting to hold on until she somehow became just as warm, normal,
human
by association.

We can’t always have what we want,
she thought.
But—there’s a middle ground, too, isn’t there? Another way.

She wanted to walk that path, she found, very dearly. Preferrably with him beside her, for as long as that might last.

“Take me home, after this,” she said, still not turning. “First subway stop we pass, okay?”

“Okay.”

“Not to Gala’s—to
my
place, though. To yours.”

“I can do that,” Sy said. And gave her hand another squeeze.

Nature is slow. It mainly stays the same, within its seasons; things rarely stay changed for long, though all things change, or
seem
to change. And the Dourvale Shore, strange a place as it may otherwise be, poses no great exception to this rule.

Inside Dourvale, the stone-strewn streets lie empty, weed-choked, fertile with decay. Outside, in the deep woods, the light stays brown and stinging at almost every time of day, filtered through a thousand mosquito wings at once. On the forest’s well-stocked killing-floor, temporal ripples continue to echo back through minutes, months, years: a harsh sound of gasping, thud of city shoes blundering past, stirring the pine-needle loam up like sodden, grey-brown snow. Sending the little toads hopping clear, each throat fluttering delicate, one more moist clump of dirt set with tiny, jewelled eyes.

And if you ever happen to find yourself outside the canning factory, just at dusk (a place you wouldn’t want to be under most circumstances, let alone as the light begins to fade, the shadows sharpen and lengthen, tricking your eyes into wanting to close), and if you see a figure approaching through the trees, and if it seems to be an old lady in a long dress . . . then you will not want to come towards her, or let her come towards you. Most especially if, as she does, you realize she’s not old at all, but young and strangely beautiful: skin a-glow, limbs like eels, lidless eyes deep-set and hard, like stones. And her hair, her dress, and six-fingered hands all wet, dripping with black, black water.

But she will not be here tonight, that same lady. Instead, under the dusty ruin the
brugh
time-tunnel’s collapse has made of what was once the Sidderstane family cottage, Ygerna Sidderstane holds her brother Gaheris’s heart in both hands, so ripe and sweet and heavy with congested blood—then takes a long bite and chews on it, thoughtfully, barely feeling the tears she cries while doing so, though they score her transparent cheeks like vitriol.

Thinking, all the while:
My own brother, my twin, my one, my only. Why would I do that to him? Why
would
I?

Because you are a monster, born of monsters,
she decides, eventually.
And because, amongst these monsters, you alone are left spared, to be queen of all you survey.

The village is hers now, by right of blood and ownership, fully uncontested. These facts make her content, as does the knowledge that, of the Five-Family Coven, it is
her
branch alone . . . so small, so feeble, against the wild, dark brightness of the rest . . . which has finally emerged from this five centuries’ maelstrom with anything even halfway worth the having.

I won,
she thinks. We
won, through the Devize girl and all those others. At last. At last.

(
Yes, sis.
)

Yes.

Hearing his voice in her head, the only part of her still left unaltered; it lulls her as little else can, even now. And thus—finding what she has done no longer bothers her quite so much, so long as she still has a version of Gaheris to talk to—Ygerna glides slickly off to her hole, where she has spent the last thirty years building a nest of bile and bones. Drifts off to sleep, still chewing. Still crying.

Around her, Dourvale remains, as it always has and always will, even now that the tale of the Druirs is over. And as all things tend towards their end, most surely, this book is also ended.

You, listening—put it down. Then find your own homes, and go there.

In case anyone still doesn’t know, I’m Canadian. Born in Britain, yes—London, to be specific, within the legendary sound of Bow Bells—but I’ve been a citizen since I was three, and every memory I have involves living in downtown Toronto, Ontario. When I was younger, I used to dream mainly about other places, having absorbed the cultural meme that anywhere is better/more interesting than any given part of my home and native land, especially the parts which happen to be located most closely to the United States. I grew up well-used to the idea that there is so little inherently “Canadian” that we are forced to define ourselves negatively, as in that famous Molson Canadian “I AM Canadian” beer commercial (YouTube it)—we don’t have a President, we don’t live in igloos, we don’t eat blubber, we don’t say “aboot,” etc. While compared to the States, which is always a given, we’re supposedly polite, and clean, and nice—the quiet neighbour above the meth lab, as Robin Williams once put it.

Of course, like with most things, the truth is far more murky. Some of us routinely do all of the above, and most of us aren’t all that nice, either—no nicer than any other nation mainly made up of people occupying land they stole from other people, at any rate. We may claim we’re in favour of a mosaic rather than a melting pot and peacekeeping rather than armed intervention, but tell that to the Kahnesetake protestors, the boys of St. Vincent, or the women whose remains were found on Robert Pickton’s pig farm. The image of “Canadian-ness” we absorb through the media, so initially diffuse the government literally set up both a National Film Board and a Canadian Broadcasting Company (first radio, then television) to disseminate it, most often applies specifically to white Canadians of non-Indigenous and non-Francophone descent, with a vague sideline in well-assimilated “immigrants” to make ourselves feel better about the whole thing.

In terms of being raised feeling they have no real identity of their own, it’s probably different in other parts of Canada—actually, I
know
it is, because the other sections all seem to have a pretty distinct sense of self, to the extent that few of them ever really wanted to become part of one big country in the first place. (In Newfoundland, for example—last to join Confederation, in 1949—some older people still claim they were essentially tricked into doing so.) But here in Ontario, the basic assumption is that, in much the same way Toronto looks
almost
enough like a bunch of different North American cities to pass, if set-decorated correctly (at least for people who don’t actually live in said cities), whatever culture we do have must be by necessity a pale, bloodless, haphazard imitation of our Southern neighbours’. This is nothing new; we used to be not-England, and now we’re not-America. But we’re also not-Quebec, not-the-Maritimes, not-the-Prairies, not-Vancouver, and
certainly
not-Nunavut.

Well, at a certain point in my life, I realized that every time I pictured “somebody” walking down “some street” in “some city,” I was actually thinking about me walking down a street in Toronto. And why not? Why continue to pretend otherwise? You could therefore say that the preceding group of stories, as well as the personal mythology supporting them—assembled over a loose period of fifteen years and winding semi-deliberately back and forth through each other, like some ouroborous tapeworm—is the result. In other words, the whole idea of the Five-Family Coven and its works proceeds in part from the idea that the beliefs I just outlined above are inaccurate by definition, a lazily assembled crock of received wisdom long overdue for forcible revision. That Toronto and Ontario can be exactly as scary as anywhere more exotic, if you know where to look . . . scarier, maybe. Because, on the surface, it all seems so
pleasant
.

I’m joking a bit, but not really. Much like the part of the Canadian Shield on which Ontario perches, there is an awful, flinty heart to Canada which underlies everything. There’s a reason that the first collection of Alice Munro short stories I ever read was called
Who Do You Think You Are?
, because that’s the primary Canadian question—contemptuous, self-excoriating. On some level, we don’t trust ourselves, because we know enough to know better than to; we’re all liars, all freaks, at least potentially, same as everywhere else. And going by the legacy of that nice young couple from Mississauga (Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka, look them up), maybe we’re right not to.

Toronto was also six million strong even back before the GTA (Greater Toronto Area) combined into a single mega-city, and remains one of the most multicultural (if not entirely integrated) in North America. I was very amused, recently, when fellow Torontonian Nalo Hopkinson talked about being told she was “trying too hard” by inserting an apparently unlikely number of people of colour into her narrative, simply because she made the racial mixture in her most recent books reflect the one she saw every day on our city’s downtown streets. Now, does this make Toronto some sort of rainbow utopia? Hardly. Canada in general is too grim for that, too jaw-clenched and rooted in Native genocide; we’re a cold, odd bunch of people, happier by far to ignore each other than harass each other, but let’s not fool ourselves—we’re capable of everything everybody else is, and worse. That’s the human condition.

Or then again, maybe that’s just me.

In retrospect, I think I was also reacting (as I often do) to Margaret Atwood’s
Survival
, a survey of Canadian fiction that pares our national identity back to one of people fighting not to be erased by the massiveness and indifference of the landscape they find themselves engulfed by and pitted against, which either absorbs them or rejects them utterly in its epic scale, its innate wilderness. This is what we all supposedly come “attached” to, even those of us who have no truck with it on a day-to-day basis: the massive sky of Manitoba, the overhanging lack of cloud, the horridly clear stars. Or the deep, dry cold of a Winnipeg Christmas, necessitating wearing a balaclava just to walk down the street and constant shuffling to disperse static electricity.

For myself, the few, relatively brief times I’ve spent outside Toronto’s grip have definitely left a mark on me. I tend to have a very slippy-slidey sense of geography, possibly because I don’t drive, so my impressions of travel always come hand in hand with a sense of vulnerability and powerlessness—of being drawn headlong, pulled to a place I don’t know, and implicitly threatened with being left there. I remember walking down a country road with one of my ex-fiancés, with no light but the moon to guide us and open fields on either side; I remember that same man’s mother, forever stranded in her home because she didn’t have a car of her own, miles of highway between her and town. I remember childhood friends whose parents moved out of the city to keep them “safe,” only to discover rural Ontario was less modelled after
My Girl
than
River’s Edge
. Because of childhood memories of cottage country, a lot of Overdeere and Dourvale is more Gravenhurst than Gananoque—the lake and the deep pines surrounding it, mist and gnats, caterpillars everywhere. Skeletal barns full of mouldy hay, and a general air that even the most weather-blown, pseudo-rustic bon-bon of a house glimpsed against the horizon might prove to conceal a serial killer’s basement.

Inhuman beneath a human mask, yet all too human anyhow; my characters tend to have it bad several ways at once, at the very least. First amongst them to raise her head was the woman who forms our through-line, Carraclough Devize. Carra was the main character of my first, unfinished horror novel, the one which—I would later realize—also introduced me to the Maskim, or Terrible Seven. Her origin can be traced pretty directly back to
The Legend of Hell House
(thus far the only film adaptation of Richard Matheson’s evocative novel
Hell House
), in which Roddy MacDowell plays a former child medium once mentally raped and left for dead by the “Mount Everest of haunted houses.” But like I said, it didn’t work out, and I genuinely thought I’d seen the last of her until she popped up as a supporting character in “The Narrow World,” the oldest of these stories, having suddenly assumed fresh new characteristics dictated by various experiences I’d had in the interim: the mental health issues of various friends, an Annex area home reminiscent of one I’d once babysat in, a stint at Ryerson University vaguely coinciding with my own.

What had begun as a sketch, a mere blueprint, had become a genuine person, this “skinless,” ectoplasmic polaroid-taking medium covered in ghostly bruise-writing who ended up a perpetual ward/employee of the same institution who once put her in harm’s way, cycling back and forth between her Mom and the nuthouse. Jude Hark Chiu-wai and his shadow troubles were the gateway drug, but Carra formed the cornerstone, and the rest of the Five-Family mythos began to spin itself out around her, accordingly.

The four biggest components of my all-Canadian monster family mash-up turned out to be psychics (like Carra or Janis Mol, but also the researchers who study and organize them, aka Dr. Guilden Abbott and the Freihoeven group), witches (Euwphaim Glouwer and the rest of the Three Betrayed), the Church (Maccabee Roke, Sister Blandina OSP, and the Ordo), and the Fae (the Druirs and their offshoots, the Sidderstanes). I found myself reaching back into my childhood for influences, remembering the images of fallen angels I’d gleaned from various texts like
The Black Arts
by Richard Cavendish, the magical and psionic basics I’d read about in William Seabrook’s
Witchcraft
, Molly Hunter’s retelling of the North Berwick Coven story in
The Thirteenth Member
and the supplements on Elizabethan
diablerie
in Edith Sitwell’s
The Queens and the Hive
, the creepy Seelie vs. Unseelie lore I’d gleaned from Georgess McHarque’s
The Impossible People
and Brian Froud’s
Faeries
. But I also looked at unpacking my own conceptual constructions of “family,” since that’s so often where Canadian weirdness seems to concentrate, from Alice Munro to Anne Hébert.

Now, I am an only child, the product of a single-parent home, which makes family beyond me-and-my-Mom a bit of a mystery to me, especially “extended” family. When I list off the people I’m directly related to, I move quickly through a half-uncle I barely see, plus a Dad who’s lived in an entirely different country (Australia) since I was nine. My cousins I see every ten years or so on one side, every twenty on the other. Of my grandparents, two died so far away I couldn’t have gotten there in time if I’d tried; the others died respectively in Toronto, where I later viewed his empty shell—I would eventually give birth to my own son in that same hospital—and in Barrie, alone and demented. This last was my maternal grandmother, vital, toxic, Scottish, and unforgiving, parts of whose gleeful delight in drama definitely made their way into Euwphaim Glouwer, who herself rose up almost wholly out of a throwaway line in “Heart’s Hole.” (Jo casually mentions that her Nan believes she’s a temporally transplanted witch from King James’s time . . . and as it turns out, that’s true!)

But then there’s another bunch of relatives, long lost to me, though I’ve gradually begun to reconnect with them over (interestingly enough) the same period it took me to assemble this book. These are the family of my Mom’s Dad, Nana’s first husband, and my impresssion of them went further into creating the Druirs than almost anything else, aside from having watched the BBC’s 2000 adaptation of
Lorna Doone,
that one time (secret valley, aristocratic border-lord outlaws, Saracen vaguely looking like a young Aidan Gillen, etc.)—this idea that somewhere in Ontario there was an odd, phantom clan of people whose blood exercised a malign influence over mine: tall, fair folk, both dark and bright, innately perverse and ultimately unknowable. Obviously, this isn’t
exactly
true, and I apologize in advance to any Hoovers who may end up picking this up for making it seem so. But whenever I think of Mac’s untrustworthy, brilliant, morbidly fascinating “country cousins” and the bad blood they’ve deeded him—this idea of predestination via genetics, a history that never dies, tainting each successive generation in a slightly more harmful way—it’s definitely an image integral to my sense of myself, both as me and as Canadian.

Along with Euwphaim and Carra’s ancestress Jonet Devize, I needed a third witch for my mini-coven, thus giving birth to Alizoun Rusk, who owes a lot to Susan Musgrave’s poetry cycle
Becky Swan’s Book.
(Her motto might as well be the lines
Yes, some women are like that/some women are wicked
from the poem “Especially this one.”) On the Druir side of the equation, meanwhile, I came up with another bunch of aristocratic dabblers in magic-use, the Rokes, from whom I eventually spun Maccabee Roke, broken priest turned magic object pawnshop manager—that he knows Jude Hark Chiu-wai goes without saying, though not in the Biblical sense. And from my need to give Mac a background in the Church, the Ordo Sororum Perpetualam evolved, martial nuns sworn to the memory of my favourite legendary saint. It was only much later that I realized uncompromising Sister Blandina must surely be descended from Alizoun Rusk, thus bringing us around in a neat little circle.

The stories go in the order their dates suggest, which also mostly identify when they were written (except for “History’s Crust,” since 1968 is the year I was born), if you want to organize them linearly. And . . . that’s about it, I suppose. Stay out of the woods, especially at night.