The Lunenburg Werewolf (6 page)

Deep in the heart of Cape Breton's Richmond County, midway down Highway 4, lies the quiet little town of Grande Anse. Legend has it that if you travel along the Grandique Ferry Road approximately one kilometre from Grand Anse, you will come to a clearing. There, framed by a border of tall black spruce standing so stock still that they seem to be holding their needled breath and waiting for something to crawl out of that darkness, is what the local folk will fearfully tell you is the Black Ground.

The Black Ground is a sprawling field bisected by the nasty slashing scar of a long dirt road. There is a lake at one end of the field that some people believe to be bottomless. A series of wildfires have blazed through the field over the centuries and as a result the soil has blackened with ash. The blueberries and cranberries that grow in the field are known to be fat and juicy, but very few locals will dare to pick them.

Many believe that the Black Ground is haunted by a Bochdan—an ancient beast that came across the ocean from its Scottish homeland, stowed away on a ship of early settlers. A Bochdan is a kind of hobgoblin that feeds on fear and carrion. The Bochdan lives for mischief and mayhem of the darkest kind. It cloaks itself in shadow and favours sour ground. It hides in brooks and peers up at unwary wanderers just before reaching up suddenly and dragging them down to drown.

The older folk who live in the surrounding regions of the Black Ground swear they've seen inhuman figures dancing there in the darkness. They claim to have heard beastly sounds of baying out there beneath the moonlight, sounds that chilled their blood and caused their hearts to skip a beat or two.

They say that there was once a settlement on the Black Ground. People lived there and grew content in the belief that they could turn its cursed soil to good. But all that changed when two young Cape Breton boys witnessed a terrifying midnight parade.

Plans and Blueberries

One long, hot, and dusty August afternoon, Harold and Franklin Dunbar set out to pick blueberries on the Black Ground. But the blueberry picking soon gave way to a game of hide-and-seek, which just as naturally gave way to a sudden bout of tree-climbing, which of course led the boys to an hour-long ponder over the best location to build themselves a tree fort. Which was right about the time that darkness fell onto them like a great panther leaping down onto the back of an unwary traveller.

Out here on the Black Ground, the charred dirt seemed to gulp down any trace of light. Even the moon and the stars seemed to blur and haze and shrink against the bleak black of that stretch of cursed Cape Breton wilderness.

“Can you see much?” Harold asked.

“Not much more than you can, I expect,” Franklin answered.

Which was right about the moment when something out there in the darkness screeched. It might have been a screech owl. It might have been a wild cat. It might even have been nothing but a long fir bough fiddling against a patch of tuneful tree bark. Or it might have been a ghost.

“We ought to light a fire,” Franklin said.

“Are you sure?” Harold asked. “The brush out here is awfully dry for lighting fires.”

Harold spoke the truth. It had been two weeks since the last rainstorm had soaked the surrounding woodland, and it was quite likely that a poorly laid camp blaze would risk a forest fire.

“I don't care,” Franklin said. “I want a fire.”

“You're scared, aren't you?”

Which was right about when that whatever-it-was in the darkness screeched out a second time, even louder than the first.

Goosebumps waddled across a pair of scared young necks. Hair started to rise. Hearts beat at a double-gallop. And fear crept on in.

“Of course I'm not scared,” Franklin replied with a hastily swallowed gulp. “I am absolutely wet-my-pants-and-scream-like-a-little-girl terrified. ‘Scared' just isn't nearly a big enough word for the way that I feel right now.”

“It's good to know I'm not the only one who is scream-like-a-little-girl terrified,” Harold replied as he scraped the fir needles away from a patch of dirt and started scooping out a firepit. “You get the wood and I'll lay the fire.”

Franklin looked fearfully out into the darkness, waiting for one more screech. “How about you get the wood and I lay the fire?” he asked.

“I've got the matches,” Harold said. “So you need to go and get the wood.”

Which made a whole lot of sense, as much as Franklin hated to admit it. So off Franklin went to gather up as much dead wood as he could bundle into his arms. Harold stayed behind to lay the beginnings of a small campfire.

Harold looked up once as Franklin walked away. He was worried for his friend, but he would not let himself stare too long, because everyone knew that to stare too long at someone leaving was bad luck and a surefire guarantee that you would never see that someone alive again. Which didn't comfort Harold in the least.

Harold busied himself with clearing away anything that might accidentally burn to prevent the risk of wildfire. He laid rocks about the fire pit and clawed up and scooped out what dry grass, twigs, and birch and pine bark that he could find close at hand.

Franklin soon came back with an armload of sticks. The boys set up their wood, and then Harold retrieved his matches and lit the kindling. With a small patch of light to cut into the oppressing darkness, the boys let out a sigh of relief.

Which was about when a cold wind whooshed down suddenly across the Black Ground. The campfire blew out like a birthday candle. Harold and Franklin huddled in the unexpected darkness.

Franklin reached out impulsively and touched the cinders of the fire. “They're as cold as December icicles,” he whispered. “They ought to be warm just a little bit, oughtn't they?”

Which was right about when they heard the sound coming from out of the darkness—a scuttling, like the sound of a thousand crabs moving across a beach of broken clamshells. The wind blew a little harder. Harold and Franklin suddenly smelled a funk, a stench so foul that it stank worse than a thousand mildewed rubber boots turned wrong-side out.

Both the boys froze.

“Look,” Harold whispered. He pointed into the darkness.

Franklin stared in horrified awe as three ancient hags teetered out of the cloying darkness. “Night hags,” he breathed in terror.

Now for those of you who don't know, a night-hag is what you find left over after a witch is hanged. The witches' shadows, if they are not properly sprinkled in holy water and holly berries, will rise up and haunt the night, eating whatever they can find in hopes of filling their emptiness.

The three night hags, their backs bent like question marks, scuttled and crawled across the Black Ground, pausing to claw up handfuls of herbs and grass, which they crammed into their constantly chewing mouths. Franklin and Harold could hear the noise of their ceaseless munching, like the sound of horses eating hay.

“I smell boy,” the first old hag said suddenly.

“I smell two boys,” the second hag said as she casually reached up and plucked a small owl from the bough of an overhanging tree and crammed it—feathers and all—into the wood-chipper maw of her mouth.

“I smell them too,” the third hag croaked. “And they're hiding just behind that alder bush.”

Which was right exactly where Franklin and Harold were hiding.

“Do you think we can outrun those three night hags?” Franklin whispered.

“I'm not worried about outrunning them,” Harold whispered back. “I just figure all I have to do is outrun you.”

The two boys took off like a pair of scalded cats. The trio of night hags followed the boys, not really running but rather passing over the Black Ground like shadows, cutting Harold and Franklin off whichever direction they turned.

“Run the other way!” Harold screamed.

“Which other way?” Franklin screamed back.

In the panic and dizzying confusion of their breakneck run, Harold and Franklin had headed straight to the shore of the dark lake. They looked down into the water and were terrified to see something rising up out of the darkness towards them—something with a goat's head and a horse's body and a set of teeth that looked like a mouthful of cutlasses and rusty cleavers.

“The Bochdan!” the boys screamed out simultaneously. They turned to run, only to find themselves facing the three night hags, who were hovering straight toward them.

“We're going to die!”

And then, as quick as you could say, “snip-snap-gulp,” the Bochdan swallowed the three night hags whole.

The boys stood there in the darkness, their knees knocking together in a state of pure and total fear. Too scared to run. Too scared to even think of running.

The Bochdan leaned down and sniffed at Franklin. “Too skinny-thin,” it said in a voice of tombstone and thunder.

And then it leaned towards Harold. “Go home and grow some more,” the Bochdan told them.

Which is right around the time those boys started running.

In the early eighteenth century, the French colonized a small area around a harbour on the northeastern side of Cape Breton. The plan was to use the little settlement as a source of ready coal for their mighty fortress in Louisburg. They named the spot the “Baie de Glace”—the “Bay of Ice”—because they found that the harbour froze over completely every winter.

By the mid 1940s, Glace Bay, as it became known, had grown into the most heavily populated town in the entire country of Canada. It was a town of coal miners—born storytellers—who told tales of dark deeds that took place in the shadows of the tunnels. Many have these stories have since been lost, but one tale the coal miners of Glace Bay will never forget is the story about a boy named Randy and his daddy's deal with the Devil.

Randy's Daddy

Randy's daddy was a coal miner, picked and culled from a long seam of mining men, none of whom knew the meaning of the word “quit.”

The men had to be built that way. Coal mining was hard, dangerous work and most coal miners died far too young. From father to son, it was a heritage and a legacy that fate poured Glace Bay men into.

“A coal miner is one part owl and one part mole,” Randy's daddy always told him. “From five in the morning to five at night, he spends his days in darkness rooting for coal at thirty-three cents a ton.”

Thirty-three cents for every ton of coal mined. Less the cost of oil, powder, and timber. Less rent of a dollar-fifty a month. Less a doctor's fee of forty cents a month. Less a school tax of fifteen cents a month. Less a payment of thirty cents to the man who kept the tally. Less a little more for sundries and the like. Eating cost extra. It's no wonder that coal is the colour of an empty pocket.

“A coal miner is a perverse thing,” Randy's daddy always told him. “A coal miner is born in the damp cave of his mother's womb, and then he starts creeping through the dank, wet darkness of the mine, picking and chipping his way down to Lord-knows-where. You'd think a man ought to know better than that.”

You'd think.

“Tip your hat to the foreman, but trust the poor bare-arsed bugger who stoops and sweats at your side,” Randy's daddy told him. “Trust the man who tells you where to get off when you've gone too far. Trust the man who curses in your face rather than the gentleman you must be polite to for fear of losing a living.”

“Is that true?” Randy asked his daddy.

“It is a true-as-bone fact,” Randy's daddy replied.

“What's a fact?” Randy asked.

“Thirty-three cents a ton, for one thing,” Randy's daddy said. “A coal miner deals in facts. He has to. Because most coal miners have got themselves a family to hold onto. Why else would a man go mucking in the dirt, breathing a sniff of death with every snort he took?”

Randy shrugged an I-dunno-why kind of shrug. “Pride?” he guessed.

“Pride?” Randy's daddy laughed with a snort. “Pride only goes so far when it comes to filling an empty belly.”

Which is why it probably shouldn't have surprised Randy when his daddy first told him how he had gone and sold his soul to the Devil himself.

Randy's Daddy's Deal

“Your granddad died a year before I was old enough to work the mine,” Randy's daddy told him. “The tunnel he was working in heaved up and lay down on top of him, burying him beneath a ton or two of Cape Breton coal—which was all the grave he ever got. We buried an empty coffin in the dirt outside the churchyard. Your grandma sang ‘Amazing Grace' and then she dried her eyes and just walked on.”

And then Randy's daddy spat. Not being rude, you understand. The fact was, Randy's daddy had spent so many years sucking on coal dust and poverty that spitting had become just as natural as breathing. He spat black, and at forty-three, his back and shoulders had already curled over into that perpetual stoop of a question mark that passed for a spine in those parts.

“Every year we lean a little closer to the dirt,” Randy's daddy told him. “Every year we dig a little deeper, looking for sunshine in the shadow of the mine. Coal is nothing more than long-dead greenings pushed down and squeezed hard; nothing but leaves and ferns that once waved beneath the sunlight glinting off of a Tyrannosaurus's backbone—fossilized sunshine and dinosaur poop. Coal is time, coal is patience, and coal is nothing more than a handful of hardened history just waiting to be dug up and burned in the belly of a woodstove.”

And then he spat again.

How sweet the sound.

Randy's daddy was a deep one. It was like he spent his entire life working on a single gigantic ponder—always submerged in a sombre solitary state of reckon ing— occasionally surfacing to allow his thoughts and pronouncements to drop upon Randy like slow, heavy raindrops plummeting down upon a rusted tin roof. They echoed and they splashed away, and that's all Randy really remembered about the man in later years.

The splash and the echo, fading away.

It all started on the night that Randy's daddy came home reeking of whiskey and grinning like a kid who had just discovered candy—and on a work night, to boot.

“I done it,” Randy's daddy said. “I done it tonight.”

“What did you do, Daddy?” Randy asked.

“I done it,” Randy's daddy repeated. “I sold my soul to the Devil.”

Randy stood there on the family front porch, waiting for his daddy to wink at him so that he would know that what his father was saying was nothing more than a coal-mining joke.

Only Randy's daddy didn't wink. He just stood there in the candle-lit darkness of the family front stoop.

“I met him tonight on the Hawkins Crossroad,” Randy's daddy said. “He was standing there tall enough that I thought he was sitting on a ladder. A long man in a long black coat with a set of eyes that burned like a pair of lantern flies. He had the stink of brimstone about him and a fiddle cocked on his elbow and two or three imps playing at his coattails like a pack of frisky cats.”

“You met your own reflection,” Randy told his daddy. “You were seeing rum in your eye and nothing more.” This sounded good coming out of Randy's mouth, only the more that Randy's daddy talked, the more certain Randy felt that what his daddy was telling him was the Devil's own truth.

“He told me,” Randy's daddy said. “That Devil told me that he was going to bring a mine down on my head in order to steal my soul.”

Fooling the Fooler

The way Randy's daddy told it to him, Randy could see it all playing out like a dream. He saw that old Devil showing his daddy how the mine was going to heave up like it did with his daddy before him, how all that gas creeping in the mine's belly was going to rise up like the fluming gorge of a fat man overstuffed. Randy saw miners screaming and darkness coming down and the preacher standing over a row of empty coffins and Momma singing “Amazing Grace.”

How sweet the sound.

“But I fooled the old fooler himself,” Randy's daddy told him. “I struck a deal with him.”

“How did you do that?” Randy asked.

“The same as you'd deal with any man. I poked him in his vanity. I said an important man like the Devil ought not to work so hard for what could be bought easy. I told him he could have my soul outright if he'd strike me a bargain.”

Randy stared at his daddy's eyes—just as dark as a shadow falling on a coal-covered face—and he could see that his daddy was telling the truth.

“So what did you ask for?” Randy said, thinking of all the sell-your-soul stories that he had ever heard. “Did you ask him for money? Did you ask for women? Did you ask for drink?”

“I asked him for none of those things,” Randy's daddy said. “I asked him to help me dig.”

Randy shook his head in disbelief. “Daddy,” he said. “That makes about as much sense as a bucket full of hole.”

“Does it?” Randy's daddy said. “It doesn't matter. I've poked a silver needle in my finger and I've signed his paper in blood smack dab at the bottom of the page. You can work alone tomorrow. From now on I'll have all the help I need.”

Randy could see that there was no arguing with the man. So come the morning, Randy headed down the tunnel by himself and filled his coal cart just as best as he could. When Randy pushed the coal cart up to the mouth of the tunnel, he was surprised and amazed to see his daddy leaning on three carts crammed chock-full of the thickest slabs of coal imaginable.

By the end of the shift, Randy's daddy had hauled out over thirteen tons of coal—something like three or four men's work on a good day. Which made the company pretty happy.

By the end of the month, the boss man had begun tipping his hat at Randy's daddy instead of the other way around. And why not? Randy's daddy had paid off what he'd owed to the company store and had even begun putting some in the bank. Mind you, he still kept some in a little a pot under the bed, because Randy's daddy didn't trust a banker any farther than he could throw one.

And he still wouldn't let Randy work with him. So one fine morning, Randy stole after his daddy, keeping to the shadows as he followed him down the hole. What Randy saw down there nearly burned away his eyes.