We Will All Go Down Together (3 page)

I shrugged. “Good? Bad?”

“Neither.” Then: “Unlikely, is all.”

And I was feeling not a lot of pain right at that moment—that Captain Jack they’re testing at Joe’s right now (with the two types of rum, the brown sugar and the fresh-shaved ginger) is
strong
, yo—so I found myself suggesting/joking that it must’ve been me she’d come to see, not him. ’Cause obviously she’d heard I was the shit in this town, or maybe just shit in this town, depending on who she’d talked to . . . but he didn’t find that even partway as funny as I did, truth to tell. Just nodded and said:

“I wondered where you might have heard that first song, hen.”

“Looked it up. Why?”

“At the Connaught Trust, yeah? But they’ve not got that version of it on record, I ken; Torrance wrote that one himself, later. In hospital.”

“Say what?”

So he launches into this big family story about Torrance Sidderstane, the Ontario Ballads, the family’s holdings up in and around Overdeere. How Torrance was a rich guy who wanted to be a poet, but he was all tapped out creatively by the time he was thirty, so he had to fall back on the old canning factory and got into tracing his family tree. Traced it all the way back to Scotland, to some bunch of his great-grandmother’s relatives who got caught up in the fallout from King James the Sixth (the stammering gay guy, Shakespeare wrote
Macbeth
for him) and his obsession with witches—but here it got loud again; couldn’t tell if he was saying they weren’t really witches or they
were
, or maybe just
some
of them were, and some of them were some other thing entirely.

But there’s where this cousin of his comes in, or from: because she has the same name as them, and this time I heard at least the last part of it fairly well . . . something like Drawer, or Drear. Or—

“D. R. U. I. R,” Ganconer spelled out, patiently. “That’s
Druir
.”

“Like Dourvale?”

“The very same. My cousins live thereabouts, from time to time. But they’re fell folk, and none too fond.”

“Of what?’

“Of any but their own, their true own; I’m only—” and did he really say “made,” like a freakin’ Mafioso, or was that just the rum talking? “—not bred, so I’m no real kin to any of them. You they’d value, though, yeah? For they do long to be sung of; always have. It’s how they know they’re still here.”

Yeah: pretty strange subject matter for a mid-date rap in general, as ever. Still, it didn’t stop me going back to Mister How’s with him, did it? Or doing the “fuck YOU buddy, I’m outta here” nasty with him on the rug, either, before packing up what little of my already painfully small store of possessions could fit inside a taxi, then cutting and running while the running was good.

Which is probably not the best sort of info-dump to enshrine on my public blog, but that’s why I’m disabling my Comments on this entry, so there you are; I’m posting drunk yet again, by the light of my laptop, so Mom and Kevin don’t have to be bothered by evidence of my well-soused nocturnal activity seeping out under the door. And only now wondering how I ever ended up so closely “involved” with somebody—involved enough to fuck them and take their money, anyhow—I’ve known for such a short time, somebody I know so amazingly little about, in the first place.

Because sometimes, in much the same way it occasionally occurs to me to wonder how the hell I can recall everything he says to me so clearly (I couldn’t quote Josh like that, and I’ve spent
hours
talking to Josh; too many, probably), I can’t help but remember that for all intents and purposes, Ganconer Sidderstane is some guy I met on the street. Some sexy guy, yes; some mysterious guy, some smart guy, some guy who loves the way I sing, some guy who’s been there for me, thus far . . . but in the end,
some guy
, who I now know Biblically yet do not know well, by normal person standards. Not even a teeny, tiny bit.

I mean, sure, he’s got charm and all—but Ted Bundy was fairly charming too, at least when you first met him. And Bundy never told rambling yarns linking his relatives to

Just a minute, I’ll be right back. There’s some sort of noise coming from upstairs.

[
Addendum A—Google search log for 5/09/2004, reconstituted from Galit Michaels’ bookmarks:

September 5, 2004

They let Kevin out of the hospital today. I’m almost not sure what to think about that, but I do think I won’t be home for a while, even if it disappoints Mom. I think I know enough now to stay away from both of them, along with anybody else I care about.

When I came up the stairs, there was a hand, and it was touching the back of Kevin’s neck. Just resting there, palm-down, not even stroking, not even anything. Just

And he had this look, like he was going to fall asleep. Like he was going to puke. Like he was asleep already. Like he was drowning. And the hand

I can see it right now: long white fingers, no rings, no distinguishing marks, not even fingernails, like the top and bottom of each finger looked exactly the same, like neither of them even had any fingerprints. And it was glowing just a bit, ever so slightly, so slim I could see the veins under the skin, the bones just under the surface, all lit up: a sick light, a phosphorescence, unnatural/impossible, like something from deep under the sea, utterly out of its element. But worse—like those veins, those bones, themselves, were the things that glowed.

It was sticking out of the wall, plaster lapped to its wrist, a sleeve. And behind it, I saw this impression of something further underneath: an arm, a shoulder, faint red smudge of hair hanging down. Faint gleam of teeth, the wall like a gauze curtain, everything reduced to scribble or implication, or

I don’t

It looked up, and it saw me, and it smiled. Like it
knew
me. Like it knew me by sight.

And because it saw me, it pulled its hand back in. Because it saw me, it let him go.

And because he was standing at the top of the stairs when it did that, he fell.

And I think it’s all my fault. Somehow. I don’t really know why, but I

No, that’s bullshit. It is. I
know
it is.

And I know
exactly
why.

September 7, 2004

You’ll notice I’m not really specifying music anymore, which isn’t like me, and sort of depressing, too. But perhaps it’s all for the best.

So I called Josh, which was fun. Asked him if I could borrow his car for a bit, considering it’s in storage, and he never renewed his driver’s licence anyway. Turns out, he was also at Joe’s on the 2
nd
; wanted to know why I needed it, what was going on with me, who was that guy. I just asked him if he’d actually meant it when he said “anything you want, I’ll do it for you, Galit,” or whether that (too) had been total bullshit.

Surprisingly enough, he didn’t hang up on me, and I now have a ride for the weekend.

Spent far more time than I should have online again today, meanwhile—pretty much all of it, actually. Hung around in Internet cafés all up and down Yonge Street, maybe two hours tops in each of them, playing a little
Myst
here and there in between surfing for lore . . . reading haiku-like snatches of story about people like Elidurus the monk, who mourned all his life over how his own ignorant treachery (he stole a golden ball, to prove where he’d been) left him forever locked out of the fairy hill he spent half his childhood inside, a “country full of delights and sports.” Or John Roy, the Highlands farmer who swapped his hat for a stolen British lady by throwing it into a passing swarm of fairies, crying: “Yours be mine and mine be yours!” Or how the best time to enter a
brugh
, a fairy hill, is apparently either at twilight, midnight, the hour just before dawn or high noon . . . pretty much anytime, in other words. Whenever you—or they, the “people” inside said hill—happen to feel like it.

More things I’ve since learned, in no particular order:

Torrance Sidderstane did die in a hospital, just like Ganconer said. It was a mental hospital. People said he’d killed his first wife, who came from Scotland; she stayed at their place in Overdeere. Nobody’s still alive who remembers ever seeing her. They used to go walking together a lot, up near the Lake of the North. In 1907, he bought some property “on the other side of the Lake”—nothing more exact—which nobody ever seems to have mapped, submitting papers to have it renamed “Dourvale.” Dourvale was the name the Druir family gave their ancestral seat on the Scots/British border, a valley people said you’d never be able to find if they didn’t want you to.

The last leader of the Druir family was Lady Glauce, prn. “GlOWzah.” She outlived her husband, Enzembler, who was executed under Queen Elizabeth the First, and acted as regent for their son Minion during his infancy. There were rumours that she brought Enzembler’s head home in a pomander bag, along with his body. After the Druirs were accused of being part of the Five-Family Coven, there were also rumours that other participants had seen Enzembler sitting next to her at the Sabbat, wearing the sort of ruff that was currently fashionable at King James’ court—the kind that looks like a big, starched platter. The kind that’d sure as hell keep your head on straight, if you were afraid of losing it.

Nobody ever knew where Glauce came from, what her family name was, nothing; Enzembler brought her home after a long trip into the wilds of Dourvale, and her dowry was some sort of meteorite, or something, a “stane,” sometimes described as large enough to lie down on, or small enough to wear around your neck. The Druirs called it their luck. People said it helped them disappear when James’ witchfinders finally came for them. The only one left after that was Glauce’s second daughter Grisell, who married into the Rokes, and the Rokes fought James in court and won. Of the other “five families,” the Rusks, Devizes, and Glouwers were almost decimated by “fire and fees,” because in Scotland, they charged your relatives the cost of torturing and burning you. They were also the only three families with no noble blood.

Torrance died of TB, consumption, the “wasting disease.” People used to say you got it from falling under the influence of fairies. And that I find I can sort of actually believe, now. Or start to, anyway.

Because they’re not Tinkerbell. They’re not nice.
They’re no’ the same as you nor I, hen.

Oh Jesus fuck. Fuck.

All I ever wanted was a song to sing.

September 8, 2004

Last night, crashing at Fiona’s, I dreamed I was in bed with Ganconer:
his
bed, not mine, I somehow knew, not that I’ve ever seen the inside of where he lives, or anything. It was cold and damp, and the sheets were leathery and soft at once, like a split milkweed pod; I didn’t have to look around to know we must be someplace dark, someplace small and close, where everything smelled like sour apples just this side of ripe, already edging towards decay. And he just held me and looked down at me, his eyes suddenly so grey-brown they didn’t have even a trace of shine left in them—brown and grey and remote, like dusty pennies, and it made my stomach clench. Because I couldn’t see anything I recognized in him at all.

He asked me if I wanted him to teach me a new song, and I said no, I liked the one I already had. He asked me if I knew there was a third version of it, and I said there wasn’t—there couldn’t be. I mean, I’d been down to the Trust, I’d done all the right research, done my homework. I’d seen those files for myself, goddamnit.

And he just kept holding me, not smiling. Replying: “Well, but there would be, hen. If you wrote one.”

So I woke up, struggling, shuddering, with that
smell
still all around me, everywhere, in the air. My eyes itching and burning like I’d rubbed them in the only thing I’m allergic to: leaf and wood mould, the kind you only find out in the forest, not downtown fucking Toronto. My back all running with sweat, shirt stuck to me when I stood up, and I saw, I saw

By the door, down the hall, in the light leaking out of the bathroom, that feeble little wash of vanity-bulb glare, oh shit, oh Christ

I saw that same face looking out at me from under the wall’s colour-drained Magritte paper, red hair hanging, teeth bright, grin sly. Saw it catch me looking and then eddy away, back into I don’t even know where.

And that’s when I finally knew, like I know now, how it is. How it’s going to be.

Because Fiona was still asleep, okay? Like maybe ten feet away. I could hear her and the baby snoring, in unison; couldn’t’ve told you which one was which if I’d tried, not even if you’d put a gun to my head, or theirs.

So I just got up and left, as quietly as I possibly could, and I came here. And I waited for the sun to come up.

Now it’s four hours and a couple of big lattes later, and here’s an open letter to whoever’s listening: if anybody wants me, you don’t have to come looking anymore, okay? Give me three days by the map, I’ll already be in Overdeere. I swear.

Then, I’ll come to you.

[
Addendum B—Partial ICQ chat record for 1:15 AM to 1:29 AM, 07/09/2004, pasted and saved to a text-file (Ganconer1) on Galit Michaels’ hard drive:

TamLin