Wild Fell (29 page)

I reached for one of the silver candlesticks to swing at the glass, to shatter it and banish this creature forever by destroying her main portal into the world of the living.

But as I picked up the candlestick, the walls of the room trembled and shivered and I realized that I had been wrong about something else, as well—the walls were not coated with thick dust.

What I had at first taken for dust were thousands, perhaps millions, of tiny white moths. They clung to the wall, they clung to each other, three, six, nine layers deep. And now, disturbed by the movement and the sound of my voice, they began to stir.

Jamie, look into the mirror again, just one more time. Tell me whose reflection you see there. Look into the glass, Jamie. It will show you the shape of your true soul. And it will show you what else you’ve forgotten about who you are.

And I looked. God help me, I looked.

My face and body in the mirror had become the face and body of a woman of forty-five, a woman with a high, intelligent brow and eyes of the purest grey-green, the eyes of the portrait in the cellar. My long hair, chestnut brown now, was gathered in a loose knot behind my head, tendrils from which cascaded down the back of my neck. When I moved my hand across the glass, my hand moved there, too, with fingers that were long and white and slender.

“This is not real,” I cried, my voice now a high, light musical contralto. I pointed my finger at the woman in the mirror. She pointed back with a slender index finger. My voice, her voice—Rosa Blackmore’s voice—formed my words in the glass. “This is not my reflection. My name is Jameson Browning. I am a man, not a woman. You’re still lying, Amanda. You’re still hurting me.”

Her mouth—my mouth—formed a perfect oval of horror and agony as she—
I
—screamed and screamed. I tore at my—
her
—face with those lovely white hands with their fine sharp nails until the blood began to flow; the reflection in the mirror was that of a keening, raving madwoman staring into her mirror, watching her own sanity flow away like water while she wept and gibbered and bled.

My mother, Catherine Blackmore, always said you could tell a lady by her hands. On those hot days of my girlhood summers here on the island that bore our name, Mother said it while forcing my own hands into white lace gloves to ward off the sun as I played. Malcolm had never been forced to wear gloves.

Boys don’t have
to, Mother said.
They’re boys.

Even before my father’s vile, beastly depredations—depredations for which he paid with his life, at my hands and the hands of . . . certain
friends
of mine—the world had seemed woefully unfair
to me.
I hated the gloves and refused to wear them after I turned thirteen.

By that time, my mother was dead, and my father didn’t care if my hands were white, only that they were soft. But my hands
are
white and lovely, and they
are
soft.

In time, Jameson’s friend, the girl, Hank, will come to Blackmore Island. Her hands are not white, nor lovely, nor soft. Her hands are hard and rough, the hands of a man. She is possessed of a man’s soul. I can
smell
it on her. She will come to find him, of that I have no doubt. I will ensure it. I will visit her tonight in her dreams and I will give her such a taste of his death that she will make haste to reach Blackmore Island even before the sun rises, in fear of his life. She won’t find him, of course. No one will. But I will be waiting for her, here in my house. 

When I find her, I will flay her alive and peel that male soul of hers like a grape.

And if I find that her soul is sheltering and disguising my brother Malcolm, I will discover it and I will make him suffer for having trie
d to escape me through death.

I heard the sound of Jameson Browning’s harsh crying on the other side of the mirror—a clumsy, indelicate masculine braying that hurt my ears to listen. I put my hands to the side of my head to block out the sound. Men forget how to cry for the most part, don’t they? And when they
do
cry, the sound is hoarse and crude, undignified and difficult to listen to. Jameson may have had a woman’s voice when he wept, but I heard his own voice.

Still, I did feel a kind of pity for the body that was making the sound as it remembered and acknowledged whose soul it harboured, whose soul occupied it (whatever vanity it may have concocted about its own identity), and most of all, whose soul would now reclaim and recycle that body’s life-force, devour it, in fact, for regenerative sustenance.

My
sustenance, to be exact. I seeded his body with my soul while he slumbered in his mother’s womb; now was the harvesting time. In truth, I had and always would find my own soul’s corporeal host wherever she—or he—had been reborn.

Jamie,
I said, gazing at his rent face on the other side of the mirror,
it’s not
my
ghost story. It’s
our
ghost story.
We
are the ghost.

From this side of the glass, I opened my arms to him. From his side of the glass, the storm of moths surged off the walls, a dry white squall of wings and dust, erasing what was left of Jameson Browning’s light, carrying off all traces of him as he pitched forward into the mirror.

I said I wanted to tell you a ghost story. I said it wasn’t to be a ghost story like any ghost story you’d ever heard. I’d said it was
my
ghost story and that it was true.

Like any ghost story, it involved the bridges between the past and the present and who, or rather
what
, uses them to cross from the world of the living into the world of the dead. As I said earlier, time is, or ought to be, linear. Sometimes it’s anything
but
linear. Certainly it has never been linear to me, not in life, certainly not in death, nor any of the time afterward.

Which brings us back to ghosts. One ghost in particular: me.

As you may have surmised, I do not acknowledge time. I do not abide temporal borders. Life or death is all the same to me. I walk those bridges with ease now, and their guardians call me by my Christian name.

I will bring pain to anyone who trespasses here on my island and I will make the trespassers see and feel terrible things before they die. I am the queen of wasps and moths. I am the enslaver of lesser spirits. I am the authoress of agonies barely yet conceived.

I am Rosa Blackmore. I am eternal.

I live in your mirror. And I will always find you.

Wild Fell House

Blackmore Island

29
th
April, 1890

Although Wild Fell and Blackmore Island are fictional locales, as is the town of Alvina, it was inspired in part by The Corran, the nineteenth-century estate of Alexander MacNeil of Wiarton, Ontario, which lies in ruins in a forest on the outskirts of that town, on a cliff above Colpoys Bay. I visited the ruins in January of 2012 with a friend in order to get a sense of the locale, and how it might possibly play into the novel I was writing. I was able to take two or three quick pictures of the ruins before my camera shut down completely and I lost the use of my cellular phone. While I do not ascribe any supernatural influence to either of those two things, I was relieved that both the camera and the phone promptly resumed their proper functions when we left the site of the ruins and returned to town.

Once again, first and foremost, my deepest thanks to Sandra Kasturi and Brett Savory for their patient, respectful nurture of this, my second novel—an experience that reminded me once again why accolades continue to be showered upon ChiZine Publications, the finest dark fantasy publisher in the business. And special thanks to Michael Matheson, for reasons he knows well.

Thank you to the supremely gifted two-time Aurora Award-winning artist Erik Mohr for the elegant cover he designed for
Wild Fell
. And thanks to my friend, writer and essayist Stephen Michell, who once again lent me his time and skill as a researcher.

Thanks to Sam Hiyate and Kelvin Kong of The Rights Factory literary agency for their work on behalf of both
Wild Fell
and
Enter, Night
.

I will be forever indebted to my friend of more than twenty years, novelist David Nickle, who generously read early drafts of
Wild Fell
and offered not only insightful and concise thoughts on its structure, but also proved an unflagging and tireless cheerleader and supporter for both the book and its author during the course of its creation.

I’m grateful to the real Sean “Moose” Schwartz for agreeing to guest-star in the opening section of
Wild Fell
. I’m pleased to report that he’s still alive and kicking, and hasn’t fallen at the hands of any woman, alive or dead—but it’s early yet.

Again, I would like to acknowledge the support of the women of my writers’ group, the Bellefire Club: Sèphera Girón, Helen Marshall, Nancy Baker, Gemma Files, Halli Villegas and Sandra Kasturi. It’s astonishing how many spirits can be raised after gallons of Earl Grey tea, barrels of red wine, entire forests of paper, and meetings of gorgeously twisted minds.

Many thanks also to Denis Armellini and Jesse Skelton for listening to me babble about ghosts and missed deadlines on our daily dog walks; to Kaley O’Neill and Chuck Gyles for sharing their practical knowledge of certain technical events in the story; to my friend Julian Russell, the youngest reader of
Enter, Night
for his unvarnished enthusiasm for that book, enthusiasm which carried me through the writing of this book; to John Toewes and Chadwick Ginther and the staff of McNally Robinson in Winnipeg, my favourite indie bookstore in North America, for the kind of personal care and attention that novelists almost never receive any more in this day and age; to Eliezenai Galvao for once again keeping the home fires burning during the writing of a novel; to my boon companion of many journeys, Scott Bramble; to Steward Noack, my longtime muse, who always makes New York feel like home and who continues to inspire me on too many layers to list; and to Christopher Rice, whose unparalleled generosity, grace and kindness is a rare wonder to behold.

If I’ve missed anyone here, please feel free to give me a bang on the ear the next time you see me.

To my family, chosen and otherwise—my father Alan Rowe and my stepmother Sarah Doughty; Shaw Madson; the Bradbury-Kus family; the Gyles family; the Davidson-Hymers family; the Braun family; the Oliver family; Nancy and Jay Bowers; Barney Ellis-Perry; Christopher Wirth; and especially Ron Oliver—I’m so glad we’re on this journey together.

And lastly, my husband Brian McDermid—none of this would make any sense without everything the last thirty years has been for us, and I thank him most of all.

Michael Rowe was born in Ottawa and has lived in Beirut, Havana, Geneva and Paris.

An award-winning journalist and essayist, he is the author of several nonfiction books including
Other Men’s Sons
, winner of the 2008 Randy Shilts Award for Nonfiction. He is also the editor of four anthologies of original fiction including the Lambda Literary Award-winning
Queer Fear
anthologies. His political and cultural essays have appeared in numerous journals, magazines and reviews in Canada and the United States. His first novel,
Enter, Night
was a finalist for both the Sunburst Award and the Prix Aurora, and will be published in Germany by Random House in 2014.
Wild Fell
is his second novel. He is married and lives in Toronto, and welcomes readers at
www.michaelrowe.com
.

AUTHOR PHOTO: RAFY STILLS

Welcome to Parr’s Landing, Population 1,528 . . . and shrinking.

The year is 1972. Widowed Christina Parr, her daughter Morgan, and her brother-in-law Jeremy have returned to the remote northern Ontario mining town of Parr’s Landing, the place from which Christina fled before Morgan was born, seeking refuge. Dr. Billy Lightning has also returned in search of answers to the mystery of his father’s brutal murder. All will find some part of what they seek—and more.

Built on the site of a decimated 17th-century Jesuit mission to the Ojibwa, Parr’s Landing is a town with secrets of its own buried in the caves around Bradley Lake. A three-hundred-year-old horror slumbers there, calling out to the insane and the murderous for centuries, begging for release—an invitation that has finally been answered.

One man is following that voice, cutting a swath of violence across the country, bent on a terrible resurrection of the ancient evil, plunging the town and all its people into an endless night.

AVAILABLE NOW

978-1-92746-9-033