Spectral Evidence

A week later, we were setting up in my grandmother’s spare room, where the air stung with dust and the furniture hadn’t been updated since 1973. Its single window looked straight out into the top sections of a British-style boundary-setting hedgerow whose roots her own grandfather supposedly laid, but which had been left to grow wild since the Korean War. Before that, however, the old man had done his work well—the fruit of his labours grew ten feet high and three feet deep, forming a close-knit lattice of stick-bone bars in winter, a mulch-fed mini-forest every other time of year. What light seeped through was green, and when you stood right next to it, your hands and face turned pallid, bruisy, veins gone suddenly delicate under leaf-thin skin. The shadows it cast made you look as though your blood had turned to chlorophyll.

“Best to stay out of the woods, kiddo,” Dad told me, that first day. “It’s an obstacle course back there—deadfalls everywhere. A kid I knew growing up fell down a crevasse once, broke his leg, didn’t get found for almost a week. Never was right in the head, after that.”

“Don’t forget the Hell Holes,” my grandmother called, from the kitchen.

“Yeah, that’s right.” To me: “There’s Hell Holes, too—sudden falls, straight down, nobody even knows how deep. The limestone forms bubbles, just gives way underfoot.”

“It’s because of the swamps. That’s where the sulphur gas comes from, too.”

“Hydrogen sulfide, Mom. It just smells like sulphur.”

“Same difference! That stuff ’ll knock you out, and it catches on fire, you aren’t careful. So no mucking ‘round with matches!”

“She’s not gonna do that, Mom. You’re not gonna do that, honey, are you?”

“No, Dad,” I lied.

—

It was hard to find a way under the hedge, but I finally managed it. I had to dig around at the bottom, where the stakes holding the ethers in place had started to break down, ‘til I found a place so damaged by underground digging, frost and blight that a pathway large enough to crawl through had opened up. It was narrower than me, but I wriggled through, like a worm—emerged on the other side covered in juice-stains and dirt, with cobwebs in my hair and bugs down the neck of my sweater. When I slid it off to scrub my face, a grasshopper fell out, still kicking.

Beyond, the woods began in progress, with no clear line of demarcation. You just looked up, and there they were; there you were, more to the point. Where the trees came in so close they shut out the sky, ferns gr

ew so deep you couldn’t see where to step, and every weed you brushed past left part of itself behind—clinging, scratching, stinging. The only way out was up, through the underbrush, the terrain getting steeper until weeds gave way to moss and the hill beneath emerged: a massive, pinky-grey blister of granite scored with hand-deep gouges where fresh acorns collected, cushioned on a rotten mush of old ones.

When I got up high enough, the rock flattened out, forming a little shelf, maybe three feet by six. And on that shelf I found an equally tiny camp-table centre-set, haphazardly nailed together from wood, stripped grey by weather. The hill went up behind it, so slant it formed a sort of seat, so I plumped myself down and looked at the table-top, where a word had been carved, in strangely beautiful script: SARACEN.

“That’s my cousin’s name,” a voice said from behind me.

Another little girl had come up, so silently I’d never heard her. She was literally leaning out of the brush above, hanging in over my shoulder, so close I couldn’t even jump; denied room to react, my heart just gave a little knock, and I looked at her, swallowing.

“Oh?” I managed, finally. “Uh...that’s cool. I never heard of a guy named Sara...”

She corrected me: “Saracen, his name is. They’re folk from away, unbelievers in Turkish climes, on the other side of the world. My mother says his mother liked the sound of it, when she was carrying.” She peered down at the carving with interest. “Must be he played here too, once, though I can barely credit it.”

“They live nearby, your family?”

“All around. We’re many, hereabouts.”

“We just moved here. Well, Dad and me.”

“Aye, I ken. You’re Jess Nuttall’s boy’s girl.”

“My name’s Nuala. What’s yours?”

“They call me Leaf.”

She had a high, hoarse voice, not much wind to it, and rough, though that might have been the rhythm of her speech. I was too young to know her accent—it all just seemed strange to me, foreign somehow, with no clear idea beyond that. Years later, it occurred to me that she sounded as though she’d learned English from someone with a thick Scots burr, but spoke it with most of a North Ontarian honk, aside from certain differences of pronunciation.

“How old are you?” I asked. “I’m nine.”

She struck a theatrical pose and told me, deadpan: “Oh, I am old, old. I have seen five forests come and go, but never before have I seen beer brewed in an eggshell.”

I goggled at her. “You’re kidding, right?” And she laughed, high and sweet, a child’s laugh like any other, save how I immediately wanted to hear it again.

“Cert,” she said. “I’m...kidding, only. I have nine years as well, myself.”

Looking back, I can see that she said the word “kidding” as though she’d never heard it before, but liked it. It made her grin, wide, which in turn showed how charmingly gappy her teeth all were, not to mention larger than you’d expect given her size. So much so that when she put her jaws back together, I swear I saw her bottom canines slightly dent her upper lip.