I brushed my teeth, went to bed, and slept till eleven, disturbed only briefly by Simon on his way out, wedging Clark into his clothes for that Saturday Social Situations course he was doing at the Trebas Institute, while the end credits of Thomas gave way to the title sequence of Star Trek: The Next Generation, with Clark doing his best Jean-Luc Picard imitation: “Stardate 24608.5. I am sending an away team down to the surface of planet Rigel Four, the Enterprise is filmed in Panavision.” What eventually woke me was my mom, her timing impeccable as ever, phoning about whether or not I knew if Clark was signed up for summer school yet (no, the Catholic School Board wouldn’t send confirmation until probably the week before, just like last year, and the year before), or if I wanted to bring him over to her place once the Institute dropped him off that afternoon. “Sure,” I told her, still sleep-stupid. “That’s, yeah—no problem. I can do that.”
“Are you all right, Lois?”
“I’m fine, Mom.”
“You don’t sound ‘fine.’”
“Had a migraine last night, that’s all. Took me a while to get to sleep.”
“Hmmm.” A beat, while I literally bit my tongue to keep from responding. Then: “That’s happening more often, isn’t it?”
“More often than what?”
“Lo
is, I know you know what I mean—you had one just last night, remember? Around this same time, actually.”
“Yeah, I know.”
“Well, even so; it’s not normal. Maybe you should see somebody.”
“Maybe,” I agreed. And hung up.
A shower and some coffee later, I was sitting in front of the computer tapping a pen, trying to rough out a plan of attack. If there really was any sort of link between Mrs. Whitcomb’s story and the footage Wrob had spliced into his film, then the easiest way to confirm that might be to go directly to the “source”—i.e. get in touch with the man himself, start a conversation, then drop hints hoping he’d simply admit it. So I accessed the Ursulines’ website and clicked on the phone number provided, straightening as it began to ring; raked my hair into place for the web-camera, grateful I’d at least had the sense to put on pants beforehand.
User is offline, F2F told me, eventually. Would you like to send a message?
“Yep,” I replied, out loud, and switched to voice-text: “Caught Untitled 13 last night, comma, my review should be up this afternoon, full stop. Would like to follow up with an interview, comma, are you interested, question mark? Please mail or call, comma, Lois Cairns.”
I waited for a few minutes after hitting SEND, just in case, then poured myself a cup of coffee and started Googling: Mrs. Whitcomb (wife of Arthur Macalla, artistic career, Spiritualism, disappearance, Balcarras’s Strange Tales, etc.), The Snake Queen’s Daughter (privately printed, one copy listed at the Toronto Public Reference Library, in the restricted-access stacks), the Wends or Wendish people (inhabitants of the now only German-speaking parts of what used to be the larger region of Old Lusatia, in Eastern Germany), Lady Midday . . .
Also known as Pscipolnitsa, Poludnica, Polednice, this Slavic noontime demon warns harvesters to pay attention to their duty or suffer the consequences. Generally pictured as a beautiful woman dressed all in white, she carries a pair of shears and roams the boundaries of the fields like a whirling dust cloud, attempting to engage labourers in conversation during the very hottest hour of the day. Any incorrect answer or unprompted subject change will result in a beheading, perhaps a symbolic representation of heatstroke. She may also appear as an old hag or twelve-year-old girl. Even today, the threat of encountering her is often used to scare children away from valuable crops.
In Wendish mythology, she is known as Mittagsfrau, “Lady Midday”; in Brandenburg, a related mythological spirit called the Roggenmuhme or “lady of the rye” makes ill-behaved children disappear on hot summer days, while in the Altmark the Regenmöhme—“with her heat”—who abducts kids foolish enough to distract their parents from their field-work. Around Lunenberg in Lower Saxony, the name of this bugbear is Kornwief or Kornwyf, meaning “woman of the corn.”
Sounded like the same person. There was an accompanying illustration that made me sit up a bit straighter, too: all-white bristling hair, sun-rayed in every direction; light-bleached face reduced to a pair of fixed, staring-owl eyes; a fiercely set mouth. Were those wings at her shoulders or a cloak blown out in two great flaps, scudding the cloudless sky? Everything had an odd Impressionist shimmer to it, like a haze; I could almost hear cicadas buzzing in unseen trees, smell the baked metal tang of sweat as the plough passed by, gleaners following behind. I shook my head then, sharply, a shiver of last night’s migraine wincing through my temples. And heard the chime of an F2F reply, appearing in my screen’s bottom left corner: yokay sounds good how bout tonite 6pm sneaky dees @ college/bathurst
“Can you make it seven question mark?”
will do txt when ur onsite byeeee
“Byeeeee to you too full stop,” I muttered, clicking voice-text off. Adding: “Asshole.”
“That’s . . . pretty similar,” Simon observed, looking at the four clips from Untitled 13 Wrob Barney had put up on his site and comparing them to my own transcription of “Lady Midday.” We’d agreed to meet for coffee earlier in the day, him heading over to get Clark from Mom’s, me with a good fifteen minutes before I really needed to hustle in order to get to Sneaky Dee’s on time; I planned to take a cab anyhow, rationalizing that twenty bucks we didn’t really have as a pretty good investment if you factored in the whole “might change my life” element.
“I know, right?” I took a sip of coffee. “It’s kind of uncanny.”
“In the truest sense, yeah. You have any evidence he actually read this story, though?”
“Nope. No evidence this supposed silent film footage isn’t really his work, either . . . but I do know Wrob Barney’s done it before and more than once—copied stuff from various sources just to stick it inside his own shit, like flavouring: Untitled 5, Untitled 7. He tends to go for stuff that’s out of copyright or porn, or both—stuff nobody’s exactly going to contest.”
“Seriously?”
I shrugged. “Sure. That’s how he lost his job at the National Film Archive—somebody walked in on him screening old films and videotaping them off the monitor to get a degenerated image, cutting in camera. Chris Coulby told me.”
Chris was a guy I’d gone to Figtree Alternative High School with, once upon a time; he’d graduated York University with a degree in Film Studies and Production, the way I’d originally planned before hedging my bets and going to Ryerson instead for Magazine Journalism. He and his fellow classmates had exploded out into the world during a recession and ended up going in very different directions—one formed a band, in which Chris briefly sang backup, before working reception and ticket sales at the NFA. He’d been my inside man ever since, never directly quotable yet the source of much information.
Simon sat back. “Okay, sounds legit. So what next?”