Spectral Evidence

“So what happened?” Grace asked. “To Milton?”

“...Don’t know.”

And after we’d all taken a few minutes to digest that: “Well,” she couldn’t quite stop herself from saying. “You know that’s your fault, right?”

(Right.)

Once I was well enough to travel, my Dad finally left Overdeere again, taking me with him. We moved first to God’s Lips, then Barrie (ironically enough), then Mississauga, then Toronto proper. I graduated high school there, made Ontario Scholar, got into U of T. My grandmother was dead by that time, of course; she left everything to Dad, who left it in turn to me, as I only discovered after he had a fatal heart attack earlier this year.

I majored in History, with a minor in Library Sciences that I parlayed into my own personal line of research. Eventually, I stumbled upon the Connaught Trust, where the records that had eluded me thus far are kept. Which is how, years on, I learned the

truth behind the Dourvale Shore’s legendary reputation—about those three bloodlines of Overdeere which supposedly trace themselves back to Scotland, to the fairies, each family’s lineage weaving back and forth and in and out of the others’ like worms through a dead dog’s heart: the Druirs of Stane Hill, lofty and secret, plus their descendants the Sidderstanes, who lend their name to the Cannery, and own most of overdeere proper. Not to mention the poorest of all their many poor relations, the Redcappies.

Though few of this latter clan have ever been seen in town, they did once own a set of houses in Dourvale in 1935, before the development collapsed, leaving the village untenanted and derelict. And this also happens to be when the youngest Redcappie family member was a nine-year-old girl named Duille, which—in Scots Gaelic—means “Leaf.”

Old, old, her voice sighs through my head sometimes, at night, when I’m alone. Old, I am, and so strange. Like beer brewed in an eggshell.

But that’s not the whole of it, not yet.

Roughly a year after that Hallowe’en, two hunters tracking a downed duck found the hairy tip of a werewolf mask’s ear poking up out of the sod on Stane Hill. Their dog began to whine and dig at it, and as they struggled to pull him away, one hunter felt rather than heard a faint, erratic knocking from beneath their feet. Ten minutes of frenzied excavation later, they broke through a blister in the earth and uncovered a thin, dirty boy in a hockey sweater, his mask’s orifices clogged with dirt. When he finally stopped crying and screaming, he told them his name was Milton Recamier, and that he thought he’d been trapped down there for a few days. Maybe a week.

The authorities said he must have fallen into a Hell Hole and been trapped underground, but Milton claimed he’d been stuck inside the Hill itself, breathing its rock like air. Unsurprisingly, he quickly ended up in a mental institution, where he stayed until he changed his tune.

When we were both sixteen, I was visiting friends in God’s Lips when he suddenly walked up to me on the street. He looked ragged, literally and figuratively, with a weird sort of eczema at his temples that I later realized might have been the result of electroshock therapy.

“She told me to give this to you, if I saw you again,” he said, handing me a package.

“Who?”

“Leaf.”

It was an old paper bag, opening folded and scotch-taped to create a seal, and by the time I’d unwrapped it, he was already too far away to call after him, even if I’d been capable. Instead, I just looked down, frozen, my chest hot and hollow. Because what it held was—a knot of ribbon.

Green.

Trimmed in silver foil.

The kind my mother was wearing, the day she left.

—

I’d help you if I could, Nuala. For that you’re my friend. My one.

My only.

—

So little of that night I recall, still, at all. Shreds and patches.

Inside Leaf ’s relatives’ house—the Hill?—it was bright (dark), and hot (cold), full of figures (yes) in costume (no), adults and children (maybe), men and women (likewise); I remember shouldering my way through a crowd of whirling, laughing, dancing creatures, humming along and toe-tapping to music I thought I recognized somehow, even though I was equally sure I’d never heard it before. Milton was spun off, whirling away through the darkness, borne on the riotous tide; Leaf clutched me close and let him go, pulling me past reams of food spread out on tables, glistening and delicious-smelling, a feast for the ages. (But: Don’t eat any, Nuala, not one bite, I felt her say, right into my ear’s hiddenmost whorls, so they vibrated secretly. It will do you no good, if you ever wish to leave here.)

Milton, in the distance, was cramming his face with both hands. He looked like he enjoyed it, at the time, and whenever I think about it now, I really hope he did.

“Have to sit down,” I told her, indistinctly, to which she shook her head: “Nay, but keep on, I pray—slack not, ‘tis only a little way further. We’re almost through.”

Pulling me on, on, ever on, past men with horns and girls with tails, faces with two mouths, faces with none. Eyes and teeth and glittering scales, leaves and vines and fruit blooming straight from skin, crowns of candles lit like marsh-flame, guttering in the darkness. Past the flap of wings and the brachiating leap of things high above, hurling themselves back and forth as though from branch to branch in some massive, invisible copse of trees.

And then, suddenly, in the very midst of it all—a dark young man, blue-eyed and handsome, emerged full-blown, coming towards us through the crowd. Leaf tried her best to avoid him, but he eddied forward, blooming up between us with his arms crossed, frowning down. And I saw (thought I saw) that when he blinked, his lids—long-lashed, luxuriant, shadow-touched at their rims, as though lined with kohl—shut the wrong way ‘round entirely: not from the top, down, but from the bottom, up.