Chapter 46: Incursion
Three weeks from Halloween, I knew that sixty meters of water wasn’t enough anymore. The plunges (now aspiring to forty) were getting so easy that the others in my head were bugging me with their private thoughts like Mr. Bergman. Charlie Arnold Dermot kept submitting ‘maps’ of the external territory and there was talk of sending a larger group as spies, everyone with an opinion on the matter, though I was thinking more and more about The Stand these days and what had happened to the spies sent west from Boulder. If the internal allegory/metaphor/dreamscape had enough correspondence to reality to allow for fort construction, mining, theft and spying, it would probably allow for capture, imprisonment and torturing of spies.
I was very impressed by what my small town was up to every time I took a nap and visited, but I needed to exert myself harder and harder to keep my waking mind to myself. Any break was an invitation, an open suggestion box.
Another Greyhound bus ride then, still keeping on the right side of the Escarpment, to a deeper body of water farther north. If anyone was tracking me, from Toronto hospital middle-management or my own monstrous tribe, it was good to move occasionally anyway. For a long stretch of the ride from North Bay I was getting closer to Lake Huron’s ‘Spirit Island’, also known as Manitoulin Island, which Daphne Laframboise chattered much about, and the discomfort made me mutter and grin strangely, freaking out some of my fellow passengers in the ride. That ‘island on a lake in an island on a lake’ that Raven had riddled about was there, its influence reaching over the horizon and the waters to give first the sensation of needing to sneeze, then an electrical twitch on the closer side of my body.
But the bus eventually started move away from that hot core of white magic in the lake, farther and farther northwest, and I jumped the bus when it stopped at Nipigon, heading further north still on foot. I was wearing my silver-weighted clothing and hauling a single piece of waterproof luggage with spare clothes, my notes, my unconventional Bible to keep holy hunters confused, and my elderberry wrapped in a napkin inside a sunglasses holder.
Lake Nipigon: maximum death, 165 meters.
“Ah, look at you. So beautiful. So deep.” I couldn’t wait to get inside this bitch.
I watched the sunset on October 12 from Shakespeare Island in the new lake, which did not launch any cats from below to play and devour me. Peering down to where even my own eyesight failed on the swim from the mainland, I tried to cast out my flying head ESP, looking for any sign of trouble, any eyes in the dark that might open at any moment. There seemed to be nothing but fish. Lots of fish, perch and walleye and pike glaring up from below, hordes of bass in the shadows soundlessly gaping at me, so I had best watch out for the occasional dangling hook.
The island I had chosen for solitude was large and packed with caribou, an obvious blood source that I might risk sampling. A long-range sweep with the ESP (I could now do this while awake, though I needed to be sitting or lying down) found that even though I had most of the Niagara Escarpment to my east another barrier took over to wall off the south and extending west all the way out my remote vision range into Manitoba, forbidding orderly ‘flights’: I’d have to dig up some geology text (or euthanize a geologist) to work out what that one was supposed to be, because it wasn’t a river or a national boundary.
When my awareness flew back into my head, I had a family of caribou staring up at me from the western shore. None of them started channeling an indignant guardian. I decided to move deeper into the island before unpacking.
An unclouded moon lit my way down into the lake latter on, plodding over the young mud with bare feet and then deeper where patches of rock began. At Nipissing I had occasionally had flashes of shock at what I was doing, knowing that this was a justified nightmare scenario for any human – the darkness, the pressure, the lack of air, the potential locals, being naked to complete the terror of a dream. In Nipigon I felt harder, smoother, colder, and I belonged more. I could be the creepy thing looking up from the depths as a half-seen white face in a ghost story.
My echolocation took over when the trickling moonlight died away as I continued down an underwater ledge. This part of Nipigon was about as deep as Nipissing’s deepest, a fine place to start. This lake’s great size made it a challenge for my ears, which picked up splashing from all over the surface resonating back and forth. The background underwater hum would take some getting used to
Crouch, flex. I boomed to the surface, my body’s inner pressure punching out in every direction, and when I landed and flutter-kicked straight down, now feeling a python constrict around every part of my body as the pressure gradient reversed.
Things went well that first night until rep number 37. Not a particularly remarkable number, but that’s when the new problem came.
Someone was intruding into my head despite all my hard work – intruding with my own memories.
Remember that old girl who tricked you? She was fine above the neck but …
The four disappointed trombone notes followed. Nocome was stealing my own bits of humor, and she had waited until I was at the bottom of this lake, with all the weight pushing down on me.
And your dick? What did it do?
The sound a slide whistle going down, to accompany a wilting flower.
(get out get out get out)
I suddenly needed to breathe, more than ever. My chest was in a straitjacket three sizes too small. Knowing that I didn’t have to breathe was such an impotent bit of knowledge against this sudden certainty that I needed air.
My crouch was tense and panicky, not fluid and confident and coordinated. I felt brittle. I couldn’t do this. If I could just breathe! The tremors in my muscles were ruining my hearing, making everything buzz.
Remember that short-haired girl, you psyched yourself up and for about an hour you actually thought that you were going to try something, ask her out … and you were so scared because you knew it would fail and you’d have to see her every class afterward, over and over again, but you actually thought you’d try anyway! Ha ha! Don’t worry, it wore off, the will wilted like your prick, and you cried into that tomato soup!
The lake’s mud down here was so hard, but so sinister when it started to flow like quicksand. Suddenly it was up to my knees, my outstretched hands plunging into the muck. I couldn’t push off.
And let’s not forget Melody, and Kailee, and Anna, and Julie, and is the ground zero Catherine, or is it …
This was my hell, not the clean place of black glass where I could be comfortably alone forever; the black quicksand at the bottom of this abysmal lake, justifiably alone forever.
(Jerry Springer you are not the father)
My imploding mind was trying to do … something
(GROSS stands for Get Rid Of …)
I needed one, solid, double-fist of manness against this bitchy weakness.
(strong male role models … I’m hitting the bottom of the barrel here, kid)
My own mind was rolling its eyes at me as I started to die, telling me that it was doing its best but it hadn’t exactly been fed what was needed. I had hard-working, kind, compassionate
(pussy-whipped)
male role models, but none of them could stand up to their wives. I had men who agreed with their women and needed their women as role models.
(fuck this fuck all this I’LL JUST BE ALONE FOREVER THEN WHO NEEDS AN UNFUN CASTRATING HEN IN THEIR EAR I’LL JUST JERK OFF AND ALMOST NONE OF THEM ARE BETTER THAN PORN!!!)
Thus enlightened, I mashed my limbs down into the bedrock below the lake’s mud, cracking it and blasted myself upward, leaping from a spreading welt of shocked water on the surface. I was cracked and leaking St. Elmo’s fire in a half-dozen places, bewitching the night with a faint swimming figure that would be visible for many miles. And when I paddled to the shoreline and got dressed my eyes were burning bright red, as if I’d fed on that blood diamond – though my state of mind wouldn’t question why this was for several hours.
To fill in some final details: I hadn’t felt anything from ‘down below’ since becoming an undead thing. Our species doesn’t procreate that way anymore. I had found this slightly amusing, and combined with the loss of the Internet I was totally undistracted and bettering myself every night … so what the hell was all this about? It was like an adult regretting not having a toy as a toddler.
Well, a more important question had to be asked. I started with my intelligence man.
“Mister Bergmann,” I said creakily, touching the lakebed in the shallows and stumbling ashore. “I am going to need a … full report.” My voice was trembling with rage, and the despair behind that rage, because it seemed that all my inner preparations had done nothing.
“Sir, I completely understand your agitation.” Now Mr. Bergmann had zero fidgeting in his voice. He was flat, calm, his eyes two cold stones. This was not the man he had been in his last years or even decades – this was the man he had been in the 1980s, on the job, when something terrible had happened and answers were needed. “I will personally conduct the interrogations, and my select team of trustworthies will be inspecting the premises top to bottom.”
“Thank you,” I said, grinding my feet into the rock at the lake’s beach, staring out into the darkness over the waters.
I face-planted in the wet pebbles, plunging in to take an immediate look with my flying head.
It was as if an office full of employees had heard the door to the boss’s office slam open.
Chester, who still had most of the mind of a Jackson Terrier for all his transformation into a hulking Hoth monster, bounded up to me in steel tunnels of the inner sanctum of my mindscape, tail wagging, something dripping blood in his paws.
So the news wasn’t all bad – Nocome had lost a finger for her trouble. After meeting with Chester her path sneaking around was very easy to track, the line of blood droplets creeping through the sanctum tunnels, conspicuously around the Snuffleup pit by a wide margin, down into the plumber’s Venice network where she had crawled on the ceiling in darkness, then through the stacked living quarters outside the sanctum, where the news got worse.
“Daphne! Where is she?” Daniel Fairstein was the first one to notice, but it was soon a chant from all of them.
Everyone had locks and their doors, and peepholes, and screens in the wall for quick calls to their neighbours, but Nocome had beaten down Daphne Laframboise’s door as if were a thin board with a karate chop. I didn’t need Mr. Bergmann’s report to realize that the attempt at possessing me at the bottom of the lake had been a convincing distraction, that she had stuck around after and taken her true prize while everyone was getting lined up for questioning.
The perimeter’s barbed wire and sensor-laden walls and array of search lights and gun turrets had not been touched. My thinking had been too two-dimensional, though there was a small bit of hope in observing that Nocome hadn’t used raw power to surpass the toughest part of the defense; she had been obligated to make a catapult in the wilderness and launch herself inside with a parachute strapped to her back. It was a trick that would never work a second time, though the price of crossing that vulnerability off my list had been a very valuable soul.
Chapter 47: Iron and Thunder, Ice and Plastic
Image credits: Robin Ferand, Robin Ottawa, Ryan Hodnett