The 'Geisters

THE TRICASTA EXPERIMENT

She had fallen in with a bad crowd in junior high school. That was how Ann’s mother would put it. Ann didn’t agree. They weren’t bad, really. Just odd.

There were five of them—three boys: Luke, Ryan and Bruce. The girls: Courtney and Leah. They were all in the gifted program, like Ann, and they were all underachievers, like Ann.

They were, as Ann’s father put it one night over dinner at the Lake House, slaves to the dice. Philip thought that was a good joke, and in Ann’s defence, told both their parents that the pastime was “a better form of birth control than the Pill.” But that didn’t get much of a laugh. Their mother quietly pointed out that spending time drawing up mazes populated with monsters and devils was walking a bit too close to the line for a girl with Ann’s history.

“Whatever,” said Ann, swirling her mashed potatoes into a little crater for the melting butter. “It’s just a game.”

“It’s like a religion,” said her mother. “It’s got its own bible.”

“Bibles,” said Ann. “And not even. They’re just rules.”

They were borrowed rules, then. There was the Player’s Handbook, which taught the novice adventurer everything she needed to know about making a character, be it thief or fighter or cleric or magic-user; the Dungeon Master’s Guide, which got into the architecture of making up imaginary continents, and the tombs and caverns and fortresses that riddled their mantle; and the Monster Manual, which told you everything you needed to know about the devils and monsters that dwelt inside.

Ryan loaned them to her after she promised not to (a) write in them, (b) tear them, or (c) spill anything on them. They were stupidly expensive—the whole set came up to nearly $100—and you couldn’t do without them, running a long-game, in-depth Dungeons & Dragons campaign like Ryan’s.

Ryan was in Grade Nine—in just a few months, he’d graduate on to the district high school. But he’d been running his campaign, on an island called Tareth, since Grade Seven. The island was a geographical jumble that intentionally or not, resembled a face; thick jungles hugged the southern coast like a beard, cut off by the arid plateau of the Sun’s Anvil, that rimmed the southern third of the island in a jack-o-lantern smile topped by a range of mountains that Leah kept calling the Mustachio of Death, for obvious reasons, but Ryan maintained were known as the Grim Spires.

A great freshwater lake might have made a nose, although it was further to the east than the west, and the towns that dotted the northern coast and followed the three rivers that drained from lake to sea did not make for eyes. But the Sun’s Anvil still grinned.

Ann wanted to make her own continent, her own campaign. She had begun work on it while she was still exploring the jungle temples of Ith, looking for a fabled jewel known only as the Fisherman’s Lure, along with Leah and Courtney—a sort of audition session that Ryan ran in the cafeteria back in September. Ann’s continent looked more like Italy—she thought it might fit in just a few hundred kilometres to the west of Tareth, across a treacherous ocean filled with sharks and reefs and kraken. It would join to a larger land mass to the northwest that was omnipresent but effectively unreachable, fenced off by swampland and foothills and a Great Wall. The wall was her big brother’s idea. Philip was nearly finished high school and had been studying Chinese history, and was of the view that every ancient Dungeons & Dragons world needed at least one Great Wall.

He helped Ann with some of the geography, too—made sure that the terrain was realistic enough nothing could be mistaken for a happy face, and helped her come up with names for her towns and lakes and rivers that didn’t immediately suggest the B side of a heavy metal album.

“You can still have monsters crawling through a burial cairn that’s just called the Cairn of Saint Lucius,” he said. “Not every cave has to have ‘Fang’ in its name.”

They came up with a decadent former imperial hub, based loosely on Rome, that still ruled the place even though it had gone monotheistic in the past hundred years. They named it Tricasta, because the city was divided into three districts which cast out from a central fountain, fed by a trapped water elemental spirit. Her name, Ann decided, was Casta.

Philip quietly suggested that was a pretty cheesy way to name a city, but he couldn’t come up with anything better. He was finishing his senior year, and had his hands full: playing basketball at the Varsity level, maintaining better than average grades, and managing a teen romance of considerable tempest with Laurie Weston, nearly a year younger than he, the middle child in a family of five boys, two of whom were teammates of his. It was complicated.

Ann disliked Phys. Ed., was bored by basketball even from the point of view of a spectator, and while she was fond of Ryan, she did not think she would like to date her dungeon master just as a rule. And her grades? They were as unspectacular as her generally uncomplicated life.

Ann liked it that way. Philip could play at sports and excel at calculus and explore and agonize over the body and mind of the mercurial Laurie West. Ann had other priorities.

With geography and ecology established, Ann busied herself with the care and feeding of the Empire of the Eternal Fountain.

As Leah drily observed just before Christmas, the empire was fed with the blood of their player characters.

“Seriously, Ann, you are one murderous dungeon master.” The root beer in Leah’s glass foamed to within a millimetre of the top before she stopped pouring. The plastic bottle made a clicking sound as she set it down beside her now-redundant character sheet.

“You guys do it to yourselves,” Ann replied. “If Halgreth wanted to live, he could have had a long career as a castrato in the Cathedral of Tears.”

“She’s right,” said Ryan. “The Archbishop did make the offer before we rescued you. All you had to do was say thanks but no, I like it here.”

“Don’t be such a dick,” said Leah.

And Ann said, “That’s what the Archbishop said,” and that cracked them all up.

They were at the Lake House that day, in the basement rec room where Ann had set up the game table. It was not the full crew; just the girls, Ryan, and Ann. Luke and Bruce, skeptics to the end, had other things to do than play in Ann’s girly little campaign.

It was Saturday—the Christmas break was just thirty hours old—and Ann was hosting the day’s game, which was scheduled to go for another five hours before their rides showed up to end it all. Leah would, in practical terms, be in for a long wait; the party was exploring a network of caverns underneath the Coliseum of Dusk, in a deep valley some fifty leagues south of Tricasta. The entrance had collapsed behind them, so there was no easy exit—and as poor dead Halgreth was the party’s only cleric… there was no one in practical earshot who could be prevailed upon to cast a resurrection spell and bring him back.

So there would be nothing for it. Leah would have to sit on the sidelines, watching as the party lashed her eviscerated corpse to a makeshift litter, and rolling up a new character or three while the rest of them fought their way through the Corridor of Bones, swam an underground river and battled the Arch-Liche of the Games in his inverted tower that clung stalactite-like above the nearly bottomless Cavern of Souls.

No two ways about it. It sucked to be her.

“Let’s take a break,” said Courtney. “Out of respect, you know, for the dead.” She patted Leah’s hand.

Ryan shrugged. “I gotta take a wizz anyway.” He pushed the chair out from the table and headed upstairs.

“Yeah, don’t take all day,” said Ann.

“Just enough time to figure out a strategy to survive this fuckin’ death march.” He grabbed his copy of the Dungeon Master’s Guide as he passed Ann, and Ann took it back, then covered the maps behind her screen.

“Easy cowboy,” she said.

“Yippee kai-yay, motherfucker,” said Ryan, and Courtney cracked up.

Ann grinned and leaned over her notes, thinking about some of the things she’d have to change in the dungeon now that Halgreth had bought it. If the party lost one more member, they’d be wiped out by the Arch-Liche and its army. She considered for a moment whether to cross out the Balrog she’d set to guard the Gossamer Bridge—to give them a sporting chance. She was literally poised to do that when Courtney piped in with a suggestion.

“You know,” she said, as Leah hunched adding up the Wisdom points on the dice she’d just rolled, “when Ryan was running his Tareth campaign, shit like this didn’t happen.”

Balrog’s in, thought Ann, but what she said was, “You want me to go a little easier on you, sister?”

“Not easier, exactly. But… remember in Tareth when we got into the treasury?”

Leah sat up, and nodded. “Yeah, Ann—that was where you picked up that sweet Bag of Holding. And the Vorpal Blade.”

“And that invisibility ring,” said Courtney. “I didn’t hear you complaining it wasn’t tough enough then.”

Ann nodded at Leah. “You got another cleric there?”

She shook her head. “Wisdom’s just 11. Won’t make the cut.”

“Re-roll it,” said Ann.

“The whole character?”

“Just the stat,” she said. “If it’s lower than 11, keep the first roll. Otherwise…”

“You want me to make another cleric?”

“You’re going to need one where you’re going,” she said. “Don’t worry—I’ll find a place to introduce him, before you get there.”

Leah nodded and rolled again. “Seventeen!” she crowed, and Ann nodded.

“Take better care of this one,” she said.

Ann shut her binder with all the notes for the dungeon and got up.

“Where you going?” asked Courtney.

“Going to pee,” she said, and headed for the stairs out of the basement. “You guys want anything from the kitchen while I’m up there?”

“Nah,” said Courtney, and Leah rubbed her arms.

“Maybe crank up the heat in here,” she said. “I’m starting to freeze.”

Leah was right. It was freezing, outside and in. The sky was clear and blue, and the air was still, but as Ann walked past the French doors to the deck, she could see frost starting to rim the glass. It was too early for the lake to have frozen over—that didn’t usually happen until mid-January—and looking out, she could see little eddies of the sharp wind crossing the middle of it. She flipped the light on in the kitchen—the brightness outside made the interior of the place greyer by definition, somehow lonelier.

Her parents had taken the car into Toronto for some last-minute Christmas shopping, and Philip was over at Laurie’s place for the day. Ann and her friends had the place to themselves.

She didn’t really have to pee. She figured she could squeeze one out if pressed on the matter. But yeah… she was hoping to run into Ryan. She had no time for Leah’s dramatics, and she wanted to confer, dungeon master to dungeon master, on the best way to deal with a troublesome player. She figured she’d catch him on his way out of the little powder room in the hall between kitchen and living room.

She flipped on the hall light, and waited outside the door for a moment. Bounced back and forth on her feet once, then tapped on the door.

“Hey Ry, you okay in there? You—oh.”

There was no light coming from under the door. She opened it, and sure enough—the little two-piece was empty. And cold. She could see her breath as she leaned inside. The room had been shut up all morning.

“Ryan?” Ann shut the door and headed into the living room. It was dark too, nothing but the reflection of the kitchen light in the screen of her dad’s rear projection TV. Ann stopped at the base of the stairs to adjust the thermostat. She put it to 24 degrees, and flicked the side of it with her thumb, as though that might kick-start it.

Light filtered down through the slats on the bannister. That was it, then. Ryan had used the upstairs bathroom, with the Jacuzzi tub and the full-length mirrors, and all her mom’s New Yorkers—or her “hometown papers” as she called them.

Ann started up the stairs. She stopped at the first landing, wondering for a moment—would Ryan think it was weird if she followed him all the way upstairs to the big bathroom, when the powder room was right there? Would he think she was following him? That she liked him?

But he had been up there awhile. She might be just going up to see if he was all right.

“Sure,” she murmured, and climbed to the second floor. The bathroom door was wide open, but it was dark in there too. The light, such as it was, was coming from around the corner of the hall.

Her room.

Ann rubbed gooseflesh down on her forearms. She didn’t call out his name this time, just padded along the hallway, stepping over the board that squeaked, and turned the corner. The door was half-open. Ryan was sitting on her bed, facing away from her. She needn’t have been so stealthy. He was wearing her headphones, so oblivious that he just about jumped out of his skin when she grabbed his shoulder with one hand and yanked off the phones with the other.

“Shit!”

“What the hell?”

“I’m sorry!” Ryan sat bolt upright, his eyes wide. The headphones were in his lap, hissing with the noise from the machine beside her bed. “Shit, Ann, I’m sorry. I was—”

“You were snooping around in my room!” said Ann. “I can’t believe it!”

Ryan blinked fast and slid off the bed so he was standing, facing away from her, toward the window in Ann’s room.

“Look—I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have been in here.”

For just another second, Ann felt like she could hit Ryan, like that was going to be the only thing for it. But the mood passed. He was really sorry. His head hung low enough that his jaw touched his chest, and his eyes, normally wide and brown, were crinkled with what seemed like genuine regret, sincere apology.

“You didn’t go through my drawers, did you?” Ann had heard about boys stealing girls’ underwear. Evidently so had Ryan; he shook his head emphatically.

“Look, I’m really sorry. I was just walking by, and saw the cool old tape deck.”

“Ah. The machine.”

“Yeah. No one uses tapes anymore. I wanted to see what you had.”

“Yeah, it’s not that kind of tape deck,” said Ann. The tape deck was an old Emerson model, with two cassette player-recorders. It was sitting on top of a broken digital tuner that wouldn’t pick up the radio but amplified the tape through the headphones. It had been at Ann’s bedside for years.

“You’re telling me. That’s some weird stuff on it.”

“You were listening to my tape,” she said, and immediately felt stupid. She had, after all, caught him listening to her tape. But saying it felt creepy; he might as well have been going through her drawers, stuffing underpants into his pockets.

“What is it? It sounds like hypnotherapy or something.”

“How do you know what hypnotherapy is?”

“My Aunt Eva is into all that stuff,” he said. “She’s a little nuts for it. Your parents make you do that too?”

Ann sat down on the bed, picked up the headphones. She held it to her ear for a second: a sound like the ocean; the voice of Dr. Sunderland, counting up the alphabet. She set them down and pressed the stop button; the machinery clicked and the ocean stopped.

“It’s just something I do,” she said. “You won’t tell anyone, will you?”

Ryan shrugged. “Why would I?”

“I dunno. You could tell everybody I was a bed-wetter and needed hypnotherapy…”

“You a bed-wetter?”

Ann made a show of sniffing. “Not last night,” she said, and Ryan, laughing, said “Good one.”

She nodded, face hung in a half-grin, and Ryan sat down on the bed beside her. The room was east-facing, so the afternoon light left the room grey and shadowy as the rest of the house. In certain lights, the bare walls were a light pink; the uncluttered floor a deep cherry. An old clock radio blinked 4:56 on the otherwise clear dresser top.

“Love what you’ve done with the place,” said Ryan.

“I don’t need a lot of stuff,” said Ann. She felt like she was apologizing.

“Well it’s not because your dad’s poor,” said Ryan. He looked at her. “What’s that tape for?”

“It’s, um…”

Ryan waited a moment. “Don’t feel bad,” he finally said. “Aunt Eva has a whole handbag full of cassettes. And crystals, too. Every time she comes over, she’s exorcising the evil spirits and opening up the gateways to the divine. Nothing you can tell me will surprise me.”

“When I was younger,” said Ann finally, “we had… some problems. The tapes help with that. I’m supposed to listen to them every night as I go to sleep.”

Ryan nodded sagely. “So it is bed-wetting.” Ann punched him in the arm and told him to shut up.

“All right,” she said finally. “You want to know?”

“I’m asking.”

She leaned close to him and whispered: “I used to be possessed by the Devil. Things would fly around the house. Knives. Nail guns.” She grabbed his arm, hard. “Axes,” she said aloud, and made a chk-kk! sound at the back of her throat—like an axe might make, embedding itself in a skull. “That’s why I can’t have any axes or other sharp things in the room.”

“Yeah, right.”

“No foolin’,” said Ann.

“Well whatever gets you through the night,” he said. “I hope this guy didn’t charge you too much for it, though.”

“Don’t know how much, don’t care.”

“Yeah, your dad’s not poor.”

“Stiiinkiiing riiich.”

“Well the main thing is that you feel better,” said Ryan. “That’s what all this is about. The placebo effect. That’s what mom says about Aunt Eva. She helps people trick themselves into getting better.”

Ann took a breath—opened her mouth, to shoot something back. But she couldn’t crack wise this time. She felt her face flush. It scarcely would have been worse if she was listening to tapes to stop her from bed-wetting. She met Ryan’s eye. Ryan leaned back and smirked at her. Then his head tilted, and his eyes narrowed with terrible purpose, and he came in close.

He was aiming for her mouth. But Ann was too quick. His lips brushed her cheek, and before he could do anything else, she scooted to the foot of the bed and got up.

“Come on,” she said. “They’ll be going through my notes by now.”

Ryan shrugged and followed her downstairs. They’d been gone awhile. By the time they were back at the table, Leah’s back-up cleric was all finished, and the furnace had done its work. Even the basement was toasty warm.

When Ann was very small, there were a couple of Christmases that they spent in Long Island, New York, where Ann’s mother’s family came from. But in recent years, they tended to keep closer to home. Ann was not sure why that was. Her parents just said they didn’t want to travel much, but it was pretty clear to both Ann and Philip that something had changed between their mother and her parents. Their grandmother Mavis would phone on Christmas Eve, but it was always their father who would take the call.

This Christmas, she called during dinner. Their mom craned her neck, checked the call-display on the credenza phone, and looked to their dad. “Them,” she said, and her dad pushed out his chair and picked up the phone

“Hello, Mavis,” he said. “Merry Christmas to you too.” He leaned against the door jamb. “It’s pretty cold here, too. A bit worse than last year, I’d say.” Their mother scooped out a spoonful of mashed potatoes and plopped it next to the capon’s left thigh on her plate. “They’re fine,” he said, looking first at Ann, then Philip. And, “I don’t think that’s a good idea.” Pause, as the phone squawked. “We’ve talked about this.” He sighed. “I’m sorry. I will. Merry Christmas, Mavis.”

And he hung up, and went through to the kitchen to get another bottle of wine. Their mother’s glass, just filled before the phone rang, was empty.

Things were better with Nan.

It was just Nan; Granddad had passed on when Ann was five. But it had been good with Granddad too. He was a giant of a man, with a full head of grey hair and a thin white beard—like Santa Claus with a subscription to GQ. That was Nan’s joke. She had a lot of jokes; she even found a way to laugh at Granddad’s funeral.

Now she lived by herself in a big ranch house outside Barrie, just a couple of hours from the Lake House. There was usually a Christmas Eve call from her, too, but it was a little longer, everyone talked on the phone, even as the purpose was to figure out the timing of their visit for late lunch on Christmas Day.

Lunch being loosely defined in this case, in that they wouldn’t generally get there until two o’clock, and food wouldn’t be out until four.

Philip explained the drill as they pulled away from Laurie’s house in town. Laurie sat in the back seat with him, her red hair tied in a ponytail, otherwise garbed in a pair of black tights and a short-cut ski jacket that wasn’t really warm enough for the day. So she bundled under his arm, nodding and listening, watching the houses go by as they pulled out. This was to be her first time at a LeSage family Christmas, and Philip wanted to make sure she knew what to expect.

“Same every year,” he said. “We get there at two. Nan’s been cooking since, like, six in the morning. She is a demon in the kitchen, seriously. Don’t get between her and her Dutch oven.” Laurie laughed, and Ann, on her own in the middle seat of the minivan, grinned and thought: Seriously. Buuuuull-Shit. Philip was laying it on thick.

“So there’s no prayers or anything, like your folks do. Nan’s not really Christian.”

“That’s okay,” said Laurie. She and her family were Baptist or something, some fundamentalist thing, and they prayed a lot. Philip did not, but he tried to be nice about it. Ann privately thought this would be the end of them, which was okay by her. But on the other hand, Philip had managed to steal her away from her family on this, the afternoon of the birth of her Lord and Saviour. Maybe it was true love.

“Nan likes singing, though. She has a guitar, an old classical guitar, and there will be singing. She likes Bob Dylan and the Beatles. After dinner, you’re going to have to sing along. You up for that, West?”

“Yes sir,” said Laurie.

The houses were gone now; they’d hit the traffic light at Highway 89, which was barely a highway so much as it was a two-lane blacktop weaving through the woodlots and fields of southern Ontario farm country. Ann found herself humming along with Laurie, as she dutifully joined Philip in an off-key rendition of “If I Had a Million Dollars.” When their dad called over his shoulder that Barenaked Ladies was a long way from John Lennon, Philip shouted back, “I’d buy you a stress tab,” and everybody cracked up.

“What’s a stress tab?” asked Laurie.

“Nan always says that,” Ann explained. “‘Take a stress tab,’ whenever anybody gets too tense.”

“So what—it’s like Prozac?”

“I think it’s a vitamin pill. From the Seventies,” said Philip. “So y’know… mushrooms… speed… caffeine.”

“Goofballs,” said Ann. “Staples.”

“That’s pretty close,” said their dad, who was either in on the gag or hadn’t heard over the road noise. “I think it’s vitamin B complex.”

“Got it,” said Laurie, and Philip said, “Good.”

“So Laurie,” said their mom over her shoulder, “you’re graduating this year too?”

“That’s right, Mrs. LeSage.”

“What comes after that?”

Philip cut in. “Foreign Legion,” he said, and Laurie hit him in the arm.

“I’m deciding,” she said. “I’ve got applications in to Queen’s, and McMaster, and Western.”

“She’s a wizard at math,” said Philip.

Their mother turned around. “Will you let the girl speak, Philip?”

“Don’t make me come back there,” said their dad.

“I can take care of myself,” said Laurie, and punched Philip again.

“Now it’ll never heal!” Philip grabbed his arm and gritted his teeth. He pressed his forehead against the windshield, making a halo of condensation on the glass. The sun had gone behind some cloud, and it seemed like a shadow fell across his face with it.

“I think I’d like to go into medicine,” said Laurie. “Have to keep my grades up for that, but that’s the plan. Probably Queen’s is my first—” she paused. “Wow. Look at that.”

“What?” said Ann’s mom, but Ann could see, looking at the road past her mom. It had been a pretty dry December so far—there’d just been two snowfalls earlier in the month, and both had melted. It looked as though they were driving into the third.

It was a wall of white, maybe a half a kilometre ahead. They had crested a hill, and were heading down into it; a translucent veil of snow, blowing across the road, through the field to their right and between the trees of the woods to their left.

“A white Christmas,” said Philip. Their dad switched on the headlights and the wipers, and their mom looked into it. Her shoulders clenched.

Laurie said, “Cool,” and shivered.

“Could you turn up the heat please, Dad?” said Ann. She was feeling it too. A chill was creeping up her arms.

“Sure,” said her dad. He turned the dial beside the radio and the fan kicked on. A blast of icy air came out of the vents.

“Aw, shit,” said her dad. “That’s just perfect.”

“What?” said her mom.

“Radiator. When the heat goes off, that’s usually what it means. The radiator’s leaking.”

He slowed the van down and put on his hazards. “We’re going to have to stop somewhere.”

“Where? There’s nothing.”

Her mother had a point. The snow was coming hard now—from where Ann was sitting, she couldn’t even see a bit of the road.

“Why do we have to stop?” asked Laurie.

“The radiator is what provides heat in the car—it’s the heat off the engine,” said Philip. “If there’s no heat, it means the radiator’s not working. And that means the engine could overheat.”

“Yeah,” said their dad, “that’s right. But I don’t want to stop right now—bad visibility—too easy to get hit by another car coming up behind. Too—”

There was a sickening lurch then, and Ann felt the seatbelt bite into her shoulder, as the van fishtailed. Laurie gasped and Philip shouted, “Whoa.”

Good.

Ann clutched the shoulder strap of her seatbelt as their dad pulled the steering wheel. Underneath them, the tires slid and screamed, and outside, a car horn dopplered in and out. And then there was sunlight, and the air blasting through the vents was suddenly hot.

Ann looked out the window.

The van was in the middle of the road, bisected by the yellow no-passing lane. On either side, farmers’ fields stretched and rolled up to lines of trees at the edge of vision. The snow had stopped; the sky was clear. The radiator, given the sudden heat, was on.

“Shit!” Their dad shook his head, turned on the ignition, and pulled around and back into his lane, gunned the motor and got up to speed. Ann hadn’t noticed the car coming down the gentle slope until it sped past them.

“Wow,” said Laurie. “Wow.”

Ann felt Philip’s hand on her shoulder. “Hey,” he said, “you okay?” She nodded, and he leaned forward and whispered, “We okay?”

Ann bent forward, held her arms tight around herself. She felt as though she might shake apart. Her mother was looking back at her over the seat.

“Annie,” she said, “remember your words.”

Ann nodded. She began to recite them. Belaim, foredawned, sheepmorne, overwind… Not speaking aloud, but listening for them, letting them bubble up. Belaim, foredawned…

Laurie was asking what was going on, and Philip was explaining that it was just a thing to help Ann with her stress, and her mom was saying “good, good,” when her dad said, “shit” again, and Ann opened her eyes.

The snow had returned. It wasn’t enveloping them this time; but to their left, and their right, and yes, behind, it was keeping pace—a great white pincer, that rolled across the fields, overtaking the van by degrees. The sun yellowed through it, as it rose higher and farther.

Good.

“We need to go back,” said Ann. “This isn’t—this isn’t the radiator.”

Ann’s mother twisted around and touched Ann’s arm. “Annie,” she said, “your words.”

And Ann thought about those words, as she listened for them again, and thought about that other snowy day—by the lake, in a room just as white as the snow outside, with Dr. Sunderland, sitting in that black office chair while she curled on a couch, repeating, “belaim”—which wasn’t even a word—and “foredawned”—could be a word, but wasn’t—and the rest, as a light flashed irregularly in the corner of her eye. And she thought about the time she’d become impatient—that she’d “had it!” And got up and tried to open the door, as Dr. Sunderland watched, and nodded, and in that way he had, begun to recite the alphabet, A and B and C and so on… And Ann thought about the new word, the one she’d heard in her room coming from Ryan’s lips….

Placebo.

She looked it up on Yahoo after he left that night. A substance with no medical ingredients, but which tricked a patient into believing that it provided a cure. Enabling the patient to provide the cure to herself.

Good.

Behind her, Laurie was using her own words, about the valley of the shadow of death, and Philip was saying “Easy, easy,” and her mother twisted around and reached and held Ann’s hand tight as the sky became a deathly yellow, like flypaper, and the pincer closed, and the van became black and the vents blew hard, lashing snow, and gravity shifted.

It’s all right. You’re safe. Shh. Hush. You’re safe with me.

Ann was cold.

She couldn’t breathe. Not at first. She coughed, and she drew a great wheezing breath so hard it seemed to crack her ribs. She was cold. And wet.

She sat up. Her ears were ringing, and she was dizzy. She was at the bottom of a ditch. She had cracked through ice and was sitting in swift, running water. She got up, a sloshy, muddy job, but not impossible. Her arms and legs all worked, and although she was dizzy, she wasn’t blacking out. Three years ago, she’d fallen down the short flight of steps from the deck, and those were the questions her dad has asked her: Do your arms and legs work? Are you dizzy? Does it seem like things are getting darker? How many fingers am I holding up?

There was no one nearby to ask her that last question. But Ann thought she could get the answer right if anyone did ask her.

She was cold. Colder than it had gotten in the van—when she’d fallen against the seatbelt, and the air had filled with the moaning sound of metal tearing, and the yowling of tires slid sideways, and a cracking sound…

And, as the seatbelt released her—

Ann leaned forward to climb the edge of the ditch. It was sunny again, and the heat of the sun felt good on the back of her hands, her shoulders. Her thighs stung under her sodden jeans. She slipped on the icy mud, and fell. “Help,” she murmured, reaching up.

Her fingers found a hand. It was warm, and she reached up with her free hand and grabbed it too. “Thank you,” she said, and found purchase in the muck. Three pushes, and she was over the top—alone, on the side of the highway.

Ann hugged herself and shivered as a bright red SUV crested the hill ahead of her, sped past. She couldn’t even tell which way it was going.

“Help!” she said as its taillights vanished around the bend in the other direction. “Help!” She started to run after it, stumbled, and fell into gravel.

She remembered sky, first that awful yellow, then blue—and then rotating, and looking down. The van rolled across the highway like a toy underneath her. She had thought it was a toy, hadn’t had time to put it together as she turned again.

And saw someone.

A tall figure—standing at the crest of the hill, from where the car had come.

Help! Ann didn’t articulate it this time, as the figure turned towards her, and raised two arms, and then two more, longer than those two, beneath that.

Ann let herself go. She felt the gravel, sharp against her face, and although it hurt, she pressed it there. And waited.

The next car that came by announced itself by its siren. The hands that helped her up were warm, and brought with them a blanket.

And when they crossed the crest of the hill moments later, the figure was gone.

They hadn’t gotten far enough to go to the hospital in Barrie, but that wouldn’t have done any good anyway. The only one who needed serious medical attention was Philip. Their mother had died at the scene—the doctors and police wouldn’t tell Ann exactly how it had happened, but Ann remembered her mother, twisted around dangerously in the front seat, holding Ann’s hand. Ann imagined that she had been torn in half when the van hit the bridge abutment. Their father had lived long enough to be put into an ambulance. But there was internal bleeding, or something, and they hadn’t been able to keep him alive even as long as Laurie, who had made it to the E.R. before she was pronounced dead.

Philip needed help. He had suffered head injuries, and had cracked his spine at the second vertebrae when the van had whipsawed back into the road and begun to roll out the other side of the bridge. When he arrived at the hospital, doctors took a look at him and called for an airlift to get him to Toronto.

Ann stayed at Fenlan. She had relatively few injuries, but the water and the cold had put her into a state of acute hypothermia. This was something the doctors and nurses at Fenlan knew how to deal with, given the local snowmobile club’s propensity for racing across the lake in the dead of winter.

Nan came. She sat by Ann’s bed, and held her arm, and told her how much she loved her, and how things would be fine, and she would see, unfortunately underlining it all with jags of tears and curses. Ann had never heard her Nan curse before, and Ann suggested, through trembling lips, that Nan should stop cursing because it was not very ladylike.

That was the sort of joke that Nan normally might appreciate but she gave no indication of doing so this time. She became quiet, her mouth drawn, her eyes narrowed.

“You’re a good girl,” she said.

But she didn’t sound as though she meant it.

It grew warmer. Ann felt her fingers and toes. A man came from the Ontario Provincial Police—Constable Reid. He had a red face and blond hair that was a bit darker at the roots. He was the one who’d found her by the side of the road. He brought her a stuffed dog, with soft furry ears and big sad eyes. She took it, and held it close. He asked her if she remembered how she got there, in that ditch, how she’d gotten out of the van before it crashed. Her Nan sat on the other side of the bed, looking down at her hands.

“I remember being in the air,” Ann said.

“Were you wearing your seatbelt?”

“Yes.”

“Okay. Do you know if your daddy was doing anything?”

“He was driving.”

“I see. Just driving?”

“There was a lot of snow,” she said. “It came up all of a sudden.” And she told him about how the heat hadn’t worked, and how her dad thought it might be the radiator, and how it had started up again, right before the snow. Nan asked if this was necessary, and Constable Reid rubbed the back of his neck and seemed to make up his mind.

“Okay, Ann. I’m not going to trouble you about this any more than that.” He put a hand on the edge of the bed. “I’m so sorry. I guess… you’ll be heading home with your Grandma soon.”

“No,” said Ann, and Constable Reid gave her a look that suddenly had a raft more questions, and Nan gave her a look that nearly broke her heart.

“Oh, darling,” she said, “don’t worry. We’ll make a nice room for you, and—”

“Not yet,” said Ann. She thought of the man on the ridge, with an extra set of arms, and that hand that had pulled her from the ditch…. And as she flew through the air… the face.

And she said, “I can’t go anywhere right now.” She didn’t add, It isn’t safe for you.

The Fenlan Medical Health Centre was the name of the hospital. It wasn’t big enough to have its own full-time grief counsellor; for this, it employed volunteers. But just because they were volunteers was not to say that they weren’t good at their job. For Ann, they called in their best. His name was Mr. Small, and he was the sort of fellow who took pains to live the opposite of his name. He was kind of heavy, and had a bushy head of whitening hair, and a long beard that was fully white. He used to be a negotiator for the teachers’ union, and was spending his retirement in Fenlan, he told Ann, “For my sins.”

“I’m sorry you had to miss Christmas,” she said.

“That’s okay,” he said. “We’re here for you right now. I see Constable Reid has given you a nice present.”

Ann nodded and held the dog close.

“You given him a name?” asked Mr. Small.

Ann shook her head.

“I’ll think of one. I promise.”

“That’s okay,” he said. “I wouldn’t give him a name either right now.”

“My parents are dead,” said Ann suddenly. The words came out fast, like she’d upchucked them. She didn’t know what to do after that, and Mr. Small didn’t seem to either. They were sitting in the pediatric room, which was a playroom for kids much smaller than Ann. There were wooden blocks all over the table between them. Mr. Small picked one up and turned it in his hand, as though studying it for clues.

“It’s okay to cry,” he said finally. “But it’s also okay not to cry.”

Ann nodded. She thought that she wouldn’t cry, not then in front of Mr. Small. She had cried a lot—when she got into the back of the OPP cruiser on the side of the highway, again when they drove past the ambulance and the other police cruisers, and she caught a glimpse of the van, or its underside, exposed obscenely to the passing road…. When she saw Philip, on a body board, wheeling through the emergency room. She couldn’t even talk to him, or see him properly.

“I was talking to your Nan just now,” said Mr. Small. “She’s a really nice lady, isn’t she?”

Ann nodded. Her Nan was a very nice lady, she guessed.

“She loves you and Philip a great deal.”

“I love her,” Ann whispered.

“That’s good,” said Mr. Small. “But Ann, can you tell me why you don’t want to go with her?”

Ann thought about how to phrase it.

“Are you afraid?”

Ann nodded.

Mr. Small set down the block, slid it to one side, as though it were actually a barrier between them. “Now you can be honest with me,” he said. “Are you afraid of your Nan?”

The legs of Ann’s chair made a groan as she pushed her chair back, and she shook her head. She saw where this was going, and it wasn’t what she meant. Mr. Small thought Ann was afraid that Nan was… maybe a pedophile, or hit her and Philip, or drank too much and said things.

“That’s not it,” said Ann. “I’m not afraid of her. I’m afraid… for her.”

“Can you explain that?”

Ann sat still again. She could explain it, sure. She could explain that Nan might find herself driving back to Barrie with Ann in the back seat of the car, and how the windows might frost over and the snows might come, and how a great wind might lift the front wheels of the car off the road, and flip it around, and kill Nan too and maybe Ann and maybe Philip too. She could tell Mr. Small that Nan might go down to her basement and check on the furnace one night a week from now, and find the door to the basement locked behind her, and then see… see it, just an instant before it got to her.

Yeah. She couldn’t tell Mr. Small any of that. He’d think she was crazy. Maybe she was—or maybe it would be best to be treated that way: taken away to a hospital where she could be filled with drugs and just shut down.

Ann sighed, and looked up. Mr. Small met her eyes, blinked twice—expecting an answer.

“I’m bad luck,” she said. “Really bad luck. I’m afraid… it’ll rub off on Nan.”

Mr. Small nodded. He actually seemed to relax. He set back, and pushed the blocks even farther to the edges of the table. Like he was clearing the very last of the debris between the two of them, and they could just level with one another. He tucked his chin down.

“It’s easy to think that. Take it all on yourself. Sometimes, that’s how we make sense of things, when really terrible things happen. But you have to know, Ann. You really had nothing to do with what happened in the car. It wasn’t your fault.”

Ann looked at him and thought about that, and thought about how it might be true. It wasn’t her fault—any more than it was when light bulbs burned and exploded, or a wind came up and lifted the surface of the lake into the sky. It was the Insect at work; not her. The best she could do was control it—keep it dormant. That was what she’d learned at the lodge. That was what she did every night, when she listened to her tapes and whispered the mnemonics that Dr. Sunderland had made her memorize. She was the gatekeeper, and the Insect was the wicked one—the mischief-maker.

The murderer, now.

And yet. Ann was the gatekeeper. She had kept that gate shut for many years, following the instructions that had been given her. She’d been diligent; a good student. A good girl, Dr. Sunderland had told her.

Had she gone bad? Had she betrayed the virtue she’d held on to so strongly? These thoughts tugged at her, as Mr. Small sat across from her, surrounded by blocks of wood that, she knew, could fly into the air at once and pummel him bloody.

Had she gone bad? Or had she simply opened her eyes—seen what Dr. Sunderland and the clinic provided, were nothing, really… nothing but a placebo.

“I know it wasn’t my fault,” said Ann finally. “But I need to have some help.”

“Of course you do,” said Mr. Small. “We can talk as long as you want.”

“Thank you.”

They sat quietly for another moment. Mr. Small asked her if she wanted to pray, if that was maybe what she meant, and Ann shook her head firmly.

“No,” she said. “But I do need to talk. Can I please call a friend?”

She could, of course.

Christmas made it easier.

Ryan and his folks had just finished dinner. His father answered after the first ring. He was a little tipsy, his words slurring a bit. He called for Ryan in a sing-song, “It’s a gir-ul, Ry. Anything you want to share?”

And as the phone clattered, and for a moment Ann could hear the din of a Christmas at home: glass clinking—a squeal, from some baby who’d stopped in—condescending laughter from a crowd of adults. And then it all cut off, as Ryan took the phone, sheltered it from the noise of the room.

“Hello?”

“Hey, Ry,” said Ann.

“Ann?”

“Yeah.”

“Uh, Merry Christmas.”

“Yeah.”

“What’s up?”

Ann didn’t, quite, get the nerve to tell him everything then. She wasn’t crying—she was feeling pretty strong, for the moment. But telling Ryan the story would crack all that. More important, she wouldn’t be able to rely on Ryan to do what she needed to have done—right away, really, as soon as possible. Mr. Small was sitting at the low table, surrounded by all those blocks, and her Nan was out in the waiting lounge… waiting, to take care of her.

“I need to talk to your Aunt,” she said. “Is she there?”

“Ye-e-es,” said Ryan, taking a what-the-fuck tone. “She’s staying the week for Christmas. How come?”

“I think,” said Ann, “that I need one of those exorcisms.”

“What?”

“I’m not safe,” said Ann. “The placebo failed.”