And then, one night in December, walking on a high embankment above the canal on his way to an evening class at Carleton University, he found himself confronted by illusion.
A cold wind scattered dry snow that evening. No skater dared the ice; no plow had touched the fallen snow on the stretch of canal beyond Dow's Lake. The sky was the colour of scorched brass, and the streetlamps along the embankment cast fumbling shadows in the snowfall.
On the canal just ahead, the gateway of Hartwell's Locks loomed above the snow, and crouched before it was a lean, dark figure, stark against the whiteness: a tall man, apparently, gaunt with age, enwrapped in what appeared to be a tight black raincoat.
The man's posture conveyed injury or suffering, so Tom glanced away from the canal toward the empty lanes of Colonel By Drive, hoping for a car he could stop if the man needed medical care. But when he turned back, the figure was gone.
Tom blinked snow from his eyes and stared down at the unbroken expanse of white. How had the figure vanished so quickly? After all, the nearest ramp leading down to the ice was boarded up and blocked with warning signs, right in front of him.
Tom clambered over the boards and descended to the canal. His footprints left deep impressions as he waded toward the spot where the figure had crouched. He stepped carefully and stared in the half-light, but found no previous tracks on the barren snow. Yet something black protruded from the white, as if it had fallen from a coat pocket: a plastic billfold stained with mildew. He found a strip of paper curled inside, but the light was too dim for close inspection. This provided a good excuse to leave the canal, for which he was grateful; in his confusion over what he had seen, he would have spent an hour in search of footprints.
Back on the sidewalk, he held the paper close to his eyes in the trembling light of a streetlamp. Scrawled in partially-smeared ink was an address on Springland Crescent and a name vaguely familiar -- Robert Piedmont.
~
For the next few days he mulled over what he had seen, or rather, what he had imagined. He was convinced that he had fooled himself with a lazy misinterpretation of visual impressions. Yet he was equally certain that he had once heard of Robert Piedmont.
When he mentioned the name to an art history professor with a keen memory for local events, she thought for a moment, then shook her head.
"Never heard of him."
"Are you sure?" he asked, and showed her the slip of paper.
"Robert Piedmont!" she said, giving it a French pronunciation. "Of course I've heard of him."
She then told him the vague story of a man who had left his house one day and vanished.
"It was in the papers for a while," she said, "and on the CBC. I'm amazed you don't remember. It happened right here in Ottawa."
"When?"
"About ten years ago, something like that. Where'd you hear his name?"
He hesitated. Then he said, "Trivia quiz," as casually as he could. In truth, he was too embarrassed to describe his lapse of visual judgment to anyone.
Later that afternoon he pulled yellowing newspapers from dusty library shelves, and found several references to Robert and Jocelin Piedmont. Their case had remained unsolved, even after a decade. He had once been told that people disappeared frequently; the Piedmonts were merely two names on a long and growing list. Yet someone had recently jotted down their old address on paper -- perhaps a journalism student or a true-crime buff. As far as Tom was concerned, the matter was hardly worth pursuing.
Yet his perceptual ineptitude on that winter night troubled him. More than ever, he was set on training himself to observe with complete confidence. He had work to do.
Over the course of that winter he sketched obsessively, and in April he spent an afternoon on Parliament Hill, peering up at gargoyles and steep, copper-green roofs that bristled with ornaments of black wrought-iron. People passed by now and then, enjoying the first clear day after a week of rain. He ignored them, intent as he was upon dormer windows and Gothic turrets, but then someone went by who grabbed his attention.
An old woman with wild hair and a face the colour of an aching bruise stumbled toward him, hunched over, with arms crossed below her throat, with one of her hands clenched like a fist against her breastbone. She wore a tattered shirt and faded jeans as ragged as her hair, and as she approached he saw that her feet were naked on the pale stubble of the lawn.
Worst of all was her expression of extreme pain: eyelids squeezed shut, the corners of her mouth dragged down in a trembling grimace. He had never seen such agony on a human face.
Calling out to her made no difference; she seemed completely unaware of the world around her. He stared at her retreating back until she came to the sidewalk on Wellington Street. When she stepped into the heavy traffic, he cried out and ran to stop her.
Somehow she made it to the other side, while he was forced to wait for several cars to pass. She stood out like a moving scarecrow against the olive sandstone wall of the Langevin building. Oddly enough, everyone she passed ignored her; people walked right by without a glance. That more than anything else angered him enough to cross the street and follow her. When she disappeared around the corner of the building, he hurried to catch up, but on the other side he found himself alone. He had been right behind her; there had been no time for her to slip away.
He stood on the sidewalk and gaped at the blank wall as his memory ran through a scene from the Rideau Canal. It was the first time in weeks he had recalled that figure on the snow. And now, here was another unlikely disappearance.
He had to be mistaken. He must have overlooked something obvious, but wandering up and down the street brought nothing to light. The woman had vanished.
One week later, she returned.
She was back on Wellington Street, limping westward. He squinted in the late-afternoon sunlight and watched her for some time, startled but determined to mind his own business. Yet once again, the disregard of those around her sparked his anger. How could anyone ignore such pain?
Hunched over, with arms crossed below her throat, with one hand clenched like a fist, she passed the Bank of Montreal and the National Press building, then turned left at an alley.
He hesitated, uneasy at the prospect of yet another disappearance, until bright daylight and the crowded street left him feeling like a fool.
When he stepped into the alleyway he was half-blinded by the glare reflected from a long white wall, but he could see the woman straight ahead, a silhouette against the cul-de-sac; he was just in time to watch her slip through the bright wall and vanish.
He stumbled, raised a hand to block the daylight, then saw what he had overlooked at first glance: an open doorway in the wall, half-hidden from his angle of sight. As he approached, he saw that it was nothing but an empty doorframe with broken hinges; peering inside, he found a dim, descending stairway and heard the echoing slap of the woman's bare feet on concrete steps below.
On a day of dazzling sunlight, on the brink of a stairwell without any door to slam shut and trap him, he found it easy to convince himself that everything was normal. So he followed her, treading quietly on the stairs, intent upon her stumbling footsteps in the half-light below. The short flight of stairs reached a narrow landing and continued down in the opposite direction to reach another, where the pattern repeated itself: an ordinary stairwell with cement walls stained by dust and grime, with a flickering fluorescent tube at every right-angle turn -- but a stairwell without exits. Even after ten flights without a single doorway on the landings, he told himself that nothing was unusual, that nothing was wrong, until the sound of her bare footsteps faded abruptly.
He stopped, listened for any sound of movement, then lowered his foot to the next step. Something soft gave way beneath his shoe: a ball of paper, crumpled and damp as if recently clenched within a fist. He unfolded it and found the smeared words illegible except for one name: Robert Piedmont.
Then he noticed that his hand against the paper was a flat silhouette, that e
very part of his body was midnight black, that the fluorescent tubes were gone, yet the stairs and walls around him stood out clearly with a dim pallour. Startled, he reached out to touch the cement wall, only to feel his hand slide into soft, wet clay.
He wrenched his hand from the wall and saw that everything around him glistened with moisture. The stairs below were shapeless with mud, and impressed upon the ooze were descending tracks of two bare feet.
An acrid stench of dust and wet concrete left him gasping as he stumbled up the sodden steps, but he forced himself to climb faster. He had reached one landing and was lunging toward the next when a night-black figure rushed down and crashed against him with stunning force.
Tom staggered and clutched at the slick wall, while the figure paused for less than a heartbeat. Then, with arms dangling and limp, it pressed forward, driving him back with quick, determined strides. He reached out and grabbed what felt like a raincoat tight against the figure's chest, but his fingers slipped from the taut wet fabric. Finally he tripped, slid against the wall of a landing and fell to the muddy floor.
He shrank against the yielding wall, drew in his arms and legs to protect himself, but the figure stepped over him, turned at the next flight of stairs and continued on its way down. By then Tom was back on his feet and stumbling in the opposite direction.
As he fled upward, the slime at his feet and the wet clay walls gave way to hard concrete. Fluorescent tubes flickered at the landings; dust motes circled in a streak of daylight overhead. He darted through the lean doorway, fell and skinned his fingers on pale asphalt. Clenching his hands, he noted that his sleeves were unmuddied, and sitting up, he saw that his clothes and shoes were dry and unstained. Then he glanced back at the doorway and found instead a blank wall of concrete, dazzling in the sunlight of late afternoon.
He sat there for a long time, paralyzed by a growing sense that his life would never again be the same. He was no longer safe. With neither guides nor signposts, he was now in a bleak new world.
Much later, in his rented room, he stripped off his clothing and discovered a fine grey dust on his feet and on his arms, legs and back where they had touched the walls of the stairwell. His pants and shirt were spotless, but his body was contaminated. Trembling with physical nausea and a more than physical dread, he scrubbed himself thoroughly.
That night he lay on the narrow mattress in his narrow bedroom and stared at sheets of scrap paper, at several hundred detailed sketches that no one else had ever seen, that no one else would ever want to see. As the paper stirred in the draft from an open window, he understood how thoroughly his struggle to perceive had isolated him. He had never been frightened before -- not like this -- and he knew that no one would accept his impossible account of missing people and disappearing stairwells. He would have to keep it to himself. He would have to live with new-found sight, alone, or never live at all.
That awareness drove him out to confront the new morning. On his way to university, he deliberately took the longer route down Wellington Street.
The world seemed perfectly normal in the slanting daylight; and walking eastward, facing the sunrise, he vowed that he would take a close look at the alley beside the National Press building. When it stood just a few blocks ahead, he began to tremble, but he steadied himself by staring at the stone-solid, almost monolithic government buildings, the passing cars and busses wreathed with exhaust in the chill air, the pedestrians in winter jackets on an April Monday that should have been much warmer.
Yet just ahead limped a man with no jacket whatsoever; a man in a blue shirt, a faded blue shirt, a ragged blue shirt with holes; a man who suddenly stumbled, lurched from the sidewalk, and fell beneath the wheels of a passing truck.
Tom would have lunged to stop the man had he been close enough, had there been time. He could only stare at the smear of blood on the road, a smear that lengthened beneath every passing tire, until he realized with a cold shock that no one else had seen the man fall, no one else had seen the blood seeping over asphalt. People walked by, oblivious to sudden death, oblivious to the sudden figures who now surged from nowhere onto the street: figures crouched and hunched in postures of unthinkable suffering, blind to all but the glare of inner pain. Weaving with clenched eyelids and contorted limbs through daylight crowds that never even noticed them, they burst into existence by hundreds, by thousands. They rushed the sidewalk in a blind stampede, forced Tom backwards against a marble wall and finally to the ground. He clutched his face protectively and screamed --
The scream echoed through silence.
He raised his head and found himself kneeling beside a suddenly vacant street. The buildings all around him bled a dim grey light beneath a sky of aching black. He touched his face with cold hands and saw that they, too, were black, like holes punched in the fabric of reality. Pain seeped in to fill the sudden void.
He staggered to his feet, but the sidewalk shifted beneath him. He fell, and when he hit the concrete, his arms burst through like knife blades into seeping clay.
~
On a cold Monday morning in April, the traffic passed over Wellington Street. Pedestrians trudged to work with heads down, intent upon their own concealed anxieties.
Unseen, unsensed, unmindful of their absence, the world moved on.
*****
Shadows In The Sunrise
My shadow on a wall, a sunrise in the western sky, a twelve-hour gap in time: how could I explain these things? And yet I found myself on the mountain road in the light of morning, whereas a moment before I had been crossing the darkened lawn in front of the Rexdale house; I had noticed my shadow moving on the wall -- in the dark of night -- and I had turned to see the maples thrashing in a sudden wind. And then I watched the sun rise on the wrong edge of the world.
But now I stood in the cold light of a normal day. Frostlight gleamed from pebbles on the dirt road and glittered from the aspen leaves that fell around me in the stillness. I was bitterly cold, as if I had spent hours in the cold air... hours passing like a dreamless night. How could I have walked halfway home without remembering the trip? I checked my watch in disbelief: the date and time revealed a sudden loss of twelve hours.
I thought of returning to the Rexdale house but the idea sent a chill through me that was deeper than the morning cold. And it was cold: my face tingled painfully, as if with frostbite. So I continued on my way along the mountainside, then took the road down into the valley toward home. Away from the trees, between barren fields, I felt exposed beneath a cloudless sky, and the feeling remained even after I entered my house and shut the door behind me.
With a fire lit in the woodstove I warmed up quickly, but the cold lingered on my face. I peered into a mirror for any sign of frostbite but found, instead, a network of tiny red sores. At first I thought of measles, but as I examined my face and scalp I saw that every pore was inflamed, as if someone had stabbed at me with tiny needles -- and then I suddenly vomited, repeatedly and helplessly, as if at the physical memory of a long-forgotten fear.
~
The day went by. With winter looming, I had vegetables to can and freeze, apples to store and wood to cut. Yet nothing I did could dispel the sense of strangeness that haunted me like an unrecollected dream. And I was very much alone: my parents had left the house years ago; they were down in the States, where they found life under martial law preferable to freezing to death in a Quebecois winter. "We're not allowed to leave the city limits," they had written, "but the weather's fine and we've got five hundred T.V. channels." That was life in America. Here, I was surrounded by abandoned farms; when the world economy had fallen apart it had dragged down all my neighbors with it. There was no one I could turn to for help.
That night, whenever I closed my eyes, I saw the Rexdale house gleaming in the darkness. I had spent a lot of time there over the years, growing up with the Rexdale children as my closest friends. When the Great Deflation forced them out of the countryside I agreed to maintain the house for them, even a
s the world around it fell apart -- not for the money they sent (which had little value at any rate), but in memory of a time when there were people in my life.
Staring into darkness, I understood that memories were all I had... and I refused to have them poisoned by a mystery.
~
I left early the next morning, walked up the road that climbed the hillside, and followed the winding route below the mountain. The day was milder, but the oblique sunlight, the woodsmoke tang of rotten leaves, brought hints of winter's approach, and the wind stung my healing face.
When I came to the spot where I had found myself the day before, I was tempted to return home. The wind in the pines hissed like a tide retreating on a hidden shore, and the scuttling of the leaves on the dirt road made me think of something dead that struggled into life. A lingering, indefinable dread had seeped through my mind and it darkened everything around me.
The few farmhouses along the route were boarded up and empty. Staghorn sumac and hawthorns had spread across the fields; grey stalks of burdock and milkweed bristled on ragged lawns. I remembered how, as a child, I could see the sparse lights from distant farms at nightfall, or hear the faint barking of a neighbour's dog; these nights, the fields and hills were black, and the silence gave way only to the baying of the wolves.
On the far side of the mountain, the driveway to the Rexdales weaved through a forest of gaunt maples and cedars until it reached the house, a white, one-storey building with a broad bay window that faced a long and narrow clearing. The surrounding woods were bleak: the scarlets and the orange-reds had faded to a dull copper, and the shimmering yellows of the aspen trees were spectral in the slanting light. Yet thanks to my maintenance work, the house felt unabandoned -- an illusion that died as I peered through the bay window at the empty living room.
I studied the house, hoping to spur recollection, but nothing came to me. The western sky, pale blue with a streak of cirrus, brought nothing to mind, even as I waited at the exact spot where I had seen my shadow leap upon the wall the night before. There was nothing here to frighten anyone.