As a child, I had played here many times with the Rexdale children. I remembered hide and seek, with the sheds and the encroaching woods as perfect spots to watch pursuers without being seen. But our favorite hiding place was the cubbyhole below the bay window, with a sliding panel built into the living room wall. If you lay down you could slide right in and close the panel until only your eyes were visible.
And then the shadows on the wall --
What?
As the shadow of a driven cloud darkens the fields and then fades away, something had loomed within my memory and passed me by.
I closed my eyes to the pale sunlight and tried to see the darkness of the night before.
Shadows.
Shadows on a wall.
I felt a sudden chill, the physiological memory of fear. I touched my face and, prompted by a vague impulse, ran my fingers over the irritable skin. They brought to mind the fronds of a plant brushing against me, the sliding touch of wet rope.
Yes... wet rope.
By now I was damp with sweat and my heartbeat raced, yet I could retrieve only the vaguest hint of shadows looming high on a wall, seen from a low angle, as if I were crouched on the ground.
No; as if I were lying on the floor, in the cubbyhole, watching shadows on the living room wall.
I opened my eyes. The day was bright and clear: that alone encouraged me to unlock the front door and step inside.
Daylight shining through the bay window warmed the empty living room, and because I had left the door open whenever I worked outside, the air was neither stale nor damp. Yet I could smell dust as I stooped at the cubby below the window. The panel was open, and I noticed scuffmarks on the dusty floorboards within; had I left them on the night before?
I lay down on my side, pulled myself into the compartment and slid the panel shut, leaving just a crack open so that I could peer at the wall on the other side of the room. Then I closed my eyes and struggled to remember.
Shadows. Shadows on the wall....
~
The sun has already set. I have just put the lawnmower into the shed and I am crossing the yard in the darkness. Something moves at the edge of sight: I look up and notice my shadow on the wall of the house. Then I turn around to see the maples tossing in a sudden squall, and there, in the western sky, the sun is rising.
No, not the sun: a beam of light flickers through the narrow clearing.
My eyes are streaming in the wind but I can just glimpse something moving through the woods: it looks like a wall in motion. No... a scaffolding, a cage, a lattice of irregular shapes and sizes, glowing with purples and magentas as deep as darkness yet somehow visible.
Descending from the sky -- behind the trees, in front, all around me -- wall after wall of glowing lattices, a cagelike framework facing all directions, too complex to take in at once. Diamond shapes, lozenges, a mountainside of spikes, weblike panels set at every angle, greens and blues and scarlets....
I run to the house, slam the door shut behind me and lock it. Then I peer through the tiny pane as tall swaying shapes approach from the light.
In a panic I crawl to the bay window, slide into the cubby and pull the panel shut until I can barely see the shadows on the opposite wall, shadows like the freeze-frame snapshots of windswept trees. Despite the storm they are motionless and I can see their ropy boughs at all angles, every bough divided into two branches, every branch divided into two twigs, every twig divided into two thorns, every thorn divided into two needles --
Then light flares in the hallway just beyond my vision as the front door crashes open. A shadow bulges on the wall and its wet ropes burst through the crack, fumbling at my face, stinging with a hundred thousand pinpricks --
~
I wrenched open the sliding door and stumbled to my feet. The empty room was warm and sunlit but I had to get away.
Standing on the lawn, staring at the trees and sky, I found that nothing in the everyday world could dispel the cold fear that haunted me. But that fear was absurd. These were not memories. Dreams, nightmares, the fabrications of a mind that would come up with any explanation to resolve anxiety: these I could accept. But memories of actual events? Never.
Yet I found myself scanning the trees for broken limbs and peering at the ground for telltale holes and gouges. When I realized what I was doing I turned away in disgust.
There had to be an explanation for the dazzling light, my wounded face, the lapse of memory. Had I been struck by lightning, had I wandered in a daze till morning? Or was isolation driving me to madness?
Madness. A word I had avoided; there it was.
I noticed the front door gaping wide: in my rush from the house I had left it open. As I went to lock it, that false memory of the door crashing open in a blaze of light nagged at me. Of course it was false. The door was undamaged; nothing had smashed it open.
Then I thought of infinitely branching ropes, repeatedly splitting in two from the size of a limb to the size of a molecule; no lock would keep them out. But that was nonsense.
It had to be nonsense.
Two ravens leapt from the boughs of a cedar; I stood in the doorway and listened to their fading cries. There was nothing I could do but go home.
Hemmed in by the trees along the driveway, I felt naked beneath that wedge of sky; I glanced away from the boarded windows of the farms along the road.
On the other side of the mountain I looked down into the valley and saw my house standing like a target amidst barren fields, exposed on all sides to any shadows that might loom with evening. Yet the darkest were already there, deep inside my head.
~
Winter struck. I tried to focus on daily work, but at night the stars looked down with enigmatic stares.
The telephone and power lines went down in the driving snow that blotted out the world beyond my windows and hissed against the walls in a constant rush of wind. I lived in the kitchen, close to the woodstove. My supplies would last for a long time if I rationed every bite. In dreams I served at banquets, but always woke before I could steal any food.
One day I began the five-hour walk to the nearest village: I had to see if the outside world existed anymore. But visibility faded beyond the length of my arm and I had to give up. I stumbled back through a white cocoon of blinding flakes, terrified that the footprints I had left on the way out would disappear before I could find my way home.
That night I heard my parents in the wind; they called my name with distant raven cries. When I opened the door they gaped at me and fled into the night. Then I woke up, stumbled to the mirror, and flinched at the sight of a stranger's hollowed face.
Last night I heard the silence when the wind stopped. I scraped frost from the window pane and saw moonlight glimmer through a lens of thinning cloud. Eddies of snow swirled across the fields: a thousand shades of white twisting in the darkness. And descending from the ragged sky, spanning the horizon, a wall of scaffolding, a glowing magenta cage sparkling with somber pinpoints of green and blue and scarlet.
Perhaps by now the world belongs to them: a world of shadows, drifting like the snow above abandoned fields, falling like the darkness on forgotten hills, awake and watching in the moonlight; a world that I could recognize but never own. My memory has returned and that, for me, is enough. There will be no spring.
*****
When The Echo Hates The Voice
1
From An Obstetrician's Memories by Marcel Dumont:
Fatigue and stress can also interfere with our work. When I was an intern on extended shifts at the hospital, I often noticed, at the end of a long day, an odd impairment or distortion at the edge of sight, very much like fluttering wings or slithering snakes coursing down the walls. My judgment and competence were never hindered, but I did experience odd hallucinations from time to time.
The worst of all was hard to forget, although I have tried to do so. It hit me on the very day of my first delivery -- an easy, uncomplicated birth that went as smoothly
as any doctor or mother could wish. On that occasion, I had known the parents for years: the Bertrands, neighbours of mine in that small town. Their son, Paul, came into this world a fine, healthy child. No doctor could have asked for a smoother, more joyous first delivery, which makes what happened next all the more incongruous.
I had left Mrs. Bertrand and her son in the care of the delivery room nurses, and was about to push open the swinging exit doors when the white hallway beyond one door's circular window pane was blocked by a dark, gaping hole. Startled, I drew back for no more than a heartbeat, then pulled the doors open to reveal something far worse than wings or snakes.
It was, to put it mildly, a giant. The ceilings of that hospital were no less than three metres high; as I pulled the doors open, this crouching being reared back and struck, with its bulging scapulae, the fluorescent light panels overhead. Then it stood there, glaring down at me -- at least, it would have glared, had its eyes been visible; but the sockets were so deep in that lean, hard face, the eyes so recessed, that all I could discern were two black pits confronting me.
You can imagine my shocked surprise. I lunged backward and collided with a nurse. The doors swung shut, blocked the being from sight -- and I knew, at that moment, that what I had seen was impossible; therefore, I had never actually seen it. It was all in my mind.
And with that, I pushed the doors open to face nothing more than an empty hospital hallway.
I glanced at the nurse behind me and offered a weak smile.
"Busy day," I said. The look she returned seemed less than charitable....
2
From the statement of Lucien Boisvert, aged 19:
Don't get me wrong, I'd never say anything bad about Paul Bertrand. But the truth is, he had problems right from the start.
He must have been about five years old when I first met him, one day when my parents were visiting his. He had been sent upstairs for a nap, and we were just about to leave when we heard him scream with what sounded to my ears like real terror. He came running down the stairs at full speed, dashed to his mother... and told her that an echo had stuck its face through the open window of his bedroom. That's right, "an echo". When I left with my parents, I looked up at Paul's window, far away from any balcony or ledge, and thought that anyone who could stick a face through that window would have to be a giant. You know how it is with kids that age: their nightmares are one hundred percent real to them, and the things they say can be pretty wild.
The next time I met him, just a few days later, he stared at me as if I were something he couldn't figure out, then he asked me if I were a voice or an echo. Pretty wild, as I've said. So I told him I was Lucien Boisvert, and I guess that must have satisfied him, because we've... we were friends ever since.
Neither Paul nor I had a brother or sister, so our parents were happy to have us play together. In fact, all throughout our childhood, one of us always stayed overnight at the other's house. I'd heard his parents mention, once or twice, that Paul could never sleep without someone else in his room, and even then there were times when he woke me up in the middle of the night with a terrible scream. He never talked about his nightmares, though -- on the few times when I mentioned the screaming, he went completely silent. There were times, too, when he suddenly looked over his shoulder as if he'd expected to find someone else in the room. Otherwise, he seemed like a typical kid to me.
And not only to me. Paul was actually one of the more popular kids in school, and he thrived on that. There was nothing he liked better than big groups, crowded hallways, lots of people surrounding him. So naturally, he excelled at group activities like track and field... and basketball, of course, always basketball.
Girls were crazy about him. They gave him cute nicknames like "Mystery Man" or "N. Igmatic"... not only for that haunted look that sometimes appeared on his face, but also, I think, for those deep-set eyes of his, like black holes in a lean, rugged mask. And the girls liked him for his drawing skill. He never had to ask any girl to pose for him -- they were always eager to volunteer. For guys like me, hanging around Paul gave us a great opportunity to meet the most beautiful girls in highschool, because they flocked to him.
But at the same time, there were hidden aspects to Paul that I never could figure out. Girls asked him out constantly, which was more than fine with him... as long as he went dating in groups. But I've had girls confess to me how disappointing and frustrating it was for them whenever they tried to talk with him in private. In crowds he came to life, but in smaller groups, and especially with only one other person around, he often became silent and easily distracted, always staring into corners or turning his head suddenly at noises the rest of us could never hear.
There were things he'd never talk about, not even with me. There was one time, I recall, when he and I were doing homework at his place. He was painting a still-life or something as an art assignment while I turned the pages of his sketchbooks and admired those gorgeous girls from highschool. But then I came across page after page of sketches I'd never seen before, all of the same leering, hateful face. Paul had captured something terrible in that face, something that chilled me as I stared at sketch after sketch... but the worst part was the obvious purpose of those drawings: they were self-caricatures. They had to be -- there was no mistaking those hidden eyes in deep, black sockets.
"You know," I finally said to him, "these faces are incredible."
"What faces?" he said, intent on his painting.
"These," I said. "But I'd hate to think what they reveal about your self-image."
He turned at that, stared at the pages... and went completely white. His neck muscles clenched several times, as if he were struggling to speak, and when he finally found his voice, it sounded weak and raw.
"Put those away," he said. And then he stared at me, not with anger, not with annoyance, but with something I could hardly understand. Now that I think of it, I guess he was pleading with me to forget all about it.
So I changed the subject, and he went on with his painting. But I could never quite get over the impact of those sketches; they made me wonder what he saw within himself, what self-knowledge he kept hidden from the rest of us.
After that, he seemed to throw himself even further into schoolwork, art, sports, any activity that kept him in the centre of a crowd. The tallest kid in highschool, he became the best basketball player, the best runner -- he drove himself constantly. He also convinced a bunch of us to train with him after school by running up and down those stairs beside the college... those stairs on the hillside.
Look, there's not much more I... do I really have to go on with this?
Okay. Okay.
Well... he was at the top of his class when highschool ended, and everyone expected great things of him at college. And even though he drove himself harder than ever, I could tell that something was wrong. For one thing, he never actually had a girlfriend. Oh, he had women all around him, all the time, and he loved the attention... but in the end, they always drifted away, frustrated by their inability to connect with him. I'd always supposed that Paul would have a steady girlfriend long before I did. You can imagine my surprise when I succeeded where he failed.
At the same time, he began to seem ill-at-ease even in crowded rooms, more easily distracted, more irritable than ever before. Something was on his mind, nagging at him, but whatever it was, he kept it to himself.
And so... that first term of college came to an end. My girlfriend Claire and I had a late exam, long after most of the out-of-town students had already left for Christmas vacation. Paul tagged along with us and decided to wait around while Claire and I took the exam. Afterward, we were going to meet him at the library, but when the time came, we couldn't find him there. We couldn't find him at the gym or in the art rooms, either. When Claire suggested the pub, I laughed: I'd never seen Paul take a drink in his life.
But in the end, that's where we found him, alone at the pub.
It was obvious, too, that he'd been
drinking all throughout the exam. When we sat down at the bar beside him he looked at us, hunched his back defensively, and said something in a voice so hushed and secretive that I couldn't hear a word.
"What's that?" I said.
He clenched his tight shoulders even tighter, and pronounced every syllable as if he were talking to a slow child: "It wants to be the voice."
"...What?"
And then Paul said something like this:
"The echo wants to be the voice. It's resented me since the day I was born. It's been sneering at me all the time, and waiting."
Claire and I glanced at each other with growing unease.
"Come on," I said to Paul. "Let's get you home."
"You'll stay with me, won't you...?"
I could sense the panic welling behind those hidden eyes.
"Sure," I said. "Sure. We both will. But let's get moving."
By that time, the sun had already set. The rising moon was straight ahead of us, dazzling our eyes as we walked through that tunnel of trees on our way to the downhill staircase. I had run along this route so many times before, driven on by Paul and his mania for sports, but now it troubled me to see him so nervous and defeated, so much a prey to something he could barely describe.
He walked ahead of us without a word, his back hunched, his hands thrust deep into his coat pockets. Suddenly he stopped, whipped his head around to the side, and held up a silencing hand.
"Hear that?" he said.
All I'd heard until that moment was the crunch of fallen leaves underfoot, and now, all I could hear was the rattling of stray aspen leaves on the branches overhead.
"Come on," I said. "Your ears are playing tricks on you."
He paused, unsatisfied, then stuck his hands back in his coat pockets and moved on.
Claire and I glanced at each other again, feeling more concerned than ever, but we kept our silence and followed him.
We were just a few metres from the stairhead when Paul stopped again. He spun around to face us. With the moon behind him, he was in shadow, but from the stance I could tell that he was terrified.