Sliver of a Stile

Sliver of a Stile

—

The second leg always felt different.

Going out, you were chasing something. Coming back, you were carrying it. Martin had done enough long rides to anticipate this as a gift—reflecting on the completed journey.  Somewhere around the Manitoba border, he could craft the morals of the story.

The Harley ran clean beneath him, a low thrum he felt more than heard, and the Trans-Canada unspooled west to east as it always had, patient and enormous.

He had made it to St. John's. Stood at Cape Spear in the early morning mist with his helmet under his arm, looking out at the Atlantic, the easternmost point in the country, the end of the road in every sense that mattered. He had been alone on the headland for nearly an hour before the other traveller arrived—a woman about his age, solo, a Winnipeg plate on the Subaru she'd parked below. She came up the path with her hands in her vest pockets and stood beside him without speaking for a long moment, which he appreciated.

"You ride all the way out?" she said, nodding at the helmet.

"From Kelowna." He paused. "Going back the same way."

She looked at him. "You must be exhausted."

"Not yet," he said. "That's the return trip."

She laughed—a short, bright sound that the Atlantic wind carried off immediately—and handed him her phone for a photo of her at the marker. He took one. She took one of him, grinning, with the ocean behind him. Then she looked at the sky, at the clouds coming in low from the northeast, and said she wanted to make Fredericton by nightfall. She had her own road ahead of her: Winnipeg, the long way around, back through Quebec and Ontario. She'd be in Northern Ontario in two days, she thought, if the weather held.

"Drive safe," he said.

She raised a hand without turning around. He watched her pick her way down the path to the parking lot, watched the Subaru pull out and head west, and then he was alone again on the headland with the Atlantic and the wind and the feeling, which he had been anticipating for three weeks, that he had done the thing he came to do.

He spent one more day in St. John's. He owed himself that.

♦

Now he was three weeks and four thousand kilometres into the return, and the trip had the quality of a good sentence finding its period. His panniers held a Newfoundland flag, a jar of partridgeberry jam, and a piece of rose quartz from a gift shop in Gros Morne that he'd bought for no sensible reason. His boots had creased in the exact same spot for six days running. The seat had broken in perfectly.

He was, by any honest measure, a happy man.

♦

Northern Ontario arrived the way it always did: without ceremony. The Canadian Shield pushed through the topsoil like the bones of something very old, and the trees thickened and grew closer to the road, and the sky narrowed into a corridor of blue. There were no farms here, no silos, no evidence of the particular human ambition to tame a flat thing. The land was not flat. The land was indifferent.

Martin had ridden this stretch twice before and loved it both times. Highway 17 hugged the North Shore of Lake Superior like it was afraid to leave, and on clear days the lake opened up on his left as he crested rises—silver-blue and enormous, more like a sea than any inland water had a right to be. He had timed his departure from White River to put himself in the heart of the park by late afternoon. Golden hour through the pines. He was, in this respect, the kind of man who planned for beauty.

His heated grips were set to three. The lo-fi playlist he'd queued in Thunder Bay—piano, soft static, the occasional brush of a snare—played through his helmet speakers at a volume just above road noise. He had a full tank. He had a reservation at a campground outside Wawa for the night. He had, from a rest stop forty kilometres back, a large coffee in the insulated holder bolted to his left pannier.

The pine trees turned amber in the westering light. The asphalt ahead of him looked like velvet.

♦

He smelled it first.

That was the thing he would try to explain later—not the storm, not the road, but the smell that came before either. Something between rot and cold, like a freezer left unplugged for a month. It arrived in a gap in the trees and was gone in half a second, and Martin wrote it off as a deer carcass in the ditch. It happened. The Shield was full of things that died without witnesses.

He rode on.

The playlist skipped. Not the skip of a buffering connection—he had no signal here and the music was local files—but something else. A stutter. A single note played four times too many, percussive and wrong, before it corrected itself. Martin glanced at the helmet display. Battery: 94%. File: track 7 of 23.

He rode on.

The temperature drop registered first in his knees. The heated grips kept his hands fine, or should have, but the cold worked up through his riding pants and he thought: the lake. Superior pulled its own weather. He'd known that. He'd known that and packed an extra layer and it was in the right pannier, accessible without stopping if he—

The display read: HEATED GRIPS: ON — LEVEL 3.

His hands were cold.

He flexed his fingers inside the gloves and told himself it was fatigue. Seven hours in the saddle did strange things to circulation. He would stop at the Agawa Bay pull-off if it was still light, stretch his legs, make sure he was—

The GPS chirped. He checked it at a glance, the way you do when you've been riding long enough to read it like a peripheral.

It showed him on a road he didn't recognize.

Not a different road. The same road—Highway 17, the blue line still there—but something in the overlay had shifted, some layer of the map unseating itself. A secondary route was highlighted in pulsing orange, threading north into the park interior. There was text beside it. He couldn't read it at speed but it had the shape of a notification, a suggestion, the kind of thing the app generated when traffic conditions changed.

He paid it no heed. The sky to the west had gone the colour of a bruise and he felt laying down distance was the better strategy.

♦

The storm came from nowhere, which was impossible, because Martin watched weather. He had checked the app at the White River Tim Hortons and it had shown a clear corridor all the way to Wawa. Nothing within fifty kilometres. But the cloud that moved in from the northwest did not seem to know that, and within six minutes the light failed and the first fat drops were hitting his visor and the pine trees on either side of the road were pitching.

He downshifted. Put his emergency flashers on. Thought: okay. Storms. They happen.

He had ridden in worse.

What he had not ridden through was a river.

It appeared around a long, downhill curve—a brown surge of water, relentless in its roar; six inches deep and sixty feet wide. Enough to wash away a transport truck.  A ministry truck was parked on the far side, amber light turning. A worker in a safety vest stood at the other edge. He did not call across. He looked at Martin for a moment, then raised one arm and pointed back the way Martin had come. Then he held up four fingers. Then he pointed north.

That was all.

Martin looked at the water moving across the road. He looked at the sky. He looked at the GPS, which had updated itself without his input—the orange route was still there, and now there was text he could read: GARGANTUA RD — CAMPGROUND 18.3 KM — FACILITIES AVAILABLE.

He looked to where the worker was. The man was already — presumably — back in his truck.

Martin put his visor down. Turned the bike around.

He told himself it was fine. He told himself that twice.

♦

Gargantua Road was gravel, recently—and then less recently—maintained. The Harley didn't love it but managed, and Martin kept his speed to thirty and his eyes on the ruts. The trees closed in immediately, the kind of closing-in that is less metaphor than fact: the boreal forest on either side was so dense it created its own darkness, and his headlight cut a cone of illumination that felt very small.

He tried not to think about the smell. It came in waves now, every few minutes, that cold-rot wrongness, and he had stopped attributing it to deer carcasses because there was nothing in the ditch. There was nothing in the ditch on either side, just gravel and dark water running in the ruts and the rain coming down through the pines.

Eleven kilometres in, something moved in the trees.

He saw it in his peripheral vision and it was gone by the time he turned his head—and that was normal, that was deer, that was the way the boreal forest worked. Things moved. Things watched. It was not personal.

But deer moved like deer. They bounded or they froze. They did not move with the kind of deliberate lateral motion he'd caught in that half-second, too tall for the undergrowth, covering ground too quickly for something that large.

He gave the throttle more than he'd meant to.

The campground materialized out of the dark eighteen point three kilometres from the highway: a wooden sign with a beaver logo, a gravel loop, a handful of cleared sites with picnic tables and metal bear lockers, and in the centre of the loop—thank God, thank whatever—a concrete-block comfort station with a light on inside. The light was fluorescent and it was the most beautiful thing Martin had seen since Cape Spear.

He parked the Harley under the overhang of the comfort station, which was not designed for motorcycles but worked anyway. Killed the engine. In the sudden silence, the rain on the metal roof was very loud and the forest was very dark and very close.

He registered on the app—$38.50 for a walk-in site—and carried his sleeping gear inside.

♦

The comfort station smelled of industrial cleaner and old concrete. Fluorescent tubes ran the length of the ceiling, two of them flickering at the far end in a slow, arrhythmic pulse. There were four sinks, six stalls, two coin-operated showers, and a heavy steel door at each end, both fitted with industrial vertical pull handles. The windows ran along the upper third of the walls—small, frosted, each one covered by a welded steel grate bolted into the concrete. The grimy fan in the ceiling ran at a low drone that Martin found, against all logic, calming.

He changed into dry clothes in a stall. Hung his riding gear over the partition. Ate a protein bar standing at the sink, looking at himself in the mirror. He looked fine. A little pale. He was forty-three years old and he had ridden almost six hundred kilometres today and he was in a bathroom in the middle of a provincial park in a storm and he was fine.

At ten forty he heard the sound.

It came from outside the east door: a long, low sound, not quite a howl and not quite a voice, that rose at the end like a question. It lasted four seconds and then stopped. Martin stood very still. His hand was on the faucet. The fluorescent lights flickered.

Coyote. Wolf, maybe. Superior Provincial Park had both. He had heard wolves before. He had—

The sound came again. Closer. And this time it contained something that his brain processed before his conscious mind could intervene, something that arrived not as a sound but as a recognition: it had shape. It had syntax. It was not an animal.

It was not an animal, and it was not a person, and Martin stood in the flickering light and listened to the rain and the fan and the silence where the sound had been.

Then the third sound came, from directly outside the east door, and something answered it from the west side of the building—overlapping, harmonizing, call and response—and what Martin heard in those overlapping tones was a conversation.  A plan.

He did not ponder.  He moved.

♦

The east door first. He scanned the room fast and found it on the paper towel dispenser: a rubber door wedge, orange, the kind the cleaning crew used to prop doors open and left behind. He dropped it at the base of the door and drove it in with three hard kicks. It caught. He tested the pull handle. No motion.

The west door. He looked for a second wedge and didn't find one. He looked for anything—a mop handle, a length of pipe—and found nothing he could use. The pull-bar had no place to thread a lock. He stood for three seconds in the flickering light and then stepped to the nearest toilet stall.

The stall door was steel, hung on two heavy gravity hinges. Martin braced himself against the partition wall, lifted his right boot, and drove a kick upward at the lower hinge with everything he had.  The boot crease connected with sturdy metal, and the ankle inside was the crumple-zone.

The pain was immediate and threatened to steal his attention from his task. He kicked again, and the door swung at a wrong angle, half-detached, and he grabbed it and wrenched it the rest of the way free.

The door was fifty-eight inches tall. The gap between the nearest sink basin and the west pull-handle was, by some margin he would later think about with a strange and helpless gratitude, just under fifty-eight inches.

He lurched the stall-door sideways and turning to the west.  Part stepping, and part falling towards the exit door.  With his weight, the door panel bowed slightly, slipped between handle and sink and then settled and wedged tight.  Now something was tapping outside the door.

He crawled to the wall between the sinks and sat on the concrete floor with his back against it, his good leg bent, his right leg extended. He checked his phone: 11:09 PM. No signal. 61% battery.

5:14 AM.  That was dawn. He had looked it up somewhere in New Brunswick—some idle planning moment—and the number was in him now the way things lodge in you when you need them: sunrise, mid-July, Northern Ontario. Six hours and five minutes.

♦

The windows were tested first. Something struck the steel grates from outside—once on the east side, once on the west—impacts that rang through the concrete and set the fluorescent tubes swinging. Then silence. Then nothing more from the windows. As if they had always known the windows wouldn't give.

What they turned to instead was the bottom of the east door.

The sound began around midnight: a dry, rhythmic scraping at the door's base, just above the wedge. Not frantic. Methodical. Martin sat against the wall and listened to it and breathed. The fan droned. One of the functioning fluorescent tubes began to flicker.

At 12:40 the scraping stopped and something hit the east door. A single impact, low, that boomed through the building and shifted the door in its frame by an eighth of an inch. The wedge held. Martin waited. Another impact, same force, same height --- or was it higher? The wedge shifted a hair toward him.

He drove his heel into it. The pain from his right foot arrived white and complete and he made a sound he did not mean to, and then the wedge was seated again.  He sat back against the wall with his leg shaking and throbbing.

Outside, the sounds came again.  Before, it had been neither animal nor human. But now—was it a voice he recognized?  From one grey morning in the headland of Newfoundland; bright, brief and carried away by the Atlantic wind?  In a different world this voice was attached to a borrowed phone, a Subaru, and a Winnipeg destination.  He had taken a photo of her.

That voice.  It changed pitch and tone and cadence, with repeating patterns, as if speaking in a language.  Speaking at a volume intended for him.  But it said nothing he could understand.

The impacts came in clusters after that—three or four in rapid succession, then silence, then more scraping, then another cluster. Each time, the wedge crept a fraction toward him. Each time, he drove his heel into it. The shaking in his right leg had become continuous. At 2:15 AM the last functioning fluorescent tube at the far end of the room went dark, and now there was only the two tubes above him and the fan and the impacts and the voice, slowly cycling through new rhythms.  Slowly sounding like intelligence.

At 3:40 he noticed the top of the door.

The pull-bar hardware was at waist height, and below it the wedge held the base. But above the pull-bar, the top half of the door was unsecured—braced only by the door's own weight and the frame and the two heavy industrial hinges bolted into the concrete wall. If the impacts torqued the door hard enough at the bottom, the top would flex. The door was steel and the hinges were heavy, and it might not flex far enough to matter.

It might.

Outside, something understood this too. The next impact landed higher, directly above the pull-bar, and the door flexed at the top—just barely, just a sliver of stile appearing and disappearing at the upper corner—and Martin drove his heel into the wedge and held it there and felt the shaking move from his leg up through his spine and into his jaw.

The door held.

He kept his heel against the wedge.

He watched the upper corner of the door and did not let himself think about anything except the arithmetic: the wedge, the hinge, the weight of the steel, the number 5:14, the heel of his good foot pressed hard against the rubber and the floor.

Outside the rain had stopped. In the silence between impacts, the forest was very still, and the voice came and came, patient and bright, carrying off into the dark.

“You must be exhausted.”  And weight slammed into the door.  And the top of the door flexed half its thickness and reliably unflexed back to flat.

— ■ —