Wild Fell by Michael Rowe Read Free Book Online

Fish Out of Water.
    Armellini wrenched his hand away and rubbed it frantically against his jeans, but not before noticing that bits of the girl’s hand had been torn away, as if by needle-sharp teeth that had been small, vicious, and unrelenting.
    Fucking northern pike will eat anything,
Armellini thought, then vomited.
    The girl appeared to be wrapped in a white gossamer veil but Armellini realized he was looking at the sodden husks of what seemed to be thousands of drowned moths, legs and wings intertwined, clinging one to the other and to the girl’s body like a shroud, woven into her hair like interlaced garlands of white graveyard flowers.
    Legends begin in small northern towns on the edge of places other people only drive through on their way to somewhere else, in station wagons and vans full of summer gear: Muskoka chairs in bright summer colours, coolers full of beer, canvas bags bursting with swimsuits and shorts and t-shirts, and dogs who slumber on blankets in the back seat and are bored by the entire process of long car trips.
    Towns pass by that are the sum of their parts, and their parts are bridges, barns, fields, and roadside stands where home-baked pies or fresh ice cream are sold in the summer, and pumpkins, sweet corn, and Indian corn in the autumn. These towns are for gas stations that are distance markers for exhausted parents, where the kids can have one final bathroom break before the last stretch of highway leading to driveways that in turn lead to front doors and lake views.
    But of the lives of the citizens of these towns—the men and women who live and die in them, who carry to the grave entire universes of their history and lore, and the happenings of the century—these urban and suburban transients know nothing, and care even less.
    The towns they pass might as well be shell facades, their residents merely extras in a movie called
Our Drive Up North to the Cottage,
a
movie with annual sequels whose totality makes up a lifetime of holiday memories.
    In 1960, the drowning deaths of Brenda Egan and Sean Schwartz tore Alvina apart and destroyed two families, each of which blamed the other’s child for inadvertently luring their own child to his or her death through irresponsibility, wantonness or malice. There was no peace for either side. The psychic wounds each sustained through their losses and their lack of forgiveness would fester for decades, never fully healing. The funerals had been on separate days, and a lifetime of grudges and feuds would spring from jaundiced notations of who in town attended which funeral, not to mention those traitors who attended both.
    The tragedy briefly made newspapers across the country, though the story was a smaller and smaller news item the farther away from Georgian Bay it was written or told. After two days it had disappeared from the news altogether. The deaths of two teenagers in a town in northern Ontario no one had ever heard of weren’t going to hold anyone’s imagination for long.
    In Alvina however, the fact that Sean had been found nude, washed up on the landing beach of Blackmore Island, lent a salacious note to the tale, one that ensured its longevity through gossip—at least behind the backs of anyone from the Egan or Schwartz families.
    Had the girl been a secret slut in spite of her goody-goody veneer? Had the boy tried to rape her, drowning them both in the attempt? God only knew. Anything was possible. Besides, it happened out there, near
that place
.
    The police had apparently searched Blackmore Island. The big house up there had been locked up tight and shuttered, and it looked like it had been so for a very long time. The grounds had been wild and overgrown. No one had been living there, and there was no evidence that anyone had lived there for decades, much less that either of the two had been on the island the night they died.
    Still, nothing good had ever happened near
that place
. Not ever. It might not be a haunted island, but it