Wild Fell by Michael Rowe Read Free Book Online Page B

(1857)
    I want to teach you about fear.
    I want to tell you a ghost story. It’s not a ghost story like any ghost story you’ve ever heard. It’s
my
ghost story, and it’s true. It happened here in the house on Blackmore Island called Wild Fell, in the inland village of Alvina, Ontario on the shores of Devil’s Lake. Like any ghost story, it involves the bridges between the past and the present and who, or rather
what
, uses them to cross from the world of the living into the world of the dead.
    But I’m getting ahead of my story. I did say the bridge is between the past and the present. Although I’ll tell you this story in the present, I would be remiss if I didn’t start with the past—specifically
my
past. Time is, or ought to be, linear. Sometimes it’s anything
but
linear, which brings us back to ghosts.
    Still, one thing at a time, right?
    By the time he was gone, my father, a gentle, loving man with a fierce intellect and great wit, had already been gone for a very long time. He had forgotten everything about what had made him my father in the first place. He didn’t know himself and he didn’t know me. The erasing had been the hardest part for me to watch, harder even than the sure knowledge that he was going to die, and that it would be soon, if not quickly.
    My father had always been my memory, the keeper of our family’s history, his own past, and even my past. The memories of any child, while vivid, are always subject to the subtle twist and eddy of time and emotional caprice. Which is in part to say, while I believe I remember everything about my childhood, I can only remember from the inside out. The actual events may have been something other than what I remember.
    My name is Jameson Browning. In the summer of 1971, when I was nine I went to Camp Manitou, the summer camp deep in rural eastern Ontario where edges of towns yielded to woods and marshes and rolling farmland hills.
    I hadn’t wanted to go at all. I deeply distrusted boys of my own age, all of whom had proven themselves to be coarse and rough and prone to noise and force. It would be tempting for anyone reading this to imagine a socially isolated, lonely boy with no friends—a loner not so much by choice, but by ostracism or social ineptitude. But the conjured image would be an inaccurate one. I wasn’t a lonely boy at all, not by any stretch, though I did indeed love to be alone.
    I loved to read. I loved to be outside by myself, especially in the greenbelt near our house, whose trees, in places, were almost dense enough to be considered a small forest and which had a stream running through it.
    I had friends, two little girls. One was real, and lived three doors down in a house that looked very much like mine, indeed like everyone else’s in our mid-century neighbourhood of elm-shaded, sidewalked streets and neatly tended lawns. The house in Ottawa in which I grew up was a classic 1960s-era suburban one on a tree-lined street, with four floors and a long, low roofline. On the top floor of the house were my parents’ bedroom and bathroom, and my father’s study. On the main floor were a spacious living room, the dining room, and the kitchen. One floor below that were my bedroom and a guest bedroom I can only ever recall my grandmother using, once, on a visit before she died in 1969. My bathroom, with the cowboys-and-Indians wallpaper, was a short flight of stairs down in the basement, next to the recreation room and the laundry room.
    The other girl lived in the wood-framed full-length mirror bolted to the wall in my bedroom. The place
she
dwelt was indistinctly bordered by my imagination and by the infinite possibilities of the worlds-upon-worlds inside the reflected glass.
    The real girl’s name was Hank Brevard—well, her
actual
name was Lucinda, and she was a tomboy who was as much of a loner as I was. Her father was away a great deal on business and her mother didn’t seem to like her very much, and was always at her to