High Art: A Short Story Read online

  Tara glared at him for a moment, but finally lowered her eyes and nodded. “I realize this all sounds pretty crazy. I guess I didn’t really look at things from someone else’s point of view.” She looked up at him, calm, sincere. “I’m glad you’re being honest about this. It tells me coming to you was the right thing to do.”

  She stood and took a final sip of beer. She stared out the window for a moment at the night-shrouded lake.

  She turned back. “I’m sorry I’ve been so short with you. I guess I was just so sure you would believe me. When you didn’t . . . I guess I got mad.”

  Pike nodded. “I get it. ‘Sokay. And you gotta understand that one thing they teach you in journalism school is to question everything. Fact is, this letter doesn’t say much, y’know?”

  “I know. But to me, it’s just too much of a coincidence that he writes that, names Benning, and turns up dead just days later.”

  “Like I said: I want to hear more.”

  Tara looked up at him. “So I come back tomorrow?”

  “Yeah. Yeah, that’d be fine.”

  She nodded and held out her hand. “Thank you, Pike.”

  He shook her hand, feeling that he was quite probably getting himself into one hell of a mess.

  *

  Gerry Hoolahan was annoyed. It was a full forty-three minutes past three in the a.m. and he was stumbling through the woods in his pyjamas and a pair of ill-fitting rubber boots. Branches lashed his face and clothes, tree roots grabbed at his toes and ankles, mosquitoes attacked his face and hands. Yet, Gerry’s annoyance was nothing compared to the concern he felt for the young girl.

  He had been trying to sleep but was kept awake by the fact that he was not sleeping in his own bed. Gerry Hoolahan had always done his best to avoid sleeping in strange beds. When travelling, he usually kept to cities in which he counted family members, people with whom he would have no problem borrowing a towel, clean pair of jeans or bed. This, however, limited his and his wife’s out of town travels to Timmins, Ontario and Low Point, Prince Edward Island. Though Gerry was always glad to go to P.E.I., his wife Ingrid had apparently had her fill of Low Point. As a passive-aggressive form of protest, Ingrid resolved to imbue her cooking with as much variety as that found in their vacation destinations. After weeks of eating the same two meals for dinner, either meatloaf or pan-fried cod, Gerry was finally convinced to negotiate. The couple settled on renting a cottage in Quebec’s Upper Laurentians. They had heard of Deer Lake, having been avid viewers of the old Unsolved Mysteries TV show, and thought a few days spent upon its shores could prove both relaxing and exciting.

  Gerry felt surprisingly good about the trip until he was faced with the bed. It wasn’t his bed. He had no idea who or how many people had slept in the bed. Did the owners rent their cottage out year-round, month after month, a different person or couple occupying the bed every thirty days? Gerry had serious doubts about sleeping in such a promiscuous bed. He decided to give it his best, for Ingrid. Come nightfall, however, he lay wide awake, staring at the ceiling, thinking about all the backsides which had occupied the very spot upon which his own rump was now sweating. He felt uncomfortable. Ill at ease. Dirty. The bed had been around. The bed had held multiple partners. Gerry was sleeping with every person that had previously slept in the bed.

  He was about to burst from beneath the sheets and run screaming into the lake to scrub the cumulative, bed-stored cottager-filth from his body when Gerry heard the child’s cry. It sounded like a young girl, no older than six or seven. The cry was plaintive, near tears. He listened closely and, after just a few moments, he heard it again. Gerry could not discern any clear word or words but the sentiment was clear: the kid was scared.

  Doing his best not to wake Ingrid, Gerry climbed out of the bed of questionable virtue, walked out the front door, onto the porch and into his rubber boots.

  An hour and a half later, he followed the beam of his Canadian Tire-brand flashlight through the woods, while moths and other nocturnal pests danced and swirled through the light, casting grotesque shadows upon the surrounding foliage and creating movement where there was none. His clunky boots were crunched and snapped through the undergrowth, the sounds echoing in the dark like gunshots.

  The child’s cries continued. They came in regular intervals, every three minutes or so. Gerry was moving closer to the source, this he could discern by the volume of the child’s calls. She did not seem to be moving, either closer or farther away. This, Gerry decided, was good. Three times Gerry called out himself, in the hopes of alerting the child that he was on his way, of reassuring her. Strangely, her cries did not stop, nor did they change at all. The child sounded no less frightened, her cries just as unintelligible. Gerry was beginning to worry, not only for the child, but for himself. He was not a woodsman. His property back home was half an acre in size and sported a grand total of two trees, each one smaller than Gerry himself. Nature was something Gerry Hoolahan watched on TV or from far away. He never integrated himself into nature.

  The cries were close now.

  “Hello,” Gerry called. “Are you lost? I’m here to help you, okay?”

  He kept moving, swinging his light from left to right and back again. He noticed a spark of light to the right. He swung toward it, spearing the night with his flashlight beam. He heard a noise, a soft, rhythmic gurgle. He took another step forward, peered into the beam of light, trying to recapture the spark or flash he had noticed before. He flicked his wrist slightly and saw the flash again. But it was not, as he had originally believed, a new source of light but, instead, a reflection of his own light. He had wandered near shore, the sound he’d heard were waves lapping at the beach while the spark was his own beam reflecting against the water’s surface.

  The girl’s cry came again and Gerry whirled about. He stumbled over a fallen tree and pushed through a tangle of branches. His light revealed tree after tree. Then there was another flash, another spark. This one was not water-borne. The lake was behind him. This new light had issued from one of the trees. A huge one, not ten yards ahead. Gerry crept toward the tree and, as he approached it, he realized there was a large hole marring its surface. The hole was large enough to hold a child of six or seven. Gerry had no kids of his own and, at forty-six, he’d resigned himself, with more relief than sorrow, to never having any. But, having been a child once himself, he knew one thing about children: they were pretty stupid. Stupid enough to wander alone into the woods, stupid enough to get lost, stupid enough to climb into a large hole in a large tree and, possibly, stupid and fat enough to get stuck in said hole in said tree.

  “Are you in the tree, sweetheart?” he whispered.

  No answer.

  He crept closer, aiming his flashlight at the hole. With every step, Gerry noticed the small flash of light issuing anew from the trunk’s depths. He reached the tree and leaned forward, holding his light high, so as to peer into the cavity. The hole was three feet from top to bottom and at least a foot in width at its widest point. At first Gerry saw only ragged bark and punky tree-innards. As he traced his beam lower, however, delving deeper into the cavity, he saw the spark. Two sparks. Eyes. Eyes that were not the eyes of a small child. Rather, they were the eyes of a fat, irritated and very scary porcupine.

  Gerry’s first thought was Holy shit, a porcupine.

  Gerry’s second thought was that the porcupine had killed and eaten the girl.

  Gerry’s third, and most insightful thought was that the porcupine was, in fact, the source of the cries.

  These three thoughts came upon Gerry quite rapidly, but they were cleanly interrupted by the porcupine as it let out a cry which sounded quite a bit like a forlorn child, and launched itself at Gerry.

  Gerry Hoolahan had never been attacked by an animal. He had never been bit or even nipped by a dog, he had never been scratched by a cat, he had never been pecked by a budgie. That his first adversarial encounter with the animal kingdom would take place in a forest, at three in th
e morning, with a porcupine, was completely unforeseeable.

  The creature screeched as it hit Gerry in the chest. Gerry screamed as he stumbled backwards, grabbed the thing and, using the beast’s own momentum, threw it over his right shoulder with as much force as he could muster. The porcupine flew through the air and landed just a foot from the water’s edge. It was back on its stumpy little legs in a flash, snarling and spitting.

  Gerry was terrified. The thing looked like an obese, spiky cat on steroids. It kept screeching at him. At that moment, Gerry Hoolahan wished more than anything that he was back in the slutty bed.

  There was a splash, a cracking of branches, a sound like a bear-trap being sprung and, after a second, louder splash, the porcupine was gone.

  Gerry could not be certain of what he had seen. Something big and dark had appeared for a split second, had enveloped the porcupine and had spirited it away, and he resolved, then and there, to keep what he had seen to himself. Otherwise, he would be forced to admit that he had seen Deery eat a porcupine.

  Buy Deer Lake here