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CHAPTER TWELVE

Visible as a few black grains in grey air, it came, at first, along the North Shore, a floating poisonous wheeze over the sulphur piles on the North Shore docks, and dawdling gently over creosoted fragments, soiled gull feathers, and lost cedar floats moved on up the slope of the city to spread depression and pleurisy.

It stopped lightly and quickly at the home of Mrs. Sarah Teasdale on Pioneer Street. It sneered at her snug home and frowned at her comforts. It gave her a hard look, a bad look, for her nephew, the last living relation of this decent old woman, widowed sixteen years. On lower Lonsdale on December 15th, Nephew Tommy, in a paroxysm of pre-Christmas tension but with no real motive but beastly boyness, had hit a little girl, a schoolmate, the eleven-year old sister of Lorraine Tartan, in the face with an ice-hard snowball. That this was the fault of Mrs. Teasdale, Sarah Teasdale felt suddenly and utterly certain when our spirit moved, in stealth and force, upon her.

Now the cold dark thing moved on westward. It harrowed souls bent to honest if selfish work in the shops of Park Royal and in the kitchen of the Tricolor restaurant, where Victor Selva planned for his wife's brother an unpleasant accident with a motorized meat slicer. It spiralled out over the Gulf of Georgia.

It moved gradually over the southern neighbourhoods of the city, alighting in moneyed Shaughnessy, where it found M lying on Serena Rapt, coiting vigourously. It brought him, as he laboured, a narrow, sharp and shadowed sense of unease and vacancy, flatness, materiality and dread. It suggested to him that he might as well turn himself in at the Campbell Soup plant on the south edge of the city near New Westminster. "Chop me, brothers," he should say to them. "Cut my gristle and bone for your giant soups! Render my bull's neck, my faun's ankles for your broths and gravies." But then, thought M, why the despair? I am after all a materialist. What I am doing here right this minute is simple enough, nothing but the old bump and squish. I don't need to be bothered by these dark hints, premonitions, emanations, night sweats. I think that I won't be bothered by them. Beneath him, pillowy, Serena billowed.

The cold northern spirit, nothing daunted by this juvenile bravado, hunted on its way. It found M again and threw at him its prowling malfeasant stinging aroma, its rank evacuating influence as this transportable polymorph perversely sat on a grey marine-painted bench in Vancouver's Coal Harbour. He'd been turned down flat in his bid for a tryout for the UBC rowing team (Junior Eights) despite or because of some vehement lobbying by Serena Rapt's big brother. Perhaps Roger Rapt II only wanted to drown the couthless M.

Now M watched a woman on the next bench in a dumpy bitter-grey tweed overcoat clutch a half-full Safeway bag and sit and stare without any hope at the frilly chop of water. M, softened by his own disappointments and by the dark northern spirit, could feel all that oppressed her, all the dismay that seeped into her in the office above the Krak-A-Joke shop on Granville St., the atrocities hurled into her by her man in the house on Hudson St., the pain from the daughter and the niece. M was ready to wrap great rubber pig-shaped bags of sand marked All Your Trials Dear around his ankles, and topple into the dark grey water for her.

But he was needed, is needed elsewhere. He must join his friends in the big dark car in which they have been abducted. He must, in truth, be the one abducted. He must take his turn. So we again transport him, astrally if you like.

The next thing M knew it was none other than himself in the back of the kidnap car, a Mercedes as it turned out. The wheel, or more correctly tyre, had been changed, and the menace-laden thing continued along the Squamish highway, though now the car headed toward Vancouver, for the addle-pated Al had put its nose the wrong way emerging from the pullout, and now steered back in the direction whence they'd come, not apparently noticing or caring. The interrogation and menace of Phase D of the ride continued though, and M was faced with hard, hard questions.

"What did you do to McMannic's girlfriend?"

"Why won't your father speak to you?"

"What's that peculiar smell?" (This from Roethke, of all people.)

"Where did you put the money?"

"How many a you seen that flash?"

"What made you think you could get away with that?"

"How many times you done that?"

"Done what?"

"What he done."

Every answer M made, and he tried, with dutiful and would-be engaging little smiles, to make several answers, was rebuffed. "Hawmphh!" said his interlocutors. "Cheep" (trying to be a good "canary") and "murmur" (trying, since nothing he said seemed to be right, not to be offensively definite) said M. For a time M supposed he had them going in his direction as he talked about patterns of violence in Kyd's Spanish Tragedy compared with those to be found in Shakespearean revenge tragedy, specifically of course Hamlet, though not entirely excluding Cyril Tourneur or Thomas Middleton, and paying full tribute to John Webster's two dark masterworks, The Duchess of Malfi, and, preeminent for M, The White Devil.

"Actually you folks remind me a good deal of Francisco and Antonio, two of the heavies whom Bosola brings in to do some cutting and strangling in The Duchess. I expect you know your way around that sort of work, eh? Could see your way clear to take on a bit of it?"

Now there was swearing, and five hands reached for the chattering, demented student. M sucked in his boyish rosy cheeks and sucked his spine as far as he could into the nasty imitation leather (even then, even Mercedes) seatcovers. The voices and faces wavered and wowed and became a quick babble of anger and jerking red masks. The car too wavered and wowed. M found hands hustling him forward on the seat and sliding him through the suddenly open door and through the sudden wind and into the gravel, skinning on his shoulder, chest, face. He felt his nose tear open and knew that he was in some way free now, but what impossible cost? And most dark of all, he knew that allies, friends, were nothing, nothing, and that the strong forces in the world had no regard for him. Wanted him out of the way. Out of the way of what?

He lay for quite a long time in the gravel, and he waited for something to come and redirect him, down a little deeper perhaps, into a shallow grave. Or off on a stretcher or a bier or a plank. Flights of saranwrapped angels sing thee. Off to the reformatory, the infirmary, the crematorium. Maybe something would raise him right up.

In an hour, perhaps two, something did raise him to his feet and start him walking slowly and uncertainly along the shoulder of the road. In what direction he was going was not clear for a time, was not a matter of interest to him as he bobbed along, dreaming elsewhere, elsewhere, and looking zebra-striped with raspberry marmalade over the right side of his neck and face and head.

Lorraine Tartan walked down the lane behind West 37th Avenue, a few blocks from Angus Cary's house. Thither was she bound. No young person was ever really welcome in the Cary home, for they were seen there as agents of corruption and springtime, influences which the Carys wished to deny to their son, and to the younger brothers, Sean and Patrick. Besides boasting the spiritually upward-mobile Carys, the district was the home of the semi-fictional Alma Dukes. This vicious and legendary neighbourhood gang was composed of such neighbourhood hoods as Patrick Cary, and it excelled in beating up primary-school kids, girls preferably, from St. Mary's School, and stealing the candy they purchased at Earl's corner store. Patrick Cary had done a couple of worse things than that, too, but he had never told anyone except his older brother Liam about these things. Once, suddenly and considerably drunk on two bottles of Lucky Lager beer in the Henderson's garage, he had blurted some threatening information to Lorraine, hoping to impress this splendid older woman. She sneered and turned away from Patrick. After all, what good was a fifteen-year-old would-be hoodlum to an attractive eighteen-year-old widow with an I.Q. of 168 on the Richter scale? Brazen, brainy, budding, bee-hived philosopher that she was, she had sights half set on Liam, who had wit as well as delinquency to offer. Liam could be winkled from the Cary house by an apparition at a basement window, and Lorraine knew this. Thither she walked. A car radio nearby gave forth The Kingston Trio singing "South Coast" and the lyrics offended Lorraine. "My heart died that night with my adoring slave," she thought.

Ahead of her in the lane a clapboard garage was spilling grey things, a human cargo, incongruously dressed up. In movies Lorraine had seen guys who looked something like this - sallow shirts, ties, suity suits, the big overcoats, hats, oh, the hats! But in the movies they looked spiffy, impressive.

They stopped in front of her, stopping her. "Are you Lorraine T?" said the nearest one.

"Yes."

"Have you seen M, G, or D around here today?"

She was confounded. What did he mean? "What do you mean?"

"You seen any of these guys around this neighbourhood today?"

He looked nasty, and so did his companions. They looked full of anger and official or very unofficial aids to angry action. The grey and navy topcoats draped down over who knows what. But they carried themselves in a way that said that they were either not out to or not able to pull just any old bystanders or bystalkers into their cars or their cells or their lineups or offices or whatever they had behind them somewhere in the city. She felt bold.

"Why would they be around here?"

"They'd be around here," the sneer readily responded, "because they're not going to be around the University, that's just for students, as I think you know. They're not going to be downtown because they haven't got any business and they haven't got any jobs and they haven't got any suits. So they can't go downtown. And they're not going to be anywhere in this city that there's work to do, because they haven't got any work to do and they wouldn't know how to do it if they did have it. They can't do it, they can't learn it, they can't take it." Here the eyes of the sneer grew large, and he advanced his face at Lorraine. "Too friggin' soft! And that's about the end of it on those guys. Isn't it, Miss Tartan?"

"I haven't seen them."

She walked past the suited man, past the group of them, and the wind, a hinting bit of the dark and cold thing that had earlier come into the city, grated its way down the lane. It didn't trouble Lorraine, who sensed it as only a very small disturbance in the ether. She was not bothered by it; she had her brains to keep her warm.

And other things. Yesterday, standing dark-eyed and flat-eyed in front of Brock Hall, Tommy P had offered to sell her the huge raccoon coat he was wearing. The great pelted thing was draggling on the ground behind Tommy P's dirty heels, and who knows where he had found or stolen the thing. "My special offer this month! My College Special. Next month maybe I'll have the Duesenberg Phaeton for ya! The pennants, Smith and Swarthmore and Fordham! Where Marshall McLuhan's on the faculty, Lorraine! I can give you all this stuff and make you a coed to wow the other coeds, kid! Teach you the varsity drag! Not to mention the Frug! I can make you authentic, Lorraine! Of course you might have to dismantle that beehive, get a short bob, a becoming Betty Coed cut."

If I wasn't an atheist he'd be Satan, thought Lorraine.

"Get behind me," she said.