IMAN SAT AMONG the din of the cafeteria, pushing overcooked—and overpriced—butter chicken around her plate. The sauce had congealed to tar-like stickiness. Strings of it clung to the tines of the fork. She pushed her tray aside.
A familiar face emerged from the fog of students and slid onto the bench seat opposite her. She brushed a rogue lock of hair from her forehead and set her backpack on the table beside her, fingers working the zipper.
“How’d you even find me in this mob?” Iman asked.
The girl shrugged. “You get a sixth sense for it after a while. It’s good to see you, Manny.”
“You too, Em.” The two girls smiled at one another: Iman slender, coffee-skinned, straight black hair hanging heavy as crepe; Emily a vision of Teutonic supremacy, the sort of buxom, cream-skinned blonde you’d find in Nazi propaganda. Only Hitler’s dream girl likely wouldn’t have taken French Literature and Women’s Studies at Brock University, nor audited a couple of Arabic courses to branch out from her study of European tongues—Romantic ones, no less. The girl was a panoply of languages, an effortless polyglot who, with a year’s casual study, could read the Quran in its native script—a feat Iman, to her shame, couldn’t even come close to managing. They’d met during a couple of English Lit classes they’d shared in undergrad—Postcolonial Women’s Narratives and Gender and Race in the Victorian Era—and struck up a fast friendship that had softened but not broken when they pursued graduate studies at separate universities: Iman continuing at Brock, Emily drifting to Holy Sceptre.
“So, no offense, but I won’t be coming to you next time I want someone to recommend me a good beach read.”
Iman gave a sheepish smile. “Was it that bad?”
“Bad? No. It was actually pretty interesting, as a historical document anyway. Prose wasn’t much, but what can you expect?” Emily reached into her bag and pulled out a stack of paper. Notes and scribbles fuzzed its margins. Some bits of text were highlighted, others underlined, giving them the beleaguered look of a manuscript that had undergone a major pummeling in the editing room. She rested an arm across the title page, allowing Iman a glimpse of the first few words of the title only: Le voyage de Lucien Chevalier.
A shiver went through her. Somehow, she felt this book was important. It was too esoteric, too outside the scope of Motes’ other readings, not to be. Iman clutched her hands to avoid snatching it from Emily’s grasp. It’s in French, dummy. It won’t do you any good.
“What do I owe you for copies?” Iman asked, reaching for her purse. Emily waved the question away.
“Please. Didn’t cost a thing. Being a grad student has its perks.”
“At a posh school like Sceptre, maybe. Anyway, thanks. I appreciate it.”
“No worries. Where’d you even hear about this thing, anyway? It’s not on the public system at all. Our archives have what might be the only copy.”
“It’s for work.” The lie rolled effortlessly off her tongue, greased as it was with a thin veneer of truth.
“Well, I guess there’re worse ways to earn a few dollars. Like I said, it’s sorta fascinating from a Canadian perspective.”
“So what’s it say, exactly?”
“Well basically, this Lucien Chevalier was a French fur trader, and a bit of an amateur explorer to boot. I couldn’t tell much about the guy’s background, but he seems pretty fascinating. You wouldn’t think some French bushman out scoring furs would be literate, let alone sophisticated enough to keep a whole diary, though I guess Champlain did it, so there’s precedent. Anyway, the journey he talks about brought him up to the Canadian Shield. He’s got a few fellow voyageurs with him, but he doesn’t seem too big on their company. He calls ‘em rude and hard-headed, and uses ‘free-thinker’ like a curse word. There aren’t a lot of specifics on their quarrels, but my take on it is that Lucien’s superstitious and they’re not. Or at least, not in the same ways.”
“What sort of ways do you mean?”
“Okay, the thing is, humans never really settled the Boreal Shield. Explorers have passed through it, and some First Nations people probably hunted around the outskirts, but it’s never supported a substantial population. It’s too rugged. The ground’s all outcrops and limestone and too tough to farm, and the winters are seriously harsh. The voyageurs had all been around long enough to know they weren’t about to run into more than the odd Beothuk or Iroquois camp. But Lucien kept insisting he saw people. Lots of them. He’d spot them mostly at night, haunting the outer fringes of their campfires, standing and silently watching. They’d vanish whenever he pointed them out, and as far as he could tell none of the voyageurs ever saw them, or believed that he did either.”
“But it could’ve been Iroquois or whatever, right? I mean, they had cause enough to be wary of white folks—no offense—so it’s no surprise they’d hang back and watch what happened rather than stroll right up to them.”
“Fair point, normally, but at this point in history, voyageurs and Native Americans were actually pretty chummy. They did a lot of trade together.”
“Maybe these ones were more cautious.”
“Sure. But here’s where the story gets weird. Lucien spends a lot of time describing these ‘encounters’ or whatever. The watchers were absolutely silent, and they stayed far enough back from the fire that they were little more than silhouettes. Most of the time, the only reason he’d even notice them was their eyes. They flashed, flecks of blue or grey or green. ‘Emeralds set in a band of deepest night,’ he called them, which was a pretty sweet phrase, I thought.”
Iman ventured another bite of her butter chicken. The taste remained subpar, but it was at least edible. She dabbed at the sauce with her naan bread. “What’s so weird about that?”
“Name me a blue-eyed Iroquois.”
Iman nodded. “Ah. I get you.”
“Lucien only got a proper look at the watchers twice. The first time he was scouting ahead with his canoe, charting the course of a river. He took a sharp bend and spotted a man dressed in ratty furs, face covered in a thick brown beard, European as can be. He called out in French and a spotty bit of German, but the guy just stared at him. He dropped his gaze for a second to try and navigate the canoe to a shoal so he could beach it and get out to greet the stranger. But when he looked up, the guy was gone. He called out after him and scoured the riverbanks for half an hour, but never caught another glimpse of him.
“After that he started seeing the silhouettes. They came pretty much nightly for about two weeks. And that was all he saw, right up until the last few pages of his diary. He’d been in the woods for about three months at this point, and it was starting to wear on him. He started venturing out onto smaller tributaries and spending nights away from his main party—he never comes out and says it, but I’m guessing he was getting pretty sick of their company.
“On one of these jaunts, he set up camp on a small clearing partially shielded by a limestone outcrop. The last mention of the figures is several days ago at this point, though he makes a point of noting each night that he ate his preserves cold and slept without lighting a fire. I’m guessing the watchers have something to do with it.
“Anyway, he hears some growling in the middle of the night, snaps awake, grabs his rifle. Bears are common in the Shield, especially back then, and grizzlies aren’t unheard of. He loads a round and creeps around the outcrop to the source of the sound, which came from the bank of a river nearby. As he gets closer, he notices not one growl, but two. The first is constant, and it doesn’t take him long to place it as a waterfall. For a moment he feels relief, assuming the other growl was nothing but his imagination piling onto the sound of running water. But then the second growl rises to a roar, then a whimper of pain, then silence, followed by some wet smacking sounds that Lucien doesn’t like at all. He sidles up to a cluster of cattails growing along the edge of the river, and very carefully peeks out.
“He sees a bear, but its days of being a threat are done. It’s dead, its belly torn open, its head flopping back like a rag doll’s. Hunched over the bear is a man who could be the older brother of the bearded guy he’d seen months earlier. Wider shoulders, darker beard, but the same hooked nose and silver-blue eyes. He’s naked save for a few straps of fur draped haphazardly over his chest and belly. Lucien looks for the weapon the guy used to fell the bear, but as far as he can tell the guy didn’t have so much as a sharpened stick. He shoves a hand into the bear’s belly, pulls out a wad of entrails, and bites into them. No fire, no knife, no nothing. Just fingers and teeth and raw meat. He scarfs down the handful in a few quick bites and licks his fingers clean, and that’s when Lucien notice’s the guy’s fingernails. They’re the yellowy-beige of old bones, and inch long, maybe a quarter-inch thick at the base, and tapered to gnarled points. As Lucien watches, the guy uses one of them to slice through fur and gristle and peel back a flap of bear skin.
“As you might expect, Lucien’s had enough. He breaks camp that night, tracks down his comrades, and tells them he’s quitting the expedition. They put up a fuss, threaten to confiscate his furs and cut him out of his share of the profits. He haggles them down until they let him take enough furs to pay his passage back to France, and counts himself well rid of the lot of them.”
Emily turned up her hands and rested them on the table. Iman waited for more information and, when she received only silence, asked: “And then what?”
“That’s it. That’s the end of the diary.”
Iman scratched her head. “Okay.”
“I mean, obviously he made it back to civilization, since he managed to get his diary bound and into the Holy Sceptre archives via who knows what roundabout process. Some canny librarian probably dug the thing out of a rummage sale. And I’m pretty sure he made it back to France at some point. I found some online historical records on an archives site, and it has a record of one Lucien Chevalier, Voyageur, né en 1586, mort en 1645. The diary includes full names for three of the other voyageurs, and I checked those guys out too. I found birth records, but no death dates for any of them. All are marked as last seen 1621, disparu à la mer.”
“Lost at sea?” Iman ventured.
“I think more ‘lost beyond the sea.’ Weird, eh?”
“Yeah, weird about covers it. But doesn’t some of what he says call the whole thing into question? I mean, mysterious figures in the darkness? A man killing a bear with his, um, bare hands? No pun intended.” Iman scratched her head, fingernails making a scraping sound against her dry scalp. “With stuff like that in there, it’s hard to take the rest of it all that seriously.”
Emily bit her lower lip and glanced aside, a gesture Iman knew meant she disagreed but wanted to say so in the gentlest possible manner. “I know I’ve made the guy sound like a bit of a nutjob, but most of his diary is so sane it hurts. Pretty much every entry is just recordkeeping. He describes the weather, charts the distance and direction they travelled each day, points out landmarks for future references, describes the local flora and fauna, keeps inventory of catches. He even talks about his meals, especially when they involve wild edibles. Talk of strange shadow people is few and far between, and when it comes the tone is more curiosity and growing unease rather than stark raving lunacy. When his colleagues don’t believe him, he reacts with frustration, not paranoia. He doesn’t start building up conspiracies or suspecting the other voyageurs of having it in for him, both thoughts you’d expect from someone having a schizophrenic episode in the woods.”
“It could be fake.”
“Sure it could. But to what end? If the guy was trying to write a thrilling account of his adventures in the savage new world, he did a lousy job of it. Half the diary is clerical blather, and the denouement just sort of flops there. There’s no climactic showdown or brush with death. He just gets spooked and goes home. If you’re gonna make something up, you might as well go big.”
Iman slurped a bit of butter chicken sauce off her fingers. “You sound like you really believe the guy saw this stuff.”
“I believe that he believed it, which is a different thing altogether. But do I think he’s lying or insane? Frankly, no. I don’t know enough about the region’s history to offer a convincing explanation, but whatever it might be, I bet it’ll make for a hell of a story.”
“For sure.” But not as good a story as what happens in Professor Motes’ basement.
“One more thing. I mentioned that Lucien gives a detailed account of how far he travelled each day. He also spends a fair bit of time pointing out any landmark he comes across. Big rocks, lakes, river forks, hilltops stripped bare by lightning. Between the two, I did a little Google mapping and put together a rough outline of his trip.” Emily handed Iman a black and white printout showing a map of northern Ontario. A thick grey line described a lopsided horseshoe through the wilds to the west of Hudson Bay. Iman traced a finger along the route, skimming over trees and rivers.
“Em, this is great.” A bizarre thought occurred to Iman, the sudden pressure of it forcing a question to her lips. “Hey, when Lucien saw the man eating the bear, did he happen to describe the phase of the moon?”
Emily leaned forward, her brows furrowed. “It’s funny you should ask. I noticed the same thing.”
“What’s that?”
Emily zipped her bag and looked at Iman, her expression oddly blank. “That it was ‘bright as a shaved coin,’ as Lucien put it. Meaning a day or two short of full.”