See now as the boy sees. Bear witness to a summerworld, a place sparkling with clear light and redolent with the fragrance of new-mown grass and where the air itself hosts all the warmth and weightlessness of bathwater.
It is the first morning in this summerworld and, knowing that autumn is but a pinpoint in the future, Michael stands on the porch of his grandparents’ country home and allows the elation to erupt inside him. He then mounts his bicycle and rides headlong into the season.
The town whisks past him in a verdant smear. But Michael holds his destination firmly in his mind’s eye.
The gravel pit on the edge of town has long been his private sanctuary. He has escaped to that secret grey place more times than he can possibly remember. It is his own summer retreat, one of the many highlights of spending the summer with his grandparents in the little village of Cherring Point.
Visiting the pits is technically trespassing. His grandfather, who was appointed by the government to maintain, and occasionally man, the place has often told him to keep away from it. Thus Michael keeps his mild transgressions to himself. Clearly he isn’t the only one to sneak into the secluded area. He isn’t the one who has cut the hole into the chain-link fence that distinguishes the property line, though he does always make sure to re-cover this portal with the brush that camouflages it.
Michael consoles himself with the logic that he really never disrupts anything in the pits. On his bike he would race over the mounds, which he likes to imagine as being the burial sites of behemoths. He loves watching his tires summon dirty fumes of gravel dust. Often that instant when his bike soars past the tipping point at the mounds’ summit, Michael feels as though he is flying.
It is his private ritual of summer elation; harmless and pure.
Except that today, on his inaugural visit of the season, Michael discovers that his ritual ground is no longer private. . . .
His initial reaction to seeing the girl beyond the fence is shock, a feeling that gives way to an almost dizzying sense of disbelief.
At the far end of the lot is a large redbrick storage shed, its door of corrugated metal shut firm and secured with a shiny silver padlock. Michael has often fantasized about all manner of treasure being stored within those walls.
Standing on the shed’s roof is a girl whom Michael guesses to be no older than he is. She is dressed in a t-shirt only slightly whiter than her teeth. Her straw-coloured hair hangs to the middle of her back. Her bare feet are uncannily balanced at the very summit of the shed’s pitched roof, yet she does not teeter or wave her arms to maintain this daring balance. She is as stationary as a totem.
Michael can feel her eyes upon him.
He veers his bike away and rides the paths above the gravel yard for a while, cutting sloppy figure-eights in the dirt while wrestling with whether or not he should retreat. What exactly is she trying to prove standing on the shed that way? What if she tries to speak to him, to shake loose his reasons for coming here? What if this place is in fact her special place? Perhaps he has been the real outlander all this time.
Michael veers his bike cautiously back to the hidden gap in the fence, hoping, foolishly, that the girl will flee.
He crouches low on his bike and glides to where the brush is thickest.
“What’s your name?”
The sound of her voice chills Michael. He wonders how she has spied him. Does her position on the roof make her all-seeing?
Like a surrendering soldier, Michael rides out from behind the greenery, clears the entrance to the pits and eases his bike toward the shed.
“How did you get up there?” he asks.
“Do you live near here?”
Michael frowns. “No. My grandparents do.”
“You’re not supposed to be in here, you know.”
“Neither are you!” Michael spits. He feels a strange and sudden rage overcoming him. Somehow his childish anxiety over seeing an interloper in his sanctuary pales beneath a fiery anger, something near to hatred. It erupts with such sharpness that Michael actually feels himself flinch, as though he’s been shocked by some hidden power line. Why should the girl anger him so? He wonders what it is about the nature of her innocuous questions that makes him despise her.
He pedals closer and is opening his mouth to say something, just what Michael isn’t sure, when a searing glint on the girl’s body forces him to screw up his face.
Shielding his eyes with one hand, Michael gives the girl a long and scrutinizing glare.
And then he truly sees her. . . .
Sees the flour-pale and bruise-blue pallor of her skin, sees the nuggets of crystallized water that form in her hair, in the folds of her oversized T-shirt, on her rigid ill-coloured limbs. Her eyes are almost solid white, but instinctively Michael knows that blindness is not the cause.
When she again asks Michael what his name is, her voice rises from somewhere in the gravel pits and not from her rigid face, for the girl’s jaw remains locked. For a beat Michael wonders if she is frozen solid.
To answer this thought, the girl suddenly raises her ice-scabbed arms as if to claim him.
Michael’s actions are so frantic they must appear as one vast and hectic gesture: the shriek, the rearing around of his bike, the aching, desperate scaling of the gravel mound, the piercing push through the tear in the fence, the breathless race across the fields.
Michael rides. And rides.
The distance Michael places between himself and the gravel yard brings little relief. Not even the sight of his grandparents’ home calms him. He rushes up their driveway, allows his bike to drop, then runs directly to the tiny guestroom that serves as his bedroom every summer vacation.
Burying his face in his pillow, Michael listens to the sound of approaching footsteps.
“Mikey, you all right?”
His grandmother’s musical voice is a balm to him.
Michael lifts his head, but when he sees the reddish stains that mar his grandmother’s fingers and the apron she’s wearing he winces.
“What is it, son?”
He points a bent finger and his grandmother laughs.
“It’s strawberries, silly. I’m making jam. I saw you come tearing up the road like the devil himself was at your heels.”
Michael wipes his mouth. “Grandma, do you believe in ghosts?”
Her brow lifts behind her spectacles. “Ghosts? No, I can’t say that I do, Mikey. Why?”
His account of the experience reaches all the way to the tip of Michael’s tongue, but at the last instant he bites it back. He shakes his head, stays silent.
His grandmother frowns. “Too much time in the sun, dear. Why don’t you lie down for a while? I’ll wake you for lunch.”
Michael nods. His grandmother’s suggestion sounds very good indeed. He reclines his head back onto the pillows and shuts out the world.
He doesn’t realize he’s dozed off until he feels his grandmother nudging him. Perspiration has dried on his hair and skin, which makes him feel clammy. He shivers and then groggily makes his way to the kitchen to join his grandparents for sandwiches.
“What happened, sleepyhead?” his grandfather teases. “You didn’t tire yourself out on the first day, did you?”
His grandfather receives a sardonic swat from his grandmother, which makes Michael laugh.
“He probably just rode too long in the heat,” she says.
“Oh? Where’d you ride to?”
“Just . . . around.” Michael bites into his sandwich, hoping that this line of questioning will end.
“Mikey asked me a little earlier if I believed in ghosts.” His grandmother sets a tumbler of milk down in front of Michael as she settles into her chair.
“Ghosts? What brought that on?”
Michael shrugs. “Nothing. I was just wondering.”
He cannot be sure, but Michael feels that his grandfather’s glare on him has hardened.
Michael remains indoors, the only place he feels relatively secure, for the rest of the day. He helps his grandmother jar up the last of her jams and wash up afterwards. He watches cartoons while she prepares supper. His grandfather is outdoors, labouring on one of the seemingly endless projects which occupies so much of his time. He is a veritable stranger in the house. Last summer
Michael had tried to assist him with the various chores, but he got the feeling that his grandfather found him more of a burden than an aid. So this year he takes his mother’s advice and just stays out of his grandfather’s way.
Though he’s never been mean, his grandfather does give off an air that Michael finds far less pleasant than that of his grandmother. She is always cheerful, brimming with old family stories or ideas of various things that he could help her with. Grandma’s chores never feel like work.
After supper Michael’s mother phones to see how his first day went. He is oddly grateful for the deep homesickness that hearing her voice summons; it means that he doesn’t have to think about what he’d seen that morning. His mother says she’ll be up to visit on the weekend.
The late morning nap and mounting anxieties make sleep almost impossible for Michael. He lies in his bed, which suddenly feels uncomfortably foreign, and wrestles with the implications of what he has seen, what he has experienced, for the encounter was far more than visual.
Standing in the presence of that girl, whatever she had been, made the world feel different. Just recollecting the event made Michael feel dizzy.
Maybe his grandmother is right, maybe he has been riding too hard under the hot sun. After a time Michael understands that the only way he can put the incident behind him is to return to the pits, to test what he’d seen or thought he had seen. His teacher last year told him the first rule when learning about science and nature is that you must repeat the experiment. If you want to know the truth about something you have to do the same thing more than once. If the results are the same, then what you’ve found is something real.
Tomorrow he will go back. He will find the truth.
The girl is nowhere to be found. Michael rides out after breakfast, despite his grandmother advising him against it. He promises her he will ride slowly and in the shade, and that he’ll be home to help her with lunch.
Michael is so elated by the absence of the ugly vision that he plunges through the rip in the chain-link and begins to scale and shoot down the gravel mounds at a manic pace. Dust mushrooms up in his wake. Michael feels unfettered from everything.
The sound of an approaching vehicle startles him to such a degree that he almost loses his balance.
Glancing up to where the country lane meets the gate of the gravel pit, Michael spies his grandfather’s pickup truck. He performs a quick shoulder check, panicked by the distance that stretches between him and the hole in the fence.
His grandfather steps out of the cab. Realizing that he has no time to escape, Michael hunches low and pedals behind the farthest gravel mound. There he dismounts, crouches, and is punished by the thundering heartbeat in his ears.
The gate is unlocked, de-chained. The pickup truck comes crawling down along the narrow path, parking before the shed. Michael doesn’t hear the engine shut off and he wonders if his grandfather is just waiting for him to come out from behind the mound so he can run him down.
But then the engine is silent and is soon followed by the rumbling sound that signifies the corrugated metal door being opened. Has the ghost-girl flung the door open from the inside? Perhaps she has attacked his grandfather. Michael swallows. With utmost caution he creeps to the edge of the mound and peers.
It is dark inside the shed, so dark that it looks boundless; a deep cavern of redbrick. Michael can just discern the faintest suggestions of objects: power tools, equipment of various shapes, overfilled shelves of metal.
The only item that stands out is the white box. It glows against the gloom and puts Michael in mind of Dracula’s coffin. But the sight of its orange power light glowing like a match flame confirms to Michael that it is nothing more than a freezer.
The shed’s corrugated door is drawn down. His grandfather must have chores to attend to in the shed. It likely won’t take him long to locate whatever tools he needs. Michael steals the opportunity to rush back to the tear and escape.
He races out to the bridge above West Creek. There he settles into a shady spot, dangles his legs over the bridge’s edge and studies catfish squirming along the current.
Near noon, Michael mounts his bike and rides back to his grandparents’ home.
The pickup truck is parked in the driveway. He takes a deep breath, praying that his grandfather hasn’t seen him making his escape.
“I’m home, grandma,” he calls from the foyer.
Entering the kitchen, Michael is startled by the sight of his grandfather fidgeting at the counter.
“She went into town to run some errands,” he says.
“Sit down, your lunch is ready.”
Michael does as he is told. His grandfather plunks down a bowl of stewed tomatoes before him, along with a glass of milk. He nests himself at the far end of the table and chews in silence.
His stomach knots. Michael chokes down the slippery fruit in his bowl.
“I suppose I should have had you wash your hands before we sat down,” his grandfather remarks. “You’re pretty filthy. You’ve got dust all over your clothes and hands.”
Michael freezes. His grandfather’s gaze remains fixed on the food in his dish, which he spoons up and eats in a measured rhythm.
When his bowl is empty, his grandfather sets down his spoon and lifts his eyes to Michael’s. “I have a confession to make,” he begins. “You know yesterday when your grandmother brought up the topic of ghosts? Well, can you keep a secret, just between us?”
Michael nods.
“You swear it?”
“I swear.”
“Cross your heart?”
Michael does so.
“All right then. I wasn’t being honest when I said I didn’t believe in them. The fact is I do. I saw a ghost once myself.”
“You did?”
“Yes. Well, it was something like a ghost. I think what
I saw was actually a jinn.”
“A jinn?”
“A jinn is a spirit, Michael. Legend says they are created by fire. They can take all kinds of forms; animals, people. But they’re very dangerous.”
“What did the jinn that you saw look like?” Michael asks breathlessly.
“It was in the form of a young girl.”
Michael feels his palms growing damp. “Where did you see her?”
“In the woods, not too far from here. I think she was planning to burn the forest down. That’s what the jinn do, they bring fire.”
“And did she?”
His grandfather shakes his head.
“So what happened?”
His grandfather tents his hands before him. “They say the only way to combat the element of fire is with ice. . . .”
And with that, a silent tension coils between child and elder, winding tighter like a spring. Michael is confused, curious, and scared. He doesn’t know what to do or say.
“Young boys get curious, and when they get curious they sometimes discover things that give them the wrong impression of what the world is like. There are always two sides to things, Michael,” his grandfather advises.
“There is the appearance of things and then there is what lies beneath. I want you to remember that, boy. Don’t base your opinions of the world on how it appears. Always try to remember what lies beneath. Sometimes the things that appear to be the most innocent are the most dangerous, and vice versa. It was a long time before I knew this, so I want you to learn it while you’re young. You understand?”
Michael nods even though he does not at all understand.
The sound of his grandmother turning into the driveway brings Michael a relief that borders on gleeful.
He runs to her. His grandfather rises and dutifully clears the table.
The remainder of the day moves at a crawl as Michael searches for a way to probe his grandfather further about the jinn. Is this what he has seen? No, what he’s seen looks more like a spirit born of ice. Either way, the woods that surrounded the old gravel pits are obviously haunted, and that means they are dangerous. By bedtime that night Michael has resolved to never again visit the gravel pits. He will find other ways to amuse himself.
He has almost managed to convince himself that everything is right with the world when the girl appears again, this time inside his grandparents’ house.
It is the dead of night and Michael is returning to his bed after relieving himself. She stands in the hallway, her flesh phosphorescent in the darkness. The nuggets of ice sparkle in her hair like a constellation of fallen stars.
Michael is bolted in place. His jaw falls open as if weighted. He looks at her but somehow isn’t truly seeing her. In the back of his mind Michael wonders if what he is experiencing is what lies beneath the surface of the girl and not merely her appearance.
The girl neither speaks nor moves. She stands like a coldly morbid statue, with one arm jutting toward the wall of the corridor.
Michael’s gaze hesitantly runs along the length of the girl’s extended arm, and her pointing finger. Is she indicating the unused phone jack on the wall? Michael turns back to face her but before him there now stretches only darkness.
He lingers in the vacated hallway for eons before finally crouching down to investigate the phone jack. It is set into the moulding, which Michael’s grandmother always keeps clean and waxed. Michael clasps the jack’s white plastic covering and tugs at it. It pops loose.
Within it Michael discovers a pair of keys. One of them is larger than the other and has the words ‘Tuff Lock’ engraved on its head. The smaller key is unmarked.
A creak of wood somewhere inside the house acts as a warning to Michael. He hurriedly recovers the jack and slips back to his room where he lies in thought until the sun at last burns away the shadows.
Only after he hears his grandfather fire up his old pickup and drive off—Is he going back to his secret redbrick vault at the gravel pits?—does Michael leave his room.
His grandmother is sitting on the living room sofa.
She seems smaller somehow, almost deflated.
“Morning,” Michael says, testing her mood.
“Good morning, dear,” she replies. Her tone is distant, a swirl of unfocused words.
“Where’s grandpa?”
She stands. “He had some chores to do. Are you hungry?” She advances to the kitchen without waiting for Michael’s response.
“You all right, grandma?”
She forces a chortle. “I’m fine, Mikey, just fine. Your grandpa just seemed a little out of sorts this morning and I guess I’m a bit worried about him, that’s all.”
Michael feels his face flush. “What’s the matter with him?”
“He didn’t sleep well.” She seems to be attempting to drown out her own voice by clattering pans and beating eggs in a chrome bowl. “Your grandpa has bad dreams sometimes, and when he does he wakes up very cranky and fidgety.”
“Oh.”
When they sit down to eat Michael wrestles to find what he hopes is a clever method of interrogation. He needs so badly to know. . . .
“Does grandpa ever talk about what his bad dreams are about?”
“No.”
“Do you ever have bad dreams?”
“Almost never, dear. I think the last time was a couple years ago when there was some bad business here in the village.”
“What happened?”
“A girl went missing.” She speaks the words more into her coffee cup than to Michael, but even muffled they stun him.
“Missing?”
His grandmother nods. “She was one of the summer people, came up here with her family. I’d see her walking to and from the beach almost every day by herself. Then one day she went down to swim but never came back. Must have drowned, poor thing. They dragged the lake but she was never found. A terrible event. Felt so bad for her mother and father. That’s why your grandfather and I never let you go to the beach unsupervised.”
“Do you remember what she looked like?”
She shrugs. “Thirteen-years-old or so. Blonde hair, I recall that much.”
Michael excuses himself from the table. His jimmying open of the phone jack is masked by the noises of his grandmother washing the breakfast dishes.
“Think I’ll go for a ride,” he tells her.
“Be careful, dear. Have fun.”
Throughout his race to the gravel pits Michael senses that the village is somehow made out of eyes. He passes no one, but is terrified by the prospect of encountering his grandfather at the pits.
The area is equally abandoned. The cavern of redbrick sits snugly locked, illuminated by a hot dappling of sunlight. He enters the breach in the fence and fishes out the pair of keys from his pocket.
He marries the one labelled Tuff Lock with the padlock that bears the same engraving. The lock gives easily. The clunking noise startles a murder of crows from their nest. Michael cries out at their sudden cawing, wing-flapping reprimand. He quickly looks about, terrified of being caught.
The gravel mounds are as ancient hills, silent and patient and indifferent to all human activity. Michael removes the padlock and struggles to raise the corrugated door. It rattles up its track, revealing the musty, cluttered darkness.
Like an ember, the orange light of the freezer gleams from the back of the shed.
Michael feels about for a light switch but finds none.
With great care he makes his way to the light. He is like a solider crossing a minefield. Every motorized tool, every stack of bagged soil, is a danger.
He reaches the freezer. Its surface is gritty with dust.
He sees the metal clamp that holds its lid shut. It is secured with another padlock. Before he’s fully realized what he is doing, Michael inserts the smaller key and frees the open padlock from its loop. He can hear the freezer buzzing and he wonders if he is truly ready to see what it contains.
You’ve gone this far, he tells himself. He pulls the lid up from the frame.
Frost funnels upward, riding on the gust of manufactured arctic air. Like ghosts, the cold smoke flies and vanishes.
A bundled canvas tarp reposes within the freezer’s bunk. Its folds are peppered with ice, its drab earthy brownness in sharp contrast to the white banks of frost that have accumulated on the old freezer’s walls. The tarp is secured with butcher’s twine, which Michael cannot break, so instead he wriggles one of the canvas flaps until his aching fingers can do no more.
But what he has done is enough. Through the small part in the bundle the whitish, lidless eye stares back at him, like a waxing moon orbiting in the microcosmic blackness of the canvas shroud.
Michael whimpers. All manner of emotion assails him at once, rendering him wordless.
A shadow steps in front of the open shed door.
Michael spins around, allowing the freezer lid to slam down. His grandfather has caught him. Michael sees his future as one encased in stifling ice.
But the figure in the doorway is too slight to be his grandfather.
Michael then sees the ghost-eyes staring at him from the dim face. A face that is brightened by rows of teeth as the girl grins. She bolts off into the woods.
“Wait!” Michael cries. He stumbles across the littered shed, but by the time he reaches the gravel pits she has gone.
What do I do? Michael keeps thinking as he locks both freezer and shed. He needs help.
His confusion blurs the ride back to his grandmother.
It also makes him doubt what he sees once the house comes into view. His grandfather’s pickup is once more in the driveway. Beyond it the entire house is engulfed in flames. Neighbours are rushing about the property, seemingly helpless. Michael speeds up to the lawn, jumps off his bike and attempts to run through the front door.
A man stops him. “No, son! We’ve called the fire department. Stay back, stay back!”
Ushered to the edge of his grandparents’ property, Michael can see the window of their bedroom. The lace curtain is being eaten by fire, allowing him a heat-weepy view of the figures that are lying on the twin beds inside.
He sees his grandmother, who appears to be bound to her bed with ropes. Next to her, Michael’s grandfather lies unbound, a willing sacrifice. The large can of gasoline stands on the floor between them. The pane shatters from the heat.
Michael feels his gaze being tugged to the trees at the end of the yard, where some kind of animal is skittering up the limbs with ease.
In the distance, sirens are wailing their lament.