Lost Girls

''Hey!''

I knock on the window harder than I need to, rattling the loose glass in its frame, but they don't move.

''HEY! HEY!''

They give no sign that they hear me aside from both of their arms rotating at the shoulders in a steady, almost mechanical movement. Except these girls are real. White skin shining out from beneath and through their hair, the caps of their knees distinctly visible just under the hems of their dresses. They've got to be freezing their asses off, no jackets on a night like this, as dry an evening as Murdoch's seen in the past two weeks but probably the coldest yet, the air having taken a final turn toward winter. Serves them goddamn right if their hands fall off.

''Who are you?'' I shout through the glass, breath curling back into my face.

Then the answer arrives on its own: a couple of the doughnut-shop girls trying to mess with me. Went out and blew twenty bucks on a couple thrift-shop dresses, waited in the dark until I came to the window so they could do this little Ash and Krys memorial freak show in my honor. Apparently the crank calls weren't entertainment enough.

So now I'm pulling open the bedroom door, pounding down the stairs without thinking to grab my coat. When I'm out the front door my first plan is to run straight at them but I don't, not right away, just squint across the street to where they stand. From here I can better see their too-white faces, thick with pasty foundation, eyes blotted out with mascara. It's the Goth look. Big with certain girls of that age, all Anne Rice novels and fishnet stockings. Punk witches cooking up spells for the bad guy's lawyer.

''I know who you are, you know!'' I call across at them. ''I can get your numbers. One call, and believe me, you're both in deep shit.''

They keep waving. Cast my eyes over them again and notice they wear no shoes. The tiny pink crescent moons of their toenails standing out like polished stones.

''You're doing a very stupid thing here, ladies.'' I step out into the street. ''There are charges for this.''

Something aside from makeup shrouds the details of their faces, an angle of light that effects a veil of shadow. I keep my eyes on them and step forward. Their mouths enlarging as I approach, borders marked by gummy lipstick.

''You think this is funny? I don't think it's fucking funny. I think you're some very sad hick bitches is what I think.''

Take a step across the yellow line at the street's midpoint and follow it with another. Close enough to see their mouths open. Strings of spit caught between their lips. Close enough to hear--

HHRRROOOONNKK!!!

A pickup truck barreling through the intersection directly to my left, weaving into the wrong lane without slowing, its huge front grille widening like the mouth of a deep-water fish. No headlights on, just a green glow from the dashboard illuminating a blank-faced, ball-capped driver with Abe Lincoln beard. There's time to catch all of this, to understand that in the next second it will meet the same place where I stand, but not time to move.

Eyes closed, but I can still see the peeling stick-on racing stripe and jagged rust holes around the truck's wheels as it blows past my face. Knocks me down with the suction of air it creates in its wake, the back of my head smacking neatly against the pavement on the way down. A white flash across my eyes followed by blue pinprick static. A million strings of pain spun out from rear molars, sinuses, top of the spine.

By the time I get back to my feet the truck is lurching around the courthouse corner at the far end of the street, giving me a double blast on its horn as it goes.

''Homicidal inbred!'' I shout into the empty street. Then I see that the street is empty.

The black-eyed girls in ragged dresses and bare feet are gone.

chapter 19

I dream of water. Not the sparkling, pale blue kind, but frigid, black, suffocating. The plots are varied: swimming in an indoor pool with glass French doors all around looking out on a lush garden; lying in a tub with the hot water rising slowly to my chin; taking a drink from a crystal glass. Comforting, even tedious dreams that bring me down to the edge of a sleep where nothing is remembered. But then everything changes. My muscles cramp and I sink in the pool's deep end, the lush garden outside the window now a seething body of vines crashing through to wrap themselves around arms and legs. Close my eyes in the bath and a hand comes down on my head, presses me under until the scalding water is taken in. The crystal glass breaking in my grip and shards of it flowing into my mouth, slicing their way down to my lungs.

Wake with the covers kicked down to a damp roll at the end of the bed. So tired I feel sick. And just as I manage to convince myself that it was only a dream and that I better put my head back down so that I can grab a couple hours before dawn--the phone. Down at the front desk. Echoing up the stairs and under the door.

Pull the pillow up around my ears and let it go until sleep returns. And when it does the dreams again, different and the same every time.

I should rip them down. Pull the already yellowing pages off the walls and turn this room back to what it was instead of the obscene shrine it's become. I'm going to, no question about it. I've got enough to worry about without glancing up every fifteen seconds to make sure they're still there.

And they always are. Still there, but are they still? It's that photographic trick, the one where the eyes in a picture follow you wherever you go. At the desk. Stepping out naked and dripping from the shower. Lifting myself up onto bare elbows in the morning. Every moment I'm dead in their sights.

Smiles that change. An adjusted angle caused by the head turned to the left instead of the right will do it, the double-take play of low-wattage bulbs. It's nothing more than shifting perspectives but there it is, a fraction of movement carried out behind my back. Giving me an insinuating look not entirely masked by ample cheeks, oversize adult teeth, and eyes a little pinched in the trained constriction of a posed smile. And then the mask disappears again. It never was a mask. It's the assembled features of a face and nothing more, two faces, free of opinion or interest. Still. But with eyes that are somehow always busy. Devouring the dust hanging in the light from the window, pulling in the tangled bedsheets, gathering up the pens, pencils, and paper clips, and claiming all of it as theirs.

Somebody brings clean sheets every third morning and leaves them outside the door in a pile. It appears that I'm expected to change the bed myself. And maybe I will sometime. But so far I'm just pulling the sheets inside and throwing them on top of the ones before, so that now a stack of white cotton folds stands crooked as a drunk against the wall. Definitely whiter than what I'm sleeping on at the moment, though, the covers thrown back to reveal rolls of gray blotched by stains that may or may not be my own.

I get up from the desk to pull the covers back into place. But I don't even get this job done before my attention is again drawn away. Something heavy stuck between the comforter and the itchy pink polyester blanket beneath. A History of Northern Ontario Towns by Alistair Dundurn. The book I took out from the library, the one Pittle recommended.

Carry it over to the window and set myself on the ledge. The old kind of recycled paper flecked with brown fiber, almost every page randomly punctuated by gummy spots the color of hot dog relish. The whole thing typewritten, gaping breaks between the lines and notched paragraphs. A homemade job (''Published by A. Dundurn Press, 1982''), there's even some handwritten corrections visible in places above the text. The dedication: ''For My Fallen Colleagues of the Royal Highland Riflemen, 2nd Division.''

I turn to the table of contents and run my fingers down the list of towns. Blind River. Sturgeon Falls. Thessalon. Capreol. New Liskeard. Then Chapter Five: Murdoch.

Before its settlement less than a hundred and fifty years ago, the area where the town of Murdoch now sits at the gateway to the great Northern Ontario wilderness was nothing but untouched Canadian Shield: 300,000 square miles of naked Precambrian rock, forest, and lakes. Natural gifts that had yet to be exploited to their full potential by the Algonkian tribes who for previous centurieswere largely oblivious to the vast riches they