He woke up underground, shivering, disoriented, and smelling of piss and shit. He was no longer cold, in fact his body pulsed with heat as though his veins were shot full of hot lead.
He raised himself on his elbow and looked around groggily. In his hand was the flashlight. He felt around for his hockey bag with his tools, but it was nowhere nearby. He switched on the flashlight and shone the beam in front of him in the darkness. The feeble light played off walls of rock and supporting arches of rotted wood. Somewhere in the distance, he heard the steady sound of water hitting stone and there was a sense of yawning emptiness ahead of him, just out of sight.
He stood up gingerly, testing the available height of the place in which he found himself. He realized that he could just barely stand without his head grazing the ceiling, or roof, of whatever this place was. He leaned forward and shone the light in front of him, and realized where he was.
He was in a mineshaft. He was underground, God knew how far, in one of the network of abandoned mineshafts that crisscrossed beneath Parr’s Landing.
Weal knew about them because he had read about them, about how the Parr family had stripped this part of northern Ontario underground, blasting tunnels beneath the earth where there had previously only been caves, expanding the natural underground tunnels their mining engineers had found with artificial ones, exploiting them, abandoning them when the veins of gold had been drained dry.
He had walked in his sleep, or whatever state he’d been in, and had fallen down a mineshaft. Weal’s chest tightened and he thought about screaming-screaming louder than he had ever screamed. The sense of being buried alive was instant and dreadful. He dropped the flashlight and flung his arms out, expecting to find himself entombed, but his fingers barely grazed the opposite walls. There was space, blessed space. He took a deep breath and tried to slow his breathing. When he was marginally calmer, he shook his head and tried to think.
If he had fallen down a mineshaft, his legs would be broken, he reasoned, or there would be some other evidence of injury. There was none, so he hadn’t fallen. Check. He could breathe, so there was oxygen. Check. He had light, so he could see. Check. He’d felt something sharp cut into his thigh when he’d leaned to pick up the flashlight. He patted his pocket gingerly and felt the edge of one of his knives in his pocket, blade cutting inwards against flesh where it had sliced through the lining. The fabric there was sticky and wet, and he realized he was bleeding.
The knife had been in the hockey bag earlier that day, not his pocket. Either he had placed it there himself without thinking, or someone had placed it in his pocket while he’d been unconscious. Weal looked around uneasily, but he knew he was alone-quite alone. Nothing human could live down here in all this darkness, and if anyone were with him down here, he’d have sensed it already. In fact, he would have sensed it immediately.
Then he heard his friend’s voice again. But beneath the sweetness of it this time, he sensed a new urgency and hunger. Weal knew where he was and why he was there. He was protected. He was loved. And he was needed.
Joyfully, Weal began to shuffle through the mineshaft, holding the bobbing flashlight in front of him, feeling his way through the maze of rotted beams and along the rock walls towards the prize waiting for him.
It was ten o’clock at night and Elliot McKitrick was off duty and minding his own business, flirting lazily with Donna Lemieux, the overblown blonde bartender with whom he’d had a brief affair when he was eighteen and she was thirty. He still carried a bit of a torch for Donna, as young men sometimes did when they thought of past conquests, if not loves. Donna realized this and was usually ambivalent, unless she was bored or horny. Tonight, Elliot thought, he might have gotten lucky if he’d wanted to, but he felt dead below the waist. He’d flirted by rote and by habit this evening. She’d picked up on his disinterest and returned it in kind. Nothing personal, as they both knew.
He was nursing his beer in the farthest corner of O’Toole’s when Jeremy Parr walked in looking like crap twice warmed over. Elliot’s heart sank at the sight of him.
He lifted the bottle of O’Keefe to his lips and took a long, cold pull of it, wishing he was invisible, wishing the beer was colder, and mostly hating everything about his life at that exact moment. Elliot looked away, vainly praying that Jeremy wouldn’t see him, but Jeremy did see him, and he started to walk over to his table.
Elliot weighed several options, all of them calculated to salvage the airtight security of the life and image he’d built for himself here in the years Jeremy had been away.
He could get up and leave, which might look unduly abrupt and draw attention. The other danger in getting up suddenly was the possibility of leaving Jeremy in the bar alone, drunk, and rambling. God knows what he’d tell Donna-or rather confirm, since everyone had heard rumours about the two of them, but Elliot had spent the last fifteen years fucking, brawling, and goal-scoring those rumours into oblivion. No, it was better to sit still and act like he was greeting an old friend. Normalize, neutralize. Maybe buy Jeremy a beer. Slap him on the back and bullshit about the old days. Or at least make it seem that’s what they were doing. It could work.
If it didn’t, Elliot was royally screwed.
Jeremy approached the table and, ludicrously, stuck out his hand to shake as though they had seen each other last week. He said, “Hey, Elliot, how’s it going? Long time no see.”
“Hi, Jem.” Elliot took Jeremy’s hand without getting up from his own chair. The part of him that wanted to rise from his seat and take Jeremy in his arms and hug him had been permanently crippled years before, largely by Elliot himself. He kept that part of himself in its place and he considered it dead and buried. “I heard you were back. What’re you doing here?”
“Can I join you?” Jeremy didn’t wait for Elliot’s answer. He pulled back the chair opposite Jeremy and sat down heavily. “So, here we are,” he said. “How’ve you been?”
When Elliot didn’t reply, he continued. “You’re a cop now, I see. I saw you in the cruiser today. Do you like being a cop?”
“What are you doing back in Parr’s Landing, Jeremy?” Elliot said again. “There has to be a reason you’d come back to town. What has it been, ten years?”
“Fifteen. You’re not happy to see me, are you?”
Elliot shrugged. “It’s a free world. You can go where you want. But no, I’m not really happy to see you. I’m surprised that you’re surprised.”
“It’s all right,” Jeremy said “No one’s really happy to see me. My mother just told me she wished I had been the one who died instead of Jack.”
“I heard about Jack a while back. I’m sorry. Was that Chris I saw in the car with you today?”
“So you did see me. I wasn’t sure if you had.”
“Yeah, I saw you,” Elliot said. “So, was that Chris? Did she come back with you, too?”
“Yeah, and Morgan, as well.” Elliot looked at him blankly. “My niece, Elliot-Jack’s daughter. Her name is Morgan. She’s fifteen. Jack didn’t leave any insurance, and Chris is broke. I brought her back here. She had nowhere else to go.”
Elliot looked over Jeremy’s head at Donna and held up two fingers. She signalled back the OK sign and took two fresh bottles of O’Keefe out of the beer fridge and carried them over to their table on a tray.
“Hey! Jeremy Parr!” Donna said, putting the beers down in front of them. “Long time no see, Jer! I heard you were back in town.” When Jeremy looked at her blankly, she said, “It’s me, Donna Lemieux. Remember? You went to school with my cousin, Rob Archambault. You remember Rob, right? I think he was a couple of years ahead of you. Maybe your brother’s class?”
“Oh yeah,” Jeremy lied. “I sure do remember him. Good to see you, Donna. How is Rob?”
Donna furrowed her brow. “He died. Ski-Doo accident, two years ago. It was so sad. He had a wife and kids. You didn’t hear?”
“No, I’m sorry,” he said. “I’ve been away. I’ve been living in Toronto.”
“Long way away,” she said. “And you ain’t been back that whole time?”
“No,” Jeremy replied. “I haven’t. Been busy.”
“I’m sorry about your brother,” Donna said. “I heard about him. We all did. There was a thing about it in the paper. He was a good guy. I knew him in school.”
“Thanks, Donna.” Jeremy forced a smile. “I appreciate it.”
