now. Ancient utility poles tilted at angles’ others, felled by beavers, sagged almost parallel to the ground, supported by smaller fir trees.
The railbed ran for fifty or sixty kilometres, but Delorme kept an eye on the passing trees for another gap. When it came up on the right, she turned and the machine clattered onto even harsher ground. At one time this would have been a construction road, but that was short-lived and nobody had kept it up since.
A few more bone-rattling minutes and then there it was.
When the tracks were torn up, the developer’s plan had been to build first a road and then a “winter recreation lodge” right here in the middle of the woods. But he underestimated the kind of delays that can ensue when you’re dealing with three levels of government, two or three public utilities, at least one defunct corporation, and a population of aging boomers who just wanted the woods left alone-but with nice cleared paths for skiers and snowmobilers. In a fit of defiance, he had begun construction and worked at great speed, perhaps counting on a fait accompli to sway fortune in his favour.
Delorme was looking at the result now. Whatever rustic glory the developer may have had in mind, what he’d actually left was a concrete-block rectangle. Half of this was covered with split pine cladding and a sharply peaked roof. The rest was bare concrete.
He had intended to call it Deep Forest Lodge, but it was known to cross-country skiers as the Ice Hotel. It was set on the crest of a long slope that faced south, so it caught the sun all day, even in winter. Any snow that fell on it melted and dripped down the walls, where it froze into a sheath of translucent, impenetrable ice.
The place couldn’t be torn down until armies of lawyers had finished wrangling-much to the chagrin of the provincial police. Although they tried to secure it, it was impossible to keep teenagers away. The place was dark, unfinished and unsafe. Every year the OPP had to rescue some kid who had climbed inside, only to end up with a broken leg.
DANGER: KEEP OUT. TRESPASSERS WILL BE PROSECUTED.
The usual signs were prominently posted, and just as prominently defaced. Delorme regarded the ruin with a shudder. Some women like to be scared. It wasn’t the place that frightened her so much as the idea that anyone would fantasize about bringing a woman out here and doing God knows what.
She left the snowmobile running to have the benefit of its headlight. She took up the tool kit and flashlight and walked toward the fence, her shadow totemic against ice and concrete. The gate was padlocked, but ten metres to the right someone had clipped the chain-link fence-none too recently by the look of it, and high enough that you could slip through without great difficulty.
She forced the fence back even more and managed not to rip her parka climbing through. She walked up to the wall and shone her flashlight upward to where the concrete wall became a glacier wall. Entrances had been bricked up, but there were gaps. She climbed through one, turning her ankle on the jagged detritus underneath the ice so hard that she gasped.
The snowmobile’s headlight was no help here. She looked up. A thin cirrus dimmed the stars, but the crescent moon hung low and bright just above one wall. No glimmer of daylight yet. She played the flashlight beam over what looked like a small prison yard. A perfect square of white ground, with a frozen white wave of snow about two feet high curling up against one wall, giving the whole a tilted effect. No tracks of any kind. Solid concrete block on three sides, then on Delorme’s right the partially collapsed building.
The cold was getting to her and she wanted to keep moving. She pushed on one boarded-up window, but there was no give in it. She tried the other window. Someone had put the original three-quarter ply back in place and wedged a two-by-four over it, but there was nothing securing it. Delorme pulled away the two-by-four and dislodged the plywood without even opening her tool kit.
Utter blackness inside. Shadows veered and lurched in the flashlight beam. Exposed struts and temporary plywood flooring, curled and separating at the edges. Delorme got up on the ledge and examined the flooring below. She turned around and lowered herself to test it with one foot. She lowered her other foot, holding on to the window ledge.
She wished Cardinal was with her. The cold seemed worse in this darkness. She moved slowly, sweeping the flashlight beam from side to side. Graffiti jeered from the walls. Old cigarette packs, beer bottles and candy wrappers littered the floor. Whoever liked this place, it wasn’t health food addicts.
A square of emptiness opened up in the floor ahead of her, a concrete stairwell that looked like an invitation to hell. She was tempted to call out, make her presence known, but the thought of how it would reverberate dissuaded her.
She went halfway down the steps and shone the flashlight around. Forest of I-beams. Could anyone-even Leonard Priest-conceivably come out here for sex?
Not far from the stairs, a sleeping bag, much stained and torn, lay in a twisted heap. Nearby, the charred remains of a small fire and a pile of feces, thankfully frozen. In a corner, a dead fox lay on its side, small white teeth exposed.
Graffiti everywhere. Many sexual invitations, many phone numbers. An individual of loftier ambition had written in letters three feet high, Become Your Dream. And Jenny P, whoever she might be, was apparently blessed with a “hot vag,” which to Delorme sounded like something you’d find in the produce section. Clearly, in the minds of many, sex and isolated ruins were a natural combination. A longing overcame her to be inside her car with the heater going full blast.
Ambition like a pheromone. Is it just ambition-or are envy and resentment making me stupid? She stood outside again and swept the flashlight beam over the walls, the snowdrift, the rest of the emptiness. She was glad she had not called Cardinal to come with her on this jaunt. He wouldn’t have anyway, she told herself, because he would have realized it was dumb.
At the break in the wall, she reached through and set her tool kit down on the far side. She turned and made one last sweep of the courtyard and the long curl of the snowdrift, which ran the length of the wall about knee high. Toward the far corner it rose higher, and now, as she held the beam steady, she saw that there was something in it. Some material partially exposed. Impossible to tell the colour.
She crossed the white square on a diagonal toward the corner. Probably another sleeping bag. She leaned closer, and now, in the more intense light, she could see that the fabric was blue, and more like a jacket than a sleeping bag. She reached with her big snowmobile mitten and brushed at the snow. It was crusty from melting and refreezing and she had to break a piece off.
A shoulder, a scarf, hair.
Delorme took off her mitten and worked her fingers under the crust of snow and broke more off. The powder underneath slid away. She went down on one knee to get a closer look.
A woman’s face, eyes closed, white crescents of snow clinging to the lashes.
Delorme reached into her parka and pulled out her cellphone. It took a while for Cardinal to answer.
“You’re not gonna believe this, John. I’m looking at a dead body. A woman… No. That’s the incredible thing. It’s not Laura Lacroix.”
Giles Blunt
Until the Night
From the Blue Notebook
It is possible in the Arctic-possible sometimes-to mistake oneself for a superhero, one’s faculties, one’s perceptions can be so transformed. Such is the array of optical and acoustic phenomena. It is a special moment, the first time you realize you are overhearing a conversation taking place more than a kilometre away. Distances of three kilometres are not unusual, depending on temperature, wind speed, surface conditions. In contrast to temperate climates, Arctic air is coldest close to the ground’ it refracts sound waves downward instead of upward.
That moment has the quality of an excellent dream-the feeling of vindication and exhilaration one sometimes gets from a gorgeous subconscious narrative: Yes, of course! This is who I am! I’ve always been infinitely more perceptive than others!
Wyndham, guileless Wyndham, reported such a dream to me once, over a midnight breakfast.
I was with Isaac Newton, he told me. At his lodgings in Cambridge. We were doing differential calculus together, performing it as if we were playing a duet. We had an enormous ledger open on the table before us. There was a cat sitting next to it, watching us with the greenest, most intelligent eyes. And we were doing these equations-incredibly intricate, incredibly precise-and they just flowed effortlessly one after another, and we took
