Burnt Black Suns: A Collection of Weird Tales (7 page)

The skirmish at the Argyle Street barricade was heating up—police orders shouted through megaphones and screaming protesters trying to avoid being seen. More sirens sounded in the distance, the cavalry coming to even the odds, and Harvey wondered where the peaceful protest had gone. It was always the same in the dark. Nothing remained real. Not the hopes of a robbed people, nor the safety of a man’s only child. It was only in the dark when a broken doll’s face made any sense. It was punishment. Plain and simple. And the punishment that was meted out on him would be meted out on the rest of Henco if the Six Nations had their way. At least, that’s what their chanting had transformed into. A call to arms. In the acrid smoke of the burning substation, voices were calling out into the dark, not stopping as the burning air irritated their eyes and lungs, compounding tempers. They were on the verge of something, and even in the blinding darkness it was clear that something would be ugly.

His grey trench coat rasped quietly as he walked. He had with him a small Maglite flashlight, but he knew better than to use it. It would betray his presence, and he’d been betrayed enough in the preceding months. Betrayed by an ex-wife who stole his daughter away in the night to put her in the hospital, betrayed by doctors who could do nothing to save her except pretend there was a chance she might one day reawaken, betrayed by a company that would keep him away from his child instead of letting him hold her safe in his arms. All these betrayals added, compounded, weighed on him, and in his blinding sorrow they betrayed him one time further, and walked him unknowingly into the middle of the protesters’ enclave.

He stopped in his tracks when he saw the smoldering embers of their fire, still red and leaping into the air before vanishing. The commotion of Argyle Street was faint in the distance, but there was talk from within the darkened tents, all in a language too ancient for him to understand. The words were monotone, hummed rather than spoken, and a sole singsong voice rose and sank in waves from within one of the tents—so deep it rattled in his chest. A breeze blew across his face, bringing with it leaves and dirt, and he turned his face and closed his lids. The sound of the swaying grasses was everywhere, like whispers surrounding him, or like the faint rasp of air pushed through the lungs of a dead girl. When he opened his eyes, the chanting had stopped, but in front of him, bare feet in the dying fire, was a broken Emily, staring. Circling her neck was the pendant he carried in his right-hand pocket.

“Emily,” he whispered in a sputter.

She bared her bloodied teeth at him. And was gone.

Blood crashed through his head, through his face, through his dry throat, and the sound was deafening. He smelled disinfectant. It seemed impossible, yet the air was suddenly full of it, and it was all Harvey could do to keep himself upright. He did not enjoy the hallucination, the reminder of what he’d done, and bit against his palm until it bled to break its lock on him. When the world righted itself and his senses once more became his own, they were like raw nerves, and he had to rest until the nausea they induced subsided. He wished not for the first time since returning that he was at a bar instead of where he was, a bottle in hand to keep the guilt from ripping him apart.

Harvey slipped out of the circle of tents and further into the darkness. If the digger was anywhere, it would be there, discreetly hidden from the world outside. The echo of his movements rippled faintly off the tree trunks that dotted the lot’s back hectares. He slowed as he approached them, unsure where the trees were in the night, and calculated the risk insignificant enough to pull the small Maglite from his pocket. A twist of its end and a narrow beam of light bore a tiny hole into the nothingness. It shouldn’t have been enough to alert anyone, but he slipped a hand in his pocket and removed his gun nonetheless. Then he slid forward among the trees.

The sounds were impossible to pinpoint. Animals moved, making the same heavy scratching he’d heard before. The wind had increased as well, wrapping around the invisible trees outside the Maglite’s periphery, howling and throwing debris. Small rocks and dirt clawed his face as they blew past, scratching lines in his flesh. But those weren’t the only sounds he heard. Beneath them was another, one that chilled his chest and spine more than any late night wind could. It was a sound that still haunted his every waking hour.

He had been sitting in that waiting room while the machine breathed for Emily; wheezing, in and out, breath forced into her tiny lungs. When the doctor appeared, it was obvious his caring was insincere, and Harvey leapt on his throat in wordless and instant rage. It took two security guards and three orderlies to pull Harvey’s hands from around the doctor’s neck, and the only reason they succeeded was Harvey’s realization that his fury did no good. It was misplaced. Harvey’s ire should have been directed at himself for not being where he belonged, and Henco for sending him there. Despite Harvey’s apologies, the doctor did not return. The one who replaced him spoke with a nervous stammer and wouldn’t stand closer than a few feet away. He told Harvey that Emily would probably never return and asked what he wanted to do. Harvey replied, “Leave,” and then turned away and held his daughter’s tiny hand. The doctor acquiesced, but with obvious concern.

The trees were like a maze in the dark, but Harvey knew that following them would eventually yield results. Somewhere, in the nothingness, the digger stood waiting for him, a quiet beast with its head curled to its chest but with teeth strong enough to tear rock apart. Harvey moved through the forest as quickly as he could, the small circle of light swinging before him looking for evidence of the truck’s passing. And yet he saw nothing. It was not until he recognized the distant metallic twang of his footsteps’ echo that he finally turned course.

In the inky darkness his circle of light found a metallic hull painted bright orange. Arms and gears erupted from the device, and it took Harvey a few moments to make sense of the violent clashing of parts. It was the digger, and under the light its giant wheels were sunken in a circle of torn sod and grass. Its scoop was tucked under its long arm like a bird sleeping, and across it was wet mud. It had been used recently, he could tell by its odor. It seemed the girl behind the Tim Hortons counter was right: something else was going on.

Part of him wished he hadn’t returned to the job so soon; his head wasn’t in the right place to deal with the continuous subterfuge and the front of solidarity the Six Nations were offering, pretending the land was what they wanted when clearly it was something beneath the ground that had their eye. He scanned the flashlight around the digger, looking for a hole, and when that failed he instead looked for the tracks the giant wheels had made in the soft turf. They would lead him to the dig as sure as any trail of breadcrumbs.

It wasn’t far. Harvey followed the torn ground until the tracks stopped at a long tent stretching one hundred feet yet standing less than three feet tall. Along the edges of the grooves he found footprints overlapping with one another, making strange shapes in the soft soil. Some of the prints he thought might have been made by a child’s bare feet, or perhaps some sort of large animal. He touched the sides of the tent and they felt rough and damp, like an old hide or rough canvas. Something about the spot emitted the faint but pungent odor of some large rodent’s abandoned nest. There was the sound again of footsteps approaching and he flashed the Maglite behind him but found nothing there, not even the face of his dead daughter condemning him for what he was doing.

He heard crickets chirp, wind rustle trees. The burning electrical fire continued, its smoke wafting over the Douglas Creek lot, its flames licking the horizon. Beneath the clouded sky Harvey circled the tent, looking for an entrance. There had to be one, after all. What was the point of having a tent without any way in or out? Why hide it when the whole structure was hidden to begin with? Or could that be part of the plan? Was it some method of revenge? Had the protesters finally decided to carry out their threats? The administration at Henco did not feel guilt for what they were doing and strongly urged him to feel the same. But it was there nonetheless, and they would all have to deal with it one way or another. Harvey hoped it would be on his own terms, but wondered if the rest of Henco would be so lucky.

His contemplation was cut short by the shadow hovering near the end of the tent furthest in the woods. Its arms seemed long and massive, and it was impossible to determine if it was a person or an animal hunched by the tent’s edge. Was it the protester he had seen earlier, still dressed in his horrible costume? Harvey took a step toward it, then another, and it did not move. With each advancement the shadow receded, and when Harvey dared lift his Maglite to reveal what it was the figure disappeared into the folds of the night as though it had never been there. It left behind a flap of rough canvas torn loose from the tent. Harvey checked his vicinity to ensure he was alone, then hazarded a peek beneath the tent. There was nothing but dark emptiness; a void without bottom. Harvey heard his dead daughter, Emily, cry out for him, but to his horror those cries were stifled. He knew she wasn’t there, that it was simply his guilt haunting him, but he could not deny the specter’s commands. Harvey slipped beneath the loose section of heavy canvas and found a deep pit waiting, one so dark his flashlight would not penetrate it. He scratched his head and knelt down, then swung his legs over the precipice until they dangled into the dark expanse. Slowly, he pushed himself farther until gravity took hold. It was then he realized there was no ground beneath the canvas. He fell, plummeting into nothing, and feared he would never stop. When he finally hit bottom, the ground was softer than grass, and turning on his flashlight he saw he had dropped no more than six feet into the earth; yet the trench stretched out as far as his flashlight beam carried, farther than it had appeared on the surface. The wind howled through the torn tarp above.

The Six Nations had been excavating something, and it seemed to be more than a single thing judging by the size of the hole. Harvey felt claustrophobic pressure from above and shone the light to determine how much headroom he really had. It was close, but there was enough space to stand. What struck him, though, was that the frame holding the canvas aloft was made of long branches standing in a row down into the darkness, bent together and tied at the top to make a series of small arches. Bizarrely, they appeared dead black under his light. He touched one and his hand came away wet and sticky with an oil-like reddish substance, though it smelled more metallic than that. Perhaps it was the air he smelled, air like that before a storm, charged with electricity. Or maybe the winds had changed, and the hydro station fire had penetrated further into the Douglas Creek land. He wiped his fingers on one of the Tim Hortons napkins he’d stashed in his pocket, then shone his Maglite along the ground. He could see the remnants in the dirt of some structure that had been buried there before, the frame of what looked like a small building. The protesters must have been trying to unearth it. What was so important, he wondered. Was it some archaeological discovery? Something of their ancestors there that they didn’t want claimed by the province? It looked like a sort of dwelling, but the geometry of the place was all wrong; the angles seemed too obtuse to bear without being driven mad. He still couldn’t tell where the door must have been—there was no evidence of the building ever having one, not unless it was carved in the hide of the tent above.

There was something else, something other than the lack of doors or windows in a place that was clearly once home to too many. In the dirt at his feet, small objects screamed like tiny shiny gems. They caught his eye, and he bent down to pick one up. They looked like teeth, sharp canine teeth of a large predator, and mixed in with them were long black claws, curved and thick. They were spread across the dirt floor, and Harvey was confident they hadn’t been unearthed but instead left there recently, as though part of some strange ceremony. That would explain the foulness in the air—rituals and customs performed, tying the natives to the earth and its creatures. Maybe the protesters were trying to ward off Henco and the destruction it might bring, or instead punish it for what it had already done. Henco deserved it. Deserved punishment for its actions, deserved it as much as he did when Harvey saw his daughter’s face staring at him, her eyes dark and soulless and unforgiving. The guilt overwhelmed him, made him angry, and everything around him shook. Dirt trickled down the walls of the hole, and somewhere closer than possible he heard himself panting like an animal. When he managed to calm himself, he found his fist clenched, and opening it saw that the sharp tooth had bitten through his skin. He threw it to the ground and rubbed the wound on his pant leg, then raised the flashlight high.

Farther into the remains of the excavated building, he was surprised by what the Six Nations had unearthed—a series of wooden structures like tables, or possibly bunks. He let his light crawl to the top and for a moment was jarred. What he thought had been a large animal sleeping in filth was in fact a pelt covered in soil. He picked up the edge and saw another beneath, less dirty, and another beneath that. He had no explanation for their presence. Disturbing them, though, released a meaty smell into the air, a sour medley of musk and decayed flesh that stifled his breath until it wheezed from his lungs. Sounds emanated around him, strange distortions possible only in the absence of light. Harvey felt his hand taken by another, smaller hand, and swung his flashlight quickly, but it was not fast enough. Everything looked different, however, as though shifted in the dark then returned before the light struck it. He shook his head. He did not like what he was witnessing. There was something wrong in that underground room, something that he wasn’t seeing but knew was there. He pointed the Maglite at the bent branches overhead, searching for evidence he was being watched. He felt a strange set of eyes intently following his every move, but again if they were there in the dark they were gone before the light found them. The sound of his raincoat rubbing against itself was overwhelming, as was the crunch of his shoes on the tiny bones underfoot. He had to get out of that pit and off the Douglas Creek grounds. He’d been there so long he was hearing chanting when there was no way he could. It was stuck in his head, repeating over and over again.