The 'Geisters (11 page)

“What?”

“
He’s not alone.
”

Ann leaned forward, hand on the aisle-side armrest. “What do you mean, not alone?”

The man shook his head and reached across the aisle, put his hand on hers. “Easy miss,” he said. “It’s going to be okay. Now sit back, miss. We all got to stay calm.”

Ann slowly pulled her hand away and did as she was told. The man gave her an uneasy smile and settled back into his own seat, hands gripping the armrests tightly as the cabin pitched again. The baby was gasping with terror; the only other human sound in the aircraft was its mother, singing something gentle to her child.

It’s going to be okay
. What a kindly lie, thought Ann. She shut her eyes tight.

It wasn’t going to be okay. This wasn’t just a storm that you could fly over, or through.

The Insect was out. Michael was gone.
And it’s my fault.

There was a loud crash to the fore of the aircraft—and a thump, a sound like metal buckling. A man shouted something, and other voices rose up around him. Ann felt a sluice of the old terror. She was in her father’s boat, watching the sky draw the lake to its bosom; she was in the women’s room at Canoe, hiding from the spinning saltshaker; she was in the minivan, and the wind
rose up . . .

The Insect was out.

Ann kept her eyes shut, and drew the spectrum to her mind. Red and Orange and Yellow . . . She swore and opened her eyes.
She couldn’t even imagine the colours; she was just reciting the words in her mind. She was cut off from the fortress, and everything that Eva had taught her.

The plane lurched again—this time, seeming to twist, hard, and Ann felt her hips press hard against the buckled seatbelt. Her purse slid up from underneath the seat where she’d stowed it, and emptied on the empty seat beside her as the plane righted. The water bottle rolled out and settled—bisected up the middle by a line of solid ice.

“Insect,” said Ann, and then louder: “Insect!”

No one paid her any heed. Another chime sounded, and Ann flinched as an oxygen mask fell in front of her, and rocked back and forth on its tubing like the watch of a hypnotist. She took hold of it and drew it to her mouth, pulled the straps over her head like they’d explained.

“Where is my husband?” she said into the mask.

The man across the aisle caught her eye. He pointed to the front of the plane.

“He is in the latrine,”
he said, quietly but clearly—in a way that left no doubt to Ann.

“
Is he safe?
” she asked.

“He is raping me,”
replied the man.
“Help.”

The cabin went dark and the plane seemed to spin. Ann was dangling from her seatbelt for a moment, then pushed hard back into her seat. Lightning skittered across the windows behind her, then across the far side as the plane turned hard. The man across from her shouted now, along with a dozen others, as several of the overhead storage compartments popped open and luggage spilled out. He blocked a hard-case carry-on bag with his forearm, and it crashed into the aisle—where Ann saw running lights had turned on. If she were to follow them—if the plane would steady enough that she could follow them—she’d find an emergency exit.

They would also take her to the latrine—where Michael was holed up. Doing what exactly?

Raping the Insect?

A laptop backpack struck the floor and bounced up again as the plane lurched and spun. It felt like a barrel roll.

Jesus,
she thought.
We’re going to fucking crash.
She looked out—and was relieved at least to see that the wing was intact. There was nothing to see beyond that but soot-coloured cloud. She wondered how near they were to the ocean now. The plane steadied, and the engines whined.

Ann waited a moment. The aircraft seemed to have steadied. Was it safe now? She would take the chance.

Ann unbuckled her seatbelt. She took off the oxygen mask, drew a breath and confirmed that the cabin pressure hadn’t dropped that badly. She pushed herself out of her seat, and stumbled into the aisle. Someone shouted at her to get back in her seat. She shook her head.

“It’s fine,” she shouted, but it wasn’t. The cabin lurched again, and Ann’s feet came off the deck. If she hadn’t been holding onto the side of a seat, she would have fallen.

Lucky me,
she thought, and it seemed to be true.

The cabin had become a cylinder of flying debris, but none of it came near Ann. It was as though a path was being cleared for her as she forced her way forward. At one point, she floated down the middle, the plane dipping into free fall. Near the first emergency exit, she fell to the ceiling, then floated, then struck the floor on her side. Ann didn’t want to think about what the plane must be doing. She clambered upright and bolted past a flight attendant, strapped in her own seat.

“Ma’am!” the woman shouted, and reached out to grab Ann’s arm. Ann slipped away and ran past.

Near the front of the plane, she stopped, gripping onto a low silver handrail before entering first class. The restroom was opposite her; it was closed, and marked OCCUPIED.

“Michael!” She had to shout—the whine of the engines, the crashing luggage—the screaming—was all deafening. She tried to open the door, but of course it was locked. She looked around for something to pry it with—there was a kitchen just beyond. Maybe . . .

She felt a hand on her shoulder and turned around. It was the flight attendant. She leaned close: “You’ve got to sit down!”

Ann shook her head and pounded on the door. “My husband’s in there!” she said.

The attendant was having none of it. “He’s safer there than coming out,” said the attendant. “There’s oxygen in there. The cabin’s depressurizing. You need to return to your seat.”

Ann tried to pull away, but the attendant’s grip was strong. “You have to obey my instructions ma’am. It’s for everyone’s safety—”

She didn’t finish. There was a bright flash as she spoke, sending spears of lightning in from both rows of windows—and it illuminated a bright silver briefcase, shooting through the air up the aisle.

The case hit the attendant in the back of the head. She collapsed into Ann. She stepped back and let the attendant fall to the floor. She bent down—on the attendant’s skirt, there was a plastic spring and a set of simple keys. Ann stretched it out, and found one that matched a keyhole underneath the handle of the restroom. The plane lurched then, and the floor tilted sharply. Ann held tight until the plane righted. She inserted the key and clicked the sign to VACANT. She let the keys snap back to the attendant and slid open the door.

The electricity seemed to be working fine in there; the lights inside the restroom flickered, occasionally flashing as bright as the lightning outside the plane. It played across a sight that at first Ann couldn’t fathom.

It was Michael. His pants were around his ankles and his linen shirt was unbuttoned, pulled back over his shoulders so it hung tight around his elbows. His head was cricked back, tendons taut under his chin. His penis was hard—and it swayed back in forth in front of him, as his hands made claws to clutch at the air. His head swung around to look at her, but it was as though he couldn’t see her; in the light, his pupils had shrunk to pinpricks. And around him—toilet paper floated, draping in the air in what seemed like a cage. Droplets of blue fluid hung in the air. Gravity had been utterly suspended in that tiny room.

He began to turn away from her, toward the little mirror over the sink—rotating in the air, unfettered to the deck. The muscles in his still-pale ass tensed as he looked in the mirror—looked at something, Ann saw, that was not precisely his own reflection.

The thing in the mirror made its face into a rictus—of anger, maybe, or something else. But Ann peered around at Michael’s face, and thought it far less ambivalent.

He was smiling.

And he was hard. More than hard. He was
engorged.

There was a popping sound then, as the light in the restroom shattered, and it was all dark again. Ann tried to reach in—to stop him—but she heard a shout, and the floor shifted beneath her again, and there was a flash of silver as the briefcase that had taken down the flight attendant leapt up from the floor and struck Ann hard in the side of the head.

She crumpled.

And she was on some kind of bench.

It seemed to be made of wooden planks—not finished, not even sanded. She smelled woodsmoke. Or maybe not, not
wood
smoke. The smoke of burning dung? What made her think of that? It was pungent, not unpleasant—but dung? Why would she think
of that?

She sighed and opened her eyes. She had thought of that because she’d invented it. The dung of cave bats was what the tribe who was charged with guarding the Insect burned in their cooking braziers. It was more plentiful than wood, and burned hot and long through the nights. And sure enough, that’s what was providing the light in this place . . . a small windowless room, halfway up the tower where the Insect was to have dwelt.

She sat up, put her bare feet down on the thick pine floor. She was wearing a long dress of velvet, a deep blue, with sleeves that fitted her arms tightly and extended just past her wrists. It was the sort of dress that an out-of-favour royal might wear in the Tower of London at various times in history.

The light came from two braziers that hung from chains hooked into ceiling joists. There was a door, made of thick planks of maple. There was a small barred slit at eye level. The door was, of course, barred from the other side. Although she couldn’t see it from here, Ann knew it was a stout bar. She had put it there herself, just as she’d invented the dung and the bench and the wood.

“A prison of my own design.” She stood on toes to peer out the slit. A rusted iron cover was drawn across the other side. She tapped on it. There would be a guard there. He would be careful, draw the cover open with the haft of his spear perhaps.

The cover drew aside.

“Hello, Miss.” The guard was not standing too close to the slit, so Ann could get a look at him in the dim firelight.

“You were on the plane,” she said. The guard rubbed his fingers through close-cut hair. He smiled. Ann had not seen him smile when he was sitting in the row next to hers, telling her to calm down. He stepped closer to the door, until their eyes were only inches apart.

“Not anymore,” he said. “Your husband still is though.”

“What?”

“He ain’t going anywhere, miss.”

And she was on a mattress. There were linens. It smelled of ammonia. A machine was beeping. It was hard to focus her eyes on the dim light sources, the odd shapes in the space that she now occupied. She lifted her arm. There was a bracelet around her wrist. She touched her head; there was a bandage taped to her forehead, and it stung, deep, when her fingers brushed it.

It was oh-so-mysterious, but only for a few seconds.

Ann was no fool.

She wasn’t on the plane anymore. She was in a hospital, somewhere. They had bandaged her forehead where the case had struck it. The bracelet on one wrist was a hospital bracelet.

She inferred from this that the plane had not exploded, had not fallen into the sea, had landed in some way.

Okay
, she thought.

Everything’s good.

It wasn’t good.

Here is what had happened according to the representative from Air Canada, who met with Ann after the doctors had pronounced her fit for visitors. There was turbulence, and it wasn’t expected, and it did some damage to the aircraft. The damage was serious. It had nearly brought the aircraft down in the ocean, the damage was so serious. But the pilots were able to regain control at 1,000 feet, and fly with only one engine all the way to Miami, Florida, where they made an emergency landing.

There was more, but Ann didn’t absorb much of that, because the representative, whose name was Carolyn something-or-other and was just about Ann’s age but seemed so much older, had already told her the most important thing.

Michael had not survived the landing.

Ann was a widow.

Were there tears?

When she came to her senses next, Ann was sure there must have been—even as she felt nothing but iron in the middle of herself. Her husband, Michael Voors, had died in the air, after . . .

After . . .

She must have cried herself to paralysis.

She had fallen in with a bad crowd in junior high school. That was how Ann’s mother would put it. Ann didn’t agree. They weren’t bad, really. Just odd.

There were five of them—three boys: Luke, Ryan and Bruce. The girls: Courtney and Leah. They were all in the gifted program, like Ann, and they were all underachievers, like Ann.

They were, as Ann’s father put it one night over dinner at the Lake House, slaves to the dice. Philip thought that was a good joke, and in Ann’s defence, told both their parents that the pastime was “a better form of birth control than the Pill.” But that didn’t get much of a laugh. Their mother quietly pointed out that spending time drawing up mazes populated with monsters and devils was walking a bit too close to the line for a girl with Ann’s history.

“Whatever,” said Ann, swirling her mashed potatoes into a little crater for the melting butter. “It’s just a game.”

“It’s like a religion,” said her mother. “It’s got its own bible.”

“Bib
les
,” said Ann. “And not even. They’re just rules.”

They were borrowed rules, then. There was the
Player’s Handbook
, which taught the novice adventurer everything she needed to know about making a character, be it thief or fighter or cleric or magic-user; the
Dungeon Master’s Guide
, which got into the architecture of making up imaginary continents, and the tombs and caverns and fortresses that riddled their mantle; and the
Monster Manual
, which told you everything you needed to know about the devils and monsters that dwelt inside.

Ryan loaned them to her after she promised not to (a) write in them, (b) tear them, or (c) spill anything on them. They were stupidly expensive—the whole set came up to nearly $100—and you couldn’t do without them, running a long-game, in-depth Dungeons & Dragons campaign like Ryan’s.

Ryan was in Grade Nine—in just a few months, he’d graduate on to the district high school. But he’d been running his campaign, on an island called Tareth, since Grade Seven. The island was a geographical jumble that intentionally or not, resembled a face; thick jungles hugged the southern coast like a beard, cut off by the arid plateau of the Sun’s Anvil, that rimmed the southern third of the island in a jack-o-lantern smile topped by a range of mountains that Leah kept calling the Mustachio of Death, for obvious reasons, but Ryan maintained were known as the Grim Spires.

A great freshwater lake might have made a nose, although it was further to the east than the west, and the towns that dotted the northern coast and followed the three rivers that drained from lake to sea did not make for eyes. But the Sun’s Anvil still grinned.

Ann wanted to make her own continent, her own campaign. She had begun work on it while she was still exploring the jungle temples of Ith, looking for a fabled jewel known only as the Fisherman’s Lure, along with Leah and Courtney—a sort of audition session that Ryan ran in the cafeteria back in September. Ann’s continent looked more like Italy—she thought it might fit in just a few hundred kilometres to the west of Tareth, across a treacherous ocean filled with sharks and reefs and kraken. It would join to a larger land mass to the northwest that was omnipresent but effectively unreachable, fenced off by swampland and foothills and a Great Wall. The wall was her big brother’s idea. Philip was nearly finished high school and had been studying Chinese history, and was of the view that every ancient Dungeons & Dragons world needed at least one Great Wall.

He helped Ann with some of the geography, too—made sure that the terrain was realistic enough nothing could be mistaken for a happy face, and helped her come up with names for her towns and lakes and rivers that didn’t immediately suggest the B side of a heavy metal album.

“You can still have monsters crawling through a burial cairn that’s just called the Cairn of Saint Lucius,” he said. “Not every cave has to have ‘Fang’ in its name.”

They came up with a decadent former imperial hub, based loosely on Rome, that still ruled the place even though it had gone monotheistic in the past hundred years. They named it Tricasta, because the city was divided into three districts which cast out from a central fountain, fed by a trapped water elemental spirit. Her name, Ann decided, was Casta.

Philip quietly suggested that was a pretty cheesy way to name a city, but he couldn’t come up with anything better. He was finishing his senior year, and had his hands full: playing basketball at the Varsity level, maintaining better than average grades, and managing a teen romance of considerable tempest with Laurie Weston, nearly a year younger than he, the middle child in a family of five boys, two of whom were teammates of his. It was complicated.

Ann disliked Phys. Ed., was bored by basketball even from the point of view of a spectator, and while she was fond of Ryan, she did not think she would like to date her dungeon master just as a rule. And her grades? They were as unspectacular as her generally uncomplicated life.

Ann liked it that way. Philip could play at sports and excel at calculus and explore and agonize over the body and mind of the mercurial Laurie West. Ann had other priorities.

With geography and ecology established, Ann busied herself with the care and feeding of the Empire of the Eternal Fountain.

As Leah drily observed just before Christmas, the empire was fed with the blood of their player characters.

“Seriously, Ann, you are one murderous dungeon master.” The root beer in Leah’s glass foamed to within a millimetre of the top before she stopped pouring. The plastic bottle made a clicking sound as she set it down beside her now-redundant character sheet.

“You guys do it to yourselves,” Ann replied. “If Halgreth wanted to live, he could have had a long career as a castrato in the Cathedral of Tears.”

“She’s right,” said Ryan. “The Archbishop did make the offer before we rescued you. All you had to do was say thanks but no, I like it here.”

“Don’t be such a dick,” said Leah.

And Ann said, “That’s what the Archbishop said,” and that cracked them all up.

They were at the Lake House that day, in the basement rec room where Ann had set up the game table. It was not the full crew; just the girls, Ryan, and Ann. Luke and Bruce, skeptics to the end, had other things to do than play in Ann’s girly little campaign.

It was Saturday—the Christmas break was just thirty hours old—and Ann was hosting the day’s game, which was scheduled to go for another five hours before their rides showed up to end it all. Leah would, in practical terms, be in for a long wait; the party was exploring a network of caverns underneath the Coliseum of Dusk, in a deep valley some fifty leagues south of Tricasta. The entrance had collapsed behind them, so there was no easy exit—and as poor dead Halgreth was the party’s only cleric . . . there was no one in practical earshot who could be prevailed upon to cast a resurrection spell and bring him back.

So there would be nothing for it. Leah would have to sit on the sidelines, watching as the party lashed her eviscerated corpse to a makeshift litter, and rolling up a new character or three while the rest of them fought their way through the Corridor of Bones, swam an underground river and battled the Arch-Liche of the Games in his inverted tower that clung stalactite-like above the nearly bottomless Cavern of Souls.

No two ways about it. It sucked to be her.

“Let’s take a break,” said Courtney. “Out of respect, you know, for the dead.” She patted Leah’s hand.

Ryan shrugged. “I gotta take a wizz anyway.” He pushed the chair out from the table and headed upstairs.

“Yeah, don’t take all day,” said Ann.

“Just enough time to figure out a strategy to survive this fuckin’ death march.” He grabbed his copy of the
Dungeon Master’s Guide
as he passed Ann, and Ann took it back, then covered the maps behind her screen.

“Easy cowboy,” she said.

“Yippee kai-yay, motherfucker,” said Ryan, and Courtney cracked up.

Ann grinned and leaned over her notes, thinking about some of the things she’d have to change in the dungeon now that Halgreth had bought it. If the party lost one more member, they’d be wiped out by the Arch-Liche and its army. She considered for a moment whether to cross out the Balrog she’d set to guard the Gossamer Bridge—to give them a sporting chance. She was literally poised to do that when Courtney piped in with a suggestion.

“You know,” she said, as Leah hunched adding up the Wisdom points on the dice she’d just rolled, “when Ryan was running his Tareth campaign, shit like this didn’t happen.”

Balrog’s in
, thought Ann, but what she said was, “You want me to go a little easier on you, sister?”

“Not easier, exactly. But . . . remember in Tareth when we got into the treasury?”

Leah sat up, and nodded. “Yeah, Ann—that was where you picked up that sweet Bag of Holding. And the Vorpal Blade.”

“And that invisibility ring,” said Courtney. “I didn’t hear you complaining it wasn’t tough enough then.”

Ann nodded at Leah. “You got another cleric there?”

She shook her head. “Wisdom’s just 11. Won’t make the cut.”

“Re-roll it,” said Ann.

“The whole character?”

“Just the stat,” she said. “If it’s lower than 11, keep the first roll. Otherwise . . .”

“You want me to make another cleric?”

“You’re going to need one where you’re going,” she said. “Don’t worry—I’ll find a place to introduce him, before you get there.”

Leah nodded and rolled again. “Seventeen!” she crowed, and Ann nodded.

“Take better care of this one,” she said.

Ann shut her binder with all the notes for the dungeon and got up.

“Where you going?” asked Courtney.

“Going to pee,” she said, and headed for the stairs out of the basement. “You guys want anything from the kitchen while I’m up there?”

“Nah,” said Courtney, and Leah rubbed her arms.

“Maybe crank up the heat in here,” she said. “I’m starting to freeze.”

Leah was right. It was freezing, outside and in. The sky was clear and blue, and the air was still, but as Ann walked past the French doors to the deck, she could see frost starting to rim the glass. It was too early for the lake to have frozen over—that didn’t usually happen until mid-January—and looking out, she could see little eddies of the sharp wind crossing the middle of it. She flipped the light on in the kitchen—the brightness outside made the interior of the place greyer by definition, somehow lonelier.

Her parents had taken the car into Toronto for some last-minute Christmas shopping, and Philip was over at Laurie’s place for the day. Ann and her friends had the place to themselves.

She didn’t really have to pee. She figured she could squeeze one out if pressed on the matter. But yeah . . . she was hoping to run into Ryan. She had no time for Leah’s dramatics, and she wanted to confer, dungeon master to dungeon master, on the best way to deal with a troublesome player. She figured she’d catch him on his way out of the little powder room in the hall between kitchen and living room.

She flipped on the hall light, and waited outside the door for a moment. Bounced back and forth on her feet once, then tapped on the door.

“Hey Ry, you okay in there? You—oh.”

There was no light coming from under the door. She opened it, and sure enough—the little two-piece was empty. And cold. She could see her breath as she leaned inside. The room had been shut up all morning.

“Ryan?” Ann shut the door and headed into the living room. It was dark too, nothing but the reflection of the kitchen light in the screen of her dad’s rear projection TV. Ann stopped at the base of the stairs to adjust the thermostat. She put it to 24 degrees, and flicked the side of it with her thumb, as though that might kick-start it.

Light filtered down through the slats on the bannister. That was it, then. Ryan had used the upstairs bathroom, with the Jacuzzi tub and the full-length mirrors, and all her mom’s New Yorkers—or her “hometown papers” as she called them.

Ann started up the stairs. She stopped at the first landing, wondering for a moment—would Ryan think it was weird if she followed him all the way upstairs to the big bathroom, when the powder room was
right there
? Would he think she was following him? That she liked him?

But he had been up there awhile. She might be just going up to see if he was all right.

“Sure,” she murmured, and climbed to the second floor. The bathroom door was wide open, but it was dark in there too. The light, such as it was, was coming from around the corner of the hall.

Her room.

Ann rubbed gooseflesh down on her forearms. She didn’t call out his name this time, just padded along the hallway, stepping over the board that squeaked, and turned the corner. The door was half-open. Ryan was sitting on her bed, facing away from her. She needn’t have been so stealthy. He was wearing her headphones, so oblivious that he just about jumped out of his skin when she grabbed his shoulder with one hand and yanked off the phones with the other.

“Shit!”

“What the hell?”

“I’m sorry!” Ryan sat bolt upright, his eyes wide. The headphones were in his lap, hissing with the noise from the machine beside her bed. “Shit, Ann, I’m sorry. I was—”

“You were snooping around in my room!” said Ann. “I can’t believe it!”

Ryan blinked fast and slid off the bed so he was standing, facing away from her, toward the window in Ann’s room.

“Look—I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have been in here.”

For just another second, Ann felt like she could hit Ryan, like that was going to be the only thing for it. But the mood passed. He was really sorry. His head hung low enough that his jaw touched his chest, and his eyes, normally wide and brown, were crinkled with what seemed like genuine regret, sincere apology.

“You didn’t go through my drawers, did you?” Ann had heard about boys stealing girls’ underwear. Evidently so had Ryan; he shook his head emphatically.

“Look, I’m really sorry. I was just walking by, and saw the cool old tape deck.”

“Ah. The machine.”