La Mémoire du lac
Joël Champetier
(Chapter 10, p. 124-133)
We had trouble sleeping. We were too hot, despite the shower we'd taken before going to bed. The thin sheet was still too much, but if I pushed it away, I felt uneasy, exposed.
Josée was also sleeping naked, which she almost never did. I could feel her thighs against me, her hips, it was both annoying and exciting and I soon had a hard-on. I came closer and began caressing her. She moved away impatiently.
"I'm trying to sleep."
I curled up in my corner, angry with the heat, with the sleep that didn't come, with women's moods. After a long silence, she turned to me.
"You really want to?"
"I don't know what I want. I'm hot. I'm fed up."
She came closer.
"Might as well be hot for a reason."
We made love in the dark, almost brutally. After, we took another shower and changed the damp sheets. It was still too hot and muggy to sleep, so we watched a late night movie, in the buff in front of the TV, still hoping though that old Adéodat was asleep. Around one a.m., the weather finally decided to break. The stormy rain fell heavily, the sky was rent by blinding lightning strikes, thunder shook the house. It was pretty scary.
The storm drifted inland, leaving a light rain and less oppressive air. Lulled by the water whispering in the gutters, I finally went to sleep. In the dream, I was back in Mylène Denoncourt's office. She was naked, which I hadn't noticed when I'd entered the room. Both excited and ill at ease, I was wondering. "Is she allowed to do that?" vaguely thinking of the controversy about sexual abuse by certain therapists. But she was smiling her little smile, she was telling me to come closer, I would have nothing to blame myself for, she was consenting, it would not be rape. Then I was in the Cochrane elementary school, sitting in front of the enormous dark desk of the sister superior. I was waiting in misery; I had surely done something bad. Near the desk there was the chair spiked with four-inch nails where the most stubborn students were forced to sit. I'd always been able to avoid that chair, I had only ever been beaten with a ruler or with the strap. But this time I was petrified on my chair, desperately terrified: what I had done was very, very bad. This time, Sister Superior would make me sit on the nails, for sure. Awful cries, like crowing, were coming from the other side of a small door, almost invisible at the back of the room. I went to open it. In the middle of the schoolyard, half a dozen sisters were fiercely going at Eric Massicotte. They ran at him one after the other, biting, clawing, hitting him with a wooden ruler or a strap, while the others kept Eric from escaping by hopping around in all directions with raucous cries as their black veils were fluttering like wings, stirring up clouds of dust. The bell rang, signalling the end of recess.
It was the pager. Josée shook me.
"Daniel, you've got a call."
I was already up, stumbling in the sheets to go turn the pager off. While I was dressing, my heart pounding, I glanced at the alarm clock: half past six.
Without a word, Josée handed me one of my shirts. I hastily finished buttoning up and I left, barely taking the time to kiss Josée goodbye. Worried, but not showing it too much, she simply told me to be careful. I said not to worry: it was probably nothing, as usual.
Josée's old Colt wasn't easy to start, because of the humid morning air, and I was one of the last to arrive at the station. The 250 gallon truck was already leaving. With the other volunteers, I piled into the 333 and we dressed en route as best we could, eyes bleary, hair all mussed.
"We got a call from the Ontario police," Leo Desormeaux explained. "The patrol on the lake saw some smoke around the Bowman Manor."
The truck went through Ville-Marie and onto the dirt road that meanders along the Pointe-au-Vin. No one was talking, the muffled growl of the tires on the gravel was only interrupted by the radio messages Chief Bérubé was sending us.
The coolness left by the storm was now only a memory; the day was going to be hot and heavy. Under the lowering sky, the farms of Pointe-au-Vin unfurled their rain-soaked fields. Banks of mist were still lingering in some folds of the land. A diffuse sun timidly appeared between two crescent-shaped clouds.
The road to the point was a dead end that stopped at the gate barring access to the manor. Beyond the gate, it became even narrower and stonier, and the low branches of the trees were whipping the windshield of the truck. It was barely a trail, and probably followed the ancient road cut through the trees in 1930 by the team of the contractor who'd built the Bowman manor. Bowman himself had probably never taken that rough trail.
For a few hundred metres, the truck left the gravelly road to run directly on granite. It was a vast rocky outcropping, very flat, coloured a vivid red by the rain; it bore the muddy tracks of the preceding trucks. We still couldn't see the manor, but a new smell was already superimposed on the rich fragrance of the woods: the acrid, oily reek of a forest fire.
The trail went back into the forest, a sparser, domesticated forest. Through the pines, I saw a very red blinking light. Our truck arrived in the domain itself. I couldn't see very well from inside the truck, but it seemed that the forest, not the building, was burning. Framed by two guest houses, each as big as a regular country house, the manor seemed to be mostly untouched. But something was burning in the back, with a heavy russet and grey smoke which hung over us like a leaded ceiling.
As we were getting out of the 333, one of the guys came to tell us that the back wall of the manor was on fire. Chief Bérubé was already there, standing by his van. He gave orders. With another recruit, Gillain Bourque, one of my former students, I screwed together the section of hose that would carry the lake water to the 500 gallon truck, which had just arrived. Having the lake so close would be a big help: no risk of running short of water. As soon as the 500 gallon was hooked up, and still with young Bourque, I hastily went to start up an autonomous pump which we hooked in turn to a small one inch hose, just in time to give it to the team equipped with tanks who were entering the manor.
With Bourque beside me, I came back to Bérubé for my next orders. He gestured to us "take it easy." The manor was uninhabited, there were no passers-by: we had the situation in hand. We'd been lucky that the Ontario police had been motoring on the lake just at the right time, especially for a wooden building. For a few minutes, we watched like ordinary spectators as our comrades worked, then the two firemen with tanks came out of the manor and came over to Bérubé.
"The worst has been doused. It was just the back wall burning, as though the fire began in the kitchen."
Bérubé waved at me.
"Bring the tools, Daniel, you remember how it goes. The last of it, the detail work."
I picked up one of the heavy toolboxes and went into the old manor. Past the mostly intact façade, there was a sickening smell of wet ashes. Saddened, I walked along the darkened corridor, wading through water the colour of India ink, careful not to touch anything, since everything was so black with ashes and soot. On my right, the corridor opened on the ballroom. The damages were not too serious there: two broken windows, a bit of soot, and the beautiful floor drowned in water.
Only in the kitchen did I realize the true extent of the damage. From this point on, everything was black: ceiling, floor, counters. The fire had apparently started in the pantry at the back of the kitchen. Through the demolished wall, we could see that the flames had spread to the trees on the northern side of the manor. Armed with a chainsaw, one of the guys was cutting down a cedar that was now only a smouldering stump while two others were still hosing down the undergrowth. Turcotte, the deputy chief, pointed at the water-covered floor.
"The building sits directly on granite, probably no basement. We'll have to open the floor to drain away the water. Cut a hole in the kitchen, the floor is a complete loss anyway."
I started the chainsaw. The black water spurted up for a moment when the blade pierced the floor. I made a few cuts around a section, which I knocked in with a good kick. The water rushed in. I pointed my flashlight into the hole, a bit surprised that I did see any granite.
Gillain Bourque came closer.
"What is it?"
"Brick work, looks like."
"It's granite," Turcotte said impatiently.
"See for yourself."
Turcotte and Bérubé both shone their flashlights down the hole, lighting a brick floor where the water had washed the dust away. Chief Bérubé also came over to have a look.
"Humpf. Maybe we'd better go down there to make sure the water can get out."
I cut a bigger section out of the floor, enough to allow us to go through. While I was putting the chainsaw away, Bourque slipped between the joists and crouched down, sweeping the beam of light from left to right.
"So?" Bérubé asked.
"It's a cellar. Big. As big as this wing of the building."
Bérubé turned to me.
"You feel okay going in there?"
Not even bothering to answer, I let myself down between the joists, careful to avoid any rusty nails. Hastily, I stepped away from the cut out section where the water was still pouring down. Only then did I realize what Bérubé's question implied. A cellar being flooded... Like in the school board building, fifteen years earlier - the connection had immediately been obvious to him. I don't recall having felt any anguish at that moment, though. It's what happened after that is seared forever in my memory.
I joined Bourque. The wavering beams of our flashlights feebly illuminated a large cellar with a low ceiling, empty except for some furniture and crates at the far end. The water was falling down between the floorboards above, looking like rain. The brick floor sloped gently, following the granite layer, so that at the other end of the cellar the ceiling was almost high enough for us to stand straight. Of course, the water was accumulating there. We'd have to find a way to drain it, either by pumping in out or by cutting a hole in the foundation wall. Splashing through the stream that came down the kitchen hole, Bourque went ahead. I followed him. At the other end of the cellar, we stopped in front of the big table, grey with dust, pushed against the wall. A stream of water had partially washed it off. It was a stone slab. Bourque looked at me in bewilderment.
"What is it?"
Above the table, on wooden shelves swollen with rot, a whole lot of dusty junk was piled up: daggers, cows' horns, leather pouches, candles, dolls made of canvas or straw, stones, coins, sculptures, everything rusted, rippled open, rotted and gnawed by vermin. Just above that, lying in a recess of the foundations, about twenty bottles were lined up. I looked more closely. The labels were brown with dust, but they looked like bottles of wine. The corks were intact. Bourque reached out to wipe off the dust, but I caught him just in time by his sleeve.
"Hey, don't touch anything!"
Bourque glared at me in annoyance:
"What's the problem?
I was too astounded to answer: I'd just recognized what it was. The stone table was obviously an altar, the cows' horns were used as chalices to drink the wine. The tools, the dolls, the bones, the daggers... No, it couldn't be happenstance. What we have before us were witchcraft paraphernalia.
Bourque was looking at me, his face pale.
"What's the matter, Mr. Verrier?"
"I... I'm not sure. Don't touch anything, whatever you do, it could be... it could be important."
"And that, what's that?"
He meant the crates. A little more than a metre long, thirty centimetres high. There were six of then, three on each side of the altar, hanging halfway up the wall on iron bars bolted into the concrete foundation.
My back was hurting from being stooped over too long. I splashed after Bourque to the closest crate. There had once been a cover, but the iron strips that had kept the boards together had rusted away a long time ago. Bourque pushed aside an old piece of wood, thirty centimetres wide, and held up his flashlight between two joists to illuminate the inside of the crate. After a fraction of a second, he stepped back as though he had been stung by a wasp.
"Jesus Christ! Oh fucking shit!"
He bumped into me, almost making me fall in the water.
"What's going on? What is it?"
"Holy shit, I'm getting out of here!"
"Hey! Where are you going?"
Bourque was running away, ignoring my calls, hitting his helmet on the joists.
"Fuck off, I'm getting out of here!"
Through the hole in the kitchen floor, the bright beam of another flashlight swept around the basement.
"What's going on down there?" Bérubé was calling.
I turned back to the crate. Feeling like I was not consciously in control of my movements, I held up my flashlight and went closer. A shaking yellow ray of light slipped through the opening. At first, I only saw something vaguely round, ochre-coloured. I wasn't really startled when I recognized a skull - Bourque's flight had prepared me for the worst. I pushed the other planks aside and discovered ribs and long bones, as thin as drumsticks, half lost in the thick layer of dirt and dead insects that covered the bottom of the coffin. The first idea that came to me is that it must be a deformity, because the skull was so out of proportion with the rest. If I immediately jumped to that conclusion, it's perhaps because the first picture that forms in our minds when we think skeleton is that of an adult one. Or perhaps because the truth still felt unbearable.
I held one arm out to estimate the size of the body. Barely one metre. I realized at last that it was not the skeleton of a deformed adult. This was the skeleton of a child, five or six years old.
With a coolness and a detachment that now seem unreal to me, I went to the other crate. An older child, too big for the coffin. The skeleton had retained the position, lying on one side, legs folded.
On the wall in front of me, my shadow was quivering.
"Daniel!"
I turned towards Bérubé; under the yellow light of my flashlight he looked livid and appalled.
"We have to call the police."
"I know. Bourque already told us."
I pointed to the other crates, on the other side of the altar.
"Six crates. Does that mean we're gonna find six... six corpses?"
Bérubé squeezed my shoulder.
"I don't know. Come, let's go."
"Those were children."
"Yes, yes. Come on, now. We can't stay here."
Overwhelmed, I followed Bérubé under the dirty water that was still raining down, back through the hole in the kitchen floor, up to the open air...
© 2001 Éditions Alire & Joël Champetier
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