Into the Fall

by Tamara L. Miller

In the distance, there was a low rumble. The storm, which had been waiting on the edges of the sky, had lost patience.

“It’s a creepy legend, actually.” The bartender set his elbows on the bar top to lean toward Sarah. “They say the wendigo is a forest-dwelling spirit with the body of an oversize emaciated man and the skull of a stag. It’s not good or evil, though it does have a rather gruesome habit of hunting people. They say no matter how much it eats, it’s never satisfied, and so it’s always hunting. But the most fascinating bit of the legend is that the wendigo’s victims are cursed to become wendigo themselves, doomed to hunt the forests claiming more victims.”

She muttered cold comforts—“It’ll be okay; that woman doesn’t know anything”—but Izzy knew they were meaningless. When Bella took her hand, Izzy let silence speak.

The towers of the power plant appeared to have moved closer, like the legs of a silent, stalking beast whose head reached above the clouds.

Rob Boychuk stood in the waiting room of the Patricia Bay detachment, appraising the young man who had just asked to see the “head officer of the looking-for-people team.” Boychuk guessed he might be in his late teens or early twenties, but estimating age seemed to be a skill that diminished as he grew older. They all looked like children to him these days. The boy sat on the waiting-room chair, phone in one hand, legs splayed as his thumb flicked through images on the screen. His free hand rested on his knee, tapping out an indecipherable beat.

The sun had just dipped below the horizon when Boychuk passed the town of Renfrew, about an hour out of Ottawa. No man’s time, his mother had called it. When light was suspended by dark and bad spirits slipped into the world.

A Herman Melville line from Moby-Dick played on repeat in his head, like a scratched CD track: There are certain queer times and occasions in this strange mixed affair we call life when a man takes this whole universe for a vast practical joke. He’d been trying to work his way through the novel for months, reading a page here and there. Not because it wasn’t readable, but because it struck Boychuck as a book you lived with for a while.