Blackfly Season

7

“YOU FEEL LIKE A LITTLE HIKE?” Delorme said when they were outside. She tucked a strand of hair behind one ear; a damp breeze was blowing across the parking lot. “Take a look at that hill close up? You recognized it, right?”

“Yeah, it was taken from somewhere up behind the university,” Cardinal said. “Why don’t we drive over that way before it starts to rain?”

“You think she’s a student at Northern?”

“We’d have heard from them by now, if she was.”

“Well, if she was on Beaufort Hill, the most likely route for anyone not a student would be via the lookout off Highway 11. Why don’t I drive to the lookout and I’ll meet you in the middle?”

“Top of Nishinabe Creek?”

“Yeah. Where it splits round that little island. Figure forty-five minutes to an hour.”

Algonquin Bay does not have any serious mountains, but the high-backed hills of the Precambrian Shield lumber around it like a herd of gargantuan buffalo. The terrain is unforgiving granite, luckily covered with a layer of loamy soil that supports thousands of square miles of forest. The Northern University campus is flung across the top of one of these hills, affording the students a spectacular view of the city and the blue expanse of Lake Nipissing. Not that it was blue today. A light drizzle had set in, and the sky was a depressing shade of grey from one horizon to the other.

Delorme dropped Cardinal at headquarters before they took their separate routes. On the way up to the campus, Cardinal stopped at a curve on Sackville Road, where there was a small, comma-shaped lay-by. Back when Cardinal was in high school, he used to come up here with Brenda Stewart, his sweetheart of the time, but Brenda Stewart had staunchly refused to go all the way in his parents’ Impala. Now, he looked out across the rooftops of the city toward the Manitou Islands some seven miles south. Beaufort Hill lay behind the forest to the west; you couldn’t quite see it from here.

Cardinal drove the rest of the way up to the university and parked in the visitors’ lot. He walked across campus toward the network of trails that fanned out behind the school. A group of students spilled giggling from the main entrance and travelled in a boisterous, shifting knot toward the residence. How young they seemed—younger even than Cardinal’s daughter, Kelly—and how innocent. Cardinal envied their easy camaraderie. When he had been a student in Toronto he had tried to save money by living off-campus in a smelly little room near Kensington Market. Thus he had missed the experience of living in a building full of fellow students, and it probably had ended up costing him more anyway.

There was a large gazebo among the pines, and then the trails. Cardinal took the one that led toward the top of the nearest hill, waving blackflies away from his face and hair, moving fast to keep ahead of them. About three hundred yards into the woods, the trail looped back toward a tiny man-made lake. Cardinal stepped off the trail and kept heading up the hill. The air was thick with smells of pine and loam and wet leaves. The drizzle didn’t reach the forest floor; it hovered in a fine mist that clung to the skin.

The worst thing about blackflies, Cardinal thought—the truly diabolical thing—is that they are absolutely silent. They do not buzz like bees, or drone like horseflies, or even emit the high-pitched whine of mosquitoes; there’s no warning, no chance of a pre-emptive smack. Cardinal felt a nip on his ankle, as if someone had stuck him with a hot pin. He bent down to tuck his pants into his socks. The only good thing you could say about blackflies is that, unlike mosquitoes, they do not bite through clothing. While he was bent over, another fly excised a piece of his neck. He slapped, and his hand came away bloody. He turned his collar up and continued toward the crest of the hill.

Ten minutes later—sweating, puffing and swearing yet again to put in more hours wrestling the many-armed Mr. Nautilus in the police gym—Cardinal climbed atop an outcropping of granite. Lake Nipissing, roughly palette-shaped, glimmered dully to the south, but off to the west he could now see Beaufort Hill. The old fire tower was just beneath the summit; the narrow dirt road that led up to it curved away from the line of hydro towers below. This was where Dr. Paley had taken his picture.

Maybe Red had stood here, too. Cardinal looked around at the clearing, swatting flies away as if he were conducting an orchestra. Signs of human activity lay everywhere—a rusted Sprite can, a wrapper from an Aero bar, the remains of a campfire. Obviously a popular spot for students, but surely not in blackfly season. Cardinal swatted at his temple.

He jumped down from the rock and, moving as fast as he could through the trees, headed west. There was no trail here, but the rocks made it the easiest route from the clearing, which was otherwise surrounded by thick brush. He kept moving, not sure what he was looking for. Bites itched on his neck and ankles.

No one in their right mind would come wandering around up here. What might have drawn a young woman like Red? Of course, if she wasn’t from the north, she wouldn’t have known about the flies.

Cardinal pushed his way through the trees, dogged now by a squadron of flies targeting his ears. Finally he found the trail that ran beside Nishinabe Creek. Winter had been particularly snowy this year, with blizzards into March and snowfalls to the end of April. In a normal summer, you could almost jump across the creek, but now it was bursting its banks with runoff.

Cardinal hurried up the trail, toward the pool he knew was at the next ridge. The “island”—little more than an outcropping of rock, really—where he was to meet Delorme wasn’t far above that. There was a faint hiss in the air. As he approached the ridge, the hissing grew louder, until it sounded like radio static. The falls. He had forgotten about Nishinabe Falls. Cardinal stopped.

Most years, Nishinabe Creek is too small to boast anything resembling a falls. The pool is fed by a trickle of water—about what you’d get from your eavestroughs in a summer storm. But this year the heavy snows had turned it into a glassy curtain of water that tumbled over the rocks and hid the cavelike recession behind it. Cardinal gripped his collar round his neck, staring.

Had the hiss of static reminded Red of this rushing falls? Of something that had frightened her up here? The water foamed and frothed at Cardinal’s feet. Further out in the pool it was black as onyx. A fly gouged his scalp, and he swatted at it, hurting his ear. He badly wanted to rush uphill, find Delorme and flee these miniature vampires, but he was stopped by the sense that Red had been here, perhaps in search of something. Perhaps against her will.

When he had been up here on a hike a couple of years back, Cardinal had crossed the creek stone by stone, but now the stones were submerged in froth. Luckily, beavers had been busy nearby and a birch tree was sprawled across the water. Cardinal stepped onto the trunk, and it crumbled under his foot. It was stronger higher up. When he had a good footing, he edged his way across the creek. A fly bit into his neck and he cuffed at it, nearly toppling.

As soon as he was near enough, he leaped to solid ground and went after the flies in a fury, slapping his neck, the side of his face, the crown of his head. Anger and frustration were aggravated by the consciousness of looking ridiculous, even though there was no one to see. He climbed a series of boulders and then he was at the edge of the pool with the falls before him. He stepped under the overhang and right away he could smell the sickly odour of rotting meat.

Cardinal edged between a rock and the falling water. He stopped again and listened. The blackflies had abandoned him now, driven back by the spray. Something else had Cardinal’s attention. The granite face of the wall behind him was defaced, not with the usual graffiti, but with long columns of hieroglyphics. They looked ancient, but Cardinal knew they had not been there two years ago.

There were pictographs of arrows three or four inches long that intersected in weird patterns. Others were heaped in bunches with one longer arrow extruding, as if indicating a direction. Along the edges of the rock, there were drawings of the moon in various stages—full, half, three-quarter, new—and everywhere there were numbers, inscribed in coloured chalk.

Cardinal moved away from the rock face and stepped around a sharp corner of granite. The smell on the other side was nauseating. He pulled out his shirt-tail and covered his mouth and nose.

The thing on the floor of the cave had once been human, but there was nothing lifelike about it. The body was naked, male, with muscular arms and legs. All that working out hadn’t come to much, though: a pale heap of flesh in a dark, cold cave. However this human being had lived, his death had been savage. The hands and feet were missing, as was the head. Maggots heaved on the major wounds, giving the appearance of movement.

There was a noise, and Cardinal whirled around.

Delorme was behind him, staring at the body from behind the corner of granite.

“I don’t know about you,” she said. “But me, I don’t think the blackflies did that.”