Ride the Moon: An Anthology (4 page)

“Maybe she's not here,” Max said, looking around with his flashlight at the still bog.

“No,” Rachel said numbly. “She's here. They've taken her below.” She heard a rustling to the left. The skittering of thousands of small feet to the right. The rise of water behind her. The creatures were listening. They were waiting.

“I know you're here!” She turned around and screamed, her voice swallowed by the encroaching darkness. “I know you're here!” She screamed again, and pivoted to catch a glimpse of the entire bog.

Max gasped and shifted closer to her, his eyes like full moons as he met hers. “Something touched my ankle,” he whispered.

“You're lucky if that's all they do,” Rachel kicked at the murky water near her, slipping and landing in the muck. Pinpricks exploded on her legs and back, and she rolled around, bringing up her arms to cover her face.

This time, Max screamed. She struck out, kicking and hurling insults, slapping the air around her. She hit nothing, the crawlers too fast for mere human speed. Tentacles wrapped around her leg.

“Give her back!” She kicked out and connected with the bogle, but others lifted their murky arms from the depths and wrapped around her legs, tugging her down. Max grabbed hold of her armpits and tried to pull her up. She screamed in pain, feeling as though she was being pulled in two.

“Let go, Max!” She hit him, trying to make him let go of her shirt as he tightened his grip. He lost his footing and fell partly under her, but he didn't lose his grip on her shirt. “Let go!” She managed to hit him square in the nose and he let go for a moment, long enough for the bogles to pull her down. Max's fingers slipped through hers as he made a final effort to grab her.

Water rose up into her mouth and nose, plugged her ears and blinded her with grit. She screamed an airless scream, looked up to where she thought she saw the light of Max's flashlight and realized that hers had slipped from her grasp.

Her only weapon against the darkness, and she had lost it.

Max plunged his hands frantically into the thick water, coming up with old sticks and grit. He could touch the bottom of the bog without having to dip his head underwater. Yet he could find no sign of Rachel.

He held the flashlight with his teeth, the beam bobbing uselessly on the still waters. So still even he barely made them move.

“Rachel! Rachel!!”

He stopped and straightened, looking for a sign, any sign, of her. The bog around him was so still it made his skin crawl for want of movement. The reeds stood like silent sentinels over a sheet of old, tired water. The creatures that had attacked them but moments earlier had vanished as quickly as they had appeared.

Had they even been real?

He walked deeper into the water, using the shovel to carefully feel his way forward. He slipped a few times, barely catching himself before being swallowed by the water. He stopped. This was foolish. He could easily slip and drown. But Rachel had been down so long already!

The houses. Nearby. They must have heard their struggles.

“Help! Please help us! My friend is injured!”

No light went on, no indication that anyone was home or, if they were, that they cared about anything but their own safety. He whipped around, thinking he had heard something, but no one was there. What was he supposed to do now? He studied lichen and read books. What use was he in a bog, having just watched his friend being pulled down, her eyes filled with rage and terror as his grip loosened on her...

“Please! Won't someone help me?”

He suddenly noticed movement on his left. Bubbles coming up from the depths. He splashed towards it, his legs weighed down by his wet pants.

He reached the bubbles, his feet kicking a large stone slab, sending him to his knees before it. His ragged breath filled his ears as he tried to see if any of those creatures were nearby. He looked around, but the bogs were silent.

But... he could see. He had dropped his flashlight when he had hit the stone, though he still held the shovel. He had seen the bubbles, he could see the swamp... he looked up, gasped. The moon, which was on its new phase and dark this night, was now full, providing him plenty of light by which to navigate.

And scaring the creatures away?

Lights danced above him. Bog lights. Created by a mix of gasses. That's what was happening. The gasses were making him hallucinate. Bubbles popped near him and he scrambled off the rock.

With his fingers he felt the shape and length of the rock. He located a crack, where the bubbles were escaping. More than a crack. It was a seam. He could trace it with his fingers.

He grabbed the shovel and forced it into the section where the bubbles were seeping out. He pushed down, grunting, hoping the shovel wouldn't break, until he heard the stone shift and topple sideways, its corner surfacing. The stone stayed standing for a few seconds, like a gravestone, before toppling back and vanishing in the dark waters.

Rachel splashed up, holding her sister, both coughing and almost falling straight back into the water.

Max grabbed them and pulled them clear of the water, into the backyard of one of the dark houses. Rachel and Jenny still clung to each other, both covered in muck and some leeches. They needed a bath, a change of clothes.

A change of life.

“Come on,” Max said, helping them up. Rachel looked at him with wide eyes, the moonlight shining deep within them, making them look silver. He placed a kiss on her lips, which were warm despite the chill of the night.

“I'm taking you out of here,” he said as he broke away.

She gave him another wry smile, but the fear in her eyes tore at his heart.

“How far away?”

He returned the smile and took her hand.

“As far as you want.”

He walked them home, keeping them close, grateful that, even though she looked up once and smiled at the full moon, Rachel said nothing to him about it.

“Why me?” I asked. We sat on a second floor balcony overlooking the floor show at The Batucada. It was noisy, but a glass partition between us and the mob downstairs made it possible to have a conversation.

Ms. Hastings (“Please: call me Diana”) sipped her Kir Royale and smiled. “You're the best dowser we know. This job may well require your fearsome talents.”

“What—identifying different brands of whiskey in blind taste-tests?” I joked. I hadn't worked the oil patch in years, and every energy company had a dowser on staff, if not officially labelled as such. Decades of experience had taught the oil and gas industry that you didn't rely on geologists and 3D seismic alone. There was something about black gold that didn't fit neatly into stats and charts and formulae, and everybody knew it. But the question remained: why me, and not someone younger, or more importantly, someone already under contract?

“Don't be modest,” Diana smiled. “You found the Viking dome outside Turner when everybody else thought Turner was dry. You put Exxon back onside in Saskatchewan, and helped turn tiny, independent Lunaco into a major player over night. There are dowsers, and then there are dowsers, professor Warren. You are among the latter.”

“Jack,” I said on reflex.

“Excuse me?”

“Just call me Jack. It's a habit, I suppose. Nobody in the oil patch calls me ‘professor'.”

I watched through the glass as down upon the dance-floor, two half-naked men in Aztec feather skirts grabbed a pretty mulatto girl out of the audience (a plant: it's always some model); watched as they hauled her kicking and screaming up the stairs onto the stage. It wasn't a bad set—sort of like the Vegas idea of Mexico with jade bas-reliefs in pre-Columbian fashion along the front lip of the stage, and all along the back wall. The girl writhed picturesquely—kicking off her expensive pumps; ripping her powder blue power-skirt; popping buttons on her midnight blue blouse. The coke-and-booze fuelled after-work crowd roared: “Human Sacrifice Fridays” at The Batucada was always a big hit. One of the ersatz-Aztecs produced a curved dagger meant to represent a side-winding serpent; rolled his eyes like a horse on meth.

I felt my age at that moment, knew myself to be out of touch. The stockbrokers and petro-lawyers, accountants and admen and models and bankers, and all the assistants who had been invited along for the ride—all of them bellowed in anticipation of the I-Can't-Believe-It's-Not-Slaughter to come.

Diana glanced down at the stage as well, dark eyes shining. She was one of them. Whatever else she was, she belonged here more than I did.

“You like this?” I said, trying not to be judgmental; failing miserably.

She smiled. In fact, she almost always seemed to be smiling a little.

Below, on the stage: impressive sleight-of-hand. A dagger plunging into a girl's chest; a heart yanked out; a geyser of blood; the victim screaming her last. I cringed in spite of myself, because knowing this was fake wasn't good enough. Everyone knew it was a trick: everyone screamed in mindless approval regardless. Sacrifice a suit, and our mortgages get paid; things we can't control at the office work out; all the parts of the machine continue to grind away sans-a-glitch.

You didn't “turn the other cheek” in Calgary—not anymore: this was Coyolxauhqu's town now. Maybe it always had been. Maybe those little white churches on the prairie had always been mere place-holders, waiting for the real juice to come along. Whatever the case, Aztec schtick was big these days—had been for years. I took a jolt of Jack Daniels; felt the ice click against my teeth.

“Brass tacks, “ Diana said. “You know the original Athabasca deposit—what we call Site 01 now?” I nodded. The first surface mine conducted by the Great Canadian Oil Sands company had become something of an Albertan legend. It was ancient history now though: the area had long since ceased to be productive.

“It's under reclamation now isn't it?” I said.

“It's actually been reopened,” Diana smiled. I was starting to get irritated by that oily smirk—no pun intended.

“Why?”

“A new survey uncovered a promising depression in the limestone—or readings to that effect—so we allowed an operator to go back in.”

I frowned: “going back in” on reclaimed land would have been a bit of an issue, at least in theory. Diana Hastings was attached to the Trans North America Environmental Ministry, which although ostensibly a government agency established under NAFTA III, was funded largely by a private energy consortium, so it was difficult to get a read on where her loyalties lay. Taken at face-value however, it looked as though someone from Environment might be on the hook if the geologicals had been wrong, or weak in this instance. Made sense that they'd want their own independent assessment done, although it wouldn't be public...not with a dowser on board. You may as well admit to people you were investigating a murder with a psychic.

“We'd like you to confirm the hydrocarbon feature of course,” Diana continued. “There have been conflicting reports on-site. If it's not panning out as anticipated, we need to get out of there. In addition, there may be some...anomalies we'd like your opinion on. Some health concerns have been reported. We actually don't have linked communications at the site, and we're a little fuzzy on these findings. Area residents have been making some noises about noxious odours—the usual sour-gas complaints. And there have been a number of...suicides.”

“Suicides? How many?”

“Thirty three.” Smile.

Ah: there it was. Thirty three “suicides” was code: they hadn't come up with anything plausible for the media yet.

I felt an old familiar chill creep up my backbone. There are dowsers, and then there are dowsers, and I was indeed one of the latter. A dowser, true enough, but also a professor of classics with knowledge of what an earlier, gentler time might have termed “unspeakable” rites and histories. I had found that the unspeakable had become—if not routine—then perhaps merely “uncomfortable” in this day and age of commonplace atrocity. Massacre was spectacle, after all. As I watched waitresses clean fake blood off the stage downstairs, I began to see why Diana had contacted me in particular.

I had always had a special affinity for and connection to oil, and that had made me useful. But it was my knowledge of the occult that made me valuable, even if nobody ever said so aloud.

I'm no environmentalist, but it seemed as though a good deal of the first-stage exploitation-land of the Athabasca deposit had been recovered, at least to look at it. Driving along the bumpy gravel road, I was bound on both sides by young, but healthy pine trees, and could see no visible evidence of the decades of strip mining that had once decimated the area. There were always concerns about what one couldn't see beneath the ground—the water quality in particular—but despite the geo-political climate of the age, it looked as though companies had followed the letter of the law with respect to reclamation. They need not have—the oil companies owned the regulatory agencies, and the politicians had long ago defaulted to production and defence as the national priorities in an age of ever-increasing scarcity. And yet...the ride was pleasantly arboreal; a rough-hewn jaunt through the country-side with crisp, clean air whistling through the open roof of the jeep, and the occasional bird circling above the trees. The area looked like a government television spot; an advertisement for the good work being done, despite the mounting geo-political pressures.

It looked that way right up until I reached the work-site.

Due to the curvature of the road, I had had no advance visual warning of the site and nearly had to pump the brakes to slow down as I emerged from the trees into a clear-cut staging area at the lip of a fresh pit. I came to a full stop in a cloud of yellow dust, and looked around at the collection of heavy diggers, trucks, sheds, pipes, wire-spools, hoses and other construction paraphernalia. It was the base-camp for the new dig, and it was a miniature ghost-town.