Tim Wynne-Jones - The Uninvited

“Oh, Ms. Cooper,” she muttered. “What have we gotten ourselves into?”

She had left New York City yesterday morning and stayed overnight just outside Albany. Then bright and early this morning-way earlier than she was used to-she had set her compass due north, and here she was, though with every passing mile she wondered if maybe Marc had been lying to her. He was hardly the world’s most reliable father.

“Almost there,” she told herself, to calm her misgivings.

She glanced into her rearview mirror, half expecting Clem and Jed to be on her tail. She imagined them hopping into their trucks to follow the half-naked girl in the toy car. Yee-haw! But the road was empty behind her. She crested a hill. There was a house ahead, though it was hard to tell if anyone still lived in it.

She whooshed by the driveway, where an old woman with an even older dog was collecting the mail from her mailbox. The woman glanced Mimi’s way, clutching a letter to her flat chest, glaring at the girl as she flew by. She was wearing a ball cap, too.

“Got to get me one of those,” said Mimi.

The road was climbing now. On her right she caught the odd glimpse through the trees of a river-the Eden, she hoped, though it wasn’t as impressive as Marc had led her to believe. She wouldn’t put it past him to turn a creek into a river. She wouldn’t put anything past him.

Lost Creek. She had seen a piece in the Tate Modern by the Irish artist Kathy Prendergast. It was called Lost and it was a map of the United States, but the places marked were all lost places: Lost Valley, Lost Hills, Lost Swamp, Lost Creek. All these lost places. She wondered if Prendergast had done a map of the lost places of Canada. She could use it about now. Or GPS.

A magical place, Marc had said. It wasn’t the kind of word he used very often. A place to get your thoughts together.

Just then her cell phone started playing “Bohemian Rhapsody.” She found it under the map, looked at the number, and threw the cell phone down. It stopped after a while but then started up a few minutes later.

“Fuck off, Lazar Cosic!” she shouted. “What part of ‘leave me alone’ don’t you understand?”

Then she pulled the map out from under the cell phone and laid it on top. Ontario was a big province-seven times bigger than the Empire State. Surely you could escape someone in a place this large? She pressed a little harder on the accelerator.

Now the road began a lazy decline, and soon she was in the bowl of a wooded valley. Towering maples made a tunnel of the road ahead, though she could see late-afternoon sunlight glinting through the canopy, tinting the leaves with gold as if she had traveled right through summer into fall. She shuddered at the thought. Shuddered at the coolness of this leafy tunnel. She tried to reach her shirt on the backseat but swerved dangerously and gave up. There wasn’t a lot of road to work with. Then she was out in the open again, and there was a flurry of tilting and rusted-out mailboxes. And then nothing…

In all fairness, Marc had described much of this, but he had never really gotten across the isolation of the place. But that’s what she had wanted, wasn’t it?

She slowed down and picked up the tiny camcorder again. “Note to self,” she said, glancing sideways at the camcorder’s beady eye. “Listen to Dorothy next time you think you need to go off and find your heart’s desire.”

And then she saw it.

“Yes!” she shouted, putting down the camcorder and pounding the ceiling with her fist. “Woo-hoo!” Ms. Cooper beeped her approval.

She brought the car to a stop beside a long driveway, over which a sign read PARADISE.

A new definition of the word, she thought, for at the end of a long dirt driveway, through a field of waist-high grass, stood a handful of fall-down buildings, one of which she supposed must be the farmhouse, though she couldn’t tell which one. But it didn’t matter, because Paradise was just a marker, not her final destination.

From under the camcorder, iPod, cell phone, Doritos bags, sandwich wrappers, mints, and maps, she found the e-mail from her father. She skipped down to the mention of this sign, highlighted in yellow.

“The letters are two feet high, cleverly constructed out of lengths of cedar sapling cut just so to make the curves of the P, the R, the D, and the S. The driveway to McAdam’s Snye will be your next turn on the right.”

Jackson Page picked up the Gibson ES-175 gingerly, as if it might be trip-wired to some explosive device. He examined the pickups, the toggle switch, the controls. It wasn’t even plugged in, but you couldn’t be too careful. No, it was okay. Still in tune-well, close enough for rock ’n’ roll. Right. And that was the problem.

“I am regressing,” he said to no one. And then he listened to see if no one had any suggestions.

He closed his eyes to try to hear the music in his head. Simple. He had already laid down a bunch of tracks, knew the overall shape of the thing, the musical through line, but there was something missing in the final movement. Ha! Movement-as if it were a symphony. Maybe he should say there was something missing in the final stages, as if it were a disease.

The big old guitar was still new to him. He’d found it in a secondhand store in Toronto. The ES-175 was a workhorse in the jazz world, the kind of guitar someone like Pat Metheny played, not some twenty-two-year-old with concert-hall pretensions. Then again, what was he doing playing around with electric guitars at all?

He swiveled his chair westward and tilted the top of the Gibson toward the window of the loft. He watched the daylight glint off the sunburst finish. The light also picked up the dust. He grabbed some polish and a rag from his worktable and set to cleaning the guitar, lovingly, until the lacquer finish gleamed. Just because he was screwing up didn’t mean the instruments should suffer.

Simple had started out spare and clean. And serious. He’d been listening to Arvo Part and Toru Takemitsu. To Hildegard von Bingen, for Christ’s sake! He wanted an unadorned, almost mystical sound, off the top, with lots of space around every note. He’d always known that the piece was going to get weird and dissonant, that “simple” was not easy-that was the point. He just hadn’t known how weird or dissonant everything was going to get. Then yesterday he’d lost it-strapped on the guitar, plugged it into the stomp box, and pretended he was Travis Stever of Coheed and Cambria. As if. He was no rock star. His garage-band days with Snye were far behind him.

Snye had packed the coffeehouse at Ladybank Collegiate, rocked the legion hall, warmed up for Hammerhead in the city. Their musical influences were ancient: King Crimson; Yes; Procul Harum; Emerson, Lake and Palmer. Big gaudy stuff. Jay had written all the band’s tunes and was the only one who had stayed with music. Got himself a degree and now was taking a year off, courtesy of Mom, to consolidate, to write. Next year-graduate school. Next fall.

So what was Simple?

It was supposed to be a tone poem, not some emo-punk piece of shit. But right now, emo-punk shit seemed about all he could channel. He had to get serious back. He closed his eyes again. Listened. It was in there somewhere.

He let the quiet build up around him. He started playing the riff he’d recorded yesterday but at half the tempo. He played it sweet. It was an inversion of the first motif, and when you didn’t distort the crap out of it, you could hear that.

He plugged the guitar into the amp. Switched it on. There were chorus dials on the Roland: he kept the rate low, cranked the depth up to six. There was that nice flangey sound. He added some reverb. Nice and wet. Pressed the distortion pedal for some crunch.