Линн Коуди - Best Canadian Stories 2020

The grill over the manhole Sarah had spotted earlier, maybe 30 cars behind them, wouldn’t budge, and Xavier’s little tools were no help, but they found another not far from the Civic, a few metres in front of the pot smokers’ red sedan. It lifted off easily.

A series of rungs ran down a curved wall, deep into the foundation pit, until they receded into darkness beyond the flashlight’s range. The heat in this shaft was even more intense than outside, concentrated like a chimney’s blast, and it carried with it an altogether different smell—watery yet sharp, with a hint of rot. Rank, really. Curious onlookers had gathered around them. Xavier took a coin from his pocket and dropped it down the hole.

A few seconds passed before they heard the tinkling of metal—the coin must have hit a rung—followed by the irregular sounds of it hitting the walls. Two drops of sweat fell from Xavier’s chin and down in a straight line, without making a plop.

“That smell,” he said. “There must be a dead animal down there.”

“You chicken?”

Sarah was already clipping her sunglasses to her tank top, tying her rope around a carabiner, kneeling down to clip it to the first rung, adjusting her headlamp, and powdering her hands. She disappeared down the hole. Xavier followed, after attaching his own sunglasses to his collar and doing his best to secure the rope she’d lent him around his waist. He carried his small flashlight between his teeth, which made him drool, and clung fast to the rungs where Sarah had left traces of powder, endeavouring to avoid the spinning rope that interfered with his descent. The view above changed, and Xavier looked up to see a few backlit heads blocking off the circle of blue. Their yells were audible, but so distorted by the tubular concrete chamber that he couldn’t understand what they were saying. He was finding it hard to breathe with his headlight between his teeth and his saliva dribbling onto his chin, and so he took a moment to put the light in his back pocket, then continued his descent by feel, sweeping each step in search of the best hold, and then stretching his foot out into the emptiness until it found purchase, which he gingerly tested before transferring his weight. It was getting hotter and hotter in this chimney. The smell was changing: it was now so thick it felt like they were actually climbing down into it, and he kept drooling even though his mouth no longer held his flashlight, an atavistic secretion reflex caused by the fetid air that made him choke and want to vomit. He was starting to feel trapped, the tunnel so narrow he could rest his back against the wall behind him. Responses kicked in that he thought he’d outgrown. The claustrophobia that hadn’t bothered him since adolescence made him feel like he might not survive this arduous expedition. He had no idea whether he should turn back or follow it through to the end. He began to worry he might slip. He was soaked down to his socks, and now each rung was covered by the paste formed by his sweat and the powder from Sarah’s hands. Xavier wiped his own hands on his damp shorts, on his shirt, and on the concrete wall. He stopped a moment, trying to figure out what it would take to climb back up to the surface right now, when a yell from below—“There’s a door down here!”—helped him get ahold of himself.

Xavier’s climbing skills couldn’t rival Sarah’s, and it took a few minutes to reach the alcove she was illuminating with her headlamp. It looked like a cell, one so tiny any prisoner would be sure to go mad. Yet with his feet back on the ground, Xavier felt suddenly free. He undid the knot at his waist and pulled the flashlight from his back pocket and the water bottle from his bag. They did their best not to finish it in two gulps. They’d be baked alive if they didn’t get out soon. He looked up. At the end of the tunnel, high above, a small white point. Sarah, headlamp in hand, was examining a strange metal door, a thick hatch out of a science fiction movie. The door harboured a sticker with an indecipherable message and a fleur-de-lys, suggesting the Quebec government, and it looked heavy enough to challenge even the strongest garbage man. Under their footsteps they could hear concrete chips and other unidentifiable debris that must have fallen through the grill over time.

In the centre of the room, on the ground, was another grill, a drain for rainwater, and in the corner there was, indeed, a desiccated animal carcass. The relief of its skeleton could be seen through its ruffled, patchy coat flecked with garbage and dust. The creature had found the entrance, but not the exit. Judging by how its huge scaly tail had been flattened like a Ping-Pong paddle, it looked like this massive rodent had been run over on the highway above and then, like them, come down through the open grill. Sarah, squatting on the ground, examined the mummy by adjusting the angle of her lamp.

“How long have beavers have been extinct around here, you think? Centuries, right?” she asked.

The smell engulfing them was turning acidic, stinging their eyes. Next to the corpse, Xavier saw a coin, and leaned over to pick it up. He thought he’d tossed a quarter. It was a dollar. He picked it up, turned the doorknob, and pushed the door. It opened with no resistance. Light flooded into the alcove. He smiled at Sarah; she smiled back.

“My lucky day,” he said, and walked through the door while she undid her harness. The door shut behind him.

In his ten minutes in the shaft he’d grown so accustomed to the gloom that the sunlight hit him like the lash of a whip. He pressed his eyes shut as hard as he could and covered them with his hands. He could feel the heat on his face. The smell had changed. As before, it was pungent, but it now stripped his throat raw, dashing any hope that it might be less concentrated once he got out into the open. The humidity was unbearable, far worse down here than up above. He walked blindly forward, giving Sarah room to open the door, but she didn’t seem to be coming. Slowly, he unclenched his hand, and when his sight returned, he noticed that he wasn’t in the open air, as expected. Sunlight poured in through a large window in the wall, on the second floor of a sprawling wooden warehouse.

It was hard to believe he could have missed this building from the parapet. He figured the door must lead to a space under the overpass, and the warehouse could be used to store excavating equipment. But in this recess of the warehouse all he could see was an arched entryway over a dirt floor. There was no machinery. His view to the right was blocked by an outcropping of wooden planks, and behind this blind corner men shouted curt instructions that lay somewhere between encouragement and orders. The fear of getting caught gripped Xavier. Site access was surely reserved for the demolition company and civil servants with clipboards and checklists. He nonetheless managed to take a few steps out of the sunbeam to see what lay beyond.

Five metres off, a few men were bent over wooden vats dug into the ground. They stirred the contents with poles and used long metal pincers to pull out what looked to Xavier like wet hides, saturated sheets which were then piled in heaps on a wooden wheelbarrow dripping with a viscous white liquid. The men’s dress—billowy blouses with rolled-up sleeves that had once been white, pants held up with suspenders, and crude boots—was both peculiar and too loose for their work, and their splattered, shiny leather aprons were clearly unequal to their task, as they were soaked. The men worked like dogs wrangling the revolting hides. When the youngest, slightest member of the crew, no older than thirteen, lost his grip on the tongs and dropped one of the hides onto the clay beside the wheelbarrow, a brute with abscess-covered arms and neck cursed and shoved him to the ground. Another few centimetres would have sent the youth into the tub. Xavier’s reflex to step forward was idiotic—he would have never dared try to reason with these men—but at that moment a cart came in, drawn slowly by a horse swarmed by flies, pulling a load of verdigris hides stacked like blankets and hanging with clumps of fur and chunks of bloody fat, tails, ears, and horned scalps. Two burly men left the tanks to receive it.