Archibald Samuel - Arvida

I worked so much before we moved in and so much after that I hardly noticed the time. I finished the swimming pool and the terracing in the back so my wife could have a place to entertain, but little by little I realized that she was getting tired of living in a construction site. She griped about the water coming out of the faucets either too hot or too cold, she griped about the lights that didn’t go on and the bulbs that flickered, she griped about the rooms that were less well insulated than in the old house, and the drafts, she griped about the creaking floors and the knocking pipes. I think she’d always found old houses beautiful without understanding what it was like to live in one, the work it demanded, and the lack of comfort, at least for a while. I suppose it was stupid on my part not to have seen it coming. It was always the same thing with her. We’d bought a cabin in the woods because she thought it would be fun to go there, but we never did go except to make four trips weighed down with supplies so she could be as snug as she was in town, and could ward off flies at all times. One year I rented from a buddy a villa in Venezuela that I’d thought of buying so we could go away every winter, and teach Julie to dive and to speak Spanish. Danièle thought it was the best idea in the world until she saw her first lizard, and realized that the meat was not wrapped in cellophane at the market. Christ, she couldn’t even sleep in a four-star hotel — I’m talking about in North America — without bringing along her own pillows, her own shampoo, and a disinfectant for the bathroom. Just to be sure.

The little one was doing okay, I think. Until one night. I was putting the cover over the swimming pool, when I heard her cry out. It had to be almost midnight, and she’d been asleep for about two hours. She cried and then her dog yapped and yapped and I ran to her bedroom. Danièle was already there. The little one was all in a sweat in her bed. The damn dog wouldn’t stop barking. I gave it a good kick in the side and that made it yap even more, and my daughter cried even louder. Danièle gave me a black angry look, and said:

“Get out of here, Gilles, get out.”

I left. I made myself a big Cutty Sark with lots of ice. Danièle came to join me about an hour later.

“It’s all right, she’s calmed down. We have to do something, Gilles.”

“Something about what?”

“To purify the house. I’m going to ask Jacqueline Martel if she knows someone.”

“Will you please tell me what you’re talking about?”

“We’re seeing things. Your daughter’s seeing things.”

“Seeing what, for God’s sake?”

She looked at me as if I were slightly retarded.

“Ghosts, Gilles. Your bloody old house is full of ghosts.”

I tried to stay calm, but I was livid. I must have told her she was crazy over and over again, with lots of bad words mixed in. My wife behaved with her daughter as if she’d been born to be her best friend. She did everything with her, and told her everything. Once, while I was consulting on the Côte-Nord, they’d watched The Exorcist together. Holy shit, Julie was nine years old. Danièle had never read a book in her life that didn’t talk about past lives, or chakras, or abductions by extraterrestrials, or spontaneous combustion, or women whose children were stolen by Arabs, all that kind of bullshit. A whole library chock full of charlatans and scaremongers. The books were lying around everywhere, and my daughter read them all day long as if they were Tinker Bell fairy tales.

“I’ve had nothing to do with that, Gilles, I swear.”

“Right. Like with Thomas, I suppose.”

That had been one of our biggest blow-ups before this particular night. The little one was just four years old. I’d come home from work and given her a bath while reading the newspaper and checking in on her from time to time. She was talking to someone while I wasn’t watching her. I noticed that two or three times.

“What’s your friend’s name, Julie?”

“He’s not my friend, he’s my little brother. He’s called Thomas.”

I almost puked. I had to hide myself on the other side of the door, in the hall, so the little one wouldn’t see me like that. Thomas was the name my first wife wanted to give to our child. She’d always been sure it would be a boy, and at the hospital they’d confirmed that that was the case. Then we had a car accident on the way home from her parents’ in Lac-Saint-Jean. She was twenty-six weeks pregnant. I was driving, and yes, I’d been drinking. But it was another car that hit us because of the freezing rain. It was a pretty bad collision, but no one suffered any serious injuries except for Diane, who had a big bloodstain on her dress. We prayed all the way to the hospital but it didn’t help. They removed the dead baby from her belly, and performed a curettage. Diane was half dead too, and I left her there and went back home. I got drunk and I took the baby’s room apart with a sledgehammer before putting everything, the clothes, the diapers, the toys, and the hunks of wall, into five big garbage bags. We separated six months later, about the same time I met Danièle. A little after, if you want to know the truth.

When I saw there was nothing magical in all that, I went to talk to Danièle, but she didn’t feel bad about it or anything. Back then she’d wanted to have another child. Not me. I figured that just the one had made her crazy enough, the way things stood. She answered me in her curt little tone of voice:

“She had to know that she’d already had a little brother.”

I clenched my fists and shut my mouth and waited for her to apologize but she never did, not once, during the seven or eight months that Julie went on calling her imaginary friend by the name of my stillborn son.

I don’t want to speak badly of her, but it wasn’t just the paranormal and stuff like that. The first time I took her out of her village to my favourite restaurant in Old Quebec, Danièle ordered lobster with a glass of milk. A year after we were married, she called me at my office in a state because she was missing a special kind of salt for the recipe she was making for supper. She wanted me to go and find some, super fast, at the fine foods place in the lower town. I said okay, even if I had a thousand things to do more urgent than that. I picked up a writing pad and asked her what kind of salt she needed.

“Optional salt,” she said.

“Are you kidding me, Danièle?”

In her book, it was written “One teaspoon salt (optional),” and she’d spent all morning freaking out over that.

Fine. That’s all to say that where good judgment was concerned, my ex-wife was no smarter than a mouse. And as if to prove it, when I asked her that night, “You didn’t tell my stories about the house to the little one, did you?” she looked down at the ground as if to say, “You know I did.”

There were some very strange things about the house, which I found once I got inside. Two things in particular, that would never have done so much harm, had my ex-wife not blabbed them to a little twelve-year-old girl who had an inordinate fondness for scary stories.

The first week, after I’d signed the act of sale with the Villeneuve son, I took a stroll through the house. There was a horrible smell coming from the basement. The good woman Villeneuve didn’t seem to have ventured there very often. I went down the stairs and followed the smell to a padlocked door. I broke off the lock with a screwdriver. That room is where I have my workbench now. When I entered it for the first time, there was nothing there. It was a big cement room without even a naked bulb in the ceiling socket. The smell was dizzying and disgusting. I left to get my flashlight, and went back. I shone the light around until I saw something. There was a cat on the ground, dead for weeks, and eaten by vermin. I got rid of it the next day by peeling it off the ground with a shovel, and I had acid reflux when the body broke in two, letting thick liquid run onto the floor. I never found out what the cat was doing there. In theory, the room was hermetically sealed. Either someone had let it in and locked the door, or else, as cats do at times, it had got in through an improbable opening like a rift in the floor, then in poor condition, and wasn’t able to get out again.