Mackenzie is a fourth-year journalism student at Concordia University and copy editor at The Concordian.
ELLA
Tick tock. Goosebumps pepper my flesh. Heat creeps up my ears. Chills travel down my spine. I can’t help but think my body is failing this unending race against the monster. My throat constricts. I can barely breathe, barely see through my anxiety. Tick tock.
The deadline looms over me. I run, run, run my fingers over the keyboard, blindly reaching into the depths of my mind for ideas that might satiate the beast. It’s become a mechanical system: I get up, do as much work as I can, and crumble from fatigue once the deadline has been fed. It lurks in the dark corners of my room when I decide to take a day off. It whispers in my ear when I’m finally doing something for me. It drains the fun from everything I do.
Tick tock. It’s dinner time. The deadline is starving—I can feel it staring expectantly, encircling me, smoking me out of my passion. The house creaks under its weight. My bones strain under its pressure.
My muscles are sore from the fight, but I need to get writing before it eats me alive. I can feel it waiting for me to nod off, ready to pounce the second I lower my guard. Even my laptop is heavy-breathing in empathy. Feed the deadline—that’s all I have to do. The clock is tick, tick, tocking so loud while my fingers are tap, tap, tapping viciously.
The shadows snuff out the setting sun, my desk lamp barely holding the fort. The deadline sneaks toward me as I frantically type. I don’t have much time left. My fingers slide on the trackpad, shaking like it’s the epitome of winter. The deadline’s cold breath down my neck makes me shiver. I freeze. Squeeze my eyes shut. I can feel its anticipation.
Tap.
“Submit.”
My muscles relax all at once as the deadline slinks away, happily fed.
ADALINE
I flinch at Ella’s visceral reaction. Her disgust and mistrust makes me want to slink back into the shadows. The clock ticks insistently, and she winces at every passing minute. I try to get closer to help ease the tension in her shoulders, but the hair rises on the back of her neck like hostile spears aimed right at me.
I sigh. I hate what people have turned me into. I hate how they disfigured my name over time. Adaline. I miss hearing people call me that, but now they curse at the “freaking Deadline.” They write down my birthdate in their calendars and cross out the days. I used to think they were excited to meet me, but I know now that was naive—they’re dreading the day.
Ella’s fingers dance across her keyboard. They miss a beat here and there, but still give it their all. She’s such a talented writer. I can’t wait to read what she wrote. I peek over her shoulder, but she shifts in her seat and anxiously looks around.
My heart skips a beat. She can feel me. Waves of joy crash over me, washing away the self-doubt and self-hatred. I step closer, craving her friendship. I should introduce myself. “Adaline,” I whisper in her ear.
She shivers violently. Squeezing her eyes shut, she presses “Submit” and a cannonball is shot right to my stomach. I stumble backwards, my eyes tearing up. I watch her melt in her chair as I melt into the wall.
Ella met her Deadline, and now she wants nothing more to do with it.
A Canadian Novelist’s voyage through the literary frontier
Trevor Ferguson, also known by his crime writer pen name, John Farrow, has gone from teenage wanderer to bestselling fiction author. And after nearly six decades of writing, Ferguson remains as committed as ever to the craft of storytelling.
On a clear day, Ferguson can see Mount Baker in the distance, a far cry from the gritty streets of Park Extension where he grew up. He moved from his home in Hudson, Que., to Victoria, B.C., right before the pandemic struck.
“For a writer to be required to stay home and not move around much means business as usual,” Ferguson said. His day-to-day may not have been interrupted by the pandemic, but connecting with readers has proved challenging. “Dead in the water,” he said of his 15th novel, Roar Back, which was released last January. His most recent novel, Lady Jail, was released on Feb. 02.
Ferguson believes that the pandemic has cast a dark shadow over the publishing industry. “People are trying online engagement, but public readings are out, and travel is out, so it is far more difficult now to get a book into the hands of readers,” he said. “What’s not working out for writers will hurt publishers and booksellers, some will not survive.”
However, Ferguson is no stranger to obstacles. His childhood reads like a coming-of-age story in which the main character overcomes the harshness of a mesmerizing but hostile world. At 11, he narrowly escaped an assault while on his newspaper route. At 14, he ran away from home and ventured west where he worked odd jobs and began to write. There, he camped beneath the northern lights and was almost run over by a train. In a motel Bible, he wrote a promise to become a writer, and he kept his word.
“I had to break the bonds of trauma,” he said. “I’m lucky to have survived in those wilderness camps but having done so I have a deep appreciation for anyone’s willingness to gamble with one’s life to create a new beginning.”
These trials helped shape the writer he would eventually become.
“Hard experience, such as a violent attack intended to be sexual, or starving on the road as a kid, which really can rip a person apart, and being and feeling utterly alone in a hostile world, all these things formed me as a person and in a way shaped me as a writer, but helped to imbue a certain resilience which over a long career has been necessary.”
But there were also struggles on the page.
“I had to write through the Faulkner influence, and that took a decade of hard-slogging and much misery, before I could break that down and rewire how my brain worked and come out the other side with a voice that is my own,” he said. “That is the magic a writer is looking for: the natural voice that in its own way simulates breathing yet spits onto the page all manner of notion.”
Ferguson published his first novel, High Water Chants, in 1977 and went on to publish a host of critically acclaimed novels like Onyx John. Yet, a wide audience of readers eluded him. To support his writing, he continued to work odd jobs for years, including driving cabs and bartending. It was not until he began writing crime fiction under the name of John Farrow that his writing achieved commercial success.
Today, the author continues to be drawn to his detective muse, Émile Cinq-Mars.
“He is a mystic in a secular age with a great interest in cosmological sciences; a moral cop among ‘dirty’ cops and living in an amoral time. He’s conservative yet living with a younger wife and he’s a French-Quebecker whose wife is American; a faithful Roman Catholic yet he considers himself a heretic. A city cop who lives in the country with a stable of horses,” he explained. “There’s dimension and contradiction in everything he is and in much of what he does. I continue to discover wells and veins I hadn’t realized were there, so while the lazy writer in me might repeat myself from time to time, the better writer in me discovers much for the first time.”
In 2014, the author returned to literary fiction with his first Trevor Ferguson novel in a decade, The River Burns. However, he did not find the transition difficult. The prose in literary fiction is more demanding, he explained, but crime fiction requires greater attention to narrative drive.
“Good writing is good writing,” he said, regardless of the genre. “A well-conceived, intelligent, well-written crime novel can blow away a lot of poorly craftly, ho-hum writing, even if it calls itself literary,” he said. “I think there is a distinction, in ambition and style, scope and narrative inclinations, but there is no automatic distinction in quality. That has to be earned and demonstrated.”
Ferguson seeks to engage his readers with multi-dimensional characters to match the complexity of the worlds they inhabit, regardless of book classification. He believes in the power of fiction and hopes that in his characters his readers will find a world beyond themselves. “Fiction is a way of restoring the world — not necessarily repairing it — but restoring its energy to carry on.”
The future of the publishing industry may be uncertain, but the author, whether telling stories as Ferguson or Farrow, has more projects lined up, including television and film writing. After a lifetime of traversing borders, both narrative and geographic, Ferguson continues to place his faith in fiction and is busy penning new chapters.
Heavyweight sports columnist Jack Todd talks journalism and his new novel
Newsrooms are abandoned. Bookstores await shipments to stock their empty shelves. As Quebec braces for the next wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, Jack Todd is hunkered down in his basement office in Longueuil’s Greenfield Park. Despite the decline of the print media and publishing industries, Todd is focused on penning his next piece of writing on his own terms. Whether it’s a new novel or commenting on a Canadiens game, Todd is typing up the new stories he wants to tell.
“All in all, life isn’t that different for me,” Todd says. “I spend much of my time holed up in my basement office anyway. I write very quickly so the usual pattern is, faff around for three hours, then write 2,000 words in an hour and quit. Then tear it all up and start again the next day.”
The Nebraska-born writer had worked in the newsrooms of the Miami Herald and the Detroit Free Press before being drafted to fight the Viet Cong in 1969. Although he wanted to write about the battlefront first-hand, Todd conscientiously objected to the Vietnam War. He defected from the U.S. Army and moved to Canada in 1970.
Thirty years after his military desertion, Todd published his 2001 memoir, A Taste of Metal, which marked the start of his literary career outside of the newsroom.
On the journalism front, Todd has fired up his readers with hard-hitting sports columns and features for the Montreal Gazette since 1986. In his signature combative style, Todd has sparred with sports figures and angry fans alike, including Don Cherry whom he called a “national disgrace” in a 2019 article and accused of espousing “bigoted, semi-coherent rants.”
Todd was furloughed for the first eight months of the pandemic, but he has since returned to the Gazette.
“Journalism right now is at a bit of an impasse – there has probably never been so much good journalism done in so many places but it comes at a time when advertising revenue has dried up because of COVID-19,” he says.
“I hope there’s a future for print journalism,” he says. “I think that print has to remain print to succeed and to stop turning itself into a pale imitation of television or the web.”
Despite the media turmoil which has also seen the literary publishing come to a near halt, Todd released a new work of fiction in July, The Woman in Green. As a ghost story and romance mystery novel, it is a departure from his earlier work that mainly focused on stories about surviving the violence and desperation in the American heartland. It is also his only novel set in Montreal.
“For some reason, I’ve always found writing about Montreal difficult,” he explains. “I have a love-hate relationship with this city that I have to work out some day.”
Lucinda Chodan, Editor-in-Chief at the Montreal Gazette, believes that Todd is the rare breed of writer with both literary and journalistic chops.
“In his fiction he has an incredible sense of detail and a command of setting a scene which is also something that he does very effectively as a feature writer and as a columnist,” she says. “He is a masterful writer in making sure that the tone is a multidimensional tone, not just painting a picture, not just reporting facts.”
Although his journalistic career began in the 1960s, Todd released his first novel in 2008.
“I think I’m much more confident now than I was when I first began writing fiction,” he says. “It was what I have wanted to do since I was 18 years old but an early obsession with the work of writers like James Joyce and Thomas Pynchon did not help at all. I’d write a few pages, compare it with their work, feel that it just didn’t stand up, and rip it up.
“My goal now is actually quite simple. Having spent a long stretch of my life flying around the world to cover sports, the thing I valued most was that book that would get me through a flight to Australia,” he explains.
Todd’s goals moving forward remain unchanged.
“For the past 15 years or so I’ve always had multiple projects going,” he explains. “One of my problems is that I have trouble settling on one thing.” The Shadow Boy, a psychological horror story set in New Mexico and Maine, is the one he hopes to see in print next. By the sound of it, the novel-in-progress represents another departure for a writer unafraid of embarking on new territories in both fact and fiction.
Newspaper revenue may be plummeting and the writing world may be subsiding around him, but Jack Todd is soldiering on.
Written by: Andy Fidel, Jocelyn Beaudet, Milos Kovacevic and Saturn De Los Angeles
“Tally-ho gents!” the Englishman’s voice boomed in the auditorium.
Graphic Jenny Kwan
Our hero of the hour, the one and only Space-Chap, puffed on his electronic pipe as the murmurs of the audience died out.
The delightful gentleman twirled his moustache, adjusted his brown tweed jacket and cleared his throat. Amazingly enough, Victorian fashion had not gone out of style in the year 3000 like many predicted in the great hipster revolution of 2020. But this event was not about style, nor the proclamation of enjoyment before popularity. Rather, this was good ole fashioned storytime with some chums.
Today’s tale is of the greatest adventure that Space-Chap had ever undergone: meeting the evil space-god, whose name none dare speak.
“Now if you would please insert the spinal whirlygig into your interface sockets, we can begin this great tale once-anew, yes?” Space-Chap told the crowd.
The neural transmitters and nano-machines of the memory-imaging machine (trademarked to none other than Space-Chap himself) would give the audience an extrasensory experience, in order that they might relive every moment of the chap’s delightful adventure.
Of course, the audience began hooking up the device to the tiny hole drilled into the back of their necks.
“If there are no questions then?” Chap asked, walking towards the enormous contraption on the side of the stage.
“I have one!” a tiny, impish man from the back of the crowd exclaimed. Our hero met his gaze quizzically, but said nothing.
“What is the name of this beast whose name you refuse to reveal?”
“Well, I dare not say, sir. The very pronunciation would curl your hairs before they fall out of your head, your eyes would melt. Each syllable of its evil name would doom another generation of your kin, and I warn you good sir, it’s name is endless, like the darkest recesses of the universe folded upon themselves into a single being,” Chap said, his eyes staring off into space.
“So you don’t know its name then?” the impish man asked.
“I didn’t feel the need to ask. We weren’t exactly out at a dinner party, exchanging pleasantries over tea, crumpets.”
All the chums collectively leaned back in their chairs. The spinal whirlygigs began to heat up as images of a boy holding a rocket launcher appeared in their minds’ eye. This was rapidly intercut with moments of static.
“Don’t you move,” said a boy’s voice. “Or I’ll shoot.”
Meanwhile, space-chap continued to tap his way across the stage. Making frequent clicking noises with his tongue. A smile creased the old man’s face like a rotten apple when his cane hit the contraption. He opened the safety latch — Click — and held a finger over the red button.
“I mean it,” said the boy. “I will shoot.”
The helmet was far too big for the boy. He had to tilt his head back to see from underneath. And the leather straps were too tight. Pinched his chin whenever he took aim. The boy shut his left eye, listening to the war outside his home. The splatter of machine guns and the rumble of tanks that made pebbles dance and the ground tremble under his feet. Right eye fixed on his opponent: the large chalk drawing on the kitchen wall. A tall, lanky beast with a large appetite for trees.
“Ka-Poosh! Ka-Poosh! Ka-Poosh!”
He puffed his cheeks out and blew air through his fish-lips at every dull click. A light chuckle caught his attention. The boy’s mother shook her head as she passed him and headed straight for the faucet on the wall. She plunged her hands under the water, scrubbed and said “Who you shooting at, Chap?”
Red water and a pair of teeth slipped into the sewer grate.
“The evil space-god.”
The evil space-god was oozing out from its little cocoon it had nurtured from the tonnes of industrial waste it had been eating. They were accumulated from an extinct artificial garbage island in the middle of the ocean that used to exist centuries ago. Those machine guns and heavy artillery were leftover armour from a bygone Fourth Millenium war that was dumped on to that smelly isle.
Carrying a venomous, phosphorous-coloured and dangerously hot acidic substance from its dozen of voluptuous disgustingly morphed tentacles that complemented its scary physique, the vicious monster went on a marathon spewing a gallon’s worth of this substance on its desired target — the young, rebellious, handsome lad.
“Mom, don’t look, let’s run!” the boy hollered, drenched from all of the cleaning sludge that was left undone.
“What the hell are you trying to do? Don’t be a reckless jerk! We need to dig ourselves out of here,” argued the mother, who was exerting her last inkling of energy left.
In a desperate and unnecessary move, the boy latched away from his mom’s hand and pulled out a really strange looking ancient plastic toy instrument from his bag.
It was a magenta-coloured keyboard guitar, keytar for short. Adorned with enamel-coloured hearts decorated all over, it was one of those odd fusion instruments from the modern Renaissance of the 1980’s. He played a disgusting teeth-seething melody that he learned when he was in elementary, reminiscent of autotune-infested music sung by the fallen western pop divas of the early 2030’s.
Irritating as one would expect it to sound, the chords coming from the keytar was emitting this supersonic power. Something that was 80 and a half millihertz strong. Something that the space-god, who had a penchant for really distasteful music, had a fond weakness for.
All those generations listening to his mom’s ancient and uncool vinyl records were beginning to pay off.
“Take that, you stinking piece of crap!” he exclaimed in an odd moment of euphoria equivalent to a musical orgasm, except he was having a ball killing that beast.
The space-god began to melt away, something that no one was expecting to happen.
The impish man frowned inwardly, initiating cascades of ripples on the projection screens that were his eyelids. Something was odd. He attempted to banish the sights, to no avail. The images refused to vacate his neural pathways, refused to give way to the locals.
“No, this isn’t right at all,” he said, recoiling.
He had partaken of reminiscences enough to know this choppiness, this disjointed static, narration was a roll of forged, flat consciousness. Had he experienced a single odor, a single texture through the young protagonist’s hands? If this was story-time, its teller was a mute.
To add to his umbrage was the image of the keytar, that shameful vocation of his in the theatre days before he had reinvented himself as a gentleman. The spinal whirligig, not content with being a fraudulent contraption, was actively co-opting of his own memories, pushing him Persian rugs woven with tawdry threads. Could the others see what he saw, or did they all hear a distinct song tailored exclusively for them by the false minstrel whispering inside their head?
“Trumpery! Trumpery I say!” he yelled, reaching backwards to clear his neural port. But his arms did not obey, tied as they were. Violently he shook his head until the thing fell out and the show’s curtains rose to no applause.
And what a site to find oneself in! The rumbling, interpreted as tanks, was actually the humming of an enormous contraption on the stage, next to Space-Chap.
Too late, he felt something dislodge and slip by the pocket fabric, leaving a lightness about his heart. And then, like sperm racing to the egg, the chain-tailed ovals embedded themselves one after another in the gigantic magnet, from each and every one of the crowd, all but him still sedated and constrained by the armchair cuffs.
“Fraud!” he bellowed, regretting his naiveté. The brave, illustrious Space-Chap? No! Rather, a travelling charlatan with an eye for the pinnacle of Victorian masculinity: pocket watches.
“Why, Space-Chap? Why have you done this to us?”
“My good man,” said the caned shape, smoking his pipe. “They say time is money, and I expect a good return for putting on a show. But if you must truly know, I will tell you!”
And he began:
“It’s simple, gents. There always was an evil, nameless space-god. He feasts not on the souls of the young, the minds of the bright, or the complicated four dimensions of Euclidian geometry. Rather, it feeds on time, quite literally !” Space-Chap chuckled at his own cleverness.
The tiny impish man, who once defiantly demanded to know the space-god’s name, was still unsatisfied with this conclusion.
“That’s absurd!” he croaked with the vocal range of a nail scraping a chalkboard. “If all an elder god would require to thrive is the eating of clocks, why would he employ such an uncivilized ruse?! You are lying to us good sir!”
The fraudulent Space-Chap considered this statement, squinting with growing ire at the man that had seen through his ruse from the start. Silence permeated the room like a thick fog, as the stunned (and restrained) audience awaited a rebuttal from the chap in front. Gripped by the notion that they would finally understand the reason for the insanity of his story, the perplexed and odd behaviour, the utterly gauche notion of feeding clocks to a monster.
And then, Space-Chap uttered the words that explained it all, as his eyes bulged out of his skull, revealing slinky-like springs.
“I totally did it for the lulz!” he laughed maniacally, before exploding into a pile of gears, bolts and steam.
“This world is but a canvas to our imagination” – Henry David Thoreau.
Smirking, Anya looked over the photographs that had been scrunched into balls; faces of her family were wrinkled and distorted, pieces of the glossy paper hung freely from the clothespins that ran along the wall on wires. Mary-Anne’s pictures were ruined. The attic began to tremble and Anya heard what sounded like the rumble of an approaching train.
A far-off voice called out her name. It sounded like Todd. Anya thought to herself, “Am I dreaming?” She looked around for where his voice might be coming from, but she was alone in the attic. The boxes stacked against the attic wall rattled as the clanking of a train on metal tracks roared louder and louder, blowing its horn as if it were headed straight toward the house. A sharp wind blew the scraps of paper in the air as Anya took a few steps back in disbelief. She bumped her foot against one of Ma’s old canvasses, her big toe coming away wet and stained with paint. Thin streams of paint trickled from the canvas and came together in red and purple puddles. The sky above the carousel in Ma’s painting sizzled like burning oil in a pan, sending off specks of blue onto Anya’s nightgown. The train whistle screeched. It was impossibly close. As Anya was about to turn and run, the boxes burst open and paint spurted everywhere.
The attic began to flood. Anya was trapped in a growing sea of swirling colours. Before long she was a floating work of art herself, covered as she was in multiple splotches of paint. Anya opened her mouth to cry out but a huge wave rolled in from behind the curtains and swept the young girl off her feet. She flailed her arms but it was no use. She felt herself being pushed and pulled as the sea of paint spun, as though someone were stirring it with a spoon. She spotted the bare bulb hanging from the ceiling and wasted no time. Kicking her legs and flailing her arms, Anya swam until she was able to reach out and grab a hold of the cord. Just then, as the cold paint was splashing against her chin, the floor gurgled. Anya hung in midair and watched as the entire sea drained into Ma’s canvas.
Groups of children were gathered around every window peering out as the bulky train came to a slow stop beside the tree with the wooden pictures frames. In large looping letters above a ferocious looking tiger, a sputtering firecracker, dancing mice and a flying trapeze swinger painted on the metallic door of one of the train cars, were the words: “Tourne au Rouge.” Leaning against the wheel of the train, the spindle-legged man dressed in a scarlet jacket with golden buttons tapped his silver spoon once more against the edge of his tea cup, before drinking it all in a single gulp.
“She mustn’t see the boy,” said the man to the shadow as it came scurrying back from where it’d gone.
It shook its head vigorously, bending over to catch its breath.
“Now go take it down,” he hissed. “She will be here any minute.”
The shadow was about to sigh, but then corrected itself. It stood by the tree and swung its arm high above its head like a loose rope. After two attempts, its hand reached the wooden frame in the top right corner and knotted itself around the branch. It snapped the frame off with a flick of its wrist. Gently, the shadow reeled its arm back down, feeling the man’s eyes locked on its every move. Just as the wooden frame was propped against the trunk, Anya came sliding out of the frame in a pool of brown mush.
“You’re right on time,” the man said, pulling a watch from his inner pocket. “The train is about to leave.”
The man held forth the broken horse’s leg, “I believe this belongs to you.”
Anya came forward, furrowing her eyebrows.
“Little brothers,” he sneered. “Always touching what doesn’t belong to them.”
“Who are you?” asked Anya, taking the broken piece.
Flecks of dust shook free as the man jerked on his jacket and said: “Jester Thingrim.” He took her hand in his and shook it firmly.
“Have you seen my bro—“
“Todd?” Jester Thingrim cocked his round head to the side and grinned. “He’s already on board.”
A gentle breeze blew under her nose, carrying a whiff of caramel and buttered popcorn with just a hint of peppermint. Rubbing her arms to warm them, Anya looked at the train and at the children inside, bickering with one another.
Anya said: “We should go home” and looked over her shoulder at the empty wooden frame.
“I’ll go get Todd then.” Jester Thingrim shrugged. “He’ll be disappointed, though. He was so excited to meet his mother…”
“W-what? My mother is here?”
Jester Thingrim took a giant step toward the train and said: “Right there,” indicating the tiny painting of the trapeze swinger. Anya stared at the painting, dumbfounded and without realizing it took the man’s proffered arm and boarded the train. ← Go back – – – Go forward →
All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
— Leo Tolstoy
– – – – –
“Get out of my room!”
Anya leaped forward and shoved Todd aside, so hard and fast that he stumbled backwards and hit his head against the bed frame. The loud thud resounded throughout the house.
Mary-Anne and Papa quickly appeared. Mary-Anne rushed to Todd but Papa merely stood in the door frame and looked at Anya. She clenched her teeth, not meeting Papa’s eyes, and ran a finger along the jagged edge of the merry-go-round where the horse’s leg had snapped off.
Mary-Anne cradled Todd in her arms as he wiped his nose on his sleeve, the broken piece held tightly in his little hand. Rubbing the stubble on his chin, Papa looked pointedly at Anya.
Anya said: “It was an accident.”
Papa held up a warning finger. “I want you to—”
“He was in my room again.”
“An—”
“He broke it!” said Anya, barely keeping her voice below a shout. “It was Ma’s.”
Papa grabbed her by the arms and shook her, “Anya!” The key at the end of her necklace slipped from her blouse and swung violently.
“That’s not a reason,” said Papa. “I want you to apologize to Todd.”
Their eyes met. Anya gaped at him like a fish out of water, eyes wide and glazed.
With her back against the wall, Anya slouched outside Todd’s bedroom as Mary-Anne read Todd The Three Little Pigs. Papa chuckled in the armchair by the bookcase.
“Little pig, little pig, let me come in.”
Todd put his finger to his nose and frowned. “Mmm…”
He leaned his head back as far as he could, and then shouted, “No!”
Mary-Anne said: “Then I’ll huff,” she put the book down on the bedside table. “And I’ll puff,” she raised her hands as if they were claws and loomed over Todd’s head, “And I’ll blow your house down!” Todd burst out laughing, squirming as Mary-Anne pinned him down and blew raspberries on his belly.
“Alright, kiddo,” said Papa, “time for bed.”
Quickly, Anya tiptoed back into bed and pulled the covers up. She shut her eyes and pretended to be asleep as Papa came into her bedroom. He brushed her hair from her face and kissed her goodnight. Anya waited until Papa and Mary-Anne went downstairs and she could hear the faint murmur of the television before taking the music box out from under the sheets. She set it beside her pillow and unclasped her mother’s necklace. Anya pushed the key into the winding hole, and turned it. With her head against the pillow, she hummed along to the cheery tune and watched the horses prance, spinning round n’ round n’ round … and round.
It was dark, but the light of the moon shone into the bedroom. Rain came down in silent sheets, droplets glistened on the window as lightning lit up the sky. A long, reed-like shadow seeped from under the door, filling the air with the burnt smell of caramel. Anya’s nose twitched. The shadow gambolled awkwardly across the bedroom, for its legs wiggled like paper in the wind. Quietly, it looked at the music box on the bed beside Anya. It reached out to touch the jagged edge of the horse’s leg, where was the broken piece? it wondered.
Seeing the table set up for tea, it rubbed its hands in delight and decided it would look for the missing piece later. Swirling up the chair like a ribbon, it took a seat between the stuffed bear and the red-headed doll. It doffed its top hat before pouring itself a cup of tea with a bit of milk and sugar. Leaning back, it swung one leg over the other, raised its long, thin pinkie high, and chomped into the rim of the cup, crumbs gathering at the corners of its round mouth.
The horse’s leg wasn’t in the closet or in a drawer; it wasn’t hidden in the jewellery box or in a pair of socks. The shadow looked around the bedroom once more, when from the corner of its eye it spotted a black bottle on the bedside table and eyed it suspiciously. With the tip of its fingers, it uncorked the perfume bottle and peeked inside— just then the door creaked, startling the shadow who drew back hastily.
“Anya?”
Todd crept past the door frame. Lightning flashed and a loud burst of thunder roared across the sky, startling the little boy. He broke into a sprint and climbed into the bed beside Anya.
“Go away,” she said flinging her pillow at Todd. It missed him by an inch, falling against the tea set. The cups bounced and clinked together. Todd gasped and Anya clasped her hands over his mouth, casting a worried glance at the door.
“I’m sorry I broke the merry-go-round.” Todd said when the coast was clear, furrowing his brow and reaching out to touch the key necklace. Anya quickly snatched it up and put it around her neck.
Todd whispered: “Can we fix it?”
“No, we can’t,” said Anya. “Now get off or I’ll push you again.”
Todd hopped down. The handles of the dresser drawer rattled as he rummaged through a heap of crayons, sheets of paper and bead bracelets. Todd emptied Anya’s pencil case and hurried back.
“What are you doing?” Anya hissed between her teeth. “You’re going to get me in trouble again!”
Todd held out the horse’s leg and showed her the glue stick in the palm of his hand, but Anya swatted his hand away.
“You can’t fix it,” said Anya. “Now go—”
All of the sudden, the shadow launched itself from under the bed, snatching the horse’s leg from Todd’s outstretched hand.
“Give it back,” said Todd, but it was too quick. The shadow grinned as it perched itself on top of the wall and gobbled the broken piece up. With a satisfying gulp, it flitted past Todd’s feet and vanished under the door. Todd chased after it.
“Wait!” shouted Anya and she rushed out of the bedroom. She caught a glimpse of Todd’s pajamas as he disappeared up the attic steps. Anya followed him, but when she reached the attic, it was empty. Todd had disappeared, as if into thin air.
