The Extinction Club Read online

  “You must be a rarity around here. Any vegetarian restaurants in these parts?”

  Unsteady, dazed, she sat up and reached for a pencil and paper on the bed table. As many as there are gay bars.

  I smiled. Wondered why she would make that comparison. “Are you gay?”

  Céleste paused, wrote a few letters, scratched them out. Then simply nodded.

  Can one be gay at fourteen? “That’s … you know, fine with me.”

  Glad you approve.

  “How do you feel?”

  Like I’ve been crumpled up in a ball for the last year.

  “And mentally?”

  I have a sense of impending doom.

  Join the club. “No, I mean physically mentally, if you know what I mean.”

  Like I’m underwater.

  I paused. “Why can’t you … speak?”

  She wrote something, scratched it out, wrote again. Tried to hang myself, damaged my voice box.

  This, I was almost a hundred percent sure, was false. “Would you like to tell me about it?”

  About what?

  “About who dumped you in the swamp. And why.”

  You writing a book? Make that chapter a mystery. She set her pencil down and turned away from me to face the wall.

  “And don’t tell me it was a gang at school because I don’t believe you.” I walked around to the other side of the bed. I know that girls this age love to keep their secrets, but this is ridiculous. “It’s time, Céleste. Tell me everything.”

  She stared right through me, stared at nothing. Her eyes were open but they appeared sightless. And then I lost her, her blood-red eyes sliding away from me in a sullen glaze.

  Once again I placed the stun gun, bear spray and revolver on her bed table. But this time, in case of emergency, she also had a walkie-talkie. She couldn’t talk into it, of course, but she could send me a mayday (from the French m’aidez) with the push of a button. Or an all-clear. Provided she was paying attention when I showed her how. Provided I stayed within eight to ten miles. Provided it worked in the mountains. For good measure, I leaned the rifle against the foot of the bed. She’s a country lass, she’ll know how to use it. I padlocked the shutters, pulled the curtains shut, double-locked the door.

  Through my Vanagon window came the clean chill air, the smell of resin, of woodsmoke. The ship of sunrise burning, from ninety-three million miles away, turned the snow into a sea of diamonds almost painful to look at. Like all beauties.

  At the top of the cedar-lined church lane I stopped in a kind of suspended time, or rather outside time, on the rim of the universe: the church cross and mullioned windows of the house were shimmering, mirage-like, in a sky of white and gold. A choir of angels sang inside my head. Angels we have heard while high.

  Ding dong! verily the sky

  Is riv’n with angel singing …

  The tension inside me, the sad feeling that churches have, the danger I felt all around me, the horrors of the bog—everything was softened by the dawn light, the wilderness air, the smell of wood and rock and snow. Again, I felt that mysterious natural chemical enter my system, immeasurably stronger than antidepressants. You’re here. You’ve been headed here all your life. I gazed at the soft peaks and swells of the Laurentian Highlands, the dappled sunlight on pines, the black and ancient pond beyond the cemetery, the valley with the half-frozen stream rambling through it. I closed my eyes and listened to the sounds—the cascading water, the carolling of birds. It all stretched out before me, the very essence of … what? Possibility? Redemption?

  A faraway sound—a rifle blast from a distant ridge—triggered another sound inside my head: the thwack of Céleste’s body hitting the half-frozen mud. I closed my eyes and clasped my hands over my ears. It was like I’d been hypnotized to react to that deafening sound. But how was I to react?

  When the rifle refired, I knew. Knew why I’d come here, what I had to do. Everything became clear as the wide blue sky. I had not come north to make a new beginning, to escape the city, to find peace and happiness in nature. It was not my destiny to be happy; I had not been programmed for it. I had not come north to save anybody either—although that was part of it, a big part. No, I had come here to kill somebody. And be killed. A vacation to die for. Buying this church was not a beginning but an end.

  The two-storey Edwardian rectory was made of yellowish-brown stone, like the wicked witch’s gingerbread house, and its severely pitched roof, built to ward off heavy winter snows, was a crazy quilt of grey and green bandages. Thick icicles shot with turquoise hung from the eaves. The doors were dark chocolate, as were the shutters on the small windows. Out front was an ice-coated wrought-iron fence, and a rusting gate that ground its teeth to let me pass.

  Around the back, on a hemp mat by the door, was a pair of large army boots covered in dried mud, and inside each were orange rubber gloves. A sign tacked to the door bore handwriting I recognized: BEWARE OF CATS. I turned round. In the middle of the backyard was a pole with a bird feeder, its wooden ledges strewn with millet seed. Was the sign a warning to the birds? On tiptoe, I felt inside the box and pulled out a ring of keys embedded in frozen bird droppings.

  The first room I entered was the kitchen. Red-brick walls and wide-planked pine floors. A great black stove, a big round table. Items scattered willy-nilly, scarily, on the floor, including bottles and plates and knives, but on closer inspection they seemed less the work of a vandal than someone preparing to clean.

  The first cupboard I opened contained rows of hardcover books. The second cupboard I opened contained rows of hardcover books. The third cupboard … If I opened the fridge or stove, I had little doubt I’d see even more books stuffed inside, perhaps paperbacks. The fourth cupboard contained food, most of which was cereal, children’s cereal: Frosted Flakes, Froot Loops, Fruity Pebbles, Cocoa Krispies, Cocoa Puffs, Reese’s Puffs, Cap’n Crunch, Corn Pops, Count Chocula, Honeycomb, Honey Smacks, Lucky Charms … The genre is full of “k” sounds, I noticed, like swear words. On the bottom shelf were metal bowls with embossed paws and rubber trim, and stacked tins of Fancy Feast Turkey & Cheese, Chicken & Salmon, Grilled Tuna. The cats, evidently, were not vegetarians.

  I began emptying tuna into six bowls set a foot apart. “Here, kitty kitty kitty …” I yelled out the door, several times. No response. But why would they respond to my voice? They need a good scent. I stacked the six bowls on top of each other, three in each hand, and carried them outside. Standing on the hemp mat, next to the size-12 army boots, I called again.

  Two cats emerged out of nowhere and were soon purring at my feet, rubbing their shoulders against my ankles. One white, one black, both half-starved. Two or three others were feral and raced away, while another lay on its back, crying mournfully. I set the bowls down.

  Back inside, not wanting to cramp their style, I watched them through the kitchen’s bay window, whose sill was covered with dried mud footprints. Five cats ate ravenously, while the last one, a wary calico, crouched slowly, belly to the ground, toward the sixth and last bowl.

  On the kitchen table was a pile of mail, which I nosily pawed through. Bills, for the most part, which I stuffed into my two coat pockets, and flyers, including one from the SAQ, the only place you can get liquor in this province. Instead of the regular price of $19.99, they were selling a Californian Pinot Noir for $19.49. Could I get there, I wondered, before the stampede?

  There was a doggy door in the kitchen but no dogs in sight. I wouldn’t have minded seeing one or two. I’d always been a dog man. Not because I was scratched in the eye by a kitten when I was five, or because I saw a cat eat a chipmunk when I was seven, or because an Abyssinian killed my grandfather when I was nine, walking between his legs and sending him headfirst onto a Chippendale lowboy. No, it was because of their notorious aloofness, their refusal to come when you called, to show their glee when you arrived home. A virtue, according to many poets, including Swinburne:

  Dogs may fawn on all and some


  As we come;

  You, a friend of loftier mind,

  Answer friends alone in kind.

  Just your foot upon my hand

  Softly bids it understand.

  After the food was devoured I went back out with bowls of water. While they drank, or at least while two of them did, I went for a quick stroll through the cemetery rows. The most sociable of the beasts, a fluffy white cat with a red collar, followed me. She made little runs and darts across my path, as if trying to trip me. I was mystified at first, but then wondered if this were a ruse to get herself lifted from the frozen ground and carried. It was. The cat not only let me pick her up, but seemed to demand it. She rode back to the rectory on my shoulder.

  The room at the top of the stairs, obviously the grandmother’s study, was designed in a more-is-definitely-more style. It contained two leather chairs and a wall-length, floor-to-ceiling bookcase crammed with century- or half-century-old books on diverse subjects: William Beebe’s The Bird, Its Form and Function, Albert Camus’s The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays, Rilke’s Das Buch der Bilder, Voltaire’s Candide, The Book of Common Prayer, The Atheist’s Bible, Bring Up Genius!, L’Enfant prodige … Many were dusty or discoloured by sunlight, while others, including E.M. Forster’s Where Angels Fear to Tread, The Complete Poems of Hart Crane and The Life of P.T. Barnum, Written by Himself, were library books with white Dewey decimals and Due Date cards from the forties.

  Shrivelled houseplants and crumbs of soil were scattered over a red and white Persian carpet. A cat or some other animal had clawed the plants out of their pots. From behind a Salvation Army armchair, its arms savaged by cat claws, gleamed two pairs of masked eyes. Raccoons. When I approached them they ran out the door with that humpbacked lope of theirs, claws clicking in the hallway. I listened as they scurried down the stairs and into the kitchen. Must lock that doggy door …

  On the other wall, across from the bookcase, was a stone fireplace with an atlas cradled in mahogany where the grate should have been, and an Anglican Church of Canada flag above it: the red cross of St. George on a white background with four green maple leaves in the quarters. Next to this was a large wooden desk covered with papers and books and diverse objects, including ivory chessmen on an inlaid board, a Telefunken short-wave, very nearly Edison era, and a manual typewriter, a Smith Corona primed with paper and carbon. Before making typewriters, my grandfather told me, L.C. Smith was known for his shotguns.

  On the discordantly papered wall above the desk, which cracked and curled at the cornices, was a local newspaper article about Céleste, about a college entrance exam she passed at the age of twelve. There was also a photograph of her and a woman with long grey hair sitting in a small aircraft, with Céleste at the throttle. The plane, which had metal plates on its wheels, was parked on a frozen lake. I looked closer at the older person, the grandmother presumably. Her face was craggy but finely boned. Both of them were beaming. I’d never seen Céleste smile like that, never seen her smile at all.

  Down the hall, after opening two closet doors, I reached Céleste’s bedroom, which was an odd L-shape, a chess knight move. There were unaccountable cold spots in the room, as in a spring-fed lake, and its pine floor was filthy, covered with large mud footprints and traces of cloth swipes.

  Like the rest of the rectory, the room contained more books than furniture. The house was a library. On the top shelf of a long bookcase, a homemade affair made of bricks and particle board, were miniature animals in plaster or pewter. At least thirty of them, many of which I could identify: Tyrannosaur, Brontosaur, Titanosaur, Stegosaur, Hadrosaur, Albertosaur, Pterodactyl, Eohippus, Triceratops, Megalodon, Mastodon, Smilodon … We had something in common, Céleste and I.

  On the sagging shelves below was an overflowing ashtray atop a stack of magazines, not those normally read by teenage girls—The Philosophical Review, The New Atheist, Wildlife Forensics—together with such books as The God Delusion, Animal Farm, Dominion, The Ethical Assassin …

  On a high grey desk, whose top looked like a mortuary slab, was an opened copy of North American Wildlife with an ad circled in red:

  BECOME A WILDLIFE DETECTIVE

  Don’t be chained to a desk, computer or McCounter.

  This easy home-study plan prepares you for an

  exciting career in conservation and ecology!

  Wildlife detectives find endangered species,

  parachute from planes to help marooned animals,

  catch poachers red-handed.

  Live the outdoor life. Sleep under pines and stars.

  Live and look like a million!

  Live like a million? What would that mean? I continued to snoop around. On the wall beside the desk was a note that said “World’s Most Dangerous Creature,” with an arrow pointing down, toward a full-length mirror. Next to this was a cartoon: in frame one, a hunter is aiming his rifle at a bear as it peacefully laps water from a pond; in frame two, the stuffed bear is in the guy’s living room, ferociously baring fang and claw.

  Thumb-tacked onto a bulletin board was a map of Paris, much used, along with overlapping newspaper clippings, at least a dozen of them, including this one from the St. Madeleine Star, December 1958. It was yellow with age and encased in plastic:

  And this more recent one on the same subject:

  With the smallest of the three keys I opened the bottom drawer of Céleste’s dresser, and promptly got a shock. A face looked back at me, from a ripped and blurred photograph of … the veterinarian. It was unmistakably her. I set this aside, thoughts whirling, and sifted through various sculpting implements—modelling tools, chisels, wire-loops, rods, dowels, netting—until finding a pair of glasses, the utopian communard model with small round lenses and frames of the thinnest wire. No doubt a spare, judging by their scratched lenses. Underneath all this was a blue sketchbook with tiny black letters on the cover. I had to put on Céleste’s glasses to read what they said: NOT TO BE READ UNTIL I’M DEAD.

  There was no phone in any of the upstairs rooms, but in the kitchen was a black wall phone. I didn’t expect it to have a dial tone and it didn’t: it had a stutter-tone. I punched in the long-distance number of Brook’s cellphone, in violation of a court order, and left a message so long it was cut off. I then called J. Leon Volpe, my attorney.

  “Do you realize, Nightingale, you are in serious shit?” was his greeting. He was my father’s attorney, to be precise, a chronically exasperated man with expletive-salted sentences and Italian suits who disliked everyone, especially me. He had a throaty, interrogatory voice that sounded less lawyerly than gangsterly.

  “Yes.”

  In the background I could hear his favourite radio station, an AM channel trapped in the fifties, which he never turned off. “For the love of Christ, Nile, I’ve been trying to reach you for the last three weeks. Do you ever retrieve your goddamn messages? Does anyone even send you messages?”

  He disliked me, in part, for my lawyer jokes. “What did you want?”

  “What did I want? What the hell do you think I wanted? I wanted to know why I’m in the middle of a shit parade. Affidavits, warrants, restraining orders, complaints for damages. Phone calls and e-mails from Katz, Carp & Ferret. I’m drowning in this stuff. Am I representing you?”

  How do you stop a lawyer from drowning? Answer one: shoot him before he hits the water. Answer two: take your foot off his head. “If you agree.”

  A loud theatrical sigh. “Can I just say, at this preliminary point, that I wish you had done me the courtesy of consulting me beforehand? And that I find your actions grossly irresponsible?”

  His job, for the most part, seemed to consist of putting people in their place. “Yes, feel free.”

  Count to five. “And where are you now, your Highness?”

  This was a reference to my drug use. Former drug use. “In a cemetery.”

  “Where? Colombia? Afghanistan?”

  Through a frost-covered window at the end of the hall, I glimpsed what looked
like a snowplow. It was heading toward the church, which was odd because the lane had already been cleared. It stopped halfway.

  “Just tell me one thing, off the record, no bullshit. Did you, or did you not, abduct and assault Brooklyn Jessica Martin?”

  I took the phone up the hall, stretching its gnarled black coil until it was no longer a coil, but before I could get a better look the plow had backed up and roared off.

  “Is this a dialogue we’re having, Nile? Or an interior fucking monologue?”

  An interior monologue, pretend you’re Hamlet. “I’m listening.”

  “Did you, or did you not, abduct and assault Brooklyn Jennifer Martin?”

  He was said to be brilliant, although I never once heard him say a brilliant thing; my father, on the other hand, said brilliant things all the time. “Her middle name is not Jennifer.”

  “Nile, for Christ’s sake—”

  “Of course I didn’t.”

  “Then what the hell were you doing with her?”

  “I took her to a zoo. As requested.”

  “As who requested? Which zoo?”

  “Brook. Cape May.”

  “Without your ex-wife’s permission.”

  “She’s not my ex-wife.”

  “But you lived together.”

  In the background I could hear the faint strains of “Earth Angel” by the Penguins. Along with keyboard clicks, as if he were double-tasking. Even when you spoke to him face to face, you got the impression he was double-tasking.

  “Yes,” I replied.

  “At the funeral you guys seemed like such a great couple. And your father just loved her—and was ecstatic about having a grandchild. What killed it, Nile? You and your … problems?”

  I’m getting an abortion so get used it: my ex’s words. “No, it was just … you know, one of those things.”

  “Your Wehmut or Weltschmerz or whatever the Germans call it?”

  “No.”

  “You still hearing things, seeing things? Prehistoric beasts, fairy-tale monsters, that kind of stuff? What’s it called again?”