Sarah Court by Craig Davidson

Author:Craig Davidson [Davidson, Craig]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: General Fiction, Horror, cookie429, Extratorrents, Kat
ISBN: 9781926851884
Publisher: ChiZine
Published: 2010-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

The highway runs north. James and I can’t return to the houseboat. I don’t even want to. I’m nearly where I need to be, anyway.

Dawn rises over tailback hills. I drive into the town of Peterborough. A bakery’s just opening on the main drag. I go in, buy coffees and rolls hot from the oven. James and I sit on the hood of the Cadillac. Matilda lays on the passenger seat. Cone-wrapped head lolling in the footwell. A pickup passes, its bed full of itinerant workers in snowmobile suits. The bus station lot lights snap off, halogen coils dimming inside their plastic shells as the sun breaks over the squat block of a Woolco store.

“Where now?”

“Back south,” James says. “I got a place. Niagara Falls. U.S. side. For tax purposes.”

“To do what?”

“I’m thinking—this may sound crazy—about raising earthworms. It’s a messy enterprise,” he admits, “but they’re gold. Not just for fishing: it’s the composting wave I’ll ride. Easy to start a worm farm. Couple kiddie pools, nightcrawlers, off you go. But you need quality worms. Good bloodlines.”

“Worms have those?”

“I’ve been told so.”

“Well . . . I got to go, James.”

For whatever reason he’s confused. As if he’d expected me to tag along the rest of his life. The sun carries over the low-rise architecture of this central Ontario town. In the Cadillac’s windshield stand James and myself, reflected. James with his bruised face, me with my scabby scalp. Matilda stares through the glass. With the cone round her head brightened by the sun she looks like the bulb in a car headlamp.

I catch a cab at the bus terminal. It heads to the destination I’d been given over the phone by a man with a Robert Goulet voice. Lakefield Research Centre. Some kind of metallurgy lab. It takes about an hour. I doze. I give the cabbie everything I’ve got left on me—everything in my pockets. Cash, half a pack of gum, a Subway Club card one punch-hole shy of a free footlong. He takes it all gratefully enough.

Lakefield is painted that industrial lime shade common in the seventies. Inside are the partially lit hallways, gypsum floors, and whitewashed concrete walls of any elementary school. I walk down halls, finding nobody, nothing but the hum of machinery through the walls. I come upon a chair and man sitting in it. Old, in a janitor’s outfit. I tell him who I am and he nods. I follow him down another hallway, up a flight of stairs. The reek of ozone. A green-tiled room. Riveted metal floors. Military cot. I lie upon it and fall into an exhausted sleep and awake to face my butcher.

Starling looks not bad, considering. Bandaged up, everything safety-pinned in place. He sits awkwardly in a wooden chair backgrounded by a man I find familiar. Starling sniffles. The other man wipes his nose with a Kleenex, which he balls and tucks up his sleeve as an old biddy would.

“The man’s dog?”

“Tough dog.”

“Tough,” Starlings agrees.

“So who cuts—you?”

“I’m not a professional,” Starling tells me.

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