The Ferryman Will Be There by Rosemary Aubert

Author:Rosemary Aubert
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781461622994
Publisher: Bridgeworks

CHAPTER EIGHT

I found four sturdy wooden fruit crates from the garbage bins behind the supermarket across the street and threw two over the fence for later. The other two helped me scale the fence, which was locked with a rusty padlock. I trespassed onto the wide drive that circled in front of the Marble Widow. I could imagine the sort of traffic the original builder had envisioned for this drive: BMW s and Mercedes. But because of the zoning bylaw halting construction, no traffic had ever graced this drive, which was now littered with empty beer bottles and pop cans and ragged remnants of plastic shopping bags.

I stood at the foot of the fence for a moment to get my bearings. The round monolith loomed above me. Its sheathing of dark red polished stone glowed like burnished porphyry in the soft autumn afternoon. But there any claim to beauty ended. Where the front entrance must have been intended, was nothing but a gaping fifteen-foot hole in the wall. I stepped through, my feet crunching bits of shattered glass and broken plastic. An eerie gray-brown light suffused the cavernous tower. Instinctively, I glanced twenty stories up. Failing daylight filtered through paneless western windows. The building had the feeling of a stopped film reel, motion stalled at some critical moment and never resumed. Up the middle, a core of electrical and plumbing installations rose. Decayed wire and warped tubing twisted in the air high over my head. A few steel girders, like the spokes of a wheel, poked out from this central core, but for the most part, the vast space was empty. In dark shadowed reaches at the very top, I sensed the lazy circling of winged creatures and realized I was in the presence of bats.

And, I soon saw, of rats, one of which eyed me from under a half-rotted denim shirt in a heap near my foot. I eyed it back. A rat can chew off your face if it’s hungry and you’re lying down drunk, but I wasn’t and it couldn’t. It turned and ran.

Walking close to the dimly lit wall, I felt for stairs down to the parking garages, though how such lower levels would be illuminated, I had no idea. Halfway around the tower, I found a dull gray iron door at the end of a hallway. Rust had eaten most of the paint and the door was propped open by a chunk of broken concrete. I leaned through and saw a rusted metal staircase.

My experience with underground garages was limited to the few times I’d fitfully slept in them. Most office and apartment buildings in Toronto are fully occupied and to sleep in the garage of one is to beg to be ejected, if not arrested. When I got to the bottom of the stairs of the Marble Widow, I was surprised to see that a system of grates provided light and ventilation from outside. I could see patches of daylight through these grates and realized I was now beneath the rear yard of the building.

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