Buddy walked along the tracks, the same route Harry would have taken as a boy. He wanted to be there with Harry… wanted to be Harry, to feel what his ancient friend must have been feeling that day, ninety years before.
“Friend?” The word had sort of snuck into his vocabulary, a composite of loyalty and affection he hadn’t allowed at first. Instead, he’d seen Harry as a sort of cranky elder, a man whose perceptions and attitudes had been sculpted by a century of hard living.
“Man’s got to know when it’s time to take the passenger’s seat and give someone else the keys,” Harry’d admitted in their talk at Kin Beach the day before.
Buddy smiled.
The world inside Mural #36 was familiar to him in some ways. He’d already experienced the mirage-like quality of mural gazing—the translucence of buildings, forests, and human beings inside the walls of Chemainus. The unnerving but exciting sense that everything could suddenly disappear or morph into a new version of reality.
“It’s as if someone has spray-painted the molecules of air,” Harry had described the sensation.
Buddy smiled at the inadvertent poetry of his friend’s words. “You see houses, cars, and people, but you know you could walk right through them if you chose. They swirl around you like coloured fog and would be a psychedelic mess if you ever dared look behind you in your wake.”
But this mural? Harry’s special mural?
It was different. It had more texture to it, more grit. It had taken almost an hour of focused gazing for Buddy to let go of his ‘other world’. And then, instead of a vaguely disembodied transition into the blueish green forest of Paul Ygartua’s painting, he found himself trudging along what he recognized as the E&N rail line, heading south.
He felt the crunch of gravel underneath his boots and the thud of his trekker’s rubber soles against the railway ties. It’s so real, he thought, wondering if it might be possible to forget completely the ‘other side’ where his ‘corporeal being’—as Harry put it—leaned on its walking seat, oblivious to the goings on in the 21st century.
Could I get lost in here? Never find my way out?
The year was 1931—if he was in sync with Harry’s memories—and Buddy was making his way down the line, looking for the entrance to the Hermit’s Trail. “There was no public path above the tracks back then,” Harry had forewarned. And a tangle of vegetation obscured Buddy’s view of Chemainus Road below. He felt alone, vulnerable.
Like Harry would have felt that day, he figured.
“It was the beginning of the Dirty Thirties,” Harry had recalled, reliving his last memories of ‘Gypsy and his best friend’.
“Desperate men were cut loose and wandering about in those days—some crazed and angry. I suppose I should have thought twice about being up there alone.” He’d paused with a deflating sigh. “But I wasn’t alone, was I? I had Gypsy with me, my tried and true companion. How could anything go wrong?”
Buddy frowned. Confused. Harry had said, “I wasn’t alone, was I? I had Gypsy with me.”
The old man looked away, scanning the horizon as if there was something important needed seeing out on Stuart Channel, as if nothing of significance had passed between them. Buddy blinked. Waited.
“It was you, wasn’t it?” he said at last, accusingly.
Harry refused to acknowledge the question.
“It was you who went missing in the woods that day, not some imaginary friend named Arthur!”
Sighing again, Harry twisted round to face him. “So now we’ve both shared a story no one else has ever heard,” he smiled feebly.
“But you haven’t told me yours!”
“Because I can’t.”
“Why not?”
“I just can’t,” Harry pleaded.
“Huh?”
“Alls I can say is something terrible happened in that forest, Buddy. So terrible that I still have nightmares about the place. All’s I can say is I went in there with Gypsy and came out alone, running like hell.
He looked imploringly at Buddy, then.
“What?” Buddy demanded, exasperated.
“I’m asking you to tell the story of what happened in there that day. Tell it for me before it’s too late.”
“Too late?”
Harry spread his arms, looking down at himself, then into Buddy’s eyes. “I’m a hundred years old, my friend. Time’s running out.”
The plea resonated in Buddy’s conscience, become a memory, echoing in his illusory here and now. If we do have a soul, that’s what it’s made up of, he thought—Memory’s ghosts, haunting us, always.
He clenched his fists and jaw, jolted by his own secret story, that monster he’d somehow convinced himself was a breed of fiction—a nightmare—until he’d shared it with his friend, Harry, and it became real again. He trod on, grim and determined—aware it wasn’t only Harry Sanderson he expected to find on the Hermit’s Trail that day; it was Buddy Hope, too.
“That’s why I’m here,” he muttered, become a mendicant on a sacred pilgrimage.
At that precise moment, the sharp staccato of a yapping dog obliterated his thoughts, followed by a boy’s voice calling out, “Gypsy! Gypsy! Wait!”
Buddy spun round, and there they were, the same ‘white shadows’ he’d tried to catch up to at Nixon Creek. He recognized them without ever having really seen them. Knew in his gut that it was Gypsy and Harry, as a boy, running toward him along the railway tracks. They were happy. If a dog could laugh, Gypsy’s barking would have been a rollicking expression of pure joy. As for Harry’s commands, they couldn’t possibly be taken seriously; they were exuberant cheers at his dog’s naughty behaviour.
Gypsy frolicked right past, ears flopping, tail wagging, as if Buddy wasn’t there. Buddy didn’t turn to follow the dog’s scrabble down the line, focusing instead on Harry, who was running as fast as he could to catch up without stumbling on the uneven ground between the ties. Harry didn’t see Buddy either.
I’m a ghost, Buddy thought. He fixed his gaze on Harry’s eyes, hoping to break through and be recognized. Closer and closer, Harry approached. Buddy braced for a collision, even though he assumed the spectre would simply pass through him, as had Gypsy.
That’s not what happened, though.
Convergence was the word he used later, describing the merging of spirits that blended his and the boy’s separate natures. In an instant, he was spun around and found himself looking through Harry’s eyes, feeling the glorious expansion and contraction of their lungs as they sucked in the life-sustaining air, feeding oxygen to their throbbing heart.
“Gypsy!” they hollered in a paroxysm of glee. “Stop!”
Next: Stone by Stone – Part 2