Expiration Date Read online

  People asked me if he was a snob— “aloof” was the word that came up once or twice. No, I didn’t feel he was. Not from what I saw. He gave the impression that he had nothing to say or, at least, nothing to say to us.

  Maybe there was nothing he could say to us.

  I believe that there were a lot of things in Keable’s life that were worth telling. But, as far as he was concerned, there was no point.

  There was nothing to be done for him. So we left him there, staring down into his pint of Chasse-Galerie, listening to the music as if there were some truth to be found there, some comfort to be expected in those tireless decibels.

  We knew almost nothing — so precious little — about him.

  * * *

  Keable lived in a small house on Orcutt Street, one of those streets near the hospital up on the hill. The shaded lawn was reasonably well maintained, the grass occasionally too long, the wooden trim in need of paint. On the ground floor — I’d been there once — a room ran lengthwise, taking up half of the house. The walls there disappeared behind bookshelves, interrupted only by the door and the windows. Books and records shared shelves packed so tight dust had nowhere to settle.

  Few people, even among those who greeted him on a daily basis, knew what Keable’s profession was. He was a composer. I believe that his past successes ensured that, from time to time, he received contracts for a movie soundtrack or a TV series. He also gave violin lessons: two or three youngsters came each week to perform their scales in the large room where, in addition to his own violin, Keable kept a computer and a synthesizer— professional quality equipment, it seemed to me.

  It was possible to imagine that he listened to his own tunes, through the headset of his music player, when you saw him taking a walk or running errands, but I don’t think so. His collection was rather well stocked — and his opinion of himself was relatively modest — for him to prefer the music of better known bluesmen and jazzmen. He also owned a great many operas, most on vinyl.

  Bernadette, his wife, had been an opera singer.

  Well, in fact, although she was an opera singer, I’m not sure she was his wife.

  All I know about her is that she died in her 30s— “under tragic circumstances”, according to the stock phrase, as if there were comical ways of dying.

  I don’t doubt that during the time spent in the Elsewhere Bar — one hour each evening, two or three times a week — Keable thought about her often.

  He lived in fear of hearing her again.

  * * *

  The little I do know about their drama, about Ronald Keable and Bernadette Dupré, I got from a common friend, Brodeur.

  It’s all veiled and blurry now: I don’t recall Brodeur’s exact words and I don’t know which part I imagined or dreamed, afterward, in that twilight where dreams and memories take on the same hues.

  It had all happened several years earlier. They were living in North Hatley at the time and the accident occurred at Ayer’s Cliff, along one of those treacherous curves where there’s a cliff on one side and the lake on the other, down below. Darkness and the freezing rain joined forces against Bernadette Dupré and her little car. The singer died in a meter of icy water, crushed against the roof of her overturned Jetta.

  That night, a November night when the winds were calm, Ronald Keable, worried about his tardy companion, heard the song of the banshee, that ominous fairy whose lamentations herald the death of a loved one— at least that’s what Brodeur told me.

  Keable never confided in me. Was he the kind of man who could make it all up? To have imagined it, maybe. His best known compositions revealed a great deal of sensitivity; reviewers had even criticized his penchant for pathos. That said, he was no alcoholic, not even much of a drinker. A pint lasted him an hour and, at his home, I never saw anything stronger than a few liqueur bottles. I could imagine him spending an entire evening sipping an ounce of Glayva, Drambuie or Irish Mist.

  Perhaps that’s why he spoke so little. How can someone who has brushed up against terror and the supernatural slip into the banality of light conversation? And how can you recount the single unique thing that haunts you when you know it probably will be repeated, with a smile, among acquaintances as soon as you’ve left the bar?

  Moreover, Marcel Brodeur was the only real friend I knew he had.

  Well, Brodeur and the druggist.

  * * *

  I have no desire to turn him into a caricature, but Keable’s head was rather well suited for his personality: it was nondescript, relatively lean, with an Adam’s apple prominent enough to be noticed. Abundant grey threaded throughout the dark hair and the stubble that betrayed lax shaving habits. Bags under his eyes made him look somewhat haggard.

  Probably, he was only able to sleep thanks to the pills the druggist gave him. I used to run across Keable regularly as he was doing his errands, always on foot, and a few times I was in the drug store at the same time as he was. He made no secret of it: who would have wanted to risk insomnia when the voice of your lover, dead going on six years, could reach you in the dark tunnel of the night?

  For the same reasons, Keable constantly surrounded himself with music: FM radio, stereo, his own music or the less pleasant sounds of his few students. Outside, as I said before, it was the portable music player (I had already observed, amused, that he had two models, an iPod with headphones, and another MP3 player with earbuds).

  As long as he erected a musical barrier between his ears and the past, he wouldn’t run the risk of hearing the banshee again— whether she assumed Bernadette Dupré’s voice or not.

  * * *

  I knew no more about banshees than the common mortal did: Irish or Scottish, Celtic in any case, banshees were spirits with female voices — reportedly heart wrenching — who announced the imminent death of a loved one with their lamentation. A family matter, if you believed the legends— at least according to the explanation provided by Brodeur, from whom I got the little I did know. And, of course, banshees could occasionally herald your own death.

  * * *

  It’s said that grieving takes a year. That, for the survivors, the worst of the distress then fades away, becomes more bearable.

  That wasn’t the case for Ronald Keable.

  Every fall, particularly in November, he would grow more sombre, his eyes more hunted, his gestures nervous. Anyone who greeted him while coming up from behind could well make him jump. As if, week by week, the anguish gradually tightened his nerves, like the strings on a violin, until the autumn was no more than a bad memory.

  That evening, the last evening anyone saw him, his mood seemed more even. Definitely not more serene. He looked as grave as a grey stone in a cemetery. But more resigned, perhaps?

  I don’t know if dates, anniversaries can be considered all that important. Was it that precise night, six years earlier, that Bernadette Dupré had plunged into Lake Massawippi and a tragic voice had screeched in Keable’s ears in their beautiful home in North Hatley? Brodeur himself was no longer certain of the date when we spoke about it.

  His Chasse-Galerie downed, the dregs of beer long turned warm in his mug, Keable went out into the cold night. He looked determined, as if he had finally made up his mind— and that is something I can confirm after the fact. That evening, what I read in his face was more like apprehension, as if the decision he had just made would give him a bad time.

  It had to have taken some time for him to walk to the Gorge, depending on whether he took a direct route or not. It was raining that evening — again — and people only went out if they really needed to, by car if possible. The police didn’t find anyone who had crossed Keable’s path after he left the bar.

  So, no one knows exactly where he entered Gorge Park; someone who was determined could manage it without much difficulty; all it took was a minimum amount of scouting beforehand.

  The Coaticook Riv
er was high that autumn; for weeks the rain had been relentless. In the summer, Keable’s body would have been found below the walk, barely much farther, among the rocks on the shore. This year, at the end of a rainy fall, the current carried the suicide victim toward the large, flat zone where the Coaticook grows calm, one hundred meters downstream from the falls.

  But they only found him the next day, at noon, before his disappearance had even been reported, since the man lived alone.

  No one doubted that his death was deliberate. Dark temperament, depressive mood, the two mingled easily in the lay mind.

  Was it merely a moment’s distraction that caused him to leave his MP3 player and his ear plugs on his chair in the bar? Brodeur and I are the only ones who know that this omission was crucial. Without music to form a rampart between his ears and the spirit world, Keable became vulnerable.

  I believe that he did it on purpose, determined to finally confront his ghosts, aware that he could not spend the rest of his life plugging his ears.

  Perhaps he wanted to hear the voice of his beloved one last time, even if it took on the gloomy tones of death.

  As well, Brodeur and I know a few things more than the coroner who closed the file.

  First, one of my students, Trottier, told me a few days after the tragedy that he had seen Keable on Child Street, running with his hands over his ears, eyes wild. Initially Trottier thought that Keable was rushing because of the rain and that he held something, possibly a clear plastic bag, over his head to keep his hair dry. But Keable had raced past the window of a shop whose neon spilled light into the night and Trottier had clearly seen that the composer’s head was uncovered, that his hands shielded his ears.

  “And he was talking to himself,” my student added. But, since Trottier was on the other side of the street, he heard nothing. Perhaps there weren’t even any words, just exclamations or confused cries. The fact is that my student was listening to rap on his music player.

  Keable was scared, that much was clear. Terrorized or frightened, I would add, extrapolating with words that are not part of a sixteen-year-old’s vocabulary.

  Did Keable hear something only in his head or did audible keening really hound him?

  Now, I’ll put to paper a little more than what I actually told Brodeur. I had left the Elsewhere Bar shortly after Keable, but I didn’t go straight home.

  Despite the rain, dressed for the cold and the damp, I made my way to Gorge Park. To the top of the tower, to be exact, in the midst of an impenetrable night where the few rare lights from town stretched into golden or mother-of-pearl filaments. I love the shadows, the exhilaration of roaming the dark, the purple man that blooms out of me in the deep of the night…

  That night I didn’t see Keable at the Gorge. Even though the walkway starts barely twenty metres from the tower, shadows covered the park with an opaque mantle that even my eyes could not pierce.

  Yet, I’m convinced that I heard something and it wasn’t the cry of terror of a jumper who feels the void opening before him. And there was no wind, apart from a silken, glacial breeze.

  No, what I heard that evening, distinctly although not very loud, was wailing. A long, gloomy cry, a heart-rending lament, both musical and painful, from a female voice. Obviously, I had no idea that Keable was in the park as well and that this phenomena concerned him above all. I only inferred that after the fact.

  What more can I say? That shivers ran up and down my spine, shaking me to the core of my very being? That the cry passed overhead like a squall, as if some night bird carrying it had flown over the entire length of the park in an instant?

  I’ll never reveal why I was perched on top of the tower that night like a bird of prey. What more can I say apart from the fact that I now live in fear of once again hearing the call of the banshee and this time ‘tis for me she’ll wail her omen.

  * * *

  Though less known to North American readers than some of his fellow Québécois F & SF writers, Daniel Sernine has a career spanning more than 40 years, with 39 books published. His works have repeatedly garnered prizes, including the Grand prix de la science-fiction et du fantastique québécois in 1992 and 1996.

  The original French version was featured in Maure à Venise, a collection of Daniel Sernine’s short stories, published by Éditions Vents d’Ouest, 2005.

  * * *

  Sheryl Curtis is a professional translator from Montreal, Quebec, with translated stories appearing in Interzone; Year’s Best Science Fiction 4; Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror 15; numerous Tesseracts; The Mammoth Book of New Jules Verne Adventures; and Sylvie Bérard’s novel, La Terre des Autres (Of Wind and Sand).

  Riding Shotgun

  by Elaine Pascale

  It had been over thirty years since Angela had first seen the white wolf in the sky.

  She had been a small girl when the carnivorous face in a cloud appeared, marking her as both unique and crazy. She had begun by telling no one — then followed up by telling everyone — of what she had seen.

  “There is a wolf in the sky and he has the body of a man,” she told her parents.

  Ignored by both, she turned to her beloved brother, then to her tolerated cousins. No one knew anything about this creature, or seemed to care, yet Angela understood that she had caught a glimpse of a powerful being.

  Once of age, she searched in books with topics that included: fable, mythology, deities and demons. She found information on Remus and Romulus, on Fenrir, on the Big Bad Wolf, but her wolf did not reside in any of the books. Only the sky was large enough to house him.

  Her career path had been predestined and permitted by the white wolf. One night, as a teen, she saw wafts of silver smoke coming from an apartment building two streets from her home. The smoke crawled across the darkened sky, appearing to hover above the building, seeming to open its elongated snout in an attempt to snatch the building in its barbarous teeth. She and her brother, Eric, had snuck out, tightly rolled together in a big bed sheet. They had been startled by sharp, crisp thunder that sounded like a wolf’s jaw snapping shut. They followed the blazing lights and sirens, and watched firefighters and paramedics pulling people from the smoke wolf, pulling people from the brink of death. While Eric had been unfazed by the experience, Angela found her true calling. This was a way to work both with and against the wolf of her imagination, the wolf that terrified and excited her. It was meant to be.

  While the wolf remained elusive in his home in the clouds, occasional clues about her destiny presented themselves. Once, she found an abandoned blood pressure cuff in a field; another time, she had been unexpectedly de-registered from robotics in high school and placed into first aid. Medical training came as easily as the mythology it had replaced. In fact, at times, the two studies seemed interchangeable. Patients’ stories unfolded like fables in the event of happy outcomes; allegories when served as fatal warnings. Poisoned apples, witches in ovens, girls in bears’ beds — Angela had seen it all.

  She even believed that her most recent partner in emergency, Gary, looked like the stock hunter in fairy tales: ordinarily handsome and modestly strong. Silent, like the hunter, and prone to an existence in the shadows until needed. Angela fancied herself in the role of the cloaked maiden— luring and out-cunning the slobbering, voracious wolf/beast.

  Being an EMT felt magical: doling out miracles with the wave of a wand, or a defibrillator.

  She had asked Gary how he felt about their work. His approach was more mundane.

  “It’s a job… my job,” he answered noncommittally. “I do what I can, and there are just as many things that I can’t do.”

  “Yeah,” she agreed, “you can’t save them all.”

  “Nope. There are rules about that.”

  She nodded, even though she didn‘t understand what that meant. “So… what do you do during your down time?” she had prodded.

  �
�I think about it…”

  “It?”

  His face took on a stony look. “Death. I think about it because we’re surrounded by it all day.”

  She smiled and tried to change the tone of the conversation, “That’s depressing.”

  He smiled in return. “Is it?”

  She realized that for her, it wasn’t. She enjoyed being so close to death. The miracles she witnessed hit her like a mainlined drug. She sought that high with a compulsion equal to the strongest addictions.

  * * *

  She rode that high with a bearded and breathless Gary, as they raced to the latest call involving a ninety-two year old male. His equally aged wife had told the dispatcher that her husband had been shot in the foot. Strangely, there was no blood, but the man was not breathing. When she peered down at his naked foot, Angela saw a scar that had seen more birthdays than she. When she opened his shirt, she was greeted by many scars; this man was as comfortable with receiving medical help as Angela was with giving it.

  “He’s been asleep for years,” the wife called out, obviously disoriented.

  “She should come, too,” she whispered to Gary, as they loaded the man onto the ambulance. “She needs to be examined.”

  Gary nodded beneath his nonstandard black hoodie that Angela would come to identify as his signature piece, and went to take the woman’s elbow, but she shooed him away.

  “I always follow the trail of crumbs to find him.” She smiled with satisfaction and sat on the curb, looking blankly into the back of the emergency vehicle. This made it easier for Gary to lift her and place her inside, seating her beside her husband.

  Angela was able to get the man’s vitals and to restart his heart. The anomalous rhythm of his assisted breathing led her to believe that his warranty had expired. Without assistance, he would stop breathing completely. Yet, the man’s eyes opened confidently when breathing was restored, and he appeared aware and alert. He even winked at his wife, once.