News

Catherine Bush launches this serialized story, which will be continued by a different author each week

What happens next is up to Paul Quarrington, author of Chapter 2 of our serialized story, which will run for eight weeks. The final instalment will be chosen from submissions from readers — watch for details as the story unfolds.

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Vida Ash's life is at a crossroads: Her mother's death has left her without a home, and her sister's place in Parkdale is dark, unwelcoming, even creepy. Where to go next? And who's that mysterious stranger? And, wait a minute ..... what did he just do?

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DARK HOUSE

Six weeks after her mother's death, Vida Ash threw her belongings into the back of her car, closed up the Hamilton bungalow where she'd nursed her dying mother for two years, and, wearing one of her three new pairs of red shoes, flew down the highway to Toronto. The night before her death, her mother had pointed to the small metal trunk beneath her bed and said there would be money in it to last Vida quite a while and more money to come, to be shared with her sister, even though Cora had not been the one to look after their mother on her deathbed, but so it went in families. You'll be free to do what you want, their mother said, her gaunt hands resting weakly on her coverlet, and now, in a sense, Vida was.

But what did she want exactly?

She had never wanted money and now she had it. She wanted a home, but what sort of home? Anything but the shuttered, loss-soaked bungalow, for a start. Home could be a room, the light at the end of a street, an open road. She wanted love, but what sort of love, she mused, as she said goodbye to Maurice, the gardener, who'd tended her tenderly all the while she'd been tending her mother. She told him she'd be back, but didn't say when — a month, a year, a lifetime?

She was going to stay with Cora and her husband, Ivan, in Parkdale. Cora had said that Vida could live in her attic as long as she wanted. This was Cora's way of being generous.

When Vida arrived, Cora met her at the door, dressed all in black, which Vida presumed was a lingering sign of mourning. Venn, their large black poodle, stood beside her. Cora led Vida through the dim house, past the living room with its marble fireplace, and up two flights of stairs, at the top of which she pulled a small key out of her pocket and opened the attic door.

Inside was a desk, a set of barbells, a single bed, and not much else. Square, uncurtained windows faced east and west. "It's private," Cora said, as if this was the most important thing, before handing over the key. Vida didn't mind the attic's spareness. She had always wanted to live in an attic, which seemed to her a way of feeling airborne.

Every morning she descended the slippery wooden stairs from the attic to the second floor, and the Berber-carpeted stairs from second floor to first, to have breakfast with Cora and Ivan, although breakfast for Cora consisted of nothing but a flagon of black coffee and for Ivan of two slices of toast so charred they looked like charcoal and filled the house with the persistent odour of something burning. Each morning, Vida entered the kitchen through a cloud of smoke.

After breakfast, after Cora and Ivan, both doctors, had driven off to their respective hospitals, Vida herself set out. She did not as yet have great plans. One day she went and bought another pair of red shoes, with silver buckles this time. She stopped to talk to women in Tibetan dress, as they wheeled their shopping carts along Queen Street. She gave money to panhandlers and left trails of pennies behind her as she walked, retracing her steps later to see how many had been picked up. Some afternoons, she took Venn for walks in High Park, where once she spied a bagpiper in a grove, leaves falling around him as he serenaded a tree with his sick, sad song, a song that made her heart clang a little. Other afternoons, she went to bars and Polish restaurants on Roncesvalles, hoping for adventure, but there remained a mournful knot inside her. At night she and Cora would sometimes huddle together on the sofa and cry over their dead mother, who had not always been loveable but had proved undeniably generous in the end, and over their long-lost father. Before bed, at least on Sundays, Vida would compose an e-mail to Maurice.

There were days when she questioned the wisdom of writing to him: What she loved about him were his hands, his tender hands, but she was not, it had to be said, quite as passionate about the rest of him.

One Friday night, she arrived home later than usual to find the house empty, apart from Venn, a coal-black shadow looming in the foyer, who barked once as she entered, then went quiet. The absence of Cora and Ivan surprised her, since they did not often go out. Most evenings they spent recounting the stories of their most gruesome patients of the day as they sat in the dining room, eating supper by candlelight.

Upstairs, Vida unlocked the attic door and removed her wet coat, for it had been raining. Slick leaves pressed themselves against the windows, and the sound of branches whipping against the glass made her feel as if she were flying. She woke up her computer, illuminating the room with its blue glow. Seated at the desk, she called up her hotmail sign-in page.

As she gazed at the screen, she gave a little start. Where her screen name automatically appeared, there was another name — name? —something so odd, so ridiculous that she didn't know what to make of it: boo@hotmail.com.

No one else ever came up to the attic, not that she was aware of. Of course, either Cora or Ivan could have come. She immediately suspected Ivan, who, she had begun to sense, wanted her out of the house.

Was he trying to scare her, in a way that was subtle but which she couldn't fail to notice? Perhaps he had come upstairs to use the barbells, which she presumed were his, and had been struck by a sudden overwhelming need to send a message. Or he had snuck up here intentionally to do so? Was Boo a secret on-line alias? Once, as Vida had passed down the stairs, she thought she'd heard him mention to Cora, as they dined by candlelight, a Dr. Boo. In the darkness, broken only by the flickering candles, she hadn't been able to see his face.

Perhaps this was some perfectly routine computer malfunction that everyone knew of but her. She considered sending an e-mail to boo@hotmail.com, asking, Who are you? But she didn't. More puzzled than frightened, she shrugged off the strangeness, deleted the peculiar name, and re-entered her own. When she checked her account, there was, sadly, not a single message waiting.

Nor did she say anything about the odd occurrence to Cora and Ivan at breakfast the next morning. When, at eight o'clock, she descended to the kitchen, they were already in their usual places, Cora nursing her flagon of coffee, Ivan at the toaster, charring three slices of toast, since it was Saturday, which he would eat with fig jam (since it was Saturday). In the middle of the floor sat Venn, who seemed larger than ever, fixing Ivan with a vulture-like gaze. Vida removed a single egg from the fridge and set about boiling it, fanning away the smoke to which Cora, as always, seemed oblivious.

"What were you up to last night?" Vida asked as she sat down at the table.

"We went to a movie," Cora said. "The nine o'clock screening of The Manchurian Candidate at The Revue."

"Oh," said Vida. "But I was there. I didn't see you."

"We didn't see you either," Cora said.

Black crumbs circling his mouth, Ivan passed Vida the classified section of the newspaper, the pages folded open to the real estate listings. He had taken to doing this on Saturday mornings, marking the houses that he thought she ought to look at, pressing the pages upon her so insistently that it was impossible to refuse them. (Cora seemed oblivious to this, also.) She should really think about buying a place of her own, Ivan said, now that she had the money to afford a house, even in Parkdale.

Vida had already visited a few open houses, if only in the most desultory fashion, after stumbling upon their signs while out wandering the streets. She stepped through their open doors more out of curiosity than because she had an urge to acquire something. She liked being invited to peer at strangers' wedding photos and into their closets, even to lie on their beds (if no one was looking), to try other people's lives on for size.

This particular Saturday afternoon, she walked north up Dowling Avenue. (Had Ivan leered at her, hurrying to turn the deadbolt as soon as she'd gone?) She crossed Queen Street, continued up Sorauren and turned left on Galley. From outside 98A, a tall brick structure, beckoned a tell-tale open house sign. A man and a woman made their way down the flagstone walk. Too thin, Vida heard the woman say. Too dark, said the man, glancing at Vida, and yet somewhat seductive. Vida followed a man in a long grey coat onto the porch.

They had to wait to enter. Apparently too many people were already inside. Once another couple exited, she and the man were allowed into the wood-panelled hallway where the besuited agent pointed a pen at their feet and told them to remove their shoes. While Vida stepped out of her red pumps, the man slipped his feet (bare, no socks) from a pair of alligator-skin oxfords, which caught Vida's eye, but, distracted by the pen-waving agent's demand that she add her name to his sign-in sheet, she lost track of the man himself.

The house was sumptuous, if not to her taste. Everything that could be panelled was. Avoiding the crowds on the ground floor, Vida climbed three flights to a room as unlike her spartan attic quarters as possible. Maroon walls and billowing brocade curtains surrounded a bed with a soaring black leather headboard. The man in the grey coat stood in bare feet on a lambskin rug beside the bed, fingering a book. A moment later, Vida tried to determine exactly what she had seen. Had he pulled a slim white volume from a pocket inside his coat and slipped it atop the stack of books arranged artfully yet carelessly at the bedside? Surely she had imagined that. Most likely he had simply picked up a book that had piqued his interest, then put it back down. And yet how to account for the little jump that he gave as he noticed her arrival, before he slipped from the room without a backward glance? Perhaps she truly was beginning to hallucinate things.

She approached the bed and examined the slim, white volume. The Anatomy of Despair. No author's name appeared beneath the title. A leather-clad couple reached the top of the stairs, clutching the brass railing, before she could pick the book up.

The second open house was on Fern. The man in the grey coat brushed past Vida and out the door just as she stepped inside. She caught a glimpse of his face, lean and with a lupine attractiveness, despite being somewhat pock-marked.

This house was smaller and brighter and there were fewer people in it. The real-estate agent, who wore a beret, sat reading a newspaper on the living-room sofa. At the top of the stairs Vida stumbled and almost fell headfirst into the bathroom. She loved the claw-foot tub, however, and for this reason alone would have moved right in. Beyond the baby's room, the middle bedroom had been converted into a library. There was an oak desk in it and bookshelves lined the walls. There were no books in the master bedroom, so she returned to the study and began to peruse the shelves.

Books on architecture and accounting, travel guides to various exotic locales including Argentina and Azerbaijan, an assortment of novels.

Between a guide for city planners and an updated building code, she spotted a copy of the same slim, white volume, Anatomy of Despair, as she had seen in the house on Galley Avenue.

It could be no more than coincidence. Perhaps the mysterious book had a cult following that she was unaware of. This would not be surprising, since she'd been quite oblivious to the world the last few years. Still, she was intrigued, her attention captured in a way that it hadn't been since the beginning of her mother's slow decline. She eased the book from the row of spines. A treatise of some sort. No author's name appeared on the title page either. Dare she take it? If an interloper had slipped the book unasked-for onto their shelves, did that make the book the property of the unaware homeowners? Would taking it be stealing it?

Someone cleared his throat in the doorway. The beret-clad agent stood staring at Vida, as she held the book in her hand. "Do you have any questions?"

"Um, no," she said, squeezing the book back onto the shelf. "Not really."

The third house was smaller still and at first glance appeared to have no books in it at all, not even picture books or pocket-sized nursery rhymes in the pink-walled children's bedroom. In the living room, a row of cardboard cut-out spines had been glued into place beneath the rows and rows of videocassettes and DVDs. Vida asked the agent in the tartan skirt if a man in a grey coat had come through, a man who wore alligator-skin shoes but no socks. The agent looked at Vida as if the last was an odd detail to know about someone she didn't seem to be acquainted with. A lot of people had come through at once about 15 minutes ago, the agent said. Perhaps he was one of them.

Did he sneak books into open houses all over the city, Vida wondered, or only in the west end? And what was his purpose in doing so? Mere subversion? Subversive enlightenment? She contemplated returning to the first open house to see if she could furtively make off with the sign-in sheet, where she believed the man's name to be written directly above hers. She wondered if she should tell Cora, or Ivan, what she'd seen.

In the kitchen of the third house, as she eased herself around a huge melamine-topped island, she spotted the familiar slim, white spine. On a shelf above the stove, The Anatomy of Despair was slipped between two cookbooks, More of the Atkins Diet and Two Thousand Ways to Cook Steak and Eggs. Desire overtook her. Vida reached up and pocketed it.

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Catherine Bush is the author of the newly released novel, Claire's Head.