CVU1

Chapter 34: My Summer Vacation

West of Deep River, I stumbled through dense brush in the heat of early summer afternoon. I had gotten lucky with the time of my injuries yet again.

Stopping to open and dry out the contents of my backpack once I found a little clearing etched out for an old covered well, I judged that Marie's map was just barely recoverable. The Bible she had put at the bottom of the pack still hurt too much to touch and open to see if the ink had run, but I convinced myself that handling it wasn't quite as bad as before. I was getting a little bit tougher.

Translating into human speak, two competing police forces had squabbled over a prisoner and now that prisoner was walking free. They might not catch him for quite a while, might search far in the wrong places or even think he was dead by the horned snake in the river ... though I had no reason to break with the original instructions. I had a monster inside me that would get stronger and stronger after the summer solstice, which couldn't be far away, just as my own vampiric power above a human's grew after noon. I had better be in the Land of No Trees before the winter began or else something would come for me - from a deep lake, or from a mountaintop. And I had best not be casual with the major rivers.

Carefully teasing apart the dried paper of the map, I saw a nice big unpopulated piece of green to the west: Algonquin Park. If I didn't disturb the spirit of the painter who had drowned somewhere in there I could use that area to hunt, exercise and think for a few days, planning the trip to a longer sanctuary in Toronto. I tried to remember if the painter's death was a murder or suicide, and couldn't - I didn't even know his name, just remembering that it was one of the Group of Seven.

In the late afternoon I passed private homes protected from the roads by marching lines of conifers, and then lonely radio stations and long corridors of felled trees that marked the paths of ancient railroads. Then I slipped through the cottage country just outside the park without incident. No strange storms or cold winds were on the horizon, and my grandmother had finally gone silent.

Helen Forgrave popped herself up into my consciousness like a gopher, and I let her look around and admire all the growing stuff. I let her babble about how northern forests and southern forests met here, making for an extra-diverse patch of land. I liked that - I was learning that for something like me a border between two unchallengeable powers was a workable arrangement.

Out of nowhere I found myself looking at a giant dish in the forest about an hour before sundown. I tiptoed around it, wondering if humans had any of their own secrets that even the spirits didn't know about.

By sunset on this day - I had completely lost track of days between the multiple bouts of unconsciousness, and would need to find a newspaper to get synchronized - I was inside the park. Nothing challenged me, not even a fence.

Then night came, and I seemed to have the park to myself. And for the first time in a long while, no one to bug me. Even the bugs didn't want to touch me, and they were swarming visibly across the lakes in places.

"Ahhh," I sighed, slumped down upon the shore of a tiny lake free of canoes or docks and napped. When I awoke, just before midnight, I was back to my first days as a vampire: running through the woods, hunting and exploring, and seeing what this new body could do.

***

I stopped rushing through the woods on my first night when I found a spot in Algonquin Park that passed every sense - no smells, sounds, or sight of humans in the faintest. Clean water, beaver dams, cackling loons, not even any trails that made the area easily accessible by foot. In places the trees were packed like a box of q-tips, and an eight-foot tall ape-man could be unseen a few paces away. Poking my head underwater and yodeling down into the depths, I got no feline answer. It was all excellent. Excellent enough, perhaps, to keep me here until autumn threatened to change the leaves. Then I would jog south, I decided - in a straight line I could hit the northern shore of Lake Ontario in ten days or less.