The Beam

by M.G. Warenycia

            The urban legend has lost much of its mythic aura. What, with everyone having a camera in their pocket and Google, GPS and other investigative tools, if we are confronted with something that sounds like it might be BS; another ‘cool story, bro,’ we can verify it in a matter of minutes from almost anywhere. Everything that happens is known or at least rapidly knowable. Yet this is a false impression embraced because it is comforting to think that there is nothing more unknown in the world—as a wise man once said, “The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.” The reason urban legends, cold cases and other unsolved mysteries have such a powerful hold on our imagination is because their settings and characters belong to the familiar world of modernity and well-ordered crowds of educated, technologically adept people who, by their sheer numbers and activity, are supposed to ward off the Unknown. These legends belong to our world, yet seem to drag into it, like a thing unclean, relics of earlier ages and far-off lands which we’ve smugly assured ourselves were are permanently sealed off from.

            As a Torontonian born and raised, I am biased, but I think there are good reasons why someone (certainly, a fellow Torontonian) would find the period in the life of the 416 and its environs which has just barely become history to be the most fascinating of all. Perhaps one is a university student—that almost always induces an attachment to the city—or one has moved into particular area and wants to learn more about it. You will quickly discover that there is a tremendous wealth of stories, rich in colour and intrigue, which never entered a textbook or Wikipedia page. So many stories, despite the invention of the internet, retain a character of tribal legends shared among select groups, or local lore known only to the denizens of specific neighbourhoods and the urban studies “anthropologists” at U of T or Ryerson who decided to spend their OSAP and tenures studying them. And among these stories, the most interesting of all are those that emerged during the period immediately preceding the modern internet of social media and smartphones. If one had to put a date to it, let’s say before the Great Recession hit in ’08-’09 and going back through the Chretien and Mulroney years to late in the reign of Trudeau the First.

            The City was recognizably the same entity; a sophisticated multicultural metropolis long since having shaken off the era of the Orange Order, dingy factories and Sunday laws, when today’s most chic districts were stained by flophouses, poverty and sin percolating beneath the shade of ancient elms.

            The rhythms of life were similar; the cars were mostly models we might spot on roads today, and folks had televisions and CD players. Kids played video games, rode bikes and skateboards, and hung out at the mall. We were past the days of village, church and superstition. Everything of these times should be knowable, at least everything important, but try and you’ll see: events as big as elections and major crimes are sometimes nearly non-existent in the digital record, unless you’re lucky enough to find a mimeographed dissertation that a diligent scholar bothered to scan and upload as a PDF. We ‘know,’ as a City and as neighbourhoods, that certain things must have happened, but casual internet research would make these events less certain than UFOs and Bigfoot. It’s plenty to stimulate any latent fear of the unknown.

            I set the stage this way because the strangeness of the account that follows comes as much from its status as a mystery from the age of computers, video games and (primitive) cell phones as from the actual events described. In so far as the events themselves were told and ‘known’ to educated, secular Torontonians to have occurred, the following is a true story. There was never any dispute as to that, although there was some discussion as to the real motives and legal identities of the parties involved. Recalling things at this date, it never ceases to amaze how our cold, hard world of facts and tech can be subverted into folklore, no different form the supposedly vampiric count of a Carpathian castle or an alleged case of bone-pointing curses in the Australian Outback.

            I first heard the story when I was in high school, although I heard it on subsequent occasions from other tellers, and individuals who were classmates or friends had heard it themselves, at different times and from different sources, one of whom was a rabidly atheistic science teacher and one of whom was the assistant proprietress of the Agincourt Garden Bakery, a Hong Kong-style bakery and dessert store on Glen Watford Drive, near Sheppard Avenue East.

            My high school, then called ASE 2 (for Alternative Scarborough Education 2), was a small ‘alternative’ school—a model of arts-focused, individualized education for students whose enthusiasm and academic abilities demanded a bit more than the typical, factory-model public high school provided. It occupied the top level of Henry Kelsey Elementary School on Chartland Boulevard, which snakes its way off Brimley Road in Agincourt, a neighbourhood in the north-western corner of Scarborough, Toronto. Agincourt, which is often understood to include the adjacent neighbourhood of Milliken to the east, was a tidy, quiet suburb of leafy crescents and cul de sacs woven around strip malls and shopping centres, both typically displaying the brown brick and dark brown or dark green fluted metal cladding style which was in vogue in the ‘80s, when much of them were built…later to be apparently replaced by covering the brick with bright aluminum panelling, pale stucco and blue-green glass. It is a neighbourhood for families—no hulking apartment blocks or condo towers—dwelling in quaint but solidly middle-class houses. Accordingly, the neighbourhood is as full of schools as malls: a stone’s throw from ASE 2 and Henry Kelsey, there is Albert Campbell Collegiate, Francis Liberman Catholic High School, North Agincourt Junior Public School and several others within a ten minute walk, although there are no colleges or universities. High taxes and absurd government policies have result in a growing migration northward beyond Steeles into Markham and Richmond Hill, but Agincourt still bears the stamp of the era in which our story takes place, when it earned the nickname “Asiancourt,” due to its ethnic makeup. An ordinary Canuck couldn’t tell, but the new inhabitants flowing in between the late ‘70s and the ‘00s were almost exclusively Hong Kong Cantonese and Taiwanese, whose culture and languages are quite distinct from the mainland, whose hostile rule these groups came to Canada to flee, especially after 1989…which, not entirely coincidentally, is around the time our story takes place.

            The parties involved were mainly students at the high school, though it’s not 100% certain that this means ASE 2, since the teaching staff had all done stints at other schools in the district. Mrs. Tse, who ran the bakery mentioned earlier saw the young lads occasionally, but the details as she remembered them were edited by the news and filled in by her only daughter, Faye, who helped out at the bakery after school and was a schoolmate of at least two of the boys. At the far corner of the brick-and-brown strip mall at 4386 Sheppard which, as of this writing, is still known as the Mandarin Shopping Centre, there was a store called The Beam. In those days, there was no Best Buy or Future Shop. Video games, the systems to play them on and associated paraphernalia were available at other places, but the best sources were specialty stores, such as The Beam, because these things were still seen as niche items and, given that the workforce largely consisted of Baby Boomers with a fair continent from the so-called Silent Generation, on top of which there was no internet for customers to learn about these products which cost, relative to wages, substantially more than they do today, there were major incentives for the discerning electronics buyer to seek out a retailer whose expertise was unquestioned. Repairs, as opposed to “toss it and buy a new one,” were also a thing back then. Strange times, indeed. Faye’s cousin, Rupert, worked at The Beam. Based on what became known later, matters were already far along when Faye’s cousin came rapping at the bakery window.

            “We’re closed,” Faye instinctively shouted, her attention concentrated on the tray of dough blobs, set to become tomorrow’s red bean buns, which she was loading onto the racks between its mates to rest and rise. It was only when she returned to the front of the shop to do a cursory check of the tables that she realized something was wrong. Rupert was standing there, as he must have been for minutes, his head hunched between his shoulders and his body pressed against the door as if for cover.

            “Faye…” he hissed her name as if he didn’t want anyone else to hear. “Open up. Come on, please, dammit!”

            This was grossly out of character for her archetypally geeky and polite cousin to swear, and in the presence of a girl! “Geez, Rupert, you look like a ghost. What’s going on? It’s not even 7:00 yet…” she checked her watch as she unlocked the door. Rupert and his boss typically closed up shop an hour or two after the bakery, partly to catch the after-supper traffic, partly because The Beam had the advantage of hired staff, whereas the Agincourt Garden Bakery relied on cheap but limited family labour.

            Rupert should have appreciated the gesture of pulling out a chair at a freshly-wiped table and the offer of a bun and coffee in the just-washed cup, but he didn’t sit down, instead moving with uncharacteristic deliberation towards the kitchen in the back. Faye trailed him. As he disappeared into the kitchen, she stopped to glance out the windows which, including the glass front door, ran the breadth of the shop from a few inches above the pavement to almost the ceiling. There was nothing but the dwindling residue of rush hour rolling by in the purple twilight.

            Rupert was already standing by the navy blue Tercel hatchback that her parents bought her, ostensibly as a reward for getting her license. Taking the hint, she drove, but when she was about to turn onto her parents’ street, Rupert, who’d said nothing up to this point (which wasn’t very long because the Tse household was only one major intersection away) grabbed her coat sleeve. “No!”

           “No what?!?” Thankfully the street was too slow for Rupert to have potentially caused an accident, but it was unsettling for him to freak out on her while she was driving, nonetheless.

            “You don’t want them to know where you live or to connect you to me—I mean, if they haven’t already.”

            “Who is ‘they?’” Admittedly, the idea of random strangers, whoever they were, finding out where her family lived was disturbing, seeing how these strangers had put such a scare into her cousin.

            “J-just find some place, any place that’s not near here. Not my house either. Somewhere we can talk. I’ll explained. Just keep driving!”

            Taking Rupert’s advice but also knowing what was best for him, Faye got on Sheppard and drove to a busy Tim Horton’s. They drank their Double-Doubles in the car. Warmed and fortified, Rupert explained what was troubling him. There were three youths—though maybe there had been a fourth one time—boys from local high schools, although he didn’t have any names to share. They had occasionally stopped in at The Beam to purchase NES games and equipment. The store sold all kinds of gaming-related merchandise, including board games with Nintendo or Sega tie-ins, figurines, branded memorabilia and so on, and all these boys were fans, not simply buyers of convenience or necessity. Rupert didn’t know them personally and, being mere high school students they didn’t have a ton of cash to fling around, but it was clear from the way they talked and from how much they spent in light of their likely incomes, that games were their main or only hobby. Faye didn’t wish to be cruel, but she might have added that this would be obvious to anyone who knew the nerdy quarter—based on Rupert’s descriptions and first names or nicknames or remembered, she figured she knew who two of them were…maybe.

            Rupert thought literally nothing of it for months. It wasn’t like nerdy teenagers being into gaming and electronics was rare. During this time, they group, or fragments of it, would come into the shop maybe once every two or three weeks. However, it was only the previous Monday, when two of the lads popped in, that these loyal customers had any extended interaction with him.

            “Where are the books?” the evident leader, a husky, buzz-cut ginger asked.

           “And the die?” his companion, a soft, sleepy-eyed brunette with longish hair parted in the middle, added.

            “Huh? What books?” Rupert was confused. They were happy-friendly, like basically all young customers besides those who are so broke they must wait in nervous silence for products to go on sale, or those who already had actual jobs in addition to their school responsibilities. “Sorry, who died?”

            Rupert had barely noticed the customers because there was a heap of other tasks, like checking off the inventory book, unpacking shipping boxes and so on, so that he could never afford to just stand there smiling at the counter as a couple of kids looked over the merchandise, the bulk of which they couldn’t afford. He snapped on guard like a soldier when one of them—the ginger—barked out the question again. “Do you have our books? We ordered them three weeks ago. You gave your word.”

            As Rupert described it, there was something off about this dingy, red-haired geek with a voice like a pissed-off pitbull. The eyes glaring across the counter had a cold intensity about them that a child in a cozy bourgeois suburb should never have. “I’m sorry?” he stammered as he tried to recall the backstory to the encounter, if indeed there was one.

            The ginger kid told him about a bunch of game manuals, guides for players that were bundled with games or sold aftermarket, before such things became digital. They were sometimes as thick as novels and contained illustrations by members of the studio or fans, if they were third-party works. They were especially keen on a Dungeon Master’s manual, so described—a compendium of lore and strategies for the Dungeons & Dragons series of games, which were extremely popular at the time, both for Nintendo and board game formats. Like with Mario, the Legend of Zelda, Sonic the Hedgehog and other well-known titles, the shop stocked a lot of memorabilia and merchandise based around the universes of the games. Rupert wasn’t a hundred percent sure, but the kids reminded him of two of a trio who had come in…it was sometime in slushy late winter. They’d bought a couple gaming magazines and a replica of a sword based on one from a game, possibly something to do with Dungeons & Dragons, thought it could have also been Castlevania or Conan the Barbarian. He remembered the transaction because of the unexpected reaction when Rupert offered to throw in, for a discount, a Nintendo Power guide for what he’d mistakenly thought was the relevant game. The kid snapped; said something like a true Dungeon Master does not cheat, accusing Rupert of not understanding the spirit of a true Dungeon Master, something like that. What really stood out to Rupert was that the kid said “does not” and “cannot,” sharply enunciated. A small detail but it stuck with him as something abnormal; not “doesn’t” or “can’t,” but “does not” and “cannot.”

            After critiquing the guide that Rupert had innocently offered them at half off, the kid demanded a different manual, one published by the official company which owned the intellectual property rights to D & D, not Nintendo or some amateur gaming journalists. Through all this conversation, the kids were glowering at him viciously. He’d nodded and answered in response to the question as to when they’d be getting in new stock, “Three weeks.” To be honest, he’d just wanted them out of the store. Trouble was, Rupert only took inventory and wrote down what got sold; the boss did the actual ordering and purchasing. Because of exams or a date or whatever reason, Ruper forgot and the books in question were never ordered.

            That evening, the kids had come back and Rupert, who was only a high school kid himself, was scared. There was nobody else in the shop and tonight, of all nights, the ordinarily diligent boss would not be locking up: Rupert would be all alone. “It was as if they knew,” he said. They left, but Rupert couldn’t relax and forget about it. He planned to call in and take a week’s holiday that he would normally have reserved for the summer.

            The next couple days were uneventful. Faye tried to remind herself to keep on the watch for anything suspicious, but nothing occurred to disturb her mundane routine, nor did she see a group of teenage boys fitting the description provided by her cousin. It was Friday when Rupert came knocking, all cringing and scared. There was only thing she could remotely consider out of the ordinary and she wasn’t sure if it was only because she was primed to look for strangeness that she took note of it at all. It happened when she was taking a walk on East Highland Creek Trail, a paved bike-slash-pedestrian path (which most people wouldn’t assume even has a name) that winds its way behind Chartland, diagonally between the bus stop at Brimley and Sheppard and at Midland and Huntingwood, continuing up in the northwest across the intersection to Finch. The path runs alongside a watercourse into which numerous culverts drain excess rainwater from the house-lined streets surrounding the trail and its park. There isn’t really any creek to speak of, just reed beds where, in summer, red wing blackbirds swoop and caw, though in the rainy season of April through to June, there can be water deep enough for ducks to swim in and nest. Faye loved the spot: the rows of houses which backed onto it and the dense stands of willows and poplars along the ‘creek’ and at either end of the trail insulated it from the noise of the traffic zooming past on the nearby thoroughfares. It was also the quickest way to get from her school to Chartwell mall or home, all of which sat on the circumference of the park.

            The crabapples, planted, presumably, to provide a climate-appropriate facsimile of Sakura cherry blossoms, had bloomed early that year owing to the wet, mild weather. Only someone like a computer programmer who actually enjoyed their job could resist the rustic charm of the flowering crabapples—Faye was not such a perverse creature. Stepping cautiously to avoid slipping on the slick, steep grass, she ogled a specimen of Malus baccata that had appeared particularly resplendent approaching it from up the path. Curiously, the blossoms were almost absent from one half of the tree, nearest the creek. Absent-mindedly, Faye searched for the inevitable tent caterpillar nest—for there is no unsprayed crabapple tree in Scarborough which is without a tent caterpillar nest, or two or three. She found it, but there were no caterpillars. She knew that the City never sprayed the trees in the park, out of regard for the health of the children on the playground of North Agincourt Junior Public, only thirty to a hundred feet away, depending on the tree. Closer inspection revealed that someone had burnt the branch in an act of sadistic and petty vandalism. The tree, because live, moist foliage doesn’t burn easily, was intact, but the damage would have required more than a candle or a Bic lighter. Glancing down at the watercourse, she saw that it was stagnant, but a mass of floating blossoms had collected at the mouth of the culvert that opened out somewhere on the other side of Brimley. One sees weird and meaningless stuff all the time; the products of boredom or the weather, which we tend to overthink. Nonetheless, the scene never quite left her mind…

            Interestingly enough, a surviving dissertation written for the U of T in 1998 by a PhD student who grew up in Agincourt indicates that, for all the neighbourhood’s pleasant appearance, the Metro Toronto Police undertook several investigations in the area at the time. Most involved organized crime and counterfeiting, but sometimes the locals were the victims. A few years earlier, there was a string of racialized vandalism and what might be described as low-key hate crimes, including a letter-writing campaign which resulted in hundreds of residents receiving flyers and typed letters warning them of the threat posed by the Asiatic newcomers. For instance, the materials claimed, some of the unassuming entrepreneurs and office workers next door were members of the “Triads” or “White Lotus” secret societies involved in smuggling opium and exotic animals, and many of them were Reds trying to subvert Canada and install a communist regime (insane, to anyone who knew anything about Hong Kong and Taiwan). Alas, for Margaret Hunter, Dorothy Henderson and Phyllis Cresswell—if those were their real names, which they—found themselves on the wrong side of history, their self-righteous Anglo-Saxonist screeds soon forgotten. Recently, however, some householders had been receiving unposted letters similar in format and style, this time informing them of the dangers of Satanism and witchcraft being practiced in their midst. Their kids, these parents were told, were being seduced by the gateway drugs of video and board  games—Dungeons & Dragons being specifically mentioned as a powerful influence—to join clubs in which participants would perform black magic and sorcery. The author stressed that this was not merely an issue of children becoming somewhat overzealous in play and make-believe; the ‘game’ aspect was only there to fool them; to make them comfortable so they could be lured in. No, these were genuine occult rituals based on authentic Wiccan spells such as witches were formerly and rightly burned for. And it was happen to their children! The teachers, especially at that ‘Alternative’ school, were turning a blind eye or were tacitly encouraging the kiddies to become good little witches and warlocks: the art teacher was not named, but the letters were sufficiently specific in their allusions to make it a defamation case and thus a Criminal Code offense.

            Because of the references to gaming and the complaint of Rupert Tse, which was reported, the police assumed that the letters were yet another attempt to get the dwindling number of white residents riled up against the by-then-well-established migrants. The opium dens and communist invasion never materialized, so new sources of potential corruption of the youth needed to be unearthed. A Constable Bartle or Barlow—sources differ—was dispatched to carry out surveillance and threaten the offender who would attempt to shatter multicultural paradise. Principals and teachers at two schools and local busy body came forward with witness testimony about occult cliques or covens among the schoolchildren, though repeated questioning whittled the supposed eyewitness reports down to idle rumours told by cat ladies with crystals over tacky mugs of herbal tea when there was nothing better to do. One teacher’s black cat had gone missing shortly before the spring solstice and, given that, during the 1980s, animal shelters introduced policies restricting the adoption of black cats at certain periods during the year because of supposed cases of animal sacrifice, the disappearance was taken more seriously than would normally be the case.

            The hypothesis of foul play was seemingly corroborated when this Constable Barlow attended at a pet store near the railway bridge across Brimley north of Sheppard, on the north side of the parking lot from where the Oriental Centre stands today. Barlow had simply wanted to advise small business owners to be vigilant. The owner of the pet shop, which specialized in aquaria and reptiles, was a stalwart of the business community and had been among those bearing the brunt of anti-immigrant sentiments early in its history. Unexpectedly, this entrepreneur took issue with the police’s theory, pointedly comparing the sample of the offensive letters which Constable Barlow brought with him against an original which the businessman kept on his wall beside where their ought to have been a cash register. The original, dated 1983, was perfection in spelling and grammar, and, although Phyllis Cresswell probably didn’t exist, the true author was without a doubt an educated WASP woman proficient with an IBM Selectric. The recent letter was not paragraphed correctly and contained numerous spelling mistakes. Additionally, it was not signed with a suitably stereotypical old Upper Canadian name. “Believe me,” the pet shop owner shook his head, “I’d complain if there was something to complain about. We’ve worked too damn hard to build what we have here for someone to tell us we don’t belong. But, I don’t think this is the same person, sorry. I can’t even understand what they are saying. What the hell kind of magical mumbo-jumbo is this?!?”

            “Well, uh, you might still say they seem like they are acting on the same motives. Right? Disturbing the peace or…uhh…” The Constable was dismayed at being forced to think up his own theories of the crime.

            “Why call you guys though? For a few stupid letters? I don’t even know who this is for.”

            “Yeah, but when kids are involved, it’s a bit different, I guess. People get protective, and if someone’s corrupting their young minds, well, we can’t just sit by and do nothing…can we?”

            “Do something about what? This sounds like opium dens and mamasans all over again.” The shopkeeper stared the cop down in such a way as to let him feel he was treading on racist-ish ground.

            “For the love of…don’t shoot the messenger! Come on, I’m just relaying to you what’s going on here, as an affair of public concern, you might say. And, hey, the teachers at the school there say that a lot of the kids are into this ghouls and goblins shtick. Guess being a wizard or warrior beats being a dweeb and a reject, even if it’s all in yer head.”

            “So? The police don’t have anything better to do? You never found those counterfeiters you were talking about on the news?”

            Barlow explained what had happened at The Beam. “When it’s threats, gossip…lotta gangs these days, I’m told, younger ‘n younger…it could escalate. Then you’ll be on our asses fer not caring about yer persecuted community!”

            “Wait, you say some kids who are into devil worship went and threatened Lo Tse’s son?” Wheels were turning inside the proprietor’s head.

            “Yep, that’s right. I’d take it with a pinch of salt, but…” The Constable described the youths based on Rupert Tse’s report.

            “I know those kids! Or, alright, okay, I’ve seen them. They came in here to buy some milk snakes. But they didn’t buy a terrarium. Some people have an aquarium already, and they think they can just fill it with dirt and rocks and that’s good enough. I try to tell them different, but if people want to be idiots…Then they came in again and I asked them—I was only joking, by the way—if they knew how to take care of them, because there was no way anyone could keep so many like they bought in one tank. They got all excited, like maybe I was accusing them of mistreating the snakes and causing them to die…which I suppose I was. I think they were afraid they’d get into trouble. They never came back.”

            “Did you report this to the Human Society?”

            “Why? It’s not like I’m a detective. Besides, that species; they aren’t worth anything except when you sell them retail. You can catch them for free Up North. Just look under rocks or in woodpiles around cornfields or at the edge of the forest.”

            Now, this sounded like there really were some kids up to no good and, although there wasn’t an obvious crime, when people’s children are involved, the Law becomes a bit more aggressive. Unfortunately, while school officials were content to shoot the breeze, when pressed for solid information that could lead to any of their own students getting hauled in for police interrogation, they were useless. The cops figured they might have been trying to shield from scrutiny the students who were into weirdness, since they were often the products of broken or abusive homes…It happened all too frequently and still happens, that the kid who tortures animals and starts fires for fun becomes sacred and inviolable and their parents and educators go to extreme lengths to prevent anyone making interventions: see the case of Austin Harrouff.

            Faye was surprised to learn from her dad that cousin Rupert was staying with relatives back in Hong Kong for a holiday. She’d tried hard to convince herself that there was nothing ominous or symbolic in any of the ‘signs’ that kept stubbornly popping into her life. So, he was taking things seriously. Everything at school was normal, though whenever she thought of Rupert’s run-in at The Beam and was on alert for the angry outcasts she figured were the kids who harassed her cousin she never saw anything of them. Bolstering herself against embarrassment, she hung around in the hall, waiting for Grade 11 Chemistry to let out. She knew that Silas McLean was big into D & D because of the printed t-shirts he wore and his habit of affecting Olde English speech when chatting in the student lounge. Alas, when the class streamed into the hallway, Faye saw only Silas’ equally pimply but less portly sister, whom she didn’t know personally. As she contemplated asking Miss McLean whether they might have an opening for a new player at her brother’s next Dungeon meet or whatever they called their gatherings, she could have sworn the geek-girl cut her some stink-eye. She walked away too fast, her head held too straight for a student heading to the lockers after a boring class.

            Irrepressible superstition tainted what consolation Faye was able to obtain. For instance, there was the cat that started to visit her. Faye’s mom didn’t allow pets other than fish and turtles, but Faye herself adored all small, cuddly animals, especially cats. That Saturday, it had first wandered into the backyard when she was digging in the garden, purring like a lawnmower as it sauntered through a gap where the green-vinyl-coated chain link was supposed to meet the wooden fence post. Astonished and delighted, Fate immediately knelt to greet the kitty, which didn’t run away, allowing her to scratch and pet it and tell it what a good boy it was. The only disappointment was the obvious fact that the rotund, well-groomed feline was surely somebody’s pet. With no small degree of anxiety, the girl went into the house and hurried back with a saucer on which she’d arranged morsels of leftover fried grouper. The cat duly gorged itself, accompanying her while she finished her chores before taking its leave with a confident grace that declared, “I shall return.” The cat did return on subsequent days, whether there was a snack or not. His chubby cheeks and googly eyes contrasted cutely with what Faye interpreted as his stoic, philosophical demeanour. If only her mom or dad could fortuitously meet the fellow, they would change their minds. Two or three times she saw him standing watchfully in the park above the watercourse, on which occasions he appeared to recognize her, though he never left his perch to greet her. At least he wasn’t running around in traffic…The fact that Sooty (so she named him) was a black cat with a white patch on his chest and yellow eyes like an owls on the one hand added to the cool factor of his maybe become her pet, but, on the other hand, it called up ominous associations with recent circumstances.

            Sooty was a gentleman and came to pay a formal call upon the Tse family early the next morning, before everyone went to work and school. As befitted a true gentleman, he brought a gift. Being a cat, the gift was the carcass of a small animal. It showed the depth of his devotion that it was no common cat-gift. Only great presence of mind and a tomboyish constitution stifled Faye’s scream: flopped on the paving stones at the threshold were the mangled remains of a snake. Faye inspected the carcass, hiding it from onlookers with her back and shoulders. The serpent was no larger than a biggish specimen of the common garter snakes which she’d come across hiking in the nearby Rouge National Park, but its head was more pointed and its scales were variegated like an ear of Indian corn. It had been slain by Sooty—and he was no tidy assassin. How to dispose of the carcass? If she just chucked it in the garden, her mom would freak out when she happened on it, which she would when doing planting and weeding later in the day. If she attempted to dispose of it in the garbage, it would be reeking by garbage day on Thursday, and if she tried to get rid of it in the park, right then and there, her absence from the family’s morning routine would be noticed, plus there would be a ton of people around. Kids in the fenced field of North Agincourt JPS adjoining the park, old people out for a stroll or tai chi, parents walking their children: someone would see her scrambling along the opposite slope with a dead snake in her hand and they’d see her toss it. People would imagine what they wished about her bizarre behaviour ad she’d never live it down.

            Knowing it was stupid as she was doing it, Faye took two garbage bags from the kitchen along with an empty cereal box—she didn’t want the thing’s texture to be perceptible. So gross! Picking it up with a plastic-wrapped hand like it was a freshly-extruded dog turd, she double-bagged it and plopped it into the cereal box which itself went inside a kitchen bag and into her backpack. There was no break long enough at school, at a suitable time, to allow her to do what needed doing. Despite her profound revulsion, it came along in her backpack to work as well, staying in the Tercel. Only when the bakery closed up and she’d parked the car but not entered her house, could she make the couple-minute trek to the watercourse. It was almost nighttime, light-wise, accelerated by the clouds which spat chill droplets enough to justify an umbrella without mandating a raincoat. Predictably, there was no one else on the path. She made her way down the bank beside a clump of osiers, so as to be invisible from the road and some angles, if not the second-storey windows of the houses. The environmentalist in her flinched at the thought of pitching so much non-biodegradable plastic into Nature, but if she took it out of the bag and didn’t also discard the bag, then the bags full of its residue would be coming home with her and, heaving tumbled them inside out, she’d have no clue which surfaces would be carrying its filth. Out the whole package went, straight into the water. It was disappointingly buoyant and visible among the reeds.

            Intending to walk home by a circuitous route different from how she’d arrived, Faye was startled to observe that the park was not so desolate as she’d imagined. A figure darted across from the bushes on the creekward side into the spruces walling off a cul de sac, or so she believed. She hadn’t seen clearly and the lay of the terrain meant the figure was not silhouetted against the sky. It was a furtive shadow that moved, or seemed to move, about fifty feet in front of her, nothing more, possibly less. This killed any desire she had to walk up to the Huntingwood exit and she instead turned around and headed towards Sheppard, where there were more streetlights and people and cars. Walking the tree-shaded, thinly-travelled sidewalks for long stretches behind the back fences of houses that may well be empty that time of night—not even thinkable.

            She would head to Chartwell Mall, grab something to drink in the food court—some of her friends worked in the mall—and use a payphone to give her dad or brother a call to come pick her up. At the intersection, she waited, waited for the signal to cross. The light changed, but some idiot decided it was his time to gun it and turn the corner, sending her tottering back with a rush of engine-warmed air. Other drivers who felt that their bosses kept them at the office too long seized the opportunity and followed, nose-to-tail.

            “Wah!?!” A heavy hand clapped her shoulder.

            “Easy there,” a low, gravelly voice intoned. “You’re not under arrest. Technically. I just wanna know what was in the bag.”

            Faye was in shock, but the sight of the cop’s badge and gun calmed her. The rumour mill had sown the seeds of many terrors in her mind, all of which were ready to take control of a woman walking home after dark, but none of them was effective against a trained police officer with a .38 special. She led the policeman to the watercourse while he radioed dispatch for backup.

            The commotion and sweeping blue and red lights drew many pairs of eyes to rear windows; many a nose butted up against a mosquito screen. No doubt the folk all had their theories, but they could hardly tell who was who in the chaotic mess of lights and darkness, nor did the plastic bad the detectives retrieved from the reed bed hint at a leg, arm or torso, much less a complete human body. A baby, perhaps? The Constable who had detained—not arrested—Faye was a man of the old school, unashamed of his already less-than-fashionable prejudices. He full knew that the anxious girl from a decent middle-class “Oriental” household was not the cause of either a hate-mail campaign or of socially isolated schoolboys engaging in cult activity. He understood what a police investigation on her record would do when she applied to a prestigious university and was familiar enough with the diverse communities his force served and protected to realize that the consequences the poor girl would face from her family (regardless of whether she was found guilty of anything) would make the provincial women’s correctional centre look like even more of a vacation resort than it already did. When Constable Barlow perfunctorily admonished her for being out alone in the park when there were bad characters on the prowl, what with the incidents with the letters and at the electronics store, Faye explained that the complainant in that case was her cousin, giving Barlow much to ponder. He changed track when he brought her home and discussed matters in the presence of her parents, as was policy. By this point, the police knew that the bag she’d tossed had contained a dead snake, and the story was too silly yet complicated to have been made up on the spot. The Constable had lived in Toronto all his life, including earlier eras when the wilderness intruded far more into the City than it does today, and he had never once seen or heard of snakes of this type living there. “I believe you that it was left by yer cat as a gift. And, seeing as that pet store over on Brimley sells this kind of snake—milk snakes, they call ‘em—I’m pretty sure that’s where it must have come from. Begs the question, though: where did yer cat find it?”

            Ignoring her mother’s protestations about her keeping a pet, Faye answered, “I dunno, he always comes in through the backyard, through a hole in the fence. The house backs onto the park, where you saw me. I’ve seen him prowling around there before, like he’s hunting. I guess he caught it there?”

            Barlow tapped his pen against his notebook. “That would be the place you’d expect snakes to live around here, isn’t it? I mean, there’s no arms or real forests or anything. What d’ya figure, somebody bought ‘em fer pets and they escaped?”

            Faye eyed him coldly, as if she was being bullshitted. “I think it has something to do with those kids who were bothering Rupert.”

            “Okay, but we’re still at square one on that topic. Don’t think it’s gonna go anywhere, not without names. Don’t tell me you don’t know if anybody’s been threatening anybody else, or’s gone missing or there’s anything suspicious at school? You see these people every day…unless you skip all your classes?” Mrs. Tse’s English comprehension was weak, but she perked at the cop’s last sentence.

            “I don’t know…it’s just…” Given that her high school had less than two hundred students, it sounded downright callous of her, but it was the truth. Despite the best teachers that the Scarborough District School Board could provide, and despite all the exhortations not to bully or exclude, high school is as tribal as the Bronze Age. One never has to fall through the cracks if one was never above the floor in the first place. It was possible that Faye was repressing memories of an occasion where she’d reused a prom dance or rebuffed what she and her razor-tongued sestren blew up into an unwanted sexual advance, but, if she was, her face was as blank as a wall of granite. “Like, I don’t know what everybody’s into in their private lives. You know, like, we do things as a family that some people might say are backwards or whatever, like feng shui or burning incense. Some people are just private and so you won’t know if you don’t ask.”

            Barlow grunted and wriggled in his chair. “’Scuse me, let me put it more straightforward. Are there any students, in your school—and this’d be dudes, probably—any kids who are so batshit—pardon my French—so crazy into this Dungeons & Dragons role-playing fantasy stuff that they might think they really are elves or wizards or something and might be real pissed if yer cousin forgot to order their wizard spell books for them, and might, say, buy snakes or other animals from the pet shop to do ritual sacrifices with them in what’s the closest thing you’ve got to a forest grove around here?”

            “What? The park, beside the creek. Right where we were.” There wasn’t really much else she could say. “Sooty—that’s his name—probably got the snake there, but I don’t know anything about cults. Sorry. I’d want to stay away from anything like that.”

            “Guess it’s a matter fer animal control now, then?” The Constable snapped shut his notebook and left.

            Even though it genuinely was ‘the way things are’ back then, Faye was uneasy. A bunch of schools are several thousand stories, each one with a different protagonist. The titles and the G-rated ones are easy to know and are written in report cards, piano recitals, sports team rosters and feel-good articles in the municipal newspaper (then, the Scarborough Mirror). She couldn’t help thinking about those other stories which played out in the same scenery as those where her and her friends were the lead characters. Some of them were centred in houses she saw as she went to and from school, but she’d never realize it except by intuition. In these stories, there were no excessively elaborate lunches prepared by mom. There was frozen pizza, store brand cereal and TV dinners. There were no smiling little girls with Hello Kitty backpacks, no spotless white carpets or lucky goldfish, or gardens, nor, later on, risqué (but not actually risky) group shopathons downtown; no nights at the arcade or tentative forays into avant garde bars and nightclubs (the ones where friends had fun, danced to Euro beats and go drunk, not the ones with private rooms and underage employees).

            These other stories existed in a parallel world where her kind were the resented ‘bad guys,’ interacted with only out of necessity in school or to make purchases at electronics stores. She did not want to know the content of these stories, but she reckoned they included lots of poking at stuff found on railway tracks or in junkyards, stupid dares, and gratuitous violence towards small animals. Sooty would be let into her room tonight; her mom’s objections would be stubbornly overpowered when they came. The climate of fear would make Mr. and Mrs. Tse more indulgent, as when Faye got the Tercel as a gift, long after her birthday but close to a series of newspaper articles about the Scarborough Rapist stalking women as they walked home from bus stops. She consoled herself that the world her stories lived in was bright, prosperous and building new malls and restaurants, while the characters of those other stories were fast leaving, retreating to the clapboard bungalows and ashen THS apartment blocks where they belonged. Soon they would be gone and all would be peaceful and clean…

            Animal control officers did come in and apparently discovered a nest of the invasive snakes. As it hadn’t been that long since they were released and there weren’t a great deal of rodents or other prey in the area, there wasn’t that many of them and the ecologists could be reasonably sure that, if they hadn’t got them all, those remaining would not be able to sustain a population beyond the winter. A complication developed in the course of the cull, however. The animal control workers well understood that the stretch where the creek entered the grassy slope and ran underneath the whole breadth of the Brimley-Sheppard intersection before disgorging into a perpendicular watercourse would be a natural hiding spot for snakes, being dark and insulated within the earth. They wanted to flush the culvert, but it was backed up somewhere between the two entrances. The reason why brought the police again.

            It was the body of a teenage boy, Caucasian, who had been in good health before he ended up there. Some say the name was withheld to spare the family the publicity. Others aren’t aware of any cover up but simply don’t remember. He would not be the first or the last youth whose body was found in a culvert in the spring in Toronto, as radio PSAs regularly warned of the dangers associated with such locations. Kids were more adventurous before the iPhone. Usually, though, the cause of death was drowning, not stabbing. This lad had been stabbed to death. That in of itself, of course, was not enough to justify the story being preserved and retold to us by our teachers and by us to our peers. Tragically, there’s no shortage of teens who get stabbed, typically over drugs, romance or jealousy, or in the course of family violence.

            The thing is, when these kids get stabbed, usually it’s with a knife, or a broken bottle, or occasionally an ice pick or screwdriver. The body in this case had been stabbed with a dagger. Once. Through the heart, as precisely as if the killer had been studying a biology textbook for reference as they did it. That’s right, by the way: a dagger. As in, the implement with a fixed, double-edged blade that one is more likely to come across in a museum than at Home Depot. The coroner, understandably, did not have much experience with murder by dagger, but, based on photographs, he was of the opinion that it was more likely a medieval-style dirk or bollocks dagger than a stiletto. The police did their due diligence, but could only conclude that the murder weapon must have been purchased at great expense from an antique dealer, or else it could have been constructed for free by a machinist in a metal shop. The body was further remarkable in the way it was clothed. The jeans, sweatshirt and sneakers were generic, but, on top of those layers, it was wrapped in a ‘cloak’ that had been fashioned from a plaid woollen blanket and secured with a broach, identified as an item made for medieval and renaissance re-enacting. With no other leads in the immediate area, the police went to Rupert Tse. There was no evidence he was involved in the death and he was never considered a suspect. Oddly enough, he recognized the body as one of the teens who had come into The Beam in search of gaming manuals. Whether he mentioned this fact or not to the police, he could not help being reminded of how the teens had purchased that Dungeons & Dragons-themed replica sword. Like many items of memorabilia manufactured for the hardcore gamer fanbase, it was no mere toy. It was no product of a blacksmith’s forge, either, but the sword’s hilt of cast bronze, leather and fake gems…if you removed it and attached it to an actual steel blade, perhaps ground out in one of the innumerable small workshops or home handyman’s sheds scattered throughout the GTA…It was noteworthy that the kids never returned to The Beam. They might have moved away. A typical Baby Boomer argument would be that they grew out of video games, but the amount of thirty and forty-something gamers today belies such facile assumptions.

            One theory, which was the one our science teacher told, was that the murdered kid had been killed as part of a ritual sacrifice somehow connected with Dungeons & Dragons. We mostly laughed at this idea, but, then, we were the first internet generation and, besides, Canadian society as a whole had become a lot cleaner, safer and more regulated by the time we were in high school. For all the reasons to be nostalgic about the Good Old Days, crime is not one of them. Anyone who has taken a couple Criminology courses at university or who simply likes watching true crime documentaries and podcasts on YouTube will soon by struck by the ridiculous amount of serial killers, cults and families with dungeons in their basements and bodies in their crawlspaces that existed between the late 1960s and the middle of the 1990s. Whether it was socioeconomic factors, technology, or, heck, something in the ether, who’s to say? As for us, we couldn’t see how any connection could exist between a board or video game mass manufactured in a corporate factory and sold in Wal-Mart (or, back then, K-Mart, Zellers or Eaton’s) and gods or spirits, if such things existed. But, then, look at all the crazy tales there are about Ouija boards—none of which came from a witch’s lair or were cursed by a mad monk in a Himalayan monastery. The interpretation of a ritual murder designed to give a teenage Dungeon Master ‘powers’ by sacrificing one of his friends to an entity dreamt up by Gary Gygax isn’t so far-fetched, given what we know people have done in distressingly modern times. It might have been exaggerated by Fate Tse and her friends in retelling to new students and thence onward, from cohort to cohort, through the classroom grapevine that winds between schools and school boards. Then again, her people don’t tend to joke about such things. Engineering or Comp Sci degrees notwithstanding, you can bet money that the denizens of ‘Asiancourt’ will keep their distance from any walls when walking at night during the seventh month of the Lunar Calendar and may demonstrate a queer reluctance to step on cockroaches or to turn round when you call their name in the dark…

            Things began to change as the Great Recession deepened in the 2010s and the municipal government’s policy of relying on real estate as a substitute for an economy drove up housing prices and property taxes. Lockdown lunacy has made the situation worse. As of this writing, the bakery has changed ownership several times, and, though it still hangs on, the Tses and countless other families like them joined the great northward march across the 416-905 border at Steeles, founding new colonies in Markham and Richmond Hill, while the old neighbourhood is being rapidly displaced by folk speaking an alien tongue and harbouring alien values. This strange fragment of local legend belongs to that earlier zeitgeist, but, through pen and word of mouth, it will live on, as is the stubborn habit of legends and their peoples.

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