Chapter 1
A New Prescription
The muttering in the basement began again, and again in the master bedroom of the very old yet very new house, Raymond Kidd lay awake listening.
Two hundred and ten years earlier, 7 Lands End had come into being as a shoebox with six cramped rooms, a simple shoreside cottage on a coast where the topsoil lay as thinly on the granite bedrock as the hair on a balding man’s head. There was no basement then. The idea of digging an underground room in such rocky ground never entered the original builder’s mind. Nor was there a master bedroom upstairs. The upstairs was an attic for storing fishing gear. Two hundred years later, however, when young Nora Lee of the Mikmaq tribe became the lead attorney for Canada’s Assembly of First Nations, she flexed the muscles of her newfound prosperity by buying the cottage for fifty thousand dollars and carrying out two hundred thousand dollars worth of renovations that included a boathouse and woodshed, a new wing, a basement, the conversion of the attic, and a ripping out of walls to make the six rooms one big open one. After the makeover, the only doors were on the bathrooms and closets and the new basement. The contractor protested against adding a basement because of the natural underground flow of the marsh behind the house down to the sea in front. But Nora had insisted, because the basement was to be not only the laundry room but also her exercise room, where while the washer was washing and the dryer drying she could mirror the movements of the obviously successful and splendidly built young men and women on the TV she ordered built into the basement wall.
As it turned out, the new basement flooded with every moderate rain and spring tide and stayed damp even after being pumped out. The sump pump couldn’t handle the influx nor a dehumidifier the mildew. The door had to be kept open to improve the ventilation. But these were minor problems for Nora. The major ones were that her husband-to-be, a talented young Haligonian movie director, abandoned her for Hollywood; and her older sister, while skating on a remote lake in northern Manitoba, plunged through thin ice to a watery grave.
The TV was never built in. Nora moved to Winnipeg to take care of her sister’s seven children, which accorded both with tribal custom and the call of her own broken heart. She sold 7 Lands End to the newly arrived American immigrant Raymond Kidd, accepting his ridiculously low offer because he professed to be a poet and because she wanted her dream that had almost come true to be appreciated by someone with imagination.
Whether Raymond was a real poet or not was anyone’s guess. He had certainly written reams of the stuff and published a couple of thin volumes. But that he was possessed of a vivid imagination was unquestionable. As he lay upstairs listening, he was certain he heard ghosts conversing, that their conversations originated in the basement where the door was always open, and that it was important to his destiny that he understand what they were saying. Strain his ears as he might, though, night after night, year after year, he had never made much sense of it. It was like a radio broadcast so faint and staticky that only a word or two was ever intelligible.
Usually this was enough, because the listening distracted him from the problems on his mind. This particular November night, however, he determined to know more, to get out of bed and go down to the basement and get to the heart of the matter.
He did not have to throw back the covers. They were already off. Having once again awakened from a dream of irreparable misfortune to find himself stewing in his own juices, he was letting bed and body dry out in a cross draft of gentle sea breezes from the open windows at either end of the long room and the open skylight overhead. The skylight was another of Nora Lee’s additions, one that Raymond found pleasing (unlike the perennially flooding basement), especially now with the moon casting a silvery sheen down through it onto the exposed left breast of Mimi, the young Québecois woman beside him. The romantic effect was not spoiled at all but even enhanced by her snoring, that was soft and regular as the beat of the distant surf it accompanied.
By daylight, Raymond would have experienced this intimate exposure more warmly, would have been tempted to touch and fondle, but the moonlight (a light once removed as it were, essentially ethereal) had moved him beyond passion. Had he still possessed a camera, he would have photographed Mimi, but the camera had gone with his wife Cat when they had separated the year before. So he simply lay there, admiring the silvery curve of that breast as if it were a wind-sculpted dune in the desert, until more muttering from the basement reminded him of his resolve.
Still not fully awake, with his first tentative steps he stumbled in the dark into the closed door of the bathroom. He could have gone in and splashed some water on his face — the idea was appealing — but he feared he might wake up too much and lose the voices, so he simply reached in to slip his house robe from its hook before continuing on, groping his way groggily along the hall to the stairwell.
At the landing he paused. What if he did find something down there? What if it was something he didn’t really want to find? He went one step down, and then another. Along with the muttering he now perceived laughter, a sort of veiled amusement that swelled with his approach. His mouth, from drinking too much wine with Mimi, was intolerably dry, and licking his lips with a tongue like a cotton swab was no help.
By the next to the last step, he was no longer sleepy at all, and no longer afraid that the voices would escape him but that he might not escape the voices.
On the last step, with the open door and deeper darkness of the basement before him and his heart doing a doomsday drumroll, he was seized from behind, at the back of the neck, by a hand cold as ice.
“Now, you see,” said Mimi, who had stolen down behind him, “how unpleasant it gets a person when you leave her lying in the bed half-uncovered and all alone.”
As he turned to go back up, his hand in hers, Raymond thought he heard a last noise from below, a sort of contemptuous chuckle, but Mimi seemed oblivious, and so he let himself be led away, his mission unaccomplished.
