I worked my way back through the closet to my room. I was wondering why I was identifying with this prison cell when I heard Bagot’s car start up. For the plot that was distilling in my head, I thought that the window with the forty-foot view (straight down) had better be open. I ran the window-sash up as far as it could go. Good, it jammed and stayed open. I listened with my head out the window to the sound of Bagot’s car growing fainter on the night air. The engine noise blended with the night noises like a black cat vanishes under a fire escape.
I knew that my way out of the lodge led through the closet, to the next room then out the front door. But how was I supposed to get by my guards? I didn’t like the shot-gun in the next room. I didn’t trust myself with it, and I didn’t know how I could stop three men with two shells. I knew one of them at least was armed, but I couldn’t remember whether it was Geoff or Len. If I could make some kind of noise, I could get the three of them to come into my room. That would be tidy. I liked that.
I went through all the drawers in the room looking for an idea. I came up with a sewing basket, three paperclips and a rubber band. A little more looking brought me a dirty toothpick. Then it hit me. It might just work. I placed the tin bucket upside-down close to the bureau with the lamp on it. I put a piece of lath normally used to prop open the window on top of the bucket. It reached within an inch of the bureau top. I raised the bucket with a few lurid paperbacks. There were four spools of thread in the sewing basket, the strongest looked like black linen, the kind my brother Sam used to manipulate his marionettes when he was twelve. I tied one end to the lath, and balanced the lamp so that it teetered over the bucket but was held up by my strut of lath. When I pulled the thread, I thought, the lamp would crash down noisily on the bucket. I ran the thread behind the couch so that it wouldn’t be the first thing the boys saw when they heard the noise and came in to investigate. I led the thread into the cupboard and into the adjoining room. Then I put the wallboard back in place and took a minute to catch my breath, get used to the dark and prepare myself for whatever was going to happen next.
Like the old nursery rhyme, I set things in motion. The thread began to pull the strut, the strut began to upset the lamp, the lamp began to make a racket, the racket began to worry the boys, the boys began to search the house … I heard them open the bolt on my door. And as soon as the three of them were in there, I slipped out and slid the bolt on the door behind them. I was running out the front door with a shot-gun under my arm before I heard them yell for the first time.
THIRTEEN
When I got into the bush that ran along the side of the canal, I tried to orient myself. I had never been totally familiar with the territory, but my teenage memory gave me some encouragement. The black mass ahead of me was the shadow of the Niagara Escarpment. At the top I could see a light in what must have been a watchman’s hut at the quarry at the rim of the cliff face. Below I thought I could make out the metal girders that formed a railroad bridge. I knew the bridge, and seeing it, or even imagining I saw it, made me feel better. Somewhere out to my right, I guessed I was facing south, ran two rights-of-way, two generations’ ideas of where the canal should run. They crossed like a double cross a mile below where I was standing. If I wanted to get back to the city, I was going to have to find a way across the old canal and the new one.
I didn’t hear the door being broken down, but it couldn’t have taken the boys very long. The night was still noisy with my own breathing, and a feeling that somewhere out there great ships were moving heavily through dark waters. I tried to think. Well, to be honest it wasn’t thinking. At times like this I get more intuitive than thoughtful. Sometimes I can’t tell the difference. I knew that I couldn’t cross the steel bridge. They would be waiting for me there. At least they would if they knew the territory half as well as I did. I stopped and listened. Nothing. Through the dark, looming up at me was the grey form of a discarded lock on the old canal. It looked like a dry bone, with all the wooden and metal works removed from it. I headed south, towards the escarpment and the railway line. There wasn’t much cover, but at least there wasn’t a moon to give me away. On the top of the first lock I came to I sat on an ancient bollard and could make out the rope burns along the limestone facing at the edge of the lock. The lock gates had disappeared years ago, so there was no way across the canal here. I pushed on, keeping the canal to my right.
Faintly, I could hear a car motor. That would be them, heading to cut me off. Once they got to the tracks they could cover a fair stretch. I’d have to cross where the bridge crossed the canal or head east until I was out of sight. I could see the criss-crossing girders closer now, and for a moment they were swept by headlights. Then to my right the deep whistle of a lake boat nearly lifted me by my belt into a stunted sumach that had grown between blocks of limestone. I could see the slow progress of the ship’s riding lights as it moved into position at the bottom step of the twin-lift locks. The old canal took twenty-five locks to lift boats in the 1870s up the escarpment. The present canal did the same job for ships three times as big, in eight huge cement steps.
I could now see the railway embankment. There was no way I could slip by under the bridge without being seen. And the embankment was high enough so that I’d be seen clambering up the slope. I kept to a fringe of sumachs that began in a depression that ran east, parallel to the railway. It suited me, so I went along with it. From the edge I could still see the bridge, and now I could make out a flashlight beam running up and down the rails. My comfortable, well-shaded depression turned towards the tracks, and just as I thought that we might have come to the parting of the ways, I could see that it was running straight for a culvert that ran under the tracks. It was made to order. It was even dry until I was within fifty feet of the entrance, then I felt both feet go wet at the same moment.
It was a narrow squeak through the culvert. Ahead of me something scampered close to the ground. Things brushed across my face, and my head banged into the overhead arch every time I tried to give my aching back a break. As I eased through, it sounded like a pipe-band rehearsal; the sloshing of my feet through the muck between the stretches of water nearly deafened me. I was glad when I came out the other side. By now I was very close to the base of the escarpment. If I had to escape to the south, that meant I’d have to go straight up.
I looked back towards the bridge. That was when the beam of light caught me. The glare blinded me and I heard the sound of the bullets cutting through the branches of the trees before I heard the echo of the shots bombarding off the face of the escarpment. I turned the shot-gun on them and let them have one blast. When I stopped running I was at an intersection of depressions. The one I was in turned east, the larger one, like a track for oxen, moved south-west. That was roughly towards the new canal, and gave me the feeling of doubling back on my pursuers, so I took it. It went low, lower than the other stream-bed, and the longer I followed it the more it seemed like an abandoned road or trail.
By now the track had continued in a gentle curve moving in the direction of the old canal. At the same time it was cutting deeper into the ground, giving me complete protection on both sides. My feet slipped in and out of muck and tripped over stones as I went. By starlight I could only see a few feet ahead at a time. For some reason, I trusted this trail. I kept moving. There was a dark round spot ahead. I was almost on top of it before I could see that it was the handsome entrance of a tunnel. I could make out a curve of well-matched stone blocks over the arch. From where I was standing, it looked enormous, although it couldn’t have been much more than about twenty feet high and fifteen or sixteen across.