Call of the Void, page 1
Contents
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER 19
CHAPTER 20
CHAPTER 21
CHAPTER 22
CHAPTER 23
CHAPTER 24
CHAPTER 25
CHAPTER 26
CHAPTER 27
CHAPTER 28
CHAPTER 29
CHAPTER 30
CHAPTER 31
CHAPTER 32
CHAPTER 33
CHAPTER 34
CHAPTER 35
CHAPTER 36
CHAPTER 37
CHAPTER 38
CHAPTER 39
CHAPTER 40
CHAPTER 41
CHAPTER 42
CHAPTER 43
CHAPTER 44
CHAPTER 45
CHAPTER 46
CHAPTER 47
CHAPTER 48
CHAPTER 49
CHAPTER 50
CHAPTER 51
CHAPTER 52
CHAPTER 53
CHAPTER 54
CHAPTER 55
CHAPTER 56
CHAPTER 57
CHAPTER 58
CHAPTER 59
CHAPTER 60
CHAPTER 61
CHAPTER 62
CHAPTER 63
CHAPTER 64
CHAPTER 65
CHAPTER 66
CHAPTER 67
CHAPTER 68
CHAPTER 69
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Landmarks
Cover
Title Page
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Page list
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CALL OF THE VOID
Copyright © 2024 J.T. Siemens
All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication—reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, recording, or otherwise), or stored in a retrieval system—without the prior consent of the publisher is an infringement of copyright law. In the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying of the material, a licence must be obtained from Access Copyright before proceeding.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Title: Call of the void / J.T. Siemens.
Names: Siemens, J. T., author.
Description: Series statement: A Sloane Donovan mystery
Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20230453872 | Canadiana (ebook) 20230453902 | ISBN 9781774390863 (softcover) | ISBN 9781774390870 (EPUB)
Classification: LCC PS8637.I27 C35 2024 | DDC C813/.6—dc23
Editor for the Press: Matt Bowes
Cover and interior design: Michel Vrana
Cover images: iStock
Author photo: Tamea Burd Photography
NeWest Press wishes to acknowledge that the land on which we operate is Treaty 6 territory and a traditional meeting ground and home for many Indigenous Peoples, including Cree, Saulteaux, Niitsitapi (Blackfoot), Métis, and Nakota Sioux.
NeWest Press acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, the Alberta Foundation for the Arts, and the Edmonton Arts Council for support of our publishing program. We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for our publishing activities
NeWest Press
#201, 8540-109 Street
Edmonton, Alberta T6G 1E6
www.newestpress.com
No bison were harmed in the making of this book.
To A.J. Devlin
CHAPTER 1
For a long time, I believed that if I ran fast enough, the dead couldn’t catch up with me.
I was wrong.
But it didn’t stop me from trying.
Feet gliding over rock, root, and earth, my body felt so light that at any moment I might lift off the earth’s surface and fly. With a fresh gust of speed, I caught up to a lanky and bearded runner, his numbered race bib reading 67. As I passed him, he gave a double take, his eyes registering shock at having been passed by a woman.
The trail rose abruptly, and I heard him huffing as he scrambled to catch me. A glance at my watch timer revealed 5 : 36 : 10 … 11 … 12 ...
Crossing a wooden footbridge over a deep ravine, I glimpsed a rushing creek at the bottom.
Flash. An ancient Winnebago abandoned in a snowy forest.
A scream from within.
Coming off the bridge, my knee buckled, and I stumbled against the mossy bark of a Douglas fir. Pushing away from the tree, I kept going, down the trail that suddenly seemed darker, full of menace. Number 67 zigzagged past on the next downhill. “Nice try,” he called back, before disappearing around the next bend.
I shook it off and kept going, feeling the blood pounding in my head and the sear of lactic acid in my legs. In the minutes it took to regain my rhythm, a compact, blonde woman edged past, moments later followed by a taller brunette in a red toque. I trailed them down the steep and gnarly section leading to Deep Cove.
The echoing scream hit me again. My vision juddered and my left foot caught a root. The ground swung up. My wrist took the brunt of the fall, and my forehead smacked against another root. Rolling onto my back, I lay there, stunned and gasping, staring up beyond the spires of the trees at a patch of ash gray sky, a distant bird circling.
Touching my forehead, my fingers came away bloody. I took a deep breath and pushed up, wincing when I put weight on my wrist. If it was broken, nothing I could do about it now. Except get up and move.
Several hundred yards down the trail, the bobbing red toque disappeared where the trail ended, and wooden stairs led down to the pavement.
Adrenaline kicked in and I began to jog, quickly picking up speed until I was again flying straight down the trail. No brakes. Rock and tree blurred past. The weightless sensation returned as my feet skimmed down the stairs. Feet hit pavement and I veered right down Panorama Drive. A row of faces cheered.
Ignore everyone.
Except Red Toque, fifty yards up the road, and the blonde a little farther beyond.
Don’t think, just breathe, breathe and kick.
More cheers, more bodies. Rounding the sweep of road leading to the cove, I caught up to Red Toque, passing her at the same moment as my shoes hit the grass of the finishing stretch.
“Go, Sloane, go!”
I recognized the voice as belonging to my friend Karin.
Breathe and kick, breathe and kick.
Suddenly the screams and shouts went mute, replaced by a shrill whine in my left ear, a vestige of an old injury.
Overtaking the compact blonde fifty yards from the finish, time suddenly seemed to slow, and despite my distorted hearing, my other senses heightened. I noticed the choppy blue waters of Deep Cove, people standing on boats, watching the race. Across Indian Arm, the green mountains of Belcarra rose in the distance. I could smell the smoke from the wildfires that were devastating the province’s interior, hundreds of kilometres away.
The digital timer above the finish line counted: 5 : 48 : 41…42…43…
A sea of smiling faces mutely cheered. A gust of wind blew off the water. A flash of a blue-gray face caused my stomach to drop and my shoes to fill with cement. It was like someone had pulled the plug to my power source, slowing my sprint to a shuffle. The other two women passed me metres from the finish.
Amid the crowd in front of the announcer’s podium stood my sister Stephanie, wearing a nightgown and holding her infant daughter against her chest. Charlie wore blue pyjamas and stood at her side, holding his mother’s free hand.
My sister’s accusing eyes pinned me to the spot. So did Charlie’s.
They weren’t cheering.
Because they were dead.
Two other blue-faced women stood further back in the crowd: Geri and Eva, one middle-aged, the other in her late teens. Geri’s eyes carried disappointment, while one of Eva’s was dangling from her mangled face, and the other was just an empty socket.
Squeezing my eyes shut for several seconds, I took a deep breath. When I opened them, all the dead were gone.
The moment I crossed the finish line, Karin rushed up. “Sloane, what’s wrong? Oh my God, you’re hurt!”
“It’s nothing,” I said, just as my legs buckled and I nearly fell.
She pulled my arm over her shoulders and led me toward the medical tent. “You almost won,” she said. “You came so close.”
CHAPTER 2
A ball cap and aviators hid most of the bandage on my forehead as I stepped from my black Jeep onto Commercial Drive. A smoky haze hung in the air, so thick you could taste the thousands of burning trees. On the sidewalk outside Prado Café, several masked-up people passed by. For a summer day, the normally bustling thoroughfare seemed apocalyptically quiet, street-front patios mostly vacant save for the odd die-hard or smoker who’d long stopped giving a shit.
My skull throbbed, and my wrist was sprained and swollen, though thankfully unbroken. My palms and knees were scraped and scabbed, and despite my best efforts, I could not manage to walk without a slight limp. The Knee-Knacker was the first race I had done in years, and it had taken more out of me than I cared to admit, and not merely on a physical level.
You think the monsters have died and the ghosts have vanished, but they’re always there, waiting. They die when you die, or maybe they follow you around for all of eternity. There’s a happy thought.
On the corner of Commercial and 4th, beneath a ratty blue-and-gold Corona parasol, sat seventy-two-year-old M.J., the hood’s perennial busker. She strummed a half-decent “Stairway to Heaven” on her ukulele while wearing a gas mask that looked like it dated back to the First World War. Her pet skunk, Pepi, dozed on a blanket beside an open guitar case sprinkled with coins and the odd bill.
I tossed a toonie into the case. M.J. glanced up, stopped playing, and pushed the gas mask up on her forehead. Her frizzy, gray hair stood straight up above the mask, like she’d stuck a fork in an electrical outlet. She studied me for a moment. “Darlin’, you keep up the rough stuff, soon you’re gonna look like me.”
“Then I’ll take up the banjo,” I said. “Give you some competition.”
“Start practicing,” she said.
“Start learning a new Zeppelin cover. You’ve been playing ‘Stairway to Heaven’ for the past three months straight.”
“I only play it when I see you coming up the street. Seems to suit you somehow. By the way, you gotta be nuts to run a race with all this crap in the air. You got any idea what that can do to your lungs?”
I shrugged and feigned a hacking cough. M.J. shook her head like I was a lost cause, then gestured with her thumb at the three-storey redbrick building behind her. “You got a visitor. She’s been up there about ten minutes.”
