A projection snapped into place in the air between us. It was a handwritten document in a foreign alphabet.
“What is this?”
“I think it might be supporting evidence. It’s a letter,” she said. “From 1912.”
“What alphabet’s this?” I asked.
“Seriously?”
“What, should I be able to read it?” I peered closer, and recognized a word. No, two. It was almost English, but warped and slanted; there was a certain beauty to it, but the letters were misformed. Some kind of proto-English?
“Gaspery, that’s cursive,” she said.
“I don’t know what that is.”
“Right,” she said, with that maddening patience I’d come to expect from her. “Let me switch to audio.”
She toggled something in the clouds, and a man’s voice filled the room.
Bert,
Thank you for your kind letter of 25th April, which made its way across the Atlantic and across Canada at a snail’s pace and arrived in my hands only this evening.
How am I, you ask? The honest answer, brother, is that I’m unsure. This comes to you from a candlelit room in Victoria—you’ll forgive, I hope, the dash of melodrama, but I feel that I’ve earned it—where I’ve taken up lodging in a pleasant boardinghouse. I have given up all thought of establishing myself in business and wish only to return home, but this is a comfortable exile and my remittance provides for my day-to-day necessities.
I’ve had a very strange time here. No, that’s not quite it. I’ve had a somewhat dull time here—my fault, not Canada’s—except for a strange interlude in the wilderness, which I shall attempt to recount. I had travelled north from Victoria with Niall’s old friend from school, Thomas Maillot, whose surname I’m possibly misspelling. For two or three days we moved north up the coast on a tidy little steamboat, weighed down with provisions, until at last we arrived at Caiette, a village consisting of a church, a pier, a one-room schoolhouse, and a handful of houses. Thomas continued on to a logging camp, a short distance up the coast. I elected to remain for the moment in the boardinghouse in Caiette, for the sake of enjoying the beauty of that place.
One morning in early September, I ventured into the forest, for reasons too tedious to relate, and a few paces in, I came upon a maple tree. I stopped there a moment, to catch my breath, and then there occurred an incident that struck me at the time as some kind of supernatural event, but seems to me in retrospect to have been perhaps some kind of fit.
I was standing there in the forest in the sunlight, and then all at once there was darkness, as abruptly as a candle snuffed out in a room, and in the darkness I heard the notes of a violin, an inscrutable noise, and with this a strange impression of being somehow fleetingly indoors, in some echoing cavernous space like a train station. Then it was over and I stood in the forest. It was as though nothing had happened. I staggered back out to the beach and was violently sick on the rocks. The following morning, concerned for my well-being and determined to quit that place and return to some semblance of civilization, I began the return journey to the little city of Victoria, where I remain.
I have a perfectly adequate room at a boardinghouse by the harbour, and amuse myself with walks, books, chess, and the occasional bit of watercolour painting. As you know, I’ve always adored gardens, and there’s a public garden here in which I’ve found great solace. Not to trouble anyone, but I did consult a doctor, who is confident in his diagnosis of migraine. Seems a peculiar sort of migraine that doesn’t involve any pain in one’s head, but I suppose I’ll accept it in lieu of an alternate explanation. I cannot forget it, however, and the memory unsettles me.
I hope you are well, Bert. Please convey my affection and respect to Mother and Father as well.
Yours,
Edwin
The audio stopped. Zoey swiped the projection into the wall and came to sit with me. There was a heaviness about her that I’d never seen before.
“Zoey,” I said, “you seem more upset than…I’m not sure I completely understand.”
“Which operating system do you use on your device?”
“Zephyr,” I said.
“Same. You remember that weird Zephyr bug a couple years ago, this only lasted a day or two, but sometimes you’d open a text file on your device and you’d hear whatever music you’d been listening to last?”
“Sure. That was annoying.” I only vaguely remembered it.
“It was file corruption.”