The Conduit Chapter 3: Oblong Reflection

North Bay, 2023. 

It took most of the trip out to her dad’s place, but around Laurier Garden Centre the crowd on the bus thinned out enough for Lori to find a seat at the back. Mercifully, the fan blew tepid air against her blazing hot skin. She rubbed her eyes, shifting the reusable bag from the seat next to her to between her legs as a heavy-set man in a suit wedged his way into it, nodding appreciatively to her while he dabbed his forehead with a folded handkerchief.  

Lori looked out the window as houses with front yards clogged with soccer nets and bicycles gave way to garages and an army surplus store set off from the road. The bus whined loudly as the driver matched pace with, and then merged onto, the highway that carved through the tree-choked landscape southward. 

Lori eyed the rest of the passengers wearily. Specifically the big man who’d sat next to her. She couldn’t help but feel like his eyes were moving from her adidas slides, up her legs, and into the bag that carried the camera. She folded one leg over, crossing her arms over her oversized Gundam Wing T-shirt. Using her heel, she slid the bag closer to her, smacking the bottom of her sandal off her heel nervously, stopping abruptly as the man lingered on the arc of her foot. Lori turned her body toward the window. 

She shifted awkwardly as the person to her right shuffled by her at the next stop. Sliding into their vacant seat she tried not to focus on the heat emanating from it and instead felt the relief of gaining some distance from the rest of the bus. Her shoulders rose and dropped with a sigh that she pushed out with extra emphasis hoping the fat creep would take the hint. 

Lori didn’t know if it was the heat or if she was getting sick, but she’d been agitated all day. Julie and the girls had erupted into the silence of the house at two-twenty in the morning, slamming cupboards and talking in stage whispers that were perforated with fits of shrieking laughter and the lazy ramblings of the latest meathead Jayla brought home. 

Lori startled from a dead sleep, momentarily dazed as her eyes adjusted to her surroundings. She was haunted by the ghoulish laughter that gripped her in her dream state before realising it was the girls she lived with. Still, it had taken a few moments for the fugue of that twisted laughter to lift and shift to the familiar (if not annoying) confirmation that the girls were back from a night at the bar. 

Lori untwisted herself from the sheets and jumped from the bed. She waited just outside her door, listening. She shifted her weight to one foot, then the other, then the first one gain trying to find a stance that didn’t feel like her bladder had a bowling bal on it. 

As soon as she heard the girls move from the kitchen she threw the door open and shuffled on tip toe to the bathroom.  

She couldn’t get back to sleep after that, and lay there listening to Jayla’s rising stage moans as her cheap ikea headboard slammed another dent in the wall. 

“So much for social distancing” Lori muttered as she stuffed her pillow over her head. A sudden burst of anger rippled through her and escaped her mouth in a muffled scream that hopefully killed the mood for her slutty housemate. 

 Lori laughed to herself as she stepped from the bus, remembering how the noise had died down shortly after that. She stayed in her room for the better part of the day. She was surprised to see Meathead come back just before she left. He brought friends this time and it wasn’t long before Lori connected the dots. It was round 2 at ‘Jayla’s Place.’ 

Lori took the bus to River Road. She was shooing deer flies away with her free hand almost as soon as she’d stepped into the blazing sun. She shifted the weight of the retro Black’s bag. 

Melancholy suddenly descended on her. 

Why did I even bring this? It’s not like he’s going to like it. 

She wiped her palms on her shirt as a rabbit raced across the road just ahead of her. A torrent of anxiety was twisting her stomach and tainting her perception toward the negative. She took a long, slow breath  trying to centre herself within her surroundings. She noticed the white of the birch trees, and beyond them the red shingles of an abandoned house. 

Lori distracted herself with the old Miligan place. The house crept into her field of view, a vision of peeling shingles and broken bricks. The vacant windows peered through a gap in the trees. It stood at the end of a winding driveway overgrown with dandelions and wild vines. The glass that wasn't boarded up was smashed and stood out like broken teeth in a crooked smile. 

The fence listed to one side before falling down all together halfway across the overgrown yard. Pigeons bobbed and nodded to one another like funeral attendants muttering condolences to themselves.. 

Rumour said it was haunted. The urban legend dictated that you had to stand dead centre of the living room on a moonless night. If you asked if RIta was home three times a woman would whisper how you would die. Others said she was a wraith that haunted the house, that if she saw you she would chase you out with her bloody sickle. 

As someone who was bullied relentlessly in high school, Lori was intimately familiar with many spectres of human cruelty. She didn’t know the full story about Rita Milligan, but recognized a sort of kinship in her victimization. She was a poor woman who was slaughtered in her own home, the place she was supposed to feel safest. Lori figured her ghost would want to be left in peace, rather than dissected by a society that refused to leave the dead in peace.  

She walked by the house everytime she went to see her dad. It was one of the few things that reminded her of mom. The house had belonged to her family once. Or maybe her relative had been a friend? Lori tried to remember every time she walked by. Today shouldn’t have been any different, but the house sung to her. Its bricks radiated warmth from beneath their crumbled faces. The ripped bits of curtain clinging to a rod over the kitchen window danced in the breeze, becoming her as a lover would to the bedroom. She stopped at teh foot of the driveway. In the woods beyond the house the evergreens swayed as if nodding their agreeance to her approach.

All of it held a kind of thrumming magnetism that pulled her down the driveway one step at a time. Before she realized fully what she was doing, Lori was so close she could make out some of the Coors and Labatt 50 cans strewn forgotten in the black space of the living room. A condom wrapper twitched at her feet, lodged between two blades of grass that held it in place. Her eye was drawn to the movement before flicking to the darkened basement window. Seasons of crushed and crumpled brown leaves lodged in the window frame. It was small, barely big enough for her to slip through. Though why the thought of entering the house had suddenly entered her mind Lori couldn;t say. She knelt, trying to peek inside, but had no idea what she was looking for. It was as if she’d started watching a girl who looked just like her do something she would never dream of attempting. The cavity beneath the house held the same magnetic pulse that seemed to arc through the bottoms of her feet, up her calves, and settle just below her navel. Lori sunk to her haunches, her arms resting on her thighs, the bagged camera between them. 

There was a small flash in the window, lighting up the mouse chewed furniture and an old mattress and box spring. It was brief. A white brilliance like a camera flash before the basement was darkened again. Lori blinked the spots out of her eyes. She pressed her nose against the cold glass. She saw it again. This time she thought she saw the outline of a person. Was someone trapped? She reached out for the window and tried to slide it open. Decades of rust and dirt kept the single pane of glass rooted in place. 

In a rapid succession of frantic jerks Lori tried again. An almost obsessive need to enter the home took her over even as her rational mind filled with forensic files episodes she’d seen that started with a man luring a woman to an isolated location like this. 

Glass crunched above her. She looked through her mess of black hair. Her eyes searched wildly for what disturbed her concentration. She gasped as she locked eyes with a man on the other side of the living room window. He was short, almost her size. He wore a grey suit with a blazing white shirt underneath. She caught the glint off gold cufflinks before he tilted his head slightly, his eyes taking on an almost avian curiosity as if he were a raven regarding a piece of roadkill that had not yet succumbed to death despite its injuries. 

Lori heard a low rumbling. She saw movement behind him. It was something swirling and flipping through the darkness just beyond his left shoulder. The rumbling began to grow. The darkness seemed to grow with it. It began enveloping the beer cans and candle nubs strewn among the floor. 

It was that growing darkness, with its guttural snarling, that finally broke Lori from her spell. She snaked her feet underneath her and  skittered backwards until she could stand. She almost lost a sandal as she threw gravel and a chunk of asphalt in her haste. To get to the road.  

In another second her flip flops were slapping onto the pavement as the trees began to once more swallow the dilapidated house behind her. She didn’t turn around to look until she was down the road far enough that she could see the trailer park. She eyed the gap on the sie of the road as she caught her breath. She waited t osee someone step out from the driveway. 

He\ll see you and start running. Keep walking. Stop staring at the place and go. Lori hitched another breath and started walking. She switched hands with the camera and kneaded her side where she started to cramp.   

River’s Edge Tent and Trailer park had been standing since the mid sixties, and most of the homes were starting to show their age. A collection of them leaned as close to the banks of the La Vase River as city code would allow. 

Dean Sellers’ Toyota Tercel was parked beside his powder blue single wide. Beyond it a heron strolled through the shallows looking for supper. In the small parkette near the centre of the grounds kids screamed and ran circles around each other in a haphazard game of tag that spilled into the laneway and adjoining yards. Lori heard one of the kids' parents threaten an end to the game if the kids couldn’t keep it to the park like she’d asked. The shout came from a closed screen door where the smell of cooked pasta wafted on the breeze. 

 Lori stared at teh black square that was the screen door, waiting to see the shadows begin to shift again, as if she were stuck in some nightmare world. Her stomach growled and she shook off the eerie feeling of double vision. She rolled her sleeves, wiping her hand across her forehead as she did so. She expected it to be soaked but her palm came away dry. 

The darkened square reminded her too much of the broken living room window of the Miligan place. Her sandals kicked gravel as she hustled up the three wooden steps to her Dad’s front door. 

The screen door was patched with gorilla tape and let out the same stiff creak Lori remembered from when she lived there. 

Dean Sellers sat at his kitchen table nursing a coke. The window he gazed out of overlooked the entrance to teh trailer park. He sucked foam from his mustache absently. A nervous habit that always got under Lori’s skin. 

“Sorry dad. The bus was late leaving the terminal.” Lori set her bag on the bed in her old room. Kicking her sandals off she padded to the fridge to get a can of coke for herself. She smiled as she saw both original and diet cans fighting for space with Hamburger Helper leftovers and a corningware bowl of Jell-o covered in a sheet of plastic wrap. In response to her excuse, her father simply held up his iPhone. His eyebrows shooting up and his mouth a tight line as he regarded his daughter with eyes that accused as much as they teased. 

“You’re thumbs break on the wait?” He asked 

“Well– no. I mean yes I could have texted, I just didn’t think of it” Lori popped the tab of her diet coke and the snap of it filled the awkward silence as she glanced over the vinyl flooring wishing her dad would stop staring at her like that. 

Dean stayed silent. He let his daughter’s excuse hang in the air. He could wait. RiRi was a terrible liar. He heard a muffled squeal through the glass and watched one of the Baker brothers (it looked like Tim) fly across the yard as his brother gave chase. A few moments later Rhiannon Baker stormed across the lawn after her boys, a wooden spoon clutched in her hand.

“Okay.” Lori broke her silence. “I stopped at the Miligan place I– the lighting was too perfect. I’ve got a project coming up after reading week and wanted to get some inspiration.” 

Dean held his daughters stare a beat longer before asking, “did you get any good shots?” 

“Nothing.” Lori shook her head. “Deleted them as I went.” 

“Mm.” Dean nodded. “Well listen, try to remember to text me okay? I damn near started looking for you.” 

“Sorry dad.” 

Dean set his glass down, sucking the moisture from his mustache. He held his arms wide. A grin bloomed and his eyes softened. Lori rolled her eyes and grinned back making a show like walking across the kitchen to her fathers embrace was the biggest inconvenience of her life. She kept her arms pinned to her sides as Dean wrapped her in a bear hug. Only returning the embrace after he began swaying with her. 

“Okay, Okay dad.” Lori laughed “you’re going to crush me.” 

Dean planted a wet kiss on her cheek with a smack. His beard pricking her cheek and neck. “I’m making tacos,.” he said t before giving one final squeeze and releasing her from the vice-like grip all fathers seemed to be imbued with. “Go sit down, it shouldn’t be long.”   

He moved to the counter and began pulling pots from the cabinet beneath the microwave stand. Lori busied herself on her phone, pulling her dad’s favourite Pearl Jam album up on Spotify. She connected to his bluetooth speaker and soon Edie Veder filled the quiet space between them. 

“Great pull RiRi.” Dean gave a small sway, trying his best soft shoe routine in his well work Berks. He ran his arm across his forehead and turned on the oscillating fan. He glanced over his shoulder, adjusting it so his daughter could get some of the air movement. She hadn’t stopped sweating since she came in. 

At the table Lori chewed her lip as she scrolled through her social media. She didn’t love lying to her dad about why she was late. But technically she hadn’t lied, she did stop at the Miligan house. 

But you left out what you saw. That’s lying by omission 

Alright, maybe it was, but how could she explain to him what she saw when she wasn’t even sure of it herself. It had been a man, that much she knew, but the way the darkness moved, could it just have been a trick of the light? She had no idea. She remembered his boney hands sticking out from his cuffs, and the way his hollow eyes seemed to drink her in with a fixation that bordered on lust. But was that accurate? She tried to focus on the memory but found, like a dream, it evaded her mind's eyes the more she tried to examine it until she started doubting she’d even seen anything at all. 

“Are you eating?” Dean’s sudden question had the same effect as if he’d come and snapped his fingers in her face. She blinked and looked up from her phone. 

“Huh?” Lori sputtered 

“Don’t say ‘huh’ Lori it makes you sound like some slack jawed hillbilly.” 

“Pardon?” Lori corrected feeling herself flush. She crossed her legs underneath her on the kitchen chair and turned to stare out the window. Her eyes bouncing from her dad’s rusted out car to the woman marching by yanking two boys by their arms back to a white double wide with red trim. 

“Are you eating?” This time Dean’s tone was softer, more compassionate. “I only ask so I know how much to make. I’m sorry kid I know how that sounded, I didn’t mean to put you on the spot.” 

“I’ll have two.” Lori said, her eyes still lingering on anything but her father’s face. It wasn’t as bad as it used to be, nothing like when she stayed in Toronto, but sometimes her anxiety still made it hard to do simple things like eat or sleep. Even now her thoughts began to spiral. 

 Why would he ask me like that? Do I look sick? Is it my clothes? She turned on her phone’s front facing camera and assessed her oversized T shirt. The garment seemed to envelop her in a way that it was a wonder her dad could make any kind of judgement on what was beneath at all. 

It must be your shorts then, your stick thin legs must be poking out of the denim like matchsticks. He’s angry that you won’t eat the food he’s taking his time to make. 

The thought was sudden and held such intensity that for a moment Lori was seized by a spirallying despair that plunged her into a brooding despair as Dean put the plates on the table. She offered one word answers and broken eye contact as her Jell-o shuddered under the scrutiny of her prodding spoon. 

Dean cleared the plates. 

Lori drummed her fingers on the table, watching the moths and other insects tap relentlessly against the kitchen window seeking the blazing salvation of the overhead light. Regret thrummed through her, tightening her chest and making her eyes burn. 

I should have just stayed home, then I could at least be comfortable eating. She let her legs fall back to the floor and flexed her feet. Dean stood with his back to his daughter. He wiped down the pan that browned the beef even as the sicily scent lingered in the small space. He placed it on the drying rack and was about to offer Lori a ride home. Her visit reminded him of when she’d lived there, shortly before she left for school. 

You’re too similar, She’s got your temper. He cracked a coke, took a swig, and slurped the foam from his mustache. Scratching his thickly bearded cheek as he muttered a small apology to Lori’s pointed glare. 

He suddenly beamed as memory dawned on her arrival. He hadn’t been so annoyed with her lateness to notice she’d chucked something into her old room. “Hey, did you bring me a present? You’ve been teasing it through text, is that it?” he nodded toward the bedroom where Lori had thrown the Speed Graphic. 

She snorted out a half hearted laugh. “Not a present.” she muttered. “Something I thrifted.”  

Dean stood for a moment longer. “Well–” For a minute he didn’t think she would move. He thought he’d pushed her too far. That his little girl, the one who sat with him on the couch drinking milk and watching thundercats re-runs was gone for good. He braced for the sickening dread that her leaving would be the start of a yawning chasm between the two of them before he only saw her at Christmas and his birthday. Her life an unravelling blank scroll that remained forever foreign to his eyes. Dean shut his eyes. He swallowed a mouthful of cola. From the darkness he heard her chair legs scrape across the floor in halting jerks as she got her feet under her. Then he heard those same feet, ones that were so small for so long, pad to the bedroom. Dean took his seat at the head of the table.  

Lori dropped the bag in front of him. She sat across from her dad and set her chin on her hand as she watched him untie the shopping bag handles. When he peered inside, his bushy eyebrows shot up. 

“Whoa. Are you serious?” 

As serious as anorexia. Lori’s thoughts needled. 

“Geez I haven't seen one of these– It must be about 40 years, if that, maybe longer. Lori, how did you score this? He said. He seemed to come alive as his hands crawled over it. 

“I found it at a second hand shop. It was a steal. Apparently it’s got film in it. I got the stuff to develop too. I’m just not smart enough to figure out how to do it.” 

“Stop,” Dean said. A single command that eliminated what little warmth was left in the room. He scratched his chest. “I don’t want to hear that kind of talk. It’s that kind of attitude that– look just let me see what I’ve got, Kay? I assume that’s why you brought this to me?” 

“Just tell me how it works.” Lori said. 

He pushed his chair back and made for the bookshelf beside the TV. His oblong reflection walked toward him in the darkened screen glass. His wheezing breath and shuffling feet filled the silence of the trailer. 

He ran a finger across the spines of the books lining the shelves until he settled on one where bits of binding were visible and the cover had been all but obliterated by a patchwork pattern of ugly brown stains Dean could never place. He’s been able to beat the seller up on the price because of those stains, once he figured out what the manual was. A selection of his best camera restorations lined the top of the bookshelf, with only a choice few being picked for place of pride in the television cabinet. They were the ones he knew he'd never sell.  

“Let’s see what the old Graflex manual has to say.” Dean said, though by now he was talking mostly to himself as Lori’s head was craned to her phone screen and her finger idly swiped through memes and pictures of influencer’s lives that all looked a hell of a lot better than hers right now. 

Dean frowned but decided to let it lie, for now. His audible sigh did nothing to snap her attention and he fought the urge to snatch the phone from his daughter’s hand and slam it on the table. 

Bright idea smartass, you’re the one who bought it for her. God he needed a toke. Why had he picked this month to throw his vape away? Dean snatched the camera from the bag instead and placed it on the coffee table in front of him. He leaned forward to examine it before swearing softly to himself and getting up again. His footsteps rattled the cameras in the TV cabinet as he went to his room and returned with a small leather roll tied shut. He untied it and rolled it out next to the camera with the practised grace of a street grifter handling three card monte. A small collection of picks, wrenches and screwdrivers. Jostled against each other with a brassy sounding tinkle. One flew from the roll and clattered to the carpet. Dean bent to pick it up, his fingers straining to roll it into their grasp. As he did so he craned his neck toward the camera and was caught staring into the black eye-like lens. It was turned toward him. He was sure he had left it facing forward. Dean scratched the back of his neck idly with the runaway screwdriver frowning at the camera. It was that all seeing impression that seemed to seep from that small glass lens. It was as if the camera could whisper a thousand secrets to him all at once. Dean thought he could hear them too, if he listened closely. This camera could tell him the winning lottery numbers, it could whisper fortune and glory through Market Place buys and camera restorations. It could tell him where Lisa was. Dean glanced over his shoulder. Lori was now fully engrossed in videos of other little shits like her dancing like idiots. 

Woah

Dean sat back hard. The frame creaked and sounded as if a bark of laughter filled the air around him. Where did that come from? Since when did he ever think of his little girl as a little shit? Dean looked over his shoulder again. Hair dye drying in a splotch on the back of her neck, his old Gundam T-shirt draped and folded over her frail looking frame, the music she picked. His kid was the furthest thing from the screaming Ritalin experiments he’d been watching all afternoon. 

He opened his mouth to say as much, let her know it didn’t matter, he loved her any way she wanted to live. The thing was Lori could be almost as volatile as her mother. And after what she went through last fall Dean didn’t want to risk setting her off and then sending her out. He turned his attention to the camera instead, his affection evaporating from words to the unnameable feeling all fathers seemed to struggle with when it came to doling out affection to their children, but more specifically their daughters. He picked up a flathead screwdriver and pick. 

At the table Lori flipped through memes and reels without really observing them. The blue light from her phone reflected off her glassy eyes as more and more input scrolled passed her unfocused gaze. She was caught in a feeling of deja vu that bent her perception. She ran a finger across her cell phone screen, an affectionate caress. It felt like she hadn’t seen anything like this in her entire existence. An almost electric thrill shuddered through her body. She wanted to be alone. She had to leave. Lori needed to get home and wall herself away. This is what she wanted to do for the rest of the night. She turned to say as much to her dad just in time to see him use a small pick to pop the casing of the Speed Graphic apart. 

Rage surged through Lori at the sight of her prized possession being violated. In  a flash Lori’s phone clattered to the table, forgotten. She was on her father as he gazed at something etched in the camera. His brow furrowed in concentration turned to wild surprise as he took in his daughter descending on him. Her eyes were saucer-wide. Her lips peeled away from teeth that looked somehow too long and too sharp in the glaring light of the headlamp he had dawned. She squinted as the beam his her eyes and for a moment Dean Sellers recognized a feral animosity in them. 

Lori snatched his arm by the wrist and held it with a strength betraying her frail frame. Pain slashed from his wrist to his arm and shoulder as Dean struggled to keep the pick he was using in his grasp. It clattered to the carpet moments later as Lori shook his arm violently. 

“Hey–what?” Dean sputtered before Lori cut him off 

“If you’ve damaged it you should pray that it’s not irreparable. Don’t bother. I don’t know why I even thought to bring this to you, and I wouldn’t if I had known all you would do is bungle it with your fumbling fingers and abrasive tools.” 

“Get your hands off me Lori. What’s wrong with you?” Dean snatched his hand away as his daughter’s grip loosened. She stared at him, her eyes rimmed with dark patchy skin and bags he’d only now noticed. 

Did she look that tired coming in here? 

Dean snapped the casing back together under that same scrutinous glance his daughter bored into him. He barely had the last screw in before she snatched the camera from him and made for the door. 

“Where the hell do you think you’re going huh? Gunna walk back to town in the dead of night?” Dean stood from the couch, anger replacing shock as he strode after Lori. 

“Answer me god damn it,” he persisted. He reached for her shoulder and tried to spin Lori to face him, but she shook him off with ease. She turned on him then, so fast Dean stopped short to avoid bowling her over. 

“Get away from me,” Lori screamed. The cry was so loud the windows seemed to rattle in the frame. Dean was struck dumb and watched as his little girl slipped her sandals on and pushed through the storm door. In her silence Eddy Veder wailed a lament for a love lost to him. 

Dean stood a moment longer. She had never spoken to him like that. Even in the months after Lisa left them, even last year when she was so skinny she had to go on I.V fluids just to eat. Through all that never once had his little girl exploded like that. He made it to the small porch of his trailer, standing under the single bulb of the porch light trying to spot her shape shifting through the darkness. He heard peepers keeping time with his heartbeat and crickets singing backup, underneath it all he tried to hear the crunch of gravel. In the distance a semi’s gear brakes sent a hollow echo through the night. 

Lori was gone. 

Dean’s eye fell to his beat up tercel. He could go after her, but what if it was a repeat of what he’d just witnessed. He knew his neighbors were watching. They'd probably heard everything. The trailer was paper thin. He shut his eyes and it heard his pulse again. In his chest he counted 20 beats quick and then 20 more until he started to finally stop seeing red. He sighed out a lungful of hot air into the cool night. 

Let her go. This is part of growing up. She’s just establishing herself. Don’t, repeat: do not call her. 

Dean Sellers stood looking into the darkness a moment longer before opening the door to his trailer, and heading for his phone.

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