The one-armed woman beams beatifically at my toddler as she walks us towards the forest behind the sprawling estate home. She’d appeared out of nowhere, like an apparition, while we waited for my husband to return. She introduces herself as Martha, Tim’s partner. I start to extend my right hand for a handshake, then realize she only has a left hand, and think better of it. I make like I’m just brushing something off the baby’s shirt and hope my awkward hesitation doesn’t register.
We walk through the forest, trailing behind Martha as she tells us about the spectres that make the woods their home. “The forest is filled with them.” I assume she’s being whimsical, metaphorical. The way people talk about their spiritual connection to their ancestral lands. I ask her if she’s from the area.
“No,” she says, raising her eyes to the canopy. “I’m from somewhere far, far away from here.”
We stop at the edge of a clearing hung with various talismans, and dotted here and there with animal skulls, bleached brilliant white by the northern elements. Streams of ethereal light filter through the tall conifers and dapple the moss laced earth, illuminating a large circle of stones in the centre of the clearing. It looks a bit like something out of a folk horror movie. The surreal scene is made even stranger by the woman’s earnest insistence that this is an energy grove, where spirits come to feed. That we are, in fact, surrounded by them. She leads us to the centre of the circle and gestures with her one hand ecstatically to the empty air. “Can’t you see them?”
Mercifully, I can’t, and I am suddenly overcome by the desire to leave the strange place. To flee back through the woods towards the safety of the Jeep. But the forest has closed in around me. My pulse beats a frenetic tattoo in my ears. I feel disoriented as I search the knotted treeline for the exit, but I can’t seem to remember where exactly we entered the clearing.
We’d driven deep into the boreal forests on our way to the mountains where we planned to spend a few days camping with our toddler. My husband had said we just had to make one quick stop on the way. He’d met a man named Tim at a work function. Tim was an engineer-cum-inventor and had a product he’d been working on that he believed could improve fuel performance and emissions. He’d asked my husband if he’d be interested in testing it out and told him to stop by to pick up a case. My husband was like that, he’d make friends with strange people and commit us to unexpected outings. No polite excuses or feigned last-minute emergencies. He could never seem to say no. Just a few weeks ago one of the old guys from his warehouse days had invited us to come watch his band play at a dirty truck stop hotel lounge connected to a strip club. I’d got stuck talking to his very drunk wife for two hours while they finished their set.
I realize that the closest neighbour is likely a few kilometres away. I feel a chill and pull my toddler, who’s begun to fuss, tight to my chest. “I really think we should head back now. My husband might worry if he comes back and we’re not there.”
The woman hesitates. A shadow of disappointment darkens her features, but she quickly rearranges them back into a mask of blank serenity. “Of course.”
We return to the Jeep to find my husband pacing beside it. He looks relieved when he spots us and mouths to me that we need to go.
“Can’t you stay for a cup of coffee?” Martha asks as we pack our toddler into the Jeep.
My husband cuts me off before I can reply. “Sorry, we need to move on if we’re going to make camp by dark.”
Tim trudges over to the gas tank, white bottle clutched in his blue veined hands. He insists on putting some of his fuel optimizer in our tank before he’ll let us go. My husband says it’s not necessary, but Tim dismisses his protests with a wave of his hand. “Trust me. You won’t believe what a difference it makes.”
As we pull out of the long drive my husband breaks into a tense laugh and says, “You’re not going to believe this…”
Tim had taken him into a room full of inventions. One, he called a beamer, he claimed could detect evil spirits. He’d run the apparatus along my husband’s torso and proclaimed that he was all clear. Next, Tim took him to stand in front of a painting of an Egyptian man and asked him if he recognized the man. “It’s a painting of Horus’ father, Osiris. I mean, you must recognize him. I’m Horus, you see, and you’re Osiris. You’re my father,” the man continued cryptically, as though this were sufficient explanation. “I knew it soon as I saw you. Its unmistakeable. Like looking into a mirror, isn’t it?” He’d talked a bit more about his fuel optimizer, said his biggest customer was Israel. He added that the benefits were manifold. As well as optimizing fuel and producing cleaner emissions, it also served to cleanse evil. He’d concluded his tour by demonstrating some sort of hoop device for exercising daemons and extending an offer to take us all up in the mothership sometime. “The guy is a total loon. I mean he’s gotta be, what, sixty? And he thinks I’m his father? An Egyptian god? The whole thing was so bizarre. Honestly, I started to feel a bit freaked out.”
I relay the story about the spirits of the rock garden. “I mean, I honest to god thought I was walking into a ritual sacrifice.”
We both laugh nervously about the ridiculousness of the whole thing and spend the rest of the ride cracking jokes about narrowly escaping being turned into skin suits and lampshades or ritual offerings to Beelzebub. After a few hours of driving, we pull into the gas station. My husband leans over to check the mileage.
“So?” I ask, not really expecting anything.
He does some math on his fingers then shakes his head. “No fucking way. That’s like, 8.6 litres per 100 Kilometres.”
“Is that good?”
He looks up at the sky, which is crested by a sliver of new moon and has begun to turn a dusky shade of indigo and says, “I mean, yeah. It’s more than good, it’s damn near incredible.”