‘A house called Halcyon Days, and it’s got a blue door, that’s what he said.’ Tom had stopped and was staring about him. Compressed by the mountains, the houses climbing steeply over the rock remains of a giant slide that had gashed the mountain above us, the pale brown bulk of a hotel and the pulp mill sprawled over the narrow flats of the river silt — it all looked much bigger than I had expected. There was a river and we could see its outfall under a bridge, hear the sound of it cascading down from the high lip of the valley.
‘You ever been here before?’ I asked.
‘Once, that’s all. BC Ferries called here regularly then. But other times when visiting the Cascades I flew straight in to the Halliday Arm by floatplane from Bella Bella.’
It was mid-afternoon, the streets empty, hardly a soul about, and a cold breeze coming down off the mountains from the north.
‘There’s a lake up there, about ten miles long. A dam, too, and a hydro-electric power station that once drove the pulp mill. I think I can hear the dynamo. Sounds like it’s still running.’ There were lights burning, street lights even in daylight — lights, too, on the verandahs of empty houses. ‘What was that about Halcyon Days?’ I asked.
‘It’s Brian’s address. A friend’s place. That’s the message he gave Steve Davis, the floatplane pilot at Bella Bella. He’d wait for us there. Trouble is, the launch operator couldn’t remember the name of the street. Said we couldn’t miss it because it was the board road down from the lake.’ By then we were into the town, looking ahead up an asphalt road that climbed beside a tumbling cascade of water. ‘Guess we’d better go up to the dam. Should be easy then to find where the board road starts. He said the house was somewhere about the middle of it.’
We dumped our bags on the verandah of an empty house beneath the dull glare of a naked electric light bulb. Clouds had come down and it was starting to drizzle, the cutter gone now and the whole narrow fjord empty of anything but the lowering clouds and the mist. ‘Always rains here,’ he muttered as we began to walk up the hill. There were hydrangeas blooming and mountain ash bright with berries, and walnut trees — I hadn’t expected walnut trees. The higher we climbed the more the noise of rushing water filled our ears, filling the whole narrow cleft of the valley with sound, just as the monstrous ochre-coloured block of the hotel filled it visually — that and the mill, and the little terraced wooden houses clinging to the valley side, bright with peeling ribbons of paint, flowers and lights. And nobody living there, only a few remaining, enough to keep the pulp mill machinery and essential services ticking over.
The dam stood massive, a straight concrete face wedged in the narrow cliffs, a blind wall poised above the town and white with the water streaming down it. Tom went as far as the locked gates that led onto the top of it, a broad dam-top walkway with the iron sluice controls at intervals and a marvellous view down the inlet, half-obscured by cloud mist. The rock-scoured mountain that overhung the town gleamed wet and wicked where the great slide had gashed it, tumbling millions of tons of debris down into the waters of the loch to form the hard standing that reached back from the quay.
But Tom wasn’t looking at the slide, or down the inlet. He had his back to the town, staring out across the endless expanse of the lake. ‘I went fishing up here once. Seven or eight years ago it must have been. There’s a torrent runs into it from another, higher lake. The Halliday Arm and the Cascades almost reach right back to it. In fact, it’s from the end of that lake that the water originates to form the falls that give the place its name. The Bella Bella Indians had a log cabin up there, a sort of boathouse for their canoes. A good position with a great rock platform we called the Pulpit. From the top there you could look right down the mountainside a thousand feet or so to the arm of water coming in from Cascade Inlet, the logging camp and the booming-ground.’ And he added almost wistfully, The cabin was still there when Thor took over as forestry manager and he made it into quite a nice bunk-cum-boathouse for fishing. There’s some trout in that lake so big and pink-fleshed I reckon they must be land-locked salmon left over from the last ice age.’
A wind swirled the cloud drizzle round us, suddenly tearing it apart, so that the sun shone and it was momentarily quite warm. The whole head of Tom’s hair became silvered with moisture, his features no longer haggard but smoothed out as he looked at the lake, smiling to himself. He seemed suddenly fit and well. I was amazed how quickly he could recover with a little sleep. The weeks spent working in Stone Slide Gully must have hardened him up, for he was a man who lived very close to the limits of his nervous system.
‘Let’s go and see if we can find Brian.’ But even as he spoke we both turned our heads to the sound of an engine far across the lake. Mist still clung to the surface of the water, so that we didn’t see it for several minutes, though the sound of it grew quite rapidly. Then suddenly it was there, on the edge of visibility, a rubber inflatable with an outboard engine and a lone man with long, dark hair huddled over it. He ran the inflatable up onto the coarse gravel of the lake edge and a moment later was coming towards us, a rucksack on his back and dragging a little sleigh with two plastic containers on it and a filler can that looked as though it had been used for kerosene. He was flat-featured, his eyes bulging above high cheekbones and broken teeth showing yellow-stained below the black droop of his moustache. If he saw us he didn’t show it. He was whistling softly to himself and he went down into the town by another road, the sleigh scraping along behind him.
‘One of the squatters, I suppose,’ Tom said. ‘The cutter’s cook told me about the only people here, apart from the mill maintenance men, were hippies up from Vancouver and other ports.’
He had turned and was moving to the bend where the lank-haired man had disappeared. The road looped, swinging down by a different route, the surface of it changed to great planks of cedar, slippery after the rain. There were small verandahed houses beside it, the broad driveway slaloming down in a great curve. God knows how many magnificent trees had been felled to build that road, for it was wide enough for two vehicles to pass, but I suppose with the mountains so full of timber it was cheaper to bridge the tumbled rock slope with sleeper-like planks than to find the infill material to build an ordinary road.
We found the house, the light on over the door and the blue paint peeling. There.was a bell, but it didn’t work. We knocked. Nobody came and nobody looked out of the windows of the nearby houses; the road, everything, very still, and the only sound the whisper of the water pouring down from the lake above. ‘He’s not here.’ My voice sounded loud, a little strange. ‘There’s nobody here.’ It was like being a visitor from outer space, looking in on a world from which all human life had been expunged. ‘Try the door,’ I breathed.
It wasn’t locked, its hinges creaking with the damp as it swung wide to show the interior of an ordinary little house, everything in place as though the occupant had gone to the post or to the shops and would be back at any moment. We hesitated, both of us standing there, staring at the open door. ‘You’re right,’ Tom muttered. ‘He’s not here.’
‘Maybe there’s a message.’
He nodded, but he didn’t move. ‘Odd, isn’t it?’ His voice was a little high, a slight tremor in it. ‘I don’t like it,’ he whispered. ‘And the town, the emptiness — it’s like a ghost town.’