I SENSED SOMEONE standing beside my bed and flung the sheets back. But no menacing figure, knife in hand, loomed over me. At first I saw only the empty darkness. Then the walls and the dresser emerged from the murk, and I was peering through an undersea camera at the ruins of the Titanic, the forgotten contours of some vaguely familiar life. I sat bolt upright. The bottom half of a body still hung in the window, as if frozen in ice. I tried to cry out, but the silence, much heavier than any I’d ever known, drowned the words in my throat.
The body slid out into the greater darkness. A low growl accompanied the departure, immediately followed by a powerful, mysterious odour – rank, wild. The kind of smell I hadn’t experienced since my youth on the Fraser River over a Christ’s lifetime ago.
