Red X
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Synopsis
A hunted community. A haunted author. A horror that spans centuries.
Men are disappearing from Toronto's gay village. They're the marginalized, the vulnerable. One by one, stalked and vanished, they leave behind small circles of baffled, frightened friends. Against the shifting backdrop of homophobia throughout the decades, from the HIV/AIDS crisis and riots against raids to gentrification and police brutality, the survivors face inaction from the law and disinterest from society at large. But as the missing grow in number, those left behind begin to realize that whoever or whatever is taking these men has been doing so for longer than is humanly possible.
Woven into their stories is David Demchuk's own personal history, a life lived in fear and in thrall to horror, a passion that boils over into obsession. As he tries to make sense of the relationship between queerness and horror, what it means for gay men to disappear, and how the isolation of the LGBTQ+ community has left them profoundly exposed to monsters that move easily among them, fact and fiction collide and reality begins to unravel.
A bold, terrifying new novel from the award-winning author of The Bone Mother.
Release date: August 31, 2021
Publisher: Strange Light
Print pages: 272
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Red X
David Demchuk
The City of Toronto, once the Town of York, is nestled against the Great Lake Ontario, ensnared in an intricate web of rivers, creeks and streams, valleys and ravines—a wildness woven into its heart that the burgeoning metropolis has struggled to suppress, reshape, contain, and control over the last two hundred years.
Established in 1793 as a British colonial outpost under King George III, York was built on the traditional lands of the Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation, the Haudenosaunee, the Anishinaabe, and the Huron-Wendat, and was then known as Tkaronto, “Where the Trees Stand in the Water,” “The Gathering Place.”
Now Canada’s largest city, Toronto has survived battles and rebellions and riots, two great fires, two massive blackouts, earthquakes, a hurricane, and outbreaks of cholera, typhus, Spanish flu, HIV/AIDS, SARS, and more. Even so, thousands arrive each year from across the country in pursuit of education, employment, community, and belonging. Waves of immigrants and refugees from around the world have made its neighbourhoods their home.
At the southern edge of the city are the waterfront and the Port Lands, including Cherry Beach, built on land reclaimed from the lake and the marshland and from the delta of the Don River.
To the north is Old Toronto, which includes the quaintly cobblestoned Distillery District, Corktown, and the St. Lawrence Market.
To the west of Old Toronto is the downtown core, the old and new city halls, and the financial district, built over what had been the poorest area of the city, formerly known as The Ward.
North of Corktown is the Garden District, which includes the inner-city neighbourhoods of Regent Park and Cabbagetown—their crumbling rooming houses, squat brick tenements, and squalid high-rises now falling prey to developers and speculators. The Garden District is home to Allan Gardens, a central park whose principal feature is an ornate Edwardian conservatory. (Its predecessor, an Orientalist pavilion that notably hosted a lecture by a young Oscar Wilde, burned to the ground in 1902.) Like Corktown, Cabbagetown was once inhabited by poor Irish immigrants who worked in the distilleries, and is so named for the cabbages they reputedly grew in the front yards of their rowhouses and cottages.
North of the Garden District and west of Allan Gardens is Toronto’s gay village, a hodgepodge of bars, clubs, bathhouses and pubs, small shops and restaurants clustered around the intersection of Church and Wellesley. “All the churches are on Queen Street and all the queens are on Church Street,” as the old saying goes. From there, the city stretches out in all directions.
Impressed by its tidiness, efficiency, elegance, and modernity, the late Sir Peter Ustinov famously referred to the Toronto of 1987 as “New York run by the Swiss.” Much of that has changed in recent years, and sadly not for the better. The city was once a bastion of nineteenth-century Victorian morality, celebrated for imposing Christian values on its laws, citizens, and marketplace. Now, its brittle veneer of propriety and conformity is belied by its treatment of its most vulnerable residents. The quaintly refined facade is eroding; the mask of civility slips and falls, littering the ground.
Frequently derided as Toronto the Good—the Centre of the Universe—the city resented by the rest of the nation for its hubris, arrogance, and vulgar ambition now strives to reconcile its prim provincial attitudes with its world-class aspirations, and to accommodate the conflicting political, economic, and cultural values held by its substantial and disparate populace. Fearful of meaningful change and the demands it might place upon them, civic leaders routinely sabotage every improvement they propose—from increasing property taxes to expanding public transit to building affordable housing. Preening, soulless, authoritarian, insecure, its singular achievement remains its many cinematic impersonations of other, greater cities. A chasm yawns between the wealthy and the disadvantaged, the privileged and the marginalized; one can see past its teeth to the back of its throat—more teeth, still more teeth, teeth all the way down.
Public services have eroded. The infrastructure is crumbling. Violence and hate are on the rise. A trans woman killed, her body found in a ravine and left unidentified for months. A murdered young woman found in a stairwell, not by the police but days later by her mother. Ten pedestrians killed and a dozen more injured by a van driver targeting women with his vehicle. Two people killed and thirteen others wounded by a mass shooter one summer Sunday. Cellars are seeping, foundations are cracking. Rivers are overrunning their banks. What was once buried, pushed underground, is now erupting, bursting up and through.
All around the city, past and present entwine like lazy lovers as the last light fades. Along streets and alleys, behind buildings and under bridges, the shadows deepen and darken. Whatever hungers within them cannot be contained.
1984
Sometime that August, a young man named Ryan Wilkes vanished without so much as a whisper. The city was radiant and shimmering in the late summer heat. A thin film of humidity adhered to the skin, attracting smog and grit and inviting midges and mosquitoes to a sticky demise on one’s forearms. Ghostbusters dominated the movie screens, a transit strike was looming, the Pope was coming to visit, and Bananarama’s “Cruel Summer” was climbing the dance charts.
Ryan was in his mid-twenties, sandy blond, lightly freckled, not quite tall enough or old enough or beefy enough to escape the dreaded twink label. Newly in town from Windsor, Detroit’s automotive sister city, with just a few months of metropolitan life under his belt, he mostly bused tables at a few of the bars, hoping to save some money to enter the design program at the Ontario College of Art. He worked as a barback at Boots, and also covered off a few times next door at Bud’s, stepping in for someone sick or picking up a stray shift or two.
He didn’t have a steady boyfriend, didn’t really date, didn’t go to the baths or parks, and rarely to other bars. He was a loner, mostly, estranged from his family, with a flight attendant for a roommate and not many friends. Sometimes, he’d have four or five days off between shifts, while his roommate held two- and three-day layovers; as a result, it took until Tuesday the 28th for anyone to realize he hadn’t been seen since the Friday before.
Even then, people assumed he’d just gone back south or gotten another job—at a straight bar maybe, where he could make more money—or shacked up with somebody somewhere, or left for another city, Montreal or Vancouver, or even the States. His roommate wasn’t necessarily surprised to see him go: the city may welcome you, but it might not invite you to stay. Still, it was confusing. His room, filled with all his belongings, offered no obvious clue. He wasn’t a known drug user, and no illicit substances were found in his room, apart from a few mild sleeping pills he had “borrowed” from a friend. Suicide was a possibility, though he “didn’t seem the type.” It was only when a garbage collector found a neatly folded stack of clothes in an alley behind a stretch of weary old sex shops and strip clubs and porn theatres, the clothes that Ryan was last seen wearing, only then was his disappearance called in to the police. But with no sign of struggle, no significant leads, and no mother or wife or girlfriend or family to place pressure on them, the investigation was half-hearted at best. Missing gay men weren’t what you’d call a priority. The flight attendant roommate and some friends and co-workers printed up flyers and posted them around the Village. Those lasted a few days before being torn down by street cleaners or papered over with photos of lost cats and dogs. The missing persons file languished, then dropped out of sight after just a few weeks. Late that autumn, on November 9, A Nightmare on Elm Street was released and made, as they say, a killing. The winter winds began to blow. The snow began to fall.
White T-shirt, white jockstrap, Levi button-fly cutoffs—wallet and cash and ID and keys tucked in the pockets. Dirty sport socks, beaten-down Chucks, and a navy-blue hanky neatly tucked into the left shoe. Ryan Wilkes, twenty-four, of 85 Isabella Street, was never found.
In the golden warmth of that August afternoon, in his sun-dappled den of a bedroom in his fourth-floor shared apartment, Ryan slept. As he slept, he dreamed. And in those minutes that felt like hours, he stood once more at the edge of the green-lit grove—the backdrop of all his dreams of late—and peered across to find the young man who made these woods his home. He always reminded Ryan of the itinerant workers who had lived in the woods in Windsor, in tents and trailers, working on nearby farms from spring to fall. His mother had called them vagrants, layabouts, hooligans. They frightened her a little, which must be why he liked them. There he was, the young drifter, on the far side of the clearing, at the foot of the towering ash-white sycamore where Ryan often found him sitting and smoking his slender waterstone pipe, the tobacco haze around him laced with licorice and sweet rum.
As the young man stood and shook himself off and ambled across the clearing, Ryan marvelled at the unspoiled beauty of the glade around them: the soft western breeze caressing the leaves, raising a gentle rush; the robins and sparrows calling out to each other, in greeting or in warning; the fox, a few yards beyond, chasing after a bounding hare till it hopped down into its hole and out of sight; and of course, the ancient tree itself, which presided over everything, the largest in the clearing and, seemingly, the entire forest. Ryan and the young wanderer had spent many dream-hours in each other’s arms in the shade of that tree, talking and laughing and lazily fucking, startling the wildlife into silence. A dirty fairy tale, he had thought to himself. It was sad but somehow unsurprising that this was the person who knew him best, who listened most, who held him close despite his flaws. Ryan wondered, not for the first time, if this impossible fantasy was imperilling his connection to the waking world.
Then the young man was upon him, smiling widely, his arms open for an embrace. He was shirtless, his suspenders down around his hips, his pale naked chest blackly furred to match his thick shock of hair and his bold black brows. He pulled Ryan close, smelled the air all around him, then pressed his mouth onto Ryan’s and kissed him as if to taste him. You came back, he said, his Scottish lilt teasing at Ryan’s ear.
“It’s only been a day,” he replied.
A day too long! Come, sit. Keep me company. He gestured to the great white sycamore looming before them. Ryan pulled back, looked up at its waving, whirling branches, its shimmering silvery leaves. There was a new menace about it, some shift in the light, some uncanny movement that made him hesitate.
“I can’t stay,” he said nervously. “I have to work.” He had been late a few times and couldn’t afford to lose the job over his messed-up sleeping schedule. But he was afraid of disappointing his friend, who was painfully lonely in his world and counted the hours and minutes until Ryan’s nightly return.
He’s not real. The thought intruded, and the balmy breeze embracing them chilled. He drew himself back, looked into the other man’s eyes. An icy flame flickered behind them and abruptly vanished. The drifter smiled again, as genial as ever.
That’s a shame, he replied, his voice like honey from the hive. But not to worry. We can spend more time tomorrow. Then added: I see you brought it. Ryan looked down to find the tattered old red book the drifter had given him on the grass at his feet. He couldn’t remember bringing it, dropping it. And yet here it was. Did you write something in it for me?
Ryan turned the book in his hands, front to back to front again. Ran his finger along the deckled edge of the pages, raised his finger to his nose. It felt so real, smelled so real. “A poem,” he answered uneasily. “Just something my mother taught me when I was home sick from school.” He reached down to pick up the book, but the feral young man snatched it first, held it close to his chest.
I’m sure it’s wonderful. I’ll read it whenever I need to feel you near. He tugged on Ryan’s hand playfully, leading him to the ashen tree. Sit with me, just for a moment. Don’t leave me here just yet. The sky darkened and the wind rose and the branches shuddered, flailed. They seemed to be reaching for him, ready to lash themselves around his arms, his body, and lift him off the ground.
He hadn’t expected to fall in love with a dream. But now the dream was turning, as they so often do, and he would have to end it. He shook his head. “I can’t come back.”
The wanderer smiled. You’re afraid. The sky grew darker still. That’s good. He leaned in and whispered wetly, Fear salts the meat.
Blackness. He reached out instinctively. Had he gone blind? His hand pressed against a wall of metal, then another. Surrounded. A forged box, not much larger than a coffin. I have to wake up. He felt for a latch or a hinge or a knob. Maybe he could dream one into existence. A sudden sharp burning sensation—he jerked his hand away. The walls glowed a dim deep red.
This is what it’s like, the drifter’s voice everywhere and nowhere. This is what it’s like to be hated, and hunted, abandoned and left to die. You claim to love me, Ryan. Tell me so, and I will let you go.
The box was a furnace now, and Ryan was roasting alive inside it. Blisters bubbling and bursting on his face, his fingers, his hair burning, his eyes swelling, poaching in their blackening sockets. “I love you!” he was shouting. “All right? I love you, I love you!”
The walls tore away with a screech, and he hurtled backwards into a limitless darkness. He pulled himself into a ball, eyes and teeth and fists clenched. A high, keening wail sounded in the distance, like a huntsman’s horn, charging ever closer. You see? The voice in his mind. We do belong together. And if you won’t come to me, I will find my way to you.
Ryan woke with a start, saturated and shivering, his arms clutched tight around his legs. Was he hurt? Was he sick? Some kind of terrible nightmare. His alarm clock shrieked. He grabbed it from the bedside table and pulled it close to his face, blinking through sleep. His shift started in an hour. He tried to remember the dream, what had been so awful, but nothing would come, not a word, not a sound, just a sick, dreadful feeling he couldn’t shake. He got up, peeled off his sweat-drenched T-shirt and boxers, and stepped into the shower, a faint, sweet burning lingering at the back of his throat.
As Ryan was getting ready for his shift, Victor Lee, short and burly in a fresh white T-shirt, well-worn leather vest, and strategically faded five-button Levi’s, sat in the back office at Boots, counting out cash and drink tickets for that night’s emergency dj, Miss Robin Reid. Boots was the vaguely butch men’s bar nestled in the lower level of the Hotel Selby, and Robin, vaguely butch herself, would be stepping in with almost no notice after their Friday night regular, Jerry, called in claiming food poisoning—maybe true, Victor thought, if you considered alcohol a food.
He had waited till the last possible moment before calling her, which unfortunately was 11 a.m. He knew the rule: never call a working dj before noon. He swivelled back and forth on one of the stools behind the bar, cringing as he counted one, two, three, four rings. Just as he expected to click over to a machine, the receiver picked up, followed by a fumbling rustle of sheets.
“Victor,” she sighed. “Somebody better be dead.”
“Not dead enough,” Victor answered, “but there’s always hope. Are you free tonight? I know it’s short notice, you can always say no, but I could really use you here.”
“Damn right I can always say no,” Robin said, then sighed again. “Fine, fine, forget my laundry. I can get there for eleven. Sixty bucks, two sets, done at one. I hate playing after last call.”
Sixty bucks. He was going to kick Jerry’s ass. “Sounds great. Make sure you bring me your cab receipt.”
“I’ll bring you two. It’s not like I’ll be walking home. Is the ac working? Don’t answer that. See you in a bit.” The receiver clattered back onto its cradle. Dial tone.
Truth be told, Victor thought Robin was a far better djthan Jerry, and would have hired her full-time if he could. She played longer sets, took fewer breaks, and knew how to pack a dance floor better than most of her male counterparts without resorting to “It’s Raining Men” or “I Will Survive,” and for that she deserved some kind of a medal. She had a way of moving from old-school disco to moody new wave to bouncy dance pop to brassy funk, riding the crowd’s energy and emotions like a wave off the shore of Tofino. She gave a nod to the bar’s masculine vibe with her black tights, leather jacket, white relax T-shirt, and biker cap perched on her short black afro. Still, there were always one or two complaints that a gay men’s bar should have a guy in the booth, preferably one who was tanned and shirtless, trim and toned. And white. A treat for the eyes as well as for the ears. “I didn’t come here to watch some black chick dance around with herself,” a regular told him once. “If I wanted that, I’d be down at the Zanzibar.”
Another had gone up to her in the middle of a set and drunkenly asked, “Are you supposed to be a man?” and she had turned and answered, “Are you?” The drunk stormed over to the bar and went off on Victor like a car alarm till he introduced the drunk to Nate the bouncer and Nate introduced the drunk to the door. He hadn’t been back since, and neither had his shitty drunken friends. Victor didn’t care. Toronto’s clubs were always playing catch-up with New York and San Francisco, ignoring the talent that was right in front of their face. He knew that Robin was something special, and the people who came for the music knew that too.
He sealed the envelope, wrote her name on the front, pulled out his keys, and unlocked the cash register. He tucked the envelope near the back of the till and locked it again. One thing done. He ducked out from behind the bar and started back towards the office when a strange sound made him slow down, then stop. He listened, and listened. It was a low, heavy hum, and it was coming from the storage room next to the back door.
Slowly, softly, he inched his way forward, the hum growing louder with every step. Was somebody in there? He stopped again. Something small and light, with tiny legs, landed on the back of his neck. He reached his hand back to brush it off and it flew up onto the tip of his middle finger, bit down into it, and stung him deep in the crease behind his knuckle. He let out a yelp and snapped his hand down, flinging the insect onto the floor. He stomped on it, then lifted his shoe to look.
A yellow jacket.
He looked at his finger, livid and swelling, then back up at the old oak door. The hum was now nearly a roar. “No fucking way, ...
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