There is a town in the north where children told stories of the Tangle.

It’s empty now.

Or nearly so. Hired groundskeepers make their endless rounds of the tidy streets, mowing lawns to keep the forest at bay; checking seals on windows and doors to shut out the damp; tracing the lines and corners and angles to keep them straight and true and unwavering. Holes are patched. Mildew scrubbed. Darkness huddled against throughout long, lonely nights while the town waits for a rebirth that does not come.

This is not a story about madness.

Steve drives the kind of truck that cannot be parked without taking up four spots on a diagonal. At least, not by him. The truck sprawls, broad and tall and wide and so heavy it chews up the road in its wake. Its oversized cab would seat a family of five and a friend, if Steve would let the rug rats with all their crumbs and smears and stinks up onto its heated leather seats, instead of exiling them to the wife’s SUV. The crew cab truck’s undersized box still thrusts out past the end of his parking pad and into the common driveway of the townhome complex he resents, the shiny, unused knob of its trailer hitch forcing his neighbours to hug the far curb to slip past. That part gives him a little thrill every time he spots their sour faces. One day he’ll get a decent bit of land and have room to spread out, even if he has to wait for the old man to croak and pass along that eyesore out in the woods. In the meantime, Steve wedges his oversized truck into his undersized, shared lot, careful not to scratch the shiny, unmarred finish between the decals or snag the flags on the back on the sad ornamental shrubs separating his slice of parking pad from the next.

Something scuttles in the shadows beneath. Roadkill in waiting.

Steve is and is not a “truck driver,” a “blue-collar working man,” a “patriot.”

This is not a story about “good men”.

Kale and Rashida and So-jeong and Krish sat around a fire in the woods. That was then and not now, and so they will not get in trouble if I tell you that they were young and drinking and maybe doing a little more than that even, and so too was it in a time and place when a fire was no great hazard and the forest had not yet been reduced to little more than dry tinder.

Then, they were wrapped in the green vastness of the Coast Mountains, and the swimming wallow of flames around regrettably damp branches and twigs and Krish’s report card and Kale’s half-written paper on the wonders of molybdenum in the modern world—hastily cribbed from Rashida and gleefully sacrificed at the earliest opportunity—did little enough to press back its heavy breath. The fire’s light and all-too-modest warmth was a sensible precaution against the bear and the cougar and the Tangle, or so said Kale, and the rest shrieked with comfortable chills and goggled into the shadows with good-naturedly amused apprehension.

Tales of ghosts and cryptids and ancient nightmares in the woods were traded back and forth as the night wore on. So-jeong snuck up a twiggy branch behind Rashida’s back, mossy and menacing, but both turned out to be more afraid of startled spiders dangling from a high side-ponytail or scuttling up a sleeve than the Tangle. Easy to play at boldness in the firelight. Harder on the trek home, shadows twisting just out of sight, unseen fingers snagging at feet, half-glimpsed somethings skittering in the dark. And then that long, long struggle to fall asleep—for the lucky pair whose parents didn’t wait up to smell the smoke in their hair and the lies on their breath—that rigid, wide-eyed, sweat-prickling battle not to hear the Tangle tapping and scraping at the windows.

This is not a story about babes in the woods.

Sahil drives truck. Feels like all he does is drive, but he can’t complain when his brother-in-law must drive in the city for not one but three of those terrible apps, ferrying passengers and dinners and shopping to and fro all day and all night so he may stay within summoning distance of ailing parents. No, Sahil is fortunate, on the balance, to have made his way so far as to own—well, one day he will pay the bank off and then he will own—his own wheels. He is an entrepreneur, the proprietor of a small business, perhaps one day of a fleet, even, and so what if he had once hoped and worked for so much more? Who will listen to him if he complains (again) that it’s an utter waste of all those years of study (when his parents are listening) or (to everyone else) that his true destiny should have been the screen, with a voice and moves like his?

So, alone but not silent, he hums and sings and bobs while his eyes grow tired and his body grows stiff and too soft for stardom, mile after mile of highway unwinding under eighteen wheels. He prefers the heavy traffic of the cities in the south, the lights and darting cars of Chilliwack-Abbotsford-Langley-Surrey and even, if he must cross the bridge, the narrow-street crush of Burnaby-Vancouver-Richmond to the ports and back again. It’s just that little bit more like the bustle and churn of home than that winding climb up the Fraser Canyon and the long, dull stretches of trees. Dark needles that seem to go on forever, and sharp-edged stone, and the rolling dry hills that go nobbly some seasons, like cheap, no-good clothes in the wash. Then more trees. Oh, and then more trees. It’s not that he hates trees, or nature, or green things; it’s the up and down and back and forth of it all that gets to him.

But the highway slips away as if someone else is doing the driving. Sahil’s head is heavy, his eyes burning. Lane markers scroll by, signs glinting in the headlights, the occasional wash of streetlights around a turnoff or rest stop painting watercolour streaks across the road. White light darts and flares in the side mirrors. An engine roars, another impatient driver passing in defiance of the double yellow, unwilling to hang back until the next passing lane appears for Sahil to sidle into. Tires squeal. Red streaks away in the distance, taillights vanishing in the night.

Something stirs in the shadows of the ditch, a snarl of something flickering by and gone so fast it barely registers on the surface of Sahil’s mind. A broken branch or a bit of bush rocked by the truck’s slipstream, perhaps, or a buck getting ready to make a dash to the other side.

Sahil blinks. Slowly. Too slow, the soothing blankness between the lowering of lashes and the raising longer each time. He needs to pull over and take a nap before he flattens a deer, or a car, or rolls the rig right off the shoulder. Instead, he reaches for the radio. Turns the music up. Slaps his face. Can’t afford to rest yet. Let the twitching shadows watch if they want; he has a job to finish. Gotta keep moving.

This is not a story about struggle.

There are stories told about stories. Anatomies of legends. Histories of folklore. Crafty cryptid lore and dry, dusty, lifeless academic butterfly-board pinnings of once-living tales and teachings, and had that lonely northern town lasted more than the ring of a tree’s span, perhaps the Tangle’s tale too would have been flayed and dissected or transformed and transmuted. Graduate papers and comic books and quirkily sympathetic or gruesomely garish indie horror flicks birthed from its flesh.

Perhaps some dogged researcher or obsessive fan would have made the trek into the wilderness and found it lonely but not empty. Perhaps Krish, or So-jeong, or Rashida, or Kale, or the children who came after them, had they had more than a year and change in the town that time forgot, would have gone off to university to fill their heads with faraway things and found themselves coming back home with more questions than answers, more curiosity than judgement. Perhaps they would have asked why a town was built instead of a tent village, why whole families were relocated instead of workers trucked or flown or shipped in, why it all ended so fast—and why ever more money was poured into maintaining the town carved out of mountain and rainforest and coastline than ever came out of it.

And what would have come of their questions? Would these intrepid questers after truth have pointed toward the mines, ripping into the earth and waking that which slept in the shadows? Toward the vast, ancient forest, alive and linked in ways hardly fathomed? Toward neighbours—yes, neighbours, for even the wilderness is never as lonely as we pretend, nor as empty. But there has come no researcher to ask invasive questions of the Nisg̱a’a, to delve into environmental violations, or to stalk the various and sundry capitalistic or imperialistic bogeymen. Or at least none has yet survived the publication gauntlet. No trace of the Tangle’s origin, nor of its purpose, nor of its victims may be found in peer-reviewed literature or fannish forums.

This is not a story about colonialism.

This summer, or the last, or one soon to come, there is a fire in the woods, as there has ever been and ever will be. But the forest is dry, pest-plagued, and drought-ravaged, choked by deadfall and half-poisoned by pesticides dropped to choke out its less “productive” expressions. The fire burns fast and high and deep all at once, greedy and mindless. The houses on the fringe go first, the ones on a bit of land. In the forest itself, really. Intruding on wild places, they share the same fate.

It’s sad. It’s unpreventable.

So-jeong’s daughter can’t fight for those homes. The fire is racing toward town, and Fire Chief Lee has to prioritize, even at the cost of her childhood home. The newer developments on the edges will go next, in their fresh-painted rows with trampolines in the backyards and flowers in the front. Then more homes will go up in their dozens and hundreds, flames splashing against banks of the more modest duplexes and townhouses. And then, finally, if the joint efforts of every urban and wildland fighter who can be called up, flown in, or driven by desperate need to haul ass by the remaining clear roads fail to hold the line, the fire will crash against the older apartment blocks and shiny new condo towers in the city core, displacing thousands, tens of thousands.

Fire Chief Lee is pulled in every direction at once, juggling press conferences, meetings with communications and emergency response leads, progress briefings, incessant calls from her mother—wondering if someone couldn’t just go ’round to look in on things, just in case the fire went around instead of through the old place—and endless coordination calls.

She still finds time to ride the front line, getting eyes on the flames, boots on the ground, providing hands-on support to her well-trained team and the desperately needed backup dropped in the middle of chaos to help.

No one needs to know if the reason she makes time for it is just a bit selfish, too.

There’s a sort of peace to it, in a way, to getting out into the field, even amidst the struggle and the danger and the raw physical misery. She gives herself over to the collective battle against humanity’s great elemental enemy and ally for long moments at a time, relishing the focus and momentary simplicity of heat and sweat and urgency, the rush of a crisis averted, a life pulled from the path of the flames, a structure saved, or the numb horror of another home alight.

In an active fire zone, little is stable. Smoke twists and churns and billows. Ash crumbles and shifts and floats. Charred structures unexpectedly give way. The very light is unsteady, unreliable, burning hot but dark, the sun swallowed by smoke and the night blighted by reflected flame. Protective equipment binds movement, mutes sound, obscures sight.

Fire Chief Lee might have been excused for paying little attention to the slow creep of shadows at the edge of her vision.

But she is careful, and far too responsible, and not nearly selfish enough to ignore a potential creature in need of aid, and so she eases back to a safe location and turns to inspect the charred mess where the woods had once met the groomed edge of an exurban yard.

Amidst the twisted, blackened roots and trunks and branches and twigs, something dark and even more twisted looks back. It hunkers low, creeping deeper into the ruin of the forest’s edge, where the light of the flames can’t reach it.

Fire Chief Lee squints. Takes a cautious step after it. Forest creatures get burned. It’s unfortunate, but she can’t have animal rescue groups on site until the fire is under control, and that won’t be for hours yet. Maybe days. If she can coax the creature out, though, dropping it off for treatment on her way back to headquarters would be its best chance at survival. She makes her voice soft, coaxing—

Tires squeal. An engine roars, nearly as loud as the fire, and cuts out. Fire Chief Lee looks over at the truck just long enough to confirm that its decals—and certainly its flags—mark it as none of hers. Even so, the creature in the shadows has already slipped away.

This is not a story about reconciliation.

There is a town in the north almost exactly where Canada turns into America and British Columbia collides with Alaska and the ocean runs up into the land and it is dead but not buried.

That is unkind, but true. Here are the facts:

Kitsault comes from the Nisg̱a’a word Gits’oohl, which according to Wikipedia means “a ways in behind.” It is also known as Chandra Krishnan Kitsault, after the deceased mother of the millionaire who bought the town twenty-two years after it died and has maintained it ever since.

This zombie town is a relic of the past, having been built in 1979 to house 1,200 residents. It features all the essentials of a healthy community circa 1980: a bowling alley, a swimming pool, a mini mall, a hospital, a supermarket, a daycare, a school, and a pub.

Notably, remote, ready-made company towns fabricated in the latter twentieth century are rare. For good reason. The mine intended to support the town—or rather, which the town was intended to supply with a functionally captive workforce—shut down when the molybdenum market collapsed. Apparently pivoting to the other resources in the area was not an option, despite the considerable investment in building and populating the town. Kitsault was evacuated less than eighteen months after residents moved in, meaning Krish really ought to have held onto that report card as a collector’s item.

No tales of the Tangle survive the town. No former residents of Kitsault have come forward with their stories. None of the (many) revival schemes over the past decade since the town was purchased, or the four decades of its existence prior, have come to fruition.

This is not a story about ghosts.

Sahil found fire season unexpectedly invigorating. People treated him like a hero, for a change. He’d been trying to build his profile as a streamer, dancing and singing, at best an annoyance. At the end of long drives, in scenic locations, in the seat of his truck. But it was his dashcam footage of flames at the side of the highway and apologies about being slow to update due to fire season deliveries that were boosting his numbers. Hey, whatever it took to go viral and catch the eye of a casting director, right?

In any case, the endless stretches of road and stiff joints and creeping exhaustion felt that much lighter as the likes and comments kept climbing. Plus, the orange apocalyptic skies and blowing smoke made for a change of scenery, like winter fog through the canyon, but dirtier. Sometimes, he even got diverted onto new and strange routes where the flames only guttered at the edges of rough side roads instead of roaring across the highway, which made for exciting, if precarious, adventures.

When the smoke closed in, though, it was hard to make good time. It was like driving in heavy rain, or blizzard weather, or bad fog, except it made his eyes water and his nose run for good measure.

Sahil leaned over the wheel and peered through the windshield, humming nervously. It didn’t help. He sighed, rubbed his eyes, and turned his music up.

That didn’t help either. These route diversions, they slowed him down to be sure, meant the time between owning 68 percent of his truck and 70 percent would be longer than he’d planned, but Uncle Krish, who was not really his uncle but a much older cousin and also his sponsor, had said not to sweat it, everyone in Canada lives on credit and no one cares, and Sahil wasn’t that old yet, not so close to retirement, just hang in there, young buck, and laughed.

Sahil had smiled to show he got the joke, and then gone and searched up the idiom until he understood that a buck was a male deer like the one on the side of the road now, a branching, bobbing tracery of antlers dark against the drifting smoke outside his window.

He slowed, blinking rapidly. Too close, too fast—and too high for deer, unless they were up on a ridge beside the road. Were a whole herd of them about to leap out in front of him? Visions of hooves cracking the windshield dance behind his eyes, sharp points crashing through glass, flesh, bone, blood seeping into the torn seat cover. There was something mesmerizing about the thought, the thick red ooze and cobwebbed glitter of safety glass, the blare of the horn drowning out his music—

But when Sahil tore himself from the depths of nightmarish imagination, the shadow was hidden again in the smoke. He peered back over his shoulder, flicking his hazards on and easing to a crawl. He sang loudly to cover his fear, bobbing his head and rolling his shoulders. If he were about to plunge to his doom, he’d rather go out on a high note.

His fog lights weren’t bright enough to cut through the gloom and find the edge of the road. The dark smoke stirred ominously, and too erratically, jittering in patterns that had nothing to do with updrafts and slipstreams, scratching and scraping against the paint as if the truck rolled through a dense thicket of thorns.

But, as Sahil’s front tires dipped, the breeze poked a hole in the smoke deep enough to show the yawning chasm ahead. He was moving just slow enough to ease back from the canyon’s edge. Perhaps he offered up a nod, a salute, a prayer.

Perhaps the Tangle just liked his music.

This is not a story about respect.

There was a time before roads.

Oh, there were tracks and trails and ways. The animals wore their best-loved routes into the bush, or did the forest make ways for its more mobile members, the busy mycelial net working its microbial magic in soil and root and sap, devouring, digesting, supplying, nurturing, redirecting, redistributing? The first people had their routes too, over land and, more often and more wisely, by water.

More people, and different people, by water and by land. Shall we stop playing coy? Stop co-opting the tone and timbre of myth and legend and say plainly that the white man brought the railroad, chopping and blasting and using and abusing? Waves of “explorers” and traders and settlers and immigrants, with their urgency and hunger and drive to get where they wanted to go by trail and river and rail. But even the horrors of the railway can become a gentle, nostalgic thing when cast in the sepia tones of children’s history books, with their electric trams and milk runs and community-uniting routes and services, compared to what came next. Cart trails for horse-drawn buggies and in rapid succession dirt, then gravel, then asphalt for Model T Fords and their successors so we could race faster, smoother, make the accidents deadly-fast not just maiming speed.

The cars and the roads got sleeker, fatter, hungrier, demanding more lives, more communities, more land, more. Homes and whole communities bulldozed to make way for highways, towns shrivelled as traffic shifted, public funds diverted. Land carved up, animals flattened, people displaced and dispossessed. But now, oh now we can go fast—except when it’s not quite fast enough, or not to the right places, or not well enough maintained, or too many other people want to go at the same time.

There is a ghost town in the north where children told stories of the Tangle.

It did not have a road out then.

It does now.

This is not a story about progress.

Steve’s truck-flags catch fire as he peels away from the fire chief. He watches this dramatic exit in in his rear and side mirrors, pleased. But the plasticky material melts and shrivels instead of flaming out in a blaze of glory, and the stupid bitch isn’t even watching anyway, though her crew’s still bristling at him. Nah, Mira’s staring off into the bush. Always was an airhead, ever since they were kids, and their parents would chuck them out in the backyard instead of putting on cartoons like normal folks. Well, so much for that.

If the district hadn’t insisted on a fucking diversity hire, maybe they’d’ve had a competent chief and her mom’s old place would still be standing. His dad’s was—barely, and only because Steve had rounded up a bunch of his buddies, grabbed some gear, and put in the work to make it happen.

That was another problem with Mira—total control freak, going on about district resources and how it was a crime to borrow equipment, even if it was an emergency, and why hadn’t he stopped to think of anyone else? Only she hadn’t used the word “borrow” and a man’s responsibilities are to his own folk first and foremost, and that’s when he’d gone from thinking she’d be pleased to hear he’d protected his dad’s place, maybe wanting some tips—after all, she’d spent her share of time playing at “Uncle Keith’s” as a kid just like he’d been forced to hang out at “Auntie So-jeong’s”—to just full-on pissed off.

Steve swerved around blackened debris, tires bumping up on the curb. He wasn’t worried. The jacked-up suspension would get him over anything that lay in his path. Emergencies—that’s what he was always telling granola-munching libs like Mira—that’s why you need a proper truck. Gotta be prepared to do your part. What’cha gonna do when the power goes down and you can’t charge your dinky little tinker-toy car, huh? How you gonna show up for your neighbours when they gotta evac and you’ve got no room, or they need help hauling shit? Like those sprinklers, those had mostly fit in the truck bed. Hadn’t even scraped it up too bad. Little polish, damage would buff right out. He hoped.

But no, Mira and her crew hadn’t wanted to hear about his heroism and how he and the boys were standing by ready to help protect their neighbours, now they’d taken care of their own. She’d mewled about training and regulation and safely working as a team, and then gone on to scold him and—well, he’d tuned her out by then, but there might have been some kinda warning even. Getting too big for her lady-pants, that one.

Gotta get back to dad’s place, though. Shift the gear off the property, if the boys hadn’t already moved it. Just in case the snitch called it into the RCMP and got somebody unfriendly to come out and take a look.

Steve was out of the active fire zone now, barrelling through the night with the high beams on to cut through the smoke. Stuff was so thick, even with the windows up, the moment he went to call his buddies, he started hacking. Had to kill the connection before he could get a word out. His eyes streamed, gritty and squinted with coughing so that he nearly missed when the headlights caught something twitch at the edge of the road.

Not that it mattered. Critters were always getting pancaked. Long as they weren’t big enough to put a dent in the frame or a crack in the windshield, he wasn’t bothered. Or—could be stuff got thrown in the wind from the fire. Charred branches, twigs, bracken. Eh, could be something else. Not his business.

His phone rang. He glanced at the display. The wife, not the guys. She’d be fine—the townhouses were pretty far inside city limits. No need to evac. She and the kids could just sit tight while he did all the work, like usual. Oh, she’d whine and pout and give him the cold shoulder for “not being there for her” or some shit later, but that was what was wrong with this country, wasn’t it? If a man couldn’t be free in his own home to do what he needed to in an emergency, where could he?

Steve considered his options. Let it ring, and she’d be all anxious and concerned—and pissed when she realized he’d just been ignoring her. Shut it up and she’d be pissed now. Have more time to work herself up a good fuss by the time he got home, too. He grinned and punched the red icon. He was in the mood for feisty.

Something clattered against the driver’s side door.

Steve swore and swerved before he’d had a chance to look properly. For all his big talk about roadkill, he didn’t mess with deer. They could do a number on your ride. And he thought he’d caught a flash of something through the side mirror. Antlers? He had a vague impression of a near-lace-like snarl of shadows.

Wild rack—twelve pointer at least! Woulda messed up his paint, but he might’ve risked it to nab that for his wall if he’d been paying closer attention. Damn tall for deer though. Could an elk have been pushed this far west by fire?

But when he pulled over and peered out the window, he couldn’t make out anything in the smoke. Must’ve just been a larger branch thrown by the wind. Fire tornado?

His phone rang again. The wife. He smirked. Waited for the noise to stop before tapping over to contacts as he got back on the road. Thumbed through the menu to find his old man’s number. Getting a busy signal would really wind her up.

His dad wasn’t answering, though. He tried the guys next, working his way through the list as, one after the other, they failed to answer.

The smoke was brighter now, unevenly lit. Shouldn’t be anything left burning in this direction—had he got turned around? Or had the flames doubled back? Maybe better check the station. He had to hand it to Mira on that front, if begrudgingly. Trust a lady fire chief to be good at paper-pusher chores like hurrying status updates out ’round the clock.

Steve reached for the radio, still clutching his phone. The sharp clatter, when it came, was accompanied by a dark smudge at the corner of Steve’s vision. He whipped around so fast he nearly chucked his phone through the windshield. It bounced off and skittered to the far corner of the dash.

He was too busy searching for the truck-attacker to worry about it. But there was no sign of anything bigger than drifting ash—some of it visibly aflame, glittering like tiny red stars.

Steve picked up speed. It was getting uncomfortably warm, AC straining against the heat. He’d better get through this next stretch fast. Didn’t want his decals to melt like the flags. Once through, it’d be maybe five minutes to his dad’s.

His phone rang, buzzing against the dash with its face down so he couldn’t check the caller ID. The truck’s Bluetooth display wasn’t picking up the call either.

Steve stretched. The broad nose of the truck defeated his reach. He unbuckled, shifted his grip on the wheel, and strained. Not quite. Moved his left foot to the gas, slid his right over, and prepared for a quick lunge.

Steve was alone on the road.

Until he wasn’t.

Until he was.

This is not a story about justice.

There is a ghost town in the north where children told stories of the Tangle.

It did not have a road then. Oh, it had streets, the kind you live on and walk to school on and ride your bike down the hill on and drive deliveries up from the dock on. Cul-de-sacs and looping, winding, closed circuits, and dead-ends that peter into nothing but unmarked forest trails. But it didn’t have a road out, that kind that braids into the great branching sprawl of roads that bind together all of us.

And so the stories they told in that town were stories of watchers in the woods and fingers among the roots, hanging twigs that snagged your hair and tapped at your window and scraped at the siding while you lay in your bed, and moss that left a stain that wouldn’t wash out no matter what you tried, that might rot you from the outside in and the inside out—or maybe just make your mom yell at you to do the laundry again.

And then the roads joined the roads joined the roads and the Tangle followed us out.

And there it waits, at the edges, along the ways, just in behind where you think to look. You’ve seen it, you just didn’t know it. It was there in the shadows between the streetlights and the tangled growth in the ditch. It was the half-glimpsed something that caught your eye through the side window and was gone before you could turn and focus. A rustling, a clattering, a watching.

But the Tangle, unstudied, unstoried, hitherto unremarked in the annals of cryptozoologists, if we are to speak of it, must not be misclassified. Do not think it a moral or immoral thing, a creature of appetites or judgements. It is more mystery than monster, more thought than thing. If it has claimed victims, if there are any patterns to its sightings and sensings and those who met their end, they are hitherto unmapped.

This is not a story about the Tangle.

Editor: Hebe Stanton

First Reader: Belicia Rhea

Copy Editors: Copy Editing Department

Accessibility: Accessibility Editors