A Close Reading of Halcolm Fontaine’s Final Letter
a short story by Justin Allec
“I loved him with a mixture of affection and reverence that knew no bounds…” — Mary Shelley, Frankenstein
Gerald brayed like the old donkey he was, his joke a stone dropped in the calm of Dr Ramona Fuller’s lecture. Laughter rippled to the edges of the classroom. Center-staged, Fuller forced herself to crack a smile over gritted teeth and aimed it at her students. Especially the elderly Gerald, who had made himself a known clown from the first class.
Inside she was a clenched fist. The professor knew their type, these Oxford rejects in tweed coats and the mealy Latin they dusted through their conversations; failed playwrights, mostly, who liked to challenge a professor on their knowledge of the classics. There was always one or two in Fuller’s English courses.
Her textbook fanned down any residual noise. She rounded the end of the stage, the soft rubber soles of her baby-blue Docs leading her cadence.
“Thank you, Gerald. Not sure what Wordsworth would’ve made of that pun on his name, but let’s get back on track, shall we?” The old man retreated into his grey overcoat at the attention, and Fuller thought how interruptions were more like hijackings. This was only her second lecture on Early Canadian Literature and she didn’t need some geriatric ‘mature student’ thinking it was an open mic. “Certainly, we can look to the Romantic poets for their views of nature—as Gerald alluded to, Wordsworth and his ilk—but, as this course is titled, we’re keeping our focus on Canada, zoomed in on Fort William at the beginning of the nineteenth century.”
Fuller went to the chalkboard and sketched a rough castle. After a thoughtful moment, she added a small Canadian flag to one turret.
“Most of the nation’s, and I use that term loosely, energy at this time was dedicated to the fur trade. Pelts were big business, and the exploitation of nature for furs led to settlement, colonization, industrialization, urbanization, and on and on. A national identity hadn’t yet been defined, but there were some characteristics—themes, if you will—starting to develop throughout personal accounts such as journals and letters: unlimited natural resources, a certain wildness only rivaled by Africa, the impression of vast distances, and an Indigenous people either noble or savage. Sound familiar at all?”
Fuller gestured at a blonde girl in the fifth row against the wall who was wearing a stressed blue Beaver Canoe hoodie, casual fashion proving her point. Some of the students nodded in agreement.
“So Canadian writing, as we understand it in the classic ‘English Class’ historical survey sense, doesn’t yet exist. Instead, as I mentioned above, we rely on the personal writings of these early Canadians. What they loved, hoped for, and desired.
“My studies, though, weren’t concerned with what was to be celebrated. I concentrated on what was to be feared. As literature spread amongst the classes in the Old World, other genres and styles of writing began to find purchase. Prose began to flourish, and many writers repurposed and heightened aspects of tragedy to create Gothic stories—Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein being the best example, and still my favorite. Mystery, madness, esoteric knowledge, impenetrable wilderness, the monster and its otherness; all important aspects of the genre, but also things to fear in this new wild world. There are elements of the Gothic in their personal accounts.”
Fuller scratched a series of straight trees on either side of the tiny castle. She then wrote FEAR over her addition. This wasn’t something she usually did in this lecture. She never drew pictures. Gerald looked as if he was going to offer another quip. She raised her book to plow ahead, but the old man’s skin slipped around his orifices and revealed something bootblack beneath.
Fuller froze. The shape of what should be Gerald quivered in its seat.
It stabilized, skin tightened, but now shaved clean to its pointed chin. Its stringy blond hair had lengthened and cupped the shoulders of a rumpled grey overcoat. It smiled at her with toothpick teeth as if urging her on with the lesson.
Fuller cleared her throat. Okay, onward, then. “Canada, as it isn’t even known yet, is a world away from European trends, especially once you passed out of the York region. Canadian writers beyond the populated south aren’t stationed at great universities or cosmopolitan cities with centuries of history; they don’t even have access to a library. They can’t get a newspaper. They are working in a vacuum: the northern wilderness. Very little of Wordsworth’s sublime when your toes are freezing. They may have had access to a Bible, perhaps a few classical works, and they would know of Shakespeare; but men like Samuel Hearne and Alexander Mackenzie—and we’ll look at them on Thursday because they’re patriotic building blocks—were voyageurs first and scholars second. They wanted to entertain and shape the world’s perception of this untrammeled wilderness, but they had a job to do first.
“Their volumes are not just descriptions of exploration, but also firmly belong to the genre of pulp. Facing unknown dangers and surviving through pluck and courage; noble quests, encounters with fierce animals, and the conquering of nature; all good, wholesome imperialistic practices, if you will. Adventure stories for boys, even if they are autobiographical.”
From the tapestry of faces throughout the lecture hall Dr. Fuller saw a few of the students nod, either in agreement or just waking up. This was her main area of study, the focus of Early Canadian Lit 102, and the reason for her precious tenure at Lakehead University.
Gerald nodded after the fact, encouraging. How his eyes had widened, it must be because he doesn’t blink; or, no, it was that his thickly bushed brows had thinned.
To her chalk picture, Fuller added rolling cursive cees under the treeline to make waves.
“Eventually I found that fear in early Canadian writing, but I had to look in some very usual places. I mean, of course, Mr. Halcolm Fontaine of Fort William and his series of letters.”
She slashed FONTAINE below the waves. She let a warm smile travel to the back of the class, ignoring the elderly thing in the overcoat. She loved this part of her course.
“Now—what do we know about Fontaine?” Fuller looked for hands, avoiding the old man’s direction. It had braided its knurled fingers on the bare desk. A girl seated along the east wall with a high ponytail of black hair volunteered.
The student prattled the necessary details. “Halcolm Fontaine, born 1781 in York, Upper Canada, died 1822 in Fort William, a minor clerk with the North West Company. He is most famous for his series of letters to Jessica Blain, which were found after his death undelivered...”
The overcoated thing shifted forward to sit much taller.
“Undelivered,” Fuller echoed and rounded the stage end with a squeak from her heel. “Messages of love unrequited. Jessica Blain was publicly courted by Fontaine throughout 18206 after they met at the Lyceum Theater. By all accounts, he made a public jackass of himself which threatened to rub off on Jessica and affect her prospects. The class system was and is still alive and well in Canada, as is the prospect of scandal. Jessica, of course, was the daughter of Lord Phillip Blain: a committee member of the Hudson Bay Company, overseer of the recently bought-out and humiliated North West Company, and a minor god in the constellation of 19th century York. And what happens when you prompt the wrath of the gods?
“Jessica never received Fontaine’s letters because he never sent them. Banished to Fort William in the fall of 1822, he wrote to her for two years but didn’t post one. I had to dig them out of the HBC’s records in the National Archives.
“Imagine: Fontaine writes at a small pine desk in his tiny, cold room, one candle against the winter’s darkness, banished to the Upper Canada fur trading post for pining after a powerful man’s daughter. He writes and writes, but doesn’t post anything. Why? Doesn’t he still yearn for her? Doesn’t he wonder if her heart’s gone cold toward him, or if she ever felt something in the first place? Either way, what genre are we operating in, then?”
She reached for their answers. Cries for tragedy and more for romance. Fuller’s hands folded up. Well done.
“Absolutely. Tragedy, romance, either of those works. Or do they? Does Jessica simply become a muse for him? Forbidden love has long been a mechanism to produce conflict in romance stories, but we’re also using elements of...” A march back to the blackboard where she underlined FEAR. To her picture, she added the outline of a boat with a lone sail high on the waves. “The Gothic takes that love and twists it, adding doubt and fear. We’ll see what it does to Fontaine. Turn to page 56, please.
“Now, all of Fontaine’s letters are worth reading for their depictions of frustrated courtship, but this final letter... ‘November 12, 1822. Dearest Jessica,’” she read, “‘Any effort must be gauged against the resounding cold. Approaching winter, the nights here are long and most frigid, bereft of any kind of warmth or kinship. I pile under pelts in my primalness. So let me, love, wish for nothing more than the essential vestiges of life which this fortress lacks: the distant warmth of your hand, a lick of honey, a warm cup of tea. I have a cut on the palm of my left hand that has taken over two months to heal.’ Not a very glamorous life, living on the frontier.
“Keep in mind Fontaine’s public position,” Fuller said for context. “As a North West employee, he’s on the losing side, but there’s a lot less comfort in Fort William than York. He’s doing penance for his impropriety with Jessica. To the people of Fort William that he interacts with, he’s a lecher, some kind of sinner, and he’s a representative of a failed company. He’s given perfunctory jobs at the Fort. It’s a prison sentence.” Scrawled on the board above the trees: PRISON.
“He’s been removed from Jessica’s orbit, but also the civilization of York that he knew. He was banished for his crime, which was love. All of that culminates in this letter with the description of the boat’s arrival.”
Pages flipped as students caught up. Fuller looked around at bent heads, knowing most had not done the reading. No matter: they would enjoy the grisly bits just the same. Among the minutia of classroom noises came the eager slap of a tongue on lips; the professor thought of the slim snouts of Dobermans, though she had never been close to one. It did it again and Fuller hastened a glance up at the grisly thing posing as a student.
Had Gerald’s teeth thickened to ivory pegs? And beyond that maw, how black was the hole of its throat? The grizzled fingers fluttered out and re-folded, nails tapered to dull points. A rush of cool, fetid air washed downriver toward Fuller and she gasped.
It drove her back to her text.
“Halcolm Fontaine’s letter describes the night that the supposed monster arrived at Fort William: ‘The bonfires clawed higher than the Fort’s walls. Flames glistening against the snow. Then the ship came down the river, silent, cut from the starless night, with no lanterns and no hails.’
“Imagine night two hundred years ago. Beyond the fort’s bonfires, with no moon, it would be black. Endless kilometers of frozen boreal forest. Who knew what was really out there? Fontaine’s company at the Fort was the Anishinaabe people, Lower Canada trappers, and they liked a story with their drink around the fire—Wendigos, Ragarous, Mishiginebigs, Qallupilluit. He goes on...anyone? Would you mind reading, please?”
In the second row, a boy brushed the blond fringe from his eyes and cleared his throat. “‘A two-mast schooner, flat-bottomed, oared, rigged for river travel and bearing no colours, pulled alongside the dock in near silence. After racking her we greeted some of the men of the Castevet, and a frightened lot they were. Their eyes begged for the firelight. They looked hungry, too, worse than most of the Europeans we usually saw. Though their ship was expected, I didn’t understand what cargo I was to receive. However, they wanted no hand in the offloading, saying that the freight had traveled from English forests darker than those that surrounded us.’
“‘Where is your Captain?’ I demanded of one forward-looking fellow, who replied, ‘the Second Mate, good sir, he’ll be giving the orders. But he can’t come off the boat because he’s the only one with a pistol.’ His reply made little sense and since they wouldn’t return to the ship, I bade the lot of them go up the hill to the chapel, and Father Allen would accommodate them—'”
“Excellent, thank you. The atmosphere Fontaine makes with his description—traveling at night, the lack of any flag or identifying marks, the disorder of the chain of command—is chilling. It sets the scene as effectively as a storm blowing leaves on a Halloween night. We’ve moved into the Gothic: normalcy off-kilter, a fearful presence, possible witnesses to something shocking. It’s the fur-trading version of The Demeter. Page 59; take us up to the monster, please.”
The thing in the overcoat had brought the sleeves together to hide its hands. Fuller looked past whatever its teeth were doing and chose another student, this time from the back.
A redheaded girl sat on her hands as she read. “Um, okay... ‘I asked two guardsmen to accompany me onto the ship, with their muskets and their lamps. We moved below deck, I leading, as was my station. Our lamps pushed against the gloom but did little for the smell, which was the pungent odor of unwashed men and rot. We reached the hold—'”
The girl paused as Fuller added MONSTER to the chalkboard above the boat.
“More Gothic hallmarks,” Fuller said, “even if he is being as factual as possible. A literal descent into hell, with no Virgil to guide. It’s cold and dark and smells terrible. I’ll continue. Ahem—‘Crouched at the base of the hold’s door there was a man, bundled in a blanket. I hailed him, and in a second he had the pistol aimed at my face. I imagined the bullet, dormant, waiting, patient in the chamber of the pistol.’”
Reading from her book meant that Fuller could avoid looking toward the old shape. She could almost see the end of the lecture.
“‘Jessica, believe me when I say I feared for my life in that moment. Facing the madman, I introduced myself and asked him to please lower his weapon, which he did as he stood. He apologized, and said he was Paul Retaine, second-mate and acting captain, but he remained at his post. Gun at ready.’
“‘Brandishing my vague paperwork, I asked Mr. Retaine: ‘What has decided your journey?’
“‘Mr. Fontaine,’ he replied heavily, ‘our only reason and our regret is what lies beyond this door, and it has brought our ship misery and decline. I would not wish to bring it ashore, good sir, as one does not wish to bear a plague. Regardless of your paperwork. I should prefer, now that the men have refuge in a house of God, to cast off and sink this boat with its precarious cargo.’
“So, like a madwoman hiding in the attic, the big secret is behind the hold’s door. Fontaine should be scared: the second mate acting as a harbinger, the missing crew members, the smell. But he’s intrigued. It’s adding some excitement to his prison sentence. If you’ve only seen the first circle, eh? Not to be dissuaded, Fontaine chooses to look.”
As did Fuller. The shape in the overcoat raised its hand to read. Everyone else in the class had gone very still after her last passage.
“Yes? Um, I guess the top of 60...” Her voice shrank, because now the Gerald-thing held some pages. They were loose, curled, and yellowed with age.
“‘I bade the guards to stand firm against whatever was contained in the hold,’” the thing said, voice strong, a slight roundness to the vowels which betrayed a rough French accent. “‘The door creaked open. I thought the hold vacant, but any shapes were hidden by the cloaking darkness therein. It was even colder in that small room, the kind of chill that saps all heat and hope. I did not hear breath but in the shadows, I could discern movement. In that moment I reflected, my dear Jessica, upon the motivation for my own long confinement.’”
The classroom slipped around Fuller. Corners darkened and crouched close to her, a meager cone of brightness surrounding herself and the reader as if from oil lanterns. Her legs listed gently with the movement of the boat. A wild cold thickened the air along with the fetid smell of the unwashed.
“‘When I shone my light in I expected the formless shape of a devil, but instead, in rapid succession, as quick as I could blink, I saw the profile of a woman, tall as you, Jessica, but scaled like a dark fish, before it constricted to the shape of a man. A small man, who held himself rigid against the far wall. A great cloud of dark hair obscured his lined face, melding with the furs covering his body. His eyes were closed but I felt seen. The orbs beneath those wrinkled lids of flesh knew of me. It thrilled me akin to the death at the bottom of the pistol barrel.’”
The reader paused and Fuller exhaled; she could see her breath. She dropped her book without noticing as she stretched out a hand for support and felt the roughness of a ship’s timber. Gerald’s shape ran the tip of a muscle, its tongue, along straight teeth the yellow of old bones before continuing.
“‘Who are you? What is the meaning of them locking you up in this way? Are you a prisoner, a criminal, or both? I asked of the man. Good heavens, but my voice shook. Behind me, the guards leveled their rifles over my shoulders.’
“‘The man didn’t answer but opened his eyes. Through the glare of my light, he saw me, truly. How he looked at me was warmth incarnate, and my heart beat fiercely. My blood, it pumped, dear Jessica. Such vivacity I have never known. Fiercer than the candlelight that caught the tumble of jewels at your throat, my dearest, when I first saw you descending the Lyceum Theater’s steps. I forgot my confinement, my disgrace; it was love to be looked at by this creature, much more than what I imagined you had for me. A kind of love that I recognized aching like the cut on my hand, refusing to heal...’”
The Gerald shape finished the passage. All the talking had loosened the skin around its mouth. It pushed wrinkles back to position, then folded its fingers again on an empty desk.
Another frigid breath expelled from Fuller, then the classroom roused itself. Students flipped pages, wondering where they had lost the lecture. Fuller retreated to the blackboard. Over the chalk-stick trees and where one would put a sun, drawn with a circle and dashed lines radiating from it, Fuller put a widened Pac-Man mouth. With teeth.
The professor turned and clapped her numb hands once for eyes on her.
“And so, Fontaine ends on a very Gothic idea of love, without any salutation, farewell, or even signature,” Fuller stammered. Her hand was dumb without her book; where was it? How had it ended up on the floor? “An image tied to pain and wounding, but also passionate fulfillment on a deeper level. Jessica, it seems, is out, and whatever this ‘creature’, as he calls it, is, it's his new muse. We don’t fully understand Fontaine’s use of ‘love’ here, as the word had many connotations at the time, even when used between men. What we do know is that this is the last preserved letter from the North West agent. He lives, we believe, for approximately two more months, during which time the Fort undergoes waves of disease and a winter that pressed the traders to famine. After that, it is abandoned, and its history remains relatively unknown...”
Normally these final minutes of class were for questions, but Fuller still felt Gerald’s eyes on her; as levees, they held back fathoms of dungy river water against the close reality of the ship’s hold.
“...Um, and we’ll look at the excerpts from Samuel Hearne and Alexander Mackenzie on Thursday. Thank you and good day!”
Professor Ramona Fuller dismissed the class early. Rounding panic, she piled her papers and shrugged out of the classroom door before her students could press on her. Her blackboard scribbles were left for the next class. She couldn’t guess what story they really told.
Her breath slowly leveled as she marched through Laskin Hall. The faded yellow of the painted cinder block hallways was familiar and solid. The rubber of her booted soles steadily clomped along the tiled floor.
The door to her office swung shut behind her as Fuller dropped the heap of notes and textbooks to her desktop. She pushed herself back into her chair for relief, sighing deeply.
Whatever dim afternoon sun was tickling through the narrow window wavered, as if it wasn’t sunlight at all but the gutting wick of an oil lantern. The loaded bookcases and cabinets lining Fuller’s office walls crouched in deep shadows.
There wasn’t a knock at the door. Instead, the whining slide of a steel deadbolt.
Gerald entered. The heavy timber door swung shut, the wrought iron latch clanking into place.
“Good day,” it began, and dread twitched within the professor as the air tinged with autumn’s chill. The room dimmed further, as dark as if a curtain had drawn over the sun. The cold shadows added depth to the figure’s mass.
“My office hours aren’t—” Fuller tried.
“I enjoyed your lecture today, your insights,” it wheezed, the sloth of Quebecois on each word.
“Really? Well, I’m glad to hear it,” Fuller exclaimed. Her passion overcame whatever misgivings the shifting figure prompted. “Fontaine’s letters are fascinating, really. I wish there was more to his story.”
“Do you believe there isn’t?” An eyebrow, grown back to bushy, raised high. There came a creak like a ship flexing with a wave.
“Well, there must be, but what he did for the two months up to his death—what anyone in that Fort was doing at that stressful time...it’s lost. Certainly, if his story of the Castevet is to be believed, a strange sickness might have taken hold. We know Fontaine was profoundly affected. But there’s no evidence regarding the rest of the Fort.”
“No evidence that you’ve seen,” came the reply.
Fuller had to shrug. “Fontaine seems to have fallen out of love with Jessica, as his last letter describes. His affection for whomever he found in the hold who ‘sees him truly’ is a flight of fancy, a bizarre reaction to the stress of being banished for a one-sided love affair. He probably had no more reasons to write, especially with the harsh winter. It would’ve been so cold that any ink would be frozen.”
“Or,” the shape countered with a rush of bilge water, “perhaps he had found other ways of showing devotion. Ways tied to other loves.”
Fuller tilted in her chair as she pondered. “It’s possible. Whoever was in the hold seemed to have, for the first time, prompted a kind of love Fontaine didn’t know he needed. He took the time to complete his last letter after his strange encounter. Having that kind of love—consuming or corrupted—offered to you... What would it do to you? What would you do to keep it? Especially if your previous love left you banished. We simply don’t know.”
“‘Aching like a cut on my hand, refusing to heal’,” it quoted regally. “Does that not sound like love to you, Dr Fuller?”
“In my book,” she attempted, “I argued that—”
“In your book, yes.” A span of the overcoat’s sleeve took in all of Fuller’s work, displayed prominently behind her desk on the first shelf. “Not the whole story, eh, Dr Fuller?” The gnarled fingers flicked a slim folder from the folds of the overcoat across the desk.
“What is this?” Inside the folder were yellowing pages, like those that she handled with white cotton gloves at the National Archives. Like those she had seen this very figure reading from in her class.
Seeing Halcolm’s looping handwriting numbed her.
“‘November 17, 1822... My god, this is the next letter. This,” she looked from the page to the shape, “shouldn’t exist. Fontaine’s fate? Maybe even the Fort’s decline? Does this explain any of it?”
Fuller felt the rush of scholarship. There may be a new book that she could wring out of this letter, or at least a paper.
She read, murmuring: “‘The Fort is still. Darkness lies behind and before each door. The chapel remains closed to me, the only source of light or life. I reside on the ship, making my berth in the hold, as its closeness calms my troubled spirit. The cabins are barred to me, the livestock savaged. The snow has finally covered the bodies where they fell...’ My god, but this could explain so much! The disease that overtook the Fort...”
“Keep reading,” the Gerald-thing urged as the office quietly bobbed in the river’s current.
“Of course...but his handwriting, ugh, I can hardly read this—‘My hunger has grown in proportion to my love. To dwell in its arms, comforted here in the hold, until I wander forth again, seeking nourishment in this frozen land. A hunger for warmth beyond any embrace from that harlot, or any summer’s day, any roaring fire, any banquet meal. The blood gives me life—’”
Fuller stared up at the darkened shape of Gerald, then flipped the last page over. “I cannot believe this,” she said and stuffed the pages back into the folder. “A forgery; a horror story. Dracula masquerading as a historical document. It isn’t real. It didn’t happen that way.”
Spindly fingers returned the folder to the coat’s folds. “Do you believe so?”
Fuller huffed against the looming darkness. Her office had rescinded to a dim hole bracketed by stout timbers. The air was frigid with damp. She coughed. “No,” she admitted, “it’s always so much worse than what’s written. But why are you showing me this? What’s the benefit?”
“You are a student of history, Dr Fuller,” the thing went on, “a scholar of Canadian literature from its beginning. This adds another chapter to Fontaine’s story, as you desired to know. So does it clarify, or complicate, as only life and death can do?”
“I would need to see more,” she hurried on, “for context. Perhaps there’s another letter after—”
“The true mark of a scholar: greed.” The figure softly shook its head. “You are a ghoul. You exhume the dead. You exhibit their corpses for your profit.”
“What?! Listen, I’m an English professor, I’m—”
She quieted, suddenly. The dark pools of the shape’s eyes caught Fuller and she understood who, or what, was standing across from her. And she knew she was terrified because history had shown what was impossible, and that there is very little that cannot be.
“I called you a ghoul. Your love of the Gothic, of the monsters and the monstrous—are you thrilled with Fontaine’s fate? A ghoul is a monster, and what happens to them in those stories you love? Death, correct? Or like Fontaine, banishment. But what about the creator, the author? Your very own Dr Frankenstein in the frigid Canadian northlands—what is their reward? It’s a harsh land, difficult to tame. Still is. Do you know that when it came time to decimate the original peoples of this land, it wasn’t just the blankets that were corrupted with plagues?”
“The cargo,” Fuller whispered, and the shape of Gerald nodded an official greeting. The window let in moonlight from a winter’s night, and beyond the office door all was quiet along the river. With its baggy sleeves the shape stretched into all the darkness behind.
“You don’t examine the unexamined life, Dr Fuller, you dramatize it. Fontaine’s fears, his insecurities, and his great love for Jessica—you read his thoughts with your critical lens and lose all sense of the man and his desires. You took one of his passages dedicated to Jessica and placed it as the epigraph in your own book.
“But for me? From the first time I saw him, I gave him a most unique love. I fulfilled his need for recognition. That’s all he’s ever wanted, really: to be seen and loved. Instead, you gave him infamy. Which do you think he deserves more?”
“What would you have me do?” Fuller blustered. “This is my job. I’m a professor. I’m to examine and interpret the remains of what’s been left behind.”
“Perhaps you should ask him what you deserve,” the shape said with a look over its shoulder.
The overcoated figure stepped quietly to the side to allow another shape passage from the darkness into the confines of the hold. A twisted, bunched shape of wrongly proportioned limbs that writhed toward them through the shadows; a shape that had once responded to the name of Halcolm Fontaine.
Fuller heard a rasp, somehow a voice, and the professor knew it spoke to the shape in the overcoat: “So let me, love...”
Justin Allec (he/him) is a writer based in Northwestern Ontario, an area which informs and influences his horror stories. He has stories appearing in forthcoming anthologies from Eerie River and Crystal Lake. He is a monthly contributor to The Walleye Magazine, Thunder Bay’s arts and culture alternative.