Now thirty-eight, Sam had come to appreciate the wisdom of the cliché as well as the cold sorrow of realizing that this natural desire might shrivel up unfulfilled. What then? Sunday afternoon cocktails with Andrea’s fellow brokers, with him chasing an endless string of movie gigs until, perhaps, he could found a company of his own?

Only when the car began to chug and lurch in an attempt to scale the road’s sudden incline did Sam realize he’d allowed his foot to ease off the gas pedal. He stomped down on it, and the asthmatic sounds the engine released made him wince. This far up the escarpment, well past the Rattlesnake Point Conservation Area, the road hosted surprise hairpin turns that required a driver’s full alertness. Sam shook the cobwebs from his head and willed his focus on the narrow road before him.

Had he not been so determined to exceed Dennis’s expectations, Sam might have let the peripheral image pass by unexplored. But his determination to prove his worth, now not only to Dennis but also to Andrea (maybe even to himself as well), inspired Sam to edge his car onto the nearest thing the narrow lane had to a shoulder. He gathered his hip-bag and exited the vehicle. With eyes fixated on the alluring quirk in the landscape, he began to climb the rocky wall that fed off the laneway.

The stiff pitch of a shingled roof was what had commanded his attention after a rather long and uneventful drive around the escarpment. It jutted up, all tar shingles and snugly carpentered beams, amidst the leafless, knotty treeline. As he climbed upward and then began to wriggle across the inhospitable terrain, Sam questioned the housetop’s reality. Had his anxious state conspired with his imagination to impress a structure where one could not be?

A few more cautious footsteps were all that was required to confirm the substance of his glimpse.

It was a wooden frame-house whose two storeys might have sprouted stiffly from the overgrown rockery that ringed its base. Blatantly abandoned, Sam couldn’t help but note how the house’s battered walls, punctured roof, and boarded windows did not convey the usual faint melancholy or eeriness that most neglected homes do. Instead, there was an air of what might be called power. Sam wondered if the house had drawn strength from its solitude, become self-perpetuating, self-sustaining, like the mythical serpent that nourishes itself by devouring its own tail.

The site was so tailored to his wishes that for a moment Sam almost believed in providence. Lugging the film crew’s equipment up and along this incline would be arduous, but he was confident that it would be worth the extra effort. Given the minuscule budget for Gnawers, even Dennis could not balk at the richness of this location.