The Laurentian Highlands had always been a place

of quiet endurance—until the tracks stopped

running. In 1897, the Grand Nord Railway, a

symbol of imperial ambition and national unity,

halted its expansion near Lac des Étoiles after

three men vanished without a trace. Their bodies

were never found, but their tools were left in a

frozen ditch, rusted with a strange blue sheen.

James Whitmore, a Conservative MP from Ottawa,

was sent to investigate. His mandate: ensure the

project resumed, and quietly bury any scandal.

But when he arrived, he found the town split.

The Francophone mayor, Étienne Lefèvre, refused

to speak of the disappearances. The

Englishspeaking miners muttered about “spirits

in the pines.”

Whitmore’s first rule: no one talks to the press.

His second: no one enters the forest after dark.

Both were broken when a local trapper turned up

dead, his throat slit with a blade that left no

mark. The townsfolk claimed it was the work of

l’ombre du lac—the shadow of the lake.

The railway workers had uncovered something

beneath the permafrost. A network of tunnels,

carved by hands that predated European

settlement. Inside, they found relics of an

Indigenous people whose names had been erased

from maps and memory. The tunnels pulsed with a

cold that defied the thermometer. The blue rust

was not rust at all—it was a mineral that

reacted to human blood.

Whitmore pressed on, despite the rules. He found

a ledger hidden in the mayor’s office, listing

payments made to a Montrealbased company called

Lumière Industries. The same company had funded

the railway’s expansion. When he confronted

Lefèvre, the mayor slammed a map onto the table.

It showed the tunnels, marked with crosses where

the men had disappeared.

“Your people built this country on stolen land,”

Lefèvre said, voice low. “Now your people are

paying for it.”

The final rule: no one leaves the town alive who

knows too much. Whitmore tried to flee, but the

forest had changed. Trees grew in impossible

directions. The sky turned black. He found

himself back at the railway station, the tracks

now leading nowhere.

In the end, the tunnels swallowed the railway.

The project was abandoned. The town became a

ghost. And the only record of what happened was

a single page from Whitmore’s journal, buried

under the frost: French and English both built

this. One wanted to forget. The other wanted to

remember.