Enter, Night (23 page)

“You left,” Elliot said. “You ran away from home and left me here.
I had to stay. You got a new life. All I had was the same one I always
had, except I had to face everything by myself that you left behind. It
doesn’t matter anyway now,” he said. “I’m
normal
. I have a
normal
life. I’m
somebody in this town. The past is in the past. I don’t want you fucking
it up.”

Jeremy looked down. “I’m sorry.” He took another sip of his beer.
“You know what? No—I’m not sorry. None of this was my fault, and none
of it had anything to do with you. I came back to Parr’s Landing with
Christina, for Christina. Not for you, and certainly not for my own good.
Thanks for reminding me of that, Elliot.”

“Jem—”

“Forget it, Elliot,” Jeremy said tiredly. He raised the bottle to his lips
and drained it in one long draught. Then he pushed the bottle away. “I
won’t bother you again. But please, it’s a small town. If we do run into
each other, can you just not act like . . . well, can you just be nice? I don’t
think I can handle any more shit right now from anyone, least of all you.”

“Don’t drive drunk now,” Elliot said, trying to joke, and failing. “I
don’t want to have to arrest you.”

If he smiles now, I’m done for,
Jeremy thought.
If he laughs, I don’t know
if I’m going to be able to walk out of here. Please, God, don’t let him laugh.

But of course he didn’t laugh, nor did he smile, and for that Jeremy
was profoundly grateful. It made it easier for him to stand up without
saying goodbye to Elliot, and to walk calmly out of the bar, nodding to
Donna and smiling, but otherwise drawing no attention to himself.

And because he didn’t turn around, he didn’t see Elliot watching him,
the longing in his face breaking through the mask of ruthless masculine
efficiency. For a moment Elliot looked seventeen, not thirty-two. The
sight of it would have broken Jeremy’s heart all over again and shattered
his resolve. Elliot knew this and was likewise profoundly grateful that
Jeremy hadn’t seen it.

Still safe,
he thought,
looking around the bar. Everything is good. And
even if it’s not good, it’s safe
. Elliot walked slowly and deliberately over to
where Donna was polishing glasses behind the bar and sat down at one
of the stools.

He leaned in on his elbows, laying his arms on the bar. Looking
deeply into her eyes, he smiled and said, “So?”

“So yourself, “ Donna said. She flushed slightly and unconsciously
touched her hair. “So, nice evening with your friend?”

“Not a friend,” Elliot drawled. He increased the heat of his smile.
“Just somebody from high school. We were in the same class at Browning,
but I really barely knew the guy. He’s just passing through town.”

Donna had dismissed the rumours she’d heard about Jeremy Parr
and Elliot years ago, hinting—to her girlfriends, at least, not to men,
because she didn’t want them to think she was some kind of
slut
—that
she had proof he wasn’t a queer. Certainly she had entertained no doubts
herself during the hours they’d spent in her bed together, with Elliot on
top of her pumping away, hard as an anvil.

If she’d thought—well, not
thought,
really, just maybe
felt,
if even
that—some trace of energy between them when she’d brought the beer
over, she told herself she had interrupted a discussion about the death
of Jeremy’s brother, Jack. She’d had a little crush on Jack back in the
day, but that Christina Whatshername (now
there
was a slut) had gotten
herself knocked up. She’d heard that they’d run off to Toronto and that
she’d forced him to Do The Right Thing and marry her. The Parrs were
filthy-loaded, so Christina must be sitting pretty by now.

Donna sighed. She ran a lacquered fingernail along Elliot’s index
finger. “So, Elliot,” she said. “Why did you never go for me?”

“I went for you plenty of times, babe,” he said lazily. He wrapped
his index finger around hers and held it down. “You do remember, don’t
you?”

“No, I mean proper-like. Why didn’t you ever ask me out. You know,
like on a date?”

“Well,” he said, “for one thing, you were married.”

She laughed. “Is that all? Lucien wouldn’t have even known. He was
drunk most of the time we were married. If that’s all that was stopping
you, you should have asked.”

“We had some great times.” He leaned in closer. “We had some
really
great times. Didn’t we?”

“You’re so conceited, Elliot,” she said. “How do you know it was as
great for me as it was for you?”

“I know,” he replied. “And so do you.” Her pupils were dilated and her
lips were moist. He knew from experience that her nipples underneath
the blouse she wore were now stiff. And though he felt nothing for her at
that moment, either in his head or below the waist, he said, “So, Donna.
Do you want to get a drink later?”

“We’re in a
bar,
Elliot.”

Donna liked delaying the moment as long as possible, especially with
Elliot when they’d first been lovers. She was all about the slow moves and
she’d enjoyed teaching the then-teenaged Elliot restraint and discipline.

But it was a cold night, and nothing was waiting for her at home but
a hungry cat and a bed with cold sheets on it. And, to be honest, though
she’d never admit it, she wasn’t getting any younger.

He leaned into her, his cheek nearly meeting hers. He smelled
shampoo and some drugstore perfume that was sexy precisely because it
smelled cheap. “I mean somewhere else. Later. Some other place.”

“What other place did you have in mind, Elliot?”

“Your place,” he said, showing all his beautiful teeth.

Elliot covered her hand in his and squeezed gently. When he turned
her hand palm-up inside his grasp, offering the softness of it to the press
of his fingers, he knew he’d scored. Maybe the day was going to end on a
better note than the one it had started on.

Whatever else happened, though, Elliot realized he had almost
succeeded in driving any thoughts or memories of Jeremy Parr from his
mind, at least for now.

It would have been impossible
for him to say how long he’d been
searching since he didn’t habitually wear a watch, but Richard Weal
knew he had two choices: he would either find his sleeping friend here,
or he would die of hunger and thirst in the Cimmerian blackness of
an abandoned mineshaft, not even knowing where he was, much less
remembering how he’d gotten there.

He guessed that he had long since wandered off what was left of
the actual path through the mine and into some sort of interconnected
underground cave system formed of arches of natural rock, but the
voice—and the trace imagery that remained in his brain long after he’d
heard actual words—somehow continued to guide him.

Living as he did almost entirely in his own mind, memories and
dreams were important to Weal—not only immediate memories, such
as how beautiful his friend’s voice was, but more recent memories—the
slaughter of his victims, of course, and the way they suffered and bled,
but also the images he’d gleaned from the pages of the manuscript he’d
killed the old man for—the translation of that letter from the dying
priest, Father Nyon, who’d followed his faith in God into the northern
wilderness of New France in 1632.

In spite of his hatred—and he loathed the priest for what he’d done
to his friend, and with as much murderous, steely hatred as if the priest
had done it to Weal himself—he had to admire his faith in God.

Well, perhaps
admire
was the wrong word. He could identify with
it, intellectually and emotionally. Had Weal himself not first heard his
invisible friend’s voice that hot day in 1952, calling to him from behind
the granite walls of these very cliffs, begging for release? Had he not been
listening to that voice all these years, calling him into the wilderness, and
was he not as eager as any postulant, now or then, to touch the Divine?

He would still have liked to put the young priest to his knives for
what he’d done to Weal’s friend—to peel his eyeballs in their sockets like
grapes and cut his fingers off in quarter-sections, taking his time and
enjoying the screams before he took an X-Acto knife to Father Nyon’s
murdering tongue.

Since the manuscript he’d taken had been incomplete, he had no
idea what happened to the priest from 1630, but as a scholar, he was
well versed in the gruesome history of the fates that had befallen the
unluckiest of the Jesuit martyrs. Weal hoped Father Nyon had met an
end like that, and that it had hurt terribly.

Out of the subterranean silence, he suddenly heard the voice again.
It spoke one word:
Here
.

So audible, present, and clear this time—not in his head, but directly
in front of him—that Weal gasped. He swung the flashlight wildly,
seeking out the recesses of the mine and the shadows between the rocks
where the light couldn’t reach. He gaped at what he saw standing there. It
was a man, or something shaped like a man, towering, wrapped in a long
black robe. Its eyes twinkled in the light, but there was no joy in those
eyes, only ancient malice and an insatiable, terrifying hunger.

Weal felt his bowels let go as he fouled himself for a second time, the
stench rising to his nostrils immediately, making him dry-retch.

And then, suddenly, there was no robed man standing in front of
him—no one at all. There were no eyes twinkling in the flashlight’s
beam. Weal blinked and stared harder into the mineshaft, trying to see.
Chimerical shapes danced in front of his eyes. He rubbed them, but the
shapes remained, fantastical, grotesquely cavorting. What he’d first
taken for the figure of a man was nothing but an odd rock formation.
The gleam of eyes was merely mica flickering as the flashlight swept over
it.

There was no one there. The only monster hiding in this place was
Weal himself. The thought filled him not with dread, but with impossible
relief, for what he’d seen was infinitely worse than anything he could
have ever imagined in his best, or worst, nightmares.

Then the voice came again, even more clearly than before. He felt
an indistinguishable mix of relief and terror in equal measure, combined
with nearly transcendent reverence.

Here. You have found me.

Weal knelt down in the dirt in a posture of abject supplication. He
felt sharp stones cutting into his kneecaps, but he welcomed the pain as
an offering of abasement.

“Where, Lord?” he wept. “Where are you? Show me. I beg you. One
more sign, Lord. Please. Just one more sign.”

Another image flashed through his mind and he turned his head
sharply to the left. He aimed the flashlight at the place where had
been told to look. A short distance from where he knelt, the natural
architecture of cave rock had created an oblong depression that jutted
out from the wall of bedrock like an anthropoid coffin, but too small to
contain the body of man.

Lying across it almost like a lid was a long, flat slab of sedimentary
shale. At first, Weal took it to be another part of the rock formation,
but when he brought the light close, he saw that it had fallen, or been
deliberately placed there, at an angle.

Roll the stone away.

He put the flashlight down and set his shoulder to the shale lid,
pushing hard. He’d expected the slab to be heavy, but it was relatively
light and brittle. It yielded readily, crashing to the ground, splitting in
two at his feet. He fumbled for the flashlight at his feet. He shone it into
the basin. Then the flashlight flickered and died.

“No!” he screamed. “No! No! Not now!”

He shook the flashlight, slapped it against his thigh. A bolt of agony
shot through his leg as the blade of the knife in his pocket bit into his
thigh again, but the impact accomplished its goal: the flashlight flickered
and went back on.

Feverishly, Weal shone the light into the stone basin. It contained
what he at first took to be the dried body of a small animal, but on closer
inspection was a bundle of what seemed to be ashes and bone fragments
inside the rotted remains of some of sort cloth, or animal skin. He reached
out to touch the bundle, finding it cold and oddly dry considering the
length of time it had lain underground, undisturbed.

Gingerly, he opened the bundle, gently prying apart the fabric that
contained it. The fabric fell apart at his touch, leaving the pile of ashes
exposed to his flashlight’s beam.

“Ashes,” he said aloud, remembering his vision. “These are
ashes
.”
He said it again, not only to confirm his findings to his senses, but also
to hear a voice that wasn’t in his head for once, even if it was his own.

But then, had all the voices been in his head? He felt a sickening sense
of betrayal wash over him. This wasn’t his
friend,
this was just an old pile
of cinders. Where was his friend? Where was the voice? Where was the
treasure
? Had this whole misadventure been a series of crazy directives
issued from his own diseased brain? The result of not taking the pills
the doctors had prescribed him at the hospital? And now, because he’d
thrown his pills away back in Toronto, he was going to die a horrible,
drawn-out death by starvation and thirst.

Why is there a coffin in a mineshaft?

“What?” he said. The silence mocked him. “Who said that?” Weal
looked left and right. “Father, is that you?”

It was in your head, you idiot. Crazy person. It’s all in your head—all of
the “voices” have been in your head the whole time. There’s no “Lord.” There’s
no “Father.” There never was. You’ve fucked yourself good and proper now,
haven’t you? Are you going to keep talking to yourself until you go blind down
here? Or crazier? Or die of thirst? Why don’t you just cut your wrist and drink
your own blood? Aren’t you thirsty enough yet? You will be, give it time. You
just watch.