Enter, Night (41 page)

Next to his bed, Finn kept his stack of magazines and comics. He
leaned down on his stomach and tore through the stack until he located
Issue Two of
The Tomb of Dracula.
Frantically, he flipped through the
pages until he reached the end, page twenty-one—seven panels, the
dawn tones of orange and yellow like the sky above Bradley Lake this
morning playing against the dark blue and black of the ever-present
darkness.

Finn looked out his window. It was dark. Rain beat against the
windows, a harbinger of colder, more murderous weather on the way as
winter raked skeletal fingers through the darkening sky for the first time
that fall. His bedside clock read five p.m. He had slept for six hours.

He looked again at the comic book in his hand, then down at the
ash-covered rubber ball on the floor.

When his mother turned
around where she stood in front of the stove,
she was readying an aluminum-covered cookie sheet upon which three
Swanson’s chicken pot pies would be placed into the preheated oven.
Finn loved Swanson’s chicken pot pies—they were his favourite.

“Hi, sweetie. How are you feeling? We’re having Swanson’s for
dinner! And mashed potatoes, and creamed corn.” She made a smacking
sound with her lips. Finn hated it when she made the sound, but he loved
his mother too much to tell her. “Delish, right?”

Finn looked better, she thought. He had washed his face and changed
his clothes. Some colour had returned to his cheeks, but he still had
those god-awful dark circles, and his eyes looked freshly sandpapered. It
was going to take a while for him to feel better. But the chicken pot pies
would be a good start.

Anne smiled expectantly and smoothed her apron with her hands.

“Mom, I know what happened to Sadie,” Finn said. “A vampire got
her. That’s why she burned up. A vampire got my dog. And I’m going to
find him, and I’m going to kill him. I’m going to drive a wooden stake into
his heart, and I’m going to make him pay for what he did to Sadie.”

A branch slapped
Hank Miller across the face in the gathering gloom,
stinging his cheek and making him yelp. Hank was a proud man, and
didn’t think men ought to show pain. But since he was alone, and it was
dark, he shouted, “Holy old
fuck
!” as loud as could. He rubbed his face,
which hurt like a whore, but no blood came off on his fingers. “Sadie,
where the
hell
did you get to, goddammit?” he muttered. “Where the hell
did you two walk this morning, the fucking moon?”

The sun was well over the yardarm, as his father used to say, and it
was most definitely going down behind those clouds, whether he could
see it or not. He looked at his watch. Six frigging o’clock. The sun wasn’t
just over the yardarm, it was halfway in the drunk tank. It was early night,
not early evening. He felt in his pocket for the flashlight and turned it
on. The beam was molded by drops of thick, swirling night fog and the
aftertaste of this afternoon’s deluge.

Hank had hoped to tell his wife and child that he’d found Sadie’s
body and brought it home to bury her before the ground froze, which
it would before long. His hope had been to keep the dog’s corpse in the
garage until Finn had gone to bed, then put her in the ground and present
his son with a
fait accompli
in the morning. Finn never doubted his father,
so Hank could have buried anything in his garden and told his son it was
his beloved Labrador, but he would never do that to Finnegan.

At four p.m., he’d clocked out an hour early. He’d left the mill and
taken his car up to the highest point of ground he could reach in his
sturdy truck. He tried to check the position of the sun in the sky, but the
storm clouds from the earlier downpour had remained. He had about
an hour of daylight left. He squinted up the cliff, guessing more or less
where Finn and Sadie had taken their walk.

Finn had rarely allowed anyone to join him on those walks, but he’d
let Hank come along one morning this summer, and Hank had excellent
recall. If worse came to worst, he wouldn’t find Sadie and would have to
come back the next morning and deal with whatever carrion mess the
forest scavengers had left of his son’s gentle dog. The thought sickened
him, but not for squeamish reasons. He’d loved Sadie far more than his
wife or his son knew.

A twig snapped somewhere above him. Hank stood stock still. He
shone the light above him, but saw nothing except branches and rock.
Hank rubbed his eyes. Something had moved up there beyond the copse
of trees. He felt a momentary stab of fear, thinking of bears.

Bears, bullshit. Get a grip, you idiot. There hasn’t been a bear attack here
in thirty years or more. The bears and the mineshaft openings are the two
stories we tell kids to keep them out of the woods. It didn’t keep Finn out, and
you’re no kid. So get some sack.

The sound came again, two more twig snaps, coming from different
places close by. This time, the sound unnerved him deeply. “Hello?” he
called out. “Hello? Is anyone there?” He whipped his head from side to
side trying to locate the source of the sound, to no avail.

The very last emotion Hank Miller would ever feel was a fear so
desolate and hopeless that it was almost chemical. He felt a sudden
kinship with every cornered animal he had ever hunted, in the moment
right before he pulled the trigger.
So this is what it feels like,
he marvelled,
as though from a great distance, even as he felt the piss running down
the leg of his work pants.

Hank knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that he was living his last
minutes before he physically saw the woman in the muddy jeans and the
stained pink blouse drift towards him out of the darkness, her feet not
touching the ground, her eyes incandescent and her mouth open and full
of teeth like he’d never seen on anything from this earth. For a moment,
he thought he recognized her, from school maybe? No, from the bar. It
was that sexpot bartender from out at O’Toole’s. But no, Hank thought,
his mind in a state of confusion.
It can’t be her—what would she be doing
out here in the forest at this hour?

And when the scrawny man with the wild, greasy hair and red matted beard crawled out from between an impossibly narrow wedge
of rock beside him like a spider coming out of its hole—a great stench
of shit and blood and rotted meat unfurling in his wake like a shroud—
Hank knew that there was no shame in dying.

Terror, yes. Terror, absolutely. Who wanted to be eaten by monsters
in the forest without even kissing his wife and son goodbye? But no, there
was no shame, nothing ignominious in falling before this implacable,
limitless blackness.

“
But you
will
see them again,
” the man said. “
You will kiss them goodbye.
We promise
.”

They fell on him in a fury, burying their faces in the soft parts of his
body and biting down, hard and sharp until he shrieked so loudly that
even the nightbirds scattered.

Above him, Hank heard the beating of heavy wings and saw a shadow
pour itself down from the treetops, lengthening, becoming columnar
and corporeal.

The last thing Hank saw before Richard Weal and Donna Lemieux
tore him apart, splitting his spine between them like a wishbone, was
the tall black-robed man with the long white hair raising his hands in a
gesture of benediction.

And because some deaths are crueler than others, Hank Miller never
knew that he
had
found Sadie’s body, after all. Indeed, he had died three
feet away from where the remainder of the Labrador’s bone and ash had
been sluiced down the rock face by the rain.

Hank never realized that Sadie had already entered the ground—
here at Spirit Rock instead of his back yard—and she had become part of
the earth in a way that Hank never would.

Forty-five minutes after
the desolate death of Hank Miller above
Bradley Lake, five miles inside the Parr’s Landing town limits, Elliot
McKitrick woke from the dreamless sleep into which he had fallen when
Jeremy Parr had left, finding himself hungrier than he had ever been in
his life. His mind was filled with cloudy, half-formed images flowering
silver and red, and the air was full of whispering, dead voices calling his
name. When he turned to look, the shadows seemed to leap back from
his sight, and when he tried to focus on them, there was nothing there
but the bare walls of his bedroom which, though pitch dark, he could see
as clearly and sharply as if it were high noon.

One voice in particular caught Elliot’s attention. It was a familiar
voice, and Elliot cocked his ear to listen. He smiled in acknowledgement,
then walked naked to the small bedroom window and opened it, extending
his arms in clear welcome.

The mist rolled in from the lightless black on the other side of the
glass, and night entered, filling his bedroom with silver-blue fog in which
vaguely human shapes shimmered and eddied.

Donna Lemieux, her mouth brown with Hank Miller’s blood,
gathered Elliot in her arms and kissed him where she had kissed him in
her cellar, claiming him, caressing his nude body with what might have
been merely the memory of possessive human desire. Elliot leaned into
her, one arm across her shoulder, submissive, supine in her arms as she
drank away the remainder of his life, taking his confusion and pain along
with it. Elliot tried to speak, but could only murmur, and even that effort
caused his eyes to roll back in his head.

“Thank you,” Elliot said, then died.

The Gold Nugget diner
was nearly deserted, and Christina couldn’t
decide if this pleased her because of the privacy it afforded, or made
her feel more conspicuous in Billy Lightning’s company. Ultimately, she
decided she didn’t care, which proved to be a relief to both her and Billy
as they picked at their Salisbury steak special. The waitress assured them
that the tapioca pudding was included in the price, then asked them if
they wanted it after the meal, or with it.

“After, please,” said Billy, speaking for them both. Though ravenous,
not having eaten since Adeline’s aborted jellied eel luncheon, Billy was
still too upset to do more than move it around on his plate. Also, he
hated tapioca pudding, which reminded him of St. Rita’s, where it was
considered a special treat for the residents, even though the milk used to
make it was usually sour and the tapioca often rancid.

In the background, a radio played softly. Christina caught the strains
of B.J. Thomas singing “Rock and Roll Lullaby,” a song about a teenage
mother and her child, which made her think of Morgan. The smell of
grease in the air was oddly warm and comforting, not off-putting.

Christina had dressed carefully, and had applied lipstick. She told
herself that it was because she was tired of Adeline making her feel
like the bottom of a grimy lunch pail by swanning through her empty
mausoleum in Mainbocher dresses and diamonds. But the truth was,
Christina wanted to look pretty tonight, for Billy.

Odd, that,
Christina thought. She’d mostly forgotten what it felt like
to care.

They had spent an hour or more discussing Adeline’s bizarre
behaviour at lunch, but Christina was sick to death of talking about
Adeline Parr.

“So, Billy,” she said. “Tell me about you.”

He shrugged. “I’ve told you about me. There’s not much else to tell.”

Christina smiled. “I don’t believe that for a second,” she chided him
gently. “You’ve lived such an impressive life. I can’t even imagine what
it took to become what you’ve become. What drove you? Was it your
father? I know he was a professor, too—did you always want to be like
him?”

“Becoming like my father wasn’t something I really thought of when
I was a kid,” he said. “I suppose having a father who was an academic,
who valued learning, was an inspiration. But no, I didn’t always want to
be like him—that came later.”

“So, what did you want to be?”

Billy paused. “I wanted to be dead,” he said. “I wanted to not exist.
I wanted the pain to stop. I wanted to be safe. Since it appeared I would
never be safe, as a child, and since pain was a daily part of my life, I didn’t
see a lot of merit in being alive.”

Christina was confused. “Billy—I’m sorry. I don’t know what you
mean.”

He shook his head. “Never mind. I’m sorry I brought it up. I don’t
usually talk about it. Please forgive me—forget I said anything.”

“No,” she said, reaching for his hand, laying her own on top of his.
“Tell me. What are you talking about? I want to know . . . that is, I want to
know if you want to tell me. Do you? I mean . . . I’d like us to be friends,
you know?”

“Friends,” he said. He tested the word, probed for sharp edges.
Finding none, he said, “I’d like that, too, I guess. I mean, yes. I
would
like
us to be friends, Christina.”

“So . . . tell me,” she said. “What happened when you were a child,
Billy? What made you wish you were dead? Death is obviously very much
a part of my life these days since Jack has been gone. Yours, too, to be fair.
I can tell you miss your dad as much as I miss Jack. I wish they were both
still alive, still here for us. I can’t imagine anything better than life right
now.”

“Do you know what my least favourite colour in the world is,
Christina? Red. I hate it. I absolutely loathe it.”

“I’m glad I didn’t wear red tonight, then,” she said lightly. She paused.
“Why red?”

“Red is the colour of the uniforms we had to wear at St. Rita’s when
the priests took us out on Sundays, or to show us off in public. Do you
know what a residential school is?”

“Not really. A school for Indian children, right?”

“Yes,” he corrected her gently. “That’s right.”

“I’m sorry,” Christina said. “I don’t know much about them. We were
taught that the schools were an example of the generosity of the Church
and the Canadian government. Charity. They told us that we were lucky
to have been born white.”