Enter, Night (43 page)

His voice was rich and full and masculine, very much the voice of a
real man—not a pansy’s voice at all, she noted. Not like Jeremy’s voice,
not like the voices of all the weak men she’d known her whole life. Could
this really be a priest?

Adeline felt a sense of vertiginous disorientation, a sensation of
being probed, being
read,
as though her mind had been taken down off
a bookshelf, her memories turned and rifled like pages in an album. She
touched her fingertips to her eyes and pressed, moaning softly at the
invasion. She felt an unfamiliar and nearly forgotten warmth spread
between her legs, a phantom dampness that she knew couldn’t possibly
be real—not standing out here on the lawn on a cold October night with
some strange intruder threatening her.

But he wasn’t really threatening was he? Not really. He was just cold.
He just wanted to come inside. He’d been sleeping in the caves above
Bradley Lake for a long time. It made sense he should want to come inside.
It was a reasonable request, and one she could easily grant by saying:
Come in. You’re welcome in my house. Enter freely.
Those were the magic
words. He was too much of a gentleman to enter without an invitation
from the lady of the house.

Images spun through her brain, her own most private memories,
coming faster and faster like a rickety black-and-white silent film. Her
memories of Phenius. Her secrets, all of them, the light and the dark
ones interchangeably. Some of them made her giggle—ridiculous, she
knew, in a woman of her age. Others made her feel violated. He had no
right to those. No . . . right . . . at all.

No, get out of my mind! You have no business here. Go away! I’m
Adeline
Parr
! How dare you— Pourrais je vous faire l’honneur de ma presence?

Adeline felt somewhat mollified by his courtesy.
May I honour you
with my presence? Let me in. I’m so cold.

“Let me in, Adeline,” Phenius said. “Let me in. I’m so cold.”

She could see his face now, as though the man had somehow deigned
to allow the moonlight to fall upon it.

It was
Phenius’s
voice she’d heard, she was sure. Phenius speaking
French. No . . . English now. But it was a
priest,
not Phenius. Phenius was
dead, and the priest was—

He was grinning.

“
Adeline, my love.
”

She took three more stumbling steps forward, towards the man with
Phenius’s voice, the man who opened his arms to her.

No, not
his
arms,
Phenius’s
arms. It was Phenius, looking exactly as
he had in the summer of 1952 on the night he took her to Spirit Rock and
showed her the site of his dig.

Adeline stumbled and fell. She felt the sharp gravel cut into her
kneecaps, scraping them bloody. The house behind her was a million
miles away and the world was reduced to Phenius’s beautiful voice, and
the moonlight was now bright enough to drown in.

Behind him on the driveway, the shadows divided and subdivided,
shifted, formed, shaping and reshaping.
Phenius hasn’t come alone. He’s
brought friends.

It was a disappointing thought to Adeline. It had been years since
she’d seen him, and she’d hoped for some time with just him alone—a
reunion.

“Let me in,” Phenius said again, his voice jagged and sharp as one
of the stalactites hanging from the roofs of the caves at Spirit Rock,
and this time there was no hint of courtesy, let alone entreaty. It was
an unambiguous command. The implicit invitation to self-abasement in
his tone thrilled her with the filth of it. No one but Phenius had ever
succeeded in making her feel that way—cheap, like a whore. Like a
woman. Desired, and desirous. His voice was a hand between her legs,
squeezing and probing with authority and ownership.

Adeline looked up at him from where she knelt at his feet in the
sharp gravel like a supplicant. “Come in. You’re welcome in my house,”
she said, the pain in her bloodied knees coming to her as though from a
great distance. “Enter freely.”

When Phenius took her in his arms, she saw that she was alone
with him on the lawn, that there was no one else there, that no one had
come back with him from the grave—for surely he must have travelled
that great distance just to be with her, smelling of dirt and caves and
centuries under the earth.

No greater proof of love could there be than that,
Adeline thought with
satisfaction.
Phenius didn’t come back to his adopted redskin “son,” he came
back to me.

By the time she saw the old man with the bone-white face and the
long white hair that blew around his head in the night wind, she was
beyond caring that it wasn’t Phenius at all—she just wanted the man
with Phenius’s voice to kiss her, to hurt her, to claim her.

And in the cold October moonlight, he did all those things, and
more.

The marble foyer of
Parr House was dark when she got home just after
ten. Christina heard the door click softly behind her as she stood in the
entryway listening to the rhythmic tick of the grandfather clock near the
entrance to the dining room.

In the darkness, the place felt cavernous. For the first time since
she’d returned to Parr’s Landing, she was aware of the true vastness of her
mother-in-law’s house. It wasn’t just a big house, or even a mansion—it
was a small castle on a hill.
A very dark castle right now,
Christina thought.

As her eyes adjusted to the gloom, she perceived that a bit of redtinted moonlight shone through the stained glass windows on the
landing of the grand staircase upstairs. In its dim light, she felt around
on the marble-topped hallway table for the Waterford crystal lamp she
knew was there.

Finding the lamp, she switched it on and the foyer was flooded with
yellow light. Familiar objects came into view. It looked like a house again,
albeit a monstrous house.

Christina crossed the floor and looked up the stairs. “Hello? Jeremy?
Morgan? Anyone still up?” She didn’t expect a reply—Adeline’s house
hadn’t proven to be the sort of house where people ran down the stairs
to greet each other, or shouted from floor to floor. But still, Christina
couldn’t ever recall the house being
this
quiet. The complete absence of
noise—the apparent absence of
life,
really—struck her for the first time.

She crossed the floor quickly and climbed the stairs, taking two at a
time. Outside Morgan’s door, she knocked and called out softly, “Morgan?
Are you still up? It’s Mom.” She opened the door as quietly as she could
and peered inside.

Morgan lay in her bed—fast asleep, by the look of it. The room was
freezing. Christina went to the window to close it, but found it tightly
shut, the latch securely in place.
So where the hell is that cold coming
from
? She looked at the glass. It was dirty, smudged with fingerprints.
Christina rubbed at them with the edge of her sweater.
What on earth was
Morgan doing this evening? Planting a garden? Adeline would be furious if
she saw this.
Christina rubbed again, harder, but the smudges still didn’t
come off. She pressed her fingers to the window, aligning them with the
smudges there. She frowned.

The marks were on the other side of the glass. Christina looked
down at the moonlit lawn. Morgan’s room was a twenty-foot drop to the
ground.

What the hell? How can there be fingerprints on the other side of the
glass? Impossible.
She shook her head and gave herself a mental swift
kick in the rear end.
Well, then, obviously they aren’t fingerprints, you
idiot—unless you think maybe Morgan was hanging from the outside wall by
a trapeze harness, trying to get into her own bedroom.

Christina crossed to the bed and pulled the blankets up to her
daughter’s neck. She leaned down and kissed her softly on the forehead.
She deeply inhaled Morgan’s scent. When she slept, Morgan still smelled
like a baby to her mother.

She paused outside
Jeremy’s door one floor up, then knocked. Light
streamed from under the door. From inside, Jeremy said, “Come in?”

She pushed open the door open. Jeremy was sitting up in bed,
wearing a T-shirt and boxer shorts, reading. Self-consciously, he reached
for the sheet to cover himself, which made Christina smile in spite of
herself. He blushed.

“Don’t worry, I can’t see anything,” she said. “Your mystery is still
intact.”

He laughed. “Old habits, I guess. This isn’t the house in which to be
caught naked, as you know. Bad consequences.” He tried to smile, but
failed.

“Are you OK, Jeremy? I mean, really OK?”

He shrugged. “Sure, I guess. How was your night?”

“It was really nice,” she admitted. “Billy was a perfect gentleman. He
told me about his life. He went to a residential school in Sault Ste. Marie.
It sounded awful. Brutal. I had no idea. It makes his success even more
amazing. But mostly he was just a really, really nice man. He reminded
me of—” she trailed off, embarrassed by the treason implicit in what she
had been about to say. “Well, he was a nice man.”

“Christina,” Jeremy said gently. “Do you . . . did you enjoy spending
time with him? I mean—that way? It’s OK if you did, you know. It doesn’t
mean you’re being disloyal to Jack. It just means that you’re human.”

She paused, struggling for composure. “It’s too soon, Jeremy,” she
said. “Even if I wanted to enjoy it that way, it’s still too soon. But thank
you for saying that. I know what you meant, and I appreciate it.”

He smiled. “I’ll always be here for you, Chris. No matter what. I
know how much you loved my brother, and I know how much he loved
you—and all of us, especially Morgan.”

“God, how did everything get so messed up? How did it all come to
this?”

Jeremy paused, then said, “Chris?”

“Yeah?”

“Chris, we’re leaving tomorrow.”

Christina raised her eyebrows. “Really? That’s news to me. Last I
heard, we were dead broke. Did you win a lottery?”

“No,” he said quietly. “But today, when you were talking to Billy
Lightning on the driveway, I went into Adeline’s room and looked around.
I found some money. A
lot
of money. She keeps it in the bottom of her
vanity. There’s almost a thousand dollars in twenties. More than enough
to get us the hell out of Parr’s Landing and back to Toronto. I would have
taken it this afternoon, but I didn’t want to risk her finding out.”

“Jeremy!” Christina was shocked in spite of herself. “You can’t do
that! What are you thinking?”

“I’m thinking that Adeline will be the death of us, and I’m thinking
that it’s time we face it,” he said calmly. “This town is a bad place. After
this afternoon—after Elliot—I realized that. We need to leave. If we
don’t, either the town or my mother will eat us alive. She’s enjoying
torturing us, you know. Can’t you tell? Can’t you feel it?”

“But you can’t steal almost a thousand dollars from her!”

“Why not?”

“Well, for one thing, she’ll have you arrested and thrown in jail.”

“We’ll be gone before she even knows the money is missing,” he
said. “And once we’re outside of northern Ontario, she has no power or
authority, whatever else she’d like you to believe. And when we’re gone,
we’ll never, ever come back.”

“Jeremy . . . ?”

“Never mind, Christina. I’m deadly serious. Pack your things
tomorrow, just don’t let her see you do it. Morgan’s, too. We’ll make a
dash for it mid-afternoon. We’ll tell her we’re . . . I don’t know, having a
talk with Morgan’s principal. We’ll think of something.”

“Are you sure? Are you
sure
this is the only way?”

“Aren’t
you
sure yet, Christina? Do you really want to risk Morgan
turning into someone like Elliot? Someone broken and ashamed of who
they are? Because my mother will do it to her, you know she will. She’ll
destroy your daughter just like she’s tried to destroy everyone else who
isn’t the person she demands they be.”

Christina looked hard at her brother-in-law. “OK. I’ll pack tomorrow
morning.”

“You don’t even need to bring everything, just what’s necessary. We
can pick up anything else once we’re the hell out of here.”

Near midnight,
Finn still heard his mother crying in the living room,
but he didn’t think he could bear to come upstairs from his room to
comfort her, nor did he believe she wanted him there—not after she’d
shouted at him and sent him to his room in such a fury an hour before.
He knew that her worry over his father not being home was the source,
but he also knew he could be of no comfort to her at that exact moment.

The house felt huge and empty to him with just Finn and his mother
in it—the ceilings higher, his bedroom walls farther from the bed, the
autumn darkness outside deeper, the shadows longer, the silence as soft
as a thunderstorm.

Anne hadn’t ordered him to stay in bed all night, something quite
unprecedented in his twelve years of bedtimes. And both of them were
on tenterhooks, listening for the sound of his father’s car in the driveway.

Finn had left her—at her request—alone after dinner, sitting in
the orange corduroy slip covered easy chair that Anne had angled facing
the front door, almost as though she were afraid that she if she didn’t
see Hank’s car pull into the driveway in addition to hearing it when he
pulled in (a sound she was acutely attuned to, after seventeen years of
marriage), it wouldn’t be real.

They’d eaten dinner in silence after Finn’s preposterous
announcement that a vampire had killed Sadie. Anne had stared at him
open-mouthed and then said, “Oh Finnegan, stop it. Please, for heaven’s
sake.”

But the look in her eye wasn’t botheration, which Finn was
accustomed to from his mother when he went on about vampires, or his
Tomb of Dracula
obsession.