Enter, Night (45 page)

But there was no answer. Thomson took a few tentative steps into
the ruined arena, playing his flashlight along the charred baseboards,
cumbrous slats, collapsed walls, and rotting ceiling beams.

Goddamn deathtrap.
The thought hovered in his mind with the
weight of a portent. Thomson was oddly glad he hadn’t said the words
out loud.

Elliot’s voice echoed from deeper inside the ruins. “Sarge, I’m in
here. Follow my voice. Use your flashlight—you can find me. Just listen
to my voice.”

“Elliot, what the
hell
are you up to? What are you doing in here? Cut
this shit pronto, mister, and come out right now!”

“Sarge, come over here. I found something you need to see. I think I
know what happened in Gyles Point. I think I know who that hockey bag
belonged to. It’s worse than we thought.”

Thomson’s heart quickened. “Elliot, what are you on about? And
why are you here?” A thought suddenly came to him. “Is it the Indian? Is
it Lightning?”

“No.” Elliot’s voice sounded as though he were standing right in front
of Thomson now, though he still couldn’t see anything except what was
directly in font of him, illuminated by the flashlight beam. “It’s worse.
It’s much, much worse than that.”

Then Elliot stepped into the beam of his flashlight. He was nude,
his body smeared with a brownish-red substance that looked like dried
blood.

Thomson dropped the flashlight. He barely had time to shout “Jesus
fucking Christ!” before Elliot, almost casually, reached out with one bare
arm and tossed his sergeant halfway across the arena.

Then Elliot was astride his chest. The fingers of one hand gathered
Thomson’s hair and brutally yanking his head to one side, while the
fingernails of the other hand ripped through his uniform shirt and jacket
like they were wet toilet paper.

Thomson kneed Elliot as hard as he could, using the force of his legs
to throw him off balance. Gaining a momentary advantage, Thomson
scrambled to the side, reaching for his revolver by instinct and pointing
it at the indistinct shape crouching in front of him.

He fired twice, again on instinct. In the flare from the gunfire, he saw
the bullets slam into Elliot’s torso, and then heard them thud into a wall
somewhere outside his limited vision. In that short glimpse, Thomson
feared he had lost control of his own senses, because as far as he could
tell, the bullets had left no trace of a wound.

Thomson’s subconscious mind registered that Elliot was not alone,
that there were other shapes crouching there behind him in the blackness,
horribly patient shapes that undulated and twisted languorously as
though undecided about what form they would ultimately choose to take.

Then Elliot stood up and said, “Coming for you now, Sarge.”

“Elliot, get back!” he gasped. He aimed the gun in the general vicinity
of Elliot’s voice. “I mean it!
Get . . . right . . . back . . . !
”

Those were the last words Dave Thomson ever spoke before
Elliot McKitrick—whom Thomson hadn’t even seen move—tore out
Thomson’s throat with his teeth. The last thing Thomson felt was the
wet warmth of his own blood on his face, and Elliot’s mouth fastened on
the wound, sucking the arterial spray as his life ran out of his body and
into the body of the thing astride him whom he’d once wished was his
son.

Finn woke to the sound of breaking glass
and his mother’s screaming.
He had been dreaming that his father had come home with Sadie riding in the passenger seat of the car, her nose out the window and her wet red tongue lolling foolishly from the side of her muzzle, tasting the wind. In the dream, it was daylight—which proved the dream’s ultimate undoing, because Finn suddenly remembered in his sleep that it was night, and that Sadie had burned up in front of him that morning above Bradley Lake.

He sat up quickly and listened to his mother shrieking in pain and terror. There were crashes that sounded like furniture splintering, and the sound of more shattering glass.
Oh, please, God,
Finn prayed.
Not again! Enough already, please.
Aloud, he screamed “Mommy!” and jumped out of bed, wrenching his bedroom door open and taking the stairs two at a time until he was standing in the living room.

What Finn saw, by the light of the table lamp on the floor casting crazy shadows on the wall, was that his father had indeed come home to them. Around him, shards of broken glass from the front picture window
twinkled in the light like icicles growing out of the green wall-to-wall
carpet.

Hank Miller’s body skewed at a horrible angle as though his bones
had all been broken and somehow reassembled in haste, with no concern
for either aesthetics or practical mechanics. Finn had barely passed
science last year in school, but even with his deficient knowledge of
human anatomy, he knew that there was no possible way the shambling,
disjointed, horror movie staple standing behind his mother, holding
her by the shoulders could possibly be able to stand up, let alone move
towards him—even at such a tortured, dislocated pace, pushing his
mother in front of him like a wheeled dolly.

And yet, he—it—did exactly that.

“Finn,” said his father through a mouthful of teeth that Finn had
only ever seen in the pages of
The Tomb of Dracula,
“you should be asleep.
Go back to bed. I’ll come and tuck you in after I’ve finished speaking with
your mother.”

Then Hank Miller opened his mouth wider than Finn could ever have
dreamed possible and buried those terrible new teeth in his mother’s
neck.

Finn and his mother shrieked at exactly the same time—and Finn
again felt that odd communion with her that he’d felt hours before when
his mother briefly appeared to consider the possibility that vampires had
carried off Sadie and his father.

This time, however, when their eyes met, the automatic, dismissive
adult façade didn’t descend and obliterate the moment.

Rather, as Anne Miller’s eyes rolled up in her head, almost regretfully,
Finn imagined her saying,
Well, Finn, you were right. There are such things
as vampires. I guess one of them did get Sadie. Now, you’d better run before
your father gets you.

Hank dropped his wife’s lifeless body on the floor, the bottom half
of his face wet and red. He licked his teeth almost curiously, seeming to
Finn as though his father were feeling them for the first time, like a child
on Christmas morning with a new toy—a dangerous one that he wanted
to enjoy before some nosey adult figured out just what to do with it.

“Finnegan,” Hank said, opening his arms. Finn noticed that his
nails had grown. “Come here. Let’s go find Sadie. She’s up at Spirit Rock
waiting for us.” He stepped over his wife’s body and took a step towards
his son. “
Come here
.”

“You’re not my father,” Finn said backing away. “Get away from me.”

He looked around wildly for a weapon, but could find nothing on the
floor, or on the table, or the walls. His father took another step towards
him, and Finn caught the smell of Hank’s breath, the copper whiff of his
own mother’s blood on his father’s lips.

“Our Father which art in Heaven,” Finn shouted, pointing his finger
at his father. “Hallowed be Thy name! Thy kingdom come! Thy will be
done on earth as it is in Heaven!”

Hank clapped his hands over his ears and roared, stumbling
backwards, his awkward, broken body tripping and falling over the
upturned, blood-spattered orange corduroy easy chair.

“Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our trespasses as we
forgive those who trespass against us!”

Finn reached down and snatched up two pieces of a broken table.
He swung them together in the shape of a cross and pushed it into his
father’s face.

It’s like a picture tube just blew up in a television,
Finn thought from
somewhere far outside his own deadly panic, wincing in the sudden
bedazzlement of blue light.

Acrid smoke burned Finn’s eyes and seared his nostrils as he stepped
back, coughing.

Finn wasn’t sure if he heard the piercing ululation come from his
father’s own throat, or whether it was merely, suddenly, everywhere at
once, from some outside place beyond the parameters of the world as
it was. Finn felt the air move with it, and he felt the sound in his teeth.
There was pure agony in that sound, and Finn was viciously, triumphantly
glad of it.

And then Hank was . . . something else.

Through the blue mist emanating from his father’s body, Finn saw
wings grow where his father’s arms had been, wings that extended the
length of the living room before they began to shimmer and dwindle
even as Hank stumbled forward to where Anne’s body lay crumpled on
the green carpet.

As he watched, his father knelt down and scissored his legs around
his mother’s waist, cinching it tightly between his thighs. There was wind
in Finn’s face and his hair blew backwards as his father’s wings flapped,
then flapped again. Hank backed away towards the window, awkward
and spraddle-legged with the weight of his mother’s body still clenched
between his legs.

He leaned against the jagged mouth of broken glass where the
window had been shattered and tilted his broken body at an impossible
angle, half-in, half-out of the living room, craning his dislocated neck
forward so he could look Finn in the eye.

“Goddamn you, you little piece of fucking shit,” Hank said. “I’m
coming back for you.”

Then Finn saw his father tumble backward, outside, airborne, rising
into the night with the lifeless body of his mother hanging from his
talons like dreadful ballast.

He rushed to the window, but it was too late—he thought he caught
one last glimpse of his mother’s blonde hair in the moonlight, but the
flash of it was gone before he could be sure of anything except that his
hands were bleeding from the broken glass, and he was alone in the
house, and it would be hours yet before the dawn.

Morgan, who usually slept
like the dead, was the first person to be
woken by the sound of Finn banging on the front door of Parr House half
an hour before dawn.

She rubbed the sleep from her eyes and squinted at the clock beside
her bed. It was six forty-five. Outside her window, there was a barely
perceptible sense of lightening in the sky, but the darkness was still
nearly absolute.

The banging came again. Morgan swung her feet over the side of
her bed and picked up her bathrobe where it lay on the chair beside her
nightstand. Then she went into the hallway and started down the stairs.

Jeremy’s sleepy voice carried from the landing above. “Morgan? Is
that you? What’s going on? Who’s at the door?”

“I don’t know, Uncle Jeremy. I just heard it now. It woke me up.”

“Wait for me,” he said. “Don’t open the door. I’ll do it, hopefully
before your grandmother hears it and makes Beatrice dish up whoever’s
pulverizing that door for breakfast.”

Christina’s door opened. “Morgan? Jeremy? What’s going on? Who’s
at the door?” She belted her own bathrobe and ran her fingers through
her hair, less through vanity than by reflex.

Jeremy hurried down the stairs past both Christina and Morgan. “I
don’t know, Chris,” he said over his shoulder. “But whoever it is, he’s
playing with his life if my mother gets to him first.”

Jeremy stared at the boy
standing in the doorway. He’d never seen
him before. The boy’s fist was poised as if to bang on the door again. His
face was puffy and pale, his hair askew. Like them, he wore pyjamas, but
his were muddy and ripped at the ankle as though he had torn them
running. Clutched tightly in the boy’s other hand was a jar full of some
sort of clear liquid that looked like water.

“Hi,” Jeremy said, confused. “Can I help you?”

“I need to see Morgan,” the boy said. “Please?”

“Morgan?” Jeremy glanced at the staircase where Christina and
Morgan stood waiting for him to identify who had woken them. “Morgan,
honey, there’s a . . . you have a visitor. Uh, come in, kid.”

Jeremy looked from Christina to Morgan, and then back at the boy,
who took a few tentative steps across the threshold, onto the marble
floor. Jeremy noticed that his feet were bare and bleeding.

Morgan hurried down the stairs and stopped in front of the doorway.
“Finn? What are you doing here? Are you OK?” She stared at him blankly,
as though trying to reconcile Finn’s bedraggled appearance in the foyer
of Parr House before dawn. Morgan looked at her mother. “Mom, this is
Finn Miller, my friend. The one I told you about? The one who walked me
home?”

Christina stared at the dirty, half-dressed boy in the foyer. “Of
course,” she said automatically, extending he hand. He stared at it blankly.
“Hi, Finn,” she said. “I’m Morgan’s mom. This is her uncle, Jeremy. Come
inside where it’s warm.

Then Christina took his full, unkempt, tattered measure with
instinctive maternal tenderheartedness. She was horrified by what she
saw—dirt, blood, dried tear-tracks on his cheeks sluicing through the
grime. “Are you OK, Finn? What happened? Where are your clothes?
Why are you in your pyjamas? Where’s your mom?”

The last question turned the key in the lock of Finn’s composure.
He stumbled into Christina’s arms and collapsed there, weeping. Again,
instinctively, Christina gathered Finn in her arms and held him tightly
while he sobbed. She could barely understand what the boy was saying,
but she made out the words
Mommy, my father, Sadie, window broke,
and
dead
. Then there were more sobs, even more wracking this time than
before.

“What’s going on?” Jeremy whispered to Morgan. “Who is this kid?
Where are his parents?”

Morgan shrugged and shook her head. “He’s Finn. He’s my friend.
He lives over on Childs Drive. He lost his dog a couple of days ago.”