Enter, Night (46 page)

“Sadie died.” Finn turned his wet face away from Christina’s shoulder.
“She burned up. We were going for a walk and she went to catch a ball I
threw, then she burned up.”

Jeremy said, “What do you mean ‘she burned up’? Finn? That doesn’t
make sense. What are you saying?”

“Hush, Jeremy, let him talk,” Christina said over the top of Finn’s
head. Then, to Finn, “Sadie is your dog, is she? Did she get lost?”

“No, she’s dead. She burned up.” His voice was calm now, and matter-of-fact.

Shock,
Christina thought.
Just like my voice when I first heard about
Jack’s car crash. Whatever has happened to this little boy is obviously very,
very bad.

“And then my dad went to look for Sadie last night,” Finn continued.
“He didn’t come home for dinner, or even later. My mom was so sad, and
she waited up for him. She was worried. She called the police. Then she
told me to go to bed. And then . . . and then my dad came home.
He killed
my mom
. He came in through the window. He broke it. There was glass all
over the place, and then he . . . then he bit my mom and he . . . he . . . took
her with him. Out. Out the window!”

“Finn,” Christina said carefully, looking only at him. “Were you in
the house all night? When this . . . well, when this happened—whatever
happened to your mom and dad? Were you there all night, in the house?”

“No,” he said in a hushed voice. “I got away—I hid.”

“Where did you hide, Finn?”

He hesitated. “I went to the church. I went to St. Bart’s. I got in
through the basement window. I waited there till I knew grownups would
be awake. When the sun was going to come up.”

He held out his hand, still clutching the jar full of liquid. When
Christina tried to take it out of his hand to examine it, he held on more
tightly. But when she said, “Shhhh, let me look,” and gave him another
little squeeze, he let her take the jar.

Christina held it up. “What is this, Finn? What’s in here?”

“Holy water,” Finn said. “It’s holy water. In case my dad comes back.”

“The phone’s out
at Finn’s house,” Jeremy said, replacing the receiver
in its cradle.

“Are you sure you got the right number, Uncle Jeremy?” Morgan
looked down at the open Parr’s Landing directory on the table. “Do you
want me to read the number to you again?”

“No, sweetie—I’ve tried it twice now. No answer. His folks aren’t
picking up.”

Morgan’s voice quavered. “What if it means they—what if it means
they’re hurt or something?”

“I’m sure they’re fine,” Jeremy said. Even has he spoke, he realized
how ridiculously adult and fake-rational he sounded.
Yes, of course, by all
means—a little boy stumbles through the door of Parr House at seven in the
morning and says his dog burst into flames and that his father broke through
a window and murdered his mother, and you assure your fifteen-year-old niece
that you’re “sure” they’re “fine.” You sound like your mother right now, Jeremy
Parr.
“I’ll take a run over there in a few minutes, Morgan. I’ll knock on the
door and see what’s what.”

“OK,” she said. “Can I come?”

“Absolutely not,” he said. “You stay here with your mother and your
friend. I’ll be right back. And Morgan?”

“What?”

“Go on upstairs and knock—very gently—on your grandmother’s
bedroom door and tell her we have a bit of an emergency situation going
on here.”

“What’ll I say?”

“Tell her . . . tell her you have a friend who got hurt.” When he saw
the trepidation on Morgan’s face, he smiled comfortingly and said, “It’ll
be all right. She’s not going to bite your head off. You’re the one she loves,
even if she doesn’t like the rest of us much.”

“Yeah, right,” Morgan said. “She hates me, too. Why can’t Beatrice
do it?”

It suddenly occurred to Jeremy that there were none of the usual
pre-breakfast sounds coming from inside the kitchen—no cutlery being
laid out, and no clatter of china plates being placed on the mahogany
sideboard in the dining room. Where
was
Beatrice? He’d never known
her to be late—not in a lifetime of meticulously orchestrated breakfasts
at Parr House.

“I don’t think Beatrice is here yet,” he said slowly. “And no, your
grandmother doesn’t hate you. Now, wait till five minutes after I leave,
then knock on her door.”

Morgan sighed. “OK, Uncle Jeremy. I will.”

“Good girl. Now, go wait in the sitting room with your mother and
your friend. I’m going to run upstairs and get dressed, then go and check
out his story. Go see if your mom needs anything for Finn.”

The Miller house
on Childs Drive was exactly as Finn had described it—
entirely nondescript except for the fact that the picture window facing
the street was shattered.

When Jeremy entered the house—trying the door handle and
finding it unlocked and, indeed, empty—he saw that the broken glass
from the window was sprayed all over the carpet. There was none on the
scrubby lawn outside. In other words, whoever had broken it had done so
by smashing it from the outside.

Jeremy looked dubiously at the lawn.
How did he get in here, assuming
someone had? On a trampoline? Did he pole-vault in?
He examined the glass
on the floor, nudging it with his foot. Under an orange corduroy cushion
he saw that the carpet was stained a brownish-red. He reached down and
touched it. The carpet was still sticky, and his finger came away smeared
red. Uh-oh, Jeremy thought.
This isn’t good. Not good at all.

Fighting rising panic, Jeremy called out, “Hello? Is anyone here?
Mrs. Miller? Mr. Miller?”

There was no answer. Jeremy would have been surprised had
he received one. In a corner of the dining room floor, he saw the wall
telephone. The jack had been ripped out of the wall, the exposed wires
protruding like bones. He thought of checking the rest of the rooms in
the house, but he already knew they would empty and he didn’t want to
spend one more minute here than he had to.

“OK,” Jeremy said aloud. The rawness of his own voice in the grey
dawn light filling the living room from the broken window startled
him. “OK,” he said again, trying to sound calm and reasonable, if only to
himself.

“Morgan, I know what
happened to Sadie,” Finn said weakly. “I know
what happened to my parents.”

“What happened, Finn?”

They were seated together on a divan in Adeline’s sitting room off the foyer. Finn had calmed down somewhat, but was still shaking from
head to toe. Little bodily earthquakes, unsettling him.

From the kitchen, Morgan heard Christina making breakfast in
Adeline’s vast kitchen. Her grandmother was still not up, and Morgan
had not gone up to check on her as Uncle Jeremy had asked. Instead,
she’d sat in an uncomfortably spindly chair next to the divan where Finn
sat.

Finn turned his face away as though he changed his mind. “You
wouldn’t believe me,” he said. “No one will. You’ll just say I’m crazy, or
fibbing. My mom didn’t believe me, and now she’s dead.”

“Finn, try me,” she prodded. “Tell me. I’m your friend. I’ll believe
you.”

“No, you won’t.”

“Yes, I will,” she said urgently. “Just tell me.”

While Christina made breakfast in the kitchen, Finn, trusting her,
told Morgan everything.

He told her about Sadie’s gruesome end in the sunlight two mornings
ago above Bradley Lake. He told her of his father’s disappearance, and his
return.

He told her about his mother’s murder, how he drove his father out
of the living room with the Lord’s Prayer and the two pieces of smashed
table leg in the shape of the cross. He told her how he crouched in his
bedroom for an hour afterwards, watching his bedroom door, his pyjamas
stained with gouts of his mother’s blood, clutching the two shards of
broken wood, thinking he heard footsteps pacing the floorboards
through the living room and the kitchen above him but not being sure,
not daring to move from his spot to find out.

Finn told her about fleeing the house on his Schwinn, watching the
skies as best he could, all the while knowing that if something came to
carry him off, he would be powerless to stop it. He told her of spending
the night crouched near a statue of the Virgin Mary near the baptismal
font at St. Barthélemy and the Martyrs, only leaving when he was sure
dawn was right around the corner, and that there would be adults awake
in the houses around him, adults that might be able to protect him from
whatever was surely hunting him even as he cycled like the wind all the
way up the hill to Parr House, and the safety of Morgan.

Morgan was silent for a long moment. The she said, “Finn, this is
like something out of one of your comic books. You realize that, don’t
you?”

He raised himself on his elbow and said furiously, “I
told
you, you
wouldn’t believe me! I
said
!”

“Finn—”

“Never mind! I mean it! Never . . .
mind
!” He stood up abruptly,
almost knocking over his jar of water—holy water, Morgan supposed,
since she believed him about having spent the night in the church.

“Finn, are you feeling better?” Christina stood in the doorway with
a glass of orange juice. “I’ve made some breakfast. Are you hungry?
Morgan’s uncle isn’t back yet, but he will be soon.” She extended the glass
of juice, but he didn’t move to take it.

Finn looked from Morgan to Christina, then back again. His
expression was hard for Christina to read—thwarted anger, longing,
terror. Grief, definitely. But mostly, it seemed, terrible frustration.

Christina said, “Finn?”

He picked up his jar of holy water and ran out of the sitting room.
They heard the sound of his bare feet on the marble foyer floor, then the
sound of the front door being flung open, then slamming shut.

“Morgan, what happened? What did you say to him?”

“Nothing! He started telling me this story . . .”

“What story? What did he tell you?”

“Something about . . .” Morgan looked at her mother’s bewildered
face, and faltered.

It was one thing for Morgan herself not to believe Finn. She was
a kid, too—well, a teenager, but still. It would be something else to for
her to tell her mother the crazy story and have Christina think Finn was
crazy. It seemed disloyal, somehow.

Finn had been the only friend she’d had since they arrived, and all
he’d ever been was kind to her. And how had she repaid him? By doing the
one thing she knew would hurt him—treating his vampire comic book
obsession like a joke. She hadn’t intended to, of course, but he clearly
believed what he had told her. The least she could have done was listen
to Finn and trust that he believed what he was saying, and keep her big
fat trap shut. She was such an idiot.

“Morgan Louise Parr, what
did
that boy say before he ran out of
here? You tell me
right now
!”

“He said . . . he said something about his mom and dad.”

“What did he say?”

“I don’t know. He wasn’t making sense. And then you . . . and then
he just ran out of here. You saw him. I don’t know why, he just did.”

They heard the door click open again, then shut. Christina called
out, “Finn?”

“No, it’s me.” Jeremy’s voice came from the foyer. He walked into the
sitting room. From his face, Christina and Morgan knew the news wasn’t
going to be good.

“Where’s Finn?” Jeremy said, looking blankly around the sitting
room.

“He left,” Morgan said. “He just ran out of here.”

“What do you mean ‘he ran out of here’? Where did he go? His
bicycle is gone, too. Weren’t you watching him?”

“Yes, we were watching him, Jeremy,” Christina snapped. “But he
just jumped up and bolted out of here a few minutes ago. We couldn’t
stop him. We tried.”

“Well, I went to his house. It’s not good, Chris. There’s glass
everywhere, all over the floor. And I think . . . Morgan, would you excuse
your mother and I for a minute?”

“I’m
fifteen,
” she said. “I’m not a baby.”

“You think what?” Christina snapped, ignoring them both.

“I think there’s blood on the carpet. It looks like something pretty
awful
did
happen—maybe a fight between the mother and the father
that went wrong. Got violent.”

Christina said, “Did you call the police?”

“The phone was ripped out of the wall. No way to call. I thought
of finding a phone booth, but I decided to stop by the police station in
person on the way back here and report it instead.”

“And? What did the police say? Are they going to check it out?”

“Well,” Jeremy said, “it was the damnedest thing. The station was
empty.”

“What do you mean the police station was empty? How could it be
empty? It’s a police station!”

“I don’t know how it could be empty, Christina. But it was. The
lights were on and the front door was unlocked. It’s like they went out
for coffee last night without even bothering to close up, then just didn’t
come in for work today.”

Christina sat down heavily on the divan. “None of this makes any
sense. And now that poor boy is running around outside in his pyjamas.
He obviously saw something happen to his parents that upset him.
Morgan, does he have any relatives in town, do you know? Or friends?
Why did he come here?”

“I think he came here because I’m his . . . well, I think I’m his only
friend,” she said. “He’s never mentioned anyone else. All Finn does is
read Dracula comics and play with his dog. Her name’s Sadie. She ran
away a couple of nights ago. Remember, I went over to see him? He was
really upset about it. I wanted to go see him yesterday, too, on the way
to school, but you were too busy to take me.” She added reproachfully,
“Remember?”

Christina sighed. “Morgan, would you just stick to Finn? Did you see
him again? Was he OK?”