Enter, Night (49 page)

But ghastlier still was the suppleness and rosy texture of the rest of
his skin—face, neck, even his hands. It glowed with vitality. When Billy
shone the light at just the right angle, he could see the red veins beneath
the surface.

To Thomson’s left, Elliot McKitrick slept, nude, his limbs lewdly
entwined with those of a blonde woman in a stained pink top and blue
jeans.

Billy backed away carefully. As he did, he saw the shadows of still
other bodies in similar states of repose, as though the dark arena was
some sort of dormitory, or a nest. Billy counted—what, fifteen? Twenty?
No, closer to thirty bodies or more scattered around the arena, all of
them assuming Thomson’s same restful posture. There were men with
the rough, rawboned faces and hands of miners. He saw children lying
against the burned boards, arms and legs askew in the way children
sleep, some still wearing pyjamas as though they had been plucked out
of their beds as they slept. There were women, some nude, some wearing
nightgowns, some dressed in bloodstained parkas—not heavy parkas,
but just the right temperature for a walk on northern Ontario night on
the death-edge of autumn.

Billy’s flashlight picked out the bodies of a man and woman in their
early thirties. His body was broken and his face was charred with an ugly
cinderous scar that was vaguely cruciform in shape. The woman’s body
was curled against the man’s body. Her head lay on his chest in a loving,
wifely aspect. Cruel new teeth protruded and lay against her lower lip,
lending a vaguely lupine mien to an otherwise loving and maternal face
that Billy could easily picture comforting a boy grieving for his lost dog,
for Billy had no doubt at all that he’d found Finn’s parents.

Not possible,
thought the anthropologist.
There are no scientific or
material grounds for any of this. Not possible. I refuse to accept this scientific
impossibility. I am a tenured university professor. I teach legends and myths. I
don’t
believe
them.

But another voice, colder and infinitely more realistic said:
Look
around you. Finn was right.

Something swayed above him in the shadows and Billy shone his
light towards the roof of the arena. The yellow beam caught a familiar
face, a face he had not seen for twenty years almost, but one whose
contours and hollows he would be able to pick out of any police lineup, in
spite of the wild long hair and the matted red beard—no, not a red beard.
Just
red
.

The body hung from its toes by a broken beam as though he weighed
nothing more than a handful of bad dreams, scrawny arms folded across
its chest as though it were cold.

“Richard,” Billy whispered. “What the hell?”

Then Weal opened his shining dark red eyes and dropped from the
ceiling with balletic grace that struck Billy as beautiful. “Hello, Billy,” he
said, opening his arms. “Welcome back.”

Billy said, “You killed my father, you crazy fuck.”

“Yes,” Weal said, winking. “I did. He didn’t put up much of a fight. He
was old and frightened. Phenius Osborne was
weak
. I wanted to use the
knives on him, but I didn’t have enough time. Luckily for him, he gave
me what I needed. His papers. The book he was writing about the history
of St. Barthélemy. I just needed the pages that showed me where to find
the Master and how to wake him. And I
did
wake him. And now,” Weal
said, “I’m a god.” He covered his mouth with his fingers and giggled—a
horrible, mirthless squealing that made Billy think of nails being dragged
across a china dinner plate. “He was a bit of a coward, wasn’t he, your
father? He wouldn’t have made a very good Jesuit martyr. No tolerance
for pain.” Weal paused, grinning. “How’s your tolerance for pain, Billy?
Shall we find out?”

Billy swung the crowbar as hard as he could at Weal’s head. His skull
cracked open in a red grapefruit
whoomph
!, spraying blood and brain
matter against the standing beams. Weal’s body pitched backwards on
the ground, jerking spasmodically.

Then he sat up and Billy watched the skull reform atop his neck,
bones miraculously reassembling themselves, flesh layering upon flesh.

Even his hair is growing back,
Billy noted with awe, feeling around
in the dark around him for something—anything—to use as a weapon
for when this fucking bastard dead thing had decided to finish growing
fully back together, which Billy already knew was imminent. His groping
hands found something that felt like a charred shovel.
Thank God!
Billy
thought.
It’s about time things started going my way here
. As Billy raised it
to swing at Weal’s body, the weight of the blade of the shovel snapped
the wooden handle in two. The blade fell uselessly to the ground, leaving
Billy holding a broken pole.

“Jesus fucking Christ!” Billy shouted. “Son of a
bitch
!”

Fully restored, Weal rose to a predatory crouch. “Now you’re going
to die,” he said. “No one is going to miss another dead Indian. At least
when I’m finished with you, you’ll have served some useful purpose, as
food.”

At the exact moment Weal leaped for his throat, Billy thrust the
shovel handle in front of him, plunging it into Weal’s chest as hard as he
could.

The skin of Weal’s torso split as easily as had his skull, but this
time there was no reforming flesh or miraculously healing bone. Weal
shrieked—a high, undulating trill that Billy felt move through the air
like electricity. Weal fell back against the rink boards, writhing like a
harpooned fish.

Billy picked up the flashlight and shone it at Weal’s body. Black
blood gushed from the chest wound, slowing to a trickle as the thrashing
stopped and he lay still.

In the shadows beyond the flashlight’s reach, Billy heard the
shivering and twitching of the sleeping bodies around him begin to stir
and wake.

Oh fuck,
he thought. He looked around wildly for another shard of
unburned wood to use as a weapon. He still had the crowbar, but he’d
already seen how useful that had been against these things.

Without thinking, he reached over and pulled the broken shovel
handle out of Weal’s chest. It came out surprisingly easily. He turned
away from the body. Using the flashlight’s beam to pick his way through
the debris, Billy retraced his way towards the entrance.

By his reckoning, he had almost reached the front of the building
when he heard the unmistakable sound of a board being accidentally
kicked.

Billy swung the flashlight in the direction of the sound, but there
was nothing. He broke into a run. Then he tripped, landing heavily
and painfully on the ground, the air driven out of him. The flashlight
pinwheeled into the air. It landed with a clatter a few feet away, the light
extinguished.

Dark-blind and gasping for breath, Billy crawled in the dirt, feeling
around for the shovel handle.

There it is!
he thought, the relief bringing him to the verge of pissing
himself.
Thank God.
His fingers closed around the shaft.

From above him, he felt rather than saw the arm that reached down
and plucked the shaft of wood out of his grip and tossed it away. Billy
heard it land, but he couldn’t gauge where.

“You should have left that inside me,” Richard Weal said. “Poor Billy.”

Jeremy Parr stood under
the hot spray of the shower in his bathroom
at Parr House and thought about his life.

It had begun here in this town and had been shaped by forces beyond
his control. As soon as he had been old enough to control his own life,
he’d fled.

Elliot had called him a coward for leaving, but leaving was his first
completely courageous act. While he would have liked to think that
there had been many other courageous acts in his life, he realized that
returning to this place with Christina and Morgan was very likely only
his second completely courageous act.

He’d returned here for them, for Christina and Morgan—to be the
man he knew Jack would have wanted him to be. When he had fled from
Parr’s Landing and Adeline, his brother had taken him in and protected
him, keeping him safe until Jeremy was strong enough to take care of
himself.

As Jeremy saw it, the best way to honour Jack had been to return
the kindness—to take care of his wife and daughter. It still was, which
was why he was taking them away tonight, whether they liked it or not.
He was already packed, and it would take Christina and Morgan no time
to follow suit.

All he needed was the money from Adeline’s dressing table drawer;
the thousand dollars that would get them home to Toronto and away
from this awful place. It was past time. They would take Finn with them
if they had to, drop him off in the care of some hospital or other, or even
a police station—anywhere other than Parr’s Landing. Finn wasn’t safe
here, either. No one was.

Jeremy stepped out of the shower and dried himself off. He wrapped
a thin white towel around his waist, then opened the bathroom door and
stepped out into the dim hall.

From downstairs in Christina’s room, he heard the television—a
comforting sound, since he couldn’t ever remember Adeline allowing it
to be turned on when she was in the house, all through his childhood
years. Tonight, the sound recalled the living room in Jack and Christina’s
house in Toronto, which made him smile.

Jeremy walked quickly down the hallway to his mother’s room and
pushed open the door. The room was dim, but there was enough light
from the hallway behind him.

He was surprised to see the snow on his mother’s bedroom
windows—he hadn’t even noticed the change in weather. He crossed
to Adeline’s dressing table and pulled open the bottom drawer, where
he knew the money was carefully hidden underneath the neat bundle of
letters and file folders.

The drawer was empty.

Outside, the wind and the snow hissed against the glass of Adeline’s
bedroom window.

Jeremy felt a cold hand on the small of his back, tugging once. The
towel around his waist fell to the floor. In the reflection of his mother’s
dressing table mirror, Jeremy was alone, naked. Behind him was reflected
the entire bedroom and doorway leading to the hallway, where light and
safety was, where Christina and Morgan were. He felt the cold hand slip
under his buttocks, between his legs.

Directly behind him, he heard his mother’s dead voice. “Jeremy,” she
said. “My son.”

Of the three of them,
only Finn had grown used to the sound of
screaming.

Consequently, when Jeremy’s high-pitched shrieks ripped through
the preternatural silence of Parr House, Finn didn’t startle, or even flinch.
He just looked up at the ceiling, pointed, and said, “They’re here in this
house, too. They’re real. I told you.”

Christina’s head snapped forward and jerked upwards to the place
Finn was pointing.

She jumped up from the chair next to her bed where Finn was still
buried under the blankets. Morgan had been lying across the foot of
the bed. She raised herself to a sitting position and instinctively moved
closer to Finn and her mother, and away from the screaming, which had
risen in pitch since Finn first spoke.

Uncle Jeremy sounded the way Morgan had always imagined an
animal being slaughtered would sound.

“Stay here!” Christina commanded, pointing her finger at Morgan
and Finn. “Do not move from this spot, do you understand me?”

“Mommy,” she whispered. “It’s Uncle Jeremy.”

“Morgan, stay here with Finn! Promise me!”

White-faced, Morgan nodded her head in assent. Finn, also pale,
nodded briefly but with much less conviction. He squeezed Morgan’s
hand.

Christina took the stairs two at a time, shouting, “Jeremy, I’m
coming! I’m coming!”

She reached Jeremy’s bedroom and pushed the door open. The room
was empty, his suitcase on the bed, half-packed. The rest of his clothing
was folded in neat piles. The screaming wasn’t coming from his bedroom;
it was coming from Adeline’s room.

Christina ran down the hallway. She threw open Adeline’s bedroom
door. The room was dark. Instinctively, she groped for a light switch and
stepped inside.

At first she wasn’t sure what she was looking at. There were three
figures in the room, arrayed in a tableau that made Christina think of the
ecclesiastical paintings of Christ’s crucifixion she’d seen in books—not
the Passion itself, but the taking-down from the cross.

Jeremy was lying nude, spread-eagled on Adeline’s yellow silk
bedspread, arms outstretched in a posture of martyrdom. The blood
from his throat wound streamed down his broken neck, soaking the
yellow silk pillowcases upon which his head lay at a terrible angle.

An old man with white hair, wearing some sort of cassock, was
crouched at the head of the bed, his face buried under Jeremy’s jaw. And
Adeline knelt at the foot of the bed, head bowed like Mary, mother of
Christ.

From somewhere outside her own body, Christina idly noted that
her mother-in-law was—ostentatiously, even for Adeline—wearing a fur
coat indoors. Underneath the coat, Christina saw the grimy hem of a
nightgown. Adeline’s bare feet on the immaculate carpet were black with
filth, and there were dirty footprints leading to—no, back from—the
window.

Adeline’s back was to Christina, her arms extended, her hands
clamped on Jeremy’s drenched thighs, holding them apart as implacably
as if they were secured in an iron grapple. The yellow silk bedspread was
sodden with Jeremy’s blood, which had started to pool on the carpet in
an outward-spreading stain.

Christina made a sound high in her throat, somewhere between the
whine of a trapped animal and a moan. “Adeline . . .”

Adeline turned her crimson-smeared face towards Christina. She
smiled as casually as a hostess who’d been disturbed in her embroidery,
and spat her son’s penis out of her mouth like an hors d’oeuvre.
“MOMMY!” Morgan stood
in the doorway to Adeline’s room, her
mouth an open circle of horror. Behind her, one hand on her shoulder,
Finn stared, likewise open-mouthed.