Enter, Night (5 page)

He screamed, “Stop! Stop the bus! Stop the bus! She’s dead!
Somebody killed a lady!”

Calmly, the driver turned the wheel of the bus and pulled over to
the side of the highway. There appeared to be no haste, no urgency in the
sequence of movements.

Still not right,
Jordan’s mind gibbered. He shook his head frantically.
Am I still asleep, or is this really happening?

Another wave of slaughterhouse stink rose from the woman’s body
and Jordan vomited. Then, smelling his own puke, he vomited again.

When he stopped retching and stood up, he saw Richard Weal
standing there beside the steering wheel. In his left hand, he held a
pickaxe. The blade of the axe was clotted with clumps of flesh and hair.
In the right hand, he held a red-spattered butcher’s knife with an eight inch blade. To Jordan, he looked like a monster out of a horror movie.
The entire bottom half of his face was caked with blood. The front of his
shirt and army surplus jacket were soaked with it and shone wetly under
the dim overhead lights of the driver’s cabin.

As Jordan’s terrified mind shook off the last remaining shred of
torpor and his eyes grew accustomed to the gloom, he saw the bus driver’s
mutilated body crumpled at Weal’s feet. Half his skull was missing and
his throat had been torn out.

“The blood is the life,” Weal said thickly, licking his lips. He waved
the pickaxe idly in Jordan’s general direction. “I told you, I brought my
tools. He tells me how,” Weal said reverently. “He speaks to me. They told
me, in that . . .
place,
to take the pills. But when I did, I couldn’t hear him
anymore. He showed me how to do this. He sends dreams into my brain.
He wants me to find him so I can live forever. I’ll be like him. I’ll be able
to fly.”

“You’re crazy,” Jordan whispered. “You’re fucking crazy.”

Weal smiled, his teeth red. “No, no, I’m not crazy. He wants me to
wake him. He wants me to find him where he sleeps and wake him. He
loves me.” Weal cocked his head like a dog listening for a supersonic
whistle. “He’s speaking right now. I can’t believe you can’t hear it. He
says I should kill you, because if I let you live, you’ll tell everyone about
him. About us.”

Weal wiped the knife on his pants and began swinging it lazily in
front of him like a pendulum. Jordan heard the hiss as it cut the air. Weal
took a step towards him, still swinging. Jordan jumped back, slipping
again on the gore-slick floor. Weal took a compensatory step forward as
though he were leading in some ghastly tango.

“No, I won’t tell! I swear! Please, please, let me go! Please! I have
to get home.” Weal swung the knife in wider arcs and feinting half-jabs
at Jordan. He grinned, advancing. Jordan backed up farther. “My mom
needs me! My dad’s hurting her. Please, if you kill me, she won’t have
anyone to protect her. Please, don’t. Oh God. I’m begging you.”

“The blood is the life,” Weal whispered. “And I’m going to live forever.”

He struck hard with the knife, slashing Jordan across the chest.
The blade shredded Jordan’s shirt, and bit deep into flesh and muscle.
He screamed as the blood rose from the wound. Jordan clutched his
chest and backed away. Weal kept advancing, driving Jordan backward,
slashing with each step, cutting Jordan’s hands when he tried to ward off
the swinging blade, slashing his neck and face when Jordan’s bleeding
hands were elsewhere.

When finally Jordan staggered and fell, dizzy from shock and pain,
Weal turned him onto his back, almost lovingly. He kissed Jordan on the
lips. Then he drew the knife across his throat, severing his carotid artery.
The last thing Jordan felt were Weal’s lips against his throat, lapping at
the blood that gushed from the wound.

Through dying eyes, Jordan looked up and tried to focus on his
murderer.

Weal’s face became his own father’s face, full of deadened, murderous
rage. Then it was Weal’s face again. Then his father’s. Then it was Weal’s
again.

Directly behind Weal, a tenebrous, mist-like column was forming,
vaguely human-shaped, but seemingly made entirely of darkness. Its
head (or whatever part of it looked to Jordan most like a human head)
was inclined towards Weal’s ear, and it was indeed whispering to him but,
now dying, Jordan heard the whispering, too.

It said,
Wake me
.

In the end,
dying proved different than anything Jordan had ever
imagined it might be.

For one thing, it seemed to go on forever, long past the point where
the pain had stopped. Past even the point where his heart stopped
pumping and his brain died. As Jordan drifted above his body, he looked
down at himself, bleeding out on the dirty floor of the bus, and felt the
truest compassion he’d known. He saw himself as he’d never seen himself
in any mirror while he’d been alive. He saw the fragility of his body and
he realized how tenuously human life was contained by such brittle shells
of flesh and bone under the best of circumstances.

Dimensions of brilliance exploded outward as he continued to rise.

Past, present, and future fused together in a continuum. There were no more secrets. Every truth of the world was laid bare to the dead.

Jordan knew, for instance—and not without satisfaction—that
his father would die of pancreatic cancer two years from now, in 1974.
He would go quickly, but not without terrible pain. He knew that his
mother would remarry, this time to a man who would cherish and care
for her. He also knew that, late at night, as she lay in bed with her gentle,
loving husband sleeping beside her, she’d think of Jordan’s father and
his cruelty and wonder if that wasn’t, in its own way, real love. In those
moments, she’d glance over at her sleeping husband and hate herself for
wishing he wasn’t just a bit harder, just a bit rougher, the way a man
ought to be. Then she’d remember the terror, and she’d forgive herself
for those treacherous thoughts. She’d lay her head on his chest while he
gathered her in his arms till she, too, slept, dreaming of Jordan, telling
herself over and over again that he was somewhere safe, living his life,
and knowing in her mother’s heart that he was gone.

He drew comfort from the knowledge that Fleur would leave Don
before the baby was born and that the violence that had marked Jordan’s
life would never mark that of Fleur’s son.

Jordan continued to rise.

He saw that the dead were everywhere, masses of them, like a vast
eldritch ocean that stretched in every direction. Men, women, children—
even animals. He laughed with revenant delight. The sound of his
laughter fell in a shower of ectoplasmic blue sparks in the ether of this
strange new in-between dimension where everything and nothing was
the same as it was in life.

When Jordan was alive he’d once asked a priest about whether or not
dogs had souls. His own dog, Prince, had died from eating poisoned bait
in the woods the previous week, and Jordan had been inconsolable. The
priest assured him that animals had no immortal souls and reprimanded
him for being stupid enough to believe they did. Jordan had cried, but he
suspected the priest was wrong—or lying. For years afterwards, he’d felt
Prince’s presence constantly when he was alone, especially at night in his
room where the dog had always slept.

Here the dead crowded the desolate country road where Weal had
awkwardly parked the bus, peering curiously through the windows,
tapping noiselessly on the glass in an endless, one-sided attempted
dialogue with the living. Finding none inside the bus, they scampered
along the roof and launched themselves into the night like spectral
fireflies in search of living receivers who could hear their voices. They
looked as they did in life, and in death seemed neither overjoyed to be
free of their mortal bodies nor particularly tormented. No wings, no
harps, no robes. They just . . .
were
.

Jordan felt the warm press of millions of souls caressing his own as
they passed through him. He realized now, as he never had when he was
alive, how
not alone
he had always been. W
hat a comfort it might have been
to know that,
he thought as he reached out to receive them.

As Jordan was absorbed into the massive vortex of spiralling black
light, he looked down one last time.

Below him, in the road, Richard Weal had stepped out of the bus
with his hockey bag full of bloodstained picks and hammers and saws.
He withdrew a bottle wrapped in a dirty towel. Stuffed into the bottle’s
opening and held in place by the stopper was a wick made of cloth.
Weal took a lighter out of his jacket pocket and lit the wick. The flame
glowed brilliant blue. He hurled the bottle through the door of the bus. It
shattered on impact, igniting a fireball that engulfed the interior of the
bus in a matter of seconds. Even before the gas tank blew, Jordan knew
his body was burning, and that when the authorities found the scorched out hulk hours later, there would be nothing left of him to identify.

Riding Weal’s shoulders, the great black shape that only the dead
could see pressed close to him, whispering to him, rippling and undulating
with malignant purpose as Weal picked up his hockey bag and began to
walk.

Jordan knew—as he knew
everything
now, including the terrible
end of Weal’s story—that there would be unlocked houses along the
route to Parr’s Landing. There would be trusting people. There would
be cars driving north with passengers who felt sympathy for a lone man
hitchhiking home to a northern mining town to be with his sick daughter
or his dying wife. Weal’s bag of hammers and knives and picks would do
the rest. All the while, the great black shape folded its wings around Weal
and urged him forward.

And then, the part of Jordan Lefebvre that was still tethered to his
experience of dying flickered out entirely, his essence becoming one with
the souls around him, passing completely from the world of the living
into the gloomy country of the dead.

Monday, October 23, 1972

That morning at the
Blue Heron Motel—thirty miles outside of Sault
Ste. Marie on the edge of the northern Ontario bush country, near the
village of Batchawana Bay—Christina Parr woke just after sunrise from
a dream of her dead husband, Jack. It was a widow’s dream—an inchoate
dream of the deepest and profoundest longing. She woke from it with her
arms outstretched as though to receive an embrace.

Christina knew that if either of the other two occupants of the motel
room had asked her to relate the dream’s narrative to them, she would
have been at a loss. The language of her grief was private and even now,
after almost a year, Christina was still painfully learning its vocabulary
and orthography.

She raised herself on her elbow and looked down at her daughter,
Morgan, lying next to her. Asleep, buried in the blankets with her black
hair (
Jack’s hair
) half-covering her face, Morgan looked younger than
fifteen. Lightly and tenderly, Christina smoothed it out of Morgan’s face
without waking her. Across the room, in the other bed, her brother-in law, Jeremy Parr, snored softly, his bare arm outside the blanket, pulling
it in to his body as though he were a cold, small child.

Christina had been dreaming of Jack almost nightly in the nine
months since the accident. The dreams varied in scale and intensity like
music, from the highest soprano pitch of remembered fragments of joy,
to the deepest, lowest
basso profundo
of grief and loss. From the latter,
she would wake up sobbing, her throat dry and raw as though she had
been swallowing graveyard dirt, feeling as if she were buried alive, and
the darkness of her bedroom a sealed, airless coffin. On those nights,
when she switched on her bedside lamp to try to read the book she always
kept on her night table for this exact purpose, knowing full well that she
wouldn’t be able to forget the yawning, empty space next to her on the
bed, she wondered whether the pain would ever end, or if this was what
she had to look forward to every night for the rest of her life.

Last night was different, though. Last night she dreamed she and
Jack were together, walking in a vast green pine forest shot through with
gold sunlight. Jack was leading her by the hand. She could still feel the
imprint of his palm in hers. She looked at the inside of her hand, half
expecting to see his fingerprints. With the insight peculiar to dreamers,
particularly dreamers of love, she knew it was one of the forests near
Jack’s family’s house in Parr’s Landing, where they’d both grown up. It
was a dream of comfort and security, a dream that drew on emotional
subtitles that stretched back over the course of eighteen years, including
the two years they’d spent together in high school in Parr’s Landing
before Morgan had been born. The dream felt like an augury, but of what
she wasn’t yet sure. The now familiar ache was there, of course. But this
morning it was tinged with something she couldn’t quite identify.

Christina looked at her watch. It was 7:25 a.m. The light leaking
through the motel curtains was deep orange, a pellucid autumnal hue that
was unique to northern regions where the snow came fast and early and
winter ruled for seemingly endless months. The light spoke of stars in
the violet-blue early morning sky, of columns of Canada geese streaking
south across the vastness of Lake Superior and Lake Huron, while below
them, the forests turned the colour of fire and rust and blood.

Then she realized what the dream had been tinged with and the
thought came, unbidden and profoundly bittersweet:
I’m almost home.
My God. I never, ever thought I would come back here.

Christina dressed
as quickly and quietly as she could so as not to
wake Morgan and Jeremy. She donned a pair of jeans and pulled a
bulky sweater over the thin T-shirt she’d slept in. In the bathroom, she
splashed cold water on her face and ran a damp comb through her thick
blonde hair. There were faint purple smudges under her eyes, but all in
all, she thought, she looked pretty good for a woman who had just driven
ten hours across the country from Toronto to Sault Ste. Marie, with a
heartbroken and anxious teenage girl and a twenty-five year old gay man
at the end of an affair he claimed was the love of his life—and for whom
this was as reluctant a homecoming as it was for her.