Enter, Night (50 page)

“Oh my God, Morgan!” Christina wailed, turning around. “I told you
to stay downstairs! Get downstairs
right now
!”

Adeline rose jerkily to her feet, looking from Christina to Morgan.
Her mouthful of teeth was stained and needle-like in the overhead light.

“Whore,” Adeline croaked. “Dirty, dirty
whore
.” She took two
shambling steps towards the doorway where Christina stood protectively
in front of Morgan.

“Get away, Adeline, goddamn you!” Christina shouted. “Get away
from my daughter!”

“Or else what, Christina?” Adeline crooned. “This is my house. I
come and go as I please, and do as I like. Haven’t you learned your place
here yet?”

Adeline reached out with one hand and slapped Christina across the
face, sending her crashing into the polished maple Philadelphia highboy
next to the doorway. Agony sang through Christina’s shoulder. She felt
blood trickling down the back of her scalp where she’d cut it on the edge
of the dresser, and she groaned.

Adeline turned her blazing eyes on Morgan and said, “Morgan, come
here to your grandmother. Come and give me a kiss. You’re a real Parr.
You’re the only real Parr in this house except for me. All of this is for
you—this house, this town, and everything in it. It’s your birthright.
Come here.
”

Morgan flinched. Then her arms dropped limply to her sides. Her
eyes glazed over and went blank. She took a blind, stumbling step
towards Adeline, who crooked her arms and opened them in a grotesque
parody of grand-maternal devotion.

“Morgan, no! Don’t go to her!” Finn shouted. “Don’t look at her!
That’s how they get you!”

Morgan, empty-eyed, took another step towards her grandmother.

At the exact moment that Adeline’s arms snaked out, her fingers
grazing the sleeves of her granddaughter’s sweater, Finn placed his palm
flat in the middle of Morgan’s back and shoved her as hard as he could.

Morgan spun off-balance and fell, sprawling on the floor near where
Christina had fallen. Christina scrambled for Morgan and dragged her
daughter across the carpet towards her.

Blind fury passed across Adeline’s face. From her open mouth came
a shrill, sibilant buzzing, vaguely insectile or serpentine.

Her teeth actually click when she hisses like that,
Finn thought in
wonderment, fascinated in spite of himself.
Just like in the comics.

Then Adeline threw back her head and laughed. “Little idiot,” she
said. Her voice brimmed with contempt and malicious, dark mirth. “Dirty
little townie boy. A dirty townie, just like my cunt of a daughter-in-law.”

Very clearly, Finn said, “Fuck you, you snob. This is for my dog.”

He unscrewed the lid of the mason jar of water he was holding
behind his back and threw its contents in Adeline Parr’s face.

Finn’s father had once
let him hold a candle up to a blowtorch. The
candle had literally been uncreated in front of Finn’s eyes, liquefying and
becoming viscous in the heat of the blowtorch.

That was what happened to Mrs. Parr’s face when the holy water
splashed into it—
into it,
not
across
it. The water burned into Adeline’s
face, flushing away skin, troughing bone, until the liquefied mixture that
had been her face ran down in an oily red and yellow stream of blood and
fat. Adeline dropped to her knees and then fell on her side, clawing at her
face and rending the air with her agony.

She’s melting just like the Wicked Witch of the West,
Finn mused.
Good.
I hope it hurts like hell.

It seemed impossible that she could still make that agonized highpitched sound with her throat melting away like it was, but Finn’s ears
rang with the sound of her excruciation. Acrid, stinging white smoke
poured from Adeline’s dissolving face, filling the room. It burned Finn’s
throat and eyes, making him cough and retch.

Temporarily blind, Finn stumbled into the cavernous bedroom,
feeling his way as he went. He flailed his arms in front of him, trying to
stay balanced.

He didn’t see Adeline’s spindly dressing table chair, but he surely felt
it when he collided with it. He said, “Ooooh!” Then his legs buckled and
he collapsed on the floor at the foot of the bed, disoriented and unable to
see.

He heard Christina screaming his name, but—still smoke-blind—he
didn’t understand why, and he couldn’t see what they saw until it was
long past too late.

The old man in black
streaked toward Finn with the speed of a deadly
underwater snake. Christina screamed Finn’s name as she saw the man’s blackrobed arms with their long-fingered white hands uncoil from his sides and
seize the boy in a possessive grip, yanking Finn back towards him, enfolding
him in his arms. He slipped his elbow around Finn’s throat in a crushing
chokehold. Finn’s face turned a dull, airless red as he began to suffocate. As he
dragged Finn towards the French doors leading to Adeline’s balcony, the old
man’s eyes met Morgan’s.

“Let him go!” she screamed. “Let Finn go!”

Christina shouted, “Morgan, stay away from him!”

But if Morgan could hear at all, she gave no sign of it. She launched herself at the old man, her fists raised. But she never reached him
or
Finn.

Finn’s face was the colour of the dark pink flush of an overripe peach, and his eyes bulged and watered from lack of oxygen. He reached out one arm and
choked out one ragged, pleading word that sounded like
Morgan
at the same
time as Morgan reached out to him, fully intending to wrench Finn from the
old man’s death grip.

Their fingers brushed, once.

Then the old man threw himself back against the closed French doors.
The glass shattered around him in his wake, and the momentum sent them
tumbling over the edge of the balcony, thirty feet above the ground. Clouds of
wet snow and cold rain blew into the bedroom from the broken doors and the
night outside, curtains flapping into the room like flags.

But instead of the sound of their bodies striking the lawn below, Morgan
heard the sound of giant wings churning the air outside the window—and
Finn screaming her name, over and over again.

When she ran to the balcony and tried to follow the sound, Morgan saw
a great dark mass, nearly indistinguishable from the general blackness, rising
into the night sky.

She might have missed it entirely except for the helplessly flailing figure
of a small, screaming boy in white pyjamas it carried in its claws, growing
smaller and smaller as they drifted almost lazily into the deeper darkness
towards the outlying forests and the cliffs beyond. Then it was swallowed up
entirely by the rain and the sheets of snow.

Adeline Parr’s bedroom reeked
of blood and acid smoke. Christina stood
up carefully, but spears of white-sharp pain still shot up her left leg from the
impact of her collision. Her head throbbed. Morgan, her hair wet with melting
snow, stood on the balcony, wailing Finn’s name over and again.

Adeline Parr’s headless body was motionless on the carpet. Where
her head had been, there was only a nimbus of boiled slush and bits of
stubborn bone fragment that had survived the annihilation of the holy
water.

Christina had a great longing to kick the body as hard as she could,
but there was still some lingering fear in her that, even now, Adeline would
reach out and grasp her ankle, diamond rings and red-lacquered scimitar
fingernails digging into Christina’s soft skin. Instead, she stepped over
Adeline’s body and went to the gory tangle of silk sheets where Jeremy
had bled out and died.

Christina couldn’t breathe. She looked down at the familiar face,
so much like Jack’s, and felt a band of grief tighten around her chest so
strongly that she feared she might literally suffocate from the pain of this
second tragic severing from their lives of the second of the two men who
had meant the most to her and Morgan.

Oh, Jeremy
, she thought.
Oh, my poor, sweet Jeremy. What did they do
to you?

Christina pulled one of the sheets out from under him—a cleaner one
than the others, at least—and carefully and lovingly covered his broken
and torn body with it.

As she did, a glitter of silver on the carpet caught her eye. It was
Jeremy’s St. Christopher’s medal. The chain was broken as though it had
been ripped off his neck and thrown down. Christina bent and picked it
up. She put it in the pocket of her jeans.

By the window, Morgan had stopped calling Finn’s name, but her
body still shook with sobs. Her shoulders were hunched forward and her
hands were loosely clasped in front of her, as though praying.

Christina called out softly, “Morgan? Honey?”

Morgan turned around. Her face was white and stiff with shock. “Hi,
Mom,” she said. “What did you say? Mom . . . he took
Finn. He carried
Finn away
.” Fresh tears streamed from her eyes. “There really are vampires.
Just like Finn said there were. It was all true.”

She shook her daughter gently. “Morgan, we have to leave,” Christina
said, struggling to keep her voice calm without sacrificing the force of her
words, words she needed Morgan to hear and heed. “We have to leave
right
now
. Are you OK to walk? Can you make it downstairs to the car?”

“But what about Finn?” She stared frantically through the broken
French doors.

“Morgan, listen to me,” she said urgently. “We have to leave the
house. It’s too dangerous here. We can’t worry about Finn now. Finn
would want you safe.”

“OK,” Morgan said. She glanced down at Jeremy’s body on the bed
and started to shake again. “Oh,
Mom
. . .”

“Don’t look at it, Morgan. Don’t look at him. Come on now—here,
look at me instead. Look at my face.” When she did, Christina smiled
encouragingly. “That’s it. Just keep your eyes on me.”

She put her arm around Morgan’s shoulders and gently herded her
past the carnage in the bedroom and out into the hallway. Once there,
she hurried her daughter down the stairs. The keys to the Chevelle were
where she left them—on the console table near the front door, next to
her purse. The only light downstairs came from the embers of the fire
in Adeline’s study bleeding through the half-closed doors, and a greenshaded library lamp on the other side of the hallway.

Christina took one last look back at the foyer of Parr House, which
seemed to have gorged itself on the darkness, both natural and unnatural,
until it was bloated. Whatever the source of the monsters that seemed to
have stepped out of the storybooks and into her world, they had all been
drawn here, to Parr’s Landing and to this awful place. Nothing could live
here—could
ever
have lived here, she corrected herself—except anguish
and misery.

Christina wished she had a can of propane and a match. She thought
briefly of looking for just that in one of the pantries off the kitchen, but
she realized that there just wasn’t time. Every moment she remained
in this house, they were in danger. She had to get Morgan to safety,
whatever “safety” meant in the middle of this horror.

“Come on, sweetheart,” Christina said. “Let’s go. We never have to
come back to this place again.”

The Gold Nugget motel
was dark when Christina pulled into the
parking lot in the snow.

The Chevelle’s headlights played across the windows of the diner,
illuminating empty tables and shining through empty water glasses that
went dark again when the high beams veered away as she parked the car.

Morgan opened the passenger-side door and looked around fearfully.
“Mom, what are we doing here? Where is this place?” She leaned close to
her mother, away from the snow and rain that was now falling in an even
mixture of both.

“It’s the motel, Morgan,” Christina said, with a calmness she didn’t
feel. “It’s the Nugget. It’s where Billy is staying.” She stepped out and
locked the car, realizing at once what a futile gesture it was. If those
things wanted to get in somewhere, they seemed to just do it. They didn’t
ask questions or worry much about locks.

At some point, when I can think about it without going insane, I must
take some time to sit down and consider the fact that my gay brother-in-law
was just killed by his mother. Oh, but it gets better: he was killed by his mother
who drank his blood and then bit his cock off with teeth the size of fingers.
Then spat it out.

At which point, a twelve-year-old friend of my daughter’s threw a jar of
holy water in the bitch’s face and melted it right off because he’d read it in
a vampire comic. Then—wait for it!—my daughter’s friend was carried off
by an old man dressed like a seventeenth-century Jesuit priest in one of our
history books from school.

I’m living in a monster movie—which is crazy, of course. But crazy or not,
here we are.

And it’s dark and I’m cold and there’s no one anywhere around here who
can help me except a man I barely know. And if I think about any of this right
now, I’ll go right off my goddamn head.

She reached for Morgan’s hand and pulled her along as quickly as
she could. “We need to find him, quickly. Let’s hope he left his room
unlocked. It’ll give us a place to stay where it’s safe, at least for now.”

“What if he’s not here? What if we have to go back to Grandmother’s
house?”

“Morgan, we’re not going back there to that house, ever—no matter
what. If Billy’s not here, I’ll kick the door in if I have to.”

In the absence of light from any of the rooms, let alone the diner or
the front office, Christina tried to recall which room Billy had entered
when she dropped him off a thousand years ago this afternoon. She
hadn’t been paying attention of course, because at that time, she and
reality still shared mutually agreed-upon parameters.