Enter, Night (53 page)

Mutely, she nodded, white-faced.

When they reached the door, Finn turned to her and hugged her. “I
love you, Morgan,” he whispered. “Thank you.”

Then Morgan opened the front door and walked Finn into the dawn.

In the end,
dying a second time proved different than anything Finn
had ever imagined it might be.

For one thing, the pain that his small, shrieking body felt as the
sunlight ignited a holocaust under his skin—an incandescence that
boiled his blood and set alight his bones from the inside, charring them
to ash in seconds—was surprisingly brief, even momentary. Such, it
seemed, was the nature of the soul—even a soul like Finn’s that had been
severed from its natural life and forced into rebirth in an unnatural one.

Rising above his body as it writhed and burned on the ground, Finn
saw, not without pain and shame, that Morgan was screaming, as well.
He’d hurt her, after all—the one person whom he wanted most to spare
any pain.

The bare skin of her arms, where she’d held him as he’d tried to duck
back inside the house at the moment the sunlight first struck his undead
flesh—exactly as he’d begged her to do—was scorched and seared and
blistered from the fire—
his
fire.

Because there were no more secrets, because every truth of the
world, past, present, and future, was laid bare to the dead—the true
dead, as Finn now was—he knew that Morgan would bear livid scars on
her arms for the rest of her life. They would fade a bit more every year, but he knew (as the dead know) that Morgan would think of him every
day when she looked at them, and the thoughts would be tender ones,
thoughts of love—and sadness.

The horror would eventually become a half-remembered nightmare,
and he was glad for that. He knew she would never return to Parr’s
Landing, nor would her mother, and that neither of them would ever see
Billy Lightning again.

Finn continued to rise.

The dead of Parr’s Landing surged around him like transcendental
tributaries to a larger sea of souls, and time itself spun like a great
tumbler of history and memory. The dead opened their arms to Finn in
love, pulled him close, carried him higher and higher.

His soul wept for the half-souls that remained, trapped.

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

Below him, he saw the oak doors of St. Barthélemy and the Martyrs
crash open. Christina Parr, screaming her daughter’s name, ran with
the speed only the mother of an injured child ever really attains to the
place where Morgan knelt, weeping over the charred skeleton of the
twelve-year-old boy Finn once was. Finn saw Christina tenderly wrap her
daughter in blankets and carefully carry her to Billy Lightning’s truck,
depositing her gently in the passenger seat and starting it up.

The dead see all roads, spiritual and temporal alike, and Finn was
well pleased with what he saw ahead on theirs.

And then, the part of Finn Miller that was eternal heard the sound
of a red rubber ball striking his bedroom floor. His soul was suddenly
engulfed in familiar fragrance—clover and lake water and sunlight on
soft black fur, and he was awash in frantic movement, warmth, and love.

The sound of Finn’s laughter fell like blue sparks and the sound of
Sadie’s triumphant, joyous barking fell like black ones, and together their
essences became one with the souls around them, passing completely
from the world of the living into a perfect, brilliant sunrise above Bradley
Lake and the cliffs of Spirit Rock.

There was no pain in it this time, only sunlight that no longer
burned.

PARR’S LANDING POLICE DEPARTMENT
75 Main Street E.
Parr’s Landing, Ontario
P2T 1R2

807-731-1002

TO:
Sergeant Gill Styles. Gyles Point Police Dept.,
Gyles Point, Ont.

FROM:
Sergeant Dave Thomson, Parr’s Landing

October 25, 1972

Dear Gill,

Following up on our telephone conversation of earlier this
evening, a local boy, Finn Miller, found this hockey bag and its
contents in the Spirit Rock area while looking for his dog. PC
Elliot McKitrick came upon the young man over the course of doing
rounds and brought the boy and the hockey bag back to the station
where we took it into evidence.

The bag appears to contain archaeological tools. In light of
the Carstairs disappearance on the night of October 22nd in Gyles
Point, I recommend that you forward them to Bruce Benson at the
RCMP in Sault St. Marie for forensic lab analysis of fingerprints
and blood type.

Also found in the bag were several documents that have been
identified by Dr. William Lightning, a visitor to Parr’s Landing, as
having belonged to his father, Dr. Phenius Osborne of Toronto, who
was the victim of homicide early this year. Dr. Lightning believes
they were taken from his father’s house during the course of said
homicide.

As an aside, he believes the perpetrator was Richard Weal, a
former student of Dr. Osborne’s, but according to the information
we have from Metro Toronto Homicide, Weal is deceased.

We do not consider Dr. Lightning a suspect at this time, though
we have asked him to remain in Parr’s Landing for the next few days.
Please call if we can be of any further help.

Dave Thomson, Sgt.

Parr’s Landing

From the notes of Professor Phenius Osborne
Department of Anthropology, University of Toronto
Sidney Smith Hall, 100 St. George Street, Toronto
Fall Term, 1971

Note:
The text that follows is my translation of an original
document held by Professor Victor Kleinschmit of the
Department of History at the University of Michigan at Ann
Arbor. The document itself, written in French, dates from the
seventeenth century and appears to be a letter from a Jesuit
missionary on his deathbed, addressed to his superiors in
Rome. I have cross-referenced both this document with every
available edition of The Jesuit Relations, but have found no
reference to it, nor to the priest mentioned (Fr. Nyon) in
any available record pertaining to the history of the Jesuits
in Canada.

Dr. Kleinschmit, upon hearing of my work on the St.
Barthélemy dig in Parr’s Landing in the summer of 1952,
invited me to come to Michigan to read it and to translate,
which I did.

It is worth noting that I did not share any of the specific
events surrounding the excavation of the St. Barthélemy
site during the summer of 1952 with Dr. Kleinschmit, so
his delivery of this document into my hands was in no way
intended to support any “fantastical” notions of what might
have occurred there that summer. The story, as read here,
presents a plausible theory of the origin of the Wendigo
legend of St. Barthélemy by a writer obviously familiar with
myths and legends of that period.

In 1968, I forwarded a copy of my translation to Fr. Pedro
Arrupe, SJ, (the twenty-eighth and current) Superior General
of the Society of Jesus in Rome to enquire as to why it had
not been included among the official records of the Jesuit
missions to New France.

On February 12th, I received a brief, very courteous
reply (see later notes, attached) from the Superior General’s
secretary thanking me for my letter, assuring me that the
Reverend Father had enjoyed reading the document I sent
him and thanking me for my “assiduous scholarship” and my

“interest in the glorious history of the Jesuit martyrs” but
asserting that, owing to both its “fantastical and lurid”
subject matter as well as its length, the document was clearly
a forgery, though it had already been examined on both
palaeographic and material grounds by Professor Kleinschmit,
and found to be consistent, even if the subject matter itself
was not. It’s not surprising to me that the SG would find
this embarrassing if fictional; and mortifying if it was
proven to be an authentic record of the delusions of a Jesuit
missionary likely driven mad by the isolation of northern
Ontario in the seventeenth century. The Jesuit motto, “Ad
Majorem Dei Gloriam”—to the greater glory of God—is repeated
several times in this narrative, which struck me as unusual,
since one can infer that both the writer and the recipient
were already well familiar with its meaning. There is an
earnestness to its use here that seems noteworthy, especially
in context of the narrative, as becomes obvious.

NB: Must forward a copy to Billy. He will find this
entertaining, esp. in light of our “adventures” with good
Dick Weal that summer!

—P. K. O., Ph. D. 09/12/71

Being the Last True Testament and Relation of Father Alphonse Nyon;
Given at Montréal, Québec in a the form of a Letter to the Very Reverend
Father Vincenzo Caraffa, Superior General of the Society of Jesus, at
Rome

Anno Domini 1650

Very Reverend Father in Christ,
Pax Christi

I send this last Relation in the hopes that it will reach Your Reverence by
the ship returning to France before the ice in this bitter region renders
entirely compromised the passage of our vessels across the ocean.

I fear that my time here in this land is short, as the pox that has
plagued hundreds of the Savages, thankfully a goodly number of them
baptized and brought to our Christian Faith and now resting in the arms
of Our Lord Jesus Christ in Heaven, has taken me into its embrace as
well.

I write with difficulty and have entrusted the care and delivery
of this Relation to Your Reverence into the hands of my friend Father
Charles Vimont. He has sworn to seal this document and not to cast his
eyes upon its contents, which are for the eyes of Your Reverence alone,
on the peril of his Immortal Soul.

For my part, my vain prayers that I should again see the shores of my
homeland or the beautiful cathedral of Notre-Dame de Chartres where I
first heard Our Lord’s call as a young man, or indeed once again touch the
face of my beloved mother, have been denied by Our Lord, and I submit
myself joyfully to His will.

My one true regret during these many years of service to the
Savages of New France is that I should have been spared the great honour
of martyrdom, the great blessing enjoined upon so many of our fallen
Fathers at the bloody hands of the Hiroquois—most lately Father de
Brébeuf, Father Chabanel, and Father de Lalande, who died so horribly
at Sainte-Marie among the Hurons last year, praising the name of Christ
and giving absolution to their Barbarian tormentors with their last
breath, even after their tongues were cut out, for they kept preaching till
death released them.

I pray for Your Reverence’s understanding, prayers, and meditation
upon the reading of this, my last Relation and Testament, for it is with a
heavy heart that I set down the strange and terrible events I witnessed at
St. Barthélemy among the Ojibwa in the northern Lac Superiéur region
of the country in the winter of the Year of Our Lord 1632.

These secrets I have kept to myself for nearly twenty years, confiding
them not even in the Sacrament of Confession, though I regularly
opened my heart to God and begged His forgiveness, not only for the
blasphemies I have seen, but also for those I have wrought myself in my
sad and pitiable effort to do His will as best as could be done by one so
unworthy.

In the autumn of that dark year of which I write, word was received
by Monsieur de Champlain at Trois-Rivières of the destruction of two of
our settlements near Sault de Gaston, in Huronia, and the martyrdom of
three of our Jesuit Fathers in what could only have been an attack by the
Hiroquois, for their fiendish handiwork leaves a spoor as unmistakable
as the handiwork of Satan himself.

In the first, the Mission of Sainte-Berthe, the martyrs were, by name,
Father Renaud d’Olivier, Father Mathieu Glazier, and Father Nausson
d’Uongue. The Fathers had travelled from France together and, it was
reported, had been as close as brothers. I pray they found comfort in their
brotherhood at the end. The Indian trappers reported the hideous sight
of the maimed and tortured bodies of d’Olivier, Glazier, and d’Uongue.
Their scorched bodies still hung from the stakes to which they were tied
and left for carrion. The Savages, it was reported, had poured boiling
water over their heads in mockery of Baptism and cut out their eyes and
tongues, placing live coals in the sockets.

Likewise, they reported the smoke still heavy and foul over the
burned village, and many dead, including a number of baptized Savages.
We wept at this news, even though we knew that our fallen Brothers
had attained the heights of Heaven, having died in the greatest possible
service to Our Lord Jesus Christ. Never have the words of our Jesuit
motto,
Ad majorem Dei gloriam,
comforted me more than they did in the
hours that followed the news of the Fathers’ martyrdom.

In the second instance, the strange news was of the mission of St.
Barthélemy deep in the Ojibwa region of that country, a region noted
for the cruelty of the terrain itself and of the strangeness of its customs,
superstitions and legends. So tight, it is said, is the Devil’s hold upon
these poor people that establishing a mission in this particular region had long been an ambition of the Crown in its support of our work here
in New France.

In the case of the mission of St. Barthélemy, the trappers related
that the mission seemed entirely abandoned.

Unlike the mission of Sainte-Berthe, which had clearly fallen to an
attack by the Hiroquois, the mission at St. Barthélemy appeared deserted,
as though the inhabitants, both Christian and Savage, had all departed
freely and of their own volition.

The trappers observed this and more and related it to Monsieur
de Champlain, who in turn related it to Father de Varennes, who was
then the representative responsible for dispatching our Fathers on their
missions upriver in the company of their Huron guides.