Enter, Night

by Michael Rowe

  Enter, Night

  A Novel

  Michael Rowe

  ChiZine Publications

  Copyright

  Enter, Night © 2011 by Michael Rowe

  Cover artwork © 2011 by Erik Mohr

  Interior design © 2011 by Samantha Beiko

  All rights reserved.

  Published by ChiZine Publications

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either a product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  EPub Edition APRIL 2012 ISBN: 978-1-92746-903-3

  All rights reserved under all applicable International Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen.

  No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

  No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in reviews.

  CHIZINE PUBLICATIONS

  Toronto, Canada

  www.chizinepub.com

  info@chizinepub.com

  Edited and copyedited by Brett Alexander Savory

  Proofread by Sandra Kasturi and Samantha Beiko

  We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, which last year invested $20.1 million in writing and publishing throughout Canada.

  Published with the generous assistance of the Ontario Arts Council.

  For Brian McDermid, With all my love, now and always

  And for Kate Davis Gyles and Michael Edward Gyles, My two favourite things that go bump in the night

  But first on earth, as Vampyre sent, Thy corpse shall from its tomb be rent; Then ghastly haunt thy native place, And suck the blood of all thy race;

  —Byron, The Giaour

  In the general belief, however, there was but one land of shades for all alike. The spirits, in form and feature, as they had been in life, wended their way through dark forests to the villages of the dead, subsisting on bark and rotten wood. On arriving, they sat all day in the crouching position of the sick, and, when night came, hunted the shades of animals, with the shades of bows and arrows, among the shades of trees and rocks; for all things, animate and inanimate, were alike immortal, and all passed together to the gloomy country of the dead.

  —Francis Parkman, The Jesuits in North America in the Seventeenth Century

  The past is never dead. It’s not even past.

  —William Faulkner, Requiem for a Nun

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  COVER PAGE

  TITLE PAGE

  COPYRIGHT

  DEDICATION

  EPIGRAPH

  NIGHT DRIVING

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  PARR’S LANDING

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  TOMB OF DRACULA

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  PARR’S LANDING POLICE DEPARTMENT

  FROM THE NOTES OF PROFESSOR PHENIUS OSBORNE

  BEING THE LAST TRUE TESTAMENT AND RELATION OF FATHER ALPHONSE NYON

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  NIGHT DRIVING

  CHAPTER ONE

  Friday, September 22, 1972

  The vampire in the dirty green army surplus jacket and cowboy hat boarded the Canada Northern Star Charter Lines bus from Ottawa to Sault Ste. Marie at noon.

  Jim Marks, who had been driving for Northern Star for twenty-five years and would retire early at the end of October, looked sourly at this late arrival. He was tired of waiting and wanted to get the trip underway. It was a long one, and boring. The total driving time would be nearly eighteen hours. There would be a refuelling and dinner stop in Toronto at five p.m. and another in Sudbury later that night. He wished he’d joined one of the majors years ago, bus lines like Greyhound or Voyageur Colonial, with normal, civilized hours and routes instead of old charter dinosaurs like Northern. He was too old for this job. He felt every one of his forty-eight years tonight, and his ass in the driver’s seat felt ninety.

  “Ticket,” Jim grunted, extending his hand. The vampire gave him the ticket. Jim tore off the driver’s half and handed the remaining portion back.

  Jim, of course, didn’t see a vampire. He saw a filthy hippie.

  In fairness to the vampire, any man with hair below his collar looked like a filthy hippie to Jim Marks. The world was crazy. Between the hippies down in the States and that commie Jane Fonda carrying on over in Viet Nam and all the drugs and weird music—never mind the fact that you couldn’t tell the boys from the girls anymore—the planet was going to hell in a handbasket. If Jim Marks was the Prime Minister of Canada, the first thing he’d institute was mandatory haircuts for every male over the age of five.

  The vampire took the ticket and moved down the aisle. His hockey bag banged against the metal armrests a couple of times. Jim resisted the urge to tell him to be careful. There was nothing to be careful of, but the metallic noise was annoying and Jim already had a headache and a long night drive ahead of him.

  None of the other passengers noticed the vampire as he passed. No one notices anyone on buses unless they are exceptionally beautiful or handsome, or dangerous-looking, or extremely fat—in which case the potential seatmate can look forward to a very long, very uncomfortable ride. The vampire was none of these things. He was entirely nondescript—a bit more dishevelled-looking than the average bus passenger, maybe a little dirty, but not remarkably so for a passenger on a night bus through the mining towns of northern Ontario. He seeped into his seat near the back of the bus like cigarette smoke and settled in for the ride north. For all intents and purposes, he might have been a ghost—felt rather than seen, whose passage might have been marked at most by a momentary waft of air. Or, marked by nothing at all. He wasn’t sure what people felt as he passed, but he did like to imagine the worst.

  In his seat near the back, the vampire covered his eyes with the brim of his cowboy hat and laid his head against the window. He closed his eyes and tried to sleep. If he slept, he would dream. If he dreamed—as he now could again, since he’d stopped taking the pills that flattened out his thoughts, rendering his movements turgid and his dreams uneventful and quiet—the voice would come to him and tell him what to do next. The voice did come to him, and he smiled in his sleep as he listened.

  In Toronto five hours later, the vampire got out and stretched his legs. It was raining.

  He ordered a hamburger, fries, and a Coke at a greasy spoon on Edward Street, not far from the bus depot, so he could keep his eye on it. He left his hockey bag on the seat, knowing that no one would look inside. He looked through the windows of the diner an
d watched the cold sluice down, dirty waterfalls of greasy urban soot against the glass. His gaze flickered up to the darkening argentite sky. The rain was intensifying. By his calculations—and he was nothing if not obsessively fastidious about facts—the moon had been ninety-seven percent full last night and would be entirely full when it rose tonight, and remain so through Saturday as he completed his voyage north. While the rain and clouds might try to hide it, the full moon would still be there. The vampire would know. He’d feel it rise and he would grow stronger and stronger.

  When the vampire was finished eating his hamburger, he took out the paperback novel he always carried in the side pocket of his army surplus coat with the intention of reading it to pass the forty-five minutes until it was time to re-board the bus.

  He patted his pocket, feeling an unfamiliar bulge there, and frowned. He’d forgotten he still had the fucking things. He looked around to make sure no one was watching, and then he took the grimy, nearly full bottle of pills out of his pocket, squinting to read the label. With a ragged thumbnail, he scratched off his name. Then he carried the Thorazine to the garbage can near the door of the diner and tossed it in. He glanced about again to make sure no one had noticed him. Of course no one had noticed him. They never did.

  CHAPTER TWO

  The coach was less than half full as it pulled out of Toronto at 6:15 p.m. Jordan Lefebvre was glad of it. He had his choice of seats. He chose two on the left-hand side of the bus, towards the back. He placed his guitar and his rucksack on the seat next to the aisle and leaned his bruised face against the window. The cool glass felt good against his swollen skin. The sun left the sky early in mid-September and the coming night rode alongside it beneath a shroud of rain as the driver navigated his way out of the city, turning north onto highway 400.

  Jordan was seventeen, almost eighteen, and today he had run out of both money and luck. He’d heard the term “rock bottom” before, but he never expected to have reached it before he was old enough to legally drink and vote. On the other hand, today he was finally a man. He’d grown up hearing older boys talk about how great it felt to finally “lose it.” It didn’t feel great to Jordan. He touched his swollen bottom lip, probing it gently. He winced when he found the split skin and his finger came away wet and red.

  Jordan had arrived in Toronto three months earlier from Lake Hepburn, a small mining town in northern Ontario that no one in Toronto seemed to have heard of—a fact few people he met there had ever allowed him to forget. He’d brought his guitar, a few changes of clothes—a couple of pairs of Lee Riders, some underwear, some faded flannel bush shirts, a spare pair of boots.

  Lake Hepburn was one of the thousands of ubiquitous northern hockey towns where boys became drinking, fighting, hockey-playing men by their mid-teens, if not earlier. Men for whom two options existed: working down the mine, or joining the army. Neither appealed to Jordan. He had the bruises to show for it—those you could see and those you couldn’t. Towns like Lake Hepburn tended to scar their sons in the same way the mines scarred their fathers, a cycle of mutual exploitation that had gone unquestioned, generation after generation.

  Jordan had always been his mother’s favourite. She’d bought him a secondhand guitar when he was fourteen and would listen to him practise for hours. She encouraged his dreams and told him he sounded like Jim Croce. Jordan loved her the way he loved no one else. His father called it beatnik crap. Jordan was a mystery to his father, a man with neither the time nor the inclination for mysteries, especially under his own roof.

  Late at night, Jordan sometimes heard his parents arguing through the wall of his bedroom. His father’s voice would rise and Jordan would catch words like normal and wrong and dreamer and other boys in between his father’s raw profanity. Those were the times he knew they were discussing him. His mother’s voice would rise in answer. Jordan heard words like be someone and out of this town and success. And dreams, which sounded like a completely different word when his mother said it. Then the furniture would crash. Things would break.

  One night when he was twelve, during one of their increasingly frequent arguments, Jordan heard the brutal smack of flesh meeting flesh. He’d jumped out of bed and opened his parents’ bedroom door to find his mother bleeding from the mouth and his father standing over her, trying to pull her to her feet. Jordan smelled the liquor from the doorway. His father stank of it. It seemed to be coming out of his pores.

  “She’s fine,” his father was muttering. “She fell. It’s all right. Go to bed. Go on, get out of here.” His mother was trembling. Her eyes were wide open and she shook her head imperceptibly, silently imploring him to do what his father asked.

  “Mom? Mom, are you OK? What’s happening? What happened?”

  “I’m fine, Jordie. Your Dad and I were just talking and I tripped on the carpet and fell. I’m all right. I just bumped myself. It’s OK. Go to bed, Jordan. Don’t make a fuss.”

  Jordan hadn’t moved. He’d looked his father full in the face, holding his gaze for a long, defiant moment, refusing to drop his eyes. His father’s flat, open hand began to rise, but it stopped in mid-air. That one time he thought better of it and lowered it to his side. As he looked down at his bleeding wife, Jordan could have sworn he saw a flicker of shame.

  It would be the last time his father exercised that restraint, however. Jordan never saw shame again. It was as though seeing his own brutality reflected in Jordan’s eyes extracted too high a cost, one his father bitterly resented having to pay.

  The beatings began a week later. They began as random slaps across the back of Jordan’s head for clumsiness or for “acting smart.” They evolved into whippings with a leather belt for chores not done to specification, or any other occasion when Jordan failed to live up to his father’s variegated standards of acceptable behaviour.

  Jordan learned to stay out of his father’s way as much as possible, which, in a small house, wasn’t much at all. He learned to dress in layers, so the bruises wouldn’t show; not that he was likely to get much more than pro forma sympathy from the adults around him. In Lake Hepburn, the disciplining of children, especially boys, was a family matter and one best dealt with inside the family. There was one consolation: when his father’s belt came down across his body, raising welts and cuts on his ass and legs, he knew that his mother was being spared.

  “Why don’t you ever fight back, you fucking little pissant?” his father had asked once during one of the beatings. He’d even managed to make the question sound reasonable. “Why don’t you try to take me? Why don’t you try to make me stop?”

  But Jordan never fought back. He sensed on some primal level that he was paying for his mother’s safety by acting as the object of his father’s rage. Unfortunately, Jordan’s capacity to endure pain was remarkable. The beatings lasted from the time Jordan was twelve until he was seventeen.

  The last time his father beat him was the night before got on the bus to Toronto three months ago. His father had come home drunk from the Legion Hall and tripped over a kitchen chair on his way to the fridge. He’d stormed up the stairs and woken Jordan with slaps and punches, screaming about his irresponsibility. The belt had come out remarkably quickly considering how drunk his father was. Jordan got the worst of it across his naked back and shoulders before his father, exhausted from his exertions, stumbled to his own bedroom and passed out.

  Jordan’s one regret, that pre-dawn morning when he’d snuck out of the house with his rucksack and guitar and hitchhiked to the next town over, was that his mother would be frantic. He’d left a note in her sewing basket telling her he was going to be all right and that she shouldn’t worry. He had two hundred dollars he’d been saving for two years, plus fifty he’d taken from his father’s wallet.

  When he’d arrived in Toronto late that first night, Jordan had checked into a dirt-cheap hotel on Jarvis Street frequented by hookers and their johns that stank of industrial cleaner and cockroach spray, and underneath that, pussy and dried semen. Afte
r a week in the hotel, his chest and legs were covered with bedbug bites. He’d found a “roommates wanted” notice tacked on the bulletin board of a bookstore on Spadina, not far from the university. Two men in their early twenties shared the apartment with a girl who was pregnant by one of them, though she was unsure of which one. None of the three seemed to find anything unusual in the arrangement.

  “It’s all beautiful,” she said. “We’re all, like, one, you know?”

  At that first meeting, the older of the two men, Mack, had been pleasant enough towards Jordan. The younger, Don, had regarded him with distrust. The girl, who said her name was Fleur, seemed entirely ambivalent, if friendly enough. After she’d introduced herself, she went into the kitchen and made herbal tea. She’d asked Jordan if he wanted some. He politely told her no. He couldn’t bring himself to tell her he had no idea what herbal tea was.

  Mack told him, “There’s a mat on the floor near the kitchen. It ain’t much, but it’s clean. First and last month’s rent would be great if you have it. First is OK, I guess, if you don’t. You got a sleeping bag?”

  “No, afraid not,” Jordan had said. “But I can buy one, I guess. Still cheaper than a bed.”

  “No problem,” Mack said. He’d gestured towards the closet. “Brian left one, I think. He OD’d. Bad trip. He don’t live here no more. You can have it if you want it.”