by Michael Rowe
He hadn’t been able to bring himself to come up to the cabin at all during the three years since her lingering death from cancer. Today, finally, he had. He’d driven to the cabin, arriving just as the sun was setting over Lake Superior and the waves were high and wild. Inside, he’d lit the kerosene lamps and eaten supper by lamplight.
Carstairs felt the vast emptiness of the cabin all around him and he knew he’d made a terrible mistake coming back up here today.
Edith had been a real Canadian girl. She’d loved the cabin when she was alive and he’d felt her presence everywhere, even on the weekends he’d come up on his own to fish, leaving her back in the city with their son and daughter. He saw her blue earthenware pitcher on a shelf by the sink. When she was alive it had always been full of wildflowers—masses of goldenrod, bouquets of Pink Lady’s Slipper, wild purple harebell.
Her watercolours of the hard granite shoreline were hanging throughout the cabin. Carstairs knew that if he brought one of the kerosene lamps over to the pine walls outside the ring of yellow light, he’d see them there, under three year’s worth of dust. But he realized he didn’t want to see them. She was gone, and no alchemy between his own loss and memory and the wild forest magic of this rocky coastline was going to render vivid something that had forever left his life.
Carstairs wept at that realization which, to him, was like watching her die all over again. His sobs made his shoulders ache. Around him, the silence and the darkness seemed to swell and expand till it was vast and huge, and he filled it with a loud keening that came from a deep and terrible empty place inside. He had never felt older or weaker—or more alone—in his life.
When Carstairs felt he had no more tears to shed, he splashed water on his face and pressed a cold washcloth to his eyes. He briefly thought of leaving the cabin that night, but he was a practical man—it was late and he was too tired to drive. It would be dangerous. Before he went to bed, he set his alarm clock for five a.m. He intended to get an early start back to the city, then telephone a realtor from home and put the place on the market. He mounted the stairs to the upper floor, holding the kerosene lantern in front of him, looking straight ahead. Then he undressed and climbed into the cold double bed.
Asleep, his Edith had come to him like an angel of mercy and comfort.
In the dream, Edith was a still just a girl from Trout Creek he’d fallen head over heels for as a student at Wesley College in Winnipeg in 1929. She was young like she had been on their wedding day. In the dream, there was no cancer—and in fact, never would be any cancer. Edith opened her plump, tanned arms to him and said, Where have you been, Alan? I’ve been waiting for you. I’ve missed you so, my darling. It’s so beautiful here.
When he woke in the darkness, it was a grinning Richard Weal he was holding in his arms and the foetor of spoiled meat, body waste, and decay was everywhere.
Carstairs didn’t see the knives at first, but he felt them immediately.
In the end, his death had come much more quickly than Edith’s had—though, like hers, it was not without pain. Weal had been leisurely with his tools this time, and he’d enjoyed himself very much.
After he was finished, Weal re-lit the kerosene lamp on the dining room table and washed his knives and hammers in the kitchen sink, enjoying the cozy thump-thump-thump as the water from the copper bottom of the sink sluiced away hair and flesh and blood from the various blades. He dried them carefully so they wouldn’t rust.
Upstairs, he wrapped the various segments of Carstairs’s body in bloodied sheets and tied them with baling twine. Then he carried them downstairs and buried them on the property, deep enough so the animals wouldn’t dig them up for food when the winter freeze made their hunger savage.
In the darkness, he bathed naked in the icy waters of the inlet, screaming when the cold burned his skin. Then he dried himself with a rough towel, rubbing hard to bring the warmth back to his limbs. He found clean clothes hanging in the bedroom closets of the cabin. They smelled a bit musty and were slightly big for him, but he dressed quickly. Weal packed the remaining clothes he’d found in the closet into the duffel bag Carstairs had brought for this trip to the lake.
Rifling through Carstairs’s wallet, Weal found five hundred dollars and several credit cards. He left the credit cards, knowing they could be used to track him if it should come to that. But he doubted it would. It wouldn’t be long now till his life changed.
The voice had grown stronger and clearer, and more urgent, like a radio signal in his brain. It faded in and out as he drew closer, or veered away, from its source.
But tonight the voice had been very, very clear. Clearer than it had ever been.
Weal could picture his Friend—for that is indeed how he had come to think of the voice in his head, as a loving Friend, one who’d been his closest companion since the night he’d first heard it five years before—suffocating beneath mounds of flinty soil and shield rock, choking on clods of cold earth, struggling to be free, screaming in the suffocating darkness of the centuries.
And when he’d lapped the blood from Alan Carstairs’s slashed throat, his holiest of personal communion rituals, an image of the place had seared itself into his brain. It had appeared entirely unbidden, but it was clear as an Ektachrome slide.
Wake me, his Friend pleaded. You are close, very close, to the place you seek. Find me. Wake me. I will repay you with rewards beyond your wildest imaginings. I will raise you up to a god.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Twelve-year-old Finnegan Miller liked to get up when the house was still quiet, while his parents were still fast asleep in their room upstairs, and take his black Labrador, Sadie, for a long walk around Bradley Lake. In October, he woke before sunrise. His routine was unvaried: he dressed in his room, fed Sadie in the kitchen, found her favourite red rubber ball, then put on a jacket and slipped out the back door of the house with Sadie at his heels.
In short order, she’d run ahead, tail wagging, nose to the ground and he’d be the one following her instead of the other way around.
Bradley Lake was half a mile from his house on Childs Drive. To call it a “lake” would flatter it, especially given the proximity of Parr’s Landing to the shore of Lake Superior, which always seemed to Finn to be more like an ocean. According to legend, Lake Superior never gave up its dead, and in school, Finn had learned about the terrible history of shipwrecks during storms of almost supernatural ferocity there—the wreck of the Mataafa Storm in 1905, the Cyprus in 1907, the Inkerman and Cerisoles minesweepers in 1918. Surely, Finn thought, no body of water that carnivorous, with that much of a taste for human flesh should rightly be called a lake.
But Bradley Lake was a lake—vast, serene, with water so deep and cold it often looked black. Rising directly above it were a tiered grouping of rocky outcrops of Canadian Shield granite cliffs surrounded by a rich taiga forest of black spruce, jack pine, and Ontario balsam poplar.
Once at the lake, the path Finn took was a mile and a half around and lined with paper birch and balsam fir. When he was younger, he’d heard stories of coming upon bush animals in the darkness, but he’d only ever seen one—a buck, last fall—and it had run off when Sadie started to bark and chase it. He’d tried to restrain her but in the end he realized that not only would she never catch the buck, she would have turned tail immediately if it had ever stopped and turned towards her with its antlers lowered.
Finn’s father had for a time urged him to let him train Sadie for hunting, but Finn despised the idea of hunting, and his father, who had learned which battles to pick with his son, decided to let it drop. Sadie’s status as Finn’s best friend—indeed, his only friend—was thus enshrined. This morning ritual hike, with Sadie bounding ahead of him through the bush, was sacrosanct. It was a ritual that was only ever interrupted if Finn was sick or injured, which he rarely was. On those mornings, Sadie would lie beside his bed in his room and whine pitifully until she realized he wasn’t ignoring her, but wasn’t able to take he
r out. Then she would lay her head on her front paws and look up at him with reproachful amber eyes.
Sometimes she brought the red rubber ball to him and dropped it at the foot of the bed, as though it were the most marvellous idea ever.
Finn enjoyed the darkness and the silence of this last hour of night best in the late autumn, when the air coming in off Superior was damp and raw, and the yellow and red leaves on the trees lining the path showered water down on him when he accidentally knocked them as he passed by.
While most boys his age might have preferred to stay under the covers for as long as possible in the morning, Finn wasn’t most twelve-year-olds. He’d never been like “most” boys his age, no matter what age. This seemed to cause the adults around him more consternation than it caused him. Finn may not have had friends, other than Sadie, but he couldn’t miss something he had neither had, nor ever felt he needed.
Besides, Finn was in love. Completely, utterly, and irrevocably in love for the first time in his life. It was a secret he worked hard to hide from his parents, who were already worried about his inability to connect with his peers. No point in making it worse.
He was in love with Dracula.
Specifically, he was in love with The Tomb of Dracula, a comic book series, the first issue of which he’d found in early summer of that year on the lowest rung of the spiral comic rack at Harper’s Drugs. Like all true loves, no matter the age at which they occur, it was a blinding, all consuming passion that left little room for reason.
Finn thrilled to the cover: a luridly inked four-colour depiction of the fanged Lord of the Undead carrying the limp body of a curvy blonde in a green mini-dress. Dracula’s cape was edged in orange satin. Mist swirled in the foreground. In the background loomed a castle framed by a full moon. The banner read NIGHT OF THE VAMPIRE! With his heart in his mouth, he’d paid his twenty cents and pedalled his five-speed Huffy Dragster with the metallic gold banana seat as fast as he could back to his house on Mission Street.
Back home, in his room, with the door closed, he’d read it from cover to cover, memorizing the names of the characters—Frank Drake, Clifton Graves, Jeanie and, of course, Count Dracula himself—as well as the storyline, until he could recite the script.
In the first issue, the skeptical hero, Frank Drake, discovers that he’s a descendant of Count Dracula and has inherited a castle in Transylvania. With the intention of turning the castle into a vampire-themed tourist resort, he travels to Romania with his best friend, Clifton Graves, and Frank’s fiancée, Jeanie (she doesn’t need a last name, Finn noted, with an unfamiliar flush, not with boobs like those). Clifton discovers the skeleton of Count Dracula in the castle’s dungeon and pulls the stake out, bringing the vampire back to life. Dracula attacks a village barmaid and kills her. The vampire returns to his castle and overpowers Frank Drake, who tries to prevent Dracula from turning Jeanie into a vampire. He drives the Count away with Jeanie’s silver compact mirror. But before he vanishes, Dracula issues a cryptic warning: “Know this, Frank Drake—you’ve won but a battle . . . in the final analysis, the game is mine—as it always has been— will always be—mine—forever mine!” And indeed the game turned out to be Dracula’s—Jeanie had been transformed into a vampire.
Finn sighed in ecstasy. Then he read it again, from start to finish. Then he read it once more. It was perfect.
Harper’s Drugs always seemed to carry comic books later than the date on the cover, something that had never bothered him before his first issue of The Tomb of Dracula. The following week he asked Mr. Harper about it and he’d told Finn that they’d already travelled a long way by the time they got to Parr’s Landing. He haunted the drugstore for a week, then two, then three, but there was no sign of issue two.
In desperation, Finn sat down at the desk in his bedroom and wrote a letter to Marvel Comics in New York City, using the address he’d found on the bottom of the first page, and taped a twenty-five cent coin to it.
Dear Marvel Comics , he wrote. I am a recent reader of your Comic Book Series, Tomb of Dracula. I live in Parr’s Landing, Ontario, Canada where it is sometimes very hard to buy your products. Can you send me Issue #2? I have enclosed 25 cents (in Canadian money) for the comic plus postage to my country. My address is c/o Gen. Delivery, Parr’s Landing, Ont. Thank you very much. Sincerely, Finnegan Miller.
As it happened, the fates elected to smile on young Finn Miller— some kind soul at Marvel returned his twenty-five cent coin along with a manila envelope containing a copy of issue number two.
Dear Finnegan Miller , came the reply. Here is a copy of the second issue of T.O.D. We hope you enjoy it. We are returning your twenty-five-cent coin. May we suggest you put it towards a subscription? We don’t send out mags from our office as a rule, but are happy to help you out this one time. Sincerely, your friends at Mighty Marvel.
Finn’s joy knew no bounds. Issue number two was even more lurid than its predecessor. This cover featured Dracula turning into a bat in front of a huddled clutch of terrified Londoners cowering in an archway as a woman in a miniskirt lay crumpled at the Count’s feet, obviously dead. The lining of Dracula’s cape this time was a glorious blood-red. The issue’s tagline shrieked, A SHRILL SCREAM SPLITS THE AIR IN LONDON AT MIDNIGHT—WHO STOLE MY COFFIN?
Well, obviously Frank Drake did, Finn gloated. Now all hell was going to break loose. He flung himself across his bed, rummaging in the paper bag of candy from Harper’s Drugs till he found what he was looking for. He bit the tip off one of the grape-flavoured Pixy Stix straws, and then poured the sweet-and-sour powder onto his tongue, letting it luxuriate there for a moment before he swallowed it. Then he started reading, picking up the story as though it were a letter from an old friend, or rather what he imagined reading a letter from an old friend would be like.
Afterwards, he thought briefly of asking his parents if they’d buy him a subscription for his birthday, but he knew they didn’t trust American companies with their money, even the relative pittance it would cost for a subscription to The Tomb of Dracula. Besides, the day after he received issue number two from the kind soul at Marvel, the shipment of new comics—including The Tomb of Dracula—arrived at Harper’s Drugs like rain after a long drought. Issue number three had arrived on the spiral rack in a relatively timely fashion, considering how far away Parr’s Landing was from New York City.
Finn was coming up to the highest point of land around Bradley Lake. He looked around for Sadie, but she was nowhere to be seen. The sky was lightening, streaked with broad shards of dark pumpkin and deep purple, and the water reflected the advancing dawn, colours running slick as oil paint.
Finn called out to the Labrador. “Here, Sadie! Here, girl!” His voice ricocheted off the rock face. He called out again. “Sadie, come! Come! Here, girl!”
He frowned. This was unlike her. While she liked to bound ahead at her own pace, exploring, she always remained within earshot and usually scampered back several times as if to check that her master was following her. Finn listened for the sound of barking or rustling in the underbrush, but heard nothing. He looked backwards, squinting into the dimness of the path but saw nothing.
The tops of the trees shook in a sudden burst of cold wind, releasing a cloud of dead autumn leaves that cascaded down before being hijacked by the sudden shift in the air currents and tattering off across the lake. The sky was reddening in advance of the sunrise, the light shadow dappled and obscure.
For the first time ever, Finn was aware of his isolation. He was a mile and a half from home and his dog was nowhere to be seen. He looked around uneasily. The familiar landscape of rough-hewn cliffs rising out of black water looked suddenly barbaric and vaguely lunar.
“ Sadie!” Finn called again. This time there was an edge of panic in his voice. Hearing nothing, he screamed, “Here, girl! Sadie, COME!” He whipped his head wildly from side to side. “SADIE! COME!”
And then from high above him he heard the sound of screaming—a high-pitched, re
nding lament that tore through the early morning air and shattered into echoes against the shield rock of the cliffs. It came again, then again. And this time, Finn recognized the voice as belonging to his dog.
“Sadie! Sadie! Where are you?” He tried to orient himself to what he now realized was a high-pitched howling that had never been part of Sadie’s vocal repertoire. If pure animal terror or pain could be distilled, this is what it would sound like.
Oh my God, what if she’s hurt? What if she has her foot caught in some sort of leg trap left by one of these assholes who hunts up here in the fall? What if she’s broken her leg or something? Please God, let her be all right.
He crashed through the bush in the general direction of Sadie’s screams, first left, then right, then doubling back and stopping to check if he was in the right place, or at least headed in the right direction. The acoustics of Bradley Lake played tricks with the sound of Sadie’s howls, seemingly sending it in every direction but its true source.
And then, dead silence. Oh my God, he thought again. Please, no. Finn came around the bend of a copse of trees and an outcropping of lichen-covered granite and saw Sadie cowering against a boulder thirty feet away—teeth bared, lips drawn back from her gums. She was growling low in her throat, her eyes wild and fixed on a point three feet from where she crouched. Her ears lay flat against her skull. The line of hackle fur along her backbone stood up in an arch and her entire body was contorted away from the spot. The Labrador’s fluffy tail was straight as an eel, and tucked up far between her hind legs.
At his approach, Sadie’s eyes rolled towards Finn. She growled again but didn’t move. When he took a step closer, her body seemed to draw itself in tighter, and for one crazy minute Finn was afraid she might attack him.
“Sadie?” he called softly. “Come here, girl. What’s the matter? Come here, Sadie.” He held out his hand. The Labrador looked at him, and then back to whatever she had been staring at. Whining softly, she lowered her head and looked imploringly at Finn.