by Michael Rowe
“No, he was in fine health.” Billy paused. He was unsure of how much more personal he wanted to get with this woman until he had a clear idea of what she wanted.
Adeline’s tone managed to be both solicitous and peremptory at the same time. “Then . . . ? How did he . . . what happened to your adoptive father?”
“He was murdered, Mrs. Parr,” Billy said, ignoring her second reference to his adoptive status. “He was killed by someone who broke into his house near the university. Whoever it was killed him and stole some personal artefacts related to his work.” Billy paused, studying her face. “He was working on a book pertaining to the history of this region—the mystery surrounding the destruction of the Jesuit mission of St. Barthélemy, in particular. And the history of the unexplained occurrences.”
Adeline blanched. “Murdered?”
“Mrs. Parr, are you all right?” Billy leaned forward across the table as though to catch her. She appeared to have aged twenty-five years in the span of seconds. Billy saw her skull beneath the flawless makeup and carefully styled hair. Her skeleton, wearing flesh and an expensive sky blue dress, slumped in the dining room chair. The falling silverware clattered loudly on the polished floor of the dining room.
“Mrs. Parr? What’s wrong? Are you all right? Shall I call someone?”
Slowly the colour returned to Adeline’s face. When she spoke, her voice was weak. “Do they know who . . . do they know who it was?”
“No, the police don’t,” Billy said. “Mrs. Parr, again—are you all right?”
“I knew your father, Dr. Lightning. We . . . he was a fine man. I remember that awful business with that student of his, what was his name? The one in 1952?”
Billy suddenly felt the room was oppressively warm. “Richard Weal. His name was Richard Weal. Why do you ask?”
“Your adoptive father was . . . we stayed in touch, Dr. Lightning. Not often, mind you. More out of courtesy. He was a very courteous man. He was quite . . . he was quite disturbed by what happened that summer. He expressed it to me several times.”
“Mrs. Parr, why are you telling me all this? Do you know something about what happened to my father? Did my father . . . were you and he frequently in touch?”
“No,” she said sharply. “As I said . . . we were very sporadically in touch.”
“Mrs. Parr, you just said that my father expressed to you several times that he was ‘disturbed’ by Richard Weal. The dig ended when Richard was arrested. When did you and my father discuss Richard Weal? And for how long? Recently? Please tell me!”
Adeline closed her eyes. “I’m sorry, Dr. Lightning. I feel rather faint. I’m going to go and lie down now.” She reached for the silver bell next to her plate and rang it. From behind the swinging door that connected the dining room to the kitchen, Beatrice approached to clear the table. “I’m so sorry about your adoptive father,” Adeline said.
The hostess voice was back, weaker of course, but evident. Billy pictured a curtain being drawn. In a few seconds, any chance of getting any information out of Mrs. Parr would vanish.
“Mrs. Parr, if you know something about Richard Weal and my father, please tell me,” Billy said urgently. “I believe Richard Weal killed my father. The police don’t believe me—they insist he’s dead. I don’t believe he is. I believe he’s come back here, looking for whatever he thought wanted him in 1952. At least one person is dead in a town not far from here, and a boy from Parr’s Landing found a bag full of bloody archaeological hammers up on Spirit Rock yesterday. Please. I’m begging you—tell me what you know, if you know anything.”
But the curtain had closed. Adeline’s eyes were again bright, her expression impermeable. “Ah, Beatrice,” she said brightly. “Yes, you can clear now. The eel was absolutely delicious. You’ve outdone yourself yet again.”
“Thank you, ma’am,” Beatrice said dutifully.
Adeline smiled at Billy, inclining her head slightly like a queen preparing to accept a visiting ambassador’s gratitude and admiration for her kingdom’s hospitality. “Did you enjoy your lunch, Dr. Lightning? The eel? Oh, I do hope you did. Dr. Lightning is a famous professor from Michigan, Beatrice,” Adeline continued, turning to the cook. “He spent some time here in the Landing as a young man. It just didn’t seem right to let such an illustrious guest pass through our little town without visiting Parr House, don’t you agree?”
“Yes, ma’am.” Beatrice began to clear away the plates. She bent down to pick up the cutlery at Adeline’s feet, placing it without a word on the empty plate she carried.
“Beatrice, would you be so kind as to see Dr. Lightning out? I would do so myself, but I’m feeling rather sleepy and may toddle upstairs for a nap. Dr. Lightning,” she said, turning to Billy. “Again, thank you for having lunch with me. I very much enjoyed our discussion about your work, and the mission that was in Parr’s Landing. We’re very proud of the town’s history, as you know—both the development of a barren region as a source of industry, and of course the introduction of Christianity and salvation to a heathen race. You’re a perfect example of the success of that introduction, Dr. Lightning. Your adoptive father’s charity allowed you to rise in the world. You should be very proud.”
Billy stared at her blankly, his mouth open in disbelief. This woman isn’t real, he thought. There’s no way this is a real person. Surely not. What the hell is going on here? I’m in a madhouse.
Adeline extended her hand, as though expecting it to be kissed. Dumbly, Billy shook it.
“Goodbye, Mrs. Parr,” Billy said. “If you can think of anything else, I’ll—”
Adeline cut him off swiftly. “Please enjoy the rest of your stay in Parr’s Landing, Dr. Lightning.”
When Billy turned around, Beatrice was waiting with his coat. “This way, Dr. Lightning,” she said, stepping ahead of him out of the dining room, into the foyer.
When Billy looked back, Adeline was staring at a fixed point in front of her, at something Billy couldn’t see.
Again, he was struck by how much she seemed to have aged in the short minutes between hearing about his father’s murder, and now. She stared ahead of her, not seeing him watching. Billy had the sudden uneasy notion that she was watching for ghosts. He wished he knew whose ghosts they were, and what secrets she was keeping for them.
The cold rain turned to wet snow, then back to rain, eventually slowing to the present drizzle, but the skies were still dark with low-hanging storm clouds, and the road was slick and wet. The air was full of the scent of pine and rain, and the near-distant overture of winter. It was a scent that Jeremy had always loved, one he secretly craved in late October, in the city.
If anything could have pleased him right now, could have soothed the rage and pain and desolation he’d felt after leaving Elliot’s house, it might have been that subtle but unmistakable turn of the seasonal wheel, but Jeremy was incapable of seeing beauty anywhere this afternoon, and if either truth or passion had greeted him by name on any one of the ugly streets of Parr’s Landing this afternoon, he wouldn’t have recognized them. That, or he would have suspected they were imposters.
There could be nothing good in this town—nothing decent thrived here, and never would. And if he and Christina and Morgan were to thrive, they’d have to leave. Every moment they remained was draining some essential part of their souls in a repetitive pattern that he suddenly understood was carnivorously cyclical, a pattern that had been woven into his history, the town’s history, and the history of their ancestors. Parr’s Landing fed on itself like the Ouroboros devouring its own tail. It had almost devoured Christina and Jack. It had devoured Elliot, draining him of all hope and tenderness, leaving him a shell, a hard, brittle revenant, a small-town cop in a dead-end job, in a town on the edge of the world where nothing ever changed. A place where the one thing he could never be was the person he actually was.
Parr’s Landing might even have swallowed Jeremy himself if he hadn’t fled that night fifteen years ago, hitchhikin
g to Toronto under the cover of darkness to ensure that his ogress of a mother wouldn’t ever find him again. And now here he was, right back where he started.
His eyes on the road, his mind sifted through this history and his own place in it.
Simple, really, Jeremy mused. I come from a family of ghouls. We’ve been feeding on the town for more than a century, in the same way the people who came from the old world to claim this corner of the new world fed on the people who lived here before us. My mother has fed on her own children. The “eternal return” in Parr’s Landing isn’t renewal, it’s damnation.
Jeremy picked up Christina at the library. She was waiting inside, by the door. She saw him, waved, and made a dash for the car to avoid the drizzle.
“How’d it go with Elliot?” Christina asked.
“Not well. I don’t want to talk about it right now. Later, though, I promise, okay?” Jeremy said, paused for a moment, then continued, “We’ve got to leave here, you know. This was a very bad idea. This town isn’t a good place for any of us.”
And the way she had of always seeming to understand him as few others had ever been able to, Christina grasped his hand and squeezed it. She said nothing, but that nothing was everything to Jeremy with her hand on his as they drove back to his mother’s house in silence, except for the steady patter of cold northern rain on the roof of the car.
“Who’s that?” Jeremy said as the Chevelle pulled up into the circular driveway of Parr House. A tall man in his late thirties or early forties, wearing a leather jacket, was stepping out of the front door, which he then closed decisively behind him. The man’s thick black hair was gathered in a ponytail.
Christina said, “It’s Billy Lightning. The professor I was telling you about the other night.”
“Handsome,” Jeremy said with more than a little envy. “This is the guy you picked up in the café?”
“Shut up, Jeremy. I didn’t pick him up in the café. We talked. Stop the car.”
“Well, obviously I’m going to stop the car. We’re here, aren’t we? Hmmm,” Jeremy said, peering through the windshield. “He doesn’t look very happy. He must have encountered dear mama. He must have asked her for money, or blood, or water or something.”
“Shut up, Jeremy,” Christina said again. “Seriously, though, what could he be doing here?”
She opened the car door and stepped out onto the gravel driveway. When Billy saw her, he brightened perceptibly.
“Hi there,” he said. “Fancy meeting you here.”
“Hi yourself,” she said. “I didn’t expect to see you again, especially not here of all places.”
“I didn’t expect to be here, of all places,” Billy replied. “Your mother-in-law phoned me and asked me to lunch. It was . . . strange.”
“She what? You’re kidding, right?”
“No, she invited me to lunch,” Billy said. “She called me this morning at the motel and said she knew my father—or rather, she’d known him— and that I should come to the house.”
Jeremy came from behind and extended his hand. “I’m Jeremy Parr,” he said. “You must be the famous Dr. Billy Lightning.”
Billy’s face was wry. “Famous here for all the wrong reasons, it seems. I seem to have antagonized the police, I seem to have upset your mother, and I sincerely hope that this young lady,” he added, indicating Christina, “will forgive me for showing up on her doorstep and surprising her.”
“I’m surprised, but it’s not my doorstep,” Christina said. “It’s fine.”
“Christina,” Jeremy said. “I’ll just go inside and check on things with Mother.” He smiled almost imperceptibly, then turned to Billy. “Nice to meet you, Dr. Lightning.”
“Nice fella, your brother-in-law,” Billy said as the front door closed behind Jeremy. “Are you sure that’s really his mother in there? I don’t see the resemblance.”
“Neither do we. My husband wasn’t much like her, either.”
“Listen, Christina.” He paused. “I know we agreed not to . . . to see each other again because of . . . well, you know. Our respective situations. But I really need to talk to you. Your mother-in-law said some very strange things this afternoon.”
“Everything my mother-in-law says is strange. Why should today be any different?” When she saw that Billy was serious, she stopped. “Strange in what way?”
“She talked about my father. She claims they knew each other, but wouldn’t elaborate. When I told her about his murder, she almost had a heart attack. Now look, I could be wrong, but something about Mrs. Parr leads me to believe that hearing about a murder isn’t going to rattle her cage too much. But she nearly pitched a fit.”
Christina tried, and failed, to picture Adeline as vulnerable in any way. Raging, yes, even murderous. But not vulnerable to the news of someone else’s death, unless she was celebrating it in some way.
“Would you have dinner with me tonight?” Billy said tentatively.
“Billy . . .”
“Not a date. Just to talk. Really, I mean it,” he said with conviction. “You’re the only sane person I’ve met in this town, and I need to thrash out some ideas. I’ll answer any question you want in exchange for you listening to what I have to say, and maybe helping me make some sense out of it.”
What am I afraid of? Christina asked herself. What Adeline thinks? What the town thinks? I already know what they think. Morgan will understand—she knows what it’s like to have her grandmother disapprove of her making friends. What do I think? I think I could use a friend—that’s what I think.
“Christina . . . ? Would you? It could be an early dinner. There’s a diner next to the motel. We could go there. Or we could go to the Pear Tree in town. Or even O’Toole’s, if you’d prefer?”
She hesitated, then said, “Yes. That’d be fine. I’d like that. I could meet you at seven. I have to be home before nine.”
“Not a problem,” Billy said, stifling his pleasure and gratitude with difficulty. “Would you like me to pick you up?”
Christina laughed. “God, no. If you thought she pitched a fit over lunch, you wouldn’t want to picture what kind of a fit she’d pitch if she knew I was going to meet . . . if she knew I wasn’t going to be at the dinner table on time. I’ll get Jeremy to tell her something. I’ll meet you at the Nugget at seven.”
As she watched Billy drive away in the Ford, she checked herself for feelings of guilt over having dinner with a man less than a year after the death of Jack Parr.
Finding none, she probed deeper. The only remorse she felt, if it could properly be called remorse, was that Jack hadn’t met Billy, as well. They would—as she had thought earlier—have liked each other immensely.
Jack—better than anyone except, perhaps, his brother—would have understood what it was like to feel alone and friendless and vulnerable at Parr House, and he wouldn’t have wanted that for anyone, least of all the woman who had given him a reason to save himself by leaving.
When Finn’s subconscious mind registered that his sanity would not survive his obsessive replaying of Sadie’s last moments—the flash of red arcing air in the orange and pink dawn sunlight, Sadie rocketing into the air in pursuit of her favourite ball, her body igniting from within as though a fire had started under her skin, and her terrible, near-human screams as she was burned alive in the sunlight—it eventually overrode his conscious mind, shutting it down and causing him to fall asleep.
It was not a restful sleep, but one full of random, dreadful images selected by his half-sleeping brain.
He dreamed of Sadie, of course, and the images of her as a puppy, or licking his face, or watching him solemnly, waiting for a piece of cheese to fall off the kitchen counter, having her wounds daubed with hydrogen peroxide by his father the other night, a million years ago. His own voice, Don’t hurt her! These were agony and somehow infinitely worse than the flashes of Sadie’s actual death that flickered at the periphery.
He moaned in his sleep, rubbing his eyes. S
weat sealed his hair to his forehead, which was hot and shiny with nightmare-sweat.
Images of Morgan, of course. Images of his parents’ faces, the scent of fresh laundry and coffee as she held him against her warm body this morning. Bits of movies, the sky over Spirit Rock, the smell of bacon frying.
And images selected from his Tomb of Dracula comics—the streaks of lightning inked in bold yellow, indigo blue for black, black only for shadows and highlights. The faces of Frank Drake and his beautiful fiancée, drawn by the artist whose name he’d memorized: Gene Colan. Vampires in slumbering coffins, vampires rising nightly to suck the blood of the living. . . .
The weakly handsome face of Clifton Graves, the weasel who betrayed Frank Drake, his best friend, trying to steal his girl from him and unwittingly pulled the wooden stake from Count Dracula’s rotting skeleton deep in the dungeons of the castle, thus releasing the risen vampire into the night.
These were his friends, and his mind whispered their names like a calming mantra: Frank, Clifton, Jeanie. Frank, Clifton, Jeanie. Dracula.
Poor Jeanie, a shard of splintered wood driven through her body by her brokenhearted fiancé in the hotel room in London. That terrible comic book scream as she died a vampire’s death—AIIEEEEEEEEEEEEEE. No exclamation point was ever required, not with that glorious, lurid green lettering.
Jeanie crumbling to dust, burning in the sunlight. Pleading for forgiveness, absolving Frank Drake of not having been able to protect her as a man ought to have been able to from the ghastly things that crept through the shadows when the sun went down.
“Frank . . . ? I’m dying, Frank. The sunlight.”
. . . vampires burning in the sunlight . . .
. . . Sadie burning in the sunlight . . .
Finn sat bolt upright in his bed, gasping for breath. The damp blanket his mother had draped over him fell from his shoulders as he pinwheeled his arms, pushing the dream away, flailing for wakefulness. He looked down into his left hand. In his sleep, he’d sought out the red rubber ball as though it were a talisman to ward off nightmares. It was still smeared with ash. Finn uttered a sharp cry and let it fall on his coverlet. It rolled across the bed and bounced on the floor.