Enter, Night

by Michael Rowe

  Next to his bed, Finn kept his stack of magazines and comics. He leaned down on his stomach and tore through the stack until he located Issue Two of The Tomb of Dracula. Frantically, he flipped through the pages until he reached the end, page twenty-one—seven panels, the dawn tones of orange and yellow like the sky above Bradley Lake this morning playing against the dark blue and black of the ever-present darkness.

  Finn looked out his window. It was dark. Rain beat against the windows, a harbinger of colder, more murderous weather on the way as winter raked skeletal fingers through the darkening sky for the first time that fall. His bedside clock read five p.m. He had slept for six hours.

  He looked again at the comic book in his hand, then down at the ash-covered rubber ball on the floor.

  When his mother turned around where she stood in front of the stove, she was readying an aluminum-covered cookie sheet upon which three Swanson’s chicken pot pies would be placed into the preheated oven. Finn loved Swanson’s chicken pot pies—they were his favourite.

  “Hi, sweetie. How are you feeling? We’re having Swanson’s for dinner! And mashed potatoes, and creamed corn.” She made a smacking sound with her lips. Finn hated it when she made the sound, but he loved his mother too much to tell her. “Delish, right?”

  Finn looked better, she thought. He had washed his face and changed his clothes. Some colour had returned to his cheeks, but he still had those god-awful dark circles, and his eyes looked freshly sandpapered. It was going to take a while for him to feel better. But the chicken pot pies would be a good start.

  Anne smiled expectantly and smoothed her apron with her hands.

  “Mom, I know what happened to Sadie,” Finn said. “A vampire got her. That’s why she burned up. A vampire got my dog. And I’m going to find him, and I’m going to kill him. I’m going to drive a wooden stake into his heart, and I’m going to make him pay for what he did to Sadie.”

  A branch slapped Hank Miller across the face in the gathering gloom, stinging his cheek and making him yelp. Hank was a proud man, and didn’t think men ought to show pain. But since he was alone, and it was dark, he shouted, “Holy old fuck!” as loud as could. He rubbed his face, which hurt like a whore, but no blood came off on his fingers. “Sadie, where the hell did you get to, goddammit?” he muttered. “Where the hell did you two walk this morning, the fucking moon?”

  The sun was well over the yardarm, as his father used to say, and it was most definitely going down behind those clouds, whether he could see it or not. He looked at his watch. Six frigging o’clock. The sun wasn’t just over the yardarm, it was halfway in the drunk tank. It was early night, not early evening. He felt in his pocket for the flashlight and turned it on. The beam was molded by drops of thick, swirling night fog and the aftertaste of this afternoon’s deluge.

  Hank had hoped to tell his wife and child that he’d found Sadie’s body and brought it home to bury her before the ground froze, which it would before long. His hope had been to keep the dog’s corpse in the garage until Finn had gone to bed, then put her in the ground and present his son with a fait accompli in the morning. Finn never doubted his father, so Hank could have buried anything in his garden and told his son it was his beloved Labrador, but he would never do that to Finnegan.

  At four p.m., he’d clocked out an hour early. He’d left the mill and taken his car up to the highest point of ground he could reach in his sturdy truck. He tried to check the position of the sun in the sky, but the storm clouds from the earlier downpour had remained. He had about an hour of daylight left. He squinted up the cliff, guessing more or less where Finn and Sadie had taken their walk.

  Finn had rarely allowed anyone to join him on those walks, but he’d let Hank come along one morning this summer, and Hank had excellent recall. If worse came to worst, he wouldn’t find Sadie and would have to come back the next morning and deal with whatever carrion mess the forest scavengers had left of his son’s gentle dog. The thought sickened him, but not for squeamish reasons. He’d loved Sadie far more than his wife or his son knew.

  A twig snapped somewhere above him. Hank stood stock still. He shone the light above him, but saw nothing except branches and rock. Hank rubbed his eyes. Something had moved up there beyond the copse of trees. He felt a momentary stab of fear, thinking of bears.

  Bears, bullshit. Get a grip, you idiot. There hasn’t been a bear attack here in thirty years or more. The bears and the mineshaft openings are the two stories we tell kids to keep them out of the woods. It didn’t keep Finn out, and you’re no kid. So get some sack.

  The sound came again, two more twig snaps, coming from different places close by. This time, the sound unnerved him deeply. “Hello?” he called out. “Hello? Is anyone there?” He whipped his head from side to side trying to locate the source of the sound, to no avail.

  The very last emotion Hank Miller would ever feel was a fear so desolate and hopeless that it was almost chemical. He felt a sudden kinship with every cornered animal he had ever hunted, in the moment right before he pulled the trigger. So this is what it feels like, he marvelled, as though from a great distance, even as he felt the piss running down the leg of his work pants.

  Hank knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that he was living his last minutes before he physically saw the woman in the muddy jeans and the stained pink blouse drift towards him out of the darkness, her feet not touching the ground, her eyes incandescent and her mouth open and full of teeth like he’d never seen on anything from this earth. For a moment, he thought he recognized her, from school maybe? No, from the bar. It was that sexpot bartender from out at O’Toole’s. But no, Hank thought, his mind in a state of confusion. It can’t be her—what would she be doing out here in the forest at this hour?

  And when the scrawny man with the wild, greasy hair and red matted beard crawled out from between an impossibly narrow wedge of rock beside him like a spider coming out of its hole—a great stench of shit and blood and rotted meat unfurling in his wake like a shroud— Hank knew that there was no shame in dying.

  Terror, yes. Terror, absolutely. Who wanted to be eaten by monsters in the forest without even kissing his wife and son goodbye? But no, there was no shame, nothing ignominious in falling before this implacable, limitless blackness.

  “ But you will see them again,” the man said. “You will kiss them goodbye. We promise.”

  They fell on him in a fury, burying their faces in the soft parts of his body and biting down, hard and sharp until he shrieked so loudly that even the nightbirds scattered.

  Above him, Hank heard the beating of heavy wings and saw a shadow pour itself down from the treetops, lengthening, becoming columnar and corporeal.

  The last thing Hank saw before Richard Weal and Donna Lemieux tore him apart, splitting his spine between them like a wishbone, was the tall black-robed man with the long white hair raising his hands in a gesture of benediction.

  And because some deaths are crueler than others, Hank Miller never knew that he had found Sadie’s body, after all. Indeed, he had died three feet away from where the remainder of the Labrador’s bone and ash had been sluiced down the rock face by the rain.

  Hank never realized that Sadie had already entered the ground— here at Spirit Rock instead of his back yard—and she had become part of the earth in a way that Hank never would.

  Forty-five minutes after the desolate death of Hank Miller above Bradley Lake, five miles inside the Parr’s Landing town limits, Elliot McKitrick woke from the dreamless sleep into which he had fallen when Jeremy Parr had left, finding himself hungrier than he had ever been in his life. His mind was filled with cloudy, half-formed images flowering silver and red, and the air was full of whispering, dead voices calling his name. When he turned to look, the shadows seemed to leap back from his sight, and when he tried to focus on them, there was nothing there but the bare walls of his bedroom which, though pitch dark, he could see as clearly and sharply as if it were high noon.

  One voice in part
icular caught Elliot’s attention. It was a familiar voice, and Elliot cocked his ear to listen. He smiled in acknowledgement, then walked naked to the small bedroom window and opened it, extending his arms in clear welcome.

  The mist rolled in from the lightless black on the other side of the glass, and night entered, filling his bedroom with silver-blue fog in which vaguely human shapes shimmered and eddied.

  Donna Lemieux, her mouth brown with Hank Miller’s blood, gathered Elliot in her arms and kissed him where she had kissed him in her cellar, claiming him, caressing his nude body with what might have been merely the memory of possessive human desire. Elliot leaned into her, one arm across her shoulder, submissive, supine in her arms as she drank away the remainder of his life, taking his confusion and pain along with it. Elliot tried to speak, but could only murmur, and even that effort caused his eyes to roll back in his head.

  “Thank you,” Elliot said, then died.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  The Gold Nugget diner was nearly deserted, and Christina couldn’t decide if this pleased her because of the privacy it afforded, or made her feel more conspicuous in Billy Lightning’s company. Ultimately, she decided she didn’t care, which proved to be a relief to both her and Billy as they picked at their Salisbury steak special. The waitress assured them that the tapioca pudding was included in the price, then asked them if they wanted it after the meal, or with it.

  “After, please,” said Billy, speaking for them both. Though ravenous, not having eaten since Adeline’s aborted jellied eel luncheon, Billy was still too upset to do more than move it around on his plate. Also, he hated tapioca pudding, which reminded him of St. Rita’s, where it was considered a special treat for the residents, even though the milk used to make it was usually sour and the tapioca often rancid.

  In the background, a radio played softly. Christina caught the strains of B.J. Thomas singing “Rock and Roll Lullaby,” a song about a teenage mother and her child, which made her think of Morgan. The smell of grease in the air was oddly warm and comforting, not off-putting.

  Christina had dressed carefully, and had applied lipstick. She told herself that it was because she was tired of Adeline making her feel like the bottom of a grimy lunch pail by swanning through her empty mausoleum in Mainbocher dresses and diamonds. But the truth was, Christina wanted to look pretty tonight, for Billy.

  Odd, that, Christina thought. She’d mostly forgotten what it felt like to care.

  They had spent an hour or more discussing Adeline’s bizarre behaviour at lunch, but Christina was sick to death of talking about Adeline Parr.

  “So, Billy,” she said. “Tell me about you.”

  He shrugged. “I’ve told you about me. There’s not much else to tell.”

  Christina smiled. “I don’t believe that for a second,” she chided him gently. “You’ve lived such an impressive life. I can’t even imagine what it took to become what you’ve become. What drove you? Was it your father? I know he was a professor, too—did you always want to be like him?”

  “Becoming like my father wasn’t something I really thought of when I was a kid,” he said. “I suppose having a father who was an academic, who valued learning, was an inspiration. But no, I didn’t always want to be like him—that came later.”

  “So, what did you want to be?”

  Billy paused. “I wanted to be dead,” he said. “I wanted to not exist. I wanted the pain to stop. I wanted to be safe. Since it appeared I would never be safe, as a child, and since pain was a daily part of my life, I didn’t see a lot of merit in being alive.”

  Christina was confused. “Billy—I’m sorry. I don’t know what you mean.”

  He shook his head. “Never mind. I’m sorry I brought it up. I don’t usually talk about it. Please forgive me—forget I said anything.”

  “No,” she said, reaching for his hand, laying her own on top of his. “Tell me. What are you talking about? I want to know . . . that is, I want to know if you want to tell me. Do you? I mean . . . I’d like us to be friends, you know?”

  “Friends,” he said. He tested the word, probed for sharp edges. Finding none, he said, “I’d like that, too, I guess. I mean, yes. I would like us to be friends, Christina.”

  “So . . . tell me,” she said. “What happened when you were a child, Billy? What made you wish you were dead? Death is obviously very much a part of my life these days since Jack has been gone. Yours, too, to be fair. I can tell you miss your dad as much as I miss Jack. I wish they were both still alive, still here for us. I can’t imagine anything better than life right now.”

  “Do you know what my least favourite colour in the world is, Christina? Red. I hate it. I absolutely loathe it.”

  “I’m glad I didn’t wear red tonight, then,” she said lightly. She paused. “Why red?”

  “Red is the colour of the uniforms we had to wear at St. Rita’s when the priests took us out on Sundays, or to show us off in public. Do you know what a residential school is?”

  “Not really. A school for Indian children, right?”

  “Yes,” he corrected her gently. “That’s right.”

  “I’m sorry,” Christina said. “I don’t know much about them. We were taught that the schools were an example of the generosity of the Church and the Canadian government. Charity. They told us that we were lucky to have been born white.”

  “Yeah, the priests taught us that you were lucky to be born white, too.” Billy realized that it sounded cruel when he said it. He forced himself to smile because it wasn’t Christina’s fault and she was obviously trying to understand.

  “I remember when we were in school here, we had to memorize that poem from Kipling. The one about other children. What was it called?”

  Billy smiled bitterly. “You mean, ‘Foreign Children.’ That was the title. ‘Foreign Children.’ They taught it to us, too. But we had to learn to recite it after we were punished. After the strap. Or worse. ” Billy looked away and recited. “Little Indian, Sioux or Crow/Little frosty Eskimo/Little Turk or Japanee/O! don’t you wish that you were me?”

  “Billy . . .”

  “You asked,” he said with another shrug. “You wanted to know me. Well, this is part of me. The government took me away from my birth father when I was a little boy. My mother had just died. My dad was all I had. I still have nightmares about that day—I was six years old. The priests shaved my head and put me in a dormitory with twenty other little boys. The first night, all I heard was crying from the other beds. When my hair grew back, they put a bowl on my head and cut around it. The priests started every day with a sermon about the love of Christ and the grace of the Catholic Church. They taught us that the price tag for acting like an Indian was an eternity of torment in Hell. But that was just after we were dead and away from the priests—they made sure that we had a taste of what was coming to ‘bad Indians’ in the afterlife right then and there. One kid I was friends with was given thirty lashes with a leather strap for speaking his own language. The food was rotten— literally rotten, sometimes. But not eating it could get you chained to the dining room table for days at a time.”

  “Billy, my God. My God.”

  “I ran away once,” Billy said. “Do you know what they did to me when they caught me and brought me back to St. Rita’s? The principal pushed me down a flight of kitchen stairs. And when I couldn’t get up, he and another priest dragged me to his office, stripped me naked, and beat me unconscious. Afterwards, they took me to the infirmary and found out I had a broken arm. They weren’t sure if it was the stairs, or the stick they used to beat me with.” He laughed mirthlessly. “I got off easy. Other kids ran away and didn’t make it. They’d bring their bodies back frozen with parts missing. I don’t need to tell you how godforsaken cold it gets up here in the winter, or how hungry the animals get when the snow comes.”

  Christina’s horror couldn’t have been more obvious if someone had written it across her forehead with a grease pencil.

  In ma
ny ways, Billy was appalled at himself for telling Christina about St. Rita’s. She could not possibly have expected to hear what he was telling her when she asked him about his childhood. On those levels, he was ashamed of himself for using the truth as a cudgel, always knowing that, if push came to shove, he could always exonerate himself using her sheer decency and his terrible childhood history to grease those wheels.

  On several other levels, including his own heart’s measure, he wanted this woman to know him. He wasn’t sure why, but he did. And he wanted her to know the worst as well as the best. He could see that she was impressed with his credentials—maybe too impressed, in that it seemed to cost her some dignity, maybe causing her undeserved shame about her own relative lack of formal education. He didn’t want Christina Parr to think his life began as a tenured college professor without also knowing about what he had endured at St. Rita’s, and how the blows of that hammer and chisel had helped shape his life.

  “Didn’t you say anything? Didn’t anybody check up on the children? How could this happen right under the noses of the authorities? I mean, didn’t anyone tell?”

  He shrugged again. “We didn’t tell,” he said flatly. “We didn’t say much of anything at all. If anyone did, after the inspectors left, the punishments were brutal. It was worse to tell than not to tell. They wouldn’t have believed us, anyway. Everyone knew Indians were lazy, and that they lie. Especially bad Indian kids.”

  “What about your mother and father? Did you ever tell them about it after you were adopted?”

  Billy shook his head. “No, I didn’t. I kept it to myself. They loved me so much, I didn’t want them to have those images in their heads. It would have been too horrible for them. Sometimes I wanted to tell them, but I always stopped myself in time. At St. Rita’s, we learned the value of keeping quiet. Some lessons are hard to unlearn, even today. I can’t believe I’m telling you this. I’ve never told anyone about his before. Christina, I’m sorry—please, don’t cry. I’m sorry I even brought it up. It wasn’t fair.”