Enter, Night

by Michael Rowe

  “You didn’t bring it up, I did,” she said. She blew her nose on the paper napkin beside her plate. With the clean end of it, she dabbed her eyes. “I wanted to know. Now I know.”

  “Yes,” he said simply.

  “I don’t know where you buried all of this, Billy. I don’t know how you got past it.”

  “I was lucky,” he said. “Two wonderful people took me out of it and did their best to raise me as their own. They didn’t try to make me ‘not be an Indian.’ They just loved me as I was. When they found out I was interested in history, they bought me books and took me to museums. They gave me the best education they could afford. And then they encouraged me to reclaim my Ojibwa heritage, and to be proud of it. But you know,” he said thoughtfully, “all it takes sometimes is someone like your brother’s friend—that G.I. Joe white cop, McKitrick—to look me up and down the way he does, like I was just a dirty, falling-down drunk, mouthwash-swilling nitchie, and suddenly it gets really hard to remember who I actually am. Or to have to sit in that funeral parlour your mother-in-law calls a dining room, eating her creamed snake, or whatever the hell she served me for lunch today, and listen to her tell me how ‘grateful’ I should be to the priests who ‘founded’ this town—her words, not mine—in 1631 for saving my soul and making me civilized. All I could think of was my birth father not being able to keep me safe from the government when they took me away from him. Thank you very much, Mrs. Parr.”

  “My mother-in-law is such an asshole!” Christina gasped. Shocked at her own audacity, she burst into horrified laughter. Billy, equally shocked at her use of the very unladylike word “asshole,” joined her.

  They doubled over, their laughter leavening the horror of Billy’s story as nothing else could have. Instinctively, he reached for her hand and held it. When their eyes met, they realized they’d breached some perimeter of distance that neither of them had believed was permeable. Christina didn’t pull her hand away from Billy’s until she saw the waitress shambling over to their table, and then she withdrew it reluctantly, her cheeks warm with flush.

  But when the waitress asked in a bored voice if they wanted their tapioca now, all bets were off and they laughed till they wept.

  When the waitress asked them what was so funny, their laughter redoubled, and all Billy could do was wheeze, “Nothing, nothing is funny. Nothing is funny.” Which, naturally, made them laugh even harder—so hard that Christina excused herself from the table to powder her nose before she had an accident.

  Adeline Parr was outraged. Why, there’s a man standing in my driveway! She gathered the collar of her cashmere bathrobe close, instinctively pulling away from the window. And he’s staring up at my bedroom, bold as can be. It’s nearly ten o’clock at night. For the Lord’s own sake.

  Adeline found it very difficult to believe that any of the locals would dare trespass on her property at any time of the day or night, but the fact remained that there was someone standing in her driveway. The moon and the stars that broke out from behind the rain clouds were bright white. They lit the driveway and the grounds with resolute clarity, and there was indeed a man standing there, looking up at her bedroom window.

  The figure wasn’t Jeremy—he was upstairs in his room. Adeline could hear her son’s radio playing behind his closed bedroom door. Her whore of a daughter-in-law wasn’t at home. She was out cavorting in some gutter somewhere. Jeremy had given Adeline some codswallop about Christina visiting high school friends for the evening, but Adeline knew better. The whore was getting her bug scratched in some basement or back alley somewhere. And Beatrice and her husband lived in town, so it wasn’t either of them.

  So, who on earth was standing in her driveway?

  Adeline shrugged off her bathrobe and took her twenty-year-old sable coat off the padded hanger in the armoire. She slipped it on over her nightgown and stepped into a pair of shoes. Then she stalked out of the bedroom and swept down the stairs.

  As she crossed the marble foyer, she wondered if she shouldn’t perhaps alert Jeremy or Morgan that there was a man outside and that she was going to investigate it herself. Yes, indeed, she thought. Which member of my illustrious, stalwart family shall I call to protect me from intruders? My pansy son? Or my fifteen-year-old granddaughter, who’s already showing the moral laxity of her mother, the whore?

  Adeline smiled to herself. She realized that, at the end of the day, it would always be up to her to settle things. It had always been that way and always would be.

  Her husband had been weak. One son was a pervert and the other had been a traitor. Adeline had only ever known one real man in her life, and even he hadn’t been man enough to leave the simpering titmouse to whom he was married, much less his jumped-up adopted redskin brat, now a so-called “professor.”

  In the meantime, there’s a man standing in my driveway.

  When Christina came back to the table, Billy saw that she had indeed powdered her nose. Himself the son of a fastidious woman, the gesture touched him and reminded him of his mother, in the best possible ways.

  He checked his watch and said with mock reproach, “It’s well after ten. Didn’t you have a nine o’clock curfew, Mrs. Parr?”

  “Good God, is it, really?” Christina looked shocked. “I didn’t even wear a watch! I have to get back home. I want to see my daughter before bed.” She shook her head in disbelief. “I can’t believe I let the time get away from me like that. What was I thinking? God, I’m such an idiot!”

  “I’d guess you were thinking that you needed a break, Christina,” he said gently. “Don’t make this into something it wasn’t. You’re entitled to some time off from being what everyone else in that house needs you to be, for good or bad. Remember that.”

  Billy walked her to her car. As they said goodbye, he had the preposterous notion to kiss her on the cheek—a notion he overrode, shaking her hand instead. He told himself it was because of gossip, but he suspected it was really that he wouldn’t want to stop kissing her. He wanted to take her away with him, back home to Toronto, even back home to Michigan with him. Somewhere he could watch over her. Anywhere, as long as it wasn’t here.

  Adeline pushed open the front door of Parr House and stepped out onto the portico.

  “You there!” she called out. “What are you doing on my property? Identify yourself at once!” She waited, hands on hips. But the man in the driveway didn’t move, nor did he speak. “Are you deaf? Answer me! This is Adeline Parr and you are trespassing on my land. Identify yourself at once.”

  When the man still didn’t move, Adeline stepped off the portico and took a step towards him. She leaned forward and squinted, but the moonlight was behind him and she couldn’t see his face.

  “This is your last chance to identify yourself and state your business,” Adeline said coldly. “In one minute, I shall go back inside my house and summon the authorities. And you’ll find out exactly what it means to trespass on my land.”

  The man took a step towards her. Then another. Adeline squinted, but the shadows seemed to follow the figure as he walked towards her. The moonlight seemed to fall around him without once touching his face, or lighting on his clothes. He was dressed in from head to toe in black, however—that much she was able to ascertain, if only by the way the night seemed to fall away from him as he moved, the shades of black separating and reforming themselves in his wake. She felt dizzy watching him . . . drift? No, he was walking, she was sure of it. He was wearing some sort of long black robe—that’s why he seemed to be floating, his feet not appearing to touch the ground. She hadn’t been able to see his legs.

  Is that . . . a priest? Why is there a priest on my front lawn in the middle of the night?

  Adeline felt light headed. She closed her eyes tightly for a moment and shook her head.

  When she opened them, the man was still there. But he had stopped moving and was standing close enough that she could touch him, his face still wreathed in shadows.

  Adeline hissed, “Get out
of here, whoever you are! I am going to turn around immediately and summon the authorities."

  “Laissez-moi entrer.”

  “What did you say?” she seethed. “Speak up. Speak English. I have no idea what you’re saying.”

  Adeline stopped. The moon was behind where he stood beside the denuding phalanx of topiary bushes. Their shadows lay against the gravel drive, but where the priest stood, there was no shadow at all.

  Too, she’d heard his voice—a beautiful, cultured voice, speaking . . . French? A language she didn’t speak or understand herself, but she hadn’t seen his lips move, and somehow she’d understood him anyway. He wanted her to invite him into her house. Into Parr House, of all the insolence!

  His voice was rich and full and masculine, very much the voice of a real man—not a pansy’s voice at all, she noted. Not like Jeremy’s voice, not like the voices of all the weak men she’d known her whole life. Could this really be a priest?

  Adeline felt a sense of vertiginous disorientation, a sensation of being probed, being read, as though her mind had been taken down off a bookshelf, her memories turned and rifled like pages in an album. She touched her fingertips to her eyes and pressed, moaning softly at the invasion. She felt an unfamiliar and nearly forgotten warmth spread between her legs, a phantom dampness that she knew couldn’t possibly be real—not standing out here on the lawn on a cold October night with some strange intruder threatening her.

  But he wasn’t really threatening was he? Not really. He was just cold. He just wanted to come inside. He’d been sleeping in the caves above Bradley Lake for a long time. It made sense he should want to come inside. It was a reasonable request, and one she could easily grant by saying: Come in. You’re welcome in my house. Enter freely. Those were the magic words. He was too much of a gentleman to enter without an invitation from the lady of the house.

  Images spun through her brain, her own most private memories, coming faster and faster like a rickety black-and-white silent film. Her memories of Phenius. Her secrets, all of them, the light and the dark ones interchangeably. Some of them made her giggle—ridiculous, she knew, in a woman of her age. Others made her feel violated. He had no right to those. No . . . right . . . at all.

  No, get out of my mind! You have no business here. Go away! I’m Adeline Parr! How dare you— Pourrais je vous faire l’honneur de ma presence?

  Adeline felt somewhat mollified by his courtesy. May I honour you with my presence? Let me in. I’m so cold.

  “Let me in, Adeline,” Phenius said. “Let me in. I’m so cold.”

  She could see his face now, as though the man had somehow deigned to allow the moonlight to fall upon it.

  It was Phenius’s voice she’d heard, she was sure. Phenius speaking French. No . . . English now. But it was a priest, not Phenius. Phenius was dead, and the priest was—

  He was grinning.

  “Adeline, my love.”

  She took three more stumbling steps forward, towards the man with Phenius’s voice, the man who opened his arms to her.

  No, not his arms, Phenius’s arms. It was Phenius, looking exactly as he had in the summer of 1952 on the night he took her to Spirit Rock and showed her the site of his dig.

  Adeline stumbled and fell. She felt the sharp gravel cut into her kneecaps, scraping them bloody. The house behind her was a million miles away and the world was reduced to Phenius’s beautiful voice, and the moonlight was now bright enough to drown in.

  Behind him on the driveway, the shadows divided and subdivided, shifted, formed, shaping and reshaping. Phenius hasn’t come alone. He’s brought friends.

  It was a disappointing thought to Adeline. It had been years since she’d seen him, and she’d hoped for some time with just him alone—a reunion.

  “Let me in,” Phenius said again, his voice jagged and sharp as one of the stalactites hanging from the roofs of the caves at Spirit Rock, and this time there was no hint of courtesy, let alone entreaty. It was an unambiguous command. The implicit invitation to self-abasement in his tone thrilled her with the filth of it. No one but Phenius had ever succeeded in making her feel that way—cheap, like a whore. Like a woman. Desired, and desirous. His voice was a hand between her legs, squeezing and probing with authority and ownership.

  Adeline looked up at him from where she knelt at his feet in the sharp gravel like a supplicant. “Come in. You’re welcome in my house,” she said, the pain in her bloodied knees coming to her as though from a great distance. “Enter freely.”

  When Phenius took her in his arms, she saw that she was alone with him on the lawn, that there was no one else there, that no one had come back with him from the grave—for surely he must have travelled that great distance just to be with her, smelling of dirt and caves and centuries under the earth.

  No greater proof of love could there be than that, Adeline thought with satisfaction. Phenius didn’t come back to his adopted redskin “son,” he came back to me.

  By the time she saw the old man with the bone-white face and the long white hair that blew around his head in the night wind, she was beyond caring that it wasn’t Phenius at all—she just wanted the man with Phenius’s voice to kiss her, to hurt her, to claim her.

  And in the cold October moonlight, he did all those things, and more.

  TOMB OF DRACULA

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  The marble foyer of Parr House was dark when she got home just after ten. Christina heard the door click softly behind her as she stood in the entryway listening to the rhythmic tick of the grandfather clock near the entrance to the dining room.

  In the darkness, the place felt cavernous. For the first time since she’d returned to Parr’s Landing, she was aware of the true vastness of her mother-in-law’s house. It wasn’t just a big house, or even a mansion—it was a small castle on a hill. A very dark castle right now, Christina thought.

  As her eyes adjusted to the gloom, she perceived that a bit of redtinted moonlight shone through the stained glass windows on the landing of the grand staircase upstairs. In its dim light, she felt around on the marble-topped hallway table for the Waterford crystal lamp she knew was there.

  Finding the lamp, she switched it on and the foyer was flooded with yellow light. Familiar objects came into view. It looked like a house again, albeit a monstrous house.

  Christina crossed the floor and looked up the stairs. “Hello? Jeremy? Morgan? Anyone still up?” She didn’t expect a reply—Adeline’s house hadn’t proven to be the sort of house where people ran down the stairs to greet each other, or shouted from floor to floor. But still, Christina couldn’t ever recall the house being this quiet. The complete absence of noise—the apparent absence of life, really—struck her for the first time.

  She crossed the floor quickly and climbed the stairs, taking two at a time. Outside Morgan’s door, she knocked and called out softly, “Morgan? Are you still up? It’s Mom.” She opened the door as quietly as she could and peered inside.

  Morgan lay in her bed—fast asleep, by the look of it. The room was freezing. Christina went to the window to close it, but found it tightly shut, the latch securely in place. So where the hell is that cold coming from? She looked at the glass. It was dirty, smudged with fingerprints. Christina rubbed at them with the edge of her sweater. What on earth was Morgan doing this evening? Planting a garden? Adeline would be furious if she saw this. Christina rubbed again, harder, but the smudges still didn’t come off. She pressed her fingers to the window, aligning them with the smudges there. She frowned.

  The marks were on the other side of the glass. Christina looked down at the moonlit lawn. Morgan’s room was a twenty-foot drop to the ground.

  What the hell? How can there be fingerprints on the other side of the glass? Impossible. She shook her head and gave herself a mental swift kick in the rear end. Well, then, obviously they aren’t fingerprints, you idiot—unless you think maybe Morgan was hanging from the outside wall by a trapeze harness, trying to get into her own bed
room.

  Christina crossed to the bed and pulled the blankets up to her daughter’s neck. She leaned down and kissed her softly on the forehead. She deeply inhaled Morgan’s scent. When she slept, Morgan still smelled like a baby to her mother.

  She paused outside Jeremy’s door one floor up, then knocked. Light streamed from under the door. From inside, Jeremy said, “Come in?”

  She pushed open the door open. Jeremy was sitting up in bed, wearing a T-shirt and boxer shorts, reading. Self-consciously, he reached for the sheet to cover himself, which made Christina smile in spite of herself. He blushed.

  “Don’t worry, I can’t see anything,” she said. “Your mystery is still intact.”

  He laughed. “Old habits, I guess. This isn’t the house in which to be caught naked, as you know. Bad consequences.” He tried to smile, but failed.

  “Are you OK, Jeremy? I mean, really OK?”

  He shrugged. “Sure, I guess. How was your night?”

  “It was really nice,” she admitted. “Billy was a perfect gentleman. He told me about his life. He went to a residential school in Sault Ste. Marie. It sounded awful. Brutal. I had no idea. It makes his success even more amazing. But mostly he was just a really, really nice man. He reminded me of—” she trailed off, embarrassed by the treason implicit in what she had been about to say. “Well, he was a nice man.”

  “Christina,” Jeremy said gently. “Do you . . . did you enjoy spending time with him? I mean—that way? It’s OK if you did, you know. It doesn’t mean you’re being disloyal to Jack. It just means that you’re human.”