Enter, Night

by Michael Rowe

  She paused, struggling for composure. “It’s too soon, Jeremy,” she said. “Even if I wanted to enjoy it that way, it’s still too soon. But thank you for saying that. I know what you meant, and I appreciate it.”

  He smiled. “I’ll always be here for you, Chris. No matter what. I know how much you loved my brother, and I know how much he loved you—and all of us, especially Morgan.”

  “God, how did everything get so messed up? How did it all come to this?”

  Jeremy paused, then said, “Chris?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Chris, we’re leaving tomorrow.”

  Christina raised her eyebrows. “Really? That’s news to me. Last I heard, we were dead broke. Did you win a lottery?”

  “No,” he said quietly. “But today, when you were talking to Billy Lightning on the driveway, I went into Adeline’s room and looked around. I found some money. A lot of money. She keeps it in the bottom of her vanity. There’s almost a thousand dollars in twenties. More than enough to get us the hell out of Parr’s Landing and back to Toronto. I would have taken it this afternoon, but I didn’t want to risk her finding out.”

  “Jeremy!” Christina was shocked in spite of herself. “You can’t do that! What are you thinking?”

  “I’m thinking that Adeline will be the death of us, and I’m thinking that it’s time we face it,” he said calmly. “This town is a bad place. After this afternoon—after Elliot—I realized that. We need to leave. If we don’t, either the town or my mother will eat us alive. She’s enjoying torturing us, you know. Can’t you tell? Can’t you feel it?”

  “But you can’t steal almost a thousand dollars from her!”

  “Why not?”

  “Well, for one thing, she’ll have you arrested and thrown in jail.”

  “We’ll be gone before she even knows the money is missing,” he said. “And once we’re outside of northern Ontario, she has no power or authority, whatever else she’d like you to believe. And when we’re gone, we’ll never, ever come back.”

  “Jeremy . . . ?”

  “Never mind, Christina. I’m deadly serious. Pack your things tomorrow, just don’t let her see you do it. Morgan’s, too. We’ll make a dash for it mid-afternoon. We’ll tell her we’re . . . I don’t know, having a talk with Morgan’s principal. We’ll think of something.”

  “Are you sure? Are you sure this is the only way?”

  “Aren’t you sure yet, Christina? Do you really want to risk Morgan turning into someone like Elliot? Someone broken and ashamed of who they are? Because my mother will do it to her, you know she will. She’ll destroy your daughter just like she’s tried to destroy everyone else who isn’t the person she demands they be.”

  Christina looked hard at her brother-in-law. “OK. I’ll pack tomorrow morning.”

  “You don’t even need to bring everything, just what’s necessary. We can pick up anything else once we’re the hell out of here.”

  Near midnight, Finn still heard his mother crying in the living room, but he didn’t think he could bear to come upstairs from his room to comfort her, nor did he believe she wanted him there—not after she’d shouted at him and sent him to his room in such a fury an hour before. He knew that her worry over his father not being home was the source, but he also knew he could be of no comfort to her at that exact moment.

  The house felt huge and empty to him with just Finn and his mother in it—the ceilings higher, his bedroom walls farther from the bed, the autumn darkness outside deeper, the shadows longer, the silence as soft as a thunderstorm.

  Anne hadn’t ordered him to stay in bed all night, something quite unprecedented in his twelve years of bedtimes. And both of them were on tenterhooks, listening for the sound of his father’s car in the driveway.

  Finn had left her—at her request—alone after dinner, sitting in the orange corduroy slip covered easy chair that Anne had angled facing the front door, almost as though she were afraid that she if she didn’t see Hank’s car pull into the driveway in addition to hearing it when he pulled in (a sound she was acutely attuned to, after seventeen years of marriage), it wouldn’t be real.

  They’d eaten dinner in silence after Finn’s preposterous announcement that a vampire had killed Sadie. Anne had stared at him open-mouthed and then said, “Oh Finnegan, stop it. Please, for heaven’s sake.”

  But the look in her eye wasn’t botheration, which Finn was accustomed to from his mother when he went on about vampires, or his Tomb of Dracula obsession.

  No, it was horror—not horror at the thought of vampires snatching up Sadie, but rather at the idea that Finn would even joke about something like that at a time like this.

  Then she’d turned back to the stove, her posture rigid enough to snap in a high wind. Finn sensed that his mother was waiting for his father to come home before she even broached the topic of his preposterous comment with him.

  As excited as he was by his new awareness of what had happened to his dog, Finn felt shamed by his mother’s silence. He knew it wasn’t what she wanted to hear, because he suddenly saw the strain on her face that Sadie’s death had caused. Selfishly, perhaps, he hadn’t considered that anyone could be as affected by Sadie’s death as he was. Sadie had been Finn’s dog, Finn’s great love, and Finn’s grief.

  But at dinner, as she pushed her chicken pie around on her plate, his mother appeared to be maintaining her composure by frayed, bloody tendons.

  Anne kept looking up at the kitchen wall clock with the carved grapes on a vine, with “Bless This House” in elaborate cursive letters around the clock’s face.

  “Where can your father be?” she’d said, repeating it twice more during the meal. But it didn’t sound like it did when she’d said it a thousand times before. There was no good-natured exasperation in the tone this time, no housewifely impatience about burned dinners, or food getting cold. It was an actual question: clinical, tinged with the metallic frostbite of growing panic. “He’s never this late.”

  “Mom, he’s probably just working late at the mill. Or he stopped off on the way home.”

  “Finn, he . . .” She stopped herself in mid-sentence. “He went . . .”

  Something in her voice pierced his self-distancing absorption in his own thoughts of Sadie and vampires and grief. “He what, Mom? Where did he go after work?”

  “Eat your dinner, Finnegan.” Anne’s face had gone the colour of milk. Her voice was robotic. “Your father will be home soon.”

  But of course, he hadn’t been home soon. He hadn’t come home at all. And now here it was, practically midnight.

  From upstairs, Finn heard his mother calling a few of his friends from down the Legion. None of them had seen Hank. Finn heard the reluctant-to-disturb-your-family’s-dinner-sir deference in her voice when she called his foreman at the mill, but he didn’t know where Hank was, either.

  No, no, no, sorry, no, Anne, we haven’t. . . . No, sorry. I’m sure he’ll be home soon. . . . No, maybe he had car trouble? Stopped for a beer? Had to finish something?

  With every phone call, with every new confirmation that Hank had cut out from the mill an hour earlier but that no one had seen him since, Anne’s voice grew incrementally tighter and shriller. After the last call, she slammed the receiver down hard enough for Finn to hear it downstairs in his room.

  Halfway up the stairs, he said, “Mom, are you OK?”

  “Finn, I’m fine.” She sounded like she was crying. “Your father should have been home hours ago. I’m at my wit’s end. Where the hell is he? Why isn’t he home with us?”

  He climbed the stairs and stood a few feet away from where she was standing, the phone poised in mid-air as though she were about to make another call. When she saw him, she put the phone down.

  “Mom, where did Dad go after work? You started to tell me at dinner, but you stopped. Why? Where did he go?”

  “Finn, he said he was going to go find Sadie and bring her home so he could bury her.” Anne began to weep. “He was
going to stop by after work and bring her back to us. I’m so very afraid he hurt himself up there or something in the woods.”

  Now it was Finn’s turn to blanch. “Mom, why did you let him go up to Spirit Rock after I told you what happened to Sadie? You let him go up there at night? After what I told you tonight? Are you crazy?”

  For an instant, terror passed across Anne’s face like the shadow of a cloud moving overland. In that moment, Finn saw everything he had seen that morning on Spirit Rock reflected in his mother’s face. Their synergy electrified him.

  In that moment, she believed him, he could tell. That knowledge both terrified and thrilled him, ripping asunder the security veil that was keeping his twelve-year-old fantasies safely locked outside the back door of reality. If his mother believed him about Sadie, or about the vampires, then they could be real.

  Then, the moment was over. Her adult face came back, and she said, “Finn, stop it. There are no such things as vampires. Nobody killed Sadie. I don’t have time to waste on this nonsense right now. Your father is missing. What happened to Sadie this morning was . . . well, it was something else.”

  “What was it? Tell me!” he demanded. “Tell me what I saw wasn’t what I saw, Mom!”

  “Summer lightning!” Anne practically screamed. “I don’t know! Go to your room right now! I can’t deal with this crap of yours right now, Finnegan! Your father is missing! Do you understand me? I don’t have time for all your Draculas and the rest of it!”

  Finn’s face flamed. He turned on his heel and fled to his room, slamming the door behind him. He flung himself across his bed feeling impotent rage—but not at his mother, of course, even though she had hurt his feelings by shouting at him, and even though he understood that she was upset about his father.

  He half hoped, half expected to hear the sound of her feet on the stairs to his room to comfort him, or apologize, or to admit that she, too, was deeply and gravely afraid that his father had been taken by the same malefic force out there in the dark that had taken Sadie—but there was nothing.

  When he quietly opened the door to his room and listened, he heard her talking to someone at the Parr’s Landing police station—maybe that liar of a cop who had promised he’d look for Sadie, or maybe the old one who had told them not to say anything to anyone about the bag of bloody knives.

  From the rising, near-hysterical crescendo of his mother’s voice, whoever had answered the phone at the station wasn’t being very helpful at all.

  “He’s never late!” she shouted. “I’m not shouting! Don’t tell me not to shout! My husband is missing!” And then, “My son found that bag of bloody knives up there by the caves and you’re telling me that . . . I don’t care if Constable McKitrick didn’t come in to work today! That’s not my problem! Do you mean to tell me that you can’t . . . Yes, I know it hasn’t been twenty-four hours yet!” There was a long pause, then Anne said. “So, I’m supposed to just wait . . . ? All right, if you promise you’ll take a ride out there and take a look. Tonight! Yes, thank you.” She hung up.

  “Mom . . . ?” She turned and saw her son back on the stairs. “Mom? I’m sorry.”

  “Come here, sweetheart,” Anne said. She opened her arms to her son, and he ran into them. She felt his face against her shoulder and she squeezed him tightly.

  “Mom! Ow! You’re squishing me!” Finn yelped, not meaning it. He snuggled in closer. “I love you, Mommy.”

  Anne closed her eyes and pressed her face against his hair. It still smelled like Prell from his shampoo before dinner. “I love you, too, Finnegan.” She looked at the clock. It was nearly midnight. “OK, bedtime, vampire hunter,” she said, obviously trying to take the sting out of her earlier chastisement. “I’m going to stay up for just a little while and wait for your daddy to come home. I want you to go to sleep.”

  “You called the police, didn’t you, Mom? Was that the police?”

  “Yes, sweetheart,” I did. “Just to be sure. You’re daddy is fine, don’t worry.”

  “Mom?”

  “What, Finnegan?”

  “Mommy,” he said solemnly. “You’re fibbing, aren’t you? Why are you fibbing?”

  “Finnegan—please, sweetheart. Please just go to bed now. Be a good boy for your mom.” She ruffled his hair. “I’ll wake you up when Daddy gets here, I promise.”

  “OK, Mom,” he said. He turned to go back downstairs. Then he turned around. His mother looked very small sitting in the orange corduroy-covered chair. Impulsively, Finn walked back over to the spot by the window and hugged her as tightly as he could. “Night, Mommy.”

  “Night, baby,” Anne said. She patted his bottom through his pyjamas and bathrobe. “I love you. Sleep tight.”

  Finn reluctantly let his mother go, then went downstairs to his bedroom to try to sleep while he waited for his father to get home.

  Before switching out his bedside lamp, Finn glanced over at Sadie’s empty dog bed across the room. When it hurt too much to breathe, he switched off the bedroom light and let the darkness swallow him up and carry him away from this terrible day.

  What the blazes is that young dunderhead doing? For Christ’s sake. He drops out of sight, then has the nerve to drive around the goddamn town in his cruiser with the lights off? And to drive past the window of the police station, practically flipping me the bird? Is he on drugs?

  Dave Thomson slammed his coffee cup down hard on his desk, spilling some of it on his blotter. He pushed his chair back from his desk and ran to the door of the station. He threw it open and stepped out onto the sidewalk.

  “Elliot,” Thomson bawled. “Goddammit, Elliot, get back here! Right now, boy! I mean it!”

  The police cruiser paused, as though waiting for Thomson to shout something else. Then the brake lights winked redly in the blackness— once, then twice, as the driver tapped the brake. Well I’ll be a goddamned jumped-up monkey-fucker! Thomson seethed. He’s actually playing with me!

  The car sped ahead, pausing a ways up the block. Again, the tapping of the brake light—flick-flick.

  I’m going to break his fucking ass!

  Thomson grabbed his keys off the desk and let the door of the police station slam shut behind him. He jumped behind the wheel of his own brand new Impala and took off in pursuit of the police cruiser that was now taunting him by maintaining a pace just slow enough to follow, but still too fast for Thomson to catch up to without speeding—something Thomson was loath to do in his own town, even at this hour.

  Elliot—and he had no doubt it was Elliot, probably stark raving high on pot, or God only knew what else he’d been getting into lately that had made him act the way he’d been acting—led him on a merry chase through the streets of Parr’s Landing, and out towards the edge of town, driving without lights and making Thomson squint.

  “Where are you going, you crazy bastard?” Thomson muttered. He leaned his arm out the window and tried to signal to Elliot that he should pull over. Instinctively, he reached down to activate a siren, but of course there was no siren to activate. “Get back here, goddammit!” he shouted again out the window. “Shit on a goddamn stick!”

  Just when it looked like Elliot was headed for the road that led to the cliffs (and on those roads, Thomson promised himself, he would open her up and pull even with the little bastard and then break his fucking ass), he turned off Percy Street and onto Brandon Nixon Road.

  Where the hell is he going?

  The cruiser sped up. Thomson floored it again, cursing his lack of siren. He could think of no better use for the siren than right now—then, when he caught Elliott, he was going to shove it so far up his goddamn ass, Elliot would shit pieces of red cherry-top glass all the way to the welfare office. He honked his horn several times, but to no avail. The cruiser kept speeding ahead.

  In the distance, Thomson saw the taillights of the cruiser abruptly veer right, then wink out and vanish altogether. What the blazes? Where the hell did he go? Thomson floored the accelerator till he reache
d the spot where he’d lost track of Elliot. He craned his neck, trying to see where the little bastard had gone.

  Then, suddenly he saw the car. He also saw why the taillights had disappeared. Elliot had parked it in front of the burned-out shell of the Mike Tackacs Hockey Arena. Got you, you little fucker, he thought, gloating. Your ass belongs to me.

  Thomson pulled in behind and parked the Impala. He took his flashlight out of the glove box and shone it alongside the cruiser.

  The early morning electrical fire that had taken the hockey rink down in ’59—killing a maintenance worker named Eric McDonald and his young son, Timmy, who was skating while his father worked, thus adding two more souls to Parr’s Landing’s already ample supply of ghosts—had burned fiercely and efficiently, leaving only a husk that somehow still smelled like smoke after all these years.

  Why no one had torn it down in all this time was a mystery to Thomson. It was as dangerous as all get-out. They’d rebuilt a new arena on the other side of town—the Brenen Gyles Arena, so named after Parr’s Landing’s one and only semi-famous contribution to the 1962 Ontario Junior A League, paid for in no small part by the Gyles Family, who owned most of the town of Gyles Point—so there was no reason for the ruins of the Takacs Arena to be standing at all.

  The Parr family could have afforded to tear the Takacs down and rebuild it themselves—hell, the old bitch could have paid for it out of her change purse, but it would be a week of frosty Fridays in hell before Adeline Parr would lift a finger to help the town do anything but work for her.

  As for Elliot, he must be high, Thomson decided. There was no other reason for this entirely out-of-character behaviour.

  “Elliot, you there?” he shouted. “Come on out, now. Stop this foolishness. We can talk about it, whatever it is. But we can’t fix it until we do. You need to come out right now, son. Don’t make me go in there and find you.”

  But there was no answer. Thomson took a few tentative steps into the ruined arena, playing his flashlight along the charred baseboards, cumbrous slats, collapsed walls, and rotting ceiling beams.