Enter, Night

by Michael Rowe

  “What do I have to do?”

  Morgan thought she had never seen a more loving or radiant smile in her life. Finn pointed to the door. “Just walk with me. Out there. Out into the sunlight. Where Sadie is. And if I can’t do it, push me.”

  Mutely, she nodded, white-faced.

  When they reached the door, Finn turned to her and hugged her. “I love you, Morgan,” he whispered. “Thank you.”

  Then Morgan opened the front door and walked Finn into the dawn.

  In the end, dying a second time proved different than anything Finn had ever imagined it might be.

  For one thing, the pain that his small, shrieking body felt as the sunlight ignited a holocaust under his skin—an incandescence that boiled his blood and set alight his bones from the inside, charring them to ash in seconds—was surprisingly brief, even momentary. Such, it seemed, was the nature of the soul—even a soul like Finn’s that had been severed from its natural life and forced into rebirth in an unnatural one.

  Rising above his body as it writhed and burned on the ground, Finn saw, not without pain and shame, that Morgan was screaming, as well. He’d hurt her, after all—the one person whom he wanted most to spare any pain.

  The bare skin of her arms, where she’d held him as he’d tried to duck back inside the house at the moment the sunlight first struck his undead flesh—exactly as he’d begged her to do—was scorched and seared and blistered from the fire—his fire.

  Because there were no more secrets, because every truth of the world, past, present, and future, was laid bare to the dead—the true dead, as Finn now was—he knew that Morgan would bear livid scars on her arms for the rest of her life. They would fade a bit more every year, but he knew (as the dead know) that Morgan would think of him every day when she looked at them, and the thoughts would be tender ones, thoughts of love—and sadness.

  The horror would eventually become a half-remembered nightmare, and he was glad for that. He knew she would never return to Parr’s Landing, nor would her mother, and that neither of them would ever see Billy Lightning again.

  Finn continued to rise.

  The dead of Parr’s Landing surged around him like transcendental tributaries to a larger sea of souls, and time itself spun like a great tumbler of history and memory. The dead opened their arms to Finn in love, pulled him close, carried him higher and higher.

  His soul wept for the half-souls that remained, trapped.

  As Finn was absorbed into the massive vortex of spiralling black light, he looked down one last time.

  Below him, he saw the oak doors of St. Barthélemy and the Martyrs crash open. Christina Parr, screaming her daughter’s name, ran with the speed only the mother of an injured child ever really attains to the place where Morgan knelt, weeping over the charred skeleton of the twelve-year-old boy Finn once was. Finn saw Christina tenderly wrap her daughter in blankets and carefully carry her to Billy Lightning’s truck, depositing her gently in the passenger seat and starting it up.

  The dead see all roads, spiritual and temporal alike, and Finn was well pleased with what he saw ahead on theirs.

  And then, the part of Finn Miller that was eternal heard the sound of a red rubber ball striking his bedroom floor. His soul was suddenly engulfed in familiar fragrance—clover and lake water and sunlight on soft black fur, and he was awash in frantic movement, warmth, and love.

  The sound of Finn’s laughter fell like blue sparks and the sound of Sadie’s triumphant, joyous barking fell like black ones, and together their essences became one with the souls around them, passing completely from the world of the living into a perfect, brilliant sunrise above Bradley Lake and the cliffs of Spirit Rock.

  There was no pain in it this time, only sunlight that no longer burned.

  PARR’S LANDING POLICE DEPARTMENT

  75 Main Street E.

  Parr’s Landing, Ontario

  P2T 1R2

  807-731-1002

  TO: Sergeant Gill Styles. Gyles Point Police Dept., Gyles Point, Ont.

  FROM: Sergeant Dave Thomson, Parr’s Landing

  October 25, 1972

  Dear Gill,

  Following up on our telephone conversation of earlier this evening, a local boy, Finn Miller, found this hockey bag and its contents in the Spirit Rock area while looking for his dog. PC Elliot McKitrick came upon the young man over the course of doing rounds and brought the boy and the hockey bag back to the station where we took it into evidence.

  The bag appears to contain archaeological tools. In light of the Carstairs disappearance on the night of October 22nd in Gyles Point, I recommend that you forward them to Bruce Benson at the RCMP in Sault St. Marie for forensic lab analysis of fingerprints and blood type.

  Also found in the bag were several documents that have been identified by Dr. William Lightning, a visitor to Parr’s Landing, as having belonged to his father, Dr. Phenius Osborne of Toronto, who was the victim of homicide early this year. Dr. Lightning believes they were taken from his father’s house during the course of said homicide.

  As an aside, he believes the perpetrator was Richard Weal, a former student of Dr. Osborne’s, but according to the information we have from Metro Toronto Homicide, Weal is deceased.

  We do not consider Dr. Lightning a suspect at this time, though we have asked him to remain in Parr’s Landing for the next few days. Please call if we can be of any further help.

  Dave Thomson, Sgt.

  Parr’s Landing

  From the notes of Professor Phenius Osborne

  Department of Anthropology, University of Toronto

  Sidney Smith Hall, 100 St. George Street, Toronto

  Fall Term, 1971

  Note: The text that follows is my translation of an original document held by Professor Victor Kleinschmit of the Department of History at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. The document itself, written in French, dates from the seventeenth century and appears to be a letter from a Jesuit missionary on his deathbed, addressed to his superiors in Rome. I have cross-referenced both this document with every available edition of The Jesuit Relations, but have found no reference to it, nor to the priest mentioned (Fr. Nyon) in any available record pertaining to the history of the Jesuits in Canada.

  Dr. Kleinschmit, upon hearing of my work on the St. Barthélemy dig in Parr’s Landing in the summer of 1952, invited me to come to Michigan to read it and to translate, which I did.

  It is worth noting that I did not share any of the specific events surrounding the excavation of the St. Barthélemy site during the summer of 1952 with Dr. Kleinschmit, so his delivery of this document into my hands was in no way intended to support any “fantastical” notions of what might have occurred there that summer. The story, as read here, presents a plausible theory of the origin of the Wendigo legend of St. Barthélemy by a writer obviously familiar with myths and legends of that period.

  In 1968, I forwarded a copy of my translation to Fr. Pedro Arrupe, SJ, (the twenty-eighth and current) Superior General of the Society of Jesus in Rome to enquire as to why it had not been included among the official records of the Jesuit missions to New France.

  On February 12th, I received a brief, very courteous reply (see later notes, attached) from the Superior General’s secretary thanking me for my letter, assuring me that the Reverend Father had enjoyed reading the document I sent him and thanking me for my “assiduous scholarship” and my

  “interest in the glorious history of the Jesuit martyrs” but asserting that, owing to both its “fantastical and lurid” subject matter as well as its length, the document was clearly a forgery, though it had already been examined on both palaeographic and material grounds by Professor Kleinschmit, and found to be consistent, even if the subject matter itself was not. It’s not surprising to me that the SG would find this embarrassing if fictional; and mortifying if it was proven to be an authentic record of the delusions of a Jesuit missionary likely driven mad by the isolation of northern Ontario in the seventeenth centu
ry. The Jesuit motto, “Ad Majorem Dei Gloriam”—to the greater glory of God—is repeated several times in this narrative, which struck me as unusual, since one can infer that both the writer and the recipient were already well familiar with its meaning. There is an earnestness to its use here that seems noteworthy, especially in context of the narrative, as becomes obvious.

  NB: Must forward a copy to Billy. He will find this entertaining, esp. in light of our “adventures” with good Dick Weal that summer!

  —P. K. O., Ph. D. 09/12/71

  Being the Last True Testament and Relation of Father Alphonse Nyon;

  Given at Montréal, Québec in a the form of a Letter to the Very Reverend Father Vincenzo Caraffa, Superior General of the Society of Jesus, at Rome

  Anno Domini 1650

  Very Reverend Father in Christ,

  Pax Christi

  I send this last Relation in the hopes that it will reach Your Reverence by the ship returning to France before the ice in this bitter region renders entirely compromised the passage of our vessels across the ocean.

  I fear that my time here in this land is short, as the pox that has plagued hundreds of the Savages, thankfully a goodly number of them baptized and brought to our Christian Faith and now resting in the arms of Our Lord Jesus Christ in Heaven, has taken me into its embrace as well.

  I write with difficulty and have entrusted the care and delivery of this Relation to Your Reverence into the hands of my friend Father Charles Vimont. He has sworn to seal this document and not to cast his eyes upon its contents, which are for the eyes of Your Reverence alone, on the peril of his Immortal Soul.

  For my part, my vain prayers that I should again see the shores of my homeland or the beautiful cathedral of Notre-Dame de Chartres where I first heard Our Lord’s call as a young man, or indeed once again touch the face of my beloved mother, have been denied by Our Lord, and I submit myself joyfully to His will.

  My one true regret during these many years of service to the Savages of New France is that I should have been spared the great honour of martyrdom, the great blessing enjoined upon so many of our fallen Fathers at the bloody hands of the Hiroquois—most lately Father de Brébeuf, Father Chabanel, and Father de Lalande, who died so horribly at Sainte-Marie among the Hurons last year, praising the name of Christ and giving absolution to their Barbarian tormentors with their last breath, even after their tongues were cut out, for they kept preaching till death released them.

  I pray for Your Reverence’s understanding, prayers, and meditation upon the reading of this, my last Relation and Testament, for it is with a heavy heart that I set down the strange and terrible events I witnessed at St. Barthélemy among the Ojibwa in the northern Lac Superiéur region of the country in the winter of the Year of Our Lord 1632.

  These secrets I have kept to myself for nearly twenty years, confiding them not even in the Sacrament of Confession, though I regularly opened my heart to God and begged His forgiveness, not only for the blasphemies I have seen, but also for those I have wrought myself in my sad and pitiable effort to do His will as best as could be done by one so unworthy.

  In the autumn of that dark year of which I write, word was received by Monsieur de Champlain at Trois-Rivières of the destruction of two of our settlements near Sault de Gaston, in Huronia, and the martyrdom of three of our Jesuit Fathers in what could only have been an attack by the Hiroquois, for their fiendish handiwork leaves a spoor as unmistakable as the handiwork of Satan himself.

  In the first, the Mission of Sainte-Berthe, the martyrs were, by name, Father Renaud d’Olivier, Father Mathieu Glazier, and Father Nausson d’Uongue. The Fathers had travelled from France together and, it was reported, had been as close as brothers. I pray they found comfort in their brotherhood at the end. The Indian trappers reported the hideous sight of the maimed and tortured bodies of d’Olivier, Glazier, and d’Uongue. Their scorched bodies still hung from the stakes to which they were tied and left for carrion. The Savages, it was reported, had poured boiling water over their heads in mockery of Baptism and cut out their eyes and tongues, placing live coals in the sockets.

  Likewise, they reported the smoke still heavy and foul over the burned village, and many dead, including a number of baptized Savages. We wept at this news, even though we knew that our fallen Brothers had attained the heights of Heaven, having died in the greatest possible service to Our Lord Jesus Christ. Never have the words of our Jesuit motto, Ad majorem Dei gloriam, comforted me more than they did in the hours that followed the news of the Fathers’ martyrdom.

  In the second instance, the strange news was of the mission of St. Barthélemy deep in the Ojibwa region of that country, a region noted for the cruelty of the terrain itself and of the strangeness of its customs, superstitions and legends. So tight, it is said, is the Devil’s hold upon these poor people that establishing a mission in this particular region had long been an ambition of the Crown in its support of our work here in New France.

  In the case of the mission of St. Barthélemy, the trappers related that the mission seemed entirely abandoned.

  Unlike the mission of Sainte-Berthe, which had clearly fallen to an attack by the Hiroquois, the mission at St. Barthélemy appeared deserted, as though the inhabitants, both Christian and Savage, had all departed freely and of their own volition.

  The trappers observed this and more and related it to Monsieur de Champlain, who in turn related it to Father de Varennes, who was then the representative responsible for dispatching our Fathers on their missions upriver in the company of their Huron guides.

  It was at this point that I was summoned to meet with Father de Varennes at Trois-Rivières. I was then still a very young man, all of twentyone, a year in New France since my departure from Chartres, and foolish in the fearless way of all young men, but determined to serve the will of God with all of my body and soul. I knew even then that martyrdom for the greater glory of God would be the highest attainment, and yet my poor flesh dreaded it, dreaded the agony of the flames of the stake as it dreaded the butchery of blade and spear. I confess that fear with shame, but with the openhearted humility that my own unworthiness demands.

  Father de Varennes wasted no time in asking me what I knew of the settlement of St. Barthélemy. Sadly, I told him, I had only heard of it in passing through the stories of the other young priests. I knew little of the region or of the mission itself.

  “Do you, for instance,” de Varennes asked me, “know anything of the Ojibwa people, Father Nyon? Do you know their language and customs?”

  “I have studied their language, Father,” I replied. “I am not fluent, but I have tried to prepare myself as best I could in the event that my service in New France led me there.”

  “You know by now, Father Nyon, of the recent destruction of our mission at Sainte-Berthe and the slaughter of our priests at the hands of the Hiroquois?”

  I nodded, bowing my head. “Yes, Father. A great tragedy.”

  “Have you then also heard,” he asked, “of the mystery of our settlement of St. Barthélemy near the shore of Lac Supérieur which has been reported as entirely deserted?”

  “Yes, Father. But again, only in passing. Only in the form of rumour and conjecture. Stories from around the campfire in these last weeks. The gossip of trappers.”

  The old priest smiled at that. But again he grew serious. “Father Nyon,” he said. “We have dispatched one of our priests, Father Lubéron, in the company of a party of Algonquians, to recover the bodies of our fallen Fathers at Sainte-Berthe and to give them a Christian burial. It is a gruesome assignation, but Father Lubéron has volunteered. We can only pray for his safe return, and that he does not meet the same fate that befell d’Olivier, Glazier, and d’Uongue.”

  “I too will pray for that, Father,” I told him. “I would also have volunteered if I had known of the assignation.”

  Father de Varennes looked hard at me and said, “Is that what is truly in your heart, Father Nyon?”

  I
replied that it was, indeed.

  “Father Nyon. I would like you to travel north to the region of Sault de Gaston and visit the site of the St. Barthélemy settlement and see if what the trappers reported is true. I would like you to find the priest, Father de Céligny. If the Savages murdered him, I would like you to bury him and perform the Last Rites. If he is alive, I would like you to bring him back with you to Trois-Rivières so he may give his own account of what transpired at the Mission.”

  “I accept joyfully, Father,” I said, quite proud of myself for having been put in charge of such an undertaking. “What can you tell me of Father de Céligny, Father? I have not heard that name before. Has he been long in New France?”

  “Father de Céligny arrived in New France in 1625 as one of the priests who answered the appeal of the Recollet friars in order to aid them in their work with the Indian missions,” Father de Varennes explained. “The Recollets were insufficient in numbers to successfully cope with the nature and hardships of evangelizing the Savages.”

  “But what of the man?” I persisted. “Who is he?”

  “The man?” Father de Varennes laughed. “Ah yes, the man. I know only the priest, but you ask me about the man. Let us see. Father de Céligny is descended from a noble family in the Nord-Pas-de-Calais, the most northerly region of France. He is kinsman to the Vicomte de Moriève of that region. He took his vows in Paris, at Montmartre. And, as I said, he came to us here in New France in 1625. By reports it was a long and terrible voyage from Dieppe to Québec. An unknown wasting sickness descended on crew and passengers alike. Many shrivelled and died, including some priests. Father de Céligny survived. He was dispatched to the Ojibwa that very year. He is a learned man. As I recall, he was also grave in manner and demeanour. In truth, I don’t remember much of the man. And even now, it is the priest I am concerned with, not the man.”