Enter, Night

by Michael Rowe

  And then I heard the sound of human voices speaking in a language I did not understand. Warm hands touched my face and my own hands. Strong arms lifted me and bore me aloft, carrying me through the deserted village. The snow continued to fall in a heavy sheet of cold, cleansing white. My eyelids fluttered and the light swam.

  Before I lost consciousness and yielded to the tide of new darkness rushing towards me, I smelled the awful stink of burning flesh, and something worse. I looked down and saw the smouldering remains of the monster I had burned with my torch.

  It had not survived the fire. Perhaps it had died attempting to cast off its shape, attempting to return to its human aspect. Its body was manlike in shape, but where its arms would have been were the webbed wings of a giant bat, ending in human hands with nails that were like the claws of a great Oriental tiger. Its face was a half-human, half-basilisk nightmare.

  I turned my head away from the abomination lying on the ground, already beginning to be covered by the falling snow. Around me, I saw that some of the men were setting fire to the village. I heard the crackle of wood and smelled new smoke.

  A wave of heat came to me, and my first thought was to stretch towards it. I cannot tell with any certainty as I write this if my impulse was to throw myself on the growing pyre, or merely to warm myself by it. And then, my eyes closed and I yielded to the mercy of complete insensibility.

  When I awoke, though I had no bearings, I sensed that I was very far from that haunted place. I was on a sort of sledge, wrapped in furs. Above me the trees were heavy with snow, and we were moving silently through the endless, damnable forest that binds this Godforsaken country like a slave’s chain.

  The Indians cared for me with a mercy and a tenderness that put Christian charity to shame. I travelled with them to their winter hunting grounds and lived as their guest and under their protection for the long months of ice and snow. In time, I came to understand that they regarded me as some sort of deliverer, and in exchange for that delivery, they were prepared to extend to me an acceptance that I would, as a Black Robe, never otherwise experience.

  I heard the word “Weetigo” many times. It was a word I knew well, though I knew none of the others they spoke. It was the word I had first heard in Trois-Rivières from the drunkard Dumont, and then later from my saviour Askuwheteau, who died that I might live. I understand the word now, as an old man who has spent his life among these people, in a way I could not have understood it as a young man.

  To my shame, I believe that the Savages who rescued me believed I had defeated just such a monster in St. Barthélemy, for they saw the remains of the demon creature that had fallen from the sky wreathed in fire. In it, they had seen the incarnation of their most terrifying legend; in a sense, I had made their word flesh.

  At that time, I had not the words to explain to them that what they had seen was not what they called a “Weetigo,” but rather something that we ourselves had brought from the Old World to the New. I suspect that the scarcity of those words likely saved my life, for I could not have answered for their rage if they had known the truth of what Father de Céligny, or whatever the monster’s real name was, had wrought there.

  That they saw me as a saviour instead of merely an extension of the same corruption that destroyed an entire village of souls—a village of innocent men, women, and children, who died without the blessing of baptism and God’s mercy, suited my cowardly purposes, though I wept with shame and grief and guilt that winter when I was alone.

  In my nightmares that winter, I revisited that terrible day when I dragged the sleeping bodies of those poor creatures into the sunlight and listened to their agonized screaming as the sunlight turned them to ash, especially the children. It haunts me that I never discovered if they could have been saved, or returned to their natural state, and if my actions had been a mercy, or merely an extension of the blasphemy.

  In the spring, the Indians passed me on to a brigade of voyageurs who, by some miracle, knew of me and my mission to rescue Father de Céligny and return him to Trois-Rivières. Perhaps in anticipation of a reward, or perhaps only out of charity and a sense of fellowship with another white man, the voyageurs returned me to Trois-Rivières and the embrace of our Jesuit headquarters there.

  Father de Varennes wept with joy, for he had counted me as dead. Together we praised God and the tender mercies of the Blessed Virgin for my safe return from the perils of the wilderness and the incivility of the Savages. We said a Mass for Father de Céligny, our most recent blessed martyr to the barbarous cruelty of the Savages.

  As we said that Mass, Askuwheteau’s face rose up in my mind like an unquiet, reproachful ghost. I added a silent prayer for his forgiveness for all the lies I was about to tell.

  I told Father de Varennes that the Indians had left me near the site of St. Barthélemy. I told him that I had made my way to the mission and had found it burned to the ground.

  I told him I had a sense that a rival tribe, perhaps even the Hiroquois, had slaughtered everyone in the village and left the carrion for the wild animals. I told him that I had found bodies and that I had buried them. I told him I had not found the body of Father de Céligny. I told him that I had thrown myself at the mercy of the Savages who found me, and that I had paid them with gold I had found buried beneath the remains of the Jesuit house.

  Even as I told those lies, I realized that the winter snow and ice would have obliterated any possible evidentiary challenge to my account, even if it were doubted, which it was not. Who would doubt the word of a priest, especially one who had survived such an ordeal?

  I covered myself in shame by blaming the Savages for the massacre of the settlement of St. Barthélemy when I knew that what happened to all of those poor people was something that we, the French had brought into their midst, something that corrupted and afflicted them, and eventually killed them.

  More than anything, I told the lies to prevent anyone from ever returning to the site of the Mission of St. Barthélemy and discovering the secret that I buried in those caves eighteen years ago.

  I am dying now, Your Reverence. I have asked for Father Vimont, who comes shortly to collect this document for your perusal, but also to give me Last Rites and absolve me for my sins, which have been many.

  My body burns with fever from the pox. I fear that the very effort of writing to you this last Relation has hastened my inevitable commendation of my soul to Christ. This Relation is my confession of the things I did, but it is also as I said my true Testament of the things I saw with my own eyes, and I swear to it on peril of my Immortal Soul.

  I know that some who read it will think it the ravings of a madman in the last deliria of fever. I pray that Your Reverence will not number among them, and that you will be able to see into my heart and know that I speak the truth in this Relation.

  Reverend Father, I have lived as a Jesuit, and I die a faithful one. Our way is not the way of ignorance and superstition, but rather of wisdom and learning. And yet, I realize now how much I had yet to learn, and how dangerous was the arrogance I had brought with me from France to this New World. I do not doubt the glory of our work among the Savages, and yet in these final hours of my life, I am plagued by questions and doubts. I realize it is not my place to question.

  But I ponder, Reverend Father, and I pray for wisdom. And I pray for your forgiveness, and for God’s, for the burden of these doubts.

  I have watched these poor people shrivel and die from mysterious illnesses they have blamed on what they call our sorcery. They claim we brought the pox to them. They claim that it did not exist in their world before we arrived. We have wrapped them in our blankets to comfort them, and watched them die, praying for a conversion before death claimed them, a baptism before they breathed their last. We have given them Christian names, and we have buried them under those names. We teach them to reject their customs and beliefs. We teach them to believe they are ignorant and lost for believing in their world of spirits and oracle, while we hold t
he belief that the Devil has them in his thrall.

  And yet, Reverend Father, may God forgive me, I believe I have seen the Devil walking in the forests of New France. But—O, blasphemy of blasphemies! He wore the same robe I wear, and his mission and legacy was a most wicked one. While I pray that I was somehow, through my sad efforts, able to halt the spread of that ungodly contagion, I am haunted by the words of the drunkard Dumont, words I have heard in my nightmares for eighteen years.

  Dumont said: There are worse things now walking in the forests at night than the Savages.

  In light of what I have witnessed, I have searched my poor ignorant soul to know, beyond a doubt, that we do God’s work here. Yea, and that we have brought these people Light and not more darkness. But my soul is silent. Around me, the Indians die, either at our hand, or at least beyond our ability to save them.

  If I have committed blasphemy here, I beg for God’s mercy and forgiveness, and for Your Reverence’s prayers after I am gone. But the account contained in this Relation is true, and I die as I have lived, as Christ’s most humble servant, and Your Reverence’s.

  Ad majorem Dei gloriam.

  Fr. Alphonse Nyon of the Society of Jesus

  Montréal, Québec, 1650

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  First and foremost, my deepest thanks to Brett Savory and Sandra Kasturi of ChiZine Publications, and to the rest of the ChiZine crew, for one of the finest publishing experiences of my career. Thanks also to artist Erik Mohr for the beautiful cover and to Samantha Beiko for her gorgeous interpretation of the town of Parr’s Landing on the endpapers of the collector’s limited edition hardcover. To be a ChiZine author is to be part of the crème de la crème of a new vanguard of speculative fiction, as well as a member of a very special creative family.

  Special thanks to my supremely patient and nurturing agent, Sam Hiyate of The Rights Factory, for his belief in my work, and his unflagging support of it.

  I’m grateful to my great friend, former teacher, and former St. John’s headmaster, Fred Parr, who inculcated in me a fascination for Canadian history in the classroom when I was a teenager, and later shared with me what it was like to grow up in northern Ontario in the early ’70s, as well as some of the folklore of the region. He also read through part of this manuscript, pronounced it worth pursuing, and allowed me to name a town full of vampires after him—not a bad endorsement, all told.

  Thanks to my friend, Elliot Shermet, who let me borrow his first name and physical appearance to create Elliot McKitrick (but not his character or personality, which is infinitely admirable, certainly more so than his fictive counterpart).

  I was very fortunate to have had an extraordinary young writer named Stephen Michell as a research assistant on this project. I am even more fortunate that we became friends over the course of working together on Enter, Night. I look forward to reading Mr. Michell’s own novels in the future, and so will you. Remember his name—you heard it here first, which is my great honour and privilege.

  My friend, author and screenwriter Robert Thomson, generously read through the manuscript of Enter, Night at every point in its evolution and offered his usual superb editorial insights, as well as talking me down from the ledge more than once. My gratitude to him for his kindness is beyond measure, as is my admiration.

  I’d like to thank the powerhouse women of my writer’s group, the Bellefire Club—Sandra Kasturi, Helen Marshall, Sephera Giron, Nancy Baker, Halli Villegas, and Gemma Files, accomplished authors, all—who read part of the seventeenth-century section of the novel, offering insightful advice and encouragement.

  On a purely personal note, Christopher Wirth and Barney EllisPerry are my two oldest friends, and they’ve been agitating for this book since I was using an electric typewriter, as has Werner Warga.

  And Ron Oliver, my constant partner in crime—he’s the one who knows where all the bodies are buried.

  Thanks to Steward Noack for always making New York feel like home to me; Thane MacPherson for his constancy; Chuck Gyles for getting the ball rolling that day in the car on the way home from Kitchener; Michael Thomas Ford and Sephera Giron always picked up the phone; and my dear friend Eliezenai Galvao kept the home fires burning during the writing of it; Mark Wheaton remains a personal hero as well as one of my most precious friends; Helen Marshall kept vigil and wielded a dexterous editorial scalpel; and Helen Oliver— my “second mum”—always seemed to know just when to call with encouragement and love. So did Tabatha Southey, who came bearing cocktails and divertissements.

  Likewise, immeasurable thanks to my great friend, J. Marc Côté, for too many reasons to list here.

  I’d like to acknowledge my father, Alan Rowe, and my stepmother, Sarah Doughty, a very great lady who came late into my life, but who has left an indelible impression on my heart.

  I would also like to acknowledge my late mother, Helen Hardt Rowe, who bought me a paperback copy of Dracula at ten, and my first typewriter at eleven, but never told me what I could or couldn’t write on it. I think she would have been proud of Enter, Night, vampires or not.

  Lastly, to Brian McDermid, my husband, who makes all things possible, and to Shaw Madson, the heart of our family—this book belongs to you, offered with my love and thanks.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Michael Rowe was born in Ottawa in 1962 and has lived in Beirut, Havana, Geneva, and Paris. An award-winning journalist, essayist, and editor, he is the author of several books, including Writing Below the Belt, a critically acclaimed study of censorship, pornography, and popular culture, and the essay collections Looking For Brothers and Other Men’s Sons, which won the 2008 Randy Shilts Award for Non-fiction. He has also won the Lambda Literary Award, the Queer Horror Award, and the Spectrum Award, and has been a finalist for the International Horror Guild Award and the National Magazine Award. He was, for 17 years, the first-tier Canadian correspondent for Fangoria. In 2002, Clive Barker credited him with “forever changing the shape of horror fiction” with his original anthologies, Queer Fear and Queer Fear 2. He is married and lives in Toronto. This is his first novel. Visit him at www.michaelrowefiction.com.