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 bedroom.
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.”
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 reached 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.
Goddamn deathtrap. The thought hovered in his mind with the weight of a portent. Thomson was oddly glad he hadn’t said the words out loud.
Elliot’s voice echoed from deeper inside the ruins. “Sarge, I’m in here. Follow my voice. Use your flashlight-you can find me. Just listen to my voice.”
“Elliot, what the hell are you up to? What are you doing in here? Cut this shit pronto, mister, and come out right now!”
“Sarge, come over here. I found something you need to see. I think I know what happened in Gyles Point. I think I know who that hockey bag belonged to. It’s worse than we thought.”
Thomson’s heart quickened. “Elliot, what are you on about? And why are you here?” A thought suddenly came to him. “Is it the Indian? Is it Lightning?”
“No.” Elliot’s voice sounded as though he were standing right in front of Thomson now, though he still couldn’t see anything except what was directly in font of him, illuminated by the flashlight beam. “It’s worse. It’s much, much worse than that.”
Then Elliot stepped into the beam of his flashlight. He was nude, his body smeared with a brownish-red substance that looked like dried blood.
Thomson dropped the flashlight. He barely had time to shout “Jesus fucking Christ!” before Elliot, almost casually, reached out with one bare arm and tossed his sergeant halfway across the arena.
Then Elliot was astride his chest. The fingers of one hand gathered Thomson’s hair and brutally yanking his head to one side, while the fingernails of the other hand ripped through his uniform shirt and jacket like they were wet toilet paper.
Thomson kneed Elliot as hard as he could, using the force of his legs to throw him off balance. Gaining a momentary advantage, Thomson scrambled to the side, reaching for his revolver by instinct and pointing it at the indistinct shape crouching in front of him.
He fired twice, again on instinct. In the flare from the gunfire, he saw the bullets slam into Elliot’s torso, and then heard them thud into a wall somewhere outside his limited vision. In that short glimpse, Thomson feared he had lost control of his own senses, because as far as he could tell, the bullets had left no trace of a wound.
Thomson’s subconscious mind registered that Elliot was not alone, that there were other shapes crouching there behind him in the blackness, horribly patient shapes that undulated and twisted languorously as though undecided about what form they would ultimately choose to take.
Then Elliot stood up and said, “Coming for you now, Sarge.”
“Elliot, get back!” he gasped. He aimed the gun in the general vicinity of Elliot’s voice. “I mean it! Get… right… back…!”
Those were the last words Dave Thomson ever spoke before Elliot McKitrick-whom Thomson hadn’t even seen move-tore out Thomson’s throat with his teeth. The last thing Thomson felt was the wet warmth of his own blood on his face, and Elliot’s mouth fastened on the wound, sucking the arterial spray as his life ran out of his body and into the body of the thing astride him whom he’d once wished was his son.
Finn woke to the sound of breaking glass and his mother’s screaming. He had been dreaming that his father had come home with Sadie riding in the passenger seat of the car, her nose out the window and her wet red tongue lolling foolishly from the side of her muzzle, tasting the wind. In the dream, it was daylight-which proved the dream’s ultimate undoing, because Finn suddenly remembered in his sleep that it was night, and that Sadie had burned up in front of him that morning above Bradley Lake.
He sat up quickly and listened to his mother shrieking in pain and terror. There were crashes that sounded like furniture splintering, and the sound of more shattering glass. Oh, please, God, Finn prayed. Not again! Enough already, please. Aloud, he screamed “Mommy!” and jumped out of bed, wrenching his bedroom door open and taking the stairs two at a time until he was standing in the living room.
What Finn saw, by the light of the table lamp on the floor casting crazy shadows on the wall, was that his father had indeed come home to them. Around him, shards of broken glass from the front picture window twinkled in the light like icicles growing out of the green wall-to-wall carpet.
Hank Miller’s body skewed at a horrible angle as though his bones had all been broken and somehow reassembled in haste, with no concern for either aesthetics or practical mechanics. Finn had barely passed science last year in school, but even with his deficient knowledge of human anatomy, he knew that there was no possible way the shambling, disjointed, horror movie staple standing behind his mother, holding her by the shoulders could possibly be able to stand up, let alone move towards him-even at such a tortured, dislocated pace, pushing his mother in front of him like a wheeled dolly.
And yet, he-it-did exactly that.
“Finn,” said his father through a mouthful of teeth that Finn had only ever seen in the pages of The Tomb of Dracula, “you should be asleep. Go back to bed. I’ll come and tuck you in after I’ve finished speaking with your mother.”
Then Hank Miller opened his mouth wider than Finn could ever have dreamed possible and buried those terrible new teeth in his mother’s neck.
Finn and his mother shrieked at exactly the same time-and Finn again felt that odd communion with her that he’d felt hours before when his mother briefly appeared to consider the possibility that vampires had carried off Sadie and his father.
This time, however, when their eyes met, the automatic, dismissive adult façade didn’t descend and obliterate the moment.
Rather, as Anne Miller’s eyes rolled up in her head, almost regretfully, Finn imagined her saying, Well, Finn, you were right. There are such things as vampires. I guess one of them did get Sadie. Now, you’d better run before your father gets you.
Hank dropped his wife’s lifeless body on the floor, the bottom half of his face wet and red. He licked his teeth almost curiously, seeming to Finn as though his father were feeling them for the first time, like a child on Christmas morning with a new toy-a dangerous one that he wanted to enjoy before some nosey adult figured out just what to do with it.
“Finnegan,” Hank said, opening his arms. Finn noticed that his nails had grown. “Come here. Let’s go find Sadie. She’s up at Spirit Rock waiting for us.” He stepped over his wife’s body and took a step towards his son. “Come here.”
“You’re not my father,” Finn said backing away. “Get away from me.”
He looked around wildly for a weapon, but could find nothing on the floor, or on the table, or the walls. His father took another step towards him, and Finn caught the smell of Hank’s breath, the copper whiff of his own mother’s blood on his father’s lips.
“Our Father which art in Heaven,” Finn shouted, pointing his finger at his father. “Hallowed be Thy name! Thy kingdom come! Thy will be done on earth as it is in Heaven!”
Hank clapped his hands over his ears and roared, stumbling backwards, his awkward, broken body tripping and falling over the upturned, blood-spattered orange corduroy easy chair.
“Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us!”
Finn reached down and snatched up two pieces of a broken table. He swung them together in the shape of a cross and pushed it into his father’s face.
It’s like a picture tube just blew up in a television, Finn thought from somewhere far outside his own deadly panic, wincing in the sudden bedazzlement of blue light.
Acrid smoke burned Finn’s eyes and seared his nostrils as he stepped back, coughing.
Finn wasn’t sure if he heard the piercing ululation come from his father’s own throat, or whether it was merely, suddenly, everywhere at once, from some outside place beyond the parameters of the world as it was. Finn felt the air move with it, and he felt the sound in his teeth. There was pure agony in that sound, and Finn was viciously, triumphantly glad of it.
And then Hank was… something else.
Through the blue mist emanating from his father’s body, Finn saw wings grow where his father’s arms had been, wings that extended the length of the living room before they began to shimmer and dwindle even as Hank stumbled forward to where Anne’s body lay crumpled on the green carpet.
As he watched, his father knelt down and scissored his legs around his mother’s waist, cinching it tightly between his thighs. There was wind in Finn’s face and his hair blew backwards as his father’s wings flapped, then flapped again. Hank backed away towards the window, awkward and spraddle-legged with the weight of his mother’s body still clenched between his legs.
He leaned against the jagged mouth of broken glass where the window had been shattered and tilted his broken body at an impossible angle, half-in, half-out of the living room, craning his dislocated neck forward so he could look Finn in the eye.
“Goddamn you, you little piece of fucking shit,” Hank said. “I’m coming back for you.”
Then Finn saw his father tumble backward, outside, airborne, rising into the night with the lifeless body of his mother hanging from his talons like dreadful ballast.
He rushed to the window, but it was too late-he thought he caught one last glimpse of his mother’s blonde hair in the moonlight, but the flash of it was gone before he could be sure of anything except that his hands were bleeding from the broken glass, and he was alone in the house, and it would be hours yet before the dawn.
Morgan, who usually slept like the dead, was the first person to be woken by the sound of Finn banging on the front door of Parr House half an hour before dawn.
She rubbed the sleep from her eyes and squinted at the clock beside her bed. It was six forty-five. Outside her window, there was a barely perceptible sense of lightening in the sky, but the darkness was still nearly absolute.
The banging came again. Morgan swung her feet over the side of her bed and picked up her bathrobe where it lay on the chair beside her nightstand. Then she went into the hallway and started down the stairs.
Jeremy’s sleepy voice carried from the landing above. “Morgan? Is that you? What’s going on? Who’s at the door?”
“I don’t know, Uncle Jeremy. I just heard it now. It woke me up.”
“Wait for me,” he said. “Don’t open the door. I’ll do it, hopefully before your grandmother hears it and makes Beatrice dish up whoever’s pulverizing that door for breakfast.”
Christina’s door opened. “Morgan? Jeremy? What’s going on? Who’s at the door?” She belted her own bathrobe and ran her fingers through her hair, less through vanity than by reflex.
Jeremy hurried down the stairs past both Christina and Morgan. “I don’t know, Chris,” he said over his shoulder. “But whoever it is, he’s playing with his life if my mother gets to him first.”
Jeremy stared at the boy standing in the doorway. He’d never seen him before. The boy’s fist was poised as if to bang on the door again. His face was puffy and pale, his hair askew. Like them, he wore pyjamas, but his were muddy and ripped at the ankle as though he had torn them running. Clutched tightly in the boy’s other hand was a jar full of some sort of clear liquid that looked like water.
“Hi,” Jeremy said, confused. “Can I help you?”
“I need to see Morgan,” the boy said. “Please?”
“Morgan?” Jeremy glanced at the staircase where Christina and Morgan stood waiting for him to identify who had woken them. “Morgan, honey, there’s a… you have a visitor. Uh, come in, kid.”
Jeremy looked from Christina to Morgan, and then back at the boy, who took a few tentative steps across the threshold, onto the marble floor. Jeremy noticed that his feet were bare and bleeding.
Morgan hurried down the stairs and stopped in front of the doorway. “Finn? What are you doing here? Are you OK?” She stared at him blankly, as though trying to reconcile Finn’s bedraggled appearance in the foyer of Parr House before dawn. Morgan looked at her mother. “Mom, this is Finn Miller, my friend. The one I told you about? The one who walked me home?”
Christina stared at the dirty, half-dressed boy in the foyer. “Of course,” she said automatically, extending he hand. He stared at it blankly. “Hi, Finn,” she said. “I’m Morgan’s mom. This is her uncle, Jeremy. Come inside where it’s warm.
Then Christina took his full, unkempt, tattered measure with instinctive maternal tenderheartedness. She was horrified by what she saw-dirt, blood, dried tear-tracks on his cheeks sluicing through the grime. “Are you OK, Finn? What happened? Where are your clothes? Why are you in your pyjamas? Where’s your mom?”
The last question turned the key in the lock of Finn’s composure. He stumbled into Christina’s arms and collapsed there, weeping. Again, instinctively, Christina gathered Finn in her arms and held him tightly while he sobbed. She could barely understand what the boy was saying, but she made out the words Mommy, my father, Sadie, window broke, and dead. Then there were more sobs, even more wracking this time than before.
“What’s going on?” Jeremy whispered to Morgan. “Who is this kid? Where are his parents?”
Morgan shrugged and shook her head. “He’s Finn. He’s my friend. He lives over on Childs Drive. He lost his dog a couple of days ago.”
“Sadie died.” Finn turned his wet face away from Christina’s shoulder. “She burned up. We were going for a walk and she went to catch a ball I threw, then she burned up.”
Jeremy said, “What do you mean ‘she burned up’? Finn? That doesn’t make sense. What are you saying?”
“Hush, Jeremy, let him talk,” Christina said over the top of Finn’s head. Then, to Finn, “Sadie is your dog, is she? Did she get lost?”
“No, she’s dead. She burned up.” His voice was calm now, and matter-of-fact.
Shock, Christina thought. Just like my voice when I first heard about Jack’s car crash. Whatever has happened to this little boy is obviously very, very bad.
“And then my dad went to look for Sadie last night,” Finn continued. “He didn’t come home for dinner, or even later. My mom was so sad, and she waited up for him. She was worried. She called the police. Then she told me to go to bed. And then… and then my dad came home. He killed my mom. He came in through the window. He broke it. There was glass all over the place, and then he… then he bit my mom and he… he… took her with him. Out. Out the window!”
“Finn,” Christina said carefully, looking only at him. “Were you in the house all night? When this… well, when this happened-whatever happened to your mom and dad? Were you there all night, in the house?”
“No,” he said in a hushed voice. “I got away-I hid.”
“Where did you hide, Finn?”
He hesitated. “I went to the church. I went to St. Bart’s. I got in through the basement window. I waited there till I knew grownups would be awake. When the sun was going to come up.”
He held out his hand, still clutching the jar full of liquid. When Christina tried to take it out of his hand to examine it, he held on more tightly. But when she said, “Shhhh, let me look,” and gave him another little squeeze, he let her take the jar.
Christina held it up. “What is this, Finn? What’s in here?”
“Holy water,” Finn said. “It’s holy water. In case my dad comes back.”
“The phone’s out at Finn’s house,” Jeremy said, replacing the receiver in its cradle.
“Are you sure you got the right number, Uncle Jeremy?” Morgan looked down at the open Parr’s Landing directory on the table. “Do you want me to read the number to you again?”
“No, sweetie-I’ve tried it twice now. No answer. His folks aren’t picking up.”
Morgan’s voice quavered. “What if it means they-what if it means they’re hurt or something?”
“I’m sure they’re fine,” Jeremy said. Even has he spoke, he realized how ridiculously adult and fake-rational he sounded. Yes, of course, by all means-a little boy stumbles through the door of Parr House at seven in the morning and says his dog burst into flames and that his father broke through a window and murdered his mother, and you assure your fifteen-year-old niece that you’re “sure” they’re “fine.” You sound like your mother right now, Jeremy Parr. “I’ll take a run over there in a few minutes, Morgan. I’ll knock on the door and see what’s what.”
“OK,” she said. “Can I come?”
“Absolutely not,” he said. “You stay here with your mother and your friend. I’ll be right back. And Morgan?”
“What?”
“Go on upstairs and knock-very gently-on your grandmother’s bedroom door and tell her we have a bit of an emergency situation going on here.”
“What’ll I say?”
“Tell her… tell her you have a friend who got hurt.” When he saw the trepidation on Morgan’s face, he smiled comfortingly and said, “It’ll be all right. She’s not going to bite your head off. You’re the one she loves, even if she doesn’t like the rest of us much.”
“Yeah, right,” Morgan said. “She hates me, too. Why can’t Beatrice do it?”
It suddenly occurred to Jeremy that there were none of the usual pre-breakfast sounds coming from inside the kitchen-no cutlery being laid out, and no clatter of china plates being placed on the mahogany sideboard in the dining room. Where was Beatrice? He’d never known her to be late-not in a lifetime of meticulously orchestrated breakfasts at Parr House.
“I don’t think Beatrice is here yet,” he said slowly. “And no, your grandmother doesn’t hate you. Now, wait till five minutes after I leave, then knock on her door.”
Morgan sighed. “OK, Uncle Jeremy. I will.”
“Good girl. Now, go wait in the sitting room with your mother and your friend. I’m going to run upstairs and get dressed, then go and check out his story. Go see if your mom needs anything for Finn.”
The Miller house on Childs Drive was exactly as Finn had described it- entirely nondescript except for the fact that the picture window facing the street was shattered.
When Jeremy entered the house-trying the door handle and finding it unlocked and, indeed, empty-he saw that the broken glass from the window was sprayed all over the carpet. There was none on the scrubby lawn outside. In other words, whoever had broken it had done so by smashing it from the outside.
Jeremy looked dubiously at the lawn. How did he get in here, assuming someone had? On a trampoline? Did he pole-vault in? He examined the glass on the floor, nudging it with his foot. Under an orange corduroy cushion he saw that the carpet was stained a brownish-red. He reached down and touched it. The carpet was still sticky, and his finger came away smeared red. Uh-oh, Jeremy thought. This isn’t good. Not good at all.
Fighting rising panic, Jeremy called out, “Hello? Is anyone here? Mrs. Miller? Mr. Miller?”
There was no answer. Jeremy would have been surprised had he received one. In a corner of the dining room floor, he saw the wall telephone. The jack had been ripped out of the wall, the exposed wires protruding like bones. He thought of checking the rest of the rooms in the house, but he already knew they would empty and he didn’t want to spend one more minute here than he had to.
“OK,” Jeremy said aloud. The rawness of his own voice in the grey dawn light filling the living room from the broken window startled him. “OK,” he said again, trying to sound calm and reasonable, if only to himself.
“Morgan, I know what happened to Sadie,” Finn said weakly. “I know what happened to my parents.”
“What happened, Finn?”
They were seated together on a divan in Adeline’s sitting room off the foyer. Finn had calmed down somewhat, but was still shaking from head to toe. Little bodily earthquakes, unsettling him.
From the kitchen, Morgan heard Christina making breakfast in Adeline’s vast kitchen. Her grandmother was still not up, and Morgan had not gone up to check on her as Uncle Jeremy had asked. Instead, she’d sat in an uncomfortably spindly chair next to the divan where Finn sat.
Finn turned his face away as though he changed his mind. “You wouldn’t believe me,” he said. “No one will. You’ll just say I’m crazy, or fibbing. My mom didn’t believe me, and now she’s dead.”
“Finn, try me,” she prodded. “Tell me. I’m your friend. I’ll believe you.”
“No, you won’t.”
“Yes, I will,” she said urgently. “Just tell me.”
While Christina made breakfast in the kitchen, Finn, trusting her, told Morgan everything.
He told her about Sadie’s gruesome end in the sunlight two mornings ago above Bradley Lake. He told her of his father’s disappearance, and his return.
He told her about his mother’s murder, how he drove his father out of the living room with the Lord’s Prayer and the two pieces of smashed table leg in the shape of the cross. He told her how he crouched in his bedroom for an hour afterwards, watching his bedroom door, his pyjamas stained with gouts of his mother’s blood, clutching the two shards of broken wood, thinking he heard footsteps pacing the floorboards through the living room and the kitchen above him but not being sure, not daring to move from his spot to find out.
Finn told her about fleeing the house on his Schwinn, watching the skies as best he could, all the while knowing that if something came to carry him off, he would be powerless to stop it. He told her of spending the night crouched near a statue of the Virgin Mary near the baptismal font at St. Barthélemy and the Martyrs, only leaving when he was sure dawn was right around the corner, and that there would be adults awake in the houses around him, adults that might be able to protect him from whatever was surely hunting him even as he cycled like the wind all the way up the hill to Parr House, and the safety of Morgan.
Morgan was silent for a long moment. The she said, “Finn, this is like something out of one of your comic books. You realize that, don’t you?”
He raised himself on his elbow and said furiously, “I told you, you wouldn’t believe me! I said!”
“Finn-”
“Never mind! I mean it! Never… mind!” He stood up abruptly, almost knocking over his jar of water-holy water, Morgan supposed, since she believed him about having spent the night in the church.
“Finn, are you feeling better?” Christina stood in the doorway with a glass of orange juice. “I’ve made some breakfast. Are you hungry? Morgan’s uncle isn’t back yet, but he will be soon.” She extended the glass of juice, but he didn’t move to take it.
Finn looked from Morgan to Christina, then back again. His expression was hard for Christina to read-thwarted anger, longing, terror. Grief, definitely. But mostly, it seemed, terrible frustration.
Christina said, “Finn?”
He picked up his jar of holy water and ran out of the sitting room. They heard the sound of his bare feet on the marble foyer floor, then the sound of the front door being flung open, then slamming shut.
“Morgan, what happened? What did you say to him?”
“Nothing! He started telling me this story…”
“What story? What did he tell you?”
“Something about…” Morgan looked at her mother’s bewildered face, and faltered.
It was one thing for Morgan herself not to believe Finn. She was a kid, too-well, a teenager, but still. It would be something else to for her to tell her mother the crazy story and have Christina think Finn was crazy. It seemed disloyal, somehow.
Finn had been the only friend she’d had since they arrived, and all he’d ever been was kind to her. And how had she repaid him? By doing the one thing she knew would hurt him-treating his vampire comic book obsession like a joke. She hadn’t intended to, of course, but he clearly believed what he had told her. The least she could have done was listen to Finn and trust that he believed what he was saying, and keep her big fat trap shut. She was such an idiot.
“Morgan Louise Parr, what did that boy say before he ran out of here? You tell me right now!”
“He said… he said something about his mom and dad.”
“What did he say?”
“I don’t know. He wasn’t making sense. And then you… and then he just ran out of here. You saw him. I don’t know why, he just did.”
They heard the door click open again, then shut. Christina called out, “Finn?”
“No, it’s me.” Jeremy’s voice came from the foyer. He walked into the sitting room. From his face, Christina and Morgan knew the news wasn’t going to be good.
“Where’s Finn?” Jeremy said, looking blankly around the sitting room.
“He left,” Morgan said. “He just ran out of here.”
“What do you mean ‘he ran out of here’? Where did he go? His bicycle is gone, too. Weren’t you watching him?”
“Yes, we were watching him, Jeremy,” Christina snapped. “But he just jumped up and bolted out of here a few minutes ago. We couldn’t stop him. We tried.”
“Well, I went to his house. It’s not good, Chris. There’s glass everywhere, all over the floor. And I think… Morgan, would you excuse your mother and I for a minute?”
“I’m fifteen,” she said. “I’m not a baby.”
“You think what?” Christina snapped, ignoring them both.
“I think there’s blood on the carpet. It looks like something pretty awful did happen-maybe a fight between the mother and the father that went wrong. Got violent.”
Christina said, “Did you call the police?”
“The phone was ripped out of the wall. No way to call. I thought of finding a phone booth, but I decided to stop by the police station in person on the way back here and report it instead.”
“And? What did the police say? Are they going to check it out?”
“Well,” Jeremy said, “it was the damnedest thing. The station was empty.”
“What do you mean the police station was empty? How could it be empty? It’s a police station!”
“I don’t know how it could be empty, Christina. But it was. The lights were on and the front door was unlocked. It’s like they went out for coffee last night without even bothering to close up, then just didn’t come in for work today.”
Christina sat down heavily on the divan. “None of this makes any sense. And now that poor boy is running around outside in his pyjamas. He obviously saw something happen to his parents that upset him. Morgan, does he have any relatives in town, do you know? Or friends? Why did he come here?”
“I think he came here because I’m his… well, I think I’m his only friend,” she said. “He’s never mentioned anyone else. All Finn does is read Dracula comics and play with his dog. Her name’s Sadie. She ran away a couple of nights ago. Remember, I went over to see him? He was really upset about it. I wanted to go see him yesterday, too, on the way to school, but you were too busy to take me.” She added reproachfully, “Remember?”
Christina sighed. “Morgan, would you just stick to Finn? Did you see him again? Was he OK?”
“I went over his house at lunchtime. I knocked, but no one answered. That was the last time, until this morning.”
Christina took a deep breath and tried to marshal her thoughts. “All right. OK. One step at a time. Morgan, shouldn’t you be getting ready for school?”
“It’s Saturday, Mom.” Morgan rolled her eyes. “There’s no school today, even in Parr’s Landing.”
Jeremy frowned. “Morgan, did you check on your grandmother like I asked you to?
“No, Uncle Jeremy. I was talking to Finn. I’m sorry.”
“It’s almost nine and I haven’t seen her at all this morning. Have you, Chris?”
“No,” Christina said. “She hasn’t been down. And Beatrice didn’t come in this morning, either. I made breakfast, and no one came into the kitchen to tell me what a disaster I was, or how I was doing it wrong, or what a mess I was making.”
Jeremy smiled wanly, then sighed. “All right, I’ll go up and check on her.”
Jeremy rapped lightly on the door of Adeline’s bedroom and called out, “Mother? It’s me, Jeremy. Are you all right? It’s almost nine o’clock.”
He expected to hear a stinging rebuke of some sort issuing through the mahogany door, but there was only silence in the gloom of the upstairs hallway. He gently turned the cut glass doorknob and pushed. The door swung easily into the room. Jeremy blinked.
The bed looked like it hadn’t been slept in. The bedspread was smooth, the pillows-fluffed up every evening by Beatrice before she was allowed to leave for the day-were propped against the ornate headboard of Adeline Parr’s bed. Her perfumes and brushes were lined up on her dressing table the way they always were.
More, though-there was a sense of dry airlessness in the room, as though the door had been left shut for much longer than just the night.
“Mother?” he called out again, in case she was in her bathroom. But no, the door was open. He saw that the bathtub was dry, as were the sinks and the floor.
Glancing guiltily around him, Jeremy crossed to Adeline’s dressing table and opened the bottom left-hand drawer. He lifted up the file folders he found there and saw that the money he’d found yesterday- almost a thousand dollars, as he’d told Christina-was still in place.
Joy rose in him. The money was still there, which meant that they could leave whenever they wanted to. Adeline’s absence would have been completely fortuitous in this regard, except that now this Miller kid had disappeared and he doubted very much that he would be able to pry either Christina or Morgan away from the Landing until he surfaced again.
Jeremy only prayed that his mother didn’t return anytime soon from whatever errand or assignation had taken her away from the house so early this morning. It would just make stealing her money and escaping from her house that much easier. He considered pocketing the money now, but realized that if Adeline came home abruptly and saw that the money was missing, the consequences of her fury would be unthinkable. No, better to take it at the last possible minute, before Adeline had time to even realize it was gone.
In the least emotionally involved and most tangential way, Jeremy wondered where his mother was. But Jeremy was a child of Parr House, and he realized that the times when he could enjoy Adeline’s absence had been few enough in his years here that he should appreciate them when they occurred. Better not to risk breaking the spell by asking questions.
The three of them ate breakfast in the kitchen, not the dining room. They mostly ate in silence, each deep in his or her own thoughts.
Jeremy tried to signal with his eyes to Christina, to remind her about their escape plan, but she stared at her plate of scrambled eggs and barely touched them.
Morgan was thinking about betrayal and how her thoughtless dismissal of Finn at his most vulnerable had sent him fleeing from the house at the moment he needed Morgan the most. And now he was somewhere outside, afraid to go home, terrified that the vampires in his comic books were real, and that they had laid siege to his family and his dog.
Then Christina said, “I’m going to call Billy Lightning. I’m going to call him at the motel and meet him in town and talk about this.”
Jeremy looked surprised. He laid down his coffee cup. “You are?
Why?”
“Because I trust him, Jeremy. Aside from you and Morgan-who frankly don’t know any more than I do about what’s happening here-he’s the only person in this town I trust. He knows a lot about this town and the things that have happened here over the years. And he has a truck. We may need it to look for Finn later, especially if he’s gone into the woods to look for his dog or something.”
“Mom, I told you, his dog is dead,” Morgan said. “Finn said the dog burned up.”
“Morgan,” Christina said patiently. “Finn’s dog didn’t ‘burn up.’ Dogs don’t ‘burn up.’ He’s probably so rattled by what he saw last night-and I can’t believe we’re not talking to the police about this because the Parr’s Landing police detachment forgot to come in to work today-that he’s imagining it. He’s probably had a spell of some sort. Anyway, Billy might know what to do, so I’m going to call him.”
“Christina,” Jeremy said, rolling his eyes surreptitiously. “Remember what we talked about…?” He mouthed today, his head angled in a way that Morgan couldn’t see his face. Christina shook her head almost imperceptibly and walked out of the room, towards the phone.
Morgan and Jeremy heard her dialling, then asking to be connected to Billy Lightning’s room. There was a brief, muffled conversation, then Christina returned to the dining room carrying her purse.
“I’ll be back soon,” she said. “Morgan, would you please stay here until we figure out what’s going on? Jeremy, would you keep an eye on her?”
“Mom! I’m not-”
“Yes, Morgan, I know you’re not a baby. So please, do as I ask and don’t leave the house until I get back. All right?”
Morgan sighed theatrically, then softened when she saw the fear on her mother’s face. “All right, Mom, don’t worry. I’ll stay here.”
“You can take advantage of your grandmother’s absence to do some exploring,” Jeremy said. “It’s a big house, and you haven’t seen much of it so far. With Adeline away, the mice can play.”
“Thanks, Jeremy,” Christina said gratefully. “I won’t be long.”
Behind the wheel of the Chevelle, Christina noticed how empty the streets were for a Saturday morning-how she passed no other cars on the road and there was no one hurrying along the sidewalks. Even with weather this raw, there ought to be people living their lives. Parr’s Landing was a tough town-weather was what they lived with, not what dictated how they lived.
That damnable cold rain began to fall again, and she turned on the windshield wipers.
When she pulled up in front of the Pear Tree, she saw Billy Lightning huddled under the awning by the front entrance, waiting for her. When he saw her, he brightened visibly and hurried over to the car. She rolled down the window. “Why are you waiting out here in the rain? Climb in before you get soaked.”
Billy shrugged, opening the door and sliding into the passenger seat. “It’s closed, I guess. Locked up tight as a-” He blushed furiously. “Well, it’s closed.”
“Really?” Christina was surprised. “The Pear Tree is always open for breakfast.”
“Closed today,” Billy said. “Let’s go to the Nugget. I passed Mr. Marin sitting at the counter having coffee on the way here.” He grinned. “How about a lift? I walked over there before the rain started.”
“Sure thing.”
“Pretty dead today, isn’t it?” Billy said mildly, looking out the passenger-side window. “I haven’t seen many people out today, even with the rain. Is there some sort of town ordinance about people staying indoors on Saturday mornings in the Landing?”
Christina squinted through rain streaming across the windshield as the sign for the Golden Nugget came into view. “I noticed that myself on the way over here. I don’t know what the hell is going on.”
Again, they were alone in the diner. Billy wondered idly how poor Darcy Marin, the owner of the Nugget, made enough money to live, between his nearly empty motel and this albatross of a diner than never seemed to have any customers in it. But the coffee was hot and it was warm inside, in sharp contrast to the rain that was now falling in earnest, and cold enough to become snow before sunset.
“Something very odd is happening in Parr’s Landing and I don’t know what, exactly. But I need to talk to you,” Christina said.
Billy raised his eyebrows. “I love a mystery. And it sure wouldn’t be the first mystery that ever occurred here.”
“It’s sort of serious,” she said. “Have you seen the police today?”
He smiled. “No, why? Am I in trouble-again? Is McKitrick going to arrest me for having dinner with you the other night?”
“Billy, please,” Christina pleaded. “I’m serious.”
Billy sighed. “OK, I’ll bite. No, Christina, I haven’t seen the police today. Why?”
“Early this morning, a friend of Morgan’s woke us up at the house,” she began. “Finn, his name is. He said his parents had been killed-to be precise, he said that his father had murdered his mother. Jeremy went over to check the house. He said the front window was broken and that there was blood on the floor. He went to report it at the police station, but no one was there-not Elliot, not his sergeant. Jeremy said the lights were on and the door was unlocked.”
“So someone was in the station at some point that morning?”
“Jeremy told us it seemed like the lights had been left on all night.”
Billy regarded her skeptically. “How does he figure that?”
“He said all the lights were on,” she said, “When you come in, in the morning to open up an office, you don’t turn all the lights on-just the ones you’ll be using.”
“So what are we to assume, then? That the Parr’s Landing police department has taken a holiday?”
“I don’t know, Billy,” she said fiercely. “But I do know that there’s a little boy out there who claims he saw his mother get killed by his father, but there’re no police around to report it to.”
Billy was silent for a long moment. To Christina he seemed about to share something, but the moment passed. Instead, he reached for his coffee cup.
“Billy, what is it?” She reached for his hand and touched it lightly. “Why did you come back here?” Christina said. “What did you hope to find here? I mean, in Parr’s Landing. You hinted at it the other day, but you said you didn’t want to talk about it. Do you still not want to talk about it?”
He sighed. “You’ll think I’m crazy and paranoid.”
“No,” she said. “I won’t. I don’t think you could be either of those things.”
“I think my father was murdered by that graduate student I told you about, Richard Weal. I think Weal was the one who killed him, and I believe he either has, or will, come back to Parr’s Landing. I feel it in my bones. Listening to this story scares the crap out of me.”
Christina looked at him dubiously. “Billy, even if that’s true-even if it’s true that this guy killed your dad, why on earth would he come back here?”
“You didn’t see him that summer, Christina,” Billy said impatiently. “You didn’t hear him raving about the voices he heard coming from under Spirit Rock. You didn’t see his face when they found him hiding out after he hurt Emory Greer. This is where he first ‘lost it,’ as they say. This is where he went crazy. Like a lot of other people over the years have gone crazy here and killed people.”
“Again-I’m sorry, Billy, but how would you find him, even if he did return? What would you do with him? You’re not a cop; you’re not a private detective. You’re a university professor.” Christina hesitated, unsure how best to phrase what she was about to say next. “I don’t have a home to go back to. You do. Wouldn’t the best way to honour your father’s memory be to go back to your teaching life? I wish I could leave here, but Jeremy and I are stuck, at least for the moment. You’re free as a bird. Is this town really where you want to be?”
“Christina,” he said slowly. “I saw a hockey bag. Some kid found it up by Spirit Rock when he was looking for his dog, apparently. It was full of hammers and knives. There was blood on them. And there were some-some personal artefacts of my father’s. Some documents. The police have the bag. They’ve sent it off for fingerprints. I think they hope they’ll find mine on it, but they won’t. They’ll find his.”
“Wait a minute. Oh my God. Did you say the kid was looking for his dog? Is that what you said?”
Billy was confused. “Yeah, that’s what the cops told me. Why?”
“Because that’s Morgan’s friend-the one who came to our door this morning.” Christina’s voice had jumped an octave. “He lost his dog up there on the cliffs. Sadie, her name was Sadie.”
Billy let out a low whistle. “You’ve got to be kidding me. The same kid who found Weal’s hockey bag was banging on your door this morning claiming he saw his mother murdered, but there are no cops around? They’re around to harass me for just daring to be in Parr’s Landing, but when there’s an actual crime, they take a break from police work?”
“Can you really picture Elliot McKitrick taking ‘a break’ from being a cop, Billy? Do you really think he just flaked off the job? My God.”
Privately, Billy couldn’t picture it, no. Not a chance. That young tight ass wouldn’t know how to take a break from being a cop, not even for money. Especially not with me in town, Billy thought. But neither did Billy want to escalate this situation-whatever it was-by giving Christina any further reason to panic. At least not yet.
Billy didn’t believe the kid had mistaken Richard Weal for his father, but it was 1972, not 1872, or even 1952. Surely whatever madness had historically afflicted the inhabitants of this place wasn’t still afflicting them after all this time? The anthropologist in him had always been intrigued by the persistent legends of this part of northern Ontario, but Billy didn’t believe in ghosts or demons or the Wendigo.
“I think we need to find a cop, Christina. I can’t believe I actually just said that, but we need some help. I suggest we pay up here, then take a drive past the Parr’s Landing police station and find either the young jackass or the old one. Any cop in a storm,” he said lamely, trying to make a joke.
But Christina didn’t laugh and, of course, neither did Billy.
Outside, the rain had turned to wet snow, and the skies were bitter and dark with low-hanging clouds, the same argentite colour as the cliffs.
The police station was as Jeremy had found it that morning-still empty, still illuminated. Billy thought briefly about searching for the hockey bag with his father’s manuscript in it, but there was a fine line between checking out a bizarre story about an abandoned police station and committing an actual crime by tampering with tagged evidence.
He looked through the station window where Christina watched him anxiously from the Chevelle. He shook his head at her: Nope, no one here.
After Billy got back in the car, Christina said, “What now?” Billy thought for a moment, then said, “Let’s go back to your mother-in-law’s Norman chateau. It might be worth talking to Morgan about her friend, Finn. He may have told her something that might help us find him before he-”
“Before he what?”
“Before it gets any colder,” Billy said quickly.
They found Finn huddled by the side of the hill leading up to the driveway to Parr House as though he was trying to decide whether to proceed up to the house itself.
Finn was leaning against his Schwinn, his pyjamas stiff with icy rain. In the basket of his bike, Christina saw that he still had the mason jar of water he’d brought into the house that morning-‘holy water,’ he’d called it, whatever that meant. Finn’s body was shaking dangerously. He was clearly skirting hypothermia.
“For the love of God,” Christina said, slamming on the brakes. “What on earth is he doing out in this rain?”
Billy said, “That’s the kid? That’s Morgan’s friend?”
“Yes! Billy, get him, would you? Put him in the back seat? Mother of Christ.”
Billy opened his door and ran out to where Finn stood. Christina couldn’t hear what Billy said, but she saw Finn flinch away, then draw in close to him. Then she saw Billy take off his leather jacket and wrap it around the boy.
Billy picked him up in his arms-effortlessly, she noted-and carried him to the car. He opened the back passenger-side door and put him on the seat.
Christina turned around in the driver’s seat and said, “Finn, for heaven’s sake, what are you doing out here? Let’s get you up to the house, and warm. You’ll catch your death!”
“I’m cuh-cuh-cuh cold,” Finn said through chattering teeth.
“Of course you’re cold,” Christina said. “Good Lord, let’s get you into a hot bath right away and warm you up. Why did you leave?”
Finn looked down, refusing to meet her eyes. His narrow shoulders rocked with repeated waves of shivering.
“Never mind,” she said, flooring the accelerator. In that moment, she didn’t care whether Adeline was watching her through the upstairs window, ready to berate her for whipping up the gravel drive. She needed to get Finn inside. Whatever else was going on, Christina was still a mother.
Morgan could just make out Finn’s face under the high stack of blankets atop Christina’s bed. Finn had let Christina bathe him in a hot tub, and had let her dry him with rough Turkish towels and put him to bed.
Christina knew that boys could be strange about being nude in front of anyone, let alone females, related or otherwise, but Finn hadn’t been strange. He’d been compliant and docile with Christina, looking anxious and fretful when she stepped out of his line of sight. He even called her
“Mom” once.
She didn’t believe the story he’d told her in the bathtub, the story about vampires and monsters and sunlight burning up his dog, but whatever had happened to this boy-whatever he’d seen-had clearly shattered him.
“Finn,” Christina said softly when she’d cleared away his bowl. “Is it OK if Dr. Lightning-Billy-comes in and talks with you? He wants to hear what you told Morgan and me?”
Finn nodded. “OK,” he said. “But he won’t believe me.”
“It’s all right, Finn. Just tell him what you told us.”
Christina nodded to Billy, who had been standing in the doorway.
He entered the room and sat down in an armchair across from the bed. Christina had made Billy promise not to ask about the bloody hockey bag. Billy asked, “How are you feeling, son?”
“Fine, I guess,” Finn replied. “Cold.”
“You’ll warm right up,” Billy said. “Now, would you mind telling me what happened? Just like you told Morgan and her mom? Morgan told me it’s a bit of a scary story. I don’t want you to be scared, because you’re safe here. But I know a bit about spooky stories myself. I’m a teacher, you know. At a university. Do you know what a university is?”
“Of course I know what a university is,” Finn said weakly. “Just because I’m a kid doesn’t mean I’m stupid.”
Billy laughed, a full-throated, warm laugh. “Of course not, Finn. Sorry, it was a stupid question. Grownups can be the dumb ones sometimes. Now, can you tell me what happened?”
“OK. Well,” Finn said, “a vampire must have taken my dog, Sadie. I put her out in the yard and the next morning she was gone. When she came back, she was all bitten up. When I took her for a walk, the sun came up and she went on fire. Then my dad went up to look for her body and he didn’t come home. When he came home, he was different. He was horrible. He had long sharp teeth and he bit my mom in the neck and killed her.”
Billy spoke calmly and neutrally. “How do you know he was a vampire, Finn?”
“Because he had long sharp teeth and he bit my mom in the neck and killed her,” Finn said patiently. “Because when I put a cross in his face, it burned him,” Finn said. “My dad screamed when it touched him. That’s the only way you can hurt them-crosses, holy water. Stuff like that. And you can only kill them with wooden stakes or by dragging them out into the sunlight. Everybody knows that.”
“Finn, have you ever thought there were vampires here before? I mean, in Parr’s Landing?”
Finn’s expression was scornful. “You don’t believe me,” he said. “You’re just fibbing.”
“I’m really interested, Finn,” Billy said softly. “There have been some strange things happening up here over the years. And, most of all, I believe you that something pretty awful happened to your mother and father. Now, why do you think that there are vampires in Parr’s Landing?”
Finn thought for a moment. “Once when I went for a walk with Sadie, we were up by Spirit Rock and she was really scared. She was barking and whining. She never made that much noise. She was scared.”
“Do you remember where you were, Finn? I mean, pretty close?”
“Up under by the paintings, on the cliffs. In my comics, sometimes dogs can tell when there’s a vampire’s grave around. I think this vampire’s grave was there. I think the vampire woke up somehow.”
Billy sat very still. “Finn, do you know any other stories from around here? You know, scary ones?”
“No,” he said. “What kind of stories?”
“You know, legends?”
Finn paused. “Not really. I once heard some of the older guys talking about a Wendigo. But that’s just a spook story to scare kids,” he added scornfully. “Nobody believes that one. It’s so fake.”
“What do you think?”
Christina and Billy were sitting in front of the fire Jeremy had built in Adeline’s ground-floor study. Even though Jeremy had assured her that Adeline wasn’t in the house-no one knew where she was, nor much cared at the moment-Christina was still uncomfortable there. She was convinced that Adeline was going to come walking through the door any second, eyes blazing, demanding to know how they dared make themselves so at home in her study. Jeremy, for his own reasons, couldn’t bear to remain in the study, and Christina had sent Morgan to her room to read.
Billy said, “Are you asking me if I think Finn’s father is a vampire?”
“Of course not! For heaven’s sake, Billy.” She shook her head. “I’m asking what you think actually happened?”
“I have no idea,” he admitted. He stood up and walked over to the fire. “But Finn believes his story exactly as he told to us. I’m no psychologist, Christina, but he really believes it. As an anthropologist, I have to take into account that Finn-who has no connection to Richard Weal, other than finding the hockey bag-seems to be suffering from another variation of the documented Wendigo psychosis, minus the anthropophagy.”
“The what?”
“The desire to eat human flesh,” Billy said. “It’s an established element of Wendigo psychosis. In Finn’s case, he just believes the myth without wanting to be part of it.”
“Jesus Christ, Billy,” she said, shuddering. “He’s a child. And he’s not talking about the Wendigo, he’s talking about vampires. Actual ones, like in the Dracula movies.”
Billy shrugged. “One legend or another,” he said, sounding embarrassingly professorial, even to himself. “Finn has just grafted his version on the myth in response to the trauma he experienced.” He looked at his watch. “Christina, it’s four in the afternoon. We need to find a cop. This is ridiculous. We have a boy upstairs in bed with no parents. I’m not sure that’s even legal. I’m going to drive into town. If Thomson and McKitrick still aren’t in the goddamn station, I’ll drive around until I find someone. You stay here. I’ll be back with the cavalry.”
“Billy?” Christina said. “Please be careful?”
He thought of making another lame joke, or a glib retort, but Billy realized two things: that Christina meant it, that she cared. And that he felt warmed by that care.
Not for the first time, he cursed the circumstances of meeting this woman so early in her widowhood, when mourning was still so fresh. But he still felt warmed.
“Hold on,” Christina said. “I’ll drive you back to the motel so you can pick up your truck. I’d let you take the Chevelle, but we may need it for Finn later.”
Billy had done two loops through the empty streets of Parr’s Landing before, entirely by haphazard chance, he turned onto Brandon Nixon Road and found himself pulling up in front of the scorched-out jumble of charred buildings with the police cruiser parked in front of it.
How did I never see this before? Billy thought, surveying the darkened ruin. What a goddamn fuck-ugly mess, even in a town full of goddamn fuckugly messes.
Wet snow had begun to fall heavily, and it was starting to cling to the ground, flowering the autumn oaks and maples along the side of the road. The snow had begun to layer the burnt boards, highlighting them with streaks and clumps of white.
Billy approached the police cruiser and peered in through the windows. He rapped on the glass with his knuckles-softly, but with tredpidation.
Of course it was empty. He hadn’t expected to find McKitrick or his boss in it, crouched wolfishly on the edge of the road in their police car on this lonely road, had he? Or had he? And what was the cruiser doing parked here in the first place-empty like the police station, like the streets of the town itself?
Billy called out, “Hello? Constable McKitrick? Sergeant Thomson?” The wind suddenly picked up, scattering the wet snow and carrying away the sound of his voice. He looked up at the darkening sky, then down at his watch. It was now nearly five. It would be dark soon, and there were no lights on Brandon Nixon Road.
Who do you report an abandoned cop car to? Well, to the cops. But if there aren’t any cops around, what then?
He hesitated, then went back to his truck and took the flashlight out of the glove box. Billy Lightning had never been a coward in his life, and he didn’t plan to start now.
He reached behind the back seat and picked up the crowbar he kept there, telling himself it was for just in case.
Billy smelled something inside the rink that made his stomach twist inside him. It was a smell that brought back a memory from St. Rita’s with horrible vividness. It was the smell of rotten pork.
There had been a sausage plant inside the school. All the boys had been forced to work in it at one point or another, manufacturing pork sausage that the priests would sell locally to earn extra money for the school. The priests told the boys their labour was pleasing in the sight of God, and might help redeem them from their fallen Indian state. There was no question of paying the boys, the priests explained, since the Indian children were already subsisting on the charity of the Canadian public and the Church.
Occasionally the pork went bad and had to be thrown out when it was too far gone even to feed to the children.
Fuck, that awful stench, Billy thought, covering his face in the crook of his arm and gagging. But the smell, putrescent though it was, was the smell of active decay. It had no place out here in a charred hockey arena on a snowswept northern Ontario road on the edge of dusk where nothing lived.
Billy felt his foot strike something soft. He shone the light on the ground.
Dave Thomson, still wearing his uniform, lay at Billy’s feet, curled up in a foetal position, eyes closed, apparently fast asleep.
Billy played his light along Thomson’s face and neck, stifling a scream with difficulty. The wounds to Thomson’s throat had been mortal ones: the flesh had been grated away from his jugular area, the flaps of skin hanging like a string of maggots from two ghastly, jagged holes. There was no way Thomson-anyone-could have survived those wounds.
But ghastlier still was the suppleness and rosy texture of the rest of his skin-face, neck, even his hands. It glowed with vitality. When Billy shone the light at just the right angle, he could see the red veins beneath the surface.
To Thomson’s left, Elliot McKitrick slept, nude, his limbs lewdly entwined with those of a blonde woman in a stained pink top and blue jeans.
Billy backed away carefully. As he did, he saw the shadows of still other bodies in similar states of repose, as though the dark arena was some sort of dormitory, or a nest. Billy counted-what, fifteen? Twenty? No, closer to thirty bodies or more scattered around the arena, all of them assuming Thomson’s same restful posture. There were men with the rough, rawboned faces and hands of miners. He saw children lying against the burned boards, arms and legs askew in the way children sleep, some still wearing pyjamas as though they had been plucked out of their beds as they slept. There were women, some nude, some wearing nightgowns, some dressed in bloodstained parkas-not heavy parkas, but just the right temperature for a walk on northern Ontario night on the death-edge of autumn.
Billy’s flashlight picked out the bodies of a man and woman in their early thirties. His body was broken and his face was charred with an ugly cinderous scar that was vaguely cruciform in shape. The woman’s body was curled against the man’s body. Her head lay on his chest in a loving, wifely aspect. Cruel new teeth protruded and lay against her lower lip, lending a vaguely lupine mien to an otherwise loving and maternal face that Billy could easily picture comforting a boy grieving for his lost dog, for Billy had no doubt at all that he’d found Finn’s parents.
Not possible, thought the anthropologist. There are no scientific or material grounds for any of this. Not possible. I refuse to accept this scientific impossibility. I am a tenured university professor. I teach legends and myths. I don’t believe them.
But another voice, colder and infinitely more realistic said: Look around you. Finn was right.
Something swayed above him in the shadows and Billy shone his light towards the roof of the arena. The yellow beam caught a familiar face, a face he had not seen for twenty years almost, but one whose contours and hollows he would be able to pick out of any police lineup, in spite of the wild long hair and the matted red beard-no, not a red beard. Just red.
The body hung from its toes by a broken beam as though he weighed nothing more than a handful of bad dreams, scrawny arms folded across its chest as though it were cold.
“Richard,” Billy whispered. “What the hell?”
Then Weal opened his shining dark red eyes and dropped from the ceiling with balletic grace that struck Billy as beautiful. “Hello, Billy,” he said, opening his arms. “Welcome back.”
Billy said, “You killed my father, you crazy fuck.”
“Yes,” Weal said, winking. “I did. He didn’t put up much of a fight. He was old and frightened. Phenius Osborne was weak. I wanted to use the knives on him, but I didn’t have enough time. Luckily for him, he gave me what I needed. His papers. The book he was writing about the history of St. Barthélemy. I just needed the pages that showed me where to find the Master and how to wake him. And I did wake him. And now,” Weal said, “I’m a god.” He covered his mouth with his fingers and giggled-a horrible, mirthless squealing that made Billy think of nails being dragged across a china dinner plate. “He was a bit of a coward, wasn’t he, your father? He wouldn’t have made a very good Jesuit martyr. No tolerance for pain.” Weal paused, grinning. “How’s your tolerance for pain, Billy? Shall we find out?”
Billy swung the crowbar as hard as he could at Weal’s head. His skull cracked open in a red grapefruit whoomph!, spraying blood and brain matter against the standing beams. Weal’s body pitched backwards on the ground, jerking spasmodically.
Then he sat up and Billy watched the skull reform atop his neck, bones miraculously reassembling themselves, flesh layering upon flesh.
Even his hair is growing back, Billy noted with awe, feeling around in the dark around him for something-anything-to use as a weapon for when this fucking bastard dead thing had decided to finish growing fully back together, which Billy already knew was imminent. His groping hands found something that felt like a charred shovel. Thank God! Billy thought. It’s about time things started going my way here. As Billy raised it to swing at Weal’s body, the weight of the blade of the shovel snapped the wooden handle in two. The blade fell uselessly to the ground, leaving Billy holding a broken pole.
“Jesus fucking Christ!” Billy shouted. “Son of a bitch!”
Fully restored, Weal rose to a predatory crouch. “Now you’re going to die,” he said. “No one is going to miss another dead Indian. At least when I’m finished with you, you’ll have served some useful purpose, as food.”
At the exact moment Weal leaped for his throat, Billy thrust the shovel handle in front of him, plunging it into Weal’s chest as hard as he could.
The skin of Weal’s torso split as easily as had his skull, but this time there was no reforming flesh or miraculously healing bone. Weal shrieked-a high, undulating trill that Billy felt move through the air like electricity. Weal fell back against the rink boards, writhing like a harpooned fish.
Billy picked up the flashlight and shone it at Weal’s body. Black blood gushed from the chest wound, slowing to a trickle as the thrashing stopped and he lay still.
In the shadows beyond the flashlight’s reach, Billy heard the shivering and twitching of the sleeping bodies around him begin to stir and wake.
Oh fuck, he thought. He looked around wildly for another shard of unburned wood to use as a weapon. He still had the crowbar, but he’d already seen how useful that had been against these things.
Without thinking, he reached over and pulled the broken shovel handle out of Weal’s chest. It came out surprisingly easily. He turned away from the body. Using the flashlight’s beam to pick his way through the debris, Billy retraced his way towards the entrance.
By his reckoning, he had almost reached the front of the building when he heard the unmistakable sound of a board being accidentally kicked.
Billy swung the flashlight in the direction of the sound, but there was nothing. He broke into a run. Then he tripped, landing heavily and painfully on the ground, the air driven out of him. The flashlight pinwheeled into the air. It landed with a clatter a few feet away, the light extinguished.
Dark-blind and gasping for breath, Billy crawled in the dirt, feeling around for the shovel handle.
There it is! he thought, the relief bringing him to the verge of pissing himself. Thank God. His fingers closed around the shaft.
From above him, he felt rather than saw the arm that reached down and plucked the shaft of wood out of his grip and tossed it away. Billy heard it land, but he couldn’t gauge where.
“You should have left that inside me,” Richard Weal said. “Poor Billy.”
Jeremy Parr stood under the hot spray of the shower in his bathroom at Parr House and thought about his life.
It had begun here in this town and had been shaped by forces beyond his control. As soon as he had been old enough to control his own life, he’d fled.
Elliot had called him a coward for leaving, but leaving was his first completely courageous act. While he would have liked to think that there had been many other courageous acts in his life, he realized that returning to this place with Christina and Morgan was very likely only his second completely courageous act.
He’d returned here for them, for Christina and Morgan-to be the man he knew Jack would have wanted him to be. When he had fled from Parr’s Landing and Adeline, his brother had taken him in and protected him, keeping him safe until Jeremy was strong enough to take care of himself.
As Jeremy saw it, the best way to honour Jack had been to return the kindness-to take care of his wife and daughter. It still was, which was why he was taking them away tonight, whether they liked it or not. He was already packed, and it would take Christina and Morgan no time to follow suit.
All he needed was the money from Adeline’s dressing table drawer; the thousand dollars that would get them home to Toronto and away from this awful place. It was past time. They would take Finn with them if they had to, drop him off in the care of some hospital or other, or even a police station-anywhere other than Parr’s Landing. Finn wasn’t safe here, either. No one was.
Jeremy stepped out of the shower and dried himself off. He wrapped a thin white towel around his waist, then opened the bathroom door and stepped out into the dim hall.
From downstairs in Christina’s room, he heard the television-a comforting sound, since he couldn’t ever remember Adeline allowing it to be turned on when she was in the house, all through his childhood years. Tonight, the sound recalled the living room in Jack and Christina’s house in Toronto, which made him smile.
Jeremy walked quickly down the hallway to his mother’s room and pushed open the door. The room was dim, but there was enough light from the hallway behind him.
He was surprised to see the snow on his mother’s bedroom windows-he hadn’t even noticed the change in weather. He crossed to Adeline’s dressing table and pulled open the bottom drawer, where he knew the money was carefully hidden underneath the neat bundle of letters and file folders.
The drawer was empty.
Outside, the wind and the snow hissed against the glass of Adeline’s bedroom window.
Jeremy felt a cold hand on the small of his back, tugging once. The towel around his waist fell to the floor. In the reflection of his mother’s dressing table mirror, Jeremy was alone, naked. Behind him was reflected the entire bedroom and doorway leading to the hallway, where light and safety was, where Christina and Morgan were. He felt the cold hand slip under his buttocks, between his legs.
Directly behind him, he heard his mother’s dead voice. “Jeremy,” she said. “My son.”
Of the three of them, only Finn had grown used to the sound of screaming.
Consequently, when Jeremy’s high-pitched shrieks ripped through the preternatural silence of Parr House, Finn didn’t startle, or even flinch. He just looked up at the ceiling, pointed, and said, “They’re here in this house, too. They’re real. I told you.”
Christina’s head snapped forward and jerked upwards to the place Finn was pointing.
She jumped up from the chair next to her bed where Finn was still buried under the blankets. Morgan had been lying across the foot of the bed. She raised herself to a sitting position and instinctively moved closer to Finn and her mother, and away from the screaming, which had risen in pitch since Finn first spoke.
Uncle Jeremy sounded the way Morgan had always imagined an animal being slaughtered would sound.
“Stay here!” Christina commanded, pointing her finger at Morgan and Finn. “Do not move from this spot, do you understand me?”
“Mommy,” she whispered. “It’s Uncle Jeremy.”
“Morgan, stay here with Finn! Promise me!”
White-faced, Morgan nodded her head in assent. Finn, also pale, nodded briefly but with much less conviction. He squeezed Morgan’s hand.
Christina took the stairs two at a time, shouting, “Jeremy, I’m coming! I’m coming!”
She reached Jeremy’s bedroom and pushed the door open. The room was empty, his suitcase on the bed, half-packed. The rest of his clothing was folded in neat piles. The screaming wasn’t coming from his bedroom; it was coming from Adeline’s room.
Christina ran down the hallway. She threw open Adeline’s bedroom door. The room was dark. Instinctively, she groped for a light switch and stepped inside.
At first she wasn’t sure what she was looking at. There were three figures in the room, arrayed in a tableau that made Christina think of the ecclesiastical paintings of Christ’s crucifixion she’d seen in books-not the Passion itself, but the taking-down from the cross.
Jeremy was lying nude, spread-eagled on Adeline’s yellow silk bedspread, arms outstretched in a posture of martyrdom. The blood from his throat wound streamed down his broken neck, soaking the yellow silk pillowcases upon which his head lay at a terrible angle.
An old man with white hair, wearing some sort of cassock, was crouched at the head of the bed, his face buried under Jeremy’s jaw. And Adeline knelt at the foot of the bed, head bowed like Mary, mother of Christ.
From somewhere outside her own body, Christina idly noted that her mother-in-law was-ostentatiously, even for Adeline-wearing a fur coat indoors. Underneath the coat, Christina saw the grimy hem of a nightgown. Adeline’s bare feet on the immaculate carpet were black with filth, and there were dirty footprints leading to-no, back from-the window.
Adeline’s back was to Christina, her arms extended, her hands clamped on Jeremy’s drenched thighs, holding them apart as implacably as if they were secured in an iron grapple. The yellow silk bedspread was sodden with Jeremy’s blood, which had started to pool on the carpet in an outward-spreading stain.
Christina made a sound high in her throat, somewhere between the whine of a trapped animal and a moan. “Adeline…”
Adeline turned her crimson-smeared face towards Christina. She smiled as casually as a hostess who’d been disturbed in her embroidery, and spat her son’s penis out of her mouth like an hors d’oeuvre. “MOMMY!” Morgan stood in the doorway to Adeline’s room, her mouth an open circle of horror. Behind her, one hand on her shoulder, Finn stared, likewise open-mouthed.
“Oh my God, Morgan!” Christina wailed, turning around. “I told you to stay downstairs! Get downstairs right now!”
Adeline rose jerkily to her feet, looking from Christina to Morgan. Her mouthful of teeth was stained and needle-like in the overhead light.
“Whore,” Adeline croaked. “Dirty, dirty whore.” She took two shambling steps towards the doorway where Christina stood protectively in front of Morgan.
“Get away, Adeline, goddamn you!” Christina shouted. “Get away from my daughter!”
“Or else what, Christina?” Adeline crooned. “This is my house. I come and go as I please, and do as I like. Haven’t you learned your place here yet?”
Adeline reached out with one hand and slapped Christina across the face, sending her crashing into the polished maple Philadelphia highboy next to the doorway. Agony sang through Christina’s shoulder. She felt blood trickling down the back of her scalp where she’d cut it on the edge of the dresser, and she groaned.
Adeline turned her blazing eyes on Morgan and said, “Morgan, come here to your grandmother. Come and give me a kiss. You’re a real Parr. You’re the only real Parr in this house except for me. All of this is for you-this house, this town, and everything in it. It’s your birthright. Come here.”
Morgan flinched. Then her arms dropped limply to her sides. Her eyes glazed over and went blank. She took a blind, stumbling step towards Adeline, who crooked her arms and opened them in a grotesque parody of grand-maternal devotion.
“Morgan, no! Don’t go to her!” Finn shouted. “Don’t look at her! That’s how they get you!”
Morgan, empty-eyed, took another step towards her grandmother.
At the exact moment that Adeline’s arms snaked out, her fingers grazing the sleeves of her granddaughter’s sweater, Finn placed his palm flat in the middle of Morgan’s back and shoved her as hard as he could.
Morgan spun off-balance and fell, sprawling on the floor near where Christina had fallen. Christina scrambled for Morgan and dragged her daughter across the carpet towards her.
Blind fury passed across Adeline’s face. From her open mouth came a shrill, sibilant buzzing, vaguely insectile or serpentine.
Her teeth actually click when she hisses like that, Finn thought in wonderment, fascinated in spite of himself. Just like in the comics.
Then Adeline threw back her head and laughed. “Little idiot,” she said. Her voice brimmed with contempt and malicious, dark mirth. “Dirty little townie boy. A dirty townie, just like my cunt of a daughter-in-law.”
Very clearly, Finn said, “Fuck you, you snob. This is for my dog.”
He unscrewed the lid of the mason jar of water he was holding behind his back and threw its contents in Adeline Parr’s face.
Finn’s father had once let him hold a candle up to a blowtorch. The candle had literally been uncreated in front of Finn’s eyes, liquefying and becoming viscous in the heat of the blowtorch.
That was what happened to Mrs. Parr’s face when the holy water splashed into it-into it, not across it. The water burned into Adeline’s face, flushing away skin, troughing bone, until the liquefied mixture that had been her face ran down in an oily red and yellow stream of blood and fat. Adeline dropped to her knees and then fell on her side, clawing at her face and rending the air with her agony.
She’s melting just like the Wicked Witch of the West, Finn mused. Good. I hope it hurts like hell.
It seemed impossible that she could still make that agonized highpitched sound with her throat melting away like it was, but Finn’s ears rang with the sound of her excruciation. Acrid, stinging white smoke poured from Adeline’s dissolving face, filling the room. It burned Finn’s throat and eyes, making him cough and retch.
Temporarily blind, Finn stumbled into the cavernous bedroom, feeling his way as he went. He flailed his arms in front of him, trying to stay balanced.
He didn’t see Adeline’s spindly dressing table chair, but he surely felt it when he collided with it. He said, “Ooooh!” Then his legs buckled and he collapsed on the floor at the foot of the bed, disoriented and unable to see.
He heard Christina screaming his name, but-still smoke-blind-he didn’t understand why, and he couldn’t see what they saw until it was long past too late.
The old man in black streaked toward Finn with the speed of a deadly underwater snake. Christina screamed Finn’s name as she saw the man’s blackrobed arms with their long-fingered white hands uncoil from his sides and seize the boy in a possessive grip, yanking Finn back towards him, enfolding him in his arms. He slipped his elbow around Finn’s throat in a crushing chokehold. Finn’s face turned a dull, airless red as he began to suffocate. As he dragged Finn towards the French doors leading to Adeline’s balcony, the old man’s eyes met Morgan’s.
“Let him go!” she screamed. “Let Finn go!”
Christina shouted, “Morgan, stay away from him!”
But if Morgan could hear at all, she gave no sign of it. She launched herself at the old man, her fists raised. But she never reached him or Finn.
Finn’s face was the colour of the dark pink flush of an overripe peach, and his eyes bulged and watered from lack of oxygen. He reached out one arm and choked out one ragged, pleading word that sounded like Morgan at the same time as Morgan reached out to him, fully intending to wrench Finn from the old man’s death grip.
Their fingers brushed, once.
Then the old man threw himself back against the closed French doors. The glass shattered around him in his wake, and the momentum sent them tumbling over the edge of the balcony, thirty feet above the ground. Clouds of wet snow and cold rain blew into the bedroom from the broken doors and the night outside, curtains flapping into the room like flags.
But instead of the sound of their bodies striking the lawn below, Morgan heard the sound of giant wings churning the air outside the window-and Finn screaming her name, over and over again.
When she ran to the balcony and tried to follow the sound, Morgan saw a great dark mass, nearly indistinguishable from the general blackness, rising into the night sky.
She might have missed it entirely except for the helplessly flailing figure of a small, screaming boy in white pyjamas it carried in its claws, growing smaller and smaller as they drifted almost lazily into the deeper darkness towards the outlying forests and the cliffs beyond. Then it was swallowed up entirely by the rain and the sheets of snow.
Adeline Parr’s bedroom reeked of blood and acid smoke. Christina stood up carefully, but spears of white-sharp pain still shot up her left leg from the impact of her collision. Her head throbbed. Morgan, her hair wet with melting snow, stood on the balcony, wailing Finn’s name over and again.
Adeline Parr’s headless body was motionless on the carpet. Where her head had been, there was only a nimbus of boiled slush and bits of stubborn bone fragment that had survived the annihilation of the holy water.
Christina had a great longing to kick the body as hard as she could, but there was still some lingering fear in her that, even now, Adeline would reach out and grasp her ankle, diamond rings and red-lacquered scimitar fingernails digging into Christina’s soft skin. Instead, she stepped over Adeline’s body and went to the gory tangle of silk sheets where Jeremy had bled out and died.
Christina couldn’t breathe. She looked down at the familiar face, so much like Jack’s, and felt a band of grief tighten around her chest so strongly that she feared she might literally suffocate from the pain of this second tragic severing from their lives of the second of the two men who had meant the most to her and Morgan.
Oh, Jeremy, she thought. Oh, my poor, sweet Jeremy. What did they do to you?
Christina pulled one of the sheets out from under him-a cleaner one than the others, at least-and carefully and lovingly covered his broken and torn body with it.
As she did, a glitter of silver on the carpet caught her eye. It was Jeremy’s St. Christopher’s medal. The chain was broken as though it had been ripped off his neck and thrown down. Christina bent and picked it up. She put it in the pocket of her jeans.
By the window, Morgan had stopped calling Finn’s name, but her body still shook with sobs. Her shoulders were hunched forward and her hands were loosely clasped in front of her, as though praying.
Christina called out softly, “Morgan? Honey?”
Morgan turned around. Her face was white and stiff with shock. “Hi, Mom,” she said. “What did you say? Mom… he took Finn. He carried Finn away.” Fresh tears streamed from her eyes. “There really are vampires. Just like Finn said there were. It was all true.”
She shook her daughter gently. “Morgan, we have to leave,” Christina said, struggling to keep her voice calm without sacrificing the force of her words, words she needed Morgan to hear and heed. “We have to leave right now. Are you OK to walk? Can you make it downstairs to the car?”
“But what about Finn?” She stared frantically through the broken French doors.
“Morgan, listen to me,” she said urgently. “We have to leave the house. It’s too dangerous here. We can’t worry about Finn now. Finn would want you safe.”
“OK,” Morgan said. She glanced down at Jeremy’s body on the bed and started to shake again. “Oh, Mom…”
“Don’t look at it, Morgan. Don’t look at him. Come on now-here, look at me instead. Look at my face.” When she did, Christina smiled encouragingly. “That’s it. Just keep your eyes on me.”
She put her arm around Morgan’s shoulders and gently herded her past the carnage in the bedroom and out into the hallway. Once there, she hurried her daughter down the stairs. The keys to the Chevelle were where she left them-on the console table near the front door, next to her purse. The only light downstairs came from the embers of the fire in Adeline’s study bleeding through the half-closed doors, and a greenshaded library lamp on the other side of the hallway.
Christina took one last look back at the foyer of Parr House, which seemed to have gorged itself on the darkness, both natural and unnatural, until it was bloated. Whatever the source of the monsters that seemed to have stepped out of the storybooks and into her world, they had all been drawn here, to Parr’s Landing and to this awful place. Nothing could live here-could ever have lived here, she corrected herself-except anguish and misery.
Christina wished she had a can of propane and a match. She thought briefly of looking for just that in one of the pantries off the kitchen, but she realized that there just wasn’t time. Every moment she remained in this house, they were in danger. She had to get Morgan to safety, whatever “safety” meant in the middle of this horror.
“Come on, sweetheart,” Christina said. “Let’s go. We never have to come back to this place again.”
The Gold Nugget motel was dark when Christina pulled into the parking lot in the snow.
The Chevelle’s headlights played across the windows of the diner, illuminating empty tables and shining through empty water glasses that went dark again when the high beams veered away as she parked the car.
Morgan opened the passenger-side door and looked around fearfully. “Mom, what are we doing here? Where is this place?” She leaned close to her mother, away from the snow and rain that was now falling in an even mixture of both.
“It’s the motel, Morgan,” Christina said, with a calmness she didn’t feel. “It’s the Nugget. It’s where Billy is staying.” She stepped out and locked the car, realizing at once what a futile gesture it was. If those things wanted to get in somewhere, they seemed to just do it. They didn’t ask questions or worry much about locks.
At some point, when I can think about it without going insane, I must take some time to sit down and consider the fact that my gay brother-in-law was just killed by his mother. Oh, but it gets better: he was killed by his mother who drank his blood and then bit his cock off with teeth the size of fingers. Then spat it out.
At which point, a twelve-year-old friend of my daughter’s threw a jar of holy water in the bitch’s face and melted it right off because he’d read it in a vampire comic. Then-wait for it!-my daughter’s friend was carried off by an old man dressed like a seventeenth-century Jesuit priest in one of our history books from school.
I’m living in a monster movie-which is crazy, of course. But crazy or not, here we are.
And it’s dark and I’m cold and there’s no one anywhere around here who can help me except a man I barely know. And if I think about any of this right now, I’ll go right off my goddamn head.
She reached for Morgan’s hand and pulled her along as quickly as she could. “We need to find him, quickly. Let’s hope he left his room unlocked. It’ll give us a place to stay where it’s safe, at least for now.”
“What if he’s not here? What if we have to go back to Grandmother’s house?”
“Morgan, we’re not going back there to that house, ever-no matter what. If Billy’s not here, I’ll kick the door in if I have to.”
In the absence of light from any of the rooms, let alone the diner or the front office, Christina tried to recall which room Billy had entered when she dropped him off a thousand years ago this afternoon. She hadn’t been paying attention of course, because at that time, she and reality still shared mutually agreed-upon parameters.
Christina and Morgan stopped in front of room 938.
“This is the one, I think,” Christina said, trying the doorknob. It was locked, of course, and the room was dark as all the others. “Jesus Christ!” she shouted, kicking the door in frustration. Christina thought for a moment, then said, “Morgan, stay right here. I’m going to break into the office and get the spare key.”
“Mom, no! Are you kidding me? I’m not waiting out here!”
“You’re right. It was a stupid idea. Forget it. Come with me-but stay close, Morgan, I mean it.”
The office, as it turned out, was not locked. It wasn’t even closed. The office door banged in the wind. A cold cup of coffee sat atop the front desk and the floor was littered with shards of broken light bulb glass. Her foot slipped in a pool of something sticky and dark that she couldn’t see, but which smelled like dirty pennies. She wondered what had happened to Darcy Morin, then decided that she couldn’t bear the knowledge right now anyway.
“Morgan, step back please,” Christina said, blocking the entrance to the office with her body. “Stay in the doorway here, but don’t come in. But stay close enough for me to grab you, OK, honey?”
“Mom, what is it,” she asked fearfully. “What’s in there?”
“Nothing, honey, just looking for the key to Billy’s room.” Privately, she was grateful for the darkness-there was nothing she might stumble upon here in the office that she had any desire to see in the light. Under her breath she muttered, “935, 936… aha! Got it!” She took the key to room 938 down off the peg and stepped outside, taking Morgan by the arm. “Come on, honey, let’s get warm! Hurry-hurry-hurry!”
Outside, she slipped the key into the lock of room 938.
Blessedly, there was a click. She pushed the door open and stepped into the warmth of Billy’s room, which smelled of leather and pipe tobacco and kindness, and when she switched on the light, it revealed nothing out of the ordinary.
Billy found them in his motel room an hour later with the doors barricaded from the inside, a chair wedged up against the handle.
He peered in through his window. Christina was sitting on the bed with her knees up. Morgan was in her arms, leaning with her head on her mother’s breast. Morgan’s eyes were closed, but Billy doubted she was sleeping. Christina’s eyes were trained on the door, wide open and alert. In her hands was some sort of silver medal on a chain.
Billy could spot a St. Christopher’s medal at thirty paces. All of the children at St. Rita’s were given one and had been expected to wear it all the time.
Ironic, Billy thought. For the first time in my life, it would have come in handy.
He looked down at his clothes and wondered what sort of a picture he would present if he knocked on the door of his own motel room and asked Christina to let him in. Not a good one, he expected. He stank, and his clothes were covered with dirt and blood. He looked down at his hands, which were the colour of coal dust. I could just leave them in there and not knock. They’d probably be safe. Then he shook his head and sighed. Of course they wouldn’t be safe in there. They’re completely unsafe in there.
He knocked on the motel room door and called out, “Christina?”
From inside, Christina’s muffled voice: “Billy, is that you?”
“Yeah, it’s me,” he said. “Let me in.”
Christina opened the door and fell into Billy Lightning’s arms. She hadn’t intended to fall into his arms, or any man’s arms, especially not in front of Morgan. But the momentum of her own relief propelled her.
Billy was solid and real and reassuring, and his presence was warm and strong. Christina was tired of being the strong one, and she was dead tired of being afraid.
“Billy, what’s that smell?” She pulled away, wrinkling her nose in distaste. Her eyes widened as she took in his appearance. “Jesus, what happened? Were you in an accident? Are you all right?”
He stepped back, away from her. “Sorry. I should have warned you about that. Look,” he said, pointing at her. “I’ve gotten you dirty.” He reached out to brush the smear of dirt off her pale pink sweater. “Here, let me.”
Christina’s eyes darted to Morgan on the bed, who was watching their interaction with wide eyes, silently. Christina shook her head almost undetectably at Billy, who understood. “No, I’ve got it, thanks,” she said, brushing the ash off the sweater herself.
“Of course,” he said politely. “Yeah, that’s it. There, you’ve got it.” She smiled, grateful for his understanding.
“Billy. What happened to you? When you weren’t here, we took the key from the front office. Mr. Marin wasn’t there-no one was there. The whole place is empty.”
“Marin is down at the old hockey arena,” he said. “The one on Brandon Nixon Road. So are Elliot and Sergeant Thomson, and about thirty other… residents of Parr’s Landing.”
Christina was confused. “What do you mean, they’re at the arena?” She shook her head. “The old arena? The Takacs one? Is that even still standing? Elliot and Jack used to play there. It burned down. It’s a ruin.”
“It’s more than a ruin, Christina,” Billy said. “It’s a grave.”
“Billy, what are you talking about?”
He glanced at Morgan, then back at Christina. “Maybe not here? Outside?”
From the bed, Morgan’s voice was surprisingly strong and clear. “Dr. Lightning,” she said. “Finn’s dead. Uncle Jeremy’s dead. I saw it happen with my very own eyes. Please tell my mom what you’re talking about. I’m never going to forget the things I saw tonight, and words aren’t going to scare me.”
Billy sighed. “OK, fair enough. I found the place they were all… uh… sleeping. The… uh…” He faltered, looking helplessly to Christina for help, adult to adult.
“The vampires,” Morgan finished impatiently. Her face was pale and hard, her mouth set in a steely line Christina had never seen before. “Finn said they were vampires. He knew what they were, but nobody believed him because we all thought he was just a dumb kid who read Tomb of Dracula comics. And now he’s dead,” she added flatly. “And it’s our fault. And now we believe him. And now it’s too late.”
“OK, vampires,” Billy said. “I found them there. It was everything Finn said it would be. Also, I found Richard Weal. I was right. He killed my father and stole his manuscript. Weal said he came here to wake someone up, someone who had been sleeping here in the caves. Those ‘voices,’ in 1952? He wasn’t imagining them. They were real. Probably all the people who heard them were really hearing them.”
“The priest,” Christina said suddenly. “He looked like a priest. The one who carried Finn away.”
“What priest? What are you talking about?”
Christina replied, “They killed Jeremy, him and Adeline. When we found him in Adeline’s room, there was someone else there. An old man. I’d never seen him before. He was in a long black robe. I remember thinking he looked like a picture of one of the Jesuit martyrs in the church here. The ones who came here to settle. The ones who died here three hundred years ago.”
Billy said, “Figures it would be a goddamn priest.”
Morgan watched Billy carefully. She said nothing, but every nerve in her body was stretched as taut as wire. Something about him wasn’t right. He was different. Maybe not different like Adeline was different… afterwards. Not quite, anyway. But she wished he wasn’t standing so close to her mother.
“We need to get you two someplace safe,” Billy said. “At least until dawn. Then you have to leave. You have to leave Parr’s Landing. You have to drive to Toronto and you have to not look back. Never, ever come back here, Christina. I mean it.”
“I don’t think the car will survive the trip, Billy. Adeline’s chauffeur has the keys to her car, and he and his wife are missing, too. And Jeremy said he found some money in Adeline’s room, but he didn’t give it to me before he… well, before what happened.”
Billy fished in his pockets and handed Christina the keys to his truck. “Take the Ford,” he said. “It’s practically new. It’ll get you home to Toronto. And there’s about seven hundred dollars in the glove box. Take it. Just promise me you’ll go. Get Morgan away from here.”
“You mean ‘we,’ don’t you? You don’t mean without you, do you, Billy?”
Billy’s expression was unreadable. “I can’t leave,” he said.
“What do you mean you can’t leave? Are you kidding me?” Hysteria made Christina’s voice shrill and jagged. “You can leave. You have to leave! There’s nothing here for you! Nothing!”
“Weal came here because of my father,” Billy said. “All these people are dead because of him. We brought Weal here in 1952 and put this all in motion. The arena was full of those things when I got there tonight. Who knows how many of them there are here, or what they’ll do. I can’t leave. I have to fix this. I have to find the one who did this and make it right. For my father’s sake, at the very least. But I won’t be able to do it unless I know that you and Morgan are safe, and a long way from here.”
When she started to protest, Billy put up his hand. “No more talk,” he said. “Get Morgan ready. I’ll bring the truck right to the entrance here. I’m taking you to the church. When the sun comes up, leave. Don’t look back.”
“Dr. Lightning,” Morgan said. “May I ask you a question?”
“What is it, honey?”
“You said that they were in the arena when you got there. How did you get away?”
“I burned them,” Billy said. “I burned their bodies. Just like Finn said, fire hurts them.”
Morgan sounded dubious. “You don’t smell like smoke. And… they just let you?”
“They weren’t awake yet,” he said vaguely. “Not all of them, anyway. I guess the sun wasn’t all the way down. Don’t worry, I took care of it. Now,” he said. “No more talking. We need to get you two to the church.” He held up his hand again. “I mean it, no more questions,” he said gruffly. “It’s time to go, ladies.”
He’s lying, Morgan thought, but Christina was already pushing her out the door of the motel, and Billy had sprinted ahead and was standing by the door of the truck.
Billy drove the short distance between the Gold Nugget and the church in complete silence, looking neither left nor right. The beams of the truck’s headlights carved a tunnel through the shadows and the snow, which had grown thick and heavy in the hours since they’d arrived at the motel. On either side of the road, houses like empty husks took momentary shape, then vanished back into the night and the falling snow.
Billy parked the truck in front St. Barthélemy and the Martyrs. The steps leading to the front door and the sanctuary were packed in wet snow. Gusts of it capered in the yellow light above the entrance to the church.
“End of the line,” he joked. “This is where everyone gets off.”
“Billy-?”
“Mom, come on,” Morgan’s voice was urgent. She didn’t look at Billy. She opened the side door of the truck and jumped out. She grabbed at her mother’s arm and practically pulled her out. “I want to be in the church. Right now. Please.”
“Morgan, you go on inside,” Christina said, shaking off Morgan’s hand on her arm. “Wait for me. I want to talk to Billy for a minute.”
“Mom, no! Now!” Morgan shouted. “I’m not going in without you! Don’t talk to him! We don’t have time!” Morgan stared defiantly at Billy. He looked back at her. Wordless communication passed between them. Then Billy looked away.
“She’s right, Christina,” Billy said finally. “Go inside where you’ll be safe. It’s open. Get some sleep. Then, tomorrow, take my truck and go.”
Christina pleaded. “Stay with us. Come inside and wait until sunrise. Then leave with us in the morning. There’s nothing for you here.”
“Mom, please!”
“Goodbye, Christina,” Billy said. “I have to go back.” He stepped away from the church, out of the ring of light, and walked into the shadows beyond it.
A trick of the lamplight, Christina thought. I can still see his eyes. Then Billy Lightning was swallowed wholly by the darkness.
Morgan woke to the sound of rocks falling on the stained glass windows.
The sound startled her and she sat up. Then she remembered. Oh yes, she thought. We’re in the church. They can’t get us here. That’s why we’re here. She looked at her watch. It was four o’clock in the morning. Dawn was still three hours away.
Beside her, Christina moaned softly in her sleep and turned over. She’s dreaming, Morgan realized. She reached out and gently touched Christina’s blonde hair. Her mother’s eyes were ringed with blue-black circles, and the skin on either side of her nose was dull red and raw in the dim overhead lights of the church. Christina looked exhausted. Morgan wondered why she hadn’t noticed it before. Then she realized why-Christina hadn’t wanted her to see it. Her mother had been trying to protect her in every possible way since they’d arrived in Parr’s Landing. But in sleep, the lie failed and her face told the truth.
The scattershot of stones on glass came again.
Morgan reached over and shook her mother’s arm. “Mom? Mom, wake up. There’s someone outside. I’m scared.”
But Christina slept on, oblivious. Morgan held the St. Christopher’s medal tightly in her hands. The silver was warm, and comforting somehow.
The rocks came again, this time harder and more insistent. She ran to the window and tried to see outside, but it was impossible. This time the stones bounced off the glass directly in front of her.
“Go away!” she screamed. “Leave us alone!”
The voice that answered her was as clear as water. A soft voice. A boy’s voice.
“Morgan. It’s me, Finn. Come outside.”
“Finn?” she cried joyously. “Is that you? Are you OK?”
“It’s me, Morgan,” he said. “I’m OK. Come outside.”
“I can’t, Finn,” she said. “I’m not allowed.”
Finn’s voice was impatient. “Come to the front door of the church, anyway. I’ll be on the front steps.”
Morgan looked at Christina sleeping on the pew. “Mom,” she whispered. “Mom, wake up. Can you hear me?” There was no answer. Christina slept on. “Finn’s here. I’m going to go and see him. I’ll be right back. Is it OK?” She won’t even know I was gone, Morgan rationalized. I’ll be back before she wakes up. Finn’s alive! Finn’s alive!
She walked the length of the nave and opened the church doors wide to welcome Finn back.
Finn stood on a small rise of accumulated snow on the lawn of the church.
His feet looked frail and blue in the light, and there was no disturbance in the snow leading in any direction to or from where stood. The wind whipped his dark hair about his face and the fabric of the pyjamas billowed ludicrously around his thin body.
Morgan stared. “Finn? Is that you? What are you doing there? It’s freezing! Come in here where it’s warm.”
“Yeah, it’s me,” he said ruefully. “I’m always coming to you, aren’t I? I wish I was older so I could have been your boyfriend, then I could have taken care of you.”
“Finn, what are you talking about? You did take care of me. You saved my from my grandmother back at the house. You saved my life.”
He went on as though he hadn’t heard her. “You’re really pretty, Morgan.” He looked like he could be blushing, but in the light it was hard to tell. “Can I tell you something?” He sounded gently embarrassed, but didn’t wait for her to answer. “I… I love you, Morgan. I guess I have, from the moment I saw you outside the school that day.”
“Oh, Finn.” Morgan’s eyes filled with tears. “I’m so sorry I wasn’t a better friend to you. I’m so sorry.”
He paused. “You know, right? You know what happened to me?”
Morgan shook her head, but even as she did so, she realized she did know. She nodded, not trusting herself to speak. The tears that had been brimming in her eyes spilled down her cheeks.
“He took me away,” Finn said darkly. “He took me to the caves up by Spirit Rock. He changed me. To punish me. You know. For, well, for what I did. You know, with the holy water.” Finn shivered. “He did awful things to me up there,” he said. “He’s terrible, Morgan. He’s so old. He’s been waiting up there for hundreds of years. Waiting for someone to wake him up. Someone did. Some crazy person. That day I found his bag with all the knives in it-that was his. For waking him up.”
Morgan glanced back towards the church doors, feeling a sudden stab of fear. She clapped her hands over her ears to block out the sound of Finn’s voice.
This isn’t Finn, dummy. It used to be, but it isn’t, now. He’s something… well, someone else. Like Grandmother Parr was.
But then, Grandmother was sort of like that even before, wasn’t she?
Finn sighed. “I’m the same person, Morgan. I’m not going to hurt you. I promise. And you were hearing me in the church even though I was outside, so don’t bother covering your ears.”
Morgan’s voice quivered. She pointed through the open doors, into the nave. “My mother is in there. She’s sleeping.”
“Your mom won’t wake up till I want her to. She’s just asleep, don’t worry.”
“You won’t hurt her, either? You promise?”
“Your mom is a nice lady,” Finn said, sounding wounded. “She was nice to me. I would never hurt her.” He smiled, showing the small pearlescent fangs of a twelve-year-old boy on the edge of manhood, a state he would never attain. “She was nice to me. Of course I won’t hurt her. I needed to see you before…”
“Before what?” she demanded.
He was silent, unmoving from his spot atop the mound of snow.
“It hurts,” Finn said. His voice was small and hollow, even where it echoed inside her head. “It hurts something awful. It’s not like I thought it would be. In my comics, the vampires forget about their lives and they stop feeling bad about it. Not me-I remember everything. And I still miss my dog. Sadie tried to protect me from this. She knew what was waiting up here.”
Morgan was trembling. She wrapped her arms around her torso and rubbed them, trying to warm herself.
“You’re cold,” Finn said. “You should go inside.”
“I don’t need to go inside. But is it OK if I run inside quickly and get my sweater? Do you want to come inside and get warm?”
“I can’t,” Finn said. “I can’t go in there.”
“Why not?” Then she thought about it. “Oh, right,” she said. “Sorry.”
Morgan realized she should feel safer knowing Finn couldn’t cross the threshold of the church, but instead it just made her feel sad. “I’ll be right back,” she promised. She knew he could probably stop her if he wanted to.
But he just said, “OK,” and shrugged.
Morgan hurried up the nave to the place where Christina was still fast asleep-if anything, in a deeper sleep than before. The dark circles under Christina’s eyes seemed to have faded by degrees, as though Finn were actually healing her mother from where he stood on top of the snow, outside the church.
I could stay in here and never come out. She picked up her sweater from where it lay on the back of the pew. I could leave him out there in the cold and the snow and the night and never have to see him again. These things can’t come into churches. But he’s not a ‘thing,’ is he? He’s Finn. He’s my friend. He saved my life.
Morgan saw the St. Christopher’s medal lying on the pew next to her mother. She picked it up and slipped it into her pocket.
“There’s a house over there,” Finn said, pointing across the snowy lawn after Morgan returned with her sweater. “Behind the manse. It’s empty. Do you want to go in there?”
“What for?” Morgan said, suddenly fearful again.
“Because it’s cold out here, dummy, obviously,” Finn teased. “And even if I’m not cold, you are. I can tell. You’re still shivering. I know you have that medal in your pocket. You could use it if you wanted. I wouldn’t be able to stop you. Besides, I told you not to worry.”
Morgan’s voice was incredulous. “How do you know all this stuff?”
Finn shrugged again, but this time it was a self-conscious shrug. “Some of it from The Tomb of Dracula, some of it from Dark Shadows. Some of it from… from him. He steals people’s memories, then he shares them with us. The rest of it I just know.” He tapped his chest and his head. “I know it in here. I don’t know how, I just do.”
She thought about it for a moment, then said, “OK, let’s go to the house. How do you know it’s empty? Or that it’s open?”
He glanced briefly at the dark window on the second floor. “Trust me. I’ve been inside already.”
The living room was plain but clean. There was a photograph of Pope Paul VI on the wall above the television set, but no books anywhere.
The unmistakable odour of boiled cabbage clung to the cheap curtains, indeed had seeped into every porous surface in the living room. Morgan hated boiled cabbage, especially the way it smelled when it was cooking. At that moment, however, it reminded her of her neighbourhood in Toronto, and she just felt homesick.
Sitting next to her on the plastic-covered sofa, Finn said shyly, “Morgan, can I ask you a question?”
Her voice was gentle, but teasing “That’s one question already, Finnegan.”
“My mom called me that,” he said.
“What was the question you wanted to ask me?”
He hesitated. “Have you ever… well, have you ever, you know… like, had a… a…”
“A boyfriend? Is that what you’re asking? If I’ve ever had a boyfriend?” If he could blush, Morgan thought, he’d be beet-red.
Mutely, Finn nodded his head.
“Have you ever had a girlfriend, Finn?”
He shook his head. “Nope.”
“Why not?” She took his hand lightly in hers, finding it ice cold. “Have you ever liked a girl before?”
“Only you,” he said, looking down. “Never before. Nobody else.”
She brought his hand up to her face and laid it there. He leaned forward clumsily to kiss her on the lips but missed, landing the kiss on her chin instead. Morgan inclined her head and kissed him tentatively on the lips.
Blood thundered in Morgan’s ears and her face flamed. “Finn, just so you know, I never… well, I’ve never had a… a boyfriend, either.”
Finn pulled away as though burned. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m such a jerk. Why would a girl like you want to kiss somebody as ugly as me? I’m sorry,” he said again. “I’m so stupid.”
Morgan sat very still, as thought considering. Then she unbuttoned the top button of her cardigan. Then the second. Finn watched, his eyes wide.
“Finn?” In the dark living room, Morgan’s voice sounded alien, even to her-thicker, fuller, almost a woman’s voice now.
Outside, the wind picked up, blowing thick fistfuls of snow at the windows. Morgan shrugged the sweater off her shoulders, letting it fall behind her on the sofa.
“What?” Finn breathed.
“You’re not ugly. You were never ugly.”
“I’m not?”
“No,” Morgan said, reaching for him. “You’re really not. You’re really beautiful to me, Finnegan.” She hesitated, then said, “Finn?”
“What?”
“Do you promise-really promise-that you won’t hurt me?”
“I promise, Morgan,” Finn said. “Cross my heart.”
They held each other close, naked in the makeshift bed of ottoman cushions and crocheted afghan blankets on the floor of the immaculate, chaste house that smelled like boiled cabbage and carpet deodorizer, under the photograph of Pope Paul VI.
Morgan had asked Finn if he wanted to go upstairs, but he seemed to panic at the thought, insisting instead they stay in the living room. When she asked him why, he shook his head and said, “Here is good. Here is fine.”
Later, in her arms, Finn’s icy body didn’t warm, but neither did Morgan’s body catch the cold from Finn’s and chill in sympathetic response. They tempered each other, explored each other’s bodies with their hands and mouths, wondering at the bevy of sensations aroused as each touched the other in places they’d never been touched before.
“Morgan,” Finn whispered in her ear when they were finished. “Would you stay with me?”
“We’re leaving in the morning,” she murmured. “I can’t stay here.”
“No,” he said. His voice was ineffably sad. “I mean, just for a little bit longer. Just for tonight. I just don’t want to be alone.”
Morgan leaned up on her elbow and looked at him quizzically. “What do you mean? Of course I’ll stay with you tonight. Why? I mean, what else would I do?”
“Just a bit longer,” Finn said, gazing out the living room window at the lightening eastern sky.
Morgan realized she must have dozed off, because when she opened her eyes, Finn was kneeling at her side, shaking her arm with nearly violent desperation.
“Morgan,” Finn said urgently. “Wake up. I need to ask you something.”
“What?” she muttered, still mostly asleep. “What is it? Are you OK?”
“Morgan, would you do something for me if I asked you to?”
“Sure,” Morgan said. “What?” Then her eyes opened wide and she focused. The scream caught in her throat, becoming a sharp gasp instead.
Finn was sweating blood-literally. It covered him like a delicate, dark red mist, a ruby dew that made his skin shimmer when he moved. He wasn’t bleeding, exactly-instead, the blood was a fine, thin, glowing roseate spray that was becoming more opaque by the second.
“Finn, oh my God! What’s happening to you?”
“It doesn’t hurt, Morgan, I promise it doesn’t. Not yet.”
“Finn! What’s happening to you?”
“Morgan, do you love me?”
“Yes! Yes! I love you! Now tell me what’s happening!?”
“I need you to help me, Morgan,” Finn said, his voice breaking. “I can’t do this by myself. You have to help me. Please?” He looked towards the window where the sky was now bright enough for her to see everything in the room. Then back at Morgan with pleading eyes. “Do you understand?”
Morgan started to cry. “No, Finn, please. I can’t,” she sobbed. “Don’t ask me to do that. I can’t. Stay with me. We’ll figure something out, I promise. Please, Finn, please. I just can’t!”
“Listen to me,” Finn said gently. “I want to find Sadie. I want to be with my dog again. I miss her. I want to be somewhere else-I want to be in the place I was in before all this happened. I want to go home. A lot of bad things happen in Parr’s Landing, but it isn’t all bad. Nothing is all bad. I was happy-I had my mom and my dad. I had my school, and my comics. And I had Sadie. I want to hug her. I want to go for a walk with her again, up on Spirit Rock. This morning-now. But I can’t do it by myself. My body won’t let me.”
“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.