Enter, Night (15 page)

“What was he saying?” Elliot asked.

“Emory said he couldn’t really make it out, but that it sounded like
Latin.”

“Latin? You mean, the language?”

“More specifically, Ecclesiastical Latin.”

“What’s the difference?”

“Ecclesiastical Latin is a form of Latin that deviates from classic
Latin in that it’s marked by certain lexical variations. It’s also the form
of Latin used in the Latin Rite of the Catholic Church. It can be found
primarily in theological works and liturgical rites.”

Thomson looked doubtful. “All of that from some muttering in the
middle of the night? In the middle of the road outside this motel?”

“Emory’s undergraduate and Master’s degrees encompassed religion,
history, and ancient languages, sergeant. His PhD work with my father
was an extension of the work he was doing on his studies of the early
Church in Canada and its cultural impact. Also, he was a devout Catholic.”

“Assuming it really was Latin—and I’m sort of doubting it, to be
honest—did this fella know what Richard was saying? Could he make
anything out?”

“Oddly,” Billy said, “he did think he caught one phrase—he thought
Richard said ‘
Abyssus abyssum invocat
.’”

“Which means what, exactly?”

“It’s from Psalm forty-two, verse seven. It means ‘Deep calleth unto
deep.’”

“You said he was a regular ‘Christer,’” Elliot said. “Maybe it was
something he heard in church sometime?”

“Richard was a Methodist, constable. His undergraduate degree was
in English Literature. He didn’t speak Latin at all.” Billy paused. “He said
something else, according to Emory. It sounded like ‘
Suscito me
.’”

“Sorry, Dr. Lightning—this means what?”

“Roughly translated, it means ‘Wake me.’”

“He wanted Emory to wake him up?” Elliot said. “So he asks in
Latin
?”

“It didn’t appear that he was speaking to Emory, based on what
Emory said about it the next day, when he told my father and me what
had happened.”

“All right, never mind all that,” Thomson said impatiently. “It doesn’t
signify one way or another, does it? Did he remember anything about the
sleepwalking the next day?”

“No. He said he’d had some peculiar dreams, but he had no memory
whatsoever of the sleepwalking. He also laughed when Emory asked him
if he knew Latin. He said the only Latin he knew was Pig Latin. He said
he felt a lot better than he had the day before. So we went to the site
and went back to work. It was a good day—bright, sunny. Not hot, but
pleasantly warm. Richard seemed to be in a terrific mood, at least to start
with.

“As the day progressed, though, Richard became a bit listless and
irritable. He snapped at Emory a couple of times for no good reason and,
at one point, threw a shovel. It didn’t hit anyone, of course, but it was so
out of character for Richard that we all noticed it. I think at one point my
father may have wondered if Richard had been malingering the previous
day—you know, storming off and pretending to have gotten lost because
he was angry about something he wasn’t being honest about—but he was
mostly concerned about Richard’s behaviour being so out of character for
such a good-natured young man.”

“Drugs? Could it have been that he was doing drugs? It sounds to me
like he might have been on some kind of dope,” Thomson said.

“I already told you, sergeant,” Billy said, “Richard was a straight
arrow.”

“OK, this is all very interesting, Dr. Lightning, but I’m going to have
to ask you to get to the point. Why are you telling us about something
that happened twenty years ago to some graduate student who doesn’t
live here in Parr’s Landing? And what in the name of sweet biscuits does
any of this have to do with why you’re here? Or with your father?”

“Let me finish the rest of my story, sergeant, and I’ll tell you.”

Thomson sighed deeply. “Very well,” he said. “Go on. But please, get
to the point soon, Dr. Lightning.”

“Do you know why we had to leave Parr’s Landing, sergeant—I mean,
we, the crew?”

“Some sort of medical problem, I recall hearing. Some sort of
accident?”

Billy said, “There was indeed an accident, but it wasn’t the sort of
accident one normally associates with a dig. Richard attacked and nearly
killed Emory a week later.”

Elliot glanced at Thomson as if to say,
Do you believe this
? But
Thomson’s expression was neutral, and his eyes on Billy betrayed nothing.

“After the sleepwalking incident,” Billy said, “Richard became more
and more withdrawn. Emory told my father that he slept badly. He tossed
and turned all night, and occasionally spoke in his sleep.”

“What did he say?” Thomson asked. “Do you remember?”

“Emory said that not much of it made any sense. Except one night,
Richard woke up screaming that he was buried alive. Emory said he was
drenched in sweat. He had apparently thrown his covers all over the floor
of the motel room and was flailing his arms like he was trying to dig
himself out of a hole.

“The next morning—again—Richard had no memory of the event
at all. He got very angry with Emory. Richard accused Emory of lying just
to confuse him. By that time Emory had started to be afraid of sharing
the motel room with him. He told my father he wanted his own room.
My father was initially reluctant to accede to Emory’s wishes, not only
because it wasn’t in the budget, but also because he was afraid that such
a drastic action would just make it worse. Richard, you see, didn’t believe
any of this was happening. I think on some level, he believed we’d all
been playing a joke on him since that first day he wandered off.”

“So, what finally happened?” Elliot asked. “You said he almost killed
the other fella, this Emory?”

“We’d been out on the site all day, that last day,” Billy said. “Richard
had apparently had another bad night and not a lot of sleep. He was
sullen and withdrawn. It was a hot day, too, that day—really hot, very
humid. There were a lot of bugs, black flies and the like, that we hadn’t
had to deal with over the course of the dig up till that point. The sort
of weather that makes people jump out of their skin at a moment’s
notice when someone looks at you the wrong way. Everyone’s shirts were
plastered to their backs before noon, but there was no wind and the bugs
were a nightmare, so we kept them on and just . . . well, endured.

“When my father announced that we were breaking for lunch,
Richard gathered up his things, as he had been doing since the first day
since his bizarre experience with the quasi-amnesia, and prepared to go
off and eat his lunch alone. My father objected. He insisted we all eat
together as a group.”

“Why?” asked Thomson. “After all that had gone on? Why would he
antagonize him like that?”

“Dad might have been trying to see what sort of a reaction it would
provoke in Richard. I know my father was growing increasingly concerned
about Richard and had spoken to both Emory and me privately about
sending Richard back home to Toronto to get some help, and finishing
up the dig as a trio.”

“What was Richard’s reaction?”

“He became furious. He accused my father of overstepping his
bounds and taking advantage of his status as Richard’s professor in
order to ‘control’ him. His rage was completely out of sync with either
my father’s request, or anything else, including how irritable we all felt in
that heat. My father insisted again, and for a moment Richard looked at
my father as though he wanted to murder him. It looked to me as though
Richard would attack him. Emory and I both stood up at the same time.
Richard looked at all three of us, and then stalked away into the bush,
towards the cliffs, without looking back.

“Emory said, ‘I’ll go after him. Let me see if I can talk to him.’ My
father said, ‘No, I’ll do it. It’s my responsibility.’ But Emory insisted,
saying that it was obvious that Richard was furious about my father
taking a paternalistic role in this situation, and that perhaps talking to
someone closer to his own age would be less threatening. So he took off
into the bush looking for Richard.”

“What happened when he found him?” Elliot asked. “I mean, I’m
assuming he did?”

Billy took a deep breath, and then exhaled slowly. “Yes, he definitely
found him. But first, we found Emory. When he wasn’t back in half an
hour, both my Dad and I had a bad feeling about it, so we went to find
him. We did, about half a mile from the camp. It wasn’t hard—we just
followed the sound of his screaming.”

Again, Elliot found himself asking, “What happened?” But this time,
he sounded less like an interrogating policeman than he did a young boy
listening to a ghoulish campfire story. Dave Thomson caught the subtle
tonal shift and glanced at the younger officer. Elliot didn’t notice. Billy
held his full attention.

“We found him,” Billy continued. “Emory had collapsed against a
boulder about a hundred yards away from where the path veered sharply
upward to the hill that led to the cliffs. At first, we thought he had fallen
and maybe broken his arm, but his screaming was too obviously the
sound of someone in terrible, terrible pain. His knees were pulled up
and he was clutching his shoulder and writhing in agony in the dirt. My
father ran to him. Emory kept screaming. Dad gently pulled his hand
away from his shoulder to see what had happened. His shirt was soaked
in blood that was gushing out of a severe, deep wound in his shoulder.
Emory’s face was paper-white—he was obviously in the early stages of
shock. My father asked him what had happened, and he was able to say
just one word before he passed out. He said,
Richard
.

“Dad tore off his own shirt and tied it around Emory’s shoulder in a
clumsy tourniquet. He said, ‘We need to get Emory to the hospital right
away.’ We picked him up as gently as we could, then carried him, half running, all the way back to the camp. Once there, we lay him across
the back seat of the van and drove down the hill as fast as possible to
the doctor’s office. Thank God he was in. The doctor said it looked like
Emory had been hit with an axe, or some sort of ice pick, in the shoulder.

“By that time, Emory had regained consciousness, though he was
in terrible pain. The doctor gave him a shot of something strong—
morphine, maybe? My father asked him what had happened, and Emory
said that Elliot had been hiding behind one of the rock walls, and had
jumped out and attacked him with the chisel end of an archaeological
hammer. Emory said something else before the drug knocked him out
cold. He said that Richard drank his blood.”

“Drank his
blood
?”

“Yes, that he’d attacked him with the hammer, and drank the blood
from the wound. That he’d pressed his mouth against it and sucked it. He
also said that Richard had told him that ‘the voice’ had told him to do it,
and that the voice was coming from ‘the caves.’”

“The caves?” Thomson said. “What caves?”

“He claimed there were caves in the cliffs,” Billy replied. “Are there?”

“Well, yes. There are caves. Parr’s Landing is a mining town. The
ground underneath it is full of tunnels. Some came about when the mine
opened a hundred years ago, but one of the reasons the mine opened was
that there were caves and gorges there in the first place. Combined with
the gold they found, it made for ideal conditions. But that’s something
that Richard could have discovered all on his own, without a ‘voice’
guiding him. So—he was plain crazy the whole time? Some kind of
breakdown?”

“Emory was picked up by an ambulance plane and taken to hospital
in Sault Ste. Marie. In addition to the blood loss, he’d suffered severe
nerve damage from the wound. The RCMP caught Richard a couple of
days later. He’d been living outdoors in the area around Bradley Lake. I
saw him when the cops brought him in. He looked like a monster out of
a horror movie. His clothes were torn and filthy. His face and hands were
scratched, and his face was smeared with Emory’s dried blood. His eyes
looked like an animal’s eyes, but even wilder. He didn’t seem to recognize
either my father or me. He claimed he didn’t know who Emory was.”

Billy stood up and walked across the room to where his suitcase
lay open at the end of his bed. He rummaged through his clothes, and
then withdrew a thick manila file folder encircled with a plastic band. He
brought it over to where the two policemen sat and put it down on the
table between them.

“What’s this, then?” Thomson said. He looked down at the file and
read the handwritten label. It said
Richard Weal case: Clippings and Notes
in faded blue ink.

“It’s the story,” Billy said simply. “It’s what happened. They arrested
Richard and charged him with assault and attempted murder. He was
still raving about voices in the rocks when they took him away under
police guard. He was declared unfit to stand trial and was incarcerated in
a mental institution outside of Montréal for fifteen years.” Billy tapped
the folder. “It’s all here—everything. My father’s notes. Newspaper
clippings. The arrest, the trial, everything. My father made a copy of this
before he died, and mailed it to me. He said he was working on a book
about what happened—and what had happened before.”

“What do you mean, what had happened before? Before
what
? You
mean, with Richard?”

“Not just with Richard,” Billy said. “There’s a history of violent
incidents associated with this place. That history stretches back almost
two hundred and fifty years. What happened with Richard and Emory
has happened before, and right around here.”

“Again, Dr. Lightning,” Thomson said in a pained voice, this time
not even trying to cover up his impatience, “this is all very interesting.
I’m sure your father’s book would have been fascinating. Forgive me for
repeating myself again, but you still haven’t answered my question about
why you’re in Parr’s Landing
now
.”