Enter, Night (21 page)

“We didn’t do anything, Grandmother,” Morgan said. “We just
walked. He was nice. No one else would talk to me, but he did. He walked
me all the way home.”

“What was his name, honey?” Christina asked again.

“Finn, Mommy. He said it was short for Finnegan.”

“It doesn’t matter what his name is,” Adeline said. “I won’t have— ”

“You won’t have
what,
Mother?” Jeremy said. “There’s nothing
wrong with Morgan making friends with a local boy. Good Lord, it’s 1972,
not 1872.”

All of the colour had left Morgan’s face, rendering it as pale as rice
paper. The dark circles beneath her eyes that had been fading of late
suddenly developed like bruises in a black-and-white photograph.
“Mommy, may I be excused?” she said faintly. “I’m not feeling well.”

“We have not finished dinner, young lady, and I—”

“Yes, sweetheart, you may,” Christina said, cutting Adeline off. She
shot her mother-in-law a look of such lethal ferocity that it stopped the
older woman in mid-flow. “Why don’t you go and lie down? I’ll come up
and see you in a bit. I think your grandmother and Uncle Jeremy and I
need to have a grown-up talk.”

Before Adeline could say anything, Morgan pushed her chair back
and ran out of the dining room, looking at none of them. They heard the
sound of her feet taking the stairs two at a time, then the sound of the
bedroom door slamming on the next floor.

“Adeline,” Christina said, struggling to maintain her composure.

“Are you
trying
to push your granddaughter away? Are you trying to drive
her away from you? Because I’ll tell you what, before she came down here,
she was crying for her dead father. Would it have been too much to ask
for you to leave her alone? If you want to beat me up for my relationship
with Jack, by all means, do your worst. But could you do it when Morgan
isn’t around? And while you’re at it, could you leave her alone and let her
settle in here?
She’s fifteen years old
! She’s
completely
innocent of whatever
crime you think Jack and I committed, and except for the three of us here,
she’s completely alone.”

Adeline narrowed her eyes. “I can see that she didn’t have very
much supervision in your home, Christina. But this is not your home.”

She raised her glass of ice water and took a delicate sip. When she put it
down again, her dark red lipstick had smudged the rim of the glass, like
the mouth of a paper cut. “This is
my
home,” she said. “And Jeremy’s
home. It would also have been my son’s home if you hadn’t taken him
away from me and killed him. And here in my home, there are rules. I will not have her running around like a common trollop, cavorting with local
boys before she has a chance to even establish a reputation for herself as
a Parr.”

“Mother, stop it,” Jeremy pleaded. “Just stop. For the love of Christ.”

“Adeline, she just wants to make friends,” Christina said. “Don’t you
understand that? It’s innocent. She’s a young girl and she’s all alone.”

“‘
Friends
!’” Adeline hissed. “‘
Friends
like you were with Jack?
Friends
like Jeremy and that miner’s son, that dirty McKitrick boy? Is that the
sort of friends you were referring to? We’ve had enough of the Parrs
making
friends
with the locals in this town!”

Jeremy stood up so abruptly that he knocked his chair back. He
picked up his dinner plate and hurled it as hard as it could against the
opposite wall. It smashed into shards, leaving a trail of butter and
hollandaise that slowly dripped down the wall. He stood there pale and
shaking, his hands balled into fists, looking as if he was expending every
ounce of restraint he possessed to keep himself from leaping across the
table and stabbing his mother to death with one of her own sterling silver
dinner knives.

Adeline sat still, entirely unruffled, her back rigid, not touching
the back of her own chair. “That Meissen plate was from your great grandmother Parr’s wedding china,” she said calmly. “It was a service
for forty people. The rim of the plate is—was—eighteen-karat gold.
I’ll wager the plate you just destroyed with your childish outburst was
worth more than the sum either of you have in your bank accounts at the
moment.”

“You’re insane,” Christina said to Adeline. “You’re completely insane.
No wonder Jack wanted to leave. It wasn’t the town, it was you.”

“We’re leaving,” Jeremy said to Christina. “Get Morgan. We’re going.
Now. We’re not spending another minute in this fucking house.”

Adeline said again, “Am I right? How much do you have in your
respective bank accounts? Assuming,” she added with a small smile,
“that either of you even have bank accounts? Enlighten me, Jeremy, my
independently wealthy son. Where will you go?”

“Christina, ! Come on!”

“You would never have come back here, Jeremy, if you had somewhere
else to go. Nor you, Christina. You are literally penniless, aren’t you? And
you’ve come back here, to me, because there was nowhere else.”

“You
bitch,
” Jeremy said. “You absolute bloody—”

“If I were you, son, I’d be more careful with my epithets,” Adeline
said mildly. “It’s only my love for you as a mother that’s keeping me from
using a few of the choice ones that describe men like you.”

“You hate me, don’t you?” Jeremy said, marvelling. “You
actually
hate me
. You wish it had been me who died instead of Jack.”

“No, my dear, I love you,” she replied. “And I do confess that,
sometimes, I wish it had been you who died instead of Jack. But the
feeling passes.”

Jeremy stumbled blindly out of the dining room. Christina rose from
her chair and threw her napkin on the table. She followed Jeremy out
into the front hall, leaving Adeline alone. From inside the dining room,
Christina heard the tinkling sound of the bell Adeline used to summon
Beatrice, and the sound of the door that connected the kitchen and the
dining room swing open and shut.

“Jeremy, where are you going?” Christina said.

“Out,” Jeremy said harshly. “Away from here. Home to Toronto.
Somewhere . . . I don’t know.”

“You’re too upset to drive. Stay here, calm down. It’s too dangerous.”

“I can’t,” he mumbled. He reached for the pea coat he’d left on the
chair next to the sideboard in the hallway. “I need to think. I need to get
away. I need a drink. Come with me.”

“I can’t leave Morgan,” Christina said. “I have to stay here with her.
Adeline’s right, you know. We have nowhere else to go, at least until one
of us has some money. She has us right where she wants us. We have to
make it work. Or rather,
I
have to make it work. Won’t you stay with me
so we can talk about this?”

“No, not now,” he said. “I’ll be back in a bit. I need to clear my head.
Don’t worry, she’s vented now, she’ll be fine for a while. Even monsters
need to rest between monstrosities.” He put his coat on and felt in his
pockets for the car keys. “I’ll be back,” he repeated. “Don’t worry.”

“Just . . . well, just drive carefully.” The unspoken thought that
passed between them was,
Please don’t leave me alone the way Jack did. I
can’t go through that again. Neither Morgan nor I could survive it happening
twice.

Jeremy hugged her. “Don’t worry,” he said. “I’ll be back in a couple of
hours.”

He held Christina tightly for a moment, then opened the front door
and walked to his car. As he turned the key in the ignition, he saw her
framed in the doorway of the house, silhouetted in the lights of the
hallway. Then he turned the car around and headed towards town.

The clatter of gravel against the undercarriage of the car sounded
like shots.

Through the windshield of the Chevelle, Jeremy saw the stars in the
night sky over Parr’s Landing as though they were underwater, for he
was weeping at this final and unalterable proof that his mother not only
regretted his existence, as he’d known since he was fifteen, but actively
wished him dead, at least if it would bring his brother back from the
grave.

Richard Weal heard
the distant passage of Jeremy’s car as he crouched
on a ledge above Bradley Lake and waited, invisible as any other night
predator. He waited with increasing desperation for his secret voice to
speak to him again, to give him one last sign that he could follow, but the
voice had been silent all day.

He sifted aimlessly through his hockey bag, wrinkling his nose in
disgust at the sour smell that drifted up from it. He had to admit, his
hockey bag was starting to stink of blood, old hair, and bits of rotted
carrion, but as he had been travelling alone for the most part, the
aesthetics hadn’t been much of a priority for obvious reasons. The
knives hadn’t been properly cleaned since before Gyles Point, and while
he’d rinsed them off as best he could in the sink at the cottage, they had
assumed a bronzy-red patina. The hammers were greasy and slick to the
touch but, testing the sharp points of them, he didn’t doubt that they
could still do the job for which they had been designed—and even a few
jobs for which they had not. But he doubted, at this point, that he would
have much need for them.

Not after tonight. Not ever again. He would have his teeth.
Weal’s muscles were cramped and sore from having spent the
previous night sleeping outdoors and he was chilled to the bone. And
hungry. The sun had been a warming balm for the brief time he’d been
able to experience it this afternoon, and he cursed the stupid cop from
town who had interrupted his exploration of Spirit Rock and forced him
to crouch in the cold shadows for hours afterwards.

That cop will be the next one to die,
Weal swore to himself.
He’s going to
die for making me so uncomfortable today. And I’m going to make it hurt, too.
I’m going to make it hurt a lot.

He closed his eyes and listened for the voice, but it was silent. He
felt a momentary flare of panic. His first thought was that his friend was
angry at him for wasting another day, for not finding him and rescuing
him. But he forced himself to calm down. He rarely heard the voice when
he was upset, or when his mind was clouded with other thoughts, or
worry, or panic. He mustn’t panic, now more than ever, when he was so
close to achieving his—
their
—goal.

“Tell me where you are,” Weal whined. He lowered himself onto his
knees in an aspect of prayer and folded his hands like a child. Tears of
frustration welled up in his eyes and ran down his filth-caked face. “I
know you’re here, Father,” he sobbed, closing his eyes. “I can
feel
you.
I know this is the place. I know you’re here. Give me a sign. Show me.
Please . . . ? Let tonight be the night. I beg you, Father. Give me just one
more sign.
Please
.”

And then the images came to him, redoubled in force and clarity,
stronger than ever before, violent and terrifying and euphoric. The
strength of them knocked him backwards and he lay on the cold ground
in violent convulsion. His jaws worked, and he bit his tongue, tasted his
own blood in his throat before it ran pinkly from his mouth, mixing with
his slobber, staining his stubbled chin. Weal’s eyes rolled back in his head,
and all was darkness, except that it was a brilliant darkness, and he could
see more clearly than he ever had in his life.

He saw Spirit Rock and he saw Bradley Lake, but they were
different,
surrounded by a denser, darker, greener forest, a bluer, clearer sunset
sky. The air was pungent, wilder and more savagely northern than it
had been that afternoon, or at any other time in his lifetime. He knew,
without knowing how, that it was
not
his lifetime, that it was some other
time altogether. He felt the weight of centuries hurtling around him
like supernovas, and he knew that the weight would crush his soul to
powder if it weren’t for the protection of his friend’s voice that he wore
like armour in this waking dream of shredded time.

He found himself standing at the opening of a cave, not the place
where his body lay shaking on the ground. He glanced around dumbly in
the sunset light and saw great piles of smoking ash heaped around the
opening of the cave.

He smelled the stink of burning flesh suddenly over the wild scent
of the forest as the wind came up and began to scatter the ash across the
cliffs. Some of it blew into his face, burning his eyes and catching acridly
in his throat.

Something happened here,
he thought.
Something marvellous and
terrible, something not of this earth. Something beautiful.

Weal looked around dumbly.
I’m dreaming. I’m not here. This is not
happening. I fell asleep outside on the ledge on Spirit Rock. Or I’m having
an episode because I threw my pills away in Toronto, and I have to wake up.
There’s work to do. I have to wake up!

But his eyes burned and his mouth tasted like cinder and he felt
the ground, solid and real. He felt the cold north wind that carried the
stinking soot that smelled like burned meat. He felt the press of sharp
stones through the worn soles of his boots.

Weal looked questioningly at the mouth of the cave, but before he
could ask, he knew what the answer would be. It came and he followed it
into the cave, and was swallowed whole by the shimmering visions.

He woke up underground,
shivering, disoriented, and smelling of
piss and shit. He was no longer cold, in fact his body pulsed with heat as
though his veins were shot full of hot lead.

He raised himself on his elbow and looked around groggily. In his
hand was the flashlight. He felt around for his hockey bag with his tools,
but it was nowhere nearby. He switched on the flashlight and shone the
beam in front of him in the darkness. The feeble light played off walls of
rock and supporting arches of rotted wood. Somewhere in the distance,
he heard the steady sound of water hitting stone and there was a sense of
yawning emptiness ahead of him, just out of sight.