Enter, Night (64 page)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ad majorem Dei gloriam.

Fr. Alphonse Nyon of the Society of Jesus

Montréal, Québec, 1650

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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