Enter, Night

by Michael Rowe

  So audible, present, and clear this time—not in his head, but directly in front of him—that Weal gasped. He swung the flashlight wildly, seeking out the recesses of the mine and the shadows between the rocks where the light couldn’t reach. He gaped at what he saw standing there. It was a man, or something shaped like a man, towering, wrapped in a long black robe. Its eyes twinkled in the light, but there was no joy in those eyes, only ancient malice and an insatiable, terrifying hunger.

  Weal felt his bowels let go as he fouled himself for a second time, the stench rising to his nostrils immediately, making him dry-retch.

  And then, suddenly, there was no robed man standing in front of him—no one at all. There were no eyes twinkling in the flashlight’s beam. Weal blinked and stared harder into the mineshaft, trying to see. Chimerical shapes danced in front of his eyes. He rubbed them, but the shapes remained, fantastical, grotesquely cavorting. What he’d first taken for the figure of a man was nothing but an odd rock formation. The gleam of eyes was merely mica flickering as the flashlight swept over it.

  There was no one there. The only monster hiding in this place was Weal himself. The thought filled him not with dread, but with impossible relief, for what he’d seen was infinitely worse than anything he could have ever imagined in his best, or worst, nightmares.

  Then the voice came again, even more clearly than before. He felt an indistinguishable mix of relief and terror in equal measure, combined with nearly transcendent reverence.

  Here. You have found me.

  Weal knelt down in the dirt in a posture of abject supplication. He felt sharp stones cutting into his kneecaps, but he welcomed the pain as an offering of abasement.

  “Where, Lord?” he wept. “Where are you? Show me. I beg you. One more sign, Lord. Please. Just one more sign.”

  Another image flashed through his mind and he turned his head sharply to the left. He aimed the flashlight at the place where had been told to look. A short distance from where he knelt, the natural architecture of cave rock had created an oblong depression that jutted out from the wall of bedrock like an anthropoid coffin, but too small to contain the body of man.

  Lying across it almost like a lid was a long, flat slab of sedimentary shale. At first, Weal took it to be another part of the rock formation, but when he brought the light close, he saw that it had fallen, or been deliberately placed there, at an angle.

  Roll the stone away.

  He put the flashlight down and set his shoulder to the shale lid, pushing hard. He’d expected the slab to be heavy, but it was relatively light and brittle. It yielded readily, crashing to the ground, splitting in two at his feet. He fumbled for the flashlight at his feet. He shone it into the basin. Then the flashlight flickered and died.

  “No!” he screamed. “No! No! Not now!”

  He shook the flashlight, slapped it against his thigh. A bolt of agony shot through his leg as the blade of the knife in his pocket bit into his thigh again, but the impact accomplished its goal: the flashlight flickered and went back on.

  Feverishly, Weal shone the light into the stone basin. It contained what he at first took to be the dried body of a small animal, but on closer inspection was a bundle of what seemed to be ashes and bone fragments inside the rotted remains of some of sort cloth, or animal skin. He reached out to touch the bundle, finding it cold and oddly dry considering the length of time it had lain underground, undisturbed.

  Gingerly, he opened the bundle, gently prying apart the fabric that contained it. The fabric fell apart at his touch, leaving the pile of ashes exposed to his flashlight’s beam.

  “Ashes,” he said aloud, remembering his vision. “These are ashes.” He said it again, not only to confirm his findings to his senses, but also to hear a voice that wasn’t in his head for once, even if it was his own.

  But then, had all the voices been in his head? He felt a sickening sense of betrayal wash over him. This wasn’t his friend, this was just an old pile of cinders. Where was his friend? Where was the voice? Where was the treasure? Had this whole misadventure been a series of crazy directives issued from his own diseased brain? The result of not taking the pills the doctors had prescribed him at the hospital? And now, because he’d thrown his pills away back in Toronto, he was going to die a horrible, drawn-out death by starvation and thirst.

  Why is there a coffin in a mineshaft?

  “What?” he said. The silence mocked him. “Who said that?” Weal looked left and right. “Father, is that you?”

  It was in your head, you idiot. Crazy person. It’s all in your head—all of the “voices” have been in your head the whole time. There’s no “Lord.” There’s no “Father.” There never was. You’ve fucked yourself good and proper now, haven’t you? Are you going to keep talking to yourself until you go blind down here? Or crazier? Or die of thirst? Why don’t you just cut your wrist and drink your own blood? Aren’t you thirsty enough yet? You will be, give it time. You just watch.

  Weal tried to swallow, but his spit had dried. He felt his throat close up, dry and hot as though it were packed with sand. He realized then that he had effectively buried himself alive, walled himself into a system of underground caves that predated the Parr family’s dynamiting of this part of the country by millennia.

  Yes, yes, buried alive. All very melodramatic. Typical crazy person. But by the way—not that it remotely matters at this moment—but how did ashes get into a tunnel?

  Weal looked at the heap of ashes—they were ashes, weren’t they? How did they get down here? Who brought them? And when? How? Traces of the vision he’d had before coming to consciousness down here floated back to him. He’d seen ash, piles of it, as though there had been a great burning. He’d smelled the burning bones and watched the wind carry the fragments into the air and scatter them across the cliffs.

  Ash. Bones. This ash? These bones?

  “Lord,” he whispered. “Where are you? If you’re real, please answer. Please only answer if it’s really you. Please show me what to do.” He waited, dreading the sound of the second voice, the mocking voice that sounded like his own. But there was nothing. “Please,” he said again. “Please.”

  Wake me. Wake me.

  “How?” he screamed. “Don’t go away again! Tell me, how?”

  You know how. I showed you many times before.

  “But I can’t do that! I’ll die! I can’t kill myself! I killed all those people for you!”

  WAKE ME!

  He bowed his head in submission and acceptance. With a sob, Weal pulled the knife out of his pocket and tested the blade with the ball of his thumb. He winced as it sliced through the skin. Blood rose to the cut and spilled down his thumb, flowing over the palm. In the light of the flashlight, it looked black on the knife blade.

  He took a deep breath, then rolled up the sleeve of his shirt and jacket. He cut the flesh of his wrist with one definitive, transversal downward stroke, severing the ulnar artery. The pain was sharp and immediate, but Weal made no sound. Instead, he squeezed the upper middle part of his forearm and pumped. He raised his arm and watched the blood drain out of his body, running down his arm onto the pile of ashes in the stone concavity where the ashes had rested undisturbed for three hundred years under Spirit Rock and the cliffs that ringed Bradley Lake.

  There was a sound like fat being dropped onto a hot griddle and the smell of burning meat.

  Above ground, a great flock of disparate nightbirds took to the sky from every treetop on Spirit Rock—a shocked, squawking black cloud, a cacophony of harsh screams soaring into the night.

  Below the mass of airborne birds, the first coyote yelped a sharp, terrified bark that became a shriek. Its mate joined in. Then another, and another, until the sound of their howling became deafening. Every dog in Parr’s Landing took up the cry, including Finn’s dog, Sadie, whose bloodcurdling lament was loud enough to wake Finn from a deep sleep in which he dreamed of Morgan Parr standing nude on the edge of Bradley Lake, beckoning him to join her
in the black water.

  “Awww fuck, Sadie,” Finn groaned, his voice thick with sleep. “You ruined it.”

  Vengefully, he lobbed a pillow at the dog who was standing rigidly on point beside his bedroom window staring at the glass. “Do you want to go out, girl?” he said, feeling guilty for throwing the pillow. “Do you? Do you want to go outside? Come. Come, Sadie, let’s go outside!”

  She whined, bounding ahead, her claws scrabbling madly on the floor. She ran like she had to take the world’s most portentous piss, and scratched madly at the metal screen door, making an even more unholy racket than she had with her howling.

  “Coming, coming,” Finn said. He knew that if Sadie howled like that again, his parents would wake up and then there would be hell to pay. He opened the back door and nudged her outside, shutting the door quickly. She had a doghouse out there; she could sleep in it tonight. Fucking dog.

  Finn went back to his bed and tried to find his Morgan dream again, already suspecting that the moment had passed, but willing to try anyway.

  Richard Weal knew he must be dying, because the cavern was full of incandescent red light and heat that streamed blindingly upward from the pile of ashes in the depression of rock. He was dying, and these were the gates of heaven. Or, more likely, hell.

  He covered his face with his bloody hand and tried to shield his eyes from the luminescence that was now so bright he could no longer see the walls of the cave. His knees gave way and buckled under his weight, and he fell to the ground in the earliest stages of hypovolemic shock. Just losing consciousness, Weal realized he was no longer alone.

  He lay on his side, squinting into the brilliance, trying to see. As the light began to fade, Weal became aware that the black-robed man he’d imagined in the moments before he’d found the ashes—the man who wasn’t—had stepped out of his feverish brain and into the world, and was bending over him.

  When the man lowered his lips to Weal’s throat, he tried to turn his head to accommodate the grateful kiss—what else could it be, but a benediction of gratitude to Weal for having found him, for having saved him, for releasing him from his prison? But he was too weak to form the words. He tried to apologize to the black shape towering over him for not being able to stand, for forcing him to kneel—surely the kneeling one should be Weal, not his friend—but no words came out. Weal realized that words would be beside the point, because his friend knew everything about him already, loved him just as he was, and knew he was sorry and had already forgiven him. He felt the man’s cold lips caress the tender skin below his jawline, then the scraping points of two sharp teeth.

  The pain when he bit down was incredible, but it vanished almost before it had even registered. As he felt the blood drain from his body, Richard Weal felt himself pulled up into a swirling vortex of crimson and gold light. For the briefest possible moment, Weal caught a glimpse of a glittering necropolis of souls, a dimension of pure love and endless wisdom. Its inhabitants reached out, their arms outstretched to embrace him, to join him to them, to forgive him and to guide him into their inanimate dimension that was opening before him and beckoning his soul to join the mass of others.

  Not this! Make me like you! Make me like you! You promised! I want to live forever! This isn’t what I killed for! This isn’t what I died for! YOU PROMISED!

  The crimson sky turned black and cold and violent.

  The dead recoiled in horror at his fury. They recognized him for what he was, for what he was becoming, and they fled in terror lest they, too, found themselves sucked into the black circumgyration of supernatural energy that dragged Richard’s enraged, insane soul back into the prison of his own dead body—the body lying on the stone floor of the cave where the creature he’d resurrected was still feeding on the last drops of his life.

  After the bar had closed, they had gone to Elliot’s place instead of Donna’s, because Elliot said he had to get up early in the morning. She didn’t find it particularly chivalrous on his part, but Donna wanted his company more than she wanted to be in her own bed, so she’d acquiesced. He’d asked her to stay the night and offered to drive her home afterwards, but she’d brought her own car and didn’t relish the prospect of leaving it in front of Elliot’s house overnight, advertising her whereabouts to the entire town. For the same reason, she didn’t want to leave her car in the O’Toole’s parking lot overnight so they could all wonder where she’d been instead of knowing.

  In the past, sex with Elliot had always been a deeply pleasurable experience. He was a devoted, attentive lover who took her satisfaction as a point of personal pride. He’d bend his body to her pleasure while taking his own, always leaving her satiated.

  Tonight had been different.

  It had all started the way it always did, the way she liked it, with his hands and mouth deftly playing her body, with Elliot offering his own body for her exploration, gratification, and pleasure. But when she’d slipped her hands between his legs to stroke his shaft, she found it soft.

  It’s me, Donna thought, abruptly and self-consciously aware of the slackening of her body and the way it must have changed, how different it must feel to him since they had first slept together years before. What she saw in the mirror at home looked just fine to her, but here, with Elliot McKitrick on top of her . . .

  She guided him onto his back and knelt between his legs, using her mouth on his cock, gently squeezing his nipples between her fingers until she felt him harden, then laid back herself and urged him along using the filthy words she knew he liked. She arched her back, offering her mouth and her breasts to his kisses the way she had always done, which he’d always liked before.

  “Turn over,” he’d said in a muffled voice she’d never heard before—a compressed, harsh, entirely unfamiliar but oddly thrilling voice. “Roll over on your stomach.”

  When she did what she was told, he entered her from behind. At first his movements were languorous and rhythmic and she moaned with familiar pleasure. But as the strokes quickened, he thrust harder and with more force.

  Then Elliot pulled out and slipped his cock into her ass.

  Donna gasped at the sudden invasion. Wanting to please him, she willed herself to relax and take him in. His fingers dug into her hips as he pushed. When he entwined his fingers in her hair and yanked on it as though it were a bridle, she cried out in shock and pain. She felt his body buckle and he collapsed against her, driving her into the bed with him on top as wave after wave of his climax shuddered through his body.

  “We’ve never done it like that before,” she said. When there was no reply, she asked, “Was it OK? I mean, doing it that way?”

  “It was great,” he said.

  Afterwards, he’d sat naked on the edge of the bed with his face in his hands. She ran her fingers along the scallops of muscle between his shoulder blades. When she’d touched his shoulder, he’d flinched.

  She’d asked him if he was crying and he said, “No, of course not, why?” as though it was the stupidest question he’d ever heard, which hurt Donna’s feelings more than anything else. When she asked him what was wrong, he told her he’d had a bad day, then apologized for snapping at her and offered to drive her home.

  “I brought my car, Elliot, remember? You have to get up early, you said.”

  “Right, sorry,” he said. “I’m sorry, Donna. Really, I am. I have a lot on my mind. Work, you know. I’ll make it up to you next time.”

  Donna said nothing. She kissed him on the cheek, then picked her jeans and pink blouse off the floor where she’d left them.

  I’m too young to feel like this, she thought bitterly. Like something secondhand, like something in the fridge that’s turned. Her clothes smelled like beer and cigarette smoke after the fresh-laundry scent of Elliot’s sheets, but she couldn’t dress quickly enough to suit her purposes. The only thing Donna wanted was to be out of Elliot’s house and back in her own bedroom, with her cat and her cold sheets, where at least there was no one to make her feel the way she felt
right now.

  “Next time,” Elliot promised as she said goodbye. But they both knew there wouldn’t be a next time. And Donna, for one, was fine with that.

  In the car, she lit a cigarette, then turned the key in the ignition and pulled out of Elliot’s driveway, heading towards her house on the other side of town, thinking that Elliot McKitrick was a prick of the first order, but that it still hurt like hell.

  At 4:30 a.m., Donna had parked her car in her driveway and put the keys in her purse. A light, cold rain had begun to fall and she hurried up the driveway to avoid getting drenched. The perfect ending to a perfectly awful night, she thought.

  She was nearly at the front door of her house when she heard something pass through the air above her head. The sound disoriented her. When she was eight, her mother took Donna with her to visit an elderly aunt who’d spent her life in a convent outside of Montréal. The sisters kept a working farm, and while her mother visited with the aunt, one of the younger nuns showed her the dovecote attached to the barn. Donna had lain on her back in hay and watched the doves fluttering above her. She’d closed her eyes, listened, and imagined they were angels.

  That’s what this was like—the ripple of wings, but louder and heavier than doves’ wings. Instinctively, she looked up towards the sound, but saw nothing in the night sky except stars and the distant mass of the cliffs.

  Then the sound came again, directly over her head this time. The last thing Donna Lemieux ever saw was something huge, something with wings—no, not something, someone, and not wings, outstretched arms—fall from the sky, smashing her into the gravel of her driveway. Her mind had time to register only two things: first, that the body on top of her was male and that it—he—was fiercely strong. And secondly, that she was about to die here on her own driveway in sight of her own front door. She tried to scream, but the impact of the body crashing down on top of her back had driven the air from her lungs and she lay on the driveway gasping for air.