Enter, Night

by Michael Rowe

  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 fat
her’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.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  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 an
d 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.