by Michael Rowe
Billy felt his foot strike something soft. He shone the light on the ground.
Dave Thomson, still wearing his uniform, lay at Billy’s feet, curled up in a foetal position, eyes closed, apparently fast asleep.
Billy played his light along Thomson’s face and neck, stifling a scream with difficulty. The wounds to Thomson’s throat had been mortal ones: the flesh had been grated away from his jugular area, the flaps of skin hanging like a string of maggots from two ghastly, jagged holes. There was no way Thomson—anyone—could have survived those wounds.
But ghastlier still was the suppleness and rosy texture of the rest of his skin—face, neck, even his hands. It glowed with vitality. When Billy shone the light at just the right angle, he could see the red veins beneath the surface.
To Thomson’s left, Elliot McKitrick slept, nude, his limbs lewdly entwined with those of a blonde woman in a stained pink top and blue jeans.
Billy backed away carefully. As he did, he saw the shadows of still other bodies in similar states of repose, as though the dark arena was some sort of dormitory, or a nest. Billy counted—what, fifteen? Twenty? No, closer to thirty bodies or more scattered around the arena, all of them assuming Thomson’s same restful posture. There were men with the rough, rawboned faces and hands of miners. He saw children lying against the burned boards, arms and legs askew in the way children sleep, some still wearing pyjamas as though they had been plucked out of their beds as they slept. There were women, some nude, some wearing nightgowns, some dressed in bloodstained parkas—not heavy parkas, but just the right temperature for a walk on northern Ontario night on the death-edge of autumn.
Billy’s flashlight picked out the bodies of a man and woman in their early thirties. His body was broken and his face was charred with an ugly cinderous scar that was vaguely cruciform in shape. The woman’s body was curled against the man’s body. Her head lay on his chest in a loving, wifely aspect. Cruel new teeth protruded and lay against her lower lip, lending a vaguely lupine mien to an otherwise loving and maternal face that Billy could easily picture comforting a boy grieving for his lost dog, for Billy had no doubt at all that he’d found Finn’s parents.
Not possible, thought the anthropologist. There are no scientific or material grounds for any of this. Not possible. I refuse to accept this scientific impossibility. I am a tenured university professor. I teach legends and myths. I don’t believe them.
But another voice, colder and infinitely more realistic said: Look around you. Finn was right.
Something swayed above him in the shadows and Billy shone his light towards the roof of the arena. The yellow beam caught a familiar face, a face he had not seen for twenty years almost, but one whose contours and hollows he would be able to pick out of any police lineup, in spite of the wild long hair and the matted red beard—no, not a red beard. Just red.
The body hung from its toes by a broken beam as though he weighed nothing more than a handful of bad dreams, scrawny arms folded across its chest as though it were cold.
“Richard,” Billy whispered. “What the hell?”
Then Weal opened his shining dark red eyes and dropped from the ceiling with balletic grace that struck Billy as beautiful. “Hello, Billy,” he said, opening his arms. “Welcome back.”
Billy said, “You killed my father, you crazy fuck.”
“Yes,” Weal said, winking. “I did. He didn’t put up much of a fight. He was old and frightened. Phenius Osborne was weak. I wanted to use the knives on him, but I didn’t have enough time. Luckily for him, he gave me what I needed. His papers. The book he was writing about the history of St. Barthélemy. I just needed the pages that showed me where to find the Master and how to wake him. And I did wake him. And now,” Weal said, “I’m a god.” He covered his mouth with his fingers and giggled—a horrible, mirthless squealing that made Billy think of nails being dragged across a china dinner plate. “He was a bit of a coward, wasn’t he, your father? He wouldn’t have made a very good Jesuit martyr. No tolerance for pain.” Weal paused, grinning. “How’s your tolerance for pain, Billy? Shall we find out?”
Billy swung the crowbar as hard as he could at Weal’s head. His skull cracked open in a red grapefruit whoomph!, spraying blood and brain matter against the standing beams. Weal’s body pitched backwards on the ground, jerking spasmodically.
Then he sat up and Billy watched the skull reform atop his neck, bones miraculously reassembling themselves, flesh layering upon flesh.
Even his hair is growing back, Billy noted with awe, feeling around in the dark around him for something—anything—to use as a weapon for when this fucking bastard dead thing had decided to finish growing fully back together, which Billy already knew was imminent. His groping hands found something that felt like a charred shovel. Thank God! Billy thought. It’s about time things started going my way here. As Billy raised it to swing at Weal’s body, the weight of the blade of the shovel snapped the wooden handle in two. The blade fell uselessly to the ground, leaving Billy holding a broken pole.
“Jesus fucking Christ!” Billy shouted. “Son of a bitch!”
Fully restored, Weal rose to a predatory crouch. “Now you’re going to die,” he said. “No one is going to miss another dead Indian. At least when I’m finished with you, you’ll have served some useful purpose, as food.”
At the exact moment Weal leaped for his throat, Billy thrust the shovel handle in front of him, plunging it into Weal’s chest as hard as he could.
The skin of Weal’s torso split as easily as had his skull, but this time there was no reforming flesh or miraculously healing bone. Weal shrieked—a high, undulating trill that Billy felt move through the air like electricity. Weal fell back against the rink boards, writhing like a harpooned fish.
Billy picked up the flashlight and shone it at Weal’s body. Black blood gushed from the chest wound, slowing to a trickle as the thrashing stopped and he lay still.
In the shadows beyond the flashlight’s reach, Billy heard the shivering and twitching of the sleeping bodies around him begin to stir and wake.
Oh fuck, he thought. He looked around wildly for another shard of unburned wood to use as a weapon. He still had the crowbar, but he’d already seen how useful that had been against these things.
Without thinking, he reached over and pulled the broken shovel handle out of Weal’s chest. It came out surprisingly easily. He turned away from the body. Using the flashlight’s beam to pick his way through the debris, Billy retraced his way towards the entrance.
By his reckoning, he had almost reached the front of the building when he heard the unmistakable sound of a board being accidentally kicked.
Billy swung the flashlight in the direction of the sound, but there was nothing. He broke into a run. Then he tripped, landing heavily and painfully on the ground, the air driven out of him. The flashlight pinwheeled into the air. It landed with a clatter a few feet away, the light extinguished.
Dark-blind and gasping for breath, Billy crawled in the dirt, feeling around for the shovel handle.
There it is! he thought, the relief bringing him to the verge of pissing himself. Thank God. His fingers closed around the shaft.
From above him, he felt rather than saw the arm that reached down and plucked the shaft of wood out of his grip and tossed it away. Billy heard it land, but he couldn’t gauge where.
“You should have left that inside me,” Richard Weal said. “Poor Billy.”
Jeremy Parr stood under the hot spray of the shower in his bathroom at Parr House and thought about his life.
It had begun here in this town and had been shaped by forces beyond his control. As soon as he had been old enough to control his own life, he’d fled.
Elliot had called him a coward for leaving, but leaving was his first completely courageous act. While he would have liked to think that there had been many other courageous acts in his life, he realized that returning to this place with Christina and Morgan was very likely only his second
completely courageous act.
He’d returned here for them, for Christina and Morgan—to be the man he knew Jack would have wanted him to be. When he had fled from Parr’s Landing and Adeline, his brother had taken him in and protected him, keeping him safe until Jeremy was strong enough to take care of himself.
As Jeremy saw it, the best way to honour Jack had been to return the kindness—to take care of his wife and daughter. It still was, which was why he was taking them away tonight, whether they liked it or not. He was already packed, and it would take Christina and Morgan no time to follow suit.
All he needed was the money from Adeline’s dressing table drawer; the thousand dollars that would get them home to Toronto and away from this awful place. It was past time. They would take Finn with them if they had to, drop him off in the care of some hospital or other, or even a police station—anywhere other than Parr’s Landing. Finn wasn’t safe here, either. No one was.
Jeremy stepped out of the shower and dried himself off. He wrapped a thin white towel around his waist, then opened the bathroom door and stepped out into the dim hall.
From downstairs in Christina’s room, he heard the television—a comforting sound, since he couldn’t ever remember Adeline allowing it to be turned on when she was in the house, all through his childhood years. Tonight, the sound recalled the living room in Jack and Christina’s house in Toronto, which made him smile.
Jeremy walked quickly down the hallway to his mother’s room and pushed open the door. The room was dim, but there was enough light from the hallway behind him.
He was surprised to see the snow on his mother’s bedroom windows—he hadn’t even noticed the change in weather. He crossed to Adeline’s dressing table and pulled open the bottom drawer, where he knew the money was carefully hidden underneath the neat bundle of letters and file folders.
The drawer was empty.
Outside, the wind and the snow hissed against the glass of Adeline’s bedroom window.
Jeremy felt a cold hand on the small of his back, tugging once. The towel around his waist fell to the floor. In the reflection of his mother’s dressing table mirror, Jeremy was alone, naked. Behind him was reflected the entire bedroom and doorway leading to the hallway, where light and safety was, where Christina and Morgan were. He felt the cold hand slip under his buttocks, between his legs.
Directly behind him, he heard his mother’s dead voice. “Jeremy,” she said. “My son.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Of the three of them, only Finn had grown used to the sound of screaming.
Consequently, when Jeremy’s high-pitched shrieks ripped through the preternatural silence of Parr House, Finn didn’t startle, or even flinch. He just looked up at the ceiling, pointed, and said, “They’re here in this house, too. They’re real. I told you.”
Christina’s head snapped forward and jerked upwards to the place Finn was pointing.
She jumped up from the chair next to her bed where Finn was still buried under the blankets. Morgan had been lying across the foot of the bed. She raised herself to a sitting position and instinctively moved closer to Finn and her mother, and away from the screaming, which had risen in pitch since Finn first spoke.
Uncle Jeremy sounded the way Morgan had always imagined an animal being slaughtered would sound.
“Stay here!” Christina commanded, pointing her finger at Morgan and Finn. “Do not move from this spot, do you understand me?”
“Mommy,” she whispered. “It’s Uncle Jeremy.”
“Morgan, stay here with Finn! Promise me!”
White-faced, Morgan nodded her head in assent. Finn, also pale, nodded briefly but with much less conviction. He squeezed Morgan’s hand.
Christina took the stairs two at a time, shouting, “Jeremy, I’m coming! I’m coming!”
She reached Jeremy’s bedroom and pushed the door open. The room was empty, his suitcase on the bed, half-packed. The rest of his clothing was folded in neat piles. The screaming wasn’t coming from his bedroom; it was coming from Adeline’s room.
Christina ran down the hallway. She threw open Adeline’s bedroom door. The room was dark. Instinctively, she groped for a light switch and stepped inside.
At first she wasn’t sure what she was looking at. There were three figures in the room, arrayed in a tableau that made Christina think of the ecclesiastical paintings of Christ’s crucifixion she’d seen in books—not the Passion itself, but the taking-down from the cross.
Jeremy was lying nude, spread-eagled on Adeline’s yellow silk bedspread, arms outstretched in a posture of martyrdom. The blood from his throat wound streamed down his broken neck, soaking the yellow silk pillowcases upon which his head lay at a terrible angle.
An old man with white hair, wearing some sort of cassock, was crouched at the head of the bed, his face buried under Jeremy’s jaw. And Adeline knelt at the foot of the bed, head bowed like Mary, mother of Christ.
From somewhere outside her own body, Christina idly noted that her mother-in-law was—ostentatiously, even for Adeline—wearing a fur coat indoors. Underneath the coat, Christina saw the grimy hem of a nightgown. Adeline’s bare feet on the immaculate carpet were black with filth, and there were dirty footprints leading to—no, back from—the window.
Adeline’s back was to Christina, her arms extended, her hands clamped on Jeremy’s drenched thighs, holding them apart as implacably as if they were secured in an iron grapple. The yellow silk bedspread was sodden with Jeremy’s blood, which had started to pool on the carpet in an outward-spreading stain.
Christina made a sound high in her throat, somewhere between the whine of a trapped animal and a moan. “Adeline . . .”
Adeline turned her crimson-smeared face towards Christina. She smiled as casually as a hostess who’d been disturbed in her embroidery, and spat her son’s penis out of her mouth like an hors d’oeuvre. “MOMMY!” Morgan stood in the doorway to Adeline’s room, her mouth an open circle of horror. Behind her, one hand on her shoulder, Finn stared, likewise open-mouthed.
“Oh my God, Morgan!” Christina wailed, turning around. “I told you to stay downstairs! Get downstairs right now!”
Adeline rose jerkily to her feet, looking from Christina to Morgan. Her mouthful of teeth was stained and needle-like in the overhead light.
“Whore,” Adeline croaked. “Dirty, dirty whore.” She took two shambling steps towards the doorway where Christina stood protectively in front of Morgan.
“Get away, Adeline, goddamn you!” Christina shouted. “Get away from my daughter!”
“Or else what, Christina?” Adeline crooned. “This is my house. I come and go as I please, and do as I like. Haven’t you learned your place here yet?”
Adeline reached out with one hand and slapped Christina across the face, sending her crashing into the polished maple Philadelphia highboy next to the doorway. Agony sang through Christina’s shoulder. She felt blood trickling down the back of her scalp where she’d cut it on the edge of the dresser, and she groaned.
Adeline turned her blazing eyes on Morgan and said, “Morgan, come here to your grandmother. Come and give me a kiss. You’re a real Parr. You’re the only real Parr in this house except for me. All of this is for you—this house, this town, and everything in it. It’s your birthright. Come here.”
Morgan flinched. Then her arms dropped limply to her sides. Her eyes glazed over and went blank. She took a blind, stumbling step towards Adeline, who crooked her arms and opened them in a grotesque parody of grand-maternal devotion.
“Morgan, no! Don’t go to her!” Finn shouted. “Don’t look at her! That’s how they get you!”
Morgan, empty-eyed, took another step towards her grandmother.
At the exact moment that Adeline’s arms snaked out, her fingers grazing the sleeves of her granddaughter’s sweater, Finn placed his palm flat in the middle of Morgan’s back and shoved her as hard as he could.
Morgan spun off-balance and fell, sprawling on the
floor near where Christina had fallen. Christina scrambled for Morgan and dragged her daughter across the carpet towards her.
Blind fury passed across Adeline’s face. From her open mouth came a shrill, sibilant buzzing, vaguely insectile or serpentine.
Her teeth actually click when she hisses like that, Finn thought in wonderment, fascinated in spite of himself. Just like in the comics.
Then Adeline threw back her head and laughed. “Little idiot,” she said. Her voice brimmed with contempt and malicious, dark mirth. “Dirty little townie boy. A dirty townie, just like my cunt of a daughter-in-law.”
Very clearly, Finn said, “Fuck you, you snob. This is for my dog.”
He unscrewed the lid of the mason jar of water he was holding behind his back and threw its contents in Adeline Parr’s face.
Finn’s father had once let him hold a candle up to a blowtorch. The candle had literally been uncreated in front of Finn’s eyes, liquefying and becoming viscous in the heat of the blowtorch.
That was what happened to Mrs. Parr’s face when the holy water splashed into it—into it, not across it. The water burned into Adeline’s face, flushing away skin, troughing bone, until the liquefied mixture that had been her face ran down in an oily red and yellow stream of blood and fat. Adeline dropped to her knees and then fell on her side, clawing at her face and rending the air with her agony.
She’s melting just like the Wicked Witch of the West, Finn mused. Good. I hope it hurts like hell.
It seemed impossible that she could still make that agonized highpitched sound with her throat melting away like it was, but Finn’s ears rang with the sound of her excruciation. Acrid, stinging white smoke poured from Adeline’s dissolving face, filling the room. It burned Finn’s throat and eyes, making him cough and retch.
Temporarily blind, Finn stumbled into the cavernous bedroom, feeling his way as he went. He flailed his arms in front of him, trying to stay balanced.
