Enter, Night

twine. Then he carried them downstairs and buried them on the property, deep enough so the animals wouldn’t dig them up for food when the winter freeze made their hunger savage.

In the darkness, he bathed naked in the icy waters of the inlet, screaming when the cold burned his skin. Then he dried himself with a rough towel, rubbing hard to bring the warmth back to his limbs. He found clean clothes hanging in the bedroom closets of the cabin. They smelled a bit musty and were slightly big for him, but he dressed quickly. Weal packed the remaining clothes he’d found in the closet into the duffel bag Carstairs had brought for this trip to the lake.

Rifling through Carstairs’s wallet, Weal found five hundred dollars and several credit cards. He left the credit cards, knowing they could be used to track him if it should come to that. But he doubted it would. It wouldn’t be long now till his life changed.

The voice had grown stronger and clearer, and more urgent, like a radio signal in his brain. It faded in and out as he drew closer, or veered away, from its source.

But tonight the voice had been very, very clear. Clearer than it had ever been.

Weal could picture his Friend-for that is indeed how he had come to think of the voice in his head, as a loving Friend, one who’d been his closest companion since the night he’d first heard it five years before-suffocating beneath mounds of flinty soil and shield rock, choking on clods of cold earth, struggling to be free, screaming in the suffocating darkness of the centuries.

And when he’d lapped the blood from Alan Carstairs’s slashed throat, his holiest of personal communion rituals, an image of the place had seared itself into his brain. It had appeared entirely unbidden, but it was clear as an Ektachrome slide.

Wake me, his Friend pleaded. You are close, very close, to the place you seek. Find me. Wake me. I will repay you with rewards beyond your wildest imaginings. I will raise you up to a god.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Twelve-year-old Finnegan Miller liked to get up when the house was still quiet, while his parents were still fast asleep in their room upstairs, and take his black Labrador, Sadie, for a long walk around Bradley Lake. In October, he woke before sunrise. His routine was unvaried: he dressed in his room, fed Sadie in the kitchen, found her favourite red rubber ball, then put on a jacket and slipped out the back door of the house with Sadie at his heels.

In short order, she’d run ahead, tail wagging, nose to the ground and he’d be the one following her instead of the other way around.

Bradley Lake was half a mile from his house on Childs Drive. To call it a “lake” would flatter it, especially given the proximity of Parr’s Landing to the shore of Lake Superior, which always seemed to Finn to be more like an ocean. According to legend, Lake Superior never gave up its dead, and in school, Finn had learned about the terrible history of shipwrecks during storms of almost supernatural ferocity there-the wreck of the Mataafa Storm in 1905, the Cyprus in 1907, the Inkerman and Cerisoles minesweepers in 1918. Surely, Finn thought, no body of water that carnivorous, with that much of a taste for human flesh should rightly be called a lake.

But Bradley Lake was a lake-vast, serene, with water so deep and cold it often looked black. Rising directly above it were a tiered grouping of rocky outcrops of Canadian Shield granite cliffs surrounded by a rich taiga forest of black spruce, jack pine, and Ontario balsam poplar.

Once at the lake, the path Finn took was a mile and a half around and lined with paper birch and balsam fir. When he was younger, he’d heard stories of coming upon bush animals in the darkness, but he’d only ever seen one-a buck, last fall-and it had run off when Sadie started to bark and chase it. He’d tried to restrain her but in the end he realized that not only would she never catch the buck, she would have turned tail immediately if it had ever stopped and turned towards her with its antlers lowered.

Finn’s father had for a time urged him to let him train Sadie for hunting, but Finn despised the idea of hunting, and his father, who had learned which battles to pick with his son, decided to let it drop. Sadie’s status as Finn’s best friend-indeed, his only friend-was thus enshrined. This morning ritual hike, with Sadie bounding ahead of him through the bush, was sacrosanct. It was a ritual that was only ever interrupted if Finn was sick or injured, which he rarely was. On those mornings, Sadie would lie beside his bed in his room and whine pitifully until she realized he wasn’t ignoring her, but wasn’t able to take her out. Then she would lay her head on her front paws and look up at him with reproachful amber eyes.

Sometimes she brought the red rubber ball to him and dropped it at the foot of the bed, as though it were the most marvellous idea ever.

Finn enjoyed the darkness and the silence of this last hour of night best in the late autumn, when the air coming in off Superior was damp and raw, and the yellow and red leaves on the trees lining the path showered water down on him when he accidentally knocked them as he passed by.

While most boys his age might have preferred to stay under the covers for as long as possible in the morning, Finn wasn’t most twelve-year-olds. He’d never been like “most” boys his age, no matter what age. This seemed to cause the adults around him more consternation than it caused him. Finn may not have had friends, other than Sadie, but he couldn’t miss something he had neither had, nor ever felt he needed.

Besides, Finn was in love. Completely, utterly, and irrevocably in love for the first time in his life. It was a secret he worked hard to hide from his parents, who were already worried about his inability to connect with his peers. No point in making it worse.

He was in love with Dracula.

Specifically, he was in love with The Tomb of Dracula, a comic book series, the first issue of which he’d found in early summer of that year on the lowest rung of the spiral comic rack at Harper’s Drugs. Like all true loves, no matter the age at which they occur, it was a blinding, all consuming passion that left little room for reason.

Finn thrilled to the cover: a luridly inked four-colour depiction of the fanged Lord of the Undead carrying the limp body of a curvy blonde in a green mini-dress. Dracula’s cape was edged in orange satin. Mist swirled in the foreground. In the background loomed a castle framed by a full moon. The banner read NIGHT OF THE VAMPIRE! With his heart in his mouth, he’d paid his twenty cents and pedalled his five-speed Huffy Dragster with the metallic gold banana seat as fast as he could back to his house on Mission Street.

Back home, in his room, with the door closed, he’d read it from cover to cover, memorizing the names of the characters-Frank Drake, Clifton Graves, Jeanie and, of course, Count Dracula himself-as well as the storyline, until he could recite the script.

In the first issue, the skeptical hero, Frank Drake, discovers that he’s a descendant of Count Dracula and has inherited a castle in Transylvania. With the intention of turning the castle into a vampire-themed tourist resort, he travels to Romania with his best friend, Clifton Graves, and Frank’s fiancee, Jeanie (she doesn’t need a last name, Finn noted, with an unfamiliar flush, not with boobs like those). Clifton discovers the skeleton of Count Dracula in the castle’s dungeon and pulls the stake out, bringing the vampire back to life. Dracula attacks a village barmaid and kills her. The vampire returns to his castle and overpowers Frank Drake, who tries to prevent Dracula from turning Jeanie into a vampire. He drives the Count away with Jeanie’s silver compact mirror. But before he vanishes, Dracula issues a cryptic warning: “Know this, Frank Drake-you’ve won but a battle… in the final analysis, the game is mine-as it always has been- will always be-mine- forever mine!” And indeed the game turned out to be Dracula’s-Jeanie had been transformed into a vampire.

Finn sighed in ecstasy. Then he read it again, from start to finish. Then he read it once more. It was perfect.

Harper’s Drugs always seemed to carry comic books later than the date on the cover, something that had never bothered him before his first issue of The Tomb of Dracula. The following week he asked Mr. Harper about it and he’d told Finn that they’d already travelled a long way by the time they got to Parr’s Landing. He haunted the drugstore for a week, then two, then three, but there was no sign of issue two.