Enter, Night

room embraced him. He sighed, as much in relief as in frustration. Eventually the relief overtook the frustration. He hadn’t expected them to believe him, but he realized that he’d bought himself a bit of time, if nothing else.

Billy picked up the file folder of his father’s notes and went back to the bed. He sat down, opened the file, and began to read what he’d already read hundreds of times before. Maybe this time, it would say something new. He felt a pang of sharp longing at the sight of his father’s handwriting on the smudged carbon. The unfathomable sense of his loss returned to him like a plaintive, restless ghost.

Elliot McKitrick and Dave Thomson rode in silence for the first few minutes of the ride back to the police station. Then Elliot spoke.

“What did you make of that?” he asked. “That was some story. Do you think he’s telling the truth?”

“Easy enough to check it out,” Thomson said. “At least the part about his father’s murder. The rest of it happened more or less the way he said it did, but I think it was pretty much an open and shut case back then of a guy who had a nervous breakdown and got locked up for it.”

“What about the Doc? Do you think this Lightning might have had anything to do with it?”

“I’ll run his name by the RCMP and see if anything comes up,” Thomson replied. “But I don’t think it’s going to add up. I think what we’re looking at is a series of tragedies, starting with this poor Weal kid going off his rocker and being packed off to the bughouse. Then the old man gets murdered years later, and his son connects the two worst events of his life and comes up with an answer he can live with. No more, no less.”

“What about the rest of it? The spirit voices and the weird stuff?”

Thomson shrugged. “You grew up here. You know how many stories there are. Those Wendigo stories, for one. Local legends. Every town has some. As for the rest of it, well, life was tough here a couple of hundred years ago. Winters were long. Things happened. People probably did go crazy, as much from the isolation as anything else. If this Weal fella read about this stuff in some history textbook in school, it’d be in his head already when he went off his head.”

Elliot looked doubtful. “So, you don’t think Weal might have anything to do with what happened up in Gyles?”

“On the say-so of Dr. William Lightning, he of the crazy story we just heard? I don’t think so. As far as anyone knows, Weal could be dead.” Thomson snorted. “I think Chief Bill’s headdress is on a bit tight. He’s a bit cocked-up about his father’s death, that’s all. That’s got to be hard for anybody. But do I think some possessed crazy hobgoblin has driven thousands of miles from God knows where just to come back here to live out of doors by Bradley Lake and eat people?” This time, Thomson laughed out loud. “No, I don’t think so.”

“It’ll be Halloween in a couple of weeks,” Elliot said. If he were an older man, and more seasoned, let alone more secure in himself, he likely would have been readier to admit to being more relieved than disappointed to hear Thomson dismiss the Indian’s story. “Maybe we’re due for a new spook tale to add to all that Wendigo bullshit we’ve been hearing for years up here in God’s country since forever.”

“God’s country,” Jeremy Parr said wistfully to Christina. He closed his eyes and breathed deeply. The air was wonderfully cool, but not too cold for comfort. It smelled of autumn-fallen leaves, the scent of cooling earth and the flowering of benign rot, the sleepy prelude to winter. The morning had started out cold, but the day had warmed again. They had parked the car a few miles out of town, past Bradley Lake, on the old logging road. They sat on a red flannel blanket. Above them, the sunlight streamed down through the cathedral of orange- leafed trees, turning everything around it the colour of caramel apple glaze. “Elliot always called it ‘God’s country,’” he said by way of clarification. “Today I can see what he meant.”

Christina’s eyes were closed, her face in the sun. She sighed. “What are you going to do, now that you’ve seen him? And he probably saw you, too. If he didn’t see you, he’s heard that you’re back. Are you going to go see him?”

“What would be the point? It was ten years ago, and the way it ended, it was like a bad dream that we had ten years ago. He’s probably married, probably has kids. It was one of those things that was never meant to happen at all.”

“But it did happen,” Christina said kindly. “He was your first love.

And it didn’t end the way it was supposed to end.”

“Maybe it did end the way it was supposed to end. Have you noticed that love doesn’t flourish in this town? You have to leave it in order to keep it. Especially,” he added bitterly, “my kind of love.”

Christina started to say something conciliatory in reply, something to suggest that Jeremy was being melodramatic or unnecessarily dour, but she didn’t. It occurred to her that her own story more or less proved his point, and she couldn’t think of any love stories off the top of her head that had blossomed and flourished in Parr’s Landing. Her own parents more or less tolerated each other, focusing the love they’d obviously once had for each other on their children. The house where Christina grew up was full of pictures-her jubilant parents on their wedding day, photos of the two of them on picnics, her mother sitting on the back of her father’s motorcycle, the two of them on a Ferris wheel at a country fair.

In those pictures, their love for each other had been nearly tangible, but once Christina and her brother entered the montage of images on the walls, a certain steeliness had set in. In later photographs, her mother seemed detached, her father more stoic than loving. It was as though the diffusion of that young love, its dispersal into the larger world of children, mortgages, church, work for subsistence wages in a northern mining town-survival, really- had damaged the love in transit, alchemically transforming it at a cellular level into something else, something greyer. Christina tried to remember her parents ever embracing, but nothing came to her.

The cancer had taken her mother when Christina was fourteen. Christina tried to remember her parents ever embracing before her mother got sick, but nothing came to her. She wondered if that gradual distancing would have eventually happened to her and Jack, and even as she wondered it, she had her answer: No, of course not. Because, as Jeremy said, they’d gotten away.

To change the subject from her own memories, as well as to distract Jeremy from his, she asked, “How do you think it’s going with your mother?”

Jeremy shrugged. “So far so good, I guess. I don’t think she’s all that happy to see either of us, but she seems happy to see Morgan, at least. Did you see her last night? She couldn’t keep her eyes off her. And this morning, she was quite testy when you said you wanted to drive her to school yourself.”

Christina laughed. It was not a happy laugh. “I think that had everything to do with her not wanting me to be seen around town with Jack Parr’s daughter-even if she is my daughter, too-more than it did any great grandmotherly love, don’t you?”

“Not sure,” he said. “I hadn’t realized how much Morgan actually looks like Jack-I mean really looks like Jack-until I saw all the pictures of him as a kid that Adeline has around the house. For her, it must be like having his ghost come back to haunt her. I think that’s why she’s trying too hard to make friends with her. The rest of us are just an inconvenience to be dealt with.”

“I don’t know,” Christina said. “I have a bad feeling about it somehow. Then again, when it comes to your mother, I’ve only ever had bad feelings. So this is nothing new.”

“I wonder how Morgan is doing in school today? First day in a new school-hell, and not just any new school. Our old school.” Christina sighed. “I’ve been trying very hard not to think about it, Jeremy. Thanks so much for bringing it up.”

“Sorry.”

“No, it’s all right.” She picked up a yellow leaf beside her and held it between her fingers, examined it, and then flicked it away. “This is probably the hardest part. I can protect her from almost anything else but this. In Toronto, at Jarvis Collegiate, she had her friends and her routine. She wasn’t anything special. Here, God only knows.”

“Hey, she’ll be fine,” Jeremy said in a soothing voice. “This is Morgan you’re talking about. Also, besides being our wonderful girl in her own right, she’s Jack’s daughter.”

“Everyone used to worship Jack, but it wasn’t because he was a Parr, it was because he was-well, Jack. Morgan isn’t Jack. She doesn’t have the experience of growing up here with that name and getting used to what it means. She doesn’t have the… the…”

“The antibodies?” Jeremy said, suppressing a smile. “Is that what you mean? She hasn’t been inoculated against being a Parr in Parr’s Landing? She doesn’t have the antibodies to the virus?”

Christina threw a pile of the yellow leaves at Jeremy. He laughed, covering his head. He threw a handful of the leaves at Christina, provoking answering laughter in return.