Enter, Night

interrupted a discussion about the death of Jeremy’s brother, Jack. She’d had a little crush on Jack back in the day, but that Christina Whatshername (now there was a slut) had gotten herself knocked up. She’d heard that they’d run off to Toronto and that she’d forced him to Do The Right Thing and marry her. The Parrs were filthy-loaded, so Christina must be sitting pretty by now.

Donna sighed. She ran a lacquered fingernail along Elliot’s index finger. “So, Elliot,” she said. “Why did you never go for me?”

“I went for you plenty of times, babe,” he said lazily. He wrapped his index finger around hers and held it down. “You do remember, don’t you?”

“No, I mean proper-like. Why didn’t you ever ask me out. You know, like on a date?”

“Well,” he said, “for one thing, you were married.”

She laughed. “Is that all? Lucien wouldn’t have even known. He was drunk most of the time we were married. If that’s all that was stopping you, you should have asked.”

“We had some great times.” He leaned in closer. “We had some really great times. Didn’t we?”

“You’re so conceited, Elliot,” she said. “How do you know it was as great for me as it was for you?”

“I know,” he replied. “And so do you.” Her pupils were dilated and her lips were moist. He knew from experience that her nipples underneath the blouse she wore were now stiff. And though he felt nothing for her at that moment, either in his head or below the waist, he said, “So, Donna. Do you want to get a drink later?”

“We’re in a bar, Elliot.”

Donna liked delaying the moment as long as possible, especially with Elliot when they’d first been lovers. She was all about the slow moves and she’d enjoyed teaching the then-teenaged Elliot restraint and discipline.

But it was a cold night, and nothing was waiting for her at home but a hungry cat and a bed with cold sheets on it. And, to be honest, though she’d never admit it, she wasn’t getting any younger.

He leaned into her, his cheek nearly meeting hers. He smelled shampoo and some drugstore perfume that was sexy precisely because it smelled cheap. “I mean somewhere else. Later. Some other place.”

“What other place did you have in mind, Elliot?”

“Your place,” he said, showing all his beautiful teeth.

Elliot covered her hand in his and squeezed gently. When he turned her hand palm-up inside his grasp, offering the softness of it to the press of his fingers, he knew he’d scored. Maybe the day was going to end on a better note than the one it had started on.

Whatever else happened, though, Elliot realized he had almost succeeded in driving any thoughts or memories of Jeremy Parr from his mind, at least for now.

It would have been impossible for him to say how long he’d been searching since he didn’t habitually wear a watch, but Richard Weal knew he had two choices: he would either find his sleeping friend here, or he would die of hunger and thirst in the Cimmerian blackness of an abandoned mineshaft, not even knowing where he was, much less remembering how he’d gotten there.

He guessed that he had long since wandered off what was left of the actual path through the mine and into some sort of interconnected underground cave system formed of arches of natural rock, but the voice-and the trace imagery that remained in his brain long after he’d heard actual words-somehow continued to guide him.

Living as he did almost entirely in his own mind, memories and dreams were important to Weal-not only immediate memories, such as how beautiful his friend’s voice was, but more recent memories-the slaughter of his victims, of course, and the way they suffered and bled, but also the images he’d gleaned from the pages of the manuscript he’d killed the old man for-the translation of that letter from the dying priest, Father Nyon, who’d followed his faith in God into the northern wilderness of New France in 1632.

In spite of his hatred-and he loathed the priest for what he’d done to his friend, and with as much murderous, steely hatred as if the priest had done it to Weal himself-he had to admire his faith in God.

Well, perhaps admire was the wrong word. He could identify with it, intellectually and emotionally. Had Weal himself not first heard his invisible friend’s voice that hot day in 1952, calling to him from behind the granite walls of these very cliffs, begging for release? Had he not been listening to that voice all these years, calling him into the wilderness, and was he not as eager as any postulant, now or then, to touch the Divine?

He would still have liked to put the young priest to his knives for what he’d done to Weal’s friend-to peel his eyeballs in their sockets like grapes and cut his fingers off in quarter-sections, taking his time and enjoying the screams before he took an X-Acto knife to Father Nyon’s murdering tongue.

Since the manuscript he’d taken had been incomplete, he had no idea what happened to the priest from 1630, but as a scholar, he was well versed in the gruesome history of the fates that had befallen the unluckiest of the Jesuit martyrs. Weal hoped Father Nyon had met an end like that, and that it had hurt terribly.

Out of the subterranean silence, he suddenly heard the voice again. It spoke one word: Here.

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