Enter, Night

dry considering the length of time it had lain underground, undisturbed.

Gingerly, he opened the bundle, gently prying apart the fabric that contained it. The fabric fell apart at his touch, leaving the pile of ashes exposed to his flashlight’s beam.

“Ashes,” he said aloud, remembering his vision. “These are ashes.” He said it again, not only to confirm his findings to his senses, but also to hear a voice that wasn’t in his head for once, even if it was his own.

But then, had all the voices been in his head? He felt a sickening sense of betrayal wash over him. This wasn’t his friend, this was just an old pile of cinders. Where was his friend? Where was the voice? Where was the treasure? Had this whole misadventure been a series of crazy directives issued from his own diseased brain? The result of not taking the pills the doctors had prescribed him at the hospital? And now, because he’d thrown his pills away back in Toronto, he was going to die a horrible, drawn- out death by starvation and thirst.

Why is there a coffin in a mineshaft?

“What?” he said. The silence mocked him. “Who said that?” Weal looked left and right. “Father, is that you?”

It was in your head, you idiot. Crazy person. It’s all in your head-all of the “voices” have been in your head the whole time. There’s no “Lord.” There’s no “Father.” There never was. You’ve fucked yourself good and proper now, haven’t you? Are you going to keep talking to yourself until you go blind down here? Or crazier? Or die of thirst? Why don’t you just cut your wrist and drink your own blood? Aren’t you thirsty enough yet? You will be, give it time. You just watch.

Weal tried to swallow, but his spit had dried. He felt his throat close up, dry and hot as though it were packed with sand. He realized then that he had effectively buried himself alive, walled himself into a system of underground caves that predated the Parr family’s dynamiting of this part of the country by millennia.

Yes, yes, buried alive. All very melodramatic. Typical crazy person. But by the way-not that it remotely matters at this moment-but how did ashes get into a tunnel?

Weal looked at the heap of ashes-they were ashes, weren’t they? How did they get down here? Who brought them? And when? How? Traces of the vision he’d had before coming to consciousness down here floated back to him. He’d seen ash, piles of it, as though there had been a great burning. He’d smelled the burning bones and watched the wind carry the fragments into the air and scatter them across the cliffs.

Ash. Bones. This ash? These bones?

“Lord,” he whispered. “Where are you? If you’re real, please answer. Please only answer if it’s really you. Please show me what to do.” He waited, dreading the sound of the second voice, the mocking voice that sounded like his own. But there was nothing. “Please,” he said again. “Please.”

Wake me. Wake me.

“How?” he screamed. “Don’t go away again! Tell me, how?”

You know how. I showed you many times before.

“But I can’t do that! I’ll die! I can’t kill myself! I killed all those people for you!”

WAKE ME!

He bowed his head in submission and acceptance. With a sob, Weal pulled the knife out of his pocket and tested the blade with the ball of his thumb. He winced as it sliced through the skin. Blood rose to the cut and spilled down his thumb, flowing over the palm. In the light of the flashlight, it looked black on the knife blade.

He took a deep breath, then rolled up the sleeve of his shirt and jacket. He cut the flesh of his wrist with one definitive, transversal downward stroke, severing the ulnar artery. The pain was sharp and immediate, but Weal made no sound. Instead, he squeezed the upper middle part of his forearm and pumped. He raised his arm and watched the blood drain out of his body, running down his arm onto the pile of ashes in the stone concavity where the ashes had rested undisturbed for three hundred years under Spirit Rock and the cliffs that ringed Bradley Lake.

There was a sound like fat being dropped onto a hot griddle and the smell of burning meat.

Above ground, a great flock of disparate nightbirds took to the sky from every treetop on Spirit Rock-a shocked, squawking black cloud, a cacophony of harsh screams soaring into the night.

Below the mass of airborne birds, the first coyote yelped a sharp, terrified bark that became a shriek. Its mate joined in. Then another, and another, until the sound of their howling became deafening. Every dog in Parr’s Landing took up the cry, including Finn’s dog, Sadie, whose bloodcurdling lament was loud enough to wake Finn from a deep sleep in which he dreamed of Morgan Parr standing nude on the edge of Bradley Lake, beckoning him to join her in the black water.

“Awww fuck, Sadie,” Finn groaned, his voice thick with sleep. “You ruined it.”

Vengefully, he lobbed a pillow at the dog who was standing rigidly on point beside his bedroom window staring at the glass. “Do you want to go out, girl?” he said, feeling guilty for throwing the pillow. “Do you? Do you want to go outside? Come. Come, Sadie, let’s go outside!”

She whined, bounding ahead, her claws scrabbling madly on the floor. She ran like she had to take the world’s most portentous piss, and scratched madly at the metal screen door, making an even more unholy racket than she had with her howling.

“Coming, coming,” Finn said. He knew that if Sadie howled like that again, his parents would wake up and then there would be hell to pay. He opened the back door and nudged her outside, shutting the door quickly. She had a doghouse out there; she could sleep in it tonight. Fucking dog.

Finn went back to his bed and tried to find his Morgan dream again, already suspecting that the moment had passed, but willing to try anyway.

Richard Weal knew he must be dying, because the cavern was full of incandescent red light and heat that streamed blindingly upward from the pile of ashes in the depression of rock. He was dying, and these were the gates of heaven. Or, more likely, hell.

He covered his face with his bloody hand and tried to shield his eyes from the luminescence that was now so bright he could no longer see the walls of the cave. His knees gave way and buckled under his weight, and he fell to the ground in the earliest stages of hypovolemic shock. Just losing consciousness, Weal realized he was no longer alone.

He lay on his side, squinting into the brilliance, trying to see. As the light began to fade, Weal became aware that the black-robed man he’d imagined in the moments before he’d found the ashes-the man who wasn’t-had stepped out of his feverish brain and into the world, and was bending over him.

When the man lowered his lips to Weal’s throat, he tried to turn his head to accommodate the grateful kiss- what else could it be, but a benediction of gratitude to Weal for having found him, for having saved him, for releasing him from his prison? But he was too weak to form the words. He tried to apologize to the black shape towering over him for not being able to stand, for forcing him to kneel-surely the kneeling one should be Weal, not his friend-but no words came out. Weal realized that words would be beside the point, because his friend knew everything about him already, loved him just as he was, and knew he was sorry and had already forgiven him. He felt the man’s cold lips caress the tender skin below his jawline, then the scraping points of two sharp teeth.

The pain when he bit down was incredible, but it vanished almost before it had even registered. As he felt the blood drain from his body, Richard Weal felt himself pulled up into a swirling vortex of crimson and gold light. For the briefest possible moment, Weal caught a glimpse of a glittering necropolis of souls, a dimension of pure love and endless wisdom. Its inhabitants reached out, their arms outstretched to embrace him, to join him to them, to forgive him and to guide him into their inanimate dimension that was opening before him and beckoning his soul to join the mass of others.

Not this! Make me like you! Make me like you! You promised! I want to live forever! This isn’t what I killed for! This isn’t what I died for! YOU PROMISED!

The crimson sky turned black and cold and violent.

The dead recoiled in horror at his fury. They recognized him for what he was, for what he was becoming, and they fled in terror lest they, too, found themselves sucked into the black circumgyration of supernatural energy that dragged Richard’s enraged, insane soul back into the prison of his own dead body-the body lying on the stone floor