Enter, Night

Behind him, the sound of something falling over, but muffled, as though from a near distance. He spun, shining the light in front of him. It found the closed door leading to the basement. Elliot strained to hear, but there was no further sound. Beads of sweat dotted his upper lip and gathered along his hairline and under his armpits.

Elliot thought of the Wendigo legends of his childhood-the stories of cannibalism and Indian witchcraft and malefic spiritualism associated with Spirit Rock. He remembered the expression on Finn Miller’s face when he first looked into the hockey bag and saw its gruesome contents. The blood on those knives still smelled sour, he thought. They weren’t used that long ago, and they weren’t washed.

Tucking the flashlight under his arm, he drew his gun with one hand and turned the handle on the cellar door with the other.

“Hello?” The loudness of his own voice startled him. “Is anyone down there? This is the police. I’m armed.”

Elliot listened for an answer. Receiving none, he stepped down into the cellar, taking the stairs one at a time. The darkness here was even deeper than it had been upstairs where there had been at least the tangential glimmer of lights from the street, or from neighbourhood porches.

Like a grave, Elliot thought. Then, he rebuked himself: Don’t be such a moron. You’re a cop. Get your shit together. He licked the sweat off his upper lip and continued his descent till he reached the bottom of the steps and stood on the floor of the cellar.

Playing his light along the walls, Elliot identified the hulking shape of the washing machine and the dryer below a wooden shelf of laundry detergent and miscellaneous odds and ends. The beam of light passed through dusty jars of jams and preserves on the opposite wall, the light transfixing the glass, the contents of the jars casting red and gold and green shadows against the stone walls.

He half-turned, shining his light on the alcove leading to the area off the main part of the basement, the place where Donna kept the enormous deep freeze that had been her husband’s pride and joy. Slowly, he walked towards the freezer, then stopped in his tracks. The contents of the freezer were spread all over the floor around it, as though someone had been so desperate to find whatever was inside that they’d tunnelled through the frozen meat and packaged vegetables to reach the bottom.

Elliot cocked his gun, the click ricocheting loud and sharp against the stone walls of the cellar. He approached the freezer, opened it, and shone his light inside.

“Donna…” Elliot breathed. “Jesus.”

Donna Lemieux was curled up on the bottom of the freezer in a foetal position. She was wearing the same jeans and pink top she’d worn the previous night when he’d left her house. The clothes were stiff now, and frozen. Her skin was blue with cold, and ice crystals blossomed like white flowers in her long hair. It seemed impossible that her body had been able to fit into the confined space without broken bones and dislocated joints, but there was no evidence of any breakage or dislocation. Her body had merely folded like a puppet in a shoebox, fitting itself to the rectangular confines of the empty freezer as though it were a single bed.

Then, Donna Lemieux opened her dead, frozen eyes and sat up.

Elliot jumped back, startled by the sudden flurry of movement. Instinctively, he swung his gun in her direction, resisting the urge to fire just in time, and cursing himself for his stupidity in aiming a loaded gun at an obviously injured woman.

Donna crawled out of the freezer in a sequence of crab like movements that disoriented Elliot, because they seemed to occur almost too quickly for his eye to follow. Then, suddenly, she was standing directly in front of him, and her hands were on his shoulders.

“Donna, are you all right?” he said. “Jesus, you gave me one fuck of a shock. What the hell are you doing down here?”

“Elliot, you came back… I knew you would.”

“Donna, let’s get you upstairs where it’s warm,” he said, putting his arm around her. “Then we need to get you to a hospital. What happened to you? What are you doing here?” The coldness of her body burned through his windbreaker, and only then did he realize that there was something very, very wrong, besides the obvious wrongness of finding the woman you couldn’t get it up for last night-until you fucked her in the ass-sleeping in a deep freeze in the basement of her house. It felt as though he had his arm around a frozen carcass in the meat locker of an abattoir.

There’s no oxygen in that freezer, Elliot, and no way to open it from the inside. Remember the kid when you were in the third grade, the one who suffocated to death because he was playing in his parents’ deep freeze and couldn’t get out? Something’s wrong here, Mr. Cop. So much for your instincts.

“Donna?” He pulled back. “Donna, how did you-”

She reached out, snakelike, and grasped his arm in a grip that made him wince and suck in his breath. Her eyes weren’t blue, as they always had been. Now they were a deep dark red, the same garnet colour as the full jelly jars when he’d shone his light through them moments ago.

Donna took his other arm and pinned him to the wall. “Elliot, I want you to love me.”

Though Elliot could see her lips move, the sound of her voice seemed to be coming from inside his head, not from her mouth. It rippled through his body, liquefying his arms and legs, crumpling him to his knees, then to the floor.

The part of his mind that governed fight-or-flight tried to inform Elliot that he should scream-wanted to, in fact-but he didn’t have access to that part of his brain. It was as though something outside him had identified it, isolated it, and cut it off from being able to communicate. Elliot floated on a cloud of luminous red mist and infinite space full of flickering points of light.

His knees buckled and he fell backward. The base of his head struck the concrete floor and he saw fireworks at the contact.

“I only ever wanted you to love me.” Donna’s voice shivered in his brain. “You never did. I always knew you didn’t. Will you love me now? I want you inside of me, Elliot.”

Elliot felt the blood thundering through his body. His cock was harder than it had ever been, straining painfully inside his uniform pants. Donna straddled his crotch and ground her pelvis against his erection. His limbs were paralyzed, but he’d never been more sexually aroused in his life. He tried to think, to focus, but his brain was disconnected from every other part of himself, and his body was on fire with sensation. The universe was composed of Elliot, his engorged cock, and Donna Lemieux writhing on top of him, suddenly the most desirable woman-the most desirable creature, male or female-he could imagine.

“Donna,” he whispered. Tears ran down his cheeks. “Donna… please…”

When she placed her lips against his neck, the pressure of her sharp teeth behind her frozen lips was the most erotic sensation he could imagine. Even the sharp pain of those teeth slicing through the soft skin below his jawline only stung for a moment, then the pain was replaced by spreading heat he felt at every extremity. Seconds before he lost consciousness, his body was wracked by the most shattering orgasm of his life.

His last thought before blacking out was that he was sorry Jeremy wasn’t there to see this proof that he really was a normal guy, and that the past really was past.

Finn wasn’t sure what woke him. The iridescent green hands of the clock on his night table read two a.m. The clock itself ticked softly and the house was deathly quiet.

Instinctively, he put out his hand beside his bed and felt for Sadie’s head. Then he remembered that she wasn’t there, that she had been lost, then come home, and was now sleeping in the kitchen. He was suddenly possessed of a powerful need to see with his own eyes that she was there, that their reunion hadn’t been some sort of fantastic dream that would leave him heartbroken when he realized it was, in fact, just a dream. He swung his legs over the side of the bed and reached for the light switch and turned it on.

Sadie was sitting a foot from his bed staring at him, silent, unmoving. At her feet was the red rubber ball.

Finn realized that she’d dropped it there. The sound of the ball hitting his bedroom floor was what had woken him.

He rubbed his eyes and stared at his dog.

Sadie’s posture was not the posture of the broken thing that had limped in through the back door a few hours earlier. The hydrogen peroxide had clearly done its work, because the bite marks in Sadie’s fur were already