Enter, Night

through the pages until he reached the end, page twenty-one-seven panels, the dawn tones of orange and yellow like the sky above Bradley Lake this morning playing against the dark blue and black of the ever-present darkness.

Finn looked out his window. It was dark. Rain beat against the windows, a harbinger of colder, more murderous weather on the way as winter raked skeletal fingers through the darkening sky for the first time that fall. His bedside clock read five p.m. He had slept for six hours.

He looked again at the comic book in his hand, then down at the ash-covered rubber ball on the floor.

When his mother turned around where she stood in front of the stove, she was readying an aluminum-covered cookie sheet upon which three Swanson’s chicken pot pies would be placed into the preheated oven. Finn loved Swanson’s chicken pot pies-they were his favourite.

“Hi, sweetie. How are you feeling? We’re having Swanson’s for dinner! And mashed potatoes, and creamed corn.” She made a smacking sound with her lips. Finn hated it when she made the sound, but he loved his mother too much to tell her. “Delish, right?”

Finn looked better, she thought. He had washed his face and changed his clothes. Some colour had returned to his cheeks, but he still had those god-awful dark circles, and his eyes looked freshly sandpapered. It was going to take a while for him to feel better. But the chicken pot pies would be a good start.

Anne smiled expectantly and smoothed her apron with her hands.

“Mom, I know what happened to Sadie,” Finn said. “A vampire got her. That’s why she burned up. A vampire got my dog. And I’m going to find him, and I’m going to kill him. I’m going to drive a wooden stake into his heart, and I’m going to make him pay for what he did to Sadie.”

A branch slapped Hank Miller across the face in the gathering gloom, stinging his cheek and making him yelp. Hank was a proud man, and didn’t think men ought to show pain. But since he was alone, and it was dark, he shouted, “Holy old fuck!” as loud as could. He rubbed his face, which hurt like a whore, but no blood came off on his fingers. “Sadie, where the hell did you get to, goddammit?” he muttered. “Where the hell did you two walk this morning, the fucking moon?”

The sun was well over the yardarm, as his father used to say, and it was most definitely going down behind those clouds, whether he could see it or not. He looked at his watch. Six frigging o’clock. The sun wasn’t just over the yardarm, it was halfway in the drunk tank. It was early night, not early evening. He felt in his pocket for the flashlight and turned it on. The beam was molded by drops of thick, swirling night fog and the aftertaste of this afternoon’s deluge.

Hank had hoped to tell his wife and child that he’d found Sadie’s body and brought it home to bury her before the ground froze, which it would before long. His hope had been to keep the dog’s corpse in the garage until Finn had gone to bed, then put her in the ground and present his son with a fait accompli in the morning. Finn never doubted his father, so Hank could have buried anything in his garden and told his son it was his beloved Labrador, but he would never do that to Finnegan.

At four p.m., he’d clocked out an hour early. He’d left the mill and taken his car up to the highest point of ground he could reach in his sturdy truck. He tried to check the position of the sun in the sky, but the storm clouds from the earlier downpour had remained. He had about an hour of daylight left. He squinted up the cliff, guessing more or less where Finn and Sadie had taken their walk.

Finn had rarely allowed anyone to join him on those walks, but he’d let Hank come along one morning this summer, and Hank had excellent recall. If worse came to worst, he wouldn’t find Sadie and would have to come back the next morning and deal with whatever carrion mess the forest scavengers had left of his son’s gentle dog. The thought sickened him, but not for squeamish reasons. He’d loved Sadie far more than his wife or his son knew.

A twig snapped somewhere above him. Hank stood stock still. He shone the light above him, but saw nothing except branches and rock. Hank rubbed his eyes. Something had moved up there beyond the copse of trees. He felt a momentary stab of fear, thinking of bears.

Bears, bullshit. Get a grip, you idiot. There hasn’t been a bear attack here in thirty years or more. The bears and the mineshaft openings are the two stories we tell kids to keep them out of the woods. It didn’t keep Finn out, and you’re no kid. So get some sack.

The sound came again, two more twig snaps, coming from different places close by. This time, the sound unnerved him deeply. “Hello?” he called out. “Hello? Is anyone there?” He whipped his head from side to side trying to locate the source of the sound, to no avail.

The very last emotion Hank Miller would ever feel was a fear so desolate and hopeless that it was almost chemical. He felt a sudden kinship with every cornered animal he had ever hunted, in the moment right before he pulled the trigger. So this is what it feels like, he marvelled, as though from a great distance, even as he felt the piss running down the leg of his work pants.

Hank knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that he was living his last minutes before he physically saw the woman in the muddy jeans and the stained pink blouse drift towards him out of the darkness, her feet not touching the ground, her eyes incandescent and her mouth open and full of teeth like he’d never seen on anything from this earth. For a moment, he thought he recognized her, from school maybe? No, from the bar. It was that sexpot bartender from out at O’Toole’s. But no, Hank thought, his mind in a state of confusion. It can’t be her-what would she be doing out here in the forest at this hour?

And when the scrawny man with the wild, greasy hair and red matted beard crawled out from between an impossibly narrow wedge of rock beside him like a spider coming out of its hole-a great stench of shit and blood and rotted meat unfurling in his wake like a shroud- Hank knew that there was no shame in dying.

Terror, yes. Terror, absolutely. Who wanted to be eaten by monsters in the forest without even kissing his wife and son goodbye? But no, there was no shame, nothing ignominious in falling before this implacable, limitless blackness.

“ But you will see them again,” the man said. “You will kiss them goodbye. We promise.”

They fell on him in a fury, burying their faces in the soft parts of his body and biting down, hard and sharp until he shrieked so loudly that even the nightbirds scattered.

Above him, Hank heard the beating of heavy wings and saw a shadow pour itself down from the treetops, lengthening, becoming columnar and corporeal.

The last thing Hank saw before Richard Weal and Donna Lemieux tore him apart, splitting his spine between them like a wishbone, was the tall black-robed man with the long white hair raising his hands in a gesture of benediction.

And because some deaths are crueler than others, Hank Miller never knew that he had found Sadie’s body, after all. Indeed, he had died three feet away from where the remainder of the Labrador’s bone and ash had been sluiced down the rock face by the rain.

Hank never realized that Sadie had already entered the ground- here at Spirit Rock instead of his back yard-and she had become part of the earth in a way that Hank never would.

Forty-five minutes after the desolate death of Hank Miller above Bradley Lake, five miles inside the Parr’s Landing town limits, Elliot McKitrick woke from the dreamless sleep into which he had fallen when Jeremy Parr had left, finding himself hungrier than he had ever been in his life. His mind was filled with cloudy, half- formed images flowering silver and red, and the air was full of whispering, dead voices calling his name. When he turned to look, the shadows seemed to leap back from his sight, and when he tried to focus on them, there was nothing there but the bare walls of his bedroom which, though pitch dark, he could see as clearly and sharply as if it were high noon.

One voice in particular caught Elliot’s attention. It was a familiar voice, and Elliot cocked his ear to listen. He smiled in acknowledgement, then walked naked to the small bedroom window and opened it, extending his arms in clear welcome.

The mist rolled in from the lightless black on the other side of the glass, and night entered, filling his bedroom with silver-blue fog in which vaguely human shapes shimmered and eddied.

Donna Lemieux, her mouth brown with Hank Miller’s blood, gathered Elliot in her arms and kissed him where she had kissed him in her cellar, claiming him, caressing his nude body with what might have been merely the memory of possessive human desire. Elliot leaned into her, one arm across her shoulder, submissive, supine in her arms as she drank away the remainder of his life, taking his confusion and pain along with it. Elliot tried to speak,