Enter, Night

Adeline felt light headed. She closed her eyes tightly for a moment and shook her head.

When she opened them, the man was still there. But he had stopped moving and was standing close enough that she could touch him, his face still wreathed in shadows.

Adeline hissed, “Get out of here, whoever you are! I am going to turn around immediately and summon the authorities.'

“Laissez-moi entrer.”

“What did you say?” she seethed. “Speak up. Speak English. I have no idea what you’re saying.”

Adeline stopped. The moon was behind where he stood beside the denuding phalanx of topiary bushes. Their shadows lay against the gravel drive, but where the priest stood, there was no shadow at all.

Too, she’d heard his voice-a beautiful, cultured voice, speaking… French? A language she didn’t speak or understand herself, but she hadn’t seen his lips move, and somehow she’d understood him anyway. He wanted her to invite him into her house. Into Parr House, of all the insolence!

His voice was rich and full and masculine, very much the voice of a real man-not a pansy’s voice at all, she noted. Not like Jeremy’s voice, not like the voices of all the weak men she’d known her whole life. Could this really be a priest?

Adeline felt a sense of vertiginous disorientation, a sensation of being probed, being read, as though her mind had been taken down off a bookshelf, her memories turned and rifled like pages in an album. She touched her fingertips to her eyes and pressed, moaning softly at the invasion. She felt an unfamiliar and nearly forgotten warmth spread between her legs, a phantom dampness that she knew couldn’t possibly be real-not standing out here on the lawn on a cold October night with some strange intruder threatening her.

But he wasn’t really threatening was he? Not really. He was just cold. He just wanted to come inside. He’d been sleeping in the caves above Bradley Lake for a long time. It made sense he should want to come inside. It was a reasonable request, and one she could easily grant by saying: Come in. You’re welcome in my house. Enter freely. Those were the magic words. He was too much of a gentleman to enter without an invitation from the lady of the house.

Images spun through her brain, her own most private memories, coming faster and faster like a rickety black- and-white silent film. Her memories of Phenius. Her secrets, all of them, the light and the dark ones interchangeably. Some of them made her giggle-ridiculous, she knew, in a woman of her age. Others made her feel violated. He had no right to those. No… right… at all.

No, get out of my mind! You have no business here. Go away! I’m Adeline Parr! How dare you- Pourrais je vous faire l’honneur de ma presence?

Adeline felt somewhat mollified by his courtesy. May I honour you with my presence? Let me in. I’m so cold.

“Let me in, Adeline,” Phenius said. “Let me in. I’m so cold.”

She could see his face now, as though the man had somehow deigned to allow the moonlight to fall upon it.

It was Phenius’s voice she’d heard, she was sure. Phenius speaking French. No… English now. But it was a priest, not Phenius. Phenius was dead, and the priest was-

He was grinning.

“Adeline, my love.”

She took three more stumbling steps forward, towards the man with Phenius’s voice, the man who opened his arms to her.

No, not his arms, Phenius’s arms. It was Phenius, looking exactly as he had in the summer of 1952 on the night he took her to Spirit Rock and showed her the site of his dig.

Adeline stumbled and fell. She felt the sharp gravel cut into her kneecaps, scraping them bloody. The house behind her was a million miles away and the world was reduced to Phenius’s beautiful voice, and the moonlight was now bright enough to drown in.

Behind him on the driveway, the shadows divided and subdivided, shifted, formed, shaping and reshaping. Phenius hasn’t come alone. He’s brought friends.

It was a disappointing thought to Adeline. It had been years since she’d seen him, and she’d hoped for some time with just him alone-a reunion.

“Let me in,” Phenius said again, his voice jagged and sharp as one of the stalactites hanging from the roofs of the caves at Spirit Rock, and this time there was no hint of courtesy, let alone entreaty. It was an unambiguous command. The implicit invitation to self-abasement in his tone thrilled her with the filth of it. No one but Phenius had ever succeeded in making her feel that way-cheap, like a whore. Like a woman. Desired, and desirous. His voice was a hand between her legs, squeezing and probing with authority and ownership.

Adeline looked up at him from where she knelt at his feet in the sharp gravel like a supplicant. “Come in. You’re welcome in my house,” she said, the pain in her bloodied knees coming to her as though from a great distance. “Enter freely.”

When Phenius took her in his arms, she saw that she was alone with him on the lawn, that there was no one else there, that no one had come back with him from the grave-for surely he must have travelled that great distance just to be with her, smelling of dirt and caves and centuries under the earth.

No greater proof of love could there be than that, Adeline thought with satisfaction. Phenius didn’t come back to his adopted redskin “son,” he came back to me.

By the time she saw the old man with the bone-white face and the long white hair that blew around his head in the night wind, she was beyond caring that it wasn’t Phenius at all-she just wanted the man with Phenius’s voice to kiss her, to hurt her, to claim her.

And in the cold October moonlight, he did all those things, and more.

TOMB OF DRACULA

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

The marble foyer of Parr House was dark when she got home just after ten. Christina heard the door click softly behind her as she stood in the entryway listening to the rhythmic tick of the grandfather clock near the entrance to the dining room.

In the darkness, the place felt cavernous. For the first time since she’d returned to Parr’s Landing, she was aware of the true vastness of her mother-in-law’s house. It wasn’t just a big house, or even a mansion-it was a small castle on a hill. A very dark castle right now, Christina thought.

As her eyes adjusted to the gloom, she perceived that a bit of redtinted moonlight shone through the stained glass windows on the landing of the grand staircase upstairs. In its dim light, she felt around on the marble-topped hallway table for the Waterford crystal lamp she knew was there.

Finding the lamp, she switched it on and the foyer was flooded with yellow light. Familiar objects came into view. It looked like a house again, albeit a monstrous house.

Christina crossed the floor and looked up the stairs. “Hello? Jeremy? Morgan? Anyone still up?” She didn’t expect a reply-Adeline’s house hadn’t proven to be the sort of house where people ran down the stairs to greet each other, or shouted from floor to floor. But still, Christina couldn’t ever recall the house being this quiet. The complete absence of noise-the apparent absence of life, really-struck her for the first time.