Enter, Night

elaborate cursive letters around the clock’s face.

“Where can your father be?” she’d said, repeating it twice more during the meal. But it didn’t sound like it did when she’d said it a thousand times before. There was no good-natured exasperation in the tone this time, no housewifely impatience about burned dinners, or food getting cold. It was an actual question: clinical, tinged with the metallic frostbite of growing panic. “He’s never this late.”

“Mom, he’s probably just working late at the mill. Or he stopped off on the way home.”

“Finn, he…” She stopped herself in mid-sentence. “He went…”

Something in her voice pierced his self-distancing absorption in his own thoughts of Sadie and vampires and grief. “He what, Mom? Where did he go after work?”

“Eat your dinner, Finnegan.” Anne’s face had gone the colour of milk. Her voice was robotic. “Your father will be home soon.”

But of course, he hadn’t been home soon. He hadn’t come home at all. And now here it was, practically midnight.

From upstairs, Finn heard his mother calling a few of his friends from down the Legion. None of them had seen Hank. Finn heard the reluctant-to-disturb-your-family’s-dinner-sir deference in her voice when she called his foreman at the mill, but he didn’t know where Hank was, either.

No, no, no, sorry, no, Anne, we haven’t… No, sorry. I’m sure he’ll be home soon… No, maybe he had car trouble? Stopped for a beer? Had to finish something?

With every phone call, with every new confirmation that Hank had cut out from the mill an hour earlier but that no one had seen him since, Anne’s voice grew incrementally tighter and shriller. After the last call, she slammed the receiver down hard enough for Finn to hear it downstairs in his room.

Halfway up the stairs, he said, “Mom, are you OK?”

“Finn, I’m fine.” She sounded like she was crying. “Your father should have been home hours ago. I’m at my wit’s end. Where the hell is he? Why isn’t he home with us?”

He climbed the stairs and stood a few feet away from where she was standing, the phone poised in mid-air as though she were about to make another call. When she saw him, she put the phone down.

“Mom, where did Dad go after work? You started to tell me at dinner, but you stopped. Why? Where did he go?”

“Finn, he said he was going to go find Sadie and bring her home so he could bury her.” Anne began to weep. “He was going to stop by after work and bring her back to us. I’m so very afraid he hurt himself up there or something in the woods.”

Now it was Finn’s turn to blanch. “Mom, why did you let him go up to Spirit Rock after I told you what happened to Sadie? You let him go up there at night? After what I told you tonight? Are you crazy?”

For an instant, terror passed across Anne’s face like the shadow of a cloud moving overland. In that moment, Finn saw everything he had seen that morning on Spirit Rock reflected in his mother’s face. Their synergy electrified him.

In that moment, she believed him, he could tell. That knowledge both terrified and thrilled him, ripping asunder the security veil that was keeping his twelve-year-old fantasies safely locked outside the back door of reality. If his mother believed him about Sadie, or about the vampires, then they could be real.

Then, the moment was over. Her adult face came back, and she said, “Finn, stop it. There are no such things as vampires. Nobody killed Sadie. I don’t have time to waste on this nonsense right now. Your father is missing. What happened to Sadie this morning was… well, it was something else.”

“What was it? Tell me!” he demanded. “Tell me what I saw wasn’t what I saw, Mom! ”

“Summer lightning!” Anne practically screamed. “I don’t know! Go to your room right now! I can’t deal with this crap of yours right now, Finnegan! Your father is missing! Do you understand me? I don’t have time for all your Draculas and the rest of it!”

Finn’s face flamed. He turned on his heel and fled to his room, slamming the door behind him. He flung himself across his bed feeling impotent rage-but not at his mother, of course, even though she had hurt his feelings by shouting at him, and even though he understood that she was upset about his father.

He half hoped, half expected to hear the sound of her feet on the stairs to his room to comfort him, or apologize, or to admit that she, too, was deeply and gravely afraid that his father had been taken by the same malefic force out there in the dark that had taken Sadie-but there was nothing.

When he quietly opened the door to his room and listened, he heard her talking to someone at the Parr’s Landing police station-maybe that liar of a cop who had promised he’d look for Sadie, or maybe the old one who had told them not to say anything to anyone about the bag of bloody knives.

From the rising, near-hysterical crescendo of his mother’s voice, whoever had answered the phone at the station wasn’t being very helpful at all.

“He’s never late!” she shouted. “I’m not shouting! Don’t tell me not to shout! My husband is missing!” And then, “My son found that bag of bloody knives up there by the caves and you’re telling me that… I don’t care if Constable McKitrick didn’t come in to work today! That’s not my problem! Do you mean to tell me that you can’t… Yes, I know it hasn’t been twenty-four hours yet!” There was a long pause, then Anne said. “So, I’m supposed to just wait…? All right, if you promise you’ll take a ride out there and take a look. Tonight! Yes, thank you.” She hung up.

“Mom…?” She turned and saw her son back on the stairs. “Mom? I’m sorry.”

“Come here, sweetheart,” Anne said. She opened her arms to her son, and he ran into them. She felt his face against her shoulder and she squeezed him tightly.

“Mom! Ow! You’re squishing me!” Finn yelped, not meaning it. He snuggled in closer. “I love you, Mommy.”

Anne closed her eyes and pressed her face against his hair. It still smelled like Prell from his shampoo before dinner. “I love you, too, Finnegan.” She looked at the clock. It was nearly midnight. “OK, bedtime, vampire hunter,” she said, obviously trying to take the sting out of her earlier chastisement. “I’m going to stay up for just a little while and wait for your daddy to come home. I want you to go to sleep.”

“You called the police, didn’t you, Mom? Was that the police?”

“Yes, sweetheart,” I did. “Just to be sure. You’re daddy is fine, don’t worry.”

“Mom?”

“What, Finnegan?”

“Mommy,” he said solemnly. “You’re fibbing, aren’t you? Why are you fibbing?”

“Finnegan-please, sweetheart. Please just go to bed now. Be a good boy for your mom.” She ruffled his hair. “I’ll wake you up when Daddy gets here, I promise.”

“OK, Mom,” he said. He turned to go back downstairs. Then he turned around. His mother looked very small sitting in the orange corduroy-covered chair. Impulsively, Finn walked back over to the spot by the window and hugged her as tightly as he could. “Night, Mommy.”

“Night, baby,” Anne said. She patted his bottom through his pyjamas and bathrobe. “I love you. Sleep tight.”

Finn reluctantly let his mother go, then went downstairs to his bedroom to try to sleep while he waited for his father to get home.

Before switching out his bedside lamp, Finn glanced over at Sadie’s empty dog bed across the room. When it hurt too much to breathe, he switched off the bedroom light and let the darkness swallow him up and carry him away from this terrible day.

What the blazes is that young dunderhead doing? For Christ’s sake. He drops out of sight, then has the nerve to drive around the goddamn town in his cruiser with the lights off? And to drive past the window of the police station, practically flipping me the bird? Is he on drugs?

Dave Thomson slammed his coffee cup down hard on his desk, spilling some of it on his blotter. He pushed his chair back from his desk and ran to the door of the station. He threw it open and stepped out onto the sidewalk.

“Elliot,” Thomson bawled. “Goddammit, Elliot, get back here! Right now, boy! I mean it!”