The police cruiser paused, as though waiting for Thomson to shout something else. Then the brake lights winked redly in the blackness- once, then twice, as the driver tapped the brake.
The car sped ahead, pausing a ways up the block. Again, the tapping of the brake light-flick-flick.
Thomson grabbed his keys off the desk and let the door of the police station slam shut behind him. He jumped behind the wheel of his own brand new Impala and took off in pursuit of the police cruiser that was now taunting him by maintaining a pace just slow enough to follow, but still too fast for Thomson to catch up to without speeding-something Thomson was loath to do in his own town, even at this hour.
Elliot-and he had no doubt it was Elliot, probably stark raving high on pot, or God only knew what else he’d been getting into lately that had made him act the way he’d been acting-led him on a merry chase through the streets of Parr’s Landing, and out towards the edge of town, driving without lights and making Thomson squint.
“Where are you going, you crazy bastard?” Thomson muttered. He leaned his arm out the window and tried to signal to Elliot that he should pull over. Instinctively, he reached down to activate a siren, but of course there was no siren to activate. “Get back here, goddammit!” he shouted again out the window. “Shit on a goddamn
Just when it looked like Elliot was headed for the road that led to the cliffs (and on those roads, Thomson promised himself, he
The cruiser sped up. Thomson floored it again, cursing his lack of siren. He could think of no better use for the siren than right now-then, when he caught Elliott, he was going to shove it so far up his goddamn ass, Elliot would shit pieces of red cherry-top glass all the way to the welfare office. He honked his horn several times, but to no avail. The cruiser kept speeding ahead.
In the distance, Thomson saw the taillights of the cruiser abruptly veer right, then wink out and vanish altogether.
Then, suddenly he saw the car. He also saw why the taillights had disappeared. Elliot had parked it in front of the burned-out shell of the Mike Tackacs Hockey Arena.
Thomson pulled in behind and parked the Impala. He took his flashlight out of the glove box and shone it alongside the cruiser.
The early morning electrical fire that had taken the hockey rink down in ’59-killing a maintenance worker named Eric McDonald and his young son, Timmy, who was skating while his father worked, thus adding two more souls to Parr’s Landing’s already ample supply of ghosts-had burned fiercely and efficiently, leaving only a husk that somehow still smelled like smoke after all these years.
Why no one had torn it down in all this time was a mystery to Thomson. It was as dangerous as all get-out. They’d rebuilt a new arena on the other side of town-the Brenen Gyles Arena, so named after Parr’s Landing’s one and only semi-famous contribution to the 1962 Ontario Junior A League, paid for in no small part by the Gyles Family, who owned most of the town of Gyles Point-so there was no reason for the ruins of the Takacs Arena to be standing at all.
The Parr family could have afforded to tear the Takacs down and rebuild it themselves-hell, the old bitch could have paid for it out of her change purse, but it would be a week of frosty Fridays in hell before Adeline Parr would lift a finger to help the town do anything but work for her.
As for Elliot, he must be high, Thomson decided. There was no other reason for this entirely out-of-character behaviour.
“Elliot, you there?” he shouted. “Come on out, now. Stop this foolishness. We can talk about it, whatever it is. But we can’t fix it until we do. You need to come out right now, son. Don’t make me go in there and find you.”
But there was no answer. Thomson took a few tentative steps into the ruined arena, playing his flashlight along the charred baseboards, cumbrous slats, collapsed walls, and rotting ceiling beams.
Elliot’s voice echoed from deeper inside the ruins. “Sarge, I’m in here. Follow my voice. Use your flashlight-you can find me. Just listen to my voice.”
“Elliot, what the
“Sarge, come over here. I found something you need to see. I think I know what happened in Gyles Point. I think I know who that hockey bag belonged to. It’s worse than we thought.”
Thomson’s heart quickened. “Elliot, what are you on about? And why are you here?” A thought suddenly came to him. “Is it the Indian? Is it Lightning?”
“No.” Elliot’s voice sounded as though he were standing right in front of Thomson now, though he still couldn’t see anything except what was directly in font of him, illuminated by the flashlight beam. “It’s worse. It’s much, much worse than that.”
Then Elliot stepped into the beam of his flashlight. He was nude, his body smeared with a brownish-red substance that looked like dried blood.
Thomson dropped the flashlight. He barely had time to shout “Jesus fucking Christ!” before Elliot, almost casually, reached out with one bare arm and tossed his sergeant halfway across the arena.
Then Elliot was astride his chest. The fingers of one hand gathered Thomson’s hair and brutally yanking his head to one side, while the fingernails of the other hand ripped through his uniform shirt and jacket like they were wet toilet paper.
Thomson kneed Elliot as hard as he could, using the force of his legs to throw him off balance. Gaining a momentary advantage, Thomson scrambled to the side, reaching for his revolver by instinct and pointing it at the indistinct shape crouching in front of him.
He fired twice, again on instinct. In the flare from the gunfire, he saw the bullets slam into Elliot’s torso, and then heard them thud into a wall somewhere outside his limited vision. In that short glimpse, Thomson feared he had lost control of his own senses, because as far as he could tell, the bullets had left no trace of a wound.
Thomson’s subconscious mind registered that Elliot was not alone, that there were other shapes crouching there behind him in the blackness, horribly patient shapes that undulated and twisted languorously as though undecided about what form they would ultimately choose to take.
Then Elliot stood up and said, “Coming for you now, Sarge.”
“Elliot, get back!” he gasped. He aimed the gun in the general vicinity of Elliot’s voice. “I mean it!
Those were the last words Dave Thomson ever spoke before Elliot McKitrick-whom Thomson hadn’t even seen move-tore out Thomson’s throat with his teeth. The last thing Thomson felt was the wet warmth of his own blood on his face, and Elliot’s mouth fastened on the wound, sucking the arterial spray as his life ran out of his body and into the body of the thing astride him whom he’d once wished was his son.
Finn woke to the sound of breaking glass and his mother’s screaming. He had been dreaming that his father had come home with Sadie riding in the passenger seat of the car, her nose out the window and her wet red tongue lolling foolishly from the side of her muzzle, tasting the wind. In the dream, it was daylight-which proved the dream’s ultimate undoing, because Finn suddenly remembered in his sleep that it was night, and that Sadie had burned up in front of him that morning above Bradley Lake.
He sat up quickly and listened to his mother shrieking in pain and terror. There were crashes that sounded like furniture splintering, and the sound of more shattering glass.
