Enter, Night

What Finn saw, by the light of the table lamp on the floor casting crazy shadows on the wall, was that his father had indeed come home to them. Around him, shards of broken glass from the front picture window twinkled in the light like icicles growing out of the green wall-to-wall carpet.

Hank Miller’s body skewed at a horrible angle as though his bones had all been broken and somehow reassembled in haste, with no concern for either aesthetics or practical mechanics. Finn had barely passed science last year in school, but even with his deficient knowledge of human anatomy, he knew that there was no possible way the shambling, disjointed, horror movie staple standing behind his mother, holding her by the shoulders could possibly be able to stand up, let alone move towards him-even at such a tortured, dislocated pace, pushing his mother in front of him like a wheeled dolly.

And yet, he-it-did exactly that.

“Finn,” said his father through a mouthful of teeth that Finn had only ever seen in the pages of The Tomb of Dracula, “you should be asleep. Go back to bed. I’ll come and tuck you in after I’ve finished speaking with your mother.”

Then Hank Miller opened his mouth wider than Finn could ever have dreamed possible and buried those terrible new teeth in his mother’s neck.

Finn and his mother shrieked at exactly the same time-and Finn again felt that odd communion with her that he’d felt hours before when his mother briefly appeared to consider the possibility that vampires had carried off Sadie and his father.

This time, however, when their eyes met, the automatic, dismissive adult facade didn’t descend and obliterate the moment.

Rather, as Anne Miller’s eyes rolled up in her head, almost regretfully, Finn imagined her saying, Well, Finn, you were right. There are such things as vampires. I guess one of them did get Sadie. Now, you’d better run before your father gets you.

Hank dropped his wife’s lifeless body on the floor, the bottom half of his face wet and red. He licked his teeth almost curiously, seeming to Finn as though his father were feeling them for the first time, like a child on Christmas morning with a new toy-a dangerous one that he wanted to enjoy before some nosey adult figured out just what to do with it.

“Finnegan,” Hank said, opening his arms. Finn noticed that his nails had grown. “Come here. Let’s go find Sadie. She’s up at Spirit Rock waiting for us.” He stepped over his wife’s body and took a step towards his son. “Come here.”

“You’re not my father,” Finn said backing away. “Get away from me.”

He looked around wildly for a weapon, but could find nothing on the floor, or on the table, or the walls. His father took another step towards him, and Finn caught the smell of Hank’s breath, the copper whiff of his own mother’s blood on his father’s lips.

“Our Father which art in Heaven,” Finn shouted, pointing his finger at his father. “Hallowed be Thy name! Thy kingdom come! Thy will be done on earth as it is in Heaven!”

Hank clapped his hands over his ears and roared, stumbling backwards, his awkward, broken body tripping and falling over the upturned, blood-spattered orange corduroy easy chair.

“Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us!”

Finn reached down and snatched up two pieces of a broken table. He swung them together in the shape of a cross and pushed it into his father’s face.

It’s like a picture tube just blew up in a television, Finn thought from somewhere far outside his own deadly panic, wincing in the sudden bedazzlement of blue light.

Acrid smoke burned Finn’s eyes and seared his nostrils as he stepped back, coughing.

Finn wasn’t sure if he heard the piercing ululation come from his father’s own throat, or whether it was merely, suddenly, everywhere at once, from some outside place beyond the parameters of the world as it was. Finn felt the air move with it, and he felt the sound in his teeth. There was pure agony in that sound, and Finn was viciously, triumphantly glad of it.

And then Hank was… something else.

Through the blue mist emanating from his father’s body, Finn saw wings grow where his father’s arms had been, wings that extended the length of the living room before they began to shimmer and dwindle even as Hank stumbled forward to where Anne’s body lay crumpled on the green carpet.

As he watched, his father knelt down and scissored his legs around his mother’s waist, cinching it tightly between his thighs. There was wind in Finn’s face and his hair blew backwards as his father’s wings flapped, then flapped again. Hank backed away towards the window, awkward and spraddle-legged with the weight of his mother’s body still clenched between his legs.

He leaned against the jagged mouth of broken glass where the window had been shattered and tilted his broken body at an impossible angle, half-in, half-out of the living room, craning his dislocated neck forward so he could look Finn in the eye.

“Goddamn you, you little piece of fucking shit,” Hank said. “I’m coming back for you.”

Then Finn saw his father tumble backward, outside, airborne, rising into the night with the lifeless body of his mother hanging from his talons like dreadful ballast.

He rushed to the window, but it was too late-he thought he caught one last glimpse of his mother’s blonde hair in the moonlight, but the flash of it was gone before he could be sure of anything except that his hands were bleeding from the broken glass, and he was alone in the house, and it would be hours yet before the dawn.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

Morgan, who usually slept like the dead, was the first person to be woken by the sound of Finn banging on the front door of Parr House half an hour before dawn.

She rubbed the sleep from her eyes and squinted at the clock beside her bed. It was six forty-five. Outside her window, there was a barely perceptible sense of lightening in the sky, but the darkness was still nearly absolute.

The banging came again. Morgan swung her feet over the side of her bed and picked up her bathrobe where it lay on the chair beside her nightstand. Then she went into the hallway and started down the stairs.

Jeremy’s sleepy voice carried from the landing above. “Morgan? Is that you? What’s going on? Who’s at the door?”

“I don’t know, Uncle Jeremy. I just heard it now. It woke me up.”

“Wait for me,” he said. “Don’t open the door. I’ll do it, hopefully before your grandmother hears it and makes Beatrice dish up whoever’s pulverizing that door for breakfast.”

Christina’s door opened. “Morgan? Jeremy? What’s going on? Who’s at the door?” She belted her own bathrobe and ran her fingers through her hair, less through vanity than by reflex.

Jeremy hurried down the stairs past both Christina and Morgan. “I don’t know, Chris,” he said over his shoulder. “But whoever it is, he’s playing with his life if my mother gets to him first.”

Jeremy stared at the boy standing in the doorway. He’d never seen him before. The boy’s fist was poised as if to bang on the door again. His face was puffy and pale, his hair askew. Like them, he wore pyjamas, but his were muddy and ripped at the ankle as though he had torn them running. Clutched tightly in the boy’s other hand was a jar full of some sort of clear liquid that looked like water.

“Hi,” Jeremy said, confused. “Can I help you?”

“I need to see Morgan,” the boy said. “Please?”

“Morgan?” Jeremy glanced at the staircase where Christina and Morgan stood waiting for him to identify who had woken them. “Morgan, honey, there’s a… you have a visitor. Uh, come in, kid.”

Jeremy looked from Christina to Morgan, and then back at the boy, who took a few tentative steps across the threshold, onto the marble floor. Jeremy noticed that his feet were bare and bleeding.

Morgan hurried down the stairs and stopped in front of the doorway. “Finn? What are you doing here? Are you OK?” She stared at him blankly, as though trying to reconcile Finn’s bedraggled appearance in the foyer of Parr