Enter, Night (35 page)

Like always, he cut across the streets, through back lots, till the land
flattened out and grew more timbered as they approached the road that
led to Bradley Lake and the cliffs of Spirit Rock. When the lake was in
sight, he turned west and began the upward ascent along a path he could
navigate with his eyes closed if he had to.

But he didn’t close his eyes. He kept them open, trained on Sadie
who trotted in front of him, not bounding ahead as she usually did, but
seeming to savour this new beginning as much as Finn was. He relished
the sight of her as though it were their very first walk. Occasionally, she
stopped and looked back, as though to reassure herself that Finn was
right behind her, as he always had been, and always would be.

Higher and higher they climbed. The land underfoot grew harder as soft earth gave way to pine needle-covered patches of shale and granite
shield. In the sky, the dark blue was lightening by degrees. Finn gauged
that the sun would begin to rise in approximately five minutes. He could
practically set his watch by the colour of the sky.

Sadie stopped abruptly and sat down on the path. She sniffed the air
and whined.

“What is it, Sadie?” he said, catching up to her. He reached down to
pet her, and she snapped at his hand. He jerked it back. “Sadie, what’s
wrong?”
She’s afraid of something,
Finn thought.
Not me, surely? She can’t
be afraid of me.

He reached down to pet her again, and this time she snarled with
unambiguous menace, showing all her teeth. Finn backed away slowly,
thinking about rabies and wondering how quickly a dog could be infected
with that virus, and how quickly it would change her.

Once again, as soon as he backed away, she closed her mouth and
wagged her tail, whining apologetically, as if to tell him she was sorry.
The thought came to him, suddenly and with near-telepathic clarity that,
for some reason, Sadie wasn’t afraid of
Finn
; rather, Sadie was trying to
keep
him
away from
her
. She was afraid for him.

Then, she turned and bounded off into the forest as if pursued.

“Sadie, no!” Finn shouted, thinking,
No, not again. Please, God, don’t
let her run away again.

He chased her straight up the hill. He’d never known Sadie to run
so swiftly and nimbly, even as a puppy. Finn was panting as he tried to
keep up with her. He watched her tail disappear around an outcropping
of boulders directly above him, slightly to the left of where he was trying
to navigate the slippery rock.

Reaching level ground, he looked left and right and called her name.
He saw the land around him clearly now. The light was pale blue and
pellucid, shot through with gossamer threads of yellow. He looked around
again and called out, “Sadie! Come on, girl! It’s OK, don’t be afraid. We’ll
go home now!”

Stupid, stupid, stupid,
he berated himself.
It was too soon for her to
come back up here after what happened to her. We should have slept in.

Then he remembered her waiting in the doorway of his bedroom
with the red ball, begging to play. He felt for the ball in his pocket. It was
there. He took it out and held it in his hand.

“Sadie, I have your ball,” Finn called out winningly. “Come and get
it. Come on, girl—come and get your red ball!” He bounced it on the
ground—Sadie could always identify that sound, no matter where she
was in the house.

He heard a soft whimper come from behind the boulders.
Thank
God,
he thought, adding a casual prayer, though no less earnest for its
casualness.
Thanks, God. Please, just one more thing? Could you make her
come to me, so I can take her home? Sorry to keep bothering you.

The whine came again, and Finn walked around the boulders.

Sadie was cowering in a deep rock shelter behind a copse of low growing white pine, almost hidden from sight. He saw her eyes gleaming
in the dimness—more red than amber in the brightening light, he noted,
dismissing the observation even as it occurred to him—and he spoke to
her in a soft, soft voice.

“Sadie, come out. Please, Sadie. Let’s go home now. Come on, baby.”

He bounced the ball twice, then three times against the ground.
From inside the grotto he could have sworn he heard the sound of her
tail swishing against stone.

He held out his hand with the ball in it, and she crept towards the
opening of the rock shelter. Finn heard her panting before he saw that
she was slick with sweat—sweat that hadn’t been there a few moments
before—trembling violently. Sadie looked at him imploringly, as though
desperately trying to push her thoughts into his mind.

He felt a wave of pure love coming from Sadie. Love, and something
more.

Finn’s pupils dilated and he swayed on his feet, struggling for
balance.

Amorphous, sibylline images tumbled through his brain—vivid
impressions of Sadie as a puppy, but not images of his own recollect,
not images of
himself
with Sadie, not the privileged god’s-eye view from
which even the most benign and loving human beings experience their
interaction with animals.

No, these were images of
Sadie
with
him
: the gift of a glimpse of
the world as experienced from Sadie’s perspective—a mosaic of smells
no human nose would ever experience; the literature of light on grass
and snow; the secret language of birds and squirrels and cats; the true
meaning of unconditional love, something no human being would ever
truly understand; the perfect ecstasy of Finn’s fingers combing through
her soft black fur, the utter completion of falling asleep at the foot of his
bed. Pure and uncomplicated gratitude for every affection ever shown to
her. Vigilance for Finn’s safety. Self-sacrifice.

The sound of the red rubber ball being dropped on the bedroom floor.
Thump-thump-thump. Bounce, bounce. Good! Chase! Me chase! Throw!

As if in a trance, Finn threw the ball. Sadie scrambled out of the
grotto and leaped into the sunlight.

Finn saw the flash of white light and felt the searing blast of
unearthly heat before his brain could record what was happening. In one
second, Sadie’s body had launched itself into the air in pursuit of the red
rubber ball. In the next second, there was a ghastly smell like ozone and
burned hair, and his dog burst into flames before his eyes, shrieking in
agony and crashing to the forest earth in front of him, writhing in the
flames of an incandescent calefaction; a fire that seemed to come from
inside
Sadie’s body, consuming it with merciless efficiency, melting fur
and flesh and bone.

As Finn watched, her body rippled and crumbled to ash, leaving a
charred skeleton that continued to burn even after the flesh was gone.
Then, the fire abruptly went out, seemingly drawn inward by the skeleton
itself, leaving only thick black smoke and the horrifying images seared
into his brain.

It had taken seconds—seconds that, to Finn, felt like centuries
repeating themselves in a cycle of agonizing revelation. The skeleton
collapsed, became ash that blew away into the forest on the dawn breeze.
In the east, the sun continued to climb in the sky, golden light touching
the crest of the pine trees and the cliffs surrounding Parr’s Landing,
promising the most beautiful of late autumn days.

Finn stared, his mouth hanging open, his mind refusing to reconcile
with what his eyes had just recorded. He opened his arms in the supplicant
posture of a cheated embrace. Then he screamed louder than he had ever
screamed in his life, a harrowing shriek of impossible betrayal, one that
ripped away his innocence, his childhood, and his faith forever.

“
SADIE
!”

Finn stumbled, half-blind, towards the pile of smoking ash that had
been his dog and reached out blindly to touch it, to hold it. Still hot, it
seared his hand. He screamed again as painful blisters rose on the skin, a
last, final insulting damnation from whoever the author of this counter miracle had been.

He said Sadie’s name over and over again, part mantra, part keening,
part pleading for this unimaginable horror to be revealed as some terrible
cosmic mistake, or a scientific impossibility that would be unmasked as a
sick joke at any moment.

But it wasn’t. Nothing came, neither relief nor absolution.

As Finn knelt alone in the forest, rocking and weeping, the smoke
dwindled down to wisps, and then died out entirely. Sunlight dappled the
forest around him, and in the trees above his head, Finn heard the gentle
lamentation of birdsong.

Anne Miller stood at
the kitchen window
wearing the pink velour
winter bathrobe she’d gotten last Christmas from Finn “and Sadie.” She
was pouring her first cup of Maxwell House when she heard the front
door click open. The house had been cold when she’d woken up half an
hour before. Sadie wasn’t in the kitchen, and Finn wasn’t in his bed.

Damn it
, she thought furiously.
Couldn’t he have at least waited till
we got home from the vet before he took her outside for a walk? Didn’t he
see how sick she was last night? That boy doesn’t have the brains God gave a
grasshopper sometimes, I swear.

Coffee cup in hand, Anne marched into the living room. “Finn? Is
that you? I can’t believe you took Sadie out knowing that she—”

The coffee cup fell from her hand and smashed against the hardwood
as her son slowly shuffled into the living room.

Finn’s face and neck was a Kabuki mask of grief; smudged white ash
scored with the tracks of Finn’s tears. His right hand was badly burned,
and he reeked of smoke and something infinitely worse.

She gasped. “Finnegan, what on
earth
. . . ? Where’s Sadie?”

“Mom,” Finn said in a dazed, swollen voice. “Mom. Mommy . . .”

He reached out his arms to his mother, but stumbled and fell. Anne
caught him before he hit the floor. She held his unconscious body against
her own, finding it clammy and cold. His breathing was shallow, his lips
and fingertips bluish. She shouted for Hank to hurry up and come out
of the bathroom right away, and to call a doctor because something was
terribly, terribly wrong with Finn.

Adeline Parr had not gone
down to breakfast. She suspected that the
rest of the family would enjoy her absence, but this one time she didn’t
care. She looked at her Piaget. It was ten o’clock in the morning. Breakfast
would be long finished. Morgan would be at school. Christina and Jeremy
would be . . . who knew where they’d be? Likely out somewhere, making
spectacles of themselves in town. Both had shown a marked preference
for being absent from Parr House during the day. Since Adeline could
barely stand the sight of either of them for reasons unique to her view of
each of them, their absence suited her perfectly.

She’d had Beatrice bring her coffee in her bedroom. Adeline sat in a
yellow brocade chair by the window smoking a steady line of du Maurier
cigarettes from a sterling silver monogrammed cigarette case that had
been a gift from her late husband. Blue smoke shimmered like a low hanging cloud over the room, caressing the glass of the closed window
like the fingers of ghosts.

Her eyes were red and sore, partly because of the smoke, but also
because, even though she prided herself on not being the sort of woman
who cried as a reaction to shock or even immediate grief, her own body
didn’t always remember to obey her. When she stubbornly refused to cry,
her body reacted on her behalf, without her permission. Adeline’s tears
were like the tears of some men, the ones who’d grown up and forgotten
the mechanics, the technique, of weeping. Adeline’s tears seemed to
bleed from pinpricks in her eyes instead of flowing naturally, let alone
with healing.

She had locked herself in her study after dinner the previous
evening. She’d heard Morgan leave the house and she’d heard Christina
and Jeremy laughing in the dining room, probably laughing at her. After
a time, she’d heard them leave the dining room and go upstairs. The
sound of the television came from one of the upper bedrooms. Adeline
assumed they were watching it together.

Shortly after nine, she’d heard the front door open again, stealthier
than it had the last time. Morgan had obviously returned from wherever
she’d been gadding. Adeline made a mental note to deal with Morgan
later. One slut in the family was more than enough. She wasn’t having a
repeat performance of Christina’s harlotry in the current generation, not
in a year of Sundays. When the house was entirely quiet, when they were
all in their beds, only then did she unlock the door to her study and glide
noiselessly up the stairs to her bedroom, locking that door in its turn,
and remaining in the room all night and into the morning.

Had anyone pointed it out to her, it wouldn’t have occurred to
Adeline Parr to find anything unusual in the fact that she had been able
to monitor the entire evening’s comings and goings from the leather
chair behind the desk without ever leaving her study. Like a bejewelled,
lacquered, well-tailored spider, Adeline Parr felt every tug on every
strand of her web, which included not only Parr House, but the town of
Parr’s Landing itself. Nothing and no one arrived or departed without
her knowing about it.

Except this time. Except for the arrival of Phenius’s adopted Indian
boy, Billy Lightning. News of his arrival in Parr’s Landing had eluded her,
as had news of Phenius’s death. She felt the impact of this the way she
might have felt the impact of an explosion on the other side of town—
the ground had shaken, the air had shimmered and eddied for a moment,
and while there was an intellectual awareness of devastation, the damage
itself had not yet been internalized or quantified.

Phenius.
Phenius.