The bus travelled a north-northwest route along the Trans Canada Highway towards Georgian Bay, exiting onto highway 69, continuing north around Georgian Bay towards Parry Sound. The rain stopped, giving way to thick fog that drifted in from the rolling farmlands on either side of the highway, which then gave way to tracks of young pine forest.
The moon, which had begun its ascent hours before in the rain, came out from behind the scudding black rain clouds, frosting the road on either side of the bus with silvery light.
In Barrie, a mother and her five-year-old daughter boarded, and in Parry Sound, four passengers who’d boarded in Toronto disembarked. But no one from Parry Sound boarded. After five hours, the bus pulled into Sudbury for a half-hour refuelling stop.
Jordan slept through Jim Marks’s announcement that all passengers could step out, stretch their legs, and get something to eat at the diner next to the terminal.
No one boarded after the break, Jim noted sourly. His mouth tasted like bad coffee and cigarettes and his back ached. He felt his jacket pocket for the Dexies he kept there. He hated using the amphetamines, mostly because of what they did to his stomach. Though at his last physical, Doc Abelard had warned him that the Dexies, in conjunction with his hours, the cigarettes, and the forty extra pounds he was carrying around his waist wasn’t doing his ticker any favours. Just as a last resort, Jim told himself. Don’t want to fall asleep and crash this old bitch before I get a chance to collect my pension.
He looked back. He counted five passengers in the back of the bus as he pulled out of the lot: an old lady sitting two rows behind him who had asked him three times already “just to be sure” that he was stopping in Whitefish; the teenage boy sleeping against the window halfway to the back who hadn’t gotten out at the Sudbury stop; the tired young mother with her little girl—Missy, he’d heard the woman call her back at the dinette; and the guy in the very back row reading a book. Come to think of it, Jim thought, that guy didn’t get off the bus in Sudbury to stretch his legs, either. One of them—the kid, he thought—was getting off in Lake Hepburn. The other guy had bought a ticket all the way to Sault Ste. Marie.
There were fewer and fewer passengers on the northern routes, Jim realized, and he wondered how long Northern Star would be able to hold out. His retirement wouldn’t come a moment too soon.
Jim turned the bus west on Highway 17 and repeated the name of the coming towns like a mantra: Whitefish, Spanish, Serpent River, Thessalon, Garden River, Lake Hepburn, Sault Ste. Marie.
It would be hours yet before dawn. It was going to be a long fucking night.
At 4:15 a.m., Jim Marks pulled the bus over to the side of the road to investigate what he feared might be a flat tire on the right side. He took his parka down from the overhead compartment, put it on, and stepped outside.
Overhead, the full moon shone down like a headlight. The thought came to him—as it happened, one of the last thoughts he would ever have—that he’d never seen a night this bright and clear up north. The radius of the moon’s light aureole was such that while the larger sky was as blackest black, the area around the moon itself was indigo blue.
He shone his flashlight along the undercarriage of the bus. The tires were all intact and none were damaged. He shrugged. Whatever he had heard and felt, at least it wasn’t a flat. He’d include the incident in his report and the mechanics could check it out when they pulled into Sault Ste. Marie. He checked his watch. They’d only lost fifteen minutes. He stepped back onto the bus and looked down the aisle. The passengers seemed to have slept through the stop, which, given that most bus passengers on long routes were light sleepers, was itself a miracle.
Jim settled himself into his seat. He fastened his seat belt and started the engine.
In his peripheral vision, he caught an abrupt flurry of motion in the rearview mirror and looked up.
The man in the army surplus jacket from the back of the bus wasn’t asleep at all. He was wide awake. He was running along the aisle of the bus with spider like agility, past the sleeping teenager, past the woman and her little girl, towards the driver’s seat.
Jim opened his mouth to tell the man to go back to his seat and sit down, but nothing came out. Then, suddenly, the man was directly behind Jim and drawing back his arm. In his hand, he held something long that gleamed in the overhead light of the cabin. The last thing Jim Marks saw was a flash of silver in the gloom as the man’s arm came down viciously in a wide arc.
Jim threw his arms up to protect his face, but it was too late. There was a short, blinding sheet of white-hot pain and sharp pressure as the chisel end of the archaeological rock hammer split open his skull, but his conscious mind barely had time to register it as pain. He was dead before he hit the floor.
Jordan was jolted awake as the bus swerved on the highway. For a moment he didn’t know where he was. He’d been dreaming that he was caught in a thunderstorm, or an earthquake. There had been the sound of thunder and of a woman singing some sort of high-pitched, screaming lament. It had been a harsh, unpleasant sound—one that, even asleep, had filled Jordan with dread.
He blinked and looked around him. Then he felt his face begin to throb, and he remembered that he was on a bus.
Jordan looked down at his watch. It was five a.m. His mouth was parched. He half-stood in his seat and looked around. The darkness inside the bus was complete except for the green glow coming from the dashboard. Squinting, he could make out the shape of the bus driver hunched over the steering wheel, but nothing else. He tried to remember what time they’d left Toronto—six? Six-thirty? It was now five in the morning. They weren’t due to reach Lake Hepburn till after six. And had the bus been full? He tried to remember—half full? A quarter full? He switched on the overhead light above his seat. The weak bulb illuminated nothing besides his seat and the seat next to his.
The bus was moving very slowly and he heard gravel under the wheels. Gravel? We’re supposed to be on a highway. Jordan pressed his face against the window. Beyond the thick fog, there was nothing but blackness. He saw no other cars, no gas stations, and no highway lights of any kind. It was as though the outside world had simply been swallowed up. The rows of seats ahead of him were tombstone-shaped in the gloom. He shook his head, trying to shake off the thick, gauzy haze left by the painkillers and the whiskey.
Something’s not right here. Something’s not right at all.
Jordan stood up and was assailed by an unfamiliar odour that made his stomach clench. For a moment, he was sure he was going to puke. It reminded him of iodine and rust, or the rotten smell of sulphur, or stagnant pond water, or shit, or some foul combination of all four.
He stepped out into the aisle of the bus and felt his way along the rows in the darkness. The smell grew thicker as he advanced. The bus was unbearably hot, as though the driver had turned up the heat as high as he could. Again, his head throbbed and he felt his stomach contract in protest against the thick smell in the air.
How can the driver not smell this? It’s disgusting! How can he keep driving and not wonder if anyone is sick back here? For that matter, how could any of the other passengers stand it?
Jordan took another step up the aisle and slipped in a slick patch on the floor. The forward motion of his foot and his own weight carried him backwards. He lost his balance and fell, landing on his tailbone and elbows. Bolts of sharp pain shot up his arms and spine. Wincing, he rose to his feet and flicked the switch above the nearest empty seat. In the watery halo of lamp light, Jordan held his hands out in front of him and stared. His first thought was that perhaps he’d cut himself when he fell. Then he looked at the legs of his jeans. They were smeared and wet, and as red as his hands. Jordan knew what the smell was. He was covered in blood—not his blood, someone else’s. Someone very close by. He stifled the scream that threatened to erupt from his throat, and turned on the light above the seat in front of him.
Then, Jordan did scream. There was no way not to.
He was looking at the body of a woman with her throat torn out. The blood from her wounds—there seemed to be at least two, apart from her torn throat, including a deep gash in the top of her skull from which a thick paste of brain, bone fragments, and hair, was leaking like red oatmeal. It had all but obliterated her face. Her left ear looked as if it had been half-bitten off and lay raggedly against the side of her skull. Jordan looked at the seat next to the woman’s body. Amidst the rags—no, not rags, a little girl’s fluffy pink coat marbled with great whorls of crimson— Jordan was just able to make out a tiny red hand and a dangling green rubber boot.
Up ahead, at the front of the bus, the slumped shape behind the wheel drove erratically forward, apparently oblivious to Jordan’s screams. In the driver’s window, thick tentacles of fog beckoned and recoiled in the yellow headlights. Jordan thought he could make out clumps of trees crowding in on either side of the road. They were definitely not on a highway. Jordan had spent his entire—if brief—life in the country and he recognized a country road when he saw it, even at five a.m. in a blind terror at the scene of some sort of gruesome bloodbath through which he’d apparently slept like the dead in a haze of painkillers and whiskey. But he was awake now—completely, horribly awake. Either that, or his nightmare had somehow followed him out of his dream and into real life.
He screamed, “Stop! Stop the bus! Stop the bus! She’s dead! Somebody killed a lady!”
Calmly, the driver turned the wheel of the bus and pulled over to the side of the highway. There appeared to be no haste, no urgency in the sequence of movements.
Still not right, Jordan’s mind gibbered. He shook his head frantically. Am I still asleep, or is this really happening?
Another wave of slaughterhouse stink rose from the woman’s body and Jordan vomited. Then, smelling his own puke, he vomited again.
When he stopped retching and stood up, he saw Richard Weal standing there beside the steering wheel. In his left hand, he held a pickaxe. The blade of the axe was clotted with clumps of flesh and hair. In the right hand, he held a red-spattered butcher’s knife with an eight inch blade. To Jordan, he looked like a monster out of a horror movie. The entire bottom half of his face was caked with blood. The front of his shirt and army surplus jacket were soaked with it and shone wetly under the dim overhead lights of the driver’s cabin.
As Jordan’s terrified mind shook off the last remaining shred of torpor and his eyes grew accustomed to the gloom, he saw the bus driver’s mutilated body crumpled at Weal’s feet. Half his skull was missing and his throat had been torn out.
“The blood is the life,” Weal said thickly, licking his lips. He waved the pickaxe idly in Jordan’s general direction. “I told you, I brought my tools. He tells me how,” Weal said reverently. “He speaks to me. They told me, in that . . . place, to take the pills. But when I did, I couldn’t hear him anymore. He showed me how to do this. He sends dreams into my brain. He wants me to find him so I can live forever. I’ll be like him. I’ll be able to fly.”
“You’re crazy,” Jordan whispered. “You’re fucking crazy.”
Weal smiled, his teeth red. “No, no, I’m not crazy. He wants me to wake him. He wants me to find him where he sleeps and wake him. He loves me.” Weal cocked his head like a dog listening for a supersonic whistle. “He’s speaking right now. I can’t believe you can’t hear it. He says I should kill you, because if I let you live, you’ll tell everyone about him. About us.”
Weal wiped the knife on his pants and began swinging it lazily in front of him like a pendulum. Jordan heard the hiss as it cut the air. Weal took a step towards him, still swinging. Jordan jumped back, slipping again on the gore-slick floor. Weal took a compensatory step forward as though he were leading in some ghastly tango.
“No, I won’t tell! I swear! Please, please, let me go! Please! I have to get home.” Weal swung the knife in wider arcs and feinting half-jabs at Jordan. He grinned, advancing. Jordan backed up farther. “My mom needs me! My dad’s hurting her. Please, if you kill me, she won’t have anyone to protect her. Please, don’t. Oh God. I’m begging you.”
“The blood is the life,” Weal whispered. “And I’m going to live forever.”
He struck hard with the knife, slashing Jordan across the chest. The blade shredded Jordan’s shirt, and bit deep into flesh and muscle. He screamed as the blood rose from the wound. Jordan clutched his chest and backed away. Weal kept advancing, driving Jordan backward, slashing with each step, cutting Jordan’s hands when he tried to ward off the swinging blade, slashing his neck and face when Jordan’s bleeding hands were elsewhere.
When finally Jordan staggered and fell, dizzy from shock and pain, Weal turned him onto his back, almost lovingly. He kissed Jordan on the lips. Then he drew the knife across his throat, severing his carotid artery. The last thing Jordan felt were Weal’s lips against his throat, lapping at the blood that gushed from the wound.
Through dying eyes, Jordan looked up and tried to focus on his murderer.
Weal’s face became his own father’s face, full of deadened, murderous rage. Then it was Weal’s face again. Then his father’s. Then it was Weal’s again.
Directly behind Weal, a tenebrous, mist-like column was forming, vaguely human-shaped, but seemingly made entirely of darkness. Its head (or whatever part of it looked to Jordan most like a human head) was inclined towards Weal’s ear, and it was indeed whispering to him but, now dying, Jordan heard the whispering, too.
It said, Wake me.
In the end, dying proved different than anything Jordan had ever imagined it might be.
For one thing, it seemed to go on forever, long past the point where the pain had stopped. Past even the point where his heart stopped pumping and his brain died. As Jordan drifted above his body, he looked down at himself, bleeding out on the dirty floor of the bus, and felt the truest compassion he’d known. He saw himself as he’d never seen himself in any mirror while he’d been alive. He saw the fragility of his body and he realized how tenuously human life was contained by such brittle shells of flesh and bone under the best of circumstances.
Dimensions of brilliance exploded outward as he continued to rise.
Past, present, and future fused together in a continuum. There were no more secrets. Every truth of the world was laid bare to the dead.
Jordan knew, for instance—and not without satisfaction—that his father would die of pancreatic cancer two years from now, in 1974. He would go quickly, but not without terrible pain. He knew that his mother would remarry, this time to a man who would cherish and care for her. He also knew that, late at night, as she lay in bed with her gentle, loving husband sleeping beside her, she’d think of Jordan’s father and his cruelty and wonder if that wasn’t, in its own way, real love. In those moments, she’d glance over at her sleeping husband and hate herself for wishing he wasn’t just a bit harder, just a bit rougher, the way a man ought to be. Then she’d remember the terror, and she’d forgive herself for those treacherous thoughts. She’d lay her head on his chest while he gathered her in his arms till she, too, slept, dreaming of Jordan, telling herself over and over again that he was somewhere safe, living his life, and knowing in her mother’s heart that he was gone.
He drew comfort from the knowledge that Fleur would leave Don before the baby was born and that the violence that had marked Jordan’s life would never mark that of Fleur’s son.
Jordan continued to rise.
He saw that the dead were everywhere, masses of them, like a vast eldritch ocean that stretched in every direction. Men, women, children— even animals. He laughed with revenant delight. The sound of his laughter fell in a shower of ectoplasmic blue sparks in the ether of this strange new in-between dimension where everything and nothing was the same as it was in life.
When Jordan was alive he’d once asked a priest about whether or not dogs had souls. His own dog, Prince, had died from eating poisoned bait in the woods the previous week, and Jordan had been inconsolable. The priest assured him that animals had no immortal souls and reprimanded him for being stupid enough to believe they did. Jordan had cried, but he suspected the priest was wrong—or lying. For years afterwards, he’d felt Prince’s presence constantly when he was alone, especially at night in his room where the dog had always slept.
Here the dead crowded the desolate country road where Weal had awkwardly parked the bus, peering curiously through the windows, tapping noiselessly on the glass in an endless, one-sided attempted dialogue with the living. Finding none inside the bus, they scampered along the roof and launched themselves into the night like spectral fireflies in search of living receivers who could hear their voices. They looked as they did in life, and in death seemed neither overjoyed to be free of their mortal bodies nor particularly tormented. No wings, no harps, no robes. They just . . . were.
Jordan felt the warm press of millions of souls caressing his own as they passed through him. He realized now, as he never had when he was alive, how not alone he had always been. What a comfort it might have been to know that, he thought as he reached out to receive them.
As Jordan was absorbed into the massive vortex of spiralling black light, he looked down one last time.
Below him, in the road, Richard Weal had stepped out of the bus with his hockey bag full of bloodstained picks and hammers and saws. He withdrew a bottle wrapped in a dirty towel. Stuffed into the bottle’s opening and held in place by the stopper was a wick made of cloth. Weal took a lighter out of his jacket pocket and lit the wick. The flame glowed brilliant blue. He hurled the bottle through the door of the bus. It shattered on impact, igniting a fireball that engulfed the interior of the bus in a matter of seconds. Even before the gas tank blew, Jordan knew his body was burning, and that when the authorities found the scorched out hulk hours later, there would be nothing left of him to identify.
Riding Weal’s shoulders, the great black shape that only the dead could see pressed close to him, whispering to him, rippling and undulating with malignant purpose as Weal picked up his hockey bag and began to walk.
Jordan knew—as he knew everything now, including the terrible end of Weal’s story—that there would be unlocked houses along the route to Parr’s Landing. There would be trusting people. There would be cars driving north with passengers who felt sympathy for a lone man hitchhiking home to a northern mining town to be with his sick daughter or his dying wife. Weal’s bag of hammers and knives and picks would do the rest. All the while, the great black shape folded its wings around Weal and urged him forward.
And then, the part of Jordan Lefebvre that was still tethered to his experience of dying flickered out entirely, his essence becoming one with the souls around him, passing completely from the world of the living into the gloomy country of the dead.