Twelve-year-old Finnegan Miller liked to get up when the house was still quiet, while his parents were still fast asleep in their room upstairs, and take his black Labrador, Sadie, for a long walk around Bradley Lake. In October, he woke before sunrise. His routine was unvaried: he dressed in his room, fed Sadie in the kitchen, found her favourite red rubber ball, then put on a jacket and slipped out the back door of the house with Sadie at his heels.
In short order, she’d run ahead, tail wagging, nose to the ground and he’d be the one following her instead of the other way around.
Bradley Lake was half a mile from his house on Childs Drive. To call it a “lake” would flatter it, especially given the proximity of Parr’s Landing to the shore of Lake Superior, which always seemed to Finn to be more like an ocean. According to legend, Lake Superior never gave up its dead, and in school, Finn had learned about the terrible history of shipwrecks during storms of almost supernatural ferocity there—the wreck of the Mataafa Storm in 1905, the Cyprus in 1907, the Inkerman and Cerisoles minesweepers in 1918. Surely, Finn thought, no body of water that carnivorous, with that much of a taste for human flesh should rightly be called a lake.
But Bradley Lake was a lake—vast, serene, with water so deep and cold it often looked black. Rising directly above it were a tiered grouping of rocky outcrops of Canadian Shield granite cliffs surrounded by a rich taiga forest of black spruce, jack pine, and Ontario balsam poplar.
Once at the lake, the path Finn took was a mile and a half around and lined with paper birch and balsam fir. When he was younger, he’d heard stories of coming upon bush animals in the darkness, but he’d only ever seen one—a buck, last fall—and it had run off when Sadie started to bark and chase it. He’d tried to restrain her but in the end he realized that not only would she never catch the buck, she would have turned tail immediately if it had ever stopped and turned towards her with its antlers lowered.
Finn’s father had for a time urged him to let him train Sadie for hunting, but Finn despised the idea of hunting, and his father, who had learned which battles to pick with his son, decided to let it drop. Sadie’s status as Finn’s best friend—indeed, his only friend—was thus enshrined. This morning ritual hike, with Sadie bounding ahead of him through the bush, was sacrosanct. It was a ritual that was only ever interrupted if Finn was sick or injured, which he rarely was. On those mornings, Sadie would lie beside his bed in his room and whine pitifully until she realized he wasn’t ignoring her, but wasn’t able to take her out. Then she would lay her head on her front paws and look up at him with reproachful amber eyes.
Sometimes she brought the red rubber ball to him and dropped it at the foot of the bed, as though it were the most marvellous idea ever.
Finn enjoyed the darkness and the silence of this last hour of night best in the late autumn, when the air coming in off Superior was damp and raw, and the yellow and red leaves on the trees lining the path showered water down on him when he accidentally knocked them as he passed by.
While most boys his age might have preferred to stay under the covers for as long as possible in the morning, Finn wasn’t most twelve-year-olds. He’d never been like “most” boys his age, no matter what age. This seemed to cause the adults around him more consternation than it caused him. Finn may not have had friends, other than Sadie, but he couldn’t miss something he had neither had, nor ever felt he needed.
Besides, Finn was in love. Completely, utterly, and irrevocably in love for the first time in his life. It was a secret he worked hard to hide from his parents, who were already worried about his inability to connect with his peers. No point in making it worse.
He was in love with Dracula.
Specifically, he was in love with The Tomb of Dracula, a comic book series, the first issue of which he’d found in early summer of that year on the lowest rung of the spiral comic rack at Harper’s Drugs. Like all true loves, no matter the age at which they occur, it was a blinding, all consuming passion that left little room for reason.
Finn thrilled to the cover: a luridly inked four-colour depiction of the fanged Lord of the Undead carrying the limp body of a curvy blonde in a green mini-dress. Dracula’s cape was edged in orange satin. Mist swirled in the foreground. In the background loomed a castle framed by a full moon. The banner read NIGHT OF THE VAMPIRE! With his heart in his mouth, he’d paid his twenty cents and pedalled his five-speed Huffy Dragster with the metallic gold banana seat as fast as he could back to his house on Mission Street.
Back home, in his room, with the door closed, he’d read it from cover to cover, memorizing the names of the characters—Frank Drake, Clifton Graves, Jeanie and, of course, Count Dracula himself—as well as the storyline, until he could recite the script.
In the first issue, the skeptical hero, Frank Drake, discovers that he’s a descendant of Count Dracula and has inherited a castle in Transylvania. With the intention of turning the castle into a vampire-themed tourist resort, he travels to Romania with his best friend, Clifton Graves, and Frank’s fiancée, Jeanie (she doesn’t need a last name, Finn noted, with an unfamiliar flush, not with boobs like those). Clifton discovers the skeleton of Count Dracula in the castle’s dungeon and pulls the stake out, bringing the vampire back to life. Dracula attacks a village barmaid and kills her. The vampire returns to his castle and overpowers Frank Drake, who tries to prevent Dracula from turning Jeanie into a vampire. He drives the Count away with Jeanie’s silver compact mirror. But before he vanishes, Dracula issues a cryptic warning: “Know this, Frank Drake—you’ve won but a battle . . . in the final analysis, the game is mine—as it always has been— will always be—mine—forever mine!” And indeed the game turned out to be Dracula’s—Jeanie had been transformed into a vampire.
Finn sighed in ecstasy. Then he read it again, from start to finish. Then he read it once more. It was perfect.
Harper’s Drugs always seemed to carry comic books later than the date on the cover, something that had never bothered him before his first issue of The Tomb of Dracula. The following week he asked Mr. Harper about it and he’d told Finn that they’d already travelled a long way by the time they got to Parr’s Landing. He haunted the drugstore for a week, then two, then three, but there was no sign of issue two.
In desperation, Finn sat down at the desk in his bedroom and wrote a letter to Marvel Comics in New York City, using the address he’d found on the bottom of the first page, and taped a twenty-five cent coin to it.
Dear Marvel Comics , he wrote. I am a recent reader of your Comic Book Series, Tomb of Dracula. I live in Parr’s Landing, Ontario, Canada where it is sometimes very hard to buy your products. Can you send me Issue #2? I have enclosed 25 cents (in Canadian money) for the comic plus postage to my country. My address is c/o Gen. Delivery, Parr’s Landing, Ont. Thank you very much. Sincerely, Finnegan Miller.
As it happened, the fates elected to smile on young Finn Miller— some kind soul at Marvel returned his twenty-five cent coin along with a manila envelope containing a copy of issue number two.
Dear Finnegan Miller , came the reply. Here is a copy of the second issue of T.O.D. We hope you enjoy it. We are returning your twenty-five-cent coin. May we suggest you put it towards a subscription? We don’t send out mags from our office as a rule, but are happy to help you out this one time. Sincerely, your friends at Mighty Marvel.
Finn’s joy knew no bounds. Issue number two was even more lurid than its predecessor. This cover featured Dracula turning into a bat in front of a huddled clutch of terrified Londoners cowering in an archway as a woman in a miniskirt lay crumpled at the Count’s feet, obviously dead. The lining of Dracula’s cape this time was a glorious blood-red. The issue’s tagline shrieked, A SHRILL SCREAM SPLITS THE AIR IN LONDON AT MIDNIGHT—WHO STOLE MY COFFIN?
Well, obviously Frank Drake did, Finn gloated. Now all hell was going to break loose. He flung himself across his bed, rummaging in the paper bag of candy from Harper’s Drugs till he found what he was looking for. He bit the tip off one of the grape-flavoured Pixy Stix straws, and then poured the sweet-and-sour powder onto his tongue, letting it luxuriate there for a moment before he swallowed it. Then he started reading, picking up the story as though it were a letter from an old friend, or rather what he imagined reading a letter from an old friend would be like.
Afterwards, he thought briefly of asking his parents if they’d buy him a subscription for his birthday, but he knew they didn’t trust American companies with their money, even the relative pittance it would cost for a subscription to The Tomb of Dracula. Besides, the day after he received issue number two from the kind soul at Marvel, the shipment of new comics—including The Tomb of Dracula—arrived at Harper’s Drugs like rain after a long drought. Issue number three had arrived on the spiral rack in a relatively timely fashion, considering how far away Parr’s Landing was from New York City.
Finn was coming up to the highest point of land around Bradley Lake. He looked around for Sadie, but she was nowhere to be seen. The sky was lightening, streaked with broad shards of dark pumpkin and deep purple, and the water reflected the advancing dawn, colours running slick as oil paint.
Finn called out to the Labrador. “Here, Sadie! Here, girl!” His voice ricocheted off the rock face. He called out again. “Sadie, come! Come! Here, girl!”
He frowned. This was unlike her. While she liked to bound ahead at her own pace, exploring, she always remained within earshot and usually scampered back several times as if to check that her master was following her. Finn listened for the sound of barking or rustling in the underbrush, but heard nothing. He looked backwards, squinting into the dimness of the path but saw nothing.
The tops of the trees shook in a sudden burst of cold wind, releasing a cloud of dead autumn leaves that cascaded down before being hijacked by the sudden shift in the air currents and tattering off across the lake. The sky was reddening in advance of the sunrise, the light shadow dappled and obscure.
For the first time ever, Finn was aware of his isolation. He was a mile and a half from home and his dog was nowhere to be seen. He looked around uneasily. The familiar landscape of rough-hewn cliffs rising out of black water looked suddenly barbaric and vaguely lunar.
“ Sadie!” Finn called again. This time there was an edge of panic in his voice. Hearing nothing, he screamed, “Here, girl! Sadie, COME!” He whipped his head wildly from side to side. “SADIE! COME!”
And then from high above him he heard the sound of screaming—a high-pitched, rending lament that tore through the early morning air and shattered into echoes against the shield rock of the cliffs. It came again, then again. And this time, Finn recognized the voice as belonging to his dog.
“Sadie! Sadie! Where are you?” He tried to orient himself to what he now realized was a high-pitched howling that had never been part of Sadie’s vocal repertoire. If pure animal terror or pain could be distilled, this is what it would sound like.
Oh my God, what if she’s hurt? What if she has her foot caught in some sort of leg trap left by one of these assholes who hunts up here in the fall? What if she’s broken her leg or something? Please God, let her be all right.
He crashed through the bush in the general direction of Sadie’s screams, first left, then right, then doubling back and stopping to check if he was in the right place, or at least headed in the right direction. The acoustics of Bradley Lake played tricks with the sound of Sadie’s howls, seemingly sending it in every direction but its true source.
And then, dead silence. Oh my God, he thought again. Please, no. Finn came around the bend of a copse of trees and an outcropping of lichen-covered granite and saw Sadie cowering against a boulder thirty feet away—teeth bared, lips drawn back from her gums. She was growling low in her throat, her eyes wild and fixed on a point three feet from where she crouched. Her ears lay flat against her skull. The line of hackle fur along her backbone stood up in an arch and her entire body was contorted away from the spot. The Labrador’s fluffy tail was straight as an eel, and tucked up far between her hind legs.
At his approach, Sadie’s eyes rolled towards Finn. She growled again but didn’t move. When he took a step closer, her body seemed to draw itself in tighter, and for one crazy minute Finn was afraid she might attack him.
“Sadie?” he called softly. “Come here, girl. What’s the matter? Come here, Sadie.” He held out his hand. The Labrador looked at him, and then back to whatever she had been staring at. Whining softly, she lowered her head and looked imploringly at Finn.
“Good girl,” he crooned in his most soothing voice. “Come, Sadie. Good girl. Come here.”
Slowly, she stepped backwards, then turned and skirted the area, giving it a wide berth, trotting over to where he was standing and burrowing between his legs as though pleading for sanctuary. He reached down and stroked her head. The dog shivered violently, panting harshly. As he continued to caress her, the shaking subsided slightly.
What the hell is going on here? Finn wondered. He looked at the spot again. There was nothing unusual about it, certainly nothing he hadn’t seen before on any number of hikes out here by the lake, or indeed anywhere in the vicinity of Parr’s Landing. Curiosity overtook him and he took a step away from Sadie, towards the rocks.
Immediately, behind him, Sadie began to whine. He looked back over his shoulder and said, “Shhhh, Sadie.”
The dog was unconvinced and continued to whimper piteously as though begging him to stay with her, to not walk any farther in that direction, to take her home and away from here.
For Finn’s part, curiosity had overtaken caution. He glanced around him—it was flat land; there nowhere for anything dangerous to be slumbering or hiding. Immediately, he discounted a very short mental checklist of wild animals he might risk provoking into violence by surprising them.
So what the hell was she so scared by?
He stopped abruptly, struck by a sound. Actually, it was not a sound at all, but rather a complete absence of sound. He heard Sadie whining; he heard his own feet crunching in the dead leaves and twigs at his feet. But all around him, there were no dawn sounds of birds twittering, no fluttering of wings above him. Even the wind seemed to have stopped abruptly. It was as though a cone had descended on this area, trapping Finn and his dog but shutting everything else out.
He took three more steps. He realized he was standing directly below the ledged rock wall upon which the Indian paintings thought to be of the Wendigo of St. Barthélemy were etched.
He looked down at the overgrowth between the rock formations. There was a crack of some sort, a hollow-looking fissure in the earth that looked like it might have been the opening to a cave mouth at some point, perhaps hundreds, or even thousands, of years ago. It looked too narrow to be an animal burrow, and he doubted Sadie would have had the reaction she did to a snake.
Finn stamped gingerly on the ground and, finding it solid, stamped again.
He knew that Parr’s Landing, like many former nineteenth-century mining towns, was honeycombed with underground tunnels. Some of the tunnels were so old they could no longer be located on modern surveyor’s maps, and there had always been tales in town of children wandering into the bush, falling through overgrown mine shaft covers. Finn had long suspected the stories were apocryphal, the primary intention being to keep small children close to home. No one he knew could recall a specific instance of it happening to anyone they knew, but it never hurt to be careful.
He leaned down to pull away some of the smaller rocks and fallen detritus of dead leaves and fallen branches, and the curious and entirely illogical thought came to him that he was disturbing a grave.
Reaching out with his right hand to lift away the first branch, he heard a piercing shriek of terror that was almost human erupt directly behind him.
He screamed involuntarily and turned around to see Sadie launching herself in the air, her black body twisting as though trying to catch something in her jaws, something hovering above her head, something that Finn could not see, however wildly he whipped his head back and forth. Again and again Sadie leaped and snapped, twisting her body into an epileptic funnel of black fur and sharp white teeth.
Then she lay prostrate on the ground and howled, peal after banshee peal, till Finn—now badly frightened himself, though still not sure of what—bolted past Sadie towards the trail, shouting at the top of the lungs for her to COME!
The Labrador was on her feet like a gunshot, galloping behind Finn as though pursued. Neither looked back—not until Finn’s lungs felt like they were burning, not until both boy and dog were well within sight of the familiar path that led around the lake, and not until they’d taken the turn that led towards the safety of home.