Richard Weal heard the distant passage of Jeremy’s car as he crouched on a ledge above Bradley Lake and waited, invisible as any other night predator. He waited with increasing desperation for his secret voice to speak to him again, to give him one last sign that he could follow, but the voice had been silent all day.
He sifted aimlessly through his hockey bag, wrinkling his nose in disgust at the sour smell that drifted up from it. He had to admit, his hockey bag was starting to stink of blood, old hair, and bits of rotted carrion, but as he had been travelling alone for the most part, the aesthetics hadn’t been much of a priority for obvious reasons. The knives hadn’t been properly cleaned since before Gyles Point, and while he’d rinsed them off as best he could in the sink at the cottage, they had assumed a bronzy-red patina. The hammers were greasy and slick to the touch but, testing the sharp points of them, he didn’t doubt that they could still do the job for which they had been designed—and even a few jobs for which they had not. But he doubted, at this point, that he would have much need for them.
Not after tonight. Not ever again. He would have his teeth. Weal’s muscles were cramped and sore from having spent the previous night sleeping outdoors and he was chilled to the bone. And hungry. The sun had been a warming balm for the brief time he’d been able to experience it this afternoon, and he cursed the stupid cop from town who had interrupted his exploration of Spirit Rock and forced him to crouch in the cold shadows for hours afterwards.
That cop will be the next one to die, Weal swore to himself. He’s going to die for making me so uncomfortable today. And I’m going to make it hurt, too. I’m going to make it hurt a lot.
He closed his eyes and listened for the voice, but it was silent. He felt a momentary flare of panic. His first thought was that his friend was angry at him for wasting another day, for not finding him and rescuing him. But he forced himself to calm down. He rarely heard the voice when he was upset, or when his mind was clouded with other thoughts, or worry, or panic. He mustn’t panic, now more than ever, when he was so close to achieving his—their—goal.
“Tell me where you are,” Weal whined. He lowered himself onto his knees in an aspect of prayer and folded his hands like a child. Tears of frustration welled up in his eyes and ran down his filth-caked face. “I know you’re here, Father,” he sobbed, closing his eyes. “I can feel you. I know this is the place. I know you’re here. Give me a sign. Show me. Please . . . ? Let tonight be the night. I beg you, Father. Give me just one more sign. Please.”
And then the images came to him, redoubled in force and clarity, stronger than ever before, violent and terrifying and euphoric. The strength of them knocked him backwards and he lay on the cold ground in violent convulsion. His jaws worked, and he bit his tongue, tasted his own blood in his throat before it ran pinkly from his mouth, mixing with his slobber, staining his stubbled chin. Weal’s eyes rolled back in his head, and all was darkness, except that it was a brilliant darkness, and he could see more clearly than he ever had in his life.
He saw Spirit Rock and he saw Bradley Lake, but they were different, surrounded by a denser, darker, greener forest, a bluer, clearer sunset sky. The air was pungent, wilder and more savagely northern than it had been that afternoon, or at any other time in his lifetime. He knew, without knowing how, that it was not his lifetime, that it was some other time altogether. He felt the weight of centuries hurtling around him like supernovas, and he knew that the weight would crush his soul to powder if it weren’t for the protection of his friend’s voice that he wore like armour in this waking dream of shredded time.
He found himself standing at the opening of a cave, not the place where his body lay shaking on the ground. He glanced around dumbly in the sunset light and saw great piles of smoking ash heaped around the opening of the cave.
He smelled the stink of burning flesh suddenly over the wild scent of the forest as the wind came up and began to scatter the ash across the cliffs. Some of it blew into his face, burning his eyes and catching acridly in his throat.
Something happened here, he thought. Something marvellous and terrible, something not of this earth. Something beautiful.
Weal looked around dumbly. I’m dreaming. I’m not here. This is not happening. I fell asleep outside on the ledge on Spirit Rock. Or I’m having an episode because I threw my pills away in Toronto, and I have to wake up. There’s work to do. I have to wake up!
But his eyes burned and his mouth tasted like cinder and he felt the ground, solid and real. He felt the cold north wind that carried the stinking soot that smelled like burned meat. He felt the press of sharp stones through the worn soles of his boots.
Weal looked questioningly at the mouth of the cave, but before he could ask, he knew what the answer would be. It came and he followed it into the cave, and was swallowed whole by the shimmering visions.
He woke up underground, shivering, disoriented, and smelling of piss and shit. He was no longer cold, in fact his body pulsed with heat as though his veins were shot full of hot lead.
He raised himself on his elbow and looked around groggily. In his hand was the flashlight. He felt around for his hockey bag with his tools, but it was nowhere nearby. He switched on the flashlight and shone the beam in front of him in the darkness. The feeble light played off walls of rock and supporting arches of rotted wood. Somewhere in the distance, he heard the steady sound of water hitting stone and there was a sense of yawning emptiness ahead of him, just out of sight.
Was I asleep? Did I walk in my sleep? This isn’t where I was. Where the fuck am I?
He stood up gingerly, testing the available height of the place in which he found himself. He realized that he could just barely stand without his head grazing the ceiling, or roof, of whatever this place was. He leaned forward and shone the light in front of him, and realized where he was.
He was in a mineshaft. He was underground, God knew how far, in one of the network of abandoned mineshafts that crisscrossed beneath Parr’s Landing.
Weal knew about them because he had read about them, about how the Parr family had stripped this part of northern Ontario underground, blasting tunnels beneath the earth where there had previously only been caves, expanding the natural underground tunnels their mining engineers had found with artificial ones, exploiting them, abandoning them when the veins of gold had been drained dry.
He had walked in his sleep, or whatever state he’d been in, and had fallen down a mineshaft. Weal’s chest tightened and he thought about screaming—screaming louder than he had ever screamed. The sense of being buried alive was instant and dreadful. He dropped the flashlight and flung his arms out, expecting to find himself entombed, but his fingers barely grazed the opposite walls. There was space, blessed space. He took a deep breath and tried to slow his breathing. When he was marginally calmer, he shook his head and tried to think.
If he had fallen down a mineshaft, his legs would be broken, he reasoned, or there would be some other evidence of injury. There was none, so he hadn’t fallen. Check. He could breathe, so there was oxygen. Check. He had light, so he could see. Check. He’d felt something sharp cut into his thigh when he’d leaned to pick up the flashlight. He patted his pocket gingerly and felt the edge of one of his knives in his pocket, blade cutting inwards against flesh where it had sliced through the lining. The fabric there was sticky and wet, and he realized he was bleeding.
The knife had been in the hockey bag earlier that day, not his pocket. Either he had placed it there himself without thinking, or someone had placed it in his pocket while he’d been unconscious. Weal looked around uneasily, but he knew he was alone—quite alone. Nothing human could live down here in all this darkness, and if anyone were with him down here, he’d have sensed it already. In fact, he would have sensed it immediately.
Then he heard his friend’s voice again. But beneath the sweetness of it this time, he sensed a new urgency and hunger. Weal knew where he was and why he was there. He was protected. He was loved. And he was needed.
Joyfully, Weal began to shuffle through the mineshaft, holding the bobbing flashlight in front of him, feeling his way through the maze of rotted beams and along the rock walls towards the prize waiting for him.
It was ten o’clock at night and Elliot McKitrick was off duty and minding his own business, flirting lazily with Donna Lemieux, the overblown blonde bartender with whom he’d had a brief affair when he was eighteen and she was thirty. He still carried a bit of a torch for Donna, as young men sometimes did when they thought of past conquests, if not loves. Donna realized this and was usually ambivalent, unless she was bored or horny. Tonight, Elliot thought, he might have gotten lucky if he’d wanted to, but he felt dead below the waist. He’d flirted by rote and by habit this evening. She’d picked up on his disinterest and returned it in kind. Nothing personal, as they both knew.
He was nursing his beer in the farthest corner of O’Toole’s when Jeremy Parr walked in looking like crap twice warmed over. Elliot’s heart sank at the sight of him.
Great, Elliot thought. This is the rosiest possible cherry on the shit sundae that this day has been so far.
He lifted the bottle of O’Keefe to his lips and took a long, cold pull of it, wishing he was invisible, wishing the beer was colder, and mostly hating everything about his life at that exact moment. Elliot looked away, vainly praying that Jeremy wouldn’t see him, but Jeremy did see him, and he started to walk over to his table.
Elliot weighed several options, all of them calculated to salvage the airtight security of the life and image he’d built for himself here in the years Jeremy had been away.
He could get up and leave, which might look unduly abrupt and draw attention. The other danger in getting up suddenly was the possibility of leaving Jeremy in the bar alone, drunk, and rambling. God knows what he’d tell Donna—or rather confirm, since everyone had heard rumours about the two of them, but Elliot had spent the last fifteen years fucking, brawling, and goal-scoring those rumours into oblivion. No, it was better to sit still and act like he was greeting an old friend. Normalize, neutralize. Maybe buy Jeremy a beer. Slap him on the back and bullshit about the old days. Or at least make it seem that’s what they were doing. It could work.
If it didn’t, Elliot was royally screwed.
Jeremy approached the table and, ludicrously, stuck out his hand to shake as though they had seen each other last week. He said, “Hey, Elliot, how’s it going? Long time no see.”
“Hi, Jem.” Elliot took Jeremy’s hand without getting up from his own chair. The part of him that wanted to rise from his seat and take Jeremy in his arms and hug him had been permanently crippled years before, largely by Elliot himself. He kept that part of himself in its place and he considered it dead and buried. “I heard you were back. What’re you doing here?”
“Can I join you?” Jeremy didn’t wait for Elliot’s answer. He pulled back the chair opposite Jeremy and sat down heavily. “So, here we are,” he said. “How’ve you been?”
When Elliot didn’t reply, he continued. “You’re a cop now, I see. I saw you in the cruiser today. Do you like being a cop?”
“What are you doing back in Parr’s Landing, Jeremy?” Elliot said again. “There has to be a reason you’d come back to town. What has it been, ten years?”
“Fifteen. You’re not happy to see me, are you?”
Elliot shrugged. “It’s a free world. You can go where you want. But no, I’m not really happy to see you. I’m surprised that you’re surprised.”
“It’s all right,” Jeremy said “No one’s really happy to see me. My mother just told me she wished I had been the one who died instead of Jack.”
“I heard about Jack a while back. I’m sorry. Was that Chris I saw in the car with you today?”
“So you did see me. I wasn’t sure if you had.”
“Yeah, I saw you,” Elliot said. “So, was that Chris? Did she come back with you, too?”
“Yeah, and Morgan, as well.” Elliot looked at him blankly. “My niece, Elliot—Jack’s daughter. Her name is Morgan. She’s fifteen. Jack didn’t leave any insurance, and Chris is broke. I brought her back here. She had nowhere else to go.”
Elliot looked over Jeremy’s head at Donna and held up two fingers. She signalled back the OK sign and took two fresh bottles of O’Keefe out of the beer fridge and carried them over to their table on a tray.
“Hey! Jeremy Parr!” Donna said, putting the beers down in front of them. “Long time no see, Jer! I heard you were back in town.” When Jeremy looked at her blankly, she said, “It’s me, Donna Lemieux. Remember? You went to school with my cousin, Rob Archambault. You remember Rob, right? I think he was a couple of years ahead of you. Maybe your brother’s class?”
“Oh yeah,” Jeremy lied. “I sure do remember him. Good to see you, Donna. How is Rob?”
Donna furrowed her brow. “He died. Ski-Doo accident, two years ago. It was so sad. He had a wife and kids. You didn’t hear?”
“No, I’m sorry,” he said. “I’ve been away. I’ve been living in Toronto.”
“Long way away,” she said. “And you ain’t been back that whole time?”
“No,” Jeremy replied. “I haven’t. Been busy.”
“I’m sorry about your brother,” Donna said. “I heard about him. We all did. There was a thing about it in the paper. He was a good guy. I knew him in school.”
“Thanks, Donna.” Jeremy forced a smile. “I appreciate it.”
“Thanks, honey,” Elliot said to Donna. What he wanted was for her to go away back behind the bar, sooner rather than later. He winked, dead sexy, something that usually opened doors for him with whichever woman was the recipient of the wink.
Donna rolled her eyes. “You with the winks,” she said. “All talk, no action.” But Donna smiled when she said it and she winked back, putting a little extra sway in her hips when she turned around and walked back to the bar. Under any other circumstances, Elliot would be looking forward to getting laid tonight, but right now he just wanted her away from him and Jeremy so he could neutralize this situation as quickly as possible. Bedding Donna Lemieux was the last thing on his mind.
For his part, Jeremy couldn’t take his eyes off Elliot’s face.
Late at night when he was alone in his bed, he’d let his mind wander back over the years. It was the only time he felt safe thinking about Parr’s Landing and what his mother had done to him by sending him away. He was able to safely scan the memories he had, sifting through them, bypassing the cruellest ones and fingering the ones that contained traces of love, or beauty, the way someone else might lovingly caress a favourite photograph in an album. Over the years, Jeremy had found that the easiest way to access those memories was to conjure Elliot’s face and body. The memories weren’t sexual, necessarily, because that part was so associated with the pain that came later at the hands of Adeline and Dr. Gionet. But they were resolutely romantic memories nonetheless fuelled by lovingly tended longing and desire.
Small things, flashes and mental snapshots; Elliot’s tanned neck as he saw it from his desk a row behind and two seats to the left in homeroom at Matthew Browning; Elliot’s dented red hockey helmet, and the way his black hair looked, wet with sweat, when he took the helmet off in the intermission between periods, his eyes never leaving the action on the ice, during the Friday night hockey games at the old Mike Takacs Memorial Arena out on Brandon Nixon Road, before the fire that shut it down.
Mostly, though, he remembered Elliot’s smile which, however rare (back then at least), lit up his entire face when it suddenly appeared. His voice, his laugh. Elliot’s powerful butterfly stroke as he swam out to the summer raft in Bradley Lake. The way the girls at Matthew Browning stared at Elliot when he passed in the hallway, the way Jeremy hated them for staring and knew that he hated them because he stared, too. But they could do it openly while he had to stare surreptitiously.
And Jeremy was still staring surreptitiously now, fifteen years later.
The face and body sitting in the chair in front of him, the man pretending that the two of them were just a couple of guys who had barely known each other in high school, and had now met again in a bar fifteen years later, was still Elliot’s. The body had hardened and thickened with muscle, and the face had the natural bronzed look of a man who lived and worked outdoors in a northern Ontario town.
But it was still somehow the same: the same thick pelt of black-brown hair in a military crew cut, almost like mink, tapering into the barest suggestion of a widow’s peak over a wide forehead; the dark eyebrows against the olive skin of his face, arching up over eyes the colour of black coffee; the strong nose and jaw, the aggressive five o’clock shadow, the sensual mouth, the white, white teeth. Jeremy’s eyes reverenced Elliot’s neck and throat, thick like the rest of him. More than anything at that moment, he wanted Elliot to laugh, so he could hear that joyous growl of pleasure he remembered better than any other part of Elliot. If he heard that, Jeremy believed, the rest of what had happened that night would go away, or at least not matter quite as much.
“So . . . are you still playing hockey?” He realized he was flailing for a neutral topic that might prompt even a minor thaw in Elliot’s demeanour, and that he sounded desperate and the question was idiotic.
Elliot shrugged. “Some. Why?”
“Elliot, aren’t we even still friends? Even just a bit? Even with everything else that happened, couldn’t we just . . . I don’t know, talk?” His eyes filled with tears again, and he hated himself even more for allowing Elliot to see them.
“We are talking,” Elliot said, looking away. He took another pull of beer from the bottle. “This is us, talking. Jem, this isn’t Toronto. People remember things here, and what we did—well, it’s taken a long time for me to make it OK here, to convince people that rumours about us . . . well, you know. That they weren’t true.”
“Rumours,” Jeremy said. “Right, the ‘rumours.’ Jesus Christ.”
“You know what I mean, Jem,” Elliot said fiercely, keeping his voice down. “Do you know what my dad did to me after your mother told him about us? Do you know what your fucking mother ordered him to do? He beat me with a fucking whip.”
“Well, my mother sent me away to be tortured for six months, Elliot,” Jeremy said, matching Elliot’s tone. “What are we doing here, having a contest to see who got it worse? Do you want to see the scars on my body from the burns? I see them every day when I’m naked. Do you want to see them?”
“Keep your fucking voice down.” Elliot looked around, but no one in the bar appeared to have heard either of them. Behind the bar, Donna was washing glasses.
Jeremy said again, softly, “Do you? Do you want to see them?”
He nudged his beer bottle almost imperceptibly across the surface of the table between them until his knuckles grazed Elliot’s. Their eyes met. Behind them, the jukebox played “Maggie May.” Elliot allowed Jeremy’s fingers to linger there for a brief second, then jerked his hand away.
“You left,” Elliot said. “You ran away from home and left me here. I had to stay. You got a new life. All I had was the same one I always had, except I had to face everything by myself that you left behind. It doesn’t matter anyway now,” he said. “I’m normal. I have a normal life. I’m somebody in this town. The past is in the past. I don’t want you fucking it up.”
Jeremy looked down. “I’m sorry.” He took another sip of his beer. “You know what? No—I’m not sorry. None of this was my fault, and none of it had anything to do with you. I came back to Parr’s Landing with Christina, for Christina. Not for you, and certainly not for my own good. Thanks for reminding me of that, Elliot.”
“Jem—”
“Forget it, Elliot,” Jeremy said tiredly. He raised the bottle to his lips and drained it in one long draught. Then he pushed the bottle away. “I won’t bother you again. But please, it’s a small town. If we do run into each other, can you just not act like . . . well, can you just be nice? I don’t think I can handle any more shit right now from anyone, least of all you.”
“Don’t drive drunk now,” Elliot said, trying to joke, and failing. “I don’t want to have to arrest you.”
If he smiles now, I’m done for, Jeremy thought. If he laughs, I don’t know if I’m going to be able to walk out of here. Please, God, don’t let him laugh.
But of course he didn’t laugh, nor did he smile, and for that Jeremy was profoundly grateful. It made it easier for him to stand up without saying goodbye to Elliot, and to walk calmly out of the bar, nodding to Donna and smiling, but otherwise drawing no attention to himself.
And because he didn’t turn around, he didn’t see Elliot watching him, the longing in his face breaking through the mask of ruthless masculine efficiency. For a moment Elliot looked seventeen, not thirty-two. The sight of it would have broken Jeremy’s heart all over again and shattered his resolve. Elliot knew this and was likewise profoundly grateful that Jeremy hadn’t seen it.
Still safe, he thought, looking around the bar. Everything is good. And even if it’s not good, it’s safe. Elliot walked slowly and deliberately over to where Donna was polishing glasses behind the bar and sat down at one of the stools.
He leaned in on his elbows, laying his arms on the bar. Looking deeply into her eyes, he smiled and said, “So?”
“So yourself, “ Donna said. She flushed slightly and unconsciously touched her hair. “So, nice evening with your friend?”
“Not a friend,” Elliot drawled. He increased the heat of his smile. “Just somebody from high school. We were in the same class at Browning, but I really barely knew the guy. He’s just passing through town.”
Donna had dismissed the rumours she’d heard about Jeremy Parr and Elliot years ago, hinting—to her girlfriends, at least, not to men, because she didn’t want them to think she was some kind of slut—that she had proof he wasn’t a queer. Certainly she had entertained no doubts herself during the hours they’d spent in her bed together, with Elliot on top of her pumping away, hard as an anvil.
If she’d thought—well, not thought, really, just maybe felt, if even that—some trace of energy between them when she’d brought the beer over, she told herself she had interrupted a discussion about the death of Jeremy’s brother, Jack. She’d had a little crush on Jack back in the day, but that Christina Whatshername (now there was a slut) had gotten herself knocked up. She’d heard that they’d run off to Toronto and that she’d forced him to Do The Right Thing and marry her. The Parrs were filthy-loaded, so Christina must be sitting pretty by now.
Donna sighed. She ran a lacquered fingernail along Elliot’s index finger. “So, Elliot,” she said. “Why did you never go for me?”
“I went for you plenty of times, babe,” he said lazily. He wrapped his index finger around hers and held it down. “You do remember, don’t you?”
“No, I mean proper-like. Why didn’t you ever ask me out. You know, like on a date?”
“Well,” he said, “for one thing, you were married.”
She laughed. “Is that all? Lucien wouldn’t have even known. He was drunk most of the time we were married. If that’s all that was stopping you, you should have asked.”
“We had some great times.” He leaned in closer. “We had some really great times. Didn’t we?”
“You’re so conceited, Elliot,” she said. “How do you know it was as great for me as it was for you?”
“I know,” he replied. “And so do you.” Her pupils were dilated and her lips were moist. He knew from experience that her nipples underneath the blouse she wore were now stiff. And though he felt nothing for her at that moment, either in his head or below the waist, he said, “So, Donna. Do you want to get a drink later?”
“We’re in a bar, Elliot.”
Donna liked delaying the moment as long as possible, especially with Elliot when they’d first been lovers. She was all about the slow moves and she’d enjoyed teaching the then-teenaged Elliot restraint and discipline.
But it was a cold night, and nothing was waiting for her at home but a hungry cat and a bed with cold sheets on it. And, to be honest, though she’d never admit it, she wasn’t getting any younger.
He leaned into her, his cheek nearly meeting hers. He smelled shampoo and some drugstore perfume that was sexy precisely because it smelled cheap. “I mean somewhere else. Later. Some other place.”
“What other place did you have in mind, Elliot?”
“Your place,” he said, showing all his beautiful teeth.
Elliot covered her hand in his and squeezed gently. When he turned her hand palm-up inside his grasp, offering the softness of it to the press of his fingers, he knew he’d scored. Maybe the day was going to end on a better note than the one it had started on.
Whatever else happened, though, Elliot realized he had almost succeeded in driving any thoughts or memories of Jeremy Parr from his mind, at least for now.
It would have been impossible for him to say how long he’d been searching since he didn’t habitually wear a watch, but Richard Weal knew he had two choices: he would either find his sleeping friend here, or he would die of hunger and thirst in the Cimmerian blackness of an abandoned mineshaft, not even knowing where he was, much less remembering how he’d gotten there.
He guessed that he had long since wandered off what was left of the actual path through the mine and into some sort of interconnected underground cave system formed of arches of natural rock, but the voice—and the trace imagery that remained in his brain long after he’d heard actual words—somehow continued to guide him.
Living as he did almost entirely in his own mind, memories and dreams were important to Weal—not only immediate memories, such as how beautiful his friend’s voice was, but more recent memories—the slaughter of his victims, of course, and the way they suffered and bled, but also the images he’d gleaned from the pages of the manuscript he’d killed the old man for—the translation of that letter from the dying priest, Father Nyon, who’d followed his faith in God into the northern wilderness of New France in 1632.
In spite of his hatred—and he loathed the priest for what he’d done to his friend, and with as much murderous, steely hatred as if the priest had done it to Weal himself—he had to admire his faith in God.
Well, perhaps admire was the wrong word. He could identify with it, intellectually and emotionally. Had Weal himself not first heard his invisible friend’s voice that hot day in 1952, calling to him from behind the granite walls of these very cliffs, begging for release? Had he not been listening to that voice all these years, calling him into the wilderness, and was he not as eager as any postulant, now or then, to touch the Divine?
He would still have liked to put the young priest to his knives for what he’d done to Weal’s friend—to peel his eyeballs in their sockets like grapes and cut his fingers off in quarter-sections, taking his time and enjoying the screams before he took an X-Acto knife to Father Nyon’s murdering tongue.
Since the manuscript he’d taken had been incomplete, he had no idea what happened to the priest from 1630, but as a scholar, he was well versed in the gruesome history of the fates that had befallen the unluckiest of the Jesuit martyrs. Weal hoped Father Nyon had met an end like that, and that it had hurt terribly.
Out of the subterranean silence, he suddenly heard the voice again. It spoke one word: Here.
So audible, present, and clear this time—not in his head, but directly in front of him—that Weal gasped. He swung the flashlight wildly, seeking out the recesses of the mine and the shadows between the rocks where the light couldn’t reach. He gaped at what he saw standing there. It was a man, or something shaped like a man, towering, wrapped in a long black robe. Its eyes twinkled in the light, but there was no joy in those eyes, only ancient malice and an insatiable, terrifying hunger.
Weal felt his bowels let go as he fouled himself for a second time, the stench rising to his nostrils immediately, making him dry-retch.
And then, suddenly, there was no robed man standing in front of him—no one at all. There were no eyes twinkling in the flashlight’s beam. Weal blinked and stared harder into the mineshaft, trying to see. Chimerical shapes danced in front of his eyes. He rubbed them, but the shapes remained, fantastical, grotesquely cavorting. What he’d first taken for the figure of a man was nothing but an odd rock formation. The gleam of eyes was merely mica flickering as the flashlight swept over it.
There was no one there. The only monster hiding in this place was Weal himself. The thought filled him not with dread, but with impossible relief, for what he’d seen was infinitely worse than anything he could have ever imagined in his best, or worst, nightmares.
Then the voice came again, even more clearly than before. He felt an indistinguishable mix of relief and terror in equal measure, combined with nearly transcendent reverence.
Here. You have found me.
Weal knelt down in the dirt in a posture of abject supplication. He felt sharp stones cutting into his kneecaps, but he welcomed the pain as an offering of abasement.
“Where, Lord?” he wept. “Where are you? Show me. I beg you. One more sign, Lord. Please. Just one more sign.”
Another image flashed through his mind and he turned his head sharply to the left. He aimed the flashlight at the place where had been told to look. A short distance from where he knelt, the natural architecture of cave rock had created an oblong depression that jutted out from the wall of bedrock like an anthropoid coffin, but too small to contain the body of man.
Lying across it almost like a lid was a long, flat slab of sedimentary shale. At first, Weal took it to be another part of the rock formation, but when he brought the light close, he saw that it had fallen, or been deliberately placed there, at an angle.
Roll the stone away.
He put the flashlight down and set his shoulder to the shale lid, pushing hard. He’d expected the slab to be heavy, but it was relatively light and brittle. It yielded readily, crashing to the ground, splitting in two at his feet. He fumbled for the flashlight at his feet. He shone it into the basin. Then the flashlight flickered and died.
“No!” he screamed. “No! No! Not now!”
He shook the flashlight, slapped it against his thigh. A bolt of agony shot through his leg as the blade of the knife in his pocket bit into his thigh again, but the impact accomplished its goal: the flashlight flickered and went back on.
Feverishly, Weal shone the light into the stone basin. It contained what he at first took to be the dried body of a small animal, but on closer inspection was a bundle of what seemed to be ashes and bone fragments inside the rotted remains of some of sort cloth, or animal skin. He reached out to touch the bundle, finding it cold and oddly dry considering the length of time it had lain underground, undisturbed.
Gingerly, he opened the bundle, gently prying apart the fabric that contained it. The fabric fell apart at his touch, leaving the pile of ashes exposed to his flashlight’s beam.
“Ashes,” he said aloud, remembering his vision. “These are ashes.” He said it again, not only to confirm his findings to his senses, but also to hear a voice that wasn’t in his head for once, even if it was his own.
But then, had all the voices been in his head? He felt a sickening sense of betrayal wash over him. This wasn’t his friend, this was just an old pile of cinders. Where was his friend? Where was the voice? Where was the treasure? Had this whole misadventure been a series of crazy directives issued from his own diseased brain? The result of not taking the pills the doctors had prescribed him at the hospital? And now, because he’d thrown his pills away back in Toronto, he was going to die a horrible, drawn-out death by starvation and thirst.
Why is there a coffin in a mineshaft?
“What?” he said. The silence mocked him. “Who said that?” Weal looked left and right. “Father, is that you?”
It was in your head, you idiot. Crazy person. It’s all in your head—all of the “voices” have been in your head the whole time. There’s no “Lord.” There’s no “Father.” There never was. You’ve fucked yourself good and proper now, haven’t you? Are you going to keep talking to yourself until you go blind down here? Or crazier? Or die of thirst? Why don’t you just cut your wrist and drink your own blood? Aren’t you thirsty enough yet? You will be, give it time. You just watch.
Weal tried to swallow, but his spit had dried. He felt his throat close up, dry and hot as though it were packed with sand. He realized then that he had effectively buried himself alive, walled himself into a system of underground caves that predated the Parr family’s dynamiting of this part of the country by millennia.
Yes, yes, buried alive. All very melodramatic. Typical crazy person. But by the way—not that it remotely matters at this moment—but how did ashes get into a tunnel?
Weal looked at the heap of ashes—they were ashes, weren’t they? How did they get down here? Who brought them? And when? How? Traces of the vision he’d had before coming to consciousness down here floated back to him. He’d seen ash, piles of it, as though there had been a great burning. He’d smelled the burning bones and watched the wind carry the fragments into the air and scatter them across the cliffs.
Ash. Bones. This ash? These bones?
“Lord,” he whispered. “Where are you? If you’re real, please answer. Please only answer if it’s really you. Please show me what to do.” He waited, dreading the sound of the second voice, the mocking voice that sounded like his own. But there was nothing. “Please,” he said again. “Please.”
Wake me. Wake me.
“How?” he screamed. “Don’t go away again! Tell me, how?”
You know how. I showed you many times before.
“But I can’t do that! I’ll die! I can’t kill myself! I killed all those people for you!”
WAKE ME!
He bowed his head in submission and acceptance. With a sob, Weal pulled the knife out of his pocket and tested the blade with the ball of his thumb. He winced as it sliced through the skin. Blood rose to the cut and spilled down his thumb, flowing over the palm. In the light of the flashlight, it looked black on the knife blade.
He took a deep breath, then rolled up the sleeve of his shirt and jacket. He cut the flesh of his wrist with one definitive, transversal downward stroke, severing the ulnar artery. The pain was sharp and immediate, but Weal made no sound. Instead, he squeezed the upper middle part of his forearm and pumped. He raised his arm and watched the blood drain out of his body, running down his arm onto the pile of ashes in the stone concavity where the ashes had rested undisturbed for three hundred years under Spirit Rock and the cliffs that ringed Bradley Lake.
There was a sound like fat being dropped onto a hot griddle and the smell of burning meat.
Above ground, a great flock of disparate nightbirds took to the sky from every treetop on Spirit Rock—a shocked, squawking black cloud, a cacophony of harsh screams soaring into the night.
Below the mass of airborne birds, the first coyote yelped a sharp, terrified bark that became a shriek. Its mate joined in. Then another, and another, until the sound of their howling became deafening. Every dog in Parr’s Landing took up the cry, including Finn’s dog, Sadie, whose bloodcurdling lament was loud enough to wake Finn from a deep sleep in which he dreamed of Morgan Parr standing nude on the edge of Bradley Lake, beckoning him to join her in the black water.
“Awww fuck, Sadie,” Finn groaned, his voice thick with sleep. “You ruined it.”
Vengefully, he lobbed a pillow at the dog who was standing rigidly on point beside his bedroom window staring at the glass. “Do you want to go out, girl?” he said, feeling guilty for throwing the pillow. “Do you? Do you want to go outside? Come. Come, Sadie, let’s go outside!”
She whined, bounding ahead, her claws scrabbling madly on the floor. She ran like she had to take the world’s most portentous piss, and scratched madly at the metal screen door, making an even more unholy racket than she had with her howling.
“Coming, coming,” Finn said. He knew that if Sadie howled like that again, his parents would wake up and then there would be hell to pay. He opened the back door and nudged her outside, shutting the door quickly. She had a doghouse out there; she could sleep in it tonight. Fucking dog.
Finn went back to his bed and tried to find his Morgan dream again, already suspecting that the moment had passed, but willing to try anyway.
Richard Weal knew he must be dying, because the cavern was full of incandescent red light and heat that streamed blindingly upward from the pile of ashes in the depression of rock. He was dying, and these were the gates of heaven. Or, more likely, hell.
He covered his face with his bloody hand and tried to shield his eyes from the luminescence that was now so bright he could no longer see the walls of the cave. His knees gave way and buckled under his weight, and he fell to the ground in the earliest stages of hypovolemic shock. Just losing consciousness, Weal realized he was no longer alone.
He lay on his side, squinting into the brilliance, trying to see. As the light began to fade, Weal became aware that the black-robed man he’d imagined in the moments before he’d found the ashes—the man who wasn’t—had stepped out of his feverish brain and into the world, and was bending over him.
When the man lowered his lips to Weal’s throat, he tried to turn his head to accommodate the grateful kiss—what else could it be, but a benediction of gratitude to Weal for having found him, for having saved him, for releasing him from his prison? But he was too weak to form the words. He tried to apologize to the black shape towering over him for not being able to stand, for forcing him to kneel—surely the kneeling one should be Weal, not his friend—but no words came out. Weal realized that words would be beside the point, because his friend knew everything about him already, loved him just as he was, and knew he was sorry and had already forgiven him. He felt the man’s cold lips caress the tender skin below his jawline, then the scraping points of two sharp teeth.
The pain when he bit down was incredible, but it vanished almost before it had even registered. As he felt the blood drain from his body, Richard Weal felt himself pulled up into a swirling vortex of crimson and gold light. For the briefest possible moment, Weal caught a glimpse of a glittering necropolis of souls, a dimension of pure love and endless wisdom. Its inhabitants reached out, their arms outstretched to embrace him, to join him to them, to forgive him and to guide him into their inanimate dimension that was opening before him and beckoning his soul to join the mass of others.
Not this! Make me like you! Make me like you! You promised! I want to live forever! This isn’t what I killed for! This isn’t what I died for! YOU PROMISED!
The crimson sky turned black and cold and violent.
The dead recoiled in horror at his fury. They recognized him for what he was, for what he was becoming, and they fled in terror lest they, too, found themselves sucked into the black circumgyration of supernatural energy that dragged Richard’s enraged, insane soul back into the prison of his own dead body—the body lying on the stone floor of the cave where the creature he’d resurrected was still feeding on the last drops of his life.
After the bar had closed, they had gone to Elliot’s place instead of Donna’s, because Elliot said he had to get up early in the morning. She didn’t find it particularly chivalrous on his part, but Donna wanted his company more than she wanted to be in her own bed, so she’d acquiesced. He’d asked her to stay the night and offered to drive her home afterwards, but she’d brought her own car and didn’t relish the prospect of leaving it in front of Elliot’s house overnight, advertising her whereabouts to the entire town. For the same reason, she didn’t want to leave her car in the O’Toole’s parking lot overnight so they could all wonder where she’d been instead of knowing.
In the past, sex with Elliot had always been a deeply pleasurable experience. He was a devoted, attentive lover who took her satisfaction as a point of personal pride. He’d bend his body to her pleasure while taking his own, always leaving her satiated.
Tonight had been different.
It had all started the way it always did, the way she liked it, with his hands and mouth deftly playing her body, with Elliot offering his own body for her exploration, gratification, and pleasure. But when she’d slipped her hands between his legs to stroke his shaft, she found it soft.
It’s me, Donna thought, abruptly and self-consciously aware of the slackening of her body and the way it must have changed, how different it must feel to him since they had first slept together years before. What she saw in the mirror at home looked just fine to her, but here, with Elliot McKitrick on top of her . . .
She guided him onto his back and knelt between his legs, using her mouth on his cock, gently squeezing his nipples between her fingers until she felt him harden, then laid back herself and urged him along using the filthy words she knew he liked. She arched her back, offering her mouth and her breasts to his kisses the way she had always done, which he’d always liked before.
“Turn over,” he’d said in a muffled voice she’d never heard before—a compressed, harsh, entirely unfamiliar but oddly thrilling voice. “Roll over on your stomach.”
When she did what she was told, he entered her from behind. At first his movements were languorous and rhythmic and she moaned with familiar pleasure. But as the strokes quickened, he thrust harder and with more force.
Then Elliot pulled out and slipped his cock into her ass.
Donna gasped at the sudden invasion. Wanting to please him, she willed herself to relax and take him in. His fingers dug into her hips as he pushed. When he entwined his fingers in her hair and yanked on it as though it were a bridle, she cried out in shock and pain. She felt his body buckle and he collapsed against her, driving her into the bed with him on top as wave after wave of his climax shuddered through his body.
“We’ve never done it like that before,” she said. When there was no reply, she asked, “Was it OK? I mean, doing it that way?”
“It was great,” he said.
Afterwards, he’d sat naked on the edge of the bed with his face in his hands. She ran her fingers along the scallops of muscle between his shoulder blades. When she’d touched his shoulder, he’d flinched.
She’d asked him if he was crying and he said, “No, of course not, why?” as though it was the stupidest question he’d ever heard, which hurt Donna’s feelings more than anything else. When she asked him what was wrong, he told her he’d had a bad day, then apologized for snapping at her and offered to drive her home.
“I brought my car, Elliot, remember? You have to get up early, you said.”
“Right, sorry,” he said. “I’m sorry, Donna. Really, I am. I have a lot on my mind. Work, you know. I’ll make it up to you next time.”
Donna said nothing. She kissed him on the cheek, then picked her jeans and pink blouse off the floor where she’d left them.
I’m too young to feel like this, she thought bitterly. Like something secondhand, like something in the fridge that’s turned. Her clothes smelled like beer and cigarette smoke after the fresh-laundry scent of Elliot’s sheets, but she couldn’t dress quickly enough to suit her purposes. The only thing Donna wanted was to be out of Elliot’s house and back in her own bedroom, with her cat and her cold sheets, where at least there was no one to make her feel the way she felt right now.
“Next time,” Elliot promised as she said goodbye. But they both knew there wouldn’t be a next time. And Donna, for one, was fine with that.
In the car, she lit a cigarette, then turned the key in the ignition and pulled out of Elliot’s driveway, heading towards her house on the other side of town, thinking that Elliot McKitrick was a prick of the first order, but that it still hurt like hell.
At 4:30 a.m., Donna had parked her car in her driveway and put the keys in her purse. A light, cold rain had begun to fall and she hurried up the driveway to avoid getting drenched. The perfect ending to a perfectly awful night, she thought.
She was nearly at the front door of her house when she heard something pass through the air above her head. The sound disoriented her. When she was eight, her mother took Donna with her to visit an elderly aunt who’d spent her life in a convent outside of Montréal. The sisters kept a working farm, and while her mother visited with the aunt, one of the younger nuns showed her the dovecote attached to the barn. Donna had lain on her back in hay and watched the doves fluttering above her. She’d closed her eyes, listened, and imagined they were angels.
That’s what this was like—the ripple of wings, but louder and heavier than doves’ wings. Instinctively, she looked up towards the sound, but saw nothing in the night sky except stars and the distant mass of the cliffs.
Then the sound came again, directly over her head this time. The last thing Donna Lemieux ever saw was something huge, something with wings—no, not something, someone, and not wings, outstretched arms—fall from the sky, smashing her into the gravel of her driveway. Her mind had time to register only two things: first, that the body on top of her was male and that it—he—was fiercely strong. And secondly, that she was about to die here on her own driveway in sight of her own front door. She tried to scream, but the impact of the body crashing down on top of her back had driven the air from her lungs and she lay on the driveway gasping for air.
Then her world went white.
All around her was the scent of hay and clover, and the musk of barn animals. She lay back on the straw and watched the doves wheel and flit above her like angels. She listened to the beating of their wings. Wonderfully, even though her eyes were closed, she could still see: the doves were indeed transforming into angels—the most beautiful angels imaginable, angels with strong, gleaming naked men’s bodies and opalescent-feathered wings.
She felt a warm gust of heavenly air as one of the angels separated from the others and swooped down to where she lay prostrate on the hay. She gazed at the angel’s face, awed by the perfection of its body—a face and body she recognized.
“Elliot,” Donna said weakly. “What are you doing—”
The angel opened its jaws and cocked its head to the side, and Donna saw its two rows of sharp white teeth. She realized then that the angel wasn’t Elliot at all—how had she ever confused them? This angel’s hair was white, and he was wearing a long black robe that covered him from neck to ankles. Rain streamed from his hair, running down from his high forehead and into his eyes, which burned like coals. But Donna didn’t care because she knew at that exact moment she was desired—desired and desirable, more desired than she’d even been by Elliot, or indeed any other man. She felt the angel’s cool lips on her throat for a moment and a sharp, momentary pain. Then a spreading coldness that felt like heat, in spite of the cold rain that soaked her clothes and her skin, as she lay there in the driveway.
When the angel—or whatever it was—enfolded her in its black wings, she gave herself up to its hunger, and knew that whatever it cost to be loved like this, she would gladly pay that price a hundredfold or more.