At lunchtime, playing truant
from the grounds of Parr’s Landing
Public School with his dog-eared copy of
Tomb of Dracula
issue #3 placed
carefully in his durable orange canvas book bag, Finn caught sight of the
girl with the long dark hair sitting by herself under the elm tree in front
of the high school down the street. He promptly fell in love the way that
only a twelve-year-old boy can.
Not since Finn laid his eyes on
Tomb of Dracula
issue #1 had he seen
anything as beautiful as Morgan Parr—whose name was still a mystery,
and would remain so for a time yet.
She ate alone, which puzzled him. How could admirers not surround
anyone that beautiful? Parr’s Landing’s population was 1,528 (give or
take) so new faces were easy to spot, and he’d never seen this girl before.
His eyes reverenced the way the sunlight brought out the bands of honey
and cinnamon-red in her dark hair. She ate her sandwich with a lack of
self-consciousness that he’d never seen before in a girl of her age.
His short life to date had been spent entirely within the precincts
of his hometown. While he’d dreamed of what life must be like outside
of its boundaries, certainly he’d never seen any evidence of it other than
what he’d gleaned from television, magazines, movies, or, of course, his
beloved comic books. The girl across the street was clearly not a local, so
she became the screen upon which he projected his vision.
She looked up suddenly, as though she realized he was watching
her. Her eyes scanned the street across from the school where he was
standing. Instinctively, he ducked behind another elm tree and prayed
she hadn’t spotted him and found him creepy.
He didn’t care a whit about being caught off the school grounds—
he never had been caught before. Finn had learned to close his eyes
and pretend to transform into mist, like Dracula did when Rachel Van
Helsing, the glamourous blonde vampire huntress from
The Tomb of
Dracula,
shot an arrow at the Lord of the Undead with her crossbow.
Finn wasn’t crazy; he knew he didn’t turn into mist. But he also knew
that whenever he pretended he turned into mist, he was somehow never
caught doing anything he didn’t want to be caught doing. And right now,
what he wanted was for the girl not to catch him staring at her. He closed
his eyes and . . . transformed into mist.
Her eyes passed over where he stood behind the tree without
registering him at all, as far as he could tell.
He breathed a sigh of relief and stepped back out from behind
the tree. He took one more longing look at her eating her sandwich.
He imprinted the image on his memory like a photograph, promising
himself he’d see her again—soon.
Then he turned and jogged back to school, all thoughts of both
lunch and his comic book momentarily forgotten, as old loves so often
are when a rival first appears.
At two in the afternoon,
Elliot McKitrick realized that he needed
desperately to be alone to think, so he told Thomson that he was going
to take the cruiser and do a loop of the town and the area around Bradley
Lake. He told the sergeant that he’d be on radio if he needed him and that
he wouldn’t go far, but he wanted to patrol the town line in light of what
had happened in Gyles Point the previous night.
“Good idea,” Thomson said without looking up. “I think the tank is
a bit low, so fill her up on the way back, would you, McKitrick? I’m going
to stay here and make some calls. I want to check out a couple of points
of Dr. Lightning’s story.”
“Sounded fishy to you, too, Sarge?”
“Not necessarily,” Thomson said, not looking at the younger man.
“Just . . . well, there are some things I want to check out.”
Elliot stood in the doorway for another moment, waiting for more.
When it was not forthcoming, he opened the door and went to where
the cruiser was parked. He turned the key in the ignition and headed
towards the road that led out of town.
He smoked as he drove. He wasn’t supposed to, but he realized he
had been in a state of suppressed anxiety ever since he’d seen Jeremy
Parr on the road earlier that morning. His heart was beating like a triphammer and his mind was cloudy with memories he’d been suppressing
for a decade—memories that were sharper than he’d ever dreamed
possible, given the time that had elapsed since that last terrible night
before Jeremy had been sent away and Elliot’s father had beaten him till
he bled.
Through the windshield, the town looked as it always did, except for
the fact that someone had ripped a hole in the airtight zone of security
and comfort he had come to rely on over the last ten years. Suddenly
his world, usually as well ordered as a soldier’s sock drawer, seemed
dangerously askew.
What Elliot wanted to know was
how
askew, and why. He had learned
as a very young boy that self-examination was called “navel gazing” and
that real men didn’t do it. And Elliot was a real man. His entire life—
with one notable deviation from the straight and narrow—had been
dedicated to being a real man. He had spilled a great deal of sweat and
blood to assure that end.
But until Elliot was sure in his own mind that the only thing that
was fucking him up about Jeremy Parr’s return to Parr’s Landing was the
possibility of bad gossip being stirred up again, he wasn’t going to be at
peace in his own mind.
Suddenly Elliot felt as though he were suffocating, as though he
were buried alive. The car felt like a coffin with metal sides and no air.
He pulled over to the side of the road and half-stepped, half-fell out the
door into the cold fall air. He drew in great gasping breaths, filling his
lungs with oxygen as though he had just broken the surface of a pit full
of quicksand, his lungs full of mud and silt and filthy water.
For a moment, he felt as though he might vomit, but he closed his
eyes and concentrated on his breathing until the nausea passed and his
mind cleared.
Goddamn you, Jeremy, why the fuck did you have to come back here?
Why didn’t you stay away?
Of course there was no answer except for the sound of the wind
and the distant squawk of crows circling somewhere high above Spirit
Rock. Elliot shaded his eyes and followed the sound of the crows, but
he couldn’t see them. He scanned the cliff, looking for the birds, but
to no avail. A cloud passed over the sun, shattering the rock face into
a diorama of light and shadow. And then something
did
move up there
on the ledge. Even before his eyes caught the blur of motion, his brain
registered
motion. Something upright, pacing carefully. And then it was
gone.
Elliot stared at the spot where he’d seen the shape, then shouted
out, “Hello? Is someone up there?” His voice sounded abnormally loud to
him in the late-afternoon sunlight. The echo mocked him and, of course,
there was no answer. But he had seen it. Something that ought not to
have been up there, something entirely out of place, something out of
the natural order.
He thought of Thomson’s description of the murder scene at Gyles
Point.
There’s blood all over the upstairs bedroom, but no body anywhere
. He
thought of the Indian, Billy Lightning, who had just arrived in town the
morning after the murder with (in Elliot’s opinion) a preposterous story
and no good reason for being in Parr’s Landing at all. By his own account,
madness and death seemed to follow the Indian around.
Elliot privately flattered himself that he had natural-born police
instincts, even when he knew he was only burnishing his self-image for
the sake of his own ego, but he still felt the hair rise on the back of his
neck, and he instinctively reached for the holster of his gun and withdrew
it.
And yet there was nothing to see now. No movement, not even a
shadow, which is probably what it was to begin with. He shook his head
to clear it and rubbed his eyes, then looked again. There was nothing but
the cliff’s edge and the daubed smudges of the Indian paintings of the
mythical Wendigo of St. Barthélemy. What the fuck had that been up
there? And why did he reach for his gun? Elliot McKitrick had rarely been
spooked by anything in his life, and never by Bradley Lake or Spirit Rock.
Everyone in Parr’s Landing had heard the stories. Those stories were for
scaring children and for getting chicks to cuddle up closer. He thought
of the years he’d spent out here, swimming, whiling away his summer
nights on blankets, in front of bonfires. He’d lost his virginity here when
he was fourteen, and yes—he’d even brought Jeremy Parr here that first
night when they’d gotten drunk and had . . . well, what had happened,
happened.
He pushed
that
memory down brutally. His head throbbed with the
beginnings of a headache that he knew was going to be one for the record
books.
Elliot sighed. He re-holstered his gun and walked slowly back to
the car. He needed a drink in the worst way. He’d always felt that Parr’s
Landing was the beginning and the end of his world, that everything
he ever needed was here and his for the asking, but as he turned the
ignition, he wondered for the very first time whether Jeremy had been
the smart one, the one to leave Parr’s Landing and make a life for himself
somewhere where no one knew him, and no one cared who—or what—
he was.
He turned the cruiser around and headed for the road back to town,
kicking up gravel in the car’s wake that smacked against the metal like
the sound of caps exploding. Elliot automatically checked his rearview
mirror as he tapped the accelerator. In the mirror, he saw the lake,
occluded by dust devils and exhaust from the car.
What he could
not
see was the shadow moving again, high up on
the ridge where he had stared, so long and so hard, trying to identify
the source of his sudden and unaccountable sense of dislocation and—
though Elliot would never have admitted it, even to himself—fear.
From his perch
high up on the ledge, Richard Weal watched the police
cruiser drive away towards town. He’d briefly considered killing this one
if he’d come too close, but he’d decided to allow him to live—for now.
Instead, Weal had remained completely motionless, willing himself into
invisibility, not moving a muscle until the policeman had left of his own
accord.
Lucky for him,
Weal thought.
Cops are so stupid.
Still, he reasoned, the policeman’s blood might have been useful,
and it would certainly have spared Weal the pain he knew was coming.
But another killing, now, when he was so close to his destination, would
only serve as a dangerous distraction. After leaving a string of bodies
between Toronto and Parr’s Landing, it would be a cruel and pathetic
ending for him to be caught killing some small-town yokel of a cop at this
point.
He’d consulted the sheaf of papers in his hockey bag a thousand time
or more. He could practically recite the text by heart. This was the place.
This
place—here, now. His friend’s voice had never been this clear, this
compelling and demanding. And when he closed his eyes, he saw visions
of blood and bones and smoke. He saw the path through the caves of rock
and stone as though it were lit by torchlight.
Weal’s heart soared with love and pride and yearning. He laid his
face reverently against the wall of rock and said, “I’m coming, Father. I’m
coming for you now. Tonight, we’ll be together. I swear.”
When the final bell rang,
Finn bolted from his seat and ran for the
door of the classroom as quickly as he could without looking like a total
jackass. He didn’t hear Mrs. Morris tell him to slow down, and he moved
too quickly through the halls of the school for either the teachers or the
hall monitors to tell him to stop running. Through the swinging front
doors he flew, taking the steps three at a time till he hit the pavement,
still running.
He had to get to the high school. He had to see the girl. If he didn’t,
he would die. It was that simple. She’d been all he was able to think of
all afternoon, and he was now sure that he was in love with her. And he
didn’t even know her name.
Finn, out of breath, found the girl standing under the same elm
tree where she’d sat having lunch an eternity of hours ago. Though out
of breath, he still managed to come to a relatively inconspicuous stop
not far from where the girl stood. In his mind, he pictured himself as a
cartoon figure caught doing whatever he was not supposed to be doing,
and whistling innocently with his head in the air.
What? Who, me? Not a
thing, officer. I just happened to be barrelling down this street at a hundred
and fifty miles an hour. Girl? What girl? I’m not following a GIRL!
Finn prayed she hadn’t noticed him, and his prayers were answered
again: she clearly hadn’t noticed him. She hadn’t looked up from the
sheet of paper she was staring at.
A group of noisily shouting children from the primary school ran
past on the other side of the street. Startled by the sound, the girl looked
up and saw Finn staring at her.
Here it comes,
Finn thought.
This is where she looks at me with disgust
and says, “Eeew, what do you want, you creepy little kid? Get lost! Stop staring
at me, or my boyfriend will put your head through a wall!”
Instead, the girl smiled, and said, “Hi there.” She stood expectantly
until Finn realized she was waiting for him to say “hi” back to her.
“Hi,” Finn said. “You new in town?” Feeling stupid, he added, “You
must be new in town. I’ve never seen you before.” Then he felt even more
stupid, because it made him sound like he knew every girl in town, which
he didn’t.
Moron,
Finn raged to himself.
You’re such a goddamn MORON
.
“Yeah,” she said. Finn thought she had a beautiful voice. Her cadence
was unlike any other he’d heard. He thought this was what Rachel van
Helsing might sound like—sophisticated, vaguely foreign. Totally sexy.
“I’m new,” she added. “Really new. I just arrived last night. It’s my first day
in town.” She walked over to where Finn was standing and put out her
hand. “My name is Morgan. Morgan Parr.”