Michael Rowe - Enter, Night

“I need you to help me, Morgan,” Finn said, his voice breaking. “I can’t do this by myself. You have to help me. Please?” He looked towards the window where the sky was now bright enough for her to see everything in the room. Then back at Morgan with pleading eyes. “Do you understand?”

Morgan started to cry. “No, Finn, please. I can’t,” she sobbed. “Don’t ask me to do that . I can’t. Stay with me. We’ll figure something out, I promise. Please, Finn, please. I just can’t !”

“Listen to me,” Finn said gently. “I want to find Sadie. I want to be with my dog again. I miss her. I want to be somewhere else-I want to be in the place I was in before all this happened. I want to go home. A lot of bad things happen in Parr’s Landing, but it isn’t all bad. Nothing is all bad. I was happy-I had my mom and my dad. I had my school, and my comics. And I had Sadie. I want to hug her. I want to go for a walk with her again, up on Spirit Rock. This morning-now. But I can’t do it by myself. My body won’t let me.”

“What do I have to do?”

Morgan thought she had never seen a more loving or radiant smile in her life. Finn pointed to the door. “Just walk with me. Out there. Out into the sunlight. Where Sadie is. And if I can’t do it, push me.”

Mutely, she nodded, white-faced.

When they reached the door, Finn turned to her and hugged her. “I love you, Morgan,” he whispered. “Thank you.”

Then Morgan opened the front door and walked Finn into the dawn.

In the end,dying a second time proved different than anything Finn had ever imagined it might be.

For one thing, the pain that his small, shrieking body felt as the sunlight ignited a holocaust under his skin-an incandescence that boiled his blood and set alight his bones from the inside, charring them to ash in seconds-was surprisingly brief, even momentary. Such, it seemed, was the nature of the soul-even a soul like Finn’s that had been severed from its natural life and forced into rebirth in an unnatural one.

Rising above his body as it writhed and burned on the ground, Finn saw, not without pain and shame, that Morgan was screaming, as well. He’d hurt her, after all-the one person whom he wanted most to spare any pain.

The bare skin of her arms, where she’d held him as he’d tried to duck back inside the house at the moment the sunlight first struck his undead flesh-exactly as he’d begged her to do-was scorched and seared and blistered from the fire- his fire.

Because there were no more secrets, because every truth of the world, past, present, and future, was laid bare to the dead-the true dead, as Finn now was-he knew that Morgan would bear livid scars on her arms for the rest of her life. They would fade a bit more every year, but he knew (as the dead know) that Morgan would think of him every day when she looked at them, and the thoughts would be tender ones, thoughts of love-and sadness.

The horror would eventually become a half-remembered nightmare, and he was glad for that. He knew she would never return to Parr’s Landing, nor would her mother, and that neither of them would ever see Billy Lightning again.

Finn continued to rise.

The dead of Parr’s Landing surged around him like transcendental tributaries to a larger sea of souls, and time itself spun like a great tumbler of history and memory. The dead opened their arms to Finn in love, pulled him close, carried him higher and higher.

His soul wept for the half-souls that remained, trapped.

As Finn was absorbed into the massive vortex of spiralling black light, he looked down one last time.

Below him, he saw the oak doors of St. Barthélemy and the Martyrs crash open. Christina Parr, screaming her daughter’s name, ran with the speed only the mother of an injured child ever really attains to the place where Morgan knelt, weeping over the charred skeleton of the twelve-year-old boy Finn once was. Finn saw Christina tenderly wrap her daughter in blankets and carefully carry her to Billy Lightning’s truck, depositing her gently in the passenger seat and starting it up.

The dead see all roads, spiritual and temporal alike, and Finn was well pleased with what he saw ahead on theirs.

And then, the part of Finn Miller that was eternal heard the sound of a red rubber ball striking his bedroom floor. His soul was suddenly engulfed in familiar fragrance-clover and lake water and sunlight on soft black fur, and he was awash in frantic movement, warmth, and love.

The sound of Finn’s laughter fell like blue sparks and the sound of Sadie’s triumphant, joyous barking fell like black ones, and together their essences became one with the souls around them, passing completely from the world of the living into a perfect, brilliant sunrise above Bradley Lake and the cliffs of Spirit Rock.

There was no pain in it this time, only sunlight that no longer burned.

75 Main Street E.

Parr’s Landing, Ontario

P2T 1R2

807-731-1002

TO:Sergeant Gill Styles. Gyles Point Police Dept., Gyles Point, Ont.

FROM:Sergeant Dave Thomson, Parr’s Landing

October 25, 1972

Dear Gill,

Following up on our telephone conversation of earlier this evening, a local boy, Finn Miller, found this hockey bag and its contents in the Spirit Rock area while looking for his dog. PC Elliot McKitrick came upon the young man over the course of doing rounds and brought the boy and the hockey bag back to the station where we took it into evidence.

The bag appears to contain archaeological tools. In light of the Carstairs disappearance on the night of October 22nd in Gyles Point, I recommend that you forward them to Bruce Benson at the RCMP in Sault St. Marie for forensic lab analysis of fingerprints and blood type.

Also found in the bag were several documents that have been identified by Dr. William Lightning, a visitor to Parr’s Landing, as having belonged to his father, Dr. Phenius Osborne of Toronto, who was the victim of homicide early this year. Dr. Lightning believes they were taken from his father’s house during the course of said homicide.

As an aside, he believes the perpetrator was Richard Weal, a former student of Dr. Osborne’s, but according to the information we have from Metro Toronto Homicide, Weal is deceased.

We do not consider Dr. Lightning a suspect at this time, though we have asked him to remain in Parr’s Landing for the next few days. Please call if we can be of any further help.

Dave Thomson, Sgt.

Parr’s Landing

Department of Anthropology, University of Toronto

Sidney Smith Hall, 100 St. George Street, Toronto

Fall Term, 1971

Note:The text that follows is my translation of an original document held by Professor Victor Kleinschmit of the Department of History at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. The document itself, written in French, dates from the seventeenth century and appears to be a letter from a Jesuit missionary on his deathbed, addressed to his superiors in Rome. I have cross-referenced both this document with every available edition of The Jesuit Relations, but have found no reference to it, nor to the priest mentioned (Fr. Nyon) in any available record pertaining to the history of the Jesuits in Canada.

Dr. Kleinschmit, upon hearing of my work on the St. Barthélemy dig in Parr’s Landing in the summer of 1952, invited me to come to Michigan to read it and to translate, which I did.

It is worth noting that I did not share any of the specific events surrounding the excavation of the St. Barthélemy site during the summer of 1952 with Dr. Kleinschmit, so his delivery of this document into my hands was in no way intended to support any “fantastical” notions of what might have occurred there that summer. The story, as read here, presents a plausible theory of the origin of the Wendigo legend of St. Barthélemy by a writer obviously familiar with myths and legends of that period.