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  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 t
he 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.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Monday, October 23, 1972

  That morning at the Blue Heron Motel—thirty miles outside of Sault Ste. Marie on the edge of the northern Ontario bush country, near the village of Batchawana Bay—Christina Parr woke just after sunrise from a dream of her dead husband, Jack. It was a widow’s dream—an inchoate dream of the deepest and profoundest longing. She woke from it with her arms outstretched as though to receive an embrace.

  Christina knew that if either of the other two occupants of the motel room had asked her to relate the dream’s narrative to them, she would have been at a loss. The language of her grief was private and even now, after almost a year, Christina was still painfully learning its vocabulary and orthography.

  She raised herself on her elbow and looked down at her daughter, Morgan, lying next to her. Asleep, buried in the blankets with her black hair (Jack’s hair) half-covering her face, Morgan looked younger than fifteen. Lightly and tenderly, Christina smoothed it out of Morgan’s face without waking her. Across the room, in the other bed, her brother-in law, Jeremy Parr, snored softly, his bare arm outside the blanket, pulling it in to his body as though he were a cold, small child.

  Christina had been dreaming of Jack almost nightly in the nine months since the accident. The dreams varied in scale and intensity like music, from the highest soprano pitch of remembered fragments of joy, to the deepest, lowest basso profundo of grief and loss. From the latter, she would wake up sobbing, her throat dry and raw as though she had been swallowing graveyard dirt, feeling as if she were buried alive, and the darkness of her bedroom a sealed, airless coffin. On those nights, when she switched on her bedside lamp to try to read the book she always kept on her night table for this exact purpose, knowing full well that she wouldn’t be able to forget the yawning, empty space next to her on the bed, she wondered whether the pain would ever end, or if this was what she had to look forward to every night for the rest of her life.

  Last night was different, though. Last night she dreamed she and Jack were together, walking in a vast green pine forest shot through with gold sunlight. Jack was leading her by the hand. She could still feel the imprint of his palm in hers. She looked at the inside of her hand, half expecting to see his fingerprints. With the insight peculiar to dreamers, particularly dreamers of love, she knew it was one of the forests near Jack’s family’s house in Parr’s Landing, where they’d both grown up. It was a dream of comfort and security, a dream that drew on emotional subtitles that stretched back over the course of eighteen years, including the two years they’d spent together in high school in Parr’s Landing before Morgan had been born. The dream felt like an augury, but of what she wasn’t yet sure. The now familiar ache was there, of course. But this morning it was tinged with something she couldn’t quite identify.

  Christina looked at her watch. It was 7:25 a.m. The light leaking through the motel curtains was deep orange, a pellucid autumnal hue that was unique to northern regions where the snow came fast and early and winter ruled for seemingly endless months. The light spoke of stars in the violet-blue early morning sky, of columns of Canada geese streaking south across the vastness of Lake Superior and Lake Huron, while below them, the forests turned the colour of fire and rust and blood.

  Then she realized what the dream had been tinged with and the thought came, unbidden and profoundly bittersweet: I’m almost home. My God. I never, ever thought I would come back here.

  Christina dressed as quickly and quietly as she could so as not to wake Morgan and Jeremy. She donned a pair of jeans and pulled a bulky sweater over the thin T-shirt she’d slept in. In the bathroom, she splashed cold water on her face and ran a damp comb through her thick blonde hair. There were faint purple smudges under her eyes, but all in all, she thought, she looked pretty good for a woman who had just driven ten hours across the country from Toronto to Sault Ste. Marie, with a heartbroken and anxious teenage girl and a twenty-five year old gay man at the end of an affair he claimed was the love of his life—and for whom this was as reluctant a homecoming as it was for her.

  There was a diner across the street from the motel. Christina sat at a booth near the window and ordered scrambled eggs and home fries. From where she sat, she could watch for Morgan in case her daughter woke up and came looking for her. It seemed unlikely, given how deeply she was sleeping when Christina had left the motel room. Sleep was nature’s best balm. Morgan and Jack had been exceptionally close, perhaps closer than most fathers and daughters, and his death had devastated her.

  That, coupled with the sudden uprooting from the only home she’d ever known—in the only city she’d ever known—to move to a town she’d only ever heard discussed in the most negative terms by her parents, had taken a visible emotional toll.

  What sort of a mother packs up her grieving teenage daughter and loads her into the back seat of a rusted-out 1969 Chevy Chevelle and drives her to the ends of the earth to start a new life, you ask? She took a sip of the fresh coffee, wincing at the bitterness and adding more sugar. A broke one, that’s who. A broke widow whose freewheeling, romantic, carefree late husband hadn’t taken out life insurance because he thought it was bourgeois, but took out a second mortgage on their house without telling her—one she found out about when the bank foreclosed on it. A woman with no job and no savings, but who had a rich mother-in-law, one who might despise her, personally, but might still feel a sense of dynastic responsibility for her granddaughter out of love for her eldest son, if nothing else.

  At least , she thought, I hope she will.

  As she ate her breakfast in blessed silence, Christina watched as the light advanced. She’d forgotten how clear that light was, especially in the fall. The mist on the lake was burning off as the sun climbed higher. On the other side of the lake, she could make out a scattering of white buildings underlined by a dirt road at the foot of the sloping, mountainous hills stretching against the blue sky. Alone in the booth at the diner with her thoughts, accountable to no one, and with nothing around her at that moment that had any bearing on her life, she gazed out the window as the sunlight touched the burnished leaves of the line of maple trees framing the motel where her daughter slept.

  When she was sure she could see the beauty, she allowed herself to feel hope.

  Christina felt a sudden crashing wave of terrible longing for Jack, one that stunned her once again with its ferocity. Tears blurred her vision, but this time she didn’t wipe them away. She rode the pain like a wave, not fighting it, cresting with it instead, allowed it to deposit her, gently and safely, in a rational place.

  She paid her bill and left the diner to wake up Morgan and Jeremy. They still had a four- to five-hour drive ahead of them to Parr’s Landing and whatever waited for them there.

  They were on the road within an hour and a half. Morgan and Jeremy were awake, showered, and packed up by the time she got back to the motel. Christina
was surprised but pleased. Getting Morgan ready in the morning had been an ordeal more or less from the day she’d turned thirteen. The waitress at the diner smiled at her when the three of them trooped over and sat down at the booth she’d left twenty minutes before.

  Christina said, “A couple more hungry customers for you before we get back on the road this morning.”

  “Couldn’t get enough of our good country cooking, eh?” The waitress beamed at Morgan and Jeremy. “Is this your hubby and your little girl? She looks just like her handsome daddy. You want some hot chocolate, honey?”

  Christina felt Morgan flinch beside her. She opened her mouth to tell the waitress that Jeremy wasn’t her father but her uncle, but before she could say a word, Morgan smiled at the waitress and politely replied, “Just some orange juice, please.”

  When the waitress returned to the kitchen with their order, Christina turned to Morgan and said, “That was very nice of you, sweetheart. It was very considerate.”

  Morgan shrugged. “It’s not her fault. She didn’t know. And I do look like daddy and so does Uncle Jeremy, so she wasn’t all wrong.”

  Jeremy said, “Your father had all the looks in the family. Ask your mother. He was so handsome when he was your age that everyone was in love with him. Your mom was the only girl in Parr’s Landing who’d ever caught his eye. It was like Romeo and Juliet with those two.”

  “Romeo and Juliet was a tragedy,” Morgan said. The previous year, her class at Jarvis Collegiate had studied Shakespeare’s play in English Lit. The teacher, Mr. Niven, had run the Franco Zeffirelli version of the film on the reel-to-reel projector in the classroom and Morgan had fallen in love with Leonard Whiting. “Mom and Dad weren’t a tragedy. They ran off and got married. They had me. They got out of Parr’s Landing. Romeo and Juliet never got out of Verona.”

  “You’re right, they did get out of Parr’s Landing.” Jeremy’s eyes met Christina’s over the table. “They did. They got away and they met their destiny. And the best part of their destiny was having you.” He reached over and put his hand over Morgan’s. “I’m so very, very glad they did.”