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.