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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 the 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