Defy the Dark (31 page)

Anyway, whatever this girl did, Cali thought it must've been pretty bad. And now it was after midnight, and Cali had things to do. Soon she'd be somewhere else. Something else. Dust, maybe. Way to go. Mission accomplished. This girl and her mother and her sad story would go on without her and there was nothing she could do, even if she wanted to help. Which she really didn't.

Plus she still had to figure out her note.

“I don't know,” the girl said after a while.

There was another long pause, dead air, the intercom beeping and echoing. It sounded like the girl was in a small room with the door open. Cali imagined the gray-green walls, the busy hallways, and file cabinets full of records. It probably looked a lot like the center. She wondered if Dr. Berg visited Eastport. Talked to the girls about their mistakes, their attention-seeking behavior, their delicate recovery process.

“Do you know what's gonna happen to you after this?” Cali asked.

“No idea,” the girl said. “But what about . . . I mean, do you know what
you're
gonna do?”

 

I'm crazy. maybe I am, but all I can

tell you

is it's like

I'm trapped and

the walls are closing

in. yeah, I know that sounds

cliché, right?

 

Yes
. The thing was, Cali
did
know. Like the gypsy moth, her destiny was short-lived, but she knew her purpose now. She'd decided when and how it would end.

 

but the words

don't always come

out

 

Across the wires and waves, another voice shattered the quiet. An adult voice laced with impatience. Cali could practically
feel
the woman standing over this girl, arms crossed, giving directives with her eyes.

“I have to go,” the girl whispered, mouth close to the receiver. The line cut out, and Cali shrugged and closed her eyes.

 

C
ali lifted her head from the desk. Her cheek had been resting against the waxy crayon lines on her paper. She'd fallen asleep, drifted off in the midst of her work.

She checked her phone, confirmed what her stiff neck and sticky eyes already knew: three hours had passed. If Cali dreamed, she didn't remember it, and now she was behind schedule and her body was anxious to continue with the plan.

She listened at the crack in her door again, humid air from the hallway tickling her ear. It was quiet; her parents snored softly from the room down the hall, the baby kicked rhythmically in his big-boy bed as his
Sesame Street
CD reset itself. Cali knew all the words, but it was late, and she didn't feel like singing along.

She crossed the room, found the rubber spoon from her dinner, and fished out her collection of pills, transferring them two or three at a time from their tight little mattress cave into her palm. She slid open her desk drawer and tipped the pills inside the plastic cup that used to hold thumbtacks and paper clips, counting them twice to be sure. Nineteen. She'd accidentally swallowed them the first few times when she was still learning the trick. But nineteen was good. More than enough. And Cali knew to take them with water. Alcohol, she'd learned from one of the guys in group, often induced vomiting, often expelled the pills.
Attention seeking,
the wise doctor would say.
Not a real attempt.

The drawer whispered as Cali slid it shut. The spider in the window had started another web in the left corner, maybe a better one this time. It occurred to Cali that the moth under her bed, had it not ended up there, would've made a tasty meal for the orb weaver. The moths flitting around her ceiling light were too far away. Maybe too smart to go near the spider. Or maybe they'd get caught in the dish that covered the bulb and sizzle to death.

Cali picked up her Outer Space crayon.

 

right and original—like when you're

suffocating, burning up inside, when your

blood is

 

A memory floated into Cali's mind from earlier in the night. She'd almost forgotten about the phone call. The girl. And now her phone was buzzing again, screen lit up with same area code as Eastport, but a different number. Cali answered, but there was no recording asking her to accept the charges.

“Hello. My name is Regina Simmons.”

Cali knew the woman was a social worker, probably the one who'd made the girl hang up before. It was the lilt in her voice, the strange combination of authoritarianism, compassion, and exhaustion. Cali drew another tree as she waited for Regina Simmons to continue, a sweeping trunk with feathery boughs. Some of the branches overlapped her words; she pulled out a different crayon and traced new ones over the treetops in Midnight Blue.

 

on fire, when your chest hurts and you

don't
can't

remember who you are. or if you even

exist at all. I'm

 

“Sorry to disturb you at this late hour. I'm a social worker for the state of Maine,” Regina Simmons went on. “I work in the Eastport Juvenile Detention Facility. I understand you may be in contact with a woman named Laura Zelnick?”

“Yes,” Cali said. Deceit was easy if you knew you wouldn't be around when the truth came out. Cali glanced at her bookshelf, scanned the author last names until she found one she liked. “My name is Wolff. Um, Gypsy Wolff.”

 

sorry I
lie
lied

about

what happened last summer.
sometimes I think

maybe

 

“I have an unusual situation here, Gypsy,” Regina Simmons said. Papers rustled in the background, and Cali imagined the woman sitting at a big industrial-looking desk, the cheap laminate kind with metal legs like the tables and chairs at school. There was probably a cup of cold, old coffee on the desk and a picture of two little kids in a dented gold frame and maybe an award for something, if they gave awards for social work things. Cali didn't know.

“What's going on?” Cali asked.

“How old are you?” the woman wanted to know.

 

I was born in the wrong time, to the wrong

family.

And I
do
did this thing, and I pretended

I'm
I was

 

“Twenty-six,” Cali said. It felt like a good age. She'd used it before. “Just turned.”

Pen scratched paper. More shuffling. “Gypsy, do you think you can locate Laura Zelnick? Ask her to contact me at this number as soon as possible?”

“Possibly. Can I . . . May I speak with . . . the daughter again?”

“Theresa. That's her name, the daughter.”

“I have a few questions for Theresa,” Cali said. “The answers might help me locate her mother.”

“Of course.” Regina Simmons gave Cali the number to her direct line again, made Cali promise she'd call with an update as soon as she heard from the mother. Then she was gone.

 

someone else, maybe.

I
make
made up these stories about

 

The girl, Theresa, breathed into the phone. She looked different in Cali's mind now that she had a name. Softer, somehow. Prettier. “Is your name really Gypsy?” she asked.

“No. I don't know your mom,” Cali said. Shame crept up her neck, heat spread to her cheeks.

 

things. in my head, you know,

I made them up, someone from the

right time, the right place.

And for a little while, you know,

 

“Yeah. I know.” The girl's voice broke again. “She left when I was . . . I don't know. A few years ago. I don't really remember.”

Cali nodded, even though the girl couldn't see. The phone slipped a little, and Cali shifted it to her other ear. Her mouth opened and closed, opened and closed. Now that she had Theresa back on the line, she really didn't know what to say, didn't know why she was messing around with this girl and her messed-up situation.

 

it was almost like

they were real. But then they told me, or I don't know,

not

them exactly, but
someone

something said

 

“I have to go,” the girl said. “That social worker is giving me the signal.”

“Yeah?”

“It's just that we're not supposed to be on the office phone like this,” the girl said. “Not like this. Sorry.”

“Okay,” Cali said.

 

Cali, it said. Cali, it won't last.
And I knew.

But I forgot. I

forgot the parts

that happened, and the parts

that weren't real, and

I tried

to make the rest make sense, but

 

Outside the window, the orb weaver worked on the next strand of her intricate web. Cali turned her paper to a clean white spot in the corner and kept scribbling as Theresa sighed into the phone, waiting like there was anything left to say.

 

everything

that
matters mattered
matters

stopped.

And then

 

Cali set down her crayon. There was no more space. She couldn't even read the last three words she'd written. She needed a new piece of paper. She slid her drawer open and shuffled through the contents with her free hand, still holding the phone with the other. She couldn't find the rest of the paper. She went back to her letter, tried again.

“Okay. I really have to go,” Theresa said. “The social worker keeps looking at me.”

 

I stopped,

too. And

now

 

“I hope you find her,” Cali said. She wanted to add something else about the girl's mother, but there was a murmur and muffled sounds and then the line cut out, and the phone blinked off. Cali set it on the desk. It was warm from her ear, moist from all those words and her skin and her breath. The battery icon blinked.

LOW LOW LOW.

Cali shoved the Midnight Blue crayon back into the cardboard sleeve, right between Razzle Dazzle Rose and Tickle Me Pink, and folded the yellow-and-green hood over the box.

She flicked her phone into a backspin, watched it twirl over her letter. Beneath the blur of metal and graphite, colors scrawled across the paper, trees and clouds, stars, spiderwebs. Her words had been totally enveloped. The original orangey-pink Mango Tango letters were nearly lost, peeking out now in thin fingers behind the sky, like the sky outside her window. The sun would be up soon, on the drawing and on the outside. The darkness was slipping through her fingers.

Cali slid the window sash up, then the screen. The breeze tickled her cheeks, her eyes. She shivered. The orb weaver approached the edge cautiously and tested the surface, untrusting.

Cali could close the screen. Hard. End the creature's uncertainty, the aching and pointless need to survive. She curled her fingers over the edge, tips turning white as she held on and considered it. The spider stopped, perched on the ledge. It seemed to Cali that the creature was weighing her options. Stay, go. Hello, good-bye.

Suddenly, without warning or lead-in, pain flooded Cali's heart. It ripped through her flesh as though she'd pressed the blade to her chest instead of her wrist, as though this bright new hurt would be the death of her now, rather than the pills rattling in the cup in the desk drawer. Her lungs filled with warm liquid, a searing, sticky feeling she didn't recognize. Her insides burned, throat tightened. Her heart thudded and blood whooshed through veins, blue and taut beneath the scar on her wrist. Her ears rang and the room spun and she looked again at the spider, then her drawing, searching for a focal point. She found the only remaining clear words on the page and stared until they, too, swirled before her eyes, as unrecognizable in their simplicity as a foreign language.

 

matters

now

 

Cali's cheeks were wet but the dizziness finally passed. She relaxed her fingers, slid them off the lip of the window screen, the spider still in limbo on the ledge. She'd read somewhere that nature didn't like interruptions. Interference. But she raised the screen higher and blew a gentle breeze across the spider's tiger belly, anyway. The sun was rising now, its bright orange fingers reaching across the sky. Cali closed her eyes and let them warm her tear-streaked face and the orb weaver scampered out over the ledge, out into the unknown.

Cali opened her eyes. The spider was gone, the remnants of her web drifting lazily and unfinished in the window.

Cali's phone blinked off, finally spent. She'd have to get the charger from her mother later. Cali slipped it into her desk drawer on top of the magazine and pushed the drawer closed. She left the window open, though; closed her eyes again and inhaled the dawn breeze.

She hoped the spider would be okay.

Jackson Pearce

Where the Light Is

U
nderground, it is cold.

The deeper you go, the colder it gets. In elementary school, I learned that if you go far enough, there's a layer of magma underneath the dirt, and beneath that the earth's core. It's hot—billions upon billions of degrees—and solid. Most people think it's made of iron. My teacher said some people think it's made of gold.

When I told my father that, he said it wasn't true—that it's the core of the
miners
that's gold. That they are brothers underground, protecting one another, using drills and shovels like wands and athames to uncover power for the world. A league of magicians working in the depths, in the secret places of the world where no one else has ever been.

I am in the league, but I am not like the other miners, who slap each other on the back and tell dirty jokes gleefully. When we go into the mine, all I can think is this—billions of degrees at the earth's core, yet it's cold. I think it's a sign, like the way people get a chill when they go into a haunted house. The earth is telling us we're not welcome.

But underground is where the money is, in the fat seams of coal, tall as me and ten times more valuable. We rumble into the mine on the cart, Roth's salt-and-pepper hair whipping back as he presses harder on the accelerator—he knows the track well enough to speed along with total confidence through the labyrinth. The headlights beam through the coal dust like we're driving through black snow; we turn our helmet lamps on as the sun vanishes behind us. I'm afraid of the dark in the mines. Afraid to be so, so far away from the world above.

I nod to a group of miners as we pass—most of them went to Middleview High with me. Just four months ago, we sat at graduation together. As the principal talked about bright futures, I entertained the idea that I would go on to something else—anything else. It was a silly fantasy, of course. The only Middleview boys who escape a life in the mines are the Runners, who slink away to colleges or the army, never to be seen till they return for their parents' funerals. The town doesn't welcome them back. They're deserters, traitors.

My father was a foreman, last out in an accident fifteen years ago.
The Middleview Mine Catastrophe
, the monument calls it. Four died; Dad kept a group of seven others alive, including Roth. My father gave them his lunch. He went hungry as three, four, five days passed until rescuers reached them. He is a local hero; he was a great miner. If I were a Runner, it would destroy my mother. It would destroy my father's memory.

I could never come back.

Roth drops me off, pats me on the shoulder as I walk away from the cart. Because I'm new, I get the boring jobs; because I don't talk, I get the solitary ones. Just like yesterday, I'm plastering an airflow wall, scooping white goo out of a bucket with my hand and rubbing it into the cracks of cinder blocks.

I pretend I'm a painter, drawing stick figures in the plaster. I pretend I'm a doctor and getting the plaster into all the cracks saves someone's life. I pretend that I'll keep my promise to myself this time around, that once this mine is dead, I'll consider leaving this town even if it means never returning. I'll escape, I'll be free, I'll be happy. I don't know how much time passes—it's hard to tell without the sun. If I check my watch I obsess over each second, so I just try not to look. I'm halfway into pretending I'm an archaeologist, making casts of something ancient, when I hear a sound.

A single knock.

No, not a single—there's another. And another. Knocks with just enough pattern to be intentional, louder than the grind of machines farther down the path. I lift my head, wipe my forearm across my mouth.
Knock, knock, knock
; before I know it I'm walking toward the noise. I pass a group of miners who look up at me, eyes of all ages lined with coal that's thick like a girl's eyeliner. Don't they hear it? We stare awkwardly at one another for a moment; I think of saying something—

Knock, knock, knock, knock.

Pause. The others stare blankly.

Knock, knock, knock, knock.

I hurry on—they don't hear it, and I don't want them to think I've lost it by saying something. Down another pathway, through an empty room . . . This is an old, old mine. The company reopened when they discovered the men from the 1800s hadn't entirely cleared out the coal. It's full of caverns, corners, tunnels that are easy to get lost in, dug with hand tools. Did someone get turned around, get sealed into an now-unused tunnel? I arrive at the retreat miners' area—a far corner of the mine, where they use mechanical drills to plant explosives. They'll take all the coal until the ceiling of earth above us is held up by a few precious pillars. Then they'll take the pillars and their coal, too, and the room will collapse. They're preoccupied with the machinery and don't notice me passing.

Knock, knock, knock, knock.

“Hello?” I call. The knocks answer. I run toward them, around the pillars—the retreaters' area looks like a big, empty ballroom. I reach the wall—is the knocking getting more desperate, or am I imagining things? I put my hands against the wall. I feel the knocking on the other side, the slight tremble that vibrates into my fingertips.

“Hello? Are you there?” I ask.

The knocking stops.

Silence. Long-drawn-out silence that makes me lean forward, wait for it, wait for it—

The knocking moves.

Along the wall,
knock, knock, knock
. I follow. The knocker and I move along the wall together to the corner of the ballroom, where he begins to knock swiftly, like he's keeping time with a song. It moves lower, to the bottom of the wall, to a crevice in the stone.

Voids in the earth aren't unheard of, but we usually don't drill this close to them. They're unpredictable, dangerous. The wall between the ballroom and the void could collapse, start a chain reaction that covers us all up. I glance back. The retreaters aren't in shouting distance—

A hand shoots out of the crevice, covered in coal dust. I leap back and scream like a girl—a
girl
. The hand grasps the edge of the crevice with white knuckles. It is not the grizzled, beaten hand of a miner. It's slender, a tiny wrist, white white white skin dusted with coal that looks like powdered makeup instead of soot.

There is a girl trapped down here.

My eyes widen and I yell for help. I duck down, shine my helmet light into the crevice. “Hang on!”

How did she get down here?
I've heard about druggies wandering into mines, homeless people hoping for a place to stay, but these mines are so well guarded that I didn't know it was possible. I reach into the crevice, wait for her to take my hand,
Please, grab it, I'll help you
. Is she too strung out to know I'm here, to understand I want to help her? I wonder what she's on, I wonder how old she is, who she is, how long she's been here.
Take my hand, please.

I hear her breathing; I pull myself farther through the crevice, and my body pitches forward on an incline. I start to slide away from the ballroom and into the void. It's only a short drop, the length of a child's slide, but my helmet falls away; the lamp flickers off. My stomach twists.

It is darker than it's ever been anywhere, ever.

I land on my back and gasp for air like a fish until oxygen rushes to my lungs. I breathe slow, wait for my eyes to adjust, but it's too dark in here without the lamp—I can't see anything, literally, not even my hand when I wave it in front of my face.

“Where are you?” I cough—the coal dust in here isn't blown away by fans, and it coats my throat. For the first time, I wish I wore my respirator.

I clamber to my feet and rub my eyes, then stand, waiting to hear a sound in the darkness. She has to be in here somewhere—does she not want to be rescued? I reach my arms out until my fingertips brush against a wall, then begin to walk, shuffling along the edge of the room.

“You aren't in trouble,” I whisper, because it seems strange to speak loudly in the dark. “If you sneaked in, it's okay. Come on, come to me. My name's Will; I'll help you. We have to leave—the air here isn't safe.”
And the dark,
I want to add.
The dark is everywhere.

Nothing. I walk farther. The room curves to the right, back toward the crevice that will lead me out, if I've got my bearings correct.

“I can help you. I can't stay in here, though.” I pause, wait for any sort of response. My hands fall along a ridge—it's the crevice, it must be. I duck my head and can see into the ballroom and, on the far end, a speck of light from the retreaters. I have to go toward it. I want to help her, but I'll have to come back with a light, with help.

“Last chance,” I whisper at the cavern.

Nothing.

I turn to climb out; the air from the ballroom is fresher, cleaner, and I welcome it into my lungs. I crawl forward and then, just as I'm about to put both hands on the outside of the cavern, I feel it.

Her hand slides onto my shoulder, so soft and gentle it feels like someone is pooling a silk scarf against my neck. I freeze as she dances her fingertips along my neck, to my jawbone. When she gets close to my lips, I turn my head toward her—no, toward the darkness where I know she is. She withdraws. I sit back on my feet, back in the dusty air of the cavern.

I don't speak, not this time. Instead I wait, eyes scanning the dark, longing to see. I force myself to stay still as she slides her palms over my cheeks, then down my shoulders, along my arms. She stops at my hands, not holding them, but touching them like she's a palm reader. I swallow hard.

My words slip out as a whisper. “Who are you? What are you doing here?”

Her fingers harden on mine, like she's fighting the urge to run.

Then her voice, the only sound and so much stronger than mine. When I hear it, I understand that she wasn't afraid of me earlier.

When I hear it, I wonder if I should be afraid of her.

“My name is Ennor. I live here.”

 

“Y
ou can't live here,” I say, shaking my head. I reach toward her, and she releases me and moves away.

“You don't understand,” she says.

“You're right,” I say slowly. “I don't understand. Tell me how—
why
—you live here.” She must be crazy, or high, maybe that's it—no one would live here willingly.

She's moving, a rustling of fabrics I can't see. I tense, wondering if she'll touch me again, where I'll feel her fingers first, wishing there was light. Her breath is by my ear; strands of her hair tickle my collarbone.

“I'm a Knocker.”

“A Knocker?” I say, and I can hear the doubt on my voice. The word is so silly, so stupid, that I feel the edges of my wonder crackling away into disbelief—I've heard the legends, all the miners have. Faeries who live underground, who help miners out or play little tricks. They were part of the bedtime stories my parents told me, the beings my mother promised would keep my father safe at work. I stopped believing when I saw the stretchers with the bodies of the four dead miners carried out of the ground.

“Yes. I called to you.” She sweeps away from me, and I hear her knocking against the stone. The sound is so much louder than skin on stone should be, and it carries through the mine, all around me, passing into my bones until I feel shaken. I'm relieved when she stops, and I reach backward until my hands find the wall. I lean against it, shaking my head.

“Why me?”

She hesitates. Long hair touches my arm. She can see me, I realize—I'm blind here, but she isn't. She moves too deftly, too easily. “Knockers reward respectful miners. I'll lead you to a new seam, on the far side of this room.” Something isn't right about her words, like this is a practiced answer instead of a real one. I'm sure if I could see her eyes, I'd know that for certain.

I chuckle nervously, trying to sound casual, hoping to coax the truth from her. “That's all? Because if that's it, you've picked the wrong miner then,” I say. “I'm not respectful. My father was the miner; I hate this place—”

She makes a strange noise, one that sounds more catlike than human, one that sounds like she's hurt herself—I lunge forward, hoping to catch her arm, but there's nothing. I sit back and wait for her to speak again.

And wait.

And wait.

And realize that the sound of her breathing is gone, as is the rustle of her clothing.

The room suddenly fills with light, blinding me for a moment. It's from my helmet, lying on the ground nearby. The lamp has flickered on, and its tiny light is like the sun. My eyes adjust and I search the room for her, waiting to see her face, to connect eyes with the voice.

The room has smooth walls and a steep pitch, and the ceiling is high and cathedral-like. Thick seams of coal line it, like striped wallpaper. Behind me, I see the exit into the ballroom. But there's no other way out, not that I see, and there's no one else here.

Maybe she only exists in the dark.

 

S
he is the only thing I'm thinking of as we head underground the following day. I didn't mention her to anyone—as strange as she is, she is the only thing about the mines I've ever found intriguing. It's almost like the mine itself has changed—it's something exciting, something different than just mile after mile of darkness and coal. I don't want anyone, not even Roth, to take that away. I wonder who she is really—a homeless girl, a runaway? A lunatic? A traveler, a con artist?

A faery girl? I'd ignore the last prospect were it not for her so easily vanishing yesterday. I spent the night thinking about it, trying to imagine what a life in the dark would be like.