Defy the Dark (33 page)

As soon as I ask it, I know—so quickly that I wonder if the answer came from my father or my heart. Maybe it was both.

 

I
grab for Ennor's hands when I enter the cavern—I know where they'll be, though I can't explain how.

“I came to warn you. They're going to blow the mountain.”

Ennor doesn't move; I wait for the sound of her breath to quicken in the darkness.

But there is nothing, there's silence and the sound of her heart beating that I can somehow hear in the still. Or maybe it's my heart—I can't tell.

“Ennor? They're closing the mine. They're going to blow the mountain to get the rest of the coal. You and your family have to leave.”

“I heard you. We already knew. My family heard other miners talking. I came to warn
you
. They're going to let the earth take them.”

Her words are soft, gentle even. She slides her hands from my palms up my forearms. At first I think she's calm, but then I feel it—a slight, uneven tremble.

“How long do we have to get out?” I whisper.

“Not long.”

I nod, and I mean to turn and run back to Roth. Instead I stand still—this time it isn't my feet weighing me down, it's something deeper, something that slinks around my heart and lungs. I inch my arms forward and then wrap them around Ennor, gently at first, then harder, till I realize I'm clutching her and, even more surprising, she's clutching me.

“Will I see you again?” I finally ask. I feel her chin tilt up and know she's looking at me, but it doesn't bother me anymore that I can't see her eyes.

“I don't know,” she answers. “I can't stop being a Knocker, and you can't stop being a miner.”

“You're only half a Knocker,” I remind her. “Maybe you can leave.”

“You're only half a miner,” she answers. “The rest of you belongs somewhere else.”

She steps back and we release each other; I stand staring into the black, knowing she's watching me, certain that I see her despite the lack of light. “You've got to go,” she says, inhaling.

I've got to save the other miners, my father's people. I focus on that, hold an image of my father in my head, think about him saving the others so long ago. I hope I'm like him.

I run out of the cavern, back toward Roth.

 

I
fly through the ballroom—some of the retreaters see me and try to call out, but I ignore them. Roth, I have to find Roth. He and the other miners are almost done removing equipment when I reach them. I don't know what to say—I don't know what to think, even. When I reach Roth, I choke on air but force words out despite the burning in my lungs.

“We have to get out,” I hack.

“What?” Roth asks, putting his hands on my shoulders and looking concerned.

“Now. There's going to be a cave-in—we'll get covered up.”

“A cave-in? How do you know?” Roth asks, eyes focusing on me carefully, like he's trying to decide if I'm drunk.

What can I say? That a faery girl in a mine warned me?

“You have to trust me,” I say, and even as I do, I suspect he won't. He barely knows me. He knew my father.
Trust me like you would trust him, please, Roth
. I stand up straight, try my best to look like him, try to channel the intensity of my father's eyes into mine.

“All right,” Roth says; I can tell he thinks I may be crazy, but he reaches for his radio.

In an instant, the mine changes. People abandon jobs, run, jump onto the carts and zip past us, supervisors driving like they're racing. No one jokes in mines, and no one would doubt Roth's word for a moment. People are running, running—

A blast, a sound that sends shock waves through the mine. The retreat miners would never do this while there are still miners in here. Words clutter Roth's radio—
accident, explosion, get out.

Rumbling echoes through the walls, ceilings, floors; it's starting.

I have to be the last to go—if I'm here, maybe Ennor will make her family wait. She won't let me die, she won't let me get trapped in the dark, she knows I'm afraid of the dark—

No, I'm not,
I argue with myself as I realize something: it's not the dark I'm afraid of anymore. It's failing the others.
It's failing my father by not being like him.

I stiffen my knees, like doing so will keep the ground below and the earth above from touching, from crushing me.

“Get on!” Roth shouts at me, shoving my shoulder.

“I want to know everyone's out!” I shout back, but Roth isn't really listening—he's too preoccupied with yelling into the radio, watching carts fly past, counting people. He nods and leaps onto a cart; another miner grabs a passenger seat—everyone is ahead of us now, everyone is on their way out. I jump onto the back of the cart and we take off, speeding like never before.

Dust blinds me, settles in my throat until it feels like I'm breathing in sand. Just as we start to see light ahead, a rock hits the front of the cart; Roth slams the wheel to one side, lifting the wheels off the ground. It's only for a moment, but it's enough to throw me off balance—I hit the mine floor. I taste blood.

 

R
ocks tumble down behind me, the tongue of the earth pressing me against the roof of its mouth, waiting to bite, to tear, to swallow me. I scramble to my feet and run toward the brake lights of Roth's cart; they look like glowing red eyes in the distance. I'm not going to make it. The world is getting smaller and my feet clumsier.
Am I running?
I can't tell—everything is hot and everything is getting blacker.

Maybe it's because it's getting darker that I feel her.

Her fingers slip over my wrist and for a moment, a fleeting moment, I see Ennor. Not her face, not her form, even, but her hair. It flicks behind her as she runs, over the stones like they're grass. She pulls me along, weaving around rocks that rain from the ceiling.

She halts; I stumble past her. Her hair spins around her face, obscuring it. I turn to her and she throws both hands out, slams them against my chest with strength like the earth itself. I fly backward, falling, tripping, sailing, until I slam onto my back at the cave's entrance. The air leaves my lungs, I'm choking, but I feel hands on me, strong hands, men's hands, the miners tugging me to safety.

The light burns my eyes, forcing me to close them. I feel dizzy, disoriented, I hear my name but don't understand where it's coming from or who is asking for me. The only phrase I pick up, a phrase I hold on to like it's a precious stone, is this:

Everyone's accounted for. Looks like we're okay.

They're out. Everyone is out.

But I feel like half of me is still trapped in the mine.

 

I
am a hero.

They ask me questions:
How did you know? Are you psychic? Did you have a gut feeling?

I tell them I can't explain it, because the truth is, I can't.

They decide it must be my father. That his spirit warned me, that he filled me, made my body warn the others. They toast him in my hospital room. Once I'm back home, I get cards from the wives and children of the men who would have been covered up if I hadn't warned them. They tell me my father would be proud. They tell me I'm more like him than I realize. They tell me I'm a miner to the core.

Then they start asking when I'll come back to work, they start saying I'm their lucky charm, that they need me there in the mine. And I wonder if things would change if I was part of it—if I'd be a miner through and through instead of a hero's boy pretending.

No. I'm not a miner. And I've lived up to my father, I've respected his work, I've helped his people. And now I'm moving on—maybe forever. But even if I never come back, I'll be free. I'll be happy.

I'm not afraid anymore.

 

W
hen you're used to the inside of a mine, even the dead of night seems brightly lit—the moon, the stars, they all cast bright blue light on the world. I wonder if this sort of light would hurt Ennor.

The mine entrance is a wall of rock, and there are warning signs everywhere—in front of the entrance, on the rocks, by the guardhouse. I approach the entrance and put my hands on the stone. The dust curls like smoke at my touch.

I don't know what to say—talking to Ennor in the darkness was one thing. She felt real there. Out here, where everything is lit and my body aches, she seems imaginary again.

But she was not, she couldn't be, because if she weren't real, I wouldn't be certain that I am not a miner. I wouldn't be certain that I have to leave this place, that I have to stop being a coward about the world outside of Middleview. I wouldn't feel so certain that someone else knows what it's like to be trapped.

I ease myself to my knees.

“Ennor,” I say; her name sounds loud in the night. I feel a little like I'm talking to a rock. No, I feel a
lot
like I'm talking to a rock. I suppose before I was talking to darkness, but I knew she was there. I could sense her, feel her.

And so I close my eyes.

“Ennor?” I say her name, and it feels more familiar on my tongue now that the world is gone.

There's a long pause, filled with crickets and stars.

“Will.”

I don't know where her voice is coming from; it feels like it's from everywhere, like it's filling, warming my heart and lungs. I grin like a child, extend my hand just like I would have in the cavern, desperate for her to take it.

She doesn't.

“You're leaving,” she says, voice low.

I inhale, drop my hand; the grin fades, but the longing for her touch intensifies. “Yes,” I admit. I wait a long time to speak again, and it's only when the words leave my mouth that I realize how true they are. “I want you to come with me.”

“But I'm a Knocker.”

“Only half.”

“Which half is it?” she asks, toying with the words.

“You're the only one who knows that,” I answer. I feel her fingers, slight and smooth, brush the tips of mine.

She grows closer, and I squeeze my eyes shut to keep myself from opening them. I feel her breath on my cheeks, I feel her fingers wind around mine, and she presses against me. There are tears on her face, but she's nodding, nodding slowly. She pulls her face back and rises, pulls me up with her—I wince as I put weight on my bad leg. We're still, and I know that she's waiting for me to open my eyes. So I do.

She is perfect where the light is.

Tessa Gratton

This Was Ophelia

I
n the darkness, I go mad.

It isn't the heartrending, barefoot madness allowed to my sex, where I wander with bedraggled hair and dying flowers, wailing riddles of loss. My madness is the fierce melancholy of longing. It causes me to sigh through dinner parties and embroider hidden words onto bedclothes intended for part of my dowry. Mother offers excuses when I gaze out the window wishing to run past the horizon instead of making entertaining conversation; and when I don't demur over tea but laugh at Colonel Chapman's opinion, Daddy explains that my brother has always encouraged me too much.

But the sun sets. I strike a match and by candlelight don a tight suit of my brother's. My breasts are easy to bind and I've little in the way of hips, as is best for the high-waisted fashions of New York. The vest cuts a lovely line under my black jacket, and pressed slacks I've only had to mend once fall perfectly hemmed to the shine of my borrowed shoes. I've stuffed them with cut-up stockings. Atop it all is a hat to hide my curls, though they're short, anyway, to better show off choker necklaces and feathered headbands popular on women these days. And I wear gloves, of course, always gloves to disguise the delicate state of my fingers.

I sneak into Daddy's library for a pocketful of cigars and five dollars from the hollow
Book of Days
. Plenty of cash for a single night's escapades.

In the clubs nobody suspects who I am, because I'm tall enough, handsome enough, and my smoke is more expensive than theirs. I say that I'm a Polonius, let them guess I'm Lars or some visiting cousin. “Call me O,” I say.

“As in Osric?” asks a young man with a scarlet tie.

“As in Oliver?” guesses another with a swirl of his brandy.

I bare my teeth at them around my slim black cigar. Slowly, I pull it from my mouth and let smoke trickle through my teeth. “As in . . .” I lean toward them. “Ohhh . . .” I moan in a low voice.

They laugh and swoon, and from then on at Club Rose I'm called “Oh,” or “Oh, oh, oh!” or sometimes they buy me a drink and suggest other words the initial could represent.

I go once a week when I'm feeling mad, at midnight, to carouse with young gentlemen eager to ignore their home lives or futures or responsibilities, to dance with finely dressed but more common women and listen to the latest Rose. I wonder, sometimes, what it would be like to arrive in a dress with my curls slicked to my cheeks and red on my lips. But one of these dandies from uptown might someday be my husband, and wouldn't that crimp the engagement negotiations?

It's late autumn, one in the morning. I've been here for nearly two hours, because it is oh-so-much easier to escape as winter approaches and the sun sets earlier, when the cold wind from Canada blows into the city, chasing upright citizens inside to fires and family. I can tuck my hat lower, wear a heavier jacket, and no one wonders why I hide my face while I wait at the cabstand two blocks from my family's townhome.

I sit swiveling on a bar stool, my back to the liquor in order to watch Rose sing a song about steamy first kisses. A young man all in black, from his tie to his gloves, slides next to me and orders a bourbon and ice. He leans his elbows onto the bar, shoulder near mine, and opens a black-lacquered cigarette case. “Light?” he asks, and I lazily oblige without taking my eyes from Rose.

Her dress is the deep color of raw emeralds, with black fringe swaying as she twists her hips. I'm thinking how good she'd look with a tie around her neck when my neighbor asks, “What's her name?”

I give him a poisonous glance. “Rose.”

He's beautiful, though, and instead of curling my mouth I'm caught in a stare. All that black makes his skin glow in a ghostly fashion and his wavy hair falls over his forehead without wax to make it shine or slick back. Worst of all, I know him. Halden King, the son of our glorious mayor who died only five months ago.

“I've not been here this semester,” he says quietly, “and the last singer was Rose, only with darker skin and smaller tits.”

I take a drag to hide my blush. “They're always Rose,” I say too harshly. The Roses are my favorite thing about this place, why I picked it over the myriad other downtown nightclubs. The patrons understand some kind of anonymity.

“Why?” Hal takes the tumbler that Tio—the barkeeper—offers.

“They're here for the pleasure of money and art—names don't matter.”

“I wish that were true.” He downs half his drink, and the ice clinks hard against the glass.

Leaning nearer to him, I say, “I'll call you anything you want tonight.”

He studies me, eyes lingering on my mouth as I smile around my cigar. So long I feel a jerk of panic that he sees through my disguise. “Sir,” he murmurs, close enough I notice the strangely spicy smell of his dark cigarette. “You already know who I am.”

“True.” My heart pounds and I can't decide if I want him flirting with me because he knows what I am or because he doesn't. “I'm O.”

“Oh,” Hal King says, shaping his mouth around it. He pops his tongue so a ring of smoke escapes.

I laugh, forgetting to modulate my voice, but Hal doesn't seem to notice how girlish it is. As Rose and the piano pick up, I stand and weave my way toward the dance floor. A girl named Patrice holds out her hand and I catch it. I spin her into the crowd and we leap into the fast fox-trot. She grins and I mirror it, teasingly keeping our hips apart.

Every time I glance toward the bar, Hal is watching me.

At song's end, I kiss Patrice at the corner of her mouth, and Hal is there, standing beside the parquet dance floor with a tumbler in each hand. “Join me,” he says, and I do, throwing my arm around his shoulders. His free hand snakes around my waist and blood rushes my ears.

 

I
've never been so lost in laughing and alcohol and hot, delicious conversation! Hal and I take over a table, and he tells me stories about his late father, about his mother and uncle who married her a mere month past the elder Mr. King's death. Hal laments into his drink, and I moan and cry protest at the right moments, leaning in to cuss a wild streak about his obviously treacherous uncle. I whisper to him that my father's said everyone expects Hal's uncle to run in the next year's election, and with Mrs. King's support he'll get in. Hissing, Hal slumps back into the booth. I gasp at his disheveled beauty and tell him I choose to come here because here I can be whoever I wish, not the person my parents expect.

“We can do anything here, Hal,” I say, and he immediately looks at my mouth.

“Brother,” he murmurs, “you make me believe it.”

I can't breathe, but Tio yells out last call. Like Cinderella I leap up. “I've got to go!”

Hal catches my wrist. “Come back tomorrow.”

Two nights in a row is a thing I've never done. It's too likely Daddy will notice I'm gone, too dangerous to think a cab driver would remember me.

But I say, “Tomorrow.”

 

O
ur second night together is more lavish and desperate than the first. Hal arranges a private booth and our own bottle of sixteen-year-old whiskey. Between her sets, Rose joins us, purring lyrics into my ear to make me blush because Hal loves it so. “It makes you seem like a sixteen-year-old virgin,” he says, caressing one long, bare finger down my jaw. “Do you even have a beard yet, O?”

I want to press my face to his and whisper my secret. “You've not so much beard yourself, my prince,” I say.

He barks a laugh. “King,” he corrects.

“But your father was the king, so. My prince.”

Rose interrupts, “You're both such pups!” and she kisses us full on the mouths, one after the other.

As she kisses Hal, his knee presses into mine under the table. It thrills me into knocking my tumbler too hard against the wood as I suddenly set it down.

When Rose leaves for her next song, I slide along the round booth and say to Hal, whose eyes are bright and lips swollen, “Let's get out of here.”

“And go where?” He shoots the last of his whiskey.

I only smile and hand him his soft black gloves.

Outside it's filthy dark and a wet, cold wind cuts under my collar. I dash across the street, loving how easy it is to run with no skirt to fight, no delicate slippers that will ruin in rain. Hal comes after, ducking with me between an old boardinghouse and a shut-down corner pub. The damp street cobbles glint like strings of black pearls in the moonlight. There's a slim public garden tucked on the other side of the block, which I discovered last month when I stumbled out of a cab that dropped me off in the wrong place.

I push through the creaky gate into layers of fallen leaves. A satyr fountain stands silent on the small lawn, spilling no water from its pursed mouth.

“O, this is gorgeous,” Hal says in a hushed tone. “It's like the whole city vanished outside.”

Emboldened by the moon, the full, madness-approving moon, I grab his hand and turn him under my arm into a waltz. It's no easy feat from my shorter stature, but he smiles and falls into the woman's steps, hand firm on my shoulder.

We dance around the satyr, to the music of the wind and the rhythm of the blood in my ears.

“O,” he whispers as we slow.

I put my hands on his face and kiss him. At first it's only a hard press of lips, his cold nose shocking beside mine. Then Hal grabs the lapels of my jacket. He drags me onto my toes and opens his mouth under mine.

It is more than a kiss. I spill out of myself, and the garden spins in dizzy circles. I strip my gloves off and dig my fingers into his hair. As he kisses me, I can feel the muscles of his jaw stretch and contract beneath my thumbs.

A moan grows out of my throat as he runs his mouth down my neck, and his hands sink to my hips. One finger flips aside my jacket and hooks around the belt on my hips.

I tear away.

The violent shove trips me and I land on the cold, frosty grass, panting. I'm a girl! I cover my burning mouth. One more inch and he'd know it, too. Shaking, I stare up at him. Against the moon, Hal is a dark ghost.

“O?” he whispers, crouching before me.

“Hal.” I reach out and touch his bottom lip with a bare finger. My gloves are discarded somewhere like so many dead leaves.

“You've never been kissed before,” he guesses, his voice low and full of something I don't understand.

I snatch back my hand. “Was it so bad?”

But Hal smiles. “No, kitten, it made me feel like I'd never been kissed before, either.”

My fingers hover over my own mouth, and as he watches me the garden opens up. I can see the entire galaxy of stars, of lives and loves, of families and cities and graveyards, of forests and foreign mountains, the oceans and plains.

And here is Halden King in the center of it all. My center.

 

N
o one but my brother notices the shift in my daylight melancholy. Instead of merely being distracted, I'm afflicted by smiles at inappropriate moments, prone to fewer snide observations, and given to sighing happily when Daddy plays a new ragtime record after supper Sunday night. The music is so delightful, my memories of Hal so consuming, I pull Lars to his feet to dance with me. My serious brother manages to enjoy himself, afterward chasing me to my bedroom. He follows me inside and bars the door with his body.

“Phe, what has gotten into you?”

I flit about, unclipping my hair and smiling over my shoulder, wishing I could tell him. Instead I say, “Life, brother! My life is wonderful.”

He narrows his eyes, but I see the very moment he decides he'd rather have me happy even if I keep the reason for it a secret. The understanding lifts his eyebrows just a tick. My brother shakes his head, sits on my bed with his legs stretched out over the quilt, and asks me to read to him from whatever novel I've lately been enjoying most. It's a love story, of course, filled with passionate declarations and racing to stop boats from leaving the docks and tragic betrayal.

Lars falls asleep against the headboard before I'm through a single chapter.

 

H
ours later, Hal escorts me home at the end of our third night. After drinking and dancing, after secret kisses in the satyr's garden. We avoid main thoroughfares, though at this time of morning no one's in our way but fellows as eager for shadows as we are—or the police.

I'm sober and cold by the time we're a block from my family's townhome, but my insides feel clean and light while my hand is in his. I walk as if my feet lift off the ground of their own accord and catch myself smiling too widely. When I pull Hal against a building, he smiles, too. The first hint of purple in the east reflects in his eyes. “I'm going back to school tomorrow.”

In Ohio, I think. Wittenberg University, where his mother's father endowed several scholarships for farmers' sons as he himself had once been. “So far.”

“You must be going to university soon. Apply to Wittenberg.”

I smile bitterly. My brother goes next year, but me? “My father would never.”

Hal kisses me softly. “I'll have to come home more often, then.”

What are you doing? I want to cry—and I don't know if my desperate question should be addressed to him or to myself. Hal is the heir to an estate that might as well be a kingdom and that comes with responsibilities like marriage. How can he speak as though he and I have any future?

A tiny voice reminds me that he could marry me, but the thought pricks my eyes with tears. I don't want to be his dress-wearing, child-bearing hostess-wife. I want this! Suits and dark gardens, wild kisses that I can choose, that I can initiate. This mad power.

“Don't cry, O.” Hal brushes my eyelashes.

If only I could explain the different ways men look at me when they believe I'm one of them.