The Hour Before Dark (25 page)

She reached over and took my hand in hers. “You’ve been through hell since he died.”

“True.”

“I can’t even imagine what it was like. I used to see your father every day, at his store. It’s left all of us feeling unsafe and worried, but most of all, I can’t imagine what it’s like for you. And now, this other stuff. Do you really need it?”

She was a smart woman. Smarter than I had remembered. “Stress?” I asked.

“I don’t know. But it sounds unhealthy. I don’t want you to get hurt. Who knows what it is? Maybe there are such things as ghosts. Maybe there aren’t. But there’s something bad in that smokehouse, and there’s something you need to avoid for now.”

Strangely, her words had the opposite effect on me than they probably should have. I held her hand as she spoke, and I thought: What am I afraid of? There are no ghosts. This is something else. This is my mind cracking a bit, trying to make sense of everything. It’s coming back here, it’s reopening old wounds, it’s feeling love and feeling abandoned all over again. It’s living in Hawthorn. It’s the house, it’s everything that comes up from it. What am I afraid of? What is there to fear?

“You’re not listening to me,” Pola said.

“Yes, I am.”

She smiled. “No you aren’t. What are you thinking? Just tell me.”

“I guess I’m thinking that maybe I’ve just been afraid of things. My whole life. Avoiding what’s hard to look at or figure out. That maybe I left here because I was afraid of what I didn’t understand. Something in me is resisting the idea that something’s wrong at home, with Brooke. Something in me doesn’t want to face it. But I think I have to. I think I have to stop leaving things behind and start looking into them,” I said. It felt like a huge relief to say it. “I’ve been afraid of home. All my life. I’ve been afraid of it.”

7

I spent the night with her. I woke up early, and not wanting to wake Pola, crept into her kitchen to make some coffee for myself with a minimum of banging around. Harry’s book,
Talking to the Lost
by Mary Manley, was where I’d left it on the counter. I picked it up, sat down at the small table in the breakfast nook, and began flipping pages.

It looked ridiculous and dull—I read a sentence or two. “... the prophecies at the Windward House were followed by rapping on the wall...” and “... I saw an aura that screamed, dark and terrible, around the woman, and I knew that she was possessed by the child ...” It all made me think that Harry’s childhood obsessions with aliens and hypnotism had never quite matured.

As I skimmed parts of the book, mainly glancing at the pictures, I realized I should just look through the index. I flipped to the back, scanned down the page, and saw the words “games: children, p. 123”—and flipped to that page.

8

Mary Manley wrote:

I’ve found in my studies of gifted children that when they’ve been raised in what I’d term an extreme situation, they often create rituals to help them cope with the trauma. To some extent, all children do this, but the ones I’ve studied, who seem to possess a level of telepathy, have had heightened trauma in their lives. Witnessing the loss of parents in a car crash, as one subject in the California study had, drove the subject to develop a unique religion that had a Hierarchy of gods and goddesses and a language that could be perfectly translated, with nearly 600 words in it. The child was only five years old. Similarly, the man I call Eric B also had developed a stylized ritual in order to escape an extremely abusive childhood, in which he was tormented endlessly by his mother, who kept him locked in the house until he was nearly fifteen, at which point she died. When he was discovered, he did not believe anyone could see him. He had so convinced himself he was invisible that it took nearly six years for him to learn the magical system he’d created in his head did not correspond to the real world.

Yet, he could prophesy disasters and predict, with some accuracy, the outcome of football games at his local school. His gift of prophecy seemed to be directly related to both the trauma he had suffered, as well as the ritual he had created to keep himself safe and sane during those years in the dark.

We’ve seen soldiers in prison camps do this as well. Who in the world can forget Micah Rollins, a private in World War II captured by the Nazis, who manifested bums on his face from believing—in his ritual—that he had flown so fast through the air he had begun to burst into flames upon entering the Earth’s atmosphere? Correspondingly, Rollins’ ritual had begun not in the prison camp, but as a child in his Kansas home. At the age of six, he’d been running with his mother through a summer thunderstorm, when both of them had been struck by lightning. His mother had died, but Rollins survived. I have no doubt that the rituals he created as a child were what allowed him to survive in the German camps as a POW.

The result of these games and rituals that children of extreme trauma have created seems to be a manifestation of some inner reality. With a woman named Willa Trent in Barstow, California; the depth of what she’d experienced as a child became the very thing that nearly drove her to suicide when she was forty-two years old. She had created such an inner world since childhood that she could no longer cope with the outer one. The attending psychiatrists and clinicians, who studied her as if she would show them about the inner workings of the human mind in a way that no one ever could, all came away with the notion that Willa was a fraud. Yet, in her forties, having tried to take her own life, it was found that she could levitate at will. She had done this since childhood, but had never really believed that it was real, only that it was part of a complicated game process she’d created that was part hopscotch, part prayer, and part witchcraft. (It will be noted that Willa did not believe she was a Wiccan or a Pagan at all. She firmly maintained that she based her witchcraft on cartoons and fairy tales.) I was able to witness one of Willa’s levitations (before she went into seclusion, refusing to see either doctors or the press ever again), and while it was less remarkable than the word “levitation” might suggest, I saw that Willa had taken what was once called “mass hysteria” to a new level. She had not developed the power to fly. What she had done was develop a powerful telepathic power that was beyond language. She did not speak within people’s minds. She created images in them. She had somehow made herself able to project images into many people’s minds. Interestingly, it was primarily the medical profession that swore to having seen her rise off the ground. I did not. But I learned that, in fact, Willa Trent had developed a powerful will, and a creative form of telepathy I had never before witnessed.

9

I set the book down and closed it.

I sipped coffee and stared at the back of the book, at Mary Manley’s photograph.

Then I went back to the pages I’d just been reading, and skimmed a few: ... what the psychologists and the psychiatrists seem to have missed in the cases of Willa Trent and Micah Rollins was that they had simply done what all children do. To the nth degree. Most children have difficulties in their lives. Most don’t understand the world adults foist upon them. How many children are sexually abused each year? How many witness murder? How many are beaten? How many are outcasts? Those children may ritualize their differentness. They may create their own ways of dealing with the continual abuse or affront to their own nature. But if you multiply that abuse by ten, or one hundred, how much more powerful will those rituals be on the minds of the children? We know so little about the developing mind of a child—and when that mind has been crushed in some way, a strong child may create a ritual for compensating for the boot on his back. A strong child may create a sense of security with an imaginary friend, a game, a ritual, a religion. Because without it, perhaps, reality is too terrifying to face at a young age. But it is in adulthood that these children need to slough off the old skin of these rituals. No doubt, many do. But there are those who do not—like Willa Trent. Like Micah Rollins. Like Eric B.

Each of them faced a trauma in adulthood that forced them back into the childhood ritual for survival.

And the manifestations from their minds became more powerful as a result.

1

I thought about the Dark Game, and how its ritual had somehow messed with our minds. I didn’t see our childhood as particularly harrowing. Perhaps our mother leaving had been the extreme moment that Manley wrote about. Perhaps it even explained my having taken on a voice, a distinct personality, inside the smokehouse, but that wouldn’t explain why Mary Manley herself had also been “possessed” (using her own terminology) there. Ghosts. Games. Rituals.

Murder.

I just wanted some ordinariness to creep back into my life.

As I sat in Pola’s kitchen, I felt an urgency to get back home.

I was going to take off and write a brief note to Pola, but I waited.

Nothing’s wrong there.

This is all just messing with your head.

You’ll get Brooke to the doctor in a day or two.

And then maybe you’ll get a check-up, too.

2

When Pola and Zack got up, I invited them to Hawthorn just to hang out a while.

The three of us drove through the village in the early morning just as the sun was coming up through a haze of cloud and mist. The road, finally plowed out to Hawthorn, had its requisite potholes and ice patches intact, and Zack laughed each time his mother’s car hit one or the other.

I felt a little hope in my gut, which seemed to be a new kind of feeling.

3

Brooke was, of course, still asleep, and I didn’t bother going off in search of Bruno. I set Zack to work in the kitchen with me to make eggs and bacon for breakfast, while Pola sat on a nearby stool and watched us try to coordinate the various pans and plates.

It was chilly in the house, and Zack decided that someone needed to make a fire in the fireplace in the living room.

After a relaxing morning, talking old times and letting Zack tell me the history of his life as a young inventor, I went out the front door again to get some wood from the pile by the front porch.

It was still misty out, as it sometimes was even on the coldest of days on the island. The smells of cleanness that snow and ice brought with them lifted my spirits as I went. 

As I trudged through the crusty snow by the porch, I lifted some of the wood—the top layer was wet, and so I dug down deeper in the pile. I thought I heard a noise—as if someone were nearby and had perhaps called my name, only indistinctly.

When I glanced up, I saw a woman standing at the open door of the smokehouse.

1

I set the wood back down on the pile.

My heart began to beat rapidly. I don’t know why. There was nothing frightening about the woman. She stood in front of the door to the smokehouse, with fog all around her, and I was nearly positive it was Brooke. But I didn’t call out to her or wave. My mouth went dry, and I squinted to see her better, but each time I tried to focus on her, she seemed to blur more. I felt a strange prickly heat along my back and felt feverish at the back of my scalp and along my forehead.

Brooke just stood there, and then she went inside the building.

My breathing was rapid, as if I’d run a mile, but in fact I had remained perfectly still for a minute or two. My heart rate felt as if it were increasing, and I suddenly thought of the one or two news stories I’d seen of men my age or even younger who suddenly dropped dead of heart attacks. It was pure fear within me, and I could not for the life of me understand why the idea of Brooke being inside the smokehouse would have such an effect on me.

It’s not Brooke, some voice within me intoned. It’s her. It’s the Banshee. It’s the ghost that Harry Withers believes is there. It’s whatever killed Dad. It’s something evil. Some malevolence that exists. Some awful spirit of darkness that you conjured up.

Yes, you. Don’t deny it You three, playing your games, playing your Dark Game after dark. Using the game to conjure devils.

Using the Dark Game to bring something into existence.

Some force.

I would never before have entertained such an irrational thought. I did not believe in these things. I did not believe in the spirit world, in evil entities, in conjuring ghosts.

But the child that still lived within me, the boy who had kept his eyes closed and been with Brooke and Bruno as we played that game, as we took it to heights that our father would never have dreamed we would, that we remained long after dark, sneaking out of the house to go into the smokehouse, that awful little icy building and conjure the Banshee.

Bring her forth.

It has to be your imagination. It can’t be real You’re under stress. It’s anxiety. It’s normal under current conditions. Your life is all Jumblies. Your world is upside down. You have love and hate confused in your family. Your father whipped you when you were a boy. Your mother left you and never contacted any of you. You grew your imagination with your brother and sister in a game that was too powerful for young minds.

Young minds that could create within themselves something hideously evil.

Something dark.

The Dark Game wasn’t supposed to be played at night.

The Dark Game wasn’t supposed to go on like it did.

And one night, it got out of hand.

One night, the night when the Brain Fart began, it went too long. You almost died. You came to in the woods with blood on you; Brooke was found out in the field, shivering from cold; Bruno was soaked with fever-sweat. You three had done something terrible with the Dark Game.

Or it had done something terrible with you.

Your father knew.

He knew that it had gotten the better of you.

He knew that you were no match for the Dark Game.

He knew that whatever was in the smokehouse was evil.