The Hour Before Dark (26 page)

He knew about the Banshee.

2

With all that burning in my brain, you’d think I would’ve not walked across the road and down the slight hill, crunching through snow, to find out who was inside the smokehouse.

But I had to. I could no longer take the sense that something in the world was so skewed that I might just be losing my mind, even as I was beginning to feel the hope of a renewal with Pola. The hope that something wonderful could be salvaged from the waste of my life and the nastiness of my father’s death.

When I reached the smokehouse, I saw that the lock had been torn off. Ripped away.

I glanced back at the main house. I imagined Pola and Zack pulling out the Scrabble board or flipping through the stack of magazines Brooke kept by the coffee table.

From within the smokehouse:

The smell that came at me was like the stench of a dead animal, its stomach ripped open.

I had a flash of an image in my head:

My father, lying on the floor
.

I entered that place regardless of fear and inner turmoil.

The place of punishment.

3

Some part of me had been hoping she would have vanished, this phantom, this Brain Fart of some kind. Or even that Brooke would be standing there, in a somnambulistic trance.

But instead, I saw her clearly.

She stood at the center of the smokehouse as the morning light entered, and even the light touched her skin. She had a corporeal presence. It was not Brooke, nor was it some other woman of the village. I felt a terrible hunger from her—the look in her eyes, the tortured grimace of her lips pulled back across her teeth, the sense I had that she was somehow a smudge of darkness, as if I could see her aura. I felt immediately that this was the woman I had sensed when I closed my eyes at night. This was the woman I had feared when Brooke went from room to room in the house. I felt electric waves of fury emanating from her—the only way I can describe it, for it did feel like a power surge in the air.

Then the door to the smokehouse slammed shut behind me.

I felt a series of electrical shocks along my arms and up my spine. It was as if I had begun short-circuiting. I was barely aware of the blood that dripped from my nose, as it had when I’d been a boy and the air was too dry in winter.

I thought that I was dying right then.

Right there.

Darkness descended within the smokehouse, like a candle just snuffed, with only the diffuse glow from the door’s window allowing me to see one square of light.

It fixed upon her face.

I thought this was a vision that I’d see at the moment of death.

My bones seemed to pain me, as if they wished to break free from my flesh.

I could not take a breath as I watched her.

Her face, seething. Her visage cruel.

Her eyes staring as if she could not see me, as if I were the ghost.

My mother.

1

I lost focus as soon as I saw her face.

It was as if my tear ducts had suddenly released a gusher, and it all went blurry. My mother? I stood there, motionless, frozen, numb on the outside, in the pinpricks along my arms and legs and deep down in my groin, my balls feeling as if they wanted to curl up inside my body never to descend again. In that moment, I felt as if my body were something alien, and my mind, what intelligence I possessed, was separate and hovering, still connected by nerves and the whoosh of blood (which I seemed to hear within my ear canals), but an entirely separate entity that had acknowledged that the flesh and bones surrounding it were of some other being, and that being was scared shitless. I didn’t piss my Levis, but I had one of the few nosebleeds I’d had in my lifetime.

Did I mention the awful word: insane? Not the big version of the word, not INSANE as in irredeemable over the chasm, I but the lowercase insane, the insane that was just a wriggling : little worm in my head. It could not be my mother. I could not see her clearly anymore, anyway. My vision was going bonkers, and my body seemed to be crapping out on me—and still, I felt it was her.

Do people do this? I wondered. Do people whose loved one has been slaughtered begin to break down and see things? Like the serpent shimmer of the greenhouse glass, and my sister’s visions.

Was I succumbing to it? Temporary, mild hallucinatory visions? I felt the cold of the world. Not the winter and its snow and ice. The cold of the world—all that was ugly and fruitless and unloved and irredeemable. The shrugged. The sloughed.

And then the blurry image of the woman whom I knew to be my mother was gone. My vision returned, albeit with a generous hosing of tears—or so it seemed to be at the time— and I saw the wall again.

In my mind, the awful thought: She has come home. She has returned. From Brazil.

And another, awful part of me began chattering, a looking-glass world jabbering:

It’s your mind. It’s only you. You let it get to you. Let it all get inside you. You were insane as a little boy, and you’re crazy now, all the Raglans are crazy, you’re inbred Yankees, what killed your father was some evil people, some sadistic narcissistic killers who enjoyed the slaughter, and this vision is your mind melting down. It’s your own personal China syndrome. It’s your fucked-up nature finally imploding and fucking you up even more.

Yet, I experienced a split, even as these words ran through my head. I was not insane.
I know I am not. I am perfectly sane in a normal everyday sanity, the kind that might crack at some future point, but not now. Not healthy and twenty-eight and knowing that there are no radio signals coming into my head from another planet or that the government has some conspiracy going that directly involves something I know, or that the Devil is trying to find out what I’m thinking.
I was not insane—to even think it, I knew that I could not be.
To even question my sanity, I must be sane. I must be.

I was alone in the smokehouse with a bloody nose and a revulsion in my body, as if I had been carrying around in my vital organs, my whole life, some devouring parasite that had begun fighting against its host.

And then something touched my hand.

Something that sent a ripple of disgust and revulsion through me, beginning at the palm of my hand. A terrible, nearly sexual feeling, that touch, that invisible feeling of something warm and moist pressing itself into my hand, a woman clutching my fingers, squeezing them, an unseen woman who was there in that dreadful place with me. In the second it happened, I felt like a child again and opened my mouth to cry out, only my throat was too dry; I tasted the blood from my nose as it dribbled onto my tongue. It was not the metallic taste I’d expected, but a sweet, sugary spike; stop squeezing my hand, I thought, let go, you’re hurting me.

The pressure on my fingers continued, and I stared at my hand and watched the skin ripple as if some magnet were pulling at nails beneath it, and the nails moved the flesh—and the tickling continued—and I felt the pressure of fingernails along my wrist, and saw the skin press in like a sponge— and then a sharp pain came, and a small droplet of blood appeared on the surface of my skin. I thought it was from the nosebleed, but it bubbled up from my wrist, and a cut in the skin grew slightly—cutting into me.

Stop it.

Stop it!

I brought my other hand down and tugged at the wrist that was held so tightly. It seemed ridiculous—I kept looking at the place where the blood and pressure were, but it was nothing; nothing.

I pulled at my arm with all the power I could muster and tripped, falling backward.

I realized that my head would hit the stone wall of the smokehouse, and sure enough, when I landed, I felt as if my brains had just been smashed against some enormous boulder.

I lay on the wood-slatted floor of the smokehouse, the back of my head throbbing and banging. I looked into the darkness, and again found the square of light that came through the window, the hazy light of morning.

And in that light, I saw a face from Hell.

Not my mother at all.

Perhaps not even a woman.

Stringy, matted hair hung over the blood-soaked face.

The mouth, open, had small nubs of what must have been broken teeth.

The eyes were empty, their sockets drawn back, as if it had not been enough to tear the eyes out, but someone had gone further and dug the holes deep, scraping back the flesh.

I saw pinpoints of light—not from the square of the window, but from the pain in my head. I knew I was passing out, and I was somewhat relieved that whatever I was seeing would pass—or kill me.

I heard a metallic sound, as of a knife being sharpened against stone, only it seemed to be louder and nearly like a bell.

I blacked out.

2

The Dark Game came to me—I dreamed it or remembered it in whatever corridors my brain still had working. I knew I dreamed, and I knew I was the grown-up Nemo, but I was somehow hovering and watching myself at the age of nine, as I stood there with a blindfold on, holding hands with my sister, a sullen eight-year-old, and Bruno, an impossibly small four and a half.

“Here comes a candle to light you to bed,” we all three recited, “and here comes a chopper to chop off your head.” Three or four times we said it, and Bruno seemed to be crying beneath his ragged blindfold, which looked as if it had been made from one of my mother’s old pantyhose.

Then young Nemo said, “We’ll go there again. We’ll find out why she went there, and we’ll see if we can bring her back.”

“Daddy said not to,” Brooke said, her voice like the chirp of a sparrow.

“I’m the Master of the Dark Game tonight,” Nemo said.

“It’s nighttime,” Bruno whined. “I’m scared.”

“Don’t be. It only works now. We’ll stop by dark, I promise. It’s still light out. But the power happens now. Let’s go find her,” Nemo said below me. “She’ll come back. We can make her come back where she is, and then none of it happened.”

“I’m scared, too,” Brooke whispered. She nearly broke contact with Nemo’s hand, but he held on to her fingers.

“Don’t break the circle,” he said. “Follow me.”

“Where?” Brook asked.

And then, the Nemo-of-nine said, “We’re going there, we’re going back before that night. We’re going back to the house, and we’re going to do it different, and we’re going to make sure that none of it ever happens again. We can find her, and we can bring her back.”

But his face had begun to perspire, and I could feel his heat—and the heat of the other two—they were burning with fever, even in the freezing cold, they were frying themselves, they were pushing their minds too hard.

3

I opened my eyes.

I was still inside the smokehouse, on the floor, with a gargantuan ache at the back of my head, and an intense feeling of exhaustion. I sat up, my muscles sore as if I’d been running for miles, my body covered with sweat, a shivering throughout.

I could barely bring myself to look at the square of light.

Nothing.

No one.

4

It felt as if my mind were flashing on and off.

As if lightning played within my head.

I closed my eyes to remember the Dark Game.

5

Holding hands with Bruno and Brooke, in a circle, peeking beneath my blindfold to make sure they weren’t peeking at me.

Reciting the nursery rhyme, and then feeling as if we were soaring—all three of us—into a darkness.

And there she was, waiting for us.

Our mother.

Not quite our mother.

Our mother somehow rebuilt inside our imaginations. Our mother crossed with the Ice Queen.

The Maiden of Snow.

The Banshee.

A hybrid of our idea of some monstrous woman and our beautiful mother, with her honey-gold hair turned white, and her eyes yellow-red and fixed with a cruel but cold, snakelike gaze.

Somehow, somehow... we had created her.

1

I must have stumbled out of the smokehouse, but I barely remember it. When I came to, Pola and Zack were calling to me from the porch of the house.

When I glanced their way, I thought I felt a pull, A gravitational pull, trying to draw me back into the smokehouse-like invisible fingers, tugging at me.

The sky was heavy with the smoky clouds that generally meant more bad weather—the predictions had been for yet another storm, as we always got on the island in December.

I had the odd sensation that I was dead. Dead and crawling across the ground, but not feeling it. Trying to resist the pull, that force, that magnet, which wanted my body back in the smokehouse.

I heard Pola’s cries, and then a sound like the giant wings of a bird flapping close to my ear—My breath was labored.

I felt as if my lungs were frozen.

I felt hands upon me.

With some effort, I turned slightly to see who had their hands on my shoulders.

As if I saw her at the end of a long dark tunnel, Pola knelt there beside me.

Her lips moved, but I couldn’t hear her.

Next to her, standing over the two of us was her son, Zack.

His eyes were wide, as if he were seeing something awful, and he wasn’t looking at me. I knew who he saw. I knew he must see her as well.

Not Pola, but the other one.

Then I heard Pola’s voice. “Nemo? Nemo, are you all right? Nemo?”

I watched, unable to move or speak, feeling a chilling paralysis in my bones, and saw Zack move away.

As if someone were calling him, and he alone could hear the voice.

2

Sound returned, and then more clear vision; finally, after a minute or so, I felt the pinpricks along my legs and arms and the soles of my feet, I could sit up, and felt wet in the snow.

Pola was nearly in tears, but she fought to keep them back. “Oh, my God,” she said. “You frightened me. Are you all right?”