The Hour Before Dark (30 page)

It’s the Dark Game. Play it. Play it as the Master of it.

I grabbed Bruno by the wrists. “We have to go there now. Right now!”

Bruno looked at me as if I had just told him we were going on a roller coaster. He grinned, nodding, and closed his eyes.

The game - a drug - a door to a better place.

I closed my eyes, terrified that I’d open them again to find the scythe coming down on my neck.

Let’s go there, let’s go. We'll find you, Brooke. We'll find you there, and we'll bring you out. Come on.

I felt Bruno’s mind slip into mine, easily, Like a hand in a glove.

Calm, as well.

In the darkness, I saw Brooke, her blindfold on.

In the darkness, I pulled the blindfold back. Tore it from her face.

I saw her eyes look up at mine.

My little sister.

I opened my eyes again and let go of Bruno’s hands.

Brooke was nearly next to me, both feet on the floor.

“You watched him torture me! You let him kill me!” she shouted with the voice of our mother. She swung the scythe up and seemed to bring it down to Bruno’s arm, but he moved at just the last second, and it sliced, instead, into his leg. I grabbed her by the wrist and shook her. I felt a jolt of electricity go through her, and that awful sweet feeling of the game.

She dropped the blade. It slid across the floor. She twisted her arm out from my hand and lunged at me, her teeth nearly going to my throat. It was like fending off a mad dog.

I threw her back with all my strength; she landed on the bed, its sheets catching fire as if she were the fire herself.

The howling wind outside the broken window—

I heard the explosive slamming of doors in the house, one after the other.

Brooke began biting her arms, reopening the cuts on them, blood on her lips. The flesh curling back as the wounds spread wide.

“Yes! Yes! Hold my hands,” she said. “Hold my hands. We don’t have to be here. We can go there. Into the dark. We can be with her. With Mother.”

I rushed to her and yanked her up from the burning bed; the skin along her neck had begun bubbling from the burn, and her hair had caught fire. I wrapped her in the quilt, snuffing out the flames along her scalp, and lifted her up.

She pressed her lips to my neck as I carried her, licking. It was the nastiest thing I’d ever felt. 

It’s not her. It’s not. It’s not a ghost. It’s something we created in that game. It’s something that exists in it. 

We don’t play it. 

It plays us.

I carried her out of her bedroom, opening one door after another to get out of the house; she clawed at me the whole way, scraping my neck and tearing at my coat like it was made of paper.

“Bruno, come on!” I shouted.

10

The fire had its own power—that same surge we’d felt—and it spread too fast on the upper floor. Flames shot out of the windows.

I lay Brooke down in the snow on the quilt.

“Watch her!” I said.

I went back in for Pola and Zack, but as I raced through the rooms on the ground floor, I saw shapes of things—of children—of us, the three of us, children in the house, as if I were seeing quick flashes of moments from my childhood. Part of me wondered whether I was still in the smokehouse.

Still in the Dark Game.

My brain was flashing on and off, as if it had a struggle to make sense of everything that had gone on that night.

At the other end of the house, in the greenhouse, the door leading outside was wide open.

I saw light down by the woods. A flashlight’s beam.

I cupped my hands around my mouth and shouted Pola’s name.

I heard a call back up from the woods.

Pola’s voice.

They were safe.

11

I stood outside and watched Hawthorn burn, as it probably should’ve burned years before. The greyhounds were on leashes—when we’d been in the smokehouse, Pola and her son had taken the dogs out through the back of the house, and they’d run off again. Pola and Zack went out in the storm, leashes in hand, to get them back. And come back they did; perhaps, those dogs even saved the lives of the woman and boy who chased them down.

Bruno took Brooke up to Harry’s SUV, and we sent Zack running across the road to go ask Paulette and Ike Doone to call the fire department if they hadn’t already.

I was hoping that the place would just burn.

None of us could ever live there again.

None of us would want to sleep in that house, or even in its general vicinity. It would be days before we could even mourn Harry's death; we were in shock.

Shock would be our operating mode for weeks to come.

But that night, our home burning, in the snow, I felt hope from the woman who stood beside me.

12

“I don’t think life has meaning,” I said to Pola. “I just don’t. Not after this.”

Pola took my hand, squeezing it lightly. It was like some Morse code between us, and I felt some meaning in her touch. No Dark Game there. “Don’t die twice,” she said.

I glanced at her. Her face, beautiful and undisturbed. She was a survivor of things. She was someone I wanted to understand better.

“There’s plenty of time for what will come. You and I will grow old. We’ll be haunted by the past. But it’s just the past,” she said. “I’m not sure there are answers here. In this world. It’s just mystery here. I think all we’re supposed to do is ask the questions. The answers are for later.”

I had nothing to say to this. I had no defense. I felt an enormous burning within myself, even as the last of the house went, and with it, some screams in my head that I suppose had not stopped since I’d been a little boy and had watched my mother die at the hands of my father.

There we were: Pola, her scarf tied around her hair, her beige jacket wrapped around her body; and me, standing on the gravel of the roadside, watching the fire consume the night.

In the darkening sky, the ashes floated gray and white:, upward, like snowflakes turning from the earth back to the heavens.

I had no words left. I reached for her, clung to her, held her, and I wanted life more than anything else in the world.

1

The murder of my father was never officially solved. There were no fingerprints. There was no evidence beyond pictures in our minds. Bruno and I knew it hadn’t really been Brooke. We knew it had been something else. An energy there, brought from darkness.

A power, fueled by a children’s game.

Fueled by fear and anger and terror.

And by something we would probably never be able to fully understand.

Perhaps, a psychic spark against a flint of human madness.

Not our mother.

But an imaginary monster called Banshee that three children had conjured once upon a time.

2

I suppose if Harry hadn’t been diagnosed as having a heart attack, Joe Grogan would’ve believed our stories about apparitions and possession and a game that drove you mad and turned you into some land of psychic generator. (We didn’t mention Brooke. We protected her. We knew the truth.) “He had a heart murmur,” Joe told me. “It could’ve happened at any time.”

I knew better. Even Joe had seen the way Harry’s face looked. It had contorted not in pain, but in fear.

But I let it go. No good would be served by protesting about what no one—least of all a policeman with an orderly and skeptical mind—would not believe unless he had been there to experience it.

Still, I knew I'd spend my life regretting ever allowing Harry into that smokehouse. It was the birthplace of all fear, for every one of us.

My mother’s remains were positively identified from dental records, and we buried her in the Raglan cemetery down beyond the woods, but not ‘til spring. I insisted that she not be buried near where my father was finally laid to rest, but at the opposite end, near Granny Pree, whom my mother had loved so much.

Brooke left the island, perhaps too quickly; we worried about her but her occasional notes and phone calls sounded as if she were healing; Bruno and I remained; Pola and I took in the greyhounds, both of whom wreaked havoc on Pola’s small house, but Zack adored them.

I adored them as well, for they had saved two people I loved very much, just by being out of control.

3

We three Raglans decided to sell off parcels of land, once summer came around. We all could use the money, and Bruno expressed an ambition to build a small place on the other side of the woods, far away from where Hawthorn had stood. So, we’d keep a few acres, and sell the rest as buyers became interested. Bruno and I wanted Brooke to have the lion’s share of any sale, but she insisted that whatever sale MontiLee Stormer could get, the proceeds would be divided three ways.

I still had to overcome my fear of the place.

I went there in March and wandered the ruins of the house. I couldn’t bring myself to go near the smokehouse, and frankly, congratulated myself on that wisdom. No use opening that door, ever again.

As I walked around the property, with the winter chill and that whistling wind still biting at my neck, I felt a peace I’d never experienced there before.

It was gone.

Whatever had been there that was bad.

It had left.

Burnt itself out.

4

We had a reunion of sorts in June at Hawthorn—Midsummer’s Eve, to be exact. The longest day of the year, which also meant the longest twilight.

The weather was delightful, the mosquitoes were a bit heavy, and Pola and I spent an afternoon cooking and preparing, with Zack running errands to make sure there were enough potatoes for the German potato salad, and for last-minute runs to Croder-Sharp-Callahan for paper plates.

Zack invited his friends, Mike and Mike’s sister, Jenny, whose parents were going off on a sailboat with another couple that evening. It was nearly like having a big family in tow, but I loved every minute.

Bruno and Cary met us in the village. We drove from there out to the property.

5

All that was left of the house was its foundation and what I’d best call “scraps”—broken glass, burnt out frames of windows, some brick rubble—the ruins. Wild-flowers, brightly colored in lavender and yellow, had sprung up around the foundation, and we settled on the southern edge of the foundation for our picnic. Cary had a huge quilt, which he spread out; it fit nearly all of us, with our feet hanging over the edge in the fresh green grass. The kids went off to play games down by the duck pond.

“How’s the book?” Cary asked.

“Crap,” I said. “But what the hell. I’m putting everything I have in me into it. It’ll probably never get published.”

“It’ll get published,” he said. “And I’ll even read it. What’s it called?”

I didn’t want to tell the title at first, but I couldn’t very well keep it a secret too long. “The Dark Game,” I said.

“Ah.” Bruno nodded. “And it’s about?”

“Innocence and evil,” I said. I didn’t want to talk much about it. The story for the book was pretty much writing itself, and I’d discovered that the less said about a writing project, the more urgent it seemed to me to write it. “How’s the business?”

“Same as yesterday,” he said, grinning. “Same as tomorrow.”

“MontiLee sell this place yet?”

“Three offers, but she said we should turn ‘em down. She said give it another three weeks of summer, and we’ll get the real offers.”

“Regular entrepreneurs we are,” I said. “Brooke probably wishes we’d just take an offer soon.”

“Brooke never responded,” he said.

“She’ll show.”

“I’m not sure if she’s coming,” Bruno said.

“She’ll be here,” I said.

I knew my sister well enough to know that she’d somehow find a way back here for this one evening. She had, after all, been the center of the family in ways that neither Bruno nor I ever could be. Yet, he and I chose to remain on Burnley, despite the past. Brooke had moved on, going first to the Cape, and then up to Maine, getting work in an art shop there.

I suppose she also had reason to never come back.

But the three of us had found some peace together; some middle ground of friendship that seemed to surpass the bad memories.

Since Bruno and I saw each other fairly regularly in the village, we just talked about the weather and the onslaught of summer tourists.

I followed Zack and his friends down to the duck pond to show them how to skip rocks.

“You choose a good flat one,” I said. “Like this.” I angled it and threw it in the pond, but it plopped down without a skip. “Been too many years,” I said.

Zack laughed, picked up any old rock he found, and tossed it—the damn thing skipped three times before sinking.

“You’ve been practicing,” I told him.

Pretty soon, Jenny and Mike were  just throwing pebbles into the duck pond. The ducks, wisely, either flew away or skedaddled to the other side of the pond.

Jenny discovered -- among the house debris -- what looked like the torn remnants of an old sheet, with light green flowers on it. She held it up. “Somebody lost their bed,” she said.

“Must be a squatter’s,” I said.

“What’s that?” Zack asked.

Jenny made pouty sounds as her brother tugged the sheet away from her.

“Someone who camps out someplace where nobody notices. They squat,” I said. 

Zack gave me a funny look. 

“It’s not a precise definition,” I added. I glanced over at the other kids, who'd begun fighting.

“Give it back!” Jenny protested.

“It’s dirty!” Mike said, flinging the sheet back to his sister. “Take your ol’ dirty sheet.”

“It’s pretty,” little Jenny said, wrapping it up in her arms. “I’m gonna make a dress.”

Mike and Zack rolled their eyes, and Jenny ignored them, rolling the sheet up as if it were some great treasure.

Zack grabbed my hand and wanted me to lean down so he could whisper something to me.

“What?” I asked.

“She’s here.”