The Hour Before Dark (17 page)

At four, when he wanted ice cream, it sounded like “ice queen,” so I just made up the stories. At first, when I read some of them to him, he got scared, and stopped asking for “ice queen” at all.

5

Here is a bit of it, with typos and misspellings intact. I was ten at the time: CHAPTER FIVE: THE ICE QUEEN RISES!

I SHALL COME FOR THE CHILDREN! the Ice Queen, the Queen of FROZEN CREAMY HELL, said, and she wrapped herself in the furs of bears and lions, and she had her Oomos, those filthy goblins of the Underland whose breath is so foul that people think its farts from a dead cow and whose hands are so grimey that they spread disease wherever they go, carry her to her Slay, made entirely of diamonds cut from the fingers of new brides. The Slay glowed and shined like millions of stars, and the Ice Queen, called by some Imyrmia, sat in it with her trusty demon servant, Chamelea, the lizard-faced and hog-bellied. The Slay was pulled by twin dragons, tortured in the Castle Fragonard that lies above the Lake of Glass and Fire at the very heart of Underland. The dragons were once kind-hearted beasts, but Imyrmia, in anger over their father’s not wanting them to be slaves of her Relm, took them to her basement and turned them into zombie dragons doing only her bidding . She used bobbed wire to beat them onward as they flew up up up from the deep diamond and ruby caves of Under land.

When the Slay came all the way up into Earth, lightning tore at the ground, opening it up for Imyrmia’s Slay. Blasts of fire and BELCHES OF FOOL STENCH! blew up like a fart from an oger’s butt. Even the twin dragons hated the smell and coughed fire as they rose into a blackened sky, their tails twisting and smashing trees down as they went and setting entire forests ablaze with their coughs.

All the land knew of the Ice Queen’s arrival, for they had known her many years before. Once upon a time, she was the Maiden of Snow, and she brought the dancing elves and fairys of winter across the land. She had made everyone have fun, and children through the entire world could skate and ski and have snowball fights and make snow angels and snow people and never go to school when the Maiden of Snow was there. But then, she got picked up by the FEARFUL AND MIGHTY ruler of Underland, a monster so dirty his skin was crawling with germs. His hair was home to thousands of cities of lice. His skin seemed alive with red mites. When he walked, his feet never touched ground, for rats and centipedes lifted the souls of his feet up on their backs and did the walking for him like roller skates. He is known as Dogrun the Merciless. He wanted the Maiden of Snow in his kingdom because it was too hot and he needed better weather. Underland was on fire most of the time. People there breathed the foulest stenches and drank polluted water from the Twin Lakes of Rhea (which were called Dya and Gonna, sisters enchanted and turned into lakes of brown lava full of wastes and chemical spills and oil spills.) Dogrun the Merciless needed a bride. So he grabbed the Maiden of Snow, Imyrmia, and she screamed, but she had to go into Underland with him. He forced her to marry him, and the heat of Under land melted her heart for him. But she herself made Dogrun’s heart turn cold, and he could not be married to her anymore. She had turned Evil, and she ended up imprisoning him on the Dark Isle of Lost Devils, a place where those demons went who no longer had Evil Believers in the world above them. Dogrun was chained and kept inside a prison that had a high fence, painted all over with magical cymbals that clanged and smashed at him when he tried to escape. He lived out the rest of his eternal life there, eating the rats beneath his feet, the red mites on his body, and the lice in his hair.

Arid the Ice Queen ruled all in Underland.

And now, she was after the elf-children who knew her secrets.

They lived on Earth, and their names were Pearling, Burnt, and River.

6

Of course this was somehow about putting my little brother and sister and me inside the story—they were the only ones I read them to. Since Bruno’s real name was Byrne, Burnt was close enough; and Brooke might be a “river,” and my much-hated real name, Fergus, was close to Fearling in some way.

We’d have read it in secret, finding a room in the house where Dad would not find us. There was a wardrobe in his bedroom, and it was just large enough for the three of us to fit in. I had a flashlight, and I’d read to them. We pretended that we were somehow entering C. S. Lewis’s
The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe
right there, and Bruno, until he was six, would not venture to the back of the wardrobe even when we dared him for fear that another world opened up there.

The legends of Imyrmia, the Ice Queen, grew over the years, and she somehow transformed in my story to an even more powerful monster called, simply, Banshee, as I had begun discovering the Celtic myths when I was twelve, and felt that the Ice Queen needed a transformation and a new name. Both Bruno and Brooke still looked forward to the stories, and although we were all a bit taller and could just fit in the wardrobe without touching each other—with the occasional gas leak from Bruno, who seemed to delight in this—we’d climb in when I had finished writing another three-or five-page opus, and I’d have the best audience a writer could ever have.

As Banshee, the Ice Queen had changed. She was no longer the frosty beauty with blue skin and white hair. She had become more monstrous, denied the beauty creams and ointments and sorcery of Underland, which kept her eternally young and insanely beautiful. Banshee came out at twilight, surrounded by flies and mosquitoes, her heralds. She was ghoulish, and her skin was torn and leathered and dried against her bones. She had razors for teeth and fingers that scraped flesh, and she took the form of anyone she chose, anyone trusted, but as dark approached, she could not hide her true form, and when night fell, all was revealed. Alone with her hapless victim, she showed her true form.

In the Banshee stories, she became trapped on Earth, unable to go to her Dark Kingdom, and she wanted more than anything the souls of the three elves who had exiled her from her world.

Scared the shit out of Bruno when he was about six. I told him that Banshee was coming for him if he stepped out of bed after the light went out. This accounted for his bedwetting, and yes, I feel ashamed that I put the thought in his mind. I tried to take it back, but once you’ve told a kid that kind of thing, it never completely erases from his memory.

7

I read through some of the stories, all of them bad, all of them somehow making me happy about my childhood again. My father had once had the ambition to be a writer, in his youth. He told me that he seemed to only be able to write the truth of things, and no one wanted to hear the truth. He’d hold up a novel from my bookshelf (Treasure Island, From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, Danny Dunn and the Anti-Gravity Paint) and he’d say, “It’s people who write lies like these who get published. Nobody wants the truth. They want lies spoon-fed to them.” All right, he had a bit of the tyrant in him—perhaps all heroes do—and had never been able to read or enjoy fiction to save his life. I attributed this, again, to both a stern upbringing (his own father, the grandfather I never knew, disciplined with whips to the back, actual whips in the smokehouse, the place of punishment), and to his two years in prison camps during his war. He nearly seemed vulnerable at those moments, when he was at his worst I forgave him anything when I was a kid because I was so grateful that he hadn’t left us as our mother had.

But those books on my shelf! To me they were worlds to explore. These were the seeds of my desire to write fiction, but I didn’t think I’d ever be able to do it as an adult. Still, when I was twenty-five my first novel, a fantasy called Igdrasil was published. (For those of you who don’t know, Igdrasil is the Tree of All Existence in myth. My novel did it a disservice.) I could not make a living from writing, but I found that fantasy was what I could write best—high fantasy as it’s called. And so this gave me the illusion that I could be a writer, but in fact, I had not been able to write another story or novel since selling that one.

It was a mental and physic constipation, my adult life to that point.

It was as if I genuinely was not meant to live outside of the island where I’d grown up—the world was too much. I needed the smallness of Burnley Island. The narrowness of the minds, the quietness of the winter s, the serenity of the separation from the mainland.

Even Carson McKinley, spanking the monkey in his truck at the harbor.

But my dreams of happiness and writing fiction and loving life, all had been there, at home, waiting for me.

Sitting in my old bedroom, I pulled out that ancient typewriter—a Royal that had no business working, let alone with a ribbon of ink still in it that managed to smudge the odd “a” and “r.”

THIS IS THE LAST STORY ABOUT BANSHEE

Now, before I tell you what I wrote, I have to tell you that whenever I write anything, I have to first write a page or two about things that are occupying my mind. It’s a way of sweeping out the cobwebs, I guess, and is my version of therapy. I’m not sure if I believe in writer’s block, but I do believe in general Brain Block, just as I believed in Brain Farts. Writing out the tangle from inside me seemed to get the creative juices going.

So I wrote:

My father is dead. Someone murdered him.

Who?

WHO?

Brooke is losing her mind. Bruno is picking apart the house. Brooke is painting. Bruno is playing the piano again. And here I am, writing.

It’s as if we’re just picking up where we left off years ago.

Brooke walks at night. Bruno has a boyfriend. I still love Pola. We have none of us figured out love right. Maybe Bruno has. Not me. Not Brooke. Our lives in shambles. Dad must have been the glue. Falling apart.

The Banshee is loose. The Banshee has taken us over.

At night, she watches us.

When I’d finished typing this sentence, I looked at it. I had no idea what it meant. Did I mean that Brooke watches us? The Banshee? Was this the beginning of a story, or was I still trying to dear my mind a bit? I wasn’t even sure.

I typed:

At night she watches us, waiting.

Again, no idea what this meant, but it might be the beginning of a story I could write. It intrigued me.

Then:

Dad was murdered. At night. Not at night. Before night.

He wasn’t killed at night. He was only found at night. Killed earlier. Body cut. Torn. Sadistic.

Who? Who? WHO?

It was the hour before dark.

The magic hour.

Why in God’s name would someone want to kill my father? War. His men? The enemy? His enemies? A psycho?

The Banshee?

I stopped, scratching my head, annoyed with the futility of this exercise.

I set the typewriter down at the foot of my bed.

8

Sometime around midnight, I was back in my bedroom again, exhausted from helping clear some of the debris that had piled up in rooms—Bruno and I made a go of sorting Dad’s papers, and going through unopened boxes in the two rooms he had used for storage.

There was that old typewriter, just waiting for me to write a bit more.

I sat on the bed and plopped it on my lap.

Someone had used it.

Someone had typed beneath what I’d already pounded out: Oranges and lemons say the bells of St. Clemens.

I am here .

I am here .

I am here.

I am here.

And I never left you.

Play it.

1

The next morning, I told Bruno I knew he’d been the one to play with my typewriter, but he denied it.

But here’s the thing: It’s the kind of prank Bruno used to pull when he was a kid.

Sometimes I’d type part of a story out, and he’d type in two or three words after my last one (usually: stupid storie or Nemo loves Pola Bear).

I didn’t really believe it was him.

But I didn’t want to believe that it might be something else.

That it might be Brooke, her mind wandering too much.

Her breakdown on its way.

2

Sometimes I could hear Brooke crying through the walls.

I worried a bit about what seemed to be a logical and terrible depression descending on all of us in the house, but most especially her. This made me sadder because she had somehow been a partner for my father—not incestuously, but in terms of being there at Hawthorn, living in the house, handling the financial matters, making sure that the roofer arrived on time, or that the pond got drained in the spring, and that nothing rusted, or that everything that broke got fixed. I suspected some part of her had wanted to be free of this life, but she must have felt guilt for the way her freedom had come. He was more of her life than he was of mine or Bruno’s. Her loss was greater to some extent, and the fact that she had discovered the body made it an even greater burden.

We didn’t get together to talk about Dad and how wonderful he was—yet. We saved our moans and cries and gnashing of teeth for the privacy of our rooms.

There had always been a barrier between me and my sister and my brother, and I was never sure where it had come from. We had gotten along famously when young, and had managed to share fairly equally among us. Despite my mother’s taking off so wildly, I looked back on a lot of childhood as joyous, and some of it as full of hard lessons learned, but never with a sense that it was anything but the right childhood for me. When one of us was sick, the others would gather ‘round the bedside and read aloud from books or bring soup and tales of the outside world. Yet, a barrier grew up between us, as if there were some unspoken crime we’d witnessed; or as if each of us had a disturbance within that seemed to intensify the more we were all three together. So we kept our mourning to ourselves and didn’t share grief much.

When I thought of my father, how he was wrenched from us, alone in my old room, in my too-small bed, I cried, also. I tried writing a few more pages on the Royal, but it was as pointless as the first page I’d attempted.