The Hour Before Dark (28 page)

We began the ritual.

4

I didn’t imagine anything, but recited the poem about the bells, and then chanted, “Here comes a candle to light you to bed, and here comes a chopper to chop off your head,” repeating these lines again and again. I slipped back into them easily—as if I felt better about myself for saying them.

As if I’d wanted to say them, in the smokehouse, the way I wanted a cigarette or the way I might want a drink.

It felt like an hour went by. We stood there. We held our hands together.

Nothing.

And then it came.

In my mind’s eye. Bruno was there with me, watching. Aloud, I described what we were both seeing: My mother.

She was naked, her womb ripped open, and her eyes ran with blood all around them. My father held her, his skin soaked with her blood as it pulsed from the thousand cuts he’d made in her.

And again, he raised the shiny crescent.

Crescent moon?

What was it?

It flashed and came down against my mother’s skin.

A small, curved blade.

The blade of a scythe.

1

One of us let go of the other’s hands. I wasn’t sure which.

I nearly fell backward, with the force of being let loose from the game.

I had forgotten its power.

“He killed her,” Bruno said, tearing off the blindfold.

2

“He may not have,” Harry said.

“Bruno, it’s a game. It’s some mindfuck. It may not be real,” I said.

“Her clothes are still here. Her things. He used the Dark Game to survive the POW camps, Nemo. He used it with us to control our minds.”

I felt as if a gun had gone off right next to my ear. It was as if the words exploded something, and for a few seconds, the world went silent.

“He used to hurt her,” Bruno said. “You may not remember it, Nemo. But I do. He probably hurt her that night.”

“Right here,” Harry said. I’d nearly forgotten that he was in the smokehouse with us.

It only took us a few minutes to decide what to do next.

We really had no choice.

3

It was so cold outside that I felt as if my ears were going to bum off, and the snow was heavy, and the wind had begun blasting from the north. This time, I was covered from head to foot in a thick down jacket, a wool cap, with a thick wool scarf wrapped around my neck. Bruno was less concerned with the cold and wore his trademark brown leather jacket and jeans, with a baseball cap scrunched down on his head.

He carried the shovels, I carried the axe and crowbar: The flashlights were stuffed in the four pockets of my coat.

Harry had remained in the smokehouse and was speaking into his recorder. Ever the reporter.

4

Inside the smokehouse, we set up flashlights around the floor.

They lit the place decently.

The smell of blood was not quite as strong as I had experienced that morning.

I crouched down and touched the slats of the floor. “He put them in the year she left.” My father’s blood had dried and frozen the wood.

“Yep,” Bruno said.

We began smashing the floor and pulling the wood up as it broke. I piled it in a comer.

We took turns with the shovels, for there were only two of them, a long-and a short-handled.

Bruno cracked the hard surface of the dirt below.

It took an hour to get to it, but we found it.

A canvas tarp, wrapped around the remains of a human body.

Harry crouched down and drew something from it.

“What’s this?”

It was a crescent-shaped object. Rusted.

“It’s what I always imagined her having. A crescent moon,” I said, feeling blood draining from my face.

“He murdered her with it,” Bruno said.

We stared at it, and then at each other, for a long time.

I said nothing. I could not comprehend what we’d found. I could not understand it logically.

Our mother had been murdered.

Our mother had been murdered by our father.

He had buried her there, in the place where we had played, when we weren’t being punished in the same spot.

Then he had created the Dark Game so that he could stop up our memories.

He fucked each one of us up with that ritual. I wonder if he even knew the power it had for us. The way it had been an addiction for us, going to the smokehouse, or even in the wardrobe in his bedroom, or down by the duck pond.

How our lives had been empty without it.

I felt that now.

Playing it again.

I felt its pull.

It wanted to be played.

It had created a hunger, carved out a place for us.

Made a home within our minds.

5

“She was furious—telling him that she’d never cared for him and that she hadn’t wanted children at all. I sat out on the stairs and listened and saw what I could from the bannister. He was practically on his knees,” I said, remembering the look on my poor father’s face as my mother, seeming more wicked than she had ever been to any of us before, told him how he had destroyed anything he’d ever touched and how if he loved the children so much, he could take care of them, but she was going to South America, she was going for love, and she was not going to spend another minute in the hellhole known as Hawthorn or the awful place called Burnley Island.

Even as I said it, it sounded false. I hadn’t drawn that memory up in years, and this time, it didn’t sound right. It sounded too perfect.

“Like it’s from a movie,” Bruno said. “Or made up. Like he made it up. Like he made you think that had happened. Face it, he murdered her. He killed her. Here.”

“The place of punishment,” I said.

“I want more,” Bruno said, a silly look coming over his face. He took deep breaths, and leaned over, resting his hands on his knees. “That wasn’t enough.”

“Bruno?” I said. “You okay?”

He looked at me wild-eyed, nodding. “We need Brooke. I want more of it. I want to go back to that night. In the Dark Game. Harry, don’t you think she should be here? We just got a glimpse. Harry, you can be part of it. You played it once."

"Nothing happened. I didn’t see anything.”

Bruno glanced over at me. “All of us. Pola, too.”

“No,” I said. “Not Harry, either.”

“Then Brooke,” Bruno said, nearly panting as if he’d been running a few miles. “He fucked us over for life, Nemo. We need to go back there. We need to play it like we used to play it. Only not by his rules.”

6

Brooke was in no condition for any of this.

She looked at him as if she could not quite focus. “I’m so tired, Bruno. Bruno, Nemo, let me sleep. I’m so tired.”

“Get up,” Bruno said. A roughness had come over him; and I also felt it. It was the hunger for the game. We wanted to be back in it. It gave us something, no matter how awful it seemed afterward, it gave us something. And when it was over, it took it away. “Come on. Let’s go out there again. Let’s play the Dark Game there. Now.”

Brooke protested, and I told him it could wait, but he was enraged. “We are going to play it!” he shouted, and somehow, I knew that I had wanted to play the Dark Game again, ever since I’d returned.

The nightmares had been waiting for me.

The doors had been locked in my mind.

I let Bruno vent all the repressed fury he’d held inside, and I was afraid he was going to hit Brooke; I lunged at him, and drew him back from her bed. “Stop it!”

Then, I told her about what we’d found in the smokehouse.

7

In the smokehouse again, with Harry standing away from our circle, we began. Brooke had taken some tranquilizers and was fuzzy with the rhyme, but she accepted the blindfold. Her hands, and mine, trembled.

Harry glanced at his watch. “It’s not quite dark yet,” he said. “It will be soon.”

“Perfect,” I said. “The hour before dark you start. And if you keep going, it becomes real.”

8

“Oranges and lemons, say the bells of St. Clemens.” We all said the rhyme. Bruno, the most enthusiastically. I felt the shivering of Brooke’s hand in mine and kept a firm grip on her. It was cruel to do this. It was perhaps even evil, for her mind was fragile enough at this point. But the hunger was in me. Just as it had been as a boy. I was merely a conduit, a channel for the Dark Game.

“You owe me five farthings, say the bells of St. Martin’s,” we said, and it continued until the line “And here comes a chopper to chop off your head.” As silly as it was, it gave me strength, and I felt more connected to my brother and sister than I had in years. It had been the missing piece to my existence. It had been the surge of power I’d regretted ever leaving behind.

We were one.

We were one in the Dark Game.

And then, with one voice, we began speaking, as if our minds had merged, and the words themselves took us into another darkness.

1

It was the night our mother left.

2

“No, Daddy!” I cried out, but I could not stop him from beating at her with his fists.

“You goddamn whore! You have done this for the last time!” he shouted. He barely looked like my father at all. His face was contorted, and his eyes wild and angry. He grabbed my mother by her long golden hair and pulled so hard that, as she screamed, long strands of blood-tipped hair came out in his fist.

She tried to fight him, but he kept punching her. I jumped on him and beat my fists against his back, but he shook me off and kicked at my face.

“You goddamn whore!” he yelled at her again. Brooke and Bruno stood in the doorway crying.

“I’m going to punish you, you bitch! You kids, get out to the smokehouse. You’re going to see how whores get treated!”

And then it was as if we were floating, all of us, and I could go in and out of my father’s mind at will, and I heard the voices he had within him. I felt the tortures that had been inflicted upon him, the whippings his father had given him, and the muddy hole he’d been kept in for months at a time while he played the Dark Game himself—and something else was there in his mind; something else lurked within him.

Something created by the Dark Game itself.

A monster.

Not a human being turned monstrous.

But a creature that had knives for teeth, in circular, lamprey rows, going down its throat. Something was loose within him, something he could not control.

Banshee.

3

Next, we watched as he held our mother up in front of us—she was barely conscious—and he tore her blouse from her, and then her bra, her pale white skin bruised.

We saw three children—they were us—tied with hands behind our backs.

“NONE OF YOU DESERVES TO LIVE!” my father screamed. “NONE OF YOU! YOU ARE ALL BASTARDS AND FOR ALL I KNOW I’M NOT EVEN YOUR FATHER! I AM THE FATHER AND WHAT I SAY GOES! NOT ONE OF YOU IS EVER GOING TO BREAK MY RULES, YOU UNDERSTAND ME?”

“Please,” my mother said. “Please, God, please, oh God, please.”

For a lightning-flash of a moment, I saw her not as a woman, but as a lamb about to be slaughtered beneath a farmer’s axe.

My father’s booming voice caused the children to tremble.

They had duct tape on their mouths.

He was going to hurt them, as well.

“You're all bad! You're all evil!” my father yelled, and then his voice softened, and he kissed the edge of my mother’s lips. “You’re making me do this. You have evil in you. It needs to be cleansed. It needs to be wiped free.”

The broken handle of the scythe was in the comer.

The blade was in my father’s hands.

The children’s eyes went wide as the blade came down into my mother’s throat.

4

And then we were all crying, digging in the dirt.

My father was digging also, burying my mother’s body.

“None of you should be alive. None of you. She was a good woman, but she went bad. You each are going bad. I can see it coming,” he said.

Bruno began moaning the loudest.

My father ripped the tape from his mouth and grabbed Bruno around the waist, hugging him.

My father wept.

“Don’t kill me, Daddy,” Bruno sobbed.

Again, I had that strange sensation. I could move into my father’s mind, and I felt the monster there, and when I tried to picture it, the word banshee came up. Inside my father. Growing. Struggling against him. I felt the killings he’d done in the war, some justified by battle, others, darker, for he had been playing the game. The monster had grown within him like a tumor. A dark blotch of cancer in his mind, taking him over, but retreating, in remission.

“I love you, baby,” he said to my brother, and began sobbing himself. He released Bruno, and pressed his hands to his forehead. “Get out of me!” he shouted. “Get out of me!”

In his mind, I felt it, some kind of change, some shift of his blood.

He replaced the duct tape over Bruno’s lips.

Little Brooke was gone. Her eyes glazed over. It had been too much for her. I moved through her mind and heard: Daddy is not doing it. It didn’t happen. She went away. She went away. Somewhere else. Another place called Brazil. She went away. Daddy did not do it. Daddy did not tie her up. Daddy did not punish her. Daddy did not punish her and make her hurt. DADDY WOULD NEVER HURT US! DADDY LOVES US! HE’S ONLY PUNISHING MOMMY! BUT IT’S NOT REAL! ITS THE DARK GAME! SHE RAN AWAY FROM US BECAUSE SHE DOESN’T LOVE US!

I felt as if I were shot back out of Brooke’s mind.

When I looked at my own nine-year-old self, I wasn’t exactly all there either. My eyes had the same glassy look as did Brooke’s, and it was the saddest thing I’d ever seen.

Who could blame these children?

Witnessing this.

Seeing it happen.

I went inside my own mind, to get a sense of what I could be thinking, and all I felt was darkness there—so much that it stung for me to stay inside my childhood self.