The Hour Before Dark (29 page)

I drew back and watched.

My father filled in my mother’s grave, and then sat with us all day.

All night.

Then, against my will, I was sucked into my childhood self.

I felt intense pain, as if my skull were about to explode, and something eel-like swam through my skin, making me feel uncomfortable in my own flesh.

In that little boy’s mind he was in a small boat on the sea. in the sky, an enormous silver crescent moon, but it was barely dark yet.

My father was turned with his back to me. He had a fishing line out in the water. When I looked in the bottom of the boat, near my bare feet, it seemed alive with fat, wriggling eels and trout, their tails flipping as they tried to get out of the boat.

He turned to face me. His eyes were no longer there, but blood poured from the empty holes.

(Someone cried near me. Bruno?)

“Don’t be afraid,” my father said. “Just close your eyes. Don’t touch anything.”

I glanced down at the eels in the boat. The eels were in the child’s imagination. He wasn’t in a boat. He wasn’t near the water. But he wanted to remake the world so that it made sense to him. “Them?” he asked, looking at the eels.

“Just stay still here. Keep your eyes closed. Don’t lean. No talking. Ignore the noise,” he said. “Listen to what I’m about to say. Listen very carefully. Each word I say is important. Each word is like a key to a door. I want you to imagine a small red light, so small you can barely see it, Everything about it is completely pitch dark, but the light is red like a tiny, tiny fire. I want you to follow me with that fire, follow me as I take you somewhere else.”

Somewhere else.

I watched an eel with a mouth like a python as it devoured one of the fish. I nodded, not wanting to say anything to him.

“She went away,” my father said, returning his gaze to the ever-growing moon as a seagull’s shriek became a scream. “But someday, she’ll be back. Nemo, you saw her on the stairs. In her red dress. You cried and you tried to grab her, but she was mean to you. She didn’t love any of you. She didn’t love me. A man waited for her outside. They were leaving you. Abandoning you. You three slept in my bed that night, you slept there and we all wept together that she didn’t love any of us anymore....”

I was expelled from my childhood mind and floated again, watching as my father used what can only be described as brainwashing techniques, combined with the Dark Game itself. Hours passed in seconds, and the children remained in that smokehouse for days, being fed, peeing and shitting in their clothes, while my father kept them prisoner.

And the Dark Game began to take them over.

5

Beneath the blindfold, aware again of being in the smokehouse with Bruno and Brooke.

Brooke seemed to be forming words as if she were first learning to speak.

Bruno whispered, “The Brain Fart.”

6

I was a bird flying in the air, looking down as each of us left the smokehouse as children. My father carried Brooke in his arms, for she seemed sick and feverish. Bruno held my - the boy I was - hand. At the house, the Nemo began to panic—you could see it in his eyes, and his skin turned pale—he let go of his little brother’s hand and ran out and away from the house and his father.

Ran down through the fields. 

We felt the sucking hunger of his mind, as if it had been carved up in that Brain Fart, and something instinctive made him run away.

Down to the woods the little boy went, and when he got there, he began biting his own arms, just above the wrist.

Even drawing blood.

But a man came there and took him to the stream to wash the blood.

It was his father.

The monster within him, gone.

The father took his son in his arms and carried him home.

7

Aloud, back in the present, in the smokehouse, I said, “Bruno, Brooke, do you feel it?”

After a moment, Brooke whispered, “What is it?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

But whatever it was, it went through the three of us like a current.

I was convinced that there were four people holding hands in that circle.

We were not there without something else also being there. Holding our hands, holding them tightly, not wanting any of us to break the circle.

8

“It’s Mom,” Bruno said. “It’s Mom, I can feel her. It’s ...it’s..."

"Oh God, do you feel it, Nemo?” Brooke asked, her voice suddenly full of energy, where it had sounded drained, and exhausted moments before.

And I did feel it.

An electrical current flowing through us.

We saw her.

Our mother.

But not as we wanted her to be.

9

We watched as our father, just two weeks before, stepped into the smokehouse.

Gordie Raglan sniffed at the air, and we smelled it as well: a powerful odor.

Dead animal.

He crouched down and touched the floor.

What was he thinking? I couldn’t sense anything from his mind. I didn’t seem to possess the power to move through him any longer.

And then something grabbed him.

I expected to see a ghost.

To see our mother there, with blade in hand.

But instead, it was Brooke.

She attacked with the ferocity of a wild animal.

The first slice came down on his shoulder.

The blade went in and out, and my sister engulfed him.

1

Suddenly, I felt my mind explode, and for minutes I began to see a strobe like white light flashing in darkness.

We’d let go of each other’s hands.

2

“It wasn’t me!” Brooke cried out.

I tore the blindfold from my face.

The flashlights on the ground cast eerie shadows around us.

“I didn’t do that,” she said. “I didn’t. It couldn't have been me.”

“I know,” I said, “It was something else. It was the Banshee in the game."

"The monster we made up," Bruno said. "We gave it life."

"In the Dark Game," I said.

There was a terrible smell in the smokehouse as we three stood there.

“I want to keep playing,” Bruno said, and his voice was curiously like that of a child.

The odor grew stronger, and I began to feel sick.

“Harry,” I said, turning around, nearly having forgotten he was there with us, observing.

What greeted me then was something I could not have imagined. Not have wished upon my worst enemy.

Or my best friend.

3

First, I have to tell you that the Dark Game was within each of us now—and all of us at once. It had been waiting there, waiting to open those doors, and close others, within our minds, just as the doors in Hawthorn had opened and closed on us, just as life had opened and closed on us.

I felt different. I remembered the high that I’d felt as a boy, as if I had no problems whatsoever, as if I could do or be anything, and how we’d play the Dark Game and soar like birds, or swim beneath the sea like eels wriggling into the fathomless depths. I breathed more clearly. I felt stronger. Sweeter.

And when I saw what had become of Harry, it terrified me, but that switch had been flicked inside me and I wasn’t sure if it was the Dark Game scaring me, or the sight of him.

He lay crumpled on the ground.

There was a look in his eyes as if he’d seen something too terrifying to live through. A kind of awe and astonishment, and he nearly seemed alive to me. As Joe Grogan might say, it was the damnedest thing.

I knelt down and held him. He was gone. Tears came to my eyes. I didn’t understand this. I wanted to know what he’d seen, why he had to die.

Why I even let him be there with us.

Why the Dark Game had to feed off him like that.

4

Bruno was the first to notice. “Look, it’s dark out. We played past twilight. It’s real now. That’s what happens. It’s real.” He spoke as if drunk, with both a lazy slurring of words and a nearly hyperactive physicality.

Brooke began shuddering. “I didn’t do it. I just could not. I didn’t.”

It was as if neither of them saw Harry, lying dead. I, too, was disconnected from that death. 

We were too much in the game now.

“What happened that night?” Bruno asks. “Why did you sit there for hours?”

“I don’t know!” Brooke shouted.

“You do know! You know, you’re just not saying!”

Something within Brooke seemed to break. “I was playing it. By myself. I closed my eyes. I went into the darkness. I couldn’t help it. I couldn’t.”

I went to her and put my hands around her, but felt cold inside toward her.

Toward myself.

The Dark Game had won.

It had been lurking and biding its time.

The Banshee, the only thing I can call the creature I felt stirring in my brain now, the name we stole from among several names of spirits and monsters, our made-up creature with the face of our mother crossed with the Ice Queen, crossed with the lamprey-monster of nightmares...it remained a small parasite in our brains, but the Dark Game had brought it out. Fed it. Let it grow.

“The night he was killed,” I whispered in Brooke’s ear. “You tried to kill yourself. You played the Dark Game. By yourself. Your blood spilled. And it came back to you.”

She drew back, her eyes wide with horror.

Then she pushed me; I nearly fell over, her strength had increased so much from the game. Her eyes seemed wild, but not with fear. Something else. Something that reminded me too much of the Banshee.

She crouched down by our mother’s remains and plucked something from them.

The scythe. She glanced back at me like a wild animal, as if she didn’t  recognize me at all.

Then she ran for the door, flung it open, and ran out into the snow.

Bruno grabbed me by my shoulders and snarled, “Let her go! You brought this back! You and your friend!” Then he let go of me and grabbed the sides of his head. “Get it out of me! I don’t want it in me! It’s burning me!”

I felt it too, a slight rise in my body temperature, and we both saw the other one, standing there between us.

The Banshee, with her eyes harsh and unforgiving.

Our mother.

Our monster.

The ultimate Mistress of the Dark Game.

And then the howling of the wind, as the creature before us became a shadow and swept out the door, across the dark night.

I ran out, and shielding my eyes, followed the shadow as it moved toward Hawthorn itself.

5

The front door to Hawthorn was open wide.

Inside, silence.

“Pola?” I called. “Zack?”

Behind me, Bruno; and what had become a blizzard.

6

Inside the house, the living room was silent.

The fire continued to burn in the hearth.

“Pola?”

From upstairs, a single, muffled scream.

7

I ran up the stairs as quickly as I could; the first door was locked.

Smoke came out from beneath it. Inside my head the words: Here comes a candle to light you to bed.

8

I turned to Bruno, behind me. The game was in him too much—his eyes—his heavy breathing as if he were consuming oxygen like beer.

“Your keys,” I said.

“Let’s play it again,” he said, licking his lips.

“Give me your keys,” I said.

9

By the time I’d opened the door, I could already smell smoke. My heart raced. I bounded from room to room, As I opened each door into the next room, more  smoke began to come my way.

“Brooke! Pola!” I shouted as I went, and when I finally got to Brooke’s bedroom, it was locked.

“Brooke!” I pounded on the door.

“It’s all right!” Brooke shouted from the other side of the door. “It’s all right, Nemo! I’m in the Dark Game! The fire won’t hurt me!”

“Unlock the door! Brooke!” I rammed the door with my shoulder, and it gave slightly. “Brooke! It wasn’t you! It was that thing. It’s inside all of us. It was in the smokehouse. It was in the game. You don’t have to do this. You didn’t kill him!”

“It’s all right,” she said, and her voice became sing-song as she recited the Dark Game rhyme. “Here comes a candle to light you to bed, and here comes a chopper to chop off your head!”

I busted the door down, my shoulder feeling as if it were nearly dislocated from the effort.

The candles were overturned, and the curtains had caught fire.

I saw something that I will never forget.

Bruno beside me start shouting, but I didn't hear him. The chill I felt inside brought a deafening silence.

Brooke stood near the bedroom window as the flames rose on either side of her, and even seemed to be under her feet.

She began to rise, just imperceptibly, so little that I thought I imagined it.

And then she levitated higher.

The whites of her eyes showed. Her face became contorted in the same rage I’d seen in the phantom of my mother at the smokehouse that morning.

All sound came back to me as her lips parted.

“HERE COMES A CANDLE TO LIGHT YOU TO BED!" she screeched, waving the crescent blade in her hand and slashing at the fire itself. “AND HERE COMES A CHOPPER! HERE IT COMES, NEMO! A CHOPPER TO CHOP OFF YOUR HEAD! TO CHOP YOU INTO PIECES WHILE YOU WATCH! WHILE YOU LIVE UNTIL THE LAST SLICE HAS GONE IN!”

Behind her, the window burst open—the storm windows as well exploded around her. The blast sent her body forward.

She began to glide on a current of air toward me.

My mind began to scramble, but I stood my ground.

It’s the Dark Game. It’s nothing more. It twists what you see. It fucks with you.

I gasped as I felt a whoosh of air being sucked out of my lungs.

Things seemed to move slowly; time had changed subtly; the fire itself moved in slow motion.