The Hour Before Dark (31 page)

When he said it, I felt that terrible bone chill again, and I looked at him as if he were some kind of evil child—for just a second, in my head: the memory of the Banshee, her fury, her absolute cold hatred for us, for any who were at Hawthorn.

But then I looked in the direction he pointed, and it was Brooke, up on the road. She had gotten a lift from Joe Grogan, who waved to us as he drove away.

I left the kids to play and trudged up the hillside.

6

“You made it!” I shouted as I reached her. Brooke had a smile  so wide that it seemed to want to break away from her face.

She looked healthier than I’d ever seen her, too. Her face, no longer pale, had a rosy glow to it. She wore silver bracelets on each wrist, no doubt her method of hiding the thin white marks left by cuts. “Guess what?” she said, and before I could say another word, “I’m pregnant.”

“Holy crap,” I said. I grabbed her and hugged her. Bruno huddling nearby with Pola and Cary,  shouted, “And you look it! You must’ve put on ten pounds!”

“At least,” she said. "I predict a thirty-pound baby at the birth."

We sat around, chewing on fried chicken and drinking Coke from the can, and at about six o’clock Bruno began telling the kids the history of the Raglan family.  

I drew Brooke aside and we took a walk down a slender path in the field.

“Who is he?” I asked. “This guy.”

“A total wastrel,” she said. “He’s a poet who also works on boats in Camden. He does a good business. And he’s a really good poet.”

“Marriage in the picture?”

“Does it matter?”

“It’s up to the two of you, I guess,” I said.

“He wants to. He’s proposed. I don’t know. It happened so fast. I need more time, I think.”

“Sure,” I said.

“I wanted to run to...well, the ends of the earth, I guess. I couldn’t get out of New England. It’s a Raglan curse. I met him in March. He told me it was love at first sight for him. I guess I love him. I mean, I feel like I do. But I don’t trust it.”

“The feeling?”

“I just don’t. I don’t know how many years it’ll take to undo all this...well, damage. Is that the word for it?"

"Sounds right to me.”

“He told me he’d wait.”

“He know about the baby?”

“Not yet. He will soon. Nemo, I’d never talk about this with anyone else, but I feel comfortable asking you. Do you think I could ever be a mother?"

"What do you mean? Of course you could. You will be."

"I’m not sure,” she said. “What if it’s some kind of mental illness? What if what happened to us is ...”

“In our blood?”

She heaved a sigh, an enormous weight from within.

“Come on, Brooke.”

“I’m more worried about the game,” she said. “I’m still not sure what it was.”

“The game is over. He taught it to us to control us."

"No,” she said. “I’ve thought about it a lot. It controlled us. It may have controlled him, too.”

“Maybe. But what happened has nothing to do with you now.”

She let out a mocking laugh. “Of course it does. Of course it does, Nemo. It has a lot to do with me—and you and Bruno—now.”

I realized how dumb I’d been sounding. How we’d always talked around each other. How all three of us had to stop it if we were going to reach out into our own lives into new families and protect them and ourselves. “You’re right. It had a profound effect on us. You look like Mom. I look like Dad. You paint like Mom. Bruno plays music like Mom. I’m as stubborn as Dad was. But what happened at this house was not about that. It was about human evil. And maybe about what that leaves behind. But it’s gone. It got burned out. None of us gets a fucked-up-free life, Brooke. Nobody. Even Pola and Cary—maybe nobody went nuts like Dad did, but everybody gets slammed into the ground by life in one way or another. And I guess the choice is what we do with it. You can wallow in that past. You can let it break you. Or it can be like...like rain, washing off you. You can let this wonderful guy go, this guy who adores you and writes poetry and fixes boats and puts you and your child first and who believes in love at first sight. You can even lose the baby. You can get it removed, and tell yourself that it’s for the best, that someone like you shouldn’t bring a child into the world. Or you can make the choice that you will overcome this. That is was a storm, but the storm is passed. Just like we overcame it in childhood. I was thinking about the Brain Fart, Brooke. I was thinking about it, and why it was there, and the only thing I can come up with is: We are meant to forget. We are meant to put aside childhood. We are meant to say goodbye to the families we came from, if they’re bad for us. We are meant to move on and create our own families. That’s what none of us had done. We are meant to have a Brain Fart so that all the bad things don’t keep us from what life offers. And for you, life is offering what you wanted: a family. Dad couldn’t provide it, not the way it’s supposed to be. He was a murderer, plain and simple. He butchered our mother. Maybe we can blame the prison camp he was in. Maybe we can blame the way his father whipped him. Maybe it was just madness. Something happened here that was terrible. Something continued to remain here afterward. But it’s gone now. It doesn’t have to be in here,” I said, and I placed my hand near her heart. “It doesn’t have to live here. Don’t make room for it.”

She glanced at me a bit archly. “You’ve been to a shrink?”

“What, and you haven’t?” I laughed. “Oh yeah. Big time. After all this, probably for the rest of my natural born days. You want to know what helped?” I twisted around and pointed back to Pola and Zack. “Those two. And even the good things we had as kids.”‘

“There were good things?”

“We three had each other. No matter what storm was out there, we had each other,” I said. “And we still do. Now, tell me, you want this baby?”

Her eyes glazed over with tears. “Yes. I want this baby. I’ve wanted a baby for years. And I want him, too. I love him. I’m afraid to love him. But I do.”

“You need to tell him,” I said.

“Nemo?”

“Yeah?”

“I don’t know if I’m out of the woods yet,” she said, a slight tremble to her voice.

“I suspect it’s all woods,” I said. “And nobody’s out of ‘em.”

7

I walked with my beautiful sister back to my beautiful wife (yes, we had the small ceremony in the early spring, just the two of us with Zack as both ring bearer and best man, and a justice of the peace), my brilliant stepson and his friends, and my fabulous brother and his handsome lover, and for a moment, at twilight, I thought, this is pretty damn good. This is great. The world is good. The universe has some benevolence to it. We live our lives in the hour before dark. The dark itself will come— but there’s no need to rush. When that hour passes, perhaps the real game begins.

We broke up the picnic after nine. The sun was on its way down at last. The woods were a haze of green; the smell of night sea in the air. I watched Bruno dance with Pola and Jenny as Zack and Mike fought over the job of deejay with the boom box; in another few minutes, Jenny ran along the fields, with her newly found sheet trailing behind her like she was a princess in a make-believe world, while Zack and Mike used sticks as swords for knightly duels, while Pola shouted at them that they’d poke an eye out; Cary went around looking in the rubble of the foundation, now and then calling out that he’d found some widget or other that was still useful; and Brooke and I sat and talked about what kind of name her baby should have, what name would be a good Raglan name even if the kid wasn’t going to be a Raglan.

Albert Einstein once said, “There are only two ways to live your life. One is that nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.”

I tried to convey this to my sister as we sat there, half on the grass, bitten by mosquitoes, half on the quilt, with the last of the longest day of the year passing over us like a warm presence.

The door was hers to open.

8

As it grew dark, Zack and crew had gone off to play with their sticks and sheets, but when Pola called after him, there was no answer.

“He’s probably running around the woods,” I said.

“He’d answer,” she said. She glanced at me with a brief look of panic.

“Don’t worry,” I said. “He’s around.”

Pola and Bruno and Cary went off to the woods to round up the kids, and I started walking up to the roadside, carrying the trash-filled cooler with me.

The way the darkness comes in summer on the island is like a tinge of blackness shimmering at the edge of the tree-lined sky.

The smells of summer were at their height: honeysuckle and lavender and lilac.

“Zack!” I called, and heard the name echo down below in the woods, as  others called to him. “Mike! Jenny!”

And then I saw that the door to the smokehouse was open slightly.

I felt as if my heart were about to stop.

I went over to it, opening the door wide.

Stepped inside.

They stood in a ring at its center.

Around their eyes, blindfolds—torn from the sheet that Jenny had picked up at the duck pond.

Zack had just finished reciting the nursery rhyme—I heard the last line of it.

Here comes a chopper to chop off your head.

I stared at them in silence. I looked around at the stone walls and out into the night as darkness swung low around the slopes and trees beyond the property.

Then back at these children.

I watched Zack. This little boy whose world had been disrupted: his mother and father divorced, a new man in the house, the memories of that awful night in December still no doubt immense in his mind.

A world that he didn’t choose himself.

Who had taught him?

The Dark Game was an addiction. It wasn’t something that could be stopped just by wanting it to be stopped.

Knowing it was there, it got in your blood.

Children were going to play it.

They had begun playing it before dark, and now, with full night around us, it would take them over. They must have heard about it. Zack would know about it, just from listening in on conversations. Children did that sometimes, and adults never really thought they were listening so carefully.

Zack looked the way I must’ve looked at his age. Blindfold on, saying what seemed like unintelligible words.

For the barest second, I thought that perhaps this was wholly innocent. That it was my own experience, and my own perception that colored my intense negative reaction to watching children play the Dark Game. That we three—Bruno, Brooke, and I—and perhaps even our father—had twisted it with the terrible trauma we’d gone through together. With watching our mother be brutally tortured and murdered. With whatever my father had experienced in those POW camps when he’d been in his twenties.

It was us. No one else. Not other children. Surely.

“Zack?” I finally said, still reeling inside from the initial shock. “Zack?” I took a step forward, and then another.

The hairs on the back of my neck stood up. My throat went dry.

I felt a crackle of static electricity in the air.

When I reached him, I crouched down and put my hand on his shoulder. The other children’s breathing seemed labored and heavy.

As gently as I could, I tried to wake him.

To bring him out of the game.

But in his mind, he’d already gone somewhere else.

*  *  *

http://DouglasClegg.com/ebooks

Published by Alkemara Press, in an arrangement with the author.

Cover Design Copyright © 2012 Alkemara Press

Cover image courtesy of iStockphoto.com, used with permission. Copyright © 2012 Shaun Lowe.

Douglas Clegg is the award-winning author of more than 25 books, including Afterlife, The Children’s Hour, You Come When I Call You, The Harrow Series, The Criminally Insane Series, Purity and many others.

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