When Things Get Dark

by Ellen Datlow

  When Imogen saw what I’d done, saw the marks I’d made on myself, her otherwise unreadable eyes got all wide and soft, as if I’d handed her a ring or something. And: I knew it, was all she said, quietly. I knew you were like me.

  Nothing to say to that but, Yes, obviously, so I nodded instead. Knowing that from now on, we’d be the same in everybody’s eyes. Kicking myself for thinking I could ever avoid it.

  * * *

  I know why I am the way I am now, and part of me managing to figure it out eventually involved teaching myself to forget—to place that time, those events, my entire childhood, at one remove, behind a scratched and dirty porthole through which I could either view things without actually having to feel them, or feel things without remembering what caused those feelings. To recall my experiences without getting caught inside them, forced to re-live them on a loop for what seems like hours, pinned in an endless useless churn of postdated embarrassment and rage and hate.

  From where I am now, my adult perspective, I can see that what I once thought was spite on others’ parts was actually fear that if they let me get away with being abnormal, then what use was the standard of normality they kept their own status by clinging to? We were all women, at least prospectively… but since puberty made me the only one with overt female characteristics, I was the one who stood out. So why not be a cop instead of a criminal, the “populars” must have thought, policing the tall poppy for crimes we’d all share a year or so later? Slut-shame the girl who thinks of herself as a brain on top of a spine, who barely notices boys except as noisy distractions; raid her locker for maxipads because she never remembers to bring her lock, then stick them to the inside of her desk so she’ll find them when she flips up the top, a mocking message written underneath with shoplifted drugstore lipstick: These belong to you, hee hee hee. Since they all purported not to know what these things were, because none of them had to, yet.

  Similarly, I can see that what I used to think was my own innate evil—the evil Imogen obviously shared, which called her to me, and me to her—was simply a long-inculcated belief I’d been somehow born wrong, a bullied bully, book-smart but street-stupid: violent from puberty on, but always uncontrollable, an egotistical liar who could never be relied upon to do the right thing, mainly because she was incapable of understanding what the right thing was. After years of therapy and some chemical help, I now understand I wasn’t bad, different, blind to what most people apparently came into this shitty world knowing about how to fit in, how to get along.

  But even only glimpsed through the porthole, the feeling sometimes comes back without me even knowing what it’s about, in waves.

  A tidal wave submerging me, but it’s all faceless, formless, attached to nothing. It’s like I’m being haunted by the ghost of a feeling; I don’t know who I’m angry at, or why; I don’t know what I hate them for, but I do, and that seems illogical, selfish, weird. So it turns into me hating myself, being angry at myself, for being weak enough to want to trust, to make friends, to find love somewhere outside the divorce-broken ring of my own family, in the first place. For laying myself open, so stupidly, again and again and again.

  My parents thought they were each other’s best friend, too. That’s why they thought they never needed anybody else, till suddenly they did, but didn’t have anybody to turn to. And while I told myself even back then that I’d never live like that, if I could help it… really, how could I have ever expected things to turn out differently? They never taught me how to manage to live with other people without hurting them, not even by bad example.

  You scared them, Una. (Good.)

  You made them scared of you. (Good.)

  (They fucking should be.)

  Things I did in the moment, that passed through me like a storm, so fast and hard I could barely remember I’d done them, later on. Like: oh yeah, that happened. I cut holes in other people’s clothes. I pissed in other people’s shoes. I stuck someone else’s Barbie’s head up inside me, then put it back on the doll for her to find. I smeared my own blood on the wall, wrote things in it. The same year I met Imogen, I picked up a cat by its tail while listening to a record on headphones, then couldn’t figure out how my mom could have known what I was doing; even after I left Imogen behind, I strangled a girl and knocked her head on the floor because she said my whales looked more like tadpoles. Later, in yet another “new” school, I got sent to the principal for interrupting class by describing how to do a lobotomy in detail— which I’d picked up by reading a biography of Frances Farmer—then threatening to do it on one of my classmates with a compass.

  I know why I am the way I am now, but only because I’ve managed to live long enough to figure it out. That’s the simple truth. And I wish— I do wish, even after everything she did, I did, we did, together—that Imogen had been able to do that, too.

  Eventually.

  * * *

  “Come out,” Imogen told me that first day, as I crouched in the bushes, watching her. “You’re Una, right? Think I can’t see you? I can see everything.”

  That seemed unlikely, but I instantly felt dumb for being there, so I stood up instead; crossed my arms and scowled at her, fuck you face screwed on hard, expecting her to be frightened. Which she very much obviously wasn’t—beckoned me over, peremptorily, and showed me what she was doing: how she’d set creek-washed rocks in a circle with a baby-doll’s detached plastic face in the middle, looking up, blue eyes blind in the green-dark diffuse sunlight slipping down around the bridge.

  “The fuck is that for?” I asked, and she giggled.

  “You swear like a boy,” she said. “Is that because you’re so tall?”

  “I don’t know, I fucking like it. So what is that, anyway?”

  “I’m making a scrying mirror. Watch.”

  She turned it over, then, showing me a small, round mirror she’d carefully fitted inside the face, probably from somebody’s make-up kit. “First you have to cure it, see—take a flame and melt the edges so it won’t fall out: the sign of fire. Then leave it all night where the wind can get at it, especially if it’s blowing past a graveyard; the sign of night, the sign of air. Then wash it in the creek and leave it down here under a bunch of leaves, looking down into the dirt: the sign of earth, and water. One thing left to do, now: anoint it, and see if it works.”

  “Anoint it with what?”

  Another giggle. “What do you think?” she asked, pointing to where my sleeves had rucked up, glued with sweat, to show off the scars inside both my wrists—those scratches I always told people came from the cat, if they asked, which they mostly didn’t. Not to mention the deeper cuts, treated with Bactine and band-aids, which I never told anybody about at all.

  I had a hook I’d stolen from my nana’s embroidery kit once, meant for ripping seams; Imogen had a penknife, the kind that folds out, its handle wrapped in tape she’d coloured black. She stuck its point into the pad at the base of her pointer finger, between heart- and head-lines, and twisted till she had to pull it out sideways, freeing a drop of blood the size of a dime. “Now you,” she commanded, and I didn’t even think to disobey. I was far too interested, at that point—I wanted to see if it would work. Nothing I’d ever tried by myself had, up to that point, and I’d always wondered why.

  (All little girls try practicing magic, eventually, my first girlfriend would tell me, in our second year of university. That’s because magic offers power, and they don’t have any… magic tells you things can change, if you want it bad enough. They haven’t figured out yet how that’s a fucking fairy tale, and fairy tales aren’t real.

  (And I remember nodding, but that was mainly because I was drunk and she was beautiful, enough so I wanted to agree with her. Thinking, as I did, how I could sure tell her some stuff to the contrary, if I wanted. If I felt like I had the right to.

  (I used to have a friend who’d disagree, was all I ended up telling her, though, so low I don’t think she actually heard me.)

  Imogen squ
eezed her wound until she’d painted a triangle on the mirror’s surface, point up. “Now you,” she said, “but widdershins, opposite, other way ’round. Point down.”

  “I know what widdershins is,” I told her, grumpily, sticking the hook between my index and middle fingers. To which she laughed again, full-on this time, loud enough to startle a nearby pigeon.

  “Of course you do,” she said.

  * * *

  And what did you see in the scrying mirror, Una? a voice asks, from deep inside my mind—that first psychiatrist Mom sent me to, maybe, with her sad, smart eyes. To which I answer, internally: Nothing. I saw nothing. I never saw anything at all. Not even when I said I did.

  And what did Imogen see, do you think?

  I can’t know that. I only know what she said she saw, over and over: a way out, an escape. A door to somewhere better than this shitty world we both knew we were trapped in, the place where one step forwards always led two steps back. Where everyone else got away with everything and we got away with nothing, not even with being two similarly inclined weirdos lucky enough to find each other, to share an affinity, to make up stories together and lie our way into believing them… acting like we believed them, anyhow. On my part.

  And yes, we hurt ourselves; we hurt each other. Why not? Pain was already a constant. Imogen’s fairy tales at least promised that pain could be harnessed, used as currency. They promised it could be bartered for entry into the numinous. No different from any other religion that way—any other mythology. All the ones we’d studied and discarded on our own, before finding each other.

  I mean, pain really should count for something, don’t you think? Considering how much it hurts.

  Think about it, Imogen told me. Why do other people hurt us? To get what they want, which is for us to hurt. Cause and effect. So when we hurt ourselves, Una, what do we want out of it? What can we possibly want?

  …to… not hurt, anymore? She didn’t answer, simply waited, which is how I knew she must be disappointed in my reasoning. Okay, no— no, obviously; that’s too easy. To hurt, so long as it hurts them, too. Like they hurt us.

  And? she prompted.

  And get away with it.

  That’s part of it, sure… witchcraft, all that. Baby steps. But I want to go farther, as far away as possible. To a place where my pain makes me queen, empress. To a place where my pain makes me—

  —what, fucking god? Good luck with that, man. She wouldn’t look away, which meant I had to, eventually. Asking her, after a beat: And besides… what about me?

  Well, you too, Una—come on, did you really think I didn’t mean it like that? We’re sisters now. Of course, you too.

  (So long as you’re willing to pay the same price, that is, she didn’t say, and didn’t have to.)

  * * *

  This thing we were after didn’t have a name, but we knew we’d know it when we saw it. It felt like… some prospective culmination for all that leprous, unchannelled pubertal fury I felt, that crazy rage to procreate held completely separate from true sexuality, never thought about in conjunction with other people, because they all hated me and I hated them. All those “hunky” boys whose attention Nini and Faz competed for, never understanding they knew even less about the whole shebang than they did; I’m not saying I didn’t think about sex at all, but not with those idiots. I mean, I already knew how to masturbate—“gouging,” I called it, for some reason, probably because everything that appealed to me at that age was about secrecy and humiliation, revenge and freedom from consequences, a toxic antique glamour wrapped in blood and gold and jewels. And power, power, power, like my girlfriend-to-be would say.

  I remember how I used to stand in the bath looking upwards into the shower’s spray and touch myself till the blood rushed so far out of my skull I blacked out: that’s how it felt, the thing Imogen wanted us to find, together. I’d wake up in the tub, cold and wet with the back of my head ringing against the porcelain, and believe me, it’s not like it never occurred to me I was probably killing brain cells, or risking I might crack my head…

  But because it felt so good, I kept on doing it—chasing that high, the mounting buzz and pixelation, the letting go, the refreshing dark. Even more like dying, I suppose, than the little death itself.

  “Blood’s what opens a door,” Imogen used to say. “Did you really think you wouldn’t have to pay for something like that? Something wonderful?”

  “No.”

  “No, that’s right. I knew you understood. That’s why we’re friends.”

  So every day we’d go down into the Ravine, look in her scrying mirror and try to find a place where the world wore thin, a crack through which to reach somewhere else. We looked for it everywhere. Under the bridge, through the trees, inside the downwards slope of the walls, the deepest part of the creek. We mapped things out in either direction, a mile or more south and north, down towards Rosedale, up towards the Mount Pleasant Cemetery. We broke through thickets of willow-whips and blackberry thorns to emerge into what had looked promising from below, only to have it turn out to be yet another slice of some too-quiet side-street lined with twin-garage houses and speed bumps, its off shoots all cul-de-sacs, for absolute minimum public access.

  Imogen would always be the one to see it first, of course; she’d cry out, point with her free hand and set off running, pulling me along. Hand in hand with our wounds pressed tight, grating, throbbing: the lope and the stagger, faster and faster, lungs burning, until it finally blinked out almost as we reached it. And I’d bend at the waist to spit on the ground, coughing as Imogen cursed, damning everything she could think of.

  “It shut again,” she’d say, finally, once she’d calmed enough to form new words. “We weren’t fast enough. We have to be faster.”

  And I’d nod, still gulping. “I know,” I’d reply. “Next time, maybe. Maybe next time.”

  * * *

  A third voice, now: Imogen’s, of course. Who else?

  You never saw anything, Una? That’s not what you told me.

  Well, no.

  Because sometimes… sometimes, I did. Almost.

  Probably a shared illusion born of mutual self-hypnosis, or whatever— but I got scared after a while, because increasingly I fooled myself that if I squinted at the exact right angle, I eventually might be able to catch something forming in the air, superimposed over whatever supernatural beacon Imogen was leading us towards. Because, on one particular day, at the very moment dusk turned to twilight, I genuinely thought I could see the threshold… a thin, bright line starting to trace itself around what could only be a frame, hanging high in the air with light from another world spilling out as the door it came attached to began to crack, just a fraction. Before it slammed tight once more.

  A fingernail of new moon shining down on us where we stood, and stars, so many stars, caught in the trees’ darkness like glitter in a woman’s hair. And Imogen grinding her thumb into my wrist, wringing my already-stinging hand so hard it spasmed: Fucking faster, Una, goddamnit. It’s like you don’t even want it.

  I do, though, Im, I swear. You know I do.

  She gave a long sigh, then, almost a snarl. Ragged and ugly. It scraped me inside, like sandpaper.

  You’d better, is all she said.

  * * *

  Here’s what I do know: when someone disappears, no matter the reason, they leave a hole. Wait long enough, and that hole is all you have—it’s all you’re left with. The assumption that they’re gone, and they’re not ever coming back. It creates its own gravity, like every other anomaly; everything left over revolves around it, forever.

  It’s like a scratch on a record, it leaves a groove. It’ll never play right again. So every time you hear this wounded song you associate with that gone person, you’ll remember she is gone—remember she might be dead—and it’ll hit you all at once, everywhere, over and over again. Shake you like a bag full of rocks. You’ll be one big bruise.

  The dead hate the living. We have what
they want: time. We have choices, chances. The dead are hungry, always. They resent us everything, even our pain.

  By remembering what you’ve forgotten, by trying to see what it is that happened objectively, what is it that you invite back into your life? Do you open a door, summon a ghost? Do you announce yourself as open to being haunted?

  The past is a trap and memory is a drug.

  Memory is a door.

  * * *

  Blood holds the door open longer, Imogen realized, after we’d not-quite-done it enough times to have some statistics to work with. We need more of it, that’s the key. Which is how we ended up poring over A History of Torture and Execution, which—in turn—is where Imogen found her pear of anguish. And it wasn’t as if I really believed she’d be able get ahold of one, but who knew what she was capable of, or what she assumed I’d be capable of? I really didn’t feel like stabbing myself (or her, or both of us) in the vagina as part of some Let’s Go! Narnia craziness any more than I felt like throwing myself from the bridge with her on the off-chance a door might open in thin air, halfway down…

  I wouldn’t tell on her, though. That was never an option.

  That evening, however, my body decided things for us. I stole an empty jar from the kitchen and squatted over it for an hour after lights-out, reading Salem’s Lot by the streetlight leaking through my bedroom window. The result was clotted red-black, thick and dreadful; I’d filled it halfway by the time I stuck the lid back on and screwed it tight, wrapping it three deep in plastic bags before stowing it away at the bottom of my backpack.