When Things Get Dark

by Ellen Datlow

  * * *

  No one was at the front door. The TV was on: he turned it off. The bell was still ringing and so he went to the kitchen and turned on the lights. A woman stood at the back door, peering in. She must have had her finger on the bell and Andy, against his better judgment, did as Hannah had said he must and unlocked the door to let her in.

  “Oh, good,” she said, stepping into the kitchen. “Did I wake you up? I’m so sorry.”

  “No,” Andy said. “It’s fine. I’m Andy. I’m housesitting here. I mean, my friend Hannah was housesitting, but she had a family emergency and so now I’m filling in.”

  “I’m Rose White,” his visitor said. “Very nice to meet you, Andy.” She opened the refrigerator and took out two beers. She handed one to him and then headed into the living room, sitting down on one of the chintz sofas and dropping her leather carry-all on the floor, plopping her muddy boots upon the coffee table.

  She couldn’t have been much older than Andy. Her hair, longish and dirty blond, looked as if it hadn’t seen a hairbrush in several days. Perhaps she had been backpacking. In any case, she was still extremely attractive.

  “Have a drink with me,” she said, smiling. One of her front teeth was just a little crooked. “Then I’ll let you go back to bed.”

  Andy opened the beer. Sat down in an armchair that faced the fireplace. Hannah had said he didn’t have to hang out, but on the other hand, he didn’t want to be rude. He said, “Mist’s cleared up.”

  “The veil? It usually does,” Rose White said. “Don’t recommend going out in it. You can get lost quite quickly. I was quite surprised to find myself right on Skinder’s doorstep. I thought I’d been going in another direction entirely.”

  “You live nearby?” Andy said. It didn’t seem polite to ask why she was out so late at night. “Hannah comes and housesits every summer. Maybe you’ve met her?”

  “Phew,” Rose White said. “The big questions! Haven’t been through in years, actually. Let’s see. The last housesitter I met was an Alma. Or Alba. But I see nothing’s much changed. Skinder’s not much for change.”

  “I don’t really know much about Skinder,” Andy said. “Anything, really.”

  “A complicated fellow,” Rose White said. “You know the rules, I suppose.”

  “I think so?” Andy said. “If he comes to the house, I’m supposed to not let him in. For some reason. I don’t really know what he looks like, but he’ll come to the front door. That’s how I’ll know that it’s him. But if anyone comes to the back door, then I let them in.”

  “Good enough to get by,” Rose White said. She began to unlace her boots. “Aren’t you going to drink your beer?”

  Andy set it down. “I might just go back to bed, unless you need me for something. Going to try to get up early and get some work done. I’m working on my dissertation while I’m here, actually.”

  “A scholar!” Rose White said. “I’ll be quiet as a mouse. Leave your beer. I’ll drink it for you.”

  But she was not, in fact, as quiet as a mouse. Andy lay in his bed, listening as she rattled and banged around the kitchen, boiling water in the kettle and pulling out various pans. The smell of frying bacon seeped under his closed door in a delicious cloud. Andy wished he had his noise-canceling headphones. But they were on the table beside his laptop, and he did not want to go downstairs and get them.

  He thought, Tomorrow I really will get some work done, visitor or no visitor. Otherwise all the time will just melt away and in the end I’ll have accomplished nothing.

  Without meaning to, he found himself listening for the sound of Rose White coming up the stairs. It must have been after three when, at last, she did. She went into the bathroom beside his bedroom and took a long shower. He wondered which room she would choose, but in the end it was his door she opened. She didn’t turn on the lights, but instead got into the bed with him.

  He turned on his side and there was enough moonlight in the room that he could see Rose White looking back at him. She had not bothered to put clothes back on post-shower. “Do you have a girlfriend?” she said.

  “Not at the moment,” Andy said.

  “Do you like to fuck women?”

  “Yes,” Andy said.

  “Then here’s my last question,” she said. “Would you like to fuck me? No strings. Just for fun.”

  “Yes,” Andy said. “Absolutely, yes. But I don’t have a condom.”

  “Not a concern for me,” she said. “You?”

  Yes, a little. That was the problem with knowing a fair bit about how statistics worked. “No,” Andy said. “Not at all.”

  But afterward, he wasn’t quite sure what the etiquette was. Should he try to get to know her a little better? He didn’t even know how long she was going to be staying at the house. It would have been easier if he’d been able to fall asleep, but that seemed to be out of the question.

  He decided he would pretend to be asleep.

  “Not tired?” Rose White said.

  “Sorry,” Andy said. “A lot to think about. Think I’ll go downstairs and watch TV for a while.”

  “Stay here,” Rose White said. “I’ll tell you a story.”

  “A story,” Andy said. “You mean like when a kid can’t fall asleep. So one of their parents tells them a story? A story like that?” He wasn’t a kid. On the other hand, there was a woman in his bed he’d just met, and they’d had sex and now she was offering to tell him a story. Why not say yes? If nothing else, it would be something, later on, that would be an interesting story of his own. “Sure. Tell me a story.”

  Rose White drew the covers up to her neck. She was lying on her back, and this gave the impression she was telling the story to someone floating on the ceiling. It felt strangely formal, as if Andy were back in a lecture hall, listening to one of his professors. She said, “Once, a very long time ago, there was a woman who wrote books for a living. She made enough from this to keep not only herself in modest comfort but also her sister, who lived with her and was her secretary. She wrote her novels longhand and it was the sister who read the manuscript first, before giving it back to the writer to edit. This sister, who was a romantic with very little outlet for expression, had a peculiar way of marking the parts she liked best. She would prick her finger with a needle and mark the place with her own blood to show how good she thought it was. A little blotch over a well-turned phrase, a little smudge. She would return the manuscript, the writer would do her revisions, sparing the lines and scenes that her sister had loved, and then the sister would type everything up properly and send it along to the writer’s agent.

  “The writer’s books were popular with a certain audience, but never garnered much critical favor. The writer shrugged this off. She told her sister the merit of the books was that they were easy to produce at a rate which kept a roof over their heads, and they served a second purpose, which was to entertain those whose lives were hard enough. But, the writer said, she had in her a book of such beauty and power that anyone who read it would be changed by it forever, and one day she would write it. When her sister asked why she did not write it now, she said that such a book would take more time and thought and effort than she could currently spare.

  “As time went on, though, the writer’s books became less popular. The checks they brought in were smaller, and their lives became little by little less comfortable. The writer determined that she would at last turn her attention to this other book. She labored over it for a year and into the next winter, and slept little and ate less and grew unwell. At night while she worked her sister would hear her groaning and coughing, and then one morning, very early, the writer woke her sister and said, ‘I have finished it at last. Now I must rest.’

  “The sister put on a robe and lit a fire and sat down to read the manuscript at once, her needle in her pocket. But upon reading the very first sentence, she drew out her needle and pricked her finger to mark it. And the second sentence, too, she marked with her blood. And it went on lik
e that as she read, until at last she had to go down to the kitchen to fetch a peeling knife. First she cut her palm and then she cut her arm and each line and every page was marked with the sister’s blood as she read, such was the power and beauty of the narrative and the characters and the writer’s language.

  “Many days later, friends of the writer and her sister grew concerned because no one had heard from them in some time. Upon forcing their way into the house they found the sister exsanguinated in her chair, the manuscript in her lap all glued together with her blood. The body of the writer, too, was discovered in her bed. She’d died of an ague she’d caught from overwork and too little rest. As for the book she’d written, it was quite impossible to read even a single word.”

  “That was really interesting,” Andy said, just as awake as he had been at the start, possibly more so. In a minute he would say so, get dressed, and go downstairs. “Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome,” Rose White said. “Now go to sleep.”

  * * *

  He woke at the table downstairs, his laptop beside his head.

  Rose White was on the couch. “I built a fire,” she said. “Thought you might catch cold. Vermont weather is unpredictable, summer or not.”

  She’d done this, Andy realized, because he was entirely naked. His shoulders ached and his ass was unhygienically stuck to the rattan seat of the chair. “What time is it?” he asked her. “How long have I been here?”

  “You were gone when I woke up,” Rose White said. “Discovered you here when I came down this morning. It’s past noon now.”

  “I must’ve been sleepwalking,” Andy said. His laptop was open, and when he woke the screen, a prompt appeared. Save changes?

  “Get dressed,” Rose White said. “I’ll make you a sandwich. Then you can get back to it.”

  He dressed and ate, reading over what he’d written the night before. It was rough, but it was also a reasonably solid foundation for revision. Moreover, there were four thousand words that had not been there the night before. This seemed like enough work for one day, and so, at Rose White’s suggestion, they spent the day in bed and the evening drinking bourbon they procured from a locked liquor cabinet. Rose White knew where to find the key.

  The next few days and nights were pleasant ones. Andy took leisurely naps in the afternoon. He shared his stash with Rose White. They took turns cooking, and let the dishes pile up. Rose White had very little interest in his life, and no interest at all in explaining anything about herself. If, after sex, she enjoyed telling him her strange little stories, at least they were mostly very short. Some of them hardly seemed to be stories at all. One went like this: “There once was a man possessed of a great estate who did not wish to marry. At last, beset by his financial advisors, he agreed to be married to the first suitable individual he encountered upon setting into town, and when he came home with his fiancée, his friends and advisors were dismayed to find that he had become engaged to a tortoise. Nevertheless, the man found a priest willing, for a goodly sum of money, to perform the ceremony. They lived together for several years and then the man died. At last a distant relative was found to inherit the estate, and on his first night in his fine new home, he had the tortoise killed and served up as a soup in its own shell. But this is not, by any means, the worst story about marriage that I know.”

  Another story began, “Once there was a blood sausage and a liver sausage and the blood sausage invited the liver sausage over for dinner.” None of Rose White’s stories were cheerful. In all of them, someone came to a bad end, but there was nothing to be learned from them. Nevertheless, each time she finished and said to Andy, “Go to sleep,” he promptly fell asleep. And, too, each morning he woke up to find that he had, in some dream state, produced more of his dissertation, though after the second time this happened he moved his laptop and his notebooks up to the vanity in the red and white bedroom.

  The groceries were left on the porch on the appointed day, and the dissertation progressed, and in the afternoons when it grew warm Rose White sunbathed topless on the patio while Andy did reps. Hannah called to check in, and to report her nieces would eat nothing but sugar cereal and mozzarella sticks, while her sister was camped out on a blow-up mattress in the dining room because she could not get up and down the stairs, and needed Hannah’s help getting onto the toilet and off again.

  “Everything’s great here,” Andy said.

  “Any visitors?” Hannah asked.

  “Yeah, some lady named Rose White. I don’t know how long she’s staying.”

  “Never met her,” Hannah said. “So, what’s she like?”

  “She’s okay,” Andy said. He didn’t really feel like getting into the details. “I’ve been really focused on the dissertation. We haven’t really hung out or anything. But she’s done some of the cooking.”

  “So, pretty normal, then,” Hannah said. “Good. Sometimes the ones who show up are kind of strange.”

  “How so?” Andy said.

  “Oh, you know,” Hannah said. “Some of them can be a little strange. I’m gonna go make lunch now for the two small assholes. Call if you need anything. And I’ll check in again later. As soon as I know when I can head back, I’ll let you know.”

  “No rush,” Andy said, looking out the window to where Rose White lay, splendid and rosy upon a beach towel. This was wonderful, yes, but what if she were developing feelings for him? Did he feel something for her? Yes, possibly. This was very inconvenient. They didn’t really know each other at all, and she was, as Hannah had said, kind of strange.

  The whole thing made him uncomfortable. Much to think about. He had a gummy and pretended to be working when Rose White came back in. But she’d only come into the house to use the bathroom and put her clothes back on. Then she was off for a hike, not even bothering to ask if he wanted to come along. She came back at dinnertime with a pocketful of mushrooms. “Psilocybe cubensis,” she said. “I’ll make us tea. The water here has some excellent properties of its own, but there’s no such thing as too much fun.”

  “Isn’t that dangerous?” Andy said. “I mean, what if you haven’t identified the mushroom correctly?”

  Rose White gave him a withering look. “Go teach your grandmother to suck eggs,” she said. “Are you a man or a chicken, Andy?”

  It was, again, the study of statistics that presented the problem. Nevertheless, Andy had some of the tea and in return shared his vape pen. It was the first time he’d ever tried mushrooms, and only pieces of the night that followed were accessible to him later on.

  Rose White, sitting astride him, her hands on his biceps, the feeling that her fingers were sinking into his flesh as if either he or she are made of mist.

  Rose White saying, “I think my sister must be quite near now.” Andy tries to say that he didn’t know she had a sister. He doesn’t really know anything about her. “I’m Rose White but she is Rose Red.” When he looks at her, her hair is full of blood. Rose Red!

  The realization that Skinder’s house has no walls, no roof, no foundation. The walls are trees, there is no ceiling, only sky. “It’s all water underneath,” he is explaining. Rose White: “Only the doors are real.”

  Later, he is seated in front of the vanity in the red and white bedroom. The bell on the wall is ringing. When he leaves one bedroom, Rose White is coming out of another. Andy has to sit down on the staircase and bump down, one step at a time. Rose White helps him stand up at the bottom. His head is floating several feet above his body and he has to walk slowly to make sure he doesn’t leave it behind.

  Two deer are arranged like statuary upon the flagstone patio. Are they real? Did these deer ring the doorbell? Do they want to come in? He finds this hysterically funny but when he opens the door, the deer approach solemnly on their attenuated, decorative legs. One and then the other comes into the kitchen, stretching their velvet necks out and down to fit through the door. Inside the velvet-lined jewel boxes of their nostrils the warmth of their breath is gold.
It dazzles. Andy’s head floats up higher, bumping against the ceiling. He stretches out his hand, strokes the flank of an actual fucking deer. A doorbell-ringing deer. A moth has flown into the kitchen, he’s left the door open. It blunders through the air, brushing against his cheek, his ear. He opens his mouth to tell Rose White to close the door and the moth flies right in.

  * * *

  Rose White says, “Once upon a time there was a real estate agent who made arrangements to show a property. When she arrived at the property, she realized at once that her new client was none other than Death. Suspecting that he was there for her, she pretended she was not the agent at all, but rather another prospective buyer. Claiming she had been told to meet the listing agent around the back, she lured Death around the side of the house and told him to look through the French windows to see if anyone was there to let them in. When he did this, she picked up an ornamental planter and bashed in his head. Then she dragged the body of Death into the full bathroom and cut it into twelve pieces in the bathtub. These she wrapped in Hefty bags and, after cleaning the bathtub thoroughly, she parked her Lexus in the garage and placed these bags in the trunk. Over the next week, she buried each piece deep on the grounds of a different listing, and each of those houses sold quite quickly. Decades went by and the real estate agent began to regret what she had done. She was now in her nineties and weary of life, but Death did not come for her. And so she visited each of the properties where she had disposed of his corpse and dug him up, but perhaps her memory was faulty: she could not find the last two pieces. She is still, in fact, searching for Death’s left forearm and his head. The rest of him, badly decomposed, is in a deep freezer in her garage. Some days she wonders if, in fact, it was really Death at all. And what if it really had been Death? What if he had only come to see a house? Isn’t it likely that even Death himself must have a house in which to keep himself?”