At Home in the Dark

by Joe Hill

  “Our dad likes coffee before breakfast, and he lets—I mean, let us drink it, too.” Three identical mugs from the cabinet sit in a line near the coffeemaker. The coffee smells rich and strong and when Skyla picks up a mug and holds it out to me, saliva seeps from the floor of my mouth. What an odd thing for her to do, especially in a stranger’s kitchen. Is she trying to manipulate me? Does she already know my plans, when I’m not even sure of them myself? She might not be looking for kindness at all. My theory is only a theory, and there are exceptions.

  She says she has no money, but, really, what is in that bag she carries? When it’s on her shoulder, it sags. Now it occupies the seat of the fourth kitchen chair, slid into its place at the table. So she is unwilling to leave the bag in her room. Interesting.

  Maybe she’s a thief. There are few things of obvious value in the house, no electronics, jewelry or fine paintings. A child couldn’t do anything with a painting! It doesn’t matter, though. They won’t be leaving here, whatever the circumstances.

  “Excellent.” I take the mug and sip carefully. The coffee is delicious, and I tell her so. She flushes, obviously pleased. Despite her narrow eyes and sallow skin, she could perhaps grow into a presentable, even pretty girl. “I have cinnamon rolls rising on top of the refrigerator. I’ll stir up the fire in the stove and get them baking.”

  While I’m working, the boy stomps into the kitchen.

  “I want some coffee too. Where are all the birds? You don’t have any birdfeeders out here or anything. But I found a really big worm. Look!” Beaming, he holds up a foot-long earthworm pinched between his forefinger and thumb. The worm curls and stretches, its head (or tail?) alternately reaching for the boy’s hand and the ground.

  “Get it outside! What do you mean, bringing that in the house?” Sounding like an angry mother, Skyla slams her own mug on the counter, making both the boy and me wince. He glances uncertainly from me to his sister and back again.

  This feels like some kind of test. Which of them to disappoint?

  “Let me get a jar, and you can put some dirt in it. If you turn it loose in the house it’ll just be confused.” My advice sounds remarkably sound and wise to my own ears.

  “Yeah. That’s right,” the boy says. “Worms get confused. Did you know if you cut a worm’s tail off, the part with the head gets to grow a new tail? But it doesn’t grow a new head on the tail part.”

  “How fascinating.” I get up to take an old Mason jar from a cabinet.

  A few minutes later, the boy returns to the kitchen with the jar half-filled with dirt, the worm writhing on its surface. He sets it on the table in front of him, and stares at it, rapt.

  “Do you have any pets at home?” I slide the pan of risen rolls into the oven, shut the door and throw the bar across it.

  “Why do you lock up the oven like that?” the girl asks.

  Why, indeed? “Oh, just habit, I guess. Safety first.” Gripping the end of the bar, I slide it back out of place. There’s a curious smile on the girl’s lips. Silly old woman, it says. We’re too old and smart to do something like climb in the oven!

  No. But you’re not too big for me to put you in it. My mother’s voice. Or is it my own? A sickly sweet taste comes to the back of my throat as though the mucus there holds my worst memories. I’ve learned that LSD flashbacks happen that way. The drug lives on in some glands and the taste trickles out on and off, sometimes for years.

  • • •

  After they dress in their laundered clothes, they tell me they want to explore the house. There’s no talk of leaving or motels or pets.

  The boy runs ahead of Skyla, skidding down the hall in my socks. He is all energy, and the coffee and cinnamon rolls probably haven’t helped. He seems at home, as though he has always lived here. I’m not sure what to do with his happiness, and it bothers me. Was there ever a truly happy child in this house? I certainly wasn’t one, except perhaps for those few weeks each year. Every other child who has come here in my lifetime was deathly afraid, and for very good reason.

  He tries every door without asking, and strides into rooms, looking like a slightly demented hospital patient in his bandage. Gone is the shy smile from the night before. When he comes to the attic door at the end of the upstairs hall, he finds it locked. “How come?” he asks, looking up at me, his head tipped like a perplexed terrier’s.

  “A couple of the stairs are wobbly, and sometimes I forget. The lock reminds me. There’s nothing up there anyway, except spiders.” I give an exaggerated shudder. “Everything I need is down here.”

  Satisfied, he moves on. Behind me, Skyla is silent, but as she passes by the door I hear the faint movement of its old metal knob as she tests it. I wish she hadn’t done that.

  They finally settle in the tiny downstairs room my mother hopefully called the library, with its piles of National Geographic magazines, light mysteries, and romance novels. If you’d known my mother, her taste in books would surprise you. She eschewed horror novels or anything else that described violence or bloody scenes. The same for books in which any harm came to children. If she accidentally purchased a book with any of those elements, she threw it in the garbage can, from which I would rescue it, hide it, and read it. Now I use the library because I get tired of dusting books. Each week I select a stack that perfectly fills my green canvas bag that bears the logo of the local natural foods co-op. They know me at the library.

  Skyla discovers the shelf of jigsaw puzzles, and asks if I will do one with her. She looks surprised when I agree. I love puzzles, and I haven’t done this one, a Mary Cassatt painting called “Summertime,” of a woman and girl in a rowboat, admiring ducks on the water. Even in puzzle form, the dazzling white of the ducks’ feathers and the bow on the girl’s hat pierce the somber colors of the water like wedges of ice. The mother reclines, resting one elbow on the side of the rowboat. She looks amused. The girl hangs back timidly. Once we have the edge pieces assembled, the boy, who has been looking at magazines, leans over the table, saying he wants to help. But after two or three minutes he wanders off, bored, and takes the worm in the jar to play outside.

  What a strange way to spend the day, with these children I don’t really know. It’s been decades since I’ve done that. Adults don’t make friends the way children can—without agendas, without commitments and worries about the future.

  I’m Skyla’s future, and the boy’s future. My stomach clenches. I think of what’s to come, and the work, and the cleaning up, and all the memories that won’t die. As I bend over the puzzle, searching for pieces to fill a section of grass, I remember the rich, dark smell of the boy’s blood as I doctored his wound and fitted the bandage. My body again floods with a confusion of shame and desire. Hunger for the metallic sweetness of flesh.

  Shame.

  Fed as a child before I knew what I was eating. The odor of cooking meat and onions and potatoes and tarragon and chervil, with its licorice scent. That day in third grade when I had real licorice for the first time, and the smell of it made me so nervous I vomited on the cloakroom floor.

  Shame.

  “Are you okay?” I’ve been staring at the jumbled pieces for too long. Skyla watches me with questioning eyes. Not concerned, just curious.

  “I was thinking about dinner.”

  She drops her gaze to the puzzle and fits in a duck’s head. “I used to make dinner a lot. Nobody likes to cook at our house. My dad worked construction and he was never home until late.”

  “Not your mother? But I guess that’s not a very correct thing to assume.” I smile. “I mean, maybe your father sometimes cooks on the weekends? You know what I’m saying.” My stomach relaxes a bit. It almost feels natural to talk to her. Whatever natural means.

  If she really knew me, she would run away. Fast. She should run away and take the boy with her. But now it’s too late.

  “I don’t have a mother. We’ve got a stepmother. My mother died and left us with our dad after Braylee was born. He says he remembe
rs her but he was only a few months old.”

  “You remember.”

  Skyla shrugs. “Now our dad’s dead. So Braylee and me had to leave.”

  “How sad.” I don’t ask for the details. Did she run away of her own accord, taking her brother? If so, then they might be the wrong children, and another child—or pair of children—could still be wandering loose on that road. What would happen to them if I didn’t retrieve them? The idea is too fantastic to consider.

  But I think they are the children. It makes sense that they’d been orphaned by their father, and left with the stepmother. There is always an unhappy stepmother involved, like someone planned it from the beginning. (It seems a bit hard on stepmothers. Talk about stereotyping.) The way such things are decided is a mystery to me, as it was to at least my mother and her mother. We are the other side of this strange bargain.

  I’m not sure why I feel so uncertain this time. Is it because my mother has only been gone two years? She’d been ill and housebound for a decade, and so I’d mostly dealt with the children alone, anyway. But this time I am completely on my own.

  “Do they deliver pizza out here?” Skyla asks. “I know where the Domino’s is, but do they come out this far?”

  • • •

  Later, we gather in the kitchen to make pizza. Neither of them is good at shaping the dough, but Skyla crumbles dried oregano and basil into the sauce, and slices mushrooms.

  “Aren’t we going to have pepperoni?” The boy is twisting the dough I gave him to play with into a long, wormlike string. Beside him on the kitchen table is the jar with the real worm. Only an inch of its burrowed body is visible through the glass. “We always have pepperoni. Hey, Skyla. Do you think Daddy eats pizza in heaven? I would eat pizza all the time in heaven. I bet you get whatever you want to eat anytime. Like that place where we went that had fifty pizzas sitting out and you could get any kind you wanted, like pineapple and ham. Pineapple is gross.”

  “Pepperoni is meat. I don’t eat meat, so I don’t have any in the house.”

  “That’s so weird,” he says. “But how come you have one of those meat hitter things?” He lets the dough drop to the table and goes to the canister that holds spatulas and wooden spoons. Utensils clatter to the counter as he pulls out a steel-headed meat tenderizer. Waving the tenderizer like a club, he says, “Mommy Janelle has one of these. This could really whack somebody. BAM!” The sharp crack of splitting wood shatters the air as the steel head makes contact with the back of a chair. Stunned, the boy stands staring at the destruction, his mouth gaping.

  “Give me that!” I’m on him in an instant. One of my flour-covered hands grips his shoulder, and the other wrenches the tenderizer away from him. Without stopping to think, I raise the thing above his head. He looks up at me, his eyes blank with shock.

  I’ve seen those eyes. I see them in my dreams. Sometimes they melt with tears, sometimes fill with disbelief or abject terror. Except those eyes always close just before I bring whatever I’m holding down on the child’s head.

  Two hands grip my raised arm, pulling at me.

  “Stop—Stop it! Don’t hurt him! Please!”

  I breathe.

  I haven’t killed him.

  The windows are open. Spring peepers chirrup from the woods. A plane passes far overhead.

  I breathe.

  I haven’t killed him.

  “I hate you,” he screams. “I hate you worse than anybody! You’re old and you’re mean and you’re just like a witch, you’re so ugly!” Swiping his arm across the table so the worm jar falls to the floor, he runs from the room. In a split second he is back, leaning on the door frame, his turban bandage sagging to one side. “You’re a witch and you’re hiding all your secret witch stuff and I’m going to tell everybody and we’re going to burn your stupid house down!”

  Skyla has let go of my arm. I can’t look at her yet. I stare at the tenderizer in my hand. It was my mother’s favorite kitchen tool. The boy’s footsteps pound up the stairs and along the hallway above our heads, sounding as heavy as a man’s.

  “He didn’t mean it.” Her voice shakes. “He does stupid things sometimes, but he’s just a little kid.”

  I feel frozen and empty. The monster living in the shell of my body has retreated to its hiding place. I know you’re a witch! Witch. Monster. Mother. Stepmother. In a child’s eyes, there isn’t necessarily a difference.

  To my surprise, Skyla doesn’t follow Braylee to his room. Without speaking, she kneels by the jar—which, by some miracle, hasn’t shattered—and uses the side of her hand to try to brush the spilled dirt back inside. When she’s gotten up as much as she can, she picks up the escaped worm without flinching, and drops him back in the jar.

  Her eyes evade mine as she asks if there’s anything else she can do. I recognize the fragile hesitation in her voice. It’s the voice of a girl who doesn’t want to make a grownup mad because she’s afraid of what will happen.

  We have to deal with them quickly, dear. It’s best not to know their names so you don’t get too attached. Farmers don’t name their livestock for a reason.

  “Nothing. You don’t need to do anything else. Thank you.” I notice the over-risen pizza dough. “The dough’s full of air bubbles now. It will take a while to get it to where it’s ready to shape again.”

  “That’s okay. I’m not hungry.” She slides out the broken chair and picks up her bag. Something inside it shifts and I hear the clink of metal on metal. She doesn’t seem to notice. “I think I’ll go to bed now.”

  “What about your brother? He hasn’t eaten since lunch.” Whether he goes hungry or not matters less than the awkwardness between Skyla and me. I don’t want her to go upstairs and leave me all alone.

  “Don’t worry, he’s used to it. Our stepmother always makes him go to bed without dinner.”

  Outside, the sun is almost gone. When I hear the bedroom door shut overhead, I turn off the kitchen light and sit waiting for night to make its way inside.

  • • •

  I wake to the sound of distant sobs. The children. Children cry all the time. But when I open my eyes, I have to wipe tears away to even see the outline of my moonlit window. Fumbling for tissues in my bedside table drawer, I try to remember the last time I cried. There aren’t any tissues. It’s obviously been a very long time.

  What if I had cried in front of the children? Would they have had any sympathy for me? No. Crying would only make me look weak. I don’t want to appear weak to them, but they witnessed my breakdown in the kitchen. Yet another reason to do something about them.

  Except I don’t think I can. If I kill them, I’ll become my mother in every way. She’s not here to carry the blame. She made me this way! You have to understand! If I don’t kill them, I’ll be a kidnapper. It won’t matter that I was only doing what they wanted. That I was their sometime priestess, presumed bestower of bounty and success.

  I use the bathroom, and return with a roll of toilet paper to keep in my bedside table. Somehow it makes me feel better to imagine that I might cry again, even if it’s in my sleep.

  Lying down, I wait for sleep to return, but I can only think about the agony of the coming day. Then I hear someone moving through the house.

  Quick, light footsteps going down the stairs, then near-silence when they reach the bottom. I want to go to the door to listen, but my bedroom floorboards creak. If it’s Skyla, I don’t want her to hear me and think I’m spying on her. But what if she’s ill? No. There still would be no reason for her to go downstairs. The two of them have their own bathroom. Or perhaps she’s hungry, or the boy is hungry. When I think of him, my body warms with anger—at myself. Yes, he’s a brat. But thank goodness I didn’t kill him. Skyla would have had to be next. I’d still be downstairs, cooking and cleaning into morning. The kitchen would be filled with that wretched, tantalizing odor, even with all the windows open. I push the images from my mind. I didn’t kill him.

  Instead, I imagine them eating a
midnight snack from the refrigerator, or stuffing themselves (pun intended, because I haven’t completely lost my sense of humor) with leftover cinnamon rolls. I turn on my side to try again to sleep. Perhaps I do, because the next thing I hear is someone walking around in the attic.

  • • •

  My keys, which I had placed in a kitchen drawer the evening before dangle clumsily from the keyhole in the attic door. Amber light from the attic’s bare bulbs filters down the stairs. I wish I were dreaming.

  Someone stole my keys.

  Skyla. She had touched the doorknob as she walked past it, thinking I wouldn’t notice, and she had dared to indulge her curiosity by stealing the keys. Would I have done the same at her age? Not in my mother’s house. I might have been amused, or maybe even a little pleased at the child’s boldness if I didn’t know what she would see when she flipped on those lights.

  Mommy, don’t make me go up there. I don’t want to take them by myself. Don’t make me. Please, Mommy.

  We all have responsibilities, my dear. This is yours now. I have my own. You don’t hear me complaining about what I have to do.

  Maybe that was the last time I cried. Maybe I stopped crying because it made her so angry.

  I creep up the stairs as quietly as I know how. As I get closer, I hear a weak voice, singing. Singing! The words warble, and the tone is pleading and pathetic.

  Blacks and bays, dapples and grays, all the pretty little horses.

  But it’s not Skyla’s voice.

  “How did you get my keys?”

  The song ends abruptly, and the boy turns around. A puddle of urine blossoms at his feet. Behind him, the pile of bones as high as his chin stands silent and still. The oldest bones belong to unknown children who died before that eight-year-old boy from over 150 years ago, and the youngest are those of the last girl I brought home to my mother.