The Dark

by Ellen Datlow

  “Good-bye,” I heard him say, and something in his tone unsettled me; it was too sad. I shivered, turned around, and my father said, “He want to see me?”

  He looked thin, I thought, just another spindly cactus, holding my duffel bag out from his side. If he’d been speaking to me, I might have run to him. I wanted to. But he was watching Lucy, who had stopped at the edge of the square of patio cement outside the front door.

  “I don’t think so,” she said, and came over to me and took my hand.

  Without another word, my father tossed my duffel bag onto the miniature patio and climbed back in his car. For a moment, his eyes caught mine through the windshield, and I said, “Wait,” but my father didn’t hear me. I said it louder, and Lucy put her hand on my shoulder.

  “This has to be done, Seth,” she said.

  “What does?”

  “This way.” She gestured toward the other side of the house, and I followed her there and stopped when I saw the hogan.

  It sat next to the squat gray cactus I’d always considered the edge of my grandfather’s yard. It looked surprisingly solid, its mud walls dry and gray and hard, its pocked, stumpy wooden pillars firm in the ground, almost as if they were real trees that had somehow taken root there.

  “You live here now?” I blurted, and Lucy stared at me.

  “Oh, yes, Seth. Me sleep-um ground. How.” She pulled aside the hide curtain at the front of the hogan and ducked inside, and I followed.

  I thought it would be cooler in there, but it wasn’t. The wood and mud trapped the heat but blocked the light. I didn’t like it. It reminded me of an oven, of Hansel and Gretel. And it reeked of the desert: burnt sand, hot wind, nothingness.

  “This is where you’ll sleep,” Lucy said. “It’s also where we’ll work.” She knelt and lit a beeswax candle and placed it in the center of the dirt floor in a scratched glass drugstore candlestick. “We need to begin right now.”

  “Begin what?” I asked, fighting down another shudder as the candlelight played over the room. Against the far wall, tucked under a miniature canopy constructed of metal poles and a tarpaulin, were a sleeping bag and a pillow. My bed, I assumed. Beside it sat a low, rolling table, and on the table were another candlestick, a cracked ceramic bowl, some matches, and the Dancing Man.

  In my room in this pension in the Czech Republic, five thousand miles and twenty years removed from that place, I put my pen down and swallowed the entire glass of lukewarm water my students had left me. Then I got up and went to the window, staring out at the trees and the street. I was hoping to see my kids returning like ducks to a familiar pond, flapping their arms and jostling each other and squawking and laughing. Instead, I saw my own face, faint and featureless, too white in the window glass. I went back to the desk and picked up the pen.

  The Dancing Man’s eyes were all pupil, carved in two perfect ovals in the knottiest wood I had ever seen. The nose was just a notch, but the mouth was enormous, a giant O, like the opening of a cave. I was terrified of the thing even before I noticed that it was moving.

  Moving, I suppose, is too grand a description. It … leaned. First one way, then the other, on a wire that ran straight through its belly. In a fit of panic, after a nightmare, I described it to my college roommate, a physics major, and he shrugged and said something about perfect balance and pendulums and gravity and the rotation of the earth. Except that the Dancing Man didn’t just move side to side. It also wiggled down its wire, very slowly, until it reached the end. And then the wire tilted up, and it began to wiggle back. Slowly. Until it reached the other end. Back and forth. Side to side. Forever.

  “Take the drum,” Lucy said behind me, and I ripped my eyes away from the Dancing Man.

  “What?” I said.

  She gestured at the table, and I realized she meant the ceramic bowl. I didn’t understand, and I didn’t want to go over there. But I didn’t know what else to do, and I felt ridiculous under Lucy’s stare.

  The Dancing Man was at the far end of its wire, leaning, mouth open. Trying to be casual, I snatched the bowl from underneath it and retreated to where Lucy knelt. The water inside the bowl made a sloshing sound but didn’t splash out, and I held it away from my chest in surprise and noticed the covering stitched over the top. It was hide of some kind, moist when I touched it.

  “Like this,” said Lucy, and she leaned close and tapped on the skin of the drum. The sound was deep and tuneful, like a voice. I sat down next to Lucy. She tapped again, in a slow, repeating pattern. I put my hands where hers had been, and when she nodded at me, I began to play.

  “Okay?” I said.

  “Harder,” Lucy said, and she reached into her pocket and pulled out a long, wooden stick. The candlelight flickered across the stick, and I saw the carving. A pine tree, and underneath it, roots that bulged along the base of the stick like long, black veins.

  “What is that?” I asked.

  “A rattle stick. My grandmother made it. I’m going to rattle it while you play. So if you would. Like I showed you.”

  I beat on the drum, and the sound came out dead in that airless space.

  “For God’s sake,” Lucy snapped. “Harder.” She had never been exceptionally friendly to me. But she’d been friendlier than this.

  I slammed my hands down harder, and after a few beats, Lucy leaned back and nodded and watched. Not long after, she lifted her hand, stared at me as though daring me to stop her, and shook the stick. The sound it made was less rattle than buzz, as though it had wasps inside it. Lucy shook it a few more times, always at the same half-pause in my rhythm. Then her eyes rolled back in her head, and her spine arched, and my hand froze over the drum and Lucy snarled, “Don’t stop.”

  After that, she began to chant. There was no tune to it, but a pattern, the pitch sliding up a little, down some, up a little more. When Lucy reached the top note, the ground under my crossed legs seemed to tingle, as though there were scorpions sliding out of the sand, but I didn’t look down. I thought of the wooden figure on its wire behind me, but I didn’t turn around. I played the drum, and I watched Lucy, and I kept my mouth shut.

  We went on for a long, long time. After that first flush of fear, I was too mesmerized to think. My bones were tingling, too, and the air in the hogan was heavy. I couldn’t get enough of it in my lungs. Tiny tidepools of sweat had formed in the hollow of Lucy’s neck and under her ears and at the throat of her shirt. Under my palms, the drum was sweating, too, and the skin got slippery and warm. Not until Lucy stopped singing did I realize that I was rocking side to side. Leaning.

  “Want lunch?” Lucy said, standing and brushing the earth off her jeans.

  I put my hands out perpendicular, felt the skin prickle and realized my wrists had gone to sleep even as they pounded out the rhythm Lucy had taught me. When I stood, the floor of the hogan seemed unstable, like the bottom of one of those balloon tents my classmates sometimes had at birthday parties. I didn’t want to look behind me, and then I did. The Dancing Man rocked slowly in no wind.

  I turned around again, but Lucy had left the hogan. I didn’t want to be alone in there, so I leapt through the hide curtain and winced against the sudden blast of sunlight and saw my grandfather.

  He was propped on his wheelchair, positioned dead center between the hogan and the back of his house. He must have been there the whole time, I thought, and somehow I’d managed not to notice him when I came in, because unless he’d gotten a whole lot better in the years since I’d seen him last, he couldn’t have wheeled himself out. And he looked worse.

  For one thing, his skin was falling off. At every exposed place on him, I saw flappy folds of yellow-pink. What was underneath was uglier still, not red or bleeding, just not skin. Too dry. Too colorless. He looked like a corn husk. An empty one.

  Next to him, propped on a rusty blue dolly, was a cylindrical silver oxygen tank. A clear tube ran from the nozzle at the top of the tank to the blue mask over my grandfather’s nose and mouth. Above the ma
sk, my grandfather’s heavy-lidded eyes watched me, though they didn’t seem capable of movement either. Leave him out here, I thought, and those eyes would simply fill up with sand.

  “Come in, Seth,” Lucy told me, without any word to my grandfather or acknowledgment that he was there.

  I had my hand on the screen door, was halfway into the house, when I realized I’d heard him speak. I stopped. It had to have been him, I thought, and couldn’t have been. I turned around and saw the back of his head tilting toward the top of the chair. Retracing my steps—I’d given him a wide berth—I returned to face him. The eyes stayed still, and the oxygen tank was silent. But the mask fogged, and I heard the whisper again.

  “Ruach,” he said. It was what he always called me, when he called me anything.

  In spite of the heat, I felt goose bumps spring from my skin, all along my legs and arms. I couldn’t move. I couldn’t answer. I should say hello, I thought. Say something.

  I waited instead. A few seconds later, the oxygen mask fogged again. “Trees,” said the whisper voice. “Screaming. In the trees.” One of my grandfather’s hands raised an inch or so off the arm of the chair and fell back into place.

  “Patience,” Lucy said from the doorway. “Come on, Seth.” This time, my grandfather said nothing as I slipped past him into the house.

  Lucy slid a bologna sandwich and a bag of Fritos and a plastic glass of apple juice in front of me. I lifted the sandwich, found that I couldn’t imagine putting it in my mouth, and dropped it on the plate.

  “Better eat,” Lucy said. “We have a long day yet.”

  I ate, a little. Eventually, Lucy sat down across from me, but she didn’t say anything else. She just gnawed a celery stick and watched the sand outside change color as the sun crawled west. The house was silent, the countertops and walls bare.

  “Can I ask you something?” I finally asked.

  Lucy was washing my plate in the sink. She didn’t turn around, but she didn’t say no.

  “What are we doing? Out there, I mean.”

  No answer. Through the kitchen doorway, I could see my grandfather’s living room, the stained wood floor, and the single brown armchair lodged against a wall, across from the TV. My grandfather had spent every waking minute of his life in this place for fifteen years or more, and there was no trace of him in it.

  “It’s a Way, isn’t it?” I said, and Lucy shut the water off.

  When she turned, her expression was the same as it had been all day, a little mocking, a little angry. She took a step toward the table.

  “We learned about them at school,” I said.

  “Did you,” she said.

  “We’re studying lots of Indian things.”

  The smile that spread over Lucy’s face was ugly, cruel. Or maybe just tired. “Good for you,” she said. “Come on. We don’t have much time.”

  “Is this to make my grandfather better?”

  “Nothing’s going to make your grandfather better.” Without waiting for me, she pushed through the screen door into the heat.

  This time, I made myself stop beside my grandfather’s chair. I could just hear the hiss of the oxygen tank, like steam escaping from the boiling ground. When no fog appeared in the blue mask and no words emerged from the hiss, I followed Lucy into the hogan and let the hide curtain fall shut.

  All afternoon and into the evening, I played the water-drum while Lucy sang. By the time the air began to cool outside, the whole hogan was vibrating, and the ground, too. Whatever we were doing, I could feel the power in it. I was the beating heart of a living thing, and Lucy was its voice. Once, I found myself wondering just what we were setting loose or summoning here, and I stopped, for a single beat. But the silence was worse. The silence was like being dead. And I thought I could hear the thing behind me, the Dancing Man. If I inclined my head, stopped playing for too long, I almost believed I’d hear him whispering.

  When Lucy finally rocked to her feet and walked out without speaking to me, it was evening, and the desert was alive. I sat shaking as the rhythm spilled out of me and the sand soaked it up. Then I stood, and that unsteady feeling came over me again, stronger this time, as if the air was wobbling, too, threatening to slide right off the surface of the earth. When I emerged from the hogan, I saw black spiders on the wall of my grandfather’s house, and I heard wind and rabbits, and the first coyotes yipping somewhere to the west. My grandfather sat slumped in the same position he had been in hours and hours ago, which meant he had been baking out here all afternoon. Lucy was on the patio, watching the sun melt into the horizon’s open mouth. Her skin was slick, and her hair was wet where it touched her ear and neck.

  “Your grandfather’s going to tell you a story,” she said, sounding exhausted. “And you’re going to listen.”

  My grandfather’s head rolled upright, and I wished we were back in the hogan, doing whatever it was we’d been doing. At least there, I was moving, pounding hard enough to drown sound out. Maybe. The screen door slapped shut, and my grandfather looked at me. His eyes were deep, deep brown, almost black, and horribly familiar. Did my eyes look like that?

  “Ruach,” he whispered, and I wasn’t sure, but his whisper seemed stronger than it had before. The oxygen mask fogged and stayed fogged. The whisper kept coming, as though Lucy had spun a spigot and left it open. “You will know … Now … Then the world … won’t be yours … anymore.” My grandfather shifted like some sort of giant, bloated sand-spider in the center of its web, and I heard his ruined skin rustle. Overhead, the whole sky went red.

  “At war’s end …” my grandfather hissed. “Do you … understand?” I nodded, transfixed. I could hear his breathing now, the ribs rising, parting, collapsing. The tank machinery had gone strangely silent. Was he breathing on his own, I wondered? Could he, still?

  “A few days. Do you understand? Before the Red Army came …” He coughed. Even his cough sounded stronger. “The Nazis took … me. And the Gypsies. From … our camp. To Chelmno.”

  I’d never heard the word before. I’ve almost never heard it since. But as my grandfather said it, another cough roared out of his throat, and when it was gone, the tank was hissing again. Still, my grandfather continued to whisper.

  “To die. Do you understand?” Gasp. Hiss. Silence. “To die. But not yet. Not … right away.” Gasp. “We came … by train, but open train. Not cattle car. Wasteland. Farmland. Nothing. And then trees.” Under the mask, the lips twitched, and above it, the eyes closed completely. “That first time. Ruach. All those … giant … green … trees. Unimaginable. To think anything … on the earth we knew … could live that long.”

  His voice continued to fade, faster than the daylight. A few minutes more, I thought, and he’d be silent again, just machine and breath, and I could sit out here in the yard and let the evening wind roll over me.

  “When they too … us off the train,” my grandfather said, “for one moment … I swear I smelled … leaves. Fat, green leaves … the new green … in them. Then the old smell … the only smell. Blood in dirt. The stink … of us. Piss. Shit. Open … sores. Skin on fire. Hnnn.”

  His voice trailed away, hardly-there air over barely moving mouth, and still he kept talking. “Prayed for … some people … to die. They smelled … better. Dead. That was one prayer … always answered.

  “They took us … into the woods. Not to barracks. So few of them. Ten. Maybe twenty. Faces like … possums. Stupid. Blank. No thoughts. We came to … ditches. Deep. Like wells. Half-full, already. They told us, ‘Stand still … ‘Breathe in.’”

  At first, I thought the ensuing silence was for effect. He was letting me smell it. And I did smell it, the earth and the dead people, and there were German soliders all around us, floating up out of the sand with black uniforms and white, blank faces. Then my grandfather crumpled forward, and I screamed for Lucy.

  She came fast but not running and put a hand on my grandfather’s back and another on his neck. After a few seconds, she straightened.
“He’s asleep,” she told me. “Stay here.” She wheeled my grandfather into the house, and she was gone a long time.

  Sliding to a sitting position, I closed my eyes and tried not to hear my grandfather’s voice. After a while, I thought I could hear bugs and snakes and something larger padding out beyond the cacti. I could feel the moonlight, too, white and cool on my skin. The screen door banged, and I opened my eyes to find Lucy moving toward me, past me, carrying a picnic basket into the hogan.

  “I want to eat out here,” I said quickly, and Lucy turned with the hide curtain in her hand.

  “Why don’t we go in?” she said, and the note of coaxing in her voice made me nervous. So did the way she glanced over her shoulder into the hogan, as though something in there had spoken.

  I stayed where I was, and eventually, Lucy shrugged and let the curtain fall and dropped the basket at my feet. From the way she was acting, I thought she might leave me alone out there, but she sat down instead and looked at the sand and the cacti and the stars.

  Inside the basket I found warmed canned chili in a plastic Tupperware container and fry bread with cinnamon-sugar and two cellophane-wrapped broccoli stalks that reminded me of uprooted miniature trees. In my ears, my grandfather’s voice murmured, and to drown out the sound, I began to eat.

  As soon as I was finished, Lucy began to stack the containers inside the basket, but she stopped when I spoke. “Please. Just talk to me a little.”

  She looked at me. The same look. As though we’d never even met. “Get some sleep. Tomorrow … well, let’s just say tomorrow’s a big day.”

  “For who?”

  Lucy pursed her lips, and all at once, inexplicably, she seemed on the verge of tears. “Go to sleep.”

  “I’m not sleeping in the hogan,” I told her.

  “Suit yourself.”

  She was standing, and her back was to me now. I said, “Just tell me what kind of Way we’re doing.”

  “An Enemy Way.”

  “What does it do?”