The Dark

by Ellen Datlow

“It’s nothing, Seth. Jesus Christ. It’s silly. Your grandfather thinks it will help him talk. He thinks it will sustain him while he tells you what he needs to tell you. Don’t worry about the goddamn Way. Worry about your grandfather, for once.”

  My mouth flew open, and my skin stung as though she’d slapped me. I started to protest, then found I couldn’t, and didn’t want to. All my life, I’d built my grandfather into a figure of fear, a gasping, grotesque monster in a wheelchair. And my father had let me. I started to cry.

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “Don’t apologize to me.” Lucy walked to the screen door.

  “Isn’t it a little late?” I called after her, furious at myself, at my father, at Lucy. Sad for my grandfather. Scared and sad.

  One more time, Lucy turned around, and the moonlight poured down the white streaks in her hair like wax through a mold. Soon, I thought, she’d be made of it.

  “I mean, for my grandfather’s enemies,” I said. “The Way can’t really do anything to them. Right?”

  “His enemies are inside him,” Lucy said, and left me.

  For hours, it seemed, I sat in the sand, watching constellations explode out of the blackness, one after another, like firecrackers. In the ground, I heard night-things stirring. I thought about the tube in my grandfather’s mouth, and the unspeakable hurt in his eyes—because that’s what it was, I thought now, not boredom, not hatred—and the enemies inside him. And then, slowly, exhaustion overtook me. The taste of fry bread lingered in my mouth, and the starlight got brighter still. I leaned back on my elbows. And finally, at God knows what hour, I crawled into the hogan, under the tarpaulin canopy Lucy had made me, and fell asleep.

  When I awoke, the Dancing Man was sliding down its wire toward me, and I knew, all at once, where I’d seen eyes like my grandfather’s, and the old fear exploded through me all over again. How had he done it, I wondered? The carving on the wooden man’s face was basic, the features crude. But the eyes were his. They had the same singular, almost oval shape, with identical little notches right near the tear ducts. The same too-heavy lids. Same expression, or lack of any.

  I was transfixed, and I stopped breathing. All I could see were those eyes dancing toward me. Halfway down the wire, they seemed to stop momentarily, as though studying me, and I remembered something my dad had told me about wolves. “They’re not trial-and-error animals,” he’d said. “They wait and watch, wait and watch, until they’re sure they know how the thing is done. And then they do it.”

  The Dancing Man began to weave again. First to one side, then the other, then back. If it reached the bottom of the wire, I thought—I knew—I would die. Or I would change. That was why Lucy was ignoring me. She had lied to me about what we were doing here. That was the reason they hadn’t let my father stay. Leaping to my feet, I grabbed the Dancing Man around its clunky wooden base, and it came off the table with the faintest little suck, as though I’d yanked a weed out of the ground. I wanted to throw it, but I didn’t dare. Instead, bent double, not looking at my clenched fist, I crab-walked to the entrance of the hogan, brushed back the hide curtain, slammed the Dancing Man down in the sand outside, and flung the curtain closed again. Then I squatted in the shadows, panting. Listening.

  I crouched there a long time, watching the bottom of the curtain, expecting to see the Dancing Man slithering beneath it. But the hide stayed motionless, the hogan shadowy but still. I let myself sit back, and eventually, I slid into my sleeping bag again. I didn’t expect to sleep anymore, but I did.

  The smell of fresh fry bread woke me, and when I opened my eyes, Lucy was laying a tray of breads and sausage and juice on a red, woven blanket on the floor of the hogan. My lips tasted sandy, and I could feel grit in my clothes and between my teeth and under my eyelids, as though I’d been buried overnight and dug up again.

  “Hurry,” Lucy told me, in the same chilly voice as yesterday.

  I threw back the sleeping bag and started to sit up and saw the Dancing Man gliding back along its wire, watching me. My whole body clenched, and I glared at Lucy and shouted, “How did that get back here?” Even as I said it, I realized that wasn’t what I wanted to ask. More than how, I needed to know when. Exactly how long had it been hovering there without my knowing?

  Without raising an eyebrow or even looking at me, Lucy shrugged and sat back. “Your grandfather wants you to have it,” she said.

  “I don’t want it.”

  “Grow up.”

  Edging as far from the nightstand as possible, I shed the sleeping bag and sat down on the blanket and ate. Everything tasted sweet and sandy. My skin prickled with the intensifying heat. I still had a piece of fry bread and half a sausage left when I put my plastic fork down and looked at Lucy, who was arranging a new candle, settling the water-drum near me, tying her hair back with a red rubber band.

  “Where did it come from?” I asked.

  For the first time that day, Lucy looked at me, and this time, there really were tears in her eyes. “I don’t understand your family,” she said.

  I shook my head. “Neither do I.”

  “Your grandfather’s been saving that for you, Seth.”

  “Since when?”

  “Since before you were born. Before your father was born. Before he ever imagined there could be a you.”

  This time, when the guilt came for me, it mixed with my fear rather than chasing it away, and I broke out sweating, and I thought I might be sick.

  “You have to eat. Damn you,” said Lucy.

  I picked up my fork and squashed a piece of sausage into the fry bread and put it in my mouth. My stomach convulsed, but it accepted what I gave it.

  I managed a few more bites. As soon as I pushed the plate back, Lucy shoved the drum onto my lap. I played while she chanted, and the sides of the hogan seemed to breathe in and out, very slowly. I felt drugged. Then I wondered if I had been. Had they sprinkled something over the bread? Was that the next step? And toward what? Erasing me, I thought, almost chanted. Erasing me, and my hands flew off the drum and Lucy stopped.

  “All right,” she said. “That’s probably enough.” Then, to my surprise, she actually reached out and tucked some of my hair behind my ear, then touched my face for a second as she took the drum from me. “It’s time for your journey,” she said.

  I stared at her. The walls, I noticed, had stilled. I didn’t feel any less strange, but a little more awake, at least. “Journey where?”

  “You’ll need water. And I’ve packed you a lunch.” She slipped through the hide curtain, and I followed, dazed, and almost walked into my grandfather, parked right outside the hogan with a black towel on his head, so that his eyes and splitting skin were in shadow. On his peeling hands, he wore black-leather gloves. His hands, I thought, must be on fire.

  Right at the moment I noticed that Lucy was no longer with us, the hiss from the oxygen tank sharpened, and my grandfather’s lips moved beneath the mask. “Ruach.” This morning, the nickname sounded almost affectionate.

  I waited, unable to look away. But the oxygen hiss settled again, like leaves after a gust of wind, and my grandfather said nothing more. A few seconds later, Lucy came back carrying a red backpack, which she handed to me.

  “Follow the signs,” she said, and turned me around until I was facing straight out from the road into the empty desert.

  Struggling to life, I shook her hand off my shoulder. “Signs of what? What am I supposed to be doing?”

  “Finding. Bringing back.”

  “I won’t go,” I said.

  “You’ll go,” said Lucy coldly. “The signs will be easily recognizable, and easy to locate. I have been assured of that. All you have to do is pay attention.”

  “Assured by who?”

  “The first sign, I am told, will be left by the tall, flowering cactus.”

  She pointed, which was unnecessary. A hundred yards or so from my grandfather’s house, a spiky green cactus poked out of the rock and sand, supported on
either side by two miniature versions of itself. A little cactus family, staggering in out of the waste.

  I glanced at my grandfather under his mock cowl, Lucy with her ferocious black eyes trained on me. Tomorrow, I thought, my father would come for me, and with any luck, I would never have to come out here again.

  Then, suddenly, I felt ridiculous, and sad, and guilty once more. Without even realizing what I was doing, I stuck my hand out and touched my grandfather’s arm. The skin under his thin, cotton shirt depressed beneath my fingers like the squishy center of a misshapen pillow. It wasn’t hot. It didn’t feel alive at all. I yanked my hand back, and Lucy glared at me. Tears sprang to my eyes.

  “Get out of here,” she said, and I stumbled away into the sand.

  I don’t really think the heat intensified as soon as I stepped away from my grandfather’s house. But it seemed to. Along my bare arms and legs, I could feel the little hairs curling as though singed. The sun had scorched the sky white, and the only place to look that didn’t hurt my eyes was down. Usually, when I walked in the desert, I was terrified of scorpions, but not that day. It was impossible to imagine anything scuttling or stinging or even breathing out there. Except me.

  I don’t know what I expected to find. Footprints maybe, or animal scat, or something dead. Instead, stuck to the stem by a cactus needle, I found a yellow stick-em note. It said, “Pueblo.”

  Gently, avoiding the rest of the spiny needles, I removed the note. The writing was black and blocky. I glanced toward my grandfather’s house, but he and Lucy were gone. The ceremonial hogan looked silly from this distance, like a little kid’s pup tent.

  Unlike the pueblo, I thought. I didn’t even want to look that way, let alone go there. Already I could hear it, calling for me in a whisper that sounded far too much like my grandfather’s. I could head for the road, I thought. Start toward town instead of the pueblo, and wait for a passing truck to carry me home. There would have to be a truck, sooner or later.

  I did go to the road. But when I got there, I turned in the direction of the pueblo. I don’t know why. I didn’t feel as if I had a choice.

  The walk, if anything, was too short. No cars passed. No road signs sprang from the dirt to point the way back to the world I knew. I watched the asphalt rise out of itself and roll in the heat, and I thought of my grandfather in the woods of Chelmno, digging graves in long, green shadows. Lucy had put ice in the thermos she gave me, and the cubes clicked against my teeth when I drank.

  I walked, and I watched the desert, trying to spot a bird or a lizard. Even a scorpion would have been welcome. What I saw was sand, distant, colorless mountains, white sky, a world as empty of life and its echoes as the surface of Mars, and just as red.

  Even the lone road sign pointing to the pueblo was rusted through, crusted with sand, the letters so scratched away that the name of the place was no longer legible. I’d never seen a tourist trailer here, or another living soul. Even calling it a pueblo seemed grandiose.

  It was two sets of caves dug into the side of a cliff face, the top one longer than the bottom, so that together they formed a sort of gigantic, cracked harmonica for the desert wind to play. The roof and walls of the top set of caves had fallen in. The whole structure seemed more monument than ruin, a marker of a people who no longer existed rather than a place they had lived.

  The bottom stretch of caves was largely intact, and as I stumbled toward them along the cracking macadam, I could feel their pull in my ankles. They seemed to be sucking the desert inside them, bit by bit. I stopped in front and listened.

  I couldn’t hear anything. I looked at the cracked, nearly square window openings, the doorless entryways leading into what had once been living spaces, the low, shadowed caves of dirt and rock. The whole pueblo just squatted there, inhaling sand through its dozens of dead mouths in a mockery of breath. I waited a while longer, but the open air didn’t feel any safer, just hotter. If my grandfather’s enemies were inside him, I suddenly wondered, and if we were calling them out, then where were they going? Finally, I ducked through the nearest entryway and stood in the gloom.

  After a few seconds, my eyes adjusted. But there was nothing to see. Along the window openings, blown sand lay in waves and mounds, like miniature relief maps of the desert outside. At my feet lay tiny stones, too small to hide scorpions, and a few animal bones, none of them larger than my pinky, distinguishable primarily by the curve of them, their stubborn whiteness.

  Then, as though my entry had triggered some sort of mechanical magic show, sound coursed into my ears. In the walls, tiny feet and bellies slithered and scuttled. Nothing rattled a warning. Nothing hissed. And the footsteps, when they came, came so softly that at first I mistook them for sand shifting along the sills and the cool, clay floor.

  I didn’t scream, but I staggered backward, lost my footing, slipped down, and I had the thermos raised and ready to swing when my father stepped out of the shadows and sat down cross-legged across the room from me.

  “What …” I said, tears flying down my face, heart thudding.

  My father said nothing. From the pocket of his plain, yellow, button-up shirt, he pulled a packet of cigarette paper and a pouch of tobacco, then rolled a cigarette in a series of quick, expert motions.

  “You don’t smoke,” I said, and my father lit the cigarette and dragged air down his lungs with a rasp.

  “Far as you know,” he answered. The red-orange light looked like an open sore on his lips. Around us, the pueblo lifted, settled.

  “Why does Grandpa call me ‘Ruach’?” I snapped. And still, my father only sat and smoked. The smell tickled unpleasantly in my nostrils. “God, Dad. What’s going on? What are you doing here, and—”

  “Do you know what ‘ruach’ means?” he said.

  I shook my head.

  “It’s a Hebrew word. It means ghost.”

  Hearing that was like being slammed to the ground. I couldn’t get my lungs to work.

  My father went on. “Sometimes, that’s what it means. It depends what you use it with, you see? Sometimes, it means spirit, as in the spirit of God. Spirit of life. What God gave to his creations.” He stubbed his cigarette in the sand, and the orange light winked out like an eye blinking shut. “And sometimes, it just means wind.”

  By my sides, I could feel my hands clutch sand as breath returned to my body. The sand felt cool, soft. “You don’t know Hebrew either,” I said.

  “I made a point of knowing that.”

  “Why?”

  “Because that’s what he called me, too;” my father said, and rolled a second cigarette but didn’t light it. For a while, we sat. Then my father said,”Lucy called me two weeks ago. She told me it was time, and she said she needed a partner for your … ceremony. Someone to hide this, then help you find it. She said it was essential to the ritual.” Reaching behind him, he produced a brown-paper grocery bag with the top rolled down and tossed it to me. “I didn’t kill it,” he said.

  I stared at him, and more tears stung my eyes. Sand licked along the skin of my legs and arms and crawled up my shorts and sleeves, as though seeking pores, points of entry. Nothing about my father’s presence here was reassuring. Nothing about him had ever been reassuring, or anything else, I thought furiously, and the fury felt good. It helped me move. I yanked the bag to me.

  The first thing I saw when I ripped it open was an eye. It was yellow-going-gray , almost dry. Not quite, though. Then I saw the folded, black, ridged wings. A furry, broken body, twisted into a J. Except for the smell and the eye, it could have been a Halloween decoration.

  “Is that a bat?” I whispered. Then I shoved the bag away and gagged. My father glanced around at the walls, back at me. He made no move toward me. He was part of it, I thought wildly, he knew what they were doing, and then I pushed the thought away. It couldn’t be true. “Dad, I don’t understand,” I pleaded.

  “I know you’re young,” my father said. “He didn’t do this to me until I left for college. Bu
t there’s no more time, is there? You’ve seen him.”

  “Why do I have to do this at all?”

  At that, my father’s gaze swung down on me. He cocked his head, pursed his lips, as though I’d asked something completely incomprehensible. “It’s your birthright,” he said, and stood up.

  We drove back to my grandfather’s adobe in silence. The trip lasted less than five minutes. I couldn’t even figure out what else to ask, let alone what I might do. I glanced at my father, wanted to scream at him, pound on him until he told me why he was acting this way.

  Except that I wasn’t sure he was acting anything but normal, for him. He didn’t speak when he walked me to the ice-cream shop either. When we arrived at the adobe, he leaned across me to push my door open, and I grabbed his hand.

  “Dad. At least tell me what the bat is for.”

  My father sat up, moved the air-conditioning lever right, then hard back to the left, as though he could surprise it into working. He always did this. It never worked. My father and his routines. “Nothing,” he said. “It’s a symbol.”

  “For what?”

  “Lucy will tell you.”

  “But you know.” I was almost snarling at him now.

  “It stands for the skin at the tip of the tongue. It’s the Talking God. Or part of it. I think. I’m sorry.”

  Gently, hand on my shoulder, he eased me out of the car before it occurred to me to wonder what he was apologizing for. But he surprised me by calling after me. “I promise you this, Seth,” he said. “This is the last time in your life that you’ll have to come here. Shut the door.”

  Too stunned and confused and scared to do anything else, I shut it, then watched as my father’s car disintegrated into the first, far-off shadows of twilight. Already, too soon, I felt the change in the air, the night chill seeping through the gauze-dry day like blood through a bandage.

  My grandfather and Lucy were waiting on the patio. She had her hand on his shoulder, her long hair gathered on her head, and without its dark frame, her face looked much older. And his—fully exposed now, without its protective shawl—looked like a rubber mask on a hook, with no bones inside to support it.