Draw the Dark

by Ilsa J. Bick

  So as I drew out my idea for my mother, the world thinned, then shushed to a whisper, then simply went away, and I was at once diamond bright and formless as a nebula, floaty and yet so concentrated with purpose, and it was the best feeling. It was like I wasn’t there, and still, I was most intensely there, in the smell of graphite that filled my nose and the sturdy feel of the pencil between my fingers and how my vision sharpened so the weave of paper was hills and valleys and threads all connecting together, and it was a real high, the best, and I loved that, I would kill to stay in that place—

  “Christian.”

  My name dropped like a hammer. I blinked away from my drawing. The teacher and the principal stood together at the front. Every single pair of eyes from every other person in the class was on me—like they’d been calling my name for a while and I hadn’t heard, which was very likely. I felt myself, all those great expansive feelings, shrivel, collapse, and go black as a lump of coal.

  The principal said, “Christian, would you come with me, please? Bring your books.”

  “Sure.” My stomach was a little fluttery. When this happened at school, it was either somebody’s relative was sick or something bad at home. The only thing I could think of was something had happened to Uncle Hank.

  Heads swiveled as I walked to the front of the class. A couple of people started whispering. About the only one to look as worried as I felt was Sarah Schoenberg. We used to hang around a lot when we were kids. Her parents and my aunt and uncle were good friends. Then Aunt Jean died and Sarah started getting popular, and since that was never one of my problems, we didn’t see much of each other except every couple of Sundays for dinner and to say hi and how are you, that kind of stuff. Sarah’s eyes are warm, buttery caramel. Da Vinci eyes. She’s not beautiful, but you can tell she’s a nice person when she smiles. Only this time, she wasn’t smiling.

  At the front, the teacher wouldn’t look me in the eye and I thought: uh-oh. Uncle Hank was the only family I had, and if he was hurt or . . .

  But when I stepped into the hall, Uncle Hank was there. He didn’t smile. “Christian, we need to talk a couple minutes.”

  I looked from Uncle Hank to the principal and back. “Okay.”

  “Not here,” said the principal. He led the way to the office. All the secretaries stopped talking when we pushed inside. They watched us go down the hall, looking at me like I was an animal in a zoo. We filed into the principal’s office, me sandwiched between the principal and Uncle Hank. The principal said, “Have a seat, Christian.”

  I sat. He didn’t. Neither did Uncle Hank. The principal leaned his butt against his desk, and Uncle Hank stood at my right elbow. I felt like a suspect getting sweated by the police. Maybe I was.

  “What?” I asked.

  Uncle Hank said, “Christian, that call I got this morning was from Mr. Eisenmann.” He paused like that was supposed to mean something.

  “Okay,” I said.

  “Someone took red spray paint to that barn on his property, the old farm about ten miles outside town. Not graffiti, either. It got reported by some of the workers coming in for first shift.”

  “Yeah?”

  “You know anything about it?”

  “Me?” I blinked. “No.”

  “You sure about that?”

  “Yeah, I’m sure.”

  “What if I was to tell you that when I saw what was painted on that barn, I didn’t think of anyone else but you?”

  I was going to say, Well then, I don’t know what to tell you, but I didn’t because I thought about my Chucks being wet and how my arm hurt, about that nightmare, and all that blood . . .

  Uncle Hank gave me that cop eye. “What?”

  I didn’t say anything. After a few more seconds, the principal said, “So you won’t mind if we open your locker.”

  I shook my head. Actually, I was a little relieved, to tell the truth. I mean, how stupid would you be if you hid cans of spray paint in your locker or at the bottom of your backpack or something?

  Three guesses how stupid.

  There were two drippy cans in my backpack that I somehow hadn’t noticed even though I’d dug around that sack that very morning. Of course, the paint was still tacky.

  “I didn’t put those there.” I turned to Uncle Hank. “I didn’t do that.”

  The principal said, “Who else would have access to your locker? Who would do that to you?”

  Everyone. Anyone. “How should I know? I mean, you can test these for fingerprints, right?” I looked at Uncle Hank again. “Right?”

  Uncle Hank put a hand on my shoulder. His hand felt like it was weighed down with lead shot. “Let me see your hands, Christian.” He studied the rust crescents under my nails, and then he pulled out a little penknife and scraped out a bit of the crud. I think he and I realized what that stuff was on the blade at just about the same moment. I was stunned, but he only looked sad.

  “All right then,” he said to the principal. “We’ll be going now.”

  Uncle Hank drove. He made me sit in back. We didn’t talk.

  We headed southwest, the road cutting through hills and farmland. The corn had petered out two weeks back and the stalks had been cut back, leaving the fields covered with brown stubble. Seven miles out, Uncle Hank hung a left onto a dirt track, and we clattered due south another couple of miles, spewing dust clouds. The farmland here hadn’t been cultivated in a long time.

  I was certain I’d never been here, but a weird swell of déjà vu crashed against my mind. Then, after hours of nothing, that weird muttering started up in my head again . . .

  The barn perched alone on a rise coming up on the right. The barn might’ve been white once, but this eastern face was weathered gray, the soot black trim of its shutters mottled and looking moth-eaten. The barn was maybe a hundred feet long and fifty feet wide. A weedy ramp curled away to the northwest, probably to hay doors. All the windows were long gone, just blank sockets.

  Far off to my right, I saw what remained of a house, reduced now to a foundation and rubble where there was once a chimney. As we ground up the rise, a dozen crows rose in a cloud from the bare spindles of a weeping willow bowed over the ratty ruin of a well.

  I swung my head back to the barn—and then I got a good look at that northwest face. That’s when my stomach kind of bottomed out.

  There, just below a broken-out window, were three words in big splashy red letters:

  I SEE YOU.

  These were bracketed by two swastikas, one on either side. Sprayed above the words was a pair of bloodred eyes, and those eyes . . .

  Dread whispered up and down my spine.

  Those eyes were not my mother’s. They weren’t mine.

  They were the eyes of a wolf.

  They were the eyes of someone new.

  II

  “Lord knows, Hank, everyone thinks you and Jean did the right thing, taking in your brother’s boy.” Mr. Eisenmann frowned down at me then, the tears dribbling from his droopy left eye. “I hope you appreciate the sacrifices your uncle’s made on your behalf.”

  “I appreciate it,” I said. We were sitting in Uncle Hank’s office, with Mr. Eisenmann in the one comfortable chair and me on a metal folding chair from the roll-call room. Uncle Hank was behind his desk, his face a chunk of granite. My head hurt like there were a million knives stabbing my brain, and I worried I might puke. “But I didn’t do it.”

  Mr. Eisenmann waved my words away. His fingers were skeletal and twiglike, and he had the face of a gargoyle: creased with scars from some kind of accident almost sixty years ago. A pink seam slashed a diagonal through the outer third of his left eyebrow, bisected his left eyelid and tracked over his cheek and the knob of his nose. Another scar carved a half moon over his right cheek. A deep horizontal gash cut his chin like a second mouth. The cuts had done something to the tear duct of his left eye, so he was always crying crocodile tears.

  “I think we’ve established, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that you di
d indeed do this, young man. The issue now is what is to be done about it.” Dabbing at his eye with a folded white kerchief, Eisenmann swung his gargoyle’s head back at Uncle Hank. Eisenmann was eighty at least, and I’d never seen him in anything but a three-piece suit and a gold watch chain with heavy gold fobs. He always carried a redwood cane topped with a gold wolf’s head. “Hank, this boy isn’t right and never has been. You know that, I know that. Hell, everyone in town knows it, and now he’s getting violent, vandalizing—”

  “Wait a minute,” I said, but Uncle Hank held up a hand, and I knew better than to go on.

  “Violent and morbidly preoccupied.” Eisenmann held open the history notebook I’d been doodling in earlier that morning. “Cemeteries? Tombstones? It’s ghoulish, Hank. It’s disturbed.”

  For the record, I hadn’t remembered doing a single headstone—I was drawing my mother. But there they all were, marching across the page like fence posts. The tombstones were weird, too: not singleton stones but doubles shaped like the Ten Commandments and not a cross in sight. Three steep-roofed mausoleums loomed in the background, like something out of New Orleans. But I didn’t remember drawing on th—

  blood on my hands and Papa no no . . . the horses are screaming

  The thought was sudden and violent like a bolt of lightning in my brain and so sharp, I gasped. What?

  blood . . . no Papa no . . .

  The nightmare, again, but I wasn’t asleep, I was awake, how... ?

  watch out ...watch...

  Oh my God. I squeezed my head between my hands. My pulse thumped in my head, and the same muttering I’d noticed when I woke up was back now and louder, a grumble that was the sound of many voices all balled together. Not my thoughts, these were not mine, so who—

  “Christian?” Uncle Hank said.

  “I don’t remember.” I screwed my eyes shut and thought at the chaos in my brain: Go away, be quiet, leave me alone, leave me alone. I said, way too loudly, “I don’t remember!”

  Eisenmann started in again. “Hank, this boy needs help. You know it, I know it. Next thing you know, he’ll be shooting up the place like those Columbine kids—”

  “That’s enough.” Uncle Hank’s voice was low, soft, and deadly. “That’s my nephew. So I’ll thank you to watch your goddamned mouth.”

  Eisenmann gawped for a second, then spluttered, “Do you know who you’re talking to? One word from me, and I could get your tenure as sheriff revoked.”

  Uncle Hank’s lips thinned like the gash on Eisenmann’s chin. He said nothing.

  “That’s right.” Eisenmann nodded as if Uncle Hank had agreed. “That’s right. So don’t think I won’t press charges. Don’t even consider that we aren’t going to court.”

  “It’s Christian’s first offense.” I could tell that cost Uncle Hank. He wasn’t pleading exactly, but it was close. “I’ll take the boy to counseling. We’ll make restitution. For God’s sake, that barn’s seen nothing but trouble, needed to come down years ago. It’s not as if we’re talking something you actually use.”

  “That’s my concern, Sheriff, not yours and property is property. As for a first offense, I remind you of that business with Ms. Stefancyzk.... ”

  “She had a nervous breakdown. Christian had nothing to do with that.”

  “Believe that if it brings you comfort.” Using his wolf-headed cane, Mr. Eisenmann levered himself to his feet. “You’re up for reelection come April. I’d keep that in mind if I were you. See you in court.”

  After he left, I couldn’t think of anything worth saying, so I didn’t. Uncle Hank didn’t say anything either, just stared at that stupid cemetery drawing. Why had I drawn that? Why today of all days? At least the muttering in my head was just a murmur now and fuzzy, like static from an old radio.

  There was a soft rap, and then Marjorie, the office manager, poked her head in the door. “I’ve got Madison on the line for you, Sheriff. What would you like me to tell Deputy Brandt?”

  Uncle Hank passed a weary hand before his eyes. “Tell Brandt to secure the house as best he can. If the owner won’t leave . . .”

  “She’s staying. Says she won’t go near the third story, though why anyone would want to stay in a virtual crime scene, I don’t know.”

  “Got me.” Uncle Hank’s ice-blue eyes clicked to me. “Go with Marjorie and wait in the roll-call room. I’ll be out in a few minutes.”

  I stood. “I’m sorry, Uncle Hank.”

  “I know,” he said, but he was already picking up the phone as I headed for the door.

  On the way, I asked Marjorie, “What’s going on? What crime scene? Who’s in Madison?”

  She took the last question first. “The forensic anthropologist. She’d be here sooner only they’ve got some sort of horrible multiple murder in a condominium right outside Milwaukee, in Brookfield. Some poor woman was having her basement extended, and one of the workmen broke through the concrete and found a body. Relatively fresh too; I hear they think it was put there when the foundation was poured, about six months ago. Now they’ve brought in ground-penetrating radar to check all the other condominiums. So far, they’ve found a body in every single basement, like a graveyard.” She nodded sagely. “That’s the problem; you get too big, people all piled up on each other like rats. People turn violent.”

  “Wow.” I knew what a forensic anthropologist was from television. “So why do we need the anthropologist up here?”

  Marjorie hesitated, her mouth puckering to a rosebud. She was office manager back when Uncle Hank’s dad was sheriff and looks the way you think a woman who’s run a bunch of guys with more efficiency than a drill sergeant should look: a helmet of silver-gray hair, sharp brown eyes behind steelrimmed glasses on a holder chain. There were a few people in Winter who either weren’t leery of me or who tolerated me because of Uncle Hank. Marjorie was in a separate category. We genuinely got along. When I was a little kid, she used to filch pop out of the deputies’ icebox. Over the years, I’d had so much Orange Crush, I could probably float a boat.

  “Come with me.” She shooed me into the roll-call room, shut the door, and said, “You know the old Ziegler place on the north side? That old brownstone mansion?” (I didn’t, but I didn’t want to derail her by asking about it.) “Well, the new owner was having work done on the third story—the servants’ quarters—and I guess the workmen were tearing out an old hearth. Only when they did, they found a body.” She paused. “A mummy, actually.”

  “Whoa. Who?”

  “Nobody knows. The coroner says it’s not recent—been there for years and years. That also means there’s no hurry, so we’re low down on Madison’s list, I guess. It happens. Your uncle says there aren’t very good records, like maybe none at all since the place has been vacant so long. The Zieglers weren’t even the original owners, and then they rented for years, so . . . they might never know.”

  “How do you put a whole person into a hearth?”

  “Well,” Marjorie said, “that gets a whole lot easier when it’s a baby.”

  Something changed in my head after that. Maybe it was the day finally catching up to me, or perhaps my subconscious picked up on yet another tumbler falling into place. But when I heard about that dead baby, there was this sensation of something going click in my mind, almost the same as when I drew, only not as nice. I knew, without knowing how, that the baby and the weirdness I’d done at Mr. Eisenmann’s barn were somehow connected. Winter was too small, the history too intertwined for all of this not to be. I had no idea how these two things could be connected, but they were. My problem was I couldn’t talk to anyone about my feelings. Heck, I wasn’t even sure what they were. Even if I had, I’d probably have sounded pretty crazy. Considering that’s how most people saw me anyway, maybe that would’ve been par for the course and there’d have been no harm done.

  But. Even now, I wonder what would’ve happened if I’d spoken up just a little sooner. If I had, maybe a couple other people wouldn’t have gotten killed. I
don’t know that for sure, but I think so.

  I didn’t go back to school, but Uncle Hank didn’t take me home right away either. He got tied up and eventually had one of the deputies drive me out. The deputy was new, and I didn’t know him.

  “What about my bike?” I asked as we walked to his cruiser. “It’s still at school.”

  “Sorry, kiddo, I got my orders,” said the deputy.

  After that, we didn’t have anything to talk about. He stared straight ahead, and I looked out the side window. People on the sidewalks turned to watch as the cruiser went past, and some elbowed each other and pointed or started nodding and chattering to each other.

  By then, I was getting really scared. Eisenmann said I was crazy. Worse, I was deranged, I would go postal. But was he right? My idea of crazy was like Renfield in Dracula. You know, eating flies and talking to people who aren’t there and spouting gobbledygook. But I wasn’t like that at all. I mean, yeah, I was strange and different and people looked at me funny or made excuses not to hang around when I walked into a room . . . but it wasn’t the same thing.

  Only what if it was?

  I thought about the muttering in my head. Was that the way voices started up, the ones that schizophrenics got? So maybe I was already way far gone....

  When I got home, I couldn’t go to my room. I was too restless to sit still. For once, I didn’t want to draw. Maybe I was afraid to. But I had to keep moving, pacing a circle around and around the living room the way caged tigers do in the zoo. I found my iPod and tried listening, but after maybe five minutes, the music was irritating and I shut it off.

  It occurred to me that this was what it would be like in jail, pacing miles and miles in my cell. For years and years and years ...