Draw the Dark

by Ilsa J. Bick

  And I had to see a shrink too. Twice a week. So I guess maybe the test results weren’t too good.

  I figured that between the work on the barn, the community service, the shrink, and school, they were out to make sure I didn’t have too much downtime.

  The thing was, I’d done Eisenmann’s barn in my sleep. Considering how my dreams had been going lately, I wasn’t too sure they could put the genie back into that particular bottle.

  IV

  Saturday. Another dog day scorcher. I started on the barn. Sometime between Wednesday and then, Eisenmann had gotten a bunch of scaffolding put up.

  “That’s pretty high.” Uncle Hank had sent Deputy Brandt with me because, technically, I was supposed to do this under the supervision of the court. Being a deputy, Justin Brandt filled the bill, and he’d volunteered. He was another one of the adults in town who didn’t hold with the way everyone else felt about me, but that might’ve been because he wasn’t all that much older than me. Aunt Jean had kind of adopted him when his father got disabled in a foundry accident.

  Wrapping his fist around one of the scaffold supports, Justin gave it a good shake, grunted when nothing came crashing down. “Seems sturdy enough. You should be okay.”

  “Oh sure. Heights don’t bother me.” I lied.

  Justin hooked his thumbs in his utility belt. “Why Eisenmann doesn’t just tear down this old place, I don’t know. The idea of making you scrape off red paint so you can paint the barn over in another color red . . . that’s just plain mean.”

  That was an understatement. Before I could scrape anything off, I had to brush on an acid-based softener. Otherwise, I’d be chipping out wood. The softener didn’t stink, but it would burn something fierce, so I also had to gear up in these coveralls and wear gloves and goggles, like those hazmat guys. Let the softener get to work, and then scrape off the paint without taking half the wood with me. I’d be lucky not to end up a puddle of grease on account of the heat.

  Justin said, “Man, I’d like to help you, but if your uncle comes by and catches me, he’ll have my hide. Still, I feel kind of stupid just sitting here with my thumb up my ass.”

  I laughed like he wanted me to, and that did feel kind of good. “I’ll be okay.”

  “Uh-huh. You got enough of that Gatorade? Last thing I need is you getting heatstroke.”

  I told Justin I would be okay and got to work. A line of crows marched along the barn’s roofline but rose in a chorus of harsh caws as I began to climb. Hauling that can of solvent, wondering if everything was going to hold, was the hardest part. The vibrations of my footfalls shuddered into the palms of my hands as I climbed the ladder. Those crows swarmed overhead, and I kept thinking: This is when the whole thing crashes down and I break my neck.

  Once I was up there, I plugged into my iPod, fitted on the goggles, and got down to it. After a few nervous minutes, I settled into a rhythm brushing on softener, but I was sweating like nobody’s business, the perspiration pooling around my waistband. Justin had brought along a book, and he pretended to read in a wedge of shade along the north edge of the barn. Maybe twenty minutes after I got started, I glanced over and Justin’s deputy’s hat was down over his eyes, his arms crossed over his chest. If my earbuds hadn’t been in, I’d have probably heard him snoring.

  The sun beat down on my back and head and arms; I was baking and basting at the same time. In maybe thirty minutes, I’d sweated through my clothes. Even the backs of my knees were wet, and my hands were clammy in their latex gloves. I chugged from a couple quart jugs of Gatorade Rain, but that made me have to pee. I might’ve just done the point and shoot—that high, the arc might’ve been kind of cool—but I was in enough trouble. So I was up and down.

  I paced myself. I’m not a real athlete or anything, but my arms are pretty good. I brushed on softener working a left-toright swath. By the time I reached the end, it had been about an hour, and then I could go back and start scraping. A couple hours of this, though, and my shoulders started to really ache and my arms were sore. I started to wonder if maybe I could get my hands on a cordless sander or power washer. I had to have something because doing this all by hand was going to take until sometime next summer.

  My fourth time down, Justin woke up, yawned, stretched, smacked his lips a couple times, squinted up at me, and said, “Hey, you’re doing okay.”

  “Mmmm.” The right swastika was maybe half gone, a mess of red and gray flakes snowing the grass below. A big irregular splotch of weathered gray board flowered along the barn like a fungus. I shrugged and worked my right shoulder. The muscles between my shoulder blades felt tight. “But I’m never going to get done this way. I’ll be here for years. Way more than eight hundred hours of community service.”

  Justin grinned. “Yeah, Eisenmann’s one cruel SOB. But I got a cousin who does a lot of carpentry. You want, I’ll see if maybe he’s got some kind of machine for next time. I don’t know a lot about painting, but there’s got to be a better way than doing this by hand.”

  “Yeah.” I armed away sweat. I reeked of greasy sunscreen I didn’t need because of the coveralls. “That would be great.”

  “Come on, it’s lunchtime. My treat.”

  But I shook my head. “If it’s all the same to you, I think that I should keep going. I’m kind of worried that getting started again would be a hundred times worse.”

  Justin said I was probably right about that. He said he’d go into town, grab some sandwiches and drinks, and be right back. “You’ll be okay, right?”

  “Sure. Just me and the barn swallows.”

  The muttering started up as soon as the red dust ball of Justin’s cruiser was out of sight.

  I was on the scaffold again when that happened. Suddenly, my arm froze, the edge of the paint scraper pressed against old wood, and I started trembling. Cold beads of sweat popped over my forehead, and my teeth actually chattered the way they hadn’t since I was a little kid with the flu. I thought about heatstroke, but I remembered that you weren’t supposed to sweat. Then, just as quickly, the icy wave passed to be replaced by the muttering.

  I wasn’t too scared, which was really weird. Did this mean I was getting used to being crazy? Did crazy people even worry about things like that? But I was more . . . apprehensive. The empty eye of that window the next level up seemed to yawn wider and wider and then this arrow of thought: the muttering—the voices—wanted me inside. Well, why not? It was hotter than heck, and the ground was so far away....

  The crows had come back too, their claws digging into the roof, and I felt their glittery eyes drilling my back as I pulled myself over the lip of the window and into the barn. Inside, the first thing that hit was the smell, which is weird for me because I usually notice how things look first. But this time, it was the smell: the memory of sun-scorched timothy hay, a faint overlay of manure, and the fresher stink of bird poop. Heart thumping, I eased my way down a rickety old ladder from a kind of catwalk that went around the mow. The ladder groaned and squealed, and I kept waiting for a rung to crumble under my feet and drop me to the loft floor, but I made it down and I stood a sec, waiting for my legs to stop wobbling. I turned a slow circle, letting my eyes sweep over the barn and broken windows, unsure what I was supposed to see but drinking—drawing—it all in. The loft was cut by thick shadow, alternating with bolts of sunlight shooting through gaps in the roof. A flight of stairs led from the cupola and ducked through a square cut into the wooden floor. The mow was wide and above it ran bare wooden beams. I spotted an old rat’s tail of rope curled around one beam, but it was frayed and would probably crumble to dust if you touched it.

  The muttering in my head was . . . well, it was there but holding its breath, waiting for me to notice—what? Then I saw it through the jagged gap in an east-facing window, and all at once, my vision narrowed and sharpened, like I was looking through a telescope, and the muttering surged to life.

  I was looking at Winter, and it was the town almost exactly as I’d drawn it
on the last page of my pad on the day I’d awakened from that first awful nightmare. There were the stacks of Eisenmann’s plant chuffing ash gray smoke. There were fields alternating with tracks of oak and birch; and beyond, the cerulean lake seeping into a light turquoise sky. My gaze involuntarily clicked to the place in the landscape where I knew the onion-domed building ought to be . . . but, of course, it wasn’t there. To the left was a copse of aspens on the southern tip of a small pond. From this height, I could see that someone had decided that was a great place to dump a load of old bricks, barely visible through weedy snarls.

  I didn’t know why I needed to see this. I didn’t know why I was doing any of this. I decided I really needed to take a break. I was tired, sweaty, hungry, my head swimmy from the heat and, yeah, a little freaked out again. Best to rest and then Justin would come back and I’d have lunch and feel better.

  The hinges of the second-story hay door protested when I tugged, but I got the door open, and a gust of cool air lifting from the lake pillowed against my cheeks. I leaned out a few seconds, letting the air wash over my face and then I felt calmer, ready for a nap. I sprawled with my back up against the boards and stretched out my legs . . . and the muttering dropped to a whisper, my thoughts got jagged and smells became sounds became colors and then I was falling—

  V

  I’ll try to describe exactly what happened next.

  I still smelled manure and hay, but the smell was stronger now, and horses nickered in their stalls below. My head filled with a swirly sensation like being on a roller coaster, and I swooped up and down the way you do when you’re on the edge of a dream: not quite asleep but not really awake either. I knew I was in the haymow; the hard edge of splintering wood from the frame dug into my back, and I felt grit beneath my thighs.

  I cranked open my eyes.

  Everything had changed.

  For one, it was high summer. I could tell from the gold and green of the fields stretching away toward the horizon. There were men in the fields to my right, bent over rows of bush beans, trailing lumpy burlap bags, which they filled. Two men on horseback kept watch. Each cradled a rifle. They were uniformed, but I couldn’t make out if they were police or prison guards. To the left, I spotted two horses munching clumps of orchard grass, and still farther on, two jet-black horses ambled toward the mirror-still pond. The aspens were still there but not as tall.

  I don’t know what I felt, exactly. Part of me was confused, convinced I was dreaming. The other part was just . . . scared.

  “Be happy you’re not a prisoner,” said someone behind me. “Otherwise, Anderson would be working you into the ground too.”

  I was so startled I almost fell out of the loft. My heart seized up and I gasped audibly. I turned.

  On the floor of the loft was a mountain of loose, fresh-mown alfalfa. A thick rope, big around as my forearm and strong and new—and not at all that frayed curl I’d spotted before—was knotted around one of the wooden beams, and a sturdy ladder leaned against a post leading to some kind of ledge.

  And there was a boy. He was much younger than me— maybe seven or eight—and thin, with a flop of brown hair and large brown eyes.

  My tongue came unglued from the roof of my mouth. “What? Who . . . ?” But I already knew. His name was on the tip of my tongue: “Pavel.”

  “Yeah? What are you waiting for, David, let’s go!”

  “Go? Go where?” Then: “What did you call me?”

  Pavel made a horsey sound. “Stop fooling around. I know you get to do this all the time, but some of us don’t get the chance, so come on!” The boy whirled on his heel and scampered over to the ladder, ascending the rickety ladder like a small monkey. The soles of his bare feet were black, and he wore grimy corduroy trousers.

  My eyes jerked to my own legs. My paint-flecked coveralls were gone, replaced by a dusty denim overall and a white button-up shirt with short sleeves. What? What? I plucked at the fabric, and that’s when I noticed that my hands weren’t right; they were smaller, the wrists bony. A scar curved along the back of my left hand.

  I wasn’t me. I was—

  “David!” High above, Pavel was reaching for the rope that dangled from the highest point of the loft. “Come on, you sissy!”

  “I . . .” I staggered to my feet. They, too, were bare. “Wait, I...”

  “WOOO!” Pavel pushed off. The rope carried him in a swooping arc like a trapeze artist, and then at the peak of his swing, above the thick mound of alfalfa, he let go. With a jungle yell, Pavel dropped like a rock and plowed into the hay. A second later, his head popped up like a jack-in-the-box. “Come on, David, you going to stand around all day?”

  “N-no,” and then I was walking, my body a little stiff, as if I were some kind of android getting used to his new skin, . . . which I guess was true. With every step, more of the body I was in took over and more of me, who I was, kind of took a backseat. Like an observer in a balcony. I felt my consciousness—me, Christian—pull back into the shadows. By the time I put my— the boy’s—hands on the rope, I wasn’t really me so much as—

  “David!” From my vantage point looking down, Pavel was as tiny as a bug. His head was tipped back, his arms akimbo. “Come on, it’s easy!”

  Heart in mouth, I pushed off. I felt the rush of air through my hair—long, shaggy, fluttering around my ears—and the mow blurred. I wondered, too late, when I should let go, and then the boy’s body took over. At the precisely right instant, my/his hands loosened, and we/he rocketed for the floor. The hay rushed for my/his face and

  then the sweet scent of alfalfa envelops me, and I’m floundering for the surface, laughing and sputtering out stalks of hay.

  Pavel’s beaming. “Wow, that was great! Come on, let’s do it again!”

  Pavel’s right and now I’m glad I invited Pavel, even though Mama’s not happy because while the war’s over, we’ve still got rationing and there’s only so much laundry soap. I glance at the farmhouse and spy the two chimneys, and there is my own sweet mother shaking a rug from the upstairs window, and I’m happy because it’s summer and school’s out and the Germans don’t matter.

  But then I look east. There, straight ahead, is the town: the familiar smokestacks, the clock tower, the high spire of the old Lutheran Kirke, and that stark gold cross winking in the sun. I can see the onion dome too, a deep lapis surmounted by tinier echoes of the main dome. As always, it reminds me of Mama’s nesting matryoshka dolls. You know the ones I mean? You open one and inside there’s a smaller one and on and on until the last doll is no bigger than the nail of your little finger. That’s what the White Lady’s dome reminds me of.

  (Who?)

  My body flinches. That last thought . . . it isn’t mine. That’s not me. There’s someone else in my mind and

  I—me, Christian—I feel the boy tense as if he’s suddenly aware that I am there, staring through his eyes, and he must look awful because his friend, Pavel, suddenly frowns. “David, you okay? What is it? You look sick.”

  “I . . .” I’m dizzy and I reel, my hand shooting out to clutch at a beam before I can topple to the floor so far below.

  “Whoa!” Pavel’s hauling back on my arm, and we’re both stumbling away from the edge. “Whoa, you’re gonna get us killed.”

  “Sorry.” I sense the boy twisting around in his mind, as if he’s trying to see into a dark corner. I turn to Pavel. “Don’t you see him?”

  “See who?” Pavel frowns, looks over his shoulder, and then back. He looks more frightened now than simply concerned; his dark eyes have gotten very big. “David, you better lie down. You don’t look so good.”

  “No, no, he’s here,” I say, stupidly, “don’t you see him?” Only I’m staring at a dark place where there’s

  (ME)

  somebody staring, and then Pavel says something, but I don’t hear him and neither does David because there’s a sudden roar; the muttering swells and then

  VI

  Another growl of engine roar
, a burst of crow chatter, and I jerked awake, my arms and legs spazzing so much I almost rolled right out of the open door. Gasping, I crabbed back, the heels of my hands snagging on splinters. The air was filled with a guttural rumbling like thunder only much louder. Confused, I inched back, glanced out, and got my second bad shock of the day.

  “Hey, Killer!” Straddling his bike, Karl Dekker lounged in black leather and matching Docs. A cigarette was glued to his lower lip, and a red and black do-rag hugged his scalp. He didn’t look any different than he did when he’d dropped out a year ago: mean and wiry, a sandrat with big knots of muscle from working the foundry.

  If there was a person born mean, that was Karl Dekker. He’d singled me out ever since Uncle Hank busted up Dekker’s dad’s chop shop. The first time Uncle Hank did that was when we were in the third grade. Dekker’s dad went to prison for nine months. I remember how bad I felt, how I tried to make it up to Dekker on the playground one afternoon. I woke up in an emergency room with stitches in my scalp and Aunt Jean trying not to cry.

  Eventually, Dekker’s dad made one too many mistakes, not only the chop shop (like three times), but he was a drunk and beat Karl. So that’s when the social workers sent Dekker to live in boys’ town for a while. Karl thought that was my fault too.

  Not that I was the only one Karl hated. Two years ago, while his dad was getting back on his feet, Dekker went to live with the Schoenbergs. It had been Reverend Schoenberg’s idea, and Dekker and Sarah had maybe hooked up, I don’t know. All I did know was Karl made some kind of trouble and they turned him out too.