Where Darkness Dwells

by Glen Krisch

  "Why you little shit," Charles Banyon said, shifting his weight from one foot to the other, coming to a drunken stasis somewhere in the middle. He gripped a bottle in his hand.

  Jimmy gasped. He scrabbled back, not sure what to do, even less sure what George's father might do. Benjamin still hadn't moved. He could have been a dead man.

  He found his voice. "Mr. Banyon, it's Jimmy, George's friend."

  "You fucker… comin' down here…" Charles Banyon slurred, staggering forward, waving his index finger in the air. He grasped the stone wall and held on to it as he walked. His eyes glistened with anger. The bitter stench of his urine-drenched clothes filled the stable stall.

  "Mr.--"

  "Don't say nothin' boy." Banyon dropped the bottle and it shattered on the floor.

  "But… George--"

  "Goddamn bottle--"

  "Mr.--"

  "I ain't no mister. Shut your trap," Banyon snapped, looming over Jimmy.

  Jimmy didn't say a word. He tried to plead with his eyes, tried to show Charles Banyon how much he wanted to leave this place. How much he wanted to live

  He had to do something. Quickly.

  "This is all your fault, boy. Now we can't let you go running 'round down here, then go back up top. Back to school. Talking. Spilling all to every open ear. This place ain't for kids, this place ain't." Charles Banyon teetered over, and for a moment, Jimmy thought the man was going to pass out. But as he leaned over, his hand came to rest on a rock the size of a summer-ripe cantaloupe. He shot a noxious breath from his nose, grimaced, and then hefted the rock. His face contorted to a sneer, slightly softened at the edges by his stupor.

  "They went after George, Mr. Banyon, I don't know what happened, we were fishing, and then we came to this tunnel, and then they went after George. Please, Mr. Banyon!"

  Banyon lifted the stone to shoulder-level, resting his hand near his collarbone. His expression didn't change with Jimmy's pleading. If anything, he seemed more focused, more clear-headed. "George. Why, George… he's dead."

  Jimmy cowered away, his back scraping the stone wall, the shackle digging into the raw skin circling his ankle.

  "No!" Jimmy flung his arms in front of his face.

  "This ain't pretty. Can't have a soul speaking on this place." The melon-sized rock rolled at his finder tips. Drawing his arm forward, a bulky shadow swept through the corner of Jimmy's eye. The rock tipped from Banyon's grip, and the shadow descended on him, engulfing him, changing the rock's trajectory.

  Jimmy saw the white spark of Benjamin's eyes as he held back Charles Banyon's arm. Banyon's friend leapt on Benjamin's back, pummeling him with wild, drunken swings. The rock fell through the air, glancing off the cavern's wall, ricocheting back, slamming into Jimmy's temple.

  Jimmy had never known such darkness. Not even in this darkest pit of hell residing just below the surface of the town of Coal Hollow. As his brain hemorrhaged, the pressure building inside his skull, flashes of still-photo memories shimmered like stars during a summer night:

  His mother's stoic profile as she gazes from her bedroom window, as always, searching for something not quite tangible.

  Jacob's unabashed and goofy grin, his cheerful side guarded from watchful eyes.

  The curve of Louise's breast, her peaked nipple, her brown eyes peering through her tousled blonde hair. Her cheek's warm glow, awash in expectation for their child.

  His father, a fading memory nearly gone, a mere outline of angled cheekbones, waxed mustache, warm laughter.

  The images were gone. In their place, only emptiness.

  9.

  Two hours was all it took from the time Cooper woke from his latest dream to walk into the Harvard Square Bank, inquire with Mr. Prescott about the ownership of the old Blankenship property, and leave the bank with a property title in hand.

  He couldn't explain his feelings for the house. Luckily, Mr. Prescott didn't question his motives, either. If he had, Cooper didn't think he could speak about it without sounding crazy. For his life entire, his most impulsive act had been to start this trek in the first place with little more than his grandmother's dying words to drive him. Despite never having stepped foot inside the Blankenship home, he couldn't leave Coal Hollow without inquiring about the property. Once his query began, his obsession with the place only intensified. His desire for knowledge became desire to own it.

  His father's voice, gruff and tired, wasn't welcoming when he answered Cooper's call from Prescott's office. Cooper began the conversation intending to explain that he wasn't coming home until autumn, perhaps not until the holidays. His father took the reins of their conversation in his controlling manner, firing off a string of questions, more an interrogation than discussion.

  In the end, however, he agreed to wire Cooper the money for the property. It was Cooper's money from his Chicago bank account. His father was reluctant to send it, but he did.

  With Prescott busying himself with the pretense of searching his file cabinet, Cooper turned the conversation in his favor. He raised his voice, breaking through his father's relentless questioning with one brief, yet biting, admonition:

  "You lied to me, father. My whole life, you lied to me."

  His words silenced his father and solidified his own determination. He would buy this house. He needed to. As the silence stretched, Cooper thought the line had gone dead, or his father had hung up on him. This was Cooper's only ammunition against his father, and he used it reluctantly. Speaking with a broken, defeated tone, he asked Cooper where he could find his pertinent banking information, and agreed to go to First Federal just as soon as he got off the phone.

  Within an hour of his phone call home, he and Mr. Prescott had worked out the logistics of the title transfer. Mr. Prescott, dressed in an impeccable black suit, talked by phone with his counterpart at First Federal in Chicago. He secured the money transfer, following protocols Cooper knew little about. Cooper agreed to pay ten percent of the latent mortgage. He thought it was a great deal, a steal really, but Mr. Prescott wagered it was a beneficial deal for both parties. The property was untended, a wasteland with a nominal mortgage sitting dormant at the bank for decades. Having Cooper buy the land, even at a cut-rate deal, insured the land would be put to use, while the bank was able to cut away a mortgage taking up dead space on its balance sheet.

  "We're done here, Mr. Cooper. You've signed your papers. We'll need to file some paperwork with the county, but otherwise, the property is yours."

  "Great. Thanks for your help, and so quickly, too."

  "Normally it takes longer for a property transaction, but I can see you want to get in before the weekend. Plus, I'm in a hurry." Prescott looked at his watch, and noting the time, blurted, "Oh, I really need to be going."

  "Sorry to have kept you."

  "George Banyon's funeral is in the morning, and I have to make sure my suit is pressed."

  "I should let you get going then."

  "Thanks, Mr. Cooper. When you get a chance, let me know how things are going with the house."

  "Sure thing."

  They shook hands as Mr. Prescott led Cooper through the front door. The banker locked the door, and hurried around the side of the building. Hurrying to prepare for the burial of the dead boy Cooper had found less than a week prior.

  What the hell did I just do? he wondered, looking at the property title in his hands. All he had wanted was for someone to show him the house. All he wanted was to have a look around. Sate his curiosity. But the price closed the deal.

  He shook his head. The store fronts seemed sleepy and slightly sad. What have I done? Cooper picked up his travel pack tucked under a bench outside the bank, lifting it to his shoulders. Walking past Magee's Barbershop, he glanced inside. Finding the place deserted, and continued on. He considered making an appearance at the cemetery the following morning, but thought better of it. He was a stranger, after all. Besides, other matters required his attention.

  He held a brown envelope in his
hand, the property title folded inside. Hopefully, he'd find answers inside the envelope as well. Answers to the yearning that had grown in him since he first saw the house, and possibly even answers to his journey as well. His yearning to be inside the old Blankenship home, now his home, only grew as he walked from town. He walked at a good clip down the dirt road for ten minutes until he stood at the mouth of the overgrown driveway.

  His overgrown driveway.

  Turning up the long driveway, fat rain drops began to pepper the brown envelope. His pack gnawing at his bones, his thoughts shifted to security, warmth, a roof over his head. He would need to speak with his boss sometime soon. He hadn't spoken to Hank about his new purchase, and he was hoping to continue with the job even though he would no longer need the room rental.

  The rain didn't matter. Nothing mattered to him but entering the house. He looked up at a second story window, sensing a light from the corner of his eye. He saw a warm yellow glow, then blinked away the rain spattering his eyes. When he opened his eyes again, the pane was dark and slick with rain. The rain clouds shifted overhead. He chalked it up to a glare on the glass, a small respite in the cloudbank, the sun peeking through for a moment, nothing more.

  He climbed the steps of the wrap-around porch. He wondered how he was going to get inside his new house, considering Mr. Prescott, in his haste to leave, couldn't find keys to give him. But he found the front door slightly ajar, as if someone might be expecting him, a slit of darkness at the corner of the frame. Had it warped open on its frame? He touched the door, gave it a small push. It opened smoothly, and the unmarred blanket of dust let him know there weren't any squatters around.

  That's one problem down, he thought. How many to go?

  Stepping through the door, he glimpsed a memory. Or maybe a slice of dream. The door opening slowly, this door, his door, an old lady with watery gray eyes and stooped shoulders welcoming him inside. Welcoming him in to security. Salvation.

  His sense of déjà vu was strong as he closed the door. The rain intensified outside the porch's protection. Lightning flashed in the distance followed by a grumbling thunderclap. Weak sunlight cut across the floor, revealing thick dust, dangling cobwebs, and hallways splitting from the entrance room. He didn't see any furniture, only a pipe organ's profile near a window at the farthest corner of the house. Somehow the instrument didn't seem out of place tucked out here in an abandoned house in the middle of nowhere. It didn't surprise him one bit to find it exactly where it was.

  Cooper inhaled deeply the long closed-in air. When he exhaled, the whole house seemed to follow suit.

  Cooper had been mistaken. It hadn't been the sun peeking through the cloud canopy to glare against the window pane. He had seen a light. A warm halo emanating from the house's interior. Waiting for him. Waiting for him to come inside, set things in motion, set things right. The lantern extinguished itself when Cooper glanced its way. As he entered the house, it retreated from the window, into the shadows gathered at the room's corner. There its owner remained. Waiting.

  10.

  The shading wasn't right. The contrasting shadow hovering at the hollows of his cheeks far too dark.

  Betty sat at the edge of her bed, a dull pencil held at an acute angle a quarter inch over the paper, waiting. As it had since she learned of George Banyon's death, her hand was shaking. She almost didn't notice it anymore, but she could see it reflected in her sketching. She just couldn't get it right. It was as if her mind had lost the ability to communicate with her hand.

  Junior was her muse. He slept across from her in his bed, his eyes clenched shut, an occasional whimper slipping from his parched lips. But her sketch was not of him asleep, but rather of an earlier memory, the final moment before his life instantly changed. Scrapes and mud and gleaming white teeth. Tromping back from his boyhood escapades, enthralled with the feeling of living so free; the moment before their mother told him their father had died in his sleep.

  He wasn't handling this well, her brother, Junior. Junior? He'd never be Gerald. Her father was Gerald, and he was alive. There was no reason to place such responsibility on a child.

  Betty flexed her hand, trying to squeeze the shaking from the digits. If anything, it worsened.

  For as long as she could remember she had kept a sketch pad nearby. She enjoyed landscapes, but the scope and scale were a bit daunting. Portraits were better, but sketching figures modeling her own clothing designs was her true joy. It would be her way to escape this place, or so she hoped. The first short scratch of lead to paper would transport her to a place where all women were glamorous. A place without want or loneliness. She hoped beyond hope to live her dream, to let her sketches pave the way to living that lifestyle. Problem was, who would notice her talents in Coal Hollow?

  She flexed her hand again. It was troubling. How could she ever escape this place? No one would consider hiring a clothing designer with a palsied hand.

  Junior shifted from his shoulder to his back. He opened his eyes, blinking twice. He looked around in confusion, but then rolled onto his stomach, slipping back into an uneasy sleep. Betty felt guilty for using him for inspiration (and not doing a good job at that), without his consent. She hugged a pillow across her lap, covering up the sketch pad, hugged it as if it were a loved one. Clutching the pillow made the shaking travel up her arms, until her whole body trembled.

  Junior started snoring. Normally annoyed by the methodical ripsaw, she felt oddly comforted by it now.

  She tossed the pillow aside and considered the sketch. The shading was too dark. While she had accurately rendered his boundless smile, and the scale of his limbs and torso was as close as she could master, the contrasting made Junior look cadaverous. The harsh detail of his arm muscles made him look skinless. Frozen in an anguish beyond recourse.

  She couldn't tear the page out quickly enough. She crumpled it and threw it under her bed, out of eyesight. She shivered again, shivered so long it felt like she would never stop.

  She kneeled on the floor, took one last look at the sketch pad, then banished it under the bed as well. She might never again toy with the idea of designing. Never dream of escape. Not as long as she couldn't hold a pencil steady.

  Or perhaps her pencil revealed the truth. Junior wasn't damaged in any physical way, but he might as well be. The image she had drawn was of Junior on the cusp of an indelible emotional wounding. Below the surface of his skin, flowing through him like lifeblood itself--the last moment of his innocence. She had captured that instant, first in her memory, and just now in her sketch. Having been a party to the destruction of her brother's innocence, she abided the deception following in its wake. She couldn't cast aside her subconscious while tapping into her creative reservoirs. It wasn't possible. Sketching would often reveal what she least wanted to face.

  Alone with the familiarity of his steady snoring, she could easily start to cry. But she didn't. She wouldn't let herself. What sense were tears now?

  She held on to the only thoughts that seemed any comfort: He's alive. I'll see him again. When I do, he won't be sick. He'll laugh without coughing himself into a fit.

  He's alive.

  Repeating the phrase made it real, made it true.

  Daddy's alive.

  But she still felt like crying. Because her father wasn't the only person she missed. In a way, Junior and her father distracted from other matters.

  She couldn't wish George alive and make it so.

  She remembered earlier this summer, how nervous he had been standing on the river shore, dripping wet after climbing free of the clouded water. His shoulder sported a welted raspberry from crashing into the shallow river bottom after jumping from a rope strung from an overhanging tree branch.

  She'd heard the rumors for weeks--since before school let out for summer--and had hoped the rumors were true.

  Then it was finally happening.

  Sitting, waiting, expectant, Betty closed her sketch pad before looking down from her perch on a high b
oulder.

  "Hi, Betty." His voice cracked. His nervousness was charming.

  Her heartbeat quickened, and she couldn't help laughing, both at his stupid stunt, and with the thrill of reaching the point of actual verbal communication.

  George thought she had been laughing at him. He looked toward the other guys from class for a possible escape route, then wiped a droplet of water dangling from the tip of his nose.

  Before he could run away, she spoke the first coherent thought to come to mind, "You're all wet."

  "Yeah, well, what can I say?" he said, letting out a pent-up breath. "You should come in. It's nice."

  "I'm not really dressed for it."

  He looked disappointed. Practically devastated.

  "Maybe tomorrow?" she offered.

  "Okay. Tomorrow." His lips slanted into a grin, looking like he would say something else, something witty. Instead, he scampered off, bare feet slapping the rocky shore, right up to the swinging rope. Grabbing it in full stride, he flung himself into the air, letting out a whoop of joy. He splashed down, then jumped up with the spraying water. When George joined his friends wading in the shallow, Jimmy Fowler glanced her way before giving him a clap on the back.

  She remembered the sun warming her skin and the familiar smoothness of the sketch pad under her fingertips, and not wanting anyone to see what she was working on. Before George had approached her, she'd been drawing the rocky shore. It had only been an excuse. Everyone knew she was artistic and wouldn't question her taking in the river's detail. The absence of certain details would be more telling than those she chose to include. To keep her longing private, George wasn't in the drawing. The landscape was a mere backdrop to consider at a later time, when she could add the detail of her memory. His squinty smile, his tan shoulders.

  Their first interaction had been so simple, so flighty, yet when she got home that night, while trying to sleep, she considered the possibilities: Betty Harris Banyon,Betty-Mae Banyon. It had been all so silly. So naïve. Naïve, but still somehow genuine. And tomorrow, an event as genuine as life had to offer. A funeral. George Banyon's funeral. At that moment, it seemed like the worst thing in the world was that she never donned her swimsuit, never went splashing through the river at his side.