by Scott Hale
By the time she’d finished reading about the Black Hour, it was the Black Hour, and she was in her daughter’s room. Or was it Linnéa’s mother’s room? Ninety percent of the items inside it had belonged to Agnes. Did Filipa’s disappearance belong to her to?
Linnéa lay down on her daughter’s bed and pressed one of the pillows to her chest. She breathed in the smell of Filipa in the fabric. Whether it was there, or it was in her mind, it was hard to say. But like life support, it kept her alive.
Agnes—Linnéa’s mother—had kept a close eye on everyone but herself. Aside from those nine months when she’d been pregnant with Linnéa, Agnes had always been a heavy drinker. That, in combination with the medications she took to treat a chronic case of “mental unbalance,” had transformed her from the scrawny, scuffed-up, postcard-picture-perfect youth, to the transient waif that waited in all corners and on all thresholds, ears pressed to plaster, plastic, wood, and brick for thunderous words and stormy rumors. Her “mental unbalance,” as Linnéa would learn when such a thing was obviously not normal, was, in fact, self-diagnosed. And the doctors treating her? They were the rich from west Bedlam who she rubbed elbows with until they were hot and raw.
When Filipa was born, that made Agnes a grandmother, and like all grandmothers, the need to see her granddaughter, to squeeze her cheeks and hold her high and relive those fabled days long gone by, bordered on mania. Linnéa, not having seen her mother and wanting to believe she had changed, relented. A bad mother could still be a good grandmother.
And Agnes had been a good grandmother, for a while. But as Filipa got older and older, Agnes hid her habits less and less; again, as always, doing the opposite of what she should have. Until one day, Agnes picked Filipa up from pre-school. High on pills, sloppy-drunk on a forty-ounce, Agnes nearly ran down Filipa as she ran to her. Before the teachers could put two and two together, Agnes floored it off the school property and, ten minutes later, drove her car through the front of a restaurant.
Surprisingly, no one was injured or killed inside the restaurant, but Agnes was found with a concussion and Filipa with a mouthful of blood from a busted lip and a few sprung baby teeth. The restaurant ended up turning into a hoity toity spot where the well-off ordered pictures of food and imagined how good they tasted, while Agnes got a lengthy inpatient stay, followed by rehab, followed by promises and the shattered beer bottles that broke them. Filipa got a social worker, a caseworker, more ice cream and cards than she knew what to do with, and a lot of people who “cared” about her as they buttered her up to get her to break down about Linnéa and Stephen and all the terrible things they had to have done to her over the years.
Filipa had given them nothing, because there was nothing to give them, except a stuck-out tongue and snot rockets. The courts came after Linnéa hard. They slapped a child endangerment charge on her, on account of Agnes being a prolific piece of shit. Instead of doing time or losing Filipa, though, Linnéa and Stephen did parenting classes and supervised sessions with Filipa until everyone involved was sufficiently convinced they did love their daughter, and that what had happened with Agnes would never happen again.
It didn’t. Filipa never saw her grandmother again after that. Linnéa tried to get her mother to come around for a holiday get-together, but Agnes refused. The whole incident had led her into a deeper, darker, drug-fueled, alcohol-drenched hole from which she never did emerge. Her last words, which she gave to Linnéa over the phone the evening before she killed herself, were these: “Mirrors mean nothing when you won’t see yourself in them.”
Agnes hadn’t much, but what she had, she left behind for Filipa, and for Filipa alone. The sum total of Linnéa’s mother’s life was two thousand dollars, her house, and all the spotless antiques she kept inside it. The two thousand dollars was sitting in Filipa’s savings, the house now belonged to another family, and all those antiques? They were here in Filipa’s room, gathering dust but getting used. It had had been her grandmother’s penance for everything she’d done. Stephen sometimes joked that Agnes only gave Filipa all that furniture to spare her from all that “cheap, made in China crap,” she was always going on about.
Linnéa pressed Filipa’s pillow harder against her face. Readjusting herself, the mattress gave and, for a moment, she thought Filipa had climbed back into bed with her. She turned on her side. Her daughter wasn’t there, but a picture of her was on the nightstand. A picture of her, Steven, and Linnéa at Bleak’s Holdout—the so-called “haunted” forest of the much larger state park it joined up with.
“That was a good day,” Linnéa said, trying to mimic Filipa’s toothy, troll-like smile. “It was a good day.”
Linnéa passed out for a half an hour, and then woke back up recharged, as if a bolt of lightning had struck her in her sleep. Too anxious to go back to bed, she went downstairs, grabbed her electric guitar and amp. Before heading back to Filipa’s room, she took a detour into the kitchen, where the vermillion veins lay like dissected specimens on the table.
She flicked the low E string on her guitar. While its dooming note rang out in the moonlit dark, she grabbed the vein from their garden and took a hunk out of it with her teeth. The texture was tough, and there were tiny bumps all over it she hadn’t noticed before. The taste was sweet, almost like wine, but at the same time completely different; it was a complex combination of flavors and tones that constantly evolved, escaping any classification her country bumpkin brain could manage. What was most disturbing, however, was how dirty it made her mouth feel. It left her tongue chalky, and her teeth became heavy. The liquid inside the vein lingered on the edge of her throat, like a finger run around a glass rim. She choked, and because this was the music the fluid was apparently trying to conduct, it then slid satisfactorily down her esophagus.
Linnéa felt dirty, the same way she used to feel after coming home from a party and remembering the men who’d gazed and grazed her like wide-eyed cows with oblivious intent. And then, Linnéa felt unworthy, the same way she had when she went to church with Stephen’s family every Christmas and partook in every communion, not because she wanted to or needed to, but because she didn’t want to let the big guy on the little cross down; he looked sad enough as it was.
Linnéa lapped at the water sputtering from the kitchen sink until her mouth was as right as it was going to get, and then she got going. Hallucinogenic? She wasn’t so sure about that. But by the time she was back in Filipa’s room, her ax plugged in and the amp squealing out feedback, she was definitely Anges’ daughter—jitters and grinding teeth and all.
In high school, Linnéa and three other girls had a black metal band named The Sisters of Ungoliant. Since her and Stephen were about to kick-up a satanic panic in the next ten hours, it seemed fitting to her she should rock out a few riffs to the Prince of Lies. Dario Onai would understand. When it came to coping skills, how could this not take the cake?
She was two choruses into their most requested song, Vistas of Evil, when the vermillion veins kicked in and caused the room to start to spin. Tremolo picking slowing to a sluggish strum, she strained her ears to hear the movement in the hall. It was Stephen, hobbling like a hunchback down this house’s lonely corridors, searching for sanctuary in the fruits of persistence. She didn’t need to see him to know where he was going; he’d spent most of the night in their office, fiddling with his phone, wondering aloud if Bethany Simmons had vermillion veins in her yard, too.
The front door slammed shut downstairs. It seemed they’d know soon enough.
Linnéa thought about going to the window, but the glass looked as if it were melting, and she figured it would be best if she stayed put. Hallucinogenic? Yeah, alright, maybe so.
The high was short lived, though. As she chugged out the funeral waltz gallop to The Mares of Bedlam, she realized what she was doing and where she was doing it, and started tearing up. She dropped her head hard against the top of the guitar—a clang of discord burst off the amp—and shook. Her mother’s last words h
ad warned her of not seeing herself when she looked in a mirror, but all she saw was herself, and how desperately she wanted to be anybody but Agnes. Who the fuck was this impromptu concert for? Not Stephen, and not Filipa, and maybe not even Linnéa. Was she coping, or just trying to be cool?
“What’s more metal than shredding in your missing daughter’s room in the middle of the night?” Linnéa snorted and let her pick fall to the floor. “Fuck, I hate this. I don’t—” She sucked up spit and clicked the amp over to ‘clean.’ “I don’t want to do this anymore.”
She plucked aimlessly on the A, D, and G strings. With each note came a memory of Filipa. She saw her on the floor, on all fours, plodding along with her baby food-encrusted baby blanket. She saw her at school, at recess, combing the recesses of the building with boys who looked up to her as if she were some punk queen. She saw her in her room, through the crack in the door, face in another book, mind in another world. She saw her and Stephen asleep in the living room, her smashed against her father’s arm, the fabric of his shirt wrapped around her clutching fingers. She saw her in Linnéa’s closet, blending in with the dresses and shirts hanging off the hangers, and holding them up like swatches to herself, to see what she may look like in five years’ time.
Linnéa continued to pluck on the A, D, and G strings until, unknowingly, she’d made something out of them. Voice hoarse and stinking of vermillion blood, she started to sing:
You were there,
And then you were not.
All that I am,
Is all that I’ve fought.
I see you sometimes,
Under that tree.
I wonder sometimes,
If it was me.
If they touched but a hair on your head,
I’ll kill them all.
I’ll kill them dead.
Whatever it takes to bring you back,
To under that tree;
Where you aren’t.
But where you should be.
Linnéa screwed up her face and dropped the guitar against the side of the bed. Needing Stephen in a way she hadn’t needed him before, she stood up and sprinted out of the room. She ran down the hall, stomped down the stairs. She could hear the crickets coming in loudly through the banisters, like they might’ve kept a window—
The front door stood open. The summer wind set it a-sway.
“Stephen?” she cried.
Her voice carried through the blackness that had filled her house; that eerie, almost solidified stillness; nocturnal amber.
“Steve!”
Heart beating fast enough to give a black metal drummer a run for their money, Linnéa took two large strides and grabbed the front door. But before she could shut it, a scene she’d seen before played before her with a distorted sense of déjà vu.
To her right, Ellen and Richard Cross stood, and as had happened before, Ellen’s figure was standing on the porch, waving her arms.
To her left, there was Trent Resin’s home, and hurrying down the driveway was the shape of Trent.
Except that wasn’t Ellen on Ellen’s porch.
And that wasn’t Trent in Trent’s driveway.
And, panicked, Linnéa looked farther down the street to Bethany Simmons’ house, where not one shape, but three were standing on her manicured lawn, staring up at Jimmy Simmons’ window.
“S-S-Steve!” Linnéa stammered, backpedaling.
The stair light flashed on behind her.
She spun around.
At the top of the stairs, a dark shape stood against the wall. It laughed like a little girl would laugh. And then slowly, it stepped around the corner, out of sight.
Paralyzed, Linnéa stood there, listening to the invader’s footsteps on the second floor. She tracked its movements to Filipa’s room, and then to hers and Stephen’s.
It shut the door. It was waiting for her to follow.
Linnéa started towards the stairs when—
“Lin?” Stephen whispered behind her.
She stopped, snaked her neck around like a feasting snake to face him.
He was holding a handful of vermillion veins. “The Simmons had some in their… What’s wrong?”
“There’s something in the house,” Linnéa whispered. “Didn’t you… Didn’t you see…” She pointed outside to the other parents’ houses. “There’s something upstairs.”
Stephen stared past her, into the house, at the staircase drenched in yellow light. His eyes wandered away, met hers. Hand slipping into his pocket, he nodded, pulled out his keys, and said, “Okay.”
Linnéa and Stephen went to the driveway, unlocked Stephen’s car, and jumped inside. He started it up, backed it down the driveway; meeting the street, he forced it into park, locked the doors, and together, they stared into their bedroom window.
“Call the police,” he said, handing her his cell phone.
She took it and started to dial 911.
“Who was it?”
“I don’t know,” Linnéa said. Before she sent the call: “I tried one of the veins.”
Stephen glanced at her. “Eh?”
“You said it’s a hallucinogenic. Fuck.” She dropped the phone in her lap. “If you didn’t see it… maybe it wasn’t…”
Stephen grabbed the phone and called 911. “We’re not taking that chance.”
The phone clicked over. On the other line, the emergency operator buzzed out a question.
Linnéa turned her attention back towards the bedroom window on the second floor. As the effects of the vermillion veins began to wane, her imagination took over, and she conjured creations behind the glass. Shadowy figures with elongated limbs and pointed teeth. Sinister silhouettes brandishing knives and fistfuls of candy. She didn’t tell Stephen what she saw, because there was no telling if it was real or not. Looking over her shoulder through the rear window, there were no signs of the other dark shapes she’d seen earlier; but there was the vermillion vein Stephen had brought home from the Simmonses’. Seeing it, she wanted to eat it whole.
The police arrived fifteen minutes later. They searched the house thoroughly and found no one inside. Linnéa left out the detail about the other shapes on the lawns, but in the end, it didn’t matter, because though the police hadn’t found anyone, they had found something.
A message written in ash on the ceiling over Linnéa and Stephen’s bed. It read: A Child in Every Home.
SUNDAYMONDAYTUESDAYWEDNESDAYTHURSDAYFRIDAYSATURDAY
Monday morning lurched drearily into Six Pillars. Fat, black clouds wandered across the sky—a funeral procession of elephantine shapes—and made miserable those below. A steady drizzle swept back and forth across the neighborhood, giving rise to just enough mist to make at home any wayward mariner. There was no sun in the sky, and with the moon still riding high, there was no guarantee it had bothered to rise. This world of heel-dragging corporate drones was one lit by porch lights and brake lights, and cell phone screens, like star maps, casting today’s course by social media’s inconsequential constellations.
Worse than clouds, than the rain, than the mist and the attention-starved machines, was the air. When the authorities had arrived in Six Pillars and discovered the warning writ in ash, the chief of police interpreted it as a threat to the other children in the neighborhood and dispatched most of the force there. Now, at 7:00 AM, as they had been at 2:00 AM, the cruisers were cruising the streets, polluting the air with their exhaust and the sleep-deprived babble that broke from the officers’ coffee-stained, gingivitis-drenched mouths. It wasn’t just that it was hard to breathe; it was that you couldn’t breathe. Sure, all that nitrogen and carbon dioxide from the exhaust would do that to a person, but it was the babble, too; the banter from the boys-in-blue—their professional indifference and sick speculation they basically belted for all to hear.
“Dumbass kids,” one cop crooned, playing a tune on his dash. “Better not let me be the one to find them.”
“You know, it’s the parents,” another cop said
to his partner, rolling, with the windows down, past. “This is fucking ridiculous.”
“I’ll buy whoever finds a body a drink,” a cop cried into his radio. He floored it down the street, spinning out at the stop sign.
Other police officers on patrol were less vocal, but their non-verbals all said the same thing: Fuck this.
Linnéa pulled away from the living room window and closed it. She wiped the layer of rain off the sill, grabbed her phone out of her pajama pocket, called her boss, and left a message to let him know she wasn’t coming in the rest of the week.
A break in a quickly cooling case should’ve roused the community and the local enforcement, and yet aside from her and Stephen and the other parents, no one could’ve cared less. Fatigue was setting in, the same way summer was dying, and the rot of change was spreading through the season. Like all things, if she was going to get something done, she was going to have to do it herself.
When Stephen came down ten minutes later, he told her he had taken the week off, too.
“Did you sleep on the couch?” he mumbled, scratching himself through his boxers.
Linnéa looked at the couch and the mess of blankets left on it.
“I didn’t sleep,” he said. “Just stayed up all night on the computer.”
“I didn’t sleep, either.” Linnéa went back to the window and cracked it open. “Feels like there’s something still in the house.”
“Can’t let anything stop us,” Stephen said. He came up behind her and started rubbing her shoulders. “This is our house.”
Linnéa turned around. She pressed her body into his, and then threw her arms around him. She absorbed his heat into her chest, and he absorbed her tears into his shirt.
“We have to do everything together from now on,” she said, nudging him with her head. “This isn’t healthy. We’re not covering more ground, just putting more distance between us.”