The Hour Before Dark

by Douglas Clegg

  Arid the Ice Queen ruled all in Underland.

  And now, she was after the elf-children who knew her secrets.

  They lived on Earth, and their names were Pearling, Burnt, and River.

  6

  Of course this was somehow about putting my little brother and sister and me inside the story—they were the only ones I read them to. Since Bruno’s real name was Byrne, Burnt was close enough; and Brooke might be a “river,” and my much-hated real name, Fergus, was close to Fearling in some way.

  We’d have read it in secret, finding a room in the house where Dad would not find us. There was a wardrobe in his bedroom, and it was just large enough for the three of us to fit in. I had a flashlight, and I’d read to them. We pretended that we were somehow entering C. S. Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe right there, and Bruno, until he was six, would not venture to the back of the wardrobe even when we dared him for fear that another world opened up there.

  The legends of Imyrmia, the Ice Queen, grew over the years, and she somehow transformed in my story to an even more powerful monster called, simply, Banshee, as I had begun discovering the Celtic myths when I was twelve, and felt that the Ice Queen needed a transformation and a new name. Both Bruno and Brooke still looked forward to the stories, and although we were all a bit taller and could just fit in the wardrobe without touching each other—with the occasional gas leak from Bruno, who seemed to delight in this—we’d climb in when I had finished writing another three-or five-page opus, and I’d have the best audience a writer could ever have.

  As Banshee, the Ice Queen had changed. She was no longer the frosty beauty with blue skin and white hair. She had become more monstrous, denied the beauty creams and ointments and sorcery of Underland, which kept her eternally young and insanely beautiful. Banshee came out at twilight, surrounded by flies and mosquitoes, her heralds. She was ghoulish, and her skin was torn and leathered and dried against her bones. She had razors for teeth and fingers that scraped flesh, and she took the form of anyone she chose, anyone trusted, but as dark approached, she could not hide her true form, and when night fell, all was revealed. Alone with her hapless victim, she showed her true form.

  In the Banshee stories, she became trapped on Earth, unable to go to her Dark Kingdom, and she wanted more than anything the souls of the three elves who had exiled her from her world.

  Scared the shit out of Bruno when he was about six. I told him that Banshee was coming for him if he stepped out of bed after the light went out. This accounted for his bedwetting, and yes, I feel ashamed that I put the thought in his mind. I tried to take it back, but once you’ve told a kid that kind of thing, it never completely erases from his memory.

  7

  I read through some of the stories, all of them bad, all of them somehow making me happy about my childhood again. My father had once had the ambition to be a writer, in his youth. He told me that he seemed to only be able to write the truth of things, and no one wanted to hear the truth. He’d hold up a novel from my bookshelf (Treasure Island, From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, Danny Dunn and the Anti-Gravity Paint) and he’d say, “It’s people who write lies like these who get published. Nobody wants the truth. They want lies spoon-fed to them.” All right, he had a bit of the tyrant in him—perhaps all heroes do—and had never been able to read or enjoy fiction to save his life. I attributed this, again, to both a stern upbringing (his own father, the grandfather I never knew, disciplined with whips to the back, actual whips in the smokehouse, the place of punishment), and to his two years in prison camps during his war. He nearly seemed vulnerable at those moments, when he was at his worst I forgave him anything when I was a kid because I was so grateful that he hadn’t left us as our mother had.

  But those books on my shelf! To me they were worlds to explore. These were the seeds of my desire to write fiction, but I didn’t think I’d ever be able to do it as an adult. Still, when I was twenty-five my first novel, a fantasy called Igdrasil was published. (For those of you who don’t know, Igdrasil is the Tree of All Existence in myth. My novel did it a disservice.) I could not make a living from writing, but I found that fantasy was what I could write best—high fantasy as it’s called. And so this gave me the illusion that I could be a writer, but in fact, I had not been able to write another story or novel since selling that one.

  It was a mental and physic constipation, my adult life to that point.

  It was as if I genuinely was not meant to live outside of the island where I’d grown up—the world was too much. I needed the smallness of Burnley Island. The narrowness of the minds, the quietness of the winter s, the serenity of the separation from the mainland.

  Even Carson McKinley, spanking the monkey in his truck at the harbor.

  But my dreams of happiness and writing fiction and loving life, all had been there, at home, waiting for me.

  Sitting in my old bedroom, I pulled out that ancient typewriter—a Royal that had no business working, let alone with a ribbon of ink still in it that managed to smudge the odd “a” and “r.”

  THIS IS THE LAST STORY ABOUT BANSHEE

  Now, before I tell you what I wrote, I have to tell you that whenever I write anything, I have to first write a page or two about things that are occupying my mind. It’s a way of sweeping out the cobwebs, I guess, and is my version of therapy. I’m not sure if I believe in writer’s block, but I do believe in general Brain Block, just as I believed in Brain Farts. Writing out the tangle from inside me seemed to get the creative juices going.

  So I wrote:

  My father is dead. Someone murdered him.

  Who?

  WHO?

  Brooke is losing her mind. Bruno is picking apart the house. Brooke is painting. Bruno is playing the piano again. And here I am, writing.

  It’s as if we’re just picking up where we left off years ago.

  Brooke walks at night. Bruno has a boyfriend. I still love Pola. We have none of us figured out love right. Maybe Bruno has. Not me. Not Brooke. Our lives in shambles. Dad must have been the glue. Falling apart.

  The Banshee is loose. The Banshee has taken us over.

  At night, she watches us.

  When I’d finished typing this sentence, I looked at it. I had no idea what it meant. Did I mean that Brooke watches us? The Banshee? Was this the beginning of a story, or was I still trying to dear my mind a bit? I wasn’t even sure.

  I typed:

  At night she watches us, waiting.

  Again, no idea what this meant, but it might be the beginning of a story I could write. It intrigued me.

  Then:

  Dad was murdered. At night. Not at night. Before night.

  He wasn’t killed at night. He was only found at night. Killed earlier. Body cut. Torn. Sadistic.

  Who? Who? WHO?

  It was the hour before dark.

  The magic hour.

  Why in God’s name would someone want to kill my father? War. His men? The enemy? His enemies? A psycho?

  The Banshee?

  I stopped, scratching my head, annoyed with the futility of this exercise.

  I set the typewriter down at the foot of my bed.

  8

  Sometime around midnight, I was back in my bedroom again, exhausted from helping clear some of the debris that had piled up in rooms—Bruno and I made a go of sorting Dad’s papers, and going through unopened boxes in the two rooms he had used for storage.

  There was that old typewriter, just waiting for me to write a bit more.

  I sat on the bed and plopped it on my lap.

  Someone had used it.

  Someone had typed beneath what I’d already pounded out: Oranges and lemons say the bells of St. Clemens.

  I am here .

  I am here .

  I am here.

  I am here.

  And I never left you.

  Play it.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  1

  The next morning, I told Br
uno I knew he’d been the one to play with my typewriter, but he denied it.

  But here’s the thing: It’s the kind of prank Bruno used to pull when he was a kid.

  Sometimes I’d type part of a story out, and he’d type in two or three words after my last one (usually: stupid storie or Nemo loves Pola Bear).

  I didn’t really believe it was him.

  But I didn’t want to believe that it might be something else.

  That it might be Brooke, her mind wandering too much.

  Her breakdown on its way.

  2

  Sometimes I could hear Brooke crying through the walls.

  I worried a bit about what seemed to be a logical and terrible depression descending on all of us in the house, but most especially her. This made me sadder because she had somehow been a partner for my father—not incestuously, but in terms of being there at Hawthorn, living in the house, handling the financial matters, making sure that the roofer arrived on time, or that the pond got drained in the spring, and that nothing rusted, or that everything that broke got fixed. I suspected some part of her had wanted to be free of this life, but she must have felt guilt for the way her freedom had come. He was more of her life than he was of mine or Bruno’s. Her loss was greater to some extent, and the fact that she had discovered the body made it an even greater burden.

  We didn’t get together to talk about Dad and how wonderful he was—yet. We saved our moans and cries and gnashing of teeth for the privacy of our rooms.

  There had always been a barrier between me and my sister and my brother, and I was never sure where it had come from. We had gotten along famously when young, and had managed to share fairly equally among us. Despite my mother’s taking off so wildly, I looked back on a lot of childhood as joyous, and some of it as full of hard lessons learned, but never with a sense that it was anything but the right childhood for me. When one of us was sick, the others would gather ‘round the bedside and read aloud from books or bring soup and tales of the outside world. Yet, a barrier grew up between us, as if there were some unspoken crime we’d witnessed; or as if each of us had a disturbance within that seemed to intensify the more we were all three together. So we kept our mourning to ourselves and didn’t share grief much.

  When I thought of my father, how he was wrenched from us, alone in my old room, in my too-small bed, I cried, also. I tried writing a few more pages on the Royal, but it was as pointless as the first page I’d attempted.

  In my head, I begged God for understanding, as if He lived there or had access to my brain. Minutes later, I’d question the idea of God at all given this kind of murder. Then I’d wonder if the pagans were right—if it weren’t just a pantheon of spirits and forces and gods and goddesses all within minidomains, ruling sections of this chaotic universe, with Nature itself the ultimate deity. Or if there was no God at all, God or gods, just the lives of animals on a rocky planet, all scrambling to survive, some of us built with an outrageous and unending hope that there was something more that existed between the words “live” and “die.” Then I went back to God and the relationship between Heaven and mankind. I even had the gods of some ancient religion arguing with the God of Abraham. It got pretty silly the way my mind went. Suddenly, I was talking to my father in silence. I imagined him in Heaven, and then felt ridiculous for the fantasy. It was wishful thinking.

  I had no idea what happened when life ended. All my Catholic upbringing had brought me was a sense that I wasn’t sure what to believe, for it all seemed like the wishes of men and women who didn’t want to face the unknowable without a comfortable ending in mind. The altar boy in me felt guilty for thinking that.

  These were nights of headaches. I’d look out my window over the slope of the hills and imagine I’d see the smokehouse out to the east.

  The pictures of my father’s final hours replayed in my head as if I’d been there, watching.

  The battering of the door, the terrific storm; the way my father had heard some sound nearby; the dropping of the flashlight; and then, the shadow figure there, bringing the stinging blade into him.

  Sawing.

  3

  All right, let me just get it all out of the way right now.

  My father’s murder was a cosmic fornication—a murder beyond what most people ever have to bear. Or dream about.

  Someone got him from behind with a sharp blade. A curved blade. Under the arm, over the shoulder, in the back. They may have severed his spinal cord so that he had to lay there and take it. Or that may have come moments later. He may have volunteered to let them do it—there were no marks of restraints on his wrists or ankles, nor were there signs of struggle. At best, the fallen flashlight might’ve indicated he’d been knocked down first and was unconscious for most of the procedure. One can only hope.

  Then they went at him. Cutting parts of him. Slicing. Curved blade carefully going in, cutting tendons. Cutting muscle. You had to assume the killer did this to keep him from escaping—but, in fact, there was no sign that my father had tried to leave the smokehouse, or even fight back at his attacker.

  The worst of it was that my father might have been conscious for most of it.

  All right, the worst of it was that each of us, my brother, sister, and I, had to now live with this without denial and without illusion.

  No Brain Fart was going to rescue us with a weeklong fever of forgetfulness.

  I could not think of my father after that without imagining the bloody room and his eyes looking up at the curved blade about to come down on another part of his body, and wonder what that must have been like.

  The unimaginable began to haunt me. With it, the nightmares came, during daily catnaps and whenever sleep found me.

  I could not get one image out of my head.

  His eyes, looking up, as a shiny crescent blade came down.

  In the nightmare, I felt as if I could see the misty face he had seen before he died.

  She had long golden hair, and thin lips, and warm almond eyes.

  It was Brooke.

  When I awoke from the nightmare, Brooke stood over my bed.

  In one hand, she cupped a small glass saucer, within which was a white votive candle, its flame small and blue-yellow.

  In her other hand, a knife.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  1

  “Brooke,” I whispered.

  The room had early morning light filtering through the white curtains—a blue-purple haze on the walls.

  I reached over to the bedside table to flick on the lamp, but my hand trembled. I found the switch and turned it on. The glare of the lamp seemed like a noon sun.

  “Brooke,” I repeated.

  “Nemo?” she said, in that same whispered delicacy with which she’d greeted me when I first arrived home. “It’s you?”

  A breath or two exhaled, she glanced at the knife she held in her hand. It was just a steak knife from the kitchen. “I heard noises.”

  She set the candle and knife on the table. Then she crouched down to pick up the small lamp that had turned over onto the floor. “I get scared at night,” she said. She sat down on the floor beside my bed. “Dad doesn’t have his guns anymore. The police took them. I don’t know why. Don’t ask me. Don’t ask me. I’m going crazy here. I thought I heard someone in the house. I thought...” She glanced around the room. “I thought this was another room. I didn’t think I was in your room.”

  “No one else is in the house. You, me, and Bruno. The doors are locked. Remember? I put all the locks in. If you want to see in the dark, just use a flashlight,” I said, glancing at the candle. “You could trip on something and set it on fire. God, or stab yourself.” It was an exaggeration, I guess, but I was tired of her nightly wanderings, which were freaking me out completely.

  She ignored my comments. “The dogs are always the first to notice. They whimpered a little while ago. I had to close their kennels up.”

  “Probably they heard a possum outside.”

  “T
hey were frightened. Nothing frightens them much.”

  “If you think someone might be here,” I said, feeling as wide awake as I’d ever felt, my heart still beating like a jack-hammer, “you might want to let the dogs roam.”

  “I thought it might be my imagination,” she said, her voice still barely more than a whisper. Her face turned glum and a bit stony. “I’ve heard it since before... well, before it happened. I kept thinking that someone was walking just ahead of me.”