The Hour Before Dark

by Douglas Clegg

  “It’s the night,” I said. I packed some pillows behind my back and sat up. The smell of the room came to me: It smelled like trash. I glanced at the small trash can by my old desk, wondering what I’d thrown in there. Banana peel? Half a sandwich? “I’ve stayed up ‘til all hours sometimes, and I start imagining all kinds of things.”

  “I don’t think it’s that,” she said. Then her voice rose. “Do you know that every night when I’m up—late—something in the house has moved?”

  “Moved?”

  “Small things. Things that no one would really notice. I notice them because I notice everything in this house.”

  “It could’ve been Bruno. Or me.”

  “No,” she said. “Not things like that. Inconsequential things, things you wouldn’t even touch.”

  “Like?”

  “The thermostat. It goes up at night.”

  “That’s Bruno,” I said. “I’m sure it is.”

  “Even on the nights he’s not here? It’s up to ninety. But it’s freezing anyway. Someone moves the dial on it up, but it still gets cold. I feel cold when I get up to check it. I feel something,” she said. She leaned forward and brought her knees up just under her chin. As she put her arms around her knees, reminding me of a little girl, her sweater rolled back a bit. I tried to see marks from her bathtub mishap, but couldn’t make anything out. “Some nights, there are windows open. In Dad’s room, in the living room. I’ve checked to see if they’re locked at four A.M. But then, by six, they’re wide open.”

  “We’ve got storm windows,” I said. “No one’s getting in or out that way.”

  “That’s the thing,” she said. “The storm windows are still on the outside. No one broke in. No one left through a window. They just opened them. As if they wanted me to know they’re here.”

  “It could be anything,” I said. I grinned. “Dad’s ghost.” A joke. I felt grim for mentioning it. I just wanted someone to lighten up—her or me.

  “No,” she said, taking this suggestion far too seriously. “It happened before Dad was killed. It happened before Bruno came back. And the wardrobe, in Dad’s room. It was moved.”

  “I can explain that,” I said. “Bruno and I—”

  “I don’t mean recently,” she said sharply, her mood changing. There was anger beneath her words, as if I were suggesting that she had somehow made something of nothing, “in October. Late October. Dad thought I did it. But I didn’t. And then there were the noises.”

  “Brooke,” I said. I reached out and tapped her knee lightly. “We’re all suffering here. You probably more than anyone. You and Dad were so close.”

  “I think,” she said, looking at my hand after it had briefly touched her knee. “I think that the killer is in the house. And has been. You know how Hawthorn was built. You know how it has those spaces.”

  “No one but a six-year-old could even get into those spaces,” I said. “Look, you’re stressed. It’s normal. You were in the war zone. You sat with him. You saw what happened. It’s normal that you’re on edge. But for your own sake, you need to start working on ways to handle the stress.”

  I knew about the old, original structure of Hawthorn—how it had been one of those less-than-sturdy New England farmhouses that had little insulation and very little room at all. The present house, built in the nineteenth century, had engulfed it—the living room with its great fireplace and the two bedrooms beyond it were the only things left from it that showed. Otherwise, there was a hollow space behind the front stairs that had been part of the original “great room” and a one-foot-wide space between the old brick and the new insulation and the brick on the outside. It couldn’t be reconciled with the later design, so it left this kind of thin wind tunnel that ran along the side front quarter of the house. When we’d been very little, Brooke and Bruno had been able to squeeze through it for as far as they could go—no more than a few feet in. By the time Bruno was seven, he could no longer fit, and Brooke couldn’t fit by her ninth year.

  “Someone could go through the walls,” Brooke said, looking at me with an unflinching gaze. She had completely ignored everything I’d just said. “Someone could if they wanted it badly enough.”

  “Who?” I asked.

  “The same someone I hear at night. I go from room to room, and I feel as if I can almost find him.”

  “Him?”

  Her eyes widened. “I know it sounds ridiculous. But either it’s a person or it’s not. Who could it be, Nemo? If it’s a ghost, what is it? Why is it here?”

  “Want me to call Joe and have him bring some detectives through?”

  “No,” she said. Her eyes teared up. She raised her hands to her face and squished her flesh around as if it were clay. “God, I feel like I’m going crazy. Do you think I’m crazy?”

  “Maybe we need to talk to someone,” I said. “All of us. A shrink. Maybe we can go see Bruno’s. He thinks she’s God.”

  “Not bloody likely,” she said, and then smiled through her sadness, for it was what our father had always said about psychiatrists. “It’s my mind. It’s unquiet. Do you know—” She stopped herself in midsentence. “No, nothing.”

  “What?”

  “Nothing,” she said. Then, “The night he died, I thought I heard someone downstairs.”

  I watched her. I had begun looking for signs of a break down. I really was worried that we had some kind of family insanity within us. Brooke, the contradiction: the sturdiest of us, also the most fragile.

  “I didn’t tell Joe. I don’t think I should,” she said.

  “Did you see someone?”

  She closed her eyes and rested the palm of her hand on her forehead, applying pressure there. “I can’t seem to turn off my mind anymore, Nemo. I keep playing things back from that night again and again and again.”

  This time, her sweater slid farther down her arm, and I saw, along her forearm, gauze wrapped with white tape.

  I leaned forward and touched the edge of her arm. “What’s this?”

  2

  She looked up, then brought her arm down to her side.

  Shrugged.

  Tugged the arm of her sweater back down to her wrists.

  “Accident. I fell asleep in the tub.” She fumbled with words, as if trying to string together the right ones to make sense. “I... broke some glass ... cut myself up ... a bit.”

  “That’s it?”

  She nodded.

  “What really happened?”

  She nearly smiled—a sad half grin. It was part of how we’d interacted as children. Brooke never liked telling the truth when she was little, so she’d make something up first to make you feel better about bad news. After she’d given some convoluted explanation for something, I’d ask her: What really happened?

  “I don’t know if I was dreaming or not,” she said, her slight smile returning to a flat line. “Bruno convinced me that I was. That I fell asleep in the tub and was dreaming, but I’m not sure. It was the night... the night of the storm. The night he died. There were voices that seemed to come from downstairs. I only really heard one of them. But it somehow made me sleepy to hear it, and in the dream I thought we were children again, playing the game.”

  Just hearing it made my brain go a little haywire—something within me rebelled at the idea of the game we’d played as children. I hated it, and was embarrassed by it. It was as if my mind squinted and cringed whenever the thought of the Dark Game arose.

  “We were all playing it. You had the blindfold on, and Bruno was doing the counting, and I helped him with the reciting. And I was just there, somehow, not really in the Dark Game and not really outside it. I had glass in my hand. I was taking it and trying to cut at the rope around my wrists. But... but I wasn’t doing it right, and the ropes became bright red ribbons floating around in the air. Bruno started laughing. So did I, but you told me to stop it. Stop it! you shouted, the way you used to when I was doing something wrong.”

  “Oh, Brooke,” I said, my he
art sinking a bit I took her hand in mine. “Did you do this to yourself?’’

  “I didn’t think I did,” she said, her voice pure confusion. She glanced over at the knife on the table, and then at me. “I didn’t want to kill myself. I really didn’t. I just... I just wanted to sleep. I wanted to be in the game again. But I felt like someone else was there. Someone else was with me. Inside me. Trying to get out.”

  3

  Her face became all screwed up, wrinkling as if she were years older. “I woke up, not in the bathtub at all. I stood on the front porch. I didn’t have anything on. Not a stitch. It was freezing. The storm that night—terrible. I was just... just... just standing there, with the door open. Rain coming down. Howling wind. Horrible night. The last thing I remembered before this was I had been in the tub. Somehow, I had gotten out of the tub when I was asleep, and walked through the rooms, down the stairs, and outside. That night. My arms were all torn up from the glass. Blood. Not as much as you’d think. The piece of glass was in my hand. I went back inside. I went back upstairs to the bathroom. When I turned on the light, I saw the glass on the floor. The water in the tub was all pink with blood. Only, something else was there.”

  “In the bathroom?” I asked, sitting up, drawing back a bit, crossing my legs in front of me. I almost didn’t want to know what was there in her dream.

  “In the tub. in all that pink, foamy water.”

  “What was it?”

  She closed her eyes, her eyebrows pressing downward as if trying to force the memory from her mind. “It was me,” she said. “I watched myself. I was dying. Blood was coining out of my arms slowing in gentle red ribbons. And then ...”

  I held my breath a moment. Denial was how I’d been raised. Deny anything even close to a bad mental state. Deny that life exerted any pressure on anyone. The voice of my father “I was in the camps, and if I could survive that without cracking up, then anyone can survive anything if they just control their mind better.”

  But Brooke had been falling apart, even before our father’s murder, even before sitting in his blood for hours.

  And neither Bruno nor I had done anything to help her.

  Bruno had found her wandering, naked, in the night.

  I had seen her paintings.

  Her mental state was a wreck, but we were ill-equipped to understand it.

  4

  “I was in the tub. All along I was in the tub,” she said. “Looking up at what seemed like steam. But it wasn’t steam. I thought for a second that it was the dream-me evaporating. In front of my eyes,” she said. “I watched it for a minute as it went—it was just steam. The whole thing had been a dream. But... remember in the Dark Game? How we could go inside and outside ourselves?”

  “Do I,” I whispered, wishing that she had not mentioned it, wishing that Bruno had not mentioned it recently, wishing that I could forget we ever had played it. The source of her disturbed state.

  The source of all our disturbances.

  “It was like that,” she said. “Just like it. Only, Nemo, there was something else. Someone else was there. It was like I had released someone from inside me, when I cut myself. It was as if I had never been alone before, and now I was—something had gotten out of me. It was just like the Dark Game. It was as if by bleeding, wanting to die—I did want to die—someone else came out of me. Like they’d been waiting a long time. Ever since we used to play it. Like they were waiting for me to open myself up and let them out.”

  5

  Our father had taught the Dark Game to us.

  Then, when we had been screaming in the smokehouse, he’d ended it.

  He told us that he never wanted to catch us playing it again. He told us that when the game got to be too much, we should hit a wall and that it could get dangerous. “The mind is fragile, and you shouldn’t play it so easily. It comes too easily for you. I shouldn’t have taught it to you. I thought you were strong enough.”

  But the game wasn’t so easy to give up, either.

  Sometimes, we still played it—in the wardrobe or in one of our bedrooms. We stopped at some point—I think when I was about thirteen or so, I had stopped playing it completely. Something changed—perhaps puberty had eliminated the need for the drug of the game.

  Or perhaps we had hit the wall in the game.

  He told us that he had fine-tuned the Dark Game when he was a prisoner of war. It helped him escape where they had imprisoned him when he was a young man during a war that I knew very little about. He told us that you could make your mind do things if you isolated it and if you directed it. He said that when he was in solitary confinement, the game allowed him to forget the pain in his legs and shoulders, and he could travel outside of the well they’d left him in for a week or two—that he could stand on the ground and travel among them—all in his mind. “The human imagination has never been fully tested. It never will be. But I could swear that during those times, particularly in the hole, I could hear their conversation and wander about freely among them.”

  He told us not to play after dark because the game could ruin your mind if you let it. “Play it during the hour before dark, no matter what hour it is, it works best then, when the world is settling and your mind is calm,” he had said.

  “What happens at night?” I asked him.

  “When I did it at night, it got hold of me,” he said. “I couldn’t get out of it on my own. Only when I hit that wall would I get thrown back into my waking consciousness, and it might be days before that happened. I’d be nearly starved, and so thirsty even my captors wondered at it. And my men...” He shook his head sadly. “They thought I was dead sometimes, in it sometimes it seemed as if I were dead.”

  We always thought he’d told us these stories to terrify us into not playing the Dark Game too much. After all, if it were such a deadly game, why even teach it to us? Why even train us to play it?

  But the boredom of Hawthorn in the winter was too much. The cable might go out or the electricity, or our friends could not tromp from the village out to our place for a winter’s day of games.

  He used the Dark Game once for something that at the time made sense, but now seemed wrong: when Granny died. Brooke was inconsolable—she sobbed and screeched as if she would never be happy again. I was also bleating my tears out, for despite her harshness at times, I had loved the old woman who had read us stories and told us about Wales and Scotland as if she had been raised there herself.

  So, our father, apparently at the end of his rope, had taken us into the smokehouse. We had thought it was to punish us for wailing so much, but he sat us down, and guided us through the Dark Game as a way to see Granny again. I barely remember it, other than feeling much better—closing my eyes on a summer afternoon in the cool smokehouse, feeling the bites of mosquitoes on my arms, and then moving in the dark of my self-imposed blindness into a different afternoon, and seeing Granny there, holding her hand out to Brooke and me, and the sweet, gentle voice of our father guiding us.

  The Dark Game was simple: You closed your eyes, or you blindfolded yourself if you couldn’t keep your eyes closed. One person, who put on his blindfold last, had to count to ten, and then began reciting a nursery rhyme.

  It was a very particular nursery rhyme—our father’s own Granny (my great-grandmother) had taught it to him, as she had been taught it as a child. He told me that the origins of the Dark Game went back further than even his two years in the prison camps. “It goes back before words were written down, and it’s the rhythm of the rhyme that counts, not the words. The words just can be said. The rhythm gets inside you. My Granny told me that the Dark Game was used in dark times—when horrible things happened to people, and those who survived those things needed rest from it all. I took the Dark Game to the prison camps with me and modified it. I used what I learned there. It helps us escape in hard times. But it’s not a toy. It is not to be abused.”

  The rhyme itself had to do with churches in England and a game that children once played wh
ile they recited it. It was a common enough nursery rhyme—I’d heard it since growing up. So it was not unique to the Dark Game. It simply was a way for the reciter to help the mind relax.

  It began:

  “Oranges and lemons, say the bells of St. Clemens.

  You owe me five farthings, say the bells of St. Martins.

  When will you pay me? say the bells of Old Bailey.

  When I am rich, say the bells of Shoreditch.

  When will that be? say the bells of Stepney.

  I do not know, says the great bell at Bowe.”

  And it ended:

  “Here comes a candle to light you to bed—

  And here comes a chopper to chop off your head.”

  Then the reciter shut his eyes and began to guide the others—and we’d go in our minds where our guide took us, with no resistance. At some point, you’d be telling what you saw in your mind, over and over again, until you began really seeing the others there as well, with you. Where you went, what you were doing. You tried to rise outside of your body and just float there and watch yourself. Our father had told us it was a survival technique—and that it would help us understand how our minds worked. Looking back, I can understand now that we were probably too young to play the Game—because our imaginations were already strong as it was. But our father played it with us when we were all a little too rambunctious and bored at the same time, and the winter blizzards had come down on the island.

  In the winter, we played the Dark Game a lot, and it was fairly innocent for a while. We could travel through time or to other countries or to places we made up. We could even see our mother—we would travel to where we thought we could find her. When she lived with us, we would travel to the store or to the kitchen and pretend we were near her. After she abandoned us, we pretended to travel to Brazil, to a beautiful home in the mountains.

  But the last time we played it, something went wrong.