The Hour Before Dark

by Douglas Clegg

  “Shit.”

  “Any idea why?”

  “No.”

  “You said you’d get all of us,” he said. “And then you knocked the flashlight out of my hand.” He made a motion with his arm as if he were physically trying to remember what I had done. He moved his arms slowly and cocked his head to the side. “Then you ... you reached up and tore my glasses off. Somewhere in there, your fingernails went into my face. Not sure when you hit my lip. And you socked me a good one right here.” He tapped a finger just below his left eye. The skin around it had grown darker.

  “Jesus. I’m sorry. Jesus.”

  “Ever have seizures?”

  “None that I know of.”

  “Ever have a scan done? MRI?”

  “No.”

  “When was the last time you had a physical?”

  I shrugged. “College. Junior year.”

  “Any accidents?”

  “Like what?”

  “Anything that would cause trauma to your head?”

  “Nothing. Accident free. I guess I fell on the sidewalk once down in Virginia. It was muddy. I slipped and hit my knee and elbow. Hard. That’s the only thing I can think of.”

  “Didn’t you get hurt on the ice once?”

  “Oh, yeah. You mean when we were fourteen? Yeah, I fell and cracked my head open.”

  “But you were checked after that.”

  “Nothing beyond some stitches.”

  He took another swig of Scotch. “You didn’t even sound like you.”

  “Who’d I sound like?”

  “No idea. Someone different.” As, an afterthought, Harry Withers added, “A woman.”

  5

  He went over it again:

  “So, I’m looking around. I was crouching down, and I hear this noise. Well, maybe not much of a noise. It’s like a high-pitched sound. I smell smoke, but I’m not sure why. Except it’s an old smokehouse and it’s winter, and you know how sometimes those old stone houses can reek of smoke if they’ve ever had it. Only you say something right at that moment, and I’m ignoring you—you say something I don’t quite understand. Now that I think of it, it was as if your tongue was heavy in your mouth, like you’d been shot up with Novocain. I turn my head back, Nemo, and you’re standing over me. The freaky thing about it is that not a second before, you were across the room. I know it’s a small room, but I would’ve heard you. But it was as if you suddenly were just standing over me.

  “I’m not one to get started over nothing, but I have to admit, my mouth went dry when I saw you, and I felt something in the air, as if the weather had changed outside, or as if there were static electricity. Maybe the feeling you’re supposed to get when lightning is about to hit where you’re standing. That’s what it felt like. And I look up at you. I can’t quite see your face. It’s not so dark with you right there that I can’t see your face at all. But you seem funny, and I’m a little freaked, and I hold the flashlight up, and that’s when you knock it out of my hand. But I see your face for a second, and Nemo, it ain’t your face, buddy. It’s someone else, it’s like you took off a mask. I don’t know what was so different, but you looked angry, and your lips seemed different.

  “And then I stood up, and you were whispering something over and over again. I said, ‘Nemo?’ and you started in on all that stuff, and it’s just not you, Nemo. I know you too well, and it’s not you at all. You clawed at my face and my glasses went flying, and I had to shove you as hard as I could, which is why your head probably hurts a little, since you hit the wall and went down.

  “It was like...” he said, finishing with a last sip of Scotch.

  “Like?”

  He smacked his lips. Shook his head. He nearly grinned when he said it. “It’s gonna sound crazy. But it was like you were possessed.”

  I thought for half a second he had said “obsessed.” Then I remembered that Harry had been the superstitious one. He had always believed there were ghosts on the island—at least as a boy. I had figured he had outgrown this, but based on mentioning possession, I assumed he still believed that there were ghosts. And that they got inside people.

  As if reading my mind, he said, “It’s probably just stress. Anxiety. All the crap you’ve been going through since you got back.”

  I nodded.

  He leaned forward slightly, staring at me with an intensity that made him seem a bit maniacal. “We gotta go back there, bud. This time with a tape recorder.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  1

  I agreed to go back to the smokehouse with Harry.

  I didn’t want to go in there again.

  I didn’t want to feel it.

  Not a terrible feeling, or a fear of being out of control.

  I had been turned on in the smokehouse. I had felt an arousal the likes of which I can only call sexual, but which seemed more encompassing than that.

  It bad been like some kind of high within my bloodstream, and when I finally tried to figure it out, I realized: I had felt like a kid again, on the cusp of pleasure and a rare, nearly erotic feeling that all my burdens in life had been lifted.

  It was like taking a hit of a really powerful drug that made the user feel euphoria, excitement, and a liberation from gravity itself.

  2

  Harry and I trudged up one late afternoon, about three or so, with flashlights, and a digital voice recorder that Harry usually used when interviewing some old salt or corporate CEO who vacationed up island. “Just talk normally. It’ll pick up all kinds of sounds. It’s a sensitive bit of machinery,” he said.

  Unlocking the door to the smokehouse, he made an “after you” gesture with his hands.

  3

  I stepped inside, and nothing happened. I stood in the smokehouse, closed my eyes for a second or two because I did feel anxious just being there.

  I guess it was during those few seconds that something did indeed happen, because when I opened my eyes—it was little more than a blink—my watch—and Harry—told me that twenty minutes had gone by.

  And it was all on tape.

  4

  “It’s fantastic!” he said, with the glee of a boy. “Oh my God, is this ever amazing! It gave me goose bumps, standing there. It was absolutely chilling!”

  “Harry?” I asked.

  He pressed the play button on the small cylindrical machine.

  “Who are you?” Harry’s voice on the tape.

  Silence. I glanced at Harry, but he kept his eyes on the recorder.

  Five minutes or more passed. I tried to block out all other sounds in the room, and any from outside the window. I was sure I could hear the whirr of the tape itself. I leaned slightly forward as if I might miss whatever it was that he was so keen on. I imagined myself standing there, eyes closed, in some kind of trance.

  And then something changed on the tape. Like a small mouse scurrying in a comer. Just a whisper of a noise.

  I tried to focus all attention on that small sound.

  And then it exploded.

  “LET ME OUT!” The scream was so loud it was nearly distorted on the tape. “LET ME OUT! PLEASE! OH GOD! LET ME OUT! DON’T DO THIS TO ME! PLEASE! OH GOD! LET ME GO! PLEASE SOMEBODY LET ME OUT! GOD HELP ME! GOD HELP ME!”

  PART THREE

  “You owe me five farthings, Say the bells of St Martin’s...”

  —traditional

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  1

  The voice kept screaming until Harry shut off the machine. He held it in his hand, looked down at it, then up at me.

  “Worst part is,” Harry said, “I’ve heard this voice before.”

  2

  Harry said, “I interviewed a psychic once—a medium. She and her husband rented the Houghs’ place up on Grotto Road for the summer four years ago. My dad still ran the paper, and I was trying to do those pieces about local color and the tourists, and she had just gotten on some TV show about reaching the other side or something, so she was a near-celeb. She told me that sh
e’d channel to show me what it was like. I may be wrong, but it was that voice. I’ve got the tape somewhere back in the files.” He said this as if he were just thinking it aloud for the first time. “Either you’re possessed,” he added, “or you’re insane. You choose your adventure.”

  “Insane,” I said, and looked at the small tape machine and wished it didn’t exist.

  “Ever had any problems of this sort before?”

  “This is ridiculous,” I said.

  “Ever had any problems of this sort before?” he repeated.

  “No.”

  “That you know of,” he said.

  “Harry,” I said. “Give me a break.”

  “Can I get your permission to do something in that smokehouse?” Harry asked.

  “Depends,” I said.

  “You want to find out who murdered your father?”

  “Of course.”

  “I think the police missed something.” He wiped his face with his hands. “I have to ask you this, but it’s insane enough as it is. Do you believe in ghosts?”

  “No,” I said immediately.

  “Good,” Harry sighed, half ginning. “I was afraid this was fraud, and you were trying to create some bizarre defense.”

  “Why the hell would I do that?”

  “In case Brooke gets arrested.”

  “She won’t.”

  “She shouldn’t. She might. She did sit in there for hours before calling Joe Grogan. Her prints are the only ones there.”

  “She didn’t do it,” I said. “And I wouldn’t suddenly start...acting out... or something... Who would the ghost be? My grandmother? My dad?”

  His face became unreadable. “I don’t know. I don’t know. It... sounds ... like a woman. Don’t you think?”

  “I don’t know. It sounds like me with a fucked-up voice.”

  “Not like you at all,” he said.

  “You believe in ghosts?” I asked.

  He shook his head. “No. Not believe. Open-minded skepticism. Look, let me find the other tape. We can go over this. You might want to hear it. Maybe it’ll mean something to you.”

  3

  That evening, we sat in Harry’s uncomfortable living room, and he played the tape. It was on an old reel-to-reel that his father had used for interviews. The psychic, named Mary Manley, had written two books on the subjects of life after death. One had been called Where Angels Fear and the other, Talking to the Lost. Harry pointed to the books up high on his dusty bookshelf, next to the fireplace, in which he’d built a comfortable, rosy fire. We picked at our white cartons of noodles and chicken with the chopsticks, although I ended up going for a fork. Harry told me about her books.

  “She mainly went where she said the spirits took her. She investigated the Gisslers’ Bed and Breakfast up in Cullen Town, Vermont, after it was said that the disturbed spirit of a dead man kept yelling at the guests. She claimed it was a fake, something put on by the owner’s oldest son, who out of sheer vindictiveness wanted his parents to sell the house and get out of the business. She’s a great detector of fraud in the world of spiritualists and mediums. She also exorcised the spirit of a little girl who haunted a playground in Vancouver, and that’s what got her on the television shows, because the mother of the dead girl claimed that there were reasons why it had to be her dead daughter. Her books are moderately level-headed, although she had theories that sound a little silly if you think about them. But one that makes sense is that if there are ghosts, they’re not literally the person made invisible. They’re the energy of that person, trapped for some reason. Unreleased energy. She used the metaphor of gas trapped in rock. Manley says it’s like that. Or carbonation in a soda bottle—you shake it up over and over again, and pretty soon it explodes. It’s not a human being per se, but a force. Well, let’s listen,” he said, and got up to turn on the enormous tape machine.

  “What preparations do you make?” Harry’s voice seemed a bit nervous on the tape.

  “Well, it’s not religion. It’s basic practicality. Some spirits are bad energy, and I have to protect myself. So, first, I spend a day or two in purification. I meditate. I do some yoga. I try to put myself in some relaxing place. I don’t fast—I eat quite a bit during that time because I’ll need the strength. I take time to talk to whomever I need to in order to settle past disputes. That’s part of purification, settling the past. It’s not a simple fix, but if I can make the first step, whether it’s an apology to a friend or business associate, or a long letter I write to my dead father and mother in order to show gratitude for what they gave me and how they cared for me. Basically, whatever is clouding my mind needs to be dealt with beforehand. Then I just go to the place of disturbance and open myself to it. You may think this is some pristine pure thing, but in fact, its feels sexual. That’s not politically correct to say, but I get an erotic and sexual feeling from it. That’s why my mind needs to be clear and my body strong. I am going to be invaded by another presence, and I have to open my arms and wrap myself around it. If not, it will be rape. The presence will rape me. That’s the danger of this. If I have not given myself to it completely and willingly, I will not remember anything, and it will have power over me, and it will destroy me in some way. Psychically.”

  “So, you’re here. It’s midsummer’s night on Burnley Island. We’re sitting up on Lookout Rock at seven at night. It’s fairly quiet. Do you sense anything?”

  “Not yet. Perhaps there’s nothing.”

  “You told me earlier—”

  “Yes. I felt something here. Like a gravitational pull. Not just all who had died here. Every place on earth has had death and violence and bones buried. But when the spirits linger, it’s because they’re trapped. Most are not trapped. Here, something is trapped and is waiting. Not here, not on this boulder. But somewhere here.”

  Harry switched the tape recorder off.

  “We went all over the island that night. It seemed like a colossal waste of time, Nemo. Til we got to your place.” He switched on the machine again, fast forwarded, listened for a word or two, then fast forwarded the tape some more. Then: “Here.”

  “Here?”

  “It’s strong here,” she said.

  A cut in the tape, and then a strange sound like a strong wind.

  “I edited the tape. Badly,” Harry told me.

  Then, “Here. Right here,” the woman said. She whispered, “I can feel it. It wants to come into me. I’m inviting it, but it doesn’t want to. Shhh... It’s all right. It’s all right. No, no.”

  “What’s happening?” Harry asked on the tape.

  A silence.

  Then a different woman’s voice. “OPEN THE DOOR! LET ME OUT! LET ME OUT! PLEASE! GOD HELP ME! I WANT TO LEAVE! I WANT TO GET OUT!’’

  4

  Then nothing.

  Harry stopped the tape.

  “Holy shit,” I said.

  “Oh yeah,” Harry nodded. “I dropped the tape recorder after that. She grabbed me, and her eyes went white, rolling up into her head. I practically had to throw her down. Ever see documentary footage of voodoo ceremonies? It was like that. It was like something had taken her over. When it was through, she was exhausted. She slept for two days. After that, she refused to come back. Hell, she refused to talk to me again. She left the island a few weeks later and wouldn’t take my calls. Her husband told me that if I bothered them again, he’d call the cops. I had been calling a lot. I wanted to know what had gone on. And then I got a letter from her. No return address. All she wrote to me was: Don’t ever go in that place again. Something terrible happened there. Some ritual. Some awful, powerful ritual And that was it.”

  “It was at Hawthorn,” I said.

  “We were outside the smokehouse,” Harry said.

  5

  “Why the smokehouse?” I asked. Rephrased it: “Why did you take her to the smokehouse?”

  Harry shrugged. “Someone died there, maybe. Maybe a hundred years ago. Or who knows. She didn’t exactly stick arou
nd and tell me. I mean, if you buy this. Do you buy it?”

  “Not really. It’s ... fucked up. But... it was because of the Brain Fart,” I said, nearly impulsively.

  He wagged a finger at me. “Don’t make me go there.”

  6

  But it was too late: The moving image of the past had already begun showing in my brain. Me and Brooke and Bruno, sitting on the big plush blue sofa in the living room, after we had our Brain Fart.

  Harry Withers, all of nine years old, sitting beside me with a big gold watch and a chain—his father would’ve killed him if he had known Harry had taken it. Waving it back and forth, saying, “Look at the watch, how shiny it is.” He had learned it on TV and in some books, when he saw some hypnotist put an entire studio audience to sleep. Harry had always been up for hypnotisms, séances with an old ratty Ouija board he had (which he called a Weejun board, not understanding the difference between Ouija and Bass Weejun shoes). None of us was up for being hypnotized, but eventually we did fell asleep—out of exhaustion and boredom.

  7

  “It was the Brain Fart. We had it, and it was at the smokehouse, and you tried to hypnotize us back then,” I said, vaguely wishing for some of Harry’s Scotch to help dull my senses a bit.

  “What’s that smokehouse mean to you?”

  “It’s an old smokehouse.”

  “Tell me about it. Its history.”

  “Well, far as I know, the current one was built sometime around 1850. I’m not up on its history. They used to smoke meat out there.”