The Hour Before Dark

by Douglas Clegg

"Zack,” his mother said. “Raglan."

  “Oh,” Zack said, as if he suddenly understood. He grew more serious. “You’re the one whose dad got killed.”

  4

  Zack explained to me that he was sad about his dad, too, because his dad had left and found another mom two years before, and Zack didn’t really like the other mom that well because she wasn’t the real thing.

  Supper consisted of homemade chili that was the most delicious I’d ever had; Zack talked nonstop through supper, and wanted to know all about things that had nothing to do with the island. What was Washington like? Boston? Had I ever been to Chicago and seen the Sears Tower? Had I ever seen the World Trade Center before the bad guys knocked it down? What was my favorite hockey team? He liked Wayne Gretzky but only because he thought the name was funny. His favorite band was the Bare Naked Ladies, although I suspected that it was because of the group’s name and not because of the music. Ditto for his second favorite: Alien Ant Farm. He asked if I had ever played lacrosse, or if I had ice skated like he did out at Hanley’s Pond. He said his best friend, Mike, had taught him how to cross-country ski, but he’d only done it once. He told me that he wished he had met Albert Einstein, and he wondered if I had. When I told him no, I did tell him my favorite Albert Einstein quote. (It goes: “There are only two ways to live your life. One is that nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.” He thought this quote was cool.) He asked me if I’d ever read anything by J. K Rowling. Then he proceeded to regale me with why he thought the Harry Potter books were the best books ever written, why he believed there might really be a Hogwarts School, and why I should make sure to go read the books even if I’d seen the movie.

  Pola got up at one point and came back to the table with a copy of my novel, Igdrasil. I felt my face flush. I wanted to rub dirt all over myself. It felt more than slightly embarrassing to know she’d read my only published novel.

  As if to ward off any criticism, I immediately said, “I really wish it hadn’t been published.” It was a lie, but I just didn’t want to face that book, the failure of my dream.

  “I love this book,” Pola said. She flipped the pages. “Look how dog-eared it is. I re-read it all the time. It’s just like having you here to talk to.”

  Zack looked at me with wonder after that and told me that I should think about writing books the way J. K. Rowling did, “the kind where every kid wants to read them.”

  After supper, it was nearly his bedtime. Pola went upstairs for a while to make sure he got into his pajamas, brushed his teeth, and was ready for a little late night reading. It was utterly charming. He did the reading (from a book called Great Inventors Through the Ages), and she sat in a chair by the bed, and listened. She invited me to read some, too.

  I asked Zack what his favorite book was and told him that I’d read a few pages to him. He asked me to read some of my novel.

  “You may not like it,” I said.

  “I will love it,” he said. “I will think it’s the best book if you read it to me.”

  Such was his enthusiasm that I read the passage from my novel about the hero when he was a boy, and how he had learned the language of the wind and rain. Zack smiled the whole time.

  When he closed his eyes and yawned a bit too much, I flicked off his bedside lamp and joined Pola, who had been in the doorway while I read.

  Pola and I stood outside his door, just watching him in the shadows.

  “He likes you,” she whispered.

  “I’m guessing a kid that great likes everybody he meets,” I said.

  “Poor little guy,” she said softy. “He’s got his troubles like anyone else.” She didn’t elaborate, but I figured it had to do with the divorce. I remembered how abandoned I’d felt when my mother had run off. I doubted a wound like that ever would heal, but would always remain a bit of a scar no matter how many years passed.

  Even for Zack.

  It was the closest I had ever come to having my own family, that moment. Standing with Pola, leaning against the doorframe, watching her son in bed, all covered up, drifting off to sleep.

  I think it was nearly like being part of a normal family. A family that seemed at peace.

  Sure, I knew it was fake. I wasn’t Zack’s dad; Pola and I still had the past to contend with, and would have to deal with it one day; the scene was all make believe.

  But it was a moment taken out of time for me.

  It was like lingering at the edge of a wonderful dream I had always wanted to have.

  Loitering with intent.

  5

  I’d like to say that we did the mature thing and went downstairs, sat in the living room, and just held hands.

  But the truth was, I couldn’t keep my mitts off her. It was a sacred love turned remarkably profane; The feeling of being part of her life again was just a complete turn on. I felt horny the way I had at sixteen with her, and I had this urge to merge. I wanted to touch her and feel her warmth, just be as close to her as I possibly could get, our lips touching, our bodies wrapped around each other.

  But that was in my head. We mainly kissed and cuddled, and the intensity of her warmth went right down to my toes.

  After a bit of making out, she drew back.

  “Something wrong?”

  “Nothing,” she said. “But you sounded bad on the phone. Want to talk about it?”

  I didn’t respond at first, still in a sort of passion-driven stare, the aroused, animal moment that needed to simmer down a bit.

  “Is it meeting Zack?”

  “No, of course not,” I said. “No, it’s not anything like that. I hate even bringing anything up.”

  “You don’t have to,” she said. “We don’t have to talk.” We began kissing again, and after a few minutes, she drew back from me again. This time she sat back up and moved to the end of the sofa. “Something’s up. I can tell.”

  “It’s crazy,” I said, wondering at her powers of observation. Could she read me that easily?

  “It’s probably not crazy,” she said.

  And then I just let it out. I felt as if the largest burden of my entire life released in one fell swoop, and I began jabbering about it all—about feeling something in the greenhouse, about Brooke and her painting, about the money in the wardrobe, and finally, about what had happened with Harry Withers in the smokehouse.

  The voice.

  6

  “Do you believe in supernatural crap?” I asked. It was the only way I could put it without laughing at myself. It sounded ridiculous.

  “I’m not sure belief is an issue,” she said thoughtfully. “Nemo, are you sure it wasn’t your voice?”

  “Positive.”

  “You don’t think Harry did some kind of trick?”

  I shook my head. “No. He believes it’s a supernatural phenomenon. He thinks there’s a ghost.”

  She ginned, and then said, “Really? A ghost?”

  “I know. I don’t believe in them, either.”

  She looked at me with an unsettling concern in her face.

  She reached over and took my hand in hers. “You’ve been through hell since he died.”

  “True.”

  “I can’t even imagine what it was like. I used to see your father every day, at his store. It’s left all of us feeling unsafe and worried, but most of all, I can’t imagine what it’s like for you. And now, this other stuff. Do you really need it?”

  She was a smart woman. Smarter than I had remembered. “Stress?” I asked.

  “I don’t know. But it sounds unhealthy. I don’t want you to get hurt. Who knows what it is? Maybe there are such things as ghosts. Maybe there aren’t. But there’s something bad in that smokehouse, and there’s something you need to avoid for now.”

  Strangely, her words had the opposite effect on me than they probably should have. I held her hand as she spoke, and I thought: What am I afraid of? There are no ghosts. This is something else. This is my mind cracking a bit, trying to make sens
e of everything. It’s coming back here, it’s reopening old wounds, it’s feeling love and feeling abandoned all over again. It’s living in Hawthorn. It’s the house, it’s everything that comes up from it. What am I afraid of? What is there to fear?

  “You’re not listening to me,” Pola said.

  “Yes, I am.”

  She smiled. “No you aren’t. What are you thinking? Just tell me.”

  “I guess I’m thinking that maybe I’ve just been afraid of things. My whole life. Avoiding what’s hard to look at or figure out. That maybe I left here because I was afraid of what I didn’t understand. Something in me is resisting the idea that something’s wrong at home, with Brooke. Something in me doesn’t want to face it. But I think I have to. I think I have to stop leaving things behind and start looking into them,” I said. It felt like a huge relief to say it. “I’ve been afraid of home. All my life. I’ve been afraid of it.”

  7

  I spent the night with her. I woke up early, and not wanting to wake Pola, crept into her kitchen to make some coffee for myself with a minimum of banging around. Harry’s book, Talking to the Lost by Mary Manley, was where I’d left it on the counter. I picked it up, sat down at the small table in the breakfast nook, and began flipping pages.

  It looked ridiculous and dull—I read a sentence or two. “... the prophecies at the Windward House were followed by rapping on the wall...” and “... I saw an aura that screamed, dark and terrible, around the woman, and I knew that she was possessed by the child ...” It all made me think that Harry’s childhood obsessions with aliens and hypnotism had never quite matured.

  As I skimmed parts of the book, mainly glancing at the pictures, I realized I should just look through the index. I flipped to the back, scanned down the page, and saw the words “games: children, p. 123”—and flipped to that page.

  8

  Mary Manley wrote:

  I’ve found in my studies of gifted children that when they’ve been raised in what I’d term an extreme situation, they often create rituals to help them cope with the trauma. To some extent, all children do this, but the ones I’ve studied, who seem to possess a level of telepathy, have had heightened trauma in their lives. Witnessing the loss of parents in a car crash, as one subject in the California study had, drove the subject to develop a unique religion that had a Hierarchy of gods and goddesses and a language that could be perfectly translated, with nearly 600 words in it. The child was only five years old. Similarly, the man I call Eric B also had developed a stylized ritual in order to escape an extremely abusive childhood, in which he was tormented endlessly by his mother, who kept him locked in the house until he was nearly fifteen, at which point she died. When he was discovered, he did not believe anyone could see him. He had so convinced himself he was invisible that it took nearly six years for him to learn the magical system he’d created in his head did not correspond to the real world.

  Yet, he could prophesy disasters and predict, with some accuracy, the outcome of football games at his local school. His gift of prophecy seemed to be directly related to both the trauma he had suffered, as well as the ritual he had created to keep himself safe and sane during those years in the dark.

  We’ve seen soldiers in prison camps do this as well. Who in the world can forget Micah Rollins, a private in World War II captured by the Nazis, who manifested bums on his face from believing—in his ritual—that he had flown so fast through the air he had begun to burst into flames upon entering the Earth’s atmosphere? Correspondingly, Rollins’ ritual had begun not in the prison camp, but as a child in his Kansas home. At the age of six, he’d been running with his mother through a summer thunderstorm, when both of them had been struck by lightning. His mother had died, but Rollins survived. I have no doubt that the rituals he created as a child were what allowed him to survive in the German camps as a POW.

  The result of these games and rituals that children of extreme trauma have created seems to be a manifestation of some inner reality. With a woman named Willa Trent in Barstow, California; the depth of what she’d experienced as a child became the very thing that nearly drove her to suicide when she was forty-two years old. She had created such an inner world since childhood that she could no longer cope with the outer one. The attending psychiatrists and clinicians, who studied her as if she would show them about the inner workings of the human mind in a way that no one ever could, all came away with the notion that Willa was a fraud. Yet, in her forties, having tried to take her own life, it was found that she could levitate at will. She had done this since childhood, but had never really believed that it was real, only that it was part of a complicated game process she’d created that was part hopscotch, part prayer, and part witchcraft. (It will be noted that Willa did not believe she was a Wiccan or a Pagan at all. She firmly maintained that she based her witchcraft on cartoons and fairy tales.) I was able to witness one of Willa’s levitations (before she went into seclusion, refusing to see either doctors or the press ever again), and while it was less remarkable than the word “levitation” might suggest, I saw that Willa had taken what was once called “mass hysteria” to a new level. She had not developed the power to fly. What she had done was develop a powerful telepathic power that was beyond language. She did not speak within people’s minds. She created images in them. She had somehow made herself able to project images into many people’s minds. Interestingly, it was primarily the medical profession that swore to having seen her rise off the ground. I did not. But I learned that, in fact, Willa Trent had developed a powerful will, and a creative form of telepathy I had never before witnessed.

  9

  I set the book down and closed it.

  I sipped coffee and stared at the back of the book, at Mary Manley’s photograph.

  Then I went back to the pages I’d just been reading, and skimmed a few: ... what the psychologists and the psychiatrists seem to have missed in the cases of Willa Trent and Micah Rollins was that they had simply done what all children do. To the nth degree. Most children have difficulties in their lives. Most don’t understand the world adults foist upon them. How many children are sexually abused each year? How many witness murder? How many are beaten? How many are outcasts? Those children may ritualize their differentness. They may create their own ways of dealing with the continual abuse or affront to their own nature. But if you multiply that abuse by ten, or one hundred, how much more powerful will those rituals be on the minds of the children? We know so little about the developing mind of a child—and when that mind has been crushed in some way, a strong child may create a ritual for compensating for the boot on his back. A strong child may create a sense of security with an imaginary friend, a game, a ritual, a religion. Because without it, perhaps, reality is too terrifying to face at a young age. But it is in adulthood that these children need to slough off the old skin of these rituals. No doubt, many do. But there are those who do not—like Willa Trent. Like Micah Rollins. Like Eric B.

  Each of them faced a trauma in adulthood that forced them back into the childhood ritual for survival.

  And the manifestations from their minds became more powerful as a result.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  1

  I thought about the Dark Game, and how its ritual had somehow messed with our minds. I didn’t see our childhood as particularly harrowing. Perhaps our mother leaving had been the extreme moment that Manley wrote about. Perhaps it even explained my having taken on a voice, a distinct personality, inside the smokehouse, but that wouldn’t explain why Mary Manley herself had also been “possessed” (using her own terminology) there. Ghosts. Games. Rituals.

  Murder.

  I just wanted some ordinariness to creep back into my life.

  As I sat in Pola’s kitchen, I felt an urgency to get back home.

  I was going to take off and write a brief note to Pola, but I waited.

  Nothing’s wrong there.

  This is all just messing with your head.

  Yo
u’ll get Brooke to the doctor in a day or two.

  And then maybe you’ll get a check-up, too.

  2

  When Pola and Zack got up, I invited them to Hawthorn just to hang out a while.

  The three of us drove through the village in the early morning just as the sun was coming up through a haze of cloud and mist. The road, finally plowed out to Hawthorn, had its requisite potholes and ice patches intact, and Zack laughed each time his mother’s car hit one or the other.

  I felt a little hope in my gut, which seemed to be a new kind of feeling.

  3

  Brooke was, of course, still asleep, and I didn’t bother going off in search of Bruno. I set Zack to work in the kitchen with me to make eggs and bacon for breakfast, while Pola sat on a nearby stool and watched us try to coordinate the various pans and plates.

  It was chilly in the house, and Zack decided that someone needed to make a fire in the fireplace in the living room.

  After a relaxing morning, talking old times and letting Zack tell me the history of his life as a young inventor, I went out the front door again to get some wood from the pile by the front porch.

  It was still misty out, as it sometimes was even on the coldest of days on the island. The smells of cleanness that snow and ice brought with them lifted my spirits as I went.

  As I trudged through the crusty snow by the porch, I lifted some of the wood—the top layer was wet, and so I dug down deeper in the pile. I thought I heard a noise—as if someone were nearby and had perhaps called my name, only indistinctly.

  When I glanced up, I saw a woman standing at the open door of the smokehouse.