The Hour Before Dark

by Douglas Clegg

  They lit the place decently.

  The smell of blood was not quite as strong as I had experienced that morning.

  I crouched down and touched the slats of the floor. “He put them in the year she left.” My father’s blood had dried and frozen the wood.

  “Yep,” Bruno said.

  We began smashing the floor and pulling the wood up as it broke. I piled it in a comer.

  We took turns with the shovels, for there were only two of them, a long-and a short-handled.

  Bruno cracked the hard surface of the dirt below.

  It took an hour to get to it, but we found it.

  A canvas tarp, wrapped around the remains of a human body.

  Harry crouched down and drew something from it.

  “What’s this?”

  It was a crescent-shaped object. Rusted.

  “It’s what I always imagined her having. A crescent moon,” I said, feeling blood draining from my face.

  “He murdered her with it,” Bruno said.

  We stared at it, and then at each other, for a long time.

  I said nothing. I could not comprehend what we’d found. I could not understand it logically.

  Our mother had been murdered.

  Our mother had been murdered by our father.

  He had buried her there, in the place where we had played, when we weren’t being punished in the same spot.

  Then he had created the Dark Game so that he could stop up our memories.

  He fucked each one of us up with that ritual. I wonder if he even knew the power it had for us. The way it had been an addiction for us, going to the smokehouse, or even in the wardrobe in his bedroom, or down by the duck pond.

  How our lives had been empty without it.

  I felt that now.

  Playing it again.

  I felt its pull.

  It wanted to be played.

  It had created a hunger, carved out a place for us.

  Made a home within our minds.

  5

  “She was furious—telling him that she’d never cared for him and that she hadn’t wanted children at all. I sat out on the stairs and listened and saw what I could from the bannister. He was practically on his knees,” I said, remembering the look on my poor father’s face as my mother, seeming more wicked than she had ever been to any of us before, told him how he had destroyed anything he’d ever touched and how if he loved the children so much, he could take care of them, but she was going to South America, she was going for love, and she was not going to spend another minute in the hellhole known as Hawthorn or the awful place called Burnley Island.

  Even as I said it, it sounded false. I hadn’t drawn that memory up in years, and this time, it didn’t sound right. It sounded too perfect.

  “Like it’s from a movie,” Bruno said. “Or made up. Like he made it up. Like he made you think that had happened. Face it, he murdered her. He killed her. Here.”

  “The place of punishment,” I said.

  “I want more,” Bruno said, a silly look coming over his face. He took deep breaths, and leaned over, resting his hands on his knees. “That wasn’t enough.”

  “Bruno?” I said. “You okay?”

  He looked at me wild-eyed, nodding. “We need Brooke. I want more of it. I want to go back to that night. In the Dark Game. Harry, don’t you think she should be here? We just got a glimpse. Harry, you can be part of it. You played it once."

  "Nothing happened. I didn’t see anything.”

  Bruno glanced over at me. “All of us. Pola, too.”

  “No,” I said. “Not Harry, either.”

  “Then Brooke,” Bruno said, nearly panting as if he’d been running a few miles. “He fucked us over for life, Nemo. We need to go back there. We need to play it like we used to play it. Only not by his rules.”

  6

  Brooke was in no condition for any of this.

  She looked at him as if she could not quite focus. “I’m so tired, Bruno. Bruno, Nemo, let me sleep. I’m so tired.”

  “Get up,” Bruno said. A roughness had come over him; and I also felt it. It was the hunger for the game. We wanted to be back in it. It gave us something, no matter how awful it seemed afterward, it gave us something. And when it was over, it took it away. “Come on. Let’s go out there again. Let’s play the Dark Game there. Now.”

  Brooke protested, and I told him it could wait, but he was enraged. “We are going to play it!” he shouted, and somehow, I knew that I had wanted to play the Dark Game again, ever since I’d returned.

  The nightmares had been waiting for me.

  The doors had been locked in my mind.

  I let Bruno vent all the repressed fury he’d held inside, and I was afraid he was going to hit Brooke; I lunged at him, and drew him back from her bed. “Stop it!”

  Then, I told her about what we’d found in the smokehouse.

  7

  In the smokehouse again, with Harry standing away from our circle, we began. Brooke had taken some tranquilizers and was fuzzy with the rhyme, but she accepted the blindfold. Her hands, and mine, trembled.

  Harry glanced at his watch. “It’s not quite dark yet,” he said. “It will be soon.”

  “Perfect,” I said. “The hour before dark you start. And if you keep going, it becomes real.”

  8

  “Oranges and lemons, say the bells of St. Clemens.” We all said the rhyme. Bruno, the most enthusiastically. I felt the shivering of Brooke’s hand in mine and kept a firm grip on her. It was cruel to do this. It was perhaps even evil, for her mind was fragile enough at this point. But the hunger was in me. Just as it had been as a boy. I was merely a conduit, a channel for the Dark Game.

  “You owe me five farthings, say the bells of St. Martin’s,” we said, and it continued until the line “And here comes a chopper to chop off your head.” As silly as it was, it gave me strength, and I felt more connected to my brother and sister than I had in years. It had been the missing piece to my existence. It had been the surge of power I’d regretted ever leaving behind.

  We were one.

  We were one in the Dark Game.

  And then, with one voice, we began speaking, as if our minds had merged, and the words themselves took us into another darkness.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  1

  It was the night our mother left.

  2

  “No, Daddy!” I cried out, but I could not stop him from beating at her with his fists.

  “You goddamn whore! You have done this for the last time!” he shouted. He barely looked like my father at all. His face was contorted, and his eyes wild and angry. He grabbed my mother by her long golden hair and pulled so hard that, as she screamed, long strands of blood-tipped hair came out in his fist.

  She tried to fight him, but he kept punching her. I jumped on him and beat my fists against his back, but he shook me off and kicked at my face.

  “You goddamn whore!” he yelled at her again. Brooke and Bruno stood in the doorway crying.

  “I’m going to punish you, you bitch! You kids, get out to the smokehouse. You’re going to see how whores get treated!”

  And then it was as if we were floating, all of us, and I could go in and out of my father’s mind at will, and I heard the voices he had within him. I felt the tortures that had been inflicted upon him, the whippings his father had given him, and the muddy hole he’d been kept in for months at a time while he played the Dark Game himself—and something else was there in his mind; something else lurked within him.

  Something created by the Dark Game itself.

  A monster.

  Not a human being turned monstrous.

  But a creature that had knives for teeth, in circular, lamprey rows, going down its throat. Something was loose within him, something he could not control.

  Banshee.

  3

  Next, we watched as he held our mother up in front of us—she was barely conscious—and he tore her blouse from her, an
d then her bra, her pale white skin bruised.

  We saw three children—they were us—tied with hands behind our backs.

  “NONE OF YOU DESERVES TO LIVE!” my father screamed. “NONE OF YOU! YOU ARE ALL BASTARDS AND FOR ALL I KNOW I’M NOT EVEN YOUR FATHER! I AM THE FATHER AND WHAT I SAY GOES! NOT ONE OF YOU IS EVER GOING TO BREAK MY RULES, YOU UNDERSTAND ME?”

  “Please,” my mother said. “Please, God, please, oh God, please.”

  For a lightning-flash of a moment, I saw her not as a woman, but as a lamb about to be slaughtered beneath a farmer’s axe.

  My father’s booming voice caused the children to tremble.

  They had duct tape on their mouths.

  He was going to hurt them, as well.

  “You're all bad! You're all evil!” my father yelled, and then his voice softened, and he kissed the edge of my mother’s lips. “You’re making me do this. You have evil in you. It needs to be cleansed. It needs to be wiped free.”

  The broken handle of the scythe was in the comer.

  The blade was in my father’s hands.

  The children’s eyes went wide as the blade came down into my mother’s throat.

  4

  And then we were all crying, digging in the dirt.

  My father was digging also, burying my mother’s body.

  “None of you should be alive. None of you. She was a good woman, but she went bad. You each are going bad. I can see it coming,” he said.

  Bruno began moaning the loudest.

  My father ripped the tape from his mouth and grabbed Bruno around the waist, hugging him.

  My father wept.

  “Don’t kill me, Daddy,” Bruno sobbed.

  Again, I had that strange sensation. I could move into my father’s mind, and I felt the monster there, and when I tried to picture it, the word banshee came up. Inside my father. Growing. Struggling against him. I felt the killings he’d done in the war, some justified by battle, others, darker, for he had been playing the game. The monster had grown within him like a tumor. A dark blotch of cancer in his mind, taking him over, but retreating, in remission.

  “I love you, baby,” he said to my brother, and began sobbing himself. He released Bruno, and pressed his hands to his forehead. “Get out of me!” he shouted. “Get out of me!”

  In his mind, I felt it, some kind of change, some shift of his blood.

  He replaced the duct tape over Bruno’s lips.

  Little Brooke was gone. Her eyes glazed over. It had been too much for her. I moved through her mind and heard: Daddy is not doing it. It didn’t happen. She went away. She went away. Somewhere else. Another place called Brazil. She went away. Daddy did not do it. Daddy did not tie her up. Daddy did not punish her. Daddy did not punish her and make her hurt. DADDY WOULD NEVER HURT US! DADDY LOVES US! HE’S ONLY PUNISHING MOMMY! BUT IT’S NOT REAL! ITS THE DARK GAME! SHE RAN AWAY FROM US BECAUSE SHE DOESN’T LOVE US!

  I felt as if I were shot back out of Brooke’s mind.

  When I looked at my own nine-year-old self, I wasn’t exactly all there either. My eyes had the same glassy look as did Brooke’s, and it was the saddest thing I’d ever seen.

  Who could blame these children?

  Witnessing this.

  Seeing it happen.

  I went inside my own mind, to get a sense of what I could be thinking, and all I felt was darkness there—so much that it stung for me to stay inside my childhood self.

  I drew back and watched.

  My father filled in my mother’s grave, and then sat with us all day.

  All night.

  Then, against my will, I was sucked into my childhood self.

  I felt intense pain, as if my skull were about to explode, and something eel-like swam through my skin, making me feel uncomfortable in my own flesh.

  In that little boy’s mind he was in a small boat on the sea. in the sky, an enormous silver crescent moon, but it was barely dark yet.

  My father was turned with his back to me. He had a fishing line out in the water. When I looked in the bottom of the boat, near my bare feet, it seemed alive with fat, wriggling eels and trout, their tails flipping as they tried to get out of the boat.

  He turned to face me. His eyes were no longer there, but blood poured from the empty holes.

  (Someone cried near me. Bruno?)

  “Don’t be afraid,” my father said. “Just close your eyes. Don’t touch anything.”

  I glanced down at the eels in the boat. The eels were in the child’s imagination. He wasn’t in a boat. He wasn’t near the water. But he wanted to remake the world so that it made sense to him. “Them?” he asked, looking at the eels.

  “Just stay still here. Keep your eyes closed. Don’t lean. No talking. Ignore the noise,” he said. “Listen to what I’m about to say. Listen very carefully. Each word I say is important. Each word is like a key to a door. I want you to imagine a small red light, so small you can barely see it, Everything about it is completely pitch dark, but the light is red like a tiny, tiny fire. I want you to follow me with that fire, follow me as I take you somewhere else.”

  Somewhere else.

  I watched an eel with a mouth like a python as it devoured one of the fish. I nodded, not wanting to say anything to him.

  “She went away,” my father said, returning his gaze to the ever-growing moon as a seagull’s shriek became a scream. “But someday, she’ll be back. Nemo, you saw her on the stairs. In her red dress. You cried and you tried to grab her, but she was mean to you. She didn’t love any of you. She didn’t love me. A man waited for her outside. They were leaving you. Abandoning you. You three slept in my bed that night, you slept there and we all wept together that she didn’t love any of us anymore....”

  I was expelled from my childhood mind and floated again, watching as my father used what can only be described as brainwashing techniques, combined with the Dark Game itself. Hours passed in seconds, and the children remained in that smokehouse for days, being fed, peeing and shitting in their clothes, while my father kept them prisoner.

  And the Dark Game began to take them over.

  5

  Beneath the blindfold, aware again of being in the smokehouse with Bruno and Brooke.

  Brooke seemed to be forming words as if she were first learning to speak.

  Bruno whispered, “The Brain Fart.”

  6

  I was a bird flying in the air, looking down as each of us left the smokehouse as children. My father carried Brooke in his arms, for she seemed sick and feverish. Bruno held my - the boy I was - hand. At the house, the Nemo began to panic—you could see it in his eyes, and his skin turned pale—he let go of his little brother’s hand and ran out and away from the house and his father.

  Ran down through the fields.

  We felt the sucking hunger of his mind, as if it had been carved up in that Brain Fart, and something instinctive made him run away.

  Down to the woods the little boy went, and when he got there, he began biting his own arms, just above the wrist.

  Even drawing blood.

  But a man came there and took him to the stream to wash the blood.

  It was his father.

  The monster within him, gone.

  The father took his son in his arms and carried him home.

  7

  Aloud, back in the present, in the smokehouse, I said, “Bruno, Brooke, do you feel it?”

  After a moment, Brooke whispered, “What is it?”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  But whatever it was, it went through the three of us like a current.

  I was convinced that there were four people holding hands in that circle.

  We were not there without something else also being there. Holding our hands, holding them tightly, not wanting any of us to break the circle.

  8

  “It’s Mom,” Bruno said. “It’s Mom, I can feel her. It’s ...it’s..."

  "Oh God, do you feel it, Nemo?” Brooke asked, her voice
suddenly full of energy, where it had sounded drained, and exhausted moments before.

  And I did feel it.

  An electrical current flowing through us.

  We saw her.

  Our mother.

  But not as we wanted her to be.

  9

  We watched as our father, just two weeks before, stepped into the smokehouse.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  Gordie Raglan sniffed at the air, and we smelled it as well: a powerful odor.

  Dead animal.

  He crouched down and touched the floor.

  What was he thinking? I couldn’t sense anything from his mind. I didn’t seem to possess the power to move through him any longer.

  And then something grabbed him.

  I expected to see a ghost.

  To see our mother there, with blade in hand.

  But instead, it was Brooke.

  She attacked with the ferocity of a wild animal.

  The first slice came down on his shoulder.

  The blade went in and out, and my sister engulfed him.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  1

  Suddenly, I felt my mind explode, and for minutes I began to see a strobe like white light flashing in darkness.

  We’d let go of each other’s hands.

  2

  “It wasn’t me!” Brooke cried out.