The Hour Before Dark

by Douglas Clegg

  I tore the blindfold from my face.

  The flashlights on the ground cast eerie shadows around us.

  “I didn’t do that,” she said. “I didn’t. It couldn't have been me.”

  “I know,” I said, “It was something else. It was the Banshee in the game."

  "The monster we made up," Bruno said. "We gave it life."

  "In the Dark Game," I said.

  There was a terrible smell in the smokehouse as we three stood there.

  “I want to keep playing,” Bruno said, and his voice was curiously like that of a child.

  The odor grew stronger, and I began to feel sick.

  “Harry,” I said, turning around, nearly having forgotten he was there with us, observing.

  What greeted me then was something I could not have imagined. Not have wished upon my worst enemy.

  Or my best friend.

  3

  First, I have to tell you that the Dark Game was within each of us now—and all of us at once. It had been waiting there, waiting to open those doors, and close others, within our minds, just as the doors in Hawthorn had opened and closed on us, just as life had opened and closed on us.

  I felt different. I remembered the high that I’d felt as a boy, as if I had no problems whatsoever, as if I could do or be anything, and how we’d play the Dark Game and soar like birds, or swim beneath the sea like eels wriggling into the fathomless depths. I breathed more clearly. I felt stronger. Sweeter.

  And when I saw what had become of Harry, it terrified me, but that switch had been flicked inside me and I wasn’t sure if it was the Dark Game scaring me, or the sight of him.

  He lay crumpled on the ground.

  There was a look in his eyes as if he’d seen something too terrifying to live through. A kind of awe and astonishment, and he nearly seemed alive to me. As Joe Grogan might say, it was the damnedest thing.

  I knelt down and held him. He was gone. Tears came to my eyes. I didn’t understand this. I wanted to know what he’d seen, why he had to die.

  Why I even let him be there with us.

  Why the Dark Game had to feed off him like that.

  4

  Bruno was the first to notice. “Look, it’s dark out. We played past twilight. It’s real now. That’s what happens. It’s real.” He spoke as if drunk, with both a lazy slurring of words and a nearly hyperactive physicality.

  Brooke began shuddering. “I didn’t do it. I just could not. I didn’t.”

  It was as if neither of them saw Harry, lying dead. I, too, was disconnected from that death.

  We were too much in the game now.

  “What happened that night?” Bruno asks. “Why did you sit there for hours?”

  “I don’t know!” Brooke shouted.

  “You do know! You know, you’re just not saying!”

  Something within Brooke seemed to break. “I was playing it. By myself. I closed my eyes. I went into the darkness. I couldn’t help it. I couldn’t.”

  I went to her and put my hands around her, but felt cold inside toward her.

  Toward myself.

  The Dark Game had won.

  It had been lurking and biding its time.

  The Banshee, the only thing I can call the creature I felt stirring in my brain now, the name we stole from among several names of spirits and monsters, our made-up creature with the face of our mother crossed with the Ice Queen, crossed with the lamprey-monster of nightmares...it remained a small parasite in our brains, but the Dark Game had brought it out. Fed it. Let it grow.

  “The night he was killed,” I whispered in Brooke’s ear. “You tried to kill yourself. You played the Dark Game. By yourself. Your blood spilled. And it came back to you.”

  She drew back, her eyes wide with horror.

  Then she pushed me; I nearly fell over, her strength had increased so much from the game. Her eyes seemed wild, but not with fear. Something else. Something that reminded me too much of the Banshee.

  She crouched down by our mother’s remains and plucked something from them.

  The scythe. She glanced back at me like a wild animal, as if she didn’t recognize me at all.

  Then she ran for the door, flung it open, and ran out into the snow.

  Bruno grabbed me by my shoulders and snarled, “Let her go! You brought this back! You and your friend!” Then he let go of me and grabbed the sides of his head. “Get it out of me! I don’t want it in me! It’s burning me!”

  I felt it too, a slight rise in my body temperature, and we both saw the other one, standing there between us.

  The Banshee, with her eyes harsh and unforgiving.

  Our mother.

  Our monster.

  The ultimate Mistress of the Dark Game.

  And then the howling of the wind, as the creature before us became a shadow and swept out the door, across the dark night.

  I ran out, and shielding my eyes, followed the shadow as it moved toward Hawthorn itself.

  5

  The front door to Hawthorn was open wide.

  Inside, silence.

  “Pola?” I called. “Zack?”

  Behind me, Bruno; and what had become a blizzard.

  6

  Inside the house, the living room was silent.

  The fire continued to burn in the hearth.

  “Pola?”

  From upstairs, a single, muffled scream.

  7

  I ran up the stairs as quickly as I could; the first door was locked.

  Smoke came out from beneath it. Inside my head the words: Here comes a candle to light you to bed.

  8

  I turned to Bruno, behind me. The game was in him too much—his eyes—his heavy breathing as if he were consuming oxygen like beer.

  “Your keys,” I said.

  “Let’s play it again,” he said, licking his lips.

  “Give me your keys,” I said.

  9

  By the time I’d opened the door, I could already smell smoke. My heart raced. I bounded from room to room, As I opened each door into the next room, more smoke began to come my way.

  “Brooke! Pola!” I shouted as I went, and when I finally got to Brooke’s bedroom, it was locked.

  “Brooke!” I pounded on the door.

  “It’s all right!” Brooke shouted from the other side of the door. “It’s all right, Nemo! I’m in the Dark Game! The fire won’t hurt me!”

  “Unlock the door! Brooke!” I rammed the door with my shoulder, and it gave slightly. “Brooke! It wasn’t you! It was that thing. It’s inside all of us. It was in the smokehouse. It was in the game. You don’t have to do this. You didn’t kill him!”

  “It’s all right,” she said, and her voice became sing-song as she recited the Dark Game rhyme. “Here comes a candle to light you to bed, and here comes a chopper to chop off your head!”

  I busted the door down, my shoulder feeling as if it were nearly dislocated from the effort.

  The candles were overturned, and the curtains had caught fire.

  I saw something that I will never forget.

  Bruno beside me start shouting, but I didn't hear him. The chill I felt inside brought a deafening silence.

  Brooke stood near the bedroom window as the flames rose on either side of her, and even seemed to be under her feet.

  She began to rise, just imperceptibly, so little that I thought I imagined it.

  And then she levitated higher.

  The whites of her eyes showed. Her face became contorted in the same rage I’d seen in the phantom of my mother at the smokehouse that morning.

  All sound came back to me as her lips parted.

  “HERE COMES A CANDLE TO LIGHT YOU TO BED!" she screeched, waving the crescent blade in her hand and slashing at the fire itself. “AND HERE COMES A CHOPPER! HERE IT COMES, NEMO! A CHOPPER TO CHOP OFF YOUR HEAD! TO CHOP YOU INTO PIECES WHILE YOU WATCH! WHILE YOU LIVE UNTIL THE LAST SLICE HAS GONE IN!”

  Behind her, the window burst open—the storm wi
ndows as well exploded around her. The blast sent her body forward.

  She began to glide on a current of air toward me.

  My mind began to scramble, but I stood my ground.

  It’s the Dark Game. It’s nothing more. It twists what you see. It fucks with you.

  I gasped as I felt a whoosh of air being sucked out of my lungs.

  Things seemed to move slowly; time had changed subtly; the fire itself moved in slow motion.

  It’s the Dark Game. Play it. Play it as the Master of it.

  I grabbed Bruno by the wrists. “We have to go there now. Right now!”

  Bruno looked at me as if I had just told him we were going on a roller coaster. He grinned, nodding, and closed his eyes.

  The game - a drug - a door to a better place.

  I closed my eyes, terrified that I’d open them again to find the scythe coming down on my neck.

  Let’s go there, let’s go. We'll find you, Brooke. We'll find you there, and we'll bring you out. Come on.

  I felt Bruno’s mind slip into mine, easily, Like a hand in a glove.

  Calm, as well.

  In the darkness, I saw Brooke, her blindfold on.

  In the darkness, I pulled the blindfold back. Tore it from her face.

  I saw her eyes look up at mine.

  My little sister.

  I opened my eyes again and let go of Bruno’s hands.

  Brooke was nearly next to me, both feet on the floor.

  “You watched him torture me! You let him kill me!” she shouted with the voice of our mother. She swung the scythe up and seemed to bring it down to Bruno’s arm, but he moved at just the last second, and it sliced, instead, into his leg. I grabbed her by the wrist and shook her. I felt a jolt of electricity go through her, and that awful sweet feeling of the game.

  She dropped the blade. It slid across the floor. She twisted her arm out from my hand and lunged at me, her teeth nearly going to my throat. It was like fending off a mad dog.

  I threw her back with all my strength; she landed on the bed, its sheets catching fire as if she were the fire herself.

  The howling wind outside the broken window—

  I heard the explosive slamming of doors in the house, one after the other.

  Brooke began biting her arms, reopening the cuts on them, blood on her lips. The flesh curling back as the wounds spread wide.

  “Yes! Yes! Hold my hands,” she said. “Hold my hands. We don’t have to be here. We can go there. Into the dark. We can be with her. With Mother.”

  I rushed to her and yanked her up from the burning bed; the skin along her neck had begun bubbling from the burn, and her hair had caught fire. I wrapped her in the quilt, snuffing out the flames along her scalp, and lifted her up.

  She pressed her lips to my neck as I carried her, licking. It was the nastiest thing I’d ever felt.

  It’s not her. It’s not. It’s not a ghost. It’s something we created in that game. It’s something that exists in it.

  We don’t play it.

  It plays us.

  I carried her out of her bedroom, opening one door after another to get out of the house; she clawed at me the whole way, scraping my neck and tearing at my coat like it was made of paper.

  “Bruno, come on!” I shouted.

  10

  The fire had its own power—that same surge we’d felt—and it spread too fast on the upper floor. Flames shot out of the windows.

  I lay Brooke down in the snow on the quilt.

  “Watch her!” I said.

  I went back in for Pola and Zack, but as I raced through the rooms on the ground floor, I saw shapes of things—of children—of us, the three of us, children in the house, as if I were seeing quick flashes of moments from my childhood. Part of me wondered whether I was still in the smokehouse.

  Still in the Dark Game.

  My brain was flashing on and off, as if it had a struggle to make sense of everything that had gone on that night.

  At the other end of the house, in the greenhouse, the door leading outside was wide open.

  I saw light down by the woods. A flashlight’s beam.

  I cupped my hands around my mouth and shouted Pola’s name.

  I heard a call back up from the woods.

  Pola’s voice.

  They were safe.

  11

  I stood outside and watched Hawthorn burn, as it probably should’ve burned years before. The greyhounds were on leashes—when we’d been in the smokehouse, Pola and her son had taken the dogs out through the back of the house, and they’d run off again. Pola and Zack went out in the storm, leashes in hand, to get them back. And come back they did; perhaps, those dogs even saved the lives of the woman and boy who chased them down.

  Bruno took Brooke up to Harry’s SUV, and we sent Zack running across the road to go ask Paulette and Ike Doone to call the fire department if they hadn’t already.

  I was hoping that the place would just burn.

  None of us could ever live there again.

  None of us would want to sleep in that house, or even in its general vicinity. It would be days before we could even mourn Harry's death; we were in shock.

  Shock would be our operating mode for weeks to come.

  But that night, our home burning, in the snow, I felt hope from the woman who stood beside me.

  12

  “I don’t think life has meaning,” I said to Pola. “I just don’t. Not after this.”

  Pola took my hand, squeezing it lightly. It was like some Morse code between us, and I felt some meaning in her touch. No Dark Game there. “Don’t die twice,” she said.

  I glanced at her. Her face, beautiful and undisturbed. She was a survivor of things. She was someone I wanted to understand better.

  “There’s plenty of time for what will come. You and I will grow old. We’ll be haunted by the past. But it’s just the past,” she said. “I’m not sure there are answers here. In this world. It’s just mystery here. I think all we’re supposed to do is ask the questions. The answers are for later.”

  I had nothing to say to this. I had no defense. I felt an enormous burning within myself, even as the last of the house went, and with it, some screams in my head that I suppose had not stopped since I’d been a little boy and had watched my mother die at the hands of my father.

  There we were: Pola, her scarf tied around her hair, her beige jacket wrapped around her body; and me, standing on the gravel of the roadside, watching the fire consume the night.

  In the darkening sky, the ashes floated gray and white:, upward, like snowflakes turning from the earth back to the heavens.

  I had no words left. I reached for her, clung to her, held her, and I wanted life more than anything else in the world.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  1

  The murder of my father was never officially solved. There were no fingerprints. There was no evidence beyond pictures in our minds. Bruno and I knew it hadn’t really been Brooke. We knew it had been something else. An energy there, brought from darkness.

  A power, fueled by a children’s game.

  Fueled by fear and anger and terror.

  And by something we would probably never be able to fully understand.

  Perhaps, a psychic spark against a flint of human madness.

  Not our mother.

  But an imaginary monster called Banshee that three children had conjured once upon a time.

  2

  I suppose if Harry hadn’t been diagnosed as having a heart attack, Joe Grogan would’ve believed our stories about apparitions and possession and a game that drove you mad and turned you into some land of psychic generator. (We didn’t mention Brooke. We protected her. We knew the truth.) “He had a heart murmur,” Joe told me. “It could’ve happened at any time.”

  I knew better. Even Joe had seen the way Harry’s face looked. It had contorted not in pain, but in fear.

  But I let it go. No good would be served by protesting about what no
one—least of all a policeman with an orderly and skeptical mind—would not believe unless he had been there to experience it.

  Still, I knew I'd spend my life regretting ever allowing Harry into that smokehouse. It was the birthplace of all fear, for every one of us.

  My mother’s remains were positively identified from dental records, and we buried her in the Raglan cemetery down beyond the woods, but not ‘til spring. I insisted that she not be buried near where my father was finally laid to rest, but at the opposite end, near Granny Pree, whom my mother had loved so much.

  Brooke left the island, perhaps too quickly; we worried about her but her occasional notes and phone calls sounded as if she were healing; Bruno and I remained; Pola and I took in the greyhounds, both of whom wreaked havoc on Pola’s small house, but Zack adored them.

  I adored them as well, for they had saved two people I loved very much, just by being out of control.

  3

  We three Raglans decided to sell off parcels of land, once summer came around. We all could use the money, and Bruno expressed an ambition to build a small place on the other side of the woods, far away from where Hawthorn had stood. So, we’d keep a few acres, and sell the rest as buyers became interested. Bruno and I wanted Brooke to have the lion’s share of any sale, but she insisted that whatever sale MontiLee Stormer could get, the proceeds would be divided three ways.

  I still had to overcome my fear of the place.

  I went there in March and wandered the ruins of the house. I couldn’t bring myself to go near the smokehouse, and frankly, congratulated myself on that wisdom. No use opening that door, ever again.