The Hour Before Dark

by Douglas Clegg

  As I walked around the property, with the winter chill and that whistling wind still biting at my neck, I felt a peace I’d never experienced there before.

  It was gone.

  Whatever had been there that was bad.

  It had left.

  Burnt itself out.

  4

  We had a reunion of sorts in June at Hawthorn—Midsummer’s Eve, to be exact. The longest day of the year, which also meant the longest twilight.

  The weather was delightful, the mosquitoes were a bit heavy, and Pola and I spent an afternoon cooking and preparing, with Zack running errands to make sure there were enough potatoes for the German potato salad, and for last-minute runs to Croder-Sharp-Callahan for paper plates.

  Zack invited his friends, Mike and Mike’s sister, Jenny, whose parents were going off on a sailboat with another couple that evening. It was nearly like having a big family in tow, but I loved every minute.

  Bruno and Cary met us in the village. We drove from there out to the property.

  5

  All that was left of the house was its foundation and what I’d best call “scraps”—broken glass, burnt out frames of windows, some brick rubble—the ruins. Wild-flowers, brightly colored in lavender and yellow, had sprung up around the foundation, and we settled on the southern edge of the foundation for our picnic. Cary had a huge quilt, which he spread out; it fit nearly all of us, with our feet hanging over the edge in the fresh green grass. The kids went off to play games down by the duck pond.

  “How’s the book?” Cary asked.

  “Crap,” I said. “But what the hell. I’m putting everything I have in me into it. It’ll probably never get published.”

  “It’ll get published,” he said. “And I’ll even read it. What’s it called?”

  I didn’t want to tell the title at first, but I couldn’t very well keep it a secret too long. “The Dark Game,” I said.

  “Ah.” Bruno nodded. “And it’s about?”

  “Innocence and evil,” I said. I didn’t want to talk much about it. The story for the book was pretty much writing itself, and I’d discovered that the less said about a writing project, the more urgent it seemed to me to write it. “How’s the business?”

  “Same as yesterday,” he said, grinning. “Same as tomorrow.”

  “MontiLee sell this place yet?”

  “Three offers, but she said we should turn ‘em down. She said give it another three weeks of summer, and we’ll get the real offers.”

  “Regular entrepreneurs we are,” I said. “Brooke probably wishes we’d just take an offer soon.”

  “Brooke never responded,” he said.

  “She’ll show.”

  “I’m not sure if she’s coming,” Bruno said.

  “She’ll be here,” I said.

  I knew my sister well enough to know that she’d somehow find a way back here for this one evening. She had, after all, been the center of the family in ways that neither Bruno nor I ever could be. Yet, he and I chose to remain on Burnley, despite the past. Brooke had moved on, going first to the Cape, and then up to Maine, getting work in an art shop there.

  I suppose she also had reason to never come back.

  But the three of us had found some peace together; some middle ground of friendship that seemed to surpass the bad memories.

  Since Bruno and I saw each other fairly regularly in the village, we just talked about the weather and the onslaught of summer tourists.

  I followed Zack and his friends down to the duck pond to show them how to skip rocks.

  “You choose a good flat one,” I said. “Like this.” I angled it and threw it in the pond, but it plopped down without a skip. “Been too many years,” I said.

  Zack laughed, picked up any old rock he found, and tossed it—the damn thing skipped three times before sinking.

  “You’ve been practicing,” I told him.

  Pretty soon, Jenny and Mike were just throwing pebbles into the duck pond. The ducks, wisely, either flew away or skedaddled to the other side of the pond.

  Jenny discovered -- among the house debris -- what looked like the torn remnants of an old sheet, with light green flowers on it. She held it up. “Somebody lost their bed,” she said.

  “Must be a squatter’s,” I said.

  “What’s that?” Zack asked.

  Jenny made pouty sounds as her brother tugged the sheet away from her.

  “Someone who camps out someplace where nobody notices. They squat,” I said.

  Zack gave me a funny look.

  “It’s not a precise definition,” I added. I glanced over at the other kids, who'd begun fighting.

  “Give it back!” Jenny protested.

  “It’s dirty!” Mike said, flinging the sheet back to his sister. “Take your ol’ dirty sheet.”

  “It’s pretty,” little Jenny said, wrapping it up in her arms. “I’m gonna make a dress.”

  Mike and Zack rolled their eyes, and Jenny ignored them, rolling the sheet up as if it were some great treasure.

  Zack grabbed my hand and wanted me to lean down so he could whisper something to me.

  “What?” I asked.

  “She’s here.”

  When he said it, I felt that terrible bone chill again, and I looked at him as if he were some kind of evil child—for just a second, in my head: the memory of the Banshee, her fury, her absolute cold hatred for us, for any who were at Hawthorn.

  But then I looked in the direction he pointed, and it was Brooke, up on the road. She had gotten a lift from Joe Grogan, who waved to us as he drove away.

  I left the kids to play and trudged up the hillside.

  6

  “You made it!” I shouted as I reached her. Brooke had a smile so wide that it seemed to want to break away from her face.

  She looked healthier than I’d ever seen her, too. Her face, no longer pale, had a rosy glow to it. She wore silver bracelets on each wrist, no doubt her method of hiding the thin white marks left by cuts. “Guess what?” she said, and before I could say another word, “I’m pregnant.”

  “Holy crap,” I said. I grabbed her and hugged her. Bruno huddling nearby with Pola and Cary, shouted, “And you look it! You must’ve put on ten pounds!”

  “At least,” she said. "I predict a thirty-pound baby at the birth."

  We sat around, chewing on fried chicken and drinking Coke from the can, and at about six o’clock Bruno began telling the kids the history of the Raglan family.

  I drew Brooke aside and we took a walk down a slender path in the field.

  “Who is he?” I asked. “This guy.”

  “A total wastrel,” she said. “He’s a poet who also works on boats in Camden. He does a good business. And he’s a really good poet.”

  “Marriage in the picture?”

  “Does it matter?”

  “It’s up to the two of you, I guess,” I said.

  “He wants to. He’s proposed. I don’t know. It happened so fast. I need more time, I think.”

  “Sure,” I said.

  “I wanted to run to...well, the ends of the earth, I guess. I couldn’t get out of New England. It’s a Raglan curse. I met him in March. He told me it was love at first sight for him. I guess I love him. I mean, I feel like I do. But I don’t trust it.”

  “The feeling?”

  “I just don’t. I don’t know how many years it’ll take to undo all this...well, damage. Is that the word for it?"

  "Sounds right to me.”

  “He told me he’d wait.”

  “He know about the baby?”

  “Not yet. He will soon. Nemo, I’d never talk about this with anyone else, but I feel comfortable asking you. Do you think I could ever be a mother?"

  "What do you mean? Of course you could. You will be."

  "I’m not sure,” she said. “What if it’s some kind of mental illness? What if what happened to us is ...”

  “In our blood?”

  She heaved a sigh, an enor
mous weight from within.

  “Come on, Brooke.”

  “I’m more worried about the game,” she said. “I’m still not sure what it was.”

  “The game is over. He taught it to us to control us."

  "No,” she said. “I’ve thought about it a lot. It controlled us. It may have controlled him, too.”

  “Maybe. But what happened has nothing to do with you now.”

  She let out a mocking laugh. “Of course it does. Of course it does, Nemo. It has a lot to do with me—and you and Bruno—now.”

  I realized how dumb I’d been sounding. How we’d always talked around each other. How all three of us had to stop it if we were going to reach out into our own lives into new families and protect them and ourselves. “You’re right. It had a profound effect on us. You look like Mom. I look like Dad. You paint like Mom. Bruno plays music like Mom. I’m as stubborn as Dad was. But what happened at this house was not about that. It was about human evil. And maybe about what that leaves behind. But it’s gone. It got burned out. None of us gets a fucked-up-free life, Brooke. Nobody. Even Pola and Cary—maybe nobody went nuts like Dad did, but everybody gets slammed into the ground by life in one way or another. And I guess the choice is what we do with it. You can wallow in that past. You can let it break you. Or it can be like...like rain, washing off you. You can let this wonderful guy go, this guy who adores you and writes poetry and fixes boats and puts you and your child first and who believes in love at first sight. You can even lose the baby. You can get it removed, and tell yourself that it’s for the best, that someone like you shouldn’t bring a child into the world. Or you can make the choice that you will overcome this. That is was a storm, but the storm is passed. Just like we overcame it in childhood. I was thinking about the Brain Fart, Brooke. I was thinking about it, and why it was there, and the only thing I can come up with is: We are meant to forget. We are meant to put aside childhood. We are meant to say goodbye to the families we came from, if they’re bad for us. We are meant to move on and create our own families. That’s what none of us had done. We are meant to have a Brain Fart so that all the bad things don’t keep us from what life offers. And for you, life is offering what you wanted: a family. Dad couldn’t provide it, not the way it’s supposed to be. He was a murderer, plain and simple. He butchered our mother. Maybe we can blame the prison camp he was in. Maybe we can blame the way his father whipped him. Maybe it was just madness. Something happened here that was terrible. Something continued to remain here afterward. But it’s gone now. It doesn’t have to be in here,” I said, and I placed my hand near her heart. “It doesn’t have to live here. Don’t make room for it.”

  She glanced at me a bit archly. “You’ve been to a shrink?”

  “What, and you haven’t?” I laughed. “Oh yeah. Big time. After all this, probably for the rest of my natural born days. You want to know what helped?” I twisted around and pointed back to Pola and Zack. “Those two. And even the good things we had as kids.”‘

  “There were good things?”

  “We three had each other. No matter what storm was out there, we had each other,” I said. “And we still do. Now, tell me, you want this baby?”

  Her eyes glazed over with tears. “Yes. I want this baby. I’ve wanted a baby for years. And I want him, too. I love him. I’m afraid to love him. But I do.”

  “You need to tell him,” I said.

  “Nemo?”

  “Yeah?”

  “I don’t know if I’m out of the woods yet,” she said, a slight tremble to her voice.

  “I suspect it’s all woods,” I said. “And nobody’s out of ‘em.”

  7

  I walked with my beautiful sister back to my beautiful wife (yes, we had the small ceremony in the early spring, just the two of us with Zack as both ring bearer and best man, and a justice of the peace), my brilliant stepson and his friends, and my fabulous brother and his handsome lover, and for a moment, at twilight, I thought, this is pretty damn good. This is great. The world is good. The universe has some benevolence to it. We live our lives in the hour before dark. The dark itself will come— but there’s no need to rush. When that hour passes, perhaps the real game begins.

  We broke up the picnic after nine. The sun was on its way down at last. The woods were a haze of green; the smell of night sea in the air. I watched Bruno dance with Pola and Jenny as Zack and Mike fought over the job of deejay with the boom box; in another few minutes, Jenny ran along the fields, with her newly found sheet trailing behind her like she was a princess in a make-believe world, while Zack and Mike used sticks as swords for knightly duels, while Pola shouted at them that they’d poke an eye out; Cary went around looking in the rubble of the foundation, now and then calling out that he’d found some widget or other that was still useful; and Brooke and I sat and talked about what kind of name her baby should have, what name would be a good Raglan name even if the kid wasn’t going to be a Raglan.

  Albert Einstein once said, “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.”

  I tried to convey this to my sister as we sat there, half on the grass, bitten by mosquitoes, half on the quilt, with the last of the longest day of the year passing over us like a warm presence.

  The door was hers to open.

  8

  As it grew dark, Zack and crew had gone off to play with their sticks and sheets, but when Pola called after him, there was no answer.

  “He’s probably running around the woods,” I said.

  “He’d answer,” she said. She glanced at me with a brief look of panic.

  “Don’t worry,” I said. “He’s around.”

  Pola and Bruno and Cary went off to the woods to round up the kids, and I started walking up to the roadside, carrying the trash-filled cooler with me.

  The way the darkness comes in summer on the island is like a tinge of blackness shimmering at the edge of the tree-lined sky.

  The smells of summer were at their height: honeysuckle and lavender and lilac.

  “Zack!” I called, and heard the name echo down below in the woods, as others called to him. “Mike! Jenny!”

  And then I saw that the door to the smokehouse was open slightly.

  I felt as if my heart were about to stop.

  I went over to it, opening the door wide.

  Stepped inside.

  They stood in a ring at its center.

  Around their eyes, blindfolds—torn from the sheet that Jenny had picked up at the duck pond.

  Zack had just finished reciting the nursery rhyme—I heard the last line of it.

  Here comes a chopper to chop off your head.

  I stared at them in silence. I looked around at the stone walls and out into the night as darkness swung low around the slopes and trees beyond the property.

  Then back at these children.

  I watched Zack. This little boy whose world had been disrupted: his mother and father divorced, a new man in the house, the memories of that awful night in December still no doubt immense in his mind.

  A world that he didn’t choose himself.

  Who had taught him?

  The Dark Game was an addiction. It wasn’t something that could be stopped just by wanting it to be stopped.

  Knowing it was there, it got in your blood.

  Children were going to play it.

  They had begun playing it before dark, and now, with full night around us, it would take them over. They must have heard about it. Zack would know about it, just from listening in on conversations. Children did that sometimes, and adults never really thought they were listening so carefully.

  Zack looked the way I must’ve looked at his age. Blindfold on, saying what seemed like unintelligible words.

  For the barest second, I thought that perhaps this was wholly innocent. That it was my own experience, and my own perception that colored my intense negative reaction to watching children play the Dark Ga
me. That we three—Bruno, Brooke, and I—and perhaps even our father—had twisted it with the terrible trauma we’d gone through together. With watching our mother be brutally tortured and murdered. With whatever my father had experienced in those POW camps when he’d been in his twenties.

  It was us. No one else. Not other children. Surely.

  “Zack?” I finally said, still reeling inside from the initial shock. “Zack?” I took a step forward, and then another.

  The hairs on the back of my neck stood up. My throat went dry.

  I felt a crackle of static electricity in the air.

  When I reached him, I crouched down and put my hand on his shoulder. The other children’s breathing seemed labored and heavy.

  As gently as I could, I tried to wake him.

  To bring him out of the game.

  But in his mind, he’d already gone somewhere else.

  * * *

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  Publisher Information

  Published by Alkemara Press, in an arrangement with the author.

  Cover Design Copyright © 2012 Alkemara Press

  Cover image courtesy of iStockphoto.com, used with permission. Copyright © 2012 Shaun Lowe.

  About the Author

  Douglas Clegg is the award-winning author of more than 25 books, including Afterlife, The Children’s Hour, You Come When I Call You, The Harrow Series, The Criminally Insane Series, Purity and many others.

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