Drawn Into Darkness

by Nancy Springer

  “Okay, I’ll stop. There’s just one more thing, Justin.”

  He faced me narrow-eyed, on guard.

  “Does Stoat ever tell you he loves you?”

  His face hardened. “A few times. In bed.”

  “He’s a liar. What he does to you in bed is not love.”

  “I figured.”

  “Yet I bet you feel something for him, don’t you? You have a big heart. It’s impossible for you to live with somebody and not get attached to him, right?”

  Justin’s rigid face contorted. “What are you trying to prove?” he yelled.

  “Just that you’re human.”

  “And what am I supposed to do about it?”

  “If you do anything, it’s completely up to you.”

  “Damn it, why aren’t you begging me to cut the ropes off the bedposts or something?”

  I took care to speak exact truth. “Because I am a mom and I am starting to love you too, Justin.”

  He gawked, gulped, then ran from the room.

  • • •

  Throughout history, female philosophers are few and far between. It would seem that women generally have had better things to do than ponder how many incorporeal bodies can caper on the head of a pin, or how many existentialists it takes to change a lightbulb. Searching my mind for a feminine Socrates to comfort me (Socrates himself wouldn’t do; he, like Stoat, hated women), I found myself baffled. Raging Ayn Rand, hell no. Simone de Beauvoir, too hung up on Sartre. Mary Wollstonecraft probably wore a corset. Hypatia—

  Hypatia might empathize.

  In ancient times just as today, women were not supposed to be philosophers, of course, but Hypatia was, so a kind of exemption was made in her case. She was not a woman. She was something more, at one with the divine being she called the One. Her students, all male, were not allowed to fall in love with her. When one of them had the temerity to do so, she showed him a diaper stained with her menstrual blood and reminded him that earthly beauty is an illusion. And that took care of that, I’m sure. Talk about attitude.

  Hypatia referred to the One as best discovered by “the Eye buried within us” and urged a return to the teachings of Plato and Aristotle. These tales of her survived; however, most of her thoughts did not, because the fourth-century Bishop of Alexandria put out a hit on her, ordering a group of fanatical monks to haul her from her chariot, divest her of the white cloak of a philosopher, strip her naked, and either beat her to death or, some accounts say, attack her with sharpened seashells. Then her writings were burned along with her body. In history as written by the Christian church, Hypatia never existed.

  Whatever Stoat did to me, I reflected, would be mild compared with what had happened to Hypatia.

  Nevertheless, dead is dead. Especially if one doesn’t believe in the afterlife.

  I doubted whether Hypatia had reached any deep philosophical insights during her last moments.

  And I doubted whether I was going to reach any either, but all the rest of the day, lying on that mattress as if waiting to be stretched on a rack, I occupied my mind with a vain attempt. At wisdom. Or consolation. Or at least a worthy quotation upon which to hang my metaphorical shroud.

  Death be not proud; carry my shroud.

  Do not go gentle unto that good night . . . as if I had a choice?

  “Though boys throw stones at frogs in sport, the frogs do not die in sport, but in earnest.” Plutarch. Who the hell was Plutarch? I ought to remember. . . .

  Something similar in Shakespeare. King Lear. “As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods; they kill us for their sport.”

  Ashes, ashes, all fall down.

  Dust to dust. Dust in the wind; all we are is dust in the wind. . . .

  Soughing outside my thoughts and my room I heard plenty of wind, but saw no dust. Just rain, lots of it. Rainsnakes on the windows.

  Then came the familiar asthmatic roar of the generic white van. Cough of silence, in front of the house rather than alongside. Slam of doors, first vehicle, then house.

  Stoat was home.

  But darkness would not come for hours yet.

  I hoped Stoat would ignore me until then. But my own hope made me so angry at myself, him, and fractal theory (ridiculously random, how I had gotten into this fix) that I would not go gentle after all. I yelled as loud as I could, “Stoat!”

  I heard a thunk as his cowboy-booted feet fell off the coffee table. I heard him swear. I heard, then saw him run into my room. “Where’s your gag?”

  “How should I know? You never put it back on me.”

  “Phew!” Short attention span; he batted at the urine-scented air with one hand. “You wet the bed!”

  “What did you expect? I understand you plan to kill me tonight.”

  Thoroughly distracted from the wet mattress, he blinked a few times, but kept the blank look on his face and in his eyes. “That’s none of your business.”

  Although painfully aware of the utter absurdity of this statement, I managed to keep a straight face. “Yes, it is, because I’d like to write a letter to my sons first.”

  “What for?”

  “Tell them I’m dead. You like things orderly, right? If your mother was dead all of a sudden, wouldn’t you want to know?”

  “I suppose so.” The mention of a letter seemed to have swung him to the opposite extreme from the Stoat whose fist had split my lip only yesterday. He seemed slightly harried, like a fussy clerk troubled by a complicated business transaction. “But you can’t tell them about me.”

  “Of course not. I wouldn’t want to get you and Justin in trouble. I’ll let you read what I write.”

  “Huh.” He stalked off, but returned in a few minutes with his pistol, aiming it at me with one hand while he unshackled me with the other. “Okay, potty time, then supper. Tie a towel around your stinking self.”

  • • •

  It did not surprise me that Stoat would not be distracted from suppertime routine no matter what the extraordinary circumstances.

  Supper was canned beef stew, presumably bought by Stoat, who therefore should reproach no one, yet the man criticized Justin, saying he had failed to microwave it evenly to the proper temperature. I had no way to verify or disprove this because I did not taste any. The concept of imminent death had solidified and lodged in my throat, preventing me from eating. Stoat frowned at me as if I were being unreasonable.

  “Now, why ain’t you eating? You know I ain’t gonna hurt you much,” he said. “Like you noticed, I like things neat and tidy, so I don’t mess up people more than is necessary. I don’t want no fuss and I’ll make it quick. I told you before, you was just in the wrong place at the wrong time, so it ain’t nobody’s fault. Even if you do have a big mouth and you did wet the bed.”

  I nodded soberly but did not trust myself to say anything lest I begin to laugh hysterically, his assurances seemed so ludicrous. Then I thought of the way he had fired the gun three times, killing Schweitzer, and how the dog had screamed, and my gut heaved, but there was nothing to retch.

  Stoat frowned harder and took my bowl of stew away. “Put that back in the pot,” he told Justin. “No use wasting good food.”

  Justin obeyed silently. He hadn’t eaten much or said much and he wouldn’t look at me. Common sense told me not to hope for any help from him. He had given up most of his selfhood in order to survive.

  After the dishes were cleared away, it was still light outside. There was still a little time. I managed to move my mouth and form words. “A letter to my sons,” I said slowly and laboriously. “I need to write my sons. I need paper, a pen, an envelope, and a stamp.”

  Seeming genuinely flummoxed, Stoat retorted, “What you think this is, some kind of office supplies store?”

  Justin brought cheesy unbleached tablet paper from school. Stoat made me pull out a page from the back so Justin’s fingerprints would not be on it. Justin supplied me with a school-issue wooden pencil. There were no pens in this house, and no envelopes, and cer
tainly no postage stamps. “I’ll take care of it next time we go to town, can’t I, Uncle Steve?”

  “Sure, Justin,” Stoat said with expansive generosity. “I’ll give you money to buy a stamp next week sometime.”

  Sitting to write, I discovered that my hands were clumsy, shaky, so I printed the mailing address first—c/o my ex-husband, the only address I could remember clearly, because for a long time it had been my own. Then, switching over to handwriting necessarily a bit larger and more childish than usual, I wrote, Dear Forrest and Quinn—

  “Forrest and Quinn,” said Justin, maybe as a weak attempt to joke or tease. “You gave them those names, Forrest and Quinn?”

  Yes, I had, meaning only to prove them a bit different, when in fact they had turned out quite conventional. Quinn, my firstborn, had become a banker, of all things, and Forrest a civil engineer, which did not mean that he was polite but rather that he constructed efficient sewer systems. Neither of them had married yet, having too much head and not enough heart; being, I thought, too much like their father, Georg with no e.

  “It’s too bad babies are named at birth,” I told Justin.

  “Go do the dishes, Justin,” growled Stoat.

  I continued my letter.

  Dear sons, please remember life has not been kind lately so this news is not terrible to me. I have encountered a man who needs to kill me. He promises to do so as quickly and painlessly as he can. By the time you receive this, I should be dead. This is my last will and testament in which I divide all my belongings equally between you. There is much I want to say but cannot, except that I wish you long and wonderful lives.

  With greatest love,

  Mom

  Stoat read this over my shoulder—revolver in hand, of course. When I had finished, he nodded. “I reckon that won’t hurt anything. Leave it lay where it is. Justin can mail it next week.”

  I looked at Justin, who had just finished washing the dishes. Drying his hands on a dingy kitchen towel, he nodded, giving me a flickering glance of acknowledgment. I barely glimpsed his eyes, yet saw there a near replica of the blank terror that might have been in my own.

  Maybe he realized, as I did, how extremely theoretical, almost fictitious, “next week” was for him; otherwise, Stoat would not have allowed me to write the letter. Logic told me that Justin was in as much danger of death as I was. Even before I came along, Stoat had wanted to replace him with a younger victim, and now would be the perfect time to kill him. Two for the price of one. Would Stoat leave Justin at home while he went to murder me? Of course not. He would keep Justin with him so the kid could not turn against him, run away, alert the police. And would he keep Justin alive after Justin had witnessed my murder? I doubted it.

  “We can’t go till deep dark.” With a stab of his gun barrel, Stoat ordered me toward the living room. “Sit down and watch TV.”

  So I did. Wrapped in my towel as if in an overlarge diaper, I sat on the sofa and looked at some program without comprehension. After a while Justin joined me on the other end of the sofa, while Stoat slumped in his chair, keeping the gun aimed at me. All the while my mind trolled near and far, fishing for any possibility of escape, any improvised weapon, any plausible ploy, but came up with none. I remembered having heard once that, when held at gunpoint, one should run while dodging back and forth, the rationale being that most criminals neglect their target practice, are indifferent shots, and it is better to risk a flesh wound than to be killed. My body, however, felt watery after being punched and kicked and handcuffed to a bed—not that I had ever been an athlete, far from it. My memories of school phys ed class, dodgeball in particular, were dismal. And the decades since had not helped any. (Jogging? I have never seen a smiling jogger.) After just two days of Stoat’s abuse, I felt incapable of jumping up and running to the door, much less dodging. Maybe later, once we got outside?

  Maybe if adrenaline kicked in?

  Maybe?

  EIGHT

  Stoat showed no impatience, not even a jiggling leg, as the television babbled and the sky darkened outside the living room window. He had decided beforehand what time to proceed, I inferred, and his plans were not to be rushed even by himself. When the TV changed programs at exactly nine o’clock, he stood up. “Leave it on,” he told Justin, who had reached for the remote. “If people drive by, it’ll look like we’re home. But they don’t need to see me standing here with this pistol. Kill the lights.”

  Justin did so. Hardly anyone drove past in the daytime, much less at night, but Stoat took no chances.

  “Go get a pair of handcuffs,” he ordered Justin.

  The boy returned almost at once. Obviously it had not been necessary for him to untie some cuffs from the bed. I wondered how many pairs of handcuffs Stoat kept around this place.

  “And an extra towel. So she don’t stink up the upholstery in the van.”

  Or leave evidence there either. As I had come to expect of him, he had planned down to the smallest detail.

  With my hands cuffed behind my back, I gave up thoughts of possible escape, thus, unintentionally, freeing myself in a different way. Freeing myself to breathe deeply of the wet nighttime air, to feel the raindrops with a perverse joy, to listen with a bittersweet pang to the frogs chiming, their croaking somehow as tuneful at a slight distance as a choir of angel bells. I had time to stand breathing and listening, for Stoat our goat man, so meticulous, would not turn on the porch light; someone might see us. So it took Justin a few minutes to feel his way down the steps before Stoat prodded me ahead of him with a hard little hollow circle pressed to my back.

  I felt for the edge of the step with one foot. “Take your time so you don’t fall,” Stoat whispered. He sounded as if he meant it sincerely, frightening me worse than if he had cursed me. The scariest thing about Stoat was how normal-nice he could be. A little bit of good in the worst of us? A little bit of bad in the best of us? Bullshit. I knew then, as never before, that there is unfathomable capacity for both good and evil in every single one of us.

  The rain poured down, drenching me to the bone, and I tilted my face up and opened my mouth, not because I was thirsty but because I needed to open myself and be cleansed. Rain, please wash away the stink of pee and sweat and fear. Rain, be my baptism into night, my last rite.

  Across a stretch of darkness I heard the side door of the van slide open as Justin got in. No overhead lights came on; of course Stoat had disabled them. I heard him open what seemed to be the passenger seat door, feel around with his gun-free hand for something, then say, “In you go.”

  No. I wanted to keep standing in the rain, all night if it would help. I did not lift a foot to feel for a step.

  “Get in.” With his free hand he grasped my upper arm and hoisted, but I became limp and unhelpful.

  “Move, or I’ll kill you right here and now, ditch you afterward.”

  His voice remained quiet and steady but conveyed a remorseless logic, making me suddenly cooperative. I fumbled with my feet, he maneuvered my handcuffed arms, and I landed more or less on the passenger seat, which felt unaccountably, ever so kindly fluffy and soft. Dry, warm. As if the loving mother of my earliest memories had somehow reached out to embrace me from heaven on this hellish night. Even though I didn’t believe in heaven or hell, not under normal circumstances, and even though I fully realized my comfort came from a towel meant to protect Stoat’s upholstery from my personal pollution, still the touch of terry cloth wrenched sobs out of me, one after another.

  Nothing Stoat could do to me would ever make me cry? Riiight.

  Did Stoat get credit if fabric softener made me quake with tears?

  On my shoulder I felt a touch, tentative and quickly withdrawn. Justin, in the backseat. Meanwhile, Stoat slammed doors, started the van, and told me, “Shut up.” I saw no light, not even headlights as I felt the van begin to roll, but I did not need to look at Stoat’s face to know I’d better stop crying. Not that his voice growled or menaced. Not at all. It was his starkne
ss that terrified me. His hollowness.

  I shut up.

  Stoat drove without headlights onto the road, and accelerated even though the asphalt showed only as a shinier blackness in the night. Somehow Stoat kept us more or less on the pavement, and when we hit the shoulder by mistake, no one spoke, not even him. Not even swearing broke the silence inside that van and the susurration of rain outside. We encountered no other vehicles for some time, but when one appeared in the distance, Stoat turned on his low beams.

  “We’re far enough away from the house now, it don’t matter,” he remarked genially.

  No one responded. Stoat turned off the paved road onto one of the gazillion dirt roads that I had not yet gotten around to exploring, meaning I had no idea—did people live back here? Since I could not lean back with my hands cuffed behind me, necessarily I perched on the edge of my seat and peered through the windshield. All I could see in the headlights, through a blur of rain, were trees and brush as oppressive as a tunnel, forest crowding the road into a single lane. Forest as thick as jungle, spiked with palmetto and slathered with Spanish moss like massive weeping cobwebs.

  Since it had been raining hard all day, fervidly I hoped that Stoat, driving on a dirt road, would get his van stuck in the mud.

  My mistake. Did I say dirt road? These roads were yellow sand plus maybe some orange clay. Sand roads don’t make mud in the rain. They just get nice and hard. It’s when they’re dry and soft that people get stuck in them.

  Stoat turned onto another one of them, and we slowed to go over—yikes. The bridge consisted of two spans of wooden planks, each just wide enough to accommodate a vehicle’s tires, plus timber supports but no rail. Just below what should have been the middle of the bridge, I saw water rushing. I flinched and closed my eyes as Stoat sent the van across the bridge that was barely there.

  We turned onto another narrow, serpentine sand road, crossed another two or three minimalist bridges, and duh, I realized we were driving not through forest, but through swamp. Or into swamp. Most of Maypop County consisted of forest or swamp, forest being trees plus undergrowth, and swamp being trees plus water. Through forest the yellow sand roads ran arrow straight. But in swamp they wriggled to find higher land.