Dreaming Darkly

by Caitlin Kittredge

  She shoved Mom off, sending her sprawling on her butt, and then grabbed my hand again so it was palm up, snatching one of the shards from her glass globe with her free hand. Before I could even react, she’d scratched an X into my palm, deep enough that the pain made my eyes water and that my blood flowed freely, like I’d dipped my hand in a jar of red paint. “That’s a mark against the evil eye,” she hissed in my ear as I yelped in pain. “Use it to ward off what’s coming.”

  “Get away from my daughter, you crazy bitch!” Mom screamed, taking the old woman to the ground, slapping and clawing at her. The old woman’s scarf came off and her hair spilled out, soaking up rainwater.

  Somebody in the crowd let out a long whistle, universal grifter signal for “Cops!” Mom and the woman let go of each other, panting, and Mom pulled herself up, grabbing her stuff.

  “You are fucking dead, I see you again,” Mom snarled at the old woman. “I mean it.”

  Mom grabbed me with her free hand and pulled me along, the two of us fading into the crowd as a pair of Portland bike cops came flying up. I looked back once at the old woman as Mom dragged me away toward the Greyhound station. She still lay on the ground, breathing hard, cheeks red. Her clothes and hair were soaked and clung to her skinny body. She looked wispy and defeated, but when she locked eyes with me I could still feel her words echoing inside my head.

  Use it to ward off what’s coming.

  I walked behind Mom, hand wrapped in her pajama bottoms to the stop the bleeding, still dragging the chair with my good arm, and feeling numb. She made me wait until we got all the way to Ashland to get stitched up in a free clinic, and in the intervening few years, the X-shaped scar had smoothed and faded, but it was still there.

  That was the same numb feeling I had now, the feeling of being so completely cut off from anything I recognized as real that I couldn’t begin to think my way out of it. Usually I was good at that—getting myself out of trouble, but that was regular trouble. Getting caught shoplifting, forging excuse notes, boosting Mom’s boyfriend’s Chevelle and driving it out to the desert when Mom and I lived in New Mexico to get drunk and smoke pot around a bonfire with the other burnouts and losers from my latest school.

  I heard a sound behind me, a voice.

  “Ivy, don’t move.”

  Doyle.

  I tipped and felt one foot slide off the edge of the platform.

  For a heartbeat, I touched nothing, suspended in the air as I finally lost my balance and fell. Then a scream ripped out of me as Doyle’s hand clamped on my arm. He pulled me toward him, but it was too late. We plunged together, and the ground flew at us. The roaring of the waves blended with the roaring in my ears, and I went limp, waiting for the impact.

  There was none. I hadn’t moved. Doyle and I had tipped back, landing hard on the iron deck, me on top of him. Doyle’s skin was fever-hot against mine, clammy and burning.

  He coughed. “I told you not to move.”

  I rolled off him, staring down at him as he winced, a thin trail of blood working its way from the corner of his mouth. “God, why did you do that?” I groaned.

  “I might not have if I’d known you were going to flip the fuck out when I touched you,” he grunted, pushing himself up and swiping at his bloody lip. “What the hell were you doing up here in the first place?”

  I tried to help him up, but I was shaky and he was sweaty and I lost my grip. He sat down hard again and let out a moan, clutching at his side.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. My voice had gone from nothing to sounding awful and bellowing inside my own head. The world still spun slowly, as the adrenaline from my imaginary fall worked its way out of me. “I don’t know what happened. I woke up, and I was on the ledge. . . .” I started shaking and couldn’t stop. I thought I was going to chip my teeth, they were rattling so hard. My vision tunneled down until all I could see were my muddy toes, which had started to turn blue.

  “Sounds like you were taking a little midnight stroll courtesy of the Ambien fairy,” Doyle muttered. He stripped off his heavy canvas jacket and wrapped it around me, rubbing my arms until I stopped shaking. “I’ll get you home,” he said.

  I stayed quiet as we picked our way back down the rusty metal stairs of the lighthouse, Doyle’s boots making a booming clang that got my head throbbing again.

  “I don’t take sleeping pills,” I said once we were outside and I could see the faint porch light on the back side of the manor sending out a struggling halo in the mist kicked up from the waves below the cliffs.

  “Well, maybe you should,” Doyle said. “Avoid any more sleepy-time adventures.” I started to tell him that, no, he didn’t understand, I could sleep like a rock anywhere—a bus, the back seat of a car, a motel with paper-thin walls where you could hear every inhale and exhale of the people in the next room, but he grabbed me before I could.

  I let out a sound I wasn’t proud of—I’d like to say it was a yelp but it was more of a ladylike squeak, the kind an actual lady would let out if a mouse ran across her foot. “Easy,” Doyle grunted. I could tell his ribs were bothering him, but he slung me up in that damsel hold guys do, like I weighed less than nothing. “Rocks are sharp,” he said by way of explanation. “Don’t need to bloody your feet on top of the night you’ve had.”

  Normally I’d fight, as much as I hated being touched, but I couldn’t muster the strength. Nor did I want to—my legs were rubbery and my calves screaming from the trip up and down the hundred lighthouse steps, and my feet were already bruised from the metal deck. As the shock of waking up drained out of me, I felt my eyelids fluttering, and I tucked my head against the warmth of Doyle’s chest.

  “What are you doing over here?” I asked him as he deposited me under the sagging roof of the manor’s back porch. The granite blocks that made up the floor were wet and freezing, but smooth enough that they soothed the pain in my feet.

  “I can’t sleep.” Doyle shrugged. I handed back his jacket, and he tucked it under his arm. “I like to walk at night. It’s peaceful. You feel like you’re the only person in the woods.” He flashed me a grin. In the half-light, I could see only the white of his teeth. “Except the cursed ghosts of all the Bloodgoods buried on the island, that is.”

  I wrapped my arms around myself, chilled all over again. “You’re freaking hilarious with that crap. You afraid I’m going to wig out and kill you?”

  “Nah,” Doyle said. “Your family’s crazy, but the last couple of generations have leaned more toward offing themselves, like your grandmother.”

  I blinked at him. “What?”

  Doyle took a step back. “Shit. You didn’t know?”

  I spread my arms. I wasn’t so cold anymore, my heart pounding. “At the risk of sounding like a broken record, know what?”

  “Never mind,” Doyle said. “That is really not my place to tell you. You should get inside. You’ll catch a cold being out here.”

  He backed off the porch and ran, slipping past the hedgerow and turning into a slice of darker space against the darkness before he vanished from my eyes entirely.

  I huffed out a breath that clouded in front of my eyes, shaking my head as I tried the back door. It was locked, but I found a loose window in the laundry room and popped the old-fashioned latch, sliding it up and climbing inside.

  I landed in a heap next to a basket of clean sheets, just glad I hadn’t landed in them. The last thing I needed capping off a night of sleepwalking to my death was Mrs. MacLeod having a conniption about dirt on her laundry.

  I made myself get up again and tried to wobble back to my room. I couldn’t even start to process what Doyle had said—although if my grandmother had killed herself, it was hardly a surprise. Whatever was off-kilter about Mom’s chemistry could be genetic. With my luck the same time bomb was ticking away in my own head. I’d had all the psych tests—you get shrinked a lot when you’re the troubled child of an itinerant single mother—and nothing too weird had shown up, but who knew? Underpaid school ps
ychologists weren’t exactly brilliant profilers. You can’t even be diagnosed with a lot of stuff until you turned eighteen. I knew from my reading I was right at the age when a lot of schizophrenic people had their first breakdown. And here I was, losing time and sleepwalking and seeing things— No, I told myself sternly. I had already decided that was just a dream.

  Either way, whatever the truth, it was too much for me right then. My sight wavered, and I collapsed right there on the kitchen floor, feeling the cool kiss of linoleum on my face before I passed out.

  Chapter 10

  Simon shook me awake. He was wearing a blue satin robe with gold trim and pajamas that looked like he might have hit up Truman Capote’s estate sale. He sat back in relief when I opened my eyes. “I wasn’t sure if you’d hit your head.”

  “I . . .” Sunlight made me crinkle up my face. My head hurt. Everything hurt. And I was covered with rust and grime, feet caked in sandy mud. Almost like I’d run to the top of a five-story building and had then been tackled to a hard surface by the nosy neighbor boy . . .

  “Did someone do this to you?” Simon helped me sit up and went to the stove, rattling around pots with an unholy clatter.

  “No,” I said. I covered my eyes, massaging my forehead. I’d had hangovers before, but at least I usually got to have fun first. “It was just a stupid accident,” I said. Once my head stopped throbbing and I stopped seeing halos any time I opened my eyes, I’d figure out exactly what sort of accident I’d purportedly had to explain this situation. Now I just pulled my knees to my chest and groaned.

  Simon started water boiling and then took a first aid kit out of a cabinet. “Care to elaborate?”

  “I . . . uh . . . tangled with an angry possum? You have those on the island, right?” I flinched. The last twelve hours were really messing with my ability to lie.

  “Cute,” Simon said. He soaked a pad in antiseptic and swiped at the cuts on my hands and forehead.

  “Ow!” I jerked my arm away but not fast enough. Simon frowned at the scratches, turning my arm back and forth in his thin, cold fingers. I realized there was an outline of a hand where Doyle had yanked me away from the ledge, and I shut my eyes, waiting for Simon to freak. Right on cue, he did.

  “Did Doyle Ramsey do this to you?” he demanded.

  I blinked. That sure was a fast jump. I guessed the animosity Doyle had for my uncle was mutual. “No, he didn’t. I would have been really hurt if he hadn’t grabbed me. He was trying to hold on to me, not harm me.”

  I didn’t want to rat Doyle out for trespassing, but I figured that was better than Simon thinking he was some kind of maniac who’d attacked me.

  “And just why the hell were you outside in the middle of the night?” Simon demanded.

  Or maybe Doyle wasn’t the one I needed to worry about.

  “I, uh . . .”

  Simon held up his hand. “I wanted to give you time to settle here. Feel like you could stay in one spot for more than a few months at a time. But if it’s already happening . . .”

  “What?” I shouted. My head kicked like a mule in response and I winced. “What is going on here? What is everyone afraid to say to me?”

  Simon sighed and pulled out a chair at the kitchen table. “Sit,” he said when I didn’t move. I hauled myself into the chair, whimpering softly as I sat and agitated a whole new group of cuts and bruises. Simon got a couple of chippy mugs and a little silver ball that he packed full of tea. “Earl Grey all right?” he asked. I shrugged.

  “Doyle didn’t do anything wrong,” I said again. “I was sleepwalking. He tried to help me.”

  Simon pursed his mouth up. He looked so parental, even after two days. Disapproving and about to chew my ass out. “The last thing the Ramseys want to do is help you, Ivy.” He took the tea strainer away and blew on his cup.

  “I’m getting the sense that’s the last thing you want too,” I said, staring at him. “Or you’d tell me the truth right now instead of making tea.”

  Simon smiled in response. The light caught his glasses and reflected two Ivys back at me. I looked like crap. I was scratched up all over my cheeks, smeared with dirt, and I had sticks in my hair.

  “You’re a lot like your mother,” he said. “Resilient to the core.”

  “That’s not the word I’d pick for her,” I muttered, taking a sip of tea. It was hot and bitter, but it warmed me up, so I downed it.

  “Ivy, there are people and things in this world that fall outside the understanding of the average person,” Simon said. “Such as our family. That curse the locals whisper about may be a fairy tale, but there is something in our blood that leads to madness. A particular kind of madness. It comes on in late adolescence, and it . . . well.” He licked his lips. “Needless to say, I was relieved when it passed me over and devastated when it consumed my sister.”

  I put my mug in the sink and ran water over my scratches, the blood dissolving and running down the drain, staining the spotless porcelain pink. “Okay,” I said, turning back to my uncle. “I get that there’s something seriously fucked-up swimming in our gene pool. If you could just fill me in using small words, that’d be awesome.”

  Simon wrinkled his nose at my swearing, but he stood and faced me. “I’m afraid I don’t know a great deal more. Myra left before doctors could do much work with her, and in our parents’ day mental-health problems weren’t much talked about . . .” He trailed off and spread his hands. “All I know is it doesn’t correspond to any disorder in the DSM, it doesn’t respond to medication, and it tends to affect the women more than men. My sister—your mother—was the worst in a long while. But I never believed she’d do harm to anyone except herself, and I’m glad to see I was right.”

  I wanted to tell him how wrong he was, to pick up the mug I’d just rinsed and smash it. I didn’t, though. I just stood there shaking, even though the radiator in the corner was hissing and clanging as it poured out waves of warmth.

  “I wanted to ease you into this, keep an eye out for any signs before I even brought it up or scheduled any doctors’ appointments for you,” said Simon. “But Doyle Ramsey made that impossible. His whole family are animals. They loathe us, and you cannot trust them.”

  “Is the loathing because of the whole penchant-for-murder thing that runs in our family?” I said. Simon grunted.

  “In the 1940s, my grandfather—your great-grandfather—walked to the other side of the island. He picked up a hatchet from the Ramseys’ woodpile and he massacred everyone in the house. Everyone except Liam’s father, Colin, who was just a boy at the time. The police eventually found my grandfather dead in the ruins of the original Ramsey mansion. My mother was also just a girl, and she was never the same after what her father did. She went looking for him the morning after the murders. She saw what he’d done. She was the one to wash the blood off Colin Ramsey and the one to wait for the boat to the mainland, to fetch the police. She was all of twelve years old.”

  Both of us went quiet. Only the radiator kept up its clanging, like tiny hands hammering to be let in. “My grandfather was insane, and it wasn’t anyone’s fault but his, but you coming here has stirred up a lot of issues for Liam, to say the least,” Simon murmured at last. “And now with that drunk idiot nephew of his, Neil, turning up dead . . . Stay away from the Ramseys, Ivy. I mean it. Just because we share this island doesn’t mean they won’t decide to take out on you what a Bloodgood did all those years ago.”

  I stayed quiet. Doyle didn’t seem so bad—he had saved me from being a human pancake, after all—but I wasn’t about to start a fight with Simon when he was finally being open with me.

  “You can ask me anything, even though I don’t know much,” Simon said, picking up his tea. “We can discuss this more later as well, but right now I need to continue my morning, and you should go shower and get ready for school.”

  “Am I for sure going crazy?” I whispered. I thought again of just telling him about Neil and the bloody shirt and my inability to shake t
he feeling I’d done something really terrible. The bottom line was he was being honest for now, but I’d known him less than a week. I’d be an idiot to trust him with something like that when I wasn’t even sure what happened.

  Simon gave a sad shrug. “I don’t know, Ivy. Your mother went through something very similar, starting around your age. All we can do is wait, watch, and hope.”

  That was a bullshit answer, and we both knew it, but I decided to let it slide. I’d had enough information thrown at me for me one sucky morning. The second thing he’d said registered with me, and I cocked my head. “You seriously expect me to go to school now?”

  “I seriously do,” my uncle said, picking up a newspaper from the table and tucking it under his arm. “Today and every other school day. The boat leaves in an hour.”

  Chapter 11

  Mrs. MacLeod was silent when she returned the next morning and drove me to the boat, which was good, because I had no clue what to say to her. I held my old leather book bag close on the boat ride over, like I hadn’t since the fifth grade.

  When the boat pulled up at the town pier and I saw the beat-up school bus waiting, I made my fingers relax. I wasn’t going to be the weirdo new kid, especially at whatever hillbilly high school they had going on in the town of Darkhaven, which from what I could see looked small, ugly, and run-down, like a million other rotted-out, zombie-apocalypse-by-way-of-Norman-Rockwell towns in the poor and rural corners of the country. I made a point of either fitting in or not giving a crap at the schools I went to, sometimes monthly if Mom was feeling restless. It was a lot easier than sparring with every bully and mean girl in whatever fresh hell our constant moving around landed me in.

  A crowd of kids was getting off the big white ferry that came from some other island, where I bet they had the internet and nobody tried to murder anybody. They were all laughing and jostling. Tight friend group. Best to not even try to infiltrate those.