Dreaming Darkly

by Caitlin Kittredge

  “It can’t happen soon enough,” Simon said. “You should have seen her, Veronica. It wasn’t pretty.”

  “I still think you’re full of it,” Mrs. MacLeod grumbled. “She’s not going to be able to handle it, Simon. She’s weak, just like her mother.”

  I bristled, fighting the urge to stomp down there and tell her off again. Simon held up a hand before I could. “Enough, Veronica. It’s not your call.”

  “No, and it’s not your only problem,” Mrs. MacLeod snarled. “I ran into Liam Ramsey on the mainland today, and he was even less charming than usual. They want their pound of flesh for that dead boy, Simon, and if you waffle much longer, they’re not going to be too particular about who they cut it out of.”

  “You let me worry about Liam,” Simon snapped.

  Mrs. MacLeod huffed. “Your mother—”

  “—knew when to keep her mouth shut, and I’d appreciate it if you learned before I lose my temper!” Simon bellowed.

  The dusty crystals in the chandelier hanging over the foyer rattled, like a wind had rushed through the house. The lights dimmed and then flared, and I heard a faint exhale of terrified air from Mrs. MacLeod. Then her footsteps retreated, at a brisk clip, without another word.

  I backed up into the shadows on the landing. I just hoped Simon never screamed at me that way. He sounded way too much like my mother.

  The next morning being Saturday, I woke up ready to stop telling myself lies and actually face up to what was going on with me. Maybe do some more careful poking around by asking Simon more about Mom and my grandmother.

  Then reality crashed over me. I wasn’t doing anything like that today. All I was doing was getting dressed and meeting Simon outside the manor house’s back door. The sky was crushingly crystal blue, but along with the clear weather came a snap of cold that took the breath out of my lungs the minute I went outside. I’d found a black coat in the hall closet, and put on my darkest jeans and shirt, turning it inside out to hide the band logo.

  The boat delivered the casket early. I skipped that part. Let Mrs. MacLeod drive my mother to the cemetery. I’d already said everything I ever wanted to say to her. Simon, I reminded myself as I shoved my hands into my armpits to thaw them out. This is for Simon. Not her.

  I had thought about calling Doyle to at least talk about how messed up this DIY funeral was, but the memory of blood on my skin, the bloody footprints, the dream that had somehow still cut my foot open, stopped me. I wasn’t in any state to be confiding in anyone right now. I walked behind Simon along the gravel road, away from the mansion, my chest getting tighter with every step, like what waited on top of the little hill was yanking me in.

  “Nearly there,” Simon said as we turned the opposite way from the forest along the property line, climbing past the lighthouse to the highest point on the cliff, where thorny wild roses and brambles sheltered a small plot hemmed in by an iron fence. Simon opened the gate for me and gave me a kind smile, pushing his glasses up his nose. He was so far from the screaming lunatic I’d seen last night I had to think Mrs. MacLeod had just pushed him over the edge. “It’s nothing to be afraid of.”

  I lifted my chin. “Do I look like I’m afraid?”

  “No,” he said. “Like my sister, I doubt you’re afraid of much.” He snapped off one of the last live roses from a nearby bush and walked ahead of me. The grave had been dug by hand, no doubt Mrs. MacLeod’s work, and the casket rested on two sawhorses. It was silver, metal, with airline shipping stickers still clinging to it. I was surprised. You always think of ornate coffins, organ music, that kind of thing. But my mother was going to be buried in what she’d blown into town in from the Omaha morgue. That was fitting, I guessed.

  Simon placed the rose on the lid of the coffin, his pale hand resting next to it. “My sister always loved the outdoors. She loved this spot, high on the rocks. Looking out over everything. Loved music, loved animals, loved her life. Right up until she got sick.” He looked at me, his eyes red behind his glasses. I knew my eyes matched his, in spite of my best intentions not to shed one more tear over her. “Did she pass any of that on to you, Ivy?”

  I shrugged. “We moved around too much to have pets, like I said. We didn’t even have plants.”

  Simon sighed. “I thought as much. I wish I could ask my sister why she did things the way she did.”

  “Not much mystery there,” I muttered. “No offense.”

  Simon lifted his glasses off the bridge of his nose, rubbing the red mark. “I wish I knew why she turned against us. She and I were close, especially after our mother . . . well.”

  “Also went crazy?” I supplied.

  Simon winced.

  “I’m sorry,” I said instantly, my stomach knotting for reasons that had nothing to do with the coffin a few feet away. Usually I had a better sense of when I’d crossed the line with a mark. Maybe that was the problem—Simon wasn’t a mark; he was family. I wasn’t supposed to read him and figure out how to manipulate him into telling me secrets and giving me all his cash to supposedly get in touch with his dead relatives. That wasn’t how normal families behaved. It wasn’t my uncle’s fault I didn’t know how to be a part of one.

  “Mom really messed up,” I said. My throat was tight, burning. I could still taste that metallic, overfiltered bathwater.

  A strong wind caught the rose, and it slid off the coffin, slamming into the ground and scattering its petals over the muddy turned earth. “She wasn’t happy,” I whispered. “But at least all that’s over now.” I sucked in a breath, looked at Simon. He was holding it together, but his cheeks were wet, and his shoulders trembled. I knew from watching other people’s grieving families that he was about two seconds from losing it. So I got control of my own shaky voice and spoke in the smooth, unruffled one I’d practiced over and over, and told the biggest lie I’d fed Simon yet.

  “I don’t know what happens after this,” I told Simon. “But I hope wherever she is, she’s at peace.”

  Simon swiped at his cheek with a gloved hand and slid his other arm around me, squeezing my shoulders with that surprising, wiry strength of his. I didn’t pull away—I didn’t even have to hold myself still. I was glad for the support. We lingered silently while Mrs. MacLeod used the winch on her Jeep to lower the casket the rest of the way into the grave. Simon picked up a handful of dirt and threw it on the casket. I did the same. Then it was over.

  Simon poured himself a mug of coffee the moment we were back in the kitchen and filled his mug to the rim from a bottle of supermarket bourbon he pulled from the back of a cabinet. He took a swig, winced, and then tipped the bottle to an empty mug, looking at me. “Ivy?”

  Normally I’d have been jazzed to have an adult offer me booze, but it just felt wrong, Plus, it was barely 10:00 a.m. “I’m good.” I said. “But I will take coffee.”

  “I know that you don’t feel much now,” Simon said as he handed me coffee and went back to sipping and wincing between sentences. “But when it eventually hits you, you can talk with me, or I can arrange for you to speak with someone else. A professional.”

  “I don’t need grief counseling,” I said sharply. I’d held it together in the cemetery, but if Simon kept going over and over this I was going to lose it.

  “I have no doubt your anger toward Myra is justified,” Simon murmured. “But she’s dead, Ivy, and holding that bitterness now only hurts you.” He drained his mug. “There’s a saying: resentment is like taking poison and expecting the other person to die. Whatever she did . . .”

  I lost it. I couldn’t keep quiet another second. Weirdly, it was because Simon had been so good to me, last night when I broke down and today at the funeral, that I started yelling, words barely separated by breathing. He was a truly decent person. He didn’t deserve the illusion about his sister, that she was damaged but basically okay. That the person he’d loved was still alive in her in any way, shape, or form the day she’d killed herself.

  “She tried to kill me!” I slammed
my mug down, coffee sloshing all over the kitchen table. “She wasn’t confused or just angry. She was so calm when she did it. She held my head under water in a bathtub, and I think she regretted not going through with it every day after, because she never treated me like I was human again, much less her daughter.” I was shaking, body and voice. I’d never been this honest with anyone, and it was terrifying. “You’ve treated me more like family in the past week than she did in sixteen years.”

  Simon stared at me, eyes unblinking behind his glasses. I shut my own eyes, waiting for the yelling to start, for the rage I’d seen the other night. He’d call me a liar, a troublemaker, want to know why I had to stir up drama. Why was I ungrateful? How dare I speak that way about his dead sister?

  I jumped when arms wrapped around me, but I didn’t fight. Simon pulled my head down onto his shoulder, his free hand rubbing my back. “I’m so sorry, Ivy,” he whispered. “I had no idea.”

  I sniffed hard. I’d had enough of crying over Mom, but I couldn’t stop. “I knew she was sick, but you have to believe if I had an inkling she’d tried to harm you, if you’d ever contacted me for help, I would have taken you in years ago, no questions asked.”

  “I do,” I said very softly. For all his awkwardness and temper, I really did think Simon would have helped me. It wasn’t his fault Mom had kept me hidden.

  “I am so very sorry,” Simon whispered.

  I pulled back, using the hem of my shirt to wipe my face. “It’s okay, Uncle Simon. It’s not your fault.”

  “I can’t change the past,” he said. “But going forward, maybe you and I can give each other what we didn’t get from our family until now. I want you to stay here, Ivy. Not just until high school is over. I want this to be your home. You can go to college all expenses paid, make a life for yourself—if not on Darkhaven, at least close by. Let me do that for you.”

  “Uncle Simon,” I said. My voice was rough from the yelling and the crying. “You don’t have to overcompensate. Really. We’re good.”

  He managed a real smile this time, not a robot smile. “You’re a good kid, Ivy. I know you haven’t heard that much, but I mean it. I’m very glad you came here.”

  Even though we’d just buried my mother and I’d finally told the worst secret I’d ever kept, I felt strangely light. I wasn’t holding everything so close anymore. I’d dropped a tiny piece of the baggage Mom had left me. I smiled back at Simon. I actually meant it too. “It doesn’t totally suck here,” I allowed. Simon barked a laugh.

  “That’s my girl. Why don’t you go wash your face and relax? If you have homework, just tell the school you were sick on Monday. I’ll back you up.”

  I didn’t argue. I was exhausted, like I’d run around the entire island a dozen times. I went back upstairs, changed into sweats, and after a moment of debate, shoved my clothes from the funeral into the trash can next to my desk. I wasn’t going to wear them again.

  I went to root around in the fridge as night fell, but Mrs. MacLeod loomed out of her apartment and stopped me. “No snacks before supper,” she said. I caught a glimpse of a tight studio off the kitchen, with a hot plate, a twin bed, and, miracle of miracles, a sleek white laptop sitting on a small desk. Just as I was about to ask if she’d let me use her Netflix account, she slammed the door and locked it with a fat skeleton key.

  “So the whole ‘my mother just died and today was her funeral’ exception isn’t gonna cut it with you?” I asked her.

  “We’ve all lost, miss,” she said. “All you can do is carry on, and part of that is sticking to routine. Indulge yourself once, and you’ll be indulgent right along, any time the slightest wind shakes your boughs.”

  I narrowed my eyes at her. “Just what exactly is your problem with me?”

  Mrs. MacLeod shrugged. “Where do I begin? I didn’t care for your mother either.”

  “In case you hadn’t noticed,” I hissed, “I’m kinda going through something. So maybe back off the anti–Mary Poppins routine for one day, okay?”

  Mrs. MacLeod bared her teeth slightly. “Rude. Like mother like daughter, I suppose.”

  “You have no idea what I’m like,” I snapped. “So instead of being awful, why don’t you take up a useful hobby, like renting yourself out at Halloween to scare kids?”

  “You . . .” Mrs. MacLeod started to reach for me but stopped when Simon came into the kitchen.

  “Could I speak with you privately, Ivy?” he said.

  “You could be about to give me the Talk, and it’d be better than this,” I said, rushing to put him between Mrs. MacLeod and me.

  Simon guided me to the door of his office and slid it open. Inside, it looked pretty normal, if you were either a big fan of scary movies or Hannibal Lecter. Bones, human and animal, were everywhere. The animals and people were displayed on bases or strung together with thick black wire and hung on the wall. Birds flew in ghostly formation from the ceiling. Behind a giant desk that was carved with all kinds of mythical creatures across the front, taxidermy heads that still had their fur studded the deep red wallpaper.

  “It’s a little much,” Simon said. “My grandfather was a biologist and a big-game hunter. He collected most of these. Before he lost it and committed multiple murders, obviously.”

  I felt my shoulders pull in as I followed him around the desk to the wall, feeling dozens of empty eye sockets and glass eyeballs on me. Any way you looked at it, displaying the prey of a guy who’d gone insane and massacred half a dozen people was both incredibly tacky and unbelievably macabre.

  “The state requires that I sign a few documents relating to finalizing my guardianship,” Simon explained, sitting himself behind the desk. He was way too small for the giant thing and still looked like a little kid playing with his dad’s stuff. “I just wanted to make sure I had all your details correct.”

  He wrote with a fountain pen on a stack of forms while I rattled off my social security number and our last address in Omaha. A clanging sound came from the kitchen, and Mrs. MacLeod bellowed. “Simon! Telephone for you!”

  Simon winced, heaving a sigh. “Once in a great while, I miss the days when my mother reigned supreme and insisted that the help didn’t holler at you from other rooms.” He pushed back from the desk. “Wait here, I won’t be a minute.”

  He was gone a lot more than a minute, and I got bored and started wandering around the office, touching all the taxidermy. It was creepy, like touching too-realistic stuffed animals, and I thought I’d really screwed myself when I touched a snowy owl mounted on the wall and its head halfway came off.

  “Crap,” I whispered, trying to push the piece of foam back onto the rest of the body. I stopped when I saw a spring-loaded latch inside the owl where its foam core should be. I twisted the head all the way to the left.

  One of the panels of wallpaper whispered back and into the wall, leaving a small open passage behind the desk.

  “No way,” I whispered, peering into the small gap. I expected something spooky, dripping with moss and moisture, or sticky with salt like the cave at the beach, but instead a set of stone steps led down into the darkness, and the brick wall was clean and free of any sinister lichens or drawings of demon goats or 666 diagrams.

  I grabbed one of the ever-present flashlights that were all over the house from the top of Simon’s desk, snapped it on, and stepped onto the top stair. I didn’t even wonder if I should be doing this—I was definitely investigating any hidden passages I stumbled across.

  The steps went down a long way, deeper than a basement, into a long room held up by arched brick columns. I saw the shadow of huge granite blocks above. I was looking up at the bones of the manor house, and I shivered at the faint sound of water droplets echoing from somewhere in the dark.

  My light picked up the edge of a circular stone well. It was too perfect to be natural, circular and wider than a hot tub, and I saw faded chisel marks on the stone: BLOODGOOD 1726. Great. Creepy-ass Connor was probably the last person to come down here. />
  I dipped my hand into the gently lapping water just below the lip of the cistern. It shocked me, so cold it almost burned at the tips of my fingers. It was the kind of cold things only get when they come from some place so deep and dark nobody has ever laid eyes on it.

  “Ouch,” I muttered, flexing my fingers to get the blood flowing again.

  I stepped around the cistern and looked into the beam of my flashlight. It illuminated a flat slab of the same flaky white stone the entire island was made out of under the thin coating of trees and sand. This one had flat black markings carved into it, rough ragged lines that looked like scars more than anything.

  I fidgeted. This place made me feel like I had ants crawling all over me, a sensation that I couldn’t shake off.

  “Ivy!” Simon’s voice echoed off the ceiling, made me jump a foot.

  “Down here!” I called, and watched the bobbing light of Simon’s electric lantern as it came down the steps.

  “Ivy, for the love of Pete,” he said. “This is not safe. There are quarry holes down here that go fifteen feet deep. Come upstairs this instant.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said, pointing to the rock. “I was just looking at this.”

  “The altar rock,” Simon said. “The first inhabitants of the island used it to worship, to mourn, and to celebrate. Connor built the house over it, hateful sort of man that he was. Superstitious idiots would probably say he thought he’d draw some kind of power from it.”

  “Yeah, this place is giving off a real Amityville vibe,” I said.

  Simon snorted a laugh. “Come upstairs. All that’s really down here is that cistern, and the water in it is terribly tainted. You’ll be seeing colors and hearing voices in no time if you ingest it. Who knows, maybe that’s what made Connor go batty.”

  “You sure that isn’t what messed up Mom and my grandmother?” I asked. He shook his head.

  “Connor’s son dug a new well, and so far so good.”

  He turned to go back up the stairs, and then glanced back. “Ivy,” he said hesitantly. “The tunnels connected to this cellar run clear under the island. Any map that may have existed is long gone, but one could still find their way with enough time.” He raised the lantern so it dazzled my eyes. “I need to know: Did you see Neil Ramsey the night he died? Did he find the route to this cellar and come inside the manor? If he tried to hurt you, Ivy, I’d understand. I wouldn’t be angry.”