by Lisa Unger
Inside the building, it was dark and rank. His allergies acted up almost immediately.
“Where are you guys?” he shouted.
“Down here!”
He followed the sound of their voices through the foyer and down a long hallway, through an industrial-size kitchen—everything covered with a thick layer of grime, rusted out, crumbling.
He sidestepped a hole in the floor, feeling his way along the wainscoting. In retrospect, he was way less afraid than he should have been. Back then, before, he was rarely afraid of anything. His parents were pragmatists; his father an engineer. He didn’t read Ian bedtime stories; he read to him from technical journals, books about how things worked. Ian knew how to change a tire, fix a leaky faucet, change a fuse. He hadn’t had stories about monsters and ghosts, castles and princesses, no fairy tales. So none of that imagining was part of his inner vocabulary. His worries were structural—rotting floors that you could easily fall through, and rusty nails, broken glass, falling chandeliers.
“Ian!”
He came to a doorway that led to a deeper darkness.
“Careful on the stairs,” yelled Matthew, just as Ian almost tripped.
Down below he could see the flickering glow of lights. He followed, testing each step before committing his weight, down the long narrow staircase. When he made it down, Matthew and Mason were waiting.
There must have been a hundred candles, burning on the floor, on stacked crates, on tall candleholders. Mason was carefully moving to each with a lighter he must have had in his pocket.
Ian approached and saw that on the ground a giant circle had been drawn in chalk so dark it might have been coal. Within the circle there was a gigantic X. It looked vaguely satanic, even to Ian, who didn’t know much about religion. His parents were also atheists, though his mother sometimes leaned toward the agnostic.
When Mason was done, he turned to look at them. He seemed older, taller in the dim, his shadow enormous on the far wall.
“So how does it work?” said Matthew, trying to sound bored. But Ian saw from the way he bit his lower lip and kept looking back at the staircase that he was as nervous as Ian. Mason, however, seemed right at home.
“You stand on the X, close your eyes, and breathe, center yourself. Then tell the Dark Man what you want. What you want more than anything.”
“And then what?” asked Ian.
“He tells you what he wants you to do for him. If you do it, you get what you asked for. And you can go to his mansion whenever you want.”
It sounded like the lie that it was, childish, too complicated. Stupid. Ian was starting to regret leaving Claire. Maybe he would have tried to kiss her, the two of them all alone in the woods.
“What do you mean he tells you?” asked Matthew.
Mason shrugged. “I don’t know. Like he’ll send you a message—somehow.”
“So he gives you what you want? Or he takes you to his mansion? Which one is it?”
“Whatever you want,” said Mason, flushing.
“Bullshit,” said Matthew. He kicked at a can on the ground, and it skittered into the dark edges of the room.
“And the thing you ask for, it can’t be like you want a million dollars, or all the pizza in the world. It has to be something true. Something real.”
“But what if I really want a lifetime supply of pizza?” asked Matthew with mock earnestness.
Ian laughed; then they were both cracking up, mostly just blowing off steam, acting from nerves. Once they started, they couldn’t stop. Ian was laughing so hard his stomach hurt.
Of course, Mason got mad.
“Shut up!” he yelled. His voice echoed. “You fucking morons. Shut up!”
“Okay, okay,” said Ian, reining it in, taking some shuddering breaths. He dropped an arm around Mason. “Relax. You go first, Mace. Show us how you do it.”
Ian expected hemming and hawing, but Mason stepped right into the circle as if he’d been planning this all along.
“How many times have you been here?” asked Ian.
Mason didn’t answer, just shook his head, his eyes shining in the candlelight. Ian felt the tiny hairs on the back of his neck tingle.
Both he and Matthew started edging back toward the stairs. They didn’t even have to look at each other to know that the second Mason closed his eyes, they were going to run for it, leave Mason in the candlelit basement and bolt as fast as they could for Claire and home.
“Oh my God. What are you idiots doing?” Claire, who had decided to join them after all, stood on the edge of the candlelight, eyes wide and black in the darkness, skin ghostly.
“I think Mason’s going to ask the Dark Man for what he wants,” said Ian.
Mason closed his eyes and lifted his palms. Instead of running, they all stood frozen, watching. There was something electric, something thick in the air.
“This is a bad idea,” Claire said pragmatically. She looked around, seemed to assess the situation coolly. “Penny is going to start calling around to our parents. We’re going to get in big trouble.”
“Just do it, Mace,” said Matthew. “Do it now.”
Mason took a deep breath. They all did the same, riveted to the sight of Mason in the middle of that circle, the candles glowing all around him. All of them, Ian suspected, thinking about what they, too, really, truly wanted.
“I wish,” Mason said. His voice sounded funny, tight and deep. “I want—”
They waited, Claire grabbing Ian’s hand tight. What did someone like Mason want, really want? What would he be willing to say in front of Claire, Ian, and Matthew—summer friends at best?
“I want my father to die. He beats me, and my mom. He’s a drunk and a monster. And I wish he was dead.”
Claire gasped, covered her mouth. Ian and Matthew exchanged a wide-eyed look. And the air all around them felt leaden. They waited. What would happen now, as the candles flickered in the draft?
Then Mason started to laugh, like really crack up. He doubled over with it, then looked over, pointing at the three of them, who had huddled together.
“You guys,” he said. “You should see your faces. Oh my God.”
“Mason,” said Claire, her voice as stern as any mom’s.
More laughter from Mason, tears streaming. “Are you serious?” he managed between peals of laughter. “The Dark Man? You think that shit’s for real?”
“You asshole,” said Matthew, pissed, embarrassed.
Then there was a loud bang upstairs; a harsh gust of wind blew down the stairs and extinguished all the candles with a woosh. After a stunned delay, the four of them ran screaming in terror up the stairs, grabbing for each other, Ian helping Claire, Matthew leading the way. They ran through the house, footfalls rattling the walls, yells ghostly, echoing in the dark, all of them just lucky not to fall through the holes in the floor.
Outside the ruined structure they kept running—through the clearing, into the trees, until they couldn’t run anymore, sides stitching, breathless. Then, silently, they kept walking toward Merle House.
“I’m sorry,” Mason called finally, trailing behind. “I was just messing with you guys.”
“It wasn’t funny, Mason,” yelled Claire, turning around to face him. “You scared the shit out of us.”
“Well,” said Matthew, coming to a stop. “It was a little funny.”
“Yeah,” said Ian, grinning. The charge, the terror, had passed. He was nauseated from exertion, and they could see the roof of Merle House up ahead. There was still time, so maybe Penny hadn’t set off the alarm. “It was a little funny.”
“You guys are idiots,” said Claire. “I’m going home.”
When she had left them, the three of them started laughing, continuing on toward home.
“Do you really wish your father was dead?” asked Matthew.
“Yeah,” said Mason. “I really do.”
Matthew nodded but didn’t say anything else. And the laughter died again. When they got to the po
rch, Penny was waiting, hands on ample hips. She wore her dark hair short and dressed in simple clothes—usually some kind of pencil skirt or pleated pant with a white top, a uniform of sorts without quite being that.
“Mason and Ian, your mothers are worried about you. Please come inside and call them. Where’s Claire?”
“She went home,” said Matthew.
Ian could tell Penny didn’t like this answer by the way she pushed up her glasses, locking Matthew in a frown. “Gentlemen don’t let ladies walk home unescorted. I shouldn’t have to tell you boys that.”
“Sorry, Penny,” said Matthew. “She was mad at us, stormed off.”
“Hmm,” said the older woman. “I’m sure she had good reason.”
The boys all nodded obediently. She did. They were assholes.
“Matthew, please call her parents and tell them she’s on her way, to be on the lookout and to call if she’s not home soon.”
They all scuttled inside to obey, taking turns on the phone in the kitchen. When it was Matthew’s turn, he took the cordless phone into the hallway, his voice lowered to a whisper when it seemed like he reached Claire.
I’m sorry, Ian heard him say. Don’t be mad.
There was an unfamiliar intimacy to Matthew’s tone; maybe there was something going on between Matthew and Claire. Ian felt a tight knot of jealousy, but he pressed it back.
“What was that place?” Ian asked Mason later, as they all sat at the kitchen table eating the hamburgers and macaroni and cheese Penny had waiting for them.
“I think it was a school,” said Mason. “Like a reform school or something. Some kids I know go there to get high. They put all that crap down there, the candles, drew the circle on the ground to call the Dark Man.”
It sounded like a lie. But Matthew and Ian had had enough of Mason for one night. Mason ate and ate, like he hadn’t had a decent meal in a week—two hamburgers, three helpings of mac and cheese. And maybe he hadn’t; the kid was rail thin. He always raved about Penny’s meals, which to Ian and Matthew were pretty standard fare. Ian was relieved when he left after dinner.
“It was pretty funny, right?” Mason asked at the door, eager, Ian could tell, to ignite the laughter again.
“Yeah,” said Matthew, back to being a dick. “It was fucking hilarious.”
He shut the door while Mason was still standing there.
Mason didn’t show up the next morning; Ian, Claire, and Matthew headed to the lake. It was an easy, sunny, lazy day that ended when the fireflies began to appear in the gloaming. If anyone had asked Ian what they’d done, he wouldn’t have been able to say. Swam, lay on the towel he brought, watched Claire run and jump and swim. They’d found a nest of baby birds, mouths gaping. Looked for frogs. Climbed a tree. Ate sandwiches Penny had packed for them. Everything. Nothing. That was summer.
Ian didn’t tell the other two about the nightmares he’d had all night about the woods, about the Dark Man and Claire. How, in his dreams, it had been him in that circle, saying what he wanted, and what the Dark Man had asked of him. Just a nightmare. Stupid. Already faded to nothing. Almost.
It wasn’t until they’d gotten home to Merle House and seen the police car parked there that they’d even thought about Mason and what had happened the night before, the things he’d said.
10.
The sun streamed through the clouds, and the day had a kind of golden glow. There was a crispness in the air and, in spite of the long night, Ian felt light, hopeful, as he sat on the porch of Astrid and Chaz’s house and watched the sun come up over the mountains, a mist lazing through the trees.
It’s a new day, Liz used to say every morning. The possibilities are endless.
Maybe she was right.
Josh had left, unsettled or disbelieving—or a little of both—by the story of the Dark Man.
“So you tell him what you want. But first you have to do something for him?” Josh had asked. They’d left the master bedroom to return to the kitchen.
“Or you might get the thing you want first, and then later he asks for what he wants in return.”
Josh tore into another energy bar.
“And how precisely is this communicated? Does he say it? Does he have a voice?”
It was a good question. An investigator’s question. But Ian didn’t have a good answer, had to think about it.
“You know about the Dark Man because you’re told by someone else,” he said. “So if you go to him, or he comes to you, then on some level you’ve already made the agreement.”
Josh seemed very young and tired, like a little boy who needed to be tucked in.
“Liz thought that all hauntings, even possessions, are internal events,” said Josh. He sounded almost petulant. Mommy said that monsters weren’t real.
“That’s true,” Ian agreed. “She believed that there was nothing truly evil in the universe, just a balanced blend of light and darkness. That true haunting, possession, supernatural phenomena in general, were psycho-spiritual events, possibly an energy imbalance. That each event was very personal, most often not seeable by anyone else but the haunted. For her, cleansing, even exorcism, was about healing dark or disturbed energies. It was about untangling, releasing.”
“And for you?”
“I don’t know.”
“So you saw him?” Josh pressed. “That night with your friends?”
“No,” he said. “But I felt him. Or something.”
“And what about last night? Did you see him?”
“Maybe.”
“Or maybe you were just dreaming.”
“It didn’t feel like a dream. The Dark Man—he seems real. Not part of me. Outside of me.”
“But every disturbed person thinks that,” said Josh.
There was that look, the one he was sure he had worn when he talked to Mason, or sometimes when he talked to some of their clients—deep concern for the unstable person before him, confusion, wondering if the darkness was real or imagined.
“True enough,” said Ian.
He rose, a little embarrassed and ready to finish the job. He never finished the story, and Josh did not press for the ending. Probably he didn’t want to know. Most likely he would quit now. When people could no longer hide behind intellectual reasoning, or lean on standard scientific explanations, they became very afraid. They got angry, turned away, and refused to see.
“Did you tell him what you wanted?” Josh was staring wide eyed at Ian.
“He already knew.”
Josh sat upright, seemed comforted by that. “Because he is you, right?”
“Maybe.” If the brain, the mind, is the seat of the divine, the place where the ethereal and the spiritual, reality and fantasy, mingle, then yes, maybe in a sense Ian was the Dark Man, or he was some nether part of Ian. But he didn’t say that.
“And what did he ask of you?” Josh wanted to know.
Ian smiled. “You can’t ever tell.”
“Or what?”
“Or he becomes a destroyer.”
“A destroyer.”
Josh didn’t say anything else. Harry Houdini had a saying that came back to Ian now and again: For those who believe, no explanation is necessary. For those who don’t, none will suffice. He had Josh pegged as a believer; but maybe he was just someone with a lot of questions.
“Go home and get some rest, okay?” said Ian. “We’ll talk later.”
“You sure?” said Josh.
“I’m going to do a standard ritual with the sage, the singing bowls, and the talismans, and tell them it’s done, that the house is clean.”
“Is it?”
“I think so.”
Josh looked around guiltily, torn maybe between knowing he should stay and wanting to leave. “Grab a beer later and talk more?”
“Definitely,” said Ian.
He hit the bowl with the mallet and the sound rang out, bright and clear. It resonated, echoing, then went quiet.
“Are you going to do it? What he want
s? Are you going to do it?”
“Get some rest, kid,” said Ian. “We’ll talk more later.”
They wouldn’t. Ian was never going to see Josh again. He wasn’t sure how he knew that, but he did. Finally, when he realized Ian had said all he was going to say, the kid left.
Ian finished the cleanse, walking through the house with the singing bowl as the sun rose. In the bedroom, he hid a piece of rose quartz behind the long drapes. Rose quartz calms and reassures. In the studio he left a tiny brass statue of Ganesha, the god of overcoming obstacles, in one of the grooves of the big wooden mandala that hung on the wall. In the nursery, he left a piece of moonstone under the cushion of the glider there. Moonstone promoted fertility. In the home office, he left a three-legged toad of good fortune to bring prosperity. He walked through with the sage, one final time. And said a prayer, the same one over and over: Darkness, release this house and this family. Light, bring your cleansing energy, dispelling negativity and welcoming renewal. It was one of Liz’s mantras.
When he was done, he brought a vitamin water out to the porch. Shortly thereafter, Astrid and Chaz glided up in their white Tesla. Chaz wore a slight scowl as he climbed out, dressed in all black, and Astrid had violet circles under her eyes, looking a little fragile. Chaz gave him a curt nod and entered the house without a word.
Astrid came to sit beside him on the porch. She, in contrast to her husband, was dressed all in white, some kind of genie pant and cashmere shawl. She wrapped her arms around her middle, pressed her legs together as if she was cold or trying to make herself very small.
“I’m sorry about Chaz,” she said. “He thinks this whole thing is crazy.”
“I get it,” said Ian. “I’ll get out of your hair. Oh, and sorry, I had a bit of an accident with the smudge stick in your master bedroom; some of the embers burned through the duvet. Just let me know how much it is to replace it, and I’ll take it off your final bill.”
“Sure,” she said, nodding. “So it went well?”
“The house is clear, Astrid. You can be at peace here, live your best life, and grow your family.”