The Dark Hour

by K. J. Young

  A cipher? Like a code? He shakes his head, unsure what she’s getting at, then turns the page again to see the words he saw earlier, but now they have more meaning: It’s all getting to be too much. I’m losing my mind.

  Mark scans the column with the repeating words: Losing my mind. Losing my mind. Losing my mind. Then he flips back to read the previous page once again. What could she have found? And what sounds? He’s aggravated at how vague this is compared to previous entries. Earlier in the journal, she wrote extensive posts about what she made for breakfast, right down to how many eggs were in the omelet, and now she bails on giving details? He flips through the pages, double-checking to see there is nothing he missed. If Mark had to summarize what happened, he’d say she started off fine, then became anxious about something vague and indefinable. That, coupled with nightmares and lack of sleep, messed with her head. The final straw was her last visit to the ballroom upstairs.

  Could she have been delusional or sleepwalking? Possibly. Or maybe she had a mental breakdown. Somehow, though, he doesn’t think that was the case. He’d worked with her every day, and although she was anxious on occasion, her demeanor was normal. All was fine until that last day, when she came running to him in the hallway, completely crazed, trembling with fear. Neither Dr. Cross nor Roy mentioned that she’d asked to be taken away from the house or that she’d confronted them about something she saw on the second floor. Instead, Dr. Cross said she’d had a psychotic break. He said it so confidently.

  But is Dr. Cross even qualified to make that kind of diagnosis? He isn’t a psychiatrist—or at least Mark doesn’t think so.

  Mark suddenly realizes that he has no idea what kind of doctor Dr. Cross is or where he works. He’s never mentioned an office or a hospital, and he seems to be available to Roy and Alma on extremely short notice. Odd. Aren’t doctors usually busy professionals with jam-packed schedules?

  Things that seemed ordinary enough earlier are starting to strike him as suspicious. It’s as if Lisa’s anxiety has been transferred from the page through his fingertips and into his own body. Was she unhinged, or was she onto something? At the very least, she found something horrifying behind the podium on the second floor. He can’t even begin to guess what it could be, but he knows a way to find out. Without hesitating, Mark opens the nightstand drawer and puts the journal back inside, then pulls out the flashlight.

  There’s no other way around it. If Mark wants to know what spooked Lisa, he needs to go upstairs and see for himself.

  Chapter Twenty

  Once he’s in the hallway, flashlight in hand, it occurs to Mark that he should check on Roy and Alma before heading upstairs. The door to Roy’s bedroom is open slightly, so he pushes it wider, wincing as it creaks. Holding his breath, he listens, and when he doesn’t hear any signs of Roy stirring, he walks into the room and stands over the bed. No need for the flashlight here—the light seeping in from the hall is enough. Roy is sleeping on his back, mouth open, gums on display. His dentures sit in a glass of water on the nightstand next to the bed. His snoring is a guttural, back-of-the-throat gargling noise, slow and steady.

  From there, Mark passes through the bathroom into Alma’s room, using his flashlight as a guide. Unlike her brother, the old woman sleeps on her side, one arm raised as if she’s in grade school and knows the answer. Her snoring makes a whistling noise as she exhales through her nose. With her face mashed against the pillow and her mouth open like a hooked fish, she looks half-dead. Mark shakes his head at the sight. In movies, sleeping people, even the elderly, are always pictured as beautiful and serene, but in real life nothing could be further from the truth.

  At least there’s one good thing: Lisa was right about the brandy manhattans. Neither one looks likely to wake up anytime soon.

  He backs out of Alma’s room, goes through the bathroom, and passes Roy once again. He thinks about the stories of old people going to bed and never waking up. How must it be to go to sleep not knowing if you’ll be opening your eyes in the morning?

  After he leaves the room, Mark flicks off the overhead light in the hallway and uses the flashlight to move down the hall. Alone, in the dark, he might as well be in a different house. Or maybe it’s not the lack of light, but the liquor kicking in? In any case, his sense of space is off. The distance to the front of the house stretches forward endlessly in the dark.

  When he reaches the front entryway, he is surprised to hear the howling of the wind outside. He doesn’t remember hearing that there would be a storm, but of course, now that he’s living in Alden Manor, he’s cut off from news of the outside world. Curious, he turns off the flashlight and pulls the sidelight curtain aside to peek outside. Spotting a figure on the sidewalk directly in front of the house, a cold shock runs down his spine. The person stands in the slice of gloom between streetlights, making it hard to see clearly, but when Mark’s eyes adjust, he can tell it’s a tall man wearing something over his face. An oval mask, made of some stiff material, with cut outs for the eyes and the mouth. The openings are rough and uneven, as if the mask is made of cardboard and the holes were snipped without having been drawn or measured first. The man faces him, open stance, in a challenging way, as if he’s waiting for a fight.

  Mark’s mouth drops open as he gets a sinking feeling. Is this guy for real? He wonders if he’s a burglar, but if so, why is he standing out in the open, so close to the street? As he continues to stare, the man reaches out and points to Mark, then beckons to him, like asking him to come out of the house.

  What the hell? How can he even see me?

  Mark drops the curtain and steps away from the window, his heart pounding, fear and anger filling his chest cavity. Fear because a guy in a mask beckoning like he’s the Grim Reaper is scary as fuck—and anger, because, really? Some asshole on the sidewalk is ruining his night with some crazy-ass behavior?

  After taking a few breaths, he peeks out again, only to see that the man has moved and is closer, now halfway up the walkway to the house. Again, he waves a finger in Mark’s direction, then points to the space in front of him. Accompanying the gesture, Mark’s mind brings up taunts from a childhood game. Come out, come out, wherever you are! Like hell he will.

  He weighs whether or not to call the police and then decides against it. The guy is trespassing, but he doubts they’d come out for that reason. No real crime has been committed. Mark has a feeling they’d think his call was ridiculous, and he can understand that mindset. This is trivial. It’s stupid to be afraid of some idiot walking around in a mask. Probably that obnoxious hippie, Doug. Mark looks down to double-check that the door is still locked, and when he glances back through the window, he’s shocked to see that the guy is gone. How did he move that quickly? If this were a horror movie, Mark would turn around to see the guy right behind him, scary mask covering his face and a butcher knife in his hand. His legs weaken at the thought. Mark closes his eyes and talks himself through his fear. He checked all the locks earlier in the evening. No one can get in, and even if they could, he’d certainly hear them first.

  As he turns around, he flicks on the flashlight and scans the entry, relieved to see it empty. The wind still howls, but the sound is gentler now, more of a whimper than a wail.

  Well, he decides, it’s best to head upstairs before he loses his nerve altogether. He walks slowly up the steps, hand gliding along the banister. There seems to be more steps than the night he followed Lisa.

  Lisa. He thinks about what he just read in her journal: This house is not safe.

  If she’d told him what she was going through, could he have helped her? Maybe. He tries not to think about her last moments, how she looked falling away from the window and plummeting to the roof. He should have saved her, but he didn’t. He failed. That’s all there is to it, and there’s no going back. Nothing can be done about it now.

  When he gets to the second floor, he tucks the flashlight under his arm and opens the double doors that lead to the wide hallway. As before, the air
upstairs is stagnant and hot. Thicker, Lisa called it, and he understands that now. It takes effort to draw a deep breath. He keeps going down the hall, which seems both longer and narrower than it did before. What did she write? The walls of the hallway were closing in on me, like they didn’t want me to be there. There must be a plausible explanation for this. Most likely, because Lisa knew she wasn’t supposed to be up here, her guilty mind played tricks on her. It’s clear she was seriously losing it, and her insanity must have been contagious, because it’s affecting him now.

  The urge to turn around and go back is so strong that he has to talk himself out of it. He tells himself that if he just sees this through, in half an hour he’ll be in his room safely tucked in his bed. Snug as a bug in a rug, as his mom used to say when he was a kid. All he needs to do is see for himself what pushed Lisa over the edge. Hell, if it winds up being too frightening, he’ll stop by the drink cart afterward for a shot of brandy. If he’d thought of it sooner, he would have done it beforehand. An extra dose of liquid courage would come in handy right about now.

  As he walks, he reaches out with his left hand and lets his fingertips graze the wall, just below the framed paintings, to ground himself. Nothing scary here, he thinks, trying to keep his heart from racing.

  Reaching the double doors to the ballroom, he’s surprised to see they’re wide open. Lisa must have been so rattled that she fled the room without bothering to close up. His steps echo on the tile floor, making the room seem bigger than last time—and more menacing too. When he casts the light beam around the room, his imagination turns the chandeliers overhead into large spiders, waiting to swoop down on him. He swallows hard and walks forward, past the weird wooden table with the leather straps and to the podium in the front of the room.

  Inside the podium. That’s what she’d written.

  Mark steps up onto the wooden platform and shines the light behind it. The podium has a shelf underneath, which holds a large leather-bound book, spine facing out, the size of an encyclopedia. The lower part of the podium is covered by a door. A storage cabinet. He pulls open the cabinet door, and a waft of dust flies up, causing him to step back to wipe his nose and blink his eyes. When his vision clears, he sees an old-fashioned Victrola record player sitting on a shelf near the floor. The metal horn is fluted, like a flower. The base is a wooden box, with a metal crank handle on one side. A record is on the turntable.

  Maybe it was used in Alma and Roy’s act back in the day? But no, he does the math and doesn’t think they’re quite that old. This antique would have been old even before their time. Still, it could have been part of one of their tricks. Magicians use all kinds of props.

  But Lisa specifically mentioned hearing something horrifying, which fit with the Victrola. I can’t believe I never thought to look inside the podium before. What I found! My skin crawls thinking of it. And those sounds! They will haunt me forever.

  The crank is too close to the edge of the cabinet to comfortably turn, so he tucks the flashlight under his arm and picks up the whole thing. It’s heavier than he would have guessed, and bulky too. He moves slowly, carrying it across the room and setting it down on the table. Now he inspects it, noticing a metal plate attached to the front with the word Victor next to an image of a dog, head cocked to one side, listening to a Victrola just like this one. At the bottom of the plate are the words Victor Talking Machine Co. He turns his attention to the record, but the label in the middle is blank. He turns the crank clockwise a dozen times, hoping he’s not breaking a valuable antique, and waits. When nothing happens, he tries turning a latch located adjacent to the record. When the turntable begins revolving, he feels his heart thump in anticipation of what comes next.

  And those sounds! They will haunt me forever.

  Mark knows that he needs to just get it over with. He lifts the needle and lowers it onto the outside groove of the record. At first all that comes out of the horn is static, but eventually an undercurrent of conversation can be heard. It sounds as if the voices weren’t intended to be recorded but are speaking in the background. He tries to make out the words, with no success. Too soft and blended. Another noise comes through. A woman sobbing? He lowers his ear to the Victrola’s horn, trying to distinguish it over the voices and the static. It may be a woman, or it could be an animal. It’s a whimpering, tormented sound.

  Just as he’s about to lift the needle to replay the beginning, a man’s voice, whiskey-hued and loud, says, “Let us begin.”

  And then the chanting starts. The voices recite the words in unison in a language he doesn’t understand. From the sound of it, the group is comprised of both men and women. Maybe fewer than ten individuals? They speak in a singsongy fashion. It reminds him of kids’ nursery rhymes, the way they emphasize the syllable on the end of each line. He listens, trying to make sense of it. Each beginning line is different, followed by an identical chant. To him the repetitive part sounds like Sursum corda. He recognizes these words from the Catholic masses his grandparents took him to as a kid, the ones conducted by the priest entirely in Latin. The whole thing sounded like so much gibberish back then, but he must have been paying attention on some level to have this phrase stick in his head.

  The chanting gets faster and faster, the voices more impassioned. The sounds are clearer, the static less noticeable. Mark feels a chill go down his spine, and he wishes they would stop. He could, in theory, lift the stylus off the record anytime, but he’s caught up in the sound. It’s carrying him along, holding him in its grip. The sound of the voices emanates from the horn, but it also seems to surround him, as if the people are in the room, right next to him. But that’s impossible. He knows it can’t be so, but some part of him is afraid to move, too frightened to turn the flashlight away from the Victrola because if there are other people there, he doesn’t want to know.

  As fearful as he was earlier that Alma and Roy might wake up, now he wishes they’d walk in right at this moment and relieve him of this, turn off the Victrola, tell him that it’s nothing, that it was part of their magic act back in the day, save him from the chanting that all ends the same.

  Sursum corda.

  Sursum corda.

  Sursum corda.

  Mark knows he is breathing too fast. His heart is hammering, muscles trembling. His vision is affected; dancing spots like dust motes are all around him.

  He swallows hard, forcing rational thoughts into his brain. It’s just a recording from a long time ago. All of the voices belong to people who are most likely dead. The house is locked up. There’s nothing here. I have conjured up my own fear.

  Bile creeps into his mouth, and his stomach lurches.

  His heart is going even faster now, racing crazily out of control. Just when he thinks it might explode in his chest, the chanting stops and there’s the noise of a woman’s scream. A high-pitched, tortured sound, it fills the ballroom and echoes off the walls. It is the exact sound of misery and impending death. There’s a pause, a silence filled with static, and after that, another noise. This time it’s a woman’s laughter, a melodic giggling, followed by her shouting, “Praise be!”

  The other voices whoop in merriment, and there’s a shuffling sound as if they’re now moving. Closer to her, maybe? The sound quality is poor, so he can only guess. At the end of the recording, he hears a man say, “Success.”

  And then it’s over. The stylus goes around and around many, many times before Mark is able to lift it off the record and stop the turntable from revolving. His legs have turned to jelly, barely holding him up. He wouldn’t have believed he could suffer this kind of emotional reaction listening to an old record. Lisa’s doing, most likely. Leaning against the table, he wills his heart to stop racing. Once it slows, he finally gets the nerve to shine the flashlight around the room. With shaking hands, he turns.

  Of course, no one is there.

  Wedging the flashlight under his arm, he picks up the Victrola and carries it back to the podium, returning it to its original spot
. After he closes the cabinet door, he moves quickly, to leave the room and go downstairs.

  It’s after he’s downed a shot of brandy and gone to bed that he remembers the book on the shelf in the podium. Damn. If he’d been thinking rationally, he would have brought it down with him. Too bad.

  He knows one thing—he’s never going up there again.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Mark wakes with a shock. The room is bright. Instinctively he knows too much of the morning has elapsed. It’s his second day working as a live-in home health aide, and he’s overslept. At the exact instant he looks at the clock radio, the number for the minute hand flips from six to seven, making it 9:27 a.m. Damn. Why didn’t his alarm go off?

  He planned to be up at six thirty in order to serve breakfast by seven. Nurse Darby normally arrives at eight, so in theory she should be in the house already. How is it that no one came to wake him? Although he feels sluggish and hungover, he forces himself out of bed and scrambles to find some suitable clothing. Pulling on his pants, he has a sudden explanation for the fact that no one woke him. Is it possible that both Alma and Roy died in the night, and Nurse Darby is at home with her own illness? He shakes his head. No. What are the chances disaster should befall all three of them at once? Shrugging a T-shirt over his head, he decides to skip his morning ritual. It won’t kill him not to shave or brush his teeth this once. He’ll work it into the day later on, after he’s made his apologies.

  If there’s anyone to apologize to.

  While he’s tying his shoes, the events of the night before play through his mind. The masked man standing outside. The trip upstairs and listening to the Victrola. The vibrations of the chanting making their way through his entire body, chilling him right to the bone. And then fleeing the ballroom and going to the blue room, where he downed a shot of brandy. Afterward he took a cold shower. Actions intended to help him sleep, but obviously some overcompensation happened, and he wound up in a sleep coma instead. He can’t believe that he overslept by so much. Shame washes over him, and he hears the words he’s tried so hard to shake off over the years, but here they are again: Loser. Unreliable. Never going to amount to anything.