Dark Rooms: Three Novels

by Douglas Clegg

  "Granny was buried in Falmouth," I reminded her.

  "She was only a Raglan by marriage," my sister said. "That was her sister's doing. Dad wanted her here, but he didn't like to stand up to the aunts from that part of the family. They were harpies." Then she nearly brightened. "There must be a way to get in touch with Mom. I know there is. I wrote six months ago to the address I found in Dad's file cabinets, but I got it back unopened. Someone else lives there now. There's got to be a way to find her."

  "Why?"

  "Why not? How many years has it been?" Brooke asked. "She's our mother. She may be married and living on a coffee plantation or something, I don't care. I want to find her. Don't you?"

  "I don't know," I said.

  "I want her to know," Brooke said. "And I want that door to be open for her."

  "If she won't find us," I said, "I'm not sure we can find her."

  4

  Brooke once turned on the TV, only to be faced with the six o'clock news out of Boston. It had a mention of the trial of some priest, and how some vandals had destroyed some of the trees on Boston Common, and a mention of Dad's murder and the suspicion that it might be a serial killer who had been responsible for the death of a New Jersey couple from the previous summer.

  "Joe said they'd do that," I told Brooke. "That the detectives would link it to other murders. He doesn't think it's true."

  When I looked over at her, she'd covered her face with her hands as if weeping, but she made no sound.

  5

  Bruno used music as anger therapy.

  Even as a kid, he had played the piano like it was his angst expeller.

  He tried to play our mother's piano in the living room, but all I heard was a flat tinkling of the keys, as if he could not remember a single composition from the three years of piano lessons he had taken.

  He could not even muster "Moonlight Sonata," which was a tune he had banged out for a solid year, it had seemed, when he had been twelve and seemed to show signs of musical prodigy.

  6

  Me, I drowned the noise in my mind with Sam Adams Ale with Bruno down at the local pub.

  Bruno had become far too familiar with brands of beer (he could distinguish between Alsatian and French and German with his eyes closed; he knew the brewing techniques of Rolling Rock and Coors and how they differed from an upstate New York beer of which he was fond called Genesee). During one of these bouts of beer, Bruno said to me, "I saw something spooky last night."

  "It was Brooke. She's walking all night. Even the dogs won't get up for her."

  "Oh yeah, I noticed. Those pills she takes don't seem to help her sleep much." He waited a beat and took a sip of beer.

  "No, it was outside my window," he said. "It was someone outside my window."

  I shrugged, grabbing the pitcher and pouring out a bit of Guinness into my glass mug. "Brooke."

  "On the second floor," he said. "Jesus, do you ever listen? I saw someone outside, like they were in the oak tree."

  7

  Some hours of the day, I found myself glancing out at the smokehouse. Thinking of the cops. Of Joe Grogan. Of damnedest things. Of my father.

  His last moments.

  8

  The smokehouse was surrounded with dead yellow stalks of weed and grass poking through the snow and what seemed like a never-ending mist, as if a translucent veil of white-gray covered the world.

  It had been both a playhouse and the place of punishment for me as a child. My father had been stern when something truly bad had happened. I tended to be the troublemaker. I think he wept sometimes when he drew off his belt to spank me there. He had been punished horribly as a child (so horribly I did not even understand the stories he used to tell me about a whipping post and a riding crop or a cat o' nine tails that my grandfather hung over the inside of the front door when my father had been a boy).

  My own punishments had never lasted long—usually one or two whacks on the butt, and then I had to sit on the dirty floor of that smelly place for an hour and think about what I had done.

  My father was afraid I would become a delinquent, as his oldest brother had, and end badly. He worried, I'm guessing, that he was more lenient than his own father and that I might turn out to be a terrible human being.

  He believed that there was bad blood in the family from the Irish and Scot sides, some kind of madness and bullheadedness, and that it had landed in his brother, and might have entered me at conception as well.

  He may have been right, since I seemed to always get in trouble or have unexplainable mishaps happen around me that seemed to only point in my direction.

  It had all been centered around the smokehouse, those punishments I got as a kid.

  And the games we used to play as well.

  I circled around the building and adjusted the strip of police tape, even though I knew it was futile.

  The wind would blow the tape away again.

  Didn't matter. The investigators had found nothing. There was nothing to find. Only Brooke's prints and her hair, and my father.

  The smokehouse seemed consecrated now.

  Consecrated by my father's blood.

  9

  One time, I was trying to clear out the gutters of the house, since they'd been neglected since the fall and were full of leaves and muck. I saw Ike Doone out by the smokehouse, and I could not get down the ladder fast enough to go chase him off.

  Other curiosity seekers drove by, slowing on the road as they got near the crime scene.

  10

  At night, after I'd been drinking with Bruno, I'd lay in bed and look at the ceiling believing that the world was somehow an unfair and tragic proposition, and life was a joke.

  One night, I dreamed my father and I were out in a boat together.

  11

  The dream: It was a dinghy, and the sea was calm as a mirror. In the sky, an enormous silver crescent moon, but it was barely dark yet.

  My father was turned with his back to me. He had on the tan baseball cap that he'd often wear when he went fishing. He had no shirt on—his back was bare and pale white. He had a fishing line out in the water. When I looked in the bottom of the boat, near my bare feet, it seemed alive with wriggling fat eels and freshwater trout, their tails flipping as they tried to get out of the boat.

  He turned to face me, and his eyes were no longer there, but blood poured from the empty holes.

  Seagulls flew in the sky above, crying out, and somehow I knew they had taken his eyes.

  Then his eyes were intact, and he got that jolly twinkle in them like he did whenever he was about to tell a funny story. "Don't be afraid," he said. "Just close your eyes. Don't touch anything."

  I glanced down at the eels in the boat. "Them?"

  "Just stay still here. Keep your eyes closed. Don't lean. No talking. Ignore the noise," he said. "Listen to what I'm about to say. Listen very carefully. Each word I say is important. Each word is like a key to a door. I want you to imagine a small red light, so small you can barely see it. Everything about it is completely pitch dark, but the light is red like a tiny, tiny fire. I want you to follow me with that fire, follow me as I take you somewhere else."

  I watched an eel with a mouth like a python as it devoured one of the fish. I nodded, not wanting to say anything to him.

  When I looked up again, the moon had grown larger, as if our boat had moved closer to it. My father hooked a long pike with a wood handle and a sharp barbed tip into one of the eels and was holding it over the boat. The eel wriggled in slow motion against the crescent moon. The moon seemed to have barbed tips, also, and for some reason looked like it was made out of metal.

  One of the seagulls shrieked louder than the rest, and its cry seemed to grow with the echoes of it.

  "She went away," my father said, returning his gaze to the ever-growing moon as the seagull's shriek became a scream. "But someday, she'll be back"

  "Pola?" I asked.

  CHAPTER TEN

  1

&n
bsp; I awoke and, strangely, felt calm from the dream.

  As if my mind was somehow giving me permission to say goodbye to him. As if, despite the savagery of the crime, he was all right, somewhere, on some glassy sea, fishing.

  The only part of the dream that disturbed me was somehow knowing my father knew I was still in love with Pola.

  As I always did whenever I had a strange dream that seemed significant to me, I got up and got a spiral notebook I'd had for years and wrote down the details I could remember in it: Moon, fishing, eels and trout, fingernail crescent moon, seagulls, eyes missing, eyes returned to normal, tan baseball cap, calm water. Pola.

  2

  For the first time in daylight, I went to the village.

  The village was only about a half-mile walk from the eastern edge of Hawthorn. The day was overcast and the woods to the south sent a piney scent up to me as I trudged through the crunchy bits of snow. It had snowed off and on since I arrived, but generally melted by late afternoon down to a manageable slush. I could've borrowed Brooke's truck, but she was sleeping and had the keys somewhere in her room. I didn't want to disturb her.

  The road to town was slick and wet, and I enjoyed the freshness of the day as I went. Part of me wanted to jog the whole way in, to feel my lungs working, but instead, I opted for a lit cigarette out the side of my mouth. My self-destruction would be slow and take as long as cigarettes could take.

  Everything about Burnleyside was unappealing in winter.

  It seemed Main Street had no color after summer—the peeling paint of the white clapboard two-stories all ran together in a jumble of storefronts and thin slivers of small Cape houses. The locals called it the Shambles—the way the stores seemed to pile on top and over each other on Main Street. It always seemed overcrowded in summer, and like a mess of poor architectural planning in the winter. The Oaks, up island, was more picturesque owing to the money poured into the houses and few convenience stores at the end of the island. In the summer, there was a Baskin-Robbins there, and even a McDonald's, all of which closed down for the winter as of October 20th. On Main Street in Burnleyside, I saw MontiLee Stormer with her swanky new hairdo. "Just like a movie star," she said, and at first I wanted to smirk and chuckle at the provincialism of Burnleyside, but when I looked twice at her, it did give her a glamorous look. MontiLee was the woman who women kept their husbands away from because she seemed to be catnip for the men in the village, even if she had never strayed from her own husband. She had the look of a woman who might stray, and no matter how she protested, there were those who thought she'd spent her life in alliances. MontiLee quizzed me about what it had been like living in the South (as she thought of Washington, DC) and asked if the senators and congressmen were as corrupt as they seemed. She talked politics a bit—first national, wondering what the president was up to and why he didn't respond to the letters she'd sent him about what she considered were the growing concerns of the nation. Then she switched to local news.

  "I know I shouldn't be mentioning this," she said. "But any news?"

  "On?"

  "The murder," she whispered, and glanced about the street as if others might hear her. As if it were a big secret. "We're absolutely terrified to go out at night."

  "They think it's a killer from the mainland. Who's back on the mainland," I said, fairly sure that it was a lie. I had to admit it: "I really don't know. I don't even understand what the cops are doing about it."

  "I watch all the Discovery Channel shows on forensics, and it's fascinating. How they can even see how blood sprays a certain way, and—" but she must've seen the look of revulsion in my face, because she stopped. "Our hearts go out to you, dear," she said, and placed a hand on my chest, right above where my heart would be. For just a second, I thought she might be flirting with me, which was less annoying than uncalled for. I will grant that it gave me a tingle, partly because MontiLee was so attractive; I was not immune to her charms. "And you know," she said, keeping her voice low, "you look like you're holding up."

  "Thanks. Ah " I said, fumbling with words. The only thing I could think to say was Joe Grogan's "It's the damnedest thing."

  "I keep meaning to come by and pay my respects," she said, next touching my wrist, lightly. "But with Christmas coming up, and the business—well, my time is never my own."

  After we did the small talk of small towns, MontiLee turned away. She sashayed to the other side of the street, heading toward her realty office. The row of shop fronts seemed dead now. Christmas lights were strung up, blinking even in daylight. At the end of Main Street, the small memorial park, with the one great fir tree, lit up.

  Christmas was around the corner.

  The year was nearly over.

  I stood there, watching her go, remembering all these things I ought not to have shoved from my brain: a woman's touch. It made me think of another woman. The woman I just could not forget. Pola Croder.

  All women I found attractive had made me think of Pola. I was beginning to suspect that even Beth, back in Washington, knew that my interest in her might've had something to do with her vague resemblance to Pola. No wonder she had distanced herself from me so easily; I had not been much of a prospect.

  I walked by Croder-Sharp-Callahan, and casually looked through the glass, but could not bring myself to go inside. I wanted to see Pola, but I did not know what I would say to her if I saw her. My pulse quickened a bit, thinking of her, and I knew I was doomed to replay the goodness and richness of a high school romance in my head until the end of my days.

  Still, she had come by the house after my father's death.

  She still cared, and I still cared, and I kept hoping that one of my father's famous quotes, stolen no doubt from others, would be true: that the universe rewards belief.

  I still believed that love couldn't die. Down in my toes I believed it. Even with the bad things in life, even with murder and sorrow, I believed that love just couldn't die if it was real between two people.

  And I knew I was a doomed fool to believe it.

  After picking up some eggs and bread at the local grocer's, where, thankfully, no one talked to me, I went by the old store my father had run.

  The storefront was smaller than I'd remembered. The closed for the holidays sign was in the window, and when I peered through the windows, it looked as if nothing had changed since I'd been eighteen.

  3

  Back home an hour or so later, I caught Bruno peeling back some old wallpaper in the dining room that was never used.

  "Look at this," he said. "Three layers of wallpaper under here. This must've been Great-Grandma Raglan's pattern." He pointed out a dulled rose pattern. "About 1905," he said. "Or 1904. Boston. I'm willing to bet it cost a pretty penny then."

  "Brooke's gonna shit when she sees you tearing at the wallpaper," I said.

  "It's amazing how old this house is. Think of all the things. Our rooms have been painted over so much," he said. "I scratched at my bedroom door and—get this—it's really made of glass."

  "Glass? It's wood."

  "No," he chuckled. "People have been painting over it so much, the center of that door is a thick oval of glass. And it's etched. I bet there are little treasures around here like that. Last night I was going through the shelves at the back of my old closet, and I found a small pantry behind it."

  "Full of treasures?"

  "No," he said. "Nothing, really. A couple of little ceramic salt and pepper shakers and a naked doll with its head cracked. Probably Granny's."

  Bruno apparently had taken to picking at parts of the house—looking through cabinets, finding the old secret staircase—a narrow child-sized staircase that led from the laundry room—through a cabinet door—down to one of the kitchen cabinets on the first floor. As kids, we used to play hide and seek in it, and our father would raise unholy hell when we leapt out of the kitchen cabinet while he was cooking supper. Bruno found several items that had been missing for years: his old teddy bear, a dust mop after a ninetee
n-year disappearance; he also discovered that there was a way to reach between the walls in his old bedroom, by way of removing a thin board in his closet.

  He found his old sketchbook there, which he had forgotten that he'd hidden away at twelve and kept private from the rest of us. He showed some of them to me. They were scenes from the Ice Queen stories—and how the goblins ended up torturing the Queen eternally for her crimes. The Ice Queen was poorly drawn, but could be identified by the crescent moon in her hand and her hair, which was straw-yellow and flowing. It was pretty vivid stuff for a little kid, and I suspect that Bruno had been getting some of his frustrations out on paper.

  "You made up the stories," he reminded me. "I was just using crayons to illustrate your books."

  "Only you never showed me," I said.

  "I'm showing you now. I'm not the artist that Brooke is. But I tried."

  "It's pretty violent," I said, ever the observer.

  "So were the stories. I wonder why we liked them so much," he said, flipping through the sketchbook. "Dad would've had a fit if he'd seen these. He'd think there was something wrong with me."

  "There is something wrong with you," I said, grinning. "You're a Raglan."

  "We were a pretty creative bunch."

  "Not a lot to do in the winter."

  "Remember the words we made up?"

  I nodded. "Jumblies."

  "Gran made that one up. I mean like the Greasels."

  "The result of Weasel and Groundhog mating," I said with some authority. "And the Eyestopper."