Dark Rooms: Three Novels

by Douglas Clegg

  "Oh," Brooke said. She waited a beat before speaking again. "He has a boyfriend. Cary Conklin. Try not to be too shocked."

  "This family will never cease to amaze me," I said. "Good for him."

  She dropped the sheets she'd bunched up in a pile on the floor. She squeezed my arm. "I'm glad you're home, even under the circumstances. You should stay a little longer this time."

  "Yeah," I said. And meant it. "It always amazes me what I don't know about stuff around here. Do you realize that none of us really knows each other?"

  "You mean, you don't know us very well anymore," she said.

  "Busted," I said, nodding.

  "What drove you from this house?" she asked, as if it were the weightiest question in the universe.

  I didn't even need to think about it. "I always felt something was rotten here," I said. "And I never knew why. But maybe I was just so messed up then. It's like it was a different life, not the one I have now."

  "It's because Mom left," she said. "Dad always said that. He said you took off because you'd been abandoned more than any of us. He said you cried and cried the night she left and begged her to stay, and then you blamed him."

  I tried to remember this, but none of it came. "I guess I buried it all."

  "I did that, too," she said. "Bruno seems to be the only one who doesn't bury stuff. He just throws it all out there on the wall. Sometimes too much."

  "I know so little about Bruno," I said. "Is there anything about you I need to know?"

  She gave me a curious stare, as if she were about to surprise me with something. "Nothing you don't already know," she said. "I gave up on love this fall. That kind of love—the kind that's about two souls binding together. And so on. It seems a little empty to even think about it after what happened, the whole idea of dating. It seems trivial. Anything I want to do seems trivial. After that." That's what she'd called our father's murder. She swore she could not even remember sitting in the smokehouse with his body, or what it looked like, or how she felt. It had been that bad of a shock. All she could say was "after what happened," "after that," or simply, "after." I wondered how many years needed to go by before all of us would somehow get better from this. "I refuse to go out on any more dates with local men until I know that they're not just here because they have no place else to go."

  "That's what I feel like. I have no place else to go," I said.

  "You always have Hawthorn. By the rights of the firstborn, the house is probably yours." She said this seriously, as if she believed it.

  "Spoken like someone who doesn't give a damn. Well, it's yours. It has been since we were kids."

  "I'm not sure I love it anymore," she said. "Not like I did then. Sometimes it's like a prison. It's like a place with too many doors. And none of them lead outside. Even before. Sometimes it's like a splinter inside me that won't come out. Someone said something to me a while ago that's been bugging me. Someone said that he thought we were too incestuous."

  "You and Dad?"

  She shot me a look that was half-grimace and half-mocking. "God, no. All of us. He told me that I'd never find a mate because I was too caught up in this family. Which is ridiculous, isn't it? We're a half-assed family now. Mom's gone, Dad's dead. Bruno hated Dad. I think he doesn't like me too much anymore. You both have lives elsewhere. How can we be incestuous?"

  "Who said it?"

  "Joe Grogan," she said. "But do you think we are? This whole Raglan thing? How we keep too separate from everyone here? How Dad didn't like our friends, and how we had those games we all played and kept other kids away? Was it unhealthy?"

  "We played with Harry when we were kids."

  "I meant in general," she said, somewhat testily.

  "What's bothering you?" I asked.

  "Nothing," she said.

  "Joe said that just to hurt you."

  "You know what?" she said. "I think all three of us aren't meant to be happy. Maybe we were too close here. I always felt like I was betraying him to have a life outside Hawthorn. I felt like if I did, it would be like Mom leaving, or you or Bruno taking off. Can I ask you something? Something I don't want to be judged on?"

  "Of course."

  "Do you believe in ghosts?"

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  1

  Before I could answer, Brooke jumped in with, "Not ghosts as in dead people. I mean, the idea of someone haunting someone. The idea that inside a person, there can be another person."

  "You mean, psychologically?"

  "Maybe. That might be it. It's Dad I'm thinking of. He always told me that someone haunted him. He didn't start talking about it 'til last year, when we were fighting. He started drinking again, and we well, we got into it. Yelling at each other. I'm not proud of it, but it happened. And he told me that he thought he was losing his mind because he felt like someone was haunting him. Do you think there are such things as hauntings?"

  "No."

  "I think I do," she said. "I think I believe there's one here. I think Dad was haunted. And I think I am, too."

  2

  That night, as I lay in bed, I had the disturbing feeling that there was a woman in the room.

  Standing near my bed.

  Please don't let it be Brooke naked, sleepwalking, her fingers running all over her body.

  I opened my eyes in the dark, expecting to see Brooke, but no one was there.

  Yet each time I closed my eyes, I had the distinct impression: a woman.

  Not a figure, and not a man. If I opened my eyes, she would be gone. Once I closed them again, she'd still be there, a phantom.

  And not only standing there, but angry.

  I had this sense, it was crawling around in my brain and body, as if I could detect her aura. Anger and madness. It pissed me off that it took me so long to fall asleep. I could picture nothing about her, but it was like a negative image behind my eyes when I closed them. It was all that ghost and haunting talk that Brooke had been going on about. It influenced me too much in the late night. It frightened me a little, as well, because it reminded me of the madness our father had told us that our mother possessed. I wondered if we each would go mad someday—some biological imperative, some little signal sent out from an obscured part of the brain. That we'd somehow begin to show signs of mental breakdown. I wondered if Brooke had already been experiencing this. I wondered if it was the reason we had ever played that awful game as children, where our minds seemed to work differently afterward.

  I felt my inner life was unquiet. Restless. Constant thought, constant debating over family and my father's death and what I sensed versus what I didn't—my brain didn't seem to stop at night at all. I tossed and turned, and wrapped myself in the comforter and blankets, and then threw them off the bed and rolled up in the top sheet.

  I don't know when sleep finally came, but soon after, I awoke to hear Brooke screaming.

  Three bloodcurdling shrieks, the like of which I'd never heard before. I stumbled out of bed and called to her.

  All the doors were closed, so I had to open the five doors that separated my room from Brooke's—Bruno had come running as well.

  As I went, I could see the first morning sunlight out the windows.

  When we got to Brooke's room, she was sound asleep in her bed.

  On her dresser, at her bedside table, even on the windowsill, small votive candles, all nursing small flames.

  Bruno and I stared at each other for a second. Bruno whispered, "That's fucked."

  He pointed to the big window over her bed, the shades up, the curtains drawn back.

  3

  It was as if just seconds before we'd gotten there, Brooke had taken her finger and rubbed words across the condensation on her bedroom window, then had breathed heavily on it so they'd show up.

  The words were written largely enough to be read from across the room: HERE COMES A CANDLE TO LIGHT YOU TO BED

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  1

  All right, let me put it all down here: Whe
n we were little kids, we'd played that damned game as if it were real, and we broke the main rule about not playing it after dark.

  We played it when we weren't supposed to, and I suspected that it screwed with our heads, only I wasn't sure how to talk about it. It had an accompanying dose of shame with it, and a decent bit of fear. (And it was fun.) It turned bad when we couldn't stop playing it. When we'd sneak away, and put on the blindfolds and start going into the Dark Game.

  Start going where it went.

  Brooke had been most affected by the Dark Game, and by the Brain Fart.

  She had been the one who had nearly died at the age of eight, afterward.

  Her heart had nearly stopped, at least that's what it had seemed like to me. I practically got hysterical and kept telling our father that she needed to go to a hospital, but he told me it wasn't that bad.

  "She's had a fright," he said. First he brought her temperature down with an ice bath. He made me his assistant, had me running all over the house for the thermometer, the ear drops, the nose drops, and the Vicks VapoRub to help her breathe better.

  Dad kept her in warm blankets for two weeks after that, and spoon-fed her, and wouldn't let her so much as go to the bathroom by herself until he was sure she was better.

  After that, he took me by the hand down to the duck pond, and he told me that if I ever played the Dark Game again, he would make sure that I lived to regret it.

  I lied to him and told him I never would play it again.

  But my fingers were crossed, so it didn't count. Or so I thought.

  As I grew up, I lived to regret pretty much everything.

  2

  "Locks," Brooke said. "I want new locks on every door."

  I stood in the doorway, having just come back from a hike with the dogs down through the woods. It was two in the afternoon—the earliest I had seen Brooke get up in a few days. "How many?"

  "Seven," she said. "For the outside doors. I want at least two for the inside."

  "All right," I said.

  "Dead bolts. All of them," she said.

  "Not for the inside," I said.

  "Inside and out," she said. "I'm sorry. I just haven't felt safe. We can call a locksmith if you want."

  "No, I can do it. Dad's tools still around?"

  She nodded and went to show me where the tool kit was—under our father's desk in his den on the first floor. The desk was piled high with folders and papers. "He was doing some genealogical research," she said.

  I flipped through some of the papers, but have to admit that I began feeling very numb doing it. I felt as if I were picking over his bones.

  "It's the Raglans going back to before William the Conqueror," she said with some wistfulness in her voice. "He spent too much time on it. But sometimes it was the only thing he did at night."

  I pulled the tool kit out—a large metal suitcase that my father had loved dearly. I crouched down and opened it.

  "Seven dead bolts," Brooke repeated, as she stood over me. "Might as well be the same key for all of them. Can you do that?"

  I glanced up at her. "Sure. It's just a key assembly."

  "Good," she said.

  "Why inside?"

  "I don't feel safe," she said. "I want the doors to the upstairs hall to lock. Both ends of the hall."

  "That's not practical. If there's a fire and it's locked and we can't get the key "

  She thought a moment, and then lifted her hands as if weighing options. "Get enough keys so that they can be on the inside of each door."

  I murmured something that might've had the words "fire code" in them.

  "Mumblespeak?" she asked.

  "What?"

  "You're mumbling."

  "I'm just not sure if the fire department would like that. If someone needed to get out, during a fire, they might not have their key." I thought of the candles she kept burning in her room at night. There must have been at least ten or twelve of them. The last thing I wanted to worry about in Hawthorn was a fire.

  "I don't care," she said. "I wouldn't mind a dead bolt for my bedroom, but since it already locks from the inside, I'll be fine with it. There's a killer somewhere. I want to feel safe. I can't sleep at night. Every little noise frightens me." She said this as if it were obvious, even though I'd never really seen her be afraid of anything. "I wish we could get better locks for the windows. When I can, I want to replace them."

  "We can get an alarm system."

  "I already ordered one," she said. "But it won't be here for another week."

  "I don't blame you," I said.

  "I don't want anyone coming near us," she said.

  "Are you all right?" I asked.

  "I'm just being sensible. We need to keep this place locked up. It's not safe here anymore."

  "This morning, early, you cried out. You were asleep."

  "I was probably dreaming," she said. As she passed me on her way out the door, she added, "Would you mind doing the locks today?"

  "Fine," I said. "Are you painting or cleaning something?"

  She glanced back at me from the doorway. "What?"

  "I keep smelling turpentine."

  "Oh," she said. "I paint sometimes. At night."

  3

  "She paints?" I asked Bruno, stopping him during one of his great concertos at the piano that had been giving me a bit of a headache. I wasn't about to complain. I figured if he was getting creative like that, it probably was healthy. It's how he had released rage as a kid, and I knew he had built up a lot of it over the past several years. Just as it might be healthy that Brooke was painting again, as she had as a young child.

  "Does anyone in this family ever ask a question directly to the person that it's about?" he responded, with a somewhat bemused expression.

  "God, I can tell you've been shrunk. That sounds like therapy-speak. Brooke's too sensitive about her drawings," I said. "Since she was little."

  "Well, yeah, she paints," he said. "She set up the back of the greenhouse like a studio. She's pretty good. Hey, you using the tub by Dad's room?"

  "No," I said. "His stuff's still in there. I feel weird about it. I'm using the downstairs shower."

  "Maybe Brooke's using it. Something's leaking downstairs. I thought it might be the caulking in the tub," he said. "Check the ceiling in the dining room. There's a water spot over toward the window. It grows by leaps and bounds. Daily."

  "Shit," I said. "I bet the same pipes are in here that were there in 1895."

  "At least," Bruno said. "I wish I knew a little about house maintenance. Other than from watching This Old House. I mainly just know how to tear walls down."

  "Hawthorn is the original This Old House," I said. "Call a plumber."

  He shook his head, laughing. " Call a plumber,' he says." Then he pressed his fingers to the piano keys and began playing again.

  4

  While Brooke was asleep, early in the day, I walked back through the rooms to get to the very end of the house. The greenhouse door was open, and I went through it.

  Past the empty pots and stacks of gardening tools, stood an easel that was low to the floor. On it a half-finished canvas. Brooke had been painting the woods out back, and using some kind of gray wash for a background that seemed to heighten the color of fire—for she painted a fire in the woods. It was not half bad.

  Behind this, several jars of water full of thin paintbrushes, a can of turpentine, and small gray cloths. Crushed tubes of oil paints—nine or ten of them—lay beside the easel as well. Four or five canvases leaned against the glass wall beyond all this.

  I crouched down and lifted one up.

  It was medium-sized, and at first I wasn't sure what it was of—three indistinct figures standing in what looked like a dimly lit room.

  Then I realized the figures were us as children. Their faces were gray and unfinished, but there was no mistaking Bruno in his little red T-shirt, with his yellow hair, at the age of four. Brooke, with her hair straight and long; and me, scrawny
and wearing my jeans that were torn at the knees. We held hands, standing in a circle.

  It was the Dark Game. We were playing.

  I was impressed with her memory—to have been able to paint these images, remembering the clothes we had worn at one time. Remembering how our bodies looked. Even if she couldn't quite remember our faces then.

  I set this canvas back down and reached for the one behind it. In this painting, it was our father's face, but young. Younger than I could remember, so I assumed it might've been from an old photograph. He had a smile, and she had managed to capture a peculiar brightness in his eyes. Something was too flat about it, as if she hadn't quite mastered perspective or even the interplay of light and dark. But it looked so much like him in its details. I pressed my thumb against my forehead to ward off a headache. I can't believe he's gone. I can't believe it.

  I set this one down, carefully, behind the first.

  Then I pulled up the third canvas.

  This one I found disturbing.

  It was a painting of Brooke herself. At least, I believe it was Brooke.

  She stood on the front porch of Hawthorn. She was naked. There was rain.

  She had painted her breasts and stomach and thighs completely red, as if smeared with blood.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  1

  I put the canvases back in place.

  I managed to spend the rest of the day, from morning 'til night, putting dead bolts on each of the doors to the outside. The front door, back door, the door from the kitchen that went down to the brick walkway out to what had once been my mother's garden, the door to the fenced-in area at the east side of the house, where the dogs could be let out to wrestle and gambol all day. And the door that came off the greenhouse, to the side and back of the house.