Dark Rooms: Three Novels

by Douglas Clegg

  She didn't respond.

  "You okay?"

  "I don't know what he wanted from me, not ever," she said, slowly, and in such a way that it gave me a chill. I realized a few seconds later that what scared me about her was that her voice didn't seem right. It seemed almost like Brooke's voice, but different.

  "You probably should go to bed now," I said.

  "He never loved me. Not the way he should have. Why couldn't he let me go? Why can't I leave? I don't understand any of this," she said. "That son of a bitch."

  "Don't think about it now," I said.

  "It's terrible what this island can do to you," she said, and she turned to look at me, but her eyes were nearly closed. For the barest second, she didn't look like herself at all. Was she sleepwalking? Her voice was calm and even, but something in her tone kept me on edge. "Not just him, but everyone. If you're an outsider, you're always one. Others knew, I think. They guessed. But no one stood up to him. Nobody protected me. Nobody wanted to know what was really happening. Not any of you. This place is a prison."

  Then she went out through the doorway to the west, through the bathroom that adjoined my room with my father's old room. She closed the door behind her as she went on, presumably to the next room.

  I left the lights on and could not sleep the rest of the night. I grabbed a book off the shelf called The House on the Strand, one of my favorites from my teen years, and sank back into a world of time travel and intrigue.

  2

  Nightmares grew within my head when I finally fell asleep at night, or in the early morning. Sometimes I got up in the middle of the night, just to avoid the bad dream. I'd go out and get a few logs from the pile just outside the front porch and make a fire in the living room and try to read, or flip TV channels in search of something to take my mind off the idea of sleep.

  But I'd fall asleep eventually.

  In my nightmares, I saw her. She wore blood as a gown. She had hair like a raven and skin as pale as snow.

  It was the Snow Queen. The Banshee. The Queen of Hell.

  And I'd created her when I was a kid.

  3

  Soon enough, the regional news shows stopped running anything about the story of the murder, nor was it showing up in the papers, outside of the Burnley Gazette. Other tragedies and terrors took over the news in the world. Other families suffered and found reporters at their door; other good men and women were cut down by vicious killers; and my world sank back into a low throbbing pain at the back of my head.

  I was beginning to feel trapped, but I had nowhere else to go. Oddly enough, I never asked Brooke about the details of our father's death, nor did I read the papers or watch the news. And none of us answered the phone.

  "Writing any more books?" Brooke asked one evening. "I read Igdarizilia."

  "Igdrasil."

  "Oh. Dad used to call it Godzilla.' I liked it. You needed more sex in it and maybe some battles. That whole elf subplot bogged it down, and the names? You picked all the wrong names. Too hard to pronounce. You know it's rough when you need a glossary just to pronounce the names. Maybe you should write about real things this time," she said. "And I didn't like how you just threw all the dirty laundry in there."

  "Huh?"

  "Well, I don't doubt that the little nymph was me. You could've at least made her a little less slutty." She laughed, but with a bit of an edge. "Dad was in there. And Bruno. I'm surprised you didn't include the dogs."

  I ignored her comments. It seemed to be a universal truth that the family of the writer never really wanted to appreciate the writing. "Dad didn't read it, did he?"

  "Don't feel bad. It's not like he ever read novels much. I told him what was in it. He was proud. He said he didn't like the father character, but I told him it had nothing to do with him. You might not have wanted to make the father the ogre who tortures elves and abducts the Queen of Hell."

  "It's fiction, Brooke. Fantasy. There's no reality about it."

  "People want to read about real things, even in fantasy," she said. She thought a moment and her eyes became slits, as if she'd just been seized with some vague moment of genius. "You really should think about writing for children. The stuff you wrote when we were kids was good. I can still remember some of it." She meant everything she said to be kind and generous. I wasn't ever going to take offense to anything Brooke said, or anything Bruno might say. I didn't want to lose this bond we were creating in the wake of tragedy over something petty like my silly book.

  I decided I needed to write again.

  4

  In my old room, I found some of my early stories, when I had just begun to learn to write.

  I had dreamed of being a writer since I was nine years old. My father had gotten me a typewriter back in the days when it was the most advanced writing tool beyond a pen and paper. It was a secondhand beast from the Croder-Sharp-Callahan general store, one that had sat on the shelf for nearly my entire life at that point. It was a thick, clunky Royal whose existence had begun sometime before even my father was born. But it served its purpose, and I learned to hunt and peck, for I'd had a bad year that year—it was the year my mother had left us, and this seemed to hit me hardest. My father asked me to write stories if it would help me, and I began writing them.

  They were, at first, one-pagers, but soon I became adept at just writing and writing with no end in sight. I suspect I was obsessed with whatever story had gotten into my head. I wrote fantasies and stories of terror and happy stories of children who had wonderful mothers who hugged them and told them how important they were. In some respects, my ambition was never to be published, but to bring onto the page the nearly perfect, if dictatorial, world of my imagination: the three-headed monsters, the perfect mother, and magical island, the boy who could fly—all the ways I wanted the world to be. In my mind, as a kid, I imagined all kinds of fantastic ways of living—of brushing the tops of trees with my feet as I flew, not like Peter Pan, but like a starling. Or animals that would speak to me in the stories. Or the kids I wanted to have like me, who did indeed enjoy my company. There were faraway lands based far too much on Tolkien's Middle Earth, and creatures out of Edith Hamilton's books on mythology, which I began reading at eleven. Once I discovered Herman Hesse's Demian, I was done for; moving on to other covert reading (for none of these books were pressed upon me in school), I went to George Orwell and H.G. Wells and Mary Shelley—and I was writing stories that mirrored my reading the whole way through.

  Writing stories—purely for myself, for I never showed these to anyone—was to not express myself, but to purge some of my imagination, get it out of my head, where it swirled and blocked me from living as a child. Brought it out into another dimension. There were times when I felt there were a thousand doors in my head, and I needed to open all of them to find the one important door. The one important key that would open it. And whatever was behind that door would somehow illuminate what I didn't understand about my life. In the meantime, I had to open those thousand doors and see what wonderful and dreadful beasts existed there, waiting for me.

  I found the one story that probably meant the most to me from childhood. It was a complete rip-off of Hans Christian Andersen's "The Snow Queen," mixed with the Greek myth of Persephone. In the Andersen story, the Snow Queen's magic mirror is broken, and a shard of glass gets in Kay's heart. He is Gerda's brother, and he becomes a very bad boy from this. The myth of Persephone is the story of the daughter of Demeter's abduction into the Underworld by the king of that realm. I even noticed shades of Narnia and Alice in Wonderland in there.

  The story was called "The Ice Queen's Revenge." I suspect I called it this not because of the obvious derivation from Andersen's "Snow Queen," but because it was a little joke with Bruno.

  At four, when he wanted ice cream, it sounded like "ice queen," so I just made up the stories. At first, when I read some of them to him, he got scared, and stopped asking for "ice queen" at all.

  5

  Here is a bit
of it, with typos and misspellings intact. I was ten at the time:

  CHAPTER FIVE: THE ICE QUEEN RISES!

  I SHALL COME FOR THE CHILDREN! the Ice Queen, the Queen of FROZEN CREAMY HELL, said, and she wrapped herself in the furs of bears and lions, and she had her Oomos, those filthy goblins of the Underland whose breath is so foul that people think its farts from a dead cow and whose hands are so grimey that they spread disease wherever they go, carry her to her Slay, made entirely of diamonds cut from the fingers of new brides. The Slay glowed and shined like millions of stars, and the Ice Queen, called by some Imyrmia, sat in it with her trusty demon servant, Chamelea, the lizard-faced and hog-bellied. The Slay was pulled by twin dragons, tortured in the Castle Fragonard that lies above the Lake of Glass and Fire at the very heart of Underland. The dragons were once kind-hearted beasts, but Imyrmia, in anger over their father's not wanting them to be slaves of her Relm, took them to her basement and turned them into zombie dragons doing only her bidding. She used bobbed wire to beat them onward as they flew up up up from the deep diamond and ruby caves of Under land.

  When the Slay came all the way up into Earth, lightning tore at the ground, opening it up for Imyrmia's Slay. Blasts of fire and BELCHES OF FOOL STENCH! blew up like a fart from an oger's butt. Even the twin dragons hated the smell and coughed fire as they rose into a blackened sky, their tails twisting and smashing trees down as they went and setting entire forests ablaze with their coughs.

  All the land knew of the Ice Queen's arrival, for they had known her many years before. Once upon a time, she was the Maiden of Snow, and she brought the dancing elves and fairys of winter across the land. She had made everyone have fun, and children through the entire world could skate and ski and have snowball fights and make snow angels and snow people and never go to school when the Maiden of Snow was there. But then, she got picked up by the FEARFUL AND MIGHTY ruler of Underland, a monster so dirty his skin was crawling with germs. His hair was home to thousands of cities of lice. His skin seemed alive with red mites. When he walked, his feet never touched ground, for rats and centipedes lifted the souls of his feet up on their backs and did the walking for him like roller skates. He is known as Dogrun the Merciless. He wanted the Maiden of Snow in his kingdom because it was too hot and he needed better weather. Underland was on fire most of the time. People there breathed the foulest stenches and drank polluted water from the Twin Lakes of Rhea (which were called Dya and Gonna, sisters enchanted and turned into lakes of brown lava full of wastes and chemical spills and oil spills.) Dogrun the Merciless needed a bride. So he grabbed the Maiden of Snow, Imyrmia, and she screamed, but she had to go into Underland with him. He forced her to marry him, and the heat of Under land melted her heart for him. But she herself made Dogrun's heart turn cold, and he could not be married to her anymore. She had turned Evil, and she ended up imprisoning him on the Dark Isle of Lost Devils, a place where those demons went who no longer had Evil Believers in the world above them. Dogrun was chained and kept inside a prison that had a high fence, painted all over with magical cymbals that clanged and smashed at him when he tried to escape. He lived out the rest of his eternal life there, eating the rats beneath his feet, the red mites on his body, and the lice in his hair.

  And the Ice Queen ruled all in Underland.

  And now, she was after the elf-children who knew her secrets.

  They lived on Earth, and their names were Fearling, Burnt, and River.

  6

  Of course this was somehow about putting my little brother and sister and me inside the story—they were the only ones I read them to. Since Bruno's real name was Byrne, Burnt was close enough; and Brooke might be a "river," and my much-hated real name, Fergus, was close to Fearling in some way.

  We'd have read it in secret, finding a room in the house where Dad would not find us. There was a wardrobe in his bedroom, and it was just large enough for the three of us to fit in. I had a flashlight, and I'd read to them. We pretended that we were somehow entering C. S. Lewis's The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe right there, and Bruno, until he was six, would not venture to the back of the wardrobe even when we dared him for fear that another world opened up there.

  The legends of Imyrmia, the Ice Queen, grew over the years, and she somehow transformed in my story to an even more powerful monster called, simply, Banshee, as I had begun discovering the Celtic myths when I was twelve, and felt that the Ice Queen needed a transformation and a new name. Both Bruno and Brooke still looked forward to the stories, and although we were all a bit taller and could just fit in the wardrobe without touching each other—with the occasional gas leak from Bruno, who seemed to delight in this—we'd climb in when I had finished writing another three-or five-page opus, and I'd have the best audience a writer could ever have.

  As Banshee, the Ice Queen had changed. She was no longer the frosty beauty with blue skin and white hair. She had become more monstrous, denied the beauty creams and ointments and sorcery of Underland, which kept her eternally young and insanely beautiful. Banshee came out at twilight, surrounded by flies and mosquitoes, her heralds. She was ghoulish, and her skin was torn and leathered and dried against her bones. She had razors for teeth and fingers that scraped flesh, and she took the form of anyone she chose, anyone trusted, but as dark approached, she could not hide her true form, and when night fell, all was revealed. Alone with her hapless victim, she showed her true form.

  In the Banshee stories, she became trapped on Earth, unable to go to her Dark Kingdom, and she wanted more than anything the souls of the three elves who had exiled her from her world.

  Scared the shit out of Bruno when he was about six. I told him that Banshee was coming for him if he stepped out of bed after the light went out. This accounted for his bedwetting, and yes, I feel ashamed that I put the thought in his mind. I tried to take it back, but once you've told a kid that kind of thing, it never completely erases from his memory.

  7

  I read through some of the stories, all of them bad, all of them somehow making me happy about my childhood again. My father had once had the ambition to be a writer, in his youth. He told me that he seemed to only be able to write the truth of things, and no one wanted to hear the truth. He'd hold up a novel from my bookshelf (Treasure Island, From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, Danny Dunn and the Anti-Gravity Paint) and he'd say, "It's people who write lies like these who get published. Nobody wants the truth. They want lies spoon-fed to them." All right, he had a bit of the tyrant in him—perhaps all heroes do—and had never been able to read or enjoy fiction to save his life. I attributed this, again, to both a stern upbringing (his own father, the grandfather I never knew, disciplined with whips to the back, actual whips in the smokehouse, the place of punishment), and to his two years in prison camps during his war. He nearly seemed vulnerable at those moments, when he was at his worst. I forgave him anything when I was a kid because I was so grateful that he hadn't left us as our mother had.

  But those books on my shelf! To me they were worlds to explore. These were the seeds of my desire to write fiction, but I didn't think I'd ever be able to do it as an adult. Still, when I was twenty-five my first novel, a fantasy called Igdrasil was published. (For those of you who don't know, Igdrasil is the Tree of All Existence in myth. My novel did it a disservice.) I could not make a living from writing, but I found that fantasy was what I could write best—high fantasy as it's called. And so this gave me the illusion that I could be a writer, but in fact, I had not been able to write another story or novel since selling that one.

  It was a mental and physical constipation, my adult life to that point.

  It was as if I genuinely was not meant to live outside of the island where I'd grown up—the world was too much. I needed the smallness of Burnley Island. The narrowness of the minds, the quietness of the winters, the serenity of the separation from the mainland.

  Even Carson McKinley, spanking the monkey in his truck at the harbor.

  Bu
t my dreams of happiness and writing fiction and loving life, all had been there, at home, waiting for me.

  Sitting in my old bedroom, I pulled out that ancient typewriter—a Royal that had no business working, let alone with a ribbon of ink still in it that managed to smudge the odd "a" and "r."

  THIS IS THE LAST STORY ABOUT BANSHEE

  Now, before I tell you what I wrote, I have to tell you that whenever I write anything, I have to first write a page or two about things that are occupying my mind. It's a way of sweeping out the cobwebs, I guess, and is my version of therapy. I'm not sure if I believe in writer's block, but I do believe in general Brain Block, just as I believed in Brain Farts. Writing out the tangle from inside me seemed to get the creative juices going.

  So I wrote:

  My father is dead. Someone murdered him.

  Who?

  WHO?

  Brooke is losing her mind. Bruno is picking apart the house. Brooke is painting. Bruno is playing the piano again. And here I am, writing.

  It's as if we're just picking up where we left off years ago.

  Brooke walks at night. Bruno has a boyfriend. I still love Pola. We have none of us figured out love right. Maybe Bruno has. Not me. Not Brooke. Our lives in shambles. Dad must have been the glue. Falling apart.

  The Banshee is loose. The Banshee has taken us over.

  At night, she watches us.

  When I'd finished typing this sentence, I looked at it. I had no idea what it meant. Did I mean that Brooke watches us? The Banshee? Was this the beginning of a story, or was I still trying to clear my mind a bit? I wasn't even sure.

  I typed:

  At night she watches us, waiting.