Dark Rooms: Three Novels

by Douglas Clegg

  "Here comes a candle to light you to bed," we all three recited, "and here comes a chopper to chop off your head." Three or four times we said it, and Bruno seemed to be crying beneath his ragged blindfold, which looked as if it had been made from one of my mother's old pantyhose.

  Then young Nemo said, "We'll go there again. We'll find out why she went there, and we'll see if we can bring her back."

  "Daddy said not to," Brooke said, her voice like the chirp of a sparrow.

  "I'm the Master of the Dark Game tonight," Nemo said.

  "It's nighttime," Bruno whined. "I'm scared."

  "Don't be. It only works now. We'll stop by dark, I promise. It's still light out. But the power happens now. Let's go find her," Nemo said below me. "She'll come back. We can make her come back where she is, and then none of it happened."

  "I'm scared, too," Brooke whispered. She nearly broke contact with Nemo's hand, but he held on to her fingers.

  "Don't break the circle," he said. "Follow me."

  "Where?" Brook asked.

  And then, the Nemo-of-nine said, "We're going there, we're going back before that night. We're going back to the house, and we're going to do it different, and we're going to make sure that none of it ever happens again. We can find her, and we can bring her back."

  But his face had begun to perspire, and I could feel his heat—and the heat of the other two—they were burning with fever, even in the freezing cold, they were frying themselves, they were pushing their minds too hard.

  3

  I opened my eyes.

  I was still inside the smokehouse, on the floor, with a gargantuan ache at the back of my head, and an intense feeling of exhaustion. I sat up, my muscles sore as if I'd been running for miles, my body covered with sweat, a shivering throughout.

  I could barely bring myself to look at the square of light.

  Nothing.

  No one.

  4

  It felt as if my mind were flashing on and off.

  As if lightning played within my head.

  I closed my eyes to remember the Dark Game.

  5

  Holding hands with Bruno and Brooke, in a circle, peeking beneath my blindfold to make sure they weren't peeking at me.

  Reciting the nursery rhyme, and then feeling as if we were soaring—all three of us—into a darkness.

  And there she was, waiting for us.

  Our mother.

  Not quite our mother.

  Our mother somehow rebuilt inside our imaginations. Our mother crossed with the Ice Queen.

  The Maiden of Snow.

  The Banshee.

  A hybrid of our idea of some monstrous woman and our beautiful mother, with her honey-gold hair turned white, and her eyes yellow-red and fixed with a cruel but cold, snakelike gaze.

  Somehow, somehow we had created her.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  1

  I must have stumbled out of the smokehouse, but I barely remember it. When I came to, Pola and Zack were calling to me from the porch of the house.

  When I glanced their way, I thought I felt a pull. A gravitational pull, trying to draw me back into the smokehouse—like invisible fingers, tugging at me.

  The sky was heavy with the smoky clouds that generally meant more bad weather—the predictions had been for yet another storm, as we always got on the island in December.

  I had the odd sensation that I was dead. Dead and crawling across the ground, but not feeling it. Trying to resist the pull, that force, that magnet, which wanted my body back in the smokehouse.

  I heard Pola's cries, and then a sound like the giant wings of a bird flapping close to my ear—

  My breath was labored.

  I felt as if my lungs were frozen.

  I felt hands upon me.

  With some effort, I turned slightly to see who had their hands on my shoulders.

  As if I saw her at the end of a long dark tunnel, Pola knelt there beside me.

  Her lips moved, but I couldn't hear her.

  Next to her, standing over the two of us was her son, Zack.

  His eyes were wide, as if he saw something awful. I knew who he saw. I knew he must see her as well.

  Not Pola, but the other one.

  Then I heard Pola's voice. "Nemo? Nemo, are you all right? Nemo?"

  I watched, unable to move or speak, feeling a chilling paralysis in my bones, and saw Zack move away.

  As if someone were calling him, and he alone could hear the voice.

  2

  Sound returned, and then sharper vision; finally, after a minute or so, I felt the pinpricks along my legs and arms and the soles of my feet, I could sit up, and felt wet in the snow.

  Pola was nearly in tears, but she fought to keep them back. "Oh, my God," she said. "You frightened me. Are you all right?"

  I said the only thing that came to my mind. "Where's Zack?"

  I wiped my eyes, for they stung. And then, with Pola's help, I got up.

  "Zack?" Pola glanced around. "Zack?"

  Her son stood at the entrance to the smokehouse.

  Zack looked back at us.

  "I thought I saw something," he said, but then bounded back over to us.

  I still felt shaky, and somehow coated with shame, as if the haywire nature of my brain was its own kind of humiliation. I might be losing my mind, the way that Brooke felt she had been losing hers. I might be suffering some nasty post-traumatic bullshit that would require years of medical attention.

  But I felt sane. If you can feel sane, and still feel the sputtering of the circuits of your brain, then I knew I was sane.

  3

  "Why would I see my mother?" I asked.

  I sat on the living room sofa and watched as Zack swung a poker around the logs in the fireplace. Pola struck a match and lit the fire, then came back to sit with me.

  "You've been through too much," she said.

  "No," I said. "I want to get Harry out here again." I reached for the phone. "You might want to go home."

  "Why?"

  "I just feel weird about it. I don't want you to worry about anything, and Harry is " I held up the phone and began tapping out Harry's number.

  "I'm staying here," Pola said. "If you and Harry want to go out there again, you're free to. You're crazy to want to, if it affects you this much. But Zack and I can just stay here by the fire."

  "We can't go home now," Zack said, pointing to the window. "It's snowing again."

  It was an understatement on Zack's part. Outside the window, the storm clouds were growing, and what came down was less snow than sleet.

  Harry picked up the phone on his end, and I said, "Harry, can you come out here? Now?"

  4

  After I got off the phone with Harry, I went to go wake up Brooke. Pola offered to come with me, but I asked her to stay in the living room. I had a feeling, something I didn't like having to admit, and it was simply that I didn't want Pola and her son to know about the Dark Game or about what I feared might be all of us cracking up in the wake of our father's death.

  I jogged up the front staircase. Unlocking the door to the first room upstairs (locked, just as I had warned Brooke away from doing), I opened it upon a mess. The room I entered, the room that we'd thought of as the sun room, looked like a whirlwind had gone through it. A chair and table had been turned upside down, and papers were scattered all over the floor. As I went from room to room, it was as if someone had been on a tirade, tossing pillows and papers and kicking over trash and pulling drawers completely out of the dressers.

  Brooke was not in her bed, but the sheet was half torn off. All the votive candles were left sitting on their shelves, upright, still lit. There were some on the floor.

  I called out to Brooke, to Bruno, but got no response.

  Then I thought I heard a woman crying. Was it in my head? Was it in the house? It was the most pitiable sound.

  I ran in its direction, regardless. Doors opened and closed, and I felt as if I were run
ning through rooms in someone else's memory, for I saw flashes—moments of my father in a room as he had been when I was a child, or of Bruno as a little boy sitting in his red wagon in the rumpus room, or my mother, writing letters at her desk—it was as if my memories were jumping out at me. Close 'em off. Close 'em off.

  I found Brooke in the greenhouse, sitting on the cold floor, surrounded by her paintings.

  5

  "The dogs are gone," she said, looking up at me. "They ran off. They haven't come back. Bruno's after them, but I think they're gone for good. I let them out, but they won't come back."

  I stood over her, glancing out through the green glass to the snowy fields and woods. "They run sometimes. Don't worry."

  "No," she said. "They've been gone all night."

  As she told me of her efforts to find them, nearly freezing to death as she went through the woods with a flashlight, calling for them, I looked at the canvases that were spread out around her.

  Each painting was of our father, dead, bleeding, looking up at someone.

  6

  I put Brooke to bed, wrapping her in quilts and comforters to still her chattering.

  There was condensation on her window, but no words finger-painted there.

  Outside, snow mixed with sleet continued falling.

  Then I went to my own room.

  My typewriter was on the floor by my bed, as if someone picked it up off my desk and dropped it there.

  I retrieved it from the floor, and when I did, I noticed the papers just under the bed. I reached for them, drawing them out.

  Someone had been typing.

  YOU CAN'T KEEP ME TRAPPED HERE. I AM GOING TO DESTROY YOU.

  PLAY THE GAME FOR ME.

  PLAY IT.

  PLAY IT OR SHE WILL DIE.

  JUST LIKE HE DID.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  1

  Bruno arrived, having chased the greyhounds all the way to the other side of the woods. "Something spooked them last night, I guess," he said, dragging them in, all of them soaked from the outdoors. We got towels, dried off the dogs, and put them in their kennels.

  Then he told me what he'd discovered.

  2

  While I'd been at Pola's house, Bruno and his boyfriend had been tearing apart the ceiling of the dining room. It had begun to bow and bend a bit, heavy with drippy plumbing from a leak Bruno hadn't been able to identify, although he had assumed it was from our father's bathroom. He had already caulked the tub and tiles upstairs, but the water damage had increased in the ceiling below it.

  He had a stepladder set up, and Cary passed him tools while he pulled at the ceiling. It burst all over him as he sat at the top of the ladder.

  Mosquitoes and tiny gnat-like flies swarmed down from the damp open hole that was left behind. He was amazed that mosquitoes could be living in the gaps in the ceiling and walls in the dead of winter. "But the water was warm, so I guess they just kept breeding," he said.

  3

  He led the three of us into the dining room and pointed to a suitcase on the rug, by the table. "I already opened it, but maybe you should take a look."

  I got down on the floor and turned the suitcase on its side. Popped it open.

  As I did this, Bruno said, "He must've put it in there when he put in the new tub upstairs."

  "A long time ago," I said.

  Inside the suitcase, wrapped in plastic and old newspapers, was more money.

  4

  "Wow!" Zack said. "You're rich!"

  Pola drew him back from bounding forward to pick up some of it. "What's all that from?"

  "It's like there's another house underneath this one," Bruno said. "Dad's buried treasure."

  "Look at all this," I said. I unwrapped the plastic off one pile of bills. "Did you count it?"

  "Barely touched it. I crapped out and then had to go hunting those dogs down. For all I know " But he didn't finish the thought.

  "Hell, Bruno, it looks like ten—maybe twelve thousand dollars here."

  We spent an hour counting it. Some of it was in neat stacks, others had been thrown loosely into the plastic wrap and newsprint. Zack helped out by counting the stray bills that had fallen loose. "Fifteen thousand," I said when I'd finished the final count.

  Bruno looked tense.

  "Fifteen thousand," I repeated.

  "Well, now we know where he stashed it," Bruno said.

  5

  Bruno began pacing after that. "He hid stuff in the house. He did it. He did the repair on the tub. Shit, he did a repair on the front stairs. What do you bet there's something behind there?"

  "The crawlspace?" I asked.

  6

  I tried to talk him out of it, but Bruno got a crowbar and a drill. I followed behind him, trying to reason with him, then shouted at him to stop, but by the time I grabbed him by the shoulder, he had already smashed the crowbar into the wall behind the front staircase, leaving a huge hole in the thin wall.

  He opened up the wall, and reached into the dark opening.

  But there was nothing, just the empty space that ran along the front quarter of the house, behind the stairs.

  "I bet I can squeeze back there," he said.

  "I can do it!" Zack volunteered, leaping up, raising his hand as if he were in school.

  "You're too big," Pola said.

  "I can do it," Zack said.

  "Nobody is going in there," I said.

  "Remember how he kept repairing things?" Bruno asked. "How he'd always be working on something—the pipes, the walls. What if he put money back there? What if there's more?"

  "That's crazy."

  "No, it's not," Bruno said. "He never trusted the bank. He never liked anyone knowing what he made. He and Brooke used to fight about the store because he never kept up with the books."

  In a moment of silence, Zack whispered in awe: "I bet there's pirate treasure back there."

  I stared at the wall by the staircase, and the raw tear he'd just made in it. "Don't do it! This is crazy!"

  "Let's find out," he said, without waiting for any approval from me. He smashed the crowbar into the drywall. It went through. "He had a hand-axe somewhere. He always kept it. Go find it."

  "You're going to destroy the house," I said.

  Bruno's face looked as if it burned with fever. "I think this house is sick. I think it needs some destroying."

  7

  When he'd opened the wall up with an axe, a crowbar, and some reckless hammering, we saw what we both wished we had never had to see.

  It was our mother's suitcase.

  Her red dress.

  Her beige shoes. The ones she wore often. The ones that she left the house in.

  Even her rosary and a small statue of the Virgin Mary that she had taken with her.

  To Brazil.

  Not to Brazil at all.

  The only foreign country we knew was Hawthorn itself.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  1

  By the time Harry showed up, I had asked Pola to take Zack home—it would not be the kind of day I'd anticipated. The only problem was, roads had worsened, Harry said even his SUV had been skidding on the road, and the only reasonable way to get back was to walk. I sat down with Pola in the den.

  "Here's the thing," I told her. "There's something wrong with us. Maybe it's some kind of stress from the murder. Maybe it's something inside me. Inside Brooke, too. But I don't understand it. And my fear is that there might be well, some kind of danger here. I have to be sensitive to Brooke's feelings in this, but I think she may be cracking up under all the pressure. And I may be also."

  "Let's all go," she said. She took my hand in hers. "Let's all of us just go. We can walk to town. We can walk in the snow. It might take half an hour at the most. You don't need to be here." She didn't say it with any serious gaze in her eyes; she sounded perfectly practical.

  And it was true, we didn't need to be there; I didn't need to be at Hawthorn.

  But I could not leave m
y sister there in that condition.

  Nor could I ignore something that had been building since I'd arrived.

  I had felt the pull of the Dark Game.

  I had left the island to avoid its pull. To get away from what was bad inside me.

  But the hallucination of my mother—she had seemed like flesh and blood—she had seemed there.

  The words from the typewriter.

  Brooke's paintings.

  Pola looked at me as clear-eyed as I had ever seen anyone. "Do you know that you did this to me when we were young? That you shut me out of your life even then? That you closed ranks with your brother and sister and father as if I didn't matter?"

  I didn't detect anger in her voice.

  Just the truth.

  The absolute truth.

  "I know."

  She offered a weak smile. "Do what you need to do. We're going to stay here. By the fire. But if I'm going to be part of your life again, I don't want to be shut out. Ever."

  2

  Pola and Zack remained in the house; we let Brooke sleep. Harry, Bruno, and I went to the smokehouse.

  3