Dark Rooms: Three Novels

by Douglas Clegg

  “Well, you have my permission to check around upstairs while we’re gone. I wouldn’t want anything bad to happen.”

  Mrs. Deerfield pursed her lips. “if only something bad could happen to that wicked Ramona, as much as I adore her she’s been the bane of my existence these past few days—she broke three of my best mason jars full of jelly trying to get up through that dumbwaiter. Now you have a good trip and don’t lie out in the sun too long, and don’t go swimming much past your knees, you know, drowning can occur so easily, so swiftly, in just a few feet of water.”

  And with that, Mrs. Deerfield shut the door.

  3.

  “I don’t think we’ll get caught in a rainstorm,” Rachel said as she rolled open the sunroof of the car; the clouds above them seemed less threatening than they had in the early morning. Hugh rummaged in the back seat. “You packed my blue sweatshirt, right?” He was wearing a gray T-shirt with the letters W and L across the front; his dark blue shorts hung loose around his pale hairy legs.

  She glanced back at him in the rearview mirror. He’d made a mess of the cooler and picnic basket, pushing them aside as he dug through the suitcase— Am I forgetting anything? Is there still aspirin in the glove compartment? Do we have the maps we need? She reached into her purse for her small bottle of lotion. Down at the bottom of her purse was the one cigarette she always kept with her. I am immune to you, she silently told the cigarette. She rubbed the lotion across her hands. She sneezed. “Oh, great, I’m probably getting a cold, too, and it’ll rain and we’ll get caught in awful beach traffic.”

  “Scout, we’ll be fine, and there’s no rush anyway. You remember your allergy stuff?” Hugh got out of the back of the car, adjusted the driver’s seat, and sat down, fiddling with her cassette tapes.

  Rachel nodded, opening the side pocket of her purse just in case; if her allergies flared up at the beach she’d be prepared—when she and Hugh used to go up to Cape Cod or down to Virginia Beach, sometimes she would get a bad case of hives after going in the water, particularly if it was a cool day. “Me and my allergies.” She waved to a neighbor who was getting into his Honda Prelude two parking places down. “I won’t mind if it rains once we get there, but I hate it when it rains on the road and then all the accidents.”

  “There are no accidents.” Hugh laughed. He drew a tape out of its plastic case. “You mind if we listen to the Beatles?”

  Rachel shrugged. “Only if it’s Revolver, not The White Album, if I have to hear your rendition of ‘Rocky Raccoon’ again…”

  He put the key in the ignition and pressed down on the accelerator. “I like my ‘Rocky Raccoon,’ and you told me you liked it, too, and to think I trusted your scout’s honor. Humph.”

  “Don’t flood the motor,” she said.

  Hugh paused, and glanced over at her. "Everything okay?”

  “You probably think I’m crazy, but I feel strange leaving our home. I’ve never cared about any place we’ve lived, but I feel like it won’t be the same when we get back.”

  “You mean it’s like an old friend,” Hugh said.

  “See, you do think I’m nuts.” She was anxious to get on the road because she was going to miss their home, things had been peaceful and homey this week, and now what if we go and mess it all up at the beach?

  Hugh was talking but Rachel was only half listening—his foot pumped the gas pedal, his wrist turned, the key turned, the lights blinked on and off behind the steering wheel as Rachel thought she heard babies crying again, their voices small and apparently all around her, while Hugh twisted the key and pumped the gas. He slapped the steering wheel with the palm of his left hand; the crying sounds seemed to be coming from inside the car, inside her, and Rachel wondered if this wasn’t a little like the ringing in her ears she occasionally experienced. The car made sputtering noises, backfired once, and Hugh said, “What the hell?”

  She glanced over at him, trying to pretend she wasn’t hearing babies. It must be from somewhere in the alley, some woman is pushing her stroller near the back of one of the buildings, either that or I have lost my marbles. And I’m pretty sure I woke up today with everything in working order. She briefly remembered a dream she’d had several nights before, puffing up and exploding with babies, but Hugh had said what the hell? and now he’d stopped turning the key in the ignition and was reaching for the car door handle to get out of the car.

  She looked over the hood of the car, and coming out of the slatted vents on the top of the hood were what looked like grayish white feathers, and then she thought they might be tufts of fur, but why were tufts of fur coming out from between the openings of the hood of her car?

  She got out from her side as Hugh went around and lifted the hood of the car.

  “Oh, Jesus,” Hugh said, and seeing her coming, “no, Scout, don’t look, not now,” but she looked and saw tiny masses of wet red and white fur. Then the body of a long-haired cat pushing its kittens away from the fan belt of the car, and then she saw the long-haired cat’s head which had been neatly separated from its body. Its eyes gazed up at the instruments of its destruction, the fan belt, the motor. Ramona.

  The kittens, four of them, rested on top of the battery. They mewled and cried and looked up at Rachel and Hugh with closed eyes.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  KEEPING HOUSE

  1.

  “Oh, dear,” Mrs. Deerfield said as she went about her work in the kitchen. “Such a good mother to sacrifice herself for her babies.”

  Penelope Deerfield watched their car rumble through the alley—it had been another hour before the nice couple had driven off, after Penelope had taken in the kittens, her eyes full of tears. “No, you two go on, go on, I shall be fine, I will call the vet and see if we can’t save Ramona’s babies, I shall be fine, I insist, go on, go on, it was an accident, I shall be fine.” And they’d laid dear Ramona down in a blue towel beneath the shade of the iron stairs, and now they were indeed leaving on their beach trip, and Ramona was indeed dead. Penelope Deerfield watched them go, standing over the sink in the kitchen. The sink filled to the brim with soapy dishwater, the just cleaned and shiny china cups and saucers lay glistening on a flowered hand towel that she’d stretched across her cutting board.

  Penelope Deerfield kept her hands down in the water, but every few seconds one of the small white kittens floated to the top, trying to escape. “Mustn’t scratch,” she told each kitten as she pressed its bobbing head deeper into the dishwater.

  2.

  Later, after she dusting off the old chair she’d recently finished upholstering, Penelope drained the sink and took the waterlogged kittens out and buried them with Ramona in the mulch pile. It was hot, and she kept swatting at her bangs which fell across her forehead every few seconds in an annoying tickle. She told Ramona’s head, “I shall have to cut my hair off if I am to survive the summer.”

  3.

  She was down in the crib when someone began ringing the doorbell like a madman. “It’s too early for my friends,” she said aloud, “so it must be the exterminator for upstairs.” Her back was aching from lifting the trapdoor and then setting it to one side. She’d had to crouch down a bit, watch her head as she descended the four steps into the cool hold. She’d taken a deep breath of the air as she sat at the bottom step, licking her lips. “You’ve been a good one, today, hardly a sound,” she’d told the darkness.

  The only light in the crib came from Mrs. Deerfield’s apartment, but even with the trapdoor completely off, there was barely enough light to see: twenty-five large mason jars filled with the memories of summers past, the preserves, the pickles, the jellies (strawberry, mint, apricot, peach, raspberry, pepper), and even a few bottles of homemade wine. It smelled of mold and dust, pickling brine and pure alcohol—the floor was made up of sandy earth. Brownish mushrooms sprouted along the corners, among the jars, and from between the clefts in the stone wall.

  Another ten jars stood in a circle in the darkest corner, the part of the crib
nearest the hidden steps up to the house above.

  Something in the dark scraped its way between the jars, rattling them as it went.

  “Be careful, dear, it won’t be much longer now I think.”

  But then the doorbell had rung, and Penelope thought of how much her back ached and how weary a body could get, how flesh just didn’t hold up in the long run. The doorbell sounded again and again until she could no longer ignore it. “Stay here, dear, it’s that exterminator for sure, come to take away all your little playmates from upstairs.”

  Keeping her head low so as not to strike it against the roof of the crib, Penelope Deerfield went back up the steps to her apartment.

  In the dark, something behind the ten jars not filled with jams, jellies, pickles, and preserves let out a low moan.

  Floating in the milky waters of those ten jars: human fetuses.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  HEALING WATERS

  1.

  Night, steamy night, a smothering pillow with the odors of rotting vegetation and carbon monoxide; the fishy swampy stink of summer curling in the dead-breeze air; the sounds of the creek running; the bright headlights, on the road nearby blinding the woman who stood over the grave, beneath the bridge. The sour taste of three-week-old milk spread across her lips. Mattie Peru flicked at a crane fly with her tongue—it had crawled along the edge of her chin. Her trash bags rattled as she raised her arms up, then whipped them down through the air as if she were trying to fly away.

  Who did this to you, my baby? Is he out of Hell now? Did he send his messenger to take even your bones away from me? “Baby!” she shouted. Sounds of footsteps on P Street Bridge above her, her voice echoed across the parkway, booming and crashing like ocean waves, but stirred up in the evening noises, the honkings, the screechings, the yowlings, the gigglings, the shooshing of Rock Creek, the cry diminished.

  The gigglings. Somewhere in the sparse dark woods around her, somewhere in the bushes.

  Mattie looked at the grave.

  The grave was empty, had been dug up, a perfect oval. She had planted her only daughter here, right here where the grass sang, where the water whispered, planted her bones all those years ago, planted them in red dry earth in the spring of 1968. The grave was filled up with water—the recent rainfall had taken over the space, had buried itself there.

  Mattie flapped her arms, yipping like a pained dog.

  She fell to her knees before the open grave. She bent over the water, dropping her face down to the muddy surface, cup ping her hands to the water, splashing it up into her face, taking long slurping drinks of it. Open my eyes, my baby! Open my mouth and my ears, open my heart, my little babygirl, give me your power, water of my child! Give me some power from the land of the dead, wash me in your bone water!

  And when she stopped drinking and washing her face in the water, she peeled her trash bags of invisibility from her. She stripped her raggedy clothes from her back, the old, stained men’s boxer shorts she wore, the open-toed hiking boots. Naked and shining with grease, her gray hair white by moonlight, white and sparkling with the jewels of the bone water, she slipped into her daughter’s grave and began washing away the clogged pores of her memory.

  From under the bridge, down by the creek, among the bushes: giggling.

  2.

  “We found ya,” the man snarled, but before Mattie saw him standing under the bridge she smelled him, and the smell was one from her memory, her memory which was shining and clean washed in the bone water of her baby.

  He was one of the men who had raped her in the springtime, up against a lamppost with his buddy, raped her and taken her bottle of Mad Dog 20/20. She could not make him out in the dark shade from beneath the bridge, but she saw what he was holding in his hands extended out from beneath the bridge: a skull, reflecting light from the moon.

  The one called Pete wagged the skull in midair, and spoke for it in a falsetto whine, “Mama, mama, they done fucked my brains out, and then they et ‘em, mama!”

  The other man was there, too, Willy, and he emerged from beneath P Street Bridge carrying part of a rib cage.

  “You lookin’ for these?” He held the ribs between his hands like an accordion, and then snapped them apart. His friend giggled, and he made Nadine’s skull giggle, too. “Oh, mama, you must be shittin’ your britches, you must be pissin’ your panties!”

  Mattie cried out at the noise. She remained in the grave, up to her waist in water. It dripped down her neck, in rivulets down her shoulders to her breasts, lingering across her nipples. Her body tingled with the water, with the smell of her daughter’s muddy grave, with the clean feeling, the baptism she was undergoing. Down in the pit of her stomach she felt the water sloshing, her bladder filling with its warmth, her tongue moistened and smooth from drinking.

  “We liked the way you went and stripped, piglet, and now you went and even took a bath!”

  The skull giggled and gibbered in midair. Pete had stuck his fingers into the empty eye sockets—he shook it like it was a rattle.

  “We want a little of what you got.” Willy snarled.

  “Piglet, we been watchin’ you for weeks, and we been seein’ you come down here, we been watchin’ you but we been waitin’, and now no more watchin’ and waitin’.”

  Mattie felt the bone water inside and outside her skin, and her blood boiled with the cleansing that was going through it.

  The power that was shooting through her.

  The spirit of her daughter, rinsing her with the old power, the mind and the power and the knowledge and the memory of the old days, the days when she was a mambo. When she was a priestess. When she could call wasps from her womb, when she could protect the soul of the dead from the gods of evil.

  “Just a little nooky,” Pete said, rubbing the skull between his palms. “Seems you got plenty, and we fellers just want a slide or two.”

  “Sure, bitch, we done it before to ya, and you liked it, you liked it.”

  “You liked it, mama!” the skull screamed.

  “Dug up my baby’s grave,” Mattie said, her voice a low growl. “You done stole my baby’s bones.”

  “Shit, we just wanted to see what you got in here. You went ‘n killed somebody—we gonna keep it a secret. Just the three of us if you gon’ be a good girl. For such an ugly old hag you sure ain't got much gratitude.”

  Mattie shook her head violently. Water sprayed out from her hair. “No, it’s him. Baron Samedi made you do it.”

  “Crazy bitch.”

  “You don't even know,” she whispered.

  “Shut up,” Pete said, waggling the skull back and forth.

  “Baron gets inside ya, means your gonna die soon, means ya might already be dead.”

  Willy dropped the busted rib cage and came to the edge of the grave. He dropped to his knees, reaching down to his crotch and unzipped himself.

  Mattie cupped her hands. She brought up a palmful of bone water. Holding her hands up to the moon, she prayed. The old prayers of her mambo days were forgotten, shut away inside her. She prayed to Nadine’s spirit and the bones. Forgive me, my babygirl, forgive your mama what she done to you, protect me from the baron, protect these old bones.

  She felt something like an eel slithering in the grave pool of water, and for a moment she was scared, afraid it was the Baron here, come to drown her in her daughter’s own grave.

  But the water had a voice, charged with electricity, and she recognized the voice, briefly, a faint sound, the words were whispered and unintelligible, but they were her daughter’s. The water around her began to roil and splash, feeling alternately hot and cold, and Mattie held her cupped hands high for the blessing.

  The skull giggled.

  Magic Touch, Nadine, bring me the Magic Touch.

  Then she splattered the man who knelt in front of her, spraying the water across the flat small penis that flopped from his pants.

  When the water hit him there, he screamed.

  He screamed as if he�
�d been scorched with fire.

  The skin of his penis bubbled and blistered in his fingers.

  When she splashed water across his face, popping eruptions hissed where the water landed, his nose melting in the middle, one eye shut by its lid which had become waxen and dripped down and over to his cheekbone, his lips drooling down his chin. The screams became choked gurgles as he inadvertently swallowed some of the bone water.

  The man with the skull ran to his friend’s side. “What ya do to my buddy?”

  Mattie ducked her head down and drank in some bone water, gargling it in the back of her throat. Then she spat it out at him, and it peeled off the top layer of skin across his right arm. He dropped the skull, holding onto his buddy as they ran away through the woods.

  The skull slipped into the bone water. Mattie reached down to catch it. She clutched it to her breasts. “My baby, my baby,” she moaned.

  3.

  The dreams of the past beat their rhythms in Mattie Peru’s mind as she lay across the park bench at mid-afternoon the next day, her trash bags thrown back away from her, her rags half falling off. A couple passed by, glancing down at the woman, upset because they could not use the bench for their lunch hour. Mattie’s smell steamed from her skin and when a breeze came up, strollers in the park wrinkled their noses without quite knowing why.

  She lay still as if dead, but beneath her skin, her heartbeat was rapid and fluttering, her pulse beat fast, and if a doctor were to examine her at the height of this memory dream, he might diagnose a mild coronary—and when that moment came, Mattie would move. Chop-choppity-chop, the ax of her blood swung into her heart. Her right arm arched and her fist tightened. Drool sluiced from between her lips.