Dark Rooms: Three Novels

by Douglas Clegg

  Her eyes flickered open, then closed.

  Her dreams unfolded like a closed fist, gradually opening, the palm spreading, fingers splayed. And in the center of that hand, a small rose made of fire, a small rose opening its heart, and in its heart, the flame, and in the heart of the flame a man who called himself Gil DuRaz.

  4.

  Mattie Peru was on fire in her mind, but the fires raged with lust, lust for the dark man from the islands, lust for her half brother, Gil DuRaz. Gil had stood six foot five, a giant of a man, and so thin his ribs stuck out and rippled through the black cotton shirts he favored. His face was the face of a man who had seen beyond what life had to offer, who had done things that only dead men knew. It was ridged with dark knowledge, with a wild gleam in his deep-set eyes, a supreme love for the dead. He looked like a god to her—he was handsome, and strong, with the sharp look of a fighter who has never lost but is always on the lookout for a worthy opponent. And his smile! Wide and thick with a forest of beautiful teeth—a gold one on the upper left side that shone when he smiled.

  And she loved him because he made her love him.

  But the man was inspired with the spirit of the dead, he knew the rotting secrets of the graveyard.

  In those days, when Mattie was called Madeleine Perreau, she was the most beautiful young girl in Winthrop Park. She was tall and sturdy, but she had the smooth curves of a cello, and long, shiny hair, inherited from her mother. Madeleine had been born watching her mother scrub the floors in the Bram Apartments, but the young girl soon discovered her mother’s true power over the people who lived in the enclave of Winthrop Park.

  And she discovered the secret of the Screaming House, the Carrefour that bordered the park—the place where the petro, the spirits of evil, passed through.

  But then, when Mattie was a teenager, her half brother had taken her mind off such fears: he was a bokor, a high priest, a powerful man who could capture a soul in a clay jar and shatter it just as easily; he could bury a man alive and make him a zombi to do his bidding, and he could make his half sister fall in love with him, because inside him, inside his tall, lean dark body, there dwelled the mind and the spirit of the Lord of the Dead, of Baron Samedi.

  Mattie’s brother Gil had undergone a thousand possessions by spirits, but only at the Screaming House had the spirits stayed within him, as if now he were the jar, holding them.

  And she learned some of the secrets of the rada and petro, of the spirits and their rhythms, but Gil turned to the darkest of spirits. She watched as he cut the babies from the wombs of young girls, and she became possessed with the clamoring spirits of the house and made love with her brother, with her brother and with any man he wanted her to make love with, and she became a mambo, a priestess with him.

  But the gods who possessed her were beyond any she had ever heard of -- they were a kind of madness itself.

  She intended to spend her whole lifetime by his side, until he betrayed her, and betrayed her with a woman that he emptied out and filled with another spirit, the spirit of evil that dwelt in the house.

  She loved him until she saw him devouring a corpse.

  She believed it had been a corpse.

  Until the corpse had moved.

  And Mattie knew then it was no corpse at all.

  That her half brother Gil had become a cannibal, that he had developed a taste for flesh and blood, that he had perverted the Voudun religion that their mother had taught them, and had let something vile and evil into his worship. And the woman, the Housekeeper, was ensuring his corruption. When her brother finally had become Baron Samedi, the foul breathed flesh and blood of the grave, he turned against her.

  And he devoured the body of her only child, a child by a man that Gil had wanted her to love in the first place, an evil white man who had been Gil’s tool for bringing the child into the world. Because the night Gil came to her like a lover, possessed by the spirits, and every night after, she did not conceive with him, no child was born.

  So he wanted her child, even if it was hers by another man.

  And he wanted her child’s child.

  And he ate her baby, and he took her baby’s baby, and Mattie made him pay.

  She made him pay.

  And as Mattie remembered how she’d made Gil DuRaz pay, she heard her little girl calling something to her, something that sounded like…

  5.

  Mattie awoke, screaming. Pigeons scattered away from the bench she’d been sleeping upon. Nadine , honey, you callin’ to me, but I don’t understand nothin’ you sayin’. Her breasts were heavy and she felt sharp pains along her ribs, down to her thighs. It was still hot and sunny. Late in the day, and sundown may have been five hours away, but Mattie could feel the night in her bones, eating away at the daylight.

  Her heartbeat was like an ax chopping away at an old thick tree, pausing to swing back, and the chop! chop! choppity-chop! Her right hand dug beneath the trash bags, pushing aside her left breast, trying to hold her heart steady, trying to slow down its chopping. A memory of love came back to her, through a smell—it was an annoying odor, one which she could not identify, not sweat, not cologne, not food cooking, but somehow, all of these. And she saw the face of the man who was Nadine’s father.

  Mattie thought it was a dream as she lay there on the bench, clutching her heart, watching the two men in the car going by. One was young and handsome and she did not know him. The other was Mr. Big Man, and how he had changed on the outside, and how she could tell at a glance that on the inside he had not changed at all.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  HE SAID, IT’S NOT EVEN HUMAN

  1.

  “Get me the hell out of here!” Winston Adair shrieked. He kept his head down, his fists pounding the dashboard of his son’s Mercedes.

  He didn’t even have to look up to see the house, he knew where they were, he knew by the tone of Ted’s voice:

  “We could say hello while we’re here.”

  While they’d been driving, Winston had felt calm, almost relaxed, for the first time in three weeks—he had stayed inside and watched for those bugs, those crawling things, those wasps, but Ted had convinced him to come out for a drive, just for some fresh air.

  “It’s such a goddamned beautiful day and you’ve been pissing in mayonnaise jars long enough, it’s either a drive or a loony bin, your choice.” And so Winston had agreed to go, but only if the windows were kept tightly rolled up, only if the doors were locked.

  But he hadn’t agreed to this.

  “Jesus, Pop,” Ted whisper-shouted, “the whole damn world can hear you.”

  “Drive, or so help me God, Ted, so help me God!”

  Ted Adair, cursing under his breath, continued driving to the end of Hammer Street, taking a left on Kalorama, heading away from Winthrop Park.

  2.

  They went to Ted’s condo, because there was booze there. Ted needed a good stiff drink. He was trying to remember the name of the shrink his ex-wife Paula used to go to.

  Although maybe what Pop needs is a whole institute -- maybe he needs a megashot of morphine, maybe a lobotomy.

  Winston Adair glanced suspiciously around the living room, but then decided it was safe.

  He walked like he was already blind drunk—weaving across the parquet floor, stubbing his toes on the coffee table, then navigating uncertainly around the beige sofa, around the lamp table, along the wall, to the window that overlooked Q Street. He stayed to the left of the window. Then, spotting the dining room table and chairs, he went over, wobbling and klutzy the whole way, grabbed a chair, and dragged it back across the floor to the window. The chair made a fingernails-on-blackboard sound as it went.

  Ted shook his head sadly as he watched his father. He stood in the front doorway, unsure as to whether he should stay or leave. Why am I letting myself in for this? “Hey, listen, let’s say you’re not crazy, let’s say you were involved in all this voodoo bullshit, but so what? That was what, over twenty years ago? So y
ou ate a couple of mushrooms or something, or you drank too much vino and a girl died on the operating table. You can afford therapy, and if you want my advice, I think you just might get the top psychiatrist in town and stay with him for another ten years -”

  Winston sat at the window, to the side, so he could see out of it without being seen. He did not turn to face Ted. The back of his head was a large pink mound, with tufts of blue white hair spraying out. Ted watched the back of his head as if he could drill into it and find out what chemical was causing this malfunction in the Old Man’s brain. “It’s not just that day in 1968, son. It’s the rest of it, the rest of the deal. When the devil makes a deal, there’s always a string, there’s always something within the deal, another deal, and within that deal, another deal.”

  “Jesus, you are talking in circles. Want a martini?” Without waiting for an answer, Ted went over to the bar and poked around in the freezer. “You know, you keep the gin in the freezer and it’s just the right temperature. No ice, nothing. Just gets that chill. You want vodka or gin? Vodka, right?”

  “Just give me the bottle.”

  “Will you make more sense if I do? I mean, this little outing wasn’t planned out of the goodness of my heart. I wanted to make sure you were certifiable before I turned you over to the nice men in the white suits.”

  Winston sighed heavily. “You are some son. You are some fucking son.”

  “Yeah, and you’re some fucking father, but let’s not get into it or I might just conk you over the head with this bottle.” Ted took a highball glass filled to the brim with vodka over to where his father sat. He lifted the Old Man’s right hand and cupped it around the glass. “Now don’t spill. That would definitely make me want to throw you out the window.”

  Winston Adair turned towards him, looking up at his oldest son with eyes that could’ve been empty sockets: there was nothing there, no color, no spark, no life. He had withdrawn somewhere inside himself the way a turtle withdraws into its shell.

  Ted wanted to cry, just break down and start crying, because as much as he despised the Old Man, as much as he loathed him, it was as if his father were already dead and this were the funeral, because it seemed like there was no turning back. No cure for a man this far gone.

  “It would be a relief if you did, just break my neck or knife me while I’m sitting here.” Winston lifted his glass in a toast. “Good drink, good meat, good God, let’s eat, boy, now there’s a grace a man can sink his teeth into. I saw him do it, too, Ted, sink his teeth into that little girl, good God, let’s eat. And we all shared in the blood. My face was streaked with it—it tasted like liquid metal. That is insane, isn’t it? Well, I was insane, and maybe I still am. But that doesn’t stop it, craziness doesn’t stop it. I don’t know what does. ” He was already finished with his drink; he held the glass out to be refilled. He wiped his free hand across his lips as if they were parched.

  Vodka makes it easier, Ted thought as he poured out another glass. Some good old Absolut makes the medicine go down a little smoother. Don’t mind if I do. He lifted the bottle to his lips and gulped back a shot.

  “I wish I had died then.” Winston fingered the rim of his glass—it made a high-pitched squealing sound. “I wish when it happened, the girl’s mother had killed me the way she killed him. But I thought then, that by killing him, Gil DuRaz, it would put an end to it. I thought they were a bunch of crazies. I didn’t really believe. When he wanted the unborn baby, not even a baby, a fetus, just a mushy wriggling pudding of flesh, I thought it was just part of his sickness, and shit, boy, I was glad to let him take it, he said, he said to me, ‘It’s not even human,’ and that’s what I thought, too, it’s not even breathing. But then I saw it, I saw the fetus. And I knew he meant something else by that. He said, ‘It’s not even human,’ boy, and he meant it. He was right, Ted, my boy, the thing wasn’t human, it was inhuman, it had claws like razors, it had eyes like a frog, it had a mouth, Jesus, its mouth was filled with warts and bumps, and it was barely formed, its spinal cord was just a knotted rope running beneath the flesh—you could practically see its heart beating, all its veins on the outside of its skin—and I said, ‘Fucking Jesus!’ and that man, Gil, said, ‘Hardly Jesus, Mr. Big Man. This is your son, this is your true son, the son you are meant to have, and he will be the vessel for my spirit, Mr. Big Man, he will be the possessor of my soul.’ I wondered what in God’s name that man had done to that girl to make her body form a baby like that, and he told me, son, he told me, get this—are you getting this? ‘Cause this is important—‘ Don’t you think it resembles you? Don’t you think this is what you are inside? ’ And hell, Ted, if that gob of flesh didn’t open its disgusting perverted mouth wide and moan and twist in his hands just like it was alive.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  NORMAL LIFE

  1.

  “What book?” Hugh asked, cradling the phone between his chin and scrunched-up shoulder—he propped the refrigerator door open with his right leg bent at the knee, and with his hands managed to move around all the jars of pickles and jams that Mrs. Deerfield had given them.

  On the other end of the line, the clerk at the bookstore said, “Diaries of an Innocent Age by Standish, Mr. Adair. You ordered it in June, but it was hard to locate—the company who published it has been out of business for ten years. We finally got it, though. It just took a little longer than usual.”

  “Oh, right,” Hugh said absent-mindedly—he found what he was looking for, a half-empty Miller Lite behind the orange juice carton. “I pretty much forgot about it—I’ll be down sometime today.”

  When he hung up the phone, he sniffed at the bottle of beer—it had gone flat. He’d opened it and put it in there the day before the trip to the beach. They’d been back a few days, so what did he expect? But he’d gone eight days without a drink of any kind, on his best behavior at the beach, for Rachel’s benefit. And the beach had been trying, particularly after the accident with the car and the cat. With Rachel crying, Penny Dreadful crying, and Hugh feeling miserable and then the rain and the late start in the noontime traffic congestion; with Rachel, her eyes red, saying that they should just turn the car around and go home, wondering how Mrs. Deerfield would ever forgive them… Hugh had craved a drink like a pregnant woman craves pickles. Then the beach was overcast most of the time (and still he managed to get a painful sunburn which no amount of lotion seemed to help—his nose continued to peel, and they’d been back three days), and Rachel was too listless, almost withdrawn over the cat’s death, to want to go out to a restaurant. So at night they sat in the motel room and ate junk food and watched bad TV. Hugh had a terrific case of constipation the whole time, and was a Metamucil junkie by the last day—he favored the orange-flavored kind in the small easy-to-toss-away packets; it reminded him of Fizzies from his childhood, dropping the Metamucil in the glass of water and having it hiss and sputter into this utilitarian punch.

  But this punch was even better than Fizzies or Metamucil. He held the bottle up and took a long, lingering drink of beer. Flat Miller Lite ain’t so bad. He chugged down the rest and set the bottle on the counter. No, better trash it. Don’t need to get her upset over an old beer. He opened the cabinet beneath the sink and tossed it out.

  No sign of roaches beneath the sink. No mousedoody behind the plastic trash can.

  “Scout!” he called up the stairs.

  She didn’t answer.

  “Honey, I’m going to run down to KramerBooks for a sec. Can I pick up anything?”

  2.

  After Hugh left for the store, Rachel lay back on their bed. She was still exhausted from the trip, and then had plunged right back to work and it felt like jumping in the cold Atlantic that first day of the trip. The week back had passed slowly even with all the work she had to catch up on, and the weekend had taken forever to arrive. But then even Saturday was not perfect: one of her famous migraines had come on suddenly in the afternoon, so she lay on top of the covers, the shades drawn
, the lights out. Her skin burned; every time she scratched her arm, more skin flaked off on the bed. The pain and nausea were unrelenting.

  But even with the pain, she smiled.

  She knew it was too soon to tell, and it’s just my overactive imagination, that and this migraine, but I am never ever late like this, it’s always like clockwork, always, the only time this has ever happened before was when it happened.

  How many times had they made love in the past ten days? Twelve? Thirteen times? What are the chances? Oh, God, but I’m imagining things. You can’t know you’re pregnant until a month or two afterwards, this is just wishful thinking… but Scout, you knew before, you knew that somewhere inside you there was a little sphere just hopping with new life. You knew then, and you thought so immediately, and you were right. It wasn’t Let’s Pretend, it was real, it was Normal Life.

  “You’re just being silly,” she said aloud, to the walls, to the ceiling, to the drapes. Her head was throbbing, but she didn’t really mind.

  3.

  From Diaries of an Innocent Age, by Verena Standish:

  …Winthrop Park was, in those days, quite a fashionable residence, although there were still lingering traces of its bohemian beginnings: they said a woman at the Bram estate ran a house of ill-repute down at the corner, mainly for sailors and coloreds, although this was all rumor and I never saw a sailor or a colored, unless that colored was a member of one of my or my neighbor’s staffs…