by Alyssa Wees
“Please.”
I hesitate, even though I know, I know I shouldn’t. I pause, and I do not open the door after all. The boy, this Darkness, an inoculation, my veins frothing with fright, foaming with fascination. Gabrielle rubs her face against my shin, wanting to leave, to run, to hide.
“If you don’t mind,” I say, in what I hope is an imperious but dispassionate tone, “I’d like to go to sleep now.”
“By all means,” says the Darkness, the tension in his voice relaxing. “I don’t mind at all.”
“I mean, I want you to leave. Now, please. Or I am going to open this door, and you can’t stop me.”
The air quivers. The silence slurps us whole, then spits us back out.
“All right,” he says at last. “Besides, shadows don’t sleep, as it happens.” Much quieter, though, he adds, “And dreams, well—they’re always asleep, aren’t they?”
There is a sigh, the release of a long breath. A sticky breeze brushes my cheeks, my hair. The boy somehow, supposedly, leaves the room. I wait, unmoving.
Is he really gone?
No. I bury my fingernails into the perspiring flesh of my palms.
I can still hear him, smell him, feel him. The Darkness.
Smiling.
Breathing.
Slowly.
I gather my pillow and my fox and abruptly tug the door wide open, and still it is so, so dark. With Gabrielle clinging to my calf, I run down the stairs into a wan tangle of light in the hallway. Suddenly I can’t stand the thought of sleeping in this house at all, so I clutch my pillow tighter and creep along the corridor to the main stairs, and then down to the first floor, where I snatch an old sleeping bag out of the coat closet. On tiptoe, I sneak through the foyer and out the front door, race across the street on bare feet. Away, away, away from the house and the room inhabited, infected, infested by the Darkness, far enough down the beach that it—he—can’t crawl out and get me. At least, this is what I tell myself. I am safe here, outside.
For a long time I lie on my stomach in the sleeping bag on a soft swatch of sand, my elbows spread out over the pillow and my chin in my hands. Gabrielle nestles into my neck, our faces close together looking back at the windowless attic. Both of us watching, waiting, hunting the hunter.
A car trundles down the road, its headlights fanning in front of it, but their spectral fluorescence doesn’t quite reach us. I stare at the house, a lone three-storied white box with green shutters and blood spots of geraniums in flowerpots on the porch, a crooked mailbox with a broken red flag that swings toward the ground. For a moment, between one blink and the next, its walls appear as torn strips of skin, rippling in the warm summer wind like clothes on a laundry line.
After a minute, an hour, a lifetime or ten, I roll onto my back. Except for the few popped pustules of stars and the waning wart of the moon, the sky is dark. But this darkness is ordinary, and it does not speak. It does not breathe.
My only wish now is for sleep. Or maybe not sleep exactly, but waking—the natural reset after a solid night’s rest, fresh sunlight and soft cotton pajamas and a hot breakfast. If I can only fall asleep, I think everything might be okay. The Darkness—maybe he will have left. Maybe I will wake and laugh at this nightmare.
Maybe.
I close my eyes and repeat a prayer, a plea: I am not afraid.
I am not afraid.
I am not afraid.
She said, “Wake up.”
She said, “Follow me.”
She said, “Come and play.”
The Witch smiled, shaking off thoughts of the strange visitors from the day before. She scratched behind the foxes’ ears before galvanizing them from their rest, singing softly as she nudged their ribs with her toes, her exultant hum setting the leaves to vibrating and the wind to whirling. The foxes needed nothing from the Witch of Wishes, and for that she was grateful. They slept in clusters all around the base of her throne, forming a ring of fine auburn fur trimming the dais, but when she called to them, they stirred and stretched their legs. They followed her to the glade, where from the heap of offerings on her altar she selected a child’s detached shadow and twisted it tightly in her hands, ridding it of its accumulated darkness. When the dust had been thoroughly drained, she compressed the light that was left into an orb and tossed it into the air, so high that it stuck to the sky. The foxes yawned, snapped their jaws, winking in the dull, dripping light of the shadow-wrung sun. They tilted their heads as the Witch of Wishes pirouetted around the glade, before they joined the wild waltz.
The foxes had not learned this yet, but it was something the stars knew well, and the Witch knew it too: The burning scream inside you hurts less when you keep moving, keep going, keep reaching, in whatever way you can.
This was the Witch’s way, and had been every day—dancing under the warm shimmer of the transient sun. Until the morning when the Witch looked out at the foxes gathered around the glade and noticed a stranger among them.
At first she ignored him, this intruder with sleek black fur who smelled of apples and cinnamon and secrets. She did not like that he appeared the day after the curious pair of older children, and neither did the other foxes, who kept their distance; only the red-furred fox approached him and snarled. The Witch called her guardian back, inciting the foxes to join in her midday revels as if nothing were amiss. Falling into a fast-footed rhythm, the Witch leaped and laughed, the sunlight silvering her dark hair. She glanced over her shoulder to see her foxes galloping dutifully after her.
Every fox but one.
At once the Witch halted, and several foxes crashed into her calves, their wet noses swiping the backs of her knees. She swiveled toward the stranger and marched over to him, hands on her hips.
She said, “Dance.”
She said, “Now.”
She said, “I will use your bones to drum the beat of our song, if you will not join along.”
But the strange fox only lifted his head, and smiled.
A colony of sleepless seagulls squawks as they fly past where I lie in my sleeping bag, their white feathers ultra bright in the sun’s glare seeming to shine from everywhere—from above, from below, from the pockmarked pavement of the street, from the undulant skin of the sea.
Was he real, the Darkness? If I were to go back to the attic, would I still find him there?
Gabrielle rises to her feet, arches her spine, before lying back down on my pillow. I turn my head to the side and nearly cry out when I see another blanket-wrapped body beside me on the sand. Face angled away, a fan of yellow hair spread across a pink pillow, and a grainy netting of sand stuck to her cheek and the tip of her nose.
Rose.
I exhale, relieved. I lift my hand to shield my eyes, and a woman jogging down the edge of the street mistakes the gesture for a wave. She raises her hand to me in greeting as she passes; her long brown ponytail swishes back and forth with each step, headphones looping to connect her ears to a device strapped to her arm. The wind seems to rip the plait right out of her scalp, and for a moment she’s bald, her scalp glowing like a second sun.
I kick out of my sleeping bag and lean back on my hands as Gabrielle raises her head, the fur on her chin matted flat. When she looks at me, I see that her pupils have shrunken, shriveled.
She feels it first, a thousandth of a second before I do: a wisp of cool air. It skitters across my shoulder blades, the nape of my neck. Not a breeze—a breath.
He’s here, I think.
No, he can’t be.
But he must be. Somewhere, somewhere on the other side of all that light. Pick the sun off the sky like a scab, and there he would be. The Darkness, the night.
“Ree?” Rose twitches, then sits up, the blankets pooling around her waist, revealing her creased red T-shirt, the hem stretched out of shape around her neck. After a long, languoro
us yawn, reaching her arms up, she smiles at me. “Good morning. How did you sleep?”
I shrug. “No worse than usual.”
“Really?” she says, knocking her shoulder against mine. “You didn’t just have the best rest of your life out here, beside the sea and beneath the stars?”
I pretend to look all around, searching. “What stars?” I point to the sun. “Oh, wait, I found one!”
She laughs, and I give her a wink. “I guess we’re too close to the city to see much at night. But the sea—the sea is nice.”
Rose scratches Gabrielle behind the ears, and my fox closes her eyes in contentment. We sit in silence for a moment, comfortable. After a while, though, I look at Rose and ask, “So how did you know I was here?”
“I heard you run down from the attic. You didn’t come to bed, and you weren’t on the couch.” Tugging an elastic off her wrist, she bends her neck and braids her hair. “I started to panic, but then I saw that the closet was open and the sleeping bag was gone. I thought about Renata and her hiding places and then found you here.” She looks up—not at me, but toward the sea. “I didn’t want you to be alone.”
Gabrielle sits up now, fully alert, and I feel again the ribbon flush of fear that clenched tightly around her spine and mine when we first realized that the darkness in the attic was breathing, alive.
“You know when you told me,” I say, piecing my words together carefully, “about how beauty needs light to exist but ugliness doesn’t? Like colors, kind of?”
She nods, scratching at the corner of her eye.
“Well.” I look down at my torn fingernails that no polish can save. After a few seconds I say it, fast: “What if I told you that there’s a boy in the attic? And he seems to know me even though I don’t know him? And I don’t know where he came from or how he got there?”
What I want is for her to tell me that there is no such thing as ugliness, as monsters. That they exist only in metaphor and human minds. And even in dreams they are out of touch, out of reach, out of sight. Intangible.
But.
She says nothing.
She says nothing, and the breath I’m holding won’t last.
I poke her cheek with my finger, and her colorless skin is cold. “What would you say to that? If I meant what I just said?”
“I’d say that sounds super sketchy.”
We both turn at the sound of Raisa, who approached so quietly, neither of us noticed. She wears shorts and a blue bikini top to match her silvery blue-dyed hair pulled into pigtails. Squinting behind hot-pink sunglasses, she drops down beside me and stretches her legs out long in front of her.
Renata skips up just a few seconds behind, dressed similarly but in a belted yellow one-piece and a sun hat with a wide droopy brim over her loose brown curls. She grins, flopping belly-down onto the sand.
“Um, how much of that did you hear?” I ask them, my face flushing as I realize they must have heard at least some of what I’ve just told Rose.
“Oh, every word,” Renata says cheerfully as she etches her initials into the sand with her fingertip, completely oblivious to my embarrassment. “Your voice carried clear across the beach.”
“I can’t believe you guys slept out here,” Raisa says, opening her eyes wide and flexing her bare feet. “You should’ve at least left a note. Mom and Dad were seriously freaking out until they saw you through the window. I mean, do you even know what grave misfortunes can befall a young woman on her own, unaccompanied? Thieves, cutthroats, bird droppings, men’s rights activists—”
Just then five teenage boys in board shorts pedal by on their bikes. I recognize them from the neighborhood down the street.
The boy at the front with long brown hair under a baseball cap stops, and the rest follow suit, staring at us. “Hey, look, guys. It’s the Raving Ravennas! How you ladies doing today? Is there enough room at the table for us to join your mad tea party?”
Raisa huffs and holds up her middle finger at them, then turns to us, as if to say, See? Grave misfortunes.
I have a reputation among my peers for being a bit of an oddball. Because of shrieking while running from mailboxes, and gawking at people when my visions make it look like they have a bird’s beak instead of a mouth. Not to mention keeping a fox as a pet. My sisters defend me when they can, but all the kids around town tease us. They think we have secrets, and maybe we do. Secrets we don’t even know ourselves, locked away in the restless, breathless blooms of our hearts, coiled in the roots of our souls. Juicy secrets. That’s the word people use—juicy.
But I think, especially after my encounter with the Darkness, that if we have secrets, they aren’t juicy at all. I think, more likely, our secrets are bloody.
The other boys snicker at Raisa, while the one in front waves his hand. “Aw, you know I’m only kidding.”
“Kindly shut up, Brett,” Raisa says. “This party is extremely exclusive. Witches only.”
“Come on, guys,” another says, and shrugs. “Let’s get out of here before they summon a demon or something to eat us.”
“Who said anything about summoning a demon?” I yell before Raisa can retort. “We’re perfectly capable of eating you ourselves.”
Brett laughs, tipping his head back, and the muscles of his tan stomach clench. He sets his feet back on the bike pedals. “Hey, have a good day. And see you around.”
“Yeah, have fun with your séance, or whatever it is you’re doing,” another one adds. “Tell the ghosts I said hi.”
Immediately I think, We are the ghosts.
And I don’t know what I mean by that, exactly. But I think it’s true.
Still sniggering, the boys push forward on their bikes and ride away. It’s quiet again, or as quiet as it can be, with the repetitive smack of the sea on the shore and the warm scuttle of the wind.
Raisa chews on the shiny ends of her pigtails, watching the boys’ retreating backs.
“Anyway,” she says to me eventually, “you were saying something? About a boy in the attic? And I know it couldn’t have been one of those idiots. They’re too stupid to figure out how to pick up a girl, let alone pick a lock.”
Everything feels so dry all of a sudden: my mouth, my skin, my eyes. The sand, the breeze, the sky. I didn’t expect an interrogation when I mentioned the Darkness—I only wanted Rose to say that he wasn’t real, that I fell asleep without realizing it, and then that would be that. I could also dismiss him, forget him, and be done. But she didn’t, and now my internal scales tip over completely.
“I don’t know what he was,” I say.
“Was he cute, at least?”
I scoop a handful of sand and sprinkle it over my knees, my thighs, the beginning of burying myself alive. “I didn’t see his face.”
Renata grabs some sand too, and drops it over my calves, absentmindedly helping me. “Oh, he’s probably come to kiss you.”
“Well, obviously,” Raisa says, tilting her head so Renata can’t see her roll her eyes. “Rose? What do you think?”
The faintest blush spills down my cheeks at the mention of kissing—and of kissing him, specifically. Would it be like kissing a ghost, a shadow? Would our lips even touch?
But then I remember his hand, his very warm, and very real hand.
I concentrate on Rose, funneling sand through my fingers. She brings her thumb to her lips, gnaws at the thin skin around her nail. She stays quiet.
“No, Ren—it was just really dark and he wouldn’t let me turn on the light.” I plunge both of my hands deep into the hot sand, trying to stop their shaking. “It—he—was actually really terrifying. Terrifying and—I mean, he said he knows me. He says we’ve met before.”
Raisa stretches her arms up over her head. “Well, why don’t we just go look?” She shrugs as if it’s that easy and hops to her feet, skipping toward the street, not b
othering to look back and see if we follow.
Gabrielle startles to her feet as I stand, as I trip and scramble to grip my sleeping bag, my pillow.
“No!” I call, careening after Raisa in what feels like slow motion, the sand searing my heels and toes. Out of the corner of my eye, I see Rose snatch up her blankets and start after me, Renata trailing behind. Raisa pauses at the side of the road, waiting for me to catch up.
“What if he’s dangerous?” I say, panting as I come to a stop beside her. “What if—”
“Dreams can’t hurt you, Ree.” Raisa shakes her head and reaches to pick up the pillow that’s tumbled out of my overstuffed arms. “Dreams aren’t dangerous. And I’m sure that’s all this faceless boy was. A very silly dream.”
This is exactly what I wanted Rose to say.
But.
I don’t feel any better about it, and I can’t put my finger on why.
Clutching my unrolled sleeping bag to my chest, I swallow and shift my feet, feeling sand everywhere. I think she’s wrong, actually—some dreams are dangerous, the ones you try the hardest to forget. Because then they grow gaunt and bladed, and will come back clawing up your throat.
“I still want to check it out,” Raisa says as the others approach. “Let’s go, okay?”
“Wait—”
And again she bounds away and is already halfway toward the house before I can finish my protest. Renata shrugs with a vague sort of smile, and Rose says nothing. Why won’t she say something? We tiptoe-run across the blistering asphalt, and then the dewy grass of the front lawn squelches beneath our grimy feet. Off to one side, Mom’s garden flourishes, an eclectic collection of early summer blooms: bright hydrangeas like puckered pink moons; sun-melt peonies; evanescent irises with gaping periwinkle tongues; and gawking marigolds, fire-cream orange.
I try not to notice how the walls of the house pimple like cold skin as we step onto the porch and let ourselves inside. I hold the door open for Gabrielle, and then dump my sleeping bag onto the couch before hurrying after Raisa.