9 Tales Told in the Dark 2

by 9 Tales Told in the Dark

  Only I encountered Luke and looked my dark knowledge at him. He would not look me in the eye the way I wanted when he found me sitting with a book or listening to music; he acted nervous instead, as if he were afraid of me. I knew it was fake, fake, fake and, more interesting still, he knew that I knew. He knew I was helpless to do anything about it. Luke was a minimalist, a fundamentally lazy creature (the apple only falls so far from the tree), and did not care because he did not have to care.

  Michael learned to act (from Luke? Certainly not from his parents), as well. Certainly Luke had nipped (tasted) him a time or two, but then for a while it seemed to happen more often. Michael was exactly two and a half years old the day he came to me, clutching an elbow. He was screeching his piping, bursting hatred of the dog that had nipped him, crawling along as if he were about to faint from the shock and pain of it. I stopped my pacing in the den, surprised to see that swollen, tearstained face aimed at me. He cried louder when I tried to examine him and clutched his elbow tighter, seemed to know I was uncomfortable with his tiny fingers. I found no mark anywhere on his arm. No sign of a bite. None. I was impressed, although it struck me as an evil development in a way that Luke’s trickiness did not. I wondered how many times he had done it.

  Luke arrived in the doorway. Michael hung awkwardly in my arms, and I turned, turned so that he could see the dog. He began to cry again. I stood there a while, serene, Michael softly crying. A feeling of rightness came over me.

  Then suddenly the boy was crying at me and swatting at me, and I put him down the way I would a rabid animal.

  The look on his little face.

  Luke shuffled aside, his rotundity dancing, as the boy pushed his way out.

  Luke spent a few nights closed in the garage where he soiled more than usual and ate glues and paints, getting them on his paws and tracking them into the house.

  Michael’s games did nothing to dissuade Luke from his company. Luke watched perpetually for gaps in the security of the house, an unsecured gate, a clumsy pair of legs taking their time in a doorway. They came often. My brother’s family were careless people. In particular, there was something in Michael’s bedroom that drew Luke there repeatedly. It seemed to be a smell on everything the boy touched. His shampoo? The smell of his old formula on baby toys still scattered around? (When the boy was still a newborn, they had once shared a meal of his stool.) Luke loved invading Michael’s room when the boy was not there, as often as possible, chewing on his baby things, stuffed toys, figures, the unloved blanket always left around the house; that was finally as much Luke’s blanket as much as Michael’s, always wet with saliva.

  For his part, as soon as Michael realized Luke’s interest in something of his, he never let it leave his sight.

  On the Fourth of July that year, I found them in the den under a desk. Luke had Michael’s stuffed dinosaur trapped under a paw while the boy struggled to get it loose, crying and growling and snotting, while Luke licked the back of Michael’s neck. Sometimes he stopped licking to lean back and, looking down his snout, study the boy with apparent affection.

  For a moment I shrunk in alarm, knowing the house would be full of shouting when the father or mother found the scene. But then the boy reared back with a great two-handed tug and got the toy. It was not Michael. It was one of the neighbor boys, and it must have been a naughty one to have gotten up here, through the baby gates, alone. Luke let him go with a last long lick.

  Masochism is the only explanation: I was staying for a week this Christmastime, in the guest bedroom. My only consolation was the knowledge that everyone is a bit like me, staying where they don’t want to stay, returning to places they barely escaped, inclined to suffer rather than do what is right. It also seemed reckless. I felt that because of the length of the stay, I might be forced to do something I did not normally do.

  To aggravate things, when I arrived, Luke was a week into his Diet. He looked no thinner, only restless, panting. He suffered these bouts of imposed humanness sometimes, when they decided he should, but this was different, struck where it would hurt him most. I felt alarmed, then cautious, at this disruption of the balance of things.

  Because Diet-Luke was different. He afforded me none of the little intrigues I’d grown to depend on when my peculiar madness brought me back here. Now, he never seemed to stop moving. He might have been a wild boar running through thickets. Every time I saw him, he was horning his muzzle under the lip of the couch or on his way to someplace else, eyes bright with need. He was not quite growling under his breath.

  The week wore on like a sickness, and I got tired of seeing his flabby shanks always quivering by; I detest fat. Luke annoyed me almost as much as his owners. His memory became what it had been when he was very young, and he checked the same rooms twice and three times an hour. He ransacked the empty garbage every night, grew wilder and louder until it sounded almost as if he were fighting with another dog.

  The calm with which his masters righted things the next morning was disturbing.

  I looked around, feeling furtive. The Purina bag was folded down far in the back of a latching cupboard; the box of treats was gone. Instead, there was a small bag of ProPlan Weight Management formula and a child-sized carton of ScienTreats. He was on two cups of food per day.

  Luke was watching the birds again, mewling at the lawn when it popped with sparrows.

  At mealtimes, he had to be locked in the den so he wouldn’t charge a lap or circle the table. I did not like it. I did not like it at all. It upset the normal balance. I would be claimed by my own reckless, half-formed designs sooner or worse than I could have imagined. I wanted to open the latch cabinets and the refrigerator to him. I thought I should stick him in the garage with his food bag. But with Michael out of town and his friends away, they would know who did it.

  The only upset was when Luke managed to break into the latch cupboard and my brother found him in a spray of Purina covering half the kitchen floor. Luke did not fight him when my brother grabbed the flesh on the sides of the dog’s neck and tried pulling him away from his kibbling, but he did not obey, either. Luke dragged the far larger man around with him, snapping at the grey-brown bits, and licking the floor until there was a single flashing bite, making my brother draw his hand back over his head with a loud curse, both of them growling.

  They thought he was hungry. Just very hungry. They understood nothing.

  Luke ran down the halls and then stopped, bug-eyed, as if he had forgotten why. He got underfoot, got stepped on. He sat in front of them, in front of me, with nothing in his face. Guttural noises came from his throat. He was becoming very much like a dog at last.

  It was not that I felt sorry for Luke. It was that I could not stand to see them having it all their way. It was killing – literally killing me. My hands shook. A cool draft on the back of my neck stiffened it near to breaking. Luke had made the house bearable. Democratic.

  Finally, on the fourth day, when I was reaching my own breaking point from such an undiluted torrent of vapidity, something about Luke broke.

  He stopped.

  He seemed to be his old self, only more so. He moved with a calm, easy, if rotund gait. He breathed slowly and deeply, not seeming to sigh as he did when he was wistful, but like a hunter. He positioned himself in a new favorite spot at the top of the stairs where he could observe all the comings and goings. He looked out of the picture window like a seasoned inmate. He vomited calmly and then picked at it with delicacy. He made regular rounds, scoring a few victories: the packaging from a frozen chicken dinner, cardboard and all; a dead field mouse in the side yard that he carried around a little while before taking it into his throat like a snake; a chocolate Santa in foil, along with a considerable amount of glittering tinsel; leather shoelaces. He showed up late at night with the sides of his mouth dripping with yellow ichor from what must have been a large insect. These opportunities came. He was patient. He seemed to be biding his time.

  What they did not realize –
could not realize – was that a cup and a half of food per day was spare but still enough to satisfy Luke’s physical hunger, yet nowhere near enough to suit the purpose of his eating.

  On the sixth day Luke was very quiet, practically a shadow. I wondered whether he knew that Michael was coming home that day. Had he seen the wife changing the sheets on Michael’s bed? Had something about the smell of the house changed?

  Michael arrived. After two weeks with his aunt and uncle, he had gained an amazing amount of weight, especially for a boy barely out of infancy. They came with him since he was too young to travel alone and, after desperate negotiations, still insisted on checking into a hotel. I retired to the guest bedroom where, despite the fact that I was the only one fool enough ever to visit them, all signs of me were erased between visits. Each of my returns represented yet another failure to lure someone better.

  With the boy and the dog back in the same house, the guard of extendible gates was tripled, the screws checked. Doors were carefully closed and checked with a test tug to make sure the latch caught. My brother and his wife were not people of great attention, but they did not completely forget Luke’s Diet. I think they even suspected the dog was a little out of his head, which might make him temperamental.

  I had often wondered on what level my brother and his wife knew things. Certainly not with their forebrains. But they were not stupid or even really unobservant at the end of the day, and sometimes this emerged in chaotic ways. Sometimes a thing I had thought outside their notice had only built into something terrible, inexpressible, causing one of the strange storms that came and went unremarked. Some of the ways I disdained them I had been forced to let out into the open, this time – because my stay was longer – in a hundred small ways. I had thought it was a miasma they could no more grasp than if it had been a dark and sourceless smell.

  The day after he returned, Michael came into the den and, a few feet from where I was listening to music, turned on the television. Androgynous, nonsensical animals began singing and dancing on the screen. I did not turn the music off. I was curious about whether he would notice the strange clash of sounds in the room and think back on what he had done.

  I happened to be thinking right then of how little my brother and the wife actually noticed in the house all around them – the very regular, very obvious doings there. I was wondering whether it was more stupidity or arrogance to blame, or more probably a noxious combination of the two. That was when the wife came and looked in on the boy, standing with arms folded, coolly thoughtful. Then her face squinted up strangely. I still had not turned off the music. She looked at me. I looked back, feeling hidden. Then the slight disturbed squint of her face became a wild contortion, and then she was flying across the room like a bat. Her hair flew around her. She slammed off the music and started screaming – screaming – accusations at me. I jumped out of the chair, blinking and stammering and wringing my hands. The boy started to cry. The animals danced. I did not know what was happening. She was mostly incoherent. My brother came into the room, and they started gesticulating at each other, shrilling about me in the third person. I stood there, backing away a little, making sure the music was completely off.

  After a minute, the wife’s tearing rage broke into sobbing. She talked about my music and the fact that no one else liked it. She talked about Michael wanting to watch his program. She called the music strange (the uncouth Chopin and his corrupting rhythms), me strange. They never looked at me. This went on a while.

  I realized that the sudden violence against me affected me less than their profound unhappiness, rudeness, savagery. It made me sick.

  The strangest thing was happening as I stood there. I dropped my well-wrung hands to my sides and became glad I was forgotten only a few feet away. I felt all the terrible nerves I’d always experienced in this place coming into sudden, awful perspective. I felt myself changing from a loose sea of resentments and jangled nerves to a crystal: something cool, clear, solid.

  Dinner on Christmas Eve went according to plan. The turkey was cooked through, the stuffings at their straightforward, mediocre best. The tree came out of a box in three pieces and was erected complete in twenty minutes, minus half of the extra tinsel, which Luke had disposed of, and which we still found here and there.

  Of the dog himself, I saw little. He was convinced now of the Diet. That it was a real condition and could not be gotten around in the usual way. He did not even hover around the vast table. I did not know where he was. I did not know if he felt the hunger anymore. Maybe starving occupied him just as well. Maybe he had found something to eat and was pulling it apart, hour by hour; something terrible, tough-jointed, gamey, and certainly off-limits.

  When I got up to pace the front hall and get away from their drivel for a few minutes, I saw the reflections of his eyes at the top of the stairs. He lay in his favorite spot, watching what passed below. His eyes were dark and reflective, his body relaxed. He had become strange again. Inexplicable. He looked at me but did not stare. He was more aware of his own eyes than any other animal I had ever seen. His eyes did many things. They peeped. They misled.

  Presents piled beneath the tree that night. Christmas music played. The wife paged through catalogues. My brother drank eggnog and beer. Stockings filled up, lights lit the lawn. A useless bunch of mistletoe hung in the front door. All of it was perverse.

  When I started getting ready to go to bed early, no one tried to change my mind.

  My last waking emotion, listening to them mutter away in the kitchen, listening to two televisions droning, droning, droning, was a bitterness so intense that it forced me to bite down on a corner of the sheets to keep from screaming and chewing my lips.

  It was not just me that was crystallized, it was everything. However hard I raged, I was part of an unchanging crystal. I saw that now.

  After midnight, my eyes opened. I did not immediately understand why.

  The door of my room was open a crack, as I had left it.

  The Christmas tree cast a red and green glow on the wall of the stairway. Down the hall, the family lay sleeping — or was supposed to be. I was almost certain I had heard small feet creeping down the hall toward the tree’s enticement. I remembered it in the echoing way one remembers things that happen in a thinness of sleep. Now I heard something else: more footsteps, then a short scuffle, and then a child’s grunt of wrath and frustration.

  I crept out of bed and placed an eye in the crack of the door. I could see Luke curled by the baby gate at the top of the stairs, head raised, and intent on something below. I watched him. He was strangely erect; his ears aimed forward. Something about his silhouette was infinitely quiet. It occurred to me again what an alien presence he was.

  I opened the door a little wider. One of Luke’s ears twitched. Then he must have known it was me, because the ear twitched away again.

  The mesh baby barrier still sealed off the stair, but it stretched from wall to wall on a slight diagonal. Not all of the friction pads were touching the wall. It had been weakened, compromised. The silence of the house with the Christmas tree glow and the smell of presents and Luke’s alert posture felt strangely alive. I knew I had arrived at one of those moments when the walls of ordinary reality – the crystal – had grown thin.

  I knew that Michael had often been frustrated with the barriers, himself, and had watched his parents work them at every opportunity. He must have discovered their secret and decided to get a head start on Christmas. Of course, Luke would have tried to slipping through with him, causing the scuffle. He was very intent on whatever was going on downstairs.

  I felt that something significant might be happening, now: a conjunction in which all of the aware things in the house were in motion, and the brutal things, which calcified and kept order were all asleep.

  I closed my eyes for a moment, and then entered the hallway. I approached the barrier and the dog as gingerly as possible. The subdivision was new and the houses huge and shoddily built like ov
erinflated balloons; already the boards of the hallway might dip and creak. All of the sounds in the place, the stair, the air system, were all noisome and flatulent.

  Luke watched me with his hungry, intelligent eyes, but remained otherwise still and silent. He would prefer the entire house were robbed and his masters murdered in their beds than do anything to warn them. I looked down the steps as he did, although I could see nothing but the kitchen wall and a sliver of Christmas tree glow. I looked at him until he looked back.

  His eyes belonged to no particular species. Even in the dark I saw that. During the first desperation of the Diet, his pupils had shrunk; now they were like drainpipes.

  We watched each other. We both were crystallized, tonight. Uneasy, singing crystals. The bulk of his body seemed to have tremendous potential, like the body of a sleeping steer. I felt that our thoughts now ran closer together than they ever had, almost as if he might suddenly speak to me in English words, and this would shock me and send me flying back to my room. But still I leaned over him. He continued watching me. I set the pad of my finger on the gate latch and stared back at him. He looked between my face and my finger. Slowly, I pulled up the latch.

  I never exactly formed a plan. I was simply acting from one moment to the next, thinking nothing, full of a blind anticipation.

  Luke’s muscles became tense, ready. He pulled his paws beneath him. He cocked his head halfway between myself and whatever he was hearing down the stairs. I felt layers of thought and restraint coming from him in strange waves.

  Still being careful not to wake the half of the household that was still asleep, I peeled back one side of the baby gate about eight inches. Taking in Luke’s soft bulk spread around his paws, I opened it another four. Too much, and no one would believe the little boy had simply left it open behind him.