Dark Things I Adore

by Katie Lattari

  Then I notice something. On top of the log. Something small. I squint at it, then push myself onto my knees and crawl the two feet over to it. I kneel, feeling my cold, wet jeans clinging to my chilled skin, my ankle throbbing as I use it to partially prop me up. I look at the item and then bring my hand to touch it. It’s a neatly folded piece of paper. It is held down at its corner with a small stone. The tidy, square parcel is wrapped up in white string, like a present. There is writing on the outside. It says MOSS.

  Moss.

  So here we are.

  I look around myself, feeling more paranoid than I ever have in my entire life. But there is no one anywhere that I can see, and hardly any sound, hardly any movement. Just the lake, the trees, the beach, the sky. This place of Coral’s big announcement.

  My heart thuds. I touch the piece of paper very lightly, as if waiting for it to bite me or burn me. I pick it up. I untie the string with shaking hands, unfold it—one, two, three, half, and half, and half—until the inside reveals itself. Taking up most of the space on the inside is a picture. Of something. I turn my body so I can catch as much of the moon and starshine as possible. I squint. It is a printout of an image of a painting.

  From side to side, corner to corner, the painting is filled with color—canary and mustard and xanthic yellows with some cedar greens and blacks for shaping and highlighting. But overwhelmingly, the image is goldenrod.

  Goldenrod upon goldenrod upon goldenrod.

  Like the ribbons in the trees, those damn trees.

  It is a shock against the black night. Burnished and flowing; liquid and sensual. The colors undulate in a feminine drape across the canvas, but there is no woman here, really. There is an elongation. An abstract landscape from deep inside someone’s heart, someone’s mind. If there is a woman to be found at all, the form of a human body, it is in the shapes to the left side of the image that evoke thin shoulders, a delicate too-long neck, a head with almost no features but an elegant, enrobing swath of goldenrod “hair.” A stark, black line—the most straight, geometric mark in the whole scene—cuts violently across what could be seen as a throat. The black line—jarring in its darkness, jarring in its lack of curves—eventually begins to wend and thin until it curls off the top edge of the canvas. It is evocative of vibrancy, and yet also evocative of death.

  It is mine.

  In a simple, nondescript font beneath:

  Animus. Max Durant. 1993.

  And then:

  This is Coral, isn’t it, Max? Isn’t it, Moss? Isn’t it, M?

  I go cold. I go still. I go empty.

  I cannot tell if the world is falling away from me or if I am falling away from the world.

  I crumple up the sheet of paper and shove it in my pocket to take it out of sight while all the blood rushes to my face and to my heart, while a battering dismay wells up inside of me. What in the hell does it mean? Is this some sort of game? Some kind of sick joke?

  How did I get out onto the lake? Where is Audra? Who left that note? Did Audra leave that note? My mind reels. But how? How could she know?

  A cold, boundless terror has taken hold of me. I whip my head around, poised to see someone lurking nearby, but there is no one. There is the lake. There is the shore. The log with my initials. The boat with no oars that has, in a chipped, looping brushstroke, Happily Eveline After painted on the back.

  Coral. Eveline. Eveline.

  I can’t think. I just move. In my wet, cold jeans and my wet, cold jacket on my throbbing, swelling ankle, I just move. Panicked. I gain the break in the trees Audra had taken me through—how long ago was it now? Who could know?—and enter a new level of darkness. I hold up right away, unable to make out anything for a moment. I try to blink the dark and the drunkenness from my eyes. The shapes in the spectrum of blackness begin to reveal themselves to me. Where are the lights? Where are those path lights? I shiver just inside the border of the forest. Dread dismay snatches me in the blackness.

  There. To the right. A light. A light!

  One of the lights, just like on our way down. There is the path, thank god. I start picking my way slowly, so slowly, along the path. My ears are radars in the relative silence. When I get to the tree with the light, I rest my head against the bark and try to catch my breath. In my solitude, in the quiet, I think of the words in the note from the shore, over and over and over again. I think of Lupine Valley. I think of the jarring goldenrod ribbons flowing from the branches of Audra’s trees, so evocative of my painting. The yellow birds on Audra’s ears.

  My painting.

  I am filled with sparking amber. Goldenrod.

  This is Coral, isn’t it, Max? Moss? M?

  I circle around to the side of the tree with the light and find there is something pinned into the bark. A tiny scrap of paper.

  M is going to make me beautiful

  M is going to make me beautiful

  M is going to make me beautiful

  M is going to make me beautiful

  M is going to make me beautiful

  —March89. CD.

  I touch the fragile, creased piece of paper, yellowed with age. Shock grips my chest.

  But how? It’s her. It’s her handwriting.

  And M. That’s me.

  It’s us.

  I suddenly feel watched. Stalked. I take my hand from the note and move away from the immediate glow of the light. I look around me, eyes wide and wild. I listen.

  “Audra?” I whisper hopefully. “Audra—are you there?” Audra. Do I even want to find Audra? Do I truly want Audra to find me? After this?

  I jump when some ancient tree towering above me creaks like rending Styrofoam. I take a breath to steady myself. You’re spooked, Max. Get it together.

  I don’t know if I see the flash or hear the thunderous shot first.

  The muzzle blast blooms—instantaneous, sudden, there and then gone so fast, I think I might have dreamed it—from the darkness less than eighty yards off to my right.

  I scream.

  I hear the violent spray of buckshot wide of me and short of me.

  I vault in my skin. A croak of sheer horror leaks from me at the closeness of it.

  I start to run, senseless, wild with terror. I dive into the blackness of the woods, trying to put distance between myself and the gunman—no innocent night hunter but a madman. Who the hell hunts at night? Where is Audra? Has he already gotten to her?

  Or is she the one doing the hunting?

  M is going to make me beautiful.

  I stumble hard during the first several yards, wrenching my ankle further, whimpering like an animal, grabbing on to the rough bark of trees to find my footing. I go on like this, scrambling, desperate, for as long as I can manage, then I slow—out of necessity as well as strategy—and begin to choose my steps more carefully, try to dampen the sounds of my passage, so my hunter might not hear.

  My god, my hunter.

  I pause and try to get my bearings. I need to find another light. The lights will lead me home. To Focus. I close my eyes and force deep breaths. But what might you find at the next light, Max?

  I open my eyes into blackness, feeling overwhelmed by it. I look and look. I shiver. I take a few steps forward and there, in the distance, is a pinprick of light, floating like some ethereal being from a fairytale. A strangled noise escapes me. It’s my way out of here.

  But what if there’s another…?

  I shake the thought off and make a beeline for the light, thinking of getting to the car, getting to safety. Twigs and leaves crackle underfoot. Audra said the lights led to the lake, that there was no reason to be afraid. That means the lights will lead back, too. I have to keep going. I squint for any shred of moonlight. As I move through the trees, stumbling over roots and rocks and rises, the image of small, lost Audra with her knife and her cardinal blood and her smoke sign
als rises into my mind. She was lost for hours. In the daylight. On land she grew up on.

  She was also a child, Max. And you have these lights. Lights that will lead you back to safety. But my own reprimand gives me little solace.

  Another gunshot booms out, but it is much farther away. Immediate fear at the sound followed by relief at the distance swells in my chest.

  My teeth chatter, and I wrap my arms around myself as if in an attempt to hold in the heat, to hold myself together. My ankle is pounding with excruciating force. Keep going.

  This is Coral, isn’t it, Max?

  M is going to make me beautiful.

  Audra’s glinting smile flashes in my mind.

  As I get nearer the light, I see there is something posted to the tree above the fixture, and I feel my heart sink. A piece of paper pinned with a tack, just like the last one. I don’t want to look. But I do. I can’t help myself. As I come to the outer limit of the light’s circle, I pause. It’s a drawing this time. But not one of mine.

  [A bird’s beak is sketched in the center. A bird’s taloned foot is to the right. The beak and talons, disembodied, are rendered in impossible detail. Obsessive, fine, ultra-real.]

  —Feb89. CD.

  The light pulls me in. A moth to the flame. I get very close to the drawing. My breath puffs out before me, brushes the old, fragile paper. Equal to the proportion of my sense of shriveling, collapsing under these circumstances is a sense of blossoming anger. At her. At Coral.

  “No,” I whisper. “Coral. No.” Even as I stumble away from the spot, fists clenched, my eyes remain fixed on it. I can’t look away. I finally turn, and not far ahead, I see the next light.

  I can hear someone.

  Moving through the terrain steady and quiet as a jaguar. It’s hard to tell how far off they might be. I recede into the blackness, making disorienting angles between myself and the sound, myself and the next light, my breaths short and harried.

  I focus on the light, on the next light.

  It doesn’t quite seem like fifty yards ahead, which I think is how far apart Audra had said the lights were, but who could tell in this darkness, on this terrain.

  My mind swirls and roils with questions, with fear, and, yes, with anger. Everything that happened with Coral was so long ago. A lifetime ago. How could any of it even matter anymore?

  I limp on, using trees I pass as braces to get me a few feet forward at a time. At every other tree, I stop and listen, but I don’t hear my pursuer anymore. I move ahead, closer to the next light, my salvation.

  I recognize the drawing without even having to step into the orb of light emanating from the tree. It’s a drawing of a beautiful mother fox. Her eyes are almost feline, almost feminine. Her fur is fluffy and excruciatingly detailed, every hair lovingly drawn. The curve of her curled body, the way her puff of a tail snakes around her—both precise. She is a picture of perfection but for one thing. Erupting from her belly, just below her rib cage, is a beautiful, tiny fox kit, slick with blood and meat, its tiny teeth so sharp and glinting, they’re almost sawlike. The kit is eating its way out of the mother. When you look at the mother fox’s eyes more carefully, you see that they are flat, dull, empty. She is dead. But the kit is alive. Beautiful, disgusting, alive.

  I find that I have a hand covering my mouth. I find that I am shaking my head no.

  “You were going to give it to Brady, you said,” I whisper into the night. “He wanted you to draw for—for the baby.” My head is shaking back and forth, back and forth. “You drew this and said you tried to give it to Brady, but he was—mortified.” I swallow, my voice a strangled whisper. “I—loved it.”

  BOOM!

  It’s one beat of my heart or the sound of a gun going off.

  I run without realizing I’ve begun to run. The booze-wooziness and the exhaustion and the pain in my leg and my utter fear are blending my gut into a relentless, sickening mash. I want to throw up. But I keep going. I keep finding lights. So many lights. But the angles are wrong. The distance and pacing are wrong. It seems like there are lights everywhere. That they are leading me nowhere.

  The next light.

  [Yellow legal paper. Fold lines. A cracked beak, close up, hyperreal.]

  —Feb89. CD.

  The next light.

  [Sketch paper. A wing. A beady little eye. A crow torn down the middle, guts spilling out.]

  —Feb89. CD.

  I want to scream, but the sound is bludgeoned in my throat, held down as if with a lump of clay, because the gunshots, like the messages from Coral, are coming faster now. Coming closer. The buckshot is nipping my heels as I limp wildly through the black trees, from light to light, orb to orb, horror to horror.

  [A nebulous, horrid thing, all curves and water and insubstantial mess. The colors dark and terrible, the eyes cocked at odd angles, the nose off-center.]

  Title: Evie, v. 7

  —March89. CD.

  I go to the drawing. I go to the light. I can’t not go. My body just brings me there. I met that baby. Eveline Bouchard. Brady Bouchard. Cindy Dunn. Little Evie Bouchard. God, I knew that baby once—the creature rendered here. So unalike. What Coral was seeing—my god.

  The next light.

  No one sees sees sees where the marks are the marks are within and

  without but they

  don’t they don’t see they don’t see.

  —Feb89. CD

  BOOM.

  BOOM.

  BOOM.

  BOOM.

  The next light.

  I tried to die today and they all stopped it and I thought what for.

  —Jul84. CD.

  BOOM.

  The next light.

  Who is that devil in king city who is that devil that devil in king city who hmmmmmmmm? mmmmmmmmmmmmm

  —Feb89. CD.

  I fear them all like they are bullets with my name on them.

  BOOM.

  BOOM.

  But then my eyes catch on something. A brighter, bigger light than all of the other lights. Hope blooms in my chest. I stand stock-still. I listen. I attempt to quiet my breathing, my heart, which both threaten to deafen me.

  The gunshots have stopped.

  The dogged, chasing rustling has stopped.

  I focus on the light source ahead. It’s steady, unmoving. Big. So bright. My heart pulses in my neck. Every muscle in my body is taut as piano wire. I fear what—or who—I might find inside that light. Some Deliverance maniac?

  Or is Audra the one doing this to me?

  Audra.

  The lights. The drawings. Coral’s drawings. My painting, tied up for me in a little packet on the lakeshore. Who? Who is after me?

  Coral?

  A creeping, slow-suffocating terror metastasizes.

  No.

  I close my eyes.

  I have to go to the light.

  But it could be a trap. I must be careful.

  I begin moving forward obliquely and at a glacial pace. As I get closer, I realize the light is in a small clearing. I see the horrid, stark shadows the bright light casts around the clearing, branches creating ominous and labyrinthine shapes. No car in sight, no cabins; with sinking dread, I realize I’m still deep in the woods. I circle and pause, circle and pause, getting a better and better look at the clearing. By now, I can see clearly that there are many lights affixed to many of the trees inside the ring of the clearing. Audra’s brown enamel lantern is in there, at the edge, turned over on its side. The ratty old BAH HAHBAH bumper sticker just visible. I freeze. My god.

  I see no Audra. I see no madman. I sense no presence at all.

  I creep to the outer ring of the light sphere, which has lit up the small, suffocating space bright as day. Inside, not quite in the middle, is a Volkswagen-size boulder into which an old, tall, fat b
irch tree is leaning, lilting, pressing, growing. The birch is tall and dying and swoops to the left, thick branches snaking from it. From the branches hang torn and shredded pieces of bright, goldenrod fabric. Dozens of them, in varying lengths and roughness. So like Audra’s apple tree, bright ribbons flowing in the breeze. I can see that on these ribbons, though, are markings of some kind. Words. Writing. Almost without thinking, I ease into the clearing. Drawn to the boulder and the birch like it cannot be helped. Because I know them. The boulder. This birch. This clearing, now that I have my bearings. This exact place. Hallowed ground. Haunted ground. I limp onward, painfully, and I feel a crystalline, cutting, terminal fear and desperation.

  THIS IS CORAL, ISN’T IT, MAX?

  THIS IS CORAL, ISN’T IT, M.?

  THIS IS CORAL, ISN’T IT, M.?

  THIS IS CORAL, ISN’T IT, MOSS?

  THIS IS CORAL, ISN’T IT, MAX?

  THIS IS CORAL, ISN’T IT, MOSS?

  A groan of outsize fear escapes me. The thought comes to me so quickly, too quickly that I can’t stifle it before it arrives: Is Coral doing this to me? Somehow?

  This is Coral, isn’t it, Max?

  Is it Coral?

  “Coral,” I say quietly, as if speaking her name might conjure her from a spell. “Is it you?” But no, it can’t be—Coral is gone. Long gone. It’s impossible. It was so very long ago. So, so, so long ago.

  “So long ago,” I whisper, shaking. “So long ago, Coral.”

  A different life. But this is the place.

  The boulder. The birch. The boulder and the birch. Yes. Coral’s Clearing. Yes.

  She knows. Audra.

  Somehow, some way.

  The horrid goldenrod fabric is electric against the night in the myriad, dazzling lights. I am all lit up. So bright, god could see.