Draw the Dark

by Ilsa J. Bick

  I shook my head, just as stubbornly. “I was angry. You’ve never been there to see what I can do, but Dr. Rainier has. She knows I’m telling the truth.” I glanced across the kitchen table. “Tell him. Tell him about your father.”

  Staring at the table, Dr. Rainier hunched in her chair, cradling a mug of coffee she hadn’t drunk. She’d said nothing when I told my story, but now her eyes crawled from the table to my face. I was shocked to see how drawn and pinched her features were, and a pang of guilt tugged my heart. I realized—too late—that I had violated a private hell, revealing it at a time that had not been her choosing. I remembered her strange choice of words in our very first meeting: I don’t have to be an axe murderer to know how to deal with one.

  Actually, I doubt she’d ever told anyone the whole story. For that matter, I’m not sure what the real story was because I had intervened. For the first time, I had taken an active role in someone else’s nightmare—

  And that was the answer, you see? That’s what I had been meant to discover. All this time, I’d thought my only recourse was to be an onlooker, a spectator to some private horror. Yes, I drew and then made pictures of what came out of my fingers, and I’d always thought the power came from elsewhere, that I was just the messenger. That was wrong. I’d had the power to get involved, probably from the start. After all, hadn’t my anger dredged up Miss Stefancyzk’s nightmare and Aunt Jean’s?

  My dream had been only that: smoke and mirrors. Yet the one thing Dr. Rainier had said during one of our sessions was that houses were the body of the dreamer, each room revealing a different facet of the personality. Well, I’d descended to the basement where the nightmares are. In the nightmares, I had dared to get involved.

  Now, awake, I could act. I had to because that’s where the truth lay: in a waking dream that was not my own but which I could visit because I’d been there before.

  She cleared her throat, and when she spoke, her tone was measured and distinct. “I am not prepared to talk a lot about my past. It would be . . . inappropriate. But I can tell you, Hank, that Christian is right. My father was a drunk, and he did murder my mother. He would’ve killed me if I hadn’t managed to hide in the coal chute back of the furnace. That’s where the police found me.” Her eyes squeezed shut, and she pressed her knuckles against her lips. “You don’t know how many times I’ve gone over it in my mind. If I’d just been able to get to the axe first....” She opened her eyes and said, “That’s what you did. You lived out the fantasy for me, I think. Or maybe the impulse to save a life just . . . overwhelmed your good sense, and you stepped into what you created. It wouldn’t have done any good.”

  “No,” I said, “because what’s past is past.”

  Her head moved in a slow nod. “Yet that means you can slip in alongside . . . although I’m not sure if this means the person has to be alive for it to happen.”

  “I’ve thought about that. I think I’ve been in David’s skin enough to... draw myself in and follow it through. I think that’s why he wanted me to find his father’s brushes . . . like what they say about automatic writing.”

  “Well, I haven’t considered it, but I don’t see why there can’t be automatic drawing too.”

  Uncle Hank burst in: “Oh for chrissake, listen to the two of you. Christian has a nightmare, and now you two want a séance.”

  “It wasn’t just a nightmare, Hank. I’ve never told anyone about my father, and I certainly wouldn’t tell a patient. Anyway, where’s the harm?”

  Uncle Hank goggled at her. “The harm lies in fueling some poor kid’s fantasy....”

  I cut in, getting hot. “I’m not a kid and it’s not a fantasy, don’t you get it? This is exactly what I did to Miss Stefancyzk and Lucy; I didn’t intervene, but I drew their futures, and I did the same thing to Aunt Jean. . . .” Too late, I clamped my mouth shut, but the damage was done.

  Uncle Hank’s features went slack a little at a time. It was like watching a building crumble brick by brick. When he spoke, his voice was low and deadly. “What are you talking about?”

  Dr. Rainier tried to step in. “Hank, that’s not important right now.”

  He ignored her. “Tell me what you mean, Christian.”

  So I did. It didn’t take long. After all, I’d been ten and angry at some slight: angry enough to reach down and draw out of Aunt Jean a picture of her worst fears realized, only of the future not the past.

  In Aunt Jean’s case, I drew, in meticulous living detail, what it would be like to be trapped in a car slowly sinking into an icy lake, without even the mercy of unconsciousness to ease her way. Oh no, in my ten-year-old’s rage, I made sure she saw and felt every agonizing, panicky second as the water crept to her chest and inched to her neck and slid past her nose. How it would feel as her lungs burned and her throat convulsed and then that moment when she had no choice and must expel her life in great glittery, silver bubbles, each rising to the surface to release screams no one ever heard....

  It hurt just to remember. It was worse to say it out loud.

  When I was done, there was a very long, very dense silence so quiet that when I swallowed, it was like thunder in my ears. Then I dared to look at Uncle Hank.

  His face was a ruin. There was such searing horror in his eyes that his tears must have burned away before they could fall. He was so still he looked made of wax.

  “Uncle Hank,” I began.

  Without a word, he scraped back his chair and strode from the room. He did not look back. A moment later, I heard the bang of the kitchen door, and then his truck growling to life, tires crunching over gravel as he backed down the driveway and then roared away.

  Dr. Rainier spoke first. “Give him time.”

  I shook my head. “He’ll never forgive me. We’ll never be the same.”

  She was quiet. She didn’t try to stop me from crying. When I’d cried myself to hiccups, she went to the sink, wet a paper towel with cool water, and brought it and a dry towel back for me to wipe my face. “Listen to me: Things stopped being the same the moment you spray-painted that barn. Things are never meant to stay the same, Christian. You’re seventeen. This is your time now, and you have work to do. And I think it’s got to be now.” She paused and looked at me for a moment, measuring her words. “I think that’s what your dream was trying to tell you too: not to wait too long or else this might all fade. Almost all religions believe that the soul hovers for a time after death, and I’ll bet Judaism’s no different.” When I looked at her in surprise, her shoulders moved in a small shrug. “Why not? Many superstitions have some basis in fact, and I’m out of my depth here. I don’t pretend to understand this, but I believe you, and I’m willing to follow you wherever this leads. Don’t forget: you saw my nightmare. So . . . you got my vote.”

  “What if it is God?” I blew my nose. “I mean, what if I have some kind of mission or something?”

  “Then you better get cracking,” she said.

  XXIX

  Dr. Rainier drove. It had turned cold again, and the sky was hard and glittery with stars. There was no moon, and once we’d past the last of the houses, the sky looked like someone had upended a bowl of diamonds over the earth. The village was a faint gray smudge on the eastern horizon.

  I said to Dr. Rainier, “Can I ask you a question?”

  Dr. Rainier’s skin was bottle green from the dash. She kept her eyes on the road. “Can I answer it?”

  “Maybe. Well, sure, you could . . . if you want to.”

  “So what’s the question?”

  “Do you wish you had killed him?”

  The question hung there, and I was feeling stupid for asking when she said, “For years afterward, yes, I did. I wish I’d been older and stronger. In a way, I wished that I’d been you, the way you were in the dream. Maybe you picked up on that because the emotion is so bound up with rage, I don’t know.”

  I wanted to ask why rage and anger and death were things that my mind snagged on, but I didn’t. Now I’m pre
tty sure I didn’t want to know the answer. I mean, what could she say, right?

  She continued, “He got forty years for second-degree intentional homicide, no possibility of parole. Looking at it now, I think that forty years in a cage is just as good as being put to death—maybe better, because if you ever get out, your life is pretty much done.”

  “So he’s still in prison.”

  “Yes, he is and, no, I’ve never gone to see him. We don’t even have the same last name anymore. Rainier is my mother’s maiden name. Anyway, that doesn’t exactly answer your question, does it? I guess I try not to think about it anymore because I can’t change the past. What’s done is done. I was just a little girl, and there was no way I could’ve saved my mother—or me, for that matter.”

  “Is that why you became a shrink?” The question was out of my mouth an instant before I wished I could call it back. “Sorry, that was stupid.”

  “No, that’s okay.” She flicked a glance at me and then returned to the road. There were no streetlights out this far, and it looked like we were following the shaft of her headlights off a cliff—which, maybe, we were. “It’s a question to which I’ve given a lot of thought. The quick answer is . . . sure. I want to understand how my mother could’ve loved a man like that. I want to know how a little girl considers a monster like that her father—because he was, once. I think the drinking started up after they’d been married a while, and I’ll bet he tried controlling it. Did you know, he was a doctor? A surgeon, if you can believe it. His patients worshipped him. He held it together in the operating room, I guess, but I really don’t know what ultimately happened. I suppose you could say that I’ve never cared to find out.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because then I would be making him the most important person in my life. My past would revolve around him, and he doesn’t deserve that kind of energy. Sounds counterintuitive, I guess. Psychiatrists are supposed to want to understand all the minutiae. But I’ve decided that he’s not worth my time. He’s a focal point in my past, sure. Otherwise, my guess is you’d never have had that dream—but he’s only one point, and you can get trapped that way, endlessly looping to the past. You have to let go, or you’ll burn up in the past, simple as that.”

  Like David Witek, I thought. Maybe his waking life hadn’t always returned to that horrible moment in the barn when his father murdered one man and maimed another. In the end, though, that’s what his thoughts fixed on, orbiting that moment like doomed satellites.

  I said, “I’m . . . I’m afraid to let my mom go. It’s not only being, you know, obsessed. You know what happens to me, what I can do. You saw my walls.”

  “I did.” A pause. “I also saw that door.” Another pause. “Do you have any ideas about why there’s no knob?”

  Sure I did. “What do you think?”

  “Careful, you’re picking up bad habits.” Her lips made a small smile, there and gone in an instant in the darkling shadows. “Fear is a healthy emotion, Christian. You haven’t failed your mother or abandoned her by not opening that door.”

  “You sound like you think there’s a real place behind it.”

  “Isn’t there?” She gave a little laugh. “Heavens, Christian, there’s been a lot of stuff happening ever since I met you. I don’t understand it all. So . . . which is it? Is that what you imagine is beyond the door, or is this a place you’re thinking about going to?”

  “I . . . I honestly don’t know which. I try to imagine where my mother might be and what things look like through her eyes. I guess I kind of graduated from doing just her eyes and doing . . . the . . . you know, the sideways place. That’s what I call it because I think my mom just slid a little too far....”

  “I see.” She was quiet a moment. “You know, Christian, what you’ve done is, yeah, obsessive, but it also takes courage.”

  “Yeah? Actually, looking at it now . . . it kind of gives me the creeps. I’m scared for my mom and dad, and I’m freaked about where they might be, and now I’m not sure I really want to go there. I guess it would be like revisiting the past over and over again.”

  “Has it occurred to you that they might both be dead?”

  That didn’t hurt the way I thought it might. “Sure. I mean, does that look like any place on this earth?”

  “Good point. But what if you’ve reached in, the way you did with Lucy, and pulled out your own destiny?”

  That hadn’t occurred to me. “I . . . I don’t know. You mean, my own death?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t understand what you can do. But if that is the case, . . . would you really want to go there?”

  “Not right now,” I said, truthfully.

  “But you’ve been tempted.”

  “Yes.” That was the truth. The next wasn’t. “But I wouldn’t know how to do it.”

  She didn’t say anything. I don’t think she believed me; after all, she was the one who’d noticed there wasn’t a knob. Uncle Hank, he never said anything at all about the door.

  We rode in silence a few moments, and then she said, “Promise me one thing: if you ever decide to try, tell me first. Okay?”

  “Why?”

  “Because,” she said, “you might want someone there to pull you back out.”

  The stone base of the barn winked in and out of the headlights as Dr. Rainier’s truck ground up the western approach road. The building seemed much more massive at night, and when we rolled to a stop and Dr. Rainier killed the engine and lights, the darkness slammed down like a black wave.

  Dr. Rainier dug two flashlights from her glove box and handed one to me. Her face was unreadable in the dark. “You’re sure you’re ready for this.”

  I nodded, remembered she couldn’t see me, hooked my hand around the strap of my backpack, and said, “Yeah. I’ve got to.”

  Stones squealed and popped under our shoes as we climbed the last hundred yards. The scaffolding was still in place; the grass was chill, and I could feel the damp through my Chucks. I played my light over the barn, sliding the fuzzy silver blue beam along the northwest face. The ghostly outlines of a swastika were still visible.

  “Oh my God.” Dr. Rainier’s voice was barely a whisper. “Christian, look. On the roof.”

  Crows. Hundreds. The roof was black with them. Their bodies blanketed the old shingles. As our lights caught them, they stirred with a rustle like dead cornstalks. Their eyes sparkled like green glass in our flashlights.

  “They won’t bother us. Come on,” I said. “We can go in through the basement.”

  Dr. Rainier followed my lead. “Is that where it happened? In the basement?”

  “I think so. I remember hearing the horses, and I thought I saw the slats of the stalls. I just don’t remember the floor....”

  The basement floor was brick laid on edge. My light picked out a crumpled, half bag of concrete mix in a corner, next to an empty horse stall. Our footfalls echoed, bouncing against brick and wood. I had not been down here before, and I was surprised to see that the iron rods of each horse stall, as well as the screen doors, were still in place. The air smelled more strongly of rust here. In the center of the basement was a flight of stairs that I knew led to the haymow and from there to the enclosed cupola. The remains of two long ladders were visible both in the right and left corners on a north-south diagonal and led to a square-cut opening in the wooden ceiling.

  We walked the length of the basement from south to north. My skin started to prickle as I approached the south end, and I swung my light to the left. A door sagged on wrought-iron hinges, and when I grasped the handle, it swung open only grudgingly, the bottom edge scraping brick. I threw my light over the empty interior. There were iron studs and pegs hammered into the brick, and in one corner, I saw the disintegrating remains of a wood-handled rake.

  Dr. Rainier was at my elbow. “Some kind of place to keep tools?”

  “Maybe.” My body was itchy now, with a familiar electric tingle that told me this place was important. Then I th
ought: pitchfork.

  Backing out, I turned left and walked to the north end of the barn. My skin, now alive with what felt like an army of ants, almost writhed. I swung my light right and left, trying to understand the source of my discomfort. But I saw nothing except more brick and empty stalls, and I eventually retraced my steps until I stood right of center. Then I stabbed my light straight up to probe the darkness above our heads.

  “What are you looking for?” asked Dr. Rainier.

  “David was watching from the haymow. I remember the stairs. . . . Got it.” My light fixed on a wide gap in the ceiling where the boards had pulled apart. “That’s it.”

  So from where I stood now, David had seen his father and Mr. Eisenmann and Walter Brotz quarrel. On this precise spot, Mordecai Witek had thrown himself on his boss, had snatched up a pitchfork, and . . .

  My head was starting to buzz. I felt the familiar ballooning sensation like I was filling up with helium, my head going hollow, and I knew the time was on me, the moment was now.

  Hurry.

  Clicking off my flashlight, I stuffed it into my backpack and then pulled out the packet of drawing pencils and sketch pad I’d brought from the house. The leather roll containing Mordecai Witek’s paintbrushes was in my hip pocket. I wouldn’t be using the brushes, but I wanted them there.

  “What do we do now?” Dr. Rainier’s voice sounded a little small coming from the darkness behind her flashlight. “What’s going to happen?”

  “I don’t know.” How could I possibly draw what David himself either had not seen or could not bear to remember? Or was I here now to be a silent witness? Because I could not participate: this would not be like my nightmare of Dr. Rainier’s father. This would be like immersing myself in Aunt Jean’s death and Miss Stefancyzk’s madness; I could watch; I could witness.