Darkshine

by R. D. Vallier

  I boiled the raw pumpkin, mashed in the sugar and spices, filled the crust. I had twenty minutes until the lasagna finished baking and the pie went in. Perfect. I swapped the wet clothes for the dryer then scrambled upstairs and collected laundry for a second load, stomping on the remaining dirty clothing to make the mound appear as small as possible. Next I setup a gift wrapping station in the living room. The timer dinged as I taped the second gift closed. I yanked the lasagna from the oven and threw the pie inside. I glanced at the clock. 6:19. One minute to spare. I smirked, feeling smug about my efficiency.

  My domestic panic grounded me, allowing no time to worry about talking birds or faeries or other such nonsense. I glanced occasionally out the living room window, but I never found a chickadee on the sill to glare or greet me. I never found a chickadee because the chickadee did not exist. Something must have been wrong with the piece of carrot cake I had eaten. Maybe it had expired, had mold spores which induced the hallucination and made me ill enough to sleep more than two hours when I needed to attend to my responsibilities.

  I set the kitchen table with mismatched dishes and fetched the lasagna from the counter. When I turned around a wolf spider the size of a small tarantula stood on Sam's dinner plate. My throat clenched. Her shiny black eyes glimmered from four feet away with all the seeming knowledge of early predators and ancient gods. I set the lasagna cautiously back onto the countertop, my sight never leaving the spider. She stood as still as stone ... then lifted a single foot, as if choosing me from a crowd of one.

  I reached for the plate with my fingertips, leaning my body and face as far back as possible without toppling over. I stretched my arms in front of me as if the plate smelled of rot and death, then slipped out the back door. My skin crawled. Something about spiders felt primeval and threatening, an instinct inherited from ancestors who had whispered warnings around campfires in drafty, soot-stained caves.

  The wolf spider stood motionless, her shiny eyes on me, my wide eyes on her. Her leg remained up and pointing. "Enjoy your spider life but stay away," I said, and flung the spider into a shrub twenty feet away from the backdoor. I then hurried inside and rewashed the plate, scrubbing harder than probably necessary.

  I clicked on the Christmas tree lights and continued wrapping presents. At 7:30 the driveway remained empty. My brow furrowed. I set the wrapped gifts beneath the tree. The dryer buzzed. I went to swap loads and stopped mid-step. I sniffed the air. It smelled like something was—

  "No!"

  I yanked open the oven, coughing as a dark cloud billowed into my face. The smoke detector screamed its high pitched ree! ree! ree! ree! The pie was black. Charred. Ruined.

  I growled at my stupidity and flung open the kitchen window. I had forgotten to set the damn timer. Was this the trap I had suspected from my mother-in-law? Proof I was an incapable moron, over something as simple as baking a pie? I slammed the oven door closed, my eyes watering from smoke. I was several miles from the closest grocery store in rural Appalachia without a car on the night of Christmas Eve. How the hell would I get another sugar pumpkin?

  The smoke detector pierced my eardrums with its shrieking ree! ree! ree! I climbed onto the table to reset it, my lips pursed. I couldn't get another sugar pumpkin, but I did have another pie crust in the freezer and canned pumpkin in the pantry. My mother-in-law would surely taste the difference, but I preferred she mock me for my inferior baking skill than mock me for being an incompetent wife.

  The can-opener whirred. By eight o'clock a new pie baked in the oven, the timer set and ticking. Sam still wasn't home. Normally he called when he was late, often from paperwork or election schemes. I scratched the back of my neck. The station would call me if anything bad happened, right? Of course they would. I was his wife, after all. Yet instincts nagged at me, insisting something was wrong. What if he is hurt and no one knows? Maybe he had rolled his truck off a hillside. Maybe a drunk driver had plowed into him and sped away. Or maybe

  [something darker than the dark]

  a paroled felon he had arrested in the past now exacted revenge.

  I gnawed my lower lip. Sam insisted personal and professional lives shouldn't mingle, and unless I was raped or murdered I should never call him at work—and even then I should only call the 9-1-1 line. I needed to relax, to trust Sam to be the responsible adult I knew he was. A daddy longlegs scurried across a cobweb above the sink. I wrung my hands. I needed to be a good girl and not cause waves.

  Don't make waves. Don't make waves. Don't make—

  I grabbed the living room phone and dialed Sam's cell. It transferred straight to voicemail. His office line rang four times, then greeted me with another recording. I clenched the useless phone, my insides swirling with anxiety ... and a repressed, burning anger trying to claw through the emotional storm in my gut.

  I went to return the phone to the living room table. A gray spider sat inside the cradle, one leg up, pointing at me. My breath caught in my throat. What the chickadee had said during my hallucination barreled back into my head: Trust the spiders.

  The deadbolt unlatched with a triumphant clack and Sam sauntered through the front door. A wave of relief washed through me as I set the phone on the coffee table.

  "Sorry I'm late." Sam pecked my lips, then shrugged off his jacket and tossed it onto the couch. "It is an absolute nightmare at the station. Bogged down with reports thanks to Thompson's idiocy."

  "Sounds terrible." I grabbed Sam's jacket from the couch and hung it in the coat closet. The gray spider faced me, its front leg still up and pointing. I opened my mouth to mention the spider to Sam, then closed it. If I was hallucinating, Sam would know when he saw nothing there. If I was sane and the spider existed, then he would squish it. Schizophrenia was a terrible fate, but I assumed squishing an agent of a magical world brought worse repercussions.

  Sam unbuttoned his deputy's shirt. "I thought you planned to finally clean this sty," he said, frowning at the dusty baseboards and the papers cluttering the coffee table.

  "I got a late start," I said, as we both drifted toward the kitchen. "I think I'm coming down with something."

  Sam glared at me from the corner of his eye. "Are you trying to get out of seeing my family for Christmas?"

  "No!"

  "Good. Cuz—" He saw the set table and stopped short. "You made lasagna."

  "Of course. You wanted me to," I said.

  "I completely forgot." Sam checked the refrigerator, making sure I had remembered the milk, and grabbed a Bud Ice. "I'm full on Wendy's, so freeze it for when we get back," he said, and cracked the can's top.

  My stomach muscles clenched as if expecting a punch. "But I—"

  "Did you burn it or something?" He slurped his beer. "The whole house smells like a goddamn crematorium."

  I took a deep breath and fetched the freezer bags from the pantry. "No. I burnt the pie."

  Sam gagged. "What? Jesus Christ, Miriam! My mother entrusted you with her recipe. The recipe!"

  "I know! I'm sorry!" I said. "I made a second, but I had only canned pumpkin, so it—"

  "My mother never uses canned anything," he snapped. "It's tradition."

  "I'm sorry," I said. "It's Christmas Eve. What was I supposed to do? All the grocery stores are closed."

  "You should have known you'd screw up, like always, and bought another pumpkin beforehand."

  I glared at him, hurt. Sam rolled his eyes. "You are too damn sensitive," he said. "You know it's true. How hard is it for you to understand that—" My insides cringed, retreated, hid. Sam's gibes blew through me, leaving me standing like the naked stem of a dandelion. He kept talking, but his words floated around me like a burst of seeds on the wind. Stupid. Wrong. Think. My anger lunged at these taunts, but I caught its tail and shoved it down into my lowest darkness. Victory awarded me with a sinking sensation in my core, as if my suppressed resentment had turned to tar and everything good in me was drowning.

  I focused on the lasagna as diligently as an agent d
efusing a bomb. On some level I acknowledged the sauced noodles, the knife and spatula breaking the melted cheese, the crispy chunks in the corner, the smoothness under my finger as the ziplock clicked. Yet numbness engulfed me, deadening my nerves, deadening me. Sam prattled about his patrol, but I registered no details. My dead hands placed two bags of lasagna in the freezer. My dead eyes regarded him vaguely, as if he weren't real but an image projected onto fog.

  Of course I am crazy, I thought. What sane person functions like this?

  "Are you even listening to me?" Sam asked.

  "Of course." My heart bobbed in the tar, and I knew its only chance for freedom was if that inner darkness overflowed and devoured me with it. And then what will be left to love?

  Sam finished his beer, showered, and plopped onto the couch with the evening news and a pack of Camel cigarettes. I curled up next to him in old flannel pajamas and my penguin slippers, its stuffing still protruding from the eye-socket. I sipped on a steaming mug of apple cider, distracting myself from burnt pies and chickadees and hallucinations and white-padded rooms.

  A yellow spider crept onto the couch's armrest during the first commercial break. It lifted one leg, as if pointing me out. I leapt to my feet. "I'm going to bed."

  "The news isn't done yet."

  "Well, as I said, I felt lousy earlier and we have a long drive tomorrow." The yellow spider stared at me, pointing. I slinked behind the couch and trailed my finger seductively across Sam's shoulders. My voice dropped. "You can join me, if you desire."

  "Maybe when I get tired," he said, and shrugged off my hand. The gray spider was still in the phone cradle, and still pointing. I sensed eyes everywhere, watching me from hidden crevices in clusters of eight. And I didn't know if they were real.

  The faeries aren't dead, the chickadee had told me. They just left the area.

  I shuddered as I hurried up the stairs, feeling that the spiders were pointing to the direction they had gone.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Dread woke me with a jolt, my heart pounding hard enough to hurt. The nightmare faded like steam when my eyes opened, leaving me feeling exposed and vulnerable without remembering why. I hugged a pillow to my chest, waiting for my breathing to steady. Warmth hummed through the floor vents. Downstairs, the kitchen clock faintly ticked. I watched Sam's shoulder rise and fall with his shallow breathing, illuminated from the light pushing through the crack in the bathroom door. My dread grew heavier, gouging a hole in my stomach, making me lonely, depressed. Homesick in my own home.

  I rolled out of bed. My fuzzy socks swished across the bedroom's floorboards. The farmhouse was creaky, drafty, and as cold as the dead hands which had built it a century ago. I used the bathroom quickly—wincing against the toilet's cold porcelain—then left the door open wider than usual. Maybe the extra light will scare away the monsters inside me.

  I huddled back beneath the blankets, warm with Sam's body-heat. He always slept as if his plug had been pulled, the lucky duck. I watched his shoulder rise and fall, wondering if his dreams were pleasant and adventurous or as dark as mine. I rolled onto my left side. Dread swirled in my gut. Worry tapped my bones. I flipped onto my stomach, back to my left side, then my right. I sighed, frustrated, then rolled onto my back and faced the ceiling.

  Hundreds of powdered eyes stared down.

  Blood drained from my face; my entrails turned to juice. Moths filled the ceiling like a powdered canopy, their numbers disappearing into the shadows. They stood motionless in the bathroom light, their yellow eyes staring down at me without a speck of white paint between. Dear God. Do they fill the entire bedroom?

  "Sam!" I squeaked. He remained still and I took a deep breath. The moths are another hallucination. If you wake him, he will know you are crazy. And then what?

  The moths' wings stretched. Their yellow eyes widened and glared. We know who you are, they said in a silent language I felt in my bones. Your secret is exposed.

  I jumped from the bed and bolted out the bedroom door.

  The unmistakable slap of cobwebs smacked my face when I hit the stairs, the strands crackling in my ears. I clawed my way through the dark; cobwebs grabbed my hair, my arms, my nightshirt, my feet. It didn't end, only thickened. I screamed and screamed and screamed.

  "Miriam!" Sam called. "What the hell?" I heard the confused rustle of blankets and sleepy feet padding the ground. The stairwell flooded with light. "Holy shit!"

  Cobwebs filled the stairwell from floor to ceiling, so thick it was as if I stood inside a solid fog. The cottony threads had filled my mouth when I screamed, sucking up all moisture and making it impossible to spit them off my tongue. Thousands of spiders scurried through the mass like eight-legged birds migrating through a cloud. Their feet tapped my flesh as they crawled up and out of my shirt, through my hair, over my pajamas and socks and face, racing up the stairwell toward the bedroom.

  I pushed through the webs and stumbled into the living room, brushing spiders off of me, my chest heaving. Spiders scurried from beneath the front door, and through cracks in the floorboards and walls that I never knew existed. I froze, wide-eyed, as hundreds stormed the stairwell.

  Whack! Whack! Whack!

  The slapping snapped my attention back to Sam. Sam! Sam was in his tighty-whities smashing spiders with a shoe. Sam saw the spiders. I'm not crazy. This is really happening.

  I heard the rustle of a thousand moth-wings take flight. Sam yelled a stream of confused curses as a brown cloud swarmed through the bedroom door. Moths flooded the stairwell, tangling themselves in the webs. Spiders lunged on the fluttering horde, some spinning them with silk. Hundreds of moths pushed forward. Their bodies piled. The cobwebs began to break and fall as the moths broke through the barrier. More spiders raced from the living room, the kitchen, scurrying up the steps. I realized then that I stood in the middle of a war. And I was the objective.

  I wheeled around and fled out the kitchen's back door.

  It was the middle of the night, but the sky was clear and the moon a few days from full, illuminating the world in silhouettes and grays. I sprinted down the gravel garden path in our back yard, past the tree-line at the edge of the property. My fuzzy socks and pajamas were a shoddy protection from the elements, but my blood pumped fiercely and shielded me from the cold.

  I stopped beside a young tree to catch my breath, feeling guilty for abandoning my husband, silly for fearing insects, and relieved Sam saw them too. Can an army of spiders defeat an army of moths? I wondered. The lights upstairs illuminated the house. I watched Sam's silhouette throw open the bedroom window, and a flood of moths billow out.

  My heart galloped. Frantically I scanned the darkness, seeing nothing, but even worse, feeling nothing. Night's siren had returned, luring away my warmth, withering it in the gloom. The moon no longer seemed to shine; instead the night sky encroached on its light. My breathing didn't send puffs of mist into the air; it abandoned my body to betray me to my enemies.

  In the dark crept something darker, and it was hunting. It was hunting me. Ice water seeped into the marrow of my bones. I pivoted on my heel, unsure where to run, unsure what to do, unsure what was happening.

  See-me-I'm-here.

  A wave of relief rushed through me. The sweet notes sung behind me, somewhere in the trees. I hurried toward the music, tripping over branches, kicking snow, acting like the least graceful prey animal to ever flee through the woods. It took all of my willpower to restrain myself from running and risk snapping an ankle. For I heard the message—see-me-I'm-here—and knew answering was my one hope.

  I panted at the base of a hill, surrounded by the shadows of skeleton-trees, and the cold, hollow chill of winter. The warmth from my breath and body had returned, as did the familiar glow of the moon. But I had no idea where I was. The woods were silent, filled with the crisp scents of frozen leaves, icicles, cedar. I hugged myself and trembled.

  The chickadee landed on my shoulder. "You are safe for now."

  "You're real," I
told the bird. My voice was monotone. Stating a fact.

  "Yes."

  My face scrunched, then I dropped to my knees and started bawling. Shock, relief, bottled emotions, and repressed beliefs bubbled out of me like searing tar. Monsters, miracles, magic. All became validated in that instant, proving I stood on something bigger than myself and the reality I had always known.

  Fairytales had taunted my imagination throughout my childhood. They made me believe anything was possible, from talking animals to granted wishes to flying carpets and candy homes. But as I aged, those adults who had seduced my imagination with these tales ripped them away. My mother insisted they were just stories and berated me for clinging onto them, for allowing my beliefs to run rampant down the road of impossibilities and dreams. I nodded and agreed to appease her, then skipped through the city park searching for enchanted castles and faerie rings among the bushes, and waited for our cat to speak every midnight on Christmas Eve. I wished on every shooting star, planted coins, kissed the frogs in the creek. Magic was everywhere. I felt it, humming on my skin like the wings of working bees on early summer flowers.

  My mother's lectures had grown heavier with age, though. Classmates berated me as well. Already isolated for inherent differences I never understood, I openly rebuked anything fantastic ... had even accepted it after a time. But in that moment, with a house of warring moths and spiders and a talking chickadee on my shoulder, I realized fairytales weren't just stories. They used to be reports, essays, eyewitness accounts.

  Once upon a time, fairytales were warnings.

  I wasn't crazy. Magic existed. Faeries were real. Animals talked and schemed. My instincts had been correct, and my body lightened with validation.

  Then dread overcame me.

  That also meant monsters existed. Magic could be used for evil. Insects had dangerous intentions, and the darkness prowled for prey. Sanity meant I was in danger, and I didn't know which fate was worse.

  I knelt in the snow, trembling with all the passion of an abandoned child. Branches rattled overhead in the breeze and I realized I was too far out to hear our wind chime's ding. The chickadee snuggled against my neck, preening cobwebs from my hair. My gasps soon shifted to hiccups, and the tears stopped pouring down my cheeks. Adrenaline's heat left me; winter drilled into my chest. The snow had soaked through my socks and made my feet feel like sacks of burning sand.