Fell of Dark

by Patrick Downes

  PHILOMEL BOOKS

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  Copyright © 2015 by Patrick Downes.

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Downes, Patrick, 1968–

  Fell of dark : a novel / Patrick Downes.

  pages cm

  Summary: Chronicles the lives of two mentally ill boys—Erik, who believes he is a saint, and Thorn, who believes he is a demon—as their minds devolve into hallucinations, showing the way their worlds intersect, and culminating in a final stand-off.

  [1. Mental illness—Fiction. 2. Good and evil—Fiction. 3. Hallucinations and illusions—Fiction.] I. Title.

  PZ7.1.D687Fel 2015

  [Fic]—dc23

  2014037606

  ISBN 978-0-698-18324-7

  The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for third-party websites or their content.

  Version_1

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  FOURTEEN

  ERIK

  THORN

  SIXTEEN

  ERIK

  THORN

  EIGHTEEN

  ERIK

  THORN

  ERIK AND THORN

  ERIK

  THORN

  ERIK

  THORN

  ERIK

  THORN

  ERIK

  THORN

  ERIK

  THORN

  ERIK

  ERIK AND THORN

  AFTERMATH

  Ackowledgments

  Dedication

  Miracles are not contrary to nature, but only contrary to what we know about nature.

  —Saint Augustine, The City of God, Book XXI

  ERIK

  Eulogy

  IT’S ALL I KNOW how to do, all I’ve ever done: read and think and write. I have to write to someone. That someone is you.

  I’ve known you since before we were born. Aren’t all true loves, the really great loves, destined? All we have to do is meet. When will I learn your name?

  Go ahead, ask me a question. When was I first hurt? When did I first see you? When did the first miracle happen? When was my first kiss? When did I first write a eulogy?

  Eulogy for a Young Boy

  He thought. He wrote. He read. He ran and drank milk. A boy made of milk and concrete. He was cut in two. He bled. He died.

  A stranger smart enough to steal a child and lock a door took the boy’s life. The man cut him in half, then chewed him up. Blood and rubble.

  Even though the boy was dead, he dreamed up a girl with skin and hair of light, taking care of him, holding his hand. He dreamed the girl gave him a kiss, and he wondered if the kiss would send him back to the world. It didn’t. It kept him under. He sleeps in the box with the girl made from light.

  We have to forget him so we can take him with us.

  That’s the eulogy exactly as it came out of me a little less than six months ago, the day I turned fourteen. I haven’t touched it. I’ve read it a few dozen times, and I still can’t be sure I understand it. But I can tell you this: I had died. I eulogized myself.

  I remember the locked garage and screaming for it to be unlocked. I remember a square of brown sunlight on the floor of the garage and a window I couldn’t reach. Why couldn’t I figure how to reach the window? Why couldn’t I stack crates and climb out? I could’ve broken the glass and escaped. I don’t know. I can’t exactly tell you what happened in that garage, except I left it without the belt I had to hold up my pants, my zipper was broken, and I was bleeding. My right arm didn’t look like mine.

  I don’t remember what happened, or how many times I ended up in that garage. It might’ve been once or a thousand times, but I died, and this came so soon after my mother lost my father.

  No, she didn’t lose him, like he was a mitten or a penny dropped through a hole in her pocket. A car killed him in the street.

  Half-Orphan

  MY FATHER’S NAME WAS Ian Lynch, and he died right before I turned five. I don’t remember much about him. I remember he rubbed his beard on my neck and called it a goat’s kiss. I remember he limped as if he dragged an invisible chain behind him. Walking made his legs ache, so he preferred to ride his bicycle. I remember he sometimes carried me in the metal basket clamped to the front of the bike. I loved the wind and bumpy streets.

  I remember the morning he died. I was crouching by my bed with my head between my knees, watching a beetle crawl around the floor. How much can a beetle carry? I wanted to know, so I pressed my thumb into its back. The beetle stopped. Even when I picked up my thumb, the beetle stayed put. Then I crushed the beetle. Why? I don’t know. I don’t know now any more than I knew then. The crack of its body, like a nutshell, scared me. A milky liquid bubbled up from its broken back.

  “Erik?”

  My mother came running across the apartment. Did she hear the beetle break? I kicked it under my bed.

  “Erik, come on with me.”

  My mother took my arm and pulled me hard behind her. That’s when I started to cry and told her I killed the beetle.

  We took a taxi to the hospital. We didn’t really have money for the luxury of a taxi, so this meant something serious. My mother couldn’t talk to me. She cried. I watched her. Her shoulders shook, and her nose leaked over the knuckles of her hand.

  The cabby pulled up to the curb. “Emergency, right?” In the rearview mirror, he had only one eye, off-center.

  My mother nodded and opened her purse.

  “Keep your money,” the driver said. “I never take money outside Emergency.”

  We waited at reception, holding hands. I heard the voices of panic and work, my mother’s voice and the receptionist’s. Voices without bodies. A typewriter. The wheel of a bed. Shoes on the floor, squeak, squeak; a rubber stamp; a revolving door, thwup, thwup; the bell of an elevator.

  There were all these sounds, and then one more. A crumpled-up girl strapped into a wheelchair. She was a crushed beetle. And she was a kettle, steam coming out of her ears and a long, high whistle.

  A nurse wearing a uniform as bright as the walls took my hand and led me away from my mother and the girl. She offered me a lollipop and asked me my name. I didn’t understand what was happening. My mother held her face in her hands, and a doctor spoke to her. He was dressed in white, his stethoscope around his neck and his eyes on his shoes. The girl in the wheelchair had disappeared. My father had already been dead two hours.

  My father died. A week or a month later, I was locked in a garage, and then the headaches came. I’d hear trains in my head. I heard them like we lived in the middle of Grand Central Station under the ceiling of painted stars, where trains meet and talk and say good-bye, and I’d ask my mother, “Do you hear the trains, Mama? Hear them?”

  My mother would say, “No, Erik. I don’t hear any trains.”

  A little whil
e later, the trains would hit me, and I would be in too much pain even to scream, and my mother would try to get me to lie still, but with each train, I would feel the impact and throw myself against the wall or onto the floor, and there was the pain in my head until the trains left the station.

  Silence.

  Everything gone from inside my head. Only long, rumbling echoes and the ringing tracks.

  Mother

  MY FATHER DIED ALMOST nine years ago, and my mother hasn’t slept a night in what was their bed. I’ve seen her slumped on the couch, but usually, almost always, she sleeps in an armchair. Not a reclining armchair either. She piles blankets on top of her and falls asleep half sitting, her legs propped on the ottoman; a crossword puzzle, a pair of reading glasses, and a fine-point felt-tip pen on her lap. Sometimes a nail file. Sometimes sections of a newspaper. Sometimes her checkbook propped open by her finger. Most often a crossword. She sleeps with her face lit by the floor lamp shining down over her shoulder.

  Whenever I see her like this, I feel sorry for her and for myself. I feel sorry for her because I can’t ever believe she’s comfortable or sleeping well. Sorry for myself because I’ve never been a good enough son, even with the miracles, to persuade her, just once in nine years, to sleep lying down.

  I know my mother is a mother when I walk by her in the middle of the night. I might bump into the ottoman or ripple the air enough by my quietest step, and she’ll come to the surface with a nervous question.

  “Are you all right?”

  “Can I get you something?”

  “Do you have a headache?”

  Only a mother would wake up like this. Or only a widowed mother.

  I’ll stand over her for a while looking at her face. My mother. She’s right-handed, and when she drinks tea, she holds her left hand to her chest, cupped, like she’s protecting an invisible bird. For her, my father’s death was a wound that never healed.

  I ask her, “Do you want me to turn off the light?”

  In a defenseless voice, sounding much younger than me, she’ll say, “Yes, please,” or, “No, thank you, leave it on.” When she asks me to leave the light on, I wonder about what hall in her memory would go black without that floor lamp shining right into her face.

  There are times when she’ll barely wake and mumble. I can’t make it out. It’s her dreaming language. I’m convinced she’s trying to ask me if I’m all right even as she’s flying or fighting a troll with a sword.

  The worst, though, the very worst, is when she wakes up and says, “I’m sorry.” She must be talking to my father.

  Last night, I went to the kitchen for a drink, and my mother asked if I had a headache. I told her no, but I did have a headache. It woke me up. I knew snow was coming. After a long time, I went back to sleep. I looked out this morning, and three inches had fallen. The snow kept coming. My head felt better. Sometimes, the headaches are as simple as that.

  My mother belongs to the sisterhood of beautiful women. If I didn’t believe in some kind of god, I’d think a committee, the Committee of Appearance, discussed her over a lunch of cocktails. They got drunk and dreamed up one of those women who comes along every hundred or thousand years. Luckily, one voice of reason kept the committee from being totally merciless. She doesn’t have dimples, and she has a hole in her heart.

  They returned to their office, the Committee of Appearance, down the hall from the Committee on Death and Disintegration, and put their heads on their desks and forgot what they’d done.

  Her eyes are two diamonds, glittering, honest, and almost impossible to look at with the naked eye. Even I find it hard.

  I do believe in a god, though, and I have to think my mother shows His sense of humor and mercy.

  One day, I know, your beauty will blow me apart. You will have no mercy at all.

  My mother has a plum-colored mouth. Her skin is soft and cool and blue. Have you ever held a woman as thin and purple as a blade of strange grass? As fragile as that? My mother, when I hug her, moans a little, which means she feels good.

  When I was young, my mother brushed through her straight black hair every morning. Her hair hung down to her waist back then. Once, when my father was already gone, though I didn’t know that meant forever, she twisted her hair into a rope for me to hold. I couldn’t get my hands around it, and all her hair slipped out. Oranges. I smelled oranges.

  “Darling,” she said. Then, she handed me her hairbrush and put her hands in her lap. “You’ve watched me a hundred times. You know what to do.”

  The silver brush was one of my mother’s heirlooms. It was her mother’s, and it felt heavy in my hand. I heard the sound of the bristles in her hair, like papery wings. Butterflies flew up out of her hair.

  “Does Daddy brush your hair?”

  “No,” she sighed. “His hands were too big and clumsy. You’re doing wonderfully, sweetheart.”

  I felt proud, and my mother reached behind to pat my leg.

  “Mama, can you have two husbands?” My mother laughed. “Can you?”

  “Why do you ask?”

  I couldn’t answer, and she turned to face me. All that beauty.

  “Erik, my son, my only son.” She held my chin and kissed my forehead.

  My mother could never be my wife, but she would be my first love all the same.

  First Miracle

  LAST NIGHT, I WENT to sleep with a headache, and I had a dream you rode up to me on a bicycle. I couldn’t make out your face, but I knew it was you. Your bicycle was like my father’s, except your basket was more girly, woven out of willow or something. You put your hands on my head and said, “I wish I could take away the pain.”

  “You could make it snow,” I said, “or get me a new head.”

  You laughed, and the snow came.

  Sometimes, I’ve gotten other people confused with you, like my first-grade teacher, Mrs. Quist. I loved her, but I was six, and she was twenty-six when we met. She told me her age in the hallway outside the teachers’ lounge.

  Older boys from the school, sixth graders, or Mr. Jimson, the science teacher, would come to her classroom to visit her or offer to help with anything she might need. She always said no to them, but never meanly. Just no-thank-you. This one morning, she tried to take too much in her hands, and I had been hanging back watching her, pretending to fix a book cover or something, and she simply couldn’t make it all work out.

  I said, “Can I help, Mrs. Quist?”

  She seemed surprised to see me there at all, like I was a two-headed cow. Then she looked relieved. “Yes, Erik. Would you please carry these books and follow me to the teachers’ lounge?” I remember a little gold pendant with a green stone, and she had on perfume.

  I walked next to her, carrying her books, listening to her heels strike the hall floor, and at least one older boy stared out from the walls. For conversation, I said, “How old are you, Mrs. Quist?”

  “Twenty-six,” she said, “but never ask a woman her age, Erik. I might not have answered if I were thirty. I might’ve gotten annoyed.”

  “How old is Mr. Quist?”

  “Thirty-four.”

  We were almost to the teacher’s lounge. I don’t know what got in my head, but I said, “Would you be sad if he died?”

  Mrs. Quist stopped short. She looked down at me, and I could tell she didn’t know what to say. She didn’t look angry, just confused. She kneeled down, and I said, “Would you?”

  “Erik.” She took the books from my hands. “I don’t know how you know what you know, but you do. I can see that.”

  “You’re not happy.”

  She kneeled there, staring at her shoes or mine, I couldn’t tell, and then she stood up. “You go and play.”

  This wasn’t the miracle. There are sad women everywhere. I see it.

  No. Mrs. Quist might have loved me because I could think
and read and write and talk and play music and sing and run and do my math homework without any help. Mrs. Quist might have loved the six-year-old boy she hoped to have for herself in her own son. Or maybe she saw in me a man she couldn’t wait to see fully grown and would know she had some part in making.

  Mrs. Quist loved me, I know it, and after our exchange outside the teachers’ lounge, her attitude toward me changed a little. She looked at me almost shyly. She looked at me like she knew she couldn’t hide her life and thoughts from me. She couldn’t.

  I loved her because she loved me.

  Poor Mrs. Quist. The miracles started with her. Nothing complicated. I gave her a flower, and the flower never died. Simple.

  It wasn’t much of a flower at first. I picked a sickly white tulip from someone’s yard and brought it to school for Mrs. Quist. I’ll admit I spoke to the flower, whispered into the cup of petals, before I put it into a mug of water. The water was straight from the tap.

  The flower got stronger in the water, and it wouldn’t die.

  When she first noticed it, Mrs. Quist said, “Thank you, somebody . . . Oh, Erik. A spring flower. The first tulip.”

  As it got stronger, she said, “Look how big and bright it is now. I didn’t think that would happen at all. I should always expect a surprise from you, Mr. Lynch.”

  The last day of school, she stopped me before I left her classroom. “This flower won’t ever die.” She said it like that, not a question.

  “No,” I said. “Why would it?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “Because flowers die.”

  “You can kill it, but it won’t die by itself.”

  Mrs. Quist rubbed a petal between her fingers. What could she have been thinking at that moment? She might have been frightened, confused, or sad. I don’t know.

  “I’ll take it home with me and bring it back in September.” She put her hand on my head, then on my shoulder. “You’re some kind of boy.”