Into That Darkness

by Steven Price

  Don’t do anything, Lear said to them in a calm slow voice. Just come here as if it’s nothing. Easy. That’s right.

  They reached him and he was walking again. She felt a rush of air pass her by and she glanced over and saw the dogs were now level with them and moving alongside them though they did not attack. There were more dogs now and she could not count them all.

  Arthur? her son said in a frightened voice. Arthur? There were tears on his cheeks.

  Just take it easy, son.

  They moved with careful slowness along that street and the dogs moved with them. They did not raise their heads nor did they slacken off and they poured alongside them like a strange dark river. Lear said very softly, There. We’ll go in there.

  She followed his gaze.

  It was an old cinema house and she could see as they approached that the double glass doors had shattered around their metal frames.

  How do we keep them out? she said.

  He said nothing.

  She could feel the hot sides of the dogs now where they bumped against her legs. Her son was crying. The dogs bumped and muscled past, their unwashed fur bristling.

  Here, she said. Here we are, honey. Here.

  As they slipped under the marquee the dogs stopped as one in the street, stood watching. Their jaws agrin, fangs yellow and mossy. Her son stared back at them from the lobby and he did not move.

  Mason, Lear said in a low hard voice. Mason. What are you doing.

  Maybe they won’t come in, he said. He looked very frightened.

  They will. They will if we don’t get these doors blocked.

  How do you know?

  Get over here Mason, she said angrily. Help us with this.

  And then they were dragging a big steel garbage can over to the doors and tilting it over with a crash. Lear hauled across a big chair. A glass popcorn machine screeched over the concrete floor, fell shattering. The dogs did not flinch.

  The cinema itself seemed safe enough. The door to the projection booth stood open and Lear made his way up to look around. Anna Mercia followed her son into the dark theatre.

  Twin grey shafts of daylight fell through the collapsed ceiling over the screen, low now and deepening yet as the day faded out. She stood at the top of the aisle peering down at the dim rows of seats, the big white screen. There was dust on the shabby seatbacks, rubble in the carpeted aisle. Mason wandered up onto the stage, ducked his head behind the screen. She turned away. A sleeve of newsprint had blown in with the leaves and caught in the armrest of a chair and she plucked it free and smoothed it out.

  There’s no one here, Lear called down from the booth.

  Mason, she said. Stay close to me.

  He nodded from the screen.

  She swallowed painfully. Thinking of the barber at the roadblock and how unlikely it seemed. She thought she must have been mistaken. When she glanced down at her hands she saw they were trembling. Arthur? she called.

  Yes?

  Hold on. I’m coming up. Mason, she called.

  They made their way back to the lobby and through the broken door and up the narrow stairs to the small projection room. In the corner a slab of the roof had lifted and driven down like a ramp and Lear was sitting on the roof peering down at the street. She left her son in the projection booth and came through and joined him and sat on the tarred roof with her knees drawn up to her chest.

  Everything alright? she asked.

  That one hasn’t moved, he said. He nodded to the lee of the building across the way. A yellow dog crouched with its head turned up the street. Something passed through her, something illicit and wild and furious.

  Is it the same one?

  He shrugged. I don’t see any others. I think we’ll be alright in the morning.

  The air was colder here. A blue shadow seemed to pass over them where they sat and then it passed on down the street and she glanced quickly at the sky.

  Look at this, Lear said. This will cost a fortune to rebuild. We’ll be at it for years.

  She nodded.

  He looked at her, his face drawn tight with regret. I’m sorry this is taking so long, he said.

  It’s not your fault.

  We’ll find your daughter tomorrow. It’s not too far from here.

  She leaned her temple against the low wall. Curled the fingers of her good hand and studied the broken skin. You know what I keep thinking? she said and she was surprised by the anguish in her voice.

  He raised his eyes.

  Did I or didn’t I appreciate it.

  He frowned. Well. You’re not through it yet.

  At the hospital Mason asked me if I thought Kat was alive.

  What did you tell him?

  I started to say yes and then I couldn’t say it.

  Well, Lear said. He shuffled his feet.

  I can’t stop thinking about it. I keep wondering where she is. What she ate last night for dinner. If she’s cold. She didn’t take a jacket with her to school. I didn’t remind her to.

  He said nothing.

  I should’ve made her take a jacket.

  Lear looked away.

  She picked up a loose stone and threw it at the broken wall of a hotel across the street. Shabby curtains billowing in the seedy rooms. It clattered hollow and sad off a sunken drainpipe and the yellow dog lifted its head, peered suspiciously up. She said, I lost her once. Kat. She wasn’t even two.

  You lost her?

  I lost her. I was with my mother in a department store shopping for a snowsuit for her and when I turned around she was gone. She smiled faintly remembering her little daughter quick in her cruel birdlike investigations. In love with a world of her own devising. Leaves and bits of twig in her hair, her dark hands on her darker knees as she squatted in the department store aisle to see beneath their silver cart. Her husky brown corduroy trousers, yellow knit sweater. And her tiny perfect milk teeth. The scent of her skin was like sap and twilight in a dusky hall. Oh lord. How she had run in a frenzy towards the escalator leaving her old mother with their cart, frail and clutching her purse to her breast and peering sadly about. The sightless white mannequins. The branched candelabra of the clothes racks. A harsh fluorescent light shining off the faces of all she passed. I thought somebody had taken her, she said. I nearly died.

  They watched the dog slip long and thin around the building and into darkness.

  Where do you think he’s off to? Lear muttered.

  He must have heard something.

  They always look like they know exactly where they’re going.

  Jesus, she said suddenly, angrily. This time last week it was a different world altogether.

  It wasn’t.

  She swallowed.

  I didn’t mean it like that, he said. I’m sorry.

  I know.

  Tell me what happened.

  With what?

  Your daughter. In the department store.

  Oh. She had been thinking of the barber’s wife and she glanced at him guiltily and gave a short laugh. I was desperate. They were stealing children back then, it was just starting up again. It was on the radio all the time. She of course never even knew she was lost. She’d crawled under one of the clothes racks and was sitting there behind the clothes watching us the whole time. I don’t know what she was thinking. I could’ve killed her.

  A helicopter whupped high overhead and she stared at the dark underbelly, the dome of glass glinting and vanishing in the late sky. She watched the bank of cloud into which it vanished for many minutes. The chop of its blades fading.

  I used to think I was a poor mother, she said.

  I’d guess if you worry about it, that probably means you’re not.

  You never had any children?

  No.

  You didn’t want any?

  I never thought I did, he said quietly. Callie died so young. I don’t know what would have happened if she’d lived.

  She was silent for a time and then she glanced down at the projection roo
m. Her son was poking about on the shelves, clattering his iron bar along the metal grates. Mason, she called in. What are you doing?

  Her son looked up at her.

  I have something to ask you, she said to the old man.

  What is it.

  I want to know what it was like in there. What you found.

  I found you. And Mason.

  But what was it like?

  He rubbed his eyes. I was so tired. I can’t remember.

  Mason remembers, she said.

  I know he does.

  I wish he could forget it.

  I wish all of us could.

  They were both peering down into the projection room where Mason crouched reading an old film magazine, turning the thin pages.

  She said after a moment, His father and I never married.

  Mason never talked about him.

  We were just kids when I got pregnant with Kat. We met at the university. We were both students in our first year. He had this big, broken shovel of a nose. I thought it was terribly romantic. We went backpacking through Thailand and Cambodia and that’s when it happened. Of course we didn’t know it until later. I think it does funny things to a man. Getting his girlfriend pregnant. At least it did to him. I don’t know. He was a good man. We had our differences but he was a good man.

  Lear shifted and studied the boy. Is he in Mason’s life at all?

  Not really.

  You don’t miss him?

  It’s just how it is, she said with a shrug. He was gone and back for six years until I got pregnant with Mason. Then I decided it was time. But things were never smooth with us. I guess we were young, I don’t know. Maybe that trip to Asia did something to us. You imagine you’re seeing the real country. But you’re not. That’s a myth we make up, there is no real country, not like that. That’s why you never do make any sense out of those countries. Places like that. They live closer to death than we do.

  Lear shifted his back and groaned. He had large irregular ears and they were very pale in the twilight and when he turned his head slightly the shadows fell across obscuring his face like a dark storm descending.

  She closed her eyes. The hot mingled stink of cooking and laundry and trash in the streets and the rough fingers picking at their sleeves and the crowds of the friendly poor. The ancient cities in the jungle carved with the terrible visages of vanquished gods. Mud streets. The staggered signs along the roadbeds indicating land mines. Beggars in swaddled robes with feet and hands missing and bowls cradled between their raw ankles. The chickens in hostel yards and the squeal and spray of slaughter. And the tower of human skulls and the elementary school with its tiny caged rooms and the black stains on its floors and the images of the bloodied incarcerated men and women and children and her standing beside a tree and digging with her shoe a small pale root which was no root but a fragment of bone from the thousands buried in the killing fields as if the earth itself were the author of such brutality.

  She scratched at her shattered hand. But out of it all, I got her, she murmured.

  They were silent for a time. The streets darkened. She could no longer make out the old man’s face when he shifted on his haunches.

  Anna Mercia? he said.

  Mm?

  Do you want to tell me who you saw at the roadblock?

  She gave him a sudden hard look. No, she said.

  She could see him nodding in the darkness.

  It wasn’t Mason’s father though.

  Jesus. No.

  Well. I just thought.

  Why would you think that?

  I don’t know. I just thought it might have been.

  It wasn’t.

  He nodded again in the darkness. I haven’t been sleeping, he said. I keep seeing her when I close my eyes.

  Who?

  Callie.

  Something in his voice arrested her and she leaned across and took his big cold hand in hers. Somewhere far off the faint clashing of cathedral bells could be heard. He rubbed at his face as if only just waking. A wind blew scurls of dust through the deepening intersection and a dark cat passed without sound in the street. The old man sat and she sat with him and they waited like that as if guests in a house not of their choosing. Which in a way they were. As are all the living in this world.

  Escape isn’t about ropes and cages, dark closets, prisons, bad marriages. True escape is absence. It eludes you, it’s what you can’t have.

  My father’s an ongoing escape. He’s a door I can’t quite close. I wonder if I will see it closing in Mason or Kat, if that’s how it will end. I don’t know. He wanted back in our lives though I couldn’t see why he should be given that privilege. He wanted to know his grandchildren. He came back to Victoria after my mother died. I don’t know why he waited, he shouldn’t have waited. But he did. He bought a café in Fernwood. I didn’t know what to think. He didn’t call us. I only heard about his return through friends months later. Imagine that. I didn’t believe it, walked down to that corner in Fernwood and stood in the doorway of a barbershop across the street watching the little brick café. It was like seeing a ghost. He looked so old, and tired, and unhappy. I didn’t go over. He’s been buried three years now and I’m still angry.

  He wasn’t a bad man. He was never a father, but he wasn’t a bad man. I tell myself this over and over, thinking maybe it will stick. In the late sixties Trinidad like everywhere else had been corrupted and was in strife and my mother could see it burning in him, that desire to go. She called it that. A desire. It was already a kind of infidelity. It was more his blood than we were.

  Jesus.

  What you can’t have. Mason was a miracle baby, he shouldn’t have happened. I’d been sick with uterine lesions and the doctor, under the weight of his pouchy face, lifted his heavy eyes and told me I wouldn’t have any more children. David was crushed. He’d always wanted a son. I don’t know. I guess we kept trying, though there was something bitter and desperate between us after that. Things got worse between us. David already had one foot over the threshold when we learned I was pregnant again.

  That was Mason. It was enough to bring David back in for a time.

  I’d hear him creeping about the house at night, going in to check on Mason, on Kat. The floorboards in the hall shivering like a haunting. After he was gone, sometimes even then I’d feel him there, padding softly down the hallway.

  In the afternoon of that fifth day they reached the black gate. Its iron spikes and ornate crossed bars wheeled back, standing wide.

  Anna Mercia held her son’s hand. He led her past the headmaster’s house with its weathered yellow paint and she slowed and they looked down over the school grounds. It was a boarding school and a day school and she knew there would be many teachers and students down there yet. Sloping off and stretched flat across to the far staked fenceline lay two playing fields, their lime markings looking sutured in the weird light. A tendril of smoke vanished in the charcoal sky. Beyond the fields stood a cluster of hollowed-out buildings like a reef which the destruction had broken upon and fallen back from. The washed light on the wimpled brickface of the ruins.

  The old man came slowly up. I know this place, he murmured. I know this school.

  Kat should be down there, she said. But in her voice she heard something lift, strange and frightened, and she knew her son could hear it also.

  Yes, Lear said.

  Mason said nothing.

  They went down. The grass they trod was grey and the brick walkways grey and mortar dust lay in a fine grey ash over all. Their heels crunching glass, stones, splintered chips of desks. Windows gaped darkly down. The school was built around an open quadrangle of grass and benches and she made her way among the ruins. Her neck was stiff and her fingers in her good arm ached and she felt nothing else that she would admit to. She did not want to think about her daughter until she had found her. The facing doors standing open on hallways buried in darkness. Men shouting in the ruins somewhere. Where the gymnasium roof had fallen a c
rane was dragging roped and tackled slabs of concrete to one side and the rubble scraped and boomed.

  And then she could not go on. She stopped in the grass beside a jumble of metal chairs and stood amid the whorled dust with her one fist gripped tight and her face dark. When her son called to her she did not turn.

  Mom, he called. Mom.

  The old man approached her slowly and she raised her eyes and he said, It’s alright, Anna. You don’t know what’s happened here. You just don’t know.

  She realized she was crying and she rubbed the heel of her hand in her eyes. A gash in the shingles of the main schoolhouse where the bell tower once had stood. She looked away.

  A fireman with a broken arm saw them then and he lifted his own sling at her in greeting. His eyes troubled. You and me both, he said to the woman. You looking for someone?

  My daughter, she said quickly. Katherine Clarke. She’s in grade eleven—

  But the fireman shook his head. His skin was leeched grey and streaked with grime and his eyes were very black. I’m not the guy to talk to, he said in his gravelly voice. Try the office. He wiped grimly at his nose with two fingers and then stood looking down. His fingers were black. My nose keeps bleeding, he said. What do you think that is?

  Where’s the office? the old man asked.

  The woman nodded at the ruined schoolhouse. In there, she said.

  No, the fireman said. They moved it to one of the boarding houses. You know the music teacher? Singh?

  Ray Singh?

  He’s been in charge of the salvage these last two days. He might be able to help you.

  Thanks.

  He looked at the woman dully and then he nodded. Sorry I can’t help you more.

  It’s alright. Thanks.

  Sure.

  The music teacher was a big dark bearded man. They found him standing in the lee of a shadowed wall in his shirtsleeves and with a tie tucked inside his shirtfront and he lifted his eyes at their approach. He seemed to stand shimmering in the shadows and he did not step out into the light. In his fist he held some manila document.