Dark Companion

by Marta Acosta

  “Usually, not always.”

  “But when we can’t predict, it’s our own lack of knowledge—it’s not as though things behave…” I paused to think of the right word. “Quixotically.”

  “You have an excellent vocabulary for someone who says she dislikes the language arts.”

  “I try to find words that are precise because language is so ambiguous. Why can’t all words be qualitative and quantitative?”

  “So that we could calibrate communication precisely?” Now he chuckled. He removed his white lab coat and hung it on a knob by the door. “I have to run off some copies of tomorrow’s worksheet. If you finish before I come back, please lock the door on your way out. Thank you, Jane.”

  “Good night, sir.”

  When I completed setting up the experiment and went to get my book bag, I noticed a folded sheet of paper on the blue linoleum near Mr. Mason’s lab coat. The edges were worn as if it had been handled a lot. I opened it to see a photocopy of a handwritten page. The heading read “Dearest Albert” and knew I should stop reading. But I didn’t.

  Dearest Albert,

  By the time you read this, you will know what I have done. I did not want you or anyone else at Birch Grove to find me so I will leave it to the ocean to wash away what remains of the body that I offered as a map of my love.

  You believe that my grief is the result of a chemical imbalance which requires medical and psychiatric treatment, a fresh start somewhere new. But my grief is real. I loved this last baby with every atom of my being, and I believed that my love could make him healthy and whole. He was the incarnation of my passion, everything I have hoped for since I first came to Birch Grove.

  Love is a poisonous drug, Albert. The first drops were so intoxicating that I felt I could possess the world. But as time passed, I wasn’t satisfied with those meager drops. It wasn’t enough, not nearly enough. Even now that I have drunk the cup of poison, I still crave more.

  You are a good and kind man and you deserved better. I now set you free to find another who will value your worth and give you a family. I ask for no one’s forgiveness, but I hope that someday you will understand why I had no choice. My traitorous body has become a map of pain and I am trapped and lost within it. There is no escape. My heart and soul will always be at Birch Grove.

  Ut incepit fidelis sic permanent.

  Claire

  By the time I read the signature, the page shook in my unsteady hand. I folded it quickly and put it in the pocket of Mr. Mason’s lab coat. I hurried out of the room and was down the hall before I remembered to go back and lock the door. Then I ran down the steps, across campus to my cottage.

  * * *

  All week, Claire Mason’s words repeated in my mind. I noticed that Mr. Mason patted his pocket the same way that I always did when I had money. How could this letter reassure him? I thought about Claire Mason and poisonous love after school, when I changed into jeans and a short-sleeved t-shirt, because I knew the mark on my arm excited Lucky, and I became more desperate with each day that went by. I didn’t bother cooking dinner and subsisted on candy bars, which I could eat quickly and then be available. I turned down an invitation to go to dinner with MV and Constance. Several times, I checked the phone to make sure it was working.

  I couldn’t focus on my schoolwork, so it took twice as long. Anger had motivated me in the past, but now I dreaded that if I didn’t do well, I’d be sent away from Birch Grove and never see Lucky again, so I second-guessed everything I did. I regretted calling his friend an ass, scolding Lucky to be nicer, and revealing my emotions.

  I’d go outside in the gloaming and stare up the hill at the Radcliffe house and think, Please, please, please, as if my desire and need could be transmitted if I only concentrated hard enough.

  I was watching the sky grow darker when I heard the familiar sound of a bike’s wheels crunching on leaves. A second later Jack came on his bike from the direction of the drive.

  He skidded to a stop and hopped off his bike, propping it against the porch banister.

  “Hey, Halfling, what are you doing outside in the cold?” He was breathing hard and his gray t-shirt clung damply to his wide chest.

  “Are you going to tell me I shouldn’t stand outside because you always know what other people should and shouldn’t do?”

  “Stand wherever you want, and, yes, I know what you shouldn’t do, if it’s letting a drunk jerk into your place in the middle of the night. Especially when the guy’s mother could expel you.”

  “Why would she expel me when he was the one—”

  “Moral turpitude. Turpitude. It’s in the handbook. Your headmistress disapproves of impropriety and she also disapproves of the appearance of impropriety.”

  “You keep telling me how important appearances are, yet you don’t care how you look or what you say.”

  “Irritating, isn’t it?” He wiped his brow with the hem of his t-shirt, showing a glimpse of his firm tanned stomach and abs.

  I looked away before he caught me staring. “Yes, it’s irritating.”

  He let the shirt drop back into place and sighed. “When I saw you standing here, so motionless, I was afraid an evil witch had transformed you to stone. What would bring a pixie back to life? A jar of angel’s tears? Or maybe I’d have to answer three trick questions.”

  “I’m sure you could answer any trick question. You like playing with people.”

  “Not me. I don’t play with people.”

  “You play with language, which is the same thing.”

  “No, it’s not, but you know that,” he said. “At night, I look down the hill and think of you here surrounded by the trees.”

  A frisson ran through me at the thought that Jack might have been staring down the hill at the same time that I was staring up toward his house.

  “I think, Has my halfling become habituated to the sounds? Should I visit her? But I get the feeling that you don’t enjoy our conversations and you don’t like my friendly neighborhood visits.”

  “Why should I? One minute you’re nice to me, and the next you’re lecturing me. You’re the one who asks trick questions, and talking to you is an exercise in futility.”

  His eyes darkened and his smile was as chilly as the breeze. “Hattie doesn’t think so. I understand her and she understands me. Isn’t that what love is, knowing another person so perfectly well that there are no surprises?”

  “You always bring up Hattie as if you’re complimenting her, when you’re really just putting me down, Jack. I know Hattie’s beautiful, talented, and sophisticated.” I felt myself losing control even though I knew that’s exactly what Jack wanted. “And I know that I’m small, plain, and no-class. I accept those facts. I accept that no one will ever fall in love with me because I’m pretty and fun, but I hope that maybe someday someone will get to know me, and he’ll find out that I have a heart and a mind just as good as any pretty girl’s.”

  “And you would love him no matter what he looked like?”

  “If he needed me, yes! I would be loyal to him and I would never give up trying to make him happy.” I tried to blink back my tears.

  “That’s not love, Jane, that’s letting yourself be used.”

  I felt as panicked as a bird caught in a room, battering against a closed window. “If you want to know what love is, ask someone who’s been loved, ask Hattie, because I don’t know what it means!”

  Jack watched me somberly and then his green eyes moved down and he saw the yellow and violet bruising around the scab on my arm. Stepping to me, he gently put his calloused hands on my wrists and heat from him went through my body.

  I tasted the salt of my tears as they slid down my face. I wanted to wipe them away, but Jack still held my wrists.

  “Oh, Halfling, what have you done?” he murmured. “What have you let him do to you?”

  Anguish rose up in me and I couldn’t bear it anymore. Jack’s head dropped so that his chin rested lightly on my head, and I had an inexpl
icable urge to lean into him, to have him hold me, to breathe in his scent of leaves and earth and sun, to weep until nothing was left inside of me but a void free from pain and aching need and loneliness.

  Why did I feel this way? Why did he make me feel?

  Then my phone rang, and I wrenched my wrists away from Jack’s hands and ran inside, slamming the door behind me.

  I got to the phone on the second ring, thinking Lucky’s calling, and choked out “Hello?”

  “Hi, Jane, this is Penelope from Latin. Do you want to join our study group?”

  The phone call was brief, and when I peeked outside, Jack had left, and the last of the dim light was gone, leaving only night and the trees and my confusion and misery.

  When I found that I was a prisoner a sort of wild feeling came over me. I rushed up and down the stairs, trying every door and peering out of every window I could find; but after a little the conviction of my helplessness overpowered all other feelings. When I look back after a few hours I think I must have been mad for the time, for I behaved much as a rat does in a trap.

  Bram Stoker, Dracula (1897)

  Chapter 22

  On Friday, I watched Hattie, wondering if Jack had told her anything about Lucky and me, but she was the same as always when we went to the Free Pop for lunch. The café was crowded with girls excited about a six-day break, because the teachers had trainings on Monday through Thursday.

  “They bring us back on Friday simply to torture us,” Mary Violet grumbled. “If we had the whole week off and two weekends, we could go somewhere fabulous.”

  Constance got off her phone. “Okay, it’s on. Movies at Spencer’s tonight and we’re all invited. You, too, Jane.”

  Mary Violet said, “His home theater’s got the most gargantuan sofa you’ve ever seen. It’s orgy size. Twenty people can fit on it. He’s got one of those old-fashioned popcorn machines. We have sexy nonversations and I’ve been saving up devastating double entendres. That’s French for ‘Oh, no, she didn’t!’”

  “Do I know any of the guys who’ll be there?”

  Constance named several guys, but didn’t mention Lucky. “You met most of them at the club. This is the last break before the semester gets really hardcore.”

  Hattie said, “I’m not going because I want to ace Music Theory and History so I have to listen to scratchy recordings and write essays through the break.”

  I was thankful that Hattie gave me an excuse to stay at my cottage waiting for Lucky. “I’m going to grind down and study, too. I have some catching up to do.”

  “You’re both really disappointing Mary Violet,” Constance said, and MV sighed dramatically and slumped her shoulders.

  At home, I changed into my good jeans and a tank top even though my bruise had almost faded away. I brushed my hair into a high ponytail so that my neck was exposed, and I put on mascara and shadow. I dabbed perfume behind my ears and imagined Lucky nuzzling me there. It had been a whole week. He must miss me by now, or at least miss what we shared.

  I ate cereal for dinner and watched television. The hours came and went. When I heard a rummaging sound outside, after eleven, I peeked through my curtains, thinking that he’d come.

  A doe stood near my porch, nibbling on a shrub. I’d never seen a live deer before and I had no idea they were so lovely, with velvety fur and liquid black eyes. I got the flashlight and tiptoed back to the living room to watch her. Another deer grazed at the lower branches of a birch.

  They moved off into the grove. I stepped out of my cottage, clicked on the flashlight, and followed them, staying as far behind as I could without losing sight of them. Suddenly the deer stood motionless. Their ears pivoted forward and with a flip of their tails, they bolted off. After a moment, I heard what had startled them: voices rising and falling. In the distance, people were singing.

  Keeping the flashlight to the ground, I walked toward the sounds. Soon I spotted yellowish light flickering through the white tree trunks. Someone was having a party. I clicked off my flashlight and stepped slowly and carefully toward the voices, dreading that I would discover Lucky with another girl there.

  What I found was worse.

  Two dozen people wearing scarlet hooded robes stood in a circle and chanted in a strange language. The words were harsh, full of sharp consonants. The hoods hid their faces in gloom, and each held a lighted torch, the flames slanting in the breeze.

  A man in a black robe with gold embroidery stood in the center of the circle beside a rough wooden table that was set with a glass decanter filled with purple-red liquid and platters of purple grapes, pomegranates, and red apples. The man next to him bowed and I made out a vaguely familiar profile under the hood.

  When I inched forward, I saw that they’d made a fire pit with rocks. The chanting halted, and the man in the black robe spoke, then touched his torch to the wood in the pit. Yellow and orange flames licked upward.

  He picked up something from the mounds of fruits. It caught the light and glittered. It was a gold knife with a long, narrow blade. He seized a pomegranate and cut into it. Rich crimson juices ran over his hands. He spoke again and tossed the pomegranate into the fire.

  The other man presented his palm and Black Robe slashed it quickly with the gold knife. Blood dripped and sizzled in the flames.

  I was too shocked to do anything but stare in horror as Black Robe picked up the decanter and poured the viscous purple-red liquid into a goblet, and the other man let his blood drip into it.

  And then I heard a low sob nearby. The wind gusted, and the trees made so much noise that I risked turning toward the sound. I caught the glint of glasses and the silhouette of a long, droopy nose. It was Mr. Mason spying on the robed people. His hand covered his mouth and his shoulders dipped and rose with his sobs.

  I edged over to him and put my forefinger over my lips. “Quiet!” I whispered, and put my hand on his elbow. I drew him away from the awful scene and when we were around a bend in the path, I clicked on my flashlight and grabbed his hand. “Run!”

  He resisted at first, but I didn’t let go. I hauled him behind me and didn’t stop running until we were on the porch of my cottage. I opened the door, yanked my teacher inside, and slammed and locked the door.

  Mr. Mason dropped onto the sofa as I walked back and forth, checking the locks and saying, “What was that! What was that!” I thought of the knife and the blood and Lucky’s knife and my blood. Had Lucky been among the people in the circle? It was impossible to know since their faces were hidden, but I thought I would have recognized his build.

  Mr. Mason took a handkerchief from his pocket and swiped his eyes before blowing his nose. “You scared me to death. I didn’t see you there at all.”

  “Mr. Mason, tell me what that was!” Fright pitched my voice high and loud. “Because right now I’m thinking vampire cult.”

  “Calm down, Jane. There’s a rational explanation, and I’ll tell you as much as I can.” He smiled nervously, and I sat down in the armchair because my knees were weak.

  Then Hosea’s instructions came to me as clearly as if he were talking to me: try to stay calm, assess the danger, don’t show fear, talk respectfully, get away as soon as possible.

  I put my hands between my knees to stop them from shaking, and Mr. Mason said, “The founders of Greenwood, including those who founded the school, emigrated from Eastern Europe, where they had been persecuted because they practiced pre-Christian folk traditions. They remained secretive to protect themselves, but they continue to celebrate the ancient farming cycles. It’s their cultural heritage, the same way we use pagan symbols like trees to celebrate Christmas and bunnies to celebrate Easter.”

  My nerves jangled loud warnings, but I tried to keep my voice even. “That man cut the other one and dripped his blood in the fire.”

  “It’s a surface cut, less than you’d get scraping your knee,” he said, and I was aware of his eyes on my arm.

  I pressed my elbow close to my side to hide the mark Luck
y had made. “Do they kill people?”

  “Good grief, no! The sort of violence you’ve seen in Helmsdale would horrify these people. Tonight is the autumnal equinox. The ceremony was in honor of the autumn harvest. My wife, Claire, was their friend. She used to participate and I went to watch because … to remember her, and how beautiful and solemn she was by the light of the fire.” His voice caught and his eyes watered behind his glasses. “It made her feel like she finally belonged somewhere.”

  I wanted to tell him that I knew about her misery, but I couldn’t without admitting that I’d read the letter. “I didn’t recognize the language.”

  “Claire told me it’s probably a dialect of Dacian, an ancient Slavic language. Like the Latin you study, it’s long dead.”

  Assess the danger. “The founders moved here because it was foggy and they’re sensitive to sunlight. That decanter was filled with blood.”

  Mr. Mason pulled off his glasses and massaged the bridge of his nose. “Yes, animal blood, probably lamb. They have an enzyme deficiency due to an autosomal recessive genetic disorder. UVA from direct sunlight fragments their DNA. A biological desire to replace the damaged DNA makes them crave blood. They can trick the craving with red foods and drinks, but only blood satisfies it.”

  His tone was so matter-of-fact, as if this were an ordinary genetic disorder like color blindness, that he took the edge off my first horrified reaction. But I had to ask the question, even though I knew the answer. “Including human blood?”

  “Animal on a regular basis, but also human with consensual partners. Some drink daily and some abstain entirely. They aren’t what the superstitions say. They’re good people. They take care of their friends and we take care of them.” He raised a shaky hand to his forehead. “Outsiders never see this. I shouldn’t be telling you this, but…”

  “But I was brought here to supply blood, like a farm animal to genetic mutants.”