Dreaming Darkly

by Caitlin Kittredge

  I snatched it from her and shoved it into my nightstand. “None of your business.”

  We locked eyes, and I found hers to be pale and smooth as pebbles, without any warmth at all. “You’re at Bloodgood Manor now, miss,” she said after a moment. “I think you’ll find everything is my business.”

  She shoved my suitcase under the bed and pointed down the stairs. “Your uncle is waiting in the solarium. Put on something presentable and come down.”

  “This is as presentable as I get,” I said, smoothing my hands over my damp jeans and my mom’s old Nirvana shirt, one of the few things she’d owned I’d held on to. What could I say, I couldn’t afford to throw out perfectly good clothes. “I must have left my party dress in my other bag.”

  Mrs. MacLeod narrowed her eyes. “It’s fortunate you’re not my child,” she said.

  I peeled off my wet, salty jacket and dumped it in the middle of the pin-straight quilt, water soaking it in a jagged circle. I looked at Mrs. MacLeod, daring her to keep talking. She stared at the jacket like she wished she could burn it, but she didn’t say anything else. She didn’t need to—I’d learned what I wanted to know. If I pushed her, she wasn’t going to react with anything worse than snapping and glaring.

  I picked up the jacket and hung it on the hook on the back of my door. “Let’s meet the long-lost uncle,” I said perkily.

  Mrs. MacLeod grunted and led me downstairs without another word, into a room with a wall of windows and droopy, half-dead potted plants sitting everywhere. Aside from some rusty iron chairs and a little rolling cart, I was alone. I turned to ask Mrs. MacLeod where my uncle was, but she’d vanished. Probably in a puff of smoke like the witch she was.

  I pushed through the plants to the windows, which looked over the sea, into the roiling water and fog beyond. Rain started and streaked the glass, blurring out everything except my reflection. The wind cut around the corner of the house, howling and whining under the eaves.

  “Beautiful, isn’t it?”

  I jumped higher than I’d admit to, feeling like I’d bitten into an electrified wire. A second reflection appeared next to mine, and I turned to see a skinny man in a tweed suit smiling at me. I shrugged. “It’s okay, I guess.”

  “You really do look like her,” my uncle said. “Myra, I mean.” He picked a teapot off the little cart and held it up. “Tea?”

  “I’m good.” I stayed by the window. I could feel the chill coming off the glass. I really needed to find some long underwear or something if I was going to be staying on Darkhaven.

  “I can’t imagine what you’ve been through,” Simon said. “But I’m so very relieved that you’re home, Ivy. You have no idea.”

  He poured two cups anyway, and I sighed. Guess I had to get used to being ignored.

  “Do you like your room?” he said. “I asked Veronica to put you in the best guest suite. Where is Veronica, anyway?”

  It took me a second to realize he was talking about Mrs. MacLeod. I wouldn’t have pegged old hatchet face for a Veronica. “Off polishing her broomstick, I think,” I said.

  Simon surprised me by laughing. He sounded like a seal. “Veronica is a dear woman, really,” he said. “She just takes a bit of getting used to. But your room—you’re comfortable? You feel at home?”

  Never in a million years would I think of this rock pile as home. Not even if I was in the best guest suite instead of the glorified closet Spiteful McHagface had stuck me in. “It’s fine,” I said. “Listen, I’m really beat, so I think I’m just going to go hang out up there for a while.”

  All the plants were making me claustrophobic, never mind that I didn’t want to be anywhere near my uncle. It probably wasn’t his fault the first sixteen years of my life had been so crappy, but I wasn’t used to being around family. “Family” was a weird way to think of Simon, anyway. If my mother had told me flat out he was a creeper, I would have felt less uncomfortable. It was the complete lack of information up until this moment—the fact that she’d never told me more than she’d had a brother and his name was Simon—that unsettled me. Simon was a void I couldn’t read yet, and I hated that. I relied on information to keep me ahead of other people, have the advantage. Simon was a black box, and that made him dangerous.

  “I heard you were the one who found her.”

  That stopped me in my tracks. I opened my mouth, to answer him or scream, I’m not sure. Simon’s expression gave me pause. It wasn’t pinched or critical or angry. He didn’t even look sad. He looked defeated.

  Simon took off his glasses and squeezed the bridge of his nose. “I’m sorry, Ivy. I truly am. No one should have to see that, least of all a child.”

  “Yeah, well.” I sat down on one of the little wire chairs, my legs inexplicably heavy. “That was far from the only crappy thing she did to me, Uncle Simon. I wasn’t all that surprised.” I didn’t say anything else, especially about the incident when I was eight. I barely knew Simon, I didn’t know how he’d react, and if I was being honest, I didn’t want anyone to know about that. Not because I was embarrassed, but because there was a part of me that wondered, even now. Had she been right about me? Had she seen something in me that was just bad?

  I wasn’t normal, that much was for sure, and Simon would eventually figure that out. No point in spilling all of Mom’s dark secrets and speeding up the process.

  Simon sat down across from me and nudged the teacup in my direction. I sighed and took a sip. It was terrible, bitter and black on my tongue, but drinking it made me a little warmer, so I forced myself to down the entire cup.

  “I can’t say I’m surprised either, insensitive as that sounds,” he said. “Deep down, I think I always knew Myra was destined to die young.”

  Finally, something we agreed on.

  Simon put his glasses back on. “If you go exploring, please stay out of the turret and the east wing. This place is old, and it’s not safe to wander around up there.”

  “That’s it?” I said. “You’re not going to spout a bunch of rules or try to make me like you by giving me presents?”

  Simon’s mouth lifted on one side. It was weird but sort of endearing, like a robot learning how to smile. “Would that work?”

  “No,” I said. “I’ve had about ten ‘new dads,’ so I know all the tricks. I’m unbribable.”

  “Myra never lost her penchant for hurting everyone she comes in contact with, then,” he said, corners of his mouth turning down.

  “She was damaged,” I said. I didn’t know why I suddenly had the impulse to defend Mom. Simon was only voicing stuff I’d thought for years. Maybe it was just that—his saying it out loud made it harsh, too real. After all, part of the “everyone” she’d damaged was me.

  “You deal with your issues when a child is involved,” Simon replied. “You don’t pass them on.”

  I stayed quiet. I wasn’t starting a fight five minutes after meeting the guy.

  “You only have the one suitcase?” he asked as I pushed back my chair. “No boxes or trunks or family pets?”

  “We moved too much for pets,” I said. “No money for anything worth boxing up and taking with us.”

  “Okay then,” Simon said. “Welcome home, Ivy.”

  I forced myself not to flinch. My last name might be Bloodgood, same as the brass sign bolted to the outside of the manor house, but this would never be my home, and Simon would learn quickly that I wasn’t the kind of person he wanted as family. Sooner or later I’d cross some line that normal people knew to steer clear of, Simon would decide I was too much trouble, and I’d be gone. Even if he was the first person to treat me like a human being in quite a while, I was doing this for both of us. For my move to San Francisco as soon as I was old enough, and for sparing him the trouble of trying to “save” me when he couldn’t do a damn thing. I tried to believe that as I climbed back to my room.

  Chapter 3

  I woke up in the woods. Darkness settled around me, no moon, no stars. Just the gray sheen of a foggy sky a
nd the tips of the tall pines stabbing into its belly.

  My bare skin prickled, and I felt mud squish between my toes. I knew I shouldn’t be this cold, even wearing only a tank top and thin sweatpants. Sweat coated my skin. You didn’t sweat in dreams, did you? This felt like just before a thunderstorm back in Omaha, when the air was so close and hot you could wrap yourself in it. When tornado sirens screamed louder than thunder, and you searched the horizon, waiting for those black clouds to funnel down and touch the earth.

  Except it was cold. So cold my fingers were going numb.

  I started to shake as moonlight shot through a tear in the fog, bathing the woods in silver. I had gone to sleep, exhausted from jet lag and everything else. In my bed. In the manor. And I was pretty sure this wasn’t a dream. I’d never been in these woods, only glimpsed them from the boat. Mom had left Darkhaven while she was pregnant, and I was born on the mainland. I’d never seen the island with my own eyes before today.

  But I was here, somehow. I glanced around, seeing shattered stumps of trees and flattened black vegetation. It looked like a foot had come from the heavens and tried to crush me, only I was still here, standing by a flowing stream, the scent of moss and mud and broken pine boughs filling my nostrils.

  I turned back the way I’d ostensibly come, and saw the body.

  I didn’t scream. I felt my mouth open, felt the frozen air rush in, stinging my throat raw. I gasped, heart throbbing. My brain told me I was having a panic attack—I’d had them constantly as a kid, and they feel like you’re choking and being hit by a truck at the same time. The last one had been years ago, around when I stopped having nightmares about the bathtub—but this time I couldn’t stop it. None of the techniques a dozen school shrinks had suggested worked. I fell to my knees, hands sinking into the moss, and in the moonlight they were black up to the elbow.

  Blood. I was covered in it. The front of my tank top, my cheeks, my arms.

  The body was a man with dark hair, tall and muscular. Or he had been. He was covered in cuts, deep wounds, burns. I could barely see his face under the destruction.

  I wanted to run, more than anything. Bolt into the trees and keep running until I hit the ocean. Why was I here?

  Had I done this?

  I remembered my mother sobbing, as she looked at me with that naked hatred after I shuffled out of the bathroom and started putting on dry clothes. I felt something shift inside me, that wrong thing I’d known deep down was there way before she locked the door and turned on the water in that motel bathroom. I was fully awake now, and my impulse was not to run back to the manor and call the cops. It was to stumble to the stream, wash the blood off me, and roll the body under the felled trunks of trees all around us.

  My panic attack was stronger than the impulse, though, and my vision started to black out. The last thing I saw before I fainted were my hands, slick and gleaming black under the moonlight, bathed in someone else’s blood.

  I had managed to convince myself at the time, after that night, that it wasn’t my fault. I read everything I could find about mental illness, and built the narrative that my mother was either seriously bipolar or some stripe of schizophrenic that made her detached from reality. That she’d taken it out on me because that’s what abusive parents do. There was nothing wrong with me.

  Nothing that my mother had recognized in me, and tried to get rid of.

  I was a good liar, and I’d lied to myself right along with everyone else. I’d ignored stuff that didn’t fit with my little story of how I was basically normal and I just had a screwed-up life.

  But now, everything I’d told myself to sleep at night was gone, and as blackness closed across my vision, my only thought was maybe Mom had been right all along.

  Chapter 4

  I woke up in my bed. Light streamed in through the lace curtains. There was no forest, no bloody body.

  I curled in on myself with relief. I hadn’t had a nightmare that vivid in a long time.

  All the racing thoughts that had boiled over the night before, that Mom had been right and I was sick, evil, a psychopath, a nutcase—take your pick, I’d heard them all—faded away in the crisp morning light. Of course she wasn’t right. She was mentally ill; we lived in a country with crappy health care for poor people, and if somebody had dosed her ass with lithium before she stuck my head under the water, all of this could have been avoided.

  I didn’t know any of that for sure, but it was a theory I could live with. Any guilt I felt over what she did was just PTSD or something. I was normal—as normal as you could get being raised by an unbalanced grifter.

  What I did know for sure was that I needed to get out. The manor was stuffy, and my bedroom was tiny and damp. The fog was still thick, but the rain had gone to a light mist. I realized I’d fallen asleep in the clothes I’d arrived in—not the thin nightclothes I’d worn in my dream. What had that been about?

  I threw on my one jacket, my other pair of jeans, boots, and a tattered Stiff Little Fingers shirt I’d gotten from PJ, one of the few cool people I’d known in Omaha. He was a skinny punk in a party country town, had great tattoos, played guitar. I wouldn’t call our thing dating, exactly, but I liked spending time with him, watching dumb Japanese monster movies from the seventies, going to underground shows, being somewhere that was not with Mom. She’d ruined it, though. Stole PJ’s ’69 Les Paul to ease our way to the next crappy town down Interstate 80. I should send him an apology now, or at least a check for the guitar. Hell, maybe a whole new guitar. I was suddenly rich; I needed to go on at least one wild spending spree.

  It didn’t take long to figure out how to escape the manor, not with an iron rose trellis outside my window. The longer I had to stay there, with nothing to think about except my horrible dream, the longer I had to think about how this was it. I lived here now. The “home” I kept equating with flat fields, dusty highways, and landlocked flyover states was gone. This place, like it or not, was home until I saved up my money and went to California, or until I got kicked out.

  The garden that Mrs. MacLeod was so proud of was a tangle of overgrown lilac trees and hedges, surrounded by a stone wall that I climbed over to go to the forest. A cry sounded from somewhere ahead of me, high and echoing. I felt rain creep down the back of my jacket, the droplets like ice kissing my skin.

  Soon I couldn’t see anything except trees and snatches of the sky. I kept walking, because it was better than being back at the house. For such a big place, it felt overstuffed, all crammed with crap over every inch of floor and wall, the damp that never went away, and the view of nothing but ocean from almost every window making me feel like I was stuck on some kind of alien planet with no way off.

  Just like she’d never told me about Simon, Mom never talked about this place aside from telling how she’d left when she was six months pregnant and was never going back. She would repeat that when things were especially bad for us—we might be broke and homeless, but at least we weren’t stuck back in Maine. We were free, she always said, over and over. She made money reading tarot cards and scamming morons, and I tried to stay out of her way. Especially when she had dark moods and would stare at me like I was a stranger, flipping those damn cards over and over in her hands. I should throw them out, I thought as I walked. They were antiques, had been hers since she was a little girl, and I guess I’d had the idea that I’d sell them, or give them back to Simon when I found out I was coming to live here. I sure as hell didn’t want them. They carried a lot of bad memories.

  But Uncle Simon clearly wasn’t a tarot guy. He couldn’t be more different from my mother, from us. He didn’t even look like Mom. She and I shared rich auburn hair, hers more red and mine more brown. We both had pale skin and freckles, but Simon was just pale, or whatever came after pale—sallow. His thinning blond hair clung to his head like it might run away any second. He was small and nervous, where my mother was imposing, almost six feet tall in her motorcycle boots, with shoulders like an Amazon in a Harley jacket. />
  Or maybe that was just the way I remembered her. She could work a room—that was for sure. On a good weekend, if there was a convention or a trade show in whatever rear end of nowhere we’d landed in, she could rake in thousands of dollars. At least until the local cops caught on to the fact she never bothered to get a permit for her tarot readings and cloned credit cards whenever she could.

  The cry rang out again, saving me from plunging my foot into a swollen brook while I was lost in thought. It sounded much closer, almost like it was next to me.

  Just a bird. Had to be. I’d never lived deep in the woods, and I didn’t know anything about Maine wildlife. There had to be all kinds of birds and small fuzzy animals hanging around, making noise.

  I walked along the thin trail through the pines and let myself zone out, enjoying being outside somewhere that didn’t smell like a stockyard. Big swathes of Nebraska stink. There was damp here, but not the enveloping humidity of the Midwest. The air tasted different—salty, sharp, a little sting when you breathed it in. This island was clean, like few places I’d ever lived. Clean and ancient, untouched by the few inhabitants. The trees and the thick ground cover spoke to that.

  I looked back after what felt like no time and saw that the manor had totally disappeared. I was in a clearing, the trees thinning out into a small circle covered in moss and flat rocks. The light had changed, and I realized I must have been gone much longer than I thought.

  Just as I decided to turn around, because I had no idea where I was on the island and didn’t want to get shot by the neighbors Mrs. MacLeod had mentioned, a shape slithered across the corner of my vision. Just a blink and then it was gone, quicker than the raindrops shimmering in the air.

  “Hello?”

  Another shape, this one off to my right. I wasn’t just spooked by the woods. There was something out there.

  A branch cracked, and the pines rustled. Scratch that. There was something big out there, and it had brought at least one friend.