Dreaming Darkly

by Caitlin Kittredge

  Either way, I buried the tank top in a corner of the cave, deep under the sand and pebbles, down past where the tide would pull it out. My hands were red and my nails were bloody by the time I finished, but I breathed deep for the first time since I’d found the top in my drawer.

  The climb back to the house was long and slow. I crept back up to my room and stripped off my wet clothes. I showered to get warm, slapped some bandages on the worst of the cuts, and tried to come up with a convenient excuse if someone asked me what had happened. “Joined a fight club” was right out. Maybe Simon would believe I was just a really intense nail-biter?

  I didn’t need to worry, though—nobody bothered me, not even when I went back to the kitchen to forage for a real meal; after covering up evidence of a violent crime, another ham sandwich just would not cut it. Mrs. MacLeod had left a note on the kitchen table: Gone to the mainland overnight for shopping. Please do not leave dirty dishes in the sink. Don’t disturb Simon.

  The adrenaline had worn off a long time ago, and now I was more bored than anything.

  I tossed what had happened earlier around in my head. Point in my favor: I’d never blacked out and lost time before. Point against: the shirt was definitely real, and something had definitely happened. But I’d never had any urge to kill anything. I didn’t even eat the venison Mom’s boyfriends brought home, if they hunted.

  I couldn’t even be sure it was blood. I’d freaked out and buried the thing—not exactly waited to do a lab test. It was dried stiff and felt a little sticky and looked like blood, but if I’d gotten that much on my shirt, there’d be some on me, on my shoes, somewhere.

  Which circled back to the idea I was sliding into delusions or hallucinations. I didn’t like that idea much, but technically it was better than covering myself in blood with no memory of it.

  I groaned, and dumped the leftover casserole I’d found, minus a few bites, into the garbage. It was really terrible—I was almost nostalgic for truck stop hot dogs.

  Before, I’d been able to stay busy to keep these thoughts away. There were parties to go to, people to hang out with, weekend trips if I knew somebody with a car. Even though my life with Mom kept us isolated in a way, in practice I’d spent very little of my life alone. Sharing a motel room or a bus-station bench or a tiny trailer with someone for sixteen years doesn’t really equip you for the profound silence of an empty house.

  I was about to sneak out and see if Doyle wanted to hang—he might be a certified weirdo, but I couldn’t exactly be picky—when I saw someone leave the servants’ entrance that I was supposed to use, to avoid embarrassing Simon in front of the nonexistent neighbors, and walk through the garden to the woods.

  I scrambled to the window and peeked through the crack in the velvet drapes, which puffed dust into my face. The blond hair was familiar even in the moonlight, and I watched Simon disappear into the tree line. I had to get better about learning the sounds of this place. I didn’t like thinking somebody could be creeping around within a couple of rooms of me and I’d have no idea. I’d figured Simon was upstairs, in his room. I hadn’t even heard the outside door shut. Simon moved like a cat burglar. I waited about thirty seconds, until he wouldn’t see me leave the house, and then followed him out the servants’ door. It was truly freezing, now that the sun was down; I shoved my hands into my pockets, turning in a slow circle until I saw Simon’s blond head bobbing through the trees.

  This is weird, Ivy, even for you, I thought as I followed him. Simon was probably just taking a walk—he looked like the kind of dude who’d go for strolls around his estate.

  But then why wasn’t he wearing walking shoes? Or walking on a trail, or out in the open? Or, I don’t know, doing this all in daylight instead of by the moon, with no flashlight?

  I had an idea of where he was heading even before I heard the whisper of the stream that divided us from the Ramsey land.

  Simon stopped at the end of the clearing, and I tucked myself behind one of the massive pine trees, feeling the damp bark scrape against my cheek and my palms.

  A sliver of silver light peeked through the fog, and then it was dark again. Simon pulled out a small flashlight and checked his watch, sighing and picking at his jacket.

  “You look more nervous than a jackrabbit in a dog run,” said a voice from the other side of the stream. I watched a tall guy with silver hair emerge from the trees. He wore one of those padded jackets that hunters like, jeans, and a plaid shirt open at the neck. He was as huge and swarthy as Simon was skinny and pale, and he towered over my uncle.

  “Liam,” Simon said. “If it’s all the same to you, why don’t you tell me what you want? The less time I spend in your dog run the happier I’ll be.”

  The Liam guy glared, taking a hard step toward Simon. I wondered if I was going to have to save my uncle from getting his ass kicked. Maybe that would help us bond.

  “Neil’s dead,” he rumbled. “Something caught him while he was out rabbit hunting, and he’s dead. You wouldn’t know anything about that, would you, Simon?”

  Simon rolled his eyes. “You mean when he was out poaching on my side of the island?”

  Liam’s face twisted up like a rough stretch of road, and he let out an actual growl, taking a step toward Simon. Simon held up a hand to halt him. “What reason would I have to hurt any of you? That would be like cutting my own throat.”

  “Well, someone did it,” Liam snarled. “And I’m going to find out who.”

  “Clean up your own house, then,” Simon said. “You know what kind of people your nephews deal with—or should I say try to rob and cheat. Neil never did know when to back off.” He didn’t seem to care that this Neil person was dead, whoever he was.

  I wished I felt the same way. I was thinking about the bloody shirt again, about my dream of the dead guy in the clearing. At least that had been a dream. This wasn’t the same clearing—the one I’d been in had been hacked out of the forest, it wasn’t natural like this spot. And as much blood as it was, if I’d killed an actual person, there would be more.

  If I’d killed a person, I told myself, I’d know. Simple as that. I trusted myself, if almost nobody else, and I knew what I’d seen had been a dream. And whatever the bloody shirt pointed to, it wasn’t this Neil guy dying by my hand.

  Simon turned to leave when Liam called out to him. “My boy met your niece today.”

  Simon stopped, his skinny shoulders bunching up. I pressed back into the shadows, afraid he’d spot me, but he spun around. “You tell your mutt of a son to stay away from Ivy.”

  “When Doyle listens to a word I say the sky will be falling,” said Liam. “And the way I hear it, she trespassed.”

  “To trespass, she’d have to go somewhere that wasn’t her birthright,” Simon said. “And she doesn’t know about all this. Not yet.”

  “You telling me everything, Simon?” Liam took another step. “Is she going to play her part? Or do you have plans for her you’re keepin’ to yourself?”

  Simon shook his head. “Your kind doesn’t understand mine, and that’s the way I like it. Keep Doyle away from her. I mean it.”

  He walked past me, and I had to dive to the ground when Liam shouted again. “We will find out what happened to Neil, Simon! You mark my words.”

  Simon smiled, and it wasn’t a nice smile. It was thin and nasty, completely at odds with his bland, pasty face and the laid-back guy who’d given me tea. “Good luck with that, Liam,” he said, and walked back toward the manor.

  I waited until I couldn’t hear Liam crashing through the trees anymore and then followed Simon, shivering from more than the cold wind.

  Chapter 8

  Simon knocked on my door a few minutes after I’d crept back inside and up to my room. He held out a steaming mug when I cracked it open. No china service this time, just a plain blue chipped coffee mug with faded yellow letters on the side. SMILE. That was rich.

  “When I used to sneak out, I went down the old fire escape at the end o
f the hall,” he said. “You’re going to get tetanus on that trellis.”

  I took the mug, feeling my face turn red. At least my cheeks warmed up when it did. I wasn’t used to normal people, people like Simon, who didn’t scam and con people as a way of life, figuring me out.

  “Not used to being the one on the spot, are you?” Simon invited himself in and sat in the little chair next to my vanity. I flinched seeing how close he was to the drawer where I’d found the bloody shirt but forced myself to stay calm. I hadn’t done anything. I had nothing to feel guilty about.

  “What gave me away?” I said. I tried the tea. It was some kind of herbal blend and stirred with enough sugar to give me type 2 diabetes.

  “Myra was the same way,” he said. “Always watching people. Hanging back. Getting a read on them so she’d know how to manip—how to act around them.”

  “She was manipulative,” I said. “You can say it. I know she played people. She would have been a crappy psychic if she wasn’t.”

  Simon tried to smile, but it looked pained, like he’d just realized he was sitting on a pin. “I don’t mean to imply she was malicious, Ivy, I really don’t. She and I both had our share of baggage, even as kids. Growing up here wasn’t easy. In a way, you’re lucky you got out of it.”

  It was my turn to flinch. I managed not to pour the mug of hot tea on my uncle’s head, so that was something. He had no idea, none at all, about what it was to grow up without enough food, without a real bed, knowing that acquiring those things depended at least partly on you. “Figured she left because she didn’t get a pony for her birthday,” I said, to cover the stab his words had aimed into me.

  Simon’s unpracticed smile turned back into a grimace. “Trust me, Ivy, there are dark places even in lives that look perfect from outside. If your mother didn’t tell you much about her past, I have to assume she had her reasons.” He stood, smoothing the wrinkles from his khakis. “Have a good evening.”

  I wanted to stop him, to blurt out everything she’d done, starting with the bathtub. I wanted to hurt Simon like he’d just hurt me.

  But I fought the impulse. I had more control than that. I had, after all, had a great teacher. Whatever else Mom was, she never ever miscalculated and got emotional when she was dealing with people outside our family.

  “I’m tired,” I said. “I’ll probably just go to bed.”

  Simon came back and patted me on the shoulder. His grip was firmer than I expected from his spindly arm and hand. “Of course you are,” he said. “I’ll leave you be. And, Ivy?”

  He paused in my open door, and I kicked off my boots, letting my sore feet and general exhaustion win out over the shit fit Mrs. MacLeod would surely throw when she saw the mud on my floor. “Yeah?” I said, flopping backward on the bed.

  “Next time you’re tempted to follow me, don’t,” he said. “The Ramseys don’t like our family, they like outsiders even less, and they’re firmly dedicated to the second amendment.” He brushed his hand across his forehead, putting his glasses askew. “Liam Ramsey is a paranoid hillbilly who thinks the government listens in on everyone and is out to get him specifically, and the rest of his family isn’t much brighter.”

  “I get it,” I said. “Although, technically the government does listen in on everyone.”

  “Go to sleep,” Simon said. “Julia will be here at seven to take you over to get registered at the high school. I filled out all the forms online, so all you have to do is show up.”

  I expected to have a terrible time falling asleep after everything—with the bloody shirt, and what I’d overheard about Neil, and Simon turning out to be way more observant than I’d calculated—but I’d barely flicked off my light when sleep hit me like one of the waves pounding the cliffs below my window, pulling me deep into its undertow and blessedly shutting off my thoughts for the night.

  Chapter 9

  Cold crept up and wrapped me from head to toe. It kissed my bare skin, and left crystal droplets in my hair and eyelashes that glimmered like tears when I opened my eyes.

  I was barefoot, wearing gym shorts and a thin T-shirt that didn’t stand up to the bone-deep chill all around me. Sharp points scraped against my heels, and I made the mistake of looking down.

  Nothing was under me. I could see straight to the bottom of the cliffs, or at least to the blackness where the bottom should be. The water hissing between the rocks drifted up to my ears. The only thing holding me up was a rusty iron balcony, floor studded with small points to keep someone from slipping and plunging into the ocean.

  My toes were on the edge. If I looked straight ahead, I could see the lit windows of the manor, glowing amid the fog as if the entire house were floating.

  Everything in me stopped, from blood to breath. For a second I just stood there, like a dumb cartoon coyote right before she realizes the road has run out and goes splat off the cliff.

  Then it all came rushing back in a wave of panic. “Oh shit,” I whispered, afraid anything louder than exhaling would dislodge me and send me tumbling. “Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit . . .”

  I felt myself start to sway as a gust of wind buffeted the lighthouse. It whined through the broken panes surrounding the giant light bulbs, and a tear slipped out of my eye as my vision ricocheted wildly from the rocks below to the silver-bellied clouds above.

  There wasn’t time to ask how I’d gotten here. I was going to fall. I was going to die.

  There was no way except straight down. The platform swayed and creaked when I so much as shifted my weight, and the wind threatened to peel me off the platform. Even the ground on the back side of the lighthouse, facing away from the cliff drop, had to be forty feet down.

  I was stranded, as far away from help as if I’d been on the moon.

  I blanked out then, from the gut-wrenching but not unfamiliar feeling of being one step from death. I tried to twist my neck and look behind me for a way back into the lighthouse—the way I must have come up—but all I saw was the sheen of shattered glass in the moonlight, the huge panes encasing the beacon lamp reflecting my terrified eyes back at me from a hundred jagged angles.

  “Help,” I tried. My voice didn’t even rise to my own ears over the howling wind. “Help me. . . .”

  I was shaking so hard I was worried I’d plunge off the platform no matter how I tried to stay put, and my mind started to jump frantically, like a jittery screen catching flashes of picture through static.

  I could hear my own screams inside my head, not from now, standing in the cold, but from a long time ago, walking along a rainy sidewalk in Portland, Oregon. Mom dragged our duffel bag and her sack of tarot cards, candles, and all the other set dressing she used in her act. I hauled her folding chair. We’d made almost sixty bucks with her fortune-teller act, and I’d pulled two credit cards from women who left giant, gaping purses slumped next to them while Mom stroked their palms and told them what they wanted to hear.

  “Will you look at this crap, now,” Mom said, pointing at a short woman hunched over a folding table. We were at a farmers market–, street fair–, hipster walkabout–type place that Portland had everywhere on the weekends. This woman didn’t fit in. She was old, and not in the soft, friendly hippie way most of the older women who worked the fake fortune-teller circuit were. She looked like she’d seen some stuff, face all lined, eyes bright as beads and sunken into her head like one of those apple dolls. Her hair was white streaked with black, like dirty snow, and wrapped in a faded red scarf.

  Mom snorted. “Fake Gypsies are so old-school,” she said, shouldering her bag again. Mom was a great cold reader—she could take one look at you and tell you all sorts of stuff that sounded like she must have an inside track to all the bullshit psychic powers she claimed. But I thought she was wrong this time. The woman at the table was flipping plain playing cards, one after the other, playing the fastest game of solitaire I’d ever seen. Her scarf wasn’t affected—it was as faded and old as the rest of her. Her skin was dark and weathered, and I
thought she probably wasn’t a fake but the real thing—a Romani who’d somehow ended up reading cards for yuppies on a rainy street corner.

  “I’m hungry,” I said, wanting to change the subject. I didn’t want Mom’s poisonous tongue turned on this old lady, who clearly had enough shit to deal with. Mom shrugged, like, What do you want me to do about that?, and walked on. I would have followed her, except the old woman looked at me. I don’t mean glanced up to see if I was a mark or on the job like her, but looked at me, burned a hole right through me with her black eyes.

  “You,” she whispered, almost like she was telling me a secret. Her hands faltered and stopped on her cards. “You can’t see darkness, but it’s all around you.” Her accent was sharp and from somewhere in the neighborhood of Brooklyn, not Eastern Europe like I’d guessed, but no matter where she was from, that didn’t change the fact she made me intensely uncomfortable.

  I glared at her. She’s just trying to scare you, I told myself. It’s just a hard sell, and it doesn’t work, because marks don’t like feeling scared.

  “Well, could you tell the darkness to back off?” I asked. “Because I need to go with my mother.”

  She moved so fast she almost jerked me off my feet, grabbing my wrist and pulling me to her. The cards went flying all over the sidewalk, fluttering around me like dead birds.

  “You and your mother are fakes, but I’m not,” she grated. “And I tell you, death will come for you three times. Once in your past and twice more in your future.”

  “Lady, back off!” I snapped, pulling away. I was a lot bigger than her, but she had one of those wiry old-lady grips that’s like a handcuff. The big glass globe sitting on her folding table fell off and shattered on the sidewalk as we struggled.

  “I’m trying to help you!” the woman barked. “You’re just a girl, you don’t deserve what’s coming!”

  “Hey!” Mom dropped our bag and ran back to me, trying to wrestle us apart. My legs tangled with hers, and I fell. I could have told her not to bother; the old woman, who looked frail, was Hulk strong.