Dreaming Darkly

by Caitlin Kittredge

  He stepped toward me. I took a corresponding giant step back. Suddenly he wasn’t my nerdy uncle. He was a guy I barely knew, and we were alone in a place where nobody would hear anything, no matter if I whispered or screamed.

  My pulse was vibrating so hard it felt like someone was squeezing my throat shut. He knew. He must have found the shirt somehow. He’d followed me into the woods and seen . . . what?

  “I don’t know anything,” I whispered. Fortunately it was dark, because I was way beyond controlling my microexpressions or keeping eye contact to sell the lie.

  “Ivy, it’s very important that if you start to have any . . . urges you tell me immediately,” Simon said. “If you did something, even if it was an accident . . .”

  “I didn’t kill Neil Ramsey, okay?” I shouted. My voice rolled back to me through the narrow space. “I’ve never been down here, and I didn’t hurt anyone.”

  I felt sick and dizzy, like all my lies might choke me. I didn’t know that I hadn’t done something. If my brain was as defective as all the other killers and freaks in my family tree . . .

  I turned, whether it was to run or just curl in on myself I wasn’t sure, but my foot caught a rock and I pitched forward, over the edge of the cistern.

  The cold water felt like being hit by a car. My lungs seized up, and for a long second I sank, unable to move. Then survival instinct took over, and my legs started kicking of their own volition. My head broke the surface, and I choked and screamed, a big mouthful of the water making its way down my throat. It tasted heavy and earthy, almost medicinal, and it burned a little on the way down.

  Simon was yelling—I couldn’t tell what, from the water sloshing and my blood roaring in my ears. His hand grabbed my collar and yanked me from the water. I landed on the dirt floor, coughing and shaking.

  “Ivy.” Simon’s voice was getting farther away. “Ivy!”

  I tried to crawl toward him. The rock under my hand gave the slightest of vibrations in response, and I started to feel prickles of electricity working their way through my fingers and up my arms. The vibration spread, the rock rumbling like a heavy truck had passed by, and I heard a faint hiss growing from behind me. My eyes slowly adjusted, and I realized there was a small bit of light coming in from somewhere above me, just barely enough for me to make out shapes. A pale cloud rose from the cistern, and I felt hot steam. The water—the frozen water—was boiling, hissing and sloshing over the sides of the pool that held it.

  The shaking increased, and I felt the same kind of breathless feeling, that sensation of being perpetually perched at the top of a roller coaster, rush through me. I tried to reach for Simon, but when I did, he wasn’t where he’d been standing, the strobing light from above showing I was alone. “Simon?” I called. “Simon!”

  Rock screamed on rock in response, and I heard something collapse off in the dark. Panic did start then—what if I was trapped down here?

  The water hissing and churning drowned out everything, even my own heartbeat, and all at once I wasn’t at the top of the coaster—I was plunging over, free-falling as something gripped me just like it had when I’d dreamed I was in another body. I was only a passenger inside the vessel of my body, and I felt a scream building inside me.

  Stop! I shouted internally. This has to stop! All at once, like the ride had crashed back to earth, the shaking ceased. I still felt floaty and disconnected, but this was different from the dream—I was still a passenger, but at least I could steer. I hoped I wasn’t dead. I’d died enough for one lifetime.

  I made myself stand up and felt my way along the rock wall. I’d seen light—that much I was sure of, and light meant a way out. Doyle had said the tunnels all ended at the beach, where the bootleggers would transfer their cargo to small boats bound for the mainland.

  My knuckles scraped along the rough granite, leaving my blood behind, and I kept stumbling on the uneven ground, but I managed to stay up. I wouldn’t say my thought process was anything approaching clear, but I managed to put one foot in front of the other until I stepped from the rocky passage into a dim, chilly cavern. The light I’d glimpsed was coming in from a crack high above, and I could only hear wind, not waves. I must be farther inland, somewhere deep underground. I slumped to my knees when I realized there was no way out, no way to reach that light. The walls were smooth, like the inside of a genie’s bottle, the chimney tapering until it truncated in a crack barely big enough to reach my fingers through.

  I smooshed my knuckles into my face, trying to massage some feeling back into it, and when my vision cleared a little I saw the faint light from above gleaming off something small and gold in the corner of the cavern.

  I crawled over to it slowly. Moving at all still felt like I was inside a particularly shitty carnival ride, and my head throbbed like someone’s jacked-up bass. The gold thing was a ring—one of the big chunky ones guys loved to show off, even if they’d graduated from high school twenty-odd years ago and were now selling tractors in Topeka. I reached out for it, the metal stinging my fingers with cold, but when I picked it up something skinny and white came with it, and clattered out of my grip against the rock.

  I shoved the ring in my pocket and scratched at the gravel, hoping what I was seeing wasn’t real, just like the boiling water or the sounds, or me missing the fact Simon had vanished, but the skeletal hand practically grabbed mine as I freed it from the ground.

  That wasn’t the end either—attached to the hand was an arm bone, still encased in some kind of disintegrating plastic jacket. I dropped it, gravel biting into my palms as I scrambled backward, until my wrist twisted and I landed almost face-to-face with a human skull.

  In my panic, all I really saw was the dry, stretched flesh clinging to the cheekbones like cheap leather clings to an old suitcase, and the straw-soft pale hair sticking to the scalp. The skull rested against a rock, like the dead person had just lain down for a nap, and on the flat surface above it, in a dip carved by the lava that had left these tunnels, sat a small gray figure, faceless and made of a material just as rotted as the corpse’s clothes. Some sort of little doll, a grotesque parody of the dead person who’d ended up just below it.

  I ran, falling like I was drunk, back through the passage. My lungs wouldn’t draw enough air to really scream, or I would have been yelling until my vocal cords gave out.

  Half running, I tripped over a corner of that damn altar stone Simon had been so excited about and landed on my face. Things went blurry and black, like when you chase a Valium with a mouthful of cheap drugstore vodka, and I blacked out for a second.

  Wakefulness crashed over me like a bucket of cold water. I started into a sitting position and vomited, managing to mostly avoid Simon’s shoes and my own legs.

  “Ivy?” Simon gripped my shoulder, holding my hair out of my face and running a hand across my cheek. “Are you all right?”

  I shoved him away. “How could you leave me alone down here?”

  Simon stumbled onto his butt on the rock, eyes widening behind his glasses. “Ivy, I’ve been looking for you for an hour! I never left the cellar!” He stood, brushing off his pants. “I came down here to tell you the cellar isn’t safe and you took off running like a bat out of hell. I’ve been practically having a stroke yelling for you down every tunnel in this place.”

  “NO!” I yelled. “You left me,” I rasped. My throat burned from throwing up and the screaming beforehand. “You left me down here with a dead fucking body!”

  “Ivy,” he said, offering me a tissue, “you hit your head. I have been trying to find you, and I did not leave you—you ran from me in a panic. Calm down before you really hurt yourself.”

  I snatched the tissue and wiped off my face, glaring up at him. My muscles ached from the fall, from running through the dark, stumbling blind. I’d be lucky if I didn’t get hypothermia, given how I was soaked through with water . . .

  Except a touch told me my jeans and shirt were bone-dry. Underwear and bra too. I was dry right
down to my socks. The only dampness was a sheen of panic sweat coating my face and sticking hair to my neck.

  “I’m so sorry,” I muttered. Simon held out his hand, and I let him pull me up. I was shaky, but I made myself stand on my own. I don’t know if I was falling back on my tough act because I was freaking out, or because I didn’t want Simon to know just how off the rails I’d gone.

  “I’m sorry to ask, Ivy, but . . . are you taking any drugs?” he said. “I won’t be angry, I just . . .”

  Now not only my head but my entire body ached, and I sat down hard on the edge of the old altar rock. “I’m not,” I sighed. “Even back in Nebraska I never did much more than smoke a little pot or steal pills from whoever Mom was seeing that week.”

  Rather than tsking or acting like he was disappointed in me, Simon lowered his head. “I was half hoping you’d say something you ingested could be causing this,” he murmured. “Ivy, you really frightened me. And what’s this about dead bodies?”

  “It’s . . .” The memory of that cavern was so real, the feeling of the smooth, cool finger bone rolling between mine vivid as the pain in my shin from where I’d tripped. And fallen into the water, which hadn’t happened at all.

  “Simon, did you . . . did you warn me about the well water?” I said carefully. His brows drew together.

  “Other than saying don’t drown in it?” he said.

  I waved the comment off, my heart sinking. “Never mind.”

  Everything I’d seen when I was blacked out before seemed real.

  My mind wasn’t the go-to source for reliability right now, anyway. When I looked to where the gap in the wall had been, the light leading to the cavern, there was nothing except smooth rock. Whatever had caused this, I wasn’t in any shape to keep exploring a bunch of caves, so I let Simon help me up.

  “Come on,” Simon said, taking me by the hand like I was five. “Let’s get you cleaned up. I may have to call Julia and take you to the emergency room if you’ve hit your head badly.”

  I faced Simon as he shut the hidden door to the tunnels and brushed off his hands. “I want to know everything. All the signs, how long I might have if I’m sick. I want to go to a real hospital and get a brain scan or something.”

  Simon looked reluctant, but then he nodded. “There are a lot of other things that could be causing this, Ivy. A lot of explanations for the things you thought you saw in the basement that made you run from me.”

  “Whatever,” I said. “I just want to figure out if this is my fault or not.” I scuttled upstairs and shut my door, propping the chair from my desk under it. I didn’t think, I just moved. Instincts ingrained since I was a little girl kicked in, and I slumped down on the floor next to the chair, my heart pounding. It’s not an easy thing to admit you’re sick. Everyone pretty much goes through life assuming they’re fine, until they’re not. And even when you hear the word schizophrenia or Parkinson’s or cancer, you want to deny it. Bullshit psychics and healers would go out of business if you didn’t.

  I wondered what I’d hear when I saw a doctor or a shrink.

  I wondered if it would make me remember anything about Neil Ramsey, the lighthouse, the “dream” where I’d cut my foot. I couldn’t remember, but clearly that didn’t mean much. I was for sure losing time. I was running around caves, hallucinating skeletons. Who said I wasn’t capable of anything when the black curtain came down over my memory?

  I made myself get off the floor after a few minutes. I was sixteen, not five, and way too much crap had already happened today for me to spend the rest of it hugging my knees and shaking.

  I showered and shoved the clothes that I’d been wearing to the bottom of my laundry bag. They smelled overpoweringly musty and dank from the cellar. I couldn’t feel that I’d even lightly tapped my head, never mind bruised it after examining myself in the mirror for cuts. I must have keeled over in a faint down in the basement. I was a fainter now. Awesome.

  Flopping on my bed, I took out the small book I’d found in my mother’s room and riffled the pages again. Her handwriting was spidery and dense, like trying to read through a thicket of pricker bushes. She had serial killer handwriting, and didn’t really believe in spaces.

  Doyle would know what to do, I realized. I rolled off the bed and slid into my boots and my jacket.

  The sun was almost down by the time I left the mansion. The rosebushes were mostly naked, just a few brown leaves and dead flowers clinging to their branches. They rattled in the wind, trying to snag my jacket and my hair as I walked to the forest. By the time I got back to the stream the moon was up. Flashes lit the clouds spotlight white for a few seconds at a time before it got dark again, blotting out everything but the indistinct skeletons of the pines.

  An eerie wolf howl cut through the woods on the wind, and I sank deeper inside my coat. Obviously, there were no wolves in Maine. Especially not on a tiny island. I was just letting myself get wigged out, substituting the things I was rightfully upset over with stupid crap like wolves and monsters. The me of six months ago, before all this started, would have laughed her butt off at me skulking through the woods, afraid of shadows.

  Doyle’s house was mostly dark, but I knocked on the back door anyway. After what had happened, having a run-in with Doyle’s father suddenly scared me a lot less.

  The porch light flicked on, and a guy who looked a lot like Doyle, just bigger and meaner, opened the door. “Yeah?” he grumbled.

  “Um,” I said. He was huge—like club-bouncer huge. Pro-wrestler huge. I tried not to stare.

  “Doyle!” the guy bellowed. “The Bloodgood girl is on our porch, bothering me!”

  “Oh, you can go back to eating protein bars and injecting hormones into your butt cheeks,” I told him with way more bite than was probably prudent, given how ’roided out he looked. “I can show myself in.”

  “You got a problem?” the giant demanded. Fortunately Doyle came thundering down the stairs into the back hall before I could tell this guy what exactly my problem was, and probably end up swallowing a few of my smaller teeth for my trouble. I could only feel sad and scared and off-balance for so long before I just started wanting to lash out at anyone near me. It was one of my less charming traits, but there you go. I hadn’t exactly had an awesome role model for anger management with Mom.

  “You’re a dick, Blake,” Doyle grumbled, taking me by the wrist and pulling me inside and down the hall. We were in his room before I could blink, and he slammed the door. “Are you crazy?” he demanded. “You know how jumpy my family is right now. The last thing they want is one of the Bloodgoods at their door. You’re just lucky Dad is on the mainland.”

  “Do you want me to leave?” I asked. The floor creaked outside the door, and Doyle growled.

  “Go away, Blake!” he shouted. He pushed a pile of laundry off his bed and gestured. “Sorry. I don’t clean much. Or ever.”

  “I’m still getting used to the idea of a room where all the furniture isn’t bolted to the walls,” I said. “My standards are insanely low.”

  Doyle flopped back on the ratty patchwork quilt and grinned up at me. “Lucky, lucky me, then.”

  I didn’t join him, choosing a seat in a ratty easy chair in the corner. Girlfriend, boundaries, et cetera. “This is okay, right?” I said. “Valerie won’t be pissed I’m in your room?”

  “Valerie doesn’t have any say over who I hang out with,” Doyle said. “Plus, I’m being honest, it’s not like we’re gonna get married. She’s heading to college in a few years, and I’m staying right here. It’s fun while it lasts, but she made it pretty clear it’s temporary.”

  I pulled my knees up to my chest, feeling kind of crappy for how happy Doyle’s words made me. I did have a little bit of a thing for him, and just because I’d never act on it while he was with someone else didn’t erase it. But for right now he was off-limits, and I wasn’t exactly in a flirting mood anyway.

  Doyle sat up, bouncing a little on the creaky bed. “So what are you doin
g here, anyway?”

  I got to my feet and started looking through the stuff on Doyle’s dresser. Suddenly I didn’t know what to say. “It just got kind of intense at home.”

  Doyle stopped bouncing and tilted his head. “Must have been a little bit more than intense if you’d risk coming over here. Not that I’m mad you did. If nothing else, you have more balls than most of my family. Or yours, for that matter. They all act like they’ll be burned at the stake if they’re caught on the wrong side of the island.”

  “It’s a lot harder than I thought being here,” I said. “My mom’s house. Her room. Her stuff. Seeing what she was like before is . . . it’s weird. And my fucking uncle—he has the nerve to tell me that, oh yeah, we’re all sick in the head apparently, and we tend to die prematurely and take anyone close down with us. Bonus, no modern medication works and no doctor is even entirely sure what’s wrong with us.”

  I slumped back down on the easy chair. “I know nothing is set in stone, but I’m scared. I haven’t admitted that since I was, like, eight years old, but I don’t want to hurt anyone. And I don’t want to lose my mind like my mother apparently did. I don’t want to spend half my adult life in a psych ward. I just want to move to California and just . . . live an entirely normal life. That part’s lame, I guess, but I . . .”

  “Not lame,” Doyle broke in. “Where in California?”

  “San Francisco,” I said.

  Doyle reached up to a wall of photos, postcards, old ticket stubs, and similar items littering the wall above his bed and handed me a dog-eared postcard showing an expanse of desert and blue-gray mountains rising into an indescribably clear sky. I recognized it without looking at the caption on the back as New Mexico.