Dreaming Darkly

by Caitlin Kittredge

  There were three bodies, in reality. Unlike my dream they lay in one corner, skeletal limbs akimbo, wrapped in the faded remains of denim and nylon and even a ragged Ked. I saw, horribly enough, a grinning skull looking back at me from a T-shirt one of the skeletons had been wearing when they weren’t so skeletal. The skull had a crown made of roses and some swirly colors floating behind it. A Grateful Dead tee.

  Aside from the irony, I thought back to what Doyle had said about the Children of Cain, the cult that had come to the island in the eighties and then simply disappeared.

  I guess now their disappearance wasn’t so mysterious.

  Breathing the dry, salty air flowing from the crack in the rocks, I heard something I hadn’t in my dream. Water. Not the bass roar of the ocean but the lazy ripple of a stream. The stream that separated the island between the Bloodgoods and the Ramseys.

  “Doyle,” I said. “I want you to stay here. Okay? Don’t move. I’m going to get help.”

  “You save me,” he said. “You were always meant to.”

  I approached the darkest part of the cavern, hearing the trickle get louder, and echo, like part of the stream was underground. If it was, it had to come out somewhere, and I could follow it.

  I went back to the shallow-buried skeletons. Behind them was a pile of old camping odds and ends, anything with initials, personal markings—anything that cops could identify as belonging to a pack of missing campers, basically. The Ramseys had been smart about what they stole.

  Doyle’s father was a creeper, but I doubted he was a cold-blooded killer. He was the type to explode on impulse, not carefully hide several bodies. He was definitely a thief, but I didn’t think he’d killed the campers—just robbed their corpses.

  Moving gingerly to avoid stepping on bones, I went through the pile of camping stuff. Everything was half-eaten with dry rot, metal bits just rust, but I found an old-style candle lantern painted with the name Ross near the bottom of the pile and a tin of waterproof matches. I went through almost all of them before I found one that actually struck, but the candle sputtered and caught, and the soft glow illuminated all the dark corners I hadn’t seen in my dream.

  Not a dream, I corrected myself. I’d been here before. Had to have been. When my uncle dosed me.

  How had I not noticed it? All those nightmares I’d been having, and the stuff I’d thought was a dream, until I found tangible things like the bloody shirt . . .

  The tea. The bitter, disgusting tea I kept taking out of politeness.

  “Doyle,” I said. “I’ll be back soon. I promise.”

  “Watch out for the dark,” he said, squeezing my hand. “Being alone in the darkness is frightening. Don’t let it extinguish that light. . . .”

  I squeezed his hand in return and climbed through the second passage, between human-sized boulders at the back of the cavern.

  Sure, the detached part of my brain was wondering why Simon was drugging me, but I figured I could chew that over once I got out of here. If the “sickness” I’d experienced was induced by whatever was in that syringe, had Mom and my grandmother also gotten dosed? It had to be something natural, something Simon had easy access to, that wasn’t detectable in a tox screen unless you were looking for it.

  Clearly it didn’t make everyone see horrible stuff—Doyle had turned into a chatty oversharer. Just my luck it made me see stuff straight out of PJ’s weird Japanese horror movies and my own worst nightmares. That was probably the Bloodgood genes, I admitted. Dosed or not, we did have a strong streak of mental problems, and who knew how that interacted with whatever was in the syringe?

  Focus, I told myself. One thing at a time. Get out of these tunnels alive, then get help for Doyle, then I could confront my uncle.

  I saw a low opening leading to a damp passage cut into the rock, and bent over to peer into it. I could see the flash and dance of the stream at the end of the tunnel and could feel fresh air on my face that smelled like the damp, slightly musty odor of dead pine needles and earth.

  Something snapped when I put my foot down, and I moved the lantern to see another set of bones, these ones much more brown-yellow than the others, a few scraps of mummified flesh still clinging here and there.

  “Come on,” I whispered, holding the light to reveal the rest. This skeleton was curled up to one side of the passage, one leg extended behind it, one arm cradled to its chest, as if it had tried to crawl away and then died right here. I was freaked out for a second, thinking that going this way meant the same for me, until I saw the neat dime-sized hole in the back of the skull. I knew what a bullet hole looked like. In a weird way, I was very relieved. “Sorry,” I whispered again, using my toe to move the deceased leg out of my way. “You understand.”

  The skeleton shifted a little, and I got a better look at the cradled arm, and my stomach lurched. I tried to pretend I was just imagining things, but all the details still clinging to the body fell into place—stringy white strands of hair in the scalp that had been blond in life, the compound fracture in the forearm bone set with three metal pins. I reached down into the gravel, to the flash of silver, and picked up the square metal frames, lenses long ago shattered, that had been Simon’s glasses.

  Simon. Formerly Benjamin.

  And not whoever had been living in my family’s house, pretending to be my uncle.

  “He left me no choice.”

  I didn’t even jump at the sound of Simon’s voice—I didn’t have anything better to call him—and the strong beam of the flashlight overwhelming my wimpy candle. I was all out of shock, of fear. Pretty much everything was toned down to a whisper. I had the calm thought that if Simon came at me, I’d bludgeon him with one of these melon-sized rocks.

  I wasn’t ending up like poor Benjamin.

  His shoes crunched the gravel as he came closer, and I turned to face him. I didn’t show fear, just squinted in the bright beam until he dropped it to the side, so the lenses of his glasses gleamed like mercury.

  “Do you know who I am, Ivy?”

  I swallowed, surprised at how calm I sounded when I answered. “Brian. Benjamin’s twin brother.”

  “Very good,” he said. “Smart. All you Bloodgood women are so smart. I won’t bother asking how you found out.”

  “Mom saved the birth certificate you tried to burn,” I said. I wanted to keep him talking, give myself time to figure out how I was going to avoid joining the skeleton collection in these tunnels.

  “That sneaky little witch,” he murmured, more to himself than me.

  “What happens now?” I said. Simon shrugged.

  “That’s really up to you, Ivy. I don’t want to hurt you. I’m very glad you didn’t panic and force me to do something final.”

  “Is that what happened to Benjamin? Simon. Your brother,” I clarified. Oh, I was way beyond panic. I was calculating the odds of me winning if I rushed Simon and tried to make a run for it. He was scrawny, but he’d taken down four people that I knew about, and I didn’t know if he was armed. I stayed put. I liked the odds much better if I let him talk.

  “Benji was unfortunate,” he said. “But I think if you hear my side, maybe you’ll understand.”

  I spread my hands. “So tell me.”

  Simon pointed ahead of him, past the body of his brother, into the dark. “That way,” he said. “Much easier than climbing all those goddamn stairs back to the manor.”

  Something else clicked into place. The odd acrid, almost burnt-earth smell—the water in the cistern had smelled and tasted the same, when I’d fallen in. I had fallen in. Simon had drugged me, changed my wet clothes, but I had swallowed that water, smelled and tasted it.

  “What you’ve been dosing me with,” I said. “It’s in that water. In the cistern.”

  “Something in the ground under the house,” Simon agreed. “The water comes up from deep below, leaches through a mineral layer, or grows bacteria—I don’t pretend to understand, but the effects on an already fragile psyche are pretty remarkabl
e.”

  “You’ve been drugging me since day one,” I said, not a question. Simon waved the flashlight down the passage.

  “It sounds so harsh when you say it like that. Walk. And listen. If at the end of the tunnel you’re not convinced, we can discuss our options.”

  He moved after me, our shadows mixing on the wall. “I was just about your age when Benji—Simon—contacted me. He wanted to get to know his family. His real family.”

  “I get that,” I said. “Pretty normal.”

  “I was on my own in Portland, sleeping rough, barely getting by. Hearing that my twin brother had been welcomed into a family rich enough to have their own island was quite a fairy-tale ending, let me tell you.” He sighed. “But they wanted nothing to do with me.”

  “Maybe it’s because you creep people out,” I said. Simon laughed, the sound echoing. The tunnel was deceptively long.

  “Just because Benji got adopted and skipped all the psychiatrists poking in his brain, giving him tests and a couple of stays in the state hospital doesn’t mean he didn’t have the same diagnosis they gave me. We were twins, after all. Anyway, initially I just intended to use him for quick money, extort a few grand, steal some family heirlooms, and buy a bus ticket to New York or something. Anywhere but Darkhaven.”

  I kept moving, sensing that he was hesitating on the next sentence. “What changed?” I said.

  “Myra,” he said.

  I felt sick all over again. “What was so special about Mom? Even back then it’s pretty clear from her diary she was way off her rocker.”

  “You know,” he snapped, steel in his voice for the first time. “I have had about enough listening to you shit-talk your poor mother. Have a little sympathy, Ivy. Be less cold-blooded.”

  “Says the murderer,” I muttered. Simon put out a hand and shoved the small of my back. I stumbled, almost going down.

  “Less lip, more walking,” he said. “Myra was everything to me. She was smart, beautiful, the first person to ever give me her full attention. So I stayed. I pretended I wanted to get to know my brother, even though I couldn’t have cared less about his pretense of being normal, his wholehearted embrace of the disgusting, snotty-rich brat Simone had turned him into. When he discovered the truth about my feelings for Myra, he got upset.” I saw his shadow shrug. “He didn’t deserve all this, you know. He was far worse than I was, really. Back in the orphanage, he was starting fires, hurting animals. If I’d left the island, left your mother and grandmother alone, who knows what he would have done. . . .”

  I figured that was crap. Probably a lie cribbed from Simon/Brian’s own childhood, and pawned off on poor Benjamin to make Simon seem sympathetic to me. “I understand,” was all I said. “So, what? You just told Mom that ‘Brian,’ what, got abducted by aliens?” I interrupted. I couldn’t touch the whole Brian/Simon having feelings for Mom thing. I’d just start screaming. Simon laughed softly.

  “It wasn’t hard. I said he’d moved on. Gone to California. I sent a couple of postcards from a remailing service in LA and that was that. Everyone on this island thought I—Brian—was a shiftless nobody, so no one so much as asked after him. I walked into Benji’s shoes, and to Myra and everyone else, I was him. Benjamin. And Benjamin was Simon, and Simon was who I deserved to be, in the end.”

  “Except my grandmother figured it out,” I said, turning back to stare at his black shape in the flashlight beam. “Didn’t she?”

  “Like I said, smart,” he said. “Fortunately, untreated mental illness really does run in the Bloodgood family. A few months of drugging her afternoon cocktail, and her evening cocktail, and her bedtime cocktail, and that was that. Involuntarily committed, power of attorney to Myra, any comments about how I wasn’t really her beloved Simon easy to discredit.” He cocked his head, smiling broadly. “The things that woman told me. She killed her father, you know. She followed him across the island and saw what he did to the Ramseys, and she killed him with a skinning knife, made it look like he cut his own throat. Said she couldn’t let that evil keep on existing. She and Liam’s father agreed to take that secret to their grave. Isn’t that adorable? Anyway, I used bits and pieces of that to suggest some choice nightmares to your subconscious. Bloody footprints, spooky little girls. Classics are classics for a reason.”

  I couldn’t even be relieved that what had happened the night the power went out had been sort of real. I was too horrified by the words flowing from Simon like a poisonous tide rising.

  Suddenly the tunnel brightened, and we were standing amid a rock pile in the same woods I’d woken up in when I was first on the island. The seam in the granite was almost invisible—especially in the dark, you’d never see it. Somebody could come and go between the manor and the property line as they pleased.

  Simon clicked the flashlight off. “Maybe I was wrong to go straight to that technique with you. Simone had a violent reaction to the drugging, went completely off the rails and had to be hauled away to a mental hospital in cuffs. I didn’t plan it that way, but it was very effective. I told Myra she’d died in the hospital. Killed herself, actually. Myra was alone except for me. I knew she resented Simone too much to scrutinize what happened, and we buried a nice urn of fake ashes, and Myra had nobody else to turn to.”

  Something about the way he said it, the little smug smile that curled his mouth, made me cold. “But then she ran out on me. The drugs didn’t have time to do their work. I guess in the long run it didn’t matter. She had cracks when I met her, and that vulnerability I loved turned her into something ugly. Broke her in the end.” He smiled as he looked into my eyes. “You’re made of stronger stuff, though. More like me.”

  “Oh, God,” I said, my legs unable to support me any longer. I crumpled to the pine needles. “Oh my God.”

  “Myra was already pregnant when she figured it out,” Simon said. “That I wasn’t the twin she thought I was.”

  The words were echoing inside my skull, like I was next to a speaker turned up way too loud.

  The devil.

  Your father.

  Why Mom had never told me about Simon. Why she’d run as far and fast as she could. Why Simon was so determined to keep me on the island, with bribes of college and a trust fund and a loving family. Why he’d never touched Mom’s room, left it just as it was when she left Darkhaven. Left him.

  Simon crouched in front of me, putting out his hand to touch my shoulder. I jerked away, the thought of his touch nauseating. “Ivy, I loved your mother. And you. I wanted us to be a family. Myra was so upset she tried to drown herself; did you know that? After she found out she was pregnant with you.”

  “You mean after she found out she’d slept with a psychopath pretending to be his own brother,” I muttered thickly. My body felt as heavy as the stones around us. I wasn’t sure what shock felt like, but I figured probably like this. I wanted to run, but I couldn’t have. Where would I go, anyway? Simon had the only keys to the boat, and I’d have to go back to the manor to get to them.

  “You’re upset,” Simon said. “I’ll make some allowances for your state of mind, but don’t keep saying things like that to me.” He stood, looming over me. “I don’t like it.”

  “You drugged me,” I said. “So you could keep me here. Like you never could her.” My brain was still working, at least. I could still talk, still try to con my way out of this. He wasn’t any different than a hundred other marks who thought they were smarter than me.

  “That is one reason, yes,” he agreed. “I tweaked the mixture, distilled it rather than just adding well water to things like I did with Simone. I had to be sure you weren’t as volatile as Myra. Fair’s fair, she did it to me too—ground up sleeping pills, put them in my drink, and ran out on me. Stole a good bit of cash and jewelry while she was at it.”

  And then, eight years later, she tried to drown me in a bathtub. Now that I understood the reason behind all of Mom’s instability, it didn’t really make it any better. I hadn’t asked to be born.
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br />   “Why didn’t she just give me up?” I said. I hadn’t even really meant to say that out loud, but Simon smiled again. It was a creepy smile, like one painted on a doll. I got the feeling you could peel off the mask on Simon and the face underneath would be totally blank, like something that had never had any human features in the first place.

  “Because of the Bloodgood map,” he said. I blinked, the abrupt shift in his tone snapping me out of my daze.

  “What map?”

  Simon gestured around. “I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but this place is a wreck. House is falling down; I can barely pay property taxes; the IRS has a lien on the estate. Bloodgoods haven’t been as rich as they want all those rednecks across the bay to think for a long time. But somewhere on this island is all the cold, hard loot Connor Bloodgood earned or stole in his long life. I’ve spent the last seventeen years scouring the tunnels, but I can’t find it without the map. And since in that time I’ve become sure the map’s not in the manor or anywhere else on the island, that leads me to believe Myra took it with her.”

  He reached down and took my arm, pulling me to my feet easily. He was really strong, and I was glad I hadn’t tried to fight him—I’d probably be broken in about ten places. “Which means you have it.”

  “I do not,” I said reflexively. “I am one hundred percent sure on that one.”

  “Unfortunately I don’t believe you,” Simon said. “Like recognizes like, Ivy. You’re like me. You lie like breathing, and you take secrets to the grave.” He shoved me ahead of him, heading back toward the manor. “Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that, because I do genuinely like you.”

  “So you drugged me to look for the map?” I said, stumbling over tree roots as he dragged me.

  “At first. Then I wanted to make sure you were pliable when I did find the Bloodgood fortune. I’m not one of you by birth. By the terms of Simone’s will, all of the actual money passes to the blood heir.” He grunted. “Tricky old bitch didn’t trust my brother half as much as she made him think, it turns out. If she had died without me locating you, the money would have gone into a trust and I’d lose everything, including my right to live here.” He curled his lip. “Only reason I’m paying to keep that bag of bones on ice in Mid-Coast. Dead women can’t sign paperwork.”