Dark Rooms: Three Novels

by Douglas Clegg

  3

  Her face became all screwed up, wrinkling as if she were years older. "I woke up, not in the bathtub at all. I stood on the front porch. I didn't have anything on. Not a stitch. It was freezing. The storm that night—terrible. I was just just just standing there, with the door open. Rain coming down. Howling wind. Horrible night. The last thing I remembered before this was I had been in the tub. Somehow, I had gotten out of the tub when I was asleep, and walked through the rooms, down the stairs, and outside. That night. My arms were all torn up from the glass. Blood. Not as much as you'd think. The piece of glass was in my hand. I went back inside. I went back upstairs to the bathroom. When I turned on the light, I saw the glass on the floor. The water in the tub was all pink with blood. Only, something else was there."

  "In the bathroom?" I asked, sitting up, drawing back a bit, crossing my legs in front of me. I almost didn't want to know what was there in her dream.

  "In the tub. In all that pink, foamy water."

  "What was it?"

  She closed her eyes, her eyebrows pressing downward as if trying to force the memory from her mind. "It was me," she said. "I watched myself. I was dying. Blood was coming out of my arms slowing in gentle red ribbons. And then "

  I held my breath a moment. Denial was how I'd been raised. Deny anything even close to a bad mental state. Deny that life exerted any pressure on anyone. The voice of my father: "I was in the camps, and if I could survive that without cracking up, then anyone can survive anything if they just control their mind better."

  But Brooke had been falling apart, even before our father's murder, even before sitting in his blood for hours.

  And neither Bruno nor I had done anything to help her.

  Bruno had found her wandering, naked, in the night.

  I had seen her paintings.

  Her mental state was a wreck, but we were ill-equipped to understand it.

  4

  "I was in the tub. All along I was in the tub," she said. "Looking up at what seemed like steam. But it wasn't steam. I thought for a second that it was the dream-me evaporating. In front of my eyes," she said. "I watched it for a minute as it went—it was just steam. The whole thing had been a dream. But remember in the Dark Game? How we could go inside and outside ourselves?"

  "Do I," I whispered, wishing that she had not mentioned it, wishing that Bruno had not mentioned it recently, wishing that I could forget we ever had played it. The source of her disturbed state.

  The source of all our disturbances.

  "It was like that," she said. "Just like it. Only, Nemo, there was something else. Someone else was there. It was like I had released someone from inside me, when I cut myself. It was as if I had never been alone before, and now I was—something had gotten out of me. It was just like the Dark Game. It was as if by bleeding, wanting to die—I did want to die—someone else came out of me. Like they'd been waiting a long time. Ever since we used to play it. Like they were waiting for me to open myself up and let them out."

  5

  Our father had taught the Dark Game to us.

  Then, when we had been screaming in the smokehouse, he'd ended it.

  He told us that he never wanted to catch us playing it again. He told us that when the game got to be too much, we should hit a wall and that it could get dangerous. "The mind is fragile, and you shouldn't play it so easily. It comes too easily for you. I shouldn't have taught it to you. I thought you were strong enough."

  But the game wasn't so easy to give up, either.

  Sometimes, we still played it—in the wardrobe or in one of our bedrooms. We stopped at some point—I think when I was about thirteen or so, I had stopped playing it completely. Something changed—perhaps puberty had eliminated the need for the drug of the game.

  Or perhaps we had hit the wall in the game.

  He told us that he had fine-tuned the Dark Game when he was a prisoner of war. It helped him escape where they had imprisoned him when he was a young man during a war that I knew very little about. He told us that you could make your mind do things if you isolated it and if you directed it. He said that when he was in solitary confinement, the game allowed him to forget the pain in his legs and shoulders, and he could travel outside of the well they'd left him in for a week or two—that he could stand on the ground and travel among them—all in his mind. "The human imagination has never been fully tested. It never will be. But I could swear that during those times, particularly in the hole, I could hear their conversation and wander about freely among them."

  He told us not to play after dark because the game could ruin your mind if you let it. "Play it during the hour before dark, no matter what hour it is, it works best then, when the world is settling and your mind is calm," he had said.

  "What happens at night?" I asked him.

  "When I did it at night, it got hold of me," he said. "I couldn't get out of it on my own. Only when I hit that wall would I get thrown back into my waking consciousness, and it might be days before that happened. I'd be nearly starved, and so thirsty even my captors wondered at it. And my men " He shook his head sadly. "They thought I was dead sometimes, in it sometimes it seemed as if I were dead."

  We always thought he'd told us these stories to terrify us into not playing the Dark Game too much. After all, if it were such a deadly game, why even teach it to us? Why even train us to play it?

  But the boredom of Hawthorn in the winter was too much. The cable might go out or the electricity, or our friends could not tromp from the village out to our place for a winter's day of games.

  He used the Dark Game once for something that at the time made sense, but now seemed wrong: when Granny died. Brooke was inconsolable—she sobbed and screeched as if she would never be happy again. I was also bleating my tears out, for despite her harshness at times, I had loved the old woman who had read us stories and told us about Wales and Scotland as if she had been raised there herself.

  So, our father, apparently at the end of his rope, had taken us into the smokehouse. We had thought it was to punish us for wailing so much, but he sat us down, and guided us through the Dark Game as a way to see Granny again. I barely remember it, other than feeling much better—closing my eyes on a summer afternoon in the cool smokehouse, feeling the bites of mosquitoes on my arms, and then moving in the dark of my self-imposed blindness into a different afternoon, and seeing Granny there, holding her hand out to Brooke and me, and the sweet, gentle voice of our father guiding us.

  The Dark Game was simple: You closed your eyes, or you blindfolded yourself if you couldn't keep your eyes closed. One person, who put on his blindfold last, had to count to ten, and then began reciting a nursery rhyme.

  It was a very particular nursery rhyme—our father's own Granny (my great-grandmother) had taught it to him, as she had been taught it as a child. He told me that the origins of the Dark Game went back further than even his two years in the prison camps. "It goes back before words were written down, and it's the rhythm of the rhyme that counts, not the words. The words just can be said. The rhythm gets inside you. My Granny told me that the Dark Game was used in dark times—when horrible things happened to people, and those who survived those things needed rest from it all. I took the Dark Game to the prison camps with me and modified it. I used what I learned there. It helps us escape in hard times. But it's not a toy. It is not to be abused."

  The rhyme itself had to do with churches in England and a game that children once played while they recited it. It was a common enough nursery rhyme—I'd heard it since growing up. So it was not unique to the Dark Game. It simply was a way for the reciter to help the mind relax.

  It began:

  "Oranges and lemons, say the bells of St. Clemens.

  You owe me five farthings, say the bells of St. Martins.

  When will you pay me? say the bells of Old Bailey.

  When I am rich, say the bells of Shoreditch.

  When will that be? say the bells of Stepney.

  I
do not know, says the great bell at Bowe."

  And it ended:

  "Here comes a candle to light you to bed—

  And here comes a chopper to chop off your head."

  Then the reciter shut his eyes and began to guide the others—and we'd go in our minds where our guide took us, with no resistance. At some point, you'd be telling what you saw in your mind, over and over again, until you began really seeing the others there as well, with you. Where you went, what you were doing. You tried to rise outside of your body and just float there and watch yourself. Our father had told us it was a survival technique—and that it would help us understand how our minds worked. Looking back, I can understand now that we were probably too young to play the Game—because our imaginations were already strong as it was. But our father played it with us when we were all a little too rambunctious and bored at the same time, and the winter blizzards had come down on the island.

  In the winter, we played the Dark Game a lot, and it was fairly innocent for a while. We could travel through time or to other countries or to places we made up. We could even see our mother—we would travel to where we thought we could find her. When she lived with us, we would travel to the store or to the kitchen and pretend we were near her. After she abandoned us, we pretended to travel to Brazil, to a beautiful home in the mountains.

  But the last time we played it, something went wrong.

  It was a flight of fantasy for us. It was our family secret—we didn't let other kids in on the Dark Game. I told Harry about it, but that was about it. Harry had been sad about his father's illness, and I wanted to help him escape. He was the only person who I believe knew about it outside of the three of us and our father.

  At some point, something broke about the game, and we all just stopped playing it.

  6

  "You painted something about your dream," I told her.

  She shook her head. "What do you mean?"

  "In the greenhouse," I said. "I saw your painting. The one of the dream you just told me. You, standing at the front door in the rain."

  "I didn't paint any dreams," she said. "And who gave you permission to snoop?"

  "You left them out. In the open."

  "I did not," Brooke said.

  7

  We got into the kind of argument over this (whether or not she'd left her painting out to be seen) that we'd had as kids. It almost felt good to spar a bit, and finally it ended as all our challenges had: We had to go downstairs to check it out for ourselves.

  Brooke went ahead of me, key in hand.

  Against my wishes, she had locked the upstairs hall door. She stood in front of me and turned the key in the lock, without apologizing for this lapse in judgment.

  Then, down the backstairs in what we'd always called the sewing room (even though no one had ever sewn in it since Granny with her quilts and embroidery), through another set of doors until we came to the closest thing that could be called a hallway (five feet in length), and the door to the greenhouse.

  Brooke went in, nearly as interested in the canvases as I had been. The one on the easel, and the one of our father she acknowledged.

  But when she reached back to lift the third canvas, she nearly dropped it. "Shit!" she cried out. The dogs, upstairs in her bedroom, began barking at some noise. "Shit! Nemo! Is this a joke?" She turned to me, holding up the canvas.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  1

  I saw the same painting I'd observed previously, a woman who looked very much like my sister, naked, her skin painted red, standing on the front porch of our house during a storm.

  "It's your dream," I said, confused. "See? There you are on the porch."

  "Did you do this?" she asked, and I heard tears and not a small amount of rage in her voice. "Did you bring this out?"

  "No," I said.

  "You did! You came back to do this kind of prank, the kinds of of things you used to do. God, I thought you grew up! I guess I was wrong!" she spat, her rage like a gathering storm. Then she took the painting and held it up to my face as if she were going to hit me with it.

  "Look at it. Look at it," she said. "Did you do this?"

  I tried to focus on the canvas, but I couldn't. It was too close to my face.

  "Brooke," I said, my voice rising, "look, what are you so mad about? It's your dream. You painted it. You."

  I grabbed it from her hands, and when I did, I saw a kind of uncalled-for fury on her face. I took the canvas and set it down at my side. "What the hell is going on?"

  "I want to know who's been getting into my paints and painting this kind of obscene "

  "Brooke, it's you," I said. "It's the same kind of figures you did here." I pointed to the one on the easel, of the faceless children.

  "It's not me!" she screamed. "I am not the one who painted that!" She pointed to the painting at my side. "How could I have? Christ, Nemo. How could I have? I did not do it!" Her shouts grew, and I had the strange feeling that something was vibrating nearby—something was shaking—I looked at her hands, clenched at her sides, trembling as she cried out.

  And then, a sound as if a bomb exploded nearby.

  2

  The glass of the greenhouse seemed to bend slightly—I was overly tired, so I couldn't tell if this was right—but it was as if the glass of the wall behind Brooke rippled like water with something moving through it—something that moved snakelike along the surface of glass.

  "Calm down, Brooke," I said. "Calm down, it's all right. It's all right."

  "I am not losing my mind! I did not imagine this! This is a trick—you're trying to make me think I'm losing it, but I'm not!" she shouted.

  "Brooke," I reached out and took her trembling fist, and held it in my hands. "It's all right. It's all right. Try and relax." I kept my eyes on the glass, for it continued its S-shaped ripples, and Brooke seemed to notice it as well—she looked up to the ceiling, the curved glass of it moving like a canopy in the breeze—just floating up slightly, and then resting back down again.

  "I am not losing " she said, and then went quiet.

  She nearly fell, trembling into my arms. She was hot with fever as I held her, briefly. "Oh my God, did you see it, too?" she asked.

  "I'm not sure," I said, but inside I knew this was a lie. "Yes. Yes. I saw it."

  Her voice was a whisper. "Sometimes I see it at night. Something is in here. Something's in the house with us."

  "We're stressed," I said. I let her go, and she wiped her hands across her face and smoothed out her hair.

  "It's not just stress," she said. "Dear God, Nemo, I thought I was losing it. I've thought so since October. But you saw it?" Tears of what might have been relief—or even gratitude—flooded her eyes and streamed down her face.

  3

  I went to wake up Bruno. I got a bit of a shock going into his room—he lay there, the quilt pulled back, his naked back with a yin-yang tattoo near his lower spine. Next to him, slightly overlapping leg upon leg, snoring away, was Cary Conklin, the guy who had brought me over in the boat. Bruno's boyfriend.

  I didn't really think to react—I had only just gotten used to Bruno being gay, so seeing his boyfriend in his old bed—far too small for the two of them, so they were draped over each other—made me feel a bit the way the three bears must've felt upon finding Goldilocks. I didn't want to wake Cary, so I tapped Bruno on his left foot. After a few taps, he snarfled awake and glanced back at me.

  "Hey, Nemo."

  "Bruno," I said. "Sorry to, um, wake you up so early. But something's up."

  "Up as in important'?"

  I nodded.

  He sighed. "Okay," he whispered. "I'll be down in a few."

  4

  "You notice anything strange here?" I asked as soon as he bounded down the stairs, wearing a long T-shirt and red boxers. He had a harsh look in his eyes, as if he were furious for being dragged out of bed so early.

  "Strange?" he asked.

  "Things missing?"

  Bruno shoo
k his head.

  "We were in the greenhouse a little while ago," I said, glancing at Brooke. "Something weird happened."

  "Like?"

  "Like the glass moved."

  "Moved? Broke?"

  "No," I said. "It was like "

  "Like quicksilver," Brooke said.

  "What's quicksilver?"

  "Like liquid," I said.

  Bruno squinted and looked at Brooke. "You've been up all night." Then at me. "You don't exactly look all there, either."

  "We saw it, tired or not," I said.

  "Did you ask her?" Bruno turned to me.

  "Ask me what?" Brooke raised an eyebrow at me,

  "No," I replied. Then to her, "You walk up and down the house all night long."

  "I know," she said.

  "Why?" Bruno chirped.

  "Why do you think? Our father was murdered. I can't sleep."

  "No," Bruno said. He pointed a finger at her. "You were doing it before Dad died."

  "No I wasn't."

  Bruno half-grinned. "Come on. I saw you. I'd wake up and see you in my room. Just walking."

  "I'm telling you," she said. She shot a glance at me. "I wasn't."

  "You sure?"

  "I don't lie," she said.

  Bruno let out what I can only describe as a repressed breath, through his nostrils.

  "I don't," she repeated.

  "So the bathtub story is accurate," he said. "You fell asleep. You weren't trying to—"

  "God!" Brooke closed her eyes. "God, I'm going to have a headache."

  "Doesn't matter," I said to him. "I was there, too. I saw it. It was this rippling thing."

  "What time?"

  I shrugged. "Six, maybe."

  "Well," he said, spreading his hands out as if this solved everything. "No sleep, the light barely up outside. And you—" he nodded to Brooke. "Miss Xanax."