Dark Rooms: Three Novels

by Douglas Clegg

  9

  I set the book down and closed it.

  I sipped coffee and stared at the back of the book, at Mary Manley's photograph.

  Then I went back to the pages I'd just been reading and skimmed a few:

  what the psychologists and the psychiatrists seem to have missed in the cases of Willa Trent and Micah Rollins was that they had simply done what all children do. To the nth degree. Most children have difficulties in their lives. Most don't understand the world adults foist upon them. How many children are sexually abused each year? How many witness murder? How many are beaten? How many are outcasts? Those children may ritualize their differentness. They may create their own ways of dealing with the continual abuse or affront to their own nature. But if you multiply that abuse by ten, or one hundred, how much more powerful will those rituals be on the minds of the children? We know so little about the developing mind of a child—and when that mind has been crushed in some way, a strong child may create a ritual for compensating for the boot on his back. A strong child may create a sense of security with an imaginary friend, a game, a ritual, a religion. Because without it, perhaps, reality is too terrifying to face at a young age. But it is in adulthood that these children need to slough off the old skin of these rituals. No doubt, many do. But there are those who do not—like Willa Trent. Like Micah Rollins. Like Eric B.

  Each of them faced a trauma in adulthood that forced them back into the childhood ritual for survival.

  And the manifestations from their minds became more powerful as a result.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  1

  I thought about the Dark Game, and how its ritual had somehow messed with our minds. I didn't see our childhood as particularly harrowing. Perhaps our mother leaving had been the extreme moment that Manley wrote about. Perhaps it even explained my having taken on a voice, a distinct personality, inside the smokehouse, but that wouldn't explain why Mary Manley herself had also been "possessed" (using her own terminology) there. Ghosts. Games. Rituals.

  Murder.

  I just wanted some ordinariness to creep back into my life.

  As I sat in Pola's kitchen, I felt an urgency to get back home.

  I was going to take off and write a brief note to Pola, but I waited.

  Nothing's wrong there.

  This is all just messing with your head.

  You'll get Brooke to the doctor in a day or two.

  And then maybe you'll get a check-up, too.

  2

  When Pola and Zack got up, I invited them to Hawthorn just to hang out a while.

  The three of us drove through the village in the early morning just as the sun was coming up through a haze of cloud and mist. The road, finally plowed out to Hawthorn, had its requisite potholes and ice patches intact, and Zack laughed each time his mother's car hit one or the other.

  I felt a little hope in my gut, which seemed to be a new kind of feeling.

  3

  Brooke was, of course, still asleep, and I didn't bother going off in search of Bruno. I set Zack to work in the kitchen with me to make eggs and bacon for breakfast, while Pola sat on a nearby stool and watched us try to coordinate the various pans and plates.

  It was chilly in the house, and Zack decided that someone needed to make a fire in the fireplace in the living room.

  After a relaxing morning, talking old times and letting Zack tell me the history of his life as a young inventor, I went out the front door again to get some wood from the pile by the front porch.

  It was still misty out, as it sometimes was even on the coldest of days on the island. The smells of cleanness that snow and ice brought with them lifted my spirits as I went. As I trudged through the crusty snow by the porch, I lifted some of the wood—the top layer was wet, and so I dug down deeper in the pile. I thought I heard a noise—as if someone were nearby and had perhaps called my name, only indistinctly.

  When I glanced up, I saw a woman standing at the open door of the smokehouse.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  1

  I set the wood back down on the pile.

  My heart began to beat rapidly. I don't know why. There was nothing frightening about the woman. She stood in front of the door to the smokehouse, with fog all around her, and I was nearly positive it was Brooke. But I didn't call out to her or wave. My mouth went dry, and I squinted to see her better, but each time I tried to focus on her, she seemed to blur more. I felt a strange prickly heat along my back and felt feverish at the back of my scalp and along my forehead.

  Brooke just stood there, and then she went inside the building.

  My breathing was rapid, as if I'd run a mile, but in fact I had remained perfectly still for a minute or two. My heart rate felt as if it were increasing, and I suddenly thought of the one or two news stories I'd seen of men my age or even younger who suddenly dropped dead of heart attacks. It was pure fear within me, and I could not for the life of me understand why the idea of Brooke being inside the smokehouse would have such an effect on me.

  It's not Brooke, some voice within me intoned. It's her. It's the Banshee. It's the ghost that Harry Withers believes is there. It's whatever killed Dad. It's something evil. Some malevolence that exists. Some awful spirit of darkness that you conjured up.

  Yes, you. Don't deny it You three, playing your games, playing your Dark Game after dark. Using the game to conjure devils.

  Using the Dark Game to bring something into existence.

  Some force.

  I would never before have entertained such an irrational thought. I did not believe in these things. I did not believe in the spirit world, in evil entities, in conjuring ghosts.

  But the child that still lived within me, the boy who had kept his eyes closed and been with Brooke and Bruno as we played that game, as we took it to heights that our father would never have dreamed we would, that we remained long after dark, sneaking out of the house to go into the smokehouse, that awful little icy building and conjure the Banshee.

  Bring her forth.

  It has to be your imagination. It can't be real You're under stress. It's anxiety. It's normal under current conditions. Your life is all Jumblies. Your world is upside down. You have love and hate confused in your family. Your father whipped you when you were a boy. Your mother left you and never contacted any of you. You grew your imagination with your brother and sister in a game that was too powerful for young minds.

  Young minds that could create within themselves something hideously evil.

  Something dark.

  The Dark Game wasn't supposed to be played at night.

  The Dark Game wasn't supposed to go on like it did.

  And one night, it got out of hand.

  One night, the night when the Brain Fart began, it went too long. You almost died. You came to in the woods with blood on you; Brooke was found out in the field, shivering from cold; Bruno was soaked with fever-sweat. You three had done something terrible with the Dark Game.

  Or it had done something terrible with you.

  Your father knew.

  He knew that it had gotten the better of you.

  He knew that you were no match for the Dark Game.

  He knew that whatever was in the smokehouse was evil.

  He knew about the Banshee.

  2

  With all that burning in my brain, you'd think I would've not walked across the road and down the slight hill, crunching through snow, to find out who was inside the smokehouse.

  But I had to. I could no longer take the sense that something in the world was so skewed that I might just be losing my mind, even as I was beginning to feel the hope of a renewal with Pola. The hope that something wonderful could be salvaged from the waste of my life and the nastiness of my father's death.

  When I reached the smokehouse, I saw that the lock had been torn off. Ripped away.

  I glanced back at the main house. I imagined Pola and Zack pulling out the Scrabble board or flipping through the stack of m
agazines Brooke kept by the coffee table.

  From within the smokehouse:

  The smell that came at me was like the stench of a dead animal, its stomach ripped open.

  I had a flash of an image in my head:

  My father, lying on the floor.

  I entered that place regardless of fear and inner turmoil.

  The place of punishment.

  3

  Some part of me had been hoping she would have vanished, this phantom, this Brain Fart of some kind. Or even that Brooke would be standing there, in a somnambulistic trance.

  But instead, I saw her clearly.

  She stood at the center of the smokehouse as the morning light entered, and even the light touched her skin. She had a corporeal presence. It was not Brooke, nor was it some other woman of the village. I felt a terrible hunger from her—the look in her eyes, the tortured grimace of her lips pulled back across her teeth, the sense I had that she was somehow a smudge of darkness, as if I could see her aura. I felt immediately that this was the woman I had sensed when I closed my eyes at night. This was the woman I had feared when Brooke went from room to room in the house. I felt electric waves of fury emanating from her—the only way I can describe it, for it did feel like a power surge in the air.

  Then the door to the smokehouse slammed shut behind me.

  I felt a series of electrical shocks along my arms and up my spine. It was as if I had begun short-circuiting. I was barely aware of the blood that dripped from my nose, as it had when I'd been a boy and the air was too dry in winter.

  I thought that I was dying right then.

  Right there.

  Darkness descended within the smokehouse, like a candle just snuffed, with only the diffuse glow from the door's window allowing me to see one square of light.

  It fixed upon her face.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  I thought this was a vision that I'd see at the moment of death.

  My bones seemed to pain me, as if they wished to break free from my flesh.

  I could not take a breath as I watched her.

  Her face, seething. Her visage cruel.

  Her eyes staring as if she could not see me, as if I were the ghost.

  My mother.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  1

  I lost focus as soon as I saw her face.

  It was as if my tear ducts had suddenly released a gusher, and it all went blurry. My mother? I stood there, motionless, frozen, numb on the outside, in the pinpricks along my arms and legs and deep down in my groin, my balls feeling as if they wanted to curl up inside my body never to descend again. In that moment, I felt as if my body were something alien, and my mind, what intelligence I possessed, was separate and hovering, still connected by nerves and the whoosh of blood (which I seemed to hear within my ear canals), but an entirely separate entity that had acknowledged that the flesh and bones surrounding it were of some other being, and that being was scared shitless. I didn't piss my Levis, but I had one of the few nosebleeds I'd had in my lifetime.

  Did I mention the awful word: insane? Not the big version of the word, not INSANE as in irredeemable over the chasm I, but the lowercase insane, the insane that was just a wriggling little worm in my head. It could not be my mother. I could not see her clearly anymore, anyway. My vision was going bonkers, and my body seemed to be crapping out on me—and still, I felt it was her.

  Do people do this? I wondered. Do people whose loved one has been slaughtered begin to break down and see things? Like the serpent shimmer of the greenhouse glass, and my sister's visions.

  Was I succumbing to it? Temporary, mild hallucinatory visions? I felt the cold of the world. Not the winter and its snow and ice. The cold of the world—all that was ugly and fruitless and unloved and irredeemable. The shrugged. The sloughed.

  And then the blurry image of the woman whom I knew to be my mother was gone. My vision returned, albeit with a generous hosing of tears—or so it seemed to be at the time—and I saw the wall again.

  In my mind, the awful thought: She has come home. She has returned. From Brazil.

  And another, awful part of me began chattering, a looking-glass world jabbering:

  It's your mind. It's only you. You let it get to you. Let it all get inside you. You were insane as a little boy, and you're crazy now, all the Raglans are crazy, you're inbred Yankees, what killed your father was some evil people, some sadistic narcissistic killers who enjoyed the slaughter, and this vision is your mind melting down. It's your own personal China syndrome. It's your fucked-up nature finally imploding and fucking you up even more.

  Yet, I experienced a split, even as these words ran through my head. I was not insane. I know I am not. I am perfectly sane in a normal everyday sanity, the kind that might crack at some future point, but not now. Not healthy and twenty-eight and knowing that there are no radio signals coming into my head from another planet or that the government has some conspiracy going that directly involves something I know, or that the devil is trying to find out what I'm thinking. I was not insane—to even think it, I knew that I could not be. To even question my sanity, I must be sane. I must be.

  I was alone in the smokehouse with a bloody nose and a revulsion in my body, as if I had been carrying around in my vital organs, my whole life, some devouring parasite that had begun fighting against its host.

  And then something touched my hand.

  Something that sent a ripple of disgust and revulsion through me, beginning at the palm of my hand. A terrible, nearly sexual feeling, that touch, that invisible feeling of something warm and moist pressing itself into my hand, a woman clutching my fingers, squeezing them, an unseen woman who was there in that dreadful place with me. In the second it happened, I felt like a child again and opened my mouth to cry out, only my throat was too dry; I tasted the blood from my nose as it dribbled onto my tongue. It was not the metallic taste I'd expected, but a sweet, sugary spike; stop squeezing my hand, I thought, let go, you're hurting me.

  The pressure on my fingers continued, and I stared at my hand and watched the skin ripple as if some magnet were pulling at nails beneath it, and the nails moved the flesh—and the tickling continued—and I felt the pressure of fingernails along my wrist, and saw the skin press in like a sponge—and then a sharp pain came, and a small droplet of blood appeared on the surface of my skin. I thought it was from the nosebleed, but it bubbled up from my wrist, and a cut in the skin grew slightly—cutting into me.

  Stop it.

  Stop it!

  I brought my other hand down and tugged at the wrist that was held so tightly. It seemed ridiculous—I kept looking at the place where the blood and pressure were, but it was nothing; nothing.

  I pulled at my arm with all the power I could muster and tripped, falling backward.

  I realized that my head would hit the stone wall of the smokehouse, and sure enough, when I landed, I felt as if my brains had just been smashed against some enormous boulder.

  I lay on the wood-slatted floor of the smokehouse, the back of my head throbbing and banging. I looked into the darkness, and again found the square of light that came through the window, the hazy light of morning.

  And in that light, I saw a face from hell.

  Not my mother at all.

  Perhaps not even a woman.

  Stringy, matted hair hung over the blood-soaked face.

  The mouth, open, had small nubs of what must have been broken teeth.

  The eyes were empty, their sockets drawn back, as if it had not been enough to tear the eyes out, but someone had gone further and dug the holes deep, scraping back the flesh.

  I saw pinpoints of light—not from the square of the window, but from the pain in my head. I knew I was passing out, and I was somewhat relieved that whatever I was seeing would pass—or kill me.

  I heard a metallic sound, as of a knife being sharpened against stone, only it seemed to be louder and nearly like a bell.

  I blacked out.

&nbs
p; 2

  The Dark Game came to me—I dreamed it or remembered it in whatever corridors my brain still had working. I knew I dreamed, and I knew I was the grown-up Nemo, but I was somehow hovering and watching myself at the age of nine, as I stood there with a blindfold on, holding hands with my sister, a sullen eight-year-old, and Bruno, an impossibly small four and a half.