The Hour Before Dark Read online

  I dropped onto my bed, and only then realized that I had left my boxer shorts in the apartment above Croder-Sharp-Callahan.

  That night, I awoke to Brooke walking through my room at some ungodly hour. Unfortunately, I had that now-expected impression that it wasn’t Brooke. I sat up and flicked on the light.

  No one was there at all.

  Both doors to my bedroom were shut.

  9

  The next morning, I discovered that Carson’s fertility rite had indeed brought a storm.

  We were buried under snow, not the most unusual occurrence for the island in December. By the time I’d trudged downstairs to the kitchen to the smell of a rich dark roast of coffee, Bruno and his boyfriend had already dug out most of the driveway. Not that it mattered: The village plow, also known as Johnny Sullivan, had yet to reach Hawthorn. There’d be no driving that day.

  Cary and Bruno started a snowball fight out front. As I watched them from the kitchen window, it reminded me of us all as kids. How we played all over the fields, how the winters were rich with ice skating on the pond or snow forts along the hill.

  Afterward, the smell of coffee and a kind of rosy glow seemed to permeate the house. I think it was just the way I felt—I had this hope again, this sense that I’d come home for a reason that was good. Not just because of my father’s murder, but because I still had to find out if there was love for me in the world—the only woman I had ever really loved. Bruno noticed and commented that I looked a bit more chipper than usual; he asked where I’d left Dad’s tool kit, and then added, “You look the way I feel.”

  A bit later, I called up Pola. “You hanging in there?”

  “Yep,” she said. “Me and Zack are making hot cocoa. Want to come over?”

  “If I can walk a mile or two in the snow.”

  “Johnny’ll be out soon.”

  “Well, then I definitely want some cocoa. With marshmallows.”

  “We have a fire going. Zack and I are gonna go to Seabird Hill and sled down it in a bit.”

  “You sure we’re okay?”

  “Nemo?”

  “I mean, last night was ...”

  “I know,” she said softly. “I wish we could’ve stayed together all night.”

  “Me, too.”

  “Why didn’t we?”

  “Don’t want to spring it on Zack too quickly,” I said. “How do you think he’ll feel about... about this?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “Well, he’s begging to go out and play. Come by when you get out from under it.”

  She hung up.

  Part of me felt the phantom of girlfriends past in the hang up. I felt the Jumblies in my stomach. Would this work out? Were we just trying to recapture a past that couldn’t last? It was still all euphoria for me. All the goofy and no-good thoughts that run through you when you realize that love looms. I thought of every woman I had ever felt close with, how I had wanted to see if love was there within each relationship. But it hadn’t been. Only Pola. It was crazy. Things like high school sweethearts weren’t supposed to work out.

  I spent the day either on the phone with Pola (the road didn’t get plowed until nine o’clock that night), or going over my dad’s papers. I found a notebook of his, and recognized his tiny scrawl that was so hard to read.

  My dad had kept track of everything that happened in his life, particularly in terms of the house. Here’s one bit of it:

  Stairway, back of house. Need repair on bannister. Call lumberyard. Call Bill. Make appointment with vet for Mab.

  Bruno’s baseball practice. 9 AM Sat Take cooler. Brooke at 11, swim team.

  Cheerios, milk, sugar, eggs, wheat bread, chicken breasts, case of Coke, case of Diet Coke, case of root beer. No Oreos for Bruno.

  It made me laugh to flip through the spiral notebooks he kept, the closest thing to a diary he’d ever had. It reminded me more of him, of his way of organizing his life, than if he’d kept a more detailed record of his every whim and mood. I laughed, and then wept a little thinking about life’s unfairness, that I’d never made things right with my father, that some insane person had murdered him and now there was nothing I could do to reach my father and tell him all the things you want to tell the dead.

  As I sat there, I began to wonder about the past month’s records. I flipped through the notebooks, but for the one marked that year, there were no strange entries at all.

  I guess I wanted to believe that my father had noticed something. Had seen anything.

  But again, my head ached, my stomach tightened, and I thought of him, lying in his own blood, sliced, someone standing over him with a curved blade in her hand.

  Her.

  I thought it: Her.

  Why her? I closed my eyes. The sense of a woman.

  Not Brooke.

  Another woman.

  As if the house itself had a woman hidden in it somewhere.

  Hiding.

  That night, it must’ve been about three or four A.M., I awoke, sensing a presence in the room.

  My heart began beating too fast, and I could taste something sour and dry in my throat. I wanted to get up, get some water, or at least flick on a light. But a half-sleepy fear kept me on the bed, trying not to move. What was it? I glanced to the bookshelf and the small desk by the window.

  Then I saw her.

  For a moment, I had a terrible feeling I didn’t know who it was. I felt my heart beating within my chest, and a strange shushing sound that was like a pulse within me. I held my breath as if afraid that she would know I was awake and saw her.

  For that slice of a moment, a terrible dread overtook me.

  I had the sure feeling—the absolute conviction—that if there were such things as ghosts, this was one of them.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  1

  She stood near the white curtain of the window, the moon shining in her hair. I could not tell if she was looking out the window or looking from the window to me, for she was nearly all shadow.

  It’s Brooke, I thought. My heart still jackhammering. I felt clammy and cold, and didn’t want to think this could be anything irrational. It has to be Brooke.

  I was about to say something, but I didn’t want to startle her. Brooke went from room to room at night, after all. Perhaps she had just stopped for a minute to look out across the woods, and think of our father.

  The sensation of dread returned.

  Somehow, I felt that this was not Brooke at all. This was someone else. I only thought it was Brooke because it was a woman in the house, and Brooke was the only candidate. I began to believe (as you only can in those terrible early morning hours when the dark has not yet vanished) that this truly was a ghost. I felt like a child again, with a belief in anything that came my way.

  It took courage for me to reach over and flick on the bedside lamp.

  When I did, and the light flashed up in the room, it saw Brooke. That nighttime imagination always did its worst with me.

  She stood there, facing the window, her back to me, the reflection of her face in the mirror.

  She wore one of her stretched-out sweaters and gray sweatpants, her hair long and stringy as if she hadn’t washed it for a few days.

  “Brooke?”

  She didn’t respond.

  “You okay?”

  “I don’t know what he wanted from me, not ever,” she said, slowly, and in such a way that it gave me a chill. I realized a few seconds later that what scared me about her was that her voice didn’t seem right. It seemed almost like Brooke’s voice, but different.

  “You probably should go to bed now,” I said.

  “He never loved me. Not the way he should have. Why couldn’t he let me go? Why can’t I leave? I don’t understand any of this,” she said. “That son of a bitch.”

  “Don’t think about it now,” I said.

  “It’s terrible what this island can do to you,” she said, and she turned to look at me, but her eyes were nearly closed. For the barest second,
she didn’t look like herself at all. Was she sleepwalking? Her voice was calm and even, but something in her tone kept me on edge. “Not just him, but everyone. If you’re an outsider, you’re always one. Others knew, I think. They guessed. But no one stood up to him. Nobody protected me. Nobody wanted to know what was really happening. Not any of you. This place is a prison.”

  Then she went out through the doorway to the west, through the bathroom that adjoined my room with my father’s old room. She closed the door behind her as she went on, presumably to the next room.

  I left the lights on and could not sleep the rest of the night. I grabbed a book off the shelf called The House on the Strand, one of my favorites from my teen years, and sank back into a world of time travel and intrigue.

  2

  Nightmares grew within my head when I finally fell asleep at night, or in the early morning. Sometimes I got up in the middle of the night, just to avoid the bad dream. I’d go out and get a few logs from the pile just outside the front porch and make a fire in the living room and try to read, or flip TV channels in search of something to take my mind off the idea of sleep.

  But I’d fall asleep eventually.

  In my nightmares, I saw her. She wore blood as a gown. She had hair like a raven and skin as pale as snow.

  It was the Snow Queen. The Banshee. The Queen of Hell.

  And I’d created her when I was a kid.

  3

  Soon enough, the regional news shows stopped running anything about the story of the murder, nor was it showing up in the papers, outside of the Burnley Gazette. Other tragedies and terrors took over the news in the world. Other families suffered and found reporters at their door; other good men and women were cut down by vicious killers; and my world sank back into a low throbbing pain at the bade of my head.

  I was beginning to feel trapped, but I had nowhere else to go. Oddly enough, I never asked Brooke about the details of our father’s death, nor did I read the papers or watch the news. And none of us answered the phone.

  “Writing any more books?” Brooke asked one evening. “I read Igdarizilia."

  “Igdrasil.”

  “Oh. Dad used to call it ‘Godzilla.’ I liked it. You needed more sex in it and maybe some more battles. That whole elf subplot bogged it down, and the names? You picked all the wrong Celtic names. Too hard to pronounce. You know it’s rough when you need a glossary just to pronounce the names. Maybe you should write about real things this time,” she said. Then she added, “I didn’t like how you just threw all the dirty laundry in there.”

  “Huh?”

  “Well, I don’t doubt that the little nymph was me. You could’ve at least made her a little less slutty.” She laughed, but with a bit of an edge. “Dad was in there. And Bruno. I’m surprised you didn’t include the greyhounds.”

  I ignored her comments. It seemed to be a universal truth that the family of the writer never really wanted to appreciate the writing. “Dad didn’t read it, did he?”

  “Don’t feel bad, he never read novels. I told him what was in it. He was proud. He said he didn’t like the father character too much, but I told him it had nothing to do with him. You might not have wanted to make the father the ogre who tortures elves and abducts the Queen of Hell.”

  “It’s fiction, Brooke. Fantasy. There’s no reality about it."

  "People want to read about real things, even in fantasy,” she said. She thought a moment and her eyes became slits, as if she’d just been seized with some vague moment of genius. “You really should think about writing for children. The stuff you wrote when we were kids was good. I can still remember some of it.” She meant everything she said to be kind and generous. I wasn’t ever going to take offense at anything Brooke said, or anything Bruno might say. I didn’t want to lose this bond we were creating in the wake of tragedy over something petty like my silly book.

  I decided I needed to write again.

  4

  In my old room, I found some of my early stories, when I had just begun to learn to write.

  I had dreamed of being a writer since I was nine years old. My father had gotten me a typewriter back in the days when it was the most advanced writing tool beyond a pen and paper. It was a secondhand beast from Croder-Sharp-Callahan general store, one that had sat on the shelf for nearly my entire life at that point. It was a thick, clunky Royal whose existence had begun sometime before even my father was born. But it served its purpose, and I learned to hunt and peck, for I’d had a bad year that year—it was the year my mother had left us, and this seemed to hit me hardest. My father asked me to write stories if it would help me, and I began writing them.

  They were, at first, one-pagers, but soon I became adept at just writing and writing with no end in sight. I suspect I was obsessed with whatever story had gotten into my head. I wrote fantasies and stories of terror and happy stories of children who had wonderful mothers who hugged them and told them how important they were, in some respects, my ambition was never to be published, but to bring onto the page the nearly perfect, if dictatorial world of my imagination: the three-headed monsters, the perfect mother, and magical island, the boy who could fly—all the ways I wanted the world to be. In my mind, as a kid, I imagined all kinds of fantastic ways of living—of brushing the tops of trees with my feet as I flew, not like Peter Pan, but like a starling. Or animals that would speak to me in the stories. Or the kids I wanted to have like me, who did indeed enjoy my company. There were faraway lands based far too much on Tolkien’s Middle Earth, and creatures out of Edith Hamilton’s books on mythology, which I began reading at eleven. Once I discovered Herman Hesse’s Demian, I was done for; moving on to other covert reading (for none of these books were pressed upon me in school), I went to George Orwell and H.G. Wells and Mary Shelley—and I was writing stories that mirrored my reading the whole way through.

  Writing stories—purely for myself, for I never showed these to anyone—was to not express myself, but to purge some of my imagination, get it out of my head, where it swirled and blocked me from living as a child. Brought it out into another dimension. There were times when I felt there were a thousand doors in my head, and I needed to open all of them to find the one important door. The one important key that would open it And whatever was behind that door would somehow illuminate what I didn’t understand about my life, in the meantime, I had to open those thousand doors and see what wonderful and dreadful beasts existed there, waiting for me.

  I found the one story that probably meant the most to me from childhood. It was a complete rip-off of Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Snow Queen,” mixed with the Greek myth of Persephone, in the Andersen story, the Snow Queen’s magic mirror is broken, and a shard of glass gets in Kay’s heart. He is Gerda’s brother, and he becomes a very bad boy from this. The myth of Persephone is the story of the daughter of Demeter’s abduction into the Underworld by the king of that realm. I even noticed shades of Narnia aid Alice in Wonderland in there.

  The story was called “The Ice Queen’s Revenge.” I suspect I called it this not because of the obvious derivation from Andersen’s “Snow Queen,” but because it was a little joke with Bruno.

  At four, when he wanted ice cream, it sounded like “ice queen,” so I just made up the stories. At first, when I read some of them to him, he got scared, and stopped asking for “ice queen” at all.

  5

  Here is a bit of it, with typos and misspellings intact. I was ten at the time: CHAPTER FIVE: THE ICE QUEEN RISES!

  I SHALL COME FOR THE CHILDREN! the Ice Queen, the Queen of FROZEN CREAMY HELL, said, and she wrapped herself in the furs of bears and lions, and she had her Oomos, those filthy goblins of the Underland whose breath is so foul that people think its farts from a dead cow and whose hands are so grimey that they spread disease wherever they go, carry her to her Slay, made entirely of diamonds cut from the fingers of new brides. The Slay glowed and shined like millions of stars, and the Ice Queen, called by some Imyrmia, sat in it wit
h her trusty demon servant, Chamelea, the lizard-faced and hog-bellied. The Slay was pulled by twin dragons, tortured in the Castle Fragonard that lies above the Lake of Glass and Fire at the very heart of Underland. The dragons were once kind-hearted beasts, but Imyrmia, in anger over their father’s not wanting them to be slaves of her Relm, took them to her basement and turned them into zombie dragons doing only her bidding . She used bobbed wire to beat them onward as they flew up up up from the deep diamond and ruby caves of Under land.

  When the Slay came all the way up into Earth, lightning tore at the ground, opening it up for Imyrmia’s Slay. Blasts of fire and BELCHES OF FOOL STENCH! blew up like a fart from an oger’s butt. Even the twin dragons hated the smell and coughed fire as they rose into a blackened sky, their tails twisting and smashing trees down as they went and setting entire forests ablaze with their coughs.

  All the land knew of the Ice Queen’s arrival, for they had known her many years before. Once upon a time, she was the Maiden of Snow, and she brought the dancing elves and fairys of winter across the land. She had made everyone have fun, and children through the entire world could skate and ski and have snowball fights and make snow angels and snow people and never go to school when the Maiden of Snow was there. But then, she got picked up by the FEARFUL AND MIGHTY ruler of Underland, a monster so dirty his skin was crawling with germs. His hair was home to thousands of cities of lice. His skin seemed alive with red mites. When he walked, his feet never touched ground, for rats and centipedes lifted the souls of his feet up on their backs and did the walking for him like roller skates. He is known as Dogrun the Merciless. He wanted the Maiden of Snow in his kingdom because it was too hot and he needed better weather. Underland was on fire most of the time. People there breathed the foulest stenches and drank polluted water from the Twin Lakes of Rhea (which were called Dya and Gonna, sisters enchanted and turned into lakes of brown lava full of wastes and chemical spills and oil spills.) Dogrun the Merciless needed a bride. So he grabbed the Maiden of Snow, Imyrmia, and she screamed, but she had to go into Underland with him. He forced her to marry him, and the heat of Under land melted her heart for him. But she herself made Dogrun’s heart turn cold, and he could not be married to her anymore. She had turned Evil, and she ended up imprisoning him on the Dark Isle of Lost Devils, a place where those demons went who no longer had Evil Believers in the world above them. Dogrun was chained and kept inside a prison that had a high fence, painted all over with magical cymbals that clanged and smashed at him when he tried to escape. He lived out the rest of his eternal life there, eating the rats beneath his feet, the red mites on his body, and the lice in his hair.