The Dark Country (21 page)

She stayed her hand in the air, near his head. Her voice was almost kind; her touch would have been almost cruel.

Outside, the tide was shifting. A single wave, the first of many, rolled and boomed against the retaining wall beneath the house. The bed throbbed once under her, and a pane of dirty glass in the one tiny window shook and ratded.

His head jerked up.

"No!"

"Shh," she said, "she'll hear you."

But of course it didn't matter. The grandmother wouldn't mind. She didn't mind anything Joel did, but only coddled him more. She waited on him, even in the middle of the night sometimes, with soothing cups of soup and those gray-and-red pills that were supposed to be hidden in the back of the top shelf of the medicine cabinet. And if Grandfather heard or

cared, he wouldn't do anything about it, either. He left the boy alone, no matter what, to dream his dreams and become what he would. Of course it was silly to think that Grandfather would be—what? afraid of him? Of course it was. He was only a boy. He was only her brother Joel.

She followed his gaze to the window. The water was rolling in long, slow curls, tipped at the ebb with a pearly-white phosphorescence. But Joel wasn't seeing that.

For the first time she noticed the window sill.

It was scored with dozens, hundreds of vertical cuts and scratches; the marks shifted and deepened as she watched, as Joel's shadow undulated over the scarred wood. Then she glanced back and saw the burning aureole of the high-intensity lamp behind him, across the room, the one the last tutor, who had stayed the longest, had left on his final visit.

Without warning, Joel lurched up. He stood a moment, turned around, around again, in the manner of an animal who has awakened to find himself trapped in a room with the door shut and the air being sucked from his lungs. Whatever he was looking for he did not see, or even, probably, know how to name it, because just then he did a strange thing, really: he shrank down until he was sitting on the floor, right where he had been standing, without having moved his feet at all. She had seen something like that only once before. It had been the day the grandmother came home from what Darcy knew had been the funeral for the father and mother; it was as if she now had permission to remember. The grandmother had come in cradling two armloads of groceries. She had stood in the middle of the kitchen, scanning the walls like that, not seeing any of it, least of all the little girl there in the doorway, because Darcy was not what she was looking for, any more than the walls or ceiling or the table and chairs. And she had moved from side to side, turning from the waist, and then the expression had come over her face and she had sunk down onto the linoleum, the bags split and the contents rolling, forgotten, a collapsed doll with its strings cut. She had probably not even known that Darcy was there.

"Use the key," he said to her, "now."

"Why?"

"Do it, Darcy."

She stepped around him carefully and backed to the door.

She saw the way the light played over the sculpture above the bed. The way its eyes shone, forever straining but unable to see the most important thing of all. The way the shadow had grown behind the hood, so that it had come to be larger, darker, more like the monster from a bedtime story than she had ever noticed. She found herself staring into the eyes until she seemed to recognize something; yes, she herself remembered the way it felt, the need to lash out and hurt. What would have happened to her those times if she had not had Grandfather there to help? And there was something else, too, about a snake she had seen in a book, one that had gotten so mad or afraid that it had actually tried to swallow its own tail. . . .

The eyes held her longer than she liked. The sharp eyes that missed nothing, not the other creatures that had come close enough to threaten, not the head that had nurtured it but which was now too old and empty to protect it, not anything but itself, what it had become, the very thing it feared most, the creature of its dreams, the most difficult thing of all to know when the dreams it is given are all nightmares.

She was standing between the door and the lamp. The shadow of Joel's head and body moved and distorted. She drew back involuntarily and, behind her back, her hand brushed the cold doorknob.

She shuddered.

She imagined the fog creeping down the steps from outside, hissing over the floor and pooling by the edges. She pushed the door shut and moved away.

As she moved, her own shadow merged with the other, rendering it somehow less frightening. But the eyes on the headboard shimmered and burned out of the blackness, and she wanted to say,
Does it see, Joel?

He gestured at her imploringly.

She wished she could say /
got to go now,
the way Maria would have said it, and simply run away as fast as she could. But there was the dark outside, and the fog that followed her down the stairs, waiting to slither under doors and between cracks. There was the grandmother, she knew, waiting at the top of the stairs with her words, her stories that would not soothe but only bring more nightmares. She wondered whether the grandmother knew that; probably not, she realized, and that was the most frightening thought of all.

She went to him.

"What do you want me to do, Joel?"

Suddenly she felt her wrist taken in a death grip.

"No, Joel, not me!" she cried, wrenching free. She lunged for the door. "I'm doing it, see, I'm ..."

She reached up to lock the door, thinking.
Why did he give me both keys?
But it was a good idea to lock it now, yes, she would—

She stared at the door.

Where was the lock? The mechanism was on the outside, as were the hinges. So the keys could not be used to keep anything out.

They could only be used to lock something in.

Very slowly she came back to him, his unblinking eyes following her.

"What do you see, Joel?" she said softly.

There was the room. The window. The luminous waves, aglow now with the pale, dancing green of St. Elmo's fire rippling below the surface. The sky ablaze with a diffused sheen of moonlight above the fog. The glass chill and brittle now, and if she placed her fingers on it they would leave behind five circles imprinted in mist, the record of a touch that would remain to return each time someone sat close and breathed at the night.

Then she was listening to the slapping of the surf, the trembling in the close room, the sound of a sob and the high, thin weeping of the wind that might have been the keening of an animal left too long alone.

"Do you hear that, Joel? Is that Copper?"

And she saw the room and that it was only her brother's, and she heard the crying and knew that it came from her own lips, and she reached out her hand to him and felt his moist hair, the bristles at the back of the neck, the fuzz at his temple and the quivering in his cheek and the wetness running to and from his tender mouth and the shaking of his body.

Closing her eyes, she said, "How do you feel?"

He would have told her to go away, just to go away and lock the door and not open it until the morning. But she placed herself between him and the window and said:

"I'm going to stay, Joel. I want to. I'll watch and listen from here and if anyone—if Copper—needs me, I'll know it. Do you understand?"

"No," he said pitifully, after some time had passed.

She kept her eyes shut tight against the fog and the world as she said, "It's all right. I'm only waiting, Joel, for you to go to sleep."

Because, she thought, somebody has to.

And that was the way their first real night together began.

1 Something Strange in Santa Mara

It was a time of leisure and deadly boredom, of investigation and inconclusion, of heat waves and chills under an effluvial sky; of cancer research and chemical juggernauts, of Tac Squads and the Basic Car Plan, of God freaks and camper cities; of no longer suppressed unrest. Assassination, mass murder, ascension to office; the bomb in the backyard and the cop in the woodpile.

Still, had Martin been able to love anyone, he would have loved his father.

"Santa Mara's not what it used to be," Martin's father was saying.

The older man rubbed his hands and glanced around the garage, almost as though expecting to see himself walk in at any moment. Boxes of many sizes were barricaded on the cement floor, some with their flaps tied upright with twine in the style of old-time grocery carry-outs. Poking out of the boxes was an uncatalogable array of picture tubes (dusty), plastic knobs, tuners, dials, tube testers, transformers, radios, cabinet legs, schematics, speaker cones (broken), screws, capacitors, battery chargers, resistors, screwdrivers, manuals, transistors, wire strippers, solder rolls (sagging), sockets, re-

lays, short wave sets, circuit breakers, wrenches, epoxy, white box tape, panels, power cords (frayed), pliers, coils, flywheels, oscilloscopes, wire cutters, washers, templates, heat sinks, mica sheets (cracked), motors, switches, circuit boards, nuts, magnets, friction tape, fuses, vacuum tubes—a detritus of years accumulated privately, away from the light of day.

From the single screened window filtered a hissing sound, as the mother watered her rosebushes one last time.

"So," began Martin uneasily. "How's the new house coming?"

"Oh, your mother—Henny, I mean—was out there yesterday for the pouring of the concrete. You have to watch things with a mobile home. The dirt's got to be packed right. Otherwise the first rain'll sink it all in and burst the pipes. I should have gone out. But this damned numbness has been getting to me." He massaged his left arm absently. "See, you have to make sure she's leveled right from the start, before you let them put the skirting around. There are so many things. Let me tell you.'' He sighed. It sounded like all the breaths he had ever drawn going out at once.

Martin gave up trying to count the boxes. "What's going to happen to all this?"

"Oh, she's got it figured. The park association's promised us a tool shed on the back. I'll have to use that for my workshop, I guess. Meanwhile, there's the storage locker. I put a check in the mail today. Two months in advance."

Martin looked at his fingernails. Somewhere down the block, puppies were yelping.

"Hallendorf's," said his father. "They never let up, ever since."

He cleared his throat. "How is old Pete, anyway?"

His father glanced up with tired eyes.

"He never made it home, Jack. In there the same time I was, you know. Different floor."

"I didn't know, Dad. I'm sorry."

Martin felt his father's eyes on him.

"Jackie?
Do you know the way to Santa Mara?"

He tried to read his father's meaning, studying his face like a problem book from which the answer page has been torn out. "I guess I do, Dad," he said finally. He tried to laugh. "I made it here, didn't I?"

His father was smiling strangely. "Good." He leaned forward conspiratorially. "That was why they didn't let him out, you know." He nodded once, as if he had made a point.

"Is that right?"

"I'll tell you, though. There's something that / know." Martin waited.

"I know that Santa Mara's not what it used to be. It never was."

2 Wiggle Alley

Going through Wiggle Alley opens gates 

Hitting bumper when lit activates flipouts 

Going into moving hole starts rollovers 

Spelling out name of game closes flippers 

EXTRA points on last shot scores SPECIAL

One, Two, or More Players 

It's Fun to Compete!

Martin hated bowling alleys.

He left the pinball machine, turned over three (or was it four?) drinks in the lounge and then slipped out through the glass door, closing off the ringing of the machine and the cries of children, the clicking of disposable cocktail tumblers, the clapping of the Thursday Nite League down on the lanes and the clattering work of the automatic pinspotters—a dull and numbing sound, something between the thud of vinyl and the knock of real wood.

He got into his car and drove back across town, passing the old Seventh Day Adventist campground on the way; he saw that sometime since his last visit to Santa Mara it had been cleared and a Zody's Discount Department Store put up in its place.

He passed the park, slowing by the picnic tables. Beyond the firepits the old natatorium still stood; he noticed that most of the high windows had been broken out by vandals, so that the building now appeared somehow foreboding, the jagged remnants of panes reflecting the night breeze's strafing of the cold waters inside.

He passed the war memorial cannon, and almost stopped there. Had he, as a child, ever carved his initials into the gray paint? He couldn't remember. As he drew alongside, he saw that it had been decorated with a dark, intricate pattern. Then he recognized the matrix as a web of spray-can gang writing. It covered everything. He could not make out any of the hieroglyphs.

He drove on.

He passed many vaguely familiar tree-shrouded streets, but did not turn into any of them.