Almost Dark Read online

  At summer camp, when Claire was eleven—too old to admit to being scared but too young not to be—the camp counsellors had gathered the middle-school aged campers around the fire for ghost stories.

  “Have you heard about the girl who haunts the old factory by the river?”

  The girls all shook their heads.

  The counsellor spoke with exaggerated honesty, in a tone that older girls used to fool younger girls, one that both acknowledged the lie and denied it. The girls knew she was making up a story to scare them, maybe because she was mean and wanted to make them cry or call their parents or pull their blankets in tight around their bodies. Still, they wanted to be told the story. They wanted to be afraid.

  “Well,” the counsellor said, sitting back so her face was out of the orange light of the fire, “the dead girl was just a little older than all of you.” She pointed to Claire, to the girl seated next to her—another Quiz Bowl member who had braces and fat, white, dimpled knees—and then to the others in turn, her bangle bracelets jangling at her wrist.

  “The murderer watched as the girl made her way back and forth, back and forth, every day from home to school.” The counsellor shook her head slowly, back and forth, as if watching a slow tennis game. “He killed her on a day in late November, right before Thanksgiving break. She had stayed late at school for detention—chewing gum, nothing serious, she was a good kid. So she had to walk home on the empty street, the sky all cloudy, and she walked home in that almost dark—”

  (Claire would remember that phrase, the almost dark. The phrase was tossed off, but for Claire it had summarized everything frightening about the factory. In the almost dark she’d sometimes think, even years later, when a shape in the corner assumed the form of a person and she’d have to close her eyes tight and shake her head before she could open them again and see only clothes draped on her dresser, her coat hanging from a hook.)

  “—and that’s how he got to her,” the counsellor said, emphasizing the word got with a slap to her naked thigh, right below the hem of her khaki shorts.

  “She was walking home alone, nobody on the road, no witnesses. She lived in one of those houses near the factory, past the sidewalk, way off in the woods. She was poor, like the people that live over there now, and she had to walk everywhere. He hit her on the head with a brick and buried her body in the parking lot of the factory. I hear her body’s still there.”

  The story wasn’t true, but it seemed so. Not the facts—how could a man bury somebody in the ground in a public place without anyone knowing?—but at least the spirit. At least that’s how it seemed when Claire had returned from camp with her constellations of mosquito bites, her skin tanned, her shins bruised.

  But Claire didn’t trust her fears—Sam wasn’t afraid, and he never had been. He said that it was just the colour of the factory, the colour of smoke or a lightning storm. It made it seem foreboding, like a castle in a movie. And the river was behind it, roaring and rock-choked. It was the kind of place you could fall in and crack your head and die and be swept away before anyone even knew you were gone. The factory was surrounded by gravel and pavement—no strips of grass, no decorative hedges to soften it and give it the impression of human intention or arrangement.

  “It just looks spooky,” Sam said. As though how a thing looks is different than what a thing is.

  As they came upon the factory, as she began to hear the river’s racket and smelled the damp rock, Claire told herself that it was just how empty it was, how dark it was, how she could hear the river, which had risen after late-summer rains and was swollen almost up to the banks.

  “Come on!” Sam shouted again. He was far off—she could barely see him waving from the steps.

  “Is anybody there?”

  Sam stood on his tip-toes to see through the small window in the door. “I thought I heard some voices. Maybe Arch is here. Maybe we can finally get some weed from him.”

  Claire jogged forward to meet him.

  Oh Jeez, she thought, what if Archie was there? She wished she’d brought her watermelon lip gloss, or even just her cherry ChapStick and a pocket comb.

  “So, how do we get in?” she asked.

  On the front steps, the darkness was deeper, and the streetlight hardly reached them—it only reflected in the windows, making them appear more opaque. Claire shivered when the wind kicked up from the river. As a child, she had never swum at the river’s deepest points—it petered out farther west until it was only a shallow brook, a place to wade in the summer and let fish swim around your legs, sending a rash of goose bumps up your skin when their quick, strange bodies slid against your ankles. But children weren’t allowed to play in the river here. The water was deep in the middle, taller than an adult, and people had died in it—mostly drunks stumbling around in the darkness, but sometimes healthy adults who had come to swim, sometimes children.

  “Archie said there was an open window around here somewhere,” Sam said. He jumped down from the steps. Claire heard the crunch of little pebbles beneath his shoes. “Come on.”

  Sam walked the perimeter of the building, touching each dark window, tapping the glass. They were now at the wall adjacent to the river. Claire couldn’t see the river, but she could hear it and smell it—piles of wet rock, dry leaves, dirt, and salt.

  “Look,” Sam said. “This one’s open.” He bent over and passed his hand through the empty hole in the dark.

  “I don’t think I can fit through that,” Claire said. The window was black and showed no signs of movement or light behind it. She imagined sticking her foot in that darkness and losing it completely, having it lopped off, sealed and cauterized before she even knew what had happened. She had a quick flash to a horror movie she and Sam had watched at Halloween, after they’d handed out mini candy bars at the front door. In the film, the woman, one of those very blonde women that populate horror movies, had stuck her hand through a patch of darkness on the other side of a black wall. (Claire couldn’t remember exactly what the wall had been—an energy field? A door into another dimension?) When the woman wrenched her arm free, it was a stump haemorrhaging blood. That night, the image had been almost funny, so unlikely and baroque that both Claire and Sam had burst into laughter at the sight of the girl screaming, her arm spraying like a garden hose. Later, Claire had dreamed about that scene, and still did—only it was her arm plunging through that wall, her blood everywhere.

  Sam touched the edges lightly with his hand. “No glass,” he said. “It’s safe.”

  “But I can’t fit—I’m fatter than you.”

  Sam laughed. “I’ll go first—if I can fit through, then you can fit through. We’re the same size exactly.” He got down on his hands and knees, ready to climb through.

  “Are you sure he said a basement window?” Claire asked.

  Basements were damp and filled with god knows what. Her mother kept boxes full of jelly jars in the basement, jars so covered in dust and muck that Claire couldn’t imagine anyone would ever have the desire to scrub them clean and use them. What if this basement was filled with something like that—glass, old clothes, piles of newspapers?

  “Yeah,” Sam said. He had already put one leg through the window, then the other. He was on his stomach, sliding down the hole, half of his body already gone. He looked up at her, smiling. She imagined him cut off at the waist, the darkness swallowing him without him even knowing it.

  “I’ll see if anyone’s down here,” he said.

  Later, Claire would think that this was the crucial moment—this was where she could have stopped him. She could have shouted wait. She could have said, Let’s just go home and watch a movie. They could have watched Heathers for the fifteenth time and stolen a little bit of their parents’ booze from the liquor cabinet, that cinnamon kind that tasted like candy and made Claire’s throat burn, and they could have fallen asleep on the couch. She could have made him cha
nge his mind. He would have heard the fear in her voice and he would have given in. He might have sighed and tried to convince her, but he would have given in. He might even have been a little angry that his sister was such a chicken, but he would have given in.

  But she didn’t say anything except okay. She remembered the stories of the women who had burned to death in the basement. She imagined Sam falling down into a pile of dry bones in little Donna Reed dresses and perfect clicking pumps. But still, she said, okay.

  “I’ll be right back.” He pushed himself down the hole until she could only see his white fingers on the edge of the window. Then he let go.

  Immediately, she knew that something was wrong, though he gave only a brief, sharp shout—the breath must have been knocked out of him when he hit. The fall had been too heavy, too long, and she had heard a tearing sound of something hard breaking through something soft, like a hammer smashing the armrest of an easy chair, splitting the fabric.

  Claire went to the window, crouched on the ground. She pushed her face into the hole, but she could not see anything.

  “Sam! Are you there? Are you okay?”

  She heard something move, a groan. She could hear breathing—a liquid, laboured wheezing, a sound like Mikey Dunbar made when he had asthma attacks during gym class and had to go to the bleachers and suck on a plastic inhaler.

  “Sam!” Her voice was shrill and bounded into the basement. The air from the window was warm and smelled faintly of old paper—like the piles of Life magazines that Claire’s mother kept in the pantry until they tipped and spilled on the floor, and she made their father box them up and put them up in the attic.

  “I’m here,” Sam said. He couldn’t shout—his voice was choked, wetly wheezing.

  “What happened?” She wished that she could see him—if she could, she’d know that he would be all right. But she wanted to get away from the window, too, as far away from that black square as she could. The cooling air around her seemed electrified, filled with tiny fingers and filaments, needles that kept her skin sensitive and prickling. But Sam was down there, still breathing. She would go down that hole to where he was, if he asked her to.

  “I fell on something,” he said. His voice was small and strained, and she had to lean into the darkness to hear him.

  “I fell on something and it hurts. I can’t breathe. I need help.”

  “I’ll come down,” Claire said. “I’ll come and get you.”

  “Don’t come down!” Sam tried to shout, but the words gargled in his throat. Blood in his mouth, Claire thought. She could almost taste it in hers, too.

  “Okay,” she shouted. “What should I do?”

  “Get somebody,” he said. He could hardly speak, he was breathing so thickly.

  “I don’t want to leave you,” she said. She was crying now. She could see nothing down there, not even a glint from his watch or the white of his tennis shoes. Though it was useless, she ran the scene of him going through the window over and over again in her head. It was only minutes ago. It seemed unfair that she couldn’t just go back and fix it, couldn’t just step back and go home. For the first time, she was aware of the ridiculous forward motion of events—it had been so recent, it seemed that she should be able to go back and stop it. But things moved in only one direction.

  “Go.” He gurgled and sputtered. She breathed in deeply—she smelled something sweet and sickening, like a slice of cake left out overnight after a birthday party.

  She pushed away from the window, rocking up onto her feet. “I’m going to go now. I’m going to be back. You’re going to be okay.”

  She didn’t stay to hear his response. She didn’t want to hear his rasping wheeze again. She imagined the sample human body in her science classroom in school, the plastic model with removable parts. The model’s lungs were bright pink. You could take them in your hands and split them open at the hinge and see the chambers and routes inside. She closed her eyes, said Sam’s name aloud twice, and then she ran.

  She ran back home, down the sidewalks they’d crossed just five minutes before, down the streets of identical houses, the automatic porch lights flicking on in turn as she passed, past cars like quiet animals in the driveways, windows and doors firmly shut. She ran as fast as she had ever run before, her lungs burning, inhaling and exhaling in hitches. She thought her chest might fly open from her violent breathing. She pumped her arms and legs, telling herself I must get home. She didn’t think about the feeling at her back, the great blackness. It echoed. It bounced and repeated, screaming in her ear. It was alone.

  At first, whatever slept there didn’t know about the blood, if you could call what it did knowing. It only woke with the same thought it had fallen asleep with—I will never leave here, look what he has done to me, Jesus Christ I can’t breathe, oh God, Please don’t let it—and, of course, the anger that came with it, the red, suffocating colour and pressure.

  The energy gathered force, gathered language, as the blood flowed on the ground, filled the air with its mineral stench.

  The boy was dying. Life leaked from him, filled the room with its humming, its bouncing and turning and agony of being freed from the container that kept it. It flowed into the thing that said I will never leave. And it flowed into the anger and the cry and the cracked skulls and the fire travelling up their hair; the one who was burned alive and the one who died before she understood what she had done wrong or why; the one who was crushed and the one who was killed and never found—the little girl in her Easter dress who had gone too far to find eggs. She’d crouched down to the ground to better see something shining, and then all had gone black and her mouth said something she did not understand and she was gone and in this pool with the others, with the voices. Whatever they were now, whatever she was now, the boy’s blood had joined it, a big throbbing thing, and it had gained another, and the anger was louder.

  Claire ran through the front door, not bothering to close it behind her. She went to her parents’ room and shook their sleeping shoulders. It felt wrong to touch them while they were sleeping—her mother not wearing her usual mascara, her eyes pinkish and bare; her father in his black socks, no shoes. They were still sick, wheezing and whistling as they woke, coughing into their fists. She had planned to calmly tell them Sam fell, but she could not help herself from crying, her words slurring and coming in gulps and coughs.

  “What’s wrong?” her mother asked.

  “It’s Sam. Sam fell. We were at the slate factory, just to see what was going on, and he fell into the basement.”

  Her father got out of bed and went to the telephone to call an ambulance, and her mother pulled on a pair of jeans and a sweater over her slip. Her father said thank you and hung up. Claire watched them moving normally, putting on shoes, clicking watches on their wrists. If they could act normally, then maybe nothing was really wrong. Then they all got in the car to go back.

  The road was completely empty as they drove to the factory. Claire watched the dark windows as they passed. The people behind those windows were sleeping in their beds, nothing wrong, nothing jerking them from sleep and making them drive to a deserted part of town to look down into a basement window. She wished to be in any other house, with any other parents, to have her brother safe in the next room, and to have only the next day to worry about.

  She waited for them to panic, for them to shout at her, but they sat silently. Her father switched on the radio and something slow, a plodding piano melody, filled the car. He tapped his fingers on the steering wheel as though the music had a beat. Her mother switched it off.

  They were so calm they made her squirm in her seat. Wasn’t it time to be worried? She sat on her hands and chewed the inside of her mouth until she broke the skin and tasted salt. The blood made her think of Sam, and she swallowed.

  The ambulance had arrived before them. When they pulled up and parked in the gravel parking lot, the pa
ramedics were already wheeling Sam out. The door to the factory was open. Claire looked inside, hoping to see something, some evidence that Sam had not been alone—that she hadn’t left him by himself in the dark, bleeding—but there was nothing. The open door revealed only more darkness, pure, without even the dim trailing of a streetlight to reach it.

  Sam was dying. He would not leave the ambulance alive. She had not yet entertained the idea, but it hit her like a punch to the gut. It was a sudden realignment of her understanding, like when she learned to ride her bike and suddenly knew exactly how to balance her body. She ran to Sam as they wheeled him into the ambulance, her parents behind her. She hardly registered their footsteps. She tripped on a boulder and almost fell onto the stretcher, but one of the paramedics caught her by the sweater-sleeve.

  “Is he okay?” Claire shouted at the paramedic. She was happy to see a little spray of spit fly up into the young man’s face. The sympathy in his face infuriated her. He did not blink or wipe his cheek. She clenched her fists at her side and shouted again.

  “Is he going to be all right?”

  The paramedic was utterly unable to hide his pity. She looked past him to Sam’s ashy face poking above the white sheet. She couldn’t see him well enough to see if his eyes were opened or closed. Blood speckled his face. She looked away.

  The paramedic composed himself for her. She could see that he was not going to tell her the truth.

  “We are going to take him to the hospital, okay? We don’t know anything yet.”

  He turned and they put Sam into the ambulance. Loaded was the word that came to mind, as they rolled him up the ramp, his weight leaden as a sack of potatoes. He didn’t speak. He didn’t move.

  She rode to the hospital with her father—her mother went in the ambulance.