About the Dark
Authors: helenrena
Helen Rena
Copyright 2014 by Helen Rena
Smashwords Edition
All rights reserved in all media.
Table of Contents
Other Titles by Helen Rena: Into the Blind
About the Dark
I stood looking at the corner of the room through
Fox’s eyes, yes, because mine were useless—as blind as a bat’s. I
could, however, see what other people looked at, and right now,
that other person was Fox, only he was looking up, at the spot
where the green cement walls met the green cement ceiling, and I
needed him to look down. I pulled on his chin. After we both
studied the floor for a while, he kissed my temple, and this time,
besides seeing the corner, he saw me as well. A white-haired girl
in a long white dress. A very unhappy-looking girl.
He smiled (I felt his lips curve against my
skin). “You can do it, Ever.”
I didn’t believe him, but I nodded. Took a
deep breath. Then, squeezing my fists hard, I sprinted ahead,
toward the corner. When I was an arm-length away from it, I leaped
up and pushed off the wall with my left foot. This propelled me
higher, although by far not as high as I wished. I pushed off with
my right foot, and as I was flying up, I arched backward, trying to
do a flip and land on my feet, but the momentum was just not there.
And so I began falling, my dress flapping, my arms and legs
flailing, and my white hair zooming upward like a cloud around my
head. Fox caught me three feet above the ground.
“Brilliant!” He laughed. “You didn’t miss my
arms!”
“It’s not funny, Fox,” Demi snapped behind
us. “It’s pathetic. Ever can’t do anything!”
“Demi,” Sinna, who stood beside her, said
with a mild rebuke in his voice, “you are exaggerating about Ever.
She can—”
“She can’t. She’s weak. And puny. And
pathetic.” Demi stomped her foot with such force it shook our
entire bookstore. I mean, technically, it wasn’t a bookstore any
more—it was our prison—but it used to be. Fifteen years ago. A
small bookstore on the second floor of a sprawling suburban mall. I
bet it’d been a nice cozy shop with beautiful bookshelves and cushy
armchairs and maybe even a few small coffee tables. The green walls
peeking from behind this furniture had accentuated its rich wooden
tones and made it so inviting that people had come in here often.
They’d browsed the books; they’d drunk their coffee. Some of them
might have even been teenagers like us. I didn’t know if those
teens had drunk any coffee. We certainly hadn’t. We’d mostly been
learning how to fight and jump and whatnot, hoping to escape this
cement hole that looked like a dark green apocalypse because our
guards had taken out the shelves and the chairs and the coffee
tables. We’d also read a lot (because the guards had left the
books). And bickered. And since not too long ago Fox and I had also
kissed a little. And Sin and Demi had kissed a lot.
Demi stomped again. “We’ve been training for
years. So that when we get a chance to escape, we’d be able to take
it. But Ever is just friggin’ useless. She—”
“Ahem,” Fox said loudly, and when Demi looked
at him, he gave her a dazzling smile. “Dem, do you happen to
remember that Ever is my life, and I—”
“And you’re a melting piece of Jell-O around
her? Yes, I recall something like that.”
Fox smiled even wider. “No, actually, I was
going to say that I’m here to address all the grievances you might
have with her. So you think she’s useless? Well, that’s a shiny
thought. You can stick it—”
Sinna waved his arms at them. “Please, calm
down. There is no need for this conflict. Since Ever is visually
impaired, it is only natural that jumping is hard for her.”
I think he kept on talking, but I didn’t
listen—I stepped closer to Demi, my five feet against her 6’3. I
was shaking. “Yes, you’re right. I am puny, and I can’t do
anything. I can’t walk. I can’t talk. But hey, why is it all about
me? How about we talk about things
you
can’t do? Like for
example, for all your strength, you can’t get us out of this
hellhole. You can’t kill our guards. You can’t even win a game of
blind man’s bluff.”
“What?” Demi inhaled sharply. “That’s not
true, not about the blind man’s bluff.”
“It is,” I said. “You’ve never won against
me.”
She glared. “That’s because you’re
blind.”
“Am not. I’ve always been able to see through
your eyes. And I’ve always looked through them. And so when the
three of you put on blindfolds, I’m as blind as you and—”
“Whatever,” Demi barked. “Let’s play the
stupid game, and we won’t stop until I win.”
Fox put his arm around my shoulders and
looked straight into Demi’s eyes, for they were the same height.
“Only if Ever wants to.”
“No, it’s fine. I’ll play,” I said.
Fox hugged me tighter. “You don’t have
to.”
“No, no, really, it’s okay.” Anything was
better than jumping in a corner. I mean, sure, in theory, it was a
useful trick. If learned, it would allow me to escape when
cornered, but in reality, it was all nonsense because our guards
were professionals. They were paid a lot of money and given a lot
of guns to keep us here.
Demi was already stalking around the room,
looking for the blindfolds, three strips of white fabric that had
been ruffles on my dress. After she found them, she gave one to
Sinna not too gently, but not violently either—I guess she’d wanted
to show she’d forgiven him for sticking up for me. The other ruffle
she threw in Fox’s direction, and the third one she tied around her
own eyes.
Fox kissed my forehead. “It’ll pain me not to
see you.”
“Enough with the sop,” Demi groused.
Fox gave me a long, loud kiss on the lips.
“Ev, you do know that if you don’t want to, you don’t have to learn
that jump. Or play this game. Demi’s not the boss here.” He didn’t
add who the boss was—we all knew it was him.
“Yeah, sure,” I said.
“Can we finally start the friggin’ game?”
Demi demanded.
“Just a sec.” Fox pulled me to his chest.
Positioned me so I was facing the same direction he was, his chin
resting on top of my head. Then, like a slowly revolving periscope,
we turned around, he looking at everything in the room and me
following his gaze. It was a large, roughly rectangular space with
a kidney-shaped counter running parallel to one of the walls. There
were three doors, or rather one door and two doorways. The door, a
gigantic block of steel, led into the mall and was locked while the
doorways opened into a bathroom and a back room, both of which were
off limits in this game. The doorframes were splintery, and the
steel handle on our front door stuck rather far into the room, but
it was the books that were the main challenge. We had tons and tons
of them. We’d mostly stacked them neatly along the walls, but the
piles sometimes toppled, and the slick magazines dispersed at the
lightest touch. Besides, specifically this morning, I had built my
own rendition of the Empire State Building in the middle of the
store. I memorized the spot where it was.
When Fox and I finished our rotation, we saw
Demi and Sinna already blindfolded, standing across the counter.
Fox winked. I couldn’t see this of course, but half of his field of
vision quickly blinked out, and that’s how I knew what he’d done. I
smiled at him just as he closed his eyes to put on the blindfold,
and instantly, the lights around me went out. I stood in absolute
dark.
“Ready?” Demi pounded something on something,
most likely her fist on the counter. Without waiting for our
answer, she began to count, “One, two…” On the count of three, it
was game time, and Demi counted as quickly as she could, all in a
rush to catch me. Just as quickly I pulled off my polyester dress
because it was long and stiff and noisy. It had a zipper in the
back, but I didn’t have time to undo it—I simply yanked the gown
off. Sure, this left me in just my underwear, but since everyone
was blindfolded, what did it matter anyway?
“Three!” Demi yelled, and I heard a dry
knock, which was probably her body bumping against the wooden
counter as she dived across it, trying to grab me. I felt the air
swishing around me from her violent movement. I ducked. Then, with
my legs still bent at the knees, I tiptoed away from the counter
and kept on going until I bumped into the wall because the single
most important thing in this game was to not get lost in the
room.
Sure, we’d spent here all our lives. We knew
every scratch on the floor, every bump on the walls. We knew the
number of steps between the counter and the closest wall (ten of
mine and seven of Fox’s), and yet every time I went blind, I felt
disoriented. Every. Single. Time. It was like the darkness around
me kept on churning and shifting, and the ten steps to the wall
turned into fifteen or twenty or infinity when I couldn’t find the
damn thing at all.
As for the others, they must have felt just
as lost, maybe even more. Over the years, I had of course caught on
their strategies of playing the blind man’s bluff. Fox, for
example, would usually stay by the counter, our mandatory starting
point, and try to calculate where I was, judging by who knew what.
The sounds I made? My previous behaviors? Demi, on the contrary,
would demand I say something often, then stomp as fast she dared in
the direction of my voice. And Sin…well, Sin unfortunately liked to
improvise and experiment. And yet, even with all these schemes in
the air, they’d seldom captured me.
“Ever!” Demi barked. “Are you going to say
something or what?”
“I’m right here,” I said and hugged the wall.
“Wherever here is.”
At once there was a thud, which must have
been Demi hopping onto the counter. In her haste to reach me, she’d
clearly decided not to bother with walking around it. I listened
for the sound of her jumping down, but all was quiet. Why was Demi
just sitting there? That’s when I heard a very familiar polyester
rustling.
“Sin,” she called out in the next moment,
“don’t take off your blindfolds until I say so.”
“What?” he asked.
But Fox got it. “Oh, that’s why I never hear
your dress, Ev. I hope you won’t get cold. And hey, while we’re on
the topic: Sinna, be kind and don’t grope my girlfriend if you
catch her.”
Demi jumped down, and I heard her stampeding
toward me. I hastened to bring the picture of the wall I was
hugging before my mental eye. Yes, there were three stacks of books
along it, the biggest one being my bed. I leaned forward. Then,
keeping my left hand on the wall and my right one in front of me to
feel for the books, I traipsed ahead.
Crash
. It sounded as if two bodies
collided, and I paused, worried that it was Fox who’d gotten hurt.
Or Sinna.
“What the hell?” groaned Fox’s voice from
somewhere close to the floor. “Okay, Dem, you can’t dash about like
this. You’ll kill us all.”
“Sorry,” Demi muttered, her tone strained
because she must have knocked the wind out of herself too.
I resumed my walk.
What troubled me the most was that I had no
idea where Sin was. Had he walked away from the counter? When he’d
talked to Demi the last time, his voice had sounded like he’d still
been there, but where was he now? What if he’d managed to find my
wall?
Fox began humming some wild tune; up and down
it went, and the downs sometimes ended with muted grunts because he
seemed to still be in pain.
Demi let out a hissing sigh. “Fox, could you
friggin’ please shut up? I’m trying to hear Ever.”
“Yeah, right,” Fox said. “So you could smash
into my groin again. I don’t think so.” He went on with his
humming, and Demi must have decided to change the way she hunted
me: she started sniffing, trying to pick up my scent. Which was
beyond ridiculous—this room had been full of books for a very, very
long time—it reeked of books.
Fox stopped humming. “You do know, Dem, that
this place is basically airtight, right? And we won’t get any fresh
oxygen, not until our guards come tomorrow.”
Demi scoffed, then barked, “Ever?”
“I’m here,” I said, and with that I walked
into Sinna’s shoulder.
Demi heard this. “Do you have her, Sin?”
I leaped away from Sinna just as he moved to
catch me—I felt his fingertips brushing against my skin. After I
took another step back, I halted because I couldn’t afford to lose
the wall. Nor could I have Sinna knowing where the wall was—this
was my winning strategy—which meant I had to lure him away from it.
And so I crouched and groped the air in front of me, and soon my
hand bumped against Sinna’s knee. He leaned forward, and I noisily
backed away. I hoped he’d follow me.