The Dark Country (20 page)

"Because you're the one who scared me of those stories." Her brown eyes were unreadable. "You can't tell me about the Nighthawk, Darcy," she said. "Not anymore, not ever again."

Darcy was stunned. "But I didn't make it happen," she said, her own eyes beginning to sting. "I don't even know

what happened to Pebbles. Maybe he—well—" But she was confused, unable to think. She remembered the story from the mouth moving above her in the darkness as she huddled close to her big brother, a long, long time ago, it must have been. "Th-there isn't any real Nighthawk, don't you get it? Come on, I thought you were big! You know it, don't you? Don't you?"

"Don't vow?" said Maria mockingly. "I don't want to have those dreams, like last night. Darcy, I don't want to!"

Darcy's mouth was open and stayed open as she heard a new sound, and it was not the blood pulsing in her ears and it was not the waves smashing out by the sea wall and it was not her own heartbeat. She looked over and saw Maria hunch down quickly, struggle to cover her eyes, then jerk herself up— almost wildly, Darcy thought later—as the sound became loud, louder. Darcy moved her lips, trying to be heard, trying to say that it was only one of those big Army helicopters somewhere above the fog, cruising low over the coastline— they were so much louder than the Sheriffs 'copter, their huge blades beating the air like some kind of monster—but Maria was already running. Just like that. In a few seconds she had disappeared completely in the fog.

Grandfather was sorting his tools when Darcy came up. She moved slowly, as though underwater, absently poking at a pile of ten-penny nails, at the chisel, at the claw of the hammer. She had been trying to think of where to begin, but it was no use.

"Well, how goes it today, sweetheart?" he said, when she made no move to go inside.

She knew he would wait to hear her story for today, whatever it might be, before getting around to the next part: the something that might be wrapped clean and special in a handkerchief in his jacket or lying inside on the kitchen table or, if it were another article about horses he had clipped from a magazine, folded and waiting in his shirt pocket. Then and only then would he get on to the serious part. She looked up at him and knew that she loved him.

"Oh—" She wanted to tell. Maybe if she started with a teacher story or a recess story; but she couldn't feel it. "Oh, same old stuff, I guess," she said.

He glanced at her, pausing perhaps a beat too long, and said,

"The pictures came, the ones we sent away for in the Sunday
Times.
Those prints of the white stallions." He fixed her with his good eye. "Remember?"

She felt a smile beginning in spite of herself. She reached over to help him.

"And I believe your grandmother would like a word with you, Darcy, before you go downstairs."

"I know," she said quickly.

He latched his toolbox, wiped his hands on a rag.

Reluctantly she started inside.

"See you at dinner," he said. "Afterwards, we can measure them for frames and figure where they should go. All right?" She turned back. "Grandpa?" "Yes?" He waited.

"What—what does it mean when somebody says you're 'evil'?" He laughed easily.

"Well, Darcy," he said, "I'd have to say it just means that somebody doesn't really know you."

She felt her way downstairs.
Now do as you're told.
She made sure to land each foot squarely in the middle of each step.
I'm sure her father knows what's best, leaving it open to the air like that.
That way no part of her would touch the edge.
Remember—but of course you couldn't
—She was aware of a pressure at her heels.
Now why would you ask a thing like that, child? Why can't you leave well enough
—She knew what she would see were she to look back.
You'd better watch yourself, young lady. You're not too old to forget the
—She would see—
/ didn't mean anything.
I didn't mean anything!
Your Mama and Daddy, rest their souls
—She would see the fog.
Say it.
Curling close.
Say it.
About her ankles.
Say it.
Say it—

"Help me."

She started.

Joel stood there in the semidarkness, one hand extended. The other hand was on the knob to the door next to hers, the door to his room. When her eyes adjusted, she saw that he held something out to her in his stubby fingers.

Without thinking, she took it. A pair of ringed keys, new and shiny. She studied them uncertainly.

Joel picked at a splinter along the doorjamb. As she watched, Darcy made out the bright brass gleam of a new lock.

"It's a dead-bolt," he said, as if that would explain everything. "Can't be forced, not unless you break the frame. The hinges are on the right side, too."

"But—"

"I want you to keep the keys in a safe place. Really safe. Got it?" When she nodded, he added with deceptive casu-alness, "You want to come in? You hardly ever do anymore, you know."

He opened the door and led her inside, looking like someone who had something terribly valuable to give away but could hardly remember where he had hidden it.

She hadn't seen the inside of her brother's room in weeks, maybe months. Since before she had met Maria. Usually they talked (more correctly, she listened while he talked) in her room, anyway, though, or else she managed to avoid him altogether to lie on her bed, playing her records or writing in her diary or thinking about the horses, the ones in the movie Grandfather had taken her to see, the wild ones leaping through water and fire on a seashore somewhere. It was very much like a dream.

While her own room seemed to be in a perpetual state of redecoration, Joel's remained the same jail-like no-color; where she had posters and cutouts to cover her walls, Joel had science and evolution charts and black felt-tip drawings she couldn't understand, marked up and shaded so dark that she couldn't see how he was able to make any sense of them. Still, it all reminded her of something, as it always did: she found herself thinking again about a house with unlocked doors and huge, loving faces bobbing in and out of the darkness over her. And fire, and water, and something else, something else.

The main thing she noticed, of course, was the statue on the shelf over the headboard of Joel's unmade bed. And, as before, it fascinated and frightened her at the same time.

It was a glazed plaster sculpture a couple of feet high, the paint brushed on real fast and sloppy, probably so that it could be sold cheap in the kind of stores that have pillows and ashtrays with words and pictures of buildings printed on them. Some kind of snake, a cobra, she thought, and it was coiled around what was supposed to be a human skull. Maybe it had

come out of the skull, out of one of the eyes; she wasn't sure. But crawling out of the other eye was an animal that looked like a mouse. It was about to attack the snake, to try to bite it on the neck, or maybe to charm it, to hold its attention so that it would do no harm; she didn't know which. The snake was poised, squinting down, his fangs dripping. There was no way of telling which one would win. She had seen another like it once, in the window of a shop in the Palisades where they sold old-looking books and those sticks like Fourth of July punks that smell sweet when you light them. She wondered where Joel had gotten it and why and how much it cost, had even asked him one time, but he had only looked at her funny and changed the subject. She sat on the edge of the bed.

"Joel," she began, knowing he would jump in about his locks and keys, whatever they were for, if she did not. There were things on her mind now, questions that were as yet only half-formed but which needed answers before she would be able to listen and really hear him. "Joel," she said again, trying to find a way to ease into it. "Was—was our house always this way? I mean, the way it is now? Or did Grandpa build it over when we were little?"

She glanced around the room, pretending interest in the cluttered walls and cramped ceiling.

"'Course it was," he said, casually condescending. "You're thinking about the other place."

"What other place is that, Joel?"

"The first house, the one over by your corral. The place where we lived with Mother and—"

He stopped himself, shot one of his sudden, funny looks at her, as if she had caught him off guard.

She had an odd feeling then, as if they had begun to talk about something they were not supposed to, and her not even knowing. The feeling attracted her and scared her at the same time.

"You don't go poking around in there, do you?" he asked in a controlled voice. "Not all the way in there, where the house used to be?"

"Anyone can go, Joel. It's right there on the beach. What's left of it."

"You've been in there, underneath there? You've been there before?"

"I've
always
been there before. So what?"

He straightened, his back to her. "You shouldn't, you know. It's not safe."

"What do you mean? Of course it's—"

"There was an explosion once, you know," he said, cutting her off with more information than he had planned to give. "The gas lines are probably still there. Anyway, I don't want you remembering a thing like that. And," he added, as if to cover up, "you ought to stay home more."

"Oh."

She felt a laugh coming on, one of those wild, high ones that she didn't want to stop. She threw herself backwards on the bed, her arms over her head. His bed was so bouncy, mounded with all tht quilts the grandmother had made for him.

"Safe, not safe," she sang. "Oh Joel, you're just on another one of your
bummers.
I know why you have such bad dreams. You pile on so many blankets, your body heats up at night like a compost heap!"

"Don't you taunt me, Darcy. Don't, or I'll—"

There, she had caught him again.
Or you'll what? Send the Nighthawk?

He turned and stared at her for too long a time, until she stopped laughing and they both grew uneasy. Then he began moving about the room, picking at things, his compass and protractor, the lens cover to his telescope, putting them down again, pacing. It was an unnatural pause; Joel never ran out of crazy things to talk to her about, which was why she always had to be the one to leave.

He faced her again.

"I hear Grandma's pretty mad at you, Darcy." This time he was doing the taunting. The tension was gone from his face now, hidden again just below the surface like one of those sharp, crusted rocks when the tide changes. "What's it about this time?"

"Oh, who knows?" It was almost true; the grandmother was pretty nearly always mad at her about something. "I don't know, why is a mouse when it screams? That probably makes about as much sense." Then, when he didn't laugh, "It was about the ponies, I guess."

"What about the ponies?"

"What do you care?"

"I had a dream about them," he said tightly.

Another one of his dreams. She sighed. She didn't want to hear about it so she went ahead and told about Pebbles. But not the part about Maria. She was not ready to talk about that part yet, least of all to him.

But then she stopped and said, "It was about the corral, your dream, wasn't it? That was where you went. In your dream.
Wasn't
it."

Sometimes, she did not know why, Joel tried to make himself look like a stone boy; this was one of those times.

"Darcy, I tried to warn you. All of you." And, surprisingly, tears of rage came to his eyes. "I told him, I told
her
to tell him, but she must've thought she could take care of—"

A new thought struck her, cold and fully shaped as a steel bit, and it stayed and would not let go. Perhaps it had been there all along and only now was she able to feel it fully, its chill, and begin to know what it was.

She said, "What was it that hurt Pebbles?"

There was a ringing silence.

"You know, don't you, Joel. I think you know."

She saw him start to shake. She went on, oddly detached, as if she were watching what was happening through the wrong end of his telescope.

"You know what else I think? I—I think that maybe Mama and Daddy got hurt the same way, a long time ago. I already know they didn't just 'go away,' like everybody says."

She waited.

He did not try to answer. He lost his balance and hunkered close to the floor, by the edge of the bed. His hands clawed into the quilt and pulled it down with him.

Now she did begin to feel afraid. She felt a nervous jolt enter her body, sort of like a charge of static electricity from the air, but she strained to keep breathing, to draw energy from the feeling and not be smothered by it. She had to know.

"Say something!" she said to him.

She saw his face press into the pillow, heard his shallow, rasping sobs. She felt a terrible closeness in her own chest as her breath caught and took hold again. She thought of touching him but could not. Because she never had. Not like that.

"What about—" she began, and this was the hardest part, but it had to be said, "—what about the fire? Tell me about the fire, Joel. Tell me about Mother and Father."

I'll help you, I will,
she thought,
and never, ever ask again. If only you'll tell me.
And then an answer came, slowly at first and then like something icy melting far away and rushing down to meet the sea. And whether it was his voice or her own she did not know just then, but could only focus on the pictures that appeared in her mind. And the pictures showed the big old house bursting upward into the sky and the boards falling back down again into a new and meaningless configuration on the sand, and she thought of charred pick-up-sticks. And before that: within the house a woman, breathing on her knees by the range, the oven open, the burners flickering and the image rising in a watery, gaseous mirage, and she thought
Mama.
And before that: a man dying in a hospital bed, his body laced with fresh scars, pink and glistening, and Mama weeping into her closed fists, her hair tumbling forward like brackwater and a little girl watching, and she thought
Daddy.
And before that: Daddy's face outside the window the night he brought Copper for her, smiling secretly and then the smile fading, shocked, as something,
something
moved against him beyond the glass, and she turned, turned for her brother who was not there, and she thought
the Nighthawk.
And before that: another face, dream-spinning over them both in the dark when Mama and Daddy were not home, an old face that went on storytelling long after she had fallen asleep, a face she had not let into her room since she had been old enough to lock it out, and again she thought
the Nighthawk.