Nothing In the Dark

In the tangled mass of poplar boughs, a raven lets loose a raucous caw-caw-caw. The wind carries the reverberations of the bird's dismal shriek across the rolling hills and out to the thin, dark line of the horizon. Ensconced in an ancient wingback chair, Rebecca watches as the brittle blades of winter grass leap back from the path of the furious gust.

Her fingers are wrapped around a cut crystal glass, the edge of which is pressed against her pursed lips. Across the room, a grizzled wolfhound lounges upon the hearthstones, lapping up the warmth of the flickering flames. It stirs as the greenwood sputters and pops in protestation of the callous torture of the fire's slow consumption.

Rebecca stirs too. She kicks the knitted afghan away from her. The weight of the wool presses as lead upon her body. She crosses to the French doors. The ancient floorboards whisper beneath her dainty tread, and leans her forehead against the window glass, gaining strength from the unyielding rigidity of the surface. Across the field, through the gathering gloom of falling night, she can just make out the outline of the imposing stone wall that rings the field like a castle bailey, keeping out the wild things that stalk the woodlands beyond.

Her fingers quiver about the whiskey glass as the wind kicks up suddenly, setting the trees to moaning in protest. The whole forest comes alive as the trees shake their limbs in protest at the violence done by the wind. The billowing mass of poplars and elms and the rocketing spikes of mighty spruce spires roils and rolls, like the churning froth upon an angry sea. But there are no white caps here, only gradated shades of black all running into each other.

But wait�"Rebecca gasps, a sharp, quick inhalation of breath, the sound of which grates against the muted quiet of the room; the wolfhound's great shaggy head snaps to attention. Some sheen of white seems to bob out in the woods, out by the trunk of the old elm tree. A spectral lurker in the dusk, a nocturnal vanguard.

Or is it exhaustion and liquor and grief? And the film of her breath that frosts the window. She wipes her sleeve across the pane and peers out again to see nothing but the dark. Her eyes close, a single, opalescent tear runs down one wan cheek. And she remembers.

 

She held a cut crystal glass to her pursed lips and tilted it back far enough so the amber liquid within burned against a cut she hadn't known was there. The liquor smelled strong and rich, but she resisted the urge to kick back her wrist and drain the glass of its contents. Its deadening effects were a welcome relief for the necrosis creeping through her soul on most nights, but not this one. She wanted the full faculty of her senses. And to hide, as much as possible, her weakness from her husband.

He had gone walking. Again. In the past, there were days when she would have gone with him, when they would have strolled across the meadows and ambled down backwoods paths together, hand in hand, their laughter joining in the melodious chirping of the birds that floated through the air. But no longer.

She was left alone, to sit here and agonize over the potentialities that swirled about the bottom of the glass. In the dregs of the cup was escape, but escape to what? Her husband had renounced his struggle against the demons, had sacrificed his reason and appeared perfectly content. It was only she who noticed the change in him, she who agonized over the irrationality of his actions. So what was stopping her from embracing his solution?

She got up and padded softly across the room to stare wistfully out the window, perhaps to spy his figure trudging across the field. And what emotion would race through her heart then: trepidation, relief? Certainly not joy, not anymore.

The shadows grew longer upon the floor as she stood there, turning over and over again the same thought in her mind, like a song stuck on repeat: Which is better, to numb oneself to the trudge of daily life, to accept the trivial annoyances and injustices of an existence where so little is actually within one's control, where one can give voice to the most eloquent treatise on reason and simply be brushed aside by the apathetic and indifferent, or to fight on, creating sustenance for the forces one abhors and protracting its reign? Is it better to be a masochist or a martyr, to live life, dying a little each day, or to kill the soul and let the body go on living through impulse? Her lips moved upon the rim of the glass, a physical fault betraying the innermost workings of her mind, where dwelled secrets she'd long desired to keep hidden, safely away from the depravities of the world. Once upon a time, her husband had been privy to them. But now, her doubts about him were as strong as about any other. And the agony this caused was almost beyond that which she could bear. And so she remained, immobile, except for the almost prayer-like repetition of the inaudible words poised upon her lips.

Darkness had fallen almost completely before she heard the groaning of the hinges lodging their protest at carrying the weight of the heavy oak panels of the front door. The thick soles of his boots fell upon the floor with a thud too heavy to ring in the wide-open space of the entryway. Rebecca listened with a feeling of detachment at the trudging sound of his progress, thinking only of the effort his tread betrayed, and of the indifference with which she would receive him.

"Is that my good Scotch you're playing with?" he asked as he entered the room.

She made no acknowledgment of his presence, though she could feel his eyes upon him. His eyes, which had once shone as lodestars. Where now there was nothing in the darkness that welled within the limitless depths of his irises.

He pried the glass from her clenched fingers, downed it in one effortless swallow and bent to her. She felt the pleasant heat of the last drops of the liquor as his lips sought hers. But it was the only heat she felt; she could smell the decay of winter upon him, feel the chill of the outdoors in the worsted wool of the overcoat he'd neglected to take off. These past few weeks, it had become like a second skin to him.

The embrace ended as suddenly as it had begun. His arm remained snaked about her waist. Through the thick shawl Rebecca wrapped about her like a protective coat of chain mail, she could feel the nervous energy twitching in his fingers.

"How was your walk?" she asked, her voice flat.

"Invigorating." he replied, looking out the window and not at her.

Her eyes followed his out to a point on the horizon, out where the field and trees converged into one solid dark mass.

"Out there, I feel a purpose I'm missing in all other aspects of my life. As if each step is imbued with meaning. As if each step has a singular purpose, since it brings me a little further.

"As if, out there..."

His voice trailed off into nothingness.

"There's nothing there." Rebecca replied, too quickly, too bitterly.

He turned to face her and she saw once again the familiarity of the spark in his eyes.

"Exactly," he snapped, "Don't you think there should be, after all that's transpired here? All the cruelty and anguish? All the suffering for which there has been no reckoning?"

He stalked across the room and mixed another drink, rattling the crystal decanters with his ministrations.

"Evil must have its recompense, suffering its expiation." he murmured into his freshly filled glass.

It was a good polemic and it deserved a setting appropriate to the grandiosity of the sentiment: a lecture hall overheating with the restless energy of those swept up in the passionate ebb and flow of the speaker pacing about the stage, his body catapulting back and forth, answering not the electronic signals sent by the brain, but the agitated pounding of the heart swept up in the majesty of that which it contemplated. But it was wasted, spat into the insulated glass prison of a whiskey glass.

"You'd wish torment eternal on those poor souls whose earthly lives expired before justice was delivered to them? Their trials are over. Peace comes in the end of a wrong actively carried out by another. Why can't that be enough for you?

He hurled his drink into the fire; the delicate tinkling notes of the glass shattering against the fireplace bricks was an overture to the sputtering roar that followed as the flame set the alcohol vapors alight.

"Don't you see: people like you and I who hold some moral creed, we struggle everyday just to cleave to our convictions, while those who lack them live their lives unperturbed by concerns about who they trample on. My family, for generations, has been corrupt and prospered. I have tried not to be and have been rewarded with crushing uncertainty, with the memories of those wronged, whom I would avenge if I could. But I must know whether there suffering meant anything beyond their own torment. I must know whether there is anything that lingers, whether the suffering that was hers and mine endures to be avenged."

Rebecca sighed; it was not the first time they'd played out this scene.

"You take on too much. We each of us have the choice of what influences us. You, and you alone, are master of your head and your heart, just as I am of mine. But we cannot control the world external to ourselves. So why ground yourself in it? You only give others greater influence over yourself. And corrupt your own purpose by so doing."

She crossed to him, and laid one hand upon his shoulder, hopeful, as ever, that something of the influence her touch had once had upon him remained. But he shrugged her off.

"No. Reality must be more than what I make of it in my head. There must be something durable, something of substance that lingers eternally here, not in some delusion of a promised otherworld to which we're transported. Life is here; the reckoning must be here too."

Rebecca locked eyes with her husband. There was a strange light in them, one that belonged more to a child, hurt at the first discovery of the limitations of a parent to insulate them from the ills of the world and who desperately seeks reassurance, than to the sober mien of a grown man, secure in his own character.

At the beginning of her marriage, Rebecca had been the one skittish of the world, the one in need of another's strength. She had siphoned her husband's surety of mind and now found herself asked to play not the role of wife, but of mother. It was not ideal, but if that was the form her husband's need took, then she would offer maternal counsel.

"Greggory," she said gently, her tone slow and metered, "why not look to the good of what remains? You stalk the woods looking for ghosts, turning yourself into the mere spectre of the man you once were, a hollow shell from which the spirit departed long ago."

She paused, seeing the doubt in his eyes.

"Darling, you are the good your mother left behind. And if you're not careful, by the time you find what you're seeking, there will be nothing left of you for her to recognize."

In the violent working of the muscles in his brow, Rebecca could see that he recognized the wisdom of her words, but, with winsome stubbornness, was fighting a conclusion he was not prepared to accept. She knew the cast of his mind, knew its relentlessly analytical tack. There was nothing more she could do but leave him to his thoughts.

"I'm very tired. I think I'll retire for the evening." she said.

His eyes were once again on the shadows coalescing around the dark line of the horizon off in the distance. It took a few seconds of the pressure of her gaze concentrated on his face to draw him out of himself.

"Oh. Yes dear. Sleep well." he replied distractedly.

She gave his elbow a comforting squeeze and departed. A cold and dark bedroom awaited her above, but she no longer felt dread of the crushing blackness pressing about her prone form. Lying all alone in the spacious king bed. She was growing accustomed to solitude, to days spent wandering around the ancient, creaking house filled with the shades of her husband's ancestry and to monotonous evenings before the fire, broken up only by the snapping of the kindling on the fire and the long sighs of the dog. Greggory sat beside her often, silent and unmoving, like one of the pieces of statuary scattered about the room. The dancing of the flames gave a glistening luster to the stone and made it seem as if the depictions of young Greek men, posed in some manner or other that displayed the perfection and power of their being, strained against their immobility. It was more than could be said of Greggory on most nights, wan and hunched, moving only to sip occasionally from the glass clutched in his hand. It had become Rebecca's habit to retire early. She was no longer eager to spend time in her husband's company, but to get away as soon as possible, before he roused himself from his state of torpor and saw the look of disgust she could not keep completely from the cast of her features.

 

Rebecca awoke with a jolt. Paralyzed, she lay simply staring up at the ceiling. The stillness of the cool night air was a balm to her senses; the sounds of the nightmare still rung in her eardrums and the pale ghosts of its images still floated before her retinas.

"The nightmare again?" Greggory's voice murmured solicitously from the darkness. Rebecca rolled over on her side and saw a glint of concern sparking in his eyes as they caught the beam of the garden floodlight just outside the window. The rustling of the silk sheets spoke before she could and then his arms were about her, pulling the length of her body tight against his. He began to run the tips of his fingers up and down along the length of her back, bared above the cut of her nightdress. It was a possessive and comforting motion, at once tender and mechanically steady as a metronome.

He had come in late and had not showered. His cologne had leached through the thin cotton of his shirt, impregnating the skin beneath. The lingering traces of its scent hung thick and pungent about him. Its heady bouquet had an intoxicating effect on her senses and her mind began to drift.

Rebecca awoke with a start and sat upright in bed, drawing large draughts of the cool night air into her lungs in great ragged gasps. It did little to soothe her; her skin still tingled with the sensations of Greggory's touch and the saccharine edge of his cologne clung to her nostrils. She whirled to the left side of the mattress, her heart pounding in the back of her throat. But there was no one in the dark; the satin sheet lay smooth, without so much as a wrinkle.

She drew her legs up to her chest and let her forehead rest against the flat table of her knees. The muscles of her lower back screamed at the strain, but she ignored it and waited for the dull, throbbing pain to drain her energy and bring on the serene oblivion that was sleep; she did not care to contemplate the meaning of the empty place beside her. Minutes passed, the dull, aching pain became like the searing throb of a burn and still her senses buzzed with the alert energy of a sentry.

She noticed a faint hint of lilac creeping into the light spilling through the bedroom window. Almost dawn, then. She shrugged off the thought of going back to sleep and rolled over across his side of the bed, marring the smooth plane of the sheet.

She extended a slender ankle over the edge of the mattress and for one moment was seized by fanciful fear from her childhood: the universal terror of some thing lying under the bed. With the nubile logic of the young, Rebecca had reasoned that she was safe from the greedy, snatching claws of monstrous limbs so long as no bit of her extended over the edge of the mattress. Perhaps it was Greggory's talk of ghosts, but the fear, dormant for long years, suddenly seized her again.

"Stupid, skittish woman. Do you want to end up like him?" she muttered through gritted teeth.

Exhaustion already manifesting itself as a pressure behind her eyes, her fury at her own weakness flared. She leapt from the bed and grabbed her dressing gown from the settee. She did not stop to fashion the sash, but let the material flow behind her, streaming out like the wingspan of one of the macabre ravens forever lurking about the grounds, as she stalked down the narrow hall of the old building and bounded down the stairs, the weight of her footfalls setting the ancient wood to creaking pitifully.

The door to the study stood ajar, just as she had left it upon her departure the previous evening. Rebecca plowed through it, prepared to accost the inert form of her husband in the chair where she had left him. A harsh rebuke danced upon the tip of her tongue.

If you wish to wallow so deeply in your anguish that you drown yourself, that is your business. But those were not the terms on which you married me. You wish to right the wrongs of your patrimony? Then begin with me. I cannot go on, consumed by worry and anguish over you. Either end this mawkish obsession or set me free.

But the words remained spoken only in her mind, for she found the room abandoned. The embers of the fire flickered anemically in the grate. Greggory was gone, as was the dog.

Rebecca's gaze flew to the French doors, to the latch that was not secured. Her heart sank, and then leapt again. The hazy grey dimness of dawn still hung like a pall over the landscape, but there, out upon the horizon, at that point where his gaze seemed drawn as if by lodestone, was a speck of white, small but definitive. It was a color that did not belong to the palette of the hour.

The French doors sprang back against the touch of her palm and slammed against the house's stone facade. She was racing through the dew-laden grass, tripping over the sodden hem of her nightgown, her stride clipped by the limiting radius of the material. The frigid nip of winter air stung her bare skin as she gathered, mid-stride, the soaking material in her hand and pulled it high about her waist.

She did not get halfway through the field before she collapsed, sobbing at the burning in her chest and thighs. The white shape remained, better defined now, like the striking contrast of a black and white image, against the jet-black darkness that receded into the overgrown wood. She could see now, the form of a thin white line hanging in space.

She knew what had happened even before the great shaggy wolfhound appeared suddenly, slinking on its belly through the stunted winter grasses, whimpering softly and nudging at her with its nose, prodding over and over again until she finally rose and walked, trance-like, her sodden dressing gown trailing out behind her like the stiffened wings of a hawk, shot down and thrown over the back of a hunter.

Greggory hung from an old oak tree, a piece of paper clutched in the arm that hung limp by his side. She took it gingerly, afraid to touch the flesh and feel it warm or cold, to consider whether she had been lying in bed awake as the last bit of oxygen was expelled from his lungs.

Forgive me, if it turns out I am wrong. I could see no other way to discover whether pain is but a fleeting mental state, or belongs to something eternal and unchanging that lingers in the forlorn places of the earth.

 

Rebecca turns away from the window as a soft rain begins to fall, the droplets striking a slow and mournful dirge against the pane. She crosses the room to the decanter, almost empty now, and fills the glass, as she observed him do so many times. Her mind swirls with the heat of the liquid as it goes rushing through her insides. She, left alone in this forlorn mausoleum to mourn, what exactly? The man she loved had been consumer long ago by the morbid stranger whose body now lay beneath the branches of the old oak tree. And what was she to hope for�"that he was right and his spirit would forever rove the woods, driven by a primal kind of wanderlust, spurred on by a need for a reckoning that now could never come? Or to hope he was wrong, and the great experiment on which he had staked his life was in vain?

She turns back to the window, her eyes shuttered and cast low, down to the trampled grass that stands as a monument to the tragedy so recently transpired. Bit by bit, she raises them, her gaze hesitant and anguished. She stops and starts, turning her head one way and another, afraid at what she might find, but unable to shake off the innate desire to know definitively. At last her gaze comes to rest at that point that so often transfixed her husband, at the place on the horizon where the earth meets sky, where the planes of reality melt into one another.

Rebecca opens her eyes, steeling herself for any possibility. But there is nothing in the dark.

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[emmajoy]

'. She held a cut crystal glass to her pursed lips and tilted it back far enough so the amber liquid within burned against a cut she hadn't known was there. The liquor smelled strong and rich, but she resisted the urge to kick back her wrist and drain the glass of its contents. Its deadening effects were a welcome relief for the necrosis creeping through her soul on most nights, but not this one. She wanted the full faculty of her senses. And to hide, as much as possible, her weakness from her husband.- He had gone walking. Again'

Such a darkness through this writing and yet it lures the reader on and on, using language that for me is a rich as it can be. The characters are distinct and yet veiled, neart hidden in their own strangenes, perhaps - seemingly isolated. The descriptions of what was, is or might be are stepping stones in a way, always another facet, still the wonderful vocabulary and phrasing.. This reminds me of an old black.white movie, where faces, places, tableaux near macabre hover .. mystify but fascinate. More people should read this.. really should. Thank you so much.

' Exhaustion already manifesting itself as a pressure behind her eyes, her fury at her own weakness flared. She leapt from the bed and grabbed her dressing gown from the settee. She did not stop to fashion the sash, but let the material flow behind her, streaming out like the wingspan of one of the macabre ravens forever lurking about the grounds, as she stalked down the narrow hall of the old building and bounded down the stairs, the weight of her footfalls setting the ancient wood to creaking pitifully.

The door to the study stood ajar, just as she had left it upon her departure the previous evening. Rebecca plowed through it, prepared to accost the inert form of her husband in the chair where she had left him. A harsh rebuke danced upon the tip of her tongue.'