108 fountains
10-07-2014, 08:09 PM
Hi everyone! It's October and just 24 days until Halloween. Here's a spooky story for you - is it a ghost story? - Or is it a trick - or a treat? You be the judge. As always, I would be pleased with any comments or feedback.
The Dark Room
“Is it really haunted?”
“Yes. Well, yes. I think so. It could be. I… I think it probably might be.”
Decisiveness was a quality alien to my husband. His tentativeness was one of several traits that tended to annoy me. For the moment, however, I put aside my exasperation in order to plunge ahead.
“Then we have to go. I want to see it. A haunted house! How charming! How romantic!”
“Go there? Oh, no. Not me. I’m not going there. And neither are you.”
He said this with some resolve, which annoyed me more than his usual reticence.
“Why not? Don’t tell me now that you’re afraid of ghosts!”
He shrugged his shoulders. “There is no reason we need to go there. There is no reason… Really, there just is no reason we need to go there.”
“Donald, but I want to go. I want to see it. Imagine! The house where you grew up – and you don’t even want to go see it.”
“I didn’t grow up there,” he countered, and again he moved his shoulders slightly, something somewhere between a shrug and a shudder. “I was seven years old when we moved from there. I… I hardly remember the place. We lived in several houses when I was growing up. There is nothing special about this one. No reason to go there to see it.”
“But this is the only property your father still owned. There must be something special about it. Some reason why he didn’t want to sell it.”
“He tried to sell it. Yes, I think… he tried to sell it at one time, but he couldn’t.”
“Because it is haunted?”
“Well, yes. Maybe. I don’t know. I was just a kid at the time. It’s just been vacant for – God, let me think – it must be nearly forty years. Dad had renters in there once, but they… but they didn’t stay long. It’s just sat there, you know, vacant all this time.”
“Oooh! They didn’t stay because of the ghost. Come on, Donald. Tell me. Tell me about the ghost. I want to hear. I love spooky stories.”
“I don’t remember,” he said almost angrily. “They were silly stories anyway. Something about a little girl. That’s all I know.”
“Oooh! A little girl ghost! Now that really is spooky. I love it!”
“Don’t make light of it. It’s not funny.” He said this in such an odd tone that I looked at him inquisitively. He turned and looked in the other direction. I saw him picking at his fingernails – a habit he engages in when he is nervous.
I knew he wanted to bring the conversation to an end, but I wouldn’t let go of the subject. “So are you going to try to sell it then – or rent it?”
“No,” he replied with no further explanation.
“What? Well, then what are you going to do with it?”
“Nothing,” he said. “I think… I think the best thing is to… well, to just let it sit vacant – like it has been.”
"That’s crazy!” I exclaimed. “Of course we’ll sell it. I’ll call a realtor. They’ll go over and inspect it. We’ll put in the necessary repairs and then put it up for sale. If we invest a few thousand dollars in fixing the place up, I bet we can…”
He was shaking his head, still looking away from me and muttering, “No. No.”
“Donald, come on! Be sensible. It’s been sitting forty years. The ghost stories will have been long forgotten. We can’t let that place sit vacant when it could provide some income for us. God knows, we could use the money.”
“I don’t want to rent it, and I don’t want to sell it. I… I just want to forget about it, and… and I want you to forget about it, too!” Then he turned and cast a dark look at me so fleetingly and yet so ominously that I felt a chill.
* * * * * * * * * * * *
After twenty-three years of marriage, I had given up my efforts to change Donald. Whatever deep-seated flaw gnawed at him was beyond my ability to reach. He was introverted, lymphatic and timid. He considered blandness a virtue. Before our marriage, his shyness and his good manners had charmed me. In those days, I never really considered his lack of self-confidence. I never dwelt on his passivity. I never stopped to think what life would be like with a man who sometimes commenced conversations with the words, “I’m sorry…” I had been impressed with his politeness. He was calm; he was level-headed. I didn’t realize then that his composure was comprised of detachment and withdrawal. I didn’t know then how aloof he could be or how stultifying life with him would be. After our marriage, I was like a person who had stumbled onto some object in the dark. I wondered what I had got. And when I examined it in the light, I found it contained neither silver nor gold.* I was disappointed and didn’t know what to do with it. We had no children, of course. I used to daydream that he would come home from work one day, take me in his arms, kiss me passionately, and tell me he was taking me away to South America. After twenty-three years of marriage, I had even given up my daydreams.
The only bright spot in Donald’s insecurity was that he allowed me to make the household decisions. So I had no qualms at all about contacting a real estate agent despite his stated objections. Had I been married to any other man, I probably would have cajoled and nagged until I had my way. With Donald, I didn’t bother – I just did whatever it was I thought should be done.
Donald was angry at first – more angry than I had ever seen him. His efforts to persuade me to give up the idea of selling the house were of an unusual, nervous intensity. After several days, however, he reverted to his usual unobtrusive self and resigned himself to the situation. He said I could do whatever I wanted with the house as long as I left him out of it. But I insisted. The house was so old and, according to the real estate agent, in such a state of disrepair that I felt it essential that Donald accompany me to help make decisions on what repairs would be necessary in order to make the house saleable. Even after he reluctantly agreed to accompany me, he kept putting it off and putting it off – procrastination, another of his annoying characteristics. His excuse was that the place was two hundred miles away, and it would take more than three hours to make the drive. He could only do it on a Saturday, and he seemed to have already made plans for every Saturday in the foreseeable future.
Donald was not particularly pleased then when I told him I had made an appointment for us to meet the realtor at the house on the first Saturday of November. He seemed apprehensive, even frightened, at the prospect of visiting his one-time childhood home. His disquietude was so great, in fact, that I began to wonder if something had happened to him there, something perhaps that he had repressed in his memory. To me, that was all the more reason to take him out there and face whatever it was that seemed to terrify him so.
We made an early start – so early that the silvery morn had yet to stir from its nest, and the croaking of the night heron among the reeds in the shallow pond behind our house could be plainly heard above the still chirping crickets. Dark clouds moved in from the west while we drove, imparting a damp heaviness to the air and an uneasy, electrical tension to the atmosphere. I could feel gusts of wind blowing the car and twice felt that Donald had almost lost control. He was preoccupied with driving and responded with irritable grunts or not at all to my few attempts at conversation.
As we approached the small town of Amunet, Donald turned off the highway and made a series of turns until we coasted down to the end of an asphalt lane that terminated in a cul-de-sac. Because of our early start, we arrived an hour before the eleven o’clock appointment. When Donald turned off the ignition, I found myself looking out the passenger window at a desolate two-story home with red brick construction on the first floor and a second-floor wooden overhang that had once been painted white, but which now was gray, cracked, peeling, and so warped that it bulged out over the brick, giving the whole house the appearance of sinking into the ground like a gravestone. A triangular wooden cornice over the front door was carved in strange images of the sun and the moon. The windows were intact but lusterless and lifeless, covered with the grime of years. A leafless bitternut hickory tree dominated the front yard, its gnarled branches floundering in the misty squall like fingers grasping at something in the dark. It was tall, but bent near the top as if it bowed its head in shame that its fruit should be so unfit for human consumption. Forlorn and gloomy, the house seemed to be reaching out for help, but was choked back in its effort by the dry weeds that swallowed up the walkway and the dead, brown leaves that rustled and swirled up in the cold wind.
Without a word to Donald, I got out of our fourteen-year-old Nissan Altima and fought my way through the weeds up to the front door. Donald got out of the car, leaned over the roof on the driver’s side, and called, “What are you doing?”
“I want to go inside,” I answered.
“The agent won’t be here for another hour. She’s got the key.”
I was disappointed. I had not thought about that. I walked up to the door anyway and turned the rusted knob. To my surprise the door creaked open. “Donald, it’s not locked!” I called, and stepped inside. With the door open, the murky shadows from within the house struggled with the muted light from without. I stood in a narrow, glass enclosed vestibule. To the right, a wide, empty room opened up in the gloom. Its corners were strewn with cobwebs, and dust particles floated in the pallid shafts of light that fell aslant into it from the open doorway. To the left, a hallway trailed off into darkness.
I turned around to see Donald still leaning on the roof of the car from the driver’s side. “Aren’t you coming?” I called.
I couldn’t hear what he said over the wind, which was gusting now and bringing with it occasional large drops of cold, black rain. He didn’t budge from his spot on the other side of the car, so I waved my arms at him and called, “Donald, come inside. It’s going to rain. We’ll be more comfortable in here.”
I saw his shoulders droop in resignation, and he slowly shuffled through the desiccated weeds and dead leaves to the door. “I don’t know how I let you talk me into this,” he said, peering into the shadowy vestibule. “I really… I really don’t want to be here.”
A roll of distant thunder made itself heard over the wind. “Wow! It sounds like we’re going to have a real storm,” I said, pulling him inside by a button of his shirt.
I pulled him further in, into the large, empty room on the right. Heavy curtains hung over the picture window in this room, leaving it in a diffuse, depressing darkness. Because of the dampness of the impending storm, the room was clammy. The plaster on the walls was wet. “So, was this the living room?”
“Yeah,” replied Donald, turning around and looking about as if he were not quite sure. “Yeah, we had a big sofa sitting under the window here. Chairs and a coffee table here in front of the sofa.” He took four or five steps towards the far wall where the room branched into an “L” shape. “This was the dining area,” he continued. “I hardly remember ever being here at all. My mother always kept these two rooms spotless, in case… in case we had any guests. ”
“Oh, look!” I said. “A piano!”
Donald stepped towards the far corner of the room where an upright piano stood in a corner enshrouded with cobwebs and dust. “We never had a piano,” Donald said. “It must have been left by the renters. They…”
“Oh my God!” I screamed – when Donald approached, the piano began playing notes by itself.
“Damme!” Donald said after he had caught his breath. “It was just some mice inside the piano. I frightened them, I guess, when I got close.”
I felt embarrassed. “Well, they just about scared me half to death! For a second I thought it was the ghost.”
Donald said nothing. This was the first time either of us had mentioned the ghost since our initial conversation about the house. He stood immobile for a long time facing away from me. I wished I had kept my mouth shut. Until that moment, Donald had seemed relatively relaxed, and I had been pleased that I had brought him into the house. But now, as the sky outside grew bleak and threatening and we heard the beating of rain on the roof, the shadows inside grew deeper and more intense, and Donald seemed to shrink in front of me, assuming the dimensions of a dwarf in the shadows. I felt the hairs on the back of my neck tingle.
After what seemed an interminable interval, Donald stepped away from the piano and passed languidly through another door. I followed him into a room that was dark as night. The windows to this room had been boarded up with plywood. We could hear the wind and the rain without. “This was the family room,” he said in a voice that was barely audible and that contained a hint of melancholy. “This is where I remember spending a lot of time. Dad kept a small table with a chess set over here. He taught me to play chess right here.”
Suddenly, Donald fell heavily to the floor. “Be careful!” I cried out. Donald had tripped over an old carpet that had been pulled back and partially rolled up near the far end of the room.
“Here, I’ve got a penlight in my bag,” I said. “It’s so dark in here!”
Donald had some difficulty in opening a sliding wooden door. It made a heavy clunking sound. “Here’s the kitchen,” he said.
The window over the sink, bare of curtains, provided a relatively brighter aspect to the room, but it was so covered with black soot that it was almost opaque to the faint light peeping in from outside. An awning protected the window from the rain, but through the grime we could see it coming down in heavy sheets. It beat against the outside walls and pounded on the roof. We heard it pulsating in the gutters and spewing down the drainpipes. The rumbling thunder seemed to engulf the entire structure. It was not the crackling, explosive thunder that accompanies lightning flashes, but a slow, threatening, growling thunder like the snarling of an angry dog. The interior wall of the kitchen was carved into a semi-circular breakfast nook. Next to that, a door stood open on its hinges, beckoning, it seemed to me, and through the opening – blackness.
“Where does that lead, Donald?” I asked. “Into the basement?”
When Donald didn’t answer, I turned to look at him. He was standing with his back to the window so that I couldn’t see his face in the hazy shadow cast from behind. I shone the penlight on his face. The expression there was ghastly. His eyes were wide open, bloodshot, and filled with inexorable terror. His lips quivered. His breath came in shallow gulps. He stared at the open door as if in a trance.
I turned back and pointed my penlight at the open door expecting – I don’t know what – some sort of aerial form gliding up the black stairs. But there was nothing, only the open door leading down into an impenetrable darkness.
“Donald,” I said. “Something is wrong. Something is wrong about you and this house. I’ve known it since you first mentioned it to me. Something happened to you in the basement. I know it. What happened to you here, Donald?”
Donald shaded his face with his hands so that I couldn’t see his eyes.
“Donald! It’s okay. You can tell me.”
Donald didn’t budge from where he was standing, but in the shadows, I saw his breast heave violently, his psyche grappling with some unutterable recollection.
“Come with me, Donald. I’m going down there.”
“No!” he cried. He tried to resist, but he was like a child now and yielded easily. I pulled him gently but firmly down the stairs after me. The dim beam from my penlight barely penetrated the blackness and failed in its attempt to fight through the gloom. A heaviness in the atmosphere hovered over us, suffocating us.
Without a word, Donald slowly reached for my hand and directed the ray from my penlight towards the wall underneath the staircase where a small door, no more than four feet high, stood padlocked. As I stood there pointing the flashlight toward the door, Donald trembled, and tears ran down his cheeks leaving streaks like rain down a dusty window.
“What’s that, Donald? What is that room?”
He spoke, but not in his own voice – he spoke in a high-pitched, quavering voice that seemed to escape his lips like cold air rising from a tomb. “That…” he said, “That we used to call the Dark Room.”
His face, smoldering in the darkness, materialized out of the gloom. “It’s only a broom closet, but… but it extends with the ceiling sloping downward under the stairs. We… Sometimes…” He stopped, gulped, and took several short, sobbing breaths.
“Once…” He stopped again and was unable to complete his thought. He was utterly wretched in his nightmarish memory.
“Oh, Donald!” I cried guessing at what happened. “Did someone abuse you? Did some monster lock you in there? Oh, Donald! It’s okay. You can tell me.”
He continued to stand there, eyes fixed on the door, panting for breath.
“Oh, Donald! I just knew something horrible happened to you here. If you just tell me about it…” and I put my arms around him and held him tight.
He pushed me away, trembling. Then he looked at me with a face disfigured by anguish, mournful eyes that glowed unsteadily in the darkness. His voice changed again – from the thin, high-pitched wail to a low, husky, tremulous croak. He said, “No. No. You… you don’t understand. It was not like that. It was… It was me – I was the monster!”
I dropped the penlight, and we were engulfed in utter blackness. The only sounds were the snarling thunder outside and the deep, dreadful croaking of Donald’s voice. He spoke slowly and laboriously in the darkness.
“It was the day we moved away from here. I was seven years old. My friend Tommy Shane and his sister were here playing with me here in the basement. Melanie. That was her name. She was four years old. She always tagged along with Tommy, and she was always getting in the way. We were mean to her, we tried to get rid of her, but she would never leave us alone. Then, that day…”
“Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God!” I whispered.
“That day, when Dad called downstairs and said it was time to go, Tommy and I looked at each other. I remember… I remember that we… we smiled. No, no, it… it was more like a smirk, a fiendish smirk. I opened the door to the Dark Room and… and Tommy pushed her in. Then I closed the door and locked it – with a padlock.”
“You didn’t leave her, Donald! Please tell me you didn’t leave her!” I cried wildly, flailing with my hands in the darkness.
“Tommy and I ran upstairs laughing – laughing! Dad and my mother were already at the front door. They couldn’t hear her screaming from the Dark Room.” Donald took a deep breath and then, in a hoarse, wailing, monstrous cry that reverberated in the depths of the darkness – he howled, “She’s still in there!”
The next thing I knew, he had picked up my penlight and was now tearing at the padlock with his fingers and kicking at the door like a madman. I had visions of a small skeleton lying in a heap on the other side of the door. Donald flashed the light around, looking for some sort of tool with which to force the lock.
“No, Donald, no!” I cried. I ran up the stairs to the kitchen. Donald followed. We both bent over, gasping for breath. We remained for some minutes, breathless and motionless. He looked at me with panic in his eyes, and I regarded him with a mixture of horror, misery and compassion.
“I’ve dreaded this day for so long,” he said, still panting for breath. “But I’ve always known it would come. All these years, the guilt, the remorse… It’s like I have been locked in there with her… Oh, my soul! Oh, the unbearable guilt! Only God knows how I have suffered all these years!”
I fought back the immediate impulse to shrink away from him; instead, I put my arms around him and embraced him – after all, he was still my husband – while he wept like a child.
We made our way, arms clasped around each other, through the darkened rooms and cobwebs to the front door. The wind had abated somewhat in its vehemence, the rain had all but stopped, and the thunder rumbled now in the distance. As we walked slowly to the car, a new thought struck me.
“Donald,” I said, “The people… the family of the little girl – where did they live?”
“Just over there,” he said pointing to a large wooden frame house three doors down painted white with a large picture window in front to let in the light.
“Donald,” I said as gently as possible. “We have to go there. We have to…”
“Good God! How can I go there?” he cried. “What could I say to them?”
“We have to tell them what happened. They have to know.”
“But… but for all I know, they don’t even live there anymore.”
“Then, we have to go see.” Donald’s knees had turned to rubber, and he leaned heavily on me for support. He offered no resistance. I knew that facing Melanie’s parents and revealing the awful truth would be horrible for him, but I also knew it was necessary – and must be done before we went to the police.
I rang the bell. Light footsteps from within portended the opening of the door. A pleasant looking woman with clear blue eyes and amiable features peered out at Donald and me with no small degree of curiosity – we must have presented her with quite a sight, considering the emotional ordeal we were going through. “May I help you?” she asked innocently.
Donald was beyond speech at this point, so I said, “Yes. We are looking for Mr. or Mrs. Shane.”
The woman looked at me quizzically, so I explained, “Mr. or Mrs. Shane who would have been living here forty years ago.”
“Forty years ago! My heaven!” exclaimed the woman. “Then you must mean my parents, but I’m afraid they both passed away a long time ago.”
“And your name is…?”
“My name is Melanie Shane. Oh, heavens! What’s the matter?”
Donald had staggered back a step and would have fallen, had I not caught him.
“Melanie Shane?” I repeated. “The sister of Tommy Shane?”
“Yes, that’s right,” said the woman, “but please step inside. Is he ill?”
She led us to a comfortable divan and sat herself down on a hassock, leaning toward us. Donald had recovered somewhat, but I found that I had to do all the talking.
“I’m sorry to have barged in on you like this,” I began. “My name is Lucy, Lucy Dunkle. My husband here is Donald Dunkle. Does that name mean anything to you? From your childhood?”
“Why, yes. I remember that name. He was a friend of my brother Tommy,” she replied. Then she turned to Donald and said, “Donald, I’m so surprised you would remember me. Why it must be forty years. We were so very young then.”
“I… I don’t know what to say,” said Donald. “I didn’t know…”
I took over for Donald, who was incapable of carrying on the conversation. “We recently inherited the house down the street where Donald used to live. He was telling me a story about the day his family moved away. He said that he and Tommy…”
“Oh, I remember that day,” said Melanie, whose cheeks flushed suddenly. “It is one of my earliest memories. Donald told you then, what he and Tommy did to me?”
“That they locked you in the Dark Room under the stairs?”
“That was so mean of them!” She said this with a smile, but still her cheeks colored at the remembrance. “Tommy came home and told my father. By that time, Donald and his parents were already gone. My father had to break in the back door to get into the house and then break the latch on the Dark Room door to get me out. I was scared to death. Why, I bet I was locked in there more than twenty minutes!”
“Twenty minutes!” exclaimed Donald weakly.
“Tommy got in a lot of trouble for that one,” she continued, laughing. Then, turning to Donald, she said, “You’re lucky you got away without punishment.”
“Without punishment!” Donald murmured.
“And so you came here looking for my parents?” asked Melanie, turning again to me.
“Yes,” I replied. “You see, we are planning to fix up the old house and put it on the market. Donald wanted to stop in to inquire about you and Tommy. But he started feeling faint a while ago. I think it was the darkness of the storm. He’s had this fear of darkness ever since he was small.”
“Yes. Yes, that’s it,” said Donald, partially regaining his composure. “But… but I’m better now, and… and, oh, I’m so happy to see you!”
“Hmmmph!” said Melanie with a toss of her head and a gay laugh. “As I remember, you were never very happy to see me when we were children.” Then she turned again to me and said, “He and Tommy were always trying to get away from me, but leaving me locked me up in the Dark Room – that was the worst. Oh, well,” she said carelessly. “I suppose I’ll have to forgive them. They were only boys at the time.”
“Oh, the real estate agent. I almost forgot,” I said, standing up, “We’re supposed to meet the agent at the house. We had better go now. Perhaps we will stop by once we have finished with her.”
“Feel free to stop by anytime you like,” said Melanie. “And Donald, it was very nice to see you again. I’ll tell Tommy when I talk with him next. And please,” she said examining Donald with some uncertainty as we walked out the door, “take care of yourself.”
* * * * * * * * * * * *
Renovation of the old house was completed in five months. It needed to be totally rewired and new plumbing put in. I drove out to Amunet every few weeks to observe the progress – by myself, as Donald still didn’t like to go out there. I called on Melanie during each visit, and we struck up a warm friendship. I had the contractor remove the wall from under the stairs – in effect, demolishing the Dark Room.
Then one day Donald came home with the news that the real estate agent had called him. “It’s done!” he exclaimed with newfound vitality. “We sold it! And we got our asking price, too.”
“That’s wonderful news, Donald!”
“And I have another surprise for you, too,” he said.
“What are these?”
“These are airline tickets,” he said, and then he handed me some other documents. “And these are travel brochures – for Brazil and Argentina!”
“Oh, Donald!”
He smiled with unrestrained pleasure as he held me in his arms and I nestled my head against his chest. After twenty-three years of marriage, I didn’t expect or need the passionate kiss. It was enough for me to know that, after such a long, long time, Donald had finally stepped out of the Dark Room and into the light.
The End
* Then, like a person who has stumbled upon some object in the dark, she wondered what she had got; mentally walked round it, estimated it; whether it were rare or common; contained gold, silver, or lead; were a clog or a pedestal, everything to her or nothing.
Thomas Hardy. An Imaginative Woman. 1893.
The Dark Room
“Is it really haunted?”
“Yes. Well, yes. I think so. It could be. I… I think it probably might be.”
Decisiveness was a quality alien to my husband. His tentativeness was one of several traits that tended to annoy me. For the moment, however, I put aside my exasperation in order to plunge ahead.
“Then we have to go. I want to see it. A haunted house! How charming! How romantic!”
“Go there? Oh, no. Not me. I’m not going there. And neither are you.”
He said this with some resolve, which annoyed me more than his usual reticence.
“Why not? Don’t tell me now that you’re afraid of ghosts!”
He shrugged his shoulders. “There is no reason we need to go there. There is no reason… Really, there just is no reason we need to go there.”
“Donald, but I want to go. I want to see it. Imagine! The house where you grew up – and you don’t even want to go see it.”
“I didn’t grow up there,” he countered, and again he moved his shoulders slightly, something somewhere between a shrug and a shudder. “I was seven years old when we moved from there. I… I hardly remember the place. We lived in several houses when I was growing up. There is nothing special about this one. No reason to go there to see it.”
“But this is the only property your father still owned. There must be something special about it. Some reason why he didn’t want to sell it.”
“He tried to sell it. Yes, I think… he tried to sell it at one time, but he couldn’t.”
“Because it is haunted?”
“Well, yes. Maybe. I don’t know. I was just a kid at the time. It’s just been vacant for – God, let me think – it must be nearly forty years. Dad had renters in there once, but they… but they didn’t stay long. It’s just sat there, you know, vacant all this time.”
“Oooh! They didn’t stay because of the ghost. Come on, Donald. Tell me. Tell me about the ghost. I want to hear. I love spooky stories.”
“I don’t remember,” he said almost angrily. “They were silly stories anyway. Something about a little girl. That’s all I know.”
“Oooh! A little girl ghost! Now that really is spooky. I love it!”
“Don’t make light of it. It’s not funny.” He said this in such an odd tone that I looked at him inquisitively. He turned and looked in the other direction. I saw him picking at his fingernails – a habit he engages in when he is nervous.
I knew he wanted to bring the conversation to an end, but I wouldn’t let go of the subject. “So are you going to try to sell it then – or rent it?”
“No,” he replied with no further explanation.
“What? Well, then what are you going to do with it?”
“Nothing,” he said. “I think… I think the best thing is to… well, to just let it sit vacant – like it has been.”
"That’s crazy!” I exclaimed. “Of course we’ll sell it. I’ll call a realtor. They’ll go over and inspect it. We’ll put in the necessary repairs and then put it up for sale. If we invest a few thousand dollars in fixing the place up, I bet we can…”
He was shaking his head, still looking away from me and muttering, “No. No.”
“Donald, come on! Be sensible. It’s been sitting forty years. The ghost stories will have been long forgotten. We can’t let that place sit vacant when it could provide some income for us. God knows, we could use the money.”
“I don’t want to rent it, and I don’t want to sell it. I… I just want to forget about it, and… and I want you to forget about it, too!” Then he turned and cast a dark look at me so fleetingly and yet so ominously that I felt a chill.
* * * * * * * * * * * *
After twenty-three years of marriage, I had given up my efforts to change Donald. Whatever deep-seated flaw gnawed at him was beyond my ability to reach. He was introverted, lymphatic and timid. He considered blandness a virtue. Before our marriage, his shyness and his good manners had charmed me. In those days, I never really considered his lack of self-confidence. I never dwelt on his passivity. I never stopped to think what life would be like with a man who sometimes commenced conversations with the words, “I’m sorry…” I had been impressed with his politeness. He was calm; he was level-headed. I didn’t realize then that his composure was comprised of detachment and withdrawal. I didn’t know then how aloof he could be or how stultifying life with him would be. After our marriage, I was like a person who had stumbled onto some object in the dark. I wondered what I had got. And when I examined it in the light, I found it contained neither silver nor gold.* I was disappointed and didn’t know what to do with it. We had no children, of course. I used to daydream that he would come home from work one day, take me in his arms, kiss me passionately, and tell me he was taking me away to South America. After twenty-three years of marriage, I had even given up my daydreams.
The only bright spot in Donald’s insecurity was that he allowed me to make the household decisions. So I had no qualms at all about contacting a real estate agent despite his stated objections. Had I been married to any other man, I probably would have cajoled and nagged until I had my way. With Donald, I didn’t bother – I just did whatever it was I thought should be done.
Donald was angry at first – more angry than I had ever seen him. His efforts to persuade me to give up the idea of selling the house were of an unusual, nervous intensity. After several days, however, he reverted to his usual unobtrusive self and resigned himself to the situation. He said I could do whatever I wanted with the house as long as I left him out of it. But I insisted. The house was so old and, according to the real estate agent, in such a state of disrepair that I felt it essential that Donald accompany me to help make decisions on what repairs would be necessary in order to make the house saleable. Even after he reluctantly agreed to accompany me, he kept putting it off and putting it off – procrastination, another of his annoying characteristics. His excuse was that the place was two hundred miles away, and it would take more than three hours to make the drive. He could only do it on a Saturday, and he seemed to have already made plans for every Saturday in the foreseeable future.
Donald was not particularly pleased then when I told him I had made an appointment for us to meet the realtor at the house on the first Saturday of November. He seemed apprehensive, even frightened, at the prospect of visiting his one-time childhood home. His disquietude was so great, in fact, that I began to wonder if something had happened to him there, something perhaps that he had repressed in his memory. To me, that was all the more reason to take him out there and face whatever it was that seemed to terrify him so.
We made an early start – so early that the silvery morn had yet to stir from its nest, and the croaking of the night heron among the reeds in the shallow pond behind our house could be plainly heard above the still chirping crickets. Dark clouds moved in from the west while we drove, imparting a damp heaviness to the air and an uneasy, electrical tension to the atmosphere. I could feel gusts of wind blowing the car and twice felt that Donald had almost lost control. He was preoccupied with driving and responded with irritable grunts or not at all to my few attempts at conversation.
As we approached the small town of Amunet, Donald turned off the highway and made a series of turns until we coasted down to the end of an asphalt lane that terminated in a cul-de-sac. Because of our early start, we arrived an hour before the eleven o’clock appointment. When Donald turned off the ignition, I found myself looking out the passenger window at a desolate two-story home with red brick construction on the first floor and a second-floor wooden overhang that had once been painted white, but which now was gray, cracked, peeling, and so warped that it bulged out over the brick, giving the whole house the appearance of sinking into the ground like a gravestone. A triangular wooden cornice over the front door was carved in strange images of the sun and the moon. The windows were intact but lusterless and lifeless, covered with the grime of years. A leafless bitternut hickory tree dominated the front yard, its gnarled branches floundering in the misty squall like fingers grasping at something in the dark. It was tall, but bent near the top as if it bowed its head in shame that its fruit should be so unfit for human consumption. Forlorn and gloomy, the house seemed to be reaching out for help, but was choked back in its effort by the dry weeds that swallowed up the walkway and the dead, brown leaves that rustled and swirled up in the cold wind.
Without a word to Donald, I got out of our fourteen-year-old Nissan Altima and fought my way through the weeds up to the front door. Donald got out of the car, leaned over the roof on the driver’s side, and called, “What are you doing?”
“I want to go inside,” I answered.
“The agent won’t be here for another hour. She’s got the key.”
I was disappointed. I had not thought about that. I walked up to the door anyway and turned the rusted knob. To my surprise the door creaked open. “Donald, it’s not locked!” I called, and stepped inside. With the door open, the murky shadows from within the house struggled with the muted light from without. I stood in a narrow, glass enclosed vestibule. To the right, a wide, empty room opened up in the gloom. Its corners were strewn with cobwebs, and dust particles floated in the pallid shafts of light that fell aslant into it from the open doorway. To the left, a hallway trailed off into darkness.
I turned around to see Donald still leaning on the roof of the car from the driver’s side. “Aren’t you coming?” I called.
I couldn’t hear what he said over the wind, which was gusting now and bringing with it occasional large drops of cold, black rain. He didn’t budge from his spot on the other side of the car, so I waved my arms at him and called, “Donald, come inside. It’s going to rain. We’ll be more comfortable in here.”
I saw his shoulders droop in resignation, and he slowly shuffled through the desiccated weeds and dead leaves to the door. “I don’t know how I let you talk me into this,” he said, peering into the shadowy vestibule. “I really… I really don’t want to be here.”
A roll of distant thunder made itself heard over the wind. “Wow! It sounds like we’re going to have a real storm,” I said, pulling him inside by a button of his shirt.
I pulled him further in, into the large, empty room on the right. Heavy curtains hung over the picture window in this room, leaving it in a diffuse, depressing darkness. Because of the dampness of the impending storm, the room was clammy. The plaster on the walls was wet. “So, was this the living room?”
“Yeah,” replied Donald, turning around and looking about as if he were not quite sure. “Yeah, we had a big sofa sitting under the window here. Chairs and a coffee table here in front of the sofa.” He took four or five steps towards the far wall where the room branched into an “L” shape. “This was the dining area,” he continued. “I hardly remember ever being here at all. My mother always kept these two rooms spotless, in case… in case we had any guests. ”
“Oh, look!” I said. “A piano!”
Donald stepped towards the far corner of the room where an upright piano stood in a corner enshrouded with cobwebs and dust. “We never had a piano,” Donald said. “It must have been left by the renters. They…”
“Oh my God!” I screamed – when Donald approached, the piano began playing notes by itself.
“Damme!” Donald said after he had caught his breath. “It was just some mice inside the piano. I frightened them, I guess, when I got close.”
I felt embarrassed. “Well, they just about scared me half to death! For a second I thought it was the ghost.”
Donald said nothing. This was the first time either of us had mentioned the ghost since our initial conversation about the house. He stood immobile for a long time facing away from me. I wished I had kept my mouth shut. Until that moment, Donald had seemed relatively relaxed, and I had been pleased that I had brought him into the house. But now, as the sky outside grew bleak and threatening and we heard the beating of rain on the roof, the shadows inside grew deeper and more intense, and Donald seemed to shrink in front of me, assuming the dimensions of a dwarf in the shadows. I felt the hairs on the back of my neck tingle.
After what seemed an interminable interval, Donald stepped away from the piano and passed languidly through another door. I followed him into a room that was dark as night. The windows to this room had been boarded up with plywood. We could hear the wind and the rain without. “This was the family room,” he said in a voice that was barely audible and that contained a hint of melancholy. “This is where I remember spending a lot of time. Dad kept a small table with a chess set over here. He taught me to play chess right here.”
Suddenly, Donald fell heavily to the floor. “Be careful!” I cried out. Donald had tripped over an old carpet that had been pulled back and partially rolled up near the far end of the room.
“Here, I’ve got a penlight in my bag,” I said. “It’s so dark in here!”
Donald had some difficulty in opening a sliding wooden door. It made a heavy clunking sound. “Here’s the kitchen,” he said.
The window over the sink, bare of curtains, provided a relatively brighter aspect to the room, but it was so covered with black soot that it was almost opaque to the faint light peeping in from outside. An awning protected the window from the rain, but through the grime we could see it coming down in heavy sheets. It beat against the outside walls and pounded on the roof. We heard it pulsating in the gutters and spewing down the drainpipes. The rumbling thunder seemed to engulf the entire structure. It was not the crackling, explosive thunder that accompanies lightning flashes, but a slow, threatening, growling thunder like the snarling of an angry dog. The interior wall of the kitchen was carved into a semi-circular breakfast nook. Next to that, a door stood open on its hinges, beckoning, it seemed to me, and through the opening – blackness.
“Where does that lead, Donald?” I asked. “Into the basement?”
When Donald didn’t answer, I turned to look at him. He was standing with his back to the window so that I couldn’t see his face in the hazy shadow cast from behind. I shone the penlight on his face. The expression there was ghastly. His eyes were wide open, bloodshot, and filled with inexorable terror. His lips quivered. His breath came in shallow gulps. He stared at the open door as if in a trance.
I turned back and pointed my penlight at the open door expecting – I don’t know what – some sort of aerial form gliding up the black stairs. But there was nothing, only the open door leading down into an impenetrable darkness.
“Donald,” I said. “Something is wrong. Something is wrong about you and this house. I’ve known it since you first mentioned it to me. Something happened to you in the basement. I know it. What happened to you here, Donald?”
Donald shaded his face with his hands so that I couldn’t see his eyes.
“Donald! It’s okay. You can tell me.”
Donald didn’t budge from where he was standing, but in the shadows, I saw his breast heave violently, his psyche grappling with some unutterable recollection.
“Come with me, Donald. I’m going down there.”
“No!” he cried. He tried to resist, but he was like a child now and yielded easily. I pulled him gently but firmly down the stairs after me. The dim beam from my penlight barely penetrated the blackness and failed in its attempt to fight through the gloom. A heaviness in the atmosphere hovered over us, suffocating us.
Without a word, Donald slowly reached for my hand and directed the ray from my penlight towards the wall underneath the staircase where a small door, no more than four feet high, stood padlocked. As I stood there pointing the flashlight toward the door, Donald trembled, and tears ran down his cheeks leaving streaks like rain down a dusty window.
“What’s that, Donald? What is that room?”
He spoke, but not in his own voice – he spoke in a high-pitched, quavering voice that seemed to escape his lips like cold air rising from a tomb. “That…” he said, “That we used to call the Dark Room.”
His face, smoldering in the darkness, materialized out of the gloom. “It’s only a broom closet, but… but it extends with the ceiling sloping downward under the stairs. We… Sometimes…” He stopped, gulped, and took several short, sobbing breaths.
“Once…” He stopped again and was unable to complete his thought. He was utterly wretched in his nightmarish memory.
“Oh, Donald!” I cried guessing at what happened. “Did someone abuse you? Did some monster lock you in there? Oh, Donald! It’s okay. You can tell me.”
He continued to stand there, eyes fixed on the door, panting for breath.
“Oh, Donald! I just knew something horrible happened to you here. If you just tell me about it…” and I put my arms around him and held him tight.
He pushed me away, trembling. Then he looked at me with a face disfigured by anguish, mournful eyes that glowed unsteadily in the darkness. His voice changed again – from the thin, high-pitched wail to a low, husky, tremulous croak. He said, “No. No. You… you don’t understand. It was not like that. It was… It was me – I was the monster!”
I dropped the penlight, and we were engulfed in utter blackness. The only sounds were the snarling thunder outside and the deep, dreadful croaking of Donald’s voice. He spoke slowly and laboriously in the darkness.
“It was the day we moved away from here. I was seven years old. My friend Tommy Shane and his sister were here playing with me here in the basement. Melanie. That was her name. She was four years old. She always tagged along with Tommy, and she was always getting in the way. We were mean to her, we tried to get rid of her, but she would never leave us alone. Then, that day…”
“Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God!” I whispered.
“That day, when Dad called downstairs and said it was time to go, Tommy and I looked at each other. I remember… I remember that we… we smiled. No, no, it… it was more like a smirk, a fiendish smirk. I opened the door to the Dark Room and… and Tommy pushed her in. Then I closed the door and locked it – with a padlock.”
“You didn’t leave her, Donald! Please tell me you didn’t leave her!” I cried wildly, flailing with my hands in the darkness.
“Tommy and I ran upstairs laughing – laughing! Dad and my mother were already at the front door. They couldn’t hear her screaming from the Dark Room.” Donald took a deep breath and then, in a hoarse, wailing, monstrous cry that reverberated in the depths of the darkness – he howled, “She’s still in there!”
The next thing I knew, he had picked up my penlight and was now tearing at the padlock with his fingers and kicking at the door like a madman. I had visions of a small skeleton lying in a heap on the other side of the door. Donald flashed the light around, looking for some sort of tool with which to force the lock.
“No, Donald, no!” I cried. I ran up the stairs to the kitchen. Donald followed. We both bent over, gasping for breath. We remained for some minutes, breathless and motionless. He looked at me with panic in his eyes, and I regarded him with a mixture of horror, misery and compassion.
“I’ve dreaded this day for so long,” he said, still panting for breath. “But I’ve always known it would come. All these years, the guilt, the remorse… It’s like I have been locked in there with her… Oh, my soul! Oh, the unbearable guilt! Only God knows how I have suffered all these years!”
I fought back the immediate impulse to shrink away from him; instead, I put my arms around him and embraced him – after all, he was still my husband – while he wept like a child.
We made our way, arms clasped around each other, through the darkened rooms and cobwebs to the front door. The wind had abated somewhat in its vehemence, the rain had all but stopped, and the thunder rumbled now in the distance. As we walked slowly to the car, a new thought struck me.
“Donald,” I said, “The people… the family of the little girl – where did they live?”
“Just over there,” he said pointing to a large wooden frame house three doors down painted white with a large picture window in front to let in the light.
“Donald,” I said as gently as possible. “We have to go there. We have to…”
“Good God! How can I go there?” he cried. “What could I say to them?”
“We have to tell them what happened. They have to know.”
“But… but for all I know, they don’t even live there anymore.”
“Then, we have to go see.” Donald’s knees had turned to rubber, and he leaned heavily on me for support. He offered no resistance. I knew that facing Melanie’s parents and revealing the awful truth would be horrible for him, but I also knew it was necessary – and must be done before we went to the police.
I rang the bell. Light footsteps from within portended the opening of the door. A pleasant looking woman with clear blue eyes and amiable features peered out at Donald and me with no small degree of curiosity – we must have presented her with quite a sight, considering the emotional ordeal we were going through. “May I help you?” she asked innocently.
Donald was beyond speech at this point, so I said, “Yes. We are looking for Mr. or Mrs. Shane.”
The woman looked at me quizzically, so I explained, “Mr. or Mrs. Shane who would have been living here forty years ago.”
“Forty years ago! My heaven!” exclaimed the woman. “Then you must mean my parents, but I’m afraid they both passed away a long time ago.”
“And your name is…?”
“My name is Melanie Shane. Oh, heavens! What’s the matter?”
Donald had staggered back a step and would have fallen, had I not caught him.
“Melanie Shane?” I repeated. “The sister of Tommy Shane?”
“Yes, that’s right,” said the woman, “but please step inside. Is he ill?”
She led us to a comfortable divan and sat herself down on a hassock, leaning toward us. Donald had recovered somewhat, but I found that I had to do all the talking.
“I’m sorry to have barged in on you like this,” I began. “My name is Lucy, Lucy Dunkle. My husband here is Donald Dunkle. Does that name mean anything to you? From your childhood?”
“Why, yes. I remember that name. He was a friend of my brother Tommy,” she replied. Then she turned to Donald and said, “Donald, I’m so surprised you would remember me. Why it must be forty years. We were so very young then.”
“I… I don’t know what to say,” said Donald. “I didn’t know…”
I took over for Donald, who was incapable of carrying on the conversation. “We recently inherited the house down the street where Donald used to live. He was telling me a story about the day his family moved away. He said that he and Tommy…”
“Oh, I remember that day,” said Melanie, whose cheeks flushed suddenly. “It is one of my earliest memories. Donald told you then, what he and Tommy did to me?”
“That they locked you in the Dark Room under the stairs?”
“That was so mean of them!” She said this with a smile, but still her cheeks colored at the remembrance. “Tommy came home and told my father. By that time, Donald and his parents were already gone. My father had to break in the back door to get into the house and then break the latch on the Dark Room door to get me out. I was scared to death. Why, I bet I was locked in there more than twenty minutes!”
“Twenty minutes!” exclaimed Donald weakly.
“Tommy got in a lot of trouble for that one,” she continued, laughing. Then, turning to Donald, she said, “You’re lucky you got away without punishment.”
“Without punishment!” Donald murmured.
“And so you came here looking for my parents?” asked Melanie, turning again to me.
“Yes,” I replied. “You see, we are planning to fix up the old house and put it on the market. Donald wanted to stop in to inquire about you and Tommy. But he started feeling faint a while ago. I think it was the darkness of the storm. He’s had this fear of darkness ever since he was small.”
“Yes. Yes, that’s it,” said Donald, partially regaining his composure. “But… but I’m better now, and… and, oh, I’m so happy to see you!”
“Hmmmph!” said Melanie with a toss of her head and a gay laugh. “As I remember, you were never very happy to see me when we were children.” Then she turned again to me and said, “He and Tommy were always trying to get away from me, but leaving me locked me up in the Dark Room – that was the worst. Oh, well,” she said carelessly. “I suppose I’ll have to forgive them. They were only boys at the time.”
“Oh, the real estate agent. I almost forgot,” I said, standing up, “We’re supposed to meet the agent at the house. We had better go now. Perhaps we will stop by once we have finished with her.”
“Feel free to stop by anytime you like,” said Melanie. “And Donald, it was very nice to see you again. I’ll tell Tommy when I talk with him next. And please,” she said examining Donald with some uncertainty as we walked out the door, “take care of yourself.”
* * * * * * * * * * * *
Renovation of the old house was completed in five months. It needed to be totally rewired and new plumbing put in. I drove out to Amunet every few weeks to observe the progress – by myself, as Donald still didn’t like to go out there. I called on Melanie during each visit, and we struck up a warm friendship. I had the contractor remove the wall from under the stairs – in effect, demolishing the Dark Room.
Then one day Donald came home with the news that the real estate agent had called him. “It’s done!” he exclaimed with newfound vitality. “We sold it! And we got our asking price, too.”
“That’s wonderful news, Donald!”
“And I have another surprise for you, too,” he said.
“What are these?”
“These are airline tickets,” he said, and then he handed me some other documents. “And these are travel brochures – for Brazil and Argentina!”
“Oh, Donald!”
He smiled with unrestrained pleasure as he held me in his arms and I nestled my head against his chest. After twenty-three years of marriage, I didn’t expect or need the passionate kiss. It was enough for me to know that, after such a long, long time, Donald had finally stepped out of the Dark Room and into the light.
The End
* Then, like a person who has stumbled upon some object in the dark, she wondered what she had got; mentally walked round it, estimated it; whether it were rare or common; contained gold, silver, or lead; were a clog or a pedestal, everything to her or nothing.
Thomas Hardy. An Imaginative Woman. 1893.