Fear the Darkness: A Thriller Page 15

  “Can I come over?”

  “Is it your niece again?”

  “No, it’s worse.”

  “How bad is it?”

  “It’s martini bad. It’s dirty martini and extra blue cheese olives bad.”

  “I’m out of vodka. I can’t stay out long, but meet me at Ramone’s.”

  That was off the lobby at the Westin on Ina, what for Mallory amounted to a neighborhood bar. She was already there, her stool swiveled in my direction, while a bartender she probably knew poured our martinis over so many blue cheese olives they looked more like a salad than a drink. He smiled at me as if somehow aware that this was serious. Either that or Mallory had been flirting with him while she waited for me.

  “This attractive young man is William,” she said. “He’s studying for a mechanical engineering degree.”

  I said hello to William, and he drifted off, likely having been instructed to leave us alone.

  Mallory raised her glass, and I clinked obediently if without enthusiasm. She sipped and said, “It’s about Neilsen, I figured out that much. What happened?”

  I ate an olive. I hedged. “He gave me a prescription for antidepressants.”

  “That’s what they all do these days. Especially women.” She cocked her head as if questioning, was this why I sounded the alarm? “Rextal slow release, twenty milligrams?”

  “That’s the one.” We were too honest to pretend. “I looked in your medicine cabinet. He gave it to you, too.”

  “I tried it. As you know, Valium is my drug of choice. But maybe you are a little depressed with having your home so out of your control. I hear it takes a couple of weeks for antidepressants to do any good, so stick with it. And you probably shouldn’t drink.” She eyed my martini, and I ignored her. “Is that all he did?”

  “He was going to run some blood tests. And he gave me a referral to a neurologist. A specialist in movement disorders.”

  She didn’t ask what for, she only blinked. I thought she had read enough about movement disorders to have already come to the same conclusion before Neilsen had.

  I gulped, realizing I was telling my friend before my husband, but I had reached the point of no return. “He thinks there’s a small chance I have Parkinson’s disease.”

  Even if she already had guessed, that made Mallory gasp. “Oh my God.”

  “See, that’s why I don’t want to tell Carlo. I’m afraid he’s going to react that way, and it scares me. And while I’m on the subject, would you not talk about this with Carlo? I don’t want him to worry until there’s something to worry about.”

  “Of course. But you need to tell him, and you need to make this your priority. You’re the one I care about. The Gemma-Kate foolishness, your investigating business, you need to put everything on the back burner and resolve this. You’re supposed to be retired, for God’s sake. I don’t know if anyone has ever told you this before, but you’re a little … driven.”

  “This is just who I am,” I said.

  Mallory laughed. “I can see it on your tombstone now, NEVER TOOK LUNCH.”

  That made me laugh, too, which I needed. “You’re busy,” I protested. “All the charities.”

  “Yes, but I admit that’s my antidepressant. For me it’s a matter of survival.”

  * * *

  Even though I still wasn’t sure I needed it, I picked up the prescription and some Pepto-Bismol at the same time, taking a swig in the car. I thought about dinner. I wasn’t hungry—the olives had filled me up, and I was still feeling a little sick to my stomach—but we had to eat. Well, Carlo had to eat. Still angry about Gemma-Kate hiding the toad, I wasn’t caring much what she did. I stopped at a Chinese restaurant and picked up some moo shu pork. The smell of it made me want to vomit, but maybe the other two would find it palatable.

  Loss of appetite. Check.

  When I walked into the house I heard loud music. Gemma-Kate in her room. Not singing, just staring at the TV, drinking a Coke. She looked up at me, a little blurry around the eyes, and not a happy blurry. She didn’t bother to hide a frown. Without turning her gaze from me, she automatically lifted the remote and turned down the volume.

  I went into the kitchen and pulled open the door to the cabinet where we keep the liquor we hardly drink. Carlo just has this thing about wanting to keep it stocked in case a guest wants a margarita. The bottles were all opened and the levels down slightly. Gemma-Kate had been at them, and I knew the pattern. A little from this bottle, a little from that, so it wasn’t obvious. Now that she had tipped her hand, she wasn’t trying as hard to play the sweet innocent.

  Neilsen and Mallory had been right about one thing. My very face felt heavy with depression having this load in the house. You’d think someone in my position would be able to figure out the options, take control. But I couldn’t see what to do, and whenever I tried to think, my mind hit a wall. I felt powerless. I figured Gemma-Kate might weigh a little more than a hundred pounds, but I was carrying every ounce of her, and pushing against a wall that wouldn’t budge.

  I took one of the pills.

  Gemma-Kate was kind enough to set the table and dish out the Chinese food.

  Twenty–eight

  The pill didn’t make me feel any better, though at bedtime I fell asleep easily enough. But at some point I had a dream I hadn’t had for a long time. I’m beating someone up, pulping their face with my fists. I stop and look closely, the face just barely recognizable through the blood. The person I’m beating up is me. I don’t like that dream. It woke me up with the sensation of a whishing sound in the ear that was pressed to the pillow. The clock said 3:07.

  I had to pee, of course. It was very dark with no moonshine to light the room. As a matter of fact, the room was darker than it usually was. No illumination from the night-light in the bathroom, or the little bulb on the ceiling smoke alarm that says the batteries are good. Even the digital numbers on the clock beside my bed had vanished. I wondered if the power had gone off.

  Groggy, not thinking that this was odd, I held my hands out before me to take the few steps to the wall where I could feel my way down the short hall to the bathroom. I took the few steps. I could not feel the wall. I took a few more steps. Still nothing but blackness, no solid surface under my fingertips.

  No longer groggy, I carefully stepped out some more. I was aware of the carpet under my bare feet, that much I could be certain of. I curled my toes, taking comfort in the familiar feel of the Berber, remembering how I had had this particular weave installed not long ago. It’s beige, I thought. That much is certain. But other than that, I could have been alone in the furthest reaches of outer space.

  I turned slightly, in the direction I thought must be back to the bed, and couldn’t see anything in that direction either. No light at all coming through the window blinds, if indeed I was looking at the window. I couldn’t tell.

  I stepped back toward the bed to get my bearings and begin again. Stepped again. As far as I could tell the bed had disappeared.

  “Carlo,” I whispered, not wanting to wake him up to discover his crazy wife surely standing at the side of the bed sleepwalking in a bad dream. “Carlo.” But I couldn’t hear my voice. What I am embarrassed to call terror started to settle into my brain and make me afraid to try either moving or speaking, neither of which seemed to work for me this night.

  Then I heard something. A whimpering. A dog whimpering, the same sound as I’d heard the other night coming from Gemma-Kate’s room. Thinking if I could not find something to see or touch, this at least was something I could hear, I moved in its direction. I hoped I could get there before whatever or whoever was making the dog whimper.

  Hearing only the dog and feeling only the carpeting under my feet, I stepped as fast as one can when blind, waving my arms slowly around me so I wouldn’t unexpectedly connect with anything hard and hurtful. I kept on this way for … I understand it’s crazy to say it, but the sensation of the passage of time was in hours. Not walking, but stepp
ing gingerly through the dark, increasingly fearful for the dog, whose whimper kept at the same intensity without ever coming closer.

  I must have entered the living room area by now, I thought. I had been walking so long. I kept going.

  Then something changed. Instead of the carpet, in the space of a single step the soles of my feet were hurt by the gravel that covers our backyard. I could not remember coming out the door. If I was in the backyard it was still all blackness and no sound. Houses away off across the valley that contained the Cañada del Oro wash always had some lights on somewhere no matter what the time, but tonight they were dark. No lights, and no stars either.

  No sound of traffic on Golder Ranch Road, which ran east and west just a few houses down from us. No night birds. No rustle of the paloverde branches in the breeze. Not even my own breath. I opened my mouth and tried to push sound out of it, any sound, felt the air come from my lungs and my throat and tongue strain, but nothing came.

  Even the sound of the dog whimpering was gone now.

  I stood this way, that same terror ballooning. Yet it was mixed with a share of some detached perplexity. If I could see, I would be staring at myself, wondering what I would do next. It was as if that thing that happens to me in times of danger was terminal. As if I had truly finally drained out of myself for good and would from now on be only a witness to my existence.

  I stood there, not wanting to step further and feel the pain of the gravel on the soles of my feet, and not even knowing which was the way to go to get back in the house.

  The darkness hit me like a great winged thing from a nightmare. I was knocked over by the nonbeingness of it. With that same feeling of witness I observed myself strain against it. Without success, I struggled, was pinned to the ground, unable to so much as raise my head against this invisible foe. I felt a pressure on my chest, the feeling of being slowly suffocated by the night. I tried to scream, but the night prevented it, filling my mouth with blackness.

  The porch light went on.

  Night dispelled in that single moment, I turned my head to the right and found myself staring at one of the bare feet of the life-sized statue of St. Francis. Big foot, was my first thought. When I looked up again I saw Gemma-Kate looking down at me. She didn’t have a flashlight, nothing but the porch light way off behind her, but my eyes must have been accustomed to the dark and I could easily see her silhouette against a sky filled again with stars. Didn’t need to say anything; for now it was enough to process this reality.

  Then she said, “I saw the back door open. I heard you yell.”

  Did I cry out? I couldn’t remember. I clutched the hand of my niece when she offered it, not caring if this was my assailant, only glad for the touch of a real human being no matter who it was. I didn’t get up at first, just clutched the hand. “What’s wrong with me?” I asked her. I felt too weak to ask the real question: What have you done?

  “Beats me,” she said, and tugged on my hand.

  Then I responded, let her pull me up off the gravel into a standing position, leaned on her a bit as I meekly allowed myself to be led inside the house from a night in which, besides all the stars reappearing, all the houses blinked with a hundred lights in the distance. The headlights of a car coming down the hill on Golder Ranch gleamed, disappeared as it went around a turn, then appeared again.

  Inside the house it was the same, the clock on the microwave illuminated, the bulb in the living room smoke alarm on, all those half-dozen points of light that I usually took for granted. They didn’t light the house but they made it not-black, partly because my eyes had grown accustomed to the dark, but mostly because I was seeing clearly and not caught in whatever nightmare or delusion or hallucination had gripped me. In this dim light I could see the Pug lying on the kitchen tile by her water dish. I went to her and she was fast asleep, her breathing steady and not even a moof coming from her. I picked her up. She hardly woke. As if she was drugged.

  Gemma-Kate took my arm. “Do you want me to take you to your bed?” she asked. Her words were soft and measured. She sounded like she was talking to a crazy woman.

  I said no, and heard myself say it. It sounded feeble. “I’ll be okay. It was just a dream,” I said, and took the Pug with me into the bedroom, where I closed and locked the door. The little lights in this room and the bath off to the side were on again, too. I easily found and got into the bed. I was grateful that Carlo had not awoken, that it was my niece who found me. I looked at the clock.

  The time was 3:19.

  I might have remained gripped in the terror I had felt just moments before, felt it drive into me anew with the realization of how little time had passed since I awoke to it, but it had exhausted me and I fell asleep, my hand on the warm Pug, telling myself the dog was real.

  Twenty–nine

  I must have relaxed enough to doze off again because at five the next morning I slammed awake with the sense that my heart had been pounding for some time. I still felt sick to my stomach, too, though partly because of the thought of what had happened the night before, or not happened at all.

  Neilsen had told me the antidepressant could take up to three weeks before I began to feel any real effect, so I shouldn’t stop taking it. After three weeks, he had said, we would reassess. And in the meantime if my blood work came back with anything suspicious he would call me. So I took another pill that morning, and an hour later threw up my breakfast.

  Looking back, the connections might seem obvious to anyone else, but that morning I could still make no successful link between the way I was feeling and the poisoned Pug. After all, we knew what had happened to the Pug, and I was absolutely certain I hadn’t eaten a toad. As for my symptoms, what I was feeling didn’t seem in keeping with someone who is poisoned. The vomiting maybe, but not the anxiety. Not what I was slowly coming to admit were hallucinations. A person who has ingested something would feel lethargic. I felt more like a hungover gerbil, nauseous yet still hyper. And Carlo seemed to be just fine. This is to explain why I didn’t suspect Gemma-Kate might have slipped something into the Chinese food when she dished it out for us the evening before. I didn’t suspect poison at all.

  I reached for the cell phone on my nightstand and called Neilsen’s office, got the nurse. She said antidepressants can sometimes cause nausea at first and said she’d call in a prescription for an antiemetic. Antiemetic, antidepressant, antibiotic. Someday I wanted a drug that was pro-something. I wanted to ask her about hallucinations but didn’t.

  What really bumped me over the edge a bit was passing by my office and seeing Gemma-Kate sitting at my desk, the referral to the movement disorder specialist in her hand.

  I could have sworn I put it somewhere safer, possibly folded under a book or something. If I hadn’t had such a rocky night I might have been more polite. But how do you respond when you see someone reading your private shit and know she’s been moving things around?

  “Put that down and get out,” I said.

  Carlo was immediately behind me. “Is everything all right?” he asked. I wondered why he had been following me around. Or had I spoken a little more loudly than I remember and it caused him to run?

  I squeezed my eyes shut, trying to shake off a mood made up of equal parts stress and a flare-up of anger that had been in control for some months. “This room is off-limits,” I said, and gestured with my thumb out the door.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, though kind of mechanically. She stood without objection, went into her own room, and shut her door.

  That door stood like a judgment till midmorning. We hadn’t talked about the events in the middle of the night.

  I went back to bed and couldn’t bring myself to get out again. This felt more like depression than ever before, but I knew I couldn’t count on the pills to bring me out that quickly. My muscles felt immobilized while my brain sort of vibrated, like I was living in two different bodies at once, one that couldn’t stop and one that couldn’t go. It was maddening. I worried about
what Tim Neilsen told me, about the possibility of having Parkinson’s, but was too scared to either make the appointment for the tests or look up on the Internet to see exactly what the disease was and what might be in store for me.

  When I felt a little better I typed some notes about Joe Neilsen’s case in my laptop and made an appointment to see Elias Manwaring on Monday to ask him about who made up the church youth group. That was the most I could do.

  I told Carlo I must have some sort of flu and asked would he pick up a prescription. Carlo was attentive as a man could be, though they don’t make good nurses at the best of times, and even Gemma-Kate was better, coming into the room carrying the female Pug, which she placed next to me for comfort. I was comforted when I saw her put the dog down. The pills settled my stomach, and when it came time for lunch Gemma-Kate made me a grilled cheese with sliced onions and tomatoes in it, which was quite good and which I kept down.

  Gemma-Kate’s ministrations made me remember how solicitous she had been with me the night before when she found me in the yard. Is this how she had been with her mother? I wondered. I thought about Mom saying what a good little nurse she was. She’s more comfortable with invalids, I thought. More sweet-natured when she’s dealing with someone sick.

  I didn’t want to think about the night before, or about being somehow sick and in need of care.

  Thirty

  By Sunday morning there had been no more hallucinations except for a few little things, like momentarily thinking my sister, Ariel, had come to stay with us and wondering where she would sleep. The kinds of things you dream, only you’re awake. The antinausea meds seemed to have kicked in a bit, so I went to church with Carlo. He talked Gemma-Kate into joining us. She resisted, then put on a dress I’d never seen before, one that showed her ample curves without being out-and-out slutty, and we went.