Eden did not sleep. She chose the first bedroom at the top of the stairs, unable to force herself to walk the length of the unlit hallway, and sat alert and huddled in her quilt. The lamp, with its pink frosted shade, produced a weak, shivering light that only enhanced the shadows in the room.
The house breathed around her, filled with darkness again and satisfied. She listened to the sly slithering of the dark over the bare wood of the stairs, and over the panels of her closed door. The doorknob trembled once, on the verge of turning, and she bit her lips to stop her scream. Once she started, she knew she wouldn’t stop.
A thin wisp of shadow curled from the keyhole, like smoke from the barrel of a gun, but gaining a pendulous weight as it came. She watched it drop toward the floor, twisting into a quivering winged creature with black fern-frond antennae, a moth. It fluttered toward her, and she covered her face and slipped down on the bed as its cold, soft feet touched her shoulder. Undeterred by the feeble light, it opened its wings and flowed over her half-fainting body in a glacial caress.
In the morning, she nearly wept with relief when Coop’s old Ford rattled down the lane. She watched him from the open kitchen windows, hidden behind the stiff white cotton of the new curtains. The smells of bleach and pine cleaner eddied across the floor and countertops, but never seemed to slip over the sills.
The kitchen was narrow and long, with yellow linoleum as crazed with fine lines as old porcelain. The bare floorboards showed through in spots, and she avoided the knotholes, afraid the dark of the cellar underneath would rise through them and twine about her ankles.
The early fog that lay over the ruined fields had just begun to burn away in the pale sunlight. She rubbed her arms against the cold and considered the immense black cook stove. It belonged in a museum. The kindling box beside it was full, though, and she opened the heavy door and shoved a few rough splits into the maw of the stove. Long matches, the kind her grandfather had called lucifers, hung in a tin box on the wall behind the iron behemoth. The tin had a scratch of sandpaper on its side to scrape fire from the matches.
She remembered how they had ignited with a sulfurous flare between Pap’s thick, work-roughened fingers, a light in the pre-dawn gloom of the kitchen, and how she had tried to stay in its corona. Pap had shooed her from under his feet in exasperation. Ain’t nothing in the dark that ain’t there in the light, Edie.
He’d been wrong, of course. As a child, she had imagined the dark as a ravenous beast waiting to eat her. It had lurked and terrified, but never had it touched her the way it had last night. She shuddered at the remembered feel of it on her skin, a reflex of revulsion and shameful arousal. Her therapist spoke up from his spotlighted wingchair in her head.
“There is more than one way of being consumed.” He had a sex-raddled mind, like so many of his ilk, and loved double entendres. “You say that you fear the dark will take you. Take you how?”
She reached over the broad stovetop for a match, jostling the pipe that fed into the brick chimney, putting out her hand to steady it. Something moved under it, like the quiver of a dying heart. She snatched her hand away, her breath stoppered in her lungs. Scratch, scratch. A weak ripple of sound and motion came from the enclosed darkness of the stovepipe. A high voice, from the outer reaches of her hearing, reverberated and wheedled. Let me out. Let me out. Let us all out.
The soft scrapes and bumps became a frenzy of wild knocking. The pipe rocked, ancient soot sifted onto the stovetop, and Eden recoiled from it until she felt the cold lip of the cast iron sink press the small of her back. She turned to the open window. Coop was outside, pouring fuel through a funnel into a chainsaw.
“Hey! There’s something caught in the stovepipe. Can you come in and look at it?” She was proud of her ability to master her voice.
He looked up, scowling. “Yeah, okay. Gimme a minute.”
She watched his broad back bend over the saw again. Behind her, the stove gonged and clattered as the dark tried to burst from the pipe. She whirled to face it, but her gaze fell on the exposed planks of the floor. Dark dwelled under there, too, a thick, flexing mass of it that pressed against the underside of the boards and glided beneath the diminutive portal of the knothole like a hungry sea monster.
“Hunger is only another word for desire, Eden. Your desire, your darkness.”
Her therapist’s voice. She put her hands over her ears, gauging the distance to the front door. She would have to pass over the hole in the plank, and now it seemed like a night-blown eye that watched her.
“Stop, stop, please stop,” she whispered. Her breath hung in the cold air.
The stove fell silent. The surging darkness beneath her feet dissipated. The eye in the floor was only a knothole in a century-old plank of oak. She grabbed a dishtowel and flung it over the hole, then approached the stove.
She touched it with a tentative finger. It remained quiet. She looked toward the window, but she could not see Coop. She let her hand rest on the stove, and something gave the slightest bump under one of the flat, heavy burner plates. Reflexively, she yanked the plate up.
For the space of a heartbeat, she stared down at liquid, boiling darkness, and then it erupted from the burner in a tide of slapping wings and high-pitched tittering. Hundreds of bats flew from the stove and swooped about the room, the icy needles of their teeth and claws piercing her. Eden fell to her knees shrieking, her arms over her head.
Boots pounded up the front steps. The kitchen door swung open hard enough to bash the wall, and Coop strode to her and dragged her to her feet.
“What the hell’s wrong? You hurt?”
He held her at arm’s length and surveyed her. His gaze raked the empty room.
“What’s all the screaming about?”
Eden drew herself up and tried to give him a haughty look, but her shaking voice ruined the effect.
“There were bats in the stove. They flew out, right in my face. They bit me!” They both looked down at the unmarred flesh of her arms. “They must have gone out the window,” she whispered.
Coop stared at her. He gave a low whistle, and wagged his head slowly.
“Bats attacked you? And they all just flew away, huh? Damn, you’re wound up tight, honey.”
“I’m not making it up,” she huffed. “And I don’t appreciate your tone, Mr. Stillwater.”
“Yeah? Well, I bet you’ll appreciate me starting a fire for you. It’s freezing in here.”
He reached over her shoulder for a match from the tin on the wall. Pinned between Coop and the stove, she felt the heat of him and one hard thigh pressed against hers. She bent under the arc of his body, and he looked down at her. He grinned, neat white teeth, the better to eat her with.
“’Scuse me,” he growled. “You might want to go shut that window.”
He didn’t move, and she slid away from him, her breasts brushing against the front of his sweatshirt. She closed the window and bent over the sink, struggling to regain her composure. She heard the blessed scrape of the match. When she turned from the window, he was lighting a twist of old newspaper from the kindling box and feeding it to the dry wood.
“There. That’ll take the chill off until I can get down cellar and see to the furnace. I called Rod Ashton. He’s bringing a load of coal out today.”
The fire burned away the dark inside the stove, and Eden felt ridiculously grateful.
“Thank you.”
He stood, shutting the stove door with his foot, and looked her up and down. “My pleasure. You need me for anything else?”
The growling voice was now a syrupy purr. She thought of the weight of him against her and felt a blush creep to the roots of her hair.
“No. What are you going to do with the chainsaw?”
“Gonna cut up that rotten sycamore that fell behind the house. Clear out your family plot.”
She had forgotten the old cemetery. There had been no burials there for ages. Her grandfather lay in the churchyard at Gypsy Corner. As ever, her mind flew like an arrow to the possibility of darkness, and there was plenty. Plenty in the deep graves, sealed as they were with earth. Plenty in the plain stone mausoleum that sheltered the house’s builders. The plot was a crumbling Victorian tribute to death, and darkness curled there like a snake ready to strike.
“Can’t we just leave it as it is?”
Coop ran a hand through his hair and snugged his ball cap down.
“You can suit yourself, but it’s a mess. Full of snakes.” His words echoed her thoughts, and she could not speak. He nodded. “Right. I’ll get to it. Get you some good firewood piled up.”
He left the kitchen, carelessly kicking aside the towel that covered the knothole in the floor. A clot of darkness climbed from it and scurried after him on spidery legs, and Eden clapped both hands over her mouth. Coop went out the door, and the little fiend that sprang at his ankle puffed away to nothing in the sunlight.
She watched him from the kitchen windows, no longer bothering to hide behind the curtains. It had never occurred to her that the dark locked in the roots of the old farm might be interested in anyone but her. Perhaps it wasn’t a personal demon after all.
Coop stalked through the yard, lithe and dangerous. He swung the chainsaw up and moved out of sight, and soon she heard the mean snarl of it as it bit into the white corpse of the sycamore. With every task, he stirred the famished flood of darkness she knew waited.
Her gaze fell on the kitchen garden, now tidy and ready for the next spring planting. The tomatoes stood against the fence, ragged but still stubbornly fruiting. Coop had not touched them. He was allergic to them, she recalled. To him they were love apples, such a romantic name for an acidic, potentially deadly weed. The plants had been robust and now sprawled decadently, their remaining fruits hanging from dying stalks. Some were still green, but those that had ripened were black.
***
The coal arrived in the late afternoon in a slat-sided pseudo-dump truck, Ashton Hauling hand painted on its doors. The sun had been strong all day, and the house was so warm that Eden could not imagine the need to fire up the ancient furnace. Coop had spent several hours in the cellar, banging and ratcheting at it, and now she could see him in the kitchen garden.
Stripped to the waist, he rinsed the grime, the dark, from his body with the garden hose. The water sluiced suggestively over the terrain of muscle and smooth, tanned skin. It made him glisten and dampened the waistband of his jeans where they rode low on his hips. Delicious.
Eden started, unsure if the whispered word came from the watchful dark beneath the floor, or if it was her own libidinous thought. Coop shook his wet hair out of his face and shouted a greeting to Ashton as the truck pulled up.
“Drive it on around to the side of the house. I’ve got the coal chute open.”
He pulled his sweatshirt over his head and followed the truck, and Eden went out to watch the house swallow the coal. The west side of the house baked in the full brunt of the late day sun, but the cellar was deep and allowed the light no entrance. The coal vanished into the fathomless dark as though absorbed, all its obsidian flashes snuffed out. Coop bent, heaved open the door of the cellar hatchway, and hopped down onto the first of the stone steps.
“Hand me that rake,” he said, pointing at the tool leaning against the house.
Eden fetched it. The lowering sun slipped down to the second step and stopped as though at a drawn line. Below Coop, the dark swirled and buckled, shaping itself and collapsing again into turmoil.
“Don’t go down there,” she blurted. She handed him the rake, but did not release it.
“Why not? I been down there half the day already. I have to rake that coal out in the bin.” He tugged at the rake. “C’mon, let go. You afraid of the dark or something?”
She stared at him, stricken, and he gaped up at her.
“You are, ain’t you? A grown woman. Nothin in the dark that’s not there in the light.”
He pulled the rake from her hand and descended into the pool of living darkness. She watched it lap over his knees, his thighs, and then he was immersed in it, a dim ghost suspended in the crawling gloom. It climbed him, wound about him in tentacled eroticism, and she felt horror, yes, but also a tickle of speculative lust. Could he feel its inky hands all over him?
She knelt by the hatch. “Coop,” she said, her voice husky.
He squinted up into the light. “See? It’s okay. Clammy and musty, is all.” He shrugged and ducked his head as a whip of darkness slid up his neck, nuzzled his ear. “Damn cobwebs. I’ll be up in a minute, nothin’s gonna eat me.”
He moved out of sight, and she heard the rake sharpen its teeth on the coal. She looked over at the rumbling chute and saw Ashton staring at her. He grinned and touched the brim of his hat. Eden’s face flamed bright as the spreading sunset.
***
Another night crept down from the hills. She stood by the garden gate and pulled her sweater tight around her. Coop, silhouetted against the dying sun, tossed his tool belt into his truck. He dragged a six-pack of beer from a cooler in the bed, tugged a can free, and held it out to her.
“Sweat of the Devil’s brow,” he said.
She took it and popped the tab. “Do you believe in the Devil, Coop?”
He flashed a wolfish grin. “Not me. Been called a devil, though.”
“I’m sure. Listen, I’ve been thinking. Maybe you could stay here nights, at least until I can get a phone put in.” She watched his face, but he must have been one hell of a poker player. “Frankly, I don’t feel very safe here by myself.”
“But you’d feel safe with me around, is that it? And where would I be sleeping?”
His expression had not changed, but his eyes burned like silver in the last of the light.
“There’s a tack room with a cot in the barn …” She could not finish. His eyes devoured her, and his lips quirked upward in a mocking smile.
“You want me to sleep in the barn? Instead of going home to my nice cozy bed, or maybe someone else’s.”
“I’m asking you -” Her voice cracked and she cleared her throat. “I’m asking if you’ll stay because I’m a little spooked here at night.”
They stared at each other. Coop crossed his arms and leaned against the truck until Eden was ready to plead with him, to promise anything as long as he would stay. The house stretched tall behind her, brimming with nascent darkness.
“I’ll stay,” he said, “but I’m sleeping in the house. You can lock your bedroom door if you want.”
He cracked open his beer and tapped it against hers before taking a long swallow.
Coop chose the bedroom at the opposite end of the hall from hers, deliberately bypassing the two between them and giving her a comically virtuous look. Together, they made up the bed, and he followed her to the door.
“I know you’re scared,” he said. “The place is kinda creepy, but it’s just an old house. If you get freaked out tonight, come get me.” He held up both hands to forestall her angry retort. “That’s no come on. I just don’t want you waking me up with your screaming.”
She looked up at him, surprised at how rich his voice could be when he wasn’t being mean or offensive. He looked tired. His hair was damp from his shower, and he smelled of her orange-patchouli soap. She thought of staying in his room. He was warm and vibrant, the ideal antidote to the cold wave of darkness that had filled the stairwell. He watched her thinking it, his eyes animal-cagey, and he let out his breath with a hiss.
“Go to bed, Eden. Get some sleep.”
He shut the door in her face, and she heard him moving about the room. His light went out, and the bed creaked under his weight. She stood there for a while, her forehead pressed against his door, until the overhead light in the hallway dimmed. She stared up in alarm at the newly installed bulb before hurrying to her room and closing the door.
Coop’s presence at the end of the hall was a tonic. Eden plummeted into a well of sleep, tumbling for lifetimes through the dreamless dark before surfacing toward a pinpoint of soft light. Awareness unfolded within her until she lay awake in the faint wash of moonlight spilling in from the hallway. Her door was open.
The moonlight burned like a cold fire along the hall. A great sheet of dead black shadow hung in the stairwell. It had weight, that shadow, and she studied it from under heavy eyelids. She blinked, and it had crossed the hallway to stand in her door. Her heart slowed to a painful throb. She recognized its proportions, the wide shoulders and narrow hips, the powerful arms. She felt its gaze on her like a pair of hands.
“Coop,” she whispered.
She had meant to scream, but the dark had robbed her of her voice. Her limbs were leaden. She could not even look away from it. The shadow moved from the doorway in a darting glide, tendrils of darkness smoking from it. It stood at the foot of her bed.
Cold bathed her, an intense iciness like a thousand insects swarming over her, but she could do no more than whimper. The thing flitted sideways to the wall, slid up it, and swam across the ceiling in an oily cloud until it hung above her, slowly resolving once again into a simulacrum of Coop. Now it had a face, black on black on black, layers of darkness that mimicked the contours of lips, nose, and eyes. It leered at her, and then it was on her. It touched her everywhere with possessive glee, filled her with its frigid need, and the scream bottled in her throat became a moan.
***
Late morning light poured like balm over Eden. She rolled onto her back, eyes closed, and bathed in it. Her body ached in secret places, her muscles felt limp against the knotted sheet. She moved a hand weakly over her bare stomach, and opened her eyes to scan the room, her head too heavy to lift from the pillow.
The light was welcome, but it was wrong. It slanted over her feet and legs, pouring from a window that should be on the westward wall. She sat up, dragging the sheet around her. This was not her room. Coop’s steel-toed boots stood by the door, his sweatshirt and hat hung on a hook beside the age-blackened armoire. She could see herself in the armoire’s mirror, her hair in a great golden tumble, her skin roughed to rosiness where Coop’s hands and mouth …
She threw the sheet aside and vaulted from the bed. She heard a clatter of dishes from the kitchen. The aroma of coffee rose through the house. He was down there, probably licking his chops like a cat with a fresh kill. She could smell him on her skin. She fled down the hall to the bathroom, where she stood under the hot shower until she felt she had washed away the imprint of all the strange hands of the night.
In her room, she dressed and stood at the window, her ears tuned to the sounds of Coop moving around the kitchen. She couldn’t bear the sight of him, couldn’t escape the house without passing him, and she swept the room with an anxious gaze, looking for a reason to remain there. She settled on making up the bed, and stripped the tousled sheets from it. They drooped in her hands, torn almost to ribbons in places, and she dropped them as though they had burned her. For once, her therapist had nothing to say. Her mind was a numb receptacle of white noise, and he sat shocked and disbelieving at its center.
She turned from the bed and found Coop in her doorway. He wore only his jeans. The sun streaming from the window at the end of the hall made a bronze sculpture of him. His bare feet were white, like the feet of a dead man. She felt nothing, neither anger nor shame. She managed a marionette smile.
“Good morning.”
“Hey.” His eyes were wary. “Look, about last night -”
She cut him off. “It’s okay. We don’t have to talk about it.”
He stood where the dark had stood, looking at her with the same intensity, if not the same intent. Her belly gave a brief flutter. Coop leaned against the doorjamb, his thumbs hooked in his belt loops, staring at her.
“I just want to know what happened,” he said.
Her equanimity gave a lurch.
“I think we both know what happened,” she said, but now she was unsure.
She remembered the icy press of the dark, the sensation of spiraling away on a storm of terrible ecstasy. Coop’s warm, animal presence seemed to have nothing to do with that.
“Uh, yeah. You surprised me, is all. What was it that was scarier than me?”
What did he want her to say? That she had fled along the hallway in the crackling moonlight, the hands of a rapacious shadow clinging to her? That when she had opened his door and seen him reclining against the pillows, smoking in the dark, he had looked strong enough to save her? He hadn’t seemed surprised then, but had pulled the sheet aside, inviting her in.
“It was nothing. I don’t want to talk about it.” She glared at him, her chin thrust forward in challenge.
He straightened, and now his eyes were as flat and menacing as a shark’s. A muscle in his jaw twitched.
“Okay. I’m gonna get to work. I’ll be in the old cemetery.”
He stalked away, and Eden shut her door and collapsed on the bed.
***
She sat at the kitchen table, Pap’s old work thermos in front of her. She turned it in her hands, tracing the lines in its red plaid pattern. She had been sitting there for two hours, contemplating the thermos, listening to the low voice of the dark that muttered in the cellar beneath her.
Sometimes it grumbled, growling in the belly of the furnace. Sometimes it ticked, tapping up through the pipes on its murderous spider feet. Sometimes it hissed a little as it eased up through the old floorboards and swirled in beautiful arabesque across the torn linoleum.
It was loose, dipping its wicked fingers into everything. It was in her, too, and she had to accept it. After last night, she was an open room it could enter with or without invitation. It murmured and cajoled tirelessly, urging her to give it what it wanted, and what it wanted was Coop. It wanted the formidable engine of his heart, the vigorous force of his life. She sighed. There were no more arguments to make, no more resistance left to her. She stood and went out into the garden.
The ripe tomatoes were not truly black. They were a deep ugly red with broad purple stripes, as though darkness had infected them. She tugged three of them from a wilting vine. They felt heavy and bloated, their skins still firm, but the fruit inside pulpy. With a grimace of disgust, she carried them into the kitchen and sliced them open over an empty coffee can. The juice ran out over her hands, bitter and somehow meaty.
She squeezed the halves over the can until she had wrung the jellied seeds from them, then peeled them as best she could and stared at the lumps of mottled fruit. They looked like gobbets of raw flesh. These she dropped into the bar blender on the counter and ground them into a slurry the color of old blood.
She needed to brew some tea, and she chose raspberry. The rich ruby color and fruity taste of the tea would mask the lethal tang of love apples. She fretted over the amount of slurry to add to the pitcher. How much was enough? She poured it all in. The dark from the cellar rubbed against her ankles as she worked, a sleek black cat that purred in a voice like the slow unwinding of the kitchen clock.
With the tea sloshing over ice in the thermos, Eden made her way to the cemetery. It wasn’t a big plot. Sixteen headstones peppered the fenced patch, and the mausoleum stood at the rear, its back against the woods. Coop had cleared away the tangled weeds and mowed the grass. She saw him at the mausoleum, fussing with the ornate iron grille that covered the door.
“Hey,” she called. “I brought you some iced tea. Made it myself.”
She wound her way among the headstones, and stopped to set down the thermos on the flat, exposed apron of one that had cracked and split. She picked up the broken chunk, wondering if it could be fitted back together. Coop watched her from the shade of the mausoleum. He tapped the grille of the door with his screwdriver.
“Found this in the weeds. Might have been kids trying to get in, but the door’s shut tight.”
She did not say that it hadn’t been kids, or anything trying to get in. Instead, she rolled her eyes and asked, “What kids? Why would anyone want to break into a tomb?”
There was the smirk she had come to know and detest.
“You really are a babe in the woods. There’s kids from Gypsy Corner, for one thing. Out drinking, looking for a cheap thrill, a way to scare their girlfriends. Fear can be a mighty turn on.”
She ignored the pointed remark and joined him by the door. “Can you open it? I’d like to see inside.” Inside, where the dark waits.
He stepped toward her, close enough to force her back against the door, but he didn’t touch her.
“You looking for a cheap thrill, Eden?”
She made no reply, only pulled a long skeleton key from her pocket and held it up. He swept his hat off and slapped it against his leg.
“Get outta the way. I’ll try to get it open.”
The key ground in the lock with a shriek, but it worked. Coop put his shoulder to the door, and it inched open in groaning protest. A gust of damp, musty air puffed out. Inside, the mausoleum was small, a mere vestibule of death, and cobwebs hung thick as banners of gauze. Two burial vaults filled the far wall, their brass plates begrimed and unreadable. Eden was disappointed. The dark here had moldered along with the corpses.
Coop shuddered and retreated to the cemetery, where he perched on the broken headstone. “It stinks in there. At least you know it wasn’t vandalized.”
He picked up the thermos of tea and unscrewed the cap. Eden watched him, enthralled. She went closer, meaning to stop him, but he raised it to his lips and chugged a few generous swallows. Too late. Was it? Surely, such a small amount couldn’t harm him. He looked so strong.
“What’s the matter with you? You look like you saw a ghost.” He coughed, rubbed a hand across his chest. “Dust makes my throat scratchy.” He raised the thermos again.
With a cry, she sprang at him and knocked it from his hand. The tea glittered through the air, turned to bloody fire in the sunlight.
“What the fuck?” he yelled.
He lurched to his feet. He pulled in a breath, probably to shout at her, but it rattled in his constricting throat. He bent forward, hacking and wheezing. When he straightened, there was sick knowledge in his eyes.
“You bitch -”
His voice was hoarse and whispery, his breathing labored. He tried to take a step forward, but went down on one knee. His enraged eyes never left her face. He reached out, caught her by the front of her shirt, and yanked her down beside him. She pushed at him, slapped and punched at his shoulder, but his grip was implacable.
He was down on both knees now, one hand planted on the ground, the other clutching her against him in a desperate spasm. Over his heaving back, she caught sight of the dark inside the mausoleum. Glossy, pulsing black replaced its initial air of dusty weariness. It coalesced into a squat shadow figure, trembling but growing more robust. It looked like a kneeling man, its head bent, and its hands on the cold stone floor.
Coop managed a strangled sip of air and sat back on his heels. His gaze fixed on the mausoleum.
“Jesus,” he gasped.
Eden fumbled in the grass and caught up the chunk of gravestone she had dropped earlier. She swung it in an arc, the angle all wrong to put much force behind it, and rapped Coop on the back of the head with it. It was enough. His grip relaxed and he sank forward onto the stiff grass as though he were going to sleep. The tortured panting ceased.
***
Eden knelt in the sunlight, watching Coop’s body. He was ashen under his tan. She thought she could see him breathing, but it was only the funeral parlor illusion the dead are so good at projecting. She could not bring herself to touch him, to feel for a pulse, but nothing but a corpse could be so still.
Her body suffered a pang of loss. The planes that had pressed against him, the limbs that had clung to him through the darkest night of her life, mourned him. She’d had no choice. Her new lover waited, impatient in its little stone house. She could see its strong, dark body through the gap in the door that was just wide enough for her to slip through. She climbed stiffly to her feet and walked toward the mausoleum.
***
Well…I did tell you it wouldn’t be the kind of romance to which you’re accustomed. It’s just a little more of that old Blackfern County magic show, and we can be glad we are only in the audience. As always, thanks for reading, and mind the dark on your way home.
Oh man, so creepy! I was digging the Coop-Eden romance, but the dark had something else to say about it. Loved this!
Great Story!