Lisa Unger: Darkness My Old Friend

“Do you know about my work?” Eloise asked.

Work. Really? Is that what they were calling it? He would have thought she’d say something like gift, or sight. Or maybe abilities. Of course, she probably did consider it work, since that was how she earned her living.

“I do,” he said. He tried to keep his tone flat, not inquiring or encouraging. But she seemed to feel the need to explain anyway.

“I’m like a radio. I pick up signals-from all over, scattered, disjointed. I have no control over what I see, when I see it, the degree of lucidity, the power of it. I could see something happening a world away, but not something right next door.”

He struggled not to roll his eyes. Did she really expect him to believe this?

“Okay,” he said. He took a sip of his coffee. He didn’t like the edgy, anxious feeling he had. He felt physically uncomfortable in the chair, had a nervous desire to get up and pace the room. “What does this have to do with me?”

“You’re getting a reputation around town, you know. That you’re available to help with things-checking houses while people are away, getting mail.”

He shrugged. “Just in the neighborhood here.” He leaned back in his chair, showed his palms. “What? Are you going on vacation? Want me to feed your cat?”

She released a sigh and looked down at the table between them.

“People are going to start coming to you for more, from farther away,” she said. “It might lead you places you don’t expect.”

Jones didn’t like how that sounded. But he wouldn’t give her the satisfaction of reacting.

“Okay,” he said, drawing out the word.

“I wanted you to be prepared. I’ve seen something.”

When she looked back up at him, her eyes were shining in a way that unsettled him. Her gaze made him think for some reason of his mother when he found her on the bathroom floor after she’d suffered a stroke. He slid his chair back from the table and stood.

“Why are you telling me this?” He leaned against the doorway that led to the kitchen.

“Because you need to know,” she said. She still sat stiff and uncomfortable, hadn’t touched the coffee before her.

Okay, great. Thanks for stopping by. Don’t call me, I’ll call you. Let me show you out . Instead, because curiosity always did get the better of him, he asked, “So what did you see?”

She ran a hand through her hair. “It’s hard to explain. Like describing a dream. The essence can be lost in translation.”

If this was some kind of show, it was a good one. She seemed sincere, not put on or self-dramatizing. If she were a witness, he would believe her story. But she wasn’t a witness, she was a crackpot.

“Try,” he said. “That’s why you came, right?”

Another long slow breath in and out. Then, “I saw you on the bank of a river… or it could have been an ocean. Some churning body of water. I saw you running, chasing a lifeless form in the water. I don’t know what or who it was. I can only assume it’s a woman or a girl, because that’s all I see. Then you jumped in-or possibly you fell. I think you were trying to save whoever it was. But you were overcome. You weren’t strong enough. The water pulled you under.”

Her tone was level, unemotional. She could have been talking mildly about the weather. And the image, for some reason, failed to jolt or disturb him. In that moment she seemed frail and silly, a carnival act that neither entertained nor intrigued.

The ticking of the large grandfather clock in the foyer seemed especially loud. He had to get rid of that thing, a housewarming present from his mother-in-law. Did he really need to hear the passing of the minutes of his life?

“You know, Ms. Montgomery,” he said, “I don’t think you’re well.”

“I’m not, Mr. Cooper. I’m not well at all.” She got up from the table, to his great relief, and started moving toward the door.

“Well, should I find myself on the banks of a river, chasing a body, I’ll be sure to stay on solid ground,” he said, allowing her to pass and following her to the door. “Thanks for the warning.”

“Would you? Would you stay on solid ground? I doubt it.” She rested her hand on the knob of the front door but neither pulled it open nor turned around.

“I guess it depended on the circumstances,” he said. “Whether I thought I could help or not. Whether I thought I could manage the risk. And, finally, who was in the water.”

Why was he even bothering to have this conversation? The woman was obviously mentally ill; she belonged in a hospital, not walking around free. She could hurt herself or someone else. She still didn’t turn to look at him, just bowed her head.

“I don’t think you can manage the risk,” she said. “There are forces more powerful than your will. I think that’s what you need to know.”

For someone as obsessed with death as Jones knew himself to be, he should have been clutching his heart with terror. But, honestly, he just found the whole situation preposterous. It was almost a relief to talk to someone who had less of a grip on life than he did.

“Okay,” he said. “Good to know.”

He gently nudged her aside with a hand on her shoulder and opened the door.

“So when do you imagine this might go down? There’s only one body of water in The Hollows.” The Black River was usually a gentle, gurgling river at the base of a glacial ravine. It could, in heavy rains, become quite powerful, but it hadn’t overflowed its banks in years. And the season had been dry.

She gave him a patient smile. “I don’t imagine , Mr. Cooper. I see, and I tell the people I need to tell to make things right. And if not right precisely, then as they should be. That’s all I do. I used to torture myself, trying to figure out where and when and if things might happen. I used to think I could save and help and fix, drive myself to distraction when I couldn’t. Now I just speak the truth of my visions. I am unattached to outcomes, to whether people treat me with respect or hostility, to whether they listen or don’t.”

“So they’re literal, these visions,” he asked. He didn’t bother to keep the skepticism out of his voice. “You see something and it happens exactly that way. It’s immutable.”

“They’re not always literal, no,” she said.

“But sometimes they are?”

“Sometimes.” She gave a careful nod. “And nothing in life is immutable, Mr. Cooper.”

“Except death.”

“Well…” she said. But she didn’t go on. Was there an attitude about it? As if she were a teacher who wouldn’t bother with a lesson that her student could never understand.

She moved through the door and let the screen close behind her. He didn’t know what to say, so he said nothing, just watched as she stiffly descended the steps. She turned around once to look at him, appeared to have something else to say. But then she just kept walking down the drive. Her pace seemed brisker, as if she’d lightened her load. She didn’t seem as frail or unwell as she had when he’d first seen her. Then she got into her car and slowly drove away.

She wrote slowly. Heavily tracing over each of the letters until her pen broke through to the notebook page beneath. Big block letters along the top of her English notebook: THE HOLLOWS SUCKS. It did. It did suck. She hated it. Beneath that she wrote in a loopy cursive, Why am I here? Why?

“Willow? Miss Willow Graves. Care to join us?”

She sat up quickly, startled. Sometimes she disappeared into her own head and the world around her faded to a buzzing white noise, only to crash back in some surprising and often embarrassing way. They were all looking at her, the cretins.