John Saul: Darkness

Kelly had blushed, wondering if her grandfather had actually been able to read her mind, and promised him she wouldn’t.

Not that it was a promise she intended to keep, since she’d been going out in Atlanta whenever she felt like it for two years now. Of course, so far it didn’t look like there was anything to do in Villejeune anyway. As they’d come through the town that afternoon — if you could really call it a town — she hadn’t seen any interesting-looking kids at all. In fact, they’d all looked like the kind of boring jerks she’d laughed at in Atlanta.

The kind of boring jerks who’d never bothered to speak to her.

Putting the thought out of her mind, she finished unpacking her clothes, which didn’t come close to filling the walk-in closet, and filled the medicine cabinet with all the cosmetics that had been stuffed in the top drawer of her dresser back in Atlanta. Finally, she unrolled a couple of the posters she’d peeled from her walls at home; but when she held them up against the brightly flowered wallpaper, she changed her mind and stuffed the whole bunch of them into the wastebasket. The room, she decided, was just perfect the way her grandfather had done it.

She went to the window, gazing out across the lawn and the canal toward the swamp. The daylight was beginning to fade, but there was still an hour before it would be completely dark. Maybe she should go out and take a look around. She started toward the door, then remembered her grandfather’s words.

I’m just going outside, she told herself. It’s not like I’m meeting someone. Why would they forbid her to go out for a little while?

Leaving the room through the interior door, she went down the stairs to the main level, and found her parents and grandfather in the den. “Is it okay if I go for a walk?” she asked. There was a brief silence as her parents looked uncertainly at each other. Kelly was sure she knew what they were thinking.

Where is she going?

What is she going to do?

Is she going to get into trouble?

Is she going to try to kill herself again?

The good mood she’d been feeling all afternoon evaporated, and she turned away. “N-Never mind,” she murmured, starting back out of the den. Her grandfather’s voice stopped her.

“What the hell’s going on?” she heard him ask. “She’s sixteen years old. Can’t she go for a walk at seven o’clock in the evening?”

She froze, then slowly turned around. Her mother was staring at her grandfather, her face pale, her eyes frightened.

Her father was licking his lips nervously.

For what seemed to her an eternity, no one said anything.

Then her grandfather looked straight at her.

“You planning to do anything stupid?” he asked. “Like jump in the canal?”

Kelly’s eyes widened at the shock of his words.

“Dad!” Ted said sharply, but Carl Anderson held up a hand to silence his son.

“Now come on,” he rumbled. “We all know what happened, and I don’t see how it’s going to hurt to ask a simple question. If you’re planning to try to watch her every minute of every day, then maybe you should have locked her up.”

“Carl,” Mary began, “you don’t understand—”

“No, I don’t,” Carl broke in, his voice much gentler. “I don’t understand at all. But I know you brought Kelly down here to give her a chance at a new life, and it seems to me you might as well start right now.”

Mary hesitated for a moment, her eyes never leaving her father-in-law’s face. It was a strong face, unlined, looking at least twenty years younger than its sixty-four years. His hair, the same burnished chestnut as Ted’s, showed not a hint of gray, and his blue eyes were as bright as those of any young man just starting out in the world. That, she supposed, was the result of his ultimate triumph — he’d hung on, and finally made a success of his life, and it had given him a strength she’d never really noticed before.

The words he’d just spoken, she realized, had the ring of truth. They were here to start over again — all of them — and they might just as well start now. She turned to her daughter.

“How long will you be gone?”

Kelly felt a surge of hope. “N-Not very long. I just thought I’d walk along the canal and look at all the houses Granddaddy built.”

Mary took a deep breath. “All right. But come home before it gets too dark, okay? And stay away from the swamp.”

Kelly nodded, hurrying out of the house before her parents had time to change their minds. She crossed the lawn, paused when she came to a narrow footpath that edged the canal, then turned right. She walked slowly, studying the houses strung along the waterway. They were much smaller than her grandfather’s, occupied by retired people who didn’t need nearly as much space as her grandfather had.

“I don’t need it either,” he’d said that afternoon. “I guess I built this big place just because I could afford it, and I’ve been rattling around in it ever since. No fool like an old fool. Still, it seems like it’s finally come in kind of handy.”

She walked about a quarter of a mile, slowly realizing that the houses were all alike — there were only four models, and two of those were simply mirror images of the other two. Bored with the houses, she turned her attention to the swamp on the other side of the canal.

She’d heard about it from her parents all her life, but now that she was actually seeing it, it didn’t look at all as she had imagined. She’d always thought of it as a scary place, filled with a tangle of vines and infested with snakes and insects. But now that she was close to it, it didn’t appear frightening at all. There were vines, all right, twisting up into the cypress trees, and the mangroves looked strange with their branching roots, but there was something about the swamp that struck her as vaguely familiar.

As if she knew it, although she’d never seen it before.

Her pace slowed as the hypnotic drone of tiny creatures drifted out of the wilderness. Finally she stopped walking altogether and stood listening, beginning to sort out one sound from another. There were bird songs rising above the drone of insects, and the high whistles of tree frogs contrasted sharply with the lower tones of the bullfrogs.

A flicker of movement caught her eye. She peered across the canal, straining to see through the failing light. Then, almost hidden in the foliage, she saw a face.

As quickly as it appeared, the face was gone. For a moment Kelly thought she had imagined it.

Had the man — the man she’d seen in her dreams, and in the mirror that night a month ago — followed her here?

No. This face had been younger.

A boy’s face.

And it had been real. Real, and somehow — in a way she didn’t understand — connected to her.

Her eyes swept the area again, and she caught sight of a footbridge a few yards up the canal. Without thinking, she hurried up the path and crossed the bridge.

She paused on the other side. There was still enough light so she could clearly make out a narrow track leading through the foliage. She hesitated, then made up her mind. It wouldn’t be fully dark for at least another half hour. Certainly it couldn’t take her more than a few minutes to find the boy.

She started along the path.

As she walked, a new sound came to her.

A sound that seemed to lead her on.

• • •

Amelie Coulton sat in the rocking chair on the porch of her shanty, a worn baby’s dress in her lap. Her fingers, nowhere near as clever as her mother’s, worked uneven stitches into the tear in the material — a tear her mother had told her she herself had put there seventeen years ago. As she gazed at the work, a feeling of hopelessness came over her. She was going to have to start all over again, and there were still so many holes in the garment that by the time she finally finished mending it, her baby would already be a year old.