I met Violet’s gaze briefly again, then stood. I turned and walked into the darkness.
The kitchen was silent. Nothing moved. I didn’t reach to the wall for the light switch. Hide-and-seek was always better played in the shadows, where the darkness gave more places to hide.
In the faint glow of moonlight through the kitchen window, I could see a gleam on the top of the stove, the flat surface of the kitchen table. A glass Violet had left on the counter after she drank some water. I listened for a rustle, a breath. Where could a little boy hide in here?
I had been It that day. I had been fourteen, and we’d drawn straws, and I’d drawn the short straw, which meant I was It. I was It now. The silence felt like a held breath.
“Ben?” I called softly. “Where are you hiding?”
Silence.
“I’ll find you,” I said, my voice falling into the croon I’d used twenty years ago, a singsong lilt I had never used since. “It’s only a matter of time.”
I couldn’t hear Dodie’s sobs anymore. I was back to that day, the snow falling past the windows in huge wet flakes, the chill in the air because this house never got truly warm in winter. The smell of woodsmoke coming from a neighboring house. The blanketing silence that came with heavy snowfall, as if the entire world was hushed.
I bent and opened the lower cupboards, one by one, my hands sure in the dark. Those were easiest for a six-year-old to climb into. He could push aside some stale boxes of cereal, some dusty old pots that no one ever cooked with, and curl up. But he wasn’t there.
Still crouching low, I checked under the table. Then I moved to the pantry and opened the door. “Ben?”
Nothing. Empty air, the handful of canned goods I’d bought, a stale smell of old floor wax. No Ben.
You’re failing,I thought.You won’t find him in time.
I left the door open and turned.
I hadn’t found Ben in time. I was It—I was the one who was supposed to find him, but I hadn’t. He’d fallen somewhere, or gotten trapped, or hit his head, and the one who was supposed to find him never had.
All of this was my fault. All of it.
I left the kitchen, still finding my way easily in the dark. I paused at the cubbyhole under the stairs, which Ben had loved to hide in. Dodie had hidden there that last day. I knew from my initial reconnaissance of the house that the cubby had been stuffed with a box of old junk, but I checked it anyway. My hand slid over the box, over its edges. There was nothing else in there. I closed the door and turned to the living room.
There were more corners in here, more pitch-black spaces a little boy might hide in. The living room was large and oddly shaped, and the furniture didn’t fit into every corner. I touched the back of the sofa, feeling my way. I crouched to look beneath a side table. I called for my little brother again.
Failing. You are failing. Again. Like you’ve failed at everything.
I’d been a diver for a while, after Ben was gone. I had the build for it, and people said I was pretty good. It was something to do. It took time before I realized that all I wanted was to crash into the water and break my neck, every single time I jumped.
Diving felt different after that. I started to think I might do it—dive into a shallow pool, or an empty one. Dive off a bridge, or from a window. Execute perfect form on the way down.
I quit diving.
When I stood, I realized I could see my hand when I held it up.
It was hours from dawn. The light was bright, white, unnatural. There was no window in this room.
Do you see lights?I’d asked Charles Zimmer in Sacramento, just a few days ago.
And his answer:Yes. They’re blinding, right in my eyes.
Light flared, and I flinched back. From the pitch-darkness, now I could see everything—every corner of the room as bright as an operating theater.
I’d dreamed this so many times as a child. Dreamed it over and over again in this house in the middle of the night. The light from nowhere, someone standing over me. The tall form peering down, staring at me, its face in shadow. The figure stared at me, and I couldn’t move—
“Ben!” I called out, but he didn’t answer.
Something flitted beside me, and I turned. A shadow, long and thin. An arm reached out like a whip and a hand gripped my throat, icy and raw. The thing pulled me toward it. It was as real as any physical hand I’d ever felt, bones and hard flesh, cruel tendons twisting the thumb and digging it into the soft spot below my jaw. I felt the scrape of a ragged nail.
“Wake up,” the thing said in my ear, its voice a rasp.
