THE DARK

  Issue 23 • April 2017

  “The Name, Blurry and Incomplete in His Mind” by Erica Mosley

  “The Witch Moth” by Bruce McAllister

  “The Language of Endings” by Kristi DeMeester

  “In Syllables of Elder Seas” by Lisa L. Hannett

  Cover Art: “A Sinner Like Me” by Aleksandra Grahovac

  ISSN 2332-4392.

  Edited by Silvia Moreno-Garcia and Sean Wallace.

  Cover design by Garry Nurrish.

  Copyright © 2017 by Prime Books.

  www.thedarkmagazine.com

  The Name, Blurry and Incomplete in His Mind

  by Erica Mosley

  When Jentri was ten her father, having run out of things to say, told her about the name he’d once found written in pencil on the wall above the basement sink, and about how he’d often wondered if it was still there.

  “Maybe you should look,” she said, and he did, and she followed him. The limestone wall above the stainless steel sink was cracked and stained like an old map, but they saw no name written on it.

  “I must have seen it somewhere else.” He ran his fingers over the limestone and Jentri took the opportunity, while he was distracted, to study her father closely. They had never stood together in the basement before; in fact they rarely ventured beyond the living room during his visits. An incandescent bulb swung from a chain and in its sweep of light Jentri noticed, for the first time, a freckle on her father’s neck.

  “Maybe I was thinking it was behind the furnace,” he said, and they looked there, but found nothing; only a green beetle hanging in a dusty web.

  “Upstairs?” he said.

  Jentri bounded up, hearing her father’s footsteps behind her. “Don’t step on that floorboard, it’s dangerous,” she said, and “That light doesn’t work, sorry,” pointing like a guide, though she knew it wasn’t necessary; he’d lived here, too. Once.

  They found it on the third floor, in a bathroom no one ever used. The bathtub had no fixtures; the toilet, no lid. But there was a name: Susie, written in childish pencil above the rust-stained porcelain sink.

  “Who’s Susie?” Jentri said.

  “I don’t know.”

  “But that’s the name you saw, right?”

  Her father paused, thinking. Jentri waited patiently, but he never did answer the question, not that day or any other one. But on their way down the stairs Jentri just happened to see—now that she was looking for it—Susie’s name scratched into the metal bracket that held the banister to the wall.

  Thereafter Jentri and her father spent almost the entirety of his weekly ninety-minute visits traveling the house looking for Susie’s marks. They were everywhere—on the back of a closet door, on the underside of a kitchen drawer—and Jentri wondered how she’d spent her whole life here without noticing them.

  They called this game “finding a Susie.”

  It was a welcome change. Jentri and her father did not know how to talk to each other, because they rarely practiced. He’d left when she was young, before she knew any words. Even after she learned, she did not have much to say to him.

  Normally, during his visits, he asked Jentri questions about which method of long division they were teaching her at school or which flavor of pudding was her favorite, and she would have to explain that she was learning fractions this year because they were done with long division, and that she didn’t like pudding. After each answer came a long and uncomfortable pause while he thought up a new question.

  He rarely spoke about himself. Jentri knew he had a dog but she did not know its name. She did not know what her father did for a living, not exactly, though he wore nice shoes and she knew he traveled often: to Jefferson City, to Cape Girardeau, to Poplar Bluff.

  Ten or so minutes into every visit the questions ran out and they required an activity, something to focus on besides each other. Before the Susie game, there had been other games: simple flip-card memory games, checkers, or Shoots and Ladders when Jentri was young, graduating to more strategic games like chess, Risk, and five-card stud as she aged. Jentri and her father concentrated on the cards, the plastic pieces, eyes down.

  But hunting for Susies was different. Jentri and her father became different people.

  “Look, Jentri.” He stood next to a stained glass window on the third floor landing. The window was missing a pane and Jentri’s mother had taped cardboard over the space, awaiting a how-to book on hold at the library because she could not afford to hire a glazier.

  Jentri ran to him, and pressing her finger next to his against the wood of the window frame she felt the depressions of carved letters. She looked closer. It had been painted over several times but the name was still readable: Susie.

  “I bet she was just a little girl when she did this, just like you,” her father said.

  Jentri pressed her fingernail into the letters, trying to chip away the paint.

  “What are you doing? Don’t do that.”

  Jentri froze. Her father had never corrected her before. He’d never had a reason.

  She traced the letters instead with the soft of her finger pads. Head down, red-faced, she thought of the other places they’d found Susies: etched into a brick by the side gate; in red nail polish on the cast iron grates that covered the basement windows. “When did she do them?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. Long time ago.”

  “How long?”

  He paused. “Like I said, I don’t know. The people we bought the house from were very old and didn’t have kids. So before them at least. The fifties, maybe? The forties? This house is very old. Maybe even longer ago than that.”

  “Where did Susie go?”

  “Well, I guess she grew up and moved away.” Another pause, this one longer. “Or maybe she died. Maybe she died in one of these rooms.” Jentri’s father suddenly, out of nowhere, produced a Count Dracula laugh.

  Jentri was so surprised by the booming bass that she jumped. She knew he’d think she’d been scared by what he said—and she was—though mostly it was because she’d never heard her father use such an animated voice before. She wasn’t sure she’d ever even heard him make a joke.

  Her father began to expand the mythos, pointing out the places Susie must have slept or played. He showed Jentri the retaining wall in the back yard where Susie used to sit munching caramel corn, and the spot under the window where Susie had kept her pet rat in a golden cage. The rat had red eyes, he said, and wore a tiny bell tied around its neck with red ribbon. The rat got out of its cage once, and though Susie searched the house top to bottom the rat was never found. Jentri’s father nibbled the air with his front teeth, and rubbed his hands together like furry paws.

  Jentri squirmed with delight at his elbow. He’d never told her stories before. His eyes had never been so bright when he talked. And he, encouraged by his daughter’s rapt attention, which he had never been able to command, became ever more inventive.

  Susie wore a blue check dress with white pearl buttons. Susie collected love letters written by WWI cavalrymen and kept them in a cigar box under her bed. Susie liked to take apart radios and put them back together again. Once, to the wonderment of the whole neighborhood, Susie built a model airplane out of pieces of an old clock and her grandmother’s egg beater and flew it clear across the pond at Tower Grove Park.

  “I wouldn’t be at all surprised,” Jentri’s father said one visit, running his fingers along an exposed drywall seam, “if there wasn’t a secret passage in this house.”

  “Really?” Jentri said.

  “Oh sure. There’s caves and tunnels running all underneath this whole city, the older parts of it, these big old houses . . . Breweries used to keep their beer cold down there, before refrigerators were invented. The banks, the big wigs, City Hall, they all had escape hatches downtown.” He looked down, ran his fingers around the tip of the tie he’d been wearing since he arrived. Then he said, almost shyly, “I’m a bit of an amateur historian, you know.”

  Jentri wondered if her father talked like this on dates. Then she realized, with some discomfort, that she’d never thought of him dating. She supposed he must; all the divorced fathers on tv did.

  “Where’s the secret door?” she said.

  “I don’t know. If there was one, though, I bet Susie knew where it was.”

  One day Jentri got home from aftercare and, heading up to her room to put her backpack away, she saw Susie standing at the top of the stairs, holding the model airplane.

  The propeller had once been the hands of a clock, one blade shorter than the other. Susie, staring down at Jentri, spun them slowly with her pinkie finger.

  Sometimes Jentri wondered how her father had not seen the Susies back when he lived in the house. True, he’d remembered the first one, the one above the porcelain sink in the third floor bathroom. But each subsequent find seemed a fresh surprise. Surely he’d seen them all before?

  Then, because she was smart, Jentri realized that maybe he had seen the Susies but was pretending for her sake that they were discovering them now for the first time together. She did not let on that she knew this. If her father could keep secrets, so could she.

  It was strange, seeing how well he knew his way around her house. More than once Jentri had offered him a soda and felt a jolt of surprise when he reached for the correct cabinet on the first try and got himself a glass. Jentri always forgot that in a way she was more of a visitor here than her father. He knew the house better. He’d stripped it bare; he’ d clattered around in its bones.

  Jentri knew the story because her mother had told it, many times. Once upon a time Jentri’s parents were very much in love but had very little money. So they bought this house in what was then a run-down section of south St. Louis, paying only a fraction of its potential value. They began to fix it up. Years passed and—this part of the story was vague and changed each time her mother told it, the number of bitter asides fluctuating with her mood and the length of her last shift—in short, the renovations stalled. Jentri was born into a skeleton of a house and a ruin of a marriage, and learned to crawl in half-finished rooms, leaving a trail through drywall dust. Even now, Jentri ten years old, one bedroom still retained its orange shag carpeting and dark wood paneling from the 70’s. In another, the walls were teal. Another had no walls at all but only exposed studs. Two stone lions stood at the base of the front steps, one missing an ear.

  Jentri’s mother had continued the work as funds allowed, progressing slowly over the years, sometimes tearing out the plumbing Jentri’s father had fitted long ago or the plaster he’d smoothed, and starting over.

  Jentri wondered now how many Susies had been obliterated by her mother’s belt sander.

  And she wondered other things, like what her father’s house was like, the one he lived in now. She thought of this mostly at the end of his visits, while she watched him get into his car and drive away. Many of her friends at school had divorced parents, and most of those friends spent every other weekend at their father’s houses or apartments. But Jentri had never seen her father’s home. She didn’t even know where it was.

  Jentri did not want her father to stop telling the stories, and so she did not tell him that late at night she lay awake listening for the tinkle of the rat’s bell, or that some nights she even heard it.

  She woke, once, screaming for her mother, screaming that she’d seen Susie walk into her bedroom closet and close the door.

  Her mother stood over her, one eye still closed in sleep, a see-through thin t-shirt hanging off her bare shoulder. “There’s nobody in your closet, baby.”

  In the morning Jentri’s mother put the cereal in the refrigerator and the milk in the cabinet and Jentri put them back in the right places before she caught the bus. Jentri understood; she knew her mother spread sixty-five hours across three different jobs and spent the rest of her waking life working on the house so they could sell it at profit. Jentri fell asleep every night to the tic tic tic of her mother’s pickax chipping away at the basement. There was a leak, a trickle of water running the length of the basement like a country brook at half-drought, and Jentri’s mother hoped to unearth the source by trial and error. The hill of limestone rubble was taller than Jentri and the waterway snaked through the basement as new courses were made for it.

  “I need you to stop with the Susie thing.” Jentri’s mother stood, covered in limestone dust, in the doorway of the mauve-wallpapered den. “She’s keeping me up at night.”

  Jentri and her father hunched on hands and knees methodically examining the wainscoting. He sat up on his haunches but didn’t say anything.

  “Kurt? I need you to stop with the Susie thing.”

  “Yeah. I heard you.”

  When Jentri’s parents spoke to each other their voices were low, their faces stiff, as though they’d forgotten how to open their mouths all the way.

  He obeyed, despite Jentri’s entreaties. She’d found another Susie under the backyard spigot, she’d tell him, or on the collar of the lion who guarded the front steps. But he showed no interest. He resumed his questions about math, about pudding. They resumed their board games.

  Jentri was old enough to realize he might be anxious to make the most of his limited time with her, and used this to her advantage. She punished him. Her responses became even more terse than usual. She pretended to be bored with the games. She pretended to be bored with him.

  Finally, a gift. Many times over the years he had arrived with a gift: a new board game tucked under his arm, cellophane and price sticker still attached.

  This time it was a document, scrolled up in his breast pocket.

  Signaling secrecy with one finger in front of his lips, he handed the paper to Jentri. “I went to city hall. I did some digging on this house, on Susie,” he said.

  Jentri unrolled the paper. It was a bad photocopy, dark along one edge, and at the top it said “Deed of Release.” She did not know what a Deed of Release was or how it pertained to Susie. But when Jentri opened her mouth to ask, her father made an abrupt sound that made her feel the same way she had that day on the landing under the stained glass window, digging her nails into the paint.

  She looked down at the paper, red-faced, and did not look up until she heard her mother’s footsteps coming up the basement stairs. Her father made remarkably calm gestures indicating Jentri should fold up the paper and hide it. She slid it under her bottom and sat on it for the remainder of his visit while they finished their round of Clue.

  Jentri did not try to speak of the Deed of Release again, and soon not speaking about the Deed of Release became its own game. She looked at her father’s blank face. Its lack of recognition for the Deed of Release or for Susie or for the game itself was in fact the game, and she cheered inwardly at how good he was at playing it. The game was something they shared, something secret, just the two of them.

  After her father left that evening Jentri squirreled the document away to her bedroom and examined it closely, reading that “Southside Gould S&L Assn hereby release all and singular rights to the real property situated at 3560 Utah Street on this day of June the Fourth in the year of 1962 unto Guarantor (party) Albert J. Robison and (party) Margaret E. Robison and to Guarantor’s heirs, successors, executors, and assigns forever.”

  Jentri stuffed the paper under the pillow when she heard her mother on the stairs, pulled it out again when the footsteps passed. It was Jentri’s address written in slanting cursive on the thin black line; it was Jentri’s house, but there was no one named Susie or Susan on the document.

  She took the Deed of Release to school and told her friends it was the “death records” for her “creepy old house,” but she didn’t let anyone touch it; she flashed it in front of their eyes and stuffed it into her backpack.

  At home, in private, she waved her hand over the Deed as though conjuring a spirit from a Ouija board. She read it over and over, trying to understand the complicated language, trying to understand why her father had given her this information, trying to understand the game.

  Jentri and her father could not search the house together, but she could search it alone, if she pretended she was doing something else. So she made up a new game: Housekeeping. She walked around every evening pretending to dust.

  “Want a rag? You could do some actual dusting.” Her mother swiped a finger across a banister, disturbing a thin film of limestone.

  Jentri shook her head, continued to rub her hands across the walls as though waxing a car.

  “I think I’m close,” her mother said.

  “Close to what?”

  “I think I found the leak. It’s the coal chute.”

  “What’s a coal chute?”

  Her mother studied the grit, rubbing it between her fingertips, and drifted down the basement steps talking to herself. “Some moron sealed it up wrong.”

  There was no surface of the house Jentri did not take under her hands. She even began to search furniture, as though pencil marks could migrate from walls to the undersides of tables, or as though Susie were still traveling the house writing her name.

  Jentri froze at the thought, standing alone in the empty third floor. An old fluorescent tube buzzed above her. Sunspots flashed across the warped wood under her feet as the maple tree outside the window trembled in the wind. She felt Susie moving through the house, moving, perhaps, through the long-forgotten secret passage, tunneling through the walls up to the third floor, approaching the portal to this very room, banging against the secret panel that had long ago been plastered over, and just as Jentri heard the sound of the plaster loosening, cracking away from the wall, she bolted down the stairs. Jentri never ventured to the third floor again.

  A Saturday. Early in the morning Jentri saw her mother with a coffee mug in one hand and a putty knife in the other, but that had been some hours ago and now Jentri was alone.

 

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