The Deeps - Volume 1, Issue 1

Inner Dark

Rory Say

Early one morning in the dull summer of her ninth year, Loreen awoke with the disquieting compulsion to remove the eyes of her three porcelain dolls. It proved a more trying task than expected. Fingers, she found, were no good for gouging into the smooth heads of her subjects, and so she went down the hall to the bathroom in search of a small pair of scissors she knew to be kept there.

The dolls, perched atop the wide mahogany dresser facing the foot of Loreen’s bed, looked all but replicated, differing only in lightness of hair and blueness of eyes. Each was the size of a newborn and wore identical red dresses with the same white stenciled trim. They were sisters, Loreen had decided, triplets of timeless age. Or perhaps the notion had been planted by her mother, whose own mother had handed them down from Loreen’s great-grandmother; so often had the dolls been passed from one generation to the next that they were older now than anyone living cared to recall.

And yet the condition of each was pristine. The idea that they might be played with had never once crossed Loreen’s mind. In truth, she never touched them. They were ornaments, fixtures of her house and life—things to be looked at without being seen.

Why, then, did she see them now?

Returning to her room, Loreen took the dolls down from where they sat and laid them side-by-side across her bed. Then, seating herself on the mattress’s edge, she dealt with them in turn, cradling their heads in her lap as she worked the scissors’ point into each socket until both marble-like eyes were dislodged.

Why hadn’t she done this long ago? How had she allowed these eyes to keep track of her, even while she slept? By the time the second doll lay face-up on her thigh, her hands had begun to tremble. Now and then a bloodless scratch was left on the pure white forehead or faintly flushed cheeks.

After a half-hour, though, it was done. Each inherited doll sat in its designated place, dark pits impairing their contented expressions. Loreen got to her knees and studied the six tiny eyes she’d dropped on the carpet, irises of morning, evening, and midnight blue. One by one, she pocketed them in her pajama bottoms and then skipped downstairs toward the kitchen, conscious of a strong appetite that had formed inside her.

•   •   •

“And here I thought you’d run off in the night and left us,” said Mrs. Laplar, extracting her head from the fridge, along with a carton of cream. “I called you down ages ago and you never came. We had pancakes with those berries you picked. Where were you?”

“I was busy,” said Loreen.

A choked laugh came from the table. Mr. Laplar, the eminent neurosurgeon, sat barricaded behind a newspaper in his usual corner, a large mug steaming in front of him. Seated to his left some several feet away, Loreen’s older brother Thomas looked up from the pool of syrup on his plate and into the face of his sister.

“Two or three?” asked Mrs. Laplar, standing now at the stove.

“Four,” said Loreen.

Mr. Laplar chuckled softly as if to the effect of some private joke. Loreen ignored him. She sat down and made faces at her brother, who gazed back with eyes as vacant as those in her pocket. Soon a plate was placed in front of her, alongside a tall glass of pink juice.

“Daddy,” Loreen said, cutting her pancakes into neat rectangles.

A mild groan responded from across the table.

“How do people go blind?”

Mr. Laplar folded up his paper and, yawning, tossed it on the counter behind him. “Only by looking at things they shouldn’t,” he said.

“Things like what?” Loreen asked.

For a moment her father, kneading the loose flesh of his neck, appeared to consider this. “If I told you that,” he said, “you might go blind by tomorrow.” Then he rose from the table and left the room, only to return a moment later and announce that his Sunday had been ruined on account of his hands being required at the hospital. He displayed his hands for all to see.

“How awful,” said Mrs. Laplar, getting at once to her feet. “I’ll drive you down, of course.”

Amid the search for jackets, bags, and keys, Loreen finished the last of her breakfast and remained in her chair, wondering what sorts of things might blind you to look at.

“Go and kiss your father goodbye,” said Mrs. Laplar, imparting a sharp smell of dried sweat as she leaned over the back of her daughter’s head and began clearing the table. “He’s got to go out and save some poor fool’s life on his day off.”

Loreen, not wanting to kiss anybody, made her way to her room but was blocked by her father, scrutinizing his face in the front hall mirror. She stood still and waited for him to move, but he only kept fussing with his hair and working his fingers into his drooping cheeks. Finally, bending lightly behind him, Loreen took a pair of eyes from her pocket and dropped them on a whim into the open mouth of the black handbag that sat on the floor.

“Here Daddy,” she said, clasping the bag shut and handing it to him.

Mr. Laplar thanked her without looking at what he’d been given. He frowned at his reflection for another moment and then, opening the door, shouted back to his wife that he’d be waiting in the car.

•   •   •

The summer had been long, and by now, nearing the end of an August that felt stretched to twice its length, Loreen and her brother had grown so desperate in mutual boredom as to have finally noticed each other. She could hear him now in the kitchen, searching the high cupboards for things meant to be out of his reach.

How much larger the house grew when they had it to themselves. Still standing at the door long after the car’s engine had faded to nothing, Loreen wished she could change into proper clothes without having to climb the stairs to her room. She tried to bring to mind why it had felt so crucial at the time to do what she’d done there before breakfast. And why hadn’t she thought of what her mother might say when she discovers how the dolls that were once hers—and her mother’s before her—had been defaced? How would she explain it?

“What’s in your pocket?”

Loreen spun around to find her brother behind her, unwrapping a bar of dark baking chocolate.

“Nothing,” she said, and showed him her empty hand.

Thomas put a square of chocolate in his mouth and held it there to melt as he looked at her. Then he took his mud-scuffed boots from the rack in the front closet and pulled one over his foot.

“Wait till I get dressed,” said Loreen.

Her brother brushed past her and opened the door. “You look dressed to me,” he said. “And anyway, who’s going to see you?”

Without another word, he strode out of the house and kicked gravel as he marched the length of the drive. Loreen, shouting after him, snatched her own boots from the closet and ran to catch up.

•   •   •

It was true that they rarely encountered another soul during their excursions. The bogland around their home was a scoured, shelterless plane, the sort of landscape that tends to be shunned. And though there existed pathways dug through the densely packed peat, they were frequently interrupted by tracts of mud or miry pools of water, even at this driest time of year. Besides, Loreen and Thomas preferred to climb atop the raised soil, where parched grass covered the earth as far as the eye could see.

With Thomas now leading the way, this was just what they did. After walking the half-kilometer down the narrow stretch of country road to the nearest access point, they helped each other up the black shelves of peat until they stood elevated more than a meter above the path.

“You know he wasn’t serious,” Thomas said, pressing on in a random direction. They were the first words either of them had spoken since leaving the house.

“What?” said Loreen, hurrying after him. “Who?”

Thomas did not slow down as he spoke. “You’re either born blind or you go that way because something happens to you,” he said. “It has nothing to do with looking at things you shouldn’t.”

“I know that,” said Loreen, embarrassed because she hadn’t.

It was one of those warm, windless days without a sun. A pair of crows tumbled across the white sky like blown cinders, but otherwise there was no life to be seen. Nothing earthbound moved but their own feet beneath them.

When they came to the edge of a path, they paused to sit down. Hugging her knees, Loreen glared at the stagnant water flooding the walkway below, half expecting a hand to emerge. Her father had told them about the shrunken corpses of sacrificed men that he claimed lay buried throughout the bog by their home. He’d shown them pictures from a book that Loreen had to believe weren’t real, even though he insisted they were. It was a book of science, he said, and there was a museum in the city where he’d one day take them.

Beside her, Thomas took the half-melted bar of chocolate from his pocket, peeled the foil, and took a bite. Loreen held out her hand, but before he could break a piece off an abrupt sound startled them both to their feet.

It repeated itself, once, twice, and then again. Past the far edge of the path in front of them, somebody was gripped by a fit of coughing so violent that it might be fatal.

Loreen looked to her brother and jerked her head back in the direction they’d come. But Thomas, to her horror, shook his own head and made his way toward the awful sound, dropping to the path and squelching through the ankle-deep muck. Loreen found herself following.

In a shallow crater beyond the path’s far side, a man sat with his back to a black wall of peat. He was wiping his mouth when they found him, his head down between heaving shoulders.

“Hello,” Thomas called.

The man in the hole turned his head slightly. He had a narrow face with sunken features, cheeks covered with dark stubble. Just now his eyes were squinted shut, as though blinded by a sun that was nowhere in the sky.

“Who’s that?” the man said, and wetly cleared his throat.

Loreen pulled on her brother’s sleeve and was shrugged away.

“Are you all right?” said Thomas.

The man’s squint deepened.

“Perfectly,” he said, and seemed to smile. “Is it not a fine hole I’ve found for myself?”

He looked old but might not have been. His hands and face were smeared with dirt, his worn trousers caked to the knees. Loreen had never seen a grown man so filthy.

“Let’s go,” she said to Thomas, tugging on his shirt.

“And who’s that with you?” the man asked without looking in their direction. “A sister, is it?”

Thomas nodded, but the man paid no attention. He had a strange way of facing forward as he spoke, and it looked to Loreen as if his eyes were unable to open completely.

“I thought it might be,” he said. “A young brother and sister out in the wilds of the world.” Resting his head against the dirt wall at his back, he appeared to retire for a time into the privacy of his thoughts. Then his face tautened. “I don’t suppose you’d be a pair of angels come to pay me a visit?” he said. “Because if you are, I never asked for you.”

“Do you mind if we come down?” said Thomas.

The man did not respond immediately. He scratched the whiskers on his throat and readjusted his position. Loreen had the sense that he had been in the hole for a very long time. “I’d do little to stop you,” he said at last.

Thomas put a hand to the edge and lowered himself, then turned to help his sister. The man stayed just where he was. He looked more alarming up close. A tooth was missing from the top of his mouth, and dried blood adhered to the sides of his nostrils. His eyes remained tightly shut.

“Do you need help?” said Thomas. “Are you lost?”

The man shook his head. “I’m at home enough here and that’s the end of it.”

Loreen knew that no matter how long they stayed with him, his eyes would never open. She felt in her pocket and was comforted to count the even number of four.

“We could go home and come back,” said Thomas.

“You’ll not see me again,” the man said flatly. “You’ll leave me here. And that’s the end of it.”

A break appeared in the low sky, and the sun that crept through it cast a harsh light on the three in the hole. No one spoke until it was covered again.

“If that’s what you want,” said Thomas.

But the man, perhaps attempting to sleep, gave no response. Loreen found it easy to imagine that he might stay this way forever, his back set comfortably against the crumbling shelf of peat, his hands resting open on his lap, a look of exhausted contentment on his dirt-smeared face. She hardly noticed when her brother left her side and made for the wall they’d climbed down.

As she stepped forward, she felt in her flesh that the man registered her presence, even though he remained immobile.

“Here,” she whispered to him, and placed in his rough hand a pair of mismatched eyes.

His fingers closed upon them and opened. He rolled them gently in his palm and rubbed them as if for luck with his thumb. Then he froze.

“Bless you,” he murmured, his hand beginning to quiver. “God bless you.”

Unable to think of how to respond, Loreen turned away but was seized by the arm. She looked down, terrified, and saw the man’s long fingers meet around her wrist, his sealed eyelids fluttering like the wings of a trapped moth.

“What are you?” His voice was ragged, desperate. “Tell me, please.”

Too shocked even to scream, Loreen tore herself from the man’s grip and ran from the hole.

She found Thomas waiting in the grass between the pit’s edge and the path, licking chocolate from his hand. Whether he’d seen her give the man a gift—if a gift it truly was—he made no comment, and she was still deciding how to explain when he dropped the foil at his feet and set off at a good pace, straight back the way they’d come.

•   •   •

There was too much to say to find the words to say anything. And yet what was there to say, really? They’d found a man in a hole in the bog down the road from their house who wished to be left alone. Why did Loreen get the sense that the last sixty minutes had taken far more than an hour from her life?

She focused on the ground in front of her, on her boots carrying her homeward. Her pajamas, tucked into them, had gotten muddied when she’d climbed in and out of the hole, and wiping them with her hands only dirtied them more. Lagging back a few more paces, she took the remaining two eyes from her pocket and discreetly tossed them behind her, one after another, like breadcrumbs intended for nobody.

Only once they had hopped down to the path leading back to the road did Thomas pause and wait for his sister. Leaning his spine against a signpost, he closed his eyes and yawned gigantically. Loreen felt it too; an exhaustion so deep it was almost pleasurable had crept over her on the return journey. She crouched beside her brother.

“You know you can’t mention it to them,” said Thomas, tilting his head to see her. “Not to them or to anyone. Promise me.”

Loreen nodded without having listened.

“What do you think was the matter with him?” she asked. “Why did he never open his eyes?”

She knew it was a stupid question by the way her brother waited a moment before he expelled air through his nose.

“Because he didn’t have any,” he said, and set off toward the road.

Loreen swallowed the saliva she had unconsciously allowed to collect in her mouth. She looked over her shoulder, startled in a tired sort of way, but nothing moved in the world at her back. The man they’d left in the hole hadn’t moved, either. He would never move. She knew this because she could not imagine otherwise.

Thomas called her name and she jumped in place. He had already made it to the road, and he waved to her only once before disappearing behind the blackberry brambles they often paused to harvest on their way home. But there was no temptation to linger this time.

As she caught up, Loreen found that her fatigue was accompanied now by a need to escape the heat; a mugginess had invaded the afternoon, and inside her wool pajamas droplets of sweat slid down her back like small, living things. Dark dots had begun dancing through her vision. She wanted nothing more than to close the door to her room and sleep dreamlessly for days on end.

“You never promised me,” said Thomas, impersonating an adult.

But Loreen heard him only faintly. Her head had become a weight her shoulders could barely support.

“Why won’t you promise me?”

Turning quickly from her brother, Loreen put her hands to her knees and vomited a blue mouthful of partially digested pancake on the road’s edge. The ground swam at her feet, and so she shut her eyes as she vomited again, a lesser glob this time, and spat sticky strings that clung to her lips.

Thomas placed a hand on her back.

“You’re all right,” he said helpfully. “We have to get back home.”

Loreen shuddered. If only she were alone she could lie on the ground and rest.

“Fine,” said Thomas. “I’ll carry you then.” He turned around and, pulling her arms over his shoulders like the straps of a schoolbag, lifted her on his back.

Something almost like sleep came over Loreen as she was carried back down the road.

•   •   •

As he set her down at the end of the drive, Thomas mentioned something about too much heat and a lack of water. He looked her over as he stretched his arms.

“You’re only tired,” he said.

Loreen supposed it was true. Her stomach had settled, but her need for the comforts of her bedroom had only intensified. A dull pressure in the core of her brain had begun building outward, while the dots that pranced through her field of vision had by now mutated into expanding and contracting blotches of bright color, as if her gaze had rested on the sun for so long that its burning imprint would not leave.

“I am tired,” she agreed, gravitating toward the house. The car had returned to its spot outside the solarium, which meant that at least their mother was at home. It was important, Loreen felt, to keep whatever was afflicting her a secret from her parents. And anyway, all she needed was to lie down.

Inside, she hid her boots in the hallway closet and hurried upstairs, head throbbing, her hand on the banister because she could hardly see. It was far too hot in the house, but she found her room to be pleasantly cool. The window had been left wide open. Wincing at the ache behind her eyes, she went to it and pulled the drapes on the colorless day.

Now, standing in the dark, she could hear her mother downstairs asking questions of Thomas, whose brief answers were inaudible. Nor did Loreen want to hear them. What she wanted was silence, and a deeper dark.

 She felt the air with her hands as she crossed the room and crawled into bed, where she buried herself, muddied pajamas and all, beneath the sheets. It made no difference now whether her eyes were open or closed. She imagined they had turned inward, that the amorphous shapes twisting and transforming against a black screen existed in the hollow center of her skull. To banish them, she tried to sleep.

•   •   •

How much time passed before the sheets were flung aside and she shouted for the light to be turned off? An hour? Three? She hoped it had been a week.

Thomas had been telling her something—about their father and the hospital, their mother and the car—but his words were an abrasive noise that intensified the pain she’d hoped that sleep would heal. She waited until he was quiet, rubbing at the ache in her eyes and hearing them squeak behind their lids. It felt better when she closed them, even in the dark.

“Loreen?”

“What?”

“Did you hear what I told you?”

She was too unnerved by his urgency to answer the question.

“What time is it?” she asked.

“Night,” said Thomas. “She came to see you before she left and said you were asleep.”

“I feel better,” Loreen said, hopeful that it was true. She knew she would need to stand in order to be sure.

“She wanted to take us,” said Thomas, “but she was worried you were sick. I wanted to go with her but she told me to stay here with you.”

“I feel better,” Loreen repeated, more determined this time.

She kept her eyes shut as Thomas stood quietly at her side. It occurred to her that he was lingering for the simple reason that he was too frightened to leave.

“Do you think he’s still out there?” she asked.

Thomas’s head turned to the curtained window. In the space between their voices there came no sound from the outer dark, nor from the house beyond the closed bedroom door.

“I’m going to get something to eat,” said Thomas. But he stayed where he was for a moment longer, waiting, perhaps, for his sister to slide out of bed and join him.

“Goodnight then,” said Loreen. She sensed the wounding effect of the words as Thomas, hesitating another second, withdrew from her side.

Loreen did not call after him when, failing to close the door, he allowed a shaft of stinging light to spill into her room. Her attention had been drawn to the illumined wall past her feet, to the ornate dresser, and to the three intact dolls that sat there, eyes gleaming various shades of blue.