Page 77 of Call Off the Dark

“Wade?”

She didn’t find him in the bathroom, so she paused outside the guest bedroom. Very quietly, she cracked the door and peeked inside. Isaac slept peacefully. She gently closed the door and looked toward the living room.

She gasped.

In the shadows of the living room, a figure stood in the corner, indistinct details and edges, but Helen had the sense it was in a black robe with a sharp hood drawn around its face. It made her think of sacrifices and religious rites, like the ones W. B. Yeats had performed with his Ghost Club in the early 1900s. She heard a sound, like it was calling to her.

Going back to the bedroom wouldn’t make it go away, and she felt compelled to move toward it, the floor creaking beneath each step. The fear in her often battled with the curiosity she now had for the darkness, a strange duality that usually emerged at nighttime. Her hands curled into balls at her sides.

“What do you want?” she whispered as she entered the living room, and in that moment, she clearly saw the way the moonlight played against the window’s curtains and created the impression of folds and curves, but it was all just shadows. There was no dark figure. She was talking to shadows.

Then she saw her Edgar Allan Poe book lying face down in the middle of the room as if someone had deliberately displayed it. She picked it up and turned it over, expecting to find it open to “The Premature Burial,” but no, it was open to the poem “The Raven.”

“Helen?”

She jumped as Wade stepped into the room from the kitchen, momentarily blinding her with the lit lantern he held up. He was in his work pants and an undershirt. After he’d refused being second in line for a bath, he’d apparently found the ability to remove his own boots but not to put on his pajamas, because she had found him sprawled on top of the comforter that way when she’d finally gone to bed.

Wade lowered the lantern, and Helen saw that his eyes looked like black saucers.

“Why are you up?” he asked.

She held up the Poe book. “Did you put my book on the floor?”

“No, I was checking the house.”

“For what?”

“I’m just trying to protect us.”

“From Isaac? He’s asleep.”

“He’s pretending to be asleep.”

Wade spoke with such certainty, and she couldn’t meet that certainty with her own, so she fell silent. There was no denying that something was going awry here in the farmhouse, but Helen thought Wade had it wrong. In fact, as she looked up at his strained face, she began to wonder if he was the source of it all.

“Let’s go back to bed,” Wade said, as if she was going to be able to sleep now.

She returned the Poe book to the mantel and took down a book of Emily Dickinson poems. As they walked back to the bedroom, she clutched the book tightly in front of her.

Wade nodded at it and whispered, “What are you doing with that?”

“Nothing.”

In the bedroom, Helen didn’t read the Dickinson book. She simply held it to her chest as she lay in bed. Some people ward off the darkness with a Bible. Helen was going to attempt to do it with poetry.

Because I could not stop for Death—He kindly stopped for me

Two hours later, still wide awake in bed, Helen got up for a second time. She hesitated for a moment before lowering her feet to the floor, but no dark hands awaited her, and she felt a spark of anger at herself for hesitating in the first place. She set the Dickinson book on her bedside table and left the room.

Helen walked down the hall to the bathroom without listening for voices or looking for shadows posing as hooded figures. In college, she’d had a suitemate in the dorm who was Catholic, and that girl had insisted the devil gets in when you leave doors open for him. Well, Helen wasn’t going to leave doors open for devils or phantom figures or men with scars across their midsection.

She used the bathroom and was just starting back to her bedroom when a disconcerting feeling came over her again, the same one she’d had just before the hands had grabbed her from beneath the bed.

The same creeping feeling . . .

And then something dropped straight down in front of her from the ceiling. She let out a strangled noise and fell to the floor, covering her head with her arms.

Nothing crashed on top of her, but still, she was afraid to pull her arms away and look. She was certain something was still there with her in the hallway. She stiffened her mind, bracing for whatever it was she was about to see, and then she looked up.