Page 8 of Call Off the Dark

She sat and waited. She waited for a long time that day in the cellar. Silence extended its icy fingers until, finally, she was shivering with it. Deep in her bones, she knew it was time for Tyler to reach out. She felt convinced it was possible, and then she felt angry he hadn’t found a way to do it yet.

“Tyler?” Nothing. Just the solitude. “Tyler?!”

Abruptly, Helen stood.

Upstairs, she opened the small wooden box on the mantel and pulled out the gun.

She wavered in front of the burning fireplace, staring down at the gun, as her tears fell onto the barrel. She stood there long enough in front of the fire that sweat broke on her brow and dripped down, and the blood began to seep through the bandage on her index finger. Her tears, her sweat, her blood, her pain—it was all pouring out of her, pouring onto the gun, pouring into her need to reach Tyler, until that need propelled her back into action.

Her feet pounded down the cellar stairs.

In front of the shrine, Helen shouted, “You want me to come to you, Tyler?” She cocked the gun and raised it to her temple. “I will!”

She closed her eyes, and her breathing quickened. She wasn’t sure if she believed in a monolithic God, but she believed the universe couldn’t just be random bacteria and a fireball that exploded. She believed Tyler’s soul was somewhere and she wanted to be with it, and if there was some type of God that so many churches preached about, she didn’t think He was a cruel one who sent suffering people to hell just because they couldn’t handle the pain of this physical realm.

She was going to do it, she was.

In mere seconds, there would be relief. It would be final.

She didn’t think of her parents in that moment, but it wasn’t because she was selfish. It was because she had spent almost two endless years feeling like an open wound, and the sorrow had blocked out the memories of times she’d laughed with them or shared interesting conversations. What she felt radiating from her parents these days on their infrequent phone calls was something close to pity, and she assumed her darkness made them feel darker. Her light had been long gone, and now she just made everything worse for everyone.

Helen didn’t think of Tyler’s family either. They kept in touch through her PO Box in town, cards arriving on holidays and letters at random intervals. The sentences were always full of friendliness, but she felt the deep sorrow in every word. They were only doing it out of a sense of duty.

None of her old friends flashed in her mind either. She hadn’t seen them in so long that it seemed like a different woman in a different life had maintained those friendships. The woman she was, here and now, had no real friends.

Somehow, she didn’t even consider Wade. The truth was, she simply forgot about him. Later, it would be impossible for her to say how it didn’t occur to her that Wade would have been the one to find her body in the cellar. It would have been devastating for him. She would have inflicted the worst kind of trauma upon someone she cared for.

No, it wasn’t the living ones who stopped her from pulling the trigger.

It was the notion in her head that maybe pulling the trigger would disappoint Tyler. And when she had that thought, she couldn’t go through with it, and she lowered the gun.

But stopping filled her with a tempest of anger.

She ran back up the stairs and raced outside into the gathering wind, and she screamed Tyler’s name as loud as she could. She wasn’t calling out to him for help anymore though. She was trying to crack open the universe.

Helen pointed the gun at the sky and fired.

The sound and the recoil jolted her, but it was the first thing that day that felt almost good.

She aimed high again and fired another bullet. If Tyler was her guardian angel, maybe one of her bullets would go whizzing past him. Wake him up and make him think twice about not giving her a direct sign.

Helen felt an ominous vibration in the air, unlike anything she’d ever felt, like thunder so far away she couldn’t hear it but could somehow still sense it.

Later, she’d look back and realize it wasn’t thunder.

It was a warning.

It was her last chance to close the door she was forcing open.

She pointed the gun at the sky again. If she couldn’t have Tyler, she wanted to break apart the sky and bleed this realm into the next.

She fired the gun a third time and almost instantly heard a strange sound—was it an impact? A scream? Or were those things in her head? She didn’t know exactly what she’d heard, but she knew something terrible had happened with the third shot.

Helen was well read, so she was aware that fateful things often happen according to the rule of three. In mythology, the Cosmos is divided into three equal parts: the Sky, the Sea, and the Underworld. In the Bible, there is the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. In supernatural parlor games, you peer into a mirror in a blackened room and say Bloody Mary exactly three times. It’s always three.

So in a way, she wasn’t surprised that it was her third gunshot that sent something hurtling toward earth. In a way, she was hoping, expecting, demanding. She didn’t realize what it was at first, but she saw the motion of it fall from the sky.

Instinctively, she ducked.