Darkness My Old Friend

that house for millennia, torturing generations of neighborhood children?

“Yes, Mrs. Miller,” he said. He always tried to be polite. “It’s on the market.”

She issued an unpleasant snort. “Well, if you don’t clean it up, it’s only going to attract riffraff.”

Riffraff? Did people still use words like that? What did it even mean? He imagined some barefoot, downtrodden family dressed in rags, their belongings in garbage bags.

“I’m working on it, Mrs. Miller.”

Mrs. Miller looked back at the house, and he followed her eyes.

“He used to keep it up, before he got sick,” she said. There was an accusation inherent in the statement. But Michael knew enough about people like Claudia Miller to ignore the subtext. She didn’t know anything about him. And she certainly didn’t know anything about his father. No one did.

He opened the car door, and she backed away from him, her eyes widening a bit-at his height, he supposed. He towered over her. She wrapped herself up in her arms. He saw how the threadbare fabric of her housecoat clung to her small, shriveled body; he turned his eyes from her. There was something, not just about her physical appearance, that repulsed him. He started to feel that familiar rise of discomfort that he often had in personal encounters, a desire to flee into the house and close the door. But for a moment she didn’t move, and neither did he.

“Mrs. Miller, do you remember my mother?” He had to force the words out.

She looked up at him, startled. A brown paper bag danced noisily down the street, lofting and landing, lifting again in the wind that was picking up. Except for that, the neighborhood was quiet. It always was. No music blaring or dogs barking. People came home and went to work, might be seen tending to their properties on the weekends. But the things he remembered as a kid-the block parties, the gangs of boys and girls riding around on their bikes, playing in one another’s yards-had vanished. Each house was a bubble; people kept to themselves these days.

“Of course I remember her.” What did he hear in her voice? Disdain? Judgment? The woman who ran off on her family, the slut? Of course I remember her.

“Do you remember anything about the night she disappeared?”

Claudia looked down at her feet, continued backing away. “It was a long time ago.”

But Claudia remembered. Because everyone remembered Marla Holt. Every little boy thinks his mother is beautiful. But Marla Holt had been truly, luminously lovely. With chestnut hair that flowed like a river around her shoulders, with those dark eyes, with her hourglass shape, she filled the room when she entered. Men stared, smiled; women looked down at their nails. She wasn’t reed thin; she wasn’t glamorous. Her face wasn’t flawless. Her beauty was something that welled up from inside her, a kind of radiant heat. Even in the snapshots Michael had of her, he could see it. The camera worshipped the contrast on her face, the black eyebrows and red lips against the pale white of her skin. She complained endlessly about the size of her bottom, the constant maintenance she felt her appearance required-plucking, waxing, moisturizing, and exercising. He’d follow her on his bicycle while she ran around the neighborhood.

“I was designed for luxuriating, not for sweating,” she’d pant.

“Come on, Mom. One more mile. You can do it.”

As a boy he’d loved his father, of course. But it was his mother who put the stars in the sky.

“You told the police that you saw her leave,” he pressed. “That she got into a black sedan parked in front of the house, that someone was waiting for her and they drove off together. You said she was carrying a suitcase.”

She stopped moving, gave a single nod. “If that’s what I told the police, then that’s what I saw.” He noticed a tremor in her right hand.

“Do you remember anything else?”

“They were always fighting,” she said. “There was always yelling coming from that house. It used to drive me crazy.”

It was true. He used to hide under his covers and wait for his mother to come weeping up the stairs and close the door to her bedroom. That was the closing bell; the fight was over, and she was the loser again. His father never came after her. Michael never heard the soft tones of their making up. If they ever did make amends, it was in private.

“Did you see who was driving the car?”

“Such a long time ago, Michael,” she said. She shook her head sadly. “I’m an old woman. How can I remember?”

But she did remember, he could tell. She no longer wanted to look at him, was moving toward the safety of her house. Finally she turned and walked rapidly past the line of hedges that divided their yards. From behind the line: “Just don’t sell this place to any unsavory types. Think of the neighborhood.”

He knew he should move after her, try to get her to say more. But he’d leave that to Ray Muldune; the private detective’s services didn’t come cheap. And Michael had had enough social contact for one day-first the girl in the woods, then her mother. He had the drained and exhausted feeling that plagued him when he’d been aboveground too long.

Michael was happier underneath the world. This sunlit place above, where normal life was lived… now, that was scary, that was the place of monsters and nightmares. The modern world and most of the people that populated it made him uncomfortable. The people he knew-friends and acquaintances, if he could even call them that-seemed motivated by things he didn’t understand. They said one thing but appeared to be thinking something else, wearing smiles that never reached their eyes. The people he didn’t know, those he observed, were what he liked to call busy-addicted, engaged in one task but paying attention to something else- grocery shopping while talking on their cell phones, driving their cars while sending texts. Multitasking, they called it. When did it become a badge of honor to be too busy, to have too much to do?

The world was in a fearful rush; he’d never been able to keep the pace. Michael often felt confused, had the vague sense that there was something terribly wrong with him. He wanted to stop and look at the sky and the trees; he wanted to talk to the people he knew and met. But everyone seemed to speed past him, move around him. He was an obstruction on the superhighway of life. And that was on a good day. On a bad day, he felt that at any time strangers might start pointing and shrieking, identifying him as something unwanted. Sometimes he was nervous to the point of sweating, even in the most mundane encounters-at tollbooths, grocery checkout lines.

But below the ground there was another world. In the dripping darkness of the mines, there was solitude and silence. There he started to relax and expand, to become more fully himself. In that peculiar living darkness, all his senses came alive.

He listened to Claudia shut her door, then turned his attention back to his father’s house. For another moment he wavered again about the hotel. But then he started up the cracked and overgrown path. He stood on the stoop a second, took in the rusting letter box, the flickering porch light, and then he walked inside.

He always stooped when he walked through doorways, though he wasn’t quite that tall, just over six feet. But he’d hit his head on so many things that others cleared with ease that it was just habit to fold in his shoulders, to bow his head.

He let the door close behind him. He could still hear her voice-her enthusiastically off-pitch singing, her trying- to-be-stern tone, her mellifluous laughter. Long after she’d gone, he’d hear her when he came home from school.

Is that you, sweetie? Are you hungry?

And the sound of her ghost voice caused him to ache inside. After she left, this house was haunted by her, though only in the way all houses were haunted-by echoes and memories, energy trapped in the drywall and floorboards. But that was bad enough. It was reason enough to go away and never come back again, to leave his father to grow old and lonely, to leave him to become sick and to rot like the rest of the debris in the dump he’d made of their home.

The hallway was lined on both sides with piles of newspapers that reached to the ceiling, narrowing the passage by more than a foot on either side. Michael had to flatten himself and turn to make his way sideways down the hall, to avoid touching the wall of newsprint, heading toward the only habitable room in the house.

The sitting room, with her television and shelves of books, the coffee table she’d inherited from her mother, the framed landscapes she’d painted hanging on the walls, remained as he remembered it. The surfaces and fabrics in here were kept clean. The sofa and love seat were free from stain; the dusky pink carpet was still fresh