Little Hidden Darknesses

Alejandro and I held hands all the way to Vinsant estate, and only parted because he skidded to a stop on the back lawn. He raised his head up the length of the house, the moon lighting up his eyes, making them gleam. His hair stuck out at odd angles from our run, his chest heaving up and down.

“What’s the matter?” I asked as I reversed toward him, my feet crunching through a blanket of old, yellow leaves. The last remnants of fall before winter swept across the island.

“N – Nothing,” he replied, still entranced. Then, he blinked and started toward the double red doors through which Aillard had let me in that afternoon. “This place is just so –”

“Scary? Freaky? Overrated?” I said with a smirk.

Alejandro paused. “Yea, I think all of those are pretty accurate. Especially when you consider the lack of lighting inside. And don’t get me started on that stained window ...”

“Wait, have you been in there before?”

The moment my question reached his ears, Alejandro’s brows caved in and he puffed his cheeks. “No,” he said, not particularly convinced. “Never. I don’t know how I knew all that.”

A pause.

“Maybe ...” He glanced sideways through a parting in his fringe, studying the house once over. “I guess that’s just what I expected. You know, the cliché of old mansions.”

“Yea, maybe.” With a laugh in my throat – maybe panic – I peeled apart the handles on the doors. Their creak made me cringe, almost as if I was afraid the Vinsants might hear it all the way downhill. As if they’d feel my boots make contact with the floors, feel my breath filling up their hallways.

“Come on,” I said with the lump dulling my voice, “we’ve got to do this as quickly as possible. I’ve bought us time at the festival, but they ought to have noticed I’m gone by now.”

Actually, I was sure they did, but a part of me refused to admit it. As if admitting it would make it final, thus diminishing any ounce of hope. Any chance of actually getting away with it.

When I didn’t enter, Alejandro pressed past me. I shuffled inside and shut the doors, but not without peering outside first. With the fog retracted and the moon beaming down, I saw as far as their front gates. Still shut. And the path beyond it still abandoned.

Good.

I shut the doors and turned the lock, then took a deep, courage-amassing breath and turned. Alejandro was already at the far end of the corridor, his head twisting and turning as he studied his surroundings. He stroked the velvety wallpaper and pressed a finger to each of the paintings. He lingered a moment on one: an oil sketch of a boat, a ship from the 1800s with masts and sails and a flag flapping in the breeze. Red with a white cross and triangle across it.

“You think that’s the ship that sank on the island?” I asked in an attempt to break the growing silence.

But Alejandro hardly even heard me. He traced the waves, the pin-straight horizon and sun that rose beyond it. Or maybe set. I couldn’t quite tell from the way it was positioned.

“Alejandro?” I asked, and he jerked.

“Oh” he said as though only then realising I was there, “it might be. I guess. I’ve got no idea.”

With his strange behaviour still resting on my shoulders, I crept around the corner to the foyer, where the stained window at the top of the stairs lit the room in blues, yellows and reds. Alejandro followed after me, his head still craned to scan every nook and cranny.

“Look at this place,” he said with his arms outstretched. “Don’t you just feel the history in these walls?”

I didn’t. Not really. Not when the only thing I could feel was angst. And like the grandfather clock kept reminding me, time was ticking by. Constantly and with no stopping it.

For all I knew, the Vinsants were on their way already. We had to hurry up and search the forbidden room. “This way,” I said, then sprinted up the staircase to the second landing.

Alejandro’s footsteps echoed in my wake, not as fast as I had hoped, but at least he seemed to have regained some focus. In fact, he caught up to me in the corridor, walking close to me with his fingers grazing mine. Someone had parted the corridor’s curtains, and the moon filtered through in shards, guiding me down the carpet to the room at the end.

“What if it’s locked?” Alejandro asked.

“Then we break it open.”

I meant it. At this point, after everything, I wasn’t about to be kept from the truth by a shard of wood. No such violence was necessary, at least, as the knob easily turned in my grip.

I opened the door on a screen at first, and when nothing dangerous jumped out at us, I gave it a push. The wood banged against the rear wall, revealing a room of pitch-black darkness. Of stuffy air and an icy draft. Only now did I feel the history, the family’s deepest secrets.

I held my breath as my fingers roamed the inside wall for a switch. “Damn. I can’t find the light.”

But then the room filled with light from behind me. A hazy orange that glowed from under a green lampshade on a table next to a bed. Alejandro stood over it, his hand still on the switch. He smiled from the corner of his mouth, clearly amused. “Is this better?”

“Much,” I replied amidst emptying my chest.

“So, this is it? The top secret, never to enter room?”

“I suppose it is.”

We scanned the space, a bedroom buried beneath piles and piles of boxes. Nothing incriminating, nor particularly flashy. It looked your normal spare bedroom with old, forgotten junk.

I couldn’t believe it. This was what they didn’t want me to see? The one room in the house that wasn’t spotless? No. This wasn’t it. This couldn’t be their deepest, darkest secret.

“I don’t want to dampen the mood or anything,” said Alejandro as he hauled one of the boxes toward him across the bed, “but I was expecting something along the lines of a body.”

My eyes rolled on their own. “Yea,” I agreed, “me too.” And it didn’t even have to be a body. A torture chamber with cages and knives would’ve also sufficed. A table with blood on it, maybe. The skins of Benjy and Bobby, and maybe several more of their victims.

The image in my mind grew too vivid, and I gagged. Great, leave it up to me to freak myself out.

“Eira,” said Alejandro just as I flopped down on an armchair in the corner. Dust billowed all around me, making me cough. He held up a photograph, his brows contorted now.

“What” – another cough – “is it? Did you find something? A picture of tiny Branka in a bathtub?”

Alejandro didn’t even crack a smile. He gathered two more photographs in his hand, then brandished them through the dusty air. “These are all ... they’re all of your mother.”

My coughs vanished in my throat. What dulled them was a tightness, a stuffiness that strangled me, made me wheeze under my breath. “What?” I asked. “Are you sure it’s her?”

“Yea, look for yourself.”

I got up from the armchair and trudged across the room, my every limp pulsing with adrenaline. Alejandro held out the photograph, but I shoved them away and dove into the box.

Every picture in every frame. My mum stared back at me, seventeen-years-old and smiling. But I only noticed the truly strange part once I had made past her portraits, and arrived at the family’s. Suddenly I couldn’t feel my fingertips. My vision blurred and I stammered back.

The box came with me, all the way onto the floor. It spilled over, frames and frames and frames. Of them with my mum.

The Vinsants.

Genevieve. Leonardo. Lilith. Freya. Branka. Aillard.

All looking exactly as they did earlier tonight. Not a year older, not a hair on their head discoloured.

“Eira,” Alejandro began, but I kicked one of the portraits to his feet. He bent down and picked it up, only to scratch his head in confusion. “But ... they’re all ... how’s this even possible?”

“It’s not.”

“Eira, your mother’s in these pictures with them. They weren’t even supposed to have been born yet.”

“I know.”

Gravity pulled me into the floorboards, making me feel heavy. Heavier than I ever thought possible. The air was cold, colder than before, and the light from the lamp hurt my eyes.

Alejandro left me to my thoughts on the ground and proceeded to rake two more boxes toward him. More photographs. More proof against whoever the heck the these people really were. Proof about what, I wasn’t sure. Immortality? This wasn’t what we came here for.

Alejandro reached into a box a took out a jumper. “Wow,” he said, “this is kind of nice.”

But I was in no mood for evaluating clothes. I rubbed my eyes with my palms, trying to figure out how the heck none of the fucking Vinsants had aged over twenty years. And what that meant for their relations. Was Lilith not my mum’s sister, but her mum?

Was Freya, Branka and Aillard her siblings? My aunts and uncles?

“Eira,” Alejandro broke through my thoughts. “Come and look at this.”

No response.

“I think these might be my dad’s things.”

Only now did I pay him any attention. Finally, our first decent lead. Or what still passed as decent.

I scraped to my feet and made a line for the bed. Alejandro gave me the hoodie to hold as he fished beneath some skirts and dresses for more photographs. The moment he saw them, however, a frown cut between his brows. He brought the topmost one closer to his face –

Only to drop it again.

I put the hoodie aside and studied it. My mum and Alejandro’s dad, sharing a passionate kiss under a tree. Only the photo was clearer than the one at the school, and I could clearly see Fernando’s face. The dimples in his cheeks. The patches around his mouth.

The patches around his mouth?

“Alejandro, I don’t –”

He already knew what I wanted to say, thus forestalled me before I confirmed it with words. “It can’t be,” he said as he flicked through the rest of the photos. “It just can’t be ...”

But it was.

In each one, it became more and more clear. The boy in the photograph wasn’t his dad, but him. Alejandro Perez. He was my mum’s lover. The boy from her note, from the school.

And like the Vinsants, he hadn’t aged a day.

“Alejandro, wait!”

Footsteps echoed down the staircase and into the foyer, the sound resonating off the high ceiling.

“Alejandro, where are you going?” I called out, my heart pumping in my chest and my voice breaking.

“I have to get away,” he muttered with his back to me as he burst through the front door and set off down the driveway. “I can’t be here. I can’t see that. I have to get away from here.”

“But ... no, you can’t just take off after something like this. We’ve got to figure out what’s going on.”

“There’s nothing to figure out.”

“Alejandro, don’t go!”

But he did anyway.

I watched him sprint across the lawn to the front gates, then thrust through one of the hedges to the other side. He didn’t stop or glance back, but kept on running, all the way down the road into the dark. And that’s when the tears came. I swiped my sleeve across my face – “Alejandro, please!” – then set off after him, my feet moving without intent.

The hedges were much harder to push through than he had made it look, but once on the other side, I sprinted downhill and around the bend in the road after him. He walked instead of ran now, and I spotted him just as he entered the cemetery across from the motel.

“Alejandro!” I called out, even though I knew he wouldn’t answer. At least he’d know I was coming and ... and what, exactly? Prepared to console him? To explain the truth to him?

My feet properly ached when I left the tar road for the cemetery’s overgrown dirt path. Candlelight fell across my face, rendering it difficult to spot Alejandro in the shadows. Though I needn’t see him to know where he was. And I found him there, bent over and digging like an animal at his dad’s headstone. Tufts of grass went everywhere.

“We thought the photo at the school was my dad,” he puffed mid-dig, “but it wasn’t. It was me.”

Dig.

Dig.

Dig.

I reached out, but didn’t touch him. “Alejandro –”

“The note from your mother wasn’t for him, but for me. I was her lover. I was in love with your mother, Eira!” Alejandro plucked the final tuft from the ground and gasped, his eyes growing wider than ever before. I felt his shock, his pain right into my own heart.

His dad’s gravestone read, Died: April 14th, 1890.

A couple hundred years ago.

“No,” Alejandro muttered, “it’s impossible. He just died the other day. He couldn’t have –”

“He could,” I correct him, much to my demise. It was all coming together now, the secrets, the lies. The fog. The Vinsants. I thought back to the photograph, to how in love my mum and Alejandro seemed, and suddenly I felt sick. Even worse than I felt at the festival.

“Eira,” said Alejandro, still on his knees and with his head lowered, “why don’t I remember her? Why does it feel like my father died a few years ago? Please, tell me what’s going on.”

I don’t know, I thought, but for his sake I said, “I think it’s the fog. It makes people forget things. How you forgot my mum, and how everyone in town forgot about Benjy and Bobby.”

“Benjy and Bobby?” Alejandro asked, raising half a brow.

“My point exactly.” I lowered into a crouch, this time putting my hand on his shoulder. It didn’t feel wrong, surprisingly. In fact, it felt fine. Great, even. “I think the Vinsants control the fog. And that’s how they’ve controlled the town. You’ve all been trapped here.”

A pause.

“For several hundred years.” As soon as the last word left my mouth, I swallowed and clenched my jaw. My mum wasn’t thirty nine when she died. She was in fact an old woman.

A very, very old woman indeed.

“It’s probably,” I went on, despite my heavy heart, “why my mum left. She couldn’t take it anymore.”

A moment of silence.

Then, Alejandro got up off his knees. Clumps of dirt fell from his pleated pants, his tie all ruffled and his hair sticking to the sides of his clammy face. His eyes bled when he said, “Why didn’t she take me with her, then?” And my heart bled at sound of longing in his voice.

“I – I don’t know.” Damn it, was I jealous of my mum now? Were the two of us competing for the same man’s heart? I shook my head and went on, “But now I want to take you with me.”

Alejandro’s face straightened. “Y – You do?” He reached for my cheek, but I pulled away.

I couldn’t do this, not now. Not while everything was still so fresh. Not while I was still processing.

“We have to get off the island. Tonight.” I stepped back, off Fernando’s grave and onto the dirt path. A breeze swept past us, a wind with traces of fog so tiny, my skin started to prickle. And I felt them. The Vinsants. “Shit, they’re looking for me. We have to go.”

“Where?” Alejandro asked as we set off toward the motel parking lot.

“Though the fog, of course.”

“What?” I felt him resisting my pull. “Are you crazy?”

“Alejandro, it’s not deadly. I promise. The Vinsants just tricked you into thinking that so they could keep you here. So you could serve as their puppets for centuries on end. My mum went through it. I went through it. It’ll be alright. As soon as we get to the other side –”

“Okay,” he said, “but, what about my mother? If what you’re saying is true, I can’t just leave her here.”

“We’ll come back for her. For everyone.”

Alejandro thought about it for a moment, then set his jaw. “Alright. How do we get off the island?”

I leapt onto the deck and held onto the wall while I caught my breath. My eyes scanned the forest, not really scanning it, but rather using the sight of it to prickle my thoughts. “That’s it,” I said after a moment. “My mum had the number of a ferry in her motel room.”

“A ferry?”

“Yea, I know it’s a long shot –”

“But it’s worth it,” he agreed.

I shook my head, the back of it thick, full of everything that had happened over the past few days. Old Bill was right when he had called this island cursed. Except he had no idea the extent of it. Heck, I didn’t know the extent of it. But I needn’t in order to escape. “Come on. Let’s get our stuff before they find us, and let’s hope someone’s on the other end of that call.”