Darkheart

The Present: Sound & Fury

No one stopped Cris as she stepped onto resort property. The watchman in his guard booth flicked a fleeting glance at her, then became preoccupied in his newspaper. She was utterly disheveled, head to toe, hair wild and clothing slapdash, feet bare and features raw and desperate. She held an old sticker-covered notebook against her chest, near her heart, though what beat inside her was something different, now, adamantine and sleek, crackling with the growth of glitter across its surface and through its chambers.

Cris hardly knew herself. She'd spent the last few days sleepless, not eating or drinking, not feeling anything at all except the ache within that drew her here. Her own minerals and stones hadn't been enough--she'd moved too far beyond them--and she likely would've sat weeping amongst them forever had not her sister stopped by with a bin of her old stuff.

Jess's unwelcome concern had nearly driven Cris insane. Cris hadn't even wanted to let her sister come in the house, but Jess had grown so pushy, and Cris had lost her resolve to argue, so she'd allowed her entrance. Jess had plopped her wheeled bin down on the kitchen floor, insisted on staying and making a pot of coffee, and shot copious looks at her older sister the entire time she messed with the filter and ground beans and filled the water. Cris had been unable to care. But when Jess, after a circumspect conversation about trivial matters, brought up the subject of therapy, of seeking "help," well . . . Cris had put hands on her and forced her to leave. Only several hours later, after shifting absently through her house, looking out at the shadowed forest and the things moving beyond her windows, did Cris recall something Jess had said--that there were weird things in that bin, rocks that had somehow begun to melt or secrete liquid. That the liquid had freaked her out, that it'd looked like blood . . .

Why hadn't Jess's words registered at first? Cris had dumped the bin, found what she'd needed to, and torn away from home in her truck. Now, here she was, her path at last clear, even if its purpose was not.

She saw the people around her--tanned shoulders and straight white smiles and chic skirts and polos and pastel touring bikes and lithe figures in dry swimsuits and small ones holding hands--but they didn't register as important; they fluttered across her brain like moths beneath a lamp. Cris was indifferent to the quickly averted glances, the children that approached and were pulled away by parents and siblings, the endorsing nods from the older patrons. Years had passed since she'd had any inclination to walk this deceptively sunny paved road, to be anywhere near this sure route into darkness. It was what it expected of her, though; she knew that, now. She'd had notions, wonderings . . . but she hadn't remembered, like he'd asked her to. She hadn't recalled everything he'd told her all those years ago, during the time they'd spent together, and even as he'd recently returned, sought and found her and striven to remind her, she'd struggled to retain what he'd said and done.

But she remembered it now. She'd written it all down in her journals, saved the gifts he'd given her before losing memory of their importance, forgotten all of it even existed, until Jess had brought it back to her.

Something to appreciate, perhaps, about her sister. The fox devours its children, Cris thought, though she didn't know why. Who was the mother--who the child?

The devil girl scampered tree to tree along the road, pace by pace with Cris, no one paying attention to her. Surely no one else even saw her because she didn't belong to them. Cris didn't quite notice her either, paid her as much attention as she did everyone else who drifted about as importantly as dust. Indeed, the girl had become such a part of her life that she no longer felt that determination to catch and be rid of her. None of that mattered, now; none of it had ever mattered.

She continued along the road, past the huge cottages with their clusters of bee-busy hydrangeas in the shade, the low mossy stone walls outlining the relaxed plots of land, the decks with their blue pots of red geraniums and their Adirondack chairs and their hammocks and porch swings. She stepped over the striped speed bumps and reached the casino and pool, passed them and continued toward the dining hall. Cris wasn't used to coming this way, but she'd been compelled, as if some force desired to prove that she'd been won over, she was under its control. Cris wasn't like the others, no. She was special, and they all knew it. "I'm coming!" she called out, incognizant of the golf carts that had run aground to avoid her and the bikes and scooters that had nearly bumped into one another in their effort to get away, of the whispers behind vertical hands and the ample side-eye. They watched her, all of them, and God damn then all! What did they know of it, with their stupid pretend rituals and bloody manipulation games? Child's play, all of it--they dabbled in the dark because they thought they understood it, but none of them knew what she did, what all of it was down below, what base presence . . . though it couldn't even be called that, could it? Because it defied categorization, defied human language altogether. And they were all meaningless stains on its surface, barely detectable, entirely inconsequential, and utterly, utterly alone.