Little Hidden Darknesses

The sun cast in shattered rays through the glass ceiling of the corridor. I might’ve enjoyed it more – the brilliance it brought to the photographs on the wall – if I didn’t have Aillard’s blunt nails digging into the back of my left arm, and his breath on the inside of my neck.

Lilith strolled ahead of us, her pace ever as steady, as controlled. Like a spirit roaming the halls of an old castle, haunting those who inhabit it. Aillard, on the other hand, constantly stepped on my heels, each time only to blame me for it when Lilith scolded him.

“You’re the one who’s holding me like an animal,” I sneered at him.

“Keep quiet,” he snapped back.

“Happily.”

Another grunt.

I snuck a glance at the photographs. They had taken down the portrait of my mum, and replaced it with one of Branka and Aillard, the two of them perched on the rim of the fountain in the driveway. I searched the wall for more photographs of my mum, but Aillard jolted me every time I turned my head, so I abandoned my efforts. It didn’t matter, anyway, as I already knew the truth. They did know my mum. And she did grow up here.

“Why did you bail me out?” I dared to ask.

Aillard scoffed into my neck, yet it was Lilith who replied, “Don’t mistake what we did for an act of kindness.” She paused by the drawing room door. “What you did was reckless.”

“Reckless and irresponsible,” Aillard contributed. Lilith cast him a half a grimace, and he shrank a little.

But I didn’t care for their wordless spat. All I cared about was what Lilith had said to me. I was reckless, and not wrong? Not coldblooded and heartless? A criminal punishable by death? I didn’t murder those boys, and they both knew it. Their words just now proved it.

Lilith twisted the crystal knob and pushed open the door. All the curtains of the drawing room were drawn, and once again a fire blazed in the fireplace. It lit the room in orange, every shadow enlarged. The sofas, the hazy lamps, the young woman pacing about.

Freya.

The moment I crossed the drawing room threshold, she charged at me. “You fucking simpleton!” she shouted. I was too slow to dodge and she shoved me back by my chest.

My head hit the threshold, the chiselled corner pressing into my back. I rapidly blinked, unsure of what to do other than endure her punches. Her punches and jabs and curses.

“You pulled him into the fog, and now you’ve ruined everything!” she spat in between shoving me.

Aillard wrapped his arms around her waist from behind, then yanked her back, away from me. “Freya,” he hissed into her messy, brown locks, “calm the heck down, will you?”

Freya wrenched free from her brother’s grip and huffed in my direction, visibly out of breath. I noticed she had red, swollen circles around her eyes and tear streaks down her cheeks. A strange sight, considering how massively she had grinned when calling the police.

An act, maybe?

Perhaps this was the act.

Freya adjusted her cardigan and paced back to the fire, her movements stiff and forceful. The sofa creaked when she flopped down next to Genevieve, her knitting needles clacking.

“They didn’t deserve to die,” Freya muttered.

So, they really were dead. But, who had murdered them? Branka? Aillard? I held my breath as I peeled away from the threshold. Lilith shut the door behind me and made a line for the armchair in the farthest corner. She hardly blinked, even as she sat down and crossed her legs.

“Children, please,” she started to say, but Branka forestalled her.

“Freya’s got a point, mother. Thanks to her, we’ve lost two more. And for no reason. Where are we supposed to find replacements? If the town keeps shrinking, we’ll all die.”

This made me frown. More than frown, actually. It made me muster enough guts to trudge forward and ask, “Hold on a second, what is going on? Why did you bring me here?”

“Stop playing the fool, Piper!” Freya snapped. The bun on her head came loose as she spun on the sofa and hooked her arm over the backside. “We all know what you came here to do!”

“Piper?” I asked, sharing in everyone else’s horror.

Even Branka covered her face in her hands. “Great, Freya,” she groaned. “You’ve done it now.”

“I knew it,” I said as the anger inside of me grew. It bubbled up, almost over, simmering and sputtering in my throat. “You’ve been lying to me. You do know my mum.” Regardless of any of their glowers, I approached the sofa. I didn’t walk around it, though, just in case I had to make a break for the door. Except Aillard had taken up position in front of it.

I waited for any of them to reply, to deny my claims once again, but no one said a thing. Not even Branka, who always had something on her mind. “What is wrong with you people?”

“We should be asking you that.” Everyone turned to Lilith, her face shadowed where she sat in the corner. She spoke softly. Slowly. “We warned you when you first got here. You might think you’ve come here to ruin us, but I assure you, we won’t let that happen.”

“Not again,” said Genevieve, and this marked the first time I heard her speak. Like her appearance would suggest, her voice sounded old, aged to the point of a crackly throatiness. She set down her knitwork, smoothed out her skirt and rose. Slowly, she approached me.

This frightened me more than I anticipated. More than a frail, old lady with a slight limp probably should.

I reversed several steps, nearly tripping over the circular carpet in the centre of the drawing room, but stopped when Aillard caught my eyes by the door, having readied himself to pounce. To apprehend me if I tried something, anything other than what they told me to.

“What are you after?” Genevieve asked with droopy, downturned eyes. “Is it revenge?”

“R – Revenge?” Despite how little I knew before, I didn’t know anything at all right now. How did they go from not acknowledging my mum, to discussing revenge in such a short time? At least I was right about one thing: these people were the farthest thing from normal.

“Wasn’t what she did to Lilith revenge enough?”

“Mother, stop.” This time, Lilith got to her feet. She had lost all sense of grace now, and rushed toward Genevieve with too much instability. Several strands of hair fell out of place, and the tip of her nose had obtained a slight glow. As did the centre of her forehead.

But Genevieve showed a hand at Lilith. Sheer skin and bone, riddled with blemishes and creased with wrinkles. “No, Lilith. Piper has caused you too much pain already.”

But Piper was dead. And here they were, talking about her as if she was the villain in all of this. How dare they? How dare they disrespect my mum? “You know what, I don’t care about whatever shit is going on here. All I want to know is why you pretended not to know your own flesh and blood. What did she do to make you hate her so much?”

No answer.

“Yea, go ahead. Just ignore me.” I clicked my tongue at them. “Keep in mind, though, I know exactly what you’re up to. I don’t know what you put in the fog to make people glow, and I don’t know how the heck you convince everyone that the stuff is deadly, but I do know you’re all a bunch of killers. You killed Benjy and Bobby, not me. You murdered them!”

I inhaled and held my breath, my heart thumping in my ears, in the tips of my fingers. I realised they were trembling, along with my knees and lower lip. I couldn’t supress it.

“Go ahead, then,” I heard myself saying, “admit it.”

They didn’t.

In fact, the Vinsants merely continued to stare at me, their faces wrought with the same expression of disbelief as Chief Constable Salameh when I had told him my surname. I waited for any of them to confess, maybe order Aillard to get rid of me, but nothing happened.

“You kidnap people and murder them, don’t you?” I couldn’t keep myself from rambling on. What an embarrassment.

A few minutes passed in which we listened to the fire’s crackle in the fireplace, and the cuckoo clock on the wall above the piano as it ticked away. Aillard adjusted positions at the door, and this brief moment proved enough to wake up Branka, who finally started to laugh.

The relief of tension proved too much for me, and I started to laugh along. I felt crazy, absolutely mad. Laughing in the company of the very people I had just accused of murder.

Branka used the edge of her hand to wipe under her eyes. This only caused her mascara to smudge and create black, crumbly shadows. “You really know absolutely nothing, do you?”

“What?” I blurted out, no longer laughing.

“Branka,” Lilith warned.

“What, mother? Can’t you see how clueless she is? And here we all thought she came her to seek revenge. To destroy everything we’ve built. She doesn’t know anything at all!”

“As much as it pains me, she’s right, mother,” Freya agreed. “I think if Eira really wants to know the truth, we should tell her.”

Lilith briefly considered this. Still with one hand on Genevieve’s shoulder, she asked, “What do you say, mother? Should we tell Eira what Piper did? And why she ran away?”

Genevieve’s eyes swerved onto me, then off of me again as she scanned the rest of the party. Her forehead smoothed, yet her face retained most of its wrinkles, especially around her mouth and neck. She slid an arm around Lilith’s waist and pulled her close, then pecked her on the cheek. “I believe so. Maybe if Eira knows, she’ll see why we acted the way we did.”

I sensed a scoff coming on, but managed to keep it in my mouth. Nothing they could possibly say would rectify murder – or causing my mum such unhappiness, she had to flee to find comfort, had to leave behind the only guy she ever loved, and brave the big, bad world. The fact that she had written a letter of apology to these people baffled me.

If anything, they owed her an apology.

“Do you really want to know what your mother did, Eira?” Lilith asked, mournful all of a sudden.

“Oh, for goodness sake,” Branka exploded. “Don’t bother asking her, just tell her already!”

“Yea, tell me,” I demanded, for the first time agreeing with Branka. The only time too, most likely.

“Alright.” Lilith pulled away from Genevieve and started toward me. The floorboards hardly made a sound as she walked, as she practically soared in my direction. “Despite what might have come to believe over the past few days, we are not the killers here.”

Lies. More lies.

I shook my head, but Lilith spoke on, “The day your mum ran away, she did something.”

The horrible deed from her letter. “Out with it already,” I demanded before my courage depleted.

“Your mother hurt me in the worst possible way.” A film of tears formed in Lilith’s eyes, all shiny and withering by the firelight. “Your mother – she murdered Leonardo, my husband.”

As soon as her words reached my ears, my vision blurred and my thoughts began to slur. Static filled my ears and forgot how to breath. “N – No,” I managed to say, staggering back.

But Lilith merely nodded, a single tear now making its way down her sharp and slanted cheek. “Believe it, Eira, because I can’t lie about something like this. Your mother is a murderer.”