You Can't Draw in the Dark

TW: violence, murder

It was so, so dark. She couldn’t remember the last time it had been light. Not here, never here. Yet it was here in this house that she was stuck, with its creaking stairs that groaned and its peeling brown walls that sighed whenever the wind blew by, and its beautiful paintings made blurry and indistinct by their thick coating of dust. Here, in the shadowed room with heavy curtains closed, painted with pain and memory, she couldn’t imagine it holding anything but darkness and scars. 

Yet, it had held light, a long time ago, when it streamed through the windows, their curtains thrust aside to let in the warm sun, which caressed her skin as she lay on her stomach beneath it, staring out at the sky. She remembered sitting, head bent over her sketchbook as she drew the birds and the clouds and the old tree just outside the widow. The feel of her pencil in her hand as she sketched and shaded had been so familiar, like her fingers had been made to wield the thin wooden instrument that could capture a moment or a face under her careful instruction. 

She couldn’t touch anything anymore. 

Feeling suddenly sick with longing for something she didn’t know how to describe, she turned away. She fled silently through the dark halls, passing lights long dark with their glass shattered and strewn like dying diamonds on the ground, the ever-present dampening blanket of dust and the absence of light letting no sparkle dance across the rotting walls.

She entered another dark room and had the urge to scream and break something, just to prove that there was someone still here in this dying house in the middle of nowhere, but it had been a long time since she had been able to touch anything, let alone destroy it. When she had been new to this dark half-existence, she had been able to trick herself into moving things, smashing the lights, even letting whispers of sound escape into the world she had left. But she knew better now. She had been fading for far too long to even do that much to her old reality. She wasn’t even sure if she counted as a someone, not anymore. She felt so real, but she knew she wasn’t. 

She closed her eyes and could see her hands, pale and long-fingered as always, made for drawing and feeling and holding, shaking in front of her eyes, real and solid and there. With her eyes closed, she could feel her body, as much a part of her as it had ever been, warm and light-touched and whole. 

There was no hole in her chest. There was no hole. No hole.

With her eyes closed, she could feel her eyelashes gently tickling her cheeks, her hair just long enough to brush her shoulders as she moved her head from side to side. She could feel her legs primed to run through the green sunlit fields just outside the walls and her arms ready to swing from the branches of a tree perfect for a little girl starting to grow into a young woman to climb.

But when she opened her eyes and looked down to where she should be, she saw nothing. When she raised the hands she knew must be there, somewhere, please be there, the air did not stir. The eyes through which she saw, ever the silent, intangible phantom, weren’t real. And the darkness pressed painfully down onto those non-eyes. They were tired of watching nothing, when they had once been accustomed to seeing so much. Once they had been so much! She closed whatever they really were that let her see and pretended for one more moment that she was really there. But her heart was no longer in it.

She had left her body long ago, bleeding out in the Room, just upstairs, that she had spent a million happy days in. That was before it was the Room and was just her room, and she had painted the walls with trees and flowers and put up tacky posters of whatever she wanted. She had laughed and drawn, done homework and read, laid on her bed and just dreamed of what she hoped her future would be. She had stormed, screamed, and sobbed over things that she couldn’t remember now, and locked the door and hid her face under the pillow and shouted at her mom to just GO AWAY when she came gently knocking at the door to the Room. But, of course, it hadn’t been the Room then. It was so hard to keep these things straight.

She remembered the swelling feeling of pride and ownership when she realized that the airy room with the lacy curtains and the sloping wall perfect for drawing on was hers. She had lived so long with her older sister that it was foreign to sleep alone, but with her pictures tacked to and drawn on the walls, she had felt a little less lonely. And it was nice to have something that was hers and a place to be alone in a house full of loud siblings and nosy parents.

This had been the dining room, she realized, looking around her at the dim and dingy room filled mostly by the massive mahogany table that was carved with the initials of every family that had lived here before her, before it was theirs. Before they left and it was just hers. 

And she had no fingers to paint away the loneliness this time.

The initials meant nothing to them, but she and her siblings had always liked guessing what they stood for. Her little brother had especially loved the letters F. G. in particular because of how they came one after the other. She remembered his giggle and her sister’s uncontrollable snorts as he came up with ridiculous name after ridiculous name to make them laugh.

“Ferbillious Gigglepants!” he choked out through laughs, “FartyMcFart Gallopwheeee!”

It had been so long that she couldn’t even remember her own name now, but those ridiculous mouthful names of her brother’s imagination were forever ingrained in her memory. The memory of his laugh, and his long drawn-out “...eeee” were so impossibly removed from this shadowed and empty space, filled only with one old table made of dead and scarred wood that was too big and ancient to move, that it hurt like a knife through the heart.

Or a hole in her chest.

But no, no, no, it was not there. It was not there. It was not there!

But she could fool herself no longer. She felt a searing pain and looked down to see a chest fading into view, just as she had wanted, but not, for there was a bloody stain spreading out from the small hole in her white shirt that hadn’t existed a moment before.

All of a sudden, she was in the Room, and it was different than she remembered. The pages she had tacked to the wall, covered with her scribbled drawings and dreams, were yellowed with age, and the paintings on the wall had no color or beauty with the lacy curtains gone and replaced with heavy black velvet that went against the happy, light place of her memory. Other than the curtain and the wicked touches of dust and age, it was exactly as she remembered.

Another soul-wrenching pain rocked her nonexistent body, and she closed her eyes, trying to remind herself that none of it was real, and slowly it faded away to the smallest twinge, barely noticeable. She opened her eyes and gasped.

It was all back. She was standing in the hallway outside the Room, but she could tell it wasn’t the Room yet. The hallway was brightly lit from the open window and electric light above, unshattered and unstrewn, and no heavy curtain of dust and rot and pain hung through the air. It was as if time had turned back, and it was all so familiar.

She tried to raise her hand to touch the freshly painted wall, to see if it was real, but realized her hands were already occupied rummaging through her bag, checking one last time to make sure the item that she had left behind really wasn’t there.

Her mom had grumbled about bringing her back to the house, saying she was going to be late to her book club and that her daughter was just like her father, who would forget his head if it wasn’t attached to his--

No. This was too familiar. She had been here before. She had lived this before. This was the Day, and that room that she was about to enter was going to become the Room, if she didn’t stop RIGHT NOW and go back to the car, lie to her mom, and say that she had it all along. She could still stop, and it would all be fixed.

But this was happening, and she couldn’t stop it. She was going to enter and it would all be ruined. She felt like sobbing, screaming, running, but she couldn’t. She wasn’t in control. Her old self heard a small noise from inside, and her hand stopped, an inch from the doorknob.

Though the part of herself still trapped in the gloomy room knew exactly what was happening, the girl in control didn’t. She paused for a moment, wondering what it could possibly be, and then her heart leapt with anger as she came to what she had thought was the only logical conclusion. Matthew has skipped school again, and was in her room! She would show him. 

She jerked open the door, and stormed in, prepared to bite off his head, because didn’t he know that mom and dad said that he was throwing away his future by fooling around and he was in her space…

She stopped dead, her momentum bringing her to a loud, stumbling halt as she realized that the man going through drawers in front of her was too big for her older brother. He whirled around, and she had a brief glimpse of tangled hair, a stubbled jaw, and terrified, desperate eyes, before she saw the glint of dark metal in his hand.

BANG. 

Fire ripped into her chest and she fell to the ground, not hearing the thudding footsteps of the man as he fled. All was pain and confusion and she could feel nothing but fire and too much red wetness that shouldn’t be leaving her. As her vision began to blur, her last vision was of her mother running into the room, her face a picture of terror, and the last thing she heard was her mother’s inhuman wail…

All was black, and she was rising up, up, up; and she knew she was leaving forever and couldn’t come back. But she wasn’t ready to go! She kept picturing her mother’s face and hearing her scream, and she knew she couldn’t leave while she was in so much pain. And she had life left to live, things left to do, new pictures to paint, and she was NOT LEAVING!

With that resolution firm in her mind, she stopped rising. With a feeling like dropping out of the sky, she was suddenly back in her room, dizzy and disoriented but back!

She looked down and received the biggest shock of her life. Her mother was sitting on the floor, sobbing and rocking her daughter’s blood-smeared body. Her body. The girl in the dark and lonely house, back in reality and away from this awful memory, tried to shrink away. She had relived dying. But this was the most painful part. With effort, the memory began to move faster, skipping around until it was just flashes of blue and red as an ambulance pulled up to the house and covered her cold, dead body, all while she tried to scream, I’m still here!

But no one heard. She saw her father clutching her mother, still covered in her blood, to his chest as they both cried. She saw her sister holding a small sketch that she had made her and crying, her little brother forgetting how to laugh, her older brother turning from skipping school every once in a while to almost never going, turning to drinking and stupid, reckless stunts that hurt her heart every time she saw him passed out in his closet, his stolen alcohol held loosely in his hand.

She saw her parents trying desperately to pretend everything was okay, her mother waking up sobbing almost every night for months, and her father trying to hold everyone together while falling apart himself. 

She had to watch it all, in her horrible limbo between alive and dead, seeing everything but able to do nothing. She was a shadow, and couldn’t even move to the window to see outside. Her home had become a prison. 

The house grew darker and dimmer until, eight months, two weeks and three days after the Day, a moving van pulled up to the house. Before her eyes, everything was packed up and gone except the things too big to move and the Room, which no one ever touched. Her mom came in once and tried to take down her drawings, but broke down sobbing. Finally, she took down the lace curtains, hung the heavy black, and left, clutching the soft white like a life preserver.

Then, they were gone, and she was alone. New face after new face tried to settle, but a darkness had spread over the house, and they always ended up leaving. Whenever she had enough strength, she smashed lights, screamed, whispered, ripped curtains from the walls, and wailed like her mother had on the Day. No one was even able to enter the Room, like some otherworldly force had locked it from outside touch. Soon, they stopped trying, and she was locked in a boarded-up house that began to decay.

With a gasp, she opened her eyes, and found herself alone in the empty, dusty, murk that was the Room. She felt tears well up in her eyes, but of course, there were no tears or eyes to shed them. The light and realness and pain had been torn away, leaving only the faded ache and remembrances of before. 

She looked down and, with some surprise, realized that her hands rested, pale and white, at her sides. Her shirt was still marred with its bloody hole, but it no longer hurt. She felt tired and brutalized and, she realized, more real than she had in a long time.

She was so, so tired of the dark.

As she looked around the dim and dirty remnant of what had once been her beautiful room, she realized that she wanted to see it beautiful again. It had been so light and airy, filled with her dreams and her drawings, and now it was dead, as dead as she was.

She walked over to the black velvet covering the large window and steeled herself for disappointment. She shouldn’t be able to touch it. But she felt different. Closer to alive than she had been in a long time. She held her breath, closed her eyes, felt her fingers touch the velvet, and...ripped!

The heavy cloth fell away, and she was looking outside for the first time in years. Light flooded in, a sunrise just peeking over the horizon. She caught a glimpse of her own reflection, pale and illuminated, in the pane of glass in the window, and smiled.

When she felt herself begin to rise up, up, up, this time she didn’t fight. 

She was so tired of the dark. Wherever she was going, she hoped there were enough pencils and enough light to draw by.