The Dead and the Dark(93)

The girl’s brow twitches in a small act of resistance. The Dark doubles down in her bones. It scrapes against her skull, filling up her head so there’s no room for anything else. It finds the small, trembling part of her that it needs; it finds the part of her that hates the man standing in front of her. It finds memories of forgotten birthdays, of nights spent watching his face on the TV, of dinners all by herself. It finds the tunnel in Tulsa, the hateful way her father looked at her, the fear that filled her up. It finds the lonely, quaking beat of her heart and takes hold.

He doesn’t love you, the Dark reminds her. He didn’t save you. I did.

The girl raises the gun. Her hand shakes.

“Hey, hey,” the man says, hands raised in defense. “Logan, listen to me. It seems louder than everything else. But you can ignore it. If you just—”

Shoot him.

The girl does.

She hesitates at the last moment, swinging to the left to avoid the man’s chest. The bullet pierces his shoulder and he col lapses to his knees. He groans in pain and it sounds like music to the Dark. It is much better than piano song. Blood pools in the man’s hand, and he bites his lip to keep from crying out.

“How are you here?” the man demands. His gentleness dissipates and he is only frantic agony, voice rasping with pain. “Why didn’t you die? It was years.”

The man still doesn’t understand. He doesn’t understand how the Dark came to be in the first place. He doesn’t understand why he was chosen to be the Dark’s first host. He doesn’t understand what sustains it now.

The girl understands, because she feels the place where the Dark holds her. It fastens its grip on a knotted, misshapen piece of her heart that was supposed to hold her absent father. She has always known that this piece of her is blackened and rotted. She understands what feeds the Dark in a way the man never could.

Tell him why, the Dark whispers.

“It chose you because you hated Snakebite so much. When you didn’t hate Snakebite anymore, it had to find something else.… It stayed alive because…”

The man remembers now. He remembers the quiet motel rooms and the long, empty stretches of highway. He remembers his husband’s voice, choked with static through the phone. He remembers closing his eyes trying to remember the details of his daughter’s face. He remembers the exhaustion aching in his bones as he forced himself to keep going, treading water to stay alive. He understands the Dark the way a stone understands a dam released over it.

The man looks at his hands.

“… because I hated myself.”

Again, the Dark commands. Kill him.

The girl grips the handle of the gun. Instead of the lonely memories the Dark feeds her, she recalls a moment spent with the man: a quiet car ride into town, a birthday party where her fathers dressed as Ghostbusters, a trip to an amusement park filled with smiles and laughter. The memories are ancient, buried under hurt and longing, but she clings to them like the sun-bleached bones of what her life could have been. She lives in the memories, pushing back against the Dark. Wind whistles through the loose boards of the cabin and raises pinpricks on the girl’s flesh. She shakes. Beads of sweat collect at her brow, but she does not bend.

The man looks at her and smiles. “I did everything wrong. I get it.”

“No, you don’t,” the girl says through clenched teeth.

“It’s probably too late, but can I tell you some things about us?” the man asks. “Not when we were in LA or on the road. Before that, when we lived here. Do you remember that? Five years of just you, me, and your dad.”

The girl’s head reels. Even with all the Dark has shown her, she does not remember this place. But the Dark remembers. It remembers pulling the girl’s bones from the dirt and piecing her back together—marrow to muscle, skin to skin, blood rushing through her veins. It remembers placing her in the man’s arms in the place where she now stands alone.

It hurts her that she does not remember this. She wants to claw at her mind until it gives her memories back to her.

“We were so happy when we lived here. I wanted it to be like that forever—just the three of us. Me and your dad were in love, but the day I saw you, it all clicked.” The man is still smiling with tears in his eyes, and the sight confuses the girl. She has never heard the man speak of love and happiness. She has never seen him cry. She doesn’t understand what these things mean.

He continues.

“You got sick. You went too fast. We couldn’t—I couldn’t—live without you.” The man tries to stand, but his arm won’t support him. He grits his teeth in pain and keeps himself from toppling to the floor. “I’m the one who gave this thing power. I let it feed on me for years. And I was so stupid, because I didn’t know what it could do. I didn’t know if it would start poisoning another town. I didn’t know if it would make me hurt people. I didn’t know if it would make me hurt you. I thought you would be safer without me.”

Enough of this, the Dark hisses, kill him and be done with it. The things he says now do not make up for your loneliness. He cannot undo the pain.

The girl closes her eyes and presses her palm to her forehead. It is a gesture the man recognizes as hers, not the Dark’s. He smiles, frail but hopeful, because he thinks he can draw her out. He thinks he can separate his daughter from the Dark. He forgets that the Dark does not capture, it becomes.