Allie, cocooned inside a purple quilt, reads by flashlight.
She suddenly becomes aware of the quiet. Shonda, her father’s girlfriend, must have finally passed out. All night they’d been screaming at each other. Several times she had heard the sickening smack of his hands on Shonda’s flesh. Months ago, after the violence towards Shonda and Allie’s own night lessons with her father, she had plucked a butcher knife from the kitchen and stashed it behind the headboard, thinking one day she would work up the nerve to use it.
That day has yet to come.
Now, Allie buries the flashlight beam into the mattress and strains her ears. Through the thin walls, she can make out her father cursing softly.
Listening to his movements, her throat tightens. Popping and creaking in the den and kitchen. The floor beneath her bed bounces a little with each movement. She digs out a small hole in the purple cocoon to peer out at the crack of the bedroom door threshold, watching the wavering light, which pulses as he staggers around the house: he always turns the lights out before he visits Allie’s room.
With each waver her heart beats harder, faster.
When at last it is snuffed out, her stomach turns sour. The shaking of the bed intensifies as those heavy boots tread down the narrow hall.
“Allie.”
Her breath catches upon hearing the whisper from the thick shadows of her room. The darkness…stirs.
“Allie, run away.” It’s a scratchy voice, lifeless but familiar.
Run where? she wonders.
The door swings open, revealing her father’s tall, stooped silhouette. The eye-watering miasma of the liquor he’s been drinking floods into the room. A Parliament burns near his lips, its ember casting the faintest orange glow over half of his face, transforming one pupil into a tiger’s eye.
She sinks down into the cocoon, drops off the other side of the twin bed, and onto the floor, then squeezes under the bed—a tight fit even for a skinny adolescent. Breathes shallowly. If her father sits down on the bed, she would be crushed beneath the pointy, metal underbelly.
She watches his boots as they approach. Hears him taking a drag on the cigarette. His feet shift suddenly, turning towards the back of the room.
The floor shakes again, and the house seems to tilt. Her flashlight clatters onto the floor and rolls to the corner window, where it shines weakly behind the starry sky curtains, illuminating massive, jet black hooves standing inches away from the dim light.
Her father’s screams shatter the silence.
Allie feels herself sliding down towards the foot of the bed, but she reaches out and grabs ahold of the corner of her quilt, the purple fabric washing down onto the floor, engulfing her. She claws and kicks at it, realizing with horror and astonishment that she has fallen through a hole in the floor. She plunges downward—twisted inside the quilt. She pulls, tears at it, but it seems to have grown, stretching out in all directions.
She sinks for a long time, the fabric scratching at her ears. Then something clutches at her t-shirt collar and yanks her upward back onto her bed. Except…it is no longer a bed, but has elongated, twisted into the shape of a skiff, her bedsheets pulled taut into a sail between the angle of a narrow mast and boom. A lantern hangs from the mast, dripping thick glops of wax onto her mattress from a black and gray flame, which casts strange, flickering darkness over her skin and the bed-boat. On the other side of the mast kneels a girl in a white t-shirt, facing away, such that Allie can only discern her thick black curls and a single pale arm fractured with black venation like living marble, drooping over the side.
“Hello?” Allie says.
There is no response.
Beyond the boat, the sea waves with purple quilts, thousands and thousands of them. An ebon dolphin crests the surface in the distance and dives back down. The ocean air smells musty, the same way her parents’ sunless bedroom had smelled during the final days of Allie’s mother’s illness. She spots islands in the distance, tiny dioramas of bedrooms. Spiders and leggy insects skitter through the air above them, against a velvety black sky, with giant star and moon shapes sewn into the fabric, the identical pattern as her window curtains.
Allie tries again. “Was it you that rescued me?”
“Yes,” the girl says in a distant, muted voice.
“Thank you. Where…where is this?”
“The Shadows.”
“Shadows?”
“In your closet, under your bed, the attic, the crawlspace, beneath the floor–the Shadows. Once the dark flame touches you, you can’t go back.”
While Allie start to digest this, the girl doubles over and cries out. Allie rushes forward to help, but the girl flails about so wildly, Allie can find no safe angle of approach.
The girl’s skin has grown darker in the seconds following the attack. With a final scream she throws herself over the edge of the boat and vanishes beneath a splash of purple fabric, the sound a curious rustling caricature of water. Allie approaches the bow, scanning the waves for any sign of the girl, but there is no sign of her. If only there were more light by which to see in all this darkness…
She notices some rips in the ceiling, through which faint light filters in. Maybe a bigger hole would brighten things sufficiently. She sees at her feet, where the girl had been kneeling the butcher knife, the very same one she had stashed in her bedroom so many months ago.
“Strange.” She plucks it up and examines it. No mistaking–the same nicks and rust streaks. Biting down on it pirate-style, she climbs the knobby wrought-iron mast, careful to avoid the candle, and slashes at the ceiling, ripping along the seams of a star.
A large purple shape pushes through the hole, knocking the knife out of her hands, plummets and splashes into the sea. Allie clambered back down, scanning the waves to see what … of course: a girl wrapped in a blanket.
The second Allie lays eyes on the figure, she feels the first pangs shoot through her body, and the words of her savior recurred in her mind: dark flame.
Grimacing, Allie plunges her hands into the roiling blankets and heaves the new girl up. As she does so, she notices her own hands, the uncanny paleness of her skin, the shocking midnight blue of her veins.
She turns away, dropping to her knees, afraid she must look hideous all over, her skin marbled.
Behind her, the new girl pants and catches her breath. The bed-boat shifts and rocks with her movements.
“Hello?” the girl says.
Allie goes stiff, afraid to respond.
“Was it you that rescued me?”
“Yes,” she whispers, lips trembling.
“Thank you. Where…where is this?”
“The Shadows.”
“Shadows?”
As if rehearsed, the words spill from her lips: “In your closet, under your bed, the attic, the crawlspace, beneath the floor—the Shadows. Once the dark flame touches you, you can’t go back.”
As she stops speaking, excruciating waves of acid flow across and down her skin, and she screams, dropping onto the mattress and rolling about, as if to smother this invisible fire.
Maybe the quilt sea will stop the burning, she thinks—her mind spinning, grasping at anything—and throws herself overboard, sinking down, down, down, feeling her body crushed by tons of scratchy cotton. Still, she burns. In her mind, she pictures the pale skin, the veins darkening, the blackness, the char, spreading throughout her. She squeezes her eyes shut and lets the Shadow world end her as it wishes her to end.
After many minutes, the pain washes away, the waves release her.
She opens her eyes, blinks. The waves have brought her to land–one of the islands.
The ground is a hump of shoddy wooden boards, barbed with crooked snaggle-nails.
She claws her way up out of the sea and gasps at the voids in space her arms make. She has not simply darkened; she has become nothing. When she stands, she feels the island shake and is pleased at the immensity of nothingness. Before her spreads a familiar tableau: a bed, her bed, with her in it; a door, her father approaching.
“Allie,” she says in a voice of ash, all of the Allie burned out of it. “Allie, run away.”
The insectile figure beneath the quilt fidgets and squirms.
Then the door flies open.
There stands her father, half-burned cigarette drooping from his lips. He looks miniscule, everything tiny, delicate, unreal.
She sighs and steps into the room, flapping out her wings and extending all sorts of new limbs she had not before noticed coiled in her darkness–and lays an unforgiving claw on her father.
—
Tim Boiteau lives near Detroit with his wife and son. He is a winner of the Writers of the Future Contest, with fiction appearing in places such as Deep Magic, The Colored Lens, LampLight, and several stories at Theme of Absence.
Dream-like and well -written. I was drawn in and swept along by the powerful imagery. Glad Bad Dad go what he deserved in the end.