There Came Darkness

There Came Darkness

by Jon Debly

In the late autumn of my thirteenth year, I was told that an acquaintance of my father’s would be coming to stay with us. I was never offered any account of his connection to my family, nor did my parents ever explain, in any substantial way, the reason for his arrival at our door on a certain cold November morning.

Though large, our home was hardly extravagant. It was an old farmhouse perched on the outskirts of a small village which was, itself, a great distance from the nearest town.

Perhaps he encountered it as I always had. Maybe, after making his way along its long, winding path and rounding the bend that brought the house into view, he had been struck by the way the snow softened it into the natural contour of the landscape, moulding its shape to the fields of wild grass and great layered walls of spruce, pine, and white birch, which followed the swelling mountains and blushed eventually into the obscurity of the horizon. If the equator did hold the monopoly on heat and languid passion that my mail-ordered adventure books suggested it did, then the north, I thought, was distinguished by a wild and terrifying hunger–the visceral sense that trees and valleys and rivers, in all their expansiveness, might consume you.

Whether our guest felt this upon his arrival, I do not know; I was more than sufficiently puzzled by his decision to visit us in the first place. Why a man who “came from money”–a detail my father had made a point of revealing some days earlier–would have any interest in a country home so far from the beaten path perplexed me. I half believed that he would never arrive and that I had been made to tidy the house in vain.

But arrive he did.

At the time, my mother was fetching something from the cellar, and my father was going over the Book of Esther in the reading room. I had once read the Book of Esther and decided I did not like it. I did not like that there was no God, and I hated to hear about a man being hung on gallows that he, himself, had prepared. I figured that would be far worse than hanging on someone else’s gallows. In any case, I never made it past the seventh chapter.

I was in the sitting room drying my winter clothes by the fireplace when there came a knock at the front door. The snow was melting off my boots and making minuscule rivers in the grooves of the brickwork. I watched it drip and fall as I heard my mother rushing up the basement steps and the scrape of my father’s chair above me. I loathed to hear that chair disturbed. Nothing good ever came from it.

“Welcome. Come in,” said my mother, holding the door open after a short, fumbling bout with the latch. Cool air rushed into the drawing room.

“Come in, put your shoes here; no, I’ll grab that, dear; oh, you can put your suitcase right here.” She rushed away with his bags, and then with his jacket, and then came back once more for his shoes as my father made his way down the stairs in his usual stiff stride.

Soon after, when the bustle died down a little, and my mother had gone off to the kitchen to continue making supper, I was able to get a better look at the young man whose hand my father was grasping.

I was not sure what to make of his appearance, nor was I certain just what I had expected. Elias, or so I had heard my mother call him, cut a strange figure against the plainness of the entryway. He was taller and thinner than my father, and his hair, long and coppery brown, was combed back from his forehead, below which the thin and narrow profile of his face was set at odds with the vividness of his blue eyes.

I was struck somewhat by the unfamiliar expensiveness of his clothing but decided, at once, that whatever gentility it lent him was tarnished by the curious hollowness that coloured his features. He walked cautiously, as if to keep from trembling, and it seemed to cost him great effort to placate my father with polite nods as he was shown around the house.

After my father introduced us, I followed them for some time, but when they retired to the reading room before supper, I returned to the parlour directly below it. There, sharpening a dry stick that I had cut from an alder tree, I could hear the sound of voices above–my father’s deep tenor and the soft, unevenness of Elias’s.

In the kitchen, my mother was muttering verses to herself as she often did. “Holy Queen, Mother of Mercy, our life, our sweetness, and our hope,” I heard her say. And then dishes clattered on the dining room table, and I heard nothing more.

At dinner, my father was in a disagreeable mood. Instinctively, mother and I tried to fill the silence with anecdotes about the days and weeks prior: I had seen a bobcat in the fields. I had witnessed my mother being startled by an absurdly large rat that had darted out from a kitchen cupboard. Mrs Lee, my mother explained, had given a homemade centrepiece to Mrs Fields, who then gave it to the Russells, who also passed it along, until Ms Gray was forced to explain, upon receiving an unexpected visit from Mrs Lee, why an object eerily similar to the centrepiece was being used as a scratch post for her cats.

None of our ramblings elicited any reaction from my father. He hardly even looked up as he chewed. This worried me less than usual. There was little risk of him losing his temper when we had company.

For some time, my mother and I barely succeeded in keeping an awkward, jolting conversation afloat, but eventually, she capitulated and fell silent. I did no such thing. Just as I was providing our guest with a terribly long-winded explanation of the waterfowl that could often be seen skittering across a frozen pond near the foot of our hill, I was interrupted by the sound of my father’s knife clattering onto his plate.

“So, Elias, why did you go in the first place,” he said. “I have never heard of a man withdrawing when a semester is nearly over. Have you, Mary? Could you not have waited?”

His appeal to my mother, who was categorically unfamiliar with higher education, was obviously nothing but a reflex brought on by decades of cohabitation.

“I could not,” said our guest, setting his fork down softly and wiping his lip with a Handkerchief.

“It was the exams then?”

I could feel my ears and face becoming red.

“You know already that’s not the case. I would have finished the term with a First.”

A long pause on the part of my father spoke to the truthfulness of this claim. Prior to Elias’s arrival, he had made a great deal to my mother of his intelligence. The “young man,” he said, had read and understood, to the extent one could, The Critique of Pure Reason at thirteen; he had taught himself French, German, Latin, and Old English by the time he had finished secondary and maintained a decent understanding of the natural sciences as well. While I was uncertain of what kind of English might be classified as old and curious about the possibility of unnatural sciences, I gathered enough, by overhearing their conversation, to gain an impression of Elias’s brilliance.

My father sighed and rubbed his stubble. “Your parents won’t be pleased,” he said. “Felix will want a better explanation than the one that you’ve given me . . . and I still can’t comprehend why you would waste your time in England in the first place if you were only going to come back empty-handed.”

Elias’s face whitened. He pushed his chair back evenly and stood up. “My father wouldn’t be bothered if I studied in Timbuktu. As for Oxford, I have said already that I travelled there for an acquaintance. Excuse me.”

“An acquaintance,” muttered my father, stabbing at his food. He looked up to find my mother glowering at him.

Not a word was spoken for the rest of dinner. I had every intention of getting as far from the dining room table as possible when I had finished eating, so I quickly slipped off my chair and excused myself. As I was leaving, however, I heard my mother do something she had rarely ever done: rebuke my father.

“Oh, you fool!” she said. “Can’t you see that he went there for a girl?”

Very quickly, I began to feel that Elias’s presence dispelled much of the heaviness that usually pervaded our home and went some way in counteracting the soberness that emanated from my father’s study. Though I was seldom beaten very badly, my time at home was nevertheless characterised by an overwhelming feeling of oppressiveness, as if peace and tranquillity were crystalline modes of being, able to be shattered by the most innocuous sound–or else as if the place were one big mousetrap ready to come down on the neck of anyone but my father.

I decided many things about Elias during that period. First, he was, indeed, rich. This was solidified in my mind when I snuck into his room and, inspecting an elaborate silver timepiece, nearly dropped it on the floor. Second, he was a genius—not the dry, musty sort of genius I would expect to find wandering around a place like Oxford, but a living encyclopaedia who could narrate to me an endless number of such tales as the Peloponnesian War and Antony and Cleopatra. Sitting on the floor next to the hearth, I could ask any question–why use an asp?–and he, sinking crookedly into the couch and staring intermittently out the windowpane, would answer: that is only Shakespeare; it was really a dose of poison. And we would fall into longer conversation, wherein I might say that I was glad it was not a snake–an asp sounds too funny to kill you–and he, smiling patiently, might assent to my point.

Third, and most interestingly of all, I found that Elias had loved a girl and been loved by her. Not the stuffy, formalistic love that my parents exhibited but something foolish and wild. This was proven to me fully one afternoon when I overheard my mother speaking softly in the kitchen. It was nearly evening, and amber threads of sun were piercing through the North-Western windows, casting shadows throughout the halls.

As I was coming through the parlour, I heard my mother say, “She’ll come around, dear. I’m certain she will.”

“I wish I shared your optimism,” came his answer.

Elias was sitting at the far end of the room, supporting his temples with both hands, as if he were trying to see something three hundred meters beyond the floorboards. “It has all been too much, I’m afraid.”

Afraid. He wasn’t saying so superficially; he really did look afraid. When they saw me, the subject was dropped, and Eli, as he soon acquiesced to my calling him, asked if I had seen any stoats in the fields.

While chivalric romances and fairy-tale books were my sole authorities on the subject of romantic love, I knew enough to realise that Eli had cared for someone very much in Oxford–enough to flee it without looking back—like Lot leaving Sodom.

Sometimes, it felt as if the subject of Eli’s adoration occupied my mind as much as she did his. It wasn’t infrequent that, laying alone beneath my bedsheets, I would close my eyes and find her features conjured before me. Some nights, she was tall and elegant, blond with sharp cheekbones and eyes that stared right back at me. Other times, I would fall asleep to visions of dark skin and hair as black as ravens’ feathers.

Yet, I never broached the subject to him. My mother had sat me down, some days after he had arrived, and said, “You mustn’t ever speak of Oxford. You mustn’t. He was at Oxford, but now he is here, and that is that. There is no sense in dredging up old stories. You wouldn’t like it if someone brought up an old melancholy story if you were feeling down, now, would you?”

I answered that I would not, and my mother smiled and pulled my toque down over my head. “That’s a good young man,” she said, “but do spend time with Elias. Time with us, with you, is what he needs. Reading upstairs is no good for that boy right now.”

Why she called me a young man and him boy was strange. I felt she had things backwards. But in a sense, I understood her delicacy; Elias was always drifting in and out of life, and he had been since arriving. I could demand a story or, outdoors, call his name from across the yard to catch his attention, but a moment later, his eyes would go wider, and I would see that he was no longer here.

“Neurosis,” I once heard my father say concerning his condition—flippantly and much to my mother’s protestation. “He lurches around like he’s half dead, and we must shake it out of him. Melancholia and neurosis.” Yet my father was no doctor.

Even if my mother had not so often urged me to “play” with him, I would have clung to Eli like a bad cold. Very rarely were we apart those days. In the mornings, we ate together, and if time allowed, he would read to me over his morning tea, sitting in a rocking chair that had only ever been occupied by boxes despite its ancient and hallowed place in the dining room corner. My mother liked to hear him read as much as I did. She said that he did not have the intonation of a person his age.

We were together most evenings as well. Outside, he watched me build forts and castles–cities of rock and snow–and when I, feigning madness, would breach their walls and smash their aqueducts to pieces, he would help me build them up again, muttering something like, “at least you did not salt the earth.”

Yet I had not the slightest idea how he spent his days outside our mornings and evenings together. Sometimes, I was given the impression that he only came alive, only existed behind those sharp, blue eyes, when I shook the snow off my boots and called to him. Then, the stairs would groan under his steps, and he would be there in the hallway, looking like he’d spent the entire day in a deep sleep without having a moment’s rest.

By the time Christmas break came, our guest, at least to me, had established himself as a permanent fixture in our home. I came to expect his presence, and with that expectation came a certain sureness that I would not return one day to find him gone.

As much to my father’s dismay as my mother’s elation, our house was soon beset by an endless cycle of visiting relations. The air became thick with the rich scent of burning wood–of cinnamon, ginger, and cloves–and was filled, nearly always, with the sound of childish voices and the trampling of woollen feet.

Yet, the holidays, with all their optimistic bustle, seemed to do Eli no good—perhaps because they precluded any prospect of solitary rumination. And despite the festivities, sweets, and company, I saw that he found it impossible to shake the melancholy disposition by which we had come to know him.

Some mornings, he would not even descend from his room; he would read to me little and speak to me less, and when he did come down in the evening, he would seem as empty and insubstantial as the closed bellows that sat before the hearth. Often, even in the brightest moment of a Christmas fête, he would retreat to a vacant, windowed corner only to fix his pale gaze on the falling snow. “He’s staring all the way to England,” I, against my better judgment, once said out loud to my mother. She sent me to my room over the mere fear that he might have heard.

Oxford, Oxford, Oxford, became profane to me. I dwelled much on the name but dared not speak it. And as much as I thought of love and Oxford, my mother worried about Eli, so that one afternoon, after witnessing a particularly harrowing bout of melancholia on his part at a party the night before, my mother pressed me to include him in whatever winter adventures I would find myself that day.

“But around the house,” she said, “because the wind is picking up, and it will be a bad night.”

Utterly thrilled to be given this sort of licence, I had no intention of squandering it in the immediate vicinity of our home. The nearby ditches, drives, and fields had, to me, outlived their appeal. For weeks, I had been raving to Eli about the Cutlass Downs, a series of mounds and shallow depressions that, beyond a shallow belt of evergreens, unrolled towards the horizon. I had invented the moniker myself, and it no doubt bore some relationship to my recent completion of Treasure Island.

Eli was less than eager to put down his book and set out on what had previously–perhaps hyperbolically–been described by me as a perilous trek through the snow. He hardly looked up as he pulled on the boots and trousers he had borrowed from my father, and only my most solemn assurances that my mother had absolutely commanded him to go with me wherever I so chose kept him from turning back.

Outside, a rusted weathervane spun and whined atop the house. The bright orange hues of the evening sun, having so often in recent days made us squint and avert our eyes, were nowhere to be found, obstructed, no doubt, by the great ceiling of pale grey that had descended since noon. It was a sky that deepened and intensified the crystal blueness of the powdered snow to the point of translucence.

My hat pulled down and my mittened hands stretched out for balance, I waded with Eli through the creases and folds of snow before us, shattering with every step the thin, crisp layer of ice atop them.

Now and then, I looked to find him trudging awkwardly a few metres back. Unlike me, he was no more than shin deep in the snow–it hardly rose above the tops of his boots–but his difficulty in moving forward was evident from the great, halting steps he took and the thick cloud of vapour that, every few seconds, obstructed his face. He was wearing a scarf around his neck, and when it began to snow lightly, he pulled it up like a balaclava and squinted.

For some time, neither of us said anything; we were accompanied only by the rhythmic crunching of our own footsteps. When reached the trees, however, Eli spoke up.

“It’s okay,” he said, having found me glancing back from the edge of the forest. “Keep going.”

I waited anyway.

When he caught up to me, we went into the woods, stepping over dead logs and protruding sticks and ducking past a multitude of sagging boughs that left needles on our jackets and tossed blankets of snow upon us if we so much as touched them. I tried to hold the branches steady as Eli came through, but I had to apologise more than once when he was caught in the face with a stray.

It smelled cold as we walked–cold, I thought, as the colour white. Everything was filled with the scent of the dark and frozen ground–not earthy and manurish as it is when it thaws but clean and bare as the smell of firewood before it has been burned. It dried out my nose and made it feel nearly bloody, so that I had to check it just to be sure.

“Hurry, Eli,” I said. Thick flakes had begun to fall again under a sky that looked no better than it had before.

“Are you sure we shouldn’t turn back?” He was struggling to free his pant leg from a jagged log without removing his other hand from the scarf across his face.

“No, no,” I said, leaning into a wind that was still biting despite having its path obstructed by tree trunks. It burned my face and froze any skin that showed between the layers of my clothing.

The snow was so deep now that I felt as if I were treading water instead of taking huge, arching steps. The only difference was that, here, I was forced to be cautious around the hidden twigs and bushes that might easily tear my pants.

“Look, I am walking in cursive,” I called to Eli, rocking back and forth. He wiped his nose and uttered something. I couldn’t tell if he had heard.

“Was there snow in Oxford?”

We had emerged from the belt of trees and were walking nearly abreast of each other. The snow had become far shallower. The earth felt much closer–alarmingly close–and my legs were not ready for its solidness when we stumbled onto hard-packed ground.

“Of course. Oxford is in England. Why are you concerned with Oxford?”

It had been a rather stupid question. I had known all about snow in England and only wanted Eli to say something instead of trudging forward with his head down.

“Do you miss it?”

“England?”

“English snow.”

“I imagine it’s no different than the Canadian stuff,” he said, “but I wouldn’t know. I left before it started.”

“Oh. But the leaves had fallen.”

“All of them.”

“I love the fall,” I said, turning around backwards as we were buffeted by a particularly frigid gust of wind. “Do you? It means Christmas is nearly there.” He said nothing, and I could see that he was trying not to grimace in the face of the numbing cold.

“Have you gotten anyone a present this year?”

“Not yet. Would you like one?”

“Yes,” I cried happily. But I did not believe he hadn’t bought her something. I didn’t believe him at all.

It had grown darker. The sun was setting much too fast, and warmth was leaving our bodies as if it would never return. I was forced to think only of movement: the rhythm up and down that would keep my limbs from freezing.

“I’m cold,” I said.

“I would think so,” shouted Eli above the wind, which had picked up. “It feels like the damned ninth circle. We’re mad to be out here at this hour. Your mother will have my head for being such a fool. I think–”

“Look!” I was pointing towards the horizon. “The Cutlass Downs. And the weather is clearing!”

“It is.” Eli rested his hand on my toque. “It is improving, and I can see why you brought me to your . . . what do you call it?”

“Cutlass Downs,” I said proudly.

“But look out there, a little farther out. It seems as if it might get worse.”

We had finally come to the broad ridge that gave way to an expanse of undulating whiteness–a lowland smoothed by the winter but nevertheless dimpled in appearance. Behind us, and even more so to the east, it was framed by a wall of evergreens, while in all other directions, the rolling hills prevailed, stretching, like an ocean, into the darkness.

On a better day, the sun, crimson, would be descending. It would show the outline of the land in violent red, and the line between the earth and sky would look to have been drawn by a knife. Yet there was no such division now; it was a great mouth yawning, a spine of black that rushed across the countryside like an inkwell overturned.

They overcame me suddenly, those clouds, and without warning I felt their coldness bearing down on us. I reckoned that I could count the distance, the paces, the breaths, that separated us from my mother, from the warmth of the hearth and the comfort of my own bedroom.

But I was glad, too, I realised. I was happy to be numb and hungry–to have my hands in fists so as to keep them warm and my toes curled under. I was glad that Eli would be forced to feel this way as well and be forced to feel his body here and now and see the shadow of a storm impending.

When I looked up at him, though, I found the same blank look on his frost-bitten face.

He looked into the storm and saw nothing.

“Eli, what is love like?” I said, grabbing at his arm. I would have said anything–anything at all–even something more wicked and embarrassing. I wished to make him speak.

“What?” he said, starting back away from me. It was the first time I had ever seen him look terrified, and for some reason, I was not surprised by his fear. Perhaps it was why I’d said it.

“Where did you learn to talk about things like that?”

“I’m sorry.” I felt my face grow hot despite the cold. Don’t you cry, I said to myself. Don’t you dare cry like a baby because you have nothing to cry about. And it was true.

Somehow, it was not his words that had hurt me.

“All right,” said Eli, regaining his composure a little. “I can tell you only what I think, and only if you will come back with me now. We’ll freeze out here.”

I nodded, and we turned away from the Cutlass Downs, hand in mittened hand.

“I’m sorry,” I repeated before we passed into the shallows of the trees. The deep snow, again, was crushed beneath our feet, and a new taste was put in the air by the coming of the night.

After some time in thought, when we were colder and more weary, Eli described love to me. He did not qualify or otherwise introduce his words, and he spoke softly. But despite the blowing wind, I heard him.

He said that for some–those who are good and trusting as children of Abel and can therefore feel the emotion in its raw and genuine form–it bears all things, believes and hopes and endures all things without failing. “It will never vanish away,” he said. But for others, for he who is short on hope and cannot bring himself to have faith in the selflessness of another, as he does not imagine he might ever find such a virtue in himself, it is poison. For him, love is fear and sickness unto death.

And the storm came suddenly after that, long before we had reached my home. The snow became thick and solid—impassable as the chalk-faced cliffs of England. So he held me. In the deep vastness of the winter night, he held me close in his arms and, in a nook between the roots of a great oak tree, shielded my face from the bitterest gusts of the squall.