It Eats the Light

In spite of the tired she could feel deep in her bones, sleep would not come. Klara lay on a rolled-out sleeping bag on the floor, staring at the ceiling for what felt like hours, wondering if she was still awake or just dreaming that she could not sleep. The latter was worse than no sleep at all. It happened sometimes, more frequently in the last six months. She would lay there, looking at the different shades of blue created by the mix of moonlight and darkness, feeling like she was floating through the depths of the ocean, and wonder whether she was asleep and dreaming or dreaming of sleep.

She had a view of the window through the back of the tent she and Cara had made out of an old sheet, a length of twine and a couple of chairs. They had rolled out their sleeping bags at Cara’s insistence because “there are no mattresses in the forest so that would be cheating”, despite Klara’s insistence that there were no real rules about camping, plenty of people went camping in RVs, for instance. Cara had stuck to her guns and so Klara had gone along with it, despite feeling her muscles cramp just by looking at the hardwood floor.

She rolled to one side to try and alleviate some of said cramping, which was particularly bad in her lower back and abdomen.

Around sundown Klaus had meandered up the stairs to make sure they brushed their teeth, washed their faces and hands, and said their prayers. The creaking stairs made him sound at least a hundred years old, a thought only exacerbated in Klara’s mind when she saw the vacant, sullen look behind his eyes as he prepared to go to bed alone, again. Mercifully they were able to skip the pre-bed baths, since the hot water wasn’t working. The thought of trying to stagger three baths in the one claw-footed bathtub with its creaky knobs and lack of adequate showerhead was one more headache that Klara did not want to deal with. She would likely not have been able to get Kora to leave her room anyway. The moment she saw the big room with broad windows facing the front yard, she was a goner. Klara knew she wasn’t getting her out of there with the promise of all the sugar and attention in the world.

She had nothing approaching her older sister’s enthusiasm for her own space. It was perhaps not all that surprising, given that this was likely the first time she would ever be sleeping on her own. She had slept in either a basinet or a crib in their parents’ room until she was three and shared a room with Kora for the previous two years, owing to the size of their old house. Now, faced with the option, she did not know what to do. The idea of having her own room was one that had never occurred to her. Sure, she knew big girls slept on their own, like Klara did, but she would never have imagined it happening too soon. Maybe after she got married.

Klara had taken her by the hand and led her up those old, creaky steps to show her the two choices. Standing at the landing at the top of the stairs and going counter clockwise there was dad’s room to the left, Kora’s in front of his, a large empty room, and then the smallest of the four to the right. She had looked around, one hand in Klara’s and the other poking her lip thoughtfully with one finger, and eyed up the smallest of the rooms.

“I know I’m not big yet but that’s a baby’s room,” she said.

She was right. Klara had noticed the jaundiced wallpaper had faded images of what looked to be circus animals, tents, a few birds. It was just long enough to be able to fit a twin bed and was almost certainly a nursery at one point. Klara led her down the hall to the next room, straight across from Kora’s with a tall window between them that may have been intended to have a Juliet balcony but ended up with a window seat instead. The second room was much larger, about the same size as Kora’s, which Klara made a point to include in her sale’s pitch.

“Two big girls with two big rooms,” she said.

Cara looked around the room with her finger still on her lip, a sign of discriminating taste.

“I’m afraid it might be too big,” she said with emphasis. “You got anything somewheres in between?”

“Um, no,” Klara said. “It’s just the two bedrooms, darling.” She looked down to see Cara craning her neck back, staring directly up at her, her face deadpan.

“I’m funny,” she said flatly, then sighed. “It’ll do, I guess.”

“Don’t worry,” Klara had said, patting her on the back. “I’ll be in here with you tonight, and you’ll always have Kora right across the hall.”

“I can’t! I’m busy!” Kora had shouted across the hall.

It had taken all of ten minutes for soft snores to begin rising from the other side of the tent. Klara looked over to see Cara’s belly gently rising and falling, a little dribble falling out of her mouth. They had taken her braids out but she had insisted on tying her hair up in loose pigtails with two of Klara’s scrunchies, and the angle of her face made her nose look flat and triangular.

Sleepy piggy, Klara thought.

She tossed and turned for a while, trying to get comfortable on the hardwood floor, but it was no use. She had never done well sleeping away, even at relatives’ houses. She remembered being about Kora’s age and having to get mom to pick her up from auntie’s when she was visiting her cousins because the thought of being in a strange place was just too much, even if she was surrounded by family. No matter how much she enjoyed being around her cousins, and she did, when the lights went out they still felt like strangers. She remembered one time when she had made it through the night after falling asleep during a horror movie that would have turned her father’s face green, and awoke to a similar sort of feeling that crept up on her those nights before. It was the unfamiliarity of it all. The way the morning light came in through the windows, thus affecting her first glimpse of the day. Different cookware and breakfast foods. The first voices she heard, the way the days were laid out, a hundred little differences that were too much to handle. Even at her grandmother’s house, her mother’s mother, where she felt as at home as in her own house, a night spent was a good idea until lights out.

She was older now, of course, and did not have the same anxieties as when she was small, but it was not different enough to disregard the similarities. She felt like she was staying at someone else’s house and wanted to go home.

Klara rolled to one side and felt a sudden pressure in her bladder. She sighed and weighed whether it was worth it to get up or if she could hold it until morning, but knew she was kidding herself. She knew she would spend the next hour thinking about it until she finally had to go for sure, so better to get it over with now. She rolled onto her elbow and pushed herself off the hard floor, her stiff muscles groaning as she did so, and quietly made her way to the bathroom at the other end of the hall.

She sat with her eyes half closed, trying to block out the blinding light that reflected off of every surface around her and wondered what idiot made it a standard to paint an entire bathroom white. Common sense dictated that most people end up having to go to the bathroom at night, so…

She finished up, but paused for a moment before dropping the tissue in the toilet. She looked down at the rusty tint on the toilet paper and groaned.

“Great,” she muttered. On top of all else, now she had one more thing to talk to her father about in the morning. Somehow, despite dealing with it half a dozen times already, he was still unable to take a simple request for tampons without breaking out his two stock responses; one about how he “didn’t need the details. Just write it on the paper”, and another less-than-subtle inquiry about how much time she had been spending with boys. It never failed to amaze her how a near-universal indicator of not being pregnant triggered in his mind the idea that she had been having sex. She hadn’t, hadn’t even had the opportunity, in fact, and had wrongfully assumed that her long days tending to her sisters and upending her life completely with the move would have been a clear enough sign of that, but somehow it just didn’t resonate with him. In his mind, she thought, there is always a stack of people in the closet just waiting to file out and defile her, to penetrate her, to steal her innocence, deflower her, make her into a slut, and so on and so forth. Naturally, he would try to end things on a high note by telling her how much he loved her, and knew she was a good girl who was saving herself for her wedding night as she ought to, and that when the lord sent her the right man she would know. She would smile courteously and nod, throwing in a polite “mhm” or “uh-huh”, or an upbeat “of course” when the timing warranted, playing the tambourine to the thump of his drum. He would try to organically work in that old adage about a woman having sex before marriage, “giving it away to anyone other than her husband”, was something a whore did, and he didn’t like to say it and would never want to say that about his own daughter, but it was in the bible. Somewhere. Page number TBD.

She flushed the toilet and kicked off her underwear, taking them in one hand and holding it behind her back as she peered into the hallway. She slipped into the bedroom nearest the bathroom, the former nursery that would be her room, and looked for the duffel bag she had stuffed with most of the contents of her sock drawer. She rummaged around for a moment, hoping in vain to find a loose pad, but gave up and went looking for her backup instead; an old pair of black boy shorts that her mother had given her on the sly about a year earlier. She snuck back to the bathroom and closed the door as quietly as possible. She slipped into the shorts and tugged them into place, feeling a bit strange wearing tight-fitting boy shorts under a long white nightgown that did nothing to flatter her figure which, as the bathroom mirror showed her, was coming in much differently than expected. She was nearly caught off guard by the young woman looking back at her.

Perhaps it was the stress of the last few weeks that she had not taken the time to look, or the fact that they had never had anything larger than a makeup mirror in the old house. Only now in front of this mirror, in which she could stretch her arms out fully and still have room to spare, only now did she really notice her own body. In her mind she was still scrawny, raw childish muscle and bone, like Kora but taller and with longer hair. The woman in the mirror was filling out. Her eyes seemed darker, her lips fuller. Her hips were wider and her butt was an almost perfect capital C. Her breasts weren’t Cs yet, but they were getting there. If her mother was any indication, she had a few cup sizes still coming to her. She spent some time just staring in the mirror in disbelief, feeling a little dumb for not noticing the changes before, but also shy looking at her own naked body. It was not her, after all. She was looking at a complete stranger, a nearly naked one at that. She shook her head clear, pulled the nightgown over her head, tucked her hair behind her ears and decided to leave the poor woman in the mirror alone for the night.

Klara made her way down the hallway and back to Cara’s room to find her still asleep on top of her sleeping bag. The room, she noticed, had grown uncomfortably warm to the point the windows were fogging around the edge. She approached the window and put her foot out with the top near the accordion-style radiator. Evidently the heat had come on at some point, despite her father’s insistence that the hot water would not be ready until late the next day at the earliest.

“Maybe,” she wondered aloud, “the heat and hot water are separate somehow. Though I’m pretty sure this kind of radiator uses hot water to – eh, I don’t know.” She looked at the side to see if there was a thermostat or a knob, or anything she could use to turn it down before Cara woke up, stuffy and dehydrated. She tended to get the sniffles if the heat was turned up too high and, lack of sleep aside, Klara had been at least enjoying the quiet that came with the night, even if it was spent in a strange new place.

Sure enough, there was a knob on one side of the radiator that connected to a pipe which ran into the floorboards. She reached down to turn it but stopped herself just a few centimeters away. She thought for a moment, then opened her hand and patted the knob lightly, expecting it might be as hot as the metal. On the contrary. It was ice cold. She turned the knob a few times counter clockwise until it was nearly closed, leaving it open just slightly, reasoning that they could always put more layers on but could only take so many off.

Klara tucked her nightgown behind her and leaned over the radiator onto the windowsill, taking her first look out the window in earnest. The view was scenic but unremarkable. There was a house across the road and to the left which was mostly out of sight. The neighbours to her right were, likewise, out of view. Most of the view was of a clearing and a grown over parking lot next to the warehouse across the road and to the right. The warehouse itself was nothing to write home about. It was unusual, not only because of the wood panel siding or the angled roof, but because it was clearly old and built before the simplified design of the big box stores she was used to. The wood letters that had been nailed to the space under the eaves had started falling off, now reading R D TOD R HI LES. The red paint on the road-facing side was aged, faded, and had turned a shade she had seen recently, which made her mildly uncomfortable. The other side was the same white, faded, chipped, and cheap, as seemingly everything else. She was aware that part of the reason she was in the house looking out the window at that moment was because her father had gotten a deal on renting part of the big ugly warehouse, but she had not been made aware of any details. What he planned to do with it was, for her, a “tomorrow problem”.

There was a teardrop-shaped streetlight, same as the ones that lined the road but attached directly to the building, which cast an eerie light over the concrete and made the cracks look like gorges. Her eyes were drawn to the trees. Moonlight reflected on the season’s new growth but was caught by the branches and kept from reaching the ground below. The undergrowth was a wall of darkness kept apart from the sky by an entanglement of skeletal branches which, though they lived the same as anything else in the forest, had a distinct nakedness easily associated with death. Klara could not help herself but stare at it and be drawn to the empty space. It was so unnatural to look at a the trees, a place where life thrived, and see utter darkness.

The wind rolled through, shaking the branches and making the rolling movements of the leaves look like a stormy ocean. Below it, the angle of the trees under the moonlight caused their shadows to dance in the long grass at the forest’s edge. Klara watched. Thousands of tiny movements, all independent, and all connected. She let her eyes come unfocused and listened to the sound of the wind in the leaves.

She had to believe it was just a shadow. A bit of moonlight made it through the branches. She saw it happen once or twice. Some moonlight, the branches, a shadow at the right angle. She had read somewhere that when people look at monotonous shapes like oil spills or piles of sand, the mind conjures up images of human faces. There was even a name for it, she was pretty sure.

She blinked a few times to clear the sleep from her eyes.

Nothing.

It could have been a tree trunk, she thought. A tree trunk with hanging limbs, and the moonlight made it look like the trunk was split, and so it looked like legs. The branches above were probably stripped of leaves, which is why they jutted in every direction and looked vaguely like antlers.

She leaned forward so that she was almost touching the window and pressed her nose softly against the glass. She breathed heavily through her nose. Fog spread across the glass under each nostril, flaring out each time she exhaled.

The moon disappeared behind a cloud and cast a shadow over the entire panorama. The wind stopped. The movement in the trees died.

The night was silent.

She looked to the undergrowth where the forest was darkest, then back to the warehouse. It had to be nearly three in the morning, but she could not rule out that the neighbours were active at that hour. She continued with slow, measured breaths, hoping that the feeling in the pit of her stomach and the hair raising on the back of her neck was just fear of the dark. She waited for the leaves to start dancing again, for the trees to move. She watched the dark undergrowth for a sign even that the wind was still out there, but the night sat before her, still as the grave.

She could feel it watching back,

And saw one tree waving at her.

Hello.

The branches began to sway and with them, the leaves began to tumble over each other once again. The wind had come back. The grass in the clearing floated about. Klara noticed a loose power cable dangling under the street light that was attached to the warehouse and, in spite of the distance of at least fifty yards between them, gave it credit for the weird shadows in the undergrowth. It was more than enough. She turned around and took a step towards the tent but stopped dead when she saw the shadow standing in the doorway.

Klara tried to scream but could not pull in enough air to make a sound. She stumbled back and caught herself by grabbing one of the hot coils of the radiator. Even the feeling of her own flesh cooking was not enough to make her able to scream.

It was half the height of the doorway, bony, its head cocked to one side as though its neck was broken. It held a dead animal’s carcass in its hand. Fresh meat. Its free hand hung loose by its side as though it shoulder were dislocated in the kill. It spoke in a dry, raspy voice like the wind through the leaves.

“Somebody’s in my room.”

Air found its way into Klara’s nostrils. She took rapid, machinegun breaths that whistled with every in and out. Her chest rose and fell violently. The front of her nightdress was suddenly warm and wet.

The moon emerged and spread its ghastly light, bringing a hideous glow to everything it touched. It showed her things she did not want to see. The specter had dropped its kill on the floor and was staring at her with hollow, hungry eyes.

“Somebody’s in my room.”

Klara’s chest loosened enough for her to take a single, deep breath.

“Kora,” she said. “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, you scared the crap out of me.”

“Don’t swear,” Kora said, sleepily. “I heard somebody in my room.”

“I doubt that,” Klara said, crossing the room and picking up her stuffed rabbit. “Come on. Let’s get you back to bed.”

Klara turned the light on and walked Kora through the routine of checking under the bed, in the drawers, and between her toes. Only when she came to the closet in one corner of the room did she pause. The door had been painted a sickly golden ochre that reminded her of vomit. The doorknob was black and rusty. She winced as she put her hand on the craggy metal. She began to turn the handle slowly.

“Did you pee yourself?” Kora said. She was not yet fully awake.

“No, sweetheart, no,” said Klara, remembering the cold fabric that was flapping against her legs. “I spilled some apple juice just before you came in.”

“A likely story,” Kora said. She laid her head down on her pillow and closed her eyes before Klara had a chance to turn the handle. Klara looked at the doorknob in her hand, then back at the door, and lowered her hand slowly.

“Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,” she whispered to herself, then kissed her sister on the forehead, turned out the light, and started toward the door.

“See?” Kora said, her voice muffled by the pillow she had smushed her face in. “I’m the funny one.”