The Darkhouse Read online

  I’m too far away to tell what the chest is made of or what it looks like in detail, but it’s precious enough to Jonah that when he brushes the red sandstone dust from the top, his hands twitch. He seems to take a breath or two during which he stretches and clenches his hands a few times. Then he unlatches the lid. I wonder if it’s a Mi’kmaq or Acadian antiquity he’s looted for himself.

  His hands keep twitching as he turns to his knapsack and opens it. He digs past the rolled cardboard sheets and pulls something else out. Because of the bright green color, I know right away that he’s brought along the baby blanket — the green frog blanket I’ve smoothed against my cheek a hundred times, that has a soother attached to it, that was hidden inside the box marked Experiment LLB.

  Jonah spreads the blanket on his lap. Then he turns to the chest and pulls something out of it. A wrapped bundle that seems very light. He lays the bundle gently on top of the green frog blanket. He removes string from it that has rotted to bits and peels open the cloth. The cloth is so dirty and old it flays like stiff cardboard flaps, but something about it looks familiar in a way I can’t quite understand. Jonah stares inside the folds of cloth for a long, long time. He even raises his thumb to one eye and then the other and rubs at his lashes. It occurs to me that he might be crying.

  After a while, he closes the cloth flaps of the bundle, places the bundle inside the green frog blanket, and sets the blanket and bundle together back inside the chest. Very carefully, he closes the lid. He gets up and rearranges all the small rocks back inside the hole and then covers it with the larger one. He grabs the shovel and pitchfork and, cradling the chest, jumps from rock to rock until he gets back to the path. I push myself deeper into the bushes and freeze, and he walks right past me like I’m not there at all.

  When he’s far enough away, I pull myself out of the bush and go back up the path toward the house. I catch him as he’s coming out of his lab again and locking the door behind him. Again, I duck out of sight. The tools aren’t in his hands anymore, but the knapsack with the cardboard rolls is still strapped to his back and the chest he pulled from the rocks is still under one arm. Jonah doesn’t go into the house like I expect him to, but walks down the path to the lighthouse. Again, I follow far behind and as quiet as a shell.

  He continues toward the lighthouse, skirting the hole that Biscuit started digging yesterday, but which seems a lot bigger today. Jonah eyes the hole, but moves on. The white tower is waiting for him, quiet and watchful.

  I hide myself behind a tree as Jonah goes through the lighthouse door. He comes out a moment later holding the climbing gear. He puts on the harness and then bends down and finds the anchor and sling that he attached to the edge of the rock face. He connects his safety line and then the rope to the sling. Then he picks up the coil of rope and throws it down the cliff. When the rope is settled, he takes a length of it and feeds it through the rappel device. Then he snaps the rappel into his harness and tests that all the holds are secure.

  I study every move he makes, determined to memorize it. He takes out some netting and wraps it around the chest and straps it to his back, making room for the knapsack with its rolls of cardboard. Jonah looks very strange now, like the hunchback of Notre Dame or something. Like a monster and not a man.

  He moves very slowly as he takes his contorted body over the side of the cliff and follows the rope. I can hear the labored huff and puff of his breath. For the first time, I get scared. I realize the rope could snap or he could lose his balance and fall to the ocean. I know if that happens, he will die. It’s the hardest thing for me not to scream at him to stop.

  The wind is strong when he climbs over the cliff. When the wind is high around the lighthouse it sounds like voices howling in pain, many many voices. More than you can count.

  Jonah’s body and then his head disappear over the ledge. When I can’t see him anymore, I run to the edge of the cliff. I grip the wall of the lighthouse and, holding tight and bracing my feet, I stretch my neck out and look far over the edge so I can see where he’s going. I’m just in time to see Jonah’s feet push through the big clump of weeds wedged into the cliff and then into the cave underneath it. His body wriggles in next.

  The high wind on the cliff chokes me. The cliff falls so violently below me, I think it might reach up and grab me for balance. At the bottom the waves crash then stretch far up, taunting me like devil’s fingernails.

  My heart stops racing when I understand that Jonah is safe. But I also know I can’t keep gawping down the cliff anymore — Jonah has only one route out of the cave, and that’s up toward me.

  I rear back out of his sight and collect my thoughts. My attention shifts to the secret mole hole on the far side of the lighthouse that hides my old jewelry box. My memory spins around the childhood treasures inside it and the fact that one of them might be of significant value.

  Spurred by a certainty, by the sense that I’m doing something inevitable, I run to the hole. It’s been ages since I’ve looked at my jewelry box, but I still remember all the things inside it: a silver bird earring from a tourist I thought could be my mom, a ring Doris gave me inside a plastic ball, and a key I found four years ago wedged in the soil by Jonah’s lab.

  I move aside the three speckled stones and crumble the dried seam of dirt that covers the secret hole, then reach down into the darkness, deep to my elbow. I almost don’t recognize it when I pull it up. All the paint has scratched off the metal, and it’s covered in rust. I can hear the key clank around inside.

  I open the box and reach past the plastic ball, but something catches my skin and makes me stop. It’s the earring — a beautiful little silver bird with wings spread like it’s ready to fly.

  She was very pretty, that tourist, almost as pretty as Marlie. What made me pay attention to her was the color of her eyes, which were almost like mine. She’d come to the island by herself, and I was in Peg’s Diner doing my lessons when she arrived. Immediately I felt a magnetic pull, so I got up and followed her around the diner, watching as she ordered a cheeseburger and fries, noticing that she had a strange accent. When she sat down to eat, I stood by her booth looking at her for a very long time before she noticed me and smiled. After looking at each other for a few minutes, she opened her hand to me. Lying on the center of her palm was the tiniest, most perfect silver bird. She asked if it was my earring, and I told the truth even though I didn’t want to. She could see that I admired it and said that since she’d found it in the grass by the keeper’s house, I should have it. I was so happy then, so certain.

  The key is the last item in the treasure box. I slip it into my pocket and go back to the house, on the lookout for anything suspicious.

  Outside the lab door, I hesitate — I’m anxious to see if the key fits the lock, but I don’t want Jonah to catch me. There’s no point searching his lab unless he’s guaranteed to be gone for a long time — like on the morning ferry run. I decide to hide in the back room until he leaves for the day.

  Just as I’m about to go into the house, there’s a rustle and blur of movement through the woods by the drive. I freeze and stare into the caged branches. I half-expect Jonah to come charging out, somehow returning more quickly than possible because he’s read my mind. But the dark, lunging shape is only Biscuit loping toward me. His fur is matted and dirty, his eyes shining and eager. He comes up to me and nuzzles my hand.

  “Go on, boy,” I say to him. “Get back home now.” Somehow he understands that this time I’m serious and he lopes away. As I let myself into the house, I see him head down the path to the lighthouse and imagine him intent on getting back to his newfound hole. I wish him well and shut the door.

  I hide myself in the back room and hold the door closed with my body. The Experiment LLB box and its soft green blanket are missing. But something new has been added.

  A small folded piece of paper balances on Marlie’s purse. I know I should leave it, but I’m drawn to it. I approach, hoping I’ll only have to observe
it from a distance to know what it means. But the paper is in my hand and unfolded before I realize it.

  Dear Marlie, it says in Jonah’s most careful handwriting.

  I look forward to seeing you when I get back from this morning’s run. Always, Jonah

  Words so slight, I wonder if Marlie will even know how meaningful they are. I remember his innocent boy’s face when he was asleep on the couch. His sweet face.

  I reorder the note and place it back on her purse.

  Not much later, Jonah returns from the cliffs. Pressed against the door, I listen as he makes himself breakfast, as he hums tunelessly — an unfamiliar sound — and as he washes up and runs upstairs. I can tell by the clomp of his boots that he’s in my room, probably checking on Marlie. Maybe kissing her on the cheek. Then there’s the thump of him running back downstairs again and leaving out the front door. The van starts up and rumbles down the drive and into town.

  The key from my treasure box fits into the knob of Jonah’s lab door like a bulb in a socket. Turning it isn’t so easy. It sticks and jams. But I keep trying. And pretty soon, it jigs right around and I hear the lock click open.

  I push the door, step inside the shed, close the door behind me, and turn on the light.

  The first things I see are the hooks securing the garden tools: the shovel, the spade, the pitchfork. Beside those is a single stack of shelves running the height of the wall, each filled with some kind of equipment: traps for capturing voles, buckets and sponges and gloves, cameras and monitors and flashlights, everything jumbled together. Beside that, there’s a stack of divided shelves, each edge labeled and each cubicle filled with Jonah’s research papers — studies upon studies that he found on computers on the mainland and printed out: Reciprocal Altruism, Pair Bonding, Human Attachment. I recognize the pencil marks and underlined text, having lost him to this work every night of my life.

  At the turn in the wall, a single shelf is set up as a workstation with a stool tucked underneath and writing material on top: pencils sharpened and collected in jars, rulers and stacks of loose-leaf paper and blank journals, a stapler, a hole punch, some metal clips.

  A small white box that looks like prescription medicine sits among them. Clomiphene, the writing says. It doesn’t say what clomiphene is, so I look inside and recognize the blister pack and pills that Jonah crushed into Marlie’s water.

  On the third wall, I find the voles.

  The whole wall is lined with enclosures from floor to ceiling, and each enclosure has some quantity of voles inside. Mothers with babies, or whole families, or voles by themselves. But most of the cages have two together. Each one labeled.

  Generation 54, Generation 55, Generation 56.

  “Critical attachment theory,” I say out loud as if to explain it to myself.

  For the first time I hear the sound: tiny, screeching, urgent pleas.

  I peer closer, and bead-like eyes find me. Ears and front paws prick up. Little whiskered snouts twitch and worry.

  Human contact must be kept to a minimum, I hear Jonah warning.

  “Shush,” I say to them as gently as I can. “Don’t worry. I would never hurt you.”

  As if they understand and believe me, most of the voles go back to their regular existence. In one cage, two voles — a bonded pair — run to opposite sides and into small identical pens. When they stop moving, a hatch is triggered in the center of the main enclosure and a small cricket is released from underneath. The voles run back and grab the cricket together, then eat it so quickly I’m hardly sure I saw it. In another cage, two voles move to a water dropper. I notice the dropper is too high for them to reach with their mouths, but one vole stands up on its hind legs and pulls the dropper down with two paws so the other vole can drink. After the vole drinks, it reaches up and pulls the dropper with two paws so the first one can drink.

  As I watch them, a burrowing love for the voles fills me. Love for their cleverness, their trust, their innocent beauty. But I can’t decide if I’m happy they’re safe and clean and well cared for — like Biscuit or any of the dozens of farm animals and pets kept all over the island — or if I’m sickened by the strangeness of their behavior and the smallness of their lives.

  I turn to the fourth wall, the one behind the door. This wall is also stacked with shelves, but each shelf is lined with journals — all the journals that I’ve watched Jonah fill over the years. Like the other cubicles, each shelf-edge is labeled. Darwin Methodology, Neo-Lamarckism, Neo-Darwinism, The Southern Red-backed Vole, Island History, Acadian History, Mi’kmaq History. All subjects I know Jonah has researched. Still, I pull out journals and flip through them.

  The last entry in the Mi’kmaq journal has an interesting story dated two years ago, and I read it with interest.

  To investigate the possibility of a Mi’kmaq cull by the British military some 200 years ago, I decided to explore the waters closest to the lighthouse. The coastline here is extremely shallow and pitted with rock deposits, making boat access impossible. The likelihood of an accidental burial ground never before discovered is high. There may not be any organic matter left, but there might be evidence of historical importance.

  Striking a course 180º straight down from the lighthouse, my descent was slow. I took my time, carefully setting the bolts and anchor for the climbing rope. About midway down the sheer rock face of the cliffs, I found myself navigating a large clump of yarrow that grows from a fissure. As I rappelled past the mass of blooms, I lost my footing and found myself bouncing into the plant instead of around it. Trying to regain my balance, I angled my foot downward. It didn’t land against a solid brace of rock, as I expected, but slipped past the foliage and through a hole. I released more rope, allowing myself to drop further, and found myself going through a small opening.

  At first I was certain I’d stumbled into a natural formation. It was only when I unhooked the rope and stood to my full height that I noticed the opening is completely square. There are vestiges of rust on the top and bottom, a sure sign that at one point metal — probably iron — bars secured it. The window to a jail, no doubt, or a keep. As my eyes adjusted to the minimal light, I could see there was a floor of sorts beneath my feet; it is as level and smooth as any manmade floor. The natural wall of the cliff face behind me — the wall with the porthole — is abutted on both sides with walls made from stacked, handmade clay bricks. It was then that I began to understand this was no natural formation, but a carefully engineered chamber.

  There had never been any talk on the island of a porthole in the rock or of a cavern behind it. In the architectural drawings that decorate the lighthouse, there is no hint of an underground chamber. Later, on inspecting from the water, I saw that through a combination of the fissure in the cliff and the overgrown yarrow — both natural accidents — the porthole is impossible to see, even through high-powered binoculars.

  I shone a lantern around the chamber. Damp and mildewed, the outside wall leached moisture into the air and sticky streams of lime marked the brick walls. The floor is hard-packed dirt with virtually no decomposition in the centuries since it was laid. The chamber is about 10 feet by 12 feet and about 7 feet high and has only the one porthole to the outside — the one through which I’d come — for air and light. As I ventured deeper inside, I discovered a tunnel off the back wall a few feet wide and several feet long, which ends with a flight of stone stairs that leads to a trap door.

  Never having noticed any sign of a trap door in the ground at lighthouse level, I calculated its approximate position relative to the light-house and I note here that above ground there is only dirt and vegetation where the entrance would be. I assume the lack of air and light has petrified the trap door’s slatted wood and kept it in place, buried for two centuries. When the Brits decamped to more effective military strongholds, the place must have been locked away and forgotten like any other useless secret.

  The good luck of finding such an unknown and secure room is not lost on me. If the lab behind t
he house is a sanctuary for the voles, here is a sanctuary for an open exhibit of the studies I would never risk exposing at the house. Even behind a locked door.

  The cavern walls, while mildewed and damp, will provide an excellent backdrop on which to hang waterproof tarps, to which my large study-charts can be attached and displayed. Here, with past experiments ordered around me, I can examine the linear evolution of my work: how this experiment led to that discovery, how that discovery led to this experiment, and so on. As a result, the space will be a safe retrospective of sorts. A reliquary of my science. A gallery to showcase exactly what for me is the essential truth of life.

  So, the hole under the lighthouse is Jonah’s “reliquary of science.” I can’t imagine, with all the information stored and catalogued in the lab, what else Jonah is researching — and hiding — down there.

  When I put the Mi’kmaq journal back on the shelf, I notice the section next to it is marked Critical Attachment. The first journal is titled: Critical Attachment Theory: Developed from Abstract for Experiment LLB.

  “Experiment LLB,” I repeat out loud. Black marker on a cardboard box: banished. Green frog blanket: banished.

  The mother-child bond, the first page reads, is the most obvious example of human attachment. It guarantees that offspring survive and ensures the future of the human gene. But our tribes have also played an imperative role in safeguarding human survival.