Claims You The Darkness Everything belonged to him — but that was a trifle. The thing to know was what he belonged to, how many powers of darkness claimed him for their own. — Joseph Conrad, “Heart of Darkness” Claims You Ten years ago: I can feel the pulse in my head, louder and faster as more blood spurts from a dozen cuts to drip past my face toward the pile of broken glass below me. My van’s emergency flashers reflect black from a thousand corners, at all angles, wherever mirrors came to rest after the collision. The shattered streetlight somewhere above me casts an occasional shower of sparks. I become aware that there’s no way out of this. Even if those EMTs made it here within the next— no, I’m going to die. It happened suddenly. I’d been driving my new van, testing the modifications for hands-only control of a manual transmission. Scary stuff, but I was doing it. Mom and Dad sat in back, disapproving but not quite willing to say so, and managing the sort of conversation we always had on this anniversary. Nothing awkward like, “Are you sure that a cripple should be trying this sort of thing?” or, “don’t you think that ten years of obsessive anger about the accident is enough?” Dad actually had some interesting stories about recent construction projects and pointed out work his firm had done to the mansions we drove past. I’d decided to take the long way home, meandering around the Arroyo Seco and seeing how many The Darkness Claims You landmarks we could identify from various movies. A lot of Dad’s corporate customers lived here, and some had the money to bring his firm in for domestic work. Some of it was just plain strange, too, like the bedroom with the elevator-mounted ceiling that the owner could lower to five feet above the floor for a “cozier” feel. Dad started listing all the building codes that had to be circumvented or bribed past for that one. Then all the lights went out for two blocks on every side. Not just the streetlights — everything. Porch lights, house lights, even the dashboard security system lights in parked cars. There was total darkness with only the new moon overhead. I started to pull over, hit something slippery and went over a bridge abutment. All a matter of timing, I suppose. A few seconds earlier and I would have steered into a ten-foot-high noise-reduction wall. It would have hurt, maybe a lot, but then we’d be stopped. A few seconds later and I’d have hit solid 1980s vintage, suicide-discouraging hurricane fence. Likely we’d have careened off that and spun, maybe flipped, but stopped somewhere on the bridge. There’s only a small gap between wall and fence, and I hit it just right. The van tumbled lengthwise on its way to the roof of the warehouse. That’s why I’m here almost upside down, my useless legs dangling overhead while my arms are pinned. If I could raise my right arm, I could touch one of the four glass rods that slammed through the windshield and on into the back. One rod runs through Dad’s throat. Two more pierce Mom, one in her right eye and one just below her collarbone. Dad gurgled for a few minutes, but Mom never made a sound. I think death came quickly for them. So it’s just me. I can’t open my door. I can shout for help, but there doesn’t seem to be anyone around. I can’t move to release my harness or disengage the steering column brace or punch in an emergency code on the car phone. Then the lights come back on, without any preliminary flickering. I can see the whole warehouse spread out below, or perhaps above, me. It’s World War II construction. I wrote an article once about the immense durability of “temporary” buildings like this one. Twisted sheets of corrugated aluminum now lie sprawled over long rows of glass. Mirrors, windows, peculiar panes whose function I can’t imagine. Exit lights reflect through the debris, reminding me briefly of the moon during a lunar eclipse, dark red and ominous. The whole scene reminds me of something. Paul Klee on a bad day. Some Futurist nightmare. The blood keeps pounding in my head. Stupid education. Smart doesn’t help you when you’re pinned in an upside-down van. No, Klee wasn’t so ham-handed. I take another look in the rear-view mirror. My parents are right where they were. The car slides down a bit. The seatbelt cuts into my neck and collarbone. Without warning, there’s a hand on my shoulder. I can’t turn my head, so I have to roll my eyes as best I can to see the slim, neatly manicured Clanbook: Lasombra fingernails. It’s a small, graceful hand, very dark indeed, perhaps African or from New Guinea. A quick check in the mirror shows nobody there. I am hallucinating. “Andrew.” The voice is clear but soft, almost whispered. Each syllable emerges perfectly formed. I see nothing in the mirror; I feel the hand on my shoulder. The hand has no pulse. “Andrew, acknowledge me. You hear me.” I say nothing. “I am not a hallucination. You’re dying, and we must speak.” I say nothing. “Your life is a story you haven’t read. Speak with me.” Something about that sounds so… overwrought that I almost laugh, and I speak to the unseen presence. “What story? Are you going to claim to be the architect of my misery? The nemesis who made me suffer for my art? Give me a break. Even oxygenstarved, I expect something better than that.” “That’s precisely what I want to tell you.” “What?” “I mean to tell you that your life has been my hobby for about a decade, and that the time has come for you to decide what to do next. Listen to me.” The voice unfolds a steady litany of secrets, things I’ve never told anyone else: the petty frustrations as well as the great ones, the minor trials along with the massive calamities. The speaker, whose sex I cannot guess, speaks to me about careless doctors and berserk mailmen and arrogant editors and the countless others who’ve made my life unpleasant. I realize, somewhere along the way, that the voice never pauses for breath. “And you made it happen?” “I did what I could.” “Why?” Laughter. For the first time I feel confident that the voice belongs to a woman. “Do you know the story of Job, Andrew?” “Of course. God took away everything from him, to prove to Satan that Job was worthy. I hope you’re not going to claim to be the angel of the Lord.” “Listen to me.” The voice remains soft, but there’s a command in it. My mouth snaps closed without any conscious decision on my part. A single nail on that immaculate hand pierces my skin. “Spare me your efforts at humor. I did not select you to be my jester.” I cannot ask the obvious question, but she anticipates it anyhow. “I needed to find out what you were like without the things that define your identity. If I could remove your brain and put it in a jar to experiment upon, I would. I had to cut away the life around your mind, as far as possible, to see how you cope with loss. Your life has been a test. You pass, if you wish.” Now I can speak again. “What do I win? I hope it’s a towel. My eyes sting.” “Eternity.” “I said I didn’t want to speak with an angel.” “You did. I am not an angel.” I can hear a smile in that voice. “Let me show you.” I hear metal scream and break behind me. At first I think that I’m losing my peripheral vision. Then I realize there’s tangible blackness beside the car, a column of something like smoke. Floating in the middle of it, I see a woman. She’s tall but slim, her face heavily scarred. Her hair… isn’t hair at all, it’s layer upon layer of moving shadows, like exfoliating granite or peeling bark. Her arms seem normal enough — I recognize the hand and wrist that rested on my shoulder. Below them, though, a second set of arms pokes through slits in the gray robe she wears. They’re mottled black, reminding me slightly The Darkness Claims You of pictures I saw where the experimenters left raw meat outdoors for a year, photographing its changes. She scares me half to death, not that that’s so far a trip just now. I’ve hallucinated before, and I see absolutely none of the cues that tell me my brain is fabricating the scene. It takes me a moment to realize that she’s hanging upside down in that darkness, since we see eye to eye. I feel chains of association at work in my mind, as though some autonomous thought process has gone searching for everything that “darkness” means to me. Memories flicker and flare like the darkness around the woman. “Andrew,” she says through latticed lips. “You see your fears in the darkness, don’t you?” She sees my slight nod. “All your life, all anyone’s life, these things live beneath your skin. Now they flow out along with your life itself. Learn.” One of those shadow-arms stretches toward me. Its blunt end smashes through the remains of the driverside window and snakes around in front of me. With one swift motion it wraps around my head, completely covering my eyes. For an instant there’s utter, profound nothing. Even the retinal flickers that go on behind closed eyelids disappear; in some sense, the darkness pours in behind my eyes. I can’t even take a breath. The flashes of memory become much more intense. There’s no sensory component to them, only states of mind. Anger, at the accident, at the hospital, at my parents, at the government bureaucrats, at the fuckhead doctors who fail to understand what I tell them. Fear, of rejection, of losing my mind as well as my legs, of never writing again, of old age and poverty in this condition. Ambition and pride, for the next great work, to prove wrong all the doctors and doubters, to show my parents the folly of their hopes for me. Depression woven in through it all, the desire to simply drift away from the body. I see myself as a vessel slopping over with dark passions, lacking anything to be for, filling the emptiness with a long litany of things to be against. Vision returns. It’s cloudy now. Some blood has coagulated around my eyes, and now my peripheral vision really is fading for lack of oxygen. Death cannot be far away. “You see, Andrew, you have cut yourself out of the fabric of society. But you do not yet know what you want to clothe yourself in, and your anger is not enough. Do you see?” I nod, or at least I try. My face grows numb. “Let me tell you what awaits.” At first her story seems irrelevant, some secondrate pastiche. She describes growing up in the Belgian Congo, hearing in her heart the voices of gods that the colonial masters sought to destroy. She describes rapine, the destruction of whole tribes, enslavement and humiliation at the hands of Europeans come to get rich. She describes hearing the voice of the night inside a particularly ambitious Clanbook: Lasombra outpost supervisor, only to lose him to his madness and self-destruction. “So you see, Andrew, others know suffering too.” She tells me the story of wandering the riverbanks at night, hoping to hear a word from the moon or the shadows. And one night the shadows spoke to her. A pale man emerged and told her the litany of her sorrows and offered her the power for revenge. “Now watch, Andrew.” The shadow-arm grabs the seat I’m in and draws it smoothly out of the car, with the other shadow-arm tearing off the remains of my door in one yank. With a sudden flip, I’m right side up again. The woman pivots to remain facing me and sinks slowly to the ground. My shoes touch bloody shards of glass. The woman steps out of the column of darkness and picks the seat and me up with one hand. She tosses me casually into the air a few times before setting me down. I’d vomit if there were anything left in my stomach. She squats to look directly at me as I fumble for the seatbelt latch. “Stop,” she says, and I freeze. Not because I want to, but because not one voluntary muscle answers me. “Stand.” Against my will, my arms unbuckle me and push me into an upright position. I teeter for a moment and then, inevitably, fall face-forward onto the glass. Half a dozen shards slice me open, one a tiny fraction of an inch from my right eye. A piece pokes into my mouth, lodging against my upper gums. I can feel it scrape tooth beneath the gum. “Now dream, Andrew. Imagine yourself able to do what I’ve just made you do. You remember your enemies. I made sure of that. Can you envision them suffering as you do now, and worse? Will you accept this gift?” The final word catches me by surprise. “Gift?” This blood and hurt is a gift? But once again the chains of association flare. I have been very confident that I understand how the world works. I’ve mocked those who disagreed. In my desk at home there’s a whole file of letters from readers who report disillusionment and loss of faith because of what I’ve written. Would anything less than this have convinced me? And I picture the sort of torment the woman describes. “Yes.” The word oozes out around the glass wedged into my mouth. “Yes.” Shadow arms flip me over so that I’m lying on my back. She opens her mouth to show me fangs. They don’t look like movie-monster props. These are the real thing, emerging organically from her jaw and serrated like carnivore fangs. As she leans over my neck, no breath stirs my shredded collar. For a moment I see channels along the fangs’ inside edges, stained with small flecks of dried blood. I marvel at their efficiency…. The Darkness Claims You I thought that I knew something about suffering, but this is the sharpest, most consuming agony I’ve ever felt. The pricks are small, and I know that there are no major nerves around them, but nonetheless it’s like fire sweeping from one side of my body to the other. Just as quickly, there’s pleasure. Not orgasmic pleasure — there’s no physiological component, only a sense of completion and rightness. In my mind, I hear the woman say, “This is your function as prey. Remember what you are leaving, kine no more.” My pulse becomes erratic, weak. Stops. Clinically, I’m dead. My eyes continue to see, dimly, but that’ll stop soon. No more oxygen in the blood. No more blood. There’s stillness in my body. My eyes dim, so I don’t see the woman bend over me. I hear her bite something. She presses her cold wrist to my mouth. Her blood — thick and slow — drains past my still lips. Pain returns, an electrical shock or something like it rippling out from my throat. It’s been ten years since I felt any real sensation below my hips. Now, as the shock blasts through them, I can feel them again. I feel the debris, and my trousers touching the hair on my legs. Something that isn’t life stirs within me. My eyes open. The woman smiles at me. “That was the first step.” *** Now: So you see, you’re not the only one to know the sort of loss you’ve felt. Yes, I’m sure that the pain where your family, your job, your standing in the community once were is sharp. I know these things too. There’s a way to redress it, if you want. Are you ready to become a predator for real, rather than prey with delusions of grandeur? Clanbook: Lasombra
