CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

One of us let go of the other's hands. I wasn't sure which. I nearly fell backward, with the force of being let loose from the game.

I had forgotten its power.

"He killed her," Bruno said, tearing off the blindfold.

"He may not have," Harry said.

"Bruno, it's a game. It's some mindfuck. It may not be real," I said.

"Her clothes are still here. Her things. He used the Dark Game to survive the POW camps, Nemo. He used it with us to control our minds."

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I felt as if a gun had gone off right next to my ear. It was as if the words exploded something, and for a few seconds, the world went silent.

"He used to hurt her," Bruno said. "You may not remember it, Nemo. But I do. He probably hurt her that night."

"Right here," Harry said. I'd nearly forgotten that he was in the smokehouse with us.

It only took us a few minutes to decide what to do next.

We really had no choice.

It was so cold outside that I felt as if my ears were going to burn off, and the snow was heavy, and the wind had begun blasting from the north.

This time, I was covered from head to foot in a thick down jacket, a wool cap, with a thick wool scarf wrapped around my neck. Bruno was less concerned with the cold and wore his trademark brown leather jacket and jeans, with a baseball cap scrunched down on his head.

He carried the shovels, I carried the axe and crowbar. The flashlights were stuffed in the four pockets of my coat.

Harry had remained in the smokehouse and was speaking into his recorder.

Ever the reporter.

Inside the smokehouse, we set up flashlights around the floor.

They lit the place decently.

The smell of blood was not quite as strong as I had experienced that morning.

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I crouched down and touched the slats of the floor. "He put them in the year she left." My father's blood had dried and frozen the wood.

"Yep," Bruno said.

We began smashing the floor and pulling the wood up as it broke. I piled it in a corner.

We took turns with the shovels, for there were only two of them, a long-and a short-handled.

Bruno cracked the hard surface of the dirt below.

It took an hour to get to it, but we found it.

A canvas tarp, wrapped around the remains of a human body.

Harry crouched down and drew something from it.

"What's this?"

It was a crescent-shaped object. Rusted.

"It's what I always imagined her having. A crescent moon," I said, feeling blood draining from my face.

"He murdered her with it," Bruno said.

We stared at it, and then at each other, for a long time.

I said nothing. I could not comprehend what we'd found. I could not understand it logically.

Our mother had been murdered.

Our mother had been murdered by our father.

He had buried her there, in the place where we had played, when we weren't being punished in the same spot.

Then he had created the Dark Game so that he could stop up our memories.

He fucked each one of us up with that ritual. I wonder if he even knew the power it had for us. The way it had been an addiction for us, going to the smokehouse, or even in the

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wardrobe in his bedroom, or down by the duck pond. How our lives had been empty without it. I felt that now. Playing it again. I felt its pull. It wanted to be played.

It had created a hunger, carved out a place for us. Made a home within our minds.

"She was furious-telling him that she'd never cared for him and that she hadn't wanted children at all. I sat out on the stairs and listened and saw what I could from the bannister. He was practically on his knees," I said, remembering the look on my poor father's face as my mother, seeming more wicked than she had ever been to any of us before, told him how he had destroyed anything he'd ever touched and how if he loved the children so much, he could take care of them, but she was going to South America, she was going for love, and she was not going to spend another minute in the hellhole known as Hawthorn or the awful place called Burnley Island.

Even as I said it, it sounded false. I hadn't drawn that memory up in years, and this time, it didn't sound right. It sounded too perfect.

"Like it's from a movie," Bruno said. "Or made up. like he made it up.

like he made you think that had happened. Face it, he murdered her. He killed her. Here."

"The place of punishment," I said.

"I want more," Bruno said, a silly look coming over his 329

face. He took deep breaths, and leaned over, resting his hands on his knees. "That wasn't enough."

"Bruno?" I said. "You okay?"

He looked at me wild-eyed, nodding. "We need Brooke. I want more of it.

I want to go back to that night. In the Dark Game. Harry, don't you think she should be here? We just got a glimpse. Harry, you can be part of it. You played it once."

"Nothing happened. I didn't see anything."

Bruno glanced over at me. "All of us. Pola, too."

"No," I said. "Not Harry, either."

"Then Brooke," Bruno said, nearly panting as if he'd been running a few miles. "He fucked us over for life, Nemo. We need to go back there. We need to play it like we used to play it. Only not by his rules."

Brooke was in no condition for any of this.

She looked at him as if she could not quite focus. "I'm so tired, Bruno.

Bruno, Nemo, let me sleep. I'm so tired."

"Get up," Bruno said. A roughness had come over him; and I also felt it.

It was the hunger for the game. We wanted to be back in it. It gave us something, no matter how awful it seemed afterward, it gave us something. And when it was over, it took it away. "Come on. Let's go out there again. Let's play the Dark Game there. Now."

Brooke protested, and I told him it could wait, but he was enraged. "We are going to play it!" he shouted, and somehow, I knew that I had wanted to play the Dark Game again, ever since I'd returned.

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The nightmares had been waiting for me.

The doors had been locked in my mind.

I let Bruno vent all the repressed fury he'd held inside, and I was afraid he was going to hit Brooke; I lunged at him, and drew him back from her bed. "Stop it!"

Then, I told her about what we'd found in the smokehouse.

In the smokehouse again, with Harry standing away from our circle, we began. Brooke had taken some tranquilizers and was fuzzy with the rhyme, but she accepted the blindfold. Her hands, and mine, trembled.

Harry glanced at his watch. "It's not quite dark yet," he said. "It will be soon."

"Perfect," I said. "The hour before dark you start. And if you keep going, it becomes real."

"Oranges and lemons, say the bells of St. Clemens." We all said the rhyme. Bruno, the most enthusiastically. I felt the shivering of Brooke's hand in mine and kept a firm grip on her. It was cruel to do this. It was perhaps even evil, for her mind was fragile enough at this point. But the hunger was in me. Just as it had been as a boy. I was merely a conduit, a channel for the Dark Game.

"You owe me five farthings, say the bells of St. Martin's," we said, and it continued until the line "And here comes a 331

chopper to chop off your head." As silly as it was, it gave me strength, and I felt more connected to my brother and sister than I had in years.

It had been the missing piece to my existence. It had been the surge of power I'd regretted ever leaving behind.

We were one.

We were one in the Dark Game.

And then, with one voice, we began speaking, as if our minds had merged, and the words themselves took us into another darkness.

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