CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

It was the night our mother left.

"No, Daddy!" I cried out, but I could not stop him from beating at her with his fists.

"You goddamn whore! You have done this for the last time!" he shouted.

He barely looked like my father at all. His face was contorted, and his eyes wild and angry. He grabbed my mother by her long golden hair and pulled so hard that, as she screamed, long strands of blood-tipped hair came out in his fist.

She tried to fight him, but he kept punching her. I jumped 334

on him and beat my fists against his back, but he shook me off and kicked at my face.

"You goddamn whore!" he yelled at her again. Brooke and Bruno stood in the doorway crying.

"I'm going to punish you, you bitch! You kids, get out to the smokehouse. You're going to see how whores get treated!"

And then it was as if we were floating, all of us, and I could go in and out of my father's mind at will, and I heard the voices he had within him. I felt the tortures that had been inflicted upon him, the whippings his father had given him, and the muddy hole he'd been kept in for months at a time while he played the Dark Game himself-and something else was there in his mind; something else lurked within him.

Something created by the Dark Game itself.

A monster.

Not a human being turned monstrous.

But a creature that had knives for teeth, in circular, lamprey-like rows, going down its throat. Something was loose within him, something he could not control.

Banshee.

Next, we watched as he held our mother up in front of us- she was barely conscious-and he tore her blouse from her, and then her bra, her pantyhose around her ankles, her pale white skin bruised.

We saw three children-they were us-tied with hands behind our backs.

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"NONE OF YOU DESERVES TO LIVE!" my father screamed. "NONE OF YOU! YOU

ARE ALL BASTARDS AND FOR ALL I KNOW I'M NOT EVEN YOUR FATHER! I AM THE

FATHER AND WHAT I SAY GOES! NOT ONE OF YOU IS EVER GOING TO BREAK MY

RULES, YOU UNDERSTAND ME?"

"Please," my mother said. "Please, God, please, oh God, please."

For a lightning-flash of a moment, I saw her not as a woman, but as a lamb about to be slaughtered beneath a farmer's axe.

My father's booming voice caused the children to tremble.

They had duct tape on their mouths.

He was going to hurt them, as well.

"YOU ARE ALL BAD! YOU ARE ALL EVIL!" my father yelled, and then his voice softened, and he kissed the edge of my mother's lips. "You're making me do this. You have evil in you. It needs to be cleansed. It needs to be wiped free."

The broken handle of the scythe was in the corner.

The blade was in my father's hands.

The children's eyes went wide as the blade came down into my mother's throat.

And then we were all crying, digging in the dirt.

My father was digging also, burying my mother's body.

"None of you should be alive. None of you. She was a good woman, but she went bad. You each are going bad. I

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can see it coming," he said, and Bruno began moaning the loudest.

My father ripped the tape from his mouth and grabbed Bruno around the waist, hugging him.

My father wept.

"Don't kill me, Daddy," Bruno sobbed.

Again, I had that strange sensation. I could move into my father's mind, and I felt the monster there, and when I tried to picture it, the word banshee came up. Inside my father. Growing. Struggling against him. I felt the killings he'd done in the war, some justified by battle, others, darker, for he had been playing the game. The monster had grown within him like a tumor. A dark blotch of cancer in his mind, taking him over, but retreating, in remission.

"I love you, baby," he said to my brother, and began sobbing himself. He released Bruno, and pressed his hands to his forehead. "Get out of me!"

he shouted. "Get out of me!"

In his mind, I felt it, some kind of change, some shift of his blood.

He replaced the duct tape over Bruno's lips.

Little Brooke was gone. Her eyes glazed over. It had been too much for her. I moved through her mind and heard:

"Daddy is not doing it. It didn't happen. She went away. She went away.

Somewhere else. Another place called Brazil. She went away. Daddy did not do it. Daddy did not tie her up. Daddy did not punish her. Daddy did not punish her and make her hurt. DADDY WOULD NEVER HURT US! DADDY LOVES

US! HE'S ONLY PUNISHING MOMMY! BUT IT'S NOT REAL! IT'S THE DARK GAME!

SHE RAN AWAY FROM US BECAUSE SHE DOESN'T LOVE US!"

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I felt as if I were shot back out of Brooke's mind.

When I looked at my own nine-year-old self, I wasn't exactly all there either. My eyes had the same glassy look as did Brooke's, and it was the saddest thing I'd ever seen.

Who could blame these children?

Witnessing this.

Seeing it happen.

I went inside my own mind, to get a sense of what I could be thinking, and all I felt was darkness there-so much that it stung for me to stay inside my childhood self.

I drew back and watched.

My father filled in my mother's grave, and then sat with us all day.

All night.

Then, against my will, I was sucked into my childhood self, and I felt intense pain, as if my skull were about to explode, and something eel-like swam through my skin, making me feel uncomfortable in my own flesh.

In that little boy's mind he was in a small boat on the sea. In the sky, an enormous silver crescent moon, but it was barely dark yet.

My father was turned with his back to me. He had a fishing line out in the water. When I looked in the bottom of the boat, near my bare feet, it seemed alive with wriggling fat eels and freshwater trout, their tails flipping as they tried to get out of the boat.

He turned to face me, and his eyes were no longer there, but blood poured from the empty holes.

(Someone cried near me. Bruno?)

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"Don't be afraid," my father said. "Just close your eyes. Don't touch anything."

I glanced down at the eels in the boat. The eels were in the child's imagination. He wasn't in a boat. He wasn't near the water. But he wanted to remake the world so that it made sense to him. "Them?" he asked, looking at the eels.

"Just stay still here. Keep your eyes closed. Don't lean. No talking.

Ignore the noise," he said. "Listen to what I'm about to say. Listen very carefully. Each word I say is important. Each word is like a key to a door. I want you to imagine a small red light, so small you can barely see it. Everything about it is completely pitch dark, but the light is red like a tiny tiny fire. I want you to follow me with that fire, follow me as I take you somewhere else."

I watched an eel with a mouth like a python as it devoured one of the fish. I nodded, not wanting to say anything to him.

"She went away," my father said, returning his gaze to the ever-growing moon as the seagull's shriek became a scream. "But someday, she'll be back. Nemo, you saw her on the stairs. In her red dress. You cried and you tried to grab her, but she was mean to you. She didn't love any of you. She didn't love me. A man waited for her outside. They were leaving you. Abandoning you. You three slept in my bed that night, you slept there and we all wept together that she didn't love any of us anymore. ..."

I was expelled from my childhood mind and floated again, watching as my father used what can only be described as brainwashing techniques, combined with the Dark Game itself. Hours passed in seconds, and the children remained in that

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smokehouse for days, being fed, peeing and shitting in their clothes, while my father kept them prisoner. And the Dark Game began to take them over.

Beneath the blindfold, aware again of being in the smokehouse NOW with Bruno and Brooke.

Brooke whimpered and seemed to be forming words as if she were just learning to speak.

Bruno whispered, "The Brain Fart."

I was a bird flying in the air, looking down as each of us left the smokehouse as children. My father carried Brooke in his arms, for she seemed sick and feverish. Bruno held my hand, and fell on the snow (it was December then as well). At the house, the little boy named Nemo began to panic-you could see it in his eyes, and his skin turned pale-he let go of his little brother's hand and ran down, away from the house and his father.

Ran down through the fields. We felt the sucking hunger of his mind, as if it had been carved up in that Brain Fart, and something instinctive made him run away.

Down to the woods the little boy went, and when he got there, he began biting his own arms, just above the wrist.

Even drawing blood.

But a man came there and took him to the stream to wash the blood.

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It was his father.

The monster within him was gone.

The father took his son in his arms and carried him home.

Aloud, NOW, in the smokehouse, I said, "Bruno, Brooke, do you feel it?"

After a moment, Brooke whispered, "What is it?"

"I don't know," I said.

But whatever it was, it went through the three of us like a current.

I was convinced that there were four people holding hands in that circle.

We were not there without something else also being there.

Holding our hands, holding them tightly, not wanting any of us to break the circle.

"It's Mom," Bruno said. "It's Mom, I can feel her. It's... it's..."

"Oh God, do you feel it, Nemo?" Brooke asked, her voice suddenly full of energy, where it had sounded drained and exhausted moments before.

And I did feel it.

An electrical current flowing through us.

We saw her.

Our mother.

But not as we wanted her to be.

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We watched as our father, just two weeks before, stepped into the smokehouse.

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