A Season Of Darkness

by Kristy Leigh

Chapter One: Arrivals

1.

 

One of the oddest things about change is that you rarely see it coming.

It sort of sidles up to you all silent and unannounced, like the rising of the sun or the turning of the seasons. For me, it happened on a bright, cool morning at the beginning of summer; not long after my ninth birthday. Must’ve been around the same time my Dad went off to Chicago with his girlfriend. Mom and I never saw that one coming either. Looking back, I suppose I shouldn’t have been so surprised at what went down over the next few months; a lot of weird stuff was going on that year.

I was sitting on the front steps of our Fairmont home, listening to the radio and absently playing with a Whipper-Snapper. A Whipper-Snapper is one of those toys that fall in and out of fashion from one generation to the next; a small blue ping-pong racket with a black rubber ball attached to it. They have about a dozen different names; Hip-Zipper or Bee-Bopper or something equally inane, but you know what I mean. You probably had one yourself when you were a kid.

It must’ve been about ten in the morning when the Tracker Brothers moving van pulled up in front of the house next door. I watched their arrival with considerable interest; the Old Stewart Place had been vacant for about two years and had half a dozen realty signs decorating the front yard. My mother secretly hoped it never sold, because you could never tell what kind of neighbors you were going to get. Guess we were about to find out.

Anyway, a couple of fat, sweaty guys got out of the truck (the Tracker Bothers presumably) and started unloading furniture onto the front lawn, grunting and wheezing with exertion. Leaving the radio on the veranda, I stood up and walked over to the edge of the yard. Even at my age, I knew you could tell a lot about people from their possessions. There was a fence dividing our properties, a low, red-brick wall maybe a foot high. I stood to one side, casually zocking the Whipper-Snapper up and down. If the Trackers noticed my presence, they didn’t give any indication.

Surveying the chaos, I figured that the new neighbors had at least one kid – most probably a girl by the looks of things. Most boys would have been disappointed to see all the dolls and pandas and bunny-ruggles, but I was the only kid living up on Fairmont Heights at the time. Most of my friends lived out in Greendale, way over on the other side of town. Any change would have been an improvement as far as I was concerned. I sat down on the fence, glancing back towards my house to make sure Mom wasn’t watching me through the window. I knew she wouldn’t like me annoying the removalists, so I decided to keep a low profile.

The neighbors themselves appeared five minutes later, rolling up the driveway in a late model ford (a Thunderbird, if I remember correctly). The doors cracked open and two people got out: a tall, dark haired woman and a little blond girl I judged to be about the same age as me. I was too far away to get a close look, although I thought the mother was probably quite good-looking. As for the daughter, she scooted into the house carrying an armload of stuffed animals faster than it takes to read this sentence. The woman walked over to talk to the moving-guys, both of whom were struggling with an antique European chaise-long, the sort you see in old Frankenstein movies. A lot of her furniture was like that; all vintage lamps and statuettes and vases from mysterious lands. I later found out that that was her job; she used to be an agent for some auction house in upstate New York.

The morning proceeded for about an hour until the Trackers took a coffee break (the older sibling kept a thermos in the van), by which time most of the furniture had been relocated inside. The lawn was still littered with tea-chests and hampers, but most of the work had been done. The little girl had spent most of her time darting in and out of the house collecting toys, books and assorted knick-knacks; now she was ready to explore her immediate surroundings. Or more precisely, she was ready to investigate me.

Gingerly mounting the brick fence, she held her arms out for balance and started walking along the top, pretending she hadn’t noticed me. I did much the same thing, hammering idly away at my paddle-ball until she was about ten feet away. We both looked up at the same instant, cued by that obscure sense of timing all children seem to possess. She paused for a moment, then tight-roped forward a few more steps.

"Hi. I’m Chissie," she informed me, cutting through all the social protocols without a backward glance.

"Hi, I’m Billy. You’re new here." I’d been on an unending quest to state the obvious for some years now.

"Yeah," she confirmed offhand, "we just moved in this morning."

"Where you from?"

"Longridge Bay."

"Where’s that?"

She shrugged her answer; very few nine year-olds can point out their hometown on a map. That was no big deal, though; I sometimes had trouble finding my way home from school, so she was probably doing better than me.

"You live there?" she asked, pointing to our modest little colonial bluestone.

"Yeah," I nodded, "I live here with my Mom."

"I live with my Mom too," she commented, still working on her balance (although the fence was only a foot off the ground), "but not my Dad. He went away a long time ago."

"Where to?" I enquired, surprised that we were both single-parent kids.

"Canada, I think."

"Mine’s in Chicago." We spoke with the unselfconscious curiosity of very young children, communicating with the simplicity of total innocence. I think that’s where it all began, in those quiet moments between each sentence. We talked and we listened, and somehow, in the brief pauses punctuating our words, our lives had become inextricably linked. Of course, neither of us could have realized that at the time. At the end of the day, we were just two kids chattering away in the warm June sunshine.

About the only thing I really noticed was how pretty Chrissie was – much prettier than any of the girls I knew from school. She had the delicate bone structure and milky complexion of a new born infant. I think her most captivating feature was her eyes. They were a pale shade of violet I’d never seen before – violet ringed with turquoise, if you can believe that. Whenever they caught the sun, they seemed to glitter with some strange purple light, though that was probably my imagination.

"Do you have any brothers or sisters?" she enquired, pirouetting around on her right foot. Her little pink sun-frock ballooned out around her thighs as she turned.

"No, I don’t," I answered, thinking she probably studied ballet or something. She reminded me of a music-box dancer.

"Me neither," she said, patting her skirt down, then added: "my Daddy left when I was really little," by way of explanation.

I thought of mentioning that my father only ran off two months before, but decided I didn’t want to talk about it. Instead, I returned my attention to the paddle-ball, whocking it towards the grass in short, elastic loops.

"What’s that?" Chrissie demanded, spinning anti-clockwise this time.

"It’s a Whipper-Snapper. I got it for my birthday." I gave the ball an extra hard zock, stretching the string out to around three feet. Chrissie’s eyes widened as if she’d never seen one before. The ball streaked out half a dozen times before I dropped the pace back to more normal parameters.

"Can I have a try?" Chrissie asked.

"Yeah, sure," I shrugged. Chrissie jumped off the wall and her dress ballooned up again, this time around her waist. I stood up and handed her the paddle, talking her through the intricacies of holding the grip. Chrissie nodded along for a few seconds, then started zocking away like a world class champion. My mouth flopped open in astonishment: it had taken me nearly two months to perfect my technique, practicing every day since my father flew the coop.

"You’ve done this before," I gaped in near disbelief.

"No, this is my first time," she corrected, literally beaming with pleasure. She turned her shimmering, purple eyes in my direction, and somehow, I knew she was telling me the truth.

2.

In the weeks that followed, I would discover that Chrissie was something of a prodigy. She could pick up new skills in the blink of an eye and usually without any practice whatsoever. Mastering the paddle-ball in a matter of seconds was probably the least of her abilities, though it sure impressed the hell out of me. At times, I found it downright spooky, but on that lazy summer morning at the beginning of June, it was the proverbial mystery of the ages. I never had the opportunity to ask her about it, however. Just at that second, Chrissie’s mother appeared on the front veranda and called out to her.

Both of us turned towards the voice, Chrissie a fraction of a second earlier than me (and without losing her rhythm for so much as a second). The woman standing at the top of the steps was tall and willow-thin with jet black hair slicing down the left side of her face. She was wearing a plain blue house dress that somehow rippled against her figure like liquid silk. She looked to be in her late twenties, though at that distance I couldn’t be sure.

"That your Mom?" I asked, squinting for focus.

"Yeah," Chrissie confirmed, taking me by the hand and tugging me towards the house, "come over and say hi." We set off across the lawn, dodging between miscellaneous crates and packing cartons. I was suddenly a little shy of meeting her, knowing she was probably incredibly busy with everything. If I’d been a few years older, I would have made some excuse and come back in a day or two, but I was still too young for such complex social rituals. Needless to say, I had nothing to worry about. Chrissie dragged me to the foot of the steps, and her mother came down to meet us.

And my jaw dropped for the second time that day.

Chrissie’s mom was the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen in my life. There’s simply no other way to describe her. It wasn’t conventional beauty, like you see in fashion magazines or TV shows. No, it was much more subtle than that, sort of like the tones of a Renaissance painting or the scales of a classical aria. I stared at her with a child’s unaffected wonder, and she rewarded me with a smile that could have shamed the sun.

"Who’s this?" she asked, touching my face with her luminous gaze. I felt my heart stall in mid-beat.

"Momma, this is Billy," Chrissie said, indicating me with a sweep of her hand, "he’s my new friend."

"Well, pleased to meet you, Billy. My name’s Evelyn Rinehart. My friends call me Eve."

"Hi, Mrs. Rinehart," I managed after an incredibly long pause, "I’m Billy Campbell. I live next door." More of my unending crusade to pinpoint the obvious. It never occurred to me to call Eve by her first name (even if it had, my mother wouldn’t have stood for it). The social niceties being concluded, Chrissie grabbed my hand and pulled me a few steps closer.

"Mom, can Billy help us move our stuff inside?" she asked, fidgeting with excitement. Eva regarded her daughter with a just a hint of amusement.

"Certainly," she nodded indulgently, "if he wants too, that is."

"You wanna?" Chrissie chimed.

"Well, sure," I agreed without paying that much attention to the question. I was peering up at Eva in a daze, taking in the perfect contours of her face, the thick, black curtain of her hair. There was no denying the facial resemblance; mother and daughter shared the same perfect features, right down to the clipped button nose and the dimples on either side of the mouth. The same haunting, violet eyes too.

"Come on, then!" Chrissie exclaimed, yanking me up the steps and breaking the spell. "I’ll show you where my my room is!"

We spent the remainder of the morning scampering around the house and yard without actually doing anything (the Trackers did most of the heavy lifting, cursing like marines because everything deemed to weigh a thousand pounds). We were too excited be of any practical use. Exploring the Old Stewart Place was like discovering some exotic, fairy-tale world. Every doorway led to a dozen more; there had to be at least a hundred rooms under its gabled roof. Or so it seems when you’re nine years old.

The removalists finished about one in the afternoon. Eve paid them both an extra twenty for their services, then set about putting the kitchen in order. Chrissie and I stood on the front lawn, watching the Tracker’s van rumbling off down the road and wondering what to do next. We couldn’t play inside; the house was a chaotic sprawl of unopened boxes, even Chrissie’s attic bedroom.

"You wanna play hide and seek out back?" she suggested, kneeding her skirt between her fingers like a four year old, almost dancing with anticipation. I have to admit I was sorely tempted. Like any boy of my generation, I would have stayed out playing until the sun went down or the world came to an end, whichever came first. Trouble was, I knew I had to get going. My mother had been kinda moody since Dad left, and I wasn’t sure how she’d react to me spending so much time with a couple of total strangers, even if they were our new neighbors.

"No, I better go home now" I explained, hoping I wouldn’t hurt her feelings, "my Mom’ll be calling me inside for lunch soon."

"OK," she said, hardly disappointed at all, "you want to play again tomorrow?"

"Well, sure. There’s a playground over on Wentworth Drive, I’ll take you there if you want."

"Good! That’ll be fun," she answered, hitting me with that 250 volt smile she’d inherited from her mother. For a split second, I saw a ghost of the woman she’d eventually become, and my heart did another somersault. Then it was gone and she was just Little Chrissie Rinehart, the girl next door.

"All right then. I’ll see you tomorrow morning." I raised a hand to signal goodbye and started walking towards the brick fence, smiling at the thought of taking Chrissie to the park tomorrow. We’d had such a wonderful day together, I was honestly looking forward to seeing her again.

I’d gotten less than ten steps before she called out to me.

"Billy?"

"Yeah?"

"Want me to get your Whipper-Snapper?"

I paused, looking back over my shoulder at her. We’d left it upstairs in her bedroom when we came down to wave goodbye to the Trackers.

"It’s yours," I said after a micro-second’s consideration.

"Really?" Chrissie asked, her expression almost comically surprised.

"Yeah. It’s yours. Keep it." Why the hell not? It was a lame excuse for a birthday present in the first place - even if it was the last thing my Dad ever gave me. Chrissie, on the other hand, was utterly delighted. She ran over in a haze of flying skirts, pigtails whipping about in the slipstream. I braced for impact, thinking she was going to kiss me.

"Thanks, Billy," she trilled, hugging herself in undisguised pleasure, "you’re really nice." That flickering purple light was back in her eyes again.

"You’re welcome," I smiled, more than a trifle embarrassed by her boundless enthusiasm. Part of me was hoping she really would kiss me - although I would have blushed the color of a ripe strawberry if she had.

"See you tomorrow then?" she demanded, still hugging herself around the middle.

"You bet." Nothing short of a mass extinction would have kept me away.

We said goodbye once more and I stepped over to my side of the fence, glancing back over my shoulder as I walked up to our front door. Chrissie was spinning across the lawn like a pink tornado, hands lifted to the skies. I halted on the porch to watch the show, half-expecting her to lift off the ground and go soaring off over the trees. It was impossible not to like her.

Giggling at the top of her lungs, she spiraled out of control, falling over in a tangle of knees and elbows. She lay there staring up at the sky, panting for breath and happy as a cloud; I stood watching her for a few more seconds, feeling a warm glow spreading though my midsection. I had no idea what I’d set in motion that day, no idea what was approaching or how my world was about to change, but none of that mattered at the time. All I knew was that I’d made a new friend, someone sweet and funny and … well, magical in ways that I couldn’t define.

And in the end, I discovered that’s all that ever matters.

  

  

  

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