By Carly Racklin
Every night I light a candle, and every night the darkness sneaks in to choke the flame near to death. It sputters and thrashes on the wick, offering one perfect pinprick flare and nothing more. We are not allowed more. Our darkness is as obstinate as a knife’s edge. Still I can’t help my hope for a fuzzy golden halo and warmth on my fingers. It’s a craving—howling from my every bone. I don’t care that Mama says the candles are useless. I’d waste every last drop of wax in this house if it meant showing the curse it doesn’t own us.
My courage is a flickering thing, like the flame I hold between blackened fingers. I can’t say which is crueler: to have my ember of courage amid so deep a gloom, or to have nothing at all.
The pitch dark of the front hall cradles me like a caul of mud; I wade through it to the stairs with knees quaking, my breath a fluttering hostage in my throat. In this house, the darkness has ears. It clings to our clothes, our skin, our dreams. It is the glue holding the paper to the walls, the nails in the web of beams keeping the roof over our heads as the winter piles on snow. When we ran, it followed. We sought priests, clairvoyants, even witches, all for nothing. Three years, and now it is only Mama, my sisters, and me. And the curse. It gorges on us, and we are whittled to the bone.
I slink to the small landing at the midpoint of the stairs where our family portrait hangs. I know it well despite the dark; I used to study it intently, memorizing my shape as Papa saw me, like an unfamiliar fourth sister. Pelageya and Ozera are identical bundles of swaddling clothes in Mama’s arms, their faces doughy and unnaturally flushed. We all wear alizarin crimson smiles, except for Papa. He did not stand with us for this one, but painted himself into the murk at Mama’s side.
Even before the curse, we all look haunted.
Papa found his own escape. He went to his death privately, the same as he did most things. We only noticed so quickly because the turpentine he drank eventually dripped from the ceiling, mixed with blood and bile. If not for us, I think Mama would have joined him already.
My toes lose feeling while I scrutinize our likenesses by the strangled candlelight, but my anger keeps me warm at the core. Anger at the curse, but Papa, too, for leaving us to fight the dark alone. Mama and my sisters think we are doomed. The darkness has warped their minds, muzzled them like it has muzzled the light. But Papa taught me how to see the colors that make the world. How they change, and manipulate, and complement each other. How the deeper you look, the more everything connects. Because of him I can’t help but see a design in our suffering. It started here, with my father’s house, so here is where it must end.
Droplets of wax singe and anneal against my shaking hand. I stab the candle into Papa’s painted face.
* * *
When the portrait catches flame, it is the brightest light I have seen in three years, fanning out from the charred pit of Papa’s face. Black wrinkles spiderweb across our images until they become chasms.
I watch and laugh as it burns. I burn, too, with triumph.
I am still laughing when the fluttering pad of footsteps dawns from behind me, and Ionna’s cold hands grab my shoulders. Then I turn, and begin to weep, because I can see my sister’s face. She squints with bloodshot, frantic eyes, and begins to weep, too.
In the holy light of the melting portrait, we embrace. And from deep in the hallway at the peak of the stairs above, Mama screams.
* * *
Mama is burning.
Smoke pours from the orange mouth of her quilt. Ionna and I move as one creature, clawing the blankets from her body, and the light that floods the room snatches the whole of my sight from me. This glow is not muzzled. It is as deliberate as the darkness it replaced.
She knocks me to the floor with her flailing. My ears ring, and in the murk of half-consciousness, the curse speaks.
It howls in a voice of embers and turpentine and loamy grave-dirt.
You wanted to see?
Here.
See.
The screaming is horrible but the smell is worse. Even with eyes shut, the brightness of my mother’s immolation overwhelms me. Her frenzied steps vibrate into my spine from the floor. Somehow, the beams do not catch. Nor do the blanket, or anything else. Just Mama. Ionna cries out after her, but her stride doesn’t falter.
A rattle rises above the din. A shriek.
I do not need my sight to tell when Mama pitches over the railing of the stairs.
There is laughter in my skull when she hits the ground.
* * *
The crash Mama’s body makes wakes the twins. I hear them drift down the hall to Ionna as she wails, but I can’t yet push myself up from the floor.
The curse spoke. It spoke to me.
I know I shouldn’t leave her to answer for my hubris alone. I am the eldest and I burned the portrait, but standing seems as impossible as climbing a mountain in the dark. I roll over toward the doorway, still expecting to see her.
Ionna cries for Mama. Then she must notice the twins, because she cuts herself off, sniffling. I am surprised she has any voice left to tell them not to look.
“Rinka,” she calls, ragged and desperate. “Irina.”
Even in the dark I know how it feels when Ionna fixes her rifle-barrel stare at me. It could drain the marrow out of anyone. It is too cold to lie still under, so I heave myself up on my forearms.
“Mama?” Ozera says. Pelageya echoes her as always.
Ionna sobs, but doesn’t speak her answer. I hear it anyway. Irina has killed her. Or maybe it is the curse that tells me so.
Their footsteps hurry down the hall. A door slams, muffling Ionna’s hiccupping and mumbled platitudes.
I get up to bury Mama alone.
* * *
The doctors have stopped heeding our calls. After Papa’s suicide, it was Mama, Ionna, and I who tended to him. We buried him out back together, hacking through the snow and frozen ground until morning broke above the treetops, above the darkness still shrouding us in mourning black. Our hands cracked and bled with the work. It was too cold to weep.
This time, I wear Papa’s sheepskin coat and gloves as I rake up the stiff earth beside his grave. After a while I don’t notice the cold. I don’t look anywhere but the dark pit I am making in the dim snow.
Sometime in my stupor, Ionna joins me in digging. She doesn’t speak a word.
I want to focus all my attention inward, to see if I can hear the curse slithering around inside. I question it with each heave: Where are you? Where did you go? But now I get no answer.
We heft Mama in together and bury her without speaking. When we finish, Ionna pats the flat back of her shovel against the lumpy dirt in a soothing motion, like how she tucks the twins into bed.
I wonder if Mama is happier now, together again with Papa. I try not to think that maybe death is our only escape, but the thought is impossible to ignore, like a pebble digging into my soft heel.
Ionna tosses her shovel aside, then wrenches mine from me and drops it, too. She steps in so close I feel her breath. It burns as she whispers, “What were you thinking, Rinka?” Her tears are gone now. All that’s left is iron.
“It spoke to me. The curse,” I answer.
Silence. “You’re not well.”
“I changed something. I brought light back into our house, even just for a moment.”
“And was it worth it?” she replies. Her grip on me tightens, bruising. “Now we are alone.”
“Where is your faith, Ionna?”
Ionna sucks in a sharp breath through her teeth. The sound shivers with us. “I can’t bury you too. Please, Rinka. Please.” Her hand cradles my cheek. “Don’t think like this,” she begs.
Slowly her footsteps crunch away from me into black nothingness. When I know she is gone, I kneel atop the mound of Mama’s grave and whisper a prayer I hope reaches the light.
* * *
The day after we buried Papa, I tried to burn the house down. I lit an entire box of matches and let the flames swath the curtains, but they wouldn’t catch. I was still cold, and wearing his coat. The fire snaked meekly over the drapes and fizzled out in seconds, but I was clumsy, and my sleeve caught. I panicked as soon as I felt the heat, singeing my fingers as I swatted the flames out. My skin healed but the cuff is still scorched. I understood an important lesson that night: the curse does not want us dead. Not until there is nothing left of us to take, like Mama and Papa. Until there is no light at all in any of us.
* * *
In the cellar, I seek out the haphazard cairn of Papa’s storage: moldering clothes, stacks of canvases seamed with grime, older paintings he never sold or repurposed. I map the memories with fumbling hands. His absence is present with me in the dark, stitched into the observing shadows; I can feel it. I just can’t tell if he is trying to urge me on, or warn me to turn back. It is colder than the grave here, and darker, but a comforting dark, one older than the curse. Whatever monsters stalk the shadows cannot be worse than those I’ve already met. I think I am half a monster, too.
I decide it does not matter. I am the eldest, the head of the house. I will not make my parents’ same mistakes, damning us with complacency.
I dig through the pile of boards and canvases. I know most of their images by touch from Papa’s thick strokes of paint, though I can’t remember their colors quite right. It’s hard to remember his face even here. I crouch down, hefting aside canvases and thick wooden boards, frothing the air with dust until my eyes grow wet with tears. None of the paintings bear my father’s face. My shivering legs fold under me.
I land atop another frame, its edges a sharp shock to my freezing hands. I reach for it desperately in the dark. It’s unfamiliar to me, though the heavy brush strokes are Papa’s for certain. I fumble with the candles and matches in my pocket, scorching my fingertips twice before I have a splinter of light to see by.
When I hold the candle to the canvas, I see a man.
I smell it then, in the same moment my vision focuses: turpentine, sharp and overwhelming. My tongue thickens with nausea in my mouth.
I wipe away the tears, gritting my teeth through the pain as frost pricks at my eyes. I know by the shades of him this man cannot be my father, though he stands before an easel, palette cradled babelike in one arm. His face is hidden from the viewer, flaxen hair rendered in sparing, soft strokes of a dry brush, one of Papa’s favorite techniques. I feel his razor-thin signature in the bottom corner. Dmitri.
I trace every inch of the painting, committing it to memory, down to the small wood slats stretching the canvas. Instead of a scratch of pencil dedicating the work to a particular subject, I find a piece of wrinkled paper.
My pulse thuds in my ears, drowning out any warning from the dark. I have to shut my eyes and breathe hard for a moment to keep from retching at the deep wrongness that must be the curse howling in my veins, its claws scraping like matches along the edges of me.
I smooth out the paper with care. It’s small and torn along one edge, the scrawl on the page so rough it barely feels like words. I move the candle closer. The flame lashes out like a hungry tongue. The words are impossible to read by touch, so I can’t shrink away.
The edge of the paper catches. For a brief, brilliant instant, I can see the message in its entirety, and my hands that clutch it, and the dim outlines of my father’s detritus.
“THEREFORE WHATEVER YE HAVE DONE IN THE DARKNESS SHALL BE BROUGHT TO THE LIGHT”
The note is addressed to Dima, my father, and signed Kirya.
I have only moments to read before the scrap is ash in my hands. The words are there one moment, then gone. They hang scorched before my eyes even after the paper burns. Not just a threat, not just a promise. A curse, birthed whole and hateful.
I blink, and the afterimage vanishes. A face hangs illuminated in the space between my raised hands: a death mask of bluish, rotted skin, grimy teeth gaping out from maggot-eaten holes. Worst of all are the eyes. They lilt out of drooping lids, milky and anguished.
It is my father’s face.
I scream, and the image vanishes, the candle flickering out. Even as I howl and shut my eyes to erase that horrid vision, it, like the words from the note, lingers inscribed on my eyelids, etched in hateful light.
I sob no, no, no, begging the dark to take it back.
Nothing answers me. The cellar quiet as a sepulcher, the pressure in my head slowly wanes, and I am left with nothing but the scent of old paint and soil and sharp cold, and fresh prickling burns on my fingertips.
* * *
My tears are not yet dry when I unearth the key to Papa’s studio from the drawer beside Mama’s bed.
The blankets still bear her shape. Part of me wants to curl into them and sleep until I forget everything, but the oily smell of her blackened flesh hangs too heavy in the air. I fear what my dreams might show me if I rest. As I move about the room, I am less and less sure of where I end and the dark begins. If I could see my own face again, for just a moment, would I recognize me?
I make up the bed, biting down hard on my lip to keep myself contained, tucking the charred blanket from the floor back into its place like it will erase what I’ve done. There is no escaping it even if I can’t see the evidence written on the room. I cannot blame the curse for this entirely. Not even Papa. This is all my own working.
The cold brass of the key bites my palm. I climb the stairs to the attic studio through a haze of cobwebs that choke me when I try to breathe. The scent of turpentine is real this time, I know. It dawns in a cloud as the door gutters open at my hand. Blood and sour bile join it, the smell of my Papa’s death.
This room was his sanctum. Where else would he entomb a secret?
THEREFORE WHATEVER YE HAVE DONE IN THE DARKNESS SHALL BE BROUGHT TO THE LIGHT
The words are etched in me. They crack and ooze sour fear, but I cannot stop now.
Papa loved this room for its vast windows, though all that seeps through the glass now is bitter cold. I bring out a candle as a comfort more than anything. I am not well-versed in this space, and clatter into the room’s furnishings with every other step. Beside his empty easel my slippers crunch into what must be the shattered glass of the bottle Papa drank from.
I lick my lips, tasting blood and salt. “Kirya,” I whisper. “Kirill?”
The silence that answers is heavy. Heavier than before. I force my body to move, to not let fear or the dark overwhelm what’s left of me. Arms outstretched, I stumble on until my fingers meet the heavy curtain over the window and my hip nudges the edge of a table. The shift of papers and clattering tools severs the silence.
I bring out a match from my pocket and light the candle. For a moment, I am hypnotized by the reflection in the slice of window peeking from the curtain. It is strangely beautiful, a floating orange wound. The last time I joined Papa in here, he showed me how he took a composition from paper to canvas, building layer upon layer until something lovely formed from muddy nothing. Now, in my hazy memories my father’s face is leathery with rot. Exactly like an underpainting brought to life, the specter rises in sticky layers from my mind and into the darkness all around me, turning the air humid with its rotting breath.
What if even death is not an escape? What if my father is still here with us, trapped in the same dark with no voice and no hope?
Though a sob rises in my throat, I steel myself, and bring my candle to the table. I feel along the edges of countless papers and splinters of charcoal for sketching, unsure of exactly what I hope to find, unsure of much at all. Within minutes my hands are stained and chapped from charcoal. I recognize nothing but Papa’s familiar compositions, sketches of our house, the trees and hills around it, the village we used to visit, all inscribed with his signature and hasty notes, the musings of an artist in love with his craft.
Where was this love for us, I wonder?
I don’t notice the tears on my cheeks until one drips onto the candle flame, making it sizzle to nothing. I feel a presence with me as the darkness settles. Closer now, looming at my shoulder. I hope it is Papa, come to help us fight the dark at last. But I don’t trust my hope enough to glance behind.
I wipe my tears on my singed sleeve and continue to the cupboard in the corner of the room, its face made of glass in an intricate lattice. The ornate handle sticks and disobeys my prodding.
A slow grin stretches my cold cheeks. Secrets hide behind locks.
I don’t bother searching for a key; I wrap my hand in my sleeve and strike at the glass. The crash it makes is deafening. I feel small, stinging wounds on my cheeks, but the pain is eclipsed by the buzz of my pulse in my veins.
I pry the cupboard doors open and feel my way over the shelves, finding more glass, bottles of medium, palette knives, and, plastered to one panel in the corner, more thick sketch papers.
I know immediately that these are not the strokes of my father’s hand. The gouges in the paper are deep and fluid, swirling lines like delicate embroidery on the page. Despite this, I recognize their renderings from my Papa’s paintings, the earliest he ever shared with me. A sloping roof teeming with rain, the jut of a proud upturned nose, a pair of eyes downcast from a wedding veil. The paintings with these subjects sold long ago, sold for so much we could afford to build this house so tall and proud and clothe my sisters and me in rich furs for winter. I was young when they were made, but still I remember the glitter of Papa’s smile when they sold.
All of the sketches are signed roughly K Ruslanovich.
“Oh, Papa.”
The house creaks beneath me. I catch a whiff of turpentine as I meet the eyes of my reflection in the remaining glass of the cupboard. There shouldn’t be enough light for a reflection, but there I am, a broken mosaic wrapped in my Papa’s coat and clutching papers that brand him a thief.
My head aches with the sudden acrid smell. I shove the sketches into my coat, vision bleary with nausea. Still, I catch a blur in the corner of my eye, peering from the darkness behind my reflection. Another specter that is both me and not, wearing a dark and jagged smile under the blackest eyes I have ever seen.
I grab one of the palette knives without thinking, my head full of turpentine and rot, my eyes burning with tears.
I am angry. Angry at Papa, and at the curse, and at myself, for how long I have spent steeping in darkness without fighting back. There is no law here in the shadows. Not anymore.
I barely keep my footing as I whirl and stab at the phantom, a guttural noise flying from my throat, the sound scarcely human. The knife cleaves into the dark and into something that is not the dark.
A second scream joins mine.
The voice that answers my strike doesn’t form words exactly, but I know it all the same. I can feel the heat now of another body standing near. Not a shade woven of grief and lies—someone living. Someone real.
I drop the palette knife. “Ionna?”
My sister makes a choked sound of pain. Her gasping breath shakes the entire room. I try to step closer, bring the candle toward the shape of her to see what I’ve done, as much as I fear it. My breath sits thick and sludged in my chest, forbidding speech. Ionna breaks into real sobs then. I see dimly the torn sleeve of her nightdress, and feel the fetid heat of blood when she reaches out and shoves me back. I go down like a felled tree, joining the scattered wreckage on the floor. My head throbs in time with the imprint of her hand on my shoulder.
“You’re not well, Rinka,” she cries, though she is the one bleeding. “You’re not well.”
There is nothing I can say that will fix this, though I try and fail to form words. Through the din between my ears, I hear Ionna running from me and latching the attic door with a heavy click.
“What have you done?” I ask the dark. Though I know this time there is no one here but me.
* * *
Ionna does not come back for me.
I do not blame her. I feel half-mad, unraveling at every seam. For a while I try yelling and pounding against the door, but all it earns me is sore shoulders and a raw throat, the tang of blood between my teeth. No answer ever comes.
I’m on my own.
Exhaustion eventually drags me to a dreamless, stiff slumber. I don’t know how long I sleep atop my father’s sketches, mere inches from where he breathed his last. I don’t trust the windows or the reflections they might hold. I’m not sure I trust my own mind. Fear gnaws at the edges of me. I blur into the muddy dark.
All my Papa’s secrets are smothering. They stack around me like brick upon brick. The drawings pressed against my breast feel like a key—but how do I escape a prison if I cannot see its doors?
K Ruslanovich. Kirya.
I speak the name again to the darkness, wondering if I can conjure its master. Whatever my Papa knew, he thought it more prudent to let turpentine eat through his guts than fight.
I wait and listen, but I don’t feel any presences. Not Papa, not another specter dressed in rot. The dark is vast and empty, and achingly cold.
I find the matches in my pocket as I try to warm my hands.
My movements stiff, I take a crumpled paper and set it alight. The catch is instant. The accompanying warmth and flash of light strike me blind and I gasp, both match and paper tumbling from my hands and extinguishing on the way down. My vision swims with blotches of honeyed brightness.
“I’m sorry, Papa,” I whisper, and strike another.
Just like last time, my father’s works burn beautifully. Each brighter than the last, sending tears down my cheeks—of pain, relief, a stinging undercurrent of rage. Despite the singes on my fingers and bitter smoke that worms down my throat, the light is intoxicating, and I crave more like a drunk.
When nothing of my father’s works remains, and dense darkness floods the room to its corners, I am not alone.
I choke on a cough, but the figure does not react to the sound. It’s a man, small and almost slighter than me, huddled with his face to the far wall. My footsteps are almost silent as I cross the room, my courage flaring within me. When he is only a few paces away, my eyes catch on the wrongness of him at last.
It is not the darkness that makes him quite so dim. He is an underpainting free from canvas. I see the blunt strokes of a palette knife in his shape. He is scarcely a muddy outline save for his hair, scraggly and matted, but flaxen gold even in the dark.
It takes several tries to dredge the words up from my throat, “Kirill Ruslanovich.”
The utterance doesn’t feel quite like a question. More an offering. The man turns his head from the shadows to me.
Kirill Ruslanovich has no eyes, but somehow, he weeps, a steady stream of shining turpentine that pools slowly out across the floor. He’s dressed in a beggar’s tatters, but the hands he outstretches to me look like my father’s, daubed in paint, the nails with their perpetual crust of charcoal. There’s no hate in that mottled face, just a hollowed-outness that has my chest aching with sympathy.
I don’t scream or make any sound at all; a gag perches in my throat, kept captive by my teeth. With trembling fingers, I take the sketches that bear his name and place them in Kirill’s open hands.
His fists close. No sound comes from his mouth when he opens it—only a flood of dark paint. It spatters across both of our feet in warm clots. I creep closer as he holds the drawings to his chest, soaking them with those bitter tears. The floor gleams with them.
I suck in what air I can and savor it. “I’m sorry,” I say, and strike a match.
The flash is violent and instant. At first, I feel no heat. I just watch Kirill Ruslanovich burn. The flames lick up the tear-tracks on his face, and I swear he breaks into a smile. They spread, then, igniting everything that’s left of my Papa’s legacy and his; whatever is stolen and whatever is original, it all burns the same. Kirill’s features melt away into an oily slurry as the room fills with smoke and the fire reaches, finally, for me. I turn to the window, breathing thin and calm.
I throw the curtains back as far as they’ll go. Snow-capped spindly trees stare back from beyond the glass, glistening as dawn breaks in a crawl overhead, and breaks, and breaks, its light cutting through the glass, the dark, and me, joining the inferno at my back. A sweet, purifying heat, evaporating any fear left in me.
I hear shouts through the floor. The pounding of feet. As I hope, they move away from me, not near.
Dawn finally reaches the snowy ground outside. Light gnaws away at the darkness like meat from bone until I can see melt on the steps, and my sisters, scrambling out into the cold far below. Ionna clutches the twins to her sides like Mama in our portrait. All of them are streaked head to toe in charcoal black. Singed perhaps, but breathing strong. I can smell burnt hair, charred wood, sickly-sweet oil.
Ionna squints up into the light, ash and snow raining down around her, carried by the breeze. Our eyes meet through the glass. I release a breath and smile as black smoke laps at my feet.
I am the least innocent of us left, but my regrets are only kindling. My thoughts, vapor. Even when the smoke forces my eyes to shut, the light gives chase, bleeding through the cracks.
* * *
Carly Racklin is a writer, editor, and vulture enthusiast with a passion for the fantastical and visceral. Her work has appeared in The NoSleep Podcast, Haven Spec Magazine, Frozen Wavelets, and more, and her debut novella FUNERAL SONG is forthcoming from Dead Sky Publishing. They can be found on most socials @willowylungs and at carlyracklin.com.