Dark Horses Magazine

Chapter 3-1

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Nathan disappeared on Wednesday morning. Or I suppose that’s when I discovered him gone. Mom had work early at the court – she slipped out to the wind and tossing trees with toast protruding from her face – so it was my job to see him off to school. We occupied the old ground floor unit I’d grown up in, and Nathan stayed now unchaperoned in the room we once shared, I having taken up the den since moving back. He was past his years of leaping from bed at dawn, and had settled into preadolescent sloth at the hoary age of 11.

I slumped down our creaking hall to wake him, in need of a proper rousing myself, and beat at his door with the bovine persistence of any good sister. He was slow to respond, even for old Nathan, so I shouldered through with a hand over my eyes grumbling something to the effect of “If you miss your bus this morning, old Nathan, it will be the final appointment you make or miss for the rest of your short life.”

But through my fleshy blindfold I could make out no half-obscured features of protest, no pajamaed rump among the blankets. I found, as my stomach fell away with my hand, no rotten little brother at all. I yanked open his closet, stuck my head below his small desk, all the while calling his name when I felt the wind violate my hair. The wind?

Sure enough his bedside window was open. Thrusting curtains aside, I found the wrought iron burglar bars rent apart and ugly. I screeched his name once more into the alley, and that’s all I remember of that.

I must have called the police.

Mom returned home, white-faced, and we sat in my makeshift bedroom and watched as a shabby gunmetal sedan puttered up to our curb with a chug of exhaust. The troopers were broad-faced, laconic, asking few questions and poking about. The bent burglar bars elicited a furrowed brow from the taller. I showed them around the apartment while Mom sat in the den. When my brief tour was ended she had some things to say.

“It was Mary Fischer’s boy went missing just last month,” she howled, “and not a word from you! Not a word!”

They left us with perfunctory assurances and waddled back to their car, disappearing past apartments into the fog. Mom hadn’t talked much since I’d moved home, but she talked less after that.

We both had work in mornings, and mostly she and I would slump out the door together and depart for our separate train stops. I’d walk through the tall, grimed buildings of North Park, past scant trees under a hint of rain, and dip into tunnels full of morning rush. The F train took me south, past my alma mater toward midtown, and the high offices of Gradus-Montgomery where I worked as a file clerk. Three years at Franklin University had at least afforded me that.

Along my morning commute I would imagine my mother on hers, huddled on the M toward downtown as it hurtled through dark tunnels to the courthouse where she had spent two decades as a stenographer. She had a curved spine, now, that forever suggested a seated position, hunching as she had, for the whole of my life, over a stenotype machine, spilling out abridgements of municipal proceedings, arsons, larcenies and child support, to be read or not by attorneys and litigants in an unclear future. She was the ear for a thousand ills, but always came home and quietly prepared supper and did not resent the world.

Prior to Nathan’s disappearance, I must confess I was assailed by no premonition of dread. The dread came later. Each day that passed without his return saw my mother retreat further into silence. I took to preparing our meals, and we would eat wordlessly at the small table that bridged my sleeping place from the kitchen. Often those nights she would doze off where she sat, or else in mornings I would find her abed in Nathan’s room, his closet open as I’d left it, the window still ajar, autumn wind moaning through the twisted iron.

The first order of business was to flyer the neighborhood. I found a printing shop two stops away that produced endless facsimiles of his small face, too wistful for its age. The weather was worsening but I made the rounds, to nearby tenements and then outward. Mom first insisted that she hadn’t the heart, staring ruefully at me from the kitchen as I’d tramp out the door into the cold. But restlessness got the better of her, and soon she joined me in an oversized jacket, red-nosed and white-lipped, pasting pictures of old Nathan on every surface in sight.

Though the troopers had performed a cursory examination at the time of their only visit, in those early days I returned to Nathan’s room, when left unoccupied by my mother, to examine his window. Its wrought iron bars, customary of ground floor units in the neighborhood, were terribly mangled. Black paint was split along stress marks where they had been twisted and torn, leaving ragged points like knives facing the alley, as though to ward off future invaders. What I found on those dark barbs was traces of a substance, whitish and foul-smelling; some secretion turned to snowy amber. I poked it, pinched it, uncareful with curiosity. The feeling made my stomach turn. Something to melt metal? If so, it had lost its corrosive properties, and felt to the touch like nothing so much as saltwater taffy.

I showed the stuff to Mom, who responded by throwing a raincoat over her shoulders and marching out into the deluge with more posters and a tape roll.

Following my discovery I spent long nights awake on the couch, aware of each shadow that crossed our windows. The pale light of a streetlamp was cast across my blankets, and each obstruction laid a body of darkness over my own. Soon I was sleeping as seldom as Mom, and the two of us would trudge through monotonous workdays and insomniac nights, falling unconscious at the kitchen table only by pure accident.

Now and then the phone would ring and one of us would pounce upon it breathlessly. It was never the police, though on occasion it would be in reference to one of our thousand posters. Mostly the calls were incoherent or unhelpful, a report of the boy on such and such train at such and such time. After frantically riding any reported route for hours, we tired of these leads and would simply write their contents on an end table notepad, staring at them blurry-eyed in the fading light.

What I began to notice on morning commutes through crowded tunnels was that our posters were not alone. Mom hadn’t been crazy when shouting about Mary Fischer’s boy; another North Park child had gone missing some months prior, and faded posters for little Ian’s face could be found on many of the same streetlamps and notice boards. But it wasn’t just him. First appeared the black and white face of young Jane Watson, then a Peter Stoller and a Raymond Bills. Class photos all, with cloudy backdrops and faces half-attentive, some baby teeth gone, and the pleading eyes of one who must briefly sit still.

I watched their faces on my walks home from work. The dark bustle would twist behind me, and I’d wonder where old Nathan could be. I watched the faces grow multitudinous, and sometimes – felt watched myself. I could not deny a growing panic, like a small slug roaming my gut. Maybe in dreams, I thought. Couldn’t a sister find her sibling in dreams? But when I slept I saw only torn iron, its barbs sticky in moonlight with some colorless thing growing dry in the wind.

I had made dinner one evening, a quick effort of reheated rice, which sat untouched as usual between us. Mom stared listlessly across the table, looking through blinds into the dark where it had begun to rain.

“I never knew you,” she said, pushing her food around with a plastic fork.

“What’s that mean, Mom?” I sighed.

“Never knew my children. I tried to listen. All you can do. Little aliens that grow like plants. Leap out you when they’re done. What a horrible thing.” She began, softly, to weep. “How could I... where is my mind? Mustn’t I keep you both,” she beat her belly. “How’s it I could lose track?”

The dishes were pushed aside and I was on my knees, my head in her lap.

“How’s it I could let you go? Where is the place? Where do you go when you’re gone from me?”

“You know me, Mom, you know me.” I gripped her pants as she wept. “I’m right here, Mom. You know me.”

“Where is our boy?” she shook. “Where is old Nathan?”

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The next night I was first to arrive home and had the quiet house to myself. The rain had stopped, and a bare tree beat at the glass. I went to Nathan’s room and shut his window. When he came home he could use the front door. I had slumped onto his small mattress, staring out the glass to where bare iron bent away like broken fingers, when the phone rang. I was by this time past pouncing, and dead tired, and I shuffled into the den with the clangor. Lifting the receiver felt almost too much a task.

“Hello,” I muttered, and sank onto the couch.

“Hello?” a woman’s voice breathed through shuffling papers. “This, uh, it’s about the boy. Am I speaking to a relative?” Another rustle came sharply through the phone. “Nathan Suther? A relative of Nathan’s?”

“This is Mona Suther,” I rubbed my eyes. “Nathan’s sister. You know something?”

“My boy Noah is gone,” she panted. “He’s gone too.”

“I’m very sorry to hear that, Miss.”

“My name is Minnie. Can call me Minnie. What’s yours?”

“Mona,” I repeated. “Sorry about your boy.”

“Mm, well. It’s not just us, you know.”

“I’ve noticed.” I sat up and reached for pen and paper.

“Lots of faces we’re seeing now,” she went on. “Every few days another one. Been a week my Noah’s gone. I’ll tell you the troopers didn’t help one bit.”

“Here either,” I shook my head in the dark.

“They come in, says ‘what’s huh, and this here,’ and poke around and they’re gone.”

“Sounds about right.”

“So I’m calling. Calling every face has a number attached. You’re number four. Got lots more after you. I say enough of the waiting, let’s us get together. See what this is. See what we know.”

A dry wind blew outside, and something crossed our window. I took a sharp breath. A tick sounded from the door. It was opening, I was onto my knees, the receiver clutched to my face. Before I could howl it swung in, and my mother stood there, glum and defeated.

“Yes,” I exhaled. “Yes, I’ll come.”

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I met Minnie the next night at a small, darkened shop. She was a small dark woman, wrapped in a gray coat and blowing fog into the cold.

“Early,” she said. I shrugged. “Good. Me too. Come in.” She struggled with the door a moment, jangling a ring of keys. “This’s my place,” she grumbled, ushering me through. We entered a cluttered workshop. “Watch repair,” she said. “Clocks, whatever. Bit of a mess.” She pushed a handcart aside and disappeared into shadow. A light clicked on sending a shaft of yellow into the dust, and she returned with some folding chairs on her arm.