Part 4

From her corner Abigail sat and watched Echo scribble in her notebook across the room. She wanted to go into the library, but Cheyne sat in the doorway. She didn’t know how to get Cheyne to move without talking to her and Abigail didn’t want to talk to her. She wondered what Echo was drawing. Probably numbers again. Abigail twirled her hair between her fingers as her mind wandered. It’s so dark here, she thought. I wonder why it’s always so dark.

She remembered the last time she had been outside. She had walked to the park and picked dandelions and made one hundred wishes. None of them had come true, but she hadn’t really expected them to. She remembered how the sun had felt, where it warmed her skin as she lay in the grass and she watched the seedlings fly away on the breeze. She thought it would be a pretty idea if the seedlings floated up to join the clouds, to make them fluffier, even maybe to grow dandelions up in the sky. But she knew it wasn’t so. She had watched children play on the playground, run around in the sand, chase each other, shouting all the time. She thought maybe if she was braver, she would have asked if she could play. But she wasn’t brave, so she had sat alone in the grass on a distant hill, blowing dandelion after dandelion naked until there weren’t any left to blow. She wondered if there were any new dandelions growing on the hill now. That day seemed very long ago.

Lila appeared from the back hallway. She walked to the doorway of the library and stood over Cheyne. Abigail watched them warily.

“What are you doing, Cheyne?” Lila demanded.

Cheyne looked up, distracted. She murmured something that Abigail couldn’t hear.

“What are you waiting for?” asked Lila.

“All the lights went out,” said Cheyne a little louder.

Lila rolled her eyes, impatient as always. “What are you talking about?"

Cheyne looked across the room at Abigail and said, “I got swallowed by a black hole today.” Abigail wanted to look away. She didn't like the way Cheyne held her eyes.

“It’s very cold in space,” continued Cheyne. “You can’t breathe and then your eyeballs get sucked out.”

“Your eyeballs seem to be intact,” said Lila.

Cheyne closed her eyes, tilted her head back and said in a dreamy way, “Birds pecked them out.”

“What?” Lila asked her.

Abigail watched Cheyne, fascinated with how her words and her voice didn’t match. “Birds pecked out my eyes and carried them away. They dropped them where he stood and he held them in his hand and I could still see out of them, I could still see… I was looking up into his face.”

“Whose face?” asked Lila.

“The Black Man.”

Lila paused, looked over at Abigail and then said, “What black man?”

Abigail started to get warm. She could hear Echo’s pen scratch paper. She could see the misty grey light turn darker. She didn’t want to hear what Cheyne was about to say, but couldn’t move.

Cheyne looked up at Lila with her eyebrows furrowed. “The Black Man… he wears a black coat and black shiny shoes. He stands far away across a lot of flat sand where there isn’t anything growing and he holds up a black umbrella so that the sun doesn’t touch him.”

Abigail shook her head. Lila looked at her curiously.

Cheyne’s dreamy voice continued. “He has a red scarf over his arm and the birds put my eyeballs into his hand and I look up into his face but his face is blank….”

“You mean,” asked Lila, “that he has a blank expression on his face?”

Abigail shook her head harder, her eyes now squeezed shut. Echo’s pen had stopped and she was staring at the two girls in the doorway.

“No,” sighed Cheyne. “His face is blank. There’s nothing there. Nothing but a mouth. A big black mouth in a shadow. I can feel him looking at me, all the time, and when he holds my eyes in his hand and looks down, he’s so close… he’s so huge. He’s a giant and he puts my eyes in his mouth and they slide down his throat and pretty soon they’re going to be--.”

“Shut up!” screamed Abigail, jumping to her feet. “Shut up! Stop talking about it!” She clapped her hands over her ears.

Cheyne’s head fell forward and she opened her eyes. “And then when my eyes are down inside the darkness and he knows that I can’t see, he’ll come and find my body and he’ll take the red scarf and he’ll—.”

“NO!” yelled Abigail, “Stop!” She began to shake, had to wrap her arms around herself to keep from falling down.

Lila watched the exchange without comment. Echo ran from the room and returned dragging Sophie by the hand.

“What’s going on?” demanded Sophie, gauging the room in a single moment. She walked to Abigail, but kept her eyes on Cheyne. She attempted to put her arm around Abigail’s shoulders, but the younger girl thrashed. “Abigail?” she asked quietly, still looking at Cheyne. “Abigail, what’s wrong?”

Abigail shook her head. Her teeth cut into her bottom lip. Echo stood by, her eyes wide.

Cheyne's voice was deliberate. “I can hear his voice in my head. He says I’ve been bad, but that I can make it better because he’s very hungry. If I can give him exactly what he wants, then I’ll be beautiful again.” She whispered, “He’s always hungry.”

Abigail was shaking her head. “No, no, no, no…,” she pleaded. “Stop her. Stop her… he’ll come. He’ll hurt me.”

“Who will come?” asked Sophie gently.

Abigail’s eyes were focused past Sophie into nothing. “The man in black… the man in black.”

Sophie turned toward Cheyne. “Cheyne, what is your problem?”

Cheyne cocked her head to one side. “He says no one will ever love me like he does.”

Abigail moaned. As her legs threatened to buckle, Sophie reached to support her.

“Don’t touch me!” Abigail screamed.

Sophie ignored this and lifted the thin girl into her arms. Abigail struggled briefly against Sophie for a moment, and then went limp. She trembled, her eyes rolled toward the shadowy ceiling. “He’s coming,” she cried. “He’s coming….”

Sophie turned to leave the room. To Abigail she said, “It’s okay sweetie, nobody is coming.” Echo followed behind, two fingers in her mouth.

“Don’t lie to her,” Cheyne said after them.

Sophie pretended not to hear.

After they were gone, Lila took off her glasses and polished them on her shirt. She replaced them on her nose and shook her hair back from her forehead. Cheyne was humming to herself. She opened and closed her right fist, studying the movement of her fingers intently.

“What did you mean?” asked Lila. “When you said Sophie was lying.”

“She was,” replied Cheyne, not looking up.

“About what?”

“About The Black Man,” Cheyne flexed her hand.

“What do you mean?” pried Lila. “You think he is coming? For Abigail?”

“No,” Cheyne put her hands flat on the floor and pushed herself to her feet. She ran her fingers through her blue hair with a smile. She walked through the same doorway Sophie had and her voice drifted back to Lila out of the darkness. “He’s coming for all of us.”