White Darkness

Demented wind. Rain pummelling trees. The drive over with its slippery roads and stirrings from the back seat and the hammering in her head keeps her in disarray. Lines of post-school traffic, workers scurrying home like ants, the road-rage a teaser of what might be coming tonight. Plus it’s Halloween. You’d think she was in America. Grinning pumpkins, orange zombies, polystyrene spiderwebs dangling from roofs. All dancing deliriously in the storm.

Regardless, her mind is elsewhere. She’s finally got the interview.

Her disarray bleats like a lamb in her brain when she pulls up outside the house. A cul-de-sac, quiet but watching, blinds being pulled, modest, conservative, hints of stiff lips and sanctimony. The lawns are mowed, the hedges tiny fortress walls. Flowers stand at attention, en guarde even in the deluge.

The blonde brick house is little different – typically dull, with an extra floor added in ad hoc renovations. And it sways, or so it appears, for an instant; or was it a tremble? She scatters through the mess on the car’s back seat, rifling between her luggage and sleeping bags, unfinished coke bottles and screwed up Macdonald’s wrappers, and drags out the lumpy plastic file. Is she dressed correctly? What does one wear? Black jeans, a buttoned-up grey shirt, her converse runners. Appropriate colours.

Dragging her hair into a wiry clasp she takes a deep breath and squares her shoulders and battles with her umbrella to the porch.

Behind the heavy oak front door whispers can be heard, a cracking and crunching of timber panels adjusting, rejecting. From the corner of her eye a yellow shape distends then disappears and pain throbs in her temple. She tells herself to be calm, it’s no migraine; but it’s unusual. The pain normally isn’t so rhythmic. Like a voodoo ritual. ‘Go away,’ she mutters; but it ensconces itself.

As the door swings she’s struck with a flash of stifling white phosphorescence and can feel nothing except an echo of someone…Who? she thinks, but a tall bald man with a cheery smile is grabbing her hand and shaking as if raising it from the dead.

‘Melanie? Melanie Mantle?’ he bellows. ‘I’m Samson. Thanks for coming. Thought you might not come, that’s what usually happens.’ He chuckles. ‘Lots answer our ad, but few turn up. Come in, come in.’

The dark green lobby is ringed with lamps and paraphernalia: a sagging doily, a faded photo in a jaded frame, an Italian statue from Freedom or Ikea. A monstrous mat once inhabited the floor – its outline abrupt on the charcoal wood – and patches stain the walls where paintings once hung. The room is used and tired, a dull late twentieth-century design. Ordinary.

In the kitchen Samson introduces her to Betsy. Both are in overalls, the name of their company patched in a polite but forceful vermilion on their left breast. Betsy flutters up to her, shakes her hand flightily, then retires like a bird.

Samson offers her tea from a pot on the stove. ‘So,’ he says. ‘You know why we’re here? You read the profile?’

‘Yes – I think I can do this. I have a…well…a knack. You know.’

All are seated on rusty-legged stools around a formica table. A gasp of air, a current, swooshes behind, rippling her hair.

‘Explain this – knack – to us, please.’

Inside the green plastic file on her lap is the ad she replied to – it had appeared out of the Facebook blue – and read:

Calling all Psychics, Mediums, Tarot Readers, and Clairvoyants!

Join our team of Psychics and Mediums as an independent contractor! Earn great per-minute rates while working part-time. If you’re ready to share your unique gifts and help others, we’d love to have you on our team!

She doesn’t reveal that losing her job (talking audibly to the office ghosts had caused her coworkers to complain) had left her unable to pay rent, and so she’d answered the ad.

‘My knack,’ she says. ‘It began when I was a child. I was struck by lightning. Ever since then I’ve seen…things.’

 ‘Spirits,’ grins Samson. ‘You can say it here.’

She nods. Doesn’t tell them how the belch of thunder in the Belanglo forest caused her and her friend Felicia to run holding hands into the open meadow. How lightning had hit Felicia and life vanished from her blueberry eyes. The flash had vibrated from Melanie’s dead friend’s hand into her own arms and ribs and vibrated glassily along all her nerves and she’d been enshrouded in a blinding white cloud. She’d been in hospital in shock for days, unable to talk, but eventually the cloud dissipated and she’d fully recovered. Except that since then she’s been visited by apparitions, constantly keening for her attention, crunching her ears at night, tugging her hair, giggling too loudly, crying like ghouls.

She thinks of what a scaredy-cat Felicia was, terrified that the lightning would hit and fell the trees where they were hiding from their parents, certain they’d be safer in the open field. But the girls were only six years old.

‘So why are you here?’ asks Betsy in her tiny voice. It’s as if she’s afraid to speak.

‘You said you need a medium of sorts. I need a job.’

As she’s talking something drizzles in the corner – a ghost. It seems familiar. It fizzles into the green wall.

‘Are you okay?’ asks Samson, glancing at the corner.

‘Fine,’ she says. ‘But I think something’s here.’

‘Good or evil?’ He and Betsy are alert now, excited.

She hesitates. ‘Not sure.’ The rain has mollified. Shouts of trick or treat compete.

Melanie twists her fingers as Samson and Betsy confer in a whisper, heads on the side and eyes flicking at her, checking, dissecting, unravelling her aura.

‘Have you ever come across something, er, harmful?’ says Samson.

She says no but rubs at a sudden wrench in her temple.

‘Are you okay?’ says Samson.

‘Just a headache,’ she says. ‘Nerves, I guess.’

They confer again, then settle back into their chairs, beaming. ‘Okay,’ says Betsy softly. ‘Sounds good to us. Let’s see how you go today.’ Samson outlines her pay per hour and employment conditions.

‘So today,’ he says. ‘This house – the owners haven’t been here for months. Too nervous. Nothing really seen, just…felt. Their furniture fiddled with, things moved around. You know? So just watch, and let us know if you feel something. Betsy and I’ll go upstairs, each to our own floor. You can stay down here.’ He throws his palms out and glances around as if lost. ‘Sorry. I don’t really have any instructions. Each to his own, you know? But if you’ve got any questions…’

Samson and Betsy’s murmuring fades as they climb the stairs. For half an hour Melanie wanders, opening kitchen cupboards, inspecting the featureless backyard. Photos on sideboards are recent, no books line the shelves, prints on the walls are drab and predictable. It’s only when she drifts into the loungeroom that her spine twitches.

A group of teenagers are lolling on the sofa, pulling old vinyl records from covers and tossing them, flicking cigarettes onto the beige carpet.

‘What are you doing here?’ she says.

‘We live here.’

‘I don’t believe you,’ she says uselessly. ‘How did you get in?’

Like many teenagers they’re dressed in half-arsed Halloween costumes, no doubt walking the streets only to pilfer treats. Still in their maroon school uniforms one wears cat’s ears, another vampire fangs. All have blood spattered on their shirts and ties, and holes round as bullets in their white shirts. The blood looks disarmingly wet, viscous.

She calls for Betsy and Samson but from the top floor they don’t hear her. As she steps onto the staircase she’s slammed again with the white phosphorescence. She covers her eyes, has trouble breathing in the ivory fug; the world pauses; groans.

From the whiteness Felicia appears, a half-burned six-year-old with an innocent smile, saying nothing, her finger on her lips, and Mel is hit with a current of déjà vu; then a torrent of realisation.

That stormy day…those schoolchildren…

Two years ago she’d arrived home to find a group of ten-year-olds in teal school uniforms opening her fridge, tossing butter and sour cream on the floor, smearing chocolate on the walls. They’d unplugged the air fryer, smashed the coffee machine. Screaming, she’d chased the six kids around the kitchen, then ran to get her phone from her bag. But before she could ring 000 – with a sick pain in her gut she now remembers that whole terrible day – before she lifted her phone the room was drenched a suffocating white and a spectre with blueberry eyes appeared. In terror she’d shrieked, recognised it as Felicia; Felicia pressed her finger to her pallid mouth and Mel, understanding all that was unsaid, went to her bedroom and shut the door. Huddling under her doona there was nothing she could do about ghostly children running riot except sleep.

The next morning, clearing up their havoc, she stopped abruptly as a news item blared from her tv.

In their teal uniforms the six children from her kitchen smiled from the screen. A school shooting, the broadcaster announced mournfully. Six dead.

‘No!’ she now screams at Felicia, and yells for Samson and Betsy. They scramble into the loungeroom, then falter; Betsy flaps her arms as if trying to fly away, Samson crushes himself against a wall, his eyes saucers.

The teenagers are rampant; they overturn the lounge, smash lamps, kick at the huge tv screen.  But their outlines are fading. Slowly, like frost on a sun-drenched window. Felicia too is melting. Melanie moves to touch her friend’s shoulder; drags her hand back quickly when it sinks into wet air.

In the kitchen Melanie begs Samson to open his laptop; once online she searches local schools. Maroon uniforms – the teenagers could be from a state school merely blocks away. Melanie is on the phone struggling to convince the police to check that school when all sound from the loungeroom ceases.

‘They’re gone,’ whispers Betsy.

The room, though in disarray, is empty. Soulless.

Melanie dashes to her car. Felicia’s face glows fleetingly in the rear vision mirror, nodding, and Mel turns the keys and speeds to where the maroon-uniformed school must be. Advancing the few blocks seems to take hours; the drive is suffocated, slo-mo. The police didn’t believe her, she doesn’t have a gun; how can she stop this?

In the distance she hears sirens, gunshots; muffled words from a loudspeaker. She stops the car violently at a nature strip and puts her face in her hands. The thump in her head is now a migraine and the streetscape through the windscreen spins. From the glovebox she drags a pack of painkillers and swallows too many.

When she awakes her arm is dead and her neck burns from the unwieldy angle in which she’s slept behind her steering wheel. She starts the car and drives slowly towards the school. Yellow tape lines the forecourt and the schoolyard, but only a single police car is parked. Mel knocks on the window.

‘Please,’ she croaks. ‘What happened here?’ Dread makes it difficult to speak. ‘Was anyone hurt?’

‘I can’t tell you,’ says the cop.

‘Please,’ she repeats.

He looks at her, reading her desperate eyes, then sighs. His voice is drained, his uniform crumpled, but he smiles.  ‘You know, we really thought this was gonna be bad. Someone phoned us and warned that something might be happening. Then a teacher in the café up the road saw a bloke with a gun heading towards here. We got the kids out before the shots were fired and we got the bloke. Sheer luck, really.’ He shook his head. ‘Damned if I know who rang us, but they deserve a medal.’

Photo by Katya Azimova on Unsplash