The Hour Before Dark by Douglas Clegg Page B

found several items that had been missing for years: his old teddy bear, a dust mop after a nineteen-year disappearance; he also discovered that there was a way to reach between the walls in his old bedroom, by way of removing a thin board in his closet.
    He found his old sketchbook there, which he had forgotten that he’d hidden away at twelve and kept private from the rest of us. He showed some of them to me. They were scenes from the Ice Queen stories—and how the goblins ended up torturing the Queen eternally for her crimes. The Ice Queen was poorly drawn, but could be identified by the crescent moon in her hand and her hair, which was straw-yellow and flowing. It was pretty vivid stuff for a little kid, and I suspect that Bruno had been getting some of his frustrations out on paper.
    “You made up the stories,” he reminded me. “I was just using crayons to illustrate your books.”
    “Only you never showed me,” I said.
    “I’m showing you now. I’m not the artist that Brooke is. But I tried.”
    “It’s pretty violent,” I said, ever the observer.
    “So were the stories. I wonder why we liked them so much,” he said, flipping through the sketchbook. “Dad would’ve had a fit if he’d seen these. He’d think there was something wrong with me.”
    “There is something wrong with you,” I said, grinning. “You’re a Raglan.”
    “We were a pretty creative bunch.”
    “Not a lot to do in the winter.”
    “Remember the words we made up?”
    I nodded. “Jumblies.”
    “Gran made that one up. I mean like the Greasels.”
    “The result of Weasel and Groundhog mating,” I said with some authority. “And the Eyestopper.”
    “Oh, yeah,” he said. “That was a bad one. The evil poison that turns children blind when they see the sun.”
    “And the goblinfire,” he said. “Look.” He showed me a page in the sketchbook of a boy who might’ve been me, but with pointed elf ears, and a blackness of night all around him. In the middle of the blackness was a smudge of fiery yellow and orange.
    We looked through some more of the sketches, pointing out what we remembered. The little ogre-girl who gobbled up people who said no to her; the boy whose skin was made out of bubblegum and blew up in a big pink bubble when he wanted to fly.
    The most unusual one had me, Bruno, and Brooke all standing in a row with our mouths open in screams, and the tops of our heads were exploding.
    Underneath this, Bruno had written in purple crayon: BRAIN FARTS!!!
    And then there was the picture that was of us playing the Dark Game.
    I barely glanced at it.
    In a circle, holding hands.
    Three children.
    Bruno, Brooke, Nemo.
    Blindfolds over their eyes.
    “I wasn’t much of an artist,” Bruno said, and quickly closed his sketchbook.
    I awoke the next meaning, with Bruno standing over my bed.
    He had on what looked like long underwear. Something about the way he looked, his hair all scruffy in his face, and something of an excited expression on his face, reminded me of him as a kid. “Get up! Nemo, you gotta see this!”

     

CHAPTER ELEVEN
     

    1
     
    After I’d rolled onto the floor, sleepily trying to find my bathrobe, Bruno dragged me from room to room until we came to my father’s bedroom. It was exactly as I remembered it: the king-sized bed with my grandmother’s quilt thrown over it and one goose down pillow at the head.
    A small black-and-white television on a metal stand by the window.
    A lamp by the bed, with a small round table beneath it, on which my father kept the TV guide and his nail clippers. Above the bed, a photo of him and my mother on their wedding day.
    “Look at this, look,” Bruno said. He opened the doors to the wardrobe, the very one we had all squeezed into as children. It had wide doors, and when he drew them back, they revealed my father’s clothes, hanging. Bruno parted these. There was no back to the wardrobe. It was open and went to the wall. The wallpaper had been scraped back