TWILIGHT by Anthea Holland and DF Lewis

I'm afraid of the dark, scared by what might lurk unseen in the unknown.  I'm uncomfortable with shadows, evil shapes that flicker and fade across the wall.  I hate the melancholy feeling that comes at twilight and bathes everything in an unearthly light.  Something bad is going to happen one day at twilight …..

There is an abundance of possible illumination in the house and I pace from room to room turning on the lights as I go.  There are no un-lit corners here, no shadows waiting to jump on me and scare  me to death, no hidden rooms or locked cupboards.

Even though I am surrounded by light I jump when the 'phone rings.  After all, although I have shut it out, I am aware that dusk is falling beyond the curtained windows - and something bad is going to happen one day at twilight ….

Is that day today, I wonder, when I hear shuffling in the chimneybreast?  Probably something dislodged by a bird.  Or the bird itself trapped between the soot walls.  The phone I ignore.  What else can you do with phones when literally anybody could be at the other end of the line?  I'm not paranoiac, but that don't mean to say they're not after me!  I've heard that saying before somewhere but it makes a lot of good sense – particularly at twilight…

Talking about sayings, the postman only rings twice.  And my door bell has joined the clarion call of night.  But it is sooner doused even than the phone.  Silence regains its sway.  I wonder who is trying to reach me.  It may be some kind soul wanting to remind me that there is no goddam reason why anyone should be worried about twilight: that cross between day and night.  But for me, night is far more wholesome than dusk.  The glimmerings of dawn, too, do not carry the same uncomfortable ambience as sunset seems to carry.  That kind soul may be Rachel: she is (or maybe was) the kindest soul in Christendom.  When she left me, well, that was a bad day.

Rachel, now there was a lady - or had been. She was too good for me, indeed  she was far too damn athletic for a sofa slug like me.  I reminded myself that it would never be Rachel jingling the bell on my 'phone again - just as she would never twang my heartstrings again or jog on my stairs.

That noise in the chimneybreast is there once  more.  I stand, totally still and listen.  I hope it isn't a bird, I dislike the thought of anything trapped; it reminds myself too closely of my own position - trapped within these four walls for the hours of twilight.  No point in tempting fate my venturing forth from the safety of my own home - although don't they say that the most dangerous place in the world isn't New York City or Harlem, but one's own kitchen?  I shrug; it doesn't apply to me in the here and now - anything bad that is going to happen to me is going to happen when I'm bathed in the non-existent light that invades the earth at dusk.

Rachel left me at twilight.  She insisted that I left the curtains open and the lamps unlit - pouring scorn all the while on my fears and insisting that I acted like a man for once in my life.  The whole thing degenerated into a row which resulted in her storming out of the house.  I would have run after her, only it was twilight out there and I knew that something bad was going to happen one day at twilight.

Twilight is akin to two.  Twolit.  Twilit.  It brings me into the present and back into the past at its whim.  Present and past the two halves of it.  At the interface is me: watching for a third force: the future.  Then threelit. Trilight.  Trilit.  Words have  more strength, it seems, than reality itself.  And tonight's leading edge of twilight, I feel, is to be where the three-cornered communion of light, dark and something-between-dark-and-light-without-being-either are due to touch base.

It was Rachel who scrabbled down the chimney like a wrong-headed santa.

I shake  my head in bewilderment at my own fancies.  That's what this wan light usually does to me as it filters through the curtains I've drawn to keep it out.  Filters, though, are two-way.  Light filtering in from the weakening source of dusk.  And my soul filtering out to stain it darker still.

I saw Rachel's soot-black fingers scrabble in the grate upon an arm that snaked from the flue.

I blink and the image is gone.  Crossing to the sideboard I took out a bottle of whiskey.  Pouring out a generous slug I gulp it in one go.  I deliberately turn my back on the hearth and think about the past/present/future.   The not-so-holy trinity; trinight.  It occurs to me that the room is no longer quite as bright as it was a few moments before and I spot that one of the table lamps no longer sheds its tulip glow across the burnished wood table top.  A moment's panic sets in but a quick check reassures me that all the other illumination is as it should be.

Rachel had been a creature of darkness, it was as though she sucked the life out of the day - as it died so she became alive, vibrant and vivacious.

I put my empty glass on the sideboard and crossed the room, intending to head for the kitchen where I stored a cupboard full of light-bulbs.

Rachel's voice hissed my name as I passed the hearth.

I blow her a kiss from my heart.  Despite everything.

This is the first twilight where she's got so far down the flue without actually coming out into the open grate.  The worst possible monster is one made from someone you used to love.  As a small child I recall that my mother - when she slept - snored and snorted and rasped her throat and made ugly faces and spoke words I couldn't fully understand -- and thus sleep had made her the worst monster simply because, when awake, she was my loving mother. 

I once told Rachel about my fears and terrors – and now she's returning to haunt me knowing exactly which fright buttons to push.

Rachel's head squeezed down within  the chimney breast, then her own sweet sweet bosom followed…

In the kitchen, I count the bulbs out, I count the bulbs in -- then idle over to the rattling spigot desperate for a drink, yet fearful of the water-hammer that besets this house everytime the plumbing's used.

I surrender to the desire for liquid - a need for something pure, perhaps, in contrast to the many-times distilled golden liquid that waits for me somewhere else.  Not that what comes out of a kitchen tap is pure, of course; urine, having been filtered by the kidneys is, I understand, much purer than tap water - but it certainly isn't the kind of golden liquid that I fancy sampling.

The sound the plumbing makes is like the hammering of a heart.

Taking the appropriate bulb from my collection, I walk through to the living room only to find Rachel sprawled on the sofa..  Ignoring her, I replace the dead bulb and walked across to the sideboard for my whiskey.  I don't need to look at her to know that her eyes are following my progress; I feel them burning me like hands of fire, and I am certain that when I later undress there will be blisters where she has touched me and yet not touched me.

I have wished for so long to have Rachel on my sofa yet now she is there I want no part of her.  Still, I thought, a bird in the hand …

Rachel was always different.  She enjoyed bobsleighing and handball and all manner of obscure sports to which she dragged me during Olympic week.  She couldn't bear watching people on TV outdoing her physically, I guess. She often smeared her face in soot and went pot-holing or was it that the soot besmirched her wondrous complexion after she'd been pot-holing?  Whatever the case, she couldn't get me threading those underground chimneys for love or money.  I'd share the toboggan with her or, even, the white-water kayak … but not those subterranean labyrinths of her heart…

The creature on the sofa is covered in soot so thick, really it's the wildest of guesses that it's Rachel at all.  The stuff looks sticky,  a tarring and feathering.  A bird after all, then, having fluttered down the chimney, perhaps, towards a fell death.  Or a cross between crow and woman.

A bird in the hand.

I return to the spigot where the water has been spluttering into the bucket; primed for sluicing the creature clean.  Rachel's already used to wet dousings what with all that water polo and synchronised swimming she used to do between dressage and softball.  If it is Rachel.

Twilight, at its height, made me feel schizophrenic. And I often sensed that all these daydreams of minority sports were mere fabrications of a twilit mind.  The pipes hummed.  And my own waterworks thrummed.  A sign that twilight was on the wane as night eased away dusk's  duplicity amid an ebon balm.

A trinity, I think; myself, Rachel and twilight.  The three together are some kind of catalyst - always have been, I remember.  It is at twilight that we first make love - a desperate, cruel kind of love-making as I recall.  My alter-ego is present and turns me into some kind of Marquis de Sade and she responds in similar fashion.  There's much scratching, biting and afterwards as we lie sated, the sheets are blood spattered.  Later tonight, when I am myself again, we shall really make love - well, I will; for her I think it will just be another sport.

I gazed at the kitchen curtains, beyond which I was aware the twilight was easing into the comparative safety of night.  I was afraid of the near dark, scared of what might have lurked  unseen in the unknown, but sometimes what we know is the scarier of the two options.  The curtains were decorated with fruit - plums, apples, oranges and raspberries which reminded me of the fruit that birds pecked at with their sharp beaks.  I could barely see the parasites now or the  worms and maggots that had decayed the fruit with their cooking.

A bird in the hand …

I realise that the bucket is over-flowing and turn off the water.  Heaving it out of the sink I return to where I had left the bird-woman.

The sofa is empty except for a slug of darkness... distilled from light and shade.

Something bad did happen that day.  My death.   Possible to experience and describe only by its  points of perspective.  Two or three, I wasn't sure.

The door and phone resume their shrill awakening.  Like Rachel's morning drill.