Dwellers of the Night: The Complete Collection (117 page)

“I’ve been sick,” Mark said.

The sound of his voice sent several birds flocking from the trees.

“Yes, you have,” the man said.

“So what are we going to do?”

Anthony Barnhart

Dwellers of the Night

545

The man refused to look at him. “What do you want to do?”

“I don’t know.”

“It’s up to you.”

“Maybe you guys should just go ahead and leave.”

“No.”

“It would be better if…”

The man spun around, glared at him. “I said ‘No’, damn it, what the fuck is so hard to understand about that?”

Mark was taken aback, suddenly quiet, and his face flushed red.

The man shook his head. “We’re not abandoning you.”

“I’m not safe.”

“We’ll worry about that when that time comes. Maybe it will work out differently.”

“It won’t.”

“You don’t know that.”

Mark shook his head now. “That’s always been your problem.”

“What’s been my problem?”

“Your refusal to accept this.”

“To accept what?”

“Reality. You refuse to accept reality.” He exhaled, took another hit, let the smoke fill his lungs, blew it out as he spoke: “The reality is that I’ve been bitten, and the reality is that I will grow sick to the point that I become one of them. The reality of our world is that everything has gotten fucked up, everything’s been blown to shit, and yet you hold onto hope that maybe, if you play your cards right, you’ll be able to escape reality. You’re living in a dream-world. We’ve all been living in a dreamworld. Aspen? What did we expect to find there? A paradise? Everyone’s just trying to escape what’s happened, but no one’s accepting it. Or maybe those who
have
accepted it have all killed themselves—because if this is reality, then what other logical choice is there?”

The man was quiet, saying nothing. “So you want to kill yourself?”

Mark cursed under his breath. “That’s not what I said.”

“I know. I just want to know what you want me to do.”

“I don’t want you to do anything.”

“Nothing?”

“No. I want you to do
one
thing.”

“Anything.”

Mark looked him in the eyes. “I want you to leave.”

The man shook his head. “I’m not abandoning you.”

“Everyone gets abandoned sooner or later.”

∑Ω∑

The next morning has come, preceded by yet another uneventful night with dark-walkers surrounding the farmhouse. The man is upstairs with his coffee, standing in the kitchen, smoking a cigarette, feeling the warm breeze coming through the broken windows. It had rained overnight, and muddy footprints are scattered over the tile floor, slowly drying into a flaky crust. The man becomes lost in his thoughts, contemplating the frailty of life, and then his concentration is shattered: Sarah is shouting downstairs. He extinguishes the cigarette, grabs the GARAND, and exits the kitchen, taking the stairwell into the wine-cellar.

Anthony Barnhart

Dwellers of the Night

546

The man finds Sarah kneeling into the bed’s mattress with one knee, speaking hurriedly to Mark. The boy has cocooned himself in the sheets, and he has pressed himself against the bed’s headboard. His eyes are global and the color of egg whites, his pupils are dilated, and cold sweat pierces his brow. The man tosses the gun aside and moves forward, grabs Sarah by the arm, pulls her away. “You can’t help him,” the man growls; “He’s hallucinating.”

“Hallucinating?” she asks, looking up at the man.

“It’s one of the symptoms of the disease.”

She looks back at Mark. “What’s he hallucinating?”

“God only knows,” the man says, “and it’s probably better that way.”

Mark is biting his lip, shivering under his sheets, shaking in a fogged fear.

“There’s nothing we can do,” the man says.

She moves forward, crawls onto the bed.

“Sarah…”

She ignores him, and she curls up with Mark, holds the boy close, whispers comforting words into his ears. Sarah looks over at the man, begging him to join her. He shrugs and backs away, returns upstairs, to the warm morning, and he smokes another cigarette. He can still hear Mark whimpering down below.

∑Ω∑

In the days leading up to the frightening and unknowable hallucination, Mark had gone through several bouts of relatively healthiness. It was in these times that he and the man shared a gauntlet of conversations, conversations that the man would remember for the rest of his life.

Mark had come upstairs to drink some coffee and smoke cigarettes, to sit on the front porch in the warm June afternoon sunshine, to watch the sun burning high in the sapphire sky. The man had joined him in silence, and they drank their hot coffee and sat in the hot sun and shared their smoldering cigarettes. Mark said, “I met you before the plague.”

The man looked over at him. “What?”

“I took Amanda to Tampa Bay to see a concert. ‘The Jonas Brothers.’ You were our pilot on the flight.”

The man was quiet, then, “Why didn’t you say anything?”

The boy shrugged. “Had none of this ever happened, we wouldn’t have come to know one another. If I mentioned it… It would mean that the circumstances of this plague gave birth to our friendship. But that would mean something good came out of the plague. And you know what?

Nothing good came out of this. Nothing.” He was silent. “This plague brought us together, and now the promise of eventuality causes the plague to tear us apart.”

Another conversation, this one in the basement in the middle of the night, while Sarah slept on the couch. The man had taken watch over the boy, and they spoke quietly in order to not attract the frenzy of the dark-walkers crawling about outside.

“We let our dream consume us,” Mark said.

“What dream is that?” the man asked.

“The dream of Aspen. The dream that things would get better.”

The man didn’t know what to say. “Oh.”

Anthony Barnhart

Dwellers of the Night

547

“We let the dream consume us, and then we proceeded to consume the dream, feasting upon it as if it were the very sustenance keeping us alive. But that’s the nature of dreams: they take our hands, as we’re grasping the mire and clay, and we let our desires and imaginations and hopes lead us to fashion that which promises, even in hidden shadows, to deliver us to redemption. We breathe life into our naïve creations, hoping our creations will bring us what our hearts long for. Yet while we are its creator, its tamer, we bend down and submit to its lashings and blows. The creation takes the chains and snaps them upon our ankles and wrists; we don’t resist, for this enslaving demon cracks a wicked smile and crackles, ‘My name is Hope.’ And so we find ourselves stripped naked, dragged through the mud, humiliated before the world, beaten and bloodied and scourged—our skin rips, our bones snap, our tendons shatter, and our chests heave in agonizing sobs of despair riddled with falsified whispers of hope. And here is the unimaginable thing: while we hold the keys to the chains, we continue to bow down before this devilish creation we made out of our blood-soaked hands. We are
willfully
dragged through the thorn-beds, scratched raw, emotionally broken, physically and mentally scarred.” He was quiet for a second, then looked over at the man, tears beginning to tiptoe down his cheeks. “How could we have been so blind? How could we have been so ignorant? How could we have been so naïve?”

The next day Mark was sick, but two days later the sickness subsided. He continued ranting in the same vein: “Dreams are such ungodly demons. We give ourselves over to them, hoping that they will come true, and we convince ourselves that our destinies lie in our dreams. This is a naïve illusion. Dreams are demons masquerading as angels of light. And you know why? Because dreams ignore the reality of the world we live in. Life is unfair, unpredictable, and full of countless sufferings. And though our dreams ignore reality, we let them take hold of us, and they drain life from our veins. How much of my own life has been consumed in the pursuit of a dream that I now realize could never be possible? My dream was to be with Cara, forever, but it didn’t work out. It’ll never work out. I gave myself over to that dream, and my foolishness led to the dream bitch-slapping me across the face. How much sleep did I lose over that dream? How much of my precious time had I squandered over pursuing this futile dream? I don’t know, perhaps dreams are good. Perhaps they serve some hidden purpose. I don’t know. All I know is this: the more I learn, the more I see, the more I understand, the more our dreams must fade, being replaced with a philosophy bordering on nihilism. Nothing matters. There is no meaning. Dreams are empty because dreams don’t come true. Ultimately, our hopes are ill-founded dreams. It means nothing. It’s all meaningless. This world is fucked up, and hope is a damn illusion.”

The next week, Mark found the man going through several old crates in the barn, searching for more bayonets. The man had stopped searching and gone outside with the boy, and together they smoked a pair of cigarettes. Mark closed his eyes and spoke, his words cool and precise, and the man wondered if the boy had not practiced this speech prior to coming outside: “As I lied in the bed downstairs, staring at the wall, reflecting on all that had come and all that has continued to come, I began to perceive that the world may not have been as I’d always perceived it. I opened my mind, and I began to suspect that I was living a lie, quietly putting my hope in a fate that would never come. Somehow, in some ways, our souls are opened to the bitter truth: we see the devil leading us on with his blood-stained whip, we feel the sharp iron on our wrists and ankles rubbing our skin raw, and suddenly we hear our aching body crying out in protest to this awful enslavement. We discover the keys lie in our hands, so we unchain the clasps and shackles binding our wrists and ankles, we lift ourselves up out of the thorn-beds and mud-patches, we wash and bandage our Anthony Barnhart

Dwellers of the Night

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wounds, and we face the horizon. There is a deep sense of remorse within us—‘We have been living a lie!’ Those haunting demons—those dreams and hopes that enslaved us, suffocated us, strangled us, and beat us—whisper in our ears, ‘Let us back in,’ but we fight against their conniving lies. ‘The world is not our friend,’ we say; ‘We were naïve, ignorant, and full of false hopes, aspirations, and dreams. We have now embraced reality.’”

“Do you remember that conversation we had driving home from the grocery store? Back when we were still at your house?” Mark had asked another evening.

“No,” the man said. “I’m sorry.”

“The one when I looked at the playground and you asked me why I was staring at it.”

“I remember,” the man said. A lie.

“I was thinking of Ashlie. That was her school. Right after Mom and Dad died. I would always go to the school to pick her up, and she wouldn’t want to leave the swings. She’d have me push her, do what was called a ‘Superman’: I would get behind her on the swing, and I’d run underneath her, lifting her as high as possible into the air.” The boy smiled, remembering his beloved sister. “I asked you if you believed in Heaven, because I wanted to believe that Ashlie was there. Do you remember what you said?”

“I don’t remember.”

“You said you didn’t believe in Heaven. And I protested you. Know why?”

He handed Mark the cup of water. “No.”

“Because I believed in Heaven. Or, at least, I
wanted
to. Because that would mean that I hadn’t lost Ashlie forever. It would mean that I would see her again someday. But that’s just… just wishful thinking. There’s no such thing as Heaven. There would have to be a loving God for a good Heaven to exist, and the concept of a loving God is irreconcilable with what has taken place here.” Mark shook his head. “That’s just the way it goes, though, you know? You have family, you have friends, you have lovers… And then they’re gone. Relationships are so fleeting and futile. If I had to do it over again, I would strangle myself on my umbilical cord—because it would save me the pain of what this world has given me.”

VII

Mark is sick again. He has hallucinated several times, and more than once he has cried out for Ashlie, Cara, even his parents. It is mid-morning, and the man and Sarah sit upstairs. He is smoking and drinking coffee, kept awake overnight by Mark’s incessant screams of pain. They don’t say anything for a long while, just listen to the cardinals and grosbeaks singing in the limbs of the trees. Their melodies are sweet, a calm symphony, steadying the nerves, and—

The man curses, speaks up: “He’s suffering.”

Sarah looks up at him. “I know.”

“It’s intolerable for him.”

“He wants us to leave.”

“I’m not going to leave him.”

Sarah knows what he is saying. “We only have four rounds left in the rifle.”

“I know,” the man said. “And I can’t find anymore in the damn barn.”

She lowers her head, stares at her hands sprawled out on the counter. “It’s your call.”

Anthony Barnhart

Dwellers of the Night

549

The man tries to look her in the eyes, but she won’t look up. “Why mine?”

Keeping her eyes averted, “You’ve known him longer than me. He’s your friend.”

“He’s
your
friend, too.”

Now she looks up, and her eyes glower. “He trusts
you
to do the right thing.
Not
me.”

They are in the bedroom upstairs, the scattered bones of the twin skeletons lying on the floor. The man kicks a femur out of the way and approaches the dresser. His movements are sluggish yet precise, his head a whirlwind of thoughts, scattered like the bones on the floor, thoughts that cannot be given any semblance of understanding. A cesspool of mind-games. Sarah stands in the doorway, watching him, her face white as a ghost, the sweet paleness of the ash of Mount Vesuvius. The man opens the drawer and begins rummaging around, spreading the moth-eaten clothes against the far sides of the dresser. He quietly shuts it, not finding what he is looking for, and he moves to the next drawer.

He doesn’t realize he is speaking. “I told Mark, with Lindsey, ‘Don’t get attached. It will only make it harder in the end.’ I went against my own wisdom. I got attached. And now I have to do the thing I’ve feared doing ever since I met him.”