Dwellers of the Night: The Complete Collection (19 page)

“Get up,” he says.

The boy doesn’t move.

“You’re going to get soaked. Get up.”

The boy raises his head from between his legs. His eyes are bloodshot from the tears.

“Come on,” the man says.

The boy bites his lip and stands. The man walks to the boy’s right side, takes him gently by the arm. His clothes are beginning to become soaked, clinging to his skin. He escorts Mark away from the car, careful to make sure he does not see again what remains within. As they near the intersection, Mark turns back around. He begins to move towards the car, but the man’s grip on his arm grows tighter, a vice. The boy cannot move. He turns around, gives the man a death-glare. The man says, “It won’t do you any good.”

“She’s my sister,” the boy says. “She’s all that I have left.”

“I know,” the man says. “I’ll take care of her.”

“Like hell you will.”

The man just looks at him. “What will it change if you go over there?”

He opens his mouth to reply, but he quickly shuts it.

Thunder booms. “Can we go now?” the man asks.

Raindrops slide down the boy’s face. He nods.

The thunder shakes the house, threatening to loose it from its moorings. Mark and the man sit across from each other at the table. The rain raps heavily on the boarded-up windows. Another pot of coffee has been made. The man snubs his cigarette in the foreign ashtray and reaches across the table, grabs the pot of coffee, and pours himself some more. HIGHLANDER GROG. He sets the coffeepot back in the middle of the table and takes another drink. The coffee is cold. He cups the mug in his hands, pretending it is warming his fingers. The cold September rains seem to breathe an aching chill into the house that nothing can refuse.

The boy nods towards the pack of GT1’s on the table. “Can I have a cigarette?”

Anthony Barnhart

Dwellers of the Night

92

“Yeah,” the man says, sliding the pack across the table.

The boy takes a cigarette from the box. “Can I have the lighter?”

The man tosses it to him.

The boy takes a hit, leans back in his chair. “It doesn’t take away the pain…”

“…But it helps.”

“Yeah,” the boy says. “It helps.”

The boy is lying sleeping on the sofa. The boy had lied down as the man proceeded to wash the coffee pot in a bucket of distilled water in the kitchen. As the boy had drifted off to sleep, he had said his sister’s name over and over, and he had cried a little. The man grabs some blankets from the closet and pulls them over the boy, gently so as not to wake him. He listens to the rain hammering on the roof, and he believes it is lightening. He goes into the garage and finds a garbage bag and some gloves. He leaves through the front door and walks down State Avenue. It is nearly 3:30. Dusk is coming earlier and earlier. He finds the wrecked car and moves over to the curb, around the wooden telephone pool, and grabs the front passenger’s side door handle. He pulls it up and opens the door. He looks inside, then wrenches away. The stench is unbearable. He quickly slides on the gloves and grabs what is left. A few shredded pieces of clothing. A tennis shoe. The stub of a leg, the edges gnawed and bloodied. He puts it all in the bag and ties it with a double-knot. He tries not to notice the heavy bloodstains soaking the seat, the glove box compartment, the floor. He shuts the door and carefully pulls off the gloves, careful not to get any blood on him, though most of it has dried. He casts the gloves into the ditch, where they fumble along with a slow-moving watery current and disappear into a tubular drain. He gets back to the house around 4:00. The boy is still sleeping. He puts the bag by the front door and goes and wakes up the boy. The boy starts when he is awakened. The man says, “If you want to bury her tonight, we need to start now. It’ll be dusk soon, and it’ll get darker quicker because of the rain.” The boy wants to do it tonight.

They stand before the fresh grave as dusk threatens to fall.

The rain had let up when they had first went into the backyard. Both had taken shovels from the garage, which the man had accumulated over the past month, and they had dug a four-foot-deep hole. The task went quicker than with digging Kira’s grave, for the earth had been moistened by the rain, and the rocks and clay easily gave way to the iron spades. They had lain the teenager’s remains into the grave, and they had begun piling the dirt back into the hole. Mark had been unable to do that part; he left the gravesite in tears, and he sat down on the tree stump next to the fallen oak, numbly staring at the man’s labor, arms hanging limp at his side. The man had completed filling in the hole, and Mark had returned. Now they stand before the grave, the shovels lying to their side, both of them staring at the disturbed dirt lying atop of all that remained of Mark’s beautiful sister. The man looks over to Mark. “Do you think we should say something?”

Mark doesn’t answer for a moment, then, “I think so.”

“Okay. What should we say?”

“I don’t know.”

“Okay.”

They stay at the grave until the calls of the dark-walkers begin to carry out over the city, shaking the air like the screams of a million coyotes. The ungodly calls beckon forth the storms, and the clouds swirl above their heads. Rain begins to fall. The man takes Mark by the arm. He doesn’t resist. They return to the house. Mark ascends the ladder as the man bolts the back door and slides wooden Anthony Barnhart

Dwellers of the Night

93

boards up against the glass, locking them into place. The man climbs after Mark and pulls up the ladder. Mark is nowhere to be seen. A moment later Mark emerges from the den. The man says, “I didn’t get you a mattress today.”

“It’s okay,” Mark says. “I’ll just sleep on the floor again.”

“We can get a mattress tomorrow.”

“It’s okay.”

III

“You don’t cry anymore, do you?” The man is throwing more blankets down onto the floor for Mark, as the night will be even colder than the last. At Mark’s words he freezes. Mark is standing beside the wall, the barricaded door to the bedroom next to him. The man looks up at Mark, says, “All my tears have dried up.” He has not cried in a long while. Kira still haunts him. In his every dream, Kira is there. He wakes aching, heart throbbing, longing for her. But he cannot deny what he knows to be true. This is no waking nightmare, no anesthesia dream. This is real. And Kira is gone. He has grown cold, bitter towards the world and everything in it. He doesn’t laugh. He doesn’t smile. He lives dayby-day, throttling all the fiery emotions that threaten to carry him asunder. There are times when he wishes to slice the blade against his wrist, but he is slowly coming to resignation and acceptance of fate’s new roll of the dice.

You don’t cry anymore
. Mark’s words echo through his mind. The rain continues to rap on the boarded-up windows, and thunder drowns out the sounds of the dark-walkers outside. He lies in bed, on his side, covered with the blankets, fingers cold, knuckles white as ash. He stares at the bouquet of purple lilies resting in a drained bottle of whisky, sitting on the wooden crate beside his cot. The flowers are wilted, curled up on themselves, drained of all life.
Like Kira
, he thinks. He remembers taking the lilies for her while at the airport. That day lives forever in his mind, is always present, yet is so far away. He rolls onto his other side and stares at the wall. He remembers her laugh, the sweetness of her voice, the way she would stroke his cheek, and he falls into a fitful sleep. He dreams she and him are together, that they are sitting before a fire, wrapped up in quilts on the sofa, drinking hot cocoa with marshmallows. He awakes halfway through the night and feels rainwater dripping from the ceiling as the house creaks and groans. He lies his head on the pillow and lies awake till the sun creeps up and the dwellers of the night return to their honeycomb caverns.

The apartment is nicer than the man expected. It is nestled into a side-street laden with run-down and dilapidated buildings, and the entrance to the apartment complex passes between an open gate that creaks in the stillborn breeze. The gate is decorated with newfound rust from ceaseless autumn rains. There are four different apartment buildings, two on either side of a parking lot with numbered parking spaces. Beat-up pickup trucks, falling-apart cars, and a few assorted minivans and a POP-ALOCK truck sprawl across the lot. The man pulls the purple Escort up beside the last building on the left, gnarled limbs of dead trees hanging over from behind a stone barricade and an overflowing dumpster. The man and the boy leave the car, and the boy opens the front door of the apartment complex. They ascend two flights of stairs in the dark, and the man feels as if unseen eyes are watching. The front door to the boy’s apartment is open, hanging on its hinges. The man raises the pistol and enters first. Light comes in through the windows. He goes room-to-room, searching for any new inhabitants, finds nothing. He stops in the bedroom, where he can see blood covering the bedAnthony Barnhart Dwellers of the Night

94

sheets, dried on the floor, crawling pricks of blood staining the far corner and adjacent walls. He returns to the boy and tells him to hurry. The man sits on one of the sofas and looks about the room as the boy gathers some things. Gallons of distilled water stacked against the wall. Books lying scattered on the floor. Soda cans crumpled and thrown into a bare wastebasket. He notices that there is no television. The boy must have gotten rid of it. He goes into the kitchen and opens the fridge. Nothing. He opens a cupboard and finds some bottled water. He takes one out, unscrews the lid, takes a drink. A moment later the boy returns. He is holding a single duffel bag bulging with contents.

“Did you get everything?”

“Yes.”

“Okay.” The man heads for the door.

Mark is behind him. Trailing footsteps cease.

The man turns. “What is it?”

The boy looks at him, then looks away, dropping his duffel bag. He half-walks, half-runs to the bedroom. The man sees him enter. The boy returns, clutching something in his hand. A stuffed animal, what looks to be a Dalmatian puppy, sprinkled with black-on-white spots. A pink bow is tied around its neck. “Her name is Molly,” the boy says. “Ashlie… She loved her. She slept with her every night. She said it brought her… comfort. Somehow, it made things better. I never understood it. I used to have a big stuffed polar bear when I was a little boy. I would have night terrors. Mom and Dad gave me the polar bear, telling me that it would chase away my bad dreams. It worked. But I grew out of it. Ashlie… I don’t know. Maybe Molly kept the bad dreams away. Sometimes Ashlie would cry in her sleep, but not all the time. Sometimes she would wake up crying, and I would hold her until she fell back asleep.” His fingers are white-knuckled, gripping the stuffed animal in a vicegrip. “She would want me to have it.”

“Okay,” the man says.

They are driving back to the house, navigating the narrow, winding streets of Upper Price Hill. They pass a construction zone for the new school—GRAND OPENING SPRING SEMESTER 2012—the sign reads. A few car wrecks, absent of passengers. Abandoned vehicles. Leaves scattered across the street, blown into the gutters by the passing car. A cryptic playground surrounded by a high-rise wire fence: the swings wisp back and forth in the sullen breeze. Between buildings, the city of Cincinnati can be seen, sprawled out in the valley, the Ohio River a chalky paste. The boy clutches the stuffed animal. His duffel bag is in the back. The man tries to turn down a street, sees the intersection is blocked by a two-vehicle car crash; he curses and pulls back onto the main road, seeking another route.

“I was taking a Night Class,” the boy says.

“What?” the man asks, keeping his eyes on the road.

“A Night Class. Where you take classes at night and work your job during the day.”

“I know what a Night Class is. I took them in college.”

“I was in a Night Class,” Mark says, “when it happened.”

“Oh.”

“I can remember it perfectly. It was a business marketing class. We were learning about advertising or something. I don’t really remember. I was falling asleep. What I do remember is the teacher leaving the room, and everyone starts getting headaches. Rubbing their temples and stuff. It made me get a headache, too. Maybe headaches are contagious. I don’t know. But then they started bleeding from their nose. And then their eyes. And then their ears and mouths. I didn’t know what to Anthony Barnhart

Dwellers of the Night

95

think of it. I was the only one not affected. I got up and ran out into the hallway to get a nurse. The hallway was abandoned, it was night-time, and then the nurse appeared from another doorway. I called to her, told her we needed help. Her back was to me. When she turned… I saw that she was bleeding, too. And she was holding something in her hand, a scalpel. I don’t know where she got a scalpel. I just thought doctors had scalpels. But then she started coming towards me, her body twitching. Arms ticking like a clock. I knew something wasn’t right. My defenses went up. She came at me, swinging that fucking scalpel. It cut me right down the arm. Drew a lot of blood. She tried to strike me again, but she missed; probably because she had so much blood in her eyes that she couldn’t see. I turned and shoved her in the back, right into the wall, next to the water fountain. She sagged down, and the scalpel fell from her hands. I kicked it away and started screaming for help. No one answered. And that’s when I looked down, and I saw that she was lying on the floor, going into convulsions. I just stood there and watched. Fucking
watched
. Part of me was fascinated.
Fascinated
. How can you be fascinated by something like that? I think it was shock… Yeah, it was shock. So I ran back into the classroom, and I saw that all the other students were lying on the floor, toppled out of their desks, or they were still in their desks, but their heads were down and their arms dangling to the side. Some were still twitching. I didn’t know what to do. So I ran out of the building, calling for help. I heard an explosion in the street and ran down to see, and I saw that two cars had crashed, and one of them was engulfed in flames. The longest night of my life… I got into my car and drove to the apartment, terrified. The streets were deserted. Most people were inside, you know, it was like midnight or something. I don’t remember. But I got to the apartment and ran inside, and I found Ashlie sleeping on the sofa. She had fallen asleep in front of the television, which was now nothing but static. I tried the phones, but none of them worked. The light switch worked for a moment, but then it faded, flickered, and went out. Ashlie woke up. I kissed her on the cheek, took her to her bed, laid her back down. She fell asleep. I sat there all night, right beside her. I didn’t want to go outside. I didn’t want to see anymore. I wanted to wake up. I was convinced it was a dream, that it would end any moment. It never has. And part of me still refuses to believe it’s real. Part of me is still… Still waiting to wake up. You know?”