Dwellers of the Night: The Complete Collection (24 page)

The man says, “You just opened the gas tank.”

“Okay. How about this one?” He flicks another plastic switch.

There is the click of unlocking. The man goes behind the wide white van and opens the back door. It swings open easily. “That’s it,” he says.

Mark joins him. “Does it open from the inside?”

“Let’s see,” he says, climbing inside. “Shut the door.”

Mark does so. The door opens back up, revealing a grinning man.

“Think we’ll be safe?”

“If we’re quiet, yes.”

“Good,” the boy says, and he climbs inside, and they shut the door. They are immersed in darkness, but it doesn’t seem as dark as the night exposed.

The boy falls asleep quickly, despite the cold. The man can hear him breathing in the darkness. He curls up in one of the corners, pulling his knees tight against him. He wishes and yearns to be in that dreaded house, that structure that had once been a home, now a haven to ravenous memories and haunting dreams. There it is warm. There it is safe. He can hear Mark talking in his sleep. “Cara…

Cara…” interspersed with mumbling. There is a bang. The man tenses. Then he realizes it was no more than Mark’s foot thrusting against the side of the van, his leg twitching in the dream-world. The man clambers through the dark, right hand outstretched, and he finds the boy. He positions him carefully, so as not to wake him, and no more sounds come that night. The man falls asleep, and is awakened only once, when he hears what sounds like sniffing out the van. His heart thumps against his ribs. The unseen creature circulates the van, then leaves, its sniffing and heavy breathing tapering off into the opaque night. And when the man sleeps, he dreams: he sees he and the boy locked in the van, the van resting on a pillar of stone reaching high into the sky, reaching out of the depths of Hell itself, and below them, the souls of a billion dark-walkers, shrieking and tumbling over one another, waiting for their prize, their glee, their delight.

V

The boy is quiet in the morning. The adrenaline is gone. The struggle to survive has vanished, to come only when night falls. No birds sing. A stiff and cold wind blows. The trees hang limp and dead, the last dying leaves scattering to the ground and whisking away. Winter is coming quickly, pushing its head through the door, icicle-teeth grinning like a drunken Cheshire cat. They load into Anthony Barnhart

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the truck and head away from the lodge. The trees are empty and bare. No dark-walkers are to be seen in any direction. The man realizes now he has received a privileged glance—if “privileged” is the word one should choose—of the “doings” of the dark-walkers. Every night, with only one exception—that being the night of last—the man has holed himself up in his house, cut off from the world of the night. He tries to figure it out all in his head.

The dark-walkers move in groups. The dark-walkers communicate, though in a primitive sense of the term. The dark-walkers are not pure beasts; there is organization, even if it is subtle. They are not brilliant, but he finds it unsettling at the same time: they are congregating, they are forming communities—in the lesser sense of the word—and they are working together. The man can only be thankful that they will soon be gone: their food source has gone all but dry—how many bones of deer has he seen over the last month? how many fragments of what had once been cats and dogs?—and when winter comes, their bodies will not be able to sustain energy and nutrition, and they will quickly die.

Any consolation in that thought dies as they turn into the circle.

“Holy shit,” the man says, staring forward.

The boy says nothing, only follows the man’s gaze as the truck pulls to a stop. The morning sunshine breaking through sparse clouds reveals scattered body parts, half chewed, strewn about the middle of the circle. There is no question about what he and the boy are seeing: these are the remains of dark-walkers, killed not by Man, but by the demons themselves. Cannibals.

The man’s throat is dry, and his words are thick as sap. “They’re eating one another.”

“Good,” Mark grows. “Then there will be less of them to worry about.”

The man doesn’t share Mark’s optimism. And he doesn’t share his own thoughts with Mark. That isn’t what Mark wants nor needs. Mark wants only Cara, and that has been nothing short of a hope-filled delusion. The man drives away from the circle, but the thoughts cross his mind like electric lightning:

They’re eating their own.

Why?

Because they’re starving.

They’re killing themselves off.

No. They’re surviving. They have plenty to eat.

The weak are extinguished: the elderly, and the young.

The strong survive.

But what happens when they continue to eat one another, and none are left?

There is no answer to that last question, only an unsettling notion, something just outside of grasp, something that perhaps he speculates but refuses to believe, and thus denies the thought any manifestation in existence. He thinks of the human nature, and of the human impulses, and it sends a shiver up his spine. He convinces himself it is impossible, and they leave Mount Airy Forest far behind.

The streets are deserted.

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Chapter Seven

The Boulevard of Broken Dreams

“Better to die, and sleep

The never-waking sleep, than linger on

And dare to live when the soul’s life is gone.”

- Sophocles (circa 409 BC)

I

The nights grow colder, and the days pass slower. Stubborn winds tear the last dying leaves from the limbs of the trees, leaving nothing but skeletons reaching up with gnarled fingers into the gray and pallid skies. Incessant rains hammer down upon the city, and the Ohio River floods the banks, and water runs down the streets of downtown, carrying with it debris and broken bodies, shattering windows and seeping into the vacant buildings. The cries of the dark-walkers are lost with the thundering of the rain upon the loose shingles on the roof, and with the roaring of the downspouts as the rain turns the grass into a murky slush. Water creeps into the old house, staining the carpet, and the man and the boy wade through two inches of rainwater, scooping it out with buckets and throwing it outside, an endless venture with empty promises. They do not speak much anymore. The boy drowns in his sadness, his hopes having been shattered like a crystal ball thrown into the flames, and the man does not know how to comfort him; and even if he did, the man’s energies are sapped and exhausted, his entire body aches, and even the few tears he sheds over Kira come with the price of dry heaves and tingling fingertips.

The rains stop, and the skies turn blue once more, but the cold refuses to dissipate. The man contemplates building some sort of makeshift fireplace, but he decides against it: the risk of fire is too great, and he doesn’t appreciate the thought of finding himself running from a burning building into the hungry throngs of the dark-walkers. Instead he treks to LOWE’S HOME IMPROVEMENT several miles up Glenway Avenue, and he takes several battery-operated heaters and sets them about the house. The heat is sparse, for it disappears through the thin house walls, but it is an improvement.

The man finds himself lonely once more. He misses the conversations struck up between him and Mark before the incident at Cara’s house. The only sustenance that had kept Mark from going insane over his sister’s death had been the hope that he and Cara would be reunited, that in her arms he would find solace and comfort and some stability and foreknowledge, some hope that destiny hadn’t scratched his name from the Book of Life and that the favor of fate would shine upon him once more. But Cara had suffered the fate of all the others: she had been transformed into a demon, a “Beautiful Beast.” The boy tries not to bring her death into the equation—he knows, logically, that the man had no choice; but yet he knows that his lover has died at the hands of the man whom he lives with—but he still cannot bring himself to talk openly with the man. And so the bond of their friendship stretches, and it nears snapping.

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The communion of friendship is absent, and the man now has no distraction from the wonder that had been Kira. He thinks of her often, and he is pained as the memories become foggy and tainted. He sits in bed at night, and by the warm glow from the Petromax lantern, he clutches a wallet-sized picture of Kira, her face shining beautifully at him, eyes sparkling with vibrancy and adoration. He clutches this picture, squeezing it tight in shaking fingers, and not even the cold traversing his spine can tear his eyes from her. His tears freeze and slide down his cheeks as icicles, and he falls asleep with that picture in the vice-grip of his hands. Sleep offers no sanctuary; he dreams often of Kira, and these dreams are fraught with deep horrors. And the dreams are transforming night-after-night as his heart grows more and more calloused: first she is smiling, then she is a dark-walker herself, and the culmination is her slain by his own hand. The dreams shift and contort, and he finds them at the ballet, or walking down a cobblestone path lined with roses and lilies, or they are in the hospital holding their newborn child. In these dreams, which seem to offer some escape, he becomes a monster himself: no, not a dark-walker, but a vicious and deranged lunatic, and he wakes sweating and crying, remembering crisply the dream where he stabbed Kira over and over, with her pleading for her life; where he strangled her in the bed-sheets; where he held her down in the tub, watching with morbid fascination as she kicked and struggled until drowning took her life. He wakes shaking and weeping, and in the darkness he can almost see her thick red blood dripping from his quivering fingers.

The man fears going to sleep. So he paces back and forth in the den, driven mad by the howls of the dark-walkers and his self-imprisonment. He drowns the bottle deep, and he spends his mornings puking out the window and lying sprawled in the sheets, cold sweat beading over his forehead and his heart fluttering like the wings of a hummingbird. He is miserable, but the physical misery is greater than the emotional agony of those god-awful dreams, where he and Kira’s fates have switched, and where he is the murderer and she is the victim. It is when he dreams that he is killing his own newborn child—ripping the infant limb-from-limb as Kira and the doctors pound on the bulletproof glass of the observation room—that his sanity truly snaps.

II

The man sits downstairs, at the dining room table, wrapped warm in winter clothes, holding a cup of steaming coffee. A cigarette filter burns in the Mexican ashtray. Mark appears down the hallway, from the ladder leading to the upper level. He quietly walks over, grabs a mug from the cupboard, and pours himself a cup of coffee. He sits down, and the man looks at him: the boy’s eyes are bloodshot, and he seems to posses the 20-yard-stare. He doesn’t say anything. He looks back down at the steam wafting from his own coffee and hears Mark take a drink.

“In Indiana,” Mark says, shattering the quiet, “they had this thing called the Pizza Train. It was this train you could ride around to different sites, and they’d serve you pizza and drinks on the way. It ran on an old railroad track. I remember one weekend, Cara and I went on the Pizza Train with some friends, and we all crashed together at this hotel. It was on an anniversary of my mom and dad’s death, and I knew that I wouldn’t be able to enjoy the trip, and that Cara would take it personally. I told her that I would probably be upset for most of the trip. She said she understood. But during the trip… I had so much fun. Just being with her, being in her presence, laughing and talking and hanging out with her. The anniversary of the accident didn’t bother me much. And it was then that I knew that I would be with her for the rest of my life. She was my deliverance.”

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The man stares at him, sipping his coffee. “You left your sister on the anniversary of your parents’ death?”

The boy is silent, sipping his coffee.

Coffee is the staple morning diet. Sometimes they drink together. This morning, they awake at the same time, and as they drink, the boy speaks: “Every morning, we would go to this coffee shop. We’d order coffee. I always got a drip coffee—Sumatra blend—and she would get an iced coffee. Morning blend. We’d go to Mt. Echo and just drink our coffees. And then I’d go to work. Sometimes it would be a burden to get up that early, you know, especially if Ashlie had a bad night. And I wasn’t always in the best mood. I would be grouchy. Sometimes mean. But she would always insist that we do it. It became a ritual. It lost its importance.” He lowers his head, a tear in his eye. “All those things…

Those rituals… They meant nothing to us back then.” He looks up at the man. “But now they mean everything. And it’s too late.”

It is sixty degrees: a warm and sunny day. Almost paradise. The boy stands in archway of the open front door, gazing out across the lawn, at the trees rising on the other side of the road. The S-10 is parked in the driveway: blood had stained it from when he had hit the little boy and crushed the knees on the adult dark-walker, but the man had cleaned it off. The truck almost looks ceremonial as sunlight reflects harshly off the windshield and front fender. The boy closes his eyes and draws a deep breath. He treks inside and finds the man lighting a cigarette in the kitchen, a half-empty bottle of Norse Whiskey sitting beside his pack of menthol Newports.

“What?” the man asks, lighting the cigarette. The cherry glows bright.

“It’s a nice day out,” Mark says.

“I saw.” He takes a few hits, turns his back on the boy, grips the bottle. The boy fidgets. “Want to go on a walk? Get some fresh air?”

The man drowns a shot, clenches his teeth, sets down the bottle. “No.”

“Are you sure?” Mark asks. “You could use the fresh—”

He doesn’t turn to face the boy. “I said ‘no’, damn it. Are you fucking deaf?”