Anthem's Fall (25 page)

The closet was its own calamity of disorganization. Ryan had only been living here since August, and he wondered how it was possible that so much stuff had already accumulated. He folded his arms and leaned against the doorframe, scanning the heaps for anything that could be thrown away. Most of the contents were winter clothes that had not yet come into season and pairs of rarely worn shoes. A few clean shirts still hung on hangers. He would hold off on laundry until the weekend.

Ryan turned wearily from the closet and flopped down on his bed, bouncing lightly on the squeaking springs. Professor Hilton had pitched him over the edge of frustration, so for the time being Ryan allowed himself a break from thinking about grades. He strained his arm out to the stack of books on his desk and ran his finger over the spines, pulling out a weathered copy of Mary Shelley’s
Frankenstein
. The library cellophane wrapped around its cover was crinkled and worn with age.

Propping pillows behind his head and resting the book against his chest, Ryan slowly surrendered to the narrative as dusk took hold of the world outside his window. He turned page after page, and his mind ambled out of time and place as he engrossed himself in the strange tale. Although Ryan may have been in the warmth of his dorm room, his imagination was in a disconsolate and gloomy nineteenth-century Europe. With each passing page, Ryan’s eyelids grew heavier, and he began to doze. With half-opened eyes, Victor Frankenstein’s voice echoed in his mind.

It was on a dreary night of November that I beheld the accomplishment of my toils. With an anxiety that almost amounted to agony, I collected the instruments of life around me, that I might infuse a spark of being in the lifeless thing that lay at my feet . . .

Ryan started, his head nodding briefly. The sleepiness felt euphoric in its serenity, and his eyes grew heavy once again as he continued.

. . . It was already one in the morning; the rain pattered dismally against the panes, and my candle was nearly burnt out, when, by the glimmer of the half-extinguished light, I saw the dull yellow eye of the creature open; it breathed hard, and a convulsive motion agitated its limbs . . .

Ryan’s eyes drew back, and his head sunk into the pillow, his mouth open and his chest drawing slow steady breaths.

. . . But now that I had finished, the beauty of the dream vanished, and breathless horror and disgust filled my heart . . .

Ryan floated into an elusive realm of his own dream. A darkening veil of nighttime had fallen across him, and he stood in a lost forest. Heavy snow fell silently through still trees rising above him. Snowflakes landed weightlessly against his shoulders and brow. He held out his hand, and the snowflakes came to rest on his palm and melted to nothing. Overhead, a curtain of snow clung to the dark fingerlike branches of the trees. Beyond the shadowy branches, midnight clouds hung low and tranquil over the woodland, quietly expelling their wondrous endowment. He turned and looked around him, then began trudging slowly through the silent forest. The snow was accumulating quickly, and his feet were already buried to his shins.

Ryan peered into the hush of the night.

As his awareness mounted, a disquieting dread began to surface, a terrible fear like sludge in his chest. Suddenly, he did not like the trees, or what might be hiding behind them. The gathering snowfall began to worry him. And he felt cold, a cold somehow unrelated to temperature. It was some other type of cold—an iciness of anxiety. With the onset of his chilled heart came a distinct awareness of another presence in the woods. Something was with him, and it was watching his movements from the shadows. When he moved through the snow, he thought he could hear it move with him, and when he became still to listen, so too did it. What it was Ryan could not be certain, but it was near, and it was hiding—perhaps behind one of the thick trunks or a step out of sight in the enveloping snowfall. Ryan could feel its gaze upon him. He stopped to listen more carefully, and squinted into the rows of thick dark trunks. A twig snapped somewhere to his right, and he turned to face the source of the noise.

At first he saw only skeletal bushes, weighed down by the heft of the storm. But then he saw it. Through the obscuring snowfall and darkness, something was hiding behind a tree. It was peering out at him, its body close against the other end of the trunk to conceal itself. Ryan’s anxiousness disappeared as he realized the creature was not a threat.

It was a child. The child was shaking, and Ryan realized that it was scared of him.

“Hey,” Ryan called out in a soft tone, but the child flinched at his voice.

“It’s okay. Are you lost?” Ryan lifted a leg from the snow and took a step toward the tree. The strange child pulled its head back from the sight of his approach and let out a piercing melancholy sob that resonated in the winter beauty of the night.

“It’s okay, I’m not going to hurt you,” Ryan said, and slowly approached the tree. “I can help you.”

But he stepped too near, and the child fled with an upturn of snow. Ryan watched in bewilderment as it ran into the shadows of the forest.

A long crimson cloak flowed in the child’s wake.

Ryan began to trot after it, the sound of his footfalls squeaking as his feet pressed into the deepening snow. His heavy breath rose and fogged his vision as his pace quickened. Something was wrong—the child needed help. It would die on its own in these cold woods. In a sudden panic, Ryan lifted his forearms to cover his face and lurched onward through the underbrush, twigs snapping and breaking against his body.

“Wait!” he called out. “Wait!”

As he followed the tracks left in the snow by the child, a familiar smell began to gather around him. It was the pleasing smoky redolence of a crackling wood fire. Ryan took some comfort in the rustic scent, but he needed to make sure the child found its way home—that it returned to the fire. And yet as he gained on the child’s small tracks, the smell of wood fire intensified to a dense smoke that Ryan could now see lingering amid the falling snow. The fog of smoke gathered around him, as if the forest itself was burning. Just as he began to question the source of the smoke, Ryan crashed out of the last stand of trees and staggered into an open field. There was a great bonfire in the middle. It shone like a great flickering candle in the distance, its warmth glinting through the shifting smoke and snowfall. Ryan made for the bonfire, trudging forward through the knee-deep snow, much deeper here in the field.

He could hear only the swish of his legs as they slashed through snowdrifts, but as he came closer to the fire, he began to discern other sounds. Carried faintly through the snowfall came screams of anguish. Shrieks were rising and falling against the storm. And as Ryan came closer still, the screams multiplied, and he saw the bonfire was far larger than he had first thought.

Ryan halted in disbelief of a sight that turned his heart black.

What he had thought was a bonfire was an entire village caught ablaze. A dozen burning huts, made with little more than straw and sticks on walls of stones, were raging furiously against the snow. Flames roared and sticks crackled and broke with piercing snaps. Ryan saw the inhabitants of the village. They looked ancient and out of place and time, like a primitive people. Their numbers were uncountable as they fled the ring of huts. He realized now that the child had been running away from this village. The child had not been lost; it had been fleeing for its life.

An evil presence had descended upon this ring of huts.

A person who looked different than the others walked past the shadows cast by the fires. The man looked bizarre and foreign. He wore strange armor that glinted in the red firelight and he carried a gun-like weapon. This man looked so unlike the rest of the people with their furs and sticks. The villagers were running from the man with the gun and into the cover of forest. Ryan watched as a number of stragglers snuck into one of the huts that had not yet caught aflame to hide from the stranger. The armor-clad man calmly approached the hut and leveled his gun.

“No!” Ryan screamed as fire belched from the gun’s barrel. The hut erupted into searing flames. Now much more visible in the luster of the blaze, the man wiped his brow with his forearm and moved to the next hut.

“Stop! Stop!” Ryan called out, sprinting toward the man. “Why?”

As the man turned around and aimed at another hut filled with wailing villagers, Ryan ran in front of him. The gun screamed, but its fire sizzled and went out against his chest. Ryan somehow knew that while in this dream, neither fire nor injury could harm him; he was invincible. Stunned by his sudden intrusion, the armored man fell back into the snow.

“What the
hell
are you doing?” the man shouted, his voice so familiar to Ryan. The man rose to his feet, spitting snow out of his mouth and brushing it off his shoulders in indignation.

“What are
you
doing?” Ryan screamed, unable to hold back his emotions at the burning horror raging around them. “Why are you doing this?”

The armored man laughed. It was a great jovial laugh full of personality and humor. “What do you mean? You got the last order—kill the intelligent ones.”

Ryan swallowed hard. “
Why
?”

“How the hell should I know why?”

The fires in the village were spreading quickly now, leaping eagerly between the huts. Snow sizzled and evaporated with a high-pitched whine against the flames. The village people were scattering, their screams of despair horrendous. An infant stumbled out from one of the burning huts and fell to the ground with flesh blackened and smoking. Ryan looked in disbelief from the carnage to the man with the gun. “How could you possibly do this?”

“If you want to be court-martialed, that’s fine with me.” The soldier moved to push past Ryan, but Ryan grabbed him by the shoulder. He had never felt such fury, such certainty of hate.

“Are you serious, kid?” the man looked down at Ryan’s hand. “It’s almost over anyway, who cares?”

“These people are wielding
sticks
and
stones
!” Ryan screamed over the unspeakable massacre.

The man wiped his forearm against the sweat of his brow and shrugged, pulling the gun back up to this shoulder. “Just following orders.”

Ryan peered through the gathering smoke as the villagers tried to beat down the fires and usher their young away from the village and into the forest. Smaller children were foundering in the tall snow, unable to push through its weight. Ryan’s heart was pounding like a sledgehammer, his breathing constricted.

“Well, what’s it going to be?” the soldier said with the vacant certainty of one relying on authority. He held the gun out to Ryan. “Your turn.”

In a daze Ryan stumbled from the armored man and into the chaos of the burning huts. He realized the villagers were fleeing him just as they were running from the man with the gun. Something rough hit his back, and Ryan turned around to face one of the bigger villagers who was staring at him with rage. A wooden spear with a chipped stone head lay splintered and broken on the ground from the blow to Ryan’s back. The villager wound up and threw another spear. The spear sliced a path through the smoky air and fractured in two as it bounced off Ryan’s chest. Ryan looked down at the shattered spear, and for the first time realized he was wearing the same armor as the horrible man with the gun.

They were together.

“I—I’m sorry,” Ryan muttered, feeling nauseated by the hatred in the large villager’s eyes. A family was sobbing beside a burning hut. Some ran into the fiery entrance, but were driven out by the roaring heat. One after another, Ryan watched them leap over the flames but then fall backward, unable to stand the torrid heat. They were obviously trying to rescue someone trapped inside. He ran to them and slipped past the blazing doorway. Ryan felt nothing—he was utterly impervious to the heat—as he stood amid the crackling inferno and surveyed the pulsing cinders and roaring flames. Prostrate on the scorched dirt floor, amid a bed of fire, was a young child. With a horrible gasp Ryan realized it was the child he had encountered in the woods.

The child was dead.

Blistering burn marks covered its pitiable body and an expression of dread and agony was etched on its face. It had endured a death by fire, not smoke. Ryan stepped through the flames, picked up the pathetic form and carried it out as the hut collapsed in embers. He placed the child in the snow and for a long moment stared into the young terrified eyes. The terror upon the child’s expression ripped a gaping hole through Ryan’s soul as ashen snow fell softly on its face. The long crimson cloak was still hung around the poor child’s body. A few spots were still smoldering, and Ryan patted the embers into the snow and pulled the burned cloak off the child’s slender shoulders. A few of the villagers, perhaps the young one’s family, watched from the distance as he looked down at their child.

Another spear hit Ryan’s back.

“I’m sorry. I—I’m sorry,” Ryan murmured. He turned to the armored man with the gun, who was busy setting fire to the last remaining hut. A sweltering wrath like he had never known surfaced within him, and Ryan sprinted at the man in an absolute rage. His velocity felt unreal, the strength in his legs and arms incomprehensible as the snow in his path exploded from his speed. He felt the power of a god within him, and his fury. . . .

Ryan let out a broken shriek, his body suddenly sitting upright in his dark dorm room.

The copy of
Frankenstein
had fallen from his chest and lay open on the tile floor. An inky evening claimed the sky beyond his window, and the dorm room was cast in shadows. Ryan was covered in a cold sweat, and he wiped his forehead on the sleeve of his sweatshirt with a long quivering sigh in the still darkness. Steadying his feet on the floor, he stood shakily and flicked on his lamp. He leaned his palms against his desk and stared quietly out the window. Under the streetlights students were walking to dining halls for dinner.

It had been a year since the last time he saw that child’s burned face in his dreams, and Ryan had even begun to think—to hope—that he had at last made peace with his recurring nightmare.