Dwellers of the Night: The Complete Collection (131 page)

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flicks the switch; the lights extinguish. By this time the cries of the dark-walkers are booming, coming down from the mountainsides, puddling together in the mountain pass. The man walks back to the driver’s door of the semi and pulls the keys out of the ignition. He walks to the back of the trailer and unlocks the door and climbs inside. He pulls the door shut and flicks the lighter. He holds the lighter up, and the firelight illuminates several wooden pallets covered with white boxes wrapped in cellophane. The man manages to shove several of the pallets against the back door, and he moves to the front of the trailer and squats between the pallets. He pulls out the GRENADIER and lights it, puffing slowly. It has a different taste, something foreign and exotic. Something different than his cigarettes. Something he likes. And it doesn’t even bother him that he retrieved it from the pocket of a man who has been dead for eleven months. He smokes, and he thinks.

IV

What greater curse is there than to be alone? To become aware of your nothingness and insignificance? To come face-to-face with the bloodcurdling reality that you are worth nothing? What greater curse is there than to stand alone amidst a sea of faces and have not one meeting of the eyes?

He has felt this way before. He remembers standing in the mall at Newport, sitting on that bench, just waiting and begging and pleading for someone to acknowledge his existence. The couple had sat down next to him and turned their backs and thus resigned him to the yet-only-contemplated fate. He had gone to that bridge and stood at the railing and stared at the icy waters below. The water churning and groaning and swelling, the waters captivated him, held him entranced with their mystical promises. The gloves and the wool cap did not hold back the ice-laced wind, and it stung him in the eyes and chewed his fingers to the bone but was only a minor discomfort that paled in comparison to the icy fingers of resolution that had crawled their way, hour-by-hour and day-by-day and week-by-week into his stillborn heart. His heart had ruptured and ceased to beat but yet he lived on, each arctic breath that pierced his lungs with pinpricked pokers continuing to give life and sustenance to a form long since destined for death. He stood upon that bridge and looked into those waters and knew only what had been, what was, and what would never be.

LONELINESS: THE CONDITION OF BEING LONELY; SOLITUDE; SECLUSION. No: an infectious disease, contracted at birth, infecting every man, poisoning the bones and sinews and muscles and organs, symptomized by tears and resentment and the beautiful art of suicide. A disease to which there is no cure, a disease which every man tries to cure: wealth, popularity, fame, success, love. A disease that is always present, sometimes quiet, but deafeningly loud in the most tender of moments. He has tried everything to eliminate this disease, has embraced the only radiation therapy that is tried and found to be wanting. Alcohol. Cigarettes. Sex—but only left empty and sad while lying next to her, nauseas with the disease that seemed to go into remission only to return. And he has tried to love—but love is a farce, a lie, no better than brandy and scotch, an intoxicating drink that only makes the disease that much more unbearable. Alcohol. Cigarettes. Sex. Love. Placebos. Masks. Veils. Lies. Empty hopes and futile dreams. It is a disease that can go into remission but always comes on so strongly when the oncologist proclaims, “Thou art healed!”

The curse of loneliness infects the bones, but there is a greater curse that infects even the marrow of the bones. This curse is greater, deeper, darker, exacerbating and exponentially multiplying the Anthony Barnhart

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disease and curse of loneliness. This is a curse accepted, a curse adopted. It is a curse that is tempting and promising—with what fate-stricken futility!—to relieve and even eradicate the disease. It is a curse that promises to deliver the antithesis to loneliness, a curse that promises peace and joy and contentment and even the oh-so-sought-after happiness. It is a curse that has stricken mankind, a curse that is a pill to be swallowed whole and without restraint. This curse is a pill, coming in all shapes and sizes and in a myriad of different colors and tastes. It is a pill that promises no ill side effects but yet delivers only another disease, a greater disease, a disease that makes the heart heavy behind the ribs, a disease that coats the lungs with sophomoric residue, a disease that will eventually paralyze… and even kill.

This curse is deceptive. It wraps itself in light, in a technicolor dream-coat, and it poses as the most beautiful of creatures: as the streamlined dolphins in the sea and the clownfish amidst the coral reefs; as the striped zebra and the elegant giraffe; as the great moose with its moon-reaching antlers and as the soaring eagles that climb even higher than the moon. It disguises itself as the most wonderful of creations: the lilies of the field, the towering sequoias, the blood-red sunrises and sunsets. It is the most seductive of all God’s creatures, a siren wrapped in wet white silk with eyes filled with lust and desire. It comes with the sound of the waterfalls, with the melodies of the songbirds, with the great symphonies that fill the ornately-designed opera-halls. It seduces man with its illusion, and its façade shatters upon embracement: it is the fanged hammerhead dwelling in the barnacle-laden hulls of sunken ships; it is the crocodile with its killer jaws; it is the hyena with its mocking laugh; it is the wolf with its disemboweling claws; it is the bird of prey with its shearing talons. It is the Venus flytrap, closing its jaws around those lured into its grasp. It is the rose, promising beauty but delivering only pain. It is the whore playing the harp of enchantment but leaving her “lovers” mauled and mangled and bloodied and empty. It comes with the sound of drowning rains, with the cries of the ravens on the hunt, and it is the quiet man who walks the dark aisles of the opera-halls, abducting the weak and slitting their throats in the bathroom and leaving them abandoned upon the toilet seats with frozen eyes and slack jaws and necks that smile with the ear-to-ear jugular slash.

What was it that kept him from gripping the railing and pulling himself up and plunging headfirst into the surging waters? He knows the answer. That which kept him from completing the most sane and logical and reasonable resolution is that which holds him now in its grasp. It was that fierce curse, the curse even worse than loneliness, that bittersweet curse that poisons the heart and constricts the limbs and forces the enslaved feet to carry you where you do not want to go: deeper into the darkness, deeper into the misery, deeper into the abyss. It is the curse of HOPE, a curse that promises a future but delivers only inexorable agony. HOPE: the great oxymoron, marked most pointedly by its synonym HOPELESSNESS. It was hope that convinced him things would get better, it was hope that pulled him away from the bridge and back through the mall and back to his JEEP, and it was a hope that could only disappoint. It is now hope that keeps him from slitting his wrists with the bayonet, hope that has enslaved him, hope which leads him deeper into the mountains. He hopes and does not know what he hopes for. This hope is a mist, a fog, with no definite shape, nor even an apparition. It is a hope that clouds his mind and scrambles his logic: for he knows that the only logical course of action is to take his own life, to depart from this wretched and empty and miserable existence, to feel the warmth of his own blood on his spasming fingers, to see the blood smoke and steam in the coldness as it delivers death and thus delivers life. The logical course of action is to become nothing more than yet another skeleton in tattered clothes; for what is he but a dead man walking, void of life and sustenance, never smiling, tears his daily diet, never laughing, never Anthony Barnhart

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enjoying, yet striving for something unseen and unknown and yet hoped for? It is the logical course of action to resign, to fondle the bayonet with its serrated blade, to look upon it no longer as a dagger but as a medicine to ease his aching heart. But he sits. And he smokes. And he hopes. And he hates himself for it. But he has been seduced, he has been enslaved, and the choice is no longer his own: he must carry on.

V

He leaves the trailer in the morning. He has not slept much, and his body aches from the cramped quarters. He had tried to sleep amongst the boxes but had been cornered in the side by the hard corners of the pallets. When he opens the door, a burst of brilliant cold splashes him in the face, a cold so dark and deep that its splices right through him. He pushes the door open wider and drops down to the pavement cracked and interwoven with weeds. His throat is sore, and he feels as if he is swallowing razorblades. He looks up to the sky, and dark storm-clouds, laden thick with rain, are stumbling over one another in a drunken ballet. He goes back to the truck and carries his bag of granola and cigarettes in one hand and the sawed-off shotgun in the other. He munches on granola as he starts the engine and continues driving west, the mountains on either side, the tips bathed in the dark shadows of the clouds.

He is thirsty. He curses himself for not gathering bottled water from the gas station. He doesn’t know how long it will be until the next town. As he is thinking about the stupidity of his lack of foresight, the road bends around the slope of a mountain and opens up into a valley. The road stretches into the valley, and it is lined on either side by rich woodlands, the trees towering and flowered in green leaves. As he drives into the valley, he sees that one of the mountainsides is sloped low, and upon the mountainside is row after row of cabins. He gets nearer, and a large sign off to his left emerges: COPPER MOUNTAIN RESORT. He has never heard of it. He drives past several recreational buildings, and he breaks away from the interstate. He climbs the road leading to the rows of cabins, and he stops the truck in front of one. It is a two-story with a walk-around porch and tall windows that reflect the sunlight. These are summer homes, and immediately he is anxious: the plague struck in the middle of the summer. This place would have been populated. He stops the truck and grabs the sawed-off shotgun and gets out. He walks onto the front porch and nears one of the windows. There is dust on the other side, so he cannot see through. He swings the butt of the shotgun into the glass and it shatters. He punches away the remaining slabs of glass and crawls into the room. It is a living area with a quiet fireplace and several leather sofas and an ornate mahogany coffee table. There is a stairwell leading up to the loft. He shouts but gets no reply except for the echo of his own voice. He goes into the kitchen and opens the refrigerator. The stench is nauseating. He sees several bottles of flavored water and pockets them. He stands in the kitchen and drinks and then goes out to the truck and leaves the resort behind.

The mountains are drawn out on either side of him, and the interstate follows a large valley lined with trees and bubbling creeks filled with water-polished rocks. Lightning dances in the skies before him, and he can see rain falling in the distance, a dark sheet of blue drenching the tops of the mountains and making them fade into nothingness. He stops the truck at a rest stop at Shrine Pass and takes a walk to stretch his legs. There are a few scattered cars, most with wheels flattened of air Anthony Barnhart

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and sporting shattered windows. He stands in front of the welcome center and smokes his cigarettes and shivers in the cold. He wants to turn on the heat in the truck but knows it will waste gas; he hasn’t seen any gas stations yet. He stands and smokes and he watches the sheet of rain approaching from the west. The wind becomes stronger, and it blows at him with a ferocity that kicks up dust from the ground and makes it sting in his eyes. He turns his back to the wind and walks back to the truck, flicking the cigarette to the ground: the wind catches the butt and carries it upwards, and the cherry bursts and sprays its embers in a solemn firecracker dance before they are extinguished in the cold.

By noon he is in Gypsum, Colorado. It is a small town facing several towering, jagged mountains that reach up into the sky. The rain has fallen heavily, and a mist clings to the ground. He pulls off the interstate and parks next to the Town Hall. The rain has let up for a moment, and he gets out to stretch his legs. He splays the map over the hood of the truck and instantly regrets it: the wetness soaks through the map and makes the colors bleed together. He holds it up and curses his misfortune, and he opens the door to the truck and places the map on the seat and leans over it, trying to trace his route. After Gypsum there are few towns, and the mountain passes dwindle. The road cuts into the mountains via tunnels, and it climbs along the mountain’s slopes with stiff sheer drops along the side of the road. It will be a difficult trek if the road is broken and if boulders have fallen onto it, and it will be even more difficult if the rains continue. He is just thankful that it isn’t snowing. It is summertime, and he knows it won’t snow. Not even in the Rockies.

He has refilled the gas tank in Gypsum and now he is driving deeper into the mountains. Excitement surges through his veins: he can be in Aspen by dusk. The thought seems so unreal, so strange, that he doesn’t quite know how to process it. He tries not to think about it as he navigates the winding road, the road that climbs along the slopes offering beautiful panoramas of the interlaced mountains, the road that ducks down into tunnels submerged in darkness—he hates these tunnels, always fears dark-walkers within them, but has not had any troubles—, the road that twists and turns just like the rhythms of fate and destiny. He tries not to think about what he will find at Aspen, for it makes his heart free and heavy all at the same time. Instead he thinks about
them
, the dark-walkers, how they are changing and evolving. He remembers New Harmony: the rapid pace of their spread, how the dead fell and rose so quickly. It was disturbing, but he has not thought about it in depth till this point. He thinks about the events at the JEFFCO AIRFIELD, how the dark-walkers let them pass. He does not know why they would do such a thing, but he has an idea, that they were delivering them because of their compassion, that they had assisted them in their devouring of the raiders and then let them continue on their journey. He doesn’t want that to be the case, because then it would make them more
human
. And the fear that made the dark-walkers flee from him at the barn, the fear in his resolution and in his coldness and in his barbarity. He had put fear in their hearts, and that terrified him—for then he would be just as terrible as them, even more-so, and any distinguishing lines between normal humanity and the dark-walkers would be torn apart, shattered like cryptic buildings under the blasts of Pompeii. He thinks about these things, and he is lost in his thoughts, and he hardly even realizes it: a snow has begun to fall.