Dwellers of the Night: The Complete Collection (33 page)

Mark doesn’t feel like arguing. “Okay.”

The man nonchalantly slides the book over to himself. “Says here… The word vampire is of Slavic origin. It means ‘Bloodsucking Ghost.’” He looks up at Mark. “Kinda eerie, isn’t it?”

He nods. “Sure.”

The man returns to the book. “The Romanians… Vlad Dracula was Romanian, I think…

Condemned some infants to the fate of vampires. Infants who were born with their amniotic membrane still attached to the head and forming a veil, or infants born with a small tail, or with hair covering its body—sounds more like a werewolf than a vampire, I’d say—were believed to be vampires. They were called
strigoi
. But… Okay, here it shows ways that people could become vampires. Want to hear?”

“Why not,” Mark says.

Anthony Barnhart

Dwellers of the Night

153

“If a dead body was bewitched—I’m guessing by a witch or warlock—it would become a vampire. Anyone cursed by their parents would become a vampire… And anyone who was excommunicated from the church would become a vampire.” A smile creases the man’s lips. “Can you imagine the Christian Reformer Martin Luther being a vampire, prowling around Wittenberg?”

Mark shakes his head. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

The man shrugs, continues, “Witches would become vampires when they were buried… And anyone whose grave was jumped over by a cat or flown over by a bird. Shit. That means there must have been
tons
of vampires… Those who committed suicide or were not given a proper Christian burial would become vampires… People who had been murdered without vengeance would turn into vampires—I imagine to wreak their own vengeance—and evil people, and even people born on Christmas, were likely to become vampires.”

“So who
wouldn’t
be a vampire?” Mark coos.

“Vampires can take on many shapes and sizes,” the man continues. “They can appear as flying insects, particularly moths or butterflies, as crows, mice, and werewolves. Oh, this is gross: the Slavs believed that a vampire appeared as nothing more than a dismembered head with torn and chewed entrails dangling from it. And… Hold on.” He flips through the pages, licking his fingers to pull the papers apart from one another.

“What is it?” Mark asks.

“Get me a light. Where’s that lamp?”

“It’s over here,” Mark says. He stands and walks over to the kitchen counter.

“It’s getting dark, and it’s hard to read…”

Mark lights the lamp with a cheap match and sets it down on the table.

“Here. ‘HOW TO STOP A VAMPIRE.’”

“Excellent.” Mark takes his seat, fascinated.

“They mention sunlight… Garlic… Silver bullets… Wooden stakes in the heart…”

“Anything a little more convenient?”

“Showing them a crucifix, burying them under running water… Or at a crossroads.”

“Wait a minute. You said sunlight kills them?”

The man pauses. “They never come out during the day.”

“No. They don’t.”

He flips through the pages, running his finger underneath a bold heading: VAMPIRES CANNOT

EXIST IN SUNLIGHT. “It says… Vampires were believed to be servants of Satan… They were demons capable of all types of trickery and atrocities… Because darkness was synonymous with evil, and light with good, vampires cannot exist in the light… Churches believed that nothing was stronger than God, and even a vampire could not survive under God’s light. Thus vampires cannot walk on holy ground or enter a church.”

Mark curses under his breath. “That’s just a bunch of folklore.”

“Of course it is. Vampire mythology evolved in the Medieval era.”

“So they don’t come out because the light is good and dark is bad?”

“That’s what this says.”

“Night and day are caused by the planet’s rotation around the sun. There’s nothing mystical or spiritual or supernatural about it. It’s the laws of nature at work, the way our universe is designed. That doesn’t explain why they don’t come out at night.”

“There
has
to be a reason.”

“I know. But it’s not in that book.”

The man is quiet for a few moments. “So we just stop here, then.”

Anthony Barnhart

Dwellers of the Night

154

The boy doesn’t answer for a moment, just stares into the lamp’s burning oil-wick.

“What are you thinking?” the man asks.

“What are the other methods for killing vampires?”

“Silver bullet. Stake through the heart.”

“What about garlic?”

“It doesn’t say anything about… Wait. Ah, here it is. It says here that vampirism can be seen as symbolic of mosquito-bites, and garlic is known in folklore as a natural mosquito repellant. Mosquitoes suck blood, and sometimes spread disease, such as malaria. Some of the symptoms of malaria—exhaustion, fever, anemia—are reminiscent of the first affects of being bitten by a vampire without being totally drained of blood or transformed into a vampire. They are both quiet for a few moments.

No one will say what they are thinking.

That the little girl was bitten by a dark-walker.

Her symptoms prior to death had been a mirror-image of malaria. And they had not checked on her since she had died.

Mark finally says, “I think we should bury Lindsey tomorrow.”

The man’s eyes are glazed. “Yeah.”

“The snow should be keeping her… in good shape.”

“Yeah,” the man says. “We’ll do it tomorrow.”

Anthony Barnhart

Dwellers of the Night

155

Chapter Ten

The Boxcar Angel

“When I die, I shall be content to vanish into nothingness… No show, however good, could conceivably be good forever… I do not believe in immortality, and have no desire for it.”

- H.L. Mencken (ca 1950)

I

The phone call had awakened him.

He groped blindly about the room until he found the phone. He hit the ANSWER button and lifted it to his ear. “Hello?”

He could hear her heavy breathing. “Mark.”

He propped himself up on one elbow. “Cara? What’s wrong?” He spoke quietly, so as not to wake Ashlie, who was sleeping in the other room.

He heard a sniffle. “I’m sorry…”

“Cara,” he said, suddenly awake. “Is everything okay? Are you hurt? Where are you?”

“I’m okay,” she said. “I’m fine.”

“Well. What’s wrong? You don’t sound like everything’s fine. Did something happen?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay,” he said. “What happened?”

Silence.

“You can talk to me, Cara, okay? You can talk to me.”

In a few moments, her words, dark and cutting: “I’m pregnant.”

Time became suspended. Her words echoed like an incessant cymbal in his mind. He suddenly felt nauseas as the terror of what had happened rustled through him. A million thoughts sprinted through his head, the most poignant being,
Why in the hell did you have to ejaculate inside of her?!
He talked to Cara for several hours over the phone until she fell asleep, and after he took Ashlie to school the next morning, he drove over to her house. She opened the front door for him, and they were quiet as she fixed macaroni and cheese with BLTs. He kept looking at her slender stomach, imagining the result of their procreation growing within her; he averted his gaze whenever she looked towards him. They ate quietly at the table. Birds sang outside in the spring air. He didn’t have much of an appetite, but he ate all his food anyway.

“We need to talk about this,” Cara said. Bags hung under her eyes.

“I know,” Mark said.

“What do you think I should do?”

Mark didn’t answer for a few moments, spinning his fork among the cheesy crescents.

“Do you think I should get an—”

He looked up, glared at her. “Don’t even talk about that.”

She bit her lip. “Okay.”

Anthony Barnhart

Dwellers of the Night

156

More silence as they ate.

“Want to watch a movie?” she asked.

“We need to have this baby,” Mark said finally, setting down his fork.

“Have the baby?” Cara repeated. “You really want to have the baby?”

“Yes.”

“We can’t afford it. We’ve only been dating for a few months.”

“It’s the right thing to do.”

“Mark…”

“It’s the right thing to do, Cara. And you know it.”

The initial shock and subsequent fear of the realization evolved into excitement. He and Cara began making preparations. His current job wouldn’t gather enough income for them to start a family, but Cara didn’t have a job, so the balancing of finances fell upon her shoulder. They grew closer over the next few weeks, and she began to bulge. Not extremely, only slightly; “My mom didn’t even get big when she was pregnant with me,” Cara informed her worried boyfriend. Mark brought up the concept of marriage, but she quickly pushed him away: “I don’t want to talk about that right now.”

He was content with having the baby without marriage, but he constantly wondered what his parents would have thought. He had grown up believing in Heaven, indoctrinated by a small Baptist church on Lehman Avenue. When his parents died in the car crash, he had stopped caring about religion. Sometimes he wondered, though, if there really
were
such a thing as Heaven, and if his parents
were
looking down upon him. They’d probably be shaking their heads.

He met Cara one morning outside her house. He went to the door and found her dressed up and pampered, looking nice for a flurry of job interviews. Her face glowed, and the smile that traced across her lips was contagious: he found himself smiling, too, despite having to wake early on his only day off.

“I dreamed we had a baby girl,” she told him. “And it made me so happy!”

Her words began a transformation within him. The nervousness and stress were replaced with a brimming excitement. He would be a Daddy! He began reading books on parenting, reading magazine articles on how to be a good dad. He would go the Barnes & Noble on Interstate 71, on the east side of Cincinnati, and read them for hours while sitting in the overstuffed chairs. His heart leapt at the sound of Cara’s voice and the sight of her slightly-round tummy. Mark wanted to get married, but he knew Cara didn’t want it. He knew why: her father had married her mother at an early age, and after having a couple children, had abandoned them. He imagined she figured he’d do the same, and maybe she hoped that not getting married would make it easier to bear. He decided to go along with her, and he would show her—with marriage, or without—what true dedication meant. He would show the girl who believed “love is a hoax” that “love is completely real… so forget anything that you have heard.”

Cara asked him one evening at MCDONALD’S, “Are you going to tell Ashlie?”

“What?” he asked, dipping a nugget in Sweet & Sour sauce. “Of course I’m going to tell her.”

“What will she think?”

“She’ll be excited.” He sipped from his Diet Coke.

Cara chewed on some fries. “When are you going to tell her?”

“Soon,” he promised.

Anthony Barnhart

Dwellers of the Night

157

They had gone out to Mt. Echo the next night. Some young boys were playing basketball on the hoops, and he and Cara, hand-in-hand, were returning to their car beside the basketball court just as dusk began to fall. The crickets and cicadas came alive in the early summer, and the sun’s last bursts of radiant light painted a canvas of reds and oranges and yellows across the sun-streaked sky. They were nearing his car when the kid with the basketball jumped in front of them. Mark guessed he was around fifteen or sixteen years old. His eyes were bloodshot and his blood sterile. Drugs. He laughed hysterically, shouted, “Catch!”, and hurled the basketball right at Cara. She didn’t have time to react as the basketball punched her in the stomach; she buckled over and fell onto the pavement, dragging Mark’s arm down with her. Mark began stepping towards the boy, his veins running thick with anger, but the first scream tore him on his heels. His eyes went wide and his face ashen to see Cara lying on the pavement, hands wrapped tight around her stomach, her mouth opened in a venomous scream. The other basketball players began to gather around, and the one who had thrown the basketball continued laughing, tears of joy sliding down his cheeks. Mark fell down next to Cara, ran a hand through her hair.

“What’s wrong?” he demanded. “Cara. What’s wrong?”

She continued screaming Bloody Mary.

“I can’t help you if I don’t know what’s wrong…”

One of her hands had slid underneath her pants, and she withdrew it. Blood sparkled on her fingertips.

Mark suddenly understood. The world slowed, and all he could hear were Cara’s screams and his own savage heartbeat. He could only be informed by the police—who let him go, seeing the trauma that had been induced by the drug-stricken boy—of what he did next. He couldn’t remember. Something within him snapped, and he lurched from the pavement, and in a few moments had reached the hysterical boy. The boy protested with his hands, but Mark fought through him; he grabbed the boy by the collar of the shirt and swung him into the side of the car. The boy shouted as Mark pulled him back and thrust his head into the glass window: the window shattered, and the boy screamed, and Mark kicked him in the groin before pushing him away. The dying sunlight reflected off the shards of glass embedded in his face, the blood running down his chin and neck, and his screams blended like a wicked symphony with Cara’s wails. Some of the other boys moved forward to defend their friend.

Tears streamed down Mark’s face as he sobbed, “You killed our baby…”

The boys paused, stared at one another with ashen faces. None moved forward. Mark knelt down beside Cara, pulled her into his arms. He held her shaking body tight, her chest heaving with broken sobs. Through his own salt-burning tears, he didn’t turn his gaze from the boys. The druggie tried to apologize, but Mark only flicked him off. The boys stood in a regretful half-circle around Mark and the girl; none moved forward, none backed away. The moment was suspended in time. Ravens cried out in the distance.

II

The man awakes to the sound of wretched vomiting. He lies in bed for a few moments, sleep clinging to him like a wet blanket. He rolls his head upon the pillow and looks towards the window, covered with a heavy black canvas. He closes his eyes and hears the puking again. With a curse he stumbles from his bed and into the hallway. The boy’s sleeping area is disturbed, the blankets lying strangled beside the boy’s mattress in the hallway. The man walks over to what had once been a stairwell, now Anthony Barnhart