Dwellers of the Night: The Complete Collection (88 page)

“I’m almost finished,” Sarah says, drawing the last threads with the needle.

“All right,” the man says. “Take your time.”

“You know… Sometimes you act like you’re totally okay with what happened.”

“What do you mean?”

“You don’t talk about your girlfriend much.”

“You don’t talk about Patrick much.”

She looks up at him. “I told you, didn’t I?”

“Yes. And I told you about Kira.”

“That was her name?”

He nods. “Yeah.”

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“I bet she was beautiful.”

“She was the most beautiful woman I’ve ever met.”

“What’d she look like?”

The man is quiet for a moment. “Indescribable.”

The sun is sinking lower behind the oak. Shadows begin to lurch across the overgrown grass. A wind picks up, the chill tickling his skin, goose-bumps spreading up his arms, across his back, and to the breadth of his neck. His heart begins to hammer in his chest, crying out for life, but he has control of his limbs, and he doesn’t move. He stares at the setting sun, and the vision is lost in the memory: Amanda lying in the sheets of her bed back home, coiled up and weeping, her tears staining the pillow. Thunder had crackled and rain rapped on the window. Wind made the wooden walls of the frail house creak and moan. He had knelt down beside her, had run his hand through her hair. She wept, told him that she loved Matthew, that she didn’t understand why he would just toss her to the street. Anthony didn’t have any answer. She looked up at him with bloodshot eyes, cheeks bloated, lips quivering. Her nose flared with each sniffle. He didn’t feel right telling her that the world was fair, that it catered to one’s hopes and dreams. So he told her the truth: “When it comes to love… It’s over-rated. Love is a joke, and if not a joke, then a myth. When we realize this, we become cold and broken. The weariness saturates our beings, rots in our bones. We realize that the world isn’t a romantic sun over strawberry fields, but it’s tragic, depressing, empty. Reality is that what you want, you can’t have; what you have, you can’t keep; and what you love is taken away from you.” He remembers his words, and they echo through his mind, in whispers and shouts:

What you want, you can’t have.

What you have, you can’t keep.

What you love is taken away from you.

He had been his own prophet, and now his prophecies have come to life. Tears brim in his eyes, and he doesn’t fight them back. He won’t be crying for very long. He can already hear the cries of the dark-walkers, floating from the buildings scattered about campus, rising like a chorus in the wasteland. They are awaking, arising, crouched down, salivating at their mouths, waiting for the last rays of the monotonous sun to dissipate from the sky, so that they can seek the fulfillment of their lusts for human flesh and human blood.

“Do you think about her a lot?” Sarah asks.

The man doesn’t answer for a moment. “I try not to.”

She pauses in her stitching. “You try
not
to?”

“Yes.”

“Why would you…” She tries to form the right words. “Why would you try
not
to?”

“Because it hurts too much,” he answers matter-of-factly.

She is quiet.

The man looks at her. “Are you done?”

“Done asking questions?”

“No,” he says. “Done stitching.”

“Oh. No. Sorry.” She continues threading.

The man closes his eyes. Exhausted.

“If you try not to think about her,” Sarah says, knowing she’s treading dangerous territory,

“You’ll forget her.”

“I know,” the man says.

“You want to forget her.”

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“Yeah.”

“Why would you want to forget the woman you loved?”

He is irritated at her questions. “Because then it won’t hurt anymore.”

For a moment he questions what he is doing, but he stubbornly refuses to give thought to such nuances.
This is what reality demands. Maybe my perception of reality is flawed, but what the Hell, it’s my
life, these are the cards I’ve been dealt, and I can make my own decisions. I have lost everything due to forces
outside my own control, and now I am securing control: now I make the decisions. If I were to chart my life, I’d
end up dying cold and alone, in the wintry wilderness of Alaska, void of friends and having no memories to
smile upon. EVERYONE WILL DIE, AND DIE ALONE. These sentiments, this understanding of reality, has carved
within me a desire to end this farce of life as soon as possible. Here I sit, looking upon a world slowly going
dark…

What is it that has kept me from moving forward?

What is it that has kept my lungs inflating and deflating?

What is it that has kept my heart beating rebelliously between the prison of my ribs?

It is a question with no answer,

a question with no meaning.

After knotting the thread, she uses scissors to snip off the end. “I think I did it right.”

The man withdraws his hand. It aches. “If the stitches fall out, we’ll know you did it wrong.”

“Then we can stitch them again. Hopefully the right way.”

“Yeah.”

She takes a deep breath.

“All right,” the man says, looking at her. “Thank you.”

“You’ll want to bandage it up. There’s a roll of gauze at your feet.”

“Okay,” the man says.

“Okay,” Sarah says.

They sit in the silence, hearing only the cries of the dark-walkers as they begin to awake.

“I’m tired,” the man says.

“Me, too,” she says. “It’s been a long day.”

“Yeah.”

She pauses, sighs, stands. She stretches, yawns. “I’ll let you sleep.”

“Thanks,” he says. “Shut the door behind you.”

The sun vanishes beyond the horizon, and its light extinguishes. The shouts and cries of the darkwalkers disappear, and then the air is filled with the sounds of doors flying open and bodies leaping from their hiding places. The boy feels so desperately alone, so desperately weak, and yet so insanely powerful. Adrenaline floods through his veins. He stays rooted on the ledge of the pool. He hears noises behind him, coming from inside the Fine Arts building. He lowers his head and stares at his fingers, can see them quivering with each heartbeat. Snarling and growling are nearing from behind him. He takes a deep breath, looks up, sees the WARNER AUDITORIUM forty meters away doused with movement along its sides, dark-walkers exploring, following his scent along the sidewalk. Something falls upon his shoulder. He looks up, sees a gnarled hand covered with scrapes and cuts on his shoulder, the fingers swollen from the cold and malnutrition. The dark-walker stares at him, a wiry old man with a stenciled face, sunken eyes. Anthony has seen the man before, had sat in on one of Amanda’s psychology classes.
Professor Wimbleton
. The dark-walker’s eyes explore the boy, and drool Anthony Barnhart

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drips from a half-opened mouth. Anthony smiles: “Hello, Professor.” The calmness in his voice frightens him. Another dark-walker comes up along his other side, grabs him by the shoulder. Anthony doesn’t resist, just closes his eyes. He sees Karen and Amanda standing together, smiling at him, memories flashing from the back of his tortured mind. The dark-walkers thrust him into the pool, and he submerges under the stagnant rainwater. He opens his mouth; water runs between his teeth; he takes a deep breath; water fills his lungs; his legs and limbs kick in automatic motion, struggling for breath. The dark-walkers thrust their heads under the water and begin feasting on his flesh. In a few moments his blood turns the pool’s water red and his arms and legs cease their kicking and thrashing. A new-come dark-walker grabs the boy’s wrist in its hands and sinks its teeth into his soft flesh; its teeth gnaw upon the tendon, and Anthony’s dead fingers twitch, betraying the silenced heart within the prison of the boy’s ribs.

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Anthony Barnhart

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Chapter Twenty-Eight

In Memoriam

“The leaves of memory seem to make

A mournful rustling in the dark.”

- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (A.D. 1807-1882)

I

When morning comes, the man awakes and finds that Anthony is gone, the sheets on his bed untouched, the pillow unruffled. He moves to each room, waking up the others, asking if they’ve seen him. No one has. Anxiety floods through the group. The man tentatively pushes open the door to Amanda’s room, but it is abandoned. They split into groups and scatter, searching for him somewhere on campus, hoping that he may have risen early, having been unable to sleep out of remorse over his skeletal sister, and that he went for a walk to clear his mind and be alone. Sarah and Katie head along the southern side of the campus, and Kyle and Mark take the northern rim of buildings. The man takes off across The Valley. Birds sing to one another in the limbs of the trees, and a fresh dew sprinkles the long grass, which crunches underfoot as he carves a path. Something at his feet catches his eye. He kneels down, brushes blades of grass out of the way. A bloodied sneaker, the sole ripped. He stands up, looks out across The Valley, searching for movement: the only movement is the wind shuffling the fresh leaves upon the trees, the blades of grass sweeping back and forth like waves in the ocean. The ephemeral silence is shattered with a single syllable: “Shit.”

Sarah and Katie walk the path past WARNER AUDITORIUM, saying nothing. They are nearing the Fine Arts building when Sarah stops in her tracks. “Katie,” she says, “wait here.” She leaves her friend behind and approaches the building.
The Helios
is before her, and she takes her steps slower, looking down at the sidewalk. The concrete is splashed with splotches and streaks of blood drying in the warm morning sunlight. Her heart begins to race like a stallion, and her steps are methodical and sluggish. She reaches the fountain with its helix statue. The statue is coated with great swathes of blood. She looks down into the water that gently laps in the stiff breeze. The water is stained red. A knot forms in her throat. She looks back at Katie, who is frozen in her place; Sarah shakes her head, and Katie sits down on the pavement, leaning back on the palms of her hands. Sarah looks down into the crimson water, can almost see Anthony’s reflection, his eyes meeting hers. A tear slides down her cheek and plunks into the pool, the ripples shattering Anthony’s reflection. She wipes another tear away, and she sees something floating in the water: a severed finger, the bone chewed off at the base, the fingernail wrapped in blood.

Kyle and Mark return to the Explorer. Sarah, Katie, and the man are already there.

“We didn’t find him, either,” Kyle says.

“We did,” the man says grimly. “But only the pieces they didn’t like.”

No one says anything.

“We should probably get going,” the man says.

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“Yeah,” Kyle says.

They begin to load into the Explorer.

Mark walks right past the man, pauses, looks at him. “You happy he’s gone?”

The man doesn’t say anything, just looks away.

II

In a former age, things would have been different. Anthony’s suicide would have been met with a grand funeral, great mourning, and a weighing sense of guilt upon those who outlived him. But this is a new age, and there is no funeral, no mourning, no guilt… only quiet acceptance. In a former age, Anthony’s death would have sent ripples that would have carried on through the lives of those who knew him, rippling into decades upon decades. Now Anthony’s memory is already faded, for there is no one left to remember him. The man, Kyle, Mark, Sarah, and Katie do not speak of his death, do not speak of what has transpired, only accept the roll of the dice, the twisted hand of fate, and they continue. There is one less mouth to feed, one less liability, one less soul to care for. In this world, care and compassion are exhausting. Only the selfish survive—and they survive in misery.

No one speaks much that day. The Explorer has difficulties with the engine, and the man pulls it off an exit and stops it at a gas station. He spends most of the day working on the engine, trying to fix a leak somewhere in the gasoline tank, staining his clothes and spilling out a slur of filthy words. Everyone else just huddles around in the cold; a cold front had swept in from the west overnight, and the sky had turned inky blue, clouds tumbling over one another, rays of sunlight penetrating their thick carpet for only moments at a time. “It’s almost sunset,” Kyle says. They load up into the Explorer and drive down the road. They find a gravel driveway leading to a mansion with an iron gate, the paint peeling. The man and Mark get out of the vehicle and push open the gate; they get back inside, and the Explorer drives up a concrete driveway to the Victorian-style house with a turnaround in the front drive. In the middle of the turnaround is a patch of grass with a fountain. No water flows, and the water within the fountain is stagnant and filled with algae. They enter the house, and the moment they step inside, two dark-walkers rush at them. The man fires a single round from the shotgun, and their bodies split open and splatter over the walls, ceiling, and carpet. The rest of the house is clear. They enter and begin pushing furniture against the windows. They head upstairs, and they shove all the furniture from the rooms against the top of the stairs. They find candles and light them once the night falls, and they don’t even hear any of the dark-walkers outside.

Mark roams the hallway. He doesn’t know what time it is. The candle lights his path, meager light splashing against the ornate walls with their elegant trim designs. He can hear the others sleeping in adjacent rooms. Movement behind him. He twists around, raising his free hand in defense. The light dances over Katie’s features, her face appearing like an orb in the darkness. The candlelight reflects in her eyes.