Dwellers of the Night: The Complete Collection (39 page)

The boy’s world spins. The cold grows heavier, and his heart beats slower. His lips move. “Cara…

Cara…” He remembers her words. They will be together again. And soon. He remembers the beauty of that place, the whispering meadow, the beautiful pines, the blooming flowers of a myriad of colors. A place of peace and tranquility, happiness and joy. This is hope. He closes his eyes and lets it come.
Beat slower
, he tells his heart,
for sooner shall we be together again
.

Move, you fucker!
his mind screams. His limbs are stubborn. His spirit is willing, but his body is weak. He refuses to move, and then he finds himself doing it. The pain rushes through him like bluegill through the bulrushes, and he finds himself in the cab. He positions himself. He swings his legs over. His throbbing ankle hits the gear-shaft and the pain nearly makes him fall from the cab. He grabs the wheel and reaches for the door with his other hand. He can’t reach it. The lone dark-walker falls from the fence and lands on the inside. The others, inspired, begin to climb. The man’s fingers brush the handle.
Grab it. Grab it. Grab it
. He leans farther out. His fingers wrap around the handle. He slams it shut. He finds the lock and throws it down. He shimmies across the seat and locks the other door. Plate glass is over the windows, and he is thankful for that. He leans back in the seat as the darkwalker fades in from the shadows. The middle-aged man stands in front of the fork of the Bobcat, and he moves forward, climbs over the engine. The man watches with crimson eyes as the creature begins swinging at the glass. Its knuckles bleed and shatter, and blood smears the window. But it’s too thick, and it can’t get in. More dark-walkers appear around him, and they climb over the Bobcat, trying to get in. Their bile and bodily fluids crawl down the side of the PLEXIGLAS as the man reaches into his jeans pocket with a feeble hand and withdraws his pack of cigarettes. He flips open the box and pulls out a cigarette. He lights it in shaking fingers and takes a beautiful drag. It is exhilarating and calming. The chemicals swarm his lungs, and for a moment he relaxes. A faint smile, born from shock, crosses his lips, and he mumbles to himself, “And Kira said
these
would kill me…”

The cold begins to overcome him. His senses are dulled. The cold feels warm, and he cannot hear the dark-walkers outside the furnace door, nor can his ears attune to his own stalling breaths. Everything begins going dim, the world fades to nothing, and as his eyes slide shut, she appears again, shimmering in the darkness, almost too vague to touch. He lifts his head. His eyelids are shut, but he can see her. She is in the furnace with him. She kneels down, her spring dress with images of sunflowers and sunshine swirling about her slender legs. She kneels beside him, and she reaches out, caresses his chin, his eyelids. She leans forward, and he feels the cold sweat on his forehead steam as her warm lips meet above his eyes in a crescent kiss.
Do you remember?
she asks.
Do you remember?
He remembers.

Anthony Barnhart

Dwellers of the Night

181

∑Ω∑

They were driving down OH-50, the Ohio River sparkling under the evening sun to their left and the rolling hills of eastern Cincinnati, splayed with two-story buildings with crumbling façades, on their right.

Cara stared out her window, watching the scenery flash by. She played with her pearl necklace. Mark looked over at her, keeping both hands on the wheel. “What are you thinking about?”

She didn’t look at him. “Do you think dreams have meanings?”

He paused to think. “No. Dreams, they’re just chemicals in your brain firing and neurons activating.”

“When I was with Damon,” she said, still gazing out the window, “I always had this dream with wolves. I was at the zoo, and I was standing behind those big plate-glass windows where you could watch the wolves on the other side. But in my dream, the windows disappeared, and I had to run from them. I was running through the zoo, and it was in the middle of the day, and it was abandoned. I was running past animal exhibits, past food stands. I ran through the amphitheater where they played concerts, and I even ran past the dolphins who were swimming and playing with their water-balls. The wolves were behind me the entire time. Every night I would have this dream, and every night I would be closer to the exit where people called out to me, telling me to just keep running, that I was almost free. But the wolves… They got closer and closer until they were nipping at my heels. When I realized that I couldn’t be with Damon and broke up with him, the wolves stopped chasing me. Looking back, I think that the wolves symbolized the danger I was in. That relationship wasn’t good. He used and abused me and made me feel bad for what he did to me. All those people who were shouting for me, trying to get me out of the zoo safely, they were the ones who cared for me and truly loved me. All my friends and my mom told me that I had to break up with Damon, that he wasn’t good for me—and they didn’t even know the things he did to me.”

Mark was quiet for a moment. “I always dream of me being a pirate or a ninja.” He looked over at her profile. “Do you think those dreams have meanings?”

She shook her head, frustrated.

Mark bit his tongue.
You’re such a jackass
.

“I just think that…
sometimes
dreams can have meaning.” After a moment: “But I hope you’re right.”

“Why do you hope I’m right?” He wished she would look over at him and stop staring away. She didn’t answer.

“I know you’ve been having bad dreams. You’ve been waking up in the middle night, and you’ve called me. Sometimes you’re crying.”

She bit her lip, stared out the window. “I have this dream… We’re in my house. And something happens. I don’t know what happens, but something happens. Something bad. And I’m taken from you. And I know that if you stay with me, something bad will happen to you, too. But if you walk away, if you leave me, nothing bad will happen to you…” She looked over at him, tears in her eyes; his heart broke for her. “I’m afraid that it means that one day, we won’t be together. That I’ll be taken from you, somehow. Not by choice. And if you stay with me, if you go where I go… then something bad will happen to you. So you’ll have to choose. Stay with me and be hurt? Or walk away and be okay?”

Mark looked over at her, took her hand in his, squeezed. “I’ll never leave you. I promise.”

She smiled sweetly, and she squeezed his hand, too.

The dreams never stopped.

Anthony Barnhart

Dwellers of the Night

182

They intensified until the day her dream came true.

The day she became a monster.

∑Ω∑

The man smokes, watching the dark-walkers pound against the glass. Their jaws are filled with yellow teeth, speckled with dried blood. Their eyes are empty and yet full of venom. Their movements are quick and surreal, and they move together, like a flock of birds in flight. Their actions are rhythmic; they smash the glass with their broken fists in an unbroken rhyme. They are naked. The men’s genitals hang loose and swollen, and the breasts of the women are worn down and the nipples bruised purple, sharp as diamonds in the cold. Several stagger around in the snow, dragging limbs long overtaken by frostbite, watching with caution those who are not so weak: for if they do not dine on the man, they shall dine on those not strong enough to fight back. It is Nietzsche’s dream come true in a way he never could have imagined. The man lets the smoke fill the cab. He lifts the cigarette to his lips, but a pang in his ankle tremors his fingers, and the cigarette spirals onto the leather seat, rolls onto the floor, and smolders out of reach. The man curses and leans back. A woman climbs on top of the hood. Her misshapen breasts swing before him like cauliflower on a string as she sends feeble arms into the window, and her spread legs reveal a bushy vagina crawling with translucent lice. Her eyes were at one time a beautiful blue, and the overgrown hair, matted down with sweat and long absent of shampoo, falls before her eyes. In a flash of moonlight he sees an iron cross necklace dangling from her neck, the jewel that rests in the center of the crucifix obscured by dried blood. He imagines that this is Kira reaching for him, scrambling for him, thirsting for him, crazed and inhumane. A tear, the first in what seems like ages, traces a jagged line down his rose-blotched cheek. The darkness is clouding, and he closes his eyes, looks away from the woman. He hears her knuckles crackling against the plate glass as he remembers.

∑Ω∑

She awoke in the middle of the night, buried underneath Mexican falsa blankets of every color, the eaves of the tent hanging over her, a petition between her wide eyes and the stars above, and she heard only the sounds of the owls and the coyotes and the winds in the trees. Her heart hammered, and sweat dripped down her brow. She rolled onto her side. He lied next to her. She gently slid her hand under the covers and felt his stomach. It moved in and out with each breath. Relief flooded through her veins. She lied back on her side and tried to go back to sleep, but the dream kept reverberating through her mind: she had been in the store shopping for groceries, and several people started screaming outside; she raced out and saw a body lying on the street, and a truck with bloody tires disappearing around a flower gift shop, speeding away; the body was dismembered and flattened, lying in a pool of blood; the face was crushed, the eyeballs hanging from their sockets, tiremarks engraved into the bones; she knew it was him because of his handsome brown hair, once wavy and styled, now matted with blood. She spooned up next to him. He breathed deep in his sleep. She clutched him tight, but not so tight as to waken him, and she whispered in his ear, “I love you.” She had never told him before.

He pretended to be asleep. He pretended not to hear her.

But he had heard her.

And at that moment, he knew:

he

loved

her,

too.

Anthony Barnhart

Dwellers of the Night

183

∑Ω∑

The memory is shattered as the air fills with popping explosions. The man’s eyes wrench open. The woman on the hood rears her body back, legs sprawled eagle-style on the hood, exposing her bushy crevice with its degenerate colonies. She lets out a shriek, and her chest explodes. The man shudders in his seat as a great wash of blood splashes over the window; amidst the blood the window cracks outwards, and a smoking round is wedged into the webbed glass. The woman falls forward against the window, and the man looks up with a dropped jaw at her contorted face, her pupils shrinking, the side of her face plastered against the window. One eye twitches. More gunshots ring out. The man is bolted to his seat, a memoria of Diogenes, absent in body and fixated in mind. Through one of the side windows he sees the dark-walkers scattering, snapping amongst themselves, and then brilliant light washes over the cab, searing his eyes through the opposite side window. He lifts his hand to his face to block out the light. The door to the cab shudders once, twice. Another gun-blast and the door swings open. The man squints forward; a brilliant beam of light swarms over him, and silhouetted as a shadow against it is a single figure, standing rigid. The man opens his mouth to speak when a searing pain rips through his gut, and he hears the gunshot as he falls onto his back. With a feeble hand he reaches up to his stomach and feels blood seeping between his fingers like sand through a sieve. His eyes roll into the back of his head as rough hands grab his feet and yank him from the cab.

Anthony Barnhart

Dwellers of the Night

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Anthony Barnhart

Dwellers of the Night

185

Book Two

February to April

2012

Anthony Barnhart

Dwellers of the Night

186

Anthony Barnhart

Dwellers of the Night

187

Chapter Thirteen

Saints & Sinners

“We are born with two incurable diseases: life, from which we die; and hope, which says maybe death isn’t the end.”

- Andrew Greeley (A.D. 1925-Present)

I

The boy awakes. The sun shines bright in his eyes, and he quickly closes them. A groan escapes his lips. He ponders for a moment if he is not dead, and brief flashes of an unknown memory spark before him: shouting, bright lights, strong hands grabbing weak limbs. He feels the heavy quilt tossed over him, and the pillow underneath his head. He tries lifting his neck, but eradicating pain breaks his movement. He lies nearly paralyzed in the bed. His eyes slowly adjust to the light, and through his peripheral vision he can see that the sunlight comes through a tall window. The walls about him are stone. The room is small, perhaps the size of a storage closet, and indeed, he sees that this is where he is: along one of the stone walls are propped several mops and brooms, and on the floor are several buckets. He watches a spider trail across the ceiling, the hairs on its body speckled with dew that reflects the wanton sunlight. Footsteps enter the room. His heart freezes in his chest. The sound of a chair being slid across the floor. A shadow falls over him. A wet towel is placed over his forehead, and a soothing voice, that of a nurse, speaks to him: “How are you feeling? Can you talk?”

His lips move on their own accord: “Where…”

“Quiet, now. You’ll be all right. You’re still quite sick. You nearly caught hypothermia.” She continues dabbing the warm towel above his brows. “Thank God your artery wasn’t cut. You wrapped your shirt around your arm. That was smart. It helped the clotting. It will take a few days for your bone marrow to create enough blood for you to be healthy again. And we sutured up your—

”

A new movement in the room. “Have you asked him?” A man’s voice. Stern. Mark tries to move his neck to see, but only a silent gasp escapes. The woman leaves the towel on his forehead, and he can hear her stand. “Please, not yet…”

“You need to ask him,” the man says.

They leave the room.

Mark lies in the bed, and sleep quickly overtakes him.