Dwellers of the Night: The Complete Collection (40 page)

The sun has died down when he is awakened. The woman is above him, and she is gently caressing the back of his hand. His arm quivers, and he withdraws it from her touch.

“I’m sorry,” the woman says. “I didn’t mean to…”

“It’s okay,” Mark coughs. His throat burns.

“Here,” she says, bringing forward a glass. “You’ll need to tip your head up.”

“I can’t.”

“If you want to drink, you will.”

Mark lifts his head and flinches with the pain.

Anthony Barnhart

Dwellers of the Night

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The woman tips the glass, and distilled water runs down his throat and across his chin.

“Don’t drink too much…” the woman warns.

Mark doesn’t care. He keeps drinking. Suddenly he wrenches to the side and heaves. Water spews all over the bed-sheets. His head falls back onto the pillow and his limbs quake with a tiny tremor. His face blushes red in embarrassment.

“It’s okay,” the woman says. “I’ll clean up the mess.”

The man enters the room again. “What did he say?”

The woman glares at him. “Not yet.”

The man curses and leaves the room.

Mark manages, “What does he want… to know?”

“Nothing to worry about, Dear. Just get some sleep.”

He lies in his bed. Night has fallen. He can hear the dark-walkers outside, but their cries and howls are distant. A pale light enters through the window, brighter than the moon but duller than the sun. He can hear distant voices, somewhat muffled, carrying into his room. They are many and collaborative, men and women, and some even sound like children. He hears footsteps coming towards the room and goes quiet. Those approaching stop beside the closed door to the room. He strains his eyes and can hear their conversation.

“It’s already been two days,” the man says. “We need to find out…”

The woman replies, frustrated, “He’s sick, and…”

“And
that’s
why we need to find out. I don’t want him in here if—”

“He lost a lot of blood. He’s getting better. His temperature is getting back to normal.”

“That’s how it happens. You fluctuate.”

“He suffered minor hypothermia. I’m a nurse, I know what he’s going through.”

“Just because he looks like your son doesn’t mean…”

He hears a slap come from beyond the door.

The woman speaks. “Don’t you dare say anything like that again.”

After a moment, “We need to ask.”

“And we will. But not right now.”

“How long will we wait?” Earnestly, “We have children here, Nancy.
Children
.”

“I’ll ask tomorrow.”

“Do you have the shots?”

“Yes.”

“Two doses. I want to make sure.”

“I know. I know the procedure. I’ve done it before.”

Mark doesn’t hear anymore: footsteps dwindle. The people are gone.

The next morning he is propped up in his bed. The sunlight illuminates the room, and he can see sitting on one of the shelves a box filled with strings and beads. One of the strings of beads is dangling from the lip of the container, and along its loop is a titanium cross. The door opens and the woman enters.

The boy manages a wry smile and greets her.

The woman’s face lights up. She is rather short, skinny, but not emaciated. Well-fed. Her eyes are a Hershey brown, and gray hair curls behind her ears. She moves to the bed quickly, and sitting in the chair, takes the boy’s hand in hers. “How are you feeling?”

“Not great,” Mark says. “But I have more strength.”

Anthony Barnhart

Dwellers of the Night

189

“I can go get you some food.” She stands and leaves without a word. She left the door open, and a figure enters the room. He is a tall, weathered man with leathery hands and an upside-down crescent scowl. He stands quietly in the corner, eyeing the boy. His cutting stare is mind-numbing. Mark refuses to look away. He says hello, but the man simply leaves the room. A moment later the woman returns with a bowl of steaming soup in which rests a metal spoon. She hands it to him, and he sits up in bed, sipping it slowly, admiring the taste. Chicken and noodles with a mushroom broth. He finishes the soup and hands her the bowl. She points to his arm. “Does it hurt?”

He looks down and sees a line of stitches running across where he had been gouged. “No.”

“Sandra was a nurse during Vietnam. She can do stitches better than I can.”

“I’ll be sure to thank her.”

A shadow falls in the doorway. Concern is etched over the woman’s features. Mark speaks: “I wasn’t bit.”

She looks at him. “Excuse me?”

“They didn’t bite me. I know what happens when you get bit. I’ve seen it.”

The man enters the room. “You’ve seen it?”

Mark nods. “Yes.”

“Then tell me. What happens?”

“It looks like malaria at first. But then it becomes something else.”

“Malaria?” the man asks.

The woman lifts a quizzical finger, deep in thought. “Malaria? Yes.” She looks at the man. “The symptoms of the sickness are similar to malaria. He’s right.”

Mark says, “A little girl. She was bit by one of them. She became really sick…”

“And she died?”

“Yes. No. She became one of them. A dark-walker.”

“A dark-walker?”

“That’s what we call them. They only come out at night. ‘Dark-Walkers.’”

“Did you see her become one of them—a ‘Dark-Walker’—yourself?” the man asks. Mark remembers the box-car. The blood on the walls. The awful stench. He hangs his head low, and his bangs flutter before his eyes. “Yeah. I saw it.”

The man is persistent: “How did you get that gash?”

“You rescued me from the factory?”

“Yes.”

“In the furnace? Then you would have seen the saw.”

“Yes,” the man says. “So?”

“I was in the furnace… I knew I wasn’t going to get out…” His voice becomes low as he speaks.

“I knew the cold would kill me. I took Health in High School. I know what hypothermia does to you. So I tried to kill myself. I tried to cut an artery… I guess I failed.”

The woman bites her lip. “You’re okay now, though. You don’t have anything to worry about.”

The boy looks up, but the man is gone.

II

He is alone, locked in a darkness he can taste, a darkness darker than the most awful silence, a darkness that makes prison seem full of radiant light. He does not know if his eyes are opened or Anthony Barnhart

Dwellers of the Night

190

closed; the darkness saturates every part of his eternal being. He props himself up on the bed, and he feels the cold. He realizes he is in his boxers lying on a bare mattress with hard springs. One hand traces up to his head, which pounds as if an angel has embedded his brain with a spiked mallet and continues to twist it around until brain matter comes from his nose and ears. He leans forward but it makes the sensation worse; he falls back on his elbows, then retreats even more into the confines of the bed, laying spread-eagled, staring into the darkness, goose bumps carving pathways across his frosty skin. Moments pass but it happens; he begins to see. His eyes widen and he consumes the room, the shadows merging and melting; he sees the stone wall and it is still covered in a thick layer of grime. The mirror on the dresser is shattered and covered with a thin layer of dust; the candle on the dresser has been knocked over and is strewn with cobwebs. He looks into the corners and sees insects crawling; a rat scurries across the floorboards and disappears into the wall. The man winces, trying to get up. He manages to sit on the edge of the bed, bare feet on the chilly stone floor. Pain throbs through his stomach; he looks down, and in the darkness he can see a bruised spot, and he touches his skin and feels the stitches. It hurts to the touch.

He stands. He can feel the ache in his bones, gnawing at the marrow and seducing his veins, causing his eyes to slide close, his spirit to desire sleep. He fights it off, doesn’t feel right, doesn’t know where he is, a terror screaming silently. Ice travels between his toes as he stumbles in the darkness. He looks to the side and sees his clothes in a neat pile upon a broken chair. He does not remember setting them there, but the headache is bogging down his mind. He quickly dresses and returns to the door. He twists the knob and swings the door open. The darkness of the corridor pervades and it takes his eyes many moments to adjust. The bare stone walls are laced with grime, and the candle mounts are empty, strewn with feathery cob-webs. He does not look at the floor, feels no need to, only runs one hand against the wall as he walks. It is not long till he feels something crackling under his feet. He cannot see and so he continues walking; it feels as if he is walking upon fortune cookies. He comes to an open door and sees faint light coming from a boarded window; the light laces through the spindly dust, breathing chalk on the walls. He steps upon a broken chair, grabs the wooden board, and rips it down. It comes free in a sea of dust and he falls back, the chair shifting; he lands on his shoulder, the wind sucked from his lungs; the wooden board breaks upon his opposite shoulder and the brilliant light burns his eyes. He lets it waft over him and slowly he opens his eyes; the light brings edges and colors and contours to the grey room.

He is looking into the hollow eyes of a skeleton covered in moss. He reels backwards, a scream rising in his throat, and he throws himself up against the wall. The light reveals the atrocities of the room; skeletons lie everywhere, most covered in furry moss and eroding clothes. The room stinks of flesh and carrion beetles crawl over the walls. He leaps to his feet, afraid to move, terrified to breathe, the world spinning a million songs of death. The skeletons seem to rise, to move, to reach for him with bony fingers. He kicks a skeleton away, the bones falling apart under beetle-crawling cloth, and he throws himself into the hallway. A rough hand grabs him by the shoulder.

He swings around. A figure in the shadows grins with rotted yellow teeth. The man wrenches away, staggers into the room, trips over a femur, collapses onto one of the skeletons. The bones twist and snap, feeble and corroded. He lets out a shout and wrenches to the side; flashing pain rockets through his stomach, and he bends over, clutching at his gut. Blood seeps from the broken stitches.

The figure enters the room, kneels down beside him. He grins. “Be kind with it, now.”

The man glares up at the man, eyes alight with fright.

Anthony Barnhart

Dwellers of the Night

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The man nods to the skeletons about the room. “Thank God they’re not alive anymore, Friend. Or
they’d
be the ones making you bleed.” A wretched smile twists over the awful man’s face, and the fallen man knows nothing more as the figure delivers a crackling blow across his cheek.

Consciousness begins to revive, and he finds himself being pulled down a corridor. Candles are lit in mounts along the gothic stone walls, casting shadows about him. His head lulls to each side, and he sees two men dragging him by the arms. They turn down an opposite corner. The man’s feet drag, and he tries to move them, but dizziness overwhelms and he feels vomit creeping up his throat. A heavy wooden door emerges; one of the men holds the man up as the other unlocks the door with a heavy iron key. They say nothing as the man is bodily pushed within. The man stumbles and falls to the ground, his insides churning: vomits pour forth. The door is quickly shut. Movement comes from the side of the room. Someone kneels down beside him, places a hand on his shoulder. The man looks up with weak eyes. “You’re just a boy…” he murmurs, and then he passes out. The man awakes. He is lying on a bed. He turns his head. There are two figures in the room. A high yet small square window lets in a shaft of light. His eyes are blurry, but they focus. The boy sits along the wall, drawing figures in the dust on the floor. He has shaggy auburn hair and a hawk-like nose. The other figure sits in a chair on the other side of the room. She is curled up into a fetal position, her head between her knees, eyes vacant and eerie. She rocks herself back and forth. The man looks up at the ceiling and tries to remember. He can hear their screams, he can remember the cigarette between his fingers—
God
, how he wants a cigarette—and he remembers the headlights. Everything afterwards becomes a fuzzy mess. He stops trying to recollect and lies quietly on the bed. He closes his eyes. The pain in his stomach takes him to sleep.

Her screams bring him from the noxious dream-world. His head twists to the side, and he watches as two men enter the room. The girl is standing in the corner, screaming at them. The boy sits dejectedly in the opposite corner, at the foot of the bed. The men grab her. She slaps one of the men across the face, and he grabs her by the throat and lifts her up against the wall, her feet dangling. She wraps her hands around his arms and tries to pull free; her eyes bulge, laden with tears; she squirms for a breath. The man spits in her face, the dribble running down the breadth of her tiny nose. Anger burns through the man, and he tries to shout, but he is silenced by the ridiculous pain scourging through his stomach. The world fades to blackness, and even the girl’s screams vanish.

He hears the boy pacing about in the small room. He moves his lips, speaking: “Where… did they take her?”

The sound of pacing stops. The boy speaks: “You’re awake?”

“Where did they…” He coughs, unable to finish his sentence.

The boy is quiet, continues pacing. “You don’t want to know.”

The man doesn’t say anything more.

The boy looks over: he has fallen asleep once more.

The light from the window is dimming. The man lies awake but unmoving, dwelling upon Kira. Her smile. Her laugh. They way she would spoon with him at night. The quiet grin it would bring him. The boy is sitting once more in the corner, staring into space. The door creaks and opens. Two men shove the girl back into the room. She stumbles about and falls to the ground. Her limbs quake, and she shudders with each sobbing croak. The boy shimmies over next to her, tries to comfort her; she wreathes away—”Don’t touch me!” she screams. The boy’s eyes fall as she returns to the corner with Anthony Barnhart