Dwellers of the Night: The Complete Collection (118 page)

He realizes he has spoken aloud when Sarah says, “If we let ourselves get attached, we risk getting hurt.”

The man pauses in his searching, closes his eyes. “Yeah.”

A moment of silence.

Sarah says, “But if we don’t get attached, we risk never feeling alive.”

The man continues shifting clothes through the drawers, saying nothing. He finds what he is looking for:

a

belt.

Sarah decides to stay upstairs. She doesn’t want to be there when it happens. The man stands at the top of the stairs for what feels like an eternity. He keeps seeing Mark, his smile, their conversations, the way he wept at the death of his sister, their journey together, helping one another. He has never had a closer friend. It has been said that tragedy and desperation forge the greatest intimacies, and the man has never felt this close to another man before. It is not homo-erotic but a deep friendship forged in the fields of fire. And now that friendship must end… and by his own hands. He takes a breath and begins making his way down the stairs. He reaches the cold dampness of the cellar, and he makes his way to the bed. Mark is lying in the sheets, his eyes barely open. The belt hangs from the man’s coiled fingers, the leather strip rubbing against the palm of his hand. He approaches the bed, and the light coming from the burning oil lamp casts his flickering shadow over the boy’s prostrated figure.

The boy props himself up on his elbows, a strength-draining task, and he speaks. “Death isn’t a bad thing. Perhaps it is the most beautiful thing. We’ve seen what life is, our experiences teach us well: life is empty, meaningless, and full of suffering. Life is a great drama of suffering, interspersed every so often with intermissions of happiness. But the drama just goes on and on, and life teaches you this lesson: ‘What you want, you can’t have; what you have, you can’t keep; and that which you love is taken away from you.’” With tears in his eyes, coiled up in the blankets, his words stumble over another, driven by a brain that is faltering and failing, slowly succumbing to the sickness. “My meaningless death is the best… it’s the best culmination to this meaningless life.”

The man has nothing to say. What can possibly be said? He crawls onto the bed.

“What are you doing?” Mark weakly asks.

Anthony Barnhart

Dwellers of the Night

550

The man wraps his legs around the boy’s waist.

He draws the belt up into the sparkling candlelight.

And then the boy knows.

“No…” the boy says, but he doesn’t have time to say anything else.

The man presses the belt against the boy’s throat, silencing his words. With one hand the man twists the boy’s neck to the side, and he slides the belt around the back of his neck, and he brings the two ends together, sliding them across one another so that the boy’s neck is held in the loop. Mark begins to kick and slap with his arms. The man ignores him, moves his knee forward, presses it into the boy’s chest. The man pulls back, the muscles in his arms searing. Mark’s hands stop slapping at the man, and they go to the belt, and he tries to wiggle his fingers between the straps, tries to pry them off, tries to breathe. The man pulls tighter: tears scale down his nose and fall from its bridge, splattering onto the boy’s agonizingly-contorted face. The boy’s eyes are wide as saucers, bulging from their sockets, the veins in his forehead are flaring red. His face becomes a grueling purple, and the man looks away, tries to ignore the squirming body underneath, the kicking of the legs, the sputtering and guttural utterances of his strangled friend.

∑Ω∑

They were sitting in the kitchen at the man’s house, drinking their coffee. Smoking their cigarettes.

“If I were bitten…” the boy asked, breaking the silence… “would you kill me?”

The man had looked up, eyes cold and heartless. “Without hesitation.”

∑Ω∑

The boy’s choking gasps for air are matched by the man’s choking sobs. Time seems to crawl forward, like a snail inching its way through a mud pit, moving but going nowhere. Only ten seconds have passed. The boy writhes his head back and forth, and the frayed edges of the belt tear into his neck. Blood begins to flow, and it flows warm and fetid against the man’s white-knuckled fingers. The boy’s kicking begins to subside, and then he lays still underneath him. His bulging eyes roll into the back of his head, and then there is silence. The man leans forward over the boy’s body, knows he must keep the belt tight, must continue strangling even after unconsciousness. He doesn’t know how long he hovers over the boy, his muscles burning with the stretching of the belt, but then Sarah is beside him, and she touches his arm, says his name.

The man reels backwards, releasing the belt, and he falls backwards onto Mark’s cold legs. He rolls off the bed and onto the floor, and he lies there, weeping, horrendous sobs that tear at his lungs, sending shivers of pain up into his neck. His cheeks swell with blood, and bile drips from his mouth as he rolls into a fetal position upon the floor, his back against the cold stone wall. Sarah moves around the bed and kneels down beside him, trying to comfort him, but the man kicks her away, sends her falling against the wall: “
Don’t touch me!
” he shrieks.

Anthony Barnhart

Dwellers of the Night

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∑Ω∑

“You wouldn’t hesitate?” the boy asked.

“No,” the man replied.

“Why not?”

“It’s what would have to be done.”

“But what about the human emotions…”

“What human emotions?”

“I don’t know. Friendship?”

“Friendship? We’re not friends.”

“Of course we’re friends.”

“We’re not friends.”

“Whatever.”

The man extinguished his cigarette on the table. “We aren’t friends. Having friends is what will get you killed. If you get bitten, and I find out, then I will kill you the moment it happens. Because I am not going to risk losing my life because of you. I’ve saved your life, and I’m not going to let you take mine. Want a good idea? If you’re ever bitten, run. Leave me. Because it’d be better for you to be away from me and what I’ll do to you than to be around the dark-walkers. I’ll make sure I
torture
you if you’re willing to endanger my life.”

∑Ω∑

The man pulls himself off the ground and runs around the bed, his eyes drawn to the corpse lying among the sheets, the belt lying loose around the neck that is smeared with blood, blood that has stopped flowing, a heart that has stopped beating. He backs up against the wall and stares at Mark’s body, feels the strength completely evaporating from his legs. He nearly falls over as he runs his bloody fingers through his greasy hair. Sarah comes towards him, but he pulls away, races past the couch and to the stairwell, ascends the steps leading upstairs. Sarah runs after him. She hears him throw the bathroom door shut, and she slowly walks over, presses her ear against it. She can hear him crying. She says his name several times, trying to comfort him, and then she lurches away from the door at the sound of a shriek, followed by the shattering of glass. She throws herself against the door and it bursts open, slamming into the man; the man stumbles against the toilet, trips, and falls backwards into the bathtub, bringing the shower curtains down around him. Blood seeps from his hands, and shards of glass are dug into his knuckles. Sarah looks over at the mirror above the sink: it is webbed and cracked, flecks of glass falling into the washing basin. She looks over at the man, who is holding his bloodied hands against his quivering lips, and he weeps: “I killed him… I killed him…

I killed him…” Sarah has never seen anyone, especially a grown man, so broken. She doesn’t know what to say.

It is early afternoon. Once the man composed himself, he went into a deep quiet. He washed his hands in the sink, using a bottle of distilled water, and he grunted as he poured hydrogen peroxide over the several small wounds carved by the glass. The only thing he said was, “Stitch them,”

pointing to several of the gashes in his knuckles. Sarah had nodded, and she performed the duty in less than ten minutes, and she bandaged his hands. Now they sit at the table, sipping coffee. Every once in a while, Sarah says something like, “You had to do it…” or “It’s not your fault that he was bitten…” or “You had to do it to protect me.” Anything to shift the blame from himself, even shifting Anthony Barnhart

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it onto her own shoulders. But he never says anything, and the sun reaches its zenith around 4:00 and begins sinking down. Sarah finishes her coffee, and she stands to get ready for the night. The man speaks: “We should bury him. It rained last night. The ground will be soft.” She pauses, nods:

“Okay.”

Sarah carries Mark’s cold body up the flight of steps and out into the backyard. The man found a shovel in the barn, and he has dug a shallow grave. They lay the boy down inside and cover him with dirt. Using a wheelbarrow, the man ferries several bricks from the barn to the grave, over and over again. By early evening, when the distant howls of the dark-walkers from the nearest town begin to float up to the sky, the man says, “I’m done.”

Sarah is standing beside him. She clutches the man’s arm.

“We should go inside now,” the man says.

“We should say something first.”

“We should go inside.”

“We should say something.”

“Okay.”

Silence.

Sarah looks up at his sweating profile. “What should we say?”

The man shakes his head, tears in his eyes. “I don’t know.”

“Me neither.”

The man takes a breath. “Nothing lasts forever.”

Anthony Barnhart

Dwellers of the Night

553

Chapter Thirty-Eight

Escapism & Shame

“With what a deep devotedness of woe

I wept thy absence o’er and o’er again,

Thinking of thee, still thee, till thought grew pain,

And memory, like a drop that, night and day,

Falls cold and ceaseless, wore my heart away!”

- Thomas Moore (A.D. 1779-1852)

I

They sit in the dampness, hearing the dark-walkers scurrying about outside. They are quieter tonight, and the man knows why: they have found Mark’s grave, a semi-fresh feast buried underneath brick and earth. He doesn’t want to think about what they are doing to him. He remembers what they did to Kira, how they tore her body limb-from-limb. He remembers them carrying her arm over the fence, the hand still attached, the engagement ring sparkling in the starlight. He remembers, and it aches, but it is a cold memory, a frostbitten remembrance. It brings him back to the coldness of the cellar, the coldness running through his veins, the breath crystallizing before his eyes. It is a cold Kansas night, and in the middle of July. He wonders if it is really that cold or if his breath is simply exhaling ash from the deadness within. Sarah is cold, too, sitting beside him, but their blankets are upstairs, and the blankets on the bed are soiled with Mark’s dried blood. If it were anyone else’s blood, the man would have no qualms about staying warm underneath the blankets; but it is Mark’s blood, and he knows that when he sleeps, he will be visited with nightmares of killing the poor and bitten boy.

The man wants to believe that Mark is in Heaven, that the deed he performed was not a period but a colon, ushering in a new chapter in Mark’s existence. He wants to believe that at this moment in time, Mark is walking through the golden fields of Elysium, hand-in-hand with Cara, the two of them basking in the glow of their love that radiates from their lively eyes. He wants to believe that, but he cannot. Not anymore. Mark is being torn apart, his body consumed, and this is the world now. The age of fairy tales and dreams has passed. Mark was right: dreams are ungodly demons. They ignore reality. And the reality is that there is nothing beyond death. The man doesn’t try to sleep but just stares forward, into the murky darkness, hearing the dark-walkers scrounging around above. He doesn’t even yawn.

“I’m cold,” Sarah says. She snuggles up close to the man. “Hold me.”

The man can barely see her in the darkness. “What?” he asks.

“Just hold me so I can keep warm. I’m fucking freezing.”

“Okay,” the man says, wrapping his arm around her.

She snuggles up close to him, buries her head into his chest.

She crawls up onto him, and he wraps his arms around her.

“You’re shaking,” the man says.

“I’m so cold.”

Anthony Barnhart

Dwellers of the Night

554

Sarah’s cheek is pressed against his. “Who’s Jessie?”

He doesn’t answer for a moment. “What?”

“Jessie. When you were hurt… You kept repeating her name.”

He lies: “I don’t know.”

Twenty minutes have passed. Sarah is nearly asleep. She speaks: “Patrick used to hold me like this.”

He doesn’t say anything, knows she is barely conscious. He just continues to hold her, thinks to himself,
I used to hold Kira like this
. His memories of Kira are dying. Sometimes he can barely even see her face. In his mind there is a great darkness, a shadow with a title, but yet that shadow is losing its form and substance, fading into the background. His memories of the parks and the theaters and the littlest moments in the house are sharp and clear, but she is always just a dark vapor fading into nothing. He dwells upon this, and it makes him hurt. He does not hurt for Kira. He does not hurt for what they had. These hurts are common, but they are not what hurts now. What hurts now is the knowledge that the simplest truths about her are slowly dwindling from his memory. He clutches Sarah tightly and fights off the tears. Soon she is snoring in his arms.

The next morning Sarah awakes on the couch alone. She trudges upstairs and finds the man sitting with his coffee at the table. Fresh muddy footprints cover the floor. She eyes him, and her face flushes red. She sits down at the table, and he begins pouring her a cup of coffee. “I can do it,” she says, taking it from him. “You don’t need to fucking pamper me.” The man is taken aback, but he says nothing. They sit and drink.