As the creature disappears from my sight I at once feel better and notice that the paralyzing horror, which had been fascinating me all of the time, begins to loosen its hard grip on me. With my fingers trembling of panic I turn the key. I believe to hear something move beyond the door. It sounds like something moving very slowly into this direction. Shuffling footfalls are approaching and seem to pause directly behind the door. One can hear inapprehensible, gargling sounds.
I with a shiver realize that the thing still utters my name. An old, blood-stained door leaf is all that separates me from this thing, Danny had called undead.
Without really wanting it I anew step back from the door. In doing so I stare like magnetized at the blood-stained key. A terrible image of it turning as if moved by an invisible hand comes to my head. The metallic clicking that is to be heard when the iron bolts of the lock are one by one pushed back enters my brains like a flood of frosty water.
But before I’m able to do the only thing that would be reasonable and logical, that is to say to as fast as possible flee from this house into my own, safe house the silence that had been detaining me for days gets torn by a deafening thunder. The air around me vibrates as if a flood of hot air was rolling through the corridor.
I spin around, allowing the beam of the torch to slide uncoordinatedly through the darkness. My ears because of the immense detonation are droning and a subtle whistling testifies me that the noise hadn’t been a mere imagination.
There suddenly is a vertigo that captures me with a scornful laughter, threatening to fetch me from my trembling legs. I nevertheless rush towards the stair, in doing so again and again having to stabilize me by leaning my shoulder against the wall. While I descend the stairs towards the ground floor the light cone in wild horror dances before me. The thunder still resounds in my ears like the echo of a dreadful laughter.
With a frightening soberness I become aware of the fact that what had raptured the silence in such an unspeakable way must have been the loud, hard pop of a gun.
Danny’s gun …
This insight hits me like a physical blow and at the end of the staircase makes me stumble. Losing my grip onto the gun, which drops down with a loud rumble, I catch my inevitable fall at the banister. Dancing shadows and the dazzling beam spots of my torch alternately scamper over the ceiling and the blood stained walls. When I ungently bump it against the very low step I feel a sharp pain hitting my kneepan. But seizing the torch with both of my hands I with a hoarse moan pull myself up at the banister and with my chest aching run towards the black rectangle that is the living room door.
The sharp odor of cordite and lead gets out to the corridor. Along with it comes a subtle anticipation of warm blood and dying flesh.
I know what’s coming up to me.
But I determinedly – nearly hypnotic – walk on until I bang into the door case and a sharp pain rolls over my shoulder and my arm into my fingertips. The torch slips from my numb hands and with a rattle rolls over the carpet. I in the middle of my movement freeze, staring at the stupefying image, which is presenting itself to my wide opened, watery eyes.
Out of the stroboscope like pattern the lamp, which the lamp throws at the walls and the ceiling in a ghastly rhythm crystalizes Danny’s figure, sitting at the sofa with his legs widely expanded, the butt of his gun set between them and the shining muzzle turned upwards – to where should have been his head. But all what between strangely pale bone fragments sticks out of the blood stained collar of his shirt is wet rags of flesh and tissue. A bubbling fountain of shiny red blood bespatters from the butt of his throat, dying his shirt into a grotesque violet. I get assailed by the crazy thought that Danny had exploded from within, like would have done a character out of a cartoon, which had eaten up a stab of dynamite. The voice inside of me screams. I feel the hysteria behind the cries and know that it’s only a question of time until I will involuntarily be diseased by it myself.
With my knees shaking I bend down to reach for the torch, keeping the cone of light apprehensively direct set on Danny’s corpse that cozily sits there. As if he was waiting for us to have a beer together – a sight that will be haunting me till the end of my days.
I have to get out of here, I suddenly think very reasonably.
The rumble of the gun possibly might attract some of the creatures from the woods. And Danny’s house is all but safe.
As I want to turn away my self-control surrenders to the inevitable toll that the last days take of an old man. I carking loudly and with my back bent forward throw up beside the door case. The odor of it perfectly mixes with the odor of blood and flesh.
With tears of exhaustion and grief in my eyes I turn around, when the light of the torch gets reflected by something lying on the small dresser next to the entrance. Highlighting it closer I recognize the metallic case of a mobile. I without really reflecting on it put the mobile into my pocket, go back to the staircase and take my gun. I do all this with an unnatural calmness and matter of course that doesn’t resemble me.
I’m aware of the fact that I’m driven on and directed by the small, close to death voice inside of me. My brains seem to be completely unable to act. I allow it to drive me forward, run out of the house and deeply suck up the fresh, cool afternoon air. My leg hurts from my collision with the step and my fingertips are still numb from hitting the door case. Tears are burning inside my eyes and my mouth steadfastly utters inarticulate sounds and words that don’t make any sense. The voice forces me down the sand path. It screams at me, seeming to flood my body with icy water.
Behind me I’m able to hear the screen door squeak sharply. The wind has sprung up and tears at my hair. Its cold fingers trespass beneath my clothes.
My breath comes intermittently, cut off by the useless litany I expel between my lips. My heart threatens to bleed through my far too tight and weak chest. My lungs ache and suddenly I know that I on this damned sand path will collapse and drown. I will merge with this forbidding world; a grey man in a grey world.
But my legs walk on, instead of the agony that briskly boils through my knee. My body has become exhausted and leached out long before. But it falls back on reserves I up till now hadn’t known about.
The voice screams.
It nags like a hysterical shrew.
Run!
When I start the motor I can’t hear it. Little stones and dirt are crackling against the under-floor.
But my mind stays silent.
There is just this voice; the outcry of my own brains and the reporting of Danny’s gun. Sometime – in this terrible nightmare – I slam the kitchen door shut behind me.
I kiss the dust …
… and press my hands upon my ears.
These shouts are so terrible.
Harv
I
This evening I feel the cold running through my bones just like they were made out of paper.
I stand inside the kitchen, preparing dinner. In doing so I keep directed towards the French window, paying attention to every suspicious sound coming from the garden.
I nailed up the square window pane inside the door from inside with wood.
On the table, on which I prepare the meal are burning two candles.
Inside the oven crackles damp wood.
I didn’t dare to actuate the electric generator in the shed. The euphoria I had been feeling in the morning, when I had blocked up the windows and made our house a would-be safe stronghold, after the incidents in Danny’s house has given way to an ice-cold, paralyzing fear. I on no account want to attract the creatures from the woods close to the house through the knocking of the old engine.
The picture of the thing inside Danny’s bedroom that had once been Cindy has burned itself into my thoughts like an image out of an extremely dreadful dream. Her words still agonize my trembling soul.
But what is even worse is the sight of my dead friend. Whenever I close my eyes that’s the image what I see before them. But even if I just blink I in
these milliseconds see Danny’s torn corpse, sitting on the sofa, waiting for his old fellow Harv to turn up again with a beer. There even seems to be an odor of black powder and blood hanging throughout the air inside the kitchen.
My head is spinning. It seems to me as if the world around me was constantly distorting itself. Sometimes I think I was tumbling down to the left side. But then I think I at any time was endangered to fall against the wall behind me.
While cutting up small a banana that’s paring has already got brown the picture of the kitchen gets constantly overlain by the dead eyes of the Cindy-thing staring toward me out of the darkness inside the bedroom. Inside my ears I can still hear the lazy scuffling of steps approaching the door and the rustling of dirty, bloodstained clothes.
I watch my hands edging the banana into a bowl and overflowing it with some milk, whose eat-by date is nearly exhausted. These are not my hands. My movements resemble me like they were made in slow motion. Then my hands pour some hot water from the old iron pot into two cups with tea bags in them; reach for the can, which is decorated by flowers, and drop two sugar cubes into the one of the cups that belongs to me. While my fingers reach for the small spoon as to be able to stir the sugar, I lift my eyes and get them set onto the nailed up rectangle where had used to be the window of the French door.
Had there been a sound?
I stand still. The odor of freshly brewed tea comes into my nose. I can feel the heat of the water against my hand that holds the spoon.
I believe to hear Cindy’s voice whispering my name.
Everything stays quiet.
As I put the two cups onto the tray next to Sarah’s banana and the two slices of bread, whose crust is slightly molded I briefly stand still and close my eyes. The odor coming up from the tray remembers me of better times; of the days, when Sarah had been waiting in the living room in front of the fireplace and we had nestled up with our traditional cup of tea.
I try to evoke the image of these days that had gone by long ago. Somewhere inside my subconscious, at the place where one uses to bury all the treasures of life and to store up one’s most beautiful memories, I know that I’m conserving these very special times in a golden chest, on whose cover stands in shining letters “Sarah”.
It’s difficult for me to remember these evenings. The way how Sarah was sitting in her chair, her legs crossed and her chin leaned on one hand, as if she had been in deep thought about something. The way she had pinned up her long hair, so that it couldn’t come in her way when she was having her tea. Or the matchless expression inside her eyes, when I had stepped up to her next to the fireplace, with the same tray I hold now in my hands, with a gallant bow serving her some tea.
Even the sizzling of the logs inside the fireplace that had used to accompany all my memories like a symphony to me isn’t more than just a faraway anticipation.
The only thing I can see clearly is this dreadful thing inside the Miller’s bedroom – and Danny, with his brain sticking against the wall behind him, while smoke is rising from the muzzle of his gun and mixing with the splattering fountains coming out of the stump of his throat.
It almost resembles me as if the treasure I had always been nourishing and maintaining now was losing its glow. As do the days on this new world. The memories I had used to treasure most wash out and become gray. Just as if they were resolving into dust.
As I open my eyes again the tears inside of them melt my view. I feel as alone as I never before in my life. Danny is gone. And Cindy seems to have turned into a walking corpse.
And Sarah …? Don’t they say that a person only dies if the memories of good times fade?
The thought of it makes me instinctively shake my head. I glance to the door and over it towards the ceiling and through this to the place where some think was God. My tears taste of salt. I lick them from my lips and snuffle.
“Don’t take everything from me”, I whisper in a choked down voice. “Don’t take all my memories. And don’t take Sarah.”
For a long time I’m just staring in the air, trying to force back the colors into my thoughts. Sarah’s dress she had used to wear these evenings at the fireplace; the color of her barrettes; the color of the flames leaking in the fireplace.
But everything stays grey. Like the ashes that had covered the world. I put one of the candles onto the tray and with my head bent down ascend up to the bedroom. The middle step of the stair creaks the way it always does, but even this familiar sound suddenly seems meaningless to me.
II
While feeding her one slice of banana after the other Sarah looks at me. The teacup stands beside her on the bedside table, pervading the small room with the perfume of olden days.
Our eyes meet. I wonder what she really sees.
Does she recognize me as the man she had been connected to for more than forty years and whose love and attention she always been able to count on? Does she recognize the color of my eyes, which she had used to call “God’s Blue”? Or am I just another shadow inside her grey world? Is she able to smell the tea? Does she imagine sitting in front of the sizzling open fire, while outside a cold wind is blowing around the corners of our house?
I will never get an answer to these questions. All I can do is to fool myself that she was able to do all these things I desire from her. That her world hadn’t lost all colors and turned into grey ashes.
She slowly chews her banana grimacing like under pain whenever swallowing. In doing so she each time utters a quiet lament.
Each tone that comes from her hits me like a punch into the stomach. It reminds me of Cindy’s hoarse moan. I know how hard it is for her to move on her own. Even to swallow something becomes more and more difficult for her. Only breathing, which is an inborn instinct, works without one having to be worried about, as the doctor has assured to me after having asked him nervously.
When the bowl with the banana is empty I put it onto the tray, push my left hand beneath the back of Sarah’s head and gently lift her towards me, so that with my right hand I’m able to bring the teacup towards her chapped lips. Her mouth moves as if she was still chewing the banana, while her eyes steadfastly keep set at me. I’m grotesquely remembered of Cindy’s dull gaze. When I bent a bit aside Sarah’s unseeing eyes no longer stare at me but at the ceiling to my side. Her eyes don’t follow my movement.
As even to swallow drinks is getting more and more difficult for her, I always have to give her the tea with caution. This ritual to me is the leveling board of her condition. And while this evening I’m watching how the tea again and again seeps from the corner of her mouth onto her nightdress, where has developed an ugly, brown spot, I know that she’s as badly off as I feel myself.
When the memories fade to grey the person in question will die …
After letting Sarah gently down onto her cushion again I take the two slices of bread and in the end eat myself. With every bite I take of the hard and dried up crust, I feel the hunger of the last days nagging at me. It won’t be long until the last oddments out of the larder will be exhausted. I in the next future will have to get us some food. But coming along peacefully with this idea is the image of Cindy going out into the garden to fetch some apples for her family.
To get some food can as well mean to meet one’s death.
But the thought doesn’t find its way into my brain.
I change Sarah’s dress for the night, wash her face and comb her stringy hair. Then I watch her closing her eyes and turning her head beside her into the direction where I use to lay down at night. Something she had always done. And still does.
The thought of still being a small part of her character soothes me; even if she probably does it unknowingly.
Aspirating a gentle kiss onto her forehead I take the candle off the bedside table and go to the table, where still stands Barry’s DVD player. I stare at the now useless, black screen and think back to when Sarah and I had been watching “Casablanca” for the last time.
I almost be
lieve to hear Bogart’s voice inside my head. But all this is mere imagination. The house stays silent.
Outside beyond of the windows a deep silence lies over a grey world.
I put one of my hands into the other, as if praying to a God I no longer believe in. With unseeing eyes I stare into the candle flame, trying to get lost inside its calm light. I’d like to be anywhere. Only get away from this place. My mind is empty and seems to be standing still.
What am I going to do next?
How carry on?
Danny is dead. He has blown his head with his damn gun,
And what’s about Cindy? Cindy is dead, too. But she nevertheless stands inside the bedroom of the small hut, staring blindly towards the door; waiting for anyone to turn the key.
Probably she right now whispers my name. Or is she really going to forget about being human? I wonder if she’ll keep standing there forever – for who should ever turn up at the Miller’s house again? Is there still someone else on this earth? The thought is too tremendous to this evening get a hold of and keep it. It leaves my head just like it had come into it. As if I by switching off the DVD player had left behind only its black, reflecting screen.
Somewhere down the road I put my hand inside my pocket. I don’t know why. I can’t tell if it’s instinct or just my body’s unconscious wish to move itself. But as I lay my hand back onto the table board, I hold the mobile out of Danny’s apartment in my fingers. I had never owned such a device of modern spirit myself. At the kitchen wall hangs the old, black phone, which already got a numeric keyboard; it had used to be my connection to the world outside and had always been completely sufficient to me. But since the apocalypse – I still don’t know how to describe the condition of our new world more accurately – the device doesn’t work better than electricity.
I turn the mobile between my fingers and in doing so regard the blunt reflection of the candle flame onto its small display. During Barry’s sporadic visits I had often in disapproval watched him using the small phone instead of my reliable device hanging at the kitchen wall. That’s why I know that to illuminate the display I just have to press one of the buttons.
A World of Darkness Page 11
