Walk Through Darkness

by David Anthony Durham

  He didn’t pause to take the scene in, but descended the steps and started walking. It was strange leaving the shelter of cellar, walking down the street that he had up to then experienced only through the grimy glass of the window. The buildings on either side of him seemed to lean in toward each other, blocking out all but a thin corridor of the sky above. He remembered the maze of his fevered mind and had to fight the fear that the buildings were conspiring against him. They were simply stationary objects, black and shadowy, yes, but made only of stone and brick and mortar. Sounds, though there were few, were loud and vivid in a way they had never been before. The scuffing of his feet and tolling of a bell and a window slammed closed: all seemed to occur just beside his ear. They pierced into his brain unfiltered.

  At the end of the first block he pulled the street map from within his shirt and studied it in the starlight. A few days before, Anne’s youngest son had marked their house with a pen, and earlier that evening he had traced a route between that dot and the street that was his destination. William followed it as best he could, counting streets and turnings. He wove his way through miles of the city night, unsure the whole time just what he intended. He knew he should wait as Anne had suggested. The danger she spoke of was real. He might be putting everything at risk. But he just couldn’t sit still.

  He had almost an hour to think out a plan as he walked, but when he found the street he was looking for he had no clearer notion of what he would do. It was a wide avenue of close-set cobbled stones. Great trees lined the walkway like sentinels standing guard over the gloomy night, long-limbed and enduring. He moved forward, checking the houses for numbers or names, moving in fits and starts, through shadows and open stretches, hugging the tree trunks. His gait was half-casual, like a man strolling in the evening, and half-frantic, head snapping toward the slightest sound, hands tense and fingers stretched apart as if grown sensitive to each other’s touch. But for all his fear he met no one on the street, and the houses that fronted upon it were uniformly dark. He moved on.

  His heart thumped against his chest when he saw the house. Its number stood out clear and burning above the wide front door. There was no mistaking it. The structure was all so silent, so still and heavy it could’ve been carved of solid granite. It was, in its immobility, a great barrier to the world enclosed within its walls, each of those mundane features impenetrable, like those of a medieval fortress. At the end of the street he halted and thought and surveyed the four corners of the intersection and looked back toward the house. It sat among the others with a shared façade, innocuous and yet so charged with import.

  The clap of a horse’s hooves broke the silence. William didn’t wait to see the horseman. He darted away from the main street, circled around and found a stony lane that ran behind the houses. It was hemmed in on one side by a brick wall that marked the properties’ boundaries. On the other side an embankment supported a hillside thick with vines and bracken. He stood a moment, listening to the clipped notes of hooves on stone. Eventually, he stepped into the alley. He counted the homes until he was sure he had found the house again. He stood at the iron gate that marked the back entrance, not touching it, but gazing between the black stencil of its metalwork. The house was as still from the back as it had been from the front and more forlorn yet. A white curtain swayed in one of the open windows, bringing to his attention how slim the barrier was between him and the inside of that house. Dover might be no more than an open window’s distance away. He could just jump the gate and scale the wall and climb through. It seemed like it would be so easy, and it took great effort to pull himself away.

  He moved farther down the lane, following the embankment as it turned away from the passageway. He settled on a spot where the wall had partially collapsed. The area was choked with shrubs. He wormed his way back into the ivy that draped over the embankment. He turned and checked the view. The house was a hundred yards away. Part of the alleyway was obscured, but he could see both the house itself and the small, dark square that marked the locked back gate. So situated, William rolled his neck upon his shoulders and tried to ease the tension out of his limbs. He asked his heart to slow its beating and wiped the sweat from the corners of his mouth. He began his vigil. He set no parameters on his mission. He just knew that his roaming was over. If Dover were employed in this household she would at some point pass through these back gates, as servants always do. He would spot her as she went to some errand, and, he believed, he would know what to do then.

  Gradually the dawn came. Features of the world stood in ever-clearer detail, monochromatic at first, but blooming into thin color. Shortly afterwards the foot traffic started. Throughout the morning there were occasional passersby through the lane; deliveries at the rear of houses, the coal wagon, workers trudging along with hats low on their heads and tools balanced at awkward angles from their shoulders or swinging at their sides. A man trudged by pulling a wagon, himself harnessed into it like a beast of burden. His feet found careful footing between the stones, muscles braced and tortured by the work. His load was covered over with a burlap sheet, but a smell escaped from it that stuck to the back of William’s throat and brought to mind images of the dead.

  As he expected, servants entered the expensive homes via their back gates. He watched them all, his eyes darting from person to person. At one point, three Negro women traversed the lane, talking amongst themselves. William studied them each in passing but noted no sign of Dover in their postures or movements or dress. Their voices came to him in fragments, but he knew from this also that she was not among them. Later in the afternoon a dog came bounding before its owner. It was drawn toward William by his scent, curious and loud, paws falling blindly on the earth. The canine was just a few feet away when its owner called it back. It went reluctantly, smelling but not seeing the man who huddled just before it, a hidden form entwined in vegetation like a tree spirit incarnate.

  That evening he watched the world run backwards. The various maids emerged from their employers’ back gates. Workers returned from their labors. Shadows stretched and the sun slipped once more out of view. His nose, sharpened by a day of fasting, scented the suppers being prepared in those grand homes. The three women left the Carrs’ just after sunset, leaving in their wake the scent of roasted chicken in gravy so rich it was nourishing just to inhale it. His stomach rumbled so loudly he feared it might give him away. But the women walked on.

  For the first few hours after dark, candles lit the upper rooms of the house he now doubted was the Carrs’. He half-decided to rise with the darkness and return to Anne’s, but he didn’t. He sat where he was, stiff and starved, waiting moment after moment, expecting to see himself stand and leave that place and yet not doing so. In his hunger and his fatigue he slept, and in his dreams he sat exactly where he was, across from the back gate of those large houses, waiting in the spirit world as he did in the physical one. When he awoke it was as if he had never slept and somehow this long period of immobility wearied him even more than his days in flight. It began to rain, a slow, gradual precipitation that fell unabated until dawn. The leaves around him dripped with moisture. Water splattered his shoulders and seeped into his hair and collected beneath him in a puddle that was at first lukewarm with his body heat but that soon grew cold.

  As miserable as he was there, a memory came upon him sudden and vivid. It was an evening late in the summer of the previous year. He waited that night, as he did whenever he could, for Dover to leave her master’s house. But this evening was different than the others, for when she came to him her smile flashed in the night. Her hands were anxious to touch him and soon her lips were soft against his. Her body pressed his with an urgency that shocked him. Her mouth opened and her tongue writhed within him, swirling around his in a sensuous dance. He remembered that she tasted of berries, of the sweet wine sipped from her master’s unfinished glasses. They had made love outside that night, not far from the slave graveyard. That one night alone he didn’t fear the spirits
. He thought nothing of them or of the world of men or of his bondage. Entwined with her against the damp grass they had found moments shared only between them and belonging to no one else in the world. Afterward, he lay listening to her as she recounted things she had overheard that night, Northern talk against slavery, high ideals that, to her ears at least, her master had been powerless to reason against. It was this that had intoxicated her. Not the wine. Not William himself. But freedom. That was what mattered to her most. He knew then something that he had never put into words before. She was the stronger of them, the one with vision, with a determination that had never wavered. Wherever she was, she was free now in a way that he believed he never would be.

  Late the second day William crawled from his hiding place, stiff from his long vigil, sapped to the core. He hadn’t actually conceded defeat, but he didn’t need to name it as such. It was tide flowing into him, building each passing hour, unnamed but no less real. He wasn’t even sure that he was going to return to Anne’s. He wasn’t planning that far ahead. He just needed to move. As he passed the back gate of the house, he paused and pushed his hands in through the iron grating. He wrapped his fingers around the ornate curls and leaves, feeling the cast metal’s irregularities, the gritty texture where rust had begun to spread its decay. He set his forehead against it, pressing so hard and long that when he pulled back his skin was imprinted with its design. He walked away with his head lowered, seeing no further than a few feet in front of him: bricks and the space between them, leaves and twigs and horse dung and the unnameable rubbish that had been and always would be the material of any city street. It was only when he was back on the main avenue, having crossed it and standing on the other side, that his gaze lifted and studied the mansion. It was unchanged from before, except brighter now and more solid and that much more indifferent. He half lifted a hand, as if in farewell to another person, and then he spun to move away.

  It was in this swirling motion that he saw her. She appeared on the opposite side of the street, trailing along at the heels of three white women. These three—two old and one young—walked in a leisurely fashion, hands folded before them, the youngest dangling a parasol at her side, all three talking at once, though William couldn’t hear them because of the distance. His eyes pushed between them, catching brief glimpses of the Negro woman who followed them. He saw parts of her at first: half of her face and the hat above it, the length of her forearm, the low hem of her skirt. But it was enough. It was Dover.

  She turned her head and met his eyes. Her step slowed, like a toy beginning to wind down; her eyes blinked and opened and blinked again; her gloved hand rose up and cupped before her mouth, as if she would catch her exhaled breath within her fingertips. She might have turned from the sidewalk and moved toward him, but the younger of the white women paused before the gate of the townhouse and called back for her. Dover hurried on, saying something to explain herself and fanning her face with her hand. She didn’t look at William as she entered the gate, or as she closed it behind her and walked beside the woman to the front door. She turned and looked back as she passed through the house’s threshold. It was a momentary glimpse, not enough to convey a message. Then the door closed.

  William didn’t move. He stared as if the door itself had done him harm and had something to answer for, awed that he had never for a moment imagined her entering the front door. The sky slid by overhead, bringing with it patches of shade and bursts of light. People passed him on either side, like water around a rock. He was aware of some pausing to study him and felt one man brush roughly past him. The minutes added one unto another, past the quarter hour and on toward the half. Still he stared, sure that it couldn’t end so incompletely, but at a loss for what to do next.

  But when she came it was from another direction. She must’ve exited through the back gate. She approached him from the alley he had himself emerged from. She slipped toward him so quietly that at first he didn’t notice. It was only the fact that a being stopped near him that drew his attention from the door. He turned and beheld her as she was, no longer a creature of dreams, but flesh and blood there before him. She whispered his name. He nodded his acceptance of it. And that was all the voiced greeting that passed between them. They moved together, closing the gap of those many months and many miles in the space of two strides.

  ONE Dover whistled for William in the pitch-blackness that precedes the rising of the moon. He stumbled forward, crouched low and feeling his way with his hands. When he stepped out of the undergrowth and emerged beside her, she pulled him tight against her. “Shh,” she said. “Don’t let nobody hear you talk.” With that, she set off, quick enough in her step to allow no dissent.

  They had precious little time to speak upon their meeting. Dover had done little more than verify through touch and a few words that William was real, then she had ordered him back into hiding until she could figure out what to do. It was too brief a reunion, and it left William with a host of unanswered questions. He waited as instructed, throughout the late afternoon and on into twilight and beyond, replaying those seconds, searching each of her gestures and words for meanings hidden below the surface. Though he was amazed by the sight of her, something in their greeting left him uneasy.

  They traveled on the side streets, the alleyways, behind people’s houses, stepping around the refuse that collected in such regions, the pungent mounds patrolled by rats wakening to their work. It was an intimate progress, this rear glimpse into people’s homes. It became more so once out of that affluent neighborhood and into working class areas. The business at the backside of the city dwellers’ lives was on display. The splash of liquids thrown from a back window, the piercing wail of a child left unattended, the glazed eyes of an old woman, alone on a porch, railing verbally against the rats she loathed. William started at the call of one Irishman to another, the two suddenly emerging from a fenced yard, dashing past them like school children, laughing as they went. Once their path brought them near a legless man. He shouted curses from the padded crate in which he sat, lashing out with his arms as if he could grapple with the world and so vent his anger. The couple circled him at length and moved on.

  Their destination was a modest row house, a unit squashed between the larger structures. They approached it from the back alley, slipped in at a rickety wooden gate and fell into shadow, and emerged into the moonlight again as they climbed the stairs. The landing at the top was a narrow balcony of rough-cut lumber. It bowed beneath their weight. William wondered how Dover knew this route so well, but he didn’t voice the question. She motioned him still and addressed herself to the door, a windowless portal whose lintel met William at eye level. She rapped against it with her knuckles. He noticed for the first time how hard she was breathing. Beads of sweat clung to her forehead. Noticing his gaze, she wiped them away with the flat of her hand.

  The door cracked open. A man stepped forward, holding a candle close to his face, bathing his features in pools of light and shadow. His complexion was similar to William’s, though his face had a muted quality very different than William’s strong features. He wore wire-rimmed glasses that reflected the candlelight in gold. His glance first settled on William, quick and defensive, but it softened the moment he noticed Dover.

  “Sorry to trouble you,” she said. She leaned in toward the man, meeting his gaze and speaking as much with her eyes as with her mouth. “Have to apologize for coming by at this hour, but we need to talk.”

  William learned the other man’s name was Redford Prince. His apartment was small but tidy, with a sparseness that at first disguised the careful selection of the room’s decorations. Red-ford bade them enter and motioned them toward the sofa, an ornate furnishing with pale upholstery, with cabriole legs of a deep mahogany that concluded in claws clenched around the balls upon which the entire structure rested. Redford swept an assortment of books and papers from the coffee table and offered them tea. They both refused, but he stoked the tiny fire in his hearth with a few
small sticks and set out saucers for them. He was largely silent through all of this, working with a quick dexterity, his fingers trembling while at rest.

  William soon found himself seated on the soft cushion, a cup and saucer balanced on the rough contours of his knees. Dover held the same in one hand, somehow graceful with the porcelain in a way that made William uneasy. She explained the situation that had brought them there. A little of it, at least. But as she knew almost nothing of William’s story it fell to him to tell his tale. He did so most reluctantly. Though he described terrors neither of his listeners could imagine, it was he who was most unnerved. He wasn’t even sure why, but somehow, already, the glow was fading. Things were already different than he had imagined. Telling his tale only made him more aware of this.

  Before long they began to talk of the couple’s options, which proved to be painfully limited. They couldn’t make a home for themselves here because William wasn’t beyond the reach of the South. And Dover, despite her apparent freedom, was still the property of a man who could call her back at any time. They could flee farther north, or to the west, but to where, with whose help, to settle in what unknown territory, with what demons stalking behind them? At length, Redford began to speak of an escape to Canada.

  “Canada?” William asked. He glanced at Dover, surprised that she did not share his shock. Yes, Canada bordered the States, but, as it was another country, it might as well have been Great Britain or Prussia or even Africa itself. “You expect us to go to Canada? I don’t know nothing bout up there.”

  “It’s the nearest truly free soil around. I know it’s a difficult thing to consider, but you’re already an exile from the place of your birth, William. Life there does have advantages, as I’ve already explained to Dover. I’ve a copy of the Provincial Freeman around here somewhere. It’s a paper put out by a Negro woman about life in the provinces. She exaggerates the positive, I’m sure, but it’s worth reading.” Redford half-stood and cast his eyes about the room.