Dark
by David Barber
She swerved to avoid a sudden deer and clipped a tree. The air
bag saved her, but the car was a wreck.
Back in the city you just took a charged battery to a showroom
and drove out a new car. Here, she hiked all afternoon before spotting the man
loading boxes into a cargo van.
The gas station on the highway had been gutted long ago; today
Frank was scavenging the straggle of buildings behind it, where a pair of rusting
cars blocked the only street, nose to nose, doors open, as if their drivers had
just got out to argue. It meant he had to carry each load back to his van and
it took so long the autumn light was beginning to fail.
This was his last,
anxious haul: a cardboard box full of candles and books.
Gotta get back, gotta
get back, he hummed. Gotta
get back with the paperbacks.
"Keep hold of the
box," said the woman, pointing a rifle. "I just want the keys to your
van."
He
had the wild hair and unwashed look of a
loner, and he refused to hand over the keys, just kept repeating he wouldn’t
get back before dark if he did that.
"I
made a house safe," he explained
earnestly. His gaze shifted everywhere except to meet hers. "You can hide
there tonight and we’ll find you a car tomorrow."
He
sounded so matter-of-fact, it almost made
sense.
She’d
once shot a man who tried to corner her,
but this one was just bewildered and lost and her finger eased off the trigger.
In the end, she found herself in the back of his van as he drove, trying to
ignore the reek that came off him.
After
a while he volunteered his name.
"Name's Frank."
"Jane,"
she said, not sure why she
lied.
Frank, Frank,
safe as
a bank, he hummed to reassure
her as they drove down empty roads, past deserted farms, bumping over rusty
railroad crossings.
The
house had planks nailed across the windows
and shiny new bolts fitted to the doors, with a kind of panic room upstairs. It
was bare except for a heavy dresser that Frank heaved across the door.
"They’ve
never tried to get in," he
admitted. "But I keep the shotgun handy because I can't stay awake all
night."
He
gave her a hopeful smile, one she suspected
wasn’t used much.
She
shook her head and sank down in the corner
opposite him. She took the shells from his shotgun and leaned it next to her
rifle.
"I’ve
got..." He examined dented
tins stacked by a primus stove. "Food, if you want it."
What
she didn’t want was to hear his story. He
sat with his arms round his knees, rocking and rocking, and eventually her eyes
grew heavy. She was woken by a thump on the wall behind her.
He
leapt across the room and they struggled
for her rifle, his eyes wide with panic.
"It’s
old," she managed to say.
"Old houses settle."
They
stood like statues while the window
rattled and there were bangs as if someone was using a lump hammer on the
brick.
In
the sudden silence his grip on the barrel
loosened.
"You’re
being stalked, Frank." By
some other pitiful, deranged loner.
She
pried the rifle loose. "Let’s find
out."
But
he shrank away, terrified, and she saw how
it must be for him, barricading himself in this room night after night,
devoured by dread and loneliness.
"You
don’t understand," he said
finally, and began to whisper a nightmare of childhood about something coming
back from the dark, like in olden times, when all we had were caves to huddle
in and campfires to keep it away.
She
told him to be quiet and pulled the
blanket tight around her, blaming the cold.
Next
morning, they jump-started an abandoned
SUV, the last vehicle in an ancient two-lane traffic jam, and as she siphoned
gas from car after car, he rambled on about the expiry dates on cans, asking
what the women in her commune would do when the tinned food ran out.
The date on the
tin,
the date on the tin, he hummed. Tells you about the state it’s in.
"Let
me come with you," he blurted
suddenly.
Of
course they’d never vote him in, but she found
she couldn’t say no to his face. Instead, she explained what she’d been doing
out here, hunting down items for her group, like the nitrous oxide cylinder
she’d left in the crash.
"We
have a doctor. Well, a paramedic.
Maybe you could locate stuff for her. You’d be good at that."
"I’d
still be on my own."
"We’ll
make sure your stalker doesn’t
follow us."
He
tried to explain about victims, but she
didn’t understand. She didn't even seem to know how strong she was. Wolves go
for the weak and sickly. All victims know that.
As
they drove in convoy towards the city,
backtracking around blocked roads, he wondered what she did to pass the time.
He hummed the victim, the victim, the wolves always pick 'im.
When
it was obvious they wouldn’t make it
before dark, he signalled a halt and was panic-struck when he found she planned
to sleep in her SUV.
"Safer
together," he insisted.
"Unless I can have my gun back."
So
she watched him getting the van ready,
performing the rituals to keep them safe inside, and was startled awake in the
night by someone banging on the outside of the van.
"How
did they follow us?" she yelled
over the din.
Of
course, he’d padlocked the back doors, so
to get out she had to shove past him into the cab with her rifle, and he was
still struggling with her when the booming stopped.
She
knew it was wrong bringing him back with
her. For a time, she’d imagined sending him off like a dog to fetch useful
stuff, rescuing him with her company and her reasonable words.
Perhaps
after a haircut, bathing again, less
mad, but she knew it wasn’t possible, that it was a responsibility she didn’t
want.
As
they neared the city, she kept looking
behind her, but no one was following.
"You
have to trust me," she told him,
"While I go and explain things."
His
van dwindled in her driving mirror, the
only vehicle in a Whole Foods parking lot gleaming with rain.
She
put off going back the next day, and the
next.
His
drivers’ door was open and the van was
empty, his shotgun and a lamp on the asphalt. He’d listened to her and tried to
be brave.
So
many thoughts before, so many loud voices.
Now the world lay defenceless.
She
never told her people, but afterwards she
was always back before dark, repeatedly checking the doors were locked, safe in
their kitchen, with company and chatter, in the soft glow of the oil lamps.
The dark, the
dark, she hummed. Not
scared of the Dark.
The End
