A World of Darkness Read online

  “Times have changed, Dad”, he whispers just as loud that I’m able to catch it.

  “Demi’s not a child any longer; even if she is just twelve. She saw her mother die.”

  Barry for a moment closes his eyes, as if trying to repress upcoming memories.

  “There, at the roof of the hospital, Demi lost her childhood”, he then continues in an even lower voice. “One glance into her eyes will show you that she changed the very moment her mother had died. But I believe that deep down inside of her she still is your little girl.”

  Barry hugs me tighter. He smells of sweat and whiskey.

  “But your little girl is on the hide. At the moment we need Demi at the weapon. Do you understand that?”

  Again I’m thinking about a lot of answers that I would have liked to shout at Barry – just like a short time before, when he had suggested the ride to Devon. But instead of crying out all my fear and rage, I just nod and hug Barry myself.”

  We keep standing there for a while without saying a word; like two lovers getting on well without words. As we disengage from each other and the cold comes creeping back inside me Barry grapples both of my shoulders and looks at me. I can see tears gleaming inside his eyes.

  “I propose you start the car. I’ll go to the helicopter and fetch our weapons.”

  I take Barry’s forearm and shake my head.

  “Let me briefly talk to Sarah, okay?”

  He lowers his eyes, seeming to think about it. Then he nods and gives me a smile that remembers me of the countless evenings together with Shelley and Sarah inside this very room.

  “Please don’t forget we’ve to be back before nightfall.”

  “You don’t have to tell me that.”

  I disengage from Barry, go over to Murphy and briefly press his upper arm. He, my friend, has become so damned thin, I think sadly. Then I take one of the candles and slowly climb the stairs up to the bedroom. The middle step crunches its nearly forgotten tune, while the cold inside of me is giving way to a dark emptiness.

  VI

  The room is lit by a single candle. The one I use to place onto the table at the foot of the bed, so that Sarah at night and day isn’t laying in complete darkness is burnt down and extinct. The only, nonpoint light comes from Demi’s candle that’s plugged in a brass candleholder.

  Sarah and my granddaughter can only be recognized as dark shadows. As I enter the room one of the shadows looks up to me. The other doesn’t move.

  I put my candle onto the little wooden table beside the burnt down one and cautiously approach the bed. Demi is sitting at its edge next to her grandmother, holding her hand. Sarah’s hand even if between the fingers of a child looks fragile. In the flickering candlelight her skin is gleaming of a ghastly white.

  I with caution sit down behind Demi, so that I’m able to look at Sarah over my granddaughter’s shoulder. It resembles me that any inconsiderate movement could desecrate this holy moment.

  We keep sitting there quietly for some time. I alternately regard Sarah’s sleeping, waxy face and the faintly bent down figure of my granddaughter. I called her midget, I think, again having to repress my rage against everything that was in charge of this new world.

  After an as it seems endless time Demi turns around to me, looking at me with sad eyes. I feel something inside my heart break. As I look down I’m hardly able to breathe.

  “Do you think she knows what happened?”

  Out of the child’s body comes an old woman’s voice. Her fingers are playing nervously with each other. The words that Demi speaks now are her first clear words since she had come here. But the sound of her voice and the obvious grief in it are frightening me. I slowly shake my head.

  “No, babe; for your grandma everything stayed like before.”

  Demi seems to think about my words. She stares to the ground. I want to shout at God for what he has done to this child. I want to ask him if he is proud to have stolen a little girl’s soul.

  “I think grandma is happiest of us all”, Demi tears me out of my rage. At the same time I feel something cold inside my hand.

  As I look down I see that she with her little, slender fingers has grabbed my hand. I with a smile lay my loose hand on hers, in doing so enclosing her pale fingers that resemble me colder than ice.

  “You’re right”, I whisper, in doing so looking at Sarah.

  “Grandma is happy where she is.”

  Demi’s thoughts and words are simple and full of a childlike innocence. But they at a sudden make me feel better. During all the days before I never had regarded Sarah’s condition the way Demi did right now. Her grandmother doesn’t know what happened to the world. She doesn’t hear the monsters howling in front of the house. She neither hears them hit their paws against the porch door. But first of all she doesn’t see what has become of me. That her young toy boy, who had abducted her so often to Devon together with Murphy and Audrey and who had been bubbling along like an enamored fool, has turned into sad old man, who each day whishes more to be dead.

  Demi is right. Sarah is the most enviable of us all. Perhaps she’s the happiest person throughout the earth. The world has moved on – but not for my Sarah, not for my girl.

  “Daddy said we’ll drive to Devon.”

  I look at Demi. And the panic I find inside her eyes makes me forget the heady feeling about Sarah being fine.

  “Your daddy and I are going to drive to Devon”, I answer her, removing a strand of hair out of her face. Even her cheeks feel cold. “You and uncle Murphy will stay here and keep an eye on grandma.”

  The strain on her body nearly at once loosens. But the fear and this unspeakable earnestness that would rather match an adult remain steadfastly inside her eyes.

  “You have to be back before nightfall”, she whispers. Her once bright eyes resemble extinct pieces of coal.

  “I know, babe. We’ll just fetch something to eat and some medicine. And your daddy and I will be back even before evening.”

  “By night these … things come from their hide-outs,” Demi says in a drawling voice. Her chest begins to lift in rapid intervals. “They help themselves to the dead, you know. I saw it from my room in the hospital.”

  Tears come into her eyes. I know exactly that she this moment is thinking of her mother.

  “You mustn’t remember Boston.”

  I tenderly attract my little one to me. As she snuggles into my arm I’m captured by her coldness as if in midwinter standing in knee-high snow.

  “Nothing will happen to you here. The house is safe. And in the hillside …”

  … there are not as many monsters, I wanted to say. But I fall silent and fondle over Demi’s head. She begins to sob. Her shoulders quiver. Then she begins to weep, pinching her little hands painfully into my forearms.

  It does me good to see my little one weep. Suddenly she is a child again, with all the fears and thoughts of a child.

  For some moments she’s my ‘midget’ again. I hold her tight while over her head regarding Sarah’s sleeping face.

  When the child been hugged last? Had it been Barry while he had been flying here? Or had it been her mother when Demi’s world hadn’t yet been broken apart?

  I close my eyes and enjoy touching my granddaughter. Her body inside my arms is moving spasmodically and quivering. Her hair smells of sweat and still a bit of apples.

  “I’ll go down to daddy again”, she finally whispers and disengages herself from my hug. I don’t want to let her loose. I therefore grab her hand and let it disappear between mine again.

  “Daddy taught me how to shoot”, she says in a throaty voice, in doing so wiping her nose with the back of her hand.

  “I know”, is all I’m able to answer her, for I can’t make me like this thought.

  “I think you know about the pistol daddy is keeping for me in the helicopter?”

  I just nod, pressing the girl’s hand a bit harder.

  “He says it was only to my best.” Suddenly her e
yes begin faintly to sparkle of life. “Having it I’ll be even better able to protect grandma while you’ll be in Devon.”

  “You’re right”, I answer with my throat tightening. “So, what might happen then?”

  A short smile is coming to Demi’s face. The thought of with my twelve year old granddaughter talking about weapons and in doing so inside her smile recognizing a certain pride proves me anew in what a backbreaking state of hopelessness this new world is in.

  “Will you do me a favor?”

  Demi steps directly before me, gazing at me with this maiden-like look inside her eyes that had enabled her to twist me around her finger already when she had still been a little child.

  “Whatever you want”, I answer and intimately bend forward to her. I feel a stabbing pain around my kidneys, but I don’t let on about it.

  “Being in Devon could you bring me something to read? You know what I like.”

  I lower my voice to a conspiratorial whisper.

  “Of course I know … Elmer Kelton and everything about Indians.”

  Demi’s eyes for a short moment begin to glow. It is as if in the little world of her own inside of her was raising a sun that was easily able to ban the darkness of the real world.

  “I promise to”, I continue, caressing the girl’s cold cheek. “I’ll see what I can do.”

  Demi nods earnestly. From one second to the next she has turned into the earnest grownup with the dark eyes again. She turns away from me, bending down to Sarah and giving her a kiss onto her forehead.

  “Sleep tight, grandma”, she whispers into her ear. Then she turns round to me, looks at me with these black coal-like eyes and suddenly gives me a childlike smile that remembers me of the happiness of the past years.

  “Thanks, Grandpa”, she says, again taking my hand and pressing it shortly. “We’ll make it.”

  With these words she stands up, throwing a last glance at her grandmother and grabbing the candleholder. When she goes out onto the corridor and as quietly as possible shuts the door the room gets darker; and more silent.

  I for a long time am staring at the dark shadow that is the door and try to imagine my granddaughter walking tentatively through the corridor down to her father; a frail girl, who hadn’t seen the severe facts of life and then had to grow up within a few days.

  I sit down directly besides Sarah, for an endless time regarding her face. Demi’s words are echoing inside my head.

  Perhaps Sarah really is the luckiest person on earth. But the longer I’m thinking about it, the more absurd resembles me this theory. How can one be happy if the only world one had been living in for nearly two years now lost its colors? In Sarah’s world, deep down inside her, there is only an endless, silent emptiness. No flowers on a wide meadow, bending in the wind. No trees singing a somewhat drowsy tune. No flavors remembering her of how beautiful the world had been once. No hillside sunsets she had loved that much.

  I often had been wondered what Sarah might see with her eyes, or which memories of her old life she might have saved into the silent quagmire that her soul had become. I then most times had asked myself if she was able to remember me; if she still knew what her young toy boy had looked like, how his voice had sounded and how he had smelled.

  Sarah had often given me an answer to these agonizing questions – namely by turning her head to my direction when I talked to her or by a simple sigh when I touched her. I then had been sure that she remembered me and that I even inside her deep silence was still walking at her side.

  I caress her cheek with my finger. Her eyelids shortly flicker. From her narrow lips comes a sigh that hardly is to be heard; or is it a whisper? As I imagine her whispering my name a smile is coming to my face. Just like it had been in the many nights of our past, when we had been laying arm in arm in the dark and her tender breath had been tickling my ear.

  “I’ll go to Devon”, I whisper in a throaty voice. “Find us something to eat … and some medicine.”

  Sarah doesn’t react. “Her eyes are moving unsteadily behind her closed lids.

  I wonder what she might see right now.

  “Barry and Demi are here, too.”

  As I take her hand she sighs again.

  “Demi had been here right now. You surely have seen her.” A short laugh escapes my throat. “She begged me to bring her something to read. You know what a bookworm she is.”

  Sarah’s lips move as if she was trying to form some words. I pause and bend down to her. But the only thing that escapes her throat is a rasping sound. Her breath smells sour.

  “Perhaps I’ll find us a new DVD-player”, I finally continue disappointedly. “Then we in the evenings will be able to watch Humphrey again.”

  I automatically glance onto the black screen of the little device Barry had given me for my last birthday. Humphrey had gone. And with him had gone the joy, the two of us had used to have with him.

  I suddenly long for a hot cup of tea and Humphrey’s calm voice. And of course I long for the unbelievable feeling of holding my girl hugged into my arms. It had only been two days ago that Sam had last been playing his tune in the small bar.

  “I’ll bring our old friend along”, I whisper, not being able to fight back my tears. “I promise to. Then we’ll have tea and by candlelight will watch the old tome again. Just the way it had used to be.”

  A sob is fighting its way up through my throat. Through my eyes that are clouded by tears I believe to see a smile onto Sarah’s face. I even can hear her voice. Just like before when she had whispered my name into my ear. But as I wipe away my tears Sarah is lying there quietly. Her eyes are still moving behind her lids and her chest is lifting faintly but regularly.

  “Demi will pay attention to you while Barry and I will be on our way to Devon. She has grown.”

  Grown up I should have said properly. But I dread this word.

  “Murphy’s here, too. Nothing will happen to you. And I very soon will be back here with you again.

  I smile and nod, as if having to confirm me of my own lies. Then I take her hand into mine, bend down to her and aspirate a kiss onto her cheek.

  “I love you.”

  This time I’m sure that she can hear my whisper. Pressing her faint hand against my cheek I close my eyes and suck in her touch. Something inside my heart tells me that it will be the last.

  I stand up, a last time regarding the pale figure at the bed and when I’m right on my way to grab the candle stop. This candle is the last one inside the room that is still burning. That’s why I, with my legs being heavy and my heart crying, descend to the living room in darkness.

  VII

  Our trip into the dark is passing before my eyes like an old silent movie. The pictures move much too fast and a strange silence is filling in my world.

  Barry and Murphy are talking to me. But I can only see her lips move and her eyes regard me questioning. I believe that I even answer their questions. But the words don’t seem to come out of my mouth. Something has taken hold of me with ice-cold claws. For I only too well am aware of the fact that we are on our way to a ghost town, where there is something worse than ghosts lurking on us, I don’t know if it’s a paralyzing horror or the stabbing sureness that we are making a huge mistake.

  As necessary our trip to Devon might possibly resemble to fill up our stocks and to stash away some medicine for an emergency, as sure I am that Barry and I are directly heading for perdition.

  Had I really just bid farewell to my Sarah? This thought is haunting my mind like an ice-cold haze, while I sit down at the passenger’s seat of the Pick-up. Apparently the silent voice inside me left the driving to Barry.

  Onto my legs I feel the soothing weight of my gun, whose chambers and mechanisms I had proofed one more time. Inside the pockets of my jacket I feel the weight of some additional cartridge. Barry’s gun lies in front of me inside the leg area, so that the butt protrudes from it like an enormous gear selector.

  My old babe’s engine stutters
and wheezes. The auto body vibrates. Inside a dead world the noise of all that is overwhelming and gradually brings me back to reality. The sounds and smells of this terrible world bit by bit come through to me again. Along with them comes a huge wave of panic that is smothering me like in a tsunami.

  While Barry stirs the Pick-up slowly over the uneven sand path up to the street my fingers grip in the armrest of the seat. The car shakes and rocks, just as if Sarah and I were inside one of these new-fashioned carousels at the fair in Devon.

  I feel that I’m getting nauseated. While I glance at the side mirror Barry with a sullen expression on his face is staring through the blotchy wind shield out to the path. His jaw muscles are stiffened and because of him clasping the stirring wheel so hard the knuckles of his hand are emerging from it as white spots.

  To be able to recognize something inside the side mirror I have to bend forward. I see the house disappear behind us.

  On the porch I can see Murphy, who that moment resembles me like the cheap stereotype of a western hero. Standing in front of the kitchen door with his legs set solidly onto the ground and looking after us with an earnest face, he holds his gun set out on his hip.

  Before climbing inside the car I had embraced him. Who knows if I will ever be able to do so again. I can’t tell if one of us had said something. But I remember the feeling of intimacy when I had pressed his thin body against my chest. I’m sure that he for his part will remember my droopy body the same way.

  In front of the porch, in the high grown grass of our former garden there’s Demi. She suddenly resembles me so small and forlorn. She no longer is a grown-up. She’s just a child, just my “midget”.

  While her hair is streaming in the wind her hand got a hold of the pistol Barry had given to her. It’s a paradox.

  The arm that holds the weapon is sagging from her side. It’s a terrible sight for an old man like me. No grandfather should have to see his little granddaughter like that.