The Darkness and Dogs

by Lanchbery, T. S.

  At nearly two am Lowell awakes in a panic, arms flailing with the terror that so often strikes him whenever he finds himself waking in a new and unfamiliar place. Sitting up in his makeshift bed he wipes the sweat from his brow and blinks as his eyes adapt to the dark of the hut, and then his heart lurches wildly as he sees a tall figure silhouetted in the doorway opposite him. Lowell holds his breath, and stifles the urge to cry out or reach for his machete that lies on the floor to his left hand side – he can’t be sure that the person has seen him yet in the darkness and is desperate to stay hidden if he can. Eventually, his eyes adapt enough that he can make out that the figure is a man, with fiery red hair and a piercing stare – which luckily for Lowell seems to be focused on the shelf above his head – strafing back and forth in search of something. Ever so slowly, Lowell’s left hand starts to move through the darkness towards his blade, and at the same time he tenses his right against the floor on the other side, ready to push himself up and towards the stranger if needed. Soon, the fingers of his left hand reach the floor, and he begins to move his hand back and forth, brushing gently against the surface in search of the knife in all directions with no success. As he fumbles blindly, sweat begins to drip from his brow once again, running down his face and dropping onto his already sodden sheet. He keeps his eyes fixed firmly on the man and continues to search back and forth until, eventually, he sees the figure turn in the doorway and at once Lowell leans over, spots the dark shape of his machete against the floor and scoops it up. Turning back around, he can just make out the figure of the man stepping gently out of the hut and away out of sight.

  As soon as the man is gone, Lowell springs to his feet, and creeps over to the doorway. Outside, a full moon illuminates the perimeter of the fence and the patch of ground inside. Lowell slowly eases closer to the opening, leans out a few inches and glances quickly in both directions. There is no sign of the man anywhere, but the ramshackle construction of the fence casts irregular shadows of impenetrable gloom across the yard, patches of night that Lowell’s imagination populates with skulking enemies waiting to leap out at him at any moment. Hands shaking, and padding softly on bare feet, Lowell tiptoes towards the edge of the building and pauses as he hears the soft murmuring of several voices in urgent conversation just around the corner ahead of him. As he pulls himself closer and strains to listen the voices stop abruptly. Lowell waits and waits, glancing behind regularly in case the people should creep around behind him, but the voices remain silent. Eventually, he decides he can take no more and moves his head forward until one eye pokes around the side of the hut. Now the moon is directly behind him, casting one long deep shadow so that once again he has to wait for his eyes to adjust, and then eventually he sees the same dark figure standing stock still and alone just ahead of him in the darkness. As he watches, he sees the man stiffen and turn, and Lowell’s fingers curl around his knife as his whole body is wracked by a paralyzing fear. For several seconds Lowell and the man remain still, each watching the other through the blackness, and then all of a sudden Lowell sees something he has missed, he cannot put his finger on it, but it is something about the figure. The way it is standing, head tilted slightly to one side maybe, some softness in its aura perhaps, Lowell cannot explain it. Whatever it is, Lowell’s terror drains away and is replaced by an instant and equally stunning wonder and joy, a sudden and wonderful, stupefying sense of familiarity and love, and he realized that the figure is not a man, but is his wife, Beth. At once he steps forward and begins to reach out his hands toward her. As he comes closer, and makes out her face more clearly, a single tear of happiness rolls down his cheek and he sees her face light up with a smile of such astonished delight that he feels the hairs on his arms stand up. They stare at each other speechlessly, and then finally she opens her mouth to speak, and then, in that same moment, she frowns, her nose wrinkles with confusion and one hand shoots up from her side to her neck. Lowell stops and stares in surprise, and an anguished cry comes unbidden from his lips as he watches a torrent of blood gush from her neck, bubbling through her fingers and coursing down her slender white fingers. Their eyes meet, and in hers he sees a deep sadness, and then, before he can move to stop it she staggers backwards and slumps down to rest against the wall of the hut. Lowell rushes forward, falls to his knees, and reaches out to grab hold of her shoulders, and then recoils as his fingers are met with a terrible damp chill and he feels that her whole body is hard to the touch. Beth’s eyes are closed now, and her hand - which dropped from her neck to the ground as she fell - now lies lifeless in the dirt. Lowell takes hold of her once again, wrapping his arms around her and rocking her desperately in the hope he will feel some life and warmth within, but there is nothing there but a terrible icy stillness, and beneath that a smell – faint and musty at first but rising and strengthening by the second until it is all that Lowell can taste – putrid waves of mold and decay. As the odor washes over him Lowell falls backwards and gags, and all of a sudden it is as if a fog lifts and he can see clearly again, and finally he recognizes the long-dead body of the woman he discovered earlier sitting in front of him, still wrapped in the shroud he had given her and toppled over, lifeless against the wall.

  Lowell wakes in the low light of dawn with a new sense of purpose. After his terrible experience of the night before, his sleep had been understandably troubled, and he had woken repeatedly in the night, immediately looking towards the doorway and praying that he would see nothing or no one there. In one such spell of disquiet he had come to a firm decision that he would not return to his forest home. He had instead resolved to press on, and seek something, anything, more than he currently had. The events of the past few days have left him with a terrible sense of having lost something that he had never possessed. It is difficult for him to know how to process the grief he is now feeling, being as it is for people that he had never known. His life has for so long been that of a fugitive that he has never had time to process the intense loneliness that has lain dormant within him. Now that hibernation is over, he feels his isolation more acutely than ever. He eats slowly of the last of the dried meat he took from the boy’s pack, then stows his possessions and makes to leave. Pausing at the doorway as he removes the broom, he cast a final eye around the hut. As he does so, his gaze comes to rest on the back of a photograph on the sill that he had missed the night before. Approaching and turning it over, he sees gazing back at him the boy’s mother, dressed smartly in a light blue summer dress and smiling as she holds a young baby in her arms. Standing next to her, with one hand draped protectively over her shoulder stands a man that Lowell recognizes now from the broken cup that he had found in the boy’s pack. He stands, head bowed, staring at the photograph for some time, before tucking the now tear-stained picture in his jacket pocket and heading out the door with a determined stride. He is going to Newmarket. He is going home.

  *****

  “Now I realize that there was at least some purpose to my misery. It was all leading somewhere, not where I thought, or hoped, but there was always a destination. There was a reason for all of the cold, a reason for all of the hunger, for all of the pain, for all of the fatigue and sleepless nights. My sleep is better now than it was, but still, after all this time I occasionally experience the same sense of confusion when I rise that I did in the days and weeks following the outbreak. I wake and turn over and still expect to see her there in the bed beside me. It sounds clichéd; it feels like I should follow it up by saying that I could still see her impression in the bed, still smell her scent on the sheets. But there are no sheets, no bed, and that surprises me also. Sometimes it isn’t until I look around me, and see that there is indeed no house even, just whichever shitty decaying bolt hole I crawled into the night before that it hits me anew. I wake and turn over and expect to see my life. But it’s gone. All there is now is existence itself.”

  Chapter Nine

  Out of the hut, Lowell takes one long, final look at the outline of the woman resting under her s
hroud, before heading to the loose post in the fence. Sliding the panel up, he remains motionless for a moment and scans his immediate surroundings for any movement. All is still, and so he crawls through the opening, replaces the board, hooks it closed, and slips swiftly into the long meadow grass and away.

  With a fixed destination in mind, he makes good time, and has crossed the meadow and started into the woodland beyond before the low sun has burnt the morning dew from the grass underfoot. Once in the forest, he travels more cautiously, constantly alert as he darts warily from the cover of one tree to the next. Whenever a suitable climb presents itself, he scales the tree, rests in the canopy, taking a moment to check the sun’s position in the sky, and rectifies his course. The most direct route to Newmarket is by the main road travelling south toward Hastings, but experience tells Lowell that this will not be the quickest. When he last passed this way, on his way out of town, the road had already been impassable in several places. Cars, laden with their owners’ worldly possessions, had savagely entwined as one or other of the drivers had succumbed to the fever whilst behind the wheel. In places, others had tried and failed to overtake these blockages off- road. Lowell had watched aghast as one man had left his car to winch away an obstruction, only to be taken down by a pack within seconds, whilst his family watched helpless and stranded in their car. Once the traffic had come to a standstill it had been easy pickings for the dogs, and the majority of the beasts had remained there for days, besieging whole families within their vehicles until starvation or dehydration forced them into a doomed last-stand bid for freedom. The dogs’ supply of food on the roads will have dried up some time ago, but still he doesn’t dare to travel that route. He will instead head northwest, pressing through the forest until he comes across the rail line to Feriton, and follow that all the way East.

  *****

  “And in existence alone I can now, at long last, appreciate beauty as a value in and of itself. It used to be that I only ever thought of the landscape around these parts as scenery. As something that flashed past the window of my car, or the train. Something I appreciated in a vague sense as a picturesque perk of living in a nice commuter town outside of the city, and otherwise the reserve for outdoorsy types; lumberjacks I suppose, maybe the odd walker, who I had no compunction to join. If someone then had told me that humans had some deep, primal connection to nature, chances are I would have pretended not to hear them, and slowly shuffled as far away as I could get. But now I understand. There were times when I was stalking the woods, simply looking for something to eat and trying hard not to be eaten, that I operated purely on instinct, and all conscious thinking just shut down. In those moments, above all others, I was alive. Maybe that was the lesson my father wanted me to take away from our trips out here, maybe that was the ‘God’ he was meant all along. Or, maybe he just wanted to get away from my mother for a bit, and have an excuse to knock back a few cans. Our final trip out together came when I was seventeen years old. I gangly, grumpy and nihilistic, he retired, resentful and nihilistic. The trip was no better, or worse, than any before. Chances are that I would have forgotten it entirely, and never considered the point at which the outings finished were it not for our return home. As I unloaded the RV, I heard a single, troubled shout from within the house. I rushed inside, and was just in time to catch my father coming down the stairs toward me, one hand held out to stop me going any further. He had discovered my mother’s body in the bedroom; she had died from a heart attack in her sleep. He told me that she looked like she was at peace – that was one of the few kind things I can ever remember him telling me – although, actually, I don’t know if that was true, I never saw her body.“

  *****

  Just after midday, he passes through the tree line at the edge of the forest, and onto the sloped stone embankment that leads up and onto the tracks, and finds that he is unsure how to proceed. Hunger is beginning to scatter his thoughts now, and he longs to climb the mound and take the easier route directly along the line. Here he would have a line of sight ahead and to the rear, but would also be that much more visible to those who could be stalking the woodland to either side. He decides on a compromise, and so tracks carefully along the edge of the forest, occasionally breaking to crawl to the tracks and survey the way ahead. As he travels, his thoughts turn repeatedly to the boy, and he strains to recollect the wound on the child’s heel in detail. At the time he had been sure it was a bite, but now in his remembrance he is convinced that it is a straight laceration, a clear example of the clean wound inflicted by knife. He tortures himself by imagining a multitude of scenarios in which he gallantly hauls the boy to safety before effortlessly defeating or evading the ferocious pack waiting below. Absorbed in thought, he stumbles on toward his former town, lost in his reverie. Suddenly, hearing a piercing cry up ahead and over the other side of the embankment, he is shaken out of himself. In a second, he drops to the ground, and presses himself into the dirt. Several minutes pass and, having heard nothing further, he raises himself to his knees and creeps forward. Reaching the edge of the embankment, he wriggles up the slope on his elbows, and can now see that he is almost upon the station house on the outskirts of Newmarket. Inching further forward, he lifts his head until he can see over the far edge of tracks, and freezes. On the path at the bottom of the slope is a dog. He can see that it would at one time have been a fine Malamute, but now it is visibly emaciated, its ribs straining against skin apparent even from a distance. Even with its weight loss it is still a fine and athletic looking animal, stockily built, if smaller framed than the leader of the pack he had encountered two days earlier. Its fur is of a creamy off-white color on its flanks, set off by a deep crown of blue-black and a distinctive white half- collar, but patchy in places and showing dull and dry from malnourishment. The dog is hunched over, one snow-white paw pinning a young marmot by the neck, its muzzle buried deeply in the flesh of its flank. Lowell holds his breath, and scans the area directly surrounding the kill. All is still in the forest. He assumes that the rest of the dog’s pack must be nearby, but knows that they can’t be too close, or they would surely now be sharing in the spoils of its kill. He guesses that this dog could be the alpha of its own pack due to its size, and begins to violently shake as he imagines the others returning to find him in such a vulnerable position.

  Glancing nervously into the woods behind him, he forces his body to relax and then lets himself slide slowly back down the slope. As soon as he is out of sight of the dog he leaps into the forest and presses himself out of sight behind the first tree he comes to on the edge. Breathing deeply, he surveys the woods ahead. Seeing no movement, he forces himself to peer around the edge of the tree: all is still on the tracks also. Straining against all of his instincts which tell him to give up his quest and flee back the way that he has come, he stalks from tree to tree all the way along, until he has reached a position directly behind the station house.

  Crawling up the slope once again, he comes to a chain link fence that runs right round the back of the house and then across each side. On the corner nearest his position, the fence has been peeled back at the bottom, creating a gap, which appears to be just large enough for a man to squeeze through. Heel-to-toe, heel-to-toe, he sidles carefully across, until he once again has sight of the dog. He can see that it is now worrying the last few scraps of meat from the body of the marmot, shaking each scrap of fur from the bone and then gnawing the skin with a rhythmic vibration of its front teeth. The man lifts one hand slowly to the fence and begins to pull back the wire. As he does so, the fence rolls in a wave all along one side until it reaches a loose point on one post and bounces against it, a metallic percussion unbearably loud to Lowell’s ear. At once, the dog cocks one ear in his direction and bristles. Its eyes darting warily around and both paws locked on to its kill. Lowell freezes, breath caught in his throat. For an unbearable moment, neither move. Lowell’s hand is still clenched tight to the wire, wavering under the pressure to let go, and sending tremor afte
r soft tremor pulsing along the screen. Coming to a decision at last, the dog rises to its feet. Casting one last distrustful eye in the direction of the station house and gripping its kill protectively in its jaws, it turns tail, scurried into the woods and disappears.