A World of Darkness

by Michael Dissieux

  The spoon falls off his hands and clanks onto the table. Demi gives a jerk, as if she had been beaten. But she keeps looking abstractedly at her table.

  “Everywhere on the street and in the front gardens were lying dead bodies. Some had been fully clothed, but most of them were only wearing pajamas or bathrobes. Little Dennis from over the way was even lying mother-naked in front of his front door. You do know the Young’s boy?”

  He shortly looks inside my eyes and then shakes his head, as if this thought had just been a slip-up. Of course I remember Dennis Young. At one of our earlier visits, when Sarah had already been marked by her illness, I had seen him out on the road, riding his bicycle accompanied by Demi and another girl.

  “I then went to Mrs. Wellington and felt her pulse “, Barry continues. “But the old woman was dead and cold. She must have been lying on the street for the whole night.”

  He folds his hands and stares at the table board. Inside his eyes are mirroring scenes he probably won’t forget for the rest of his life.

  “I ran back into the house, where I found Shelley with Demi hugged inside her arms. She looked at me with horror reflecting in her eyes and told me that our phone was dead and that she wasn’t able to reach anyone. She through the window and the open front door had of course been able to take a look at the street in front of the house and asked me what was going on there.”

  Barry shakes his head. His face conveys the entire panic he possibly must have been feeling towards Shelley, too.

  “I couldn’t tell her:”

  He stays silent for a while.

  “I couldn’t tell her:”

  He gazes at Demi, who is sitting impassively before her plate, eating only very slowly. “Demi was crying in her mother’s arms and always asked what had happened to Mrs. Wellington. Shelley tried to soothe the little one, but she constantly kept asking for the old woman, who, dressed in her bathrobe, was lying in the middle of the road without someone caring for her. She wouldn’t have understood this.”

  Barry’s eyes are trying to meet mine. Inside of them I can recognize a damp glance.

  “Neither of us could understand this. Then Shelley accompanied Demi into her room, trying to console her. In the meantime I had got dressed and walked away to get some help from anywhere. As I had seen all the people lying there, I had first thought of an assault. I thought of some militant movement having now brought terror into the suburbs of the big cities to kill as much civilians as possible. One these days hadn’t seen anything else at TV. In Europe they had erased whole cities. When I went through the streets of our block I felt a bloody damn angst inside of me. Wherever I went I came across dead persons. I found even babies. That was the most terrible thing of all.”

  He folds his hands as if wanting to pray. Although I had used to know Barry as a religious man I’m sure that during the last two weeks his sight onto God had changed.

  “I didn’t want to remove myself too far from the house: didn’t want to leave Shelley and the little one alone. What if the sods, which had made this mess, were still around, I thought then. I therefore went back to the house and talked in confidence with Sarah. Demi had fallen asleep inside her mother’s arms and was now lying at the sofa inside the living room. She sighed and was sleeping fitfully. Shelley was as helpless as I. And she was as afraid as I. We were permanently trying to reach someone, but the phone was dead and we also weren’t able to reach someone via cell phone though it rang at the people we called. There wasn’t anything on TV as well. Some TV transmitters were showing off an emergency program consisting of cartoons, but most of them simply were deactivated. It was terrible:” Barry again catches at the spoon, regarding his inside of it blurred mirror image. “As if one was living inside a nightmare, one wasn’t able to leave.”

  He for a while falls silent. The silence suddenly lasts very heavy over the house. But I don’t ask questions, but wait for Barry to begin to speak anew.

  “We were looking after Demi all of the day”, he finally continues, in doing so tenderly running some hair out of Demi’s forehead.

  Apparently everything her father tells isn’t new to her; even not when he mentions her friend Dennis. To imagine how grueling afraid Dennis must have been chokes off my breath.

  “The child was suffering the most from this absurd situation. She was asking thousands of questions without us being able to answer only one of them. In addition to that she noticed that we were afraid ourselves. We weren’t able to dissimulate and to show off some confidence. This is why we began to play some games with her; the same games we had used to play with her before. But neither of us was able to concentrate on card games. In the end we were just sitting there, talking about all kinds of things – unless about what was going on directly in front of our door. But nothing happened.”

  Barry’s voice gets lower and lower.

  “This was our first day.”

  He gets up, goes to the kitchen and comes back again with his whiskey glass. I don’t say a word. I after all am able to understand him.

  “Then, at night, we heard them. I can’t tell you what it was, for the noises coming from the street were so horrible that I didn’t dare to check back. I just went down to the living room and peeked outside through a gap inside the curtain. In the dark I could see shadowy creatures, which were briskly moving over the street and carrying something away on their bent forward backs. In doing so they snarled and howled like animals. The next morning all dead bodies had disappeared from the street and the front gardens; even old Mrs. Wellington and little Dennis.”

  Barry empties his glass all at once, uttering a hoarse wheeze, as if the alcohol was warming his stomach.

  “We then drove to the hospital. I told myself that if anyone could help us and if we would be able to meet people, who were going through the same as we, it would be there. While driving there we noticed that in fact all dead had disappeared. The bodies were away from each place, where I had been the day before. And we didn’t see someone else, too. The streets were empty like died out. With many houses the doors were standing ajar. But nobody came to shut them. There was no face behind the windows and even on the market place we couldn’t find someone. It really was as if we were driving through the abandoned setting of a cheap horror film. There were cars standing in the middle of the street, with their doors standing ajar and one, whose engine was even ongoing, but there was no motorist to be seen around.”

  Barry shakes his head as if not being able to believe his own story. He for a while is regarding Demi, who while her father had been speaking has emptied her plate.

  “You know, what was worst?”

  His dark gaze again searches to meet mine. I have the impression of looking into the eyes of a man, who is some years older than me.

  “Throughout the streets there was silence – an omnipresent, heavy as a lead silence. No cars making noise, no sound of steps, no children’s laughter, nothing. It simply was terribly silent. As if someone had pulled the plug out of the world. We could see some isolated dogs, straying aimlessly through the gardens. But these animals were so scared that they ran away when they saw our car.”

  Barry regards his empty glass. I know that if he were sitting alone at the table he would have filled it up again. But instead of doing so he begins to roll the glass between the palms of his hands. There’s a last rest of whiskey sparkling in the candlelight.

  “It was hell. This silence was hell. Even worse than the dead bodies: or these strange creatures in the night. The silence was … like death.”

  His words make me shiver to the bones. They express exactly what I feel inwardly, since it had begun. This silence is death. To hear these words spoken out was even more terrible than to again and again think them in one’s subconscious.

  “On the entire way to the hospital we didn’t encounter a soul. And even when we had arrived at the hospital we first thought that the whole building was vacant. We were petrified that it would be full of dead bodies, having all
died in their beds. I also didn’t want to see one of my colleagues lying dead in the corridor or in the nurses’ room. But to my surprise there was not one dead body throughout the building. We instead found three survivors.”

  Barry looks up and I for the first time am able to recognize a faint trace of life inside his eyes.

  “They were two men and a woman. I didn’t know the woman and one of the men. The second man had been Mark, an assistant doctor-in-training, who had been working at our hospital for about half a year. You can’t imagine how good it felt to see another familiar face aside of the ones of my family; to meet some living human beings at all.”

  There was a bitter smile playing round the corners of Barry’s mouth. I don’t know whether he is smiling in remembrance of these three people or if he is trying to prevent himself from bursting into tears.

  “The others were Jerry and Becky, two young people from outside. They had have the same idea like me and told themselves that they probably could get some help in hospital first. There they had met Mark, who, like he had told me, had been hiding in the boiler room since the early morning of the day before. He had considered himself safe there. Especially after the building at night had been filled by the screaming and bellowing of countless creatures that had hurried sizzling through the corridors and banged doors shut, turning the entire complex for all the night into an inferno out of whining and howling.”

  Barry throws a worried glance at Demi. But she doesn’t seem to hear her father’s words. He finally leans back, takes his glass and empties the last rest of whiskey. Then he e puts his glass back onto the table, pushing it to and fro.

  “This also explained why we hadn’t found dead bodies in the rooms. Mark had told me that the building in the first day had been full of them. This was why he had been hiding down in the cellar, because the whole thing had been beyond his grasp and he had feared a terrorist attack of a biblical dimension, like he expressed it.” Barry again laughs this bitter laugh. “But after these beings had come to the hospital that night, the dead bodies had disappeared, too. Just the way they had done at our place at home. Like old Mrs. Wellington. We didn’t find any blood or other signs of dismay either. Once and again we found an overthrown saline drip or some medical instruments lying scattered on the floor. But nothing suggested what had happened to the bodies. They simply had passed away; had disappeared.”

  Barry is staring into space, as if in his memory once again regarding the scenery inside the abandoned hospital. Then he looks aside, where Demi with her face being pale and her eyes flickering unsteadily browses the room. The light of the candle ghastly reflects inside her pupils.

  “Darling, you look tired. Would you like to rest a bit, while I’m talking to grandpa?”

  Demi nods mechanically, as if she had been drilled onto this question. She with awkward movements removes from the table, takes her plate and carries it into the kitchen.

  Barry for his part takes his plate and the whiskey glass, suggesting me with a nod of his head to do the same.

  “She has been awake all night”, he whispers while we go behind the girl. “She simply didn’t want to sleep; wanted to help me recognize something in the dark. She really is a brave little angle.”

  Barry’s voice sounds blatant pride, but also great sorrow and even greater tiredness.

  “Perhaps you should have a good night’s rest first”, I answer, regarding his jaded face from aside.

  “Later”, he answers. “First I want to tell you about Boston.” He shortly stands still and stares down to the floor. “… And about Shelley.”

  His last words trail off into a whisper.

  We go over to the living room, where Barry sits down at the sofa. Apparently even in this new world one can’t give up old habits, because he had always used to sit at this very same place at the utmost edge of the sofa. Demi without a word crawls beside him, so cuddling up to her father, that her head comes to rest on his leg. Her legs are pulled tight and her arms twined round her knees. She resembles me like a defenseless baby inside a world full of monsters.

  I take a blanket out of the closet, shake it forcefully, because it hadn’t been used for a long time, and then place it gently over the child. Demi at once grabs the edge of the blanket and pulls it up to her chin. Then she looks up to me with small eyes, giving me a faint smile.

  “Sleep tight, my little one”, I whisper, having difficulties to breathe instead of the lump inside my throat. Demi closes her eyes and only few seconds later her chest lifts in regular and quiet intervals. At least in the familiar setting of her grandparent’s house the child seems to be safe of the nightmares of this terrible new world.

  Silently regarding my granddaughter for some seconds I ask myself where the vivid and open minded girl, who on so many evenings had given so much pleasure to Sarah and me, might have gone. When she had been younger, she had used to permanently run behind her grandma, asking her sundry questions, mainly about preparing meals. Sarah patiently and with the typical cliché like smile of a proud grandmother had answered all her questions and in the evening, when Demi had been home at her parents again, had tried to predict me that Demi later on would surely go for an apprenticeship in catering or in the hotel business. In doing so I could see a glow inside Sarah’s eyes and from her facial features, which one probably could only find with a very special person like Sarah, l could recognize that she was taking a blatant pride in her granddaughter.

  I can recognize her face before me in the twilight; the way she had been once, before her illness had taken hold of her. I’m nearly tempted to reach my hand out for her face, so that I was able to caress her pretty and warm features and to touch her instead of her age still shining hair.

  But I block out this picture, being aghast about how easily it gets me to simply turn off my memories of the old world and my familiar and beloved life like a bad television program. Sarah doesn’t deserve that the pictures of her life are left behind inside the haze of the past, which gets denser and denser.

  But my unconsciousness in its egoistic way seems to have learned that here one is only able to survive if one concentrates completely to oneself alone. To save one’s own life, not to let one’s own thoughts go insane and to always hold one’s head only a few inches above the odor of the new regime and to fight against the maelstrom that moves downwards.

  But such thoughts resemble me strange. They are contemplations of people, whom I’d been despising for all of my life: women looking about their career and men being greedy for wealth, both of them having paved their way through the mass of their fellow men with an unscrupulous, cold smile on their face. People, who are fixated on themselves, narcissistic and jaundiced and showing no kind of regret or shame.

  Did I really turn into such a person? Is this mutation the only way one is able to survive in a world that is dead and empty? That kept turning …

  This thought is abhorrent to me.

  Just like is the expression on the face of my little granddaughter that even in her sleep is sad and weary.

  I quickly turn away from her, sit down in a chair opposite of Barry, noticing that he had been watching me all of the time. He holds his glass inside his hands, as if desperately trying to cling to it, and regards me with the same expression inside his eyes, with which I until few seconds ago had been regarding Demi.

  Does he think the same as me? Has he, just like me, changed into one of these abhorrent egoists from the old world?

  “Demi has had a tough time lately”, he says, looking at me sadly. “She has gone through a lot of hardship.” His eyes slowly wander over the sleeping girl. His vacant hand finds its way to her hair and runs it out of her forehead.

  The sight of Demi bedding her head in complete security onto her father’s thigh is too much for me. My throat gets tight, preventing me from breathing.

  “You wanted to tell me about Boston”, I therefore say, deliberately balking to look at Demi.

  Barry seems not to have heard me fir
st. He’s ceaselessly caressing though his daughter’s unkempt hair before he looks at me and shortly nods.

  “You won’t like what I’m going to tell you, Dad”, he finally replies in a low voice. I don’t know whether he has no longer got the strength to speak louder or if he just doesn’t want to wake Demi.

  Living up here in the hillside you won’t have noticed a lot of the decline of mankind – at least not the abhorrent things.”

  Thinking of Danny and Cindy I shake my head.

  “I know very well what’s going on in the world”, I answer harsher than I had intended to. “But I admit that I don’t understand everything. Perhaps you can help me with that.”

  Barry is looking at me for a long time and then nods.

  “After we soon had realized that this was the safest place for us we ensconced ourselves in the hospital. We had barricaded the exits and the windows of the first and the second floor with boards and heavy closets; just like you did here.”

  He gazes at the black wall that has become of the window.

  “How I said before we had been six. Shelley, Demi and I. And then there were Jerry, Becky and my colleague Mark. I don’t know if it had been the special situation that had brought us together or if man is really able to acclimatize so fast to such an extreme change. But all the six of us astonishingly well came to grips with the things we had been going through. Even Demi did. Of course in the first days there had been tears and countless conversations, especially among the women. We, as men, didn’t have to talk that much. We somehow kept living according to the dim-witted guideline that men understand themselves without having to talk a lot.”