Nightwalker

by Ime Atakpa

My gut throbs. He’s right. It wasn’t a dream. Maybe they were memories, but they can’t be mine. I’d been so many different things in so many different places that it couldn’t have been me. Even so, none of those people felt explicitly different from me, least of all my mom—and then the drowning woman. I smile. I don’t understand why but I keep smiling anyway. Being her reminded me of a version of myself, one that’s not necessarily me. It’s all so hard to piece together. She felt proper yet out of place, like she’d been stolen from the past.

  In a hasty moment, the pain intensifies. It cripples my thought. Just ahead, Rinaldo still stands there, eyes focused on the space where the glowing cloud had been. He weaves something invisible in that space. Weaving. Something about that thought makes the pain intensify again. But why? What does any of this mean? The more I think, the more relentless the pain becomes, like needles being thrust into my skull. But I need answers. Right when the pain reaches its apex, on the verge of being unbearable, the answers come.

  So there I am again, back in the drowning woman’s body. She’s staring into a rundown house under the cover of darkness. The air reeks of rotten wood and dead things. I want to turn and run—she wants to turn and run—but intuition tells her that everything she needs is in that house. More importantly, someone special is in there. Darkness obscures him, and I can’t tell exactly what he’s doing or what the motions he makes with his arms are supposed to be. I’m afraid and anxious. She knows that she needs to move forward and visit whoever lives there, but the townspeople have already warned her. I hear their warnings in my head, tales of a spellweaver responsible for an unprovable murder. Even so, she refuses to back away. This woman is braver than I.

  More pieces fall into place, then fade away. Flashes of white and black alternate across my vision; and between those flashes, even smaller pieces reveal themselves in discordant blurs.

  She holds a black vial against her chest. The ocean oscillates in front of her. She has a choice to make regarding the vial. I feel her apprehension and her desire fighting one another. Neither is quite strong enough to overpower its opposite. The woman doesn’t want to make the choice alone, but there’s no one left to guide her. The town no longer holds her in esteem. Only one woman saw her true beauty, and she was run out, never to return. I feel everything this woman feels. The weight of her decision bogs me down.

  The sharpest pain yet cuts deep into me, and with it comes the last of the revelations before the dream fades away: the town wants her dead.

  “It’s death,” Rinaldo says, but he’s not referring to my dream. He gestures at the ground just below me. A lump of fabric and rot rests there. Animals have been here. Scavengers, most likely. Judging from the number of holes bored into the fabric, a good number of them came out to eat. I don’t even want to see what remains beneath the clothes. Whatever flesh used to be there is probably long gone by now, either eaten or decomposed. This is why I refused to find my way into the gale. I didn’t want to accept that this had been my end (and just like that, I understand the gale so much better).

  My corpse. It reeks. But once the pain of revelation subsides, I feel nothing but shame for having fought against reality for so long. It’s liberating to look down at what little remains. And there’s something else I feel: different. Rinaldo smiles and claps slowly. His menace stifles the air in this clearing. For a moment, the drowning sensation returns, but I shake it off and move forward.

  “You’re—”

  “Crowley, Rinaldo, Alastaire. Different times, different places. I’ve answered to many names.”

  “You’re not human.”

  “Not at all,” he laughs. He’s closer to me now than he was a moment ago. “Nothing so fragile.”

  I see myself standing by my parents’ bedside, watching over them. I see my father distraught and my mother broken. All of it is so clear yet so distant. Was that their weakness? Being human? Could they have survived the distress of losing their son if they had been anything but that? In the last year, my parents have done nothing but grown. So have I. Someone or something like Rinaldo couldn’t understand what it means to be human.

  “Needless to say, immortality is but one of many gifts of my ilk.”

  There’s a flash of light. I see the ocean surface, feel the sand shifting between my toes, and feel the cool air against my skin. “What I just saw, those were memories, weren’t they?”

  He nods and urges that I continue.

  “My ancestors?”

  He nods again. “One of them.”

  “The first one. She’s the reason all of this is happening.” Another memory flashes before me. Mom told Dad a story last year about the very same ancestor. She loved and lost that love and threw herself into the ocean. The drowned woman. A name falls on the tip of my tongue. “Alice?”

  Now he laughs at me and shakes his head. I want to pummel him. He seems to sense this somehow. His eyebrow raises. We both know I can’t do anything.

  “You’ve nothing to arm yourself with, boy, and had you arms, you’d have no arms to wield them.” He laughs at his own witless humor. An expression crosses his face that I’ve never seen before. No inquisitiveness, no wide eyes, no gentle smile. No, all of that’s gone now, replaced by something bitter and self-serving.

  “How am I supposed to believe all this? That I’m dead? This could still be a dream. It’s not too late for that. I can still wake up in bed in the morning and be with my parents again.”

  Rinaldo’s still laughing, but louder now. “You don’t even believe that.”

  Again, to my displeasure, I have to accept that he’s right. I could hear the uncertainty in my own voice, the shakiness of those final syllables.

  “Don’t worry. You’ve still much to learn. Your journey is not yet over.” Despite having never disappeared, Rinaldo reappears below me (like my senses halted just long enough for him to edge closer) and runs his fingers through the dirt surrounding my corpse. His long fingers work through the earth and pull buried sinews to the surface. “It’s incredibly hard to preserve a body, even if only for a year. It’s a shame. Years ago, this would have been child’s play.” Both his hands clench into fists.

  “What am I supposed to do?”

  “Ah.” He looks pensive, but doesn’t stop digging into my remains. This scene should disturb me. I shouldn’t be able to watch so calmly. “You’ve unwound a lengthy coil. So much depended on her.”

  “Her? You mean the one who’s inside—”

  “Who was within you.” A frown appears briefly on his face. “I don’t suppose there’s much longer now, for either of you.”

  “Can’t you give me a straight answer for once?” He finally pulls out of my corpse and steadies his chin in his palm with a smirk.

  “For once, I don’t have one.”

  The walk back to his lodge is cold and silent. Mixed emotions sort themselves out in my head. The cloud of mist that he transformed into a bead was another dead thing, no different than me. It was my ancestor who drowned, the one who set this blood curse into motion. That much makes sense to me. What still remains for me to learn is why and how she was inside of me to begin with. Hard as I try to make sense of the bigger picture, it eludes me. I need Rinaldo to fill in these last details.

  When we reach the lodge, Rinaldo is quick to open the door. He shuffles in and gestures with a nod for me to follow him upstairs. He lacks the steady formality that I’ve grown accustomed to, but the bigger part of me doesn’t care right now. As long as there are clear answers at the end of this, I don’t care how out of character he behaves.

  The upstairs bedroom is just how I remember it. One twin-sized bed, one nightstand with a small lamp on top of it, a dresser in a far corner, and several wooden chairs set around the room. A number of personal possessions are strewn across the ground. I can only guess who they belong to.

  “Is someone staying here?”

  “No,” Rinaldo says bluntly. He shuts the door behind us and heads for one of the wooden chairs. I
make myself comfortable on the bed and watch and wait for him to finally say something useful.

  “This ancestor, your Alice, she’d drowned in that ocean. And when she did, I stole her soul as a prize. She wanted eternal life, and I intended to give it to her.” His foot taps wildly against the wooden floor. The few times I’ve seen Rinaldo, he’s never been unnerved or anxious. Not much has passed between us since I first arrived, but now that we’ve returned, something has changed. He knows what’s going to happen, and he’s not ready for it.

  “Eternal life,” I say, trying to fit the existence of such a thing into the grand tapestry that is my family history.

  “Yes.” Rinaldo pulls the soul bead from his pocket. “So I took her soul and I coddled it, but no amount of care can save a soul from death once the body to which it belongs is no more. To live, it needed to feed on…” He looks awkwardly in my direction and quickly turns away. He stands and exhales, then turns to face the wall. “It needed to feed on life. I did my best to satisfy that need.”

  “You killed more people?”

  “Ha! You think me a savage? Nothing like that. I merely…reallocated. But it happened that—”

  “Hold on. What does that mean? That you reallocated?”

  Rinaldo paces the room, pressing his fingers together. There’s a wrinkle on the edge of his mouth where he grimaces. “You asked me earlier what it is that I am. And I suppose, given the circumstances, there’s little reason to keep you from the truth. I am the one who ferries souls. I am called the Death Eater.”

  “Oh, is that right? I think you’re full of shit.”

  “Says the boy who thought himself invisible. How absurd could it possibly be? I’ve shown you memories of yore and can see you when no one else can. I don’t suppose you found those moments to be natural?”

  I don’t want to believe him. I want to hate him for everything he’s done to me. But I’ve been searching a long time for answers, and this is the closest I’ve gotten in all that time to any semblance of truth. Besides, nothing else makes sense. The things I’ve experienced in the last year have been so unreal. I wouldn’t have dreamt it possible. That I’d be dead. That I’d be a ghost. That my night walks weren’t just some weird genetic mutation, but a—

  That’s it. “You’ve been using me.”

  “You, your mother, her sister. Their mother. It’s a long list.”

  He says that with a detached matter-of-factness, as though he had no other choice. Like it didn’t matter how many lives were ruined because of his meddling. But it does matter. My mother matters. My parents and their marriage matters. I matter. That’s the thought that gets me to fully realize just how much we’ve been abused. My anger boils over.

  “You fucking used me!”

  “Quite the temper. So this is the real you?” He barely flinched at my voice, and now his lips are curved into a wide grin. He’s enjoying himself. “I was hoping you might be a little more tame considering her spirit was part of yours for so long.”

  “How do you expect me to react? I’m fucking dead! I’m fucking—” I exhale sharply, searching for the right words amidst all the curses begging to be released. “You killed me. Your fault. Your. Fucking. Fault.”

  “Such a mouth on this one.”

  “Shut up!” More than anything, I wish I still had a body. I wish I could drive him into the far wall and beat him until there was nothing left but a mess of flesh and blood, until he looked no different than the hummingbird flattened against the concrete. I wish I could make him feel everything he’s made me feel. How else would I react when all my suffering—and all my parents’ suffering—turned out to be meaningless? For so long, the luxury of my life has belonged to someone else.

  Rinaldo’s right. I do have a temper. My emotions all rise to the surface without the filter of someone else’s soul to dilute them. I want Rinaldo to feel my anger for all that it’s worth. He’s taken too much from me to stand there and smile the way he does. Smugly. Silently.

  My temper stills. This quietness is unlike him. He always enjoyed the sound of his own voice, even if it was oddly monotone. It feels like spite. He’s so far above me that he refuses me human decency or acknowledgement of the legitimacy of my anger. I can’t imagine there’s anything he could do right now that wouldn’t irritate me. But after all he’s done to me and my family, there’s nothing I can feel toward him except spite.

  Rinaldo stands off in a corner, arms folded across his chest, head cocked lazily to the side. Then there’s that cold, gray eye set like a stone in his sunken skull and the slender patch that covers the other. His thin, crusted lips look as though they might dissolve into dust at any moment. Those disgusting hairs on his chin, also gray, speckle him unevenly. His features sink in for the first time.

  I see a younger version of him in my head, dressed in a black cloak, eye glowing in the dark of night. He stands on the bow of an unmanned ship making its way to harbor. His face shines with all the glory of youth, weary but full of spirit. This memory of him belongs to Alice. Back then, he was a much different man. I comb my own memory for traces of him on the first day I saw him. His hair had been dark, long, and healthy. His face had been warm and brimming with life. Both memories are betrayed by the face of the man sulking in the corner. Different times, different names, he had said. My rage quiets. That solitary gray eye rattles in its socket. It glares thoughtfully at the worn wooden floor. Rinaldo glowers.

  “What?” I ask unsteadily.

  Without moving, without looking up from the ground, he answers. “The world beyond all this is grand, Hubert. It’s larger than you or your family, but it doesn’t seem that I’ll have time to explain it all, or that you’re willing to listen. Your ‘Alice’ gave me something I needed at a time when I couldn’t have been more defeated.” He pauses but doesn’t break eye contact with me.

  Suddenly, his head makes a sharp turn, just as a blue blur disappears from the doorway. Rinaldo frowns at this, turns his head back to the floor, and nods to himself. Several more times, he looks back at the doorway, but there’s nothing there anymore. His frown deepens. He sighs. Then he finally looks up to face me.

  Underlying bones accentuate the thinness of his face. My mind can’t be playing tricks on me; his robe hangs loosely from his arms and shoulders.

  “It’s a shame,” Rinaldo says, “but we must all pay our debts.”

  There’s a story behind his frailness. I try to discern the nature of his aging through the little movements in his face, but it turns out I’m no good at reading into finer details—just as he said. However, there’s a short moment when I catch a tinge of sadness in his eye. After that, it’s difficult to stay angry at him. Despite what I’ve endured on account of his selfishness, another side to the story exists.

  I hold eye contact with him.

  “There’s more to this than I have time to explain,” Rinaldo says. What comes on to me next hits hard. It’s both familiar and unwanted: a sensation of inner peace floods into me, and soon I’m so filled with feelings of gratitude that I trust Rinaldo again. One final time, he nods to himself, and then he begins telling me what I’ve longed to know all this time.

  “We have two matters to discuss. Firstly, what I am. Secondly, where we go from here—yes, we. From this moment forward, both of us are to undergo radical changes. I, who have never known death. And you, who has never known life. I told you already what I am. The Death Eater. What that means, however, is complicated. The short version, I hope, shall suffice.”

  I nod quietly.

  “I am one of the many who together rule over the Balance of things. Ages ago, we were twelve, but time saw to it that some of us were lost forever. No monument or memory exists that might do service to their existences. Those of us remaining only remember that they did exist, but their names and functions are forever lost.”

  Rulers of the Balance? It sounds like fairy tale bullshit. From someone who claims to be the master of death, it might as well be. We’re born, and th
en we die. There’s nothing supernatural about living and dying. That’s what I used to think. But in the wake of everything that’s happened, I can’t lie to myself. I can’t convince myself that there isn’t at least one kernel of truth in what he’s saying.

  “We remaining few are Death, Time, Judgment, Space, and Will. And then there’s…” Rinaldo grimaces and clenches his fists for just a moment.

  “And then there’s what?”

  “Never mind. What’s important is that to a certain end, the five of us must always exist.”

  He’s not filling in all the details. Just like his usual self, he has the upper hand. He gets to pick and choose which parts of the narrative are worthy for my ears. But it’s all I have. “Okay, I’ll bite. You control death, so what do the others do?”

  “Ah.” Rinaldo’s smile returns, but not the arrogant, condescending one. The one I remember him for. The warm one. “Time,” he repeats, and his smile fades once more. “Just as I rule over death, Light’s Arrow ruled over time. She controlled its ebb and flow. And I…ah, it doesn’t matter what the circumstances were, does it? I killed her—I think I killed her—when I stole her mantle.”

  “You weren’t popular with your friends, were you?” I imagine my face as I say this, lips pulled into a grin, eyes sharp and focused.” Rinaldo does not seem amused.

  “I needed her dominion over time to escape Judgment. That was the day I fell.”

  “So what, now you’re a fallen angel?”

  “In a sense, I suppose. We’ve watched over men for a long time. And all that time, we’ve followed unwritten laws buried deep in our psyches. They existed to maintain Balance. They were probably given to us by one of the others, one that we’ve forgotten. Anyway, I disturbed it. And so I was to be punished.”

  “You broke it?” I have a hard time believing he could break a rule that, if he can be trusted, exists within his nature. “What did you do?”

  “Irrelevant.”

  I press for an answer to this question, but he deflects me each time. He insists it doesn’t matter, though it seems to be the most important detail. What rule is so important that not even a guardian of his so-called “balance” could bend it? I don’t know. Maybe it really doesn’t matter, but again I have no choice except to take the bits and pieces he’s actually willing to share.