Nightwalker

by Ime Atakpa

  My desire to contact Mom diminishes. I know better than to linger here. The world of the living belongs to them. I have no place there. Thinking back to all the times I disturbed them with ruffled sheets and shifting furniture, I’m ashamed of myself for lacking the decency to see what’s now so clear. All along, I was their tormentor. They’ll never recover from that harsh year. Mom continues flipping through channels.

  Even so, I can’t let it end here. I can’t allow myself to fade into oblivion, my life nothing more than the last chapter of someone else’s journey. The thought sends pulses of anger through me. I refuse to be a pawn in someone else’s game. Never again.

  Upstairs, I find my room just how I left it, just how it’s remained throughout the last year. Everything perfectly preserved, except the newly laid clothing. Something else, too, catches my attention. The black lamp is gone from my bedside table. In its place is an outline of dust. I walk in front of the mirror for the final time, and gaze deep into the glass. I don’t see my reflection in it, but I do see a haggard boy, weary and half-naked. This boy is myself, as I last had the pleasure of remembering.

  Earlier that day, I’d gone out on a long stroll with Mom. That’s why I’d been so tired. As for the anxiety, I felt a strain in my gut as I shuffled my way into bed that night. I knew that the night walk, that Alceste, would take me during my sleep. I braced myself for it no differently than any other night. Whenever I felt the foreboding—knots in my stomach, pinpoint tension in my head, or just discomfort in general—thoughts that didn’t belong to me overlapped with my own, like a second personality was dawning on me. In the brief moments before sleep, voices chimed in my head. They were soft and sweet, but they were also sad, and it made me sad too to hear them. In retrospect, I can’t remember exactly what I thought about them, not that it ever mattered. The words that voice spoke to me slipped out of memory the moment I drifted to sleep. All I’d ever remember was that there had been a voice. A lullaby to send me off into my night walk.

  Knowing what I know now, it makes a little more sense. Alceste probably couldn’t wait for a chance to take her soul for a stroll. Generation after generation, she’d have done the same thing, stealing little pieces of our lives from us. And it makes even more sense that none of the doctors ever diagnosed us with anything remotely useful. I’d have laughed at the first doctor to explain the night walks were caused by the immortal soul of my distant ancestor.

  Distant indeed. She’s hundreds of years removed from the world she grew up in. Everything has changed, but she’s still around watching it continue to do so. For three hundred years. She watched the world she grew up in melt away and be replaced by today. Because Rinaldo was selfish. He could have released her from the torture of separation, but instead kept her locked away in that lodge. And he wants me to believe she wanted that life. I can’t. She’s lived according to someone else’s design. That’s no life at all.

  Every last one of us has paid the price. At the very least, I might have stopped my parents from suffering throughout my purgatory. If I’d not been such a grand optimist.

  Damn it. In hindsight, everything seems so simple. I can’t help but admonish myself for not accepting my death sooner. I know it’s stupid for me to feel responsible, and I know I acted the only way I knew how. Like my parents, I’m a victim of my character.

  But it was the fault in my character that allowed the faults in theirs to show through. If I had left them, Mom would never have held on to her delusions. Dad would have never struggled with his own belief. They’d never have heard the voices that haunted them for months, all because their selfish child couldn’t imagine a world where he was alone.

  I stop where I am.

  “No,” I tell myself. I couldn’t have solved anything. Everything happened the only way it could have. Who’s to say though that things should be so set in stone? What really stopped me from breaking free from my own delusions? Even though I’ve reached the end of all this, I find nothing ahead but more questions.

  I laugh. Or I want to. I can’t laugh for real. I’m dead. Everything I do is an illusion laid over reality.

  How can I not wonder, though, what things would have been like if I accepted my death from the start? They are useless thoughts. It wouldn’t have made a difference. I’d still be dead. They’d still have mourned me. My ancestor would still be unhinged. I’d still have a choice to make.

  I leave my room with that conviction. There’s nothing left here for me, so I make my way to the stairs. Just above the first step, I freeze.

  The gale calls me. Its rapping is quieter now, more comforting, but I can’t mistake the howl of its winds. It invites me to enter my parents’ room. “See them.” That’s what I gather from the cacophony of its voices. “See them.”

  My soul trembles. It was in that room that I first experienced the gale, drumming its rain against the window. To return now, knowing vaguely what the gale is, unsettles me. I’d been so close to giving in completely, so terribly unafraid of what the gale meant for me. Back then, I wondered what it’d say to me, if we could speak.

  “Go,” the gale urges me.

  We can speak. Not with words, but with feelings. The same feelings that drew it to me time and time again. The gale knew me before I knew myself and it offered me answers. Each time, I rejected it. Not today.

  I pass through the hallway toward the master bedroom. The door hangs wide open. A shadow extends from the edge of the bed, which is just barely in view from the doorway. I move in.

  “Be brave.” Dad’s voice. My pace slows. “We’re both strong, we’ve both been strong. We just need to be brave now.” One shadow becomes two as the room comes into full view. Their bed is neatly made. Dozens of pictures adorn it, most face down, but an immediately familiar group sits face up.

  “I want to remember,” Mom begs. “That’s my baby.” She claws at the sheets, ruffles her hair, and whines a quieted, high-pitched whine. She rocks back and forth, finally rocking herself into Dad’s arms.

  “Me too,” he says, “but we can’t. We can’t do this anymore. I want to remember him, but this is what it does.” He holds her chin between his thumb and index finger, raises it up. His other hand rubs the tears from her face. “See? See how miserable we are?”

  Mom scrambles for more of the pictures but doesn’t break her gaze with him. “I’m fine being miserable. I’m fine with it. I don’t care. I need him.”

  “I need you, Lyn. We need each other. If I could be sober, you wouldn’t be lonely, would you? If I could stop. But I can’t. Without you, I’m nothing.”

  “I can’t do it either.” She buries her face back in his chest.

  “You can, Lyn. Shh—shh. Listen.”

  Mother sniffles a few times, then stops. She turns her head so that one ear rests against Father and the other points outward, toward the far window.

  “I’ve been hearing something lately whenever I drink. These voices. They tell me to drink more, to keep going. They remind me of him and of how sad I am, and I’m afraid that one day I’m going to listen. I’m going to keep drinking and go to sleep and never wake back up.”

  “You—”

  “Wait. When I hear the voices, I think about how awful I’d be to leave you like that. You lost your son, your husband. I couldn’t do that to you, not to you, Lyn. But when I’m with you, like right now, even if I’ve been drinking, I can’t hear them, or they’re quieter. I can’t make it without you.”

  This is why the gale directed me here. It’s been tempting him. I hear the echo of shattered glass from when I first learned to extend those tendrils from myself. The gale had been there too, no doubt.

  “I can’t make it without Huey,” Mom cries.

  “Neither can I.” Dad strokes her hair gently.

  “But we both have to.”

  There’s silence. It’s painful to sit through. I try to make out words in the wind, but they don’t come. The gale followed me home when I died, and even though it couldn’t find
good prey in me, it found something better nearby. Oh, but I’ll be damned if I let them have him.

  Mom moves closer to Dad and whispers in his ear. I can’t hear what she says, but it brings a weak smile to his lips. They embrace. The air in the room becomes so charged that I can’t bear it. I feel it oppressing me, telling me to leave, and so I do just that. I return downstairs and linger at the table, and I stare at the cellar door and loathe myself for being so useless to them. There was nothing I could do to stop any of this, but I’ll wear my guilt proudly. Because without it, I won’t be able to do what I’m about to do. I won’t be able to make the only amends I can for a year of torturing them.

  They come downstairs a few hours later, quiet and sweaty, carrying the box of photographs. The box goes with them outside where they set a circle of stones around a thick growth of grass. Neither stands on ceremony. Dad nods toward the circle, and Mom proceeds to do the honors of dumping the contents of the box into the stone circle. Once the last picture touches the ground, Dad pulls a box of matches from his pocket. He lights four at once and sets the prints ablaze.

  I leave home for the last time. There have been so many of these last times. More of them than I care to remember. When I was younger, I remember running away. I was always leaving. Back then, I really thought they hated me. Dad always got deep red when I returned form a night walk. He looked spiteful, like he saw something in me he both loved and hated but couldn’t decide how to reconcile the two. It never made much sense to run away. Me leaving only ever pissed him off more. But when you’re a kid, you’re all emotion and no reason. Your happiness comes at the expense of everything else. Yeah, running away only made him more pissed. Didn’t stop me from doing it again, and a few more times for good measure.

  It was always easy to tell when Dad was upset. He got quieter than usual. Instead of talking, he’d glare apologetically. I could read his eyes like a book. Every word he refused to say somehow managed to find me through his eyes. Then Mom would come from around the corner and catch him glaring at me, and she’d plant a small kiss on his cheek.

  Just like that, his anger melted away.

  Mom rarely saw any wrong in my misbehavior. If she did, she sure didn’t show it. No matter what I did, nothing upset her. I never could understand how she managed to do nothing but smile at me and touch my face, and cradle me, and whisper away the feelings that tortured me.

  It’s a comfort that death has stolen from me. When I come back around to Rinaldo’s lodge, he’ll be expecting a prompt answer. I see him in my head slumped against the wall, skin flaking from his muscles in heavy sheets. Alceste stands beside him, whispering sweet words into his ear. “Be gentle,” she tells him and raises a glass of water to his lips. “Drink and be gentle. It’s quiet where you’re going.” Just then I hear the crash of water against a shoreline, feel the wave press down on me and drag me into its depths.

  There’s no solace in death. There’s this limbo, this shitty in-between. And then there’s what the others have: the gale. There’s an eternity of torment, losing a little bit of yourself every day until nothing remains but raw desire. It’s neither being alive nor being dead. It’s primal and unrelenting. That’s all I know about death. And if there is some third end, a place for those who gracefully accept their demise, I haven’t seen it. Hell, if the options I do know are this bleak, I don’t trust a third to be much better. Maybe there are infinite deaths, each as unappealing as the last. I don’t know that there’s an afterlife worth hoping for, or if everything leads to the same place.

  When I’m finally gone, will my parents think nothing more of me? Will my rotting corpse and those ashes in the backyard in the garden be all that remain of my brief life? Will they relapse and continue to mourn me and be miserable? Or find some sanctuary in believing there’s something else out there, somewhere for innocent souls taken before their time? The last thing they need is more disappointment, but whatever comes is out of my control. All I’ve been given are two choices and one decision.

  The grass around Rinaldo’s lodge is shriveled and ugly. All color has drained from it. Just across the road, the forest retains all of its splendor. A jumble of greens and browns stare out at the lodge, laughing at its plight. The wind carries their laughter. It carries the scent of leaves across the road, into an open window. The only vigor left to Rinaldo has been borrowed. He’s shit out of luck. It’s incredible how this landscape has changed beyond recognition in just a few hours’ time. The wood paneling and shutters hang loosely from their hinges. Decay seeps into each splinter of wood, eats it from the inside out. I picture Rinaldo again, dying in Alceste’s arms. Glittering feathers fall to the ground around her, like petals from a dying tree.

  It was such a damn long time ago that I saw that hummingbird and thought about nothing but its beauty. Maybe that had something to do with Alceste still lingering in me. Maybe it didn’t. Either way, it was undeniably me. Everything I felt that day…it’s damn different. I’m in a different place now, aren’t I? I have a choice to make. There’s no beauty in death. But then, there’s not much beauty in living either. My parents won’t suffer death for a long time; instead, they’ll suffer life. When suffering is all I’ve seen, how am I expected to choose one over the other?

  Damn it all.

  Besides, I still can’t be sure that this isn’t another of Rinaldo’s deceptions. Can I trust—no, I can’t. He’s yet to give me enough of a reason to believe he’s acting out of my best interests. I’ve thought of him as a protector for years, but even those memories are false. A proxy. That’s all I am to him. A means to an end. I’m a tool whose worth is determined only by his capability to survive. I needed him then. I wonder if he knew back then, when I still had a life to lose, that he’d see me again so soon, and so damaged. How might things have changed if I hadn’t taken that final step? If the driver of that truck called in sick or traveled a different road? If Rinaldo hadn’t given my family this curse to begin with? In an instant, everything is different…and then there’s no turning back.

  “It doesn’t matter,” I tell myself. “There are no truer words than that.” All I have to work with is the present. And I have a gift to give to my parents. He’s taken enough from me. I won’t let him take whatever’s left. I can’t pass away and leave the possibility that he’ll endure beyond my death and go on killing and manipulating people for his own benefit. It’s no longer his choice to make, to abuse all that power—

  All that power.

  -V-

  Descendant

  Enough time has been spent inside my head that I shouldn’t have to hesitate at the final step, but I do. The rot and decay spreading from the steps of Rinaldo’s lodge isn’t just his end. I see it as my own, one I’ll inevitably share if I decide to go through with this. I don’t know what it means to be the Death Eater.

  “You’ve already decided,” I tell myself. “No ifs. Be like your dad. Be brave.” But that was a different kind of bravery. He never faced anything at all like this, and he never will. I back away from Rinaldo’s cabin, right on the edge of the road. I could turn around and run, disappear into the forest. He said so himself, that he doesn’t have enough strength to live much longer. I’ll have escaped death—no, no. I’ve been there already. I’ve run for long enough. My future awaits beyond his doors.

  One push forward. And another. And before I know it, the heavy wooden door stands in front of me, subtly shaking. I’m not surprised when the door swings backward and Rinaldo collapses against its frame. He leans heavily against the threshold, not even bothering to get back to his feet. All the color has now drained from his face and eye. Dark spheres hang below his eyelid. Where there was once smooth, tawny skin, lines and wrinkles have appeared. My eyes linger too long on those aberrations; shame screams through his expression.

  Rinaldo turns around as quickly as his weakened body allows and gestures for me to follow.

  Once inside, he falls toward the left wall. He stretches out and braces his palm
against it. The wall creaks loudly, then the rest of his body follows and thuds against it. Rinaldo’s breathing hastens, but before I have a chance to offer him a word of pity, he raises his right hand to silence me. For a few moments, he struggles to pull himself together. Rinaldo leans his head against the wall. His raspy breath comes in thick, uneven gasps. His legs tremble beneath him, and every effort to regain his balance only makes him weaker. Despite my low opinion of him, I can only stand by for so long before I’m exhausted of watching him stumble in place.

  “Here.” I offer him my arm. His right hand is still raised in protest, and now that I’m closer to him, I can see a tinge of light showing through his eye. It’s trembling and shiny. That luster is unmistakable. “Here,” I offer again, but instead of waiting for him to accept my assistance, I force a ghostly arm around his waist and hoist him to his feet.

  His soul resonates against mine. It chirps and hums, and I realize how different it is than mine. We’re together, soul touching soul, and the vibrations his sends to mine feel otherworldly. That’s when it solidifies in my head that Rinaldo is everything but human. I feel absolutely nothing where there should be emotions and thoughts and feelings. There’s blackness and a deep-seated desire to—

  Rinaldo pulls away. He groans then mutters something about running out of time. I nod my agreement although I’m not entirely sure what it is he said (and I’m preoccupied with the small resonances of his soul that still strike my own). We move slowly along the wall. Each step brings us closer to Alceste who awaits us in the room where death will die.