Walk Through Darkness

by David Anthony Durham

  “What are you doing?” the old one asked. He stepped in from the door and slid a little to one side, measuring the room, his voice calm, tinged slightly with something else, an aggression that didn’t go unnoticed.

  William closed his eyes, thinking it strange that with all the pain in his body a few moments of breathing eased him so.

  The fat one said that they were just dealing with their prisoner, if it’s any of his business. They had it under control and he could shut up and watch or else move on. What had he been doing with the girl, anyway? the teenager asked. The old man ignored him. When he spoke again he was on the other side of the room. He asked where Humboldt was and the dark man said he didn’t give a damn. He spoke on, his words suddenly laced with profanities that William didn’t catch. He felt the man moving again, heard him ask for the dowel and say something that the others found funny.

  “Hold on a minute,” the old one said. “You just want to wait on that.”

  The smooth grain of the wood brushed the heels of his feet, a soft touch, just a kiss. William knew that when that kiss ended the wood would pull back and then it would start again. This time he wouldn’t yell. He would hold it in no matter what. He had to be stronger than he had been.

  “You don’t know what you’re doing.”

  But the dark man believed he did and said he would demonstrate just what he was doing. The baton lifted on the upswing. William opened his eyes. They came to focus on the old man and, as if spurred by the touch of his eyes, he acted. The old man raised his rifle with the power of a single arm and brought it to sight with the help of the other, steady and motionless, the barrel so long it seemed almost to reach out and touch him. William thought that the man was acting out some plan the slavers had concocted while he was unconscious and was preparing to shoot him. But the aim was slightly off, and when he pulled the trigger the slug didn’t enter William. Neither did he see clearly all that happened but he saw pieces of it and this is how it fit together.

  The blast was deafening. The first shot ripped through the soft spot in the tall man’s neck, severing the artery there, blood bursting from the wound in a sudden rain. But the lead was not spent. The angle was such that it slammed with undiminished force into the dark man’s skull, entering through his ear and exiting through the entire far side of his face. William snapped his head around but on seeing the dark man poised behind him he could make no sense of it because what had been his face was now nothing that he could recognize.

  The old man spun. He jabbed the muzzle of the rifle into the fat man’s face with enough force to crush the bridge of his nose and gouge deeply into one of his eyes. The man spun again, moved forward and swung the butt end of the rifle around and caught the boy in his stupefied face and snapped his jaw. This pain spurred the boy to motion and that motion was flight. He kept spinning with the force of the blow, his legs slick on the stones, pawing for purchase but finding none. The old man tripped him. The boy landed on his chin and the force of it made the break complete. The lower portion of his face was a shapeless mess when he rolled over. He was trying to scream but he could not and instead he grasped at his face with his hands and tried to set things right and realized he could not and tried to scream again.

  The old man looked around the room at each of the men, calm in the way of some men during scenes of amazing violence, as if in the act he had found a truth and though it wasn’t a pleasant truth it was one deserving of thought. Only the dark one was completely dead. The tall man leaned against the wall trying to stay the squirts of blood pulsing through his fingers where they were clamped to his neck. The fat one lay squirming on the ground. He tried to pull his revolver but couldn’t get a grip on it and began to curse it in a voice that cracked higher and lower with each alternating word. The old man dispatched each of the three in turn with the butt end of the rifle. Then he turned toward the prisoner.

  William felt a moment of fear. But only a moment. Then the emotion changed to hope. Perhaps this man would kill him quickly. But the old man did not. He tossed the rifle down and touched him gently and wiped away the blood on his face and felt over his body as if checking for wounds. The man was so close that William could smell him and hear his breathing and feel the tremble in his hands. When the man was satisfied he pulled back a little, just far enough to meet William face to face.

  “Sorry you had to see me like that,” he said. “I’d ask you to forget it if I thought you could, but I know you never will. Your first memory of me is always gonna be the sight of me killing four men. That’s a damnable bad showing but there was nothing for it.”

  William heard him but he didn’t comprehend even the smallest part of it. He lay there dumb as the man rummaged through one of the dead men’s pockets, came up with the keys and unshackled him and helped him stand. But when his feet touched the ground splinters of pure white agony screamed up his legs. He heard the man speak to him but he couldn’t sort out the words. They had stopped making sense almost from the moment the man began speaking and now each new word just piled onto the ones preceding it and added to the confusion.

  The old man seemed to understand this. He grasped William by the shoulders and looked at him squarely and didn’t speak at all, just looked and in that look tried to say something. No, not to say something, but to stop saying anything and create a silence between them, to find a calm and to anchor them to it and to share the moment.

  “Come,” he said. He bent and grasped William about the legs and lifted him to his back. William felt himself hoisted up, felt himself come to rest across the man’s shoulders, and felt the man push himself erect. The room spun with the man’s motions, and in the spinning William again lost consciousness.

  He awoke in agony. His legs were aflame, crawling with fiery ants, pierced by shards of colored glass. Just the flexing of his muscles as he pulled himself upright sent splinters of pain shooting through his entire body, sucking the wind out of him and leaving him panting. He realized that he was in a different room than before. In the corner of his vision he saw a shape rise and move toward him, but even as he turned to look he fell back to a prone position. The effort of the motion was too great and at that moment nothing was as real as pain.

  The body moving toward him spoke. “William.”

  It was Dover’s voice. It was her face looking down on him. “We’re safe now,” she said. “Understand? We got out of that place.”

  Staring up at her he realized he did understand. They had left that dungeon. He had been carried out on that man’s shoulder, he that had somehow wreaked a world of violence on those others. He had killed them one and all in the flutter of an eyelid. Everything had changed and then he had spoken, lifted him and carried him out into the streets. This pain was not new. He had lived with it as the man carried him. He remembered wondering where they were going and not caring, and then realizing that Dover was with them and suddenly caring again. He had tried to lift his face up to her but his head never moved as commanded. He saw bits of her in passing, her walking along beside him, hip rocking, one hand as it moved through his field of vision.

  Now they were in a room which for some reason he recognized, a single cubicle with an opening behind Dover, a dark space into which he couldn’t see. There was a lamp on the table at the far end, its glow warm on the yellowed walls. And then his eyes were back on Dover’s. He reached up to touch her, moving slowly for exertion of any part of his body stirred pain in distant regions. He needed to feel her. The motion was only half completed before she understood it and leaned down close to him. Her cheek touched his and she whispered that it was all right. They were safe now. Her voice spread warmth over him, in the hollow of his neck, against his ear. The scent of her skin was more acrid than he remembered. But it was her nonetheless, and he tried to hear her words and take them in and hold them. He wanted to believe her, and for a moment he did, that closeness to her was enough. But as soon as she pulled back and air rushed to fill the space between he remembered there was m
ore to it than that.

  “Where’s he?” he asked.

  Dover hesitated, eyes studying him as if to gauge his capability to receive the answer. “He’s up talking with Miss Anne,” she said.

  So simply said but conjuring a world of questions. He realized why the room was familiar. It was his cell below Anne’s house. He remembered being carried down the steps and set down on the cot. He had caught a glimpse of Anne’s round face, saddened and serious, but he had already filed that image away as a part of a dream. How was that possible? Though he had some fractured recollection of his journey here, it only made sense in glimpses, as segments but never as a complete whole. Dover explained that they’d had to get someplace safe and nearby. She remembered what he had told her about Anne and, together with the old man, they’d found her. Anne had taken them in with only the briefest of explanations.

  “A wonderful woman,” Dover said. “Few like her in the world.”

  William listened to all of this, still staring, his face unchanging, still full of questions. “Who is that man?” he asked.

  Dover glanced over her shoulder as if the man in question might be listening. Without answering, she rose and moved away to the washbasin. Her motions were slow and pained also, her belly supported in the crook of one arm. She picked up the basin and returned, sat with the chipped porcelain in her lap, a piece once valuable but now ancient with neglect. She said he was just a man who’d helped them. He would have to explain anything else himself.

  “He the man Redford talked bout, the captain?”

  Dover spit out a scornful breath. “Not hardly. That man had sold us out, each and every one of them, even Redford hisself.”

  He heard the derision in her voice. He rolled the words around inside of him, thinking, trying to put them before the aches of his body. It was some time before he spoke again, but when he did it was as if there had been no pause. He steeled himself and asked, “Redford? What happened to him?”

  Dover shook her head and stirred the cloth in the bowl with her finger, swirling it with such attention that she seemed to have forgotten William. But she had not. “He’s dead,” she said. She raised her finger up out of the water, watching the cloth revolve slowly in the current.

  William asked her how and she told what she knew, which wasn’t much. Her story was fragmented and incomplete in all details save two: Redford was dead and the other fugitives were now in Humboldt’s hands. The whole thing was a failure. At that moment, only the two of them still held on to some semblance of freedom. She pulled a dripping cloth from the basin and wrung it out. She wiped William’s face with it, starting with his forehead and moving down.

  “He’s dead?” William asked, not looking for an answer but saying the words out loud to help digest them within. The shock of it was complete. Of all the tragedies he had imagined he only envisioned himself or Dover as victims. Of all the ways things could go wrong, he had never really believed Redford was at risk. It wasn’t his fight. He was not a slave. He was a free man. He couldn’t have died for a cause not his own. It didn’t make sense.

  William suddenly wanted very badly to leave that room. They weren’t safe. They had to flee before somebody came for them. What were they doing sitting in a room, her dabbing his forehead with a cloth? He almost said as much, but he knew it was impossible. He couldn’t even sit, much less rise and take charge and lead Dover to safety. He was helpless, and the full realization of it was different than any fear he had thus far felt. It was a quieter panic. The room seemed to revolve around him, as if he was at the pole of the world and all else rotated. It seemed this motion had always been there and yet he had just now recognized it, just now realized how helpless he was. He closed his eyes against the feeling of motion.

  “What bout them others?” he asked.

  “Told you. Humboldt got them.”

  “I’ll kill him,” William said. He knew the words sounded foolish but he was unable to stop them. He wanted that man’s death so badly that he had to speak it out loud. “Shoulda killed him already. Shoulda broke his neck.” His arms rose up as he spoke. His hands clenched the air, fingers trembling, so tense they seemed to strain against a solid object. But only for a second. He dropped them in exhaustion and lay panting.

  “You ain’t gonna strangle anybody anytime soon,” Dover said, her voice that of a mother, knowing better, speaking reason to a child. “That’s all right, though. He ain’t got us, does he? We breathing free air right now.”

  William turned away from her and shut his eyes, thinking that sentiment an absurd one. Air had always been free. That was no change. This was not freedom, not when his body was so raw and pained. Them in this room that wasn’t theirs, brought here by a murderous stranger. How could she find any peace in that? He heard her speaking, talking about his legs. She said that nothing had been broken. That was the trick of it. Nothing broken but a whole lot of damage done. He felt the tips of her fingers touching his thigh, moving down over his shins, which he realized were exposed. Her touch was meant to be gentle, but it pained him. His body was useless. Didn’t that make it broken? Wasn’t he just as crippled as if his legs had been snapped at the midpoint? He opened his eyes and stared at her again.

  “Don’t look at me like that,” she said. Her face was composed, resigned somehow, hopeful somehow. “All we been through and you look at me like to strangle me instead of Humboldt.”

  He stared on, his mouth opening, lips starting to form words he couldn’t fully put together. Didn’t she see the situation they were in? Didn’t she care about Redford and the others? He wanted to hear her voice quaver with fear, to see her eyes full of tears, face full of sorrow. He wanted to know that she felt something, but in the end all he managed to say was something that he had feared for a long time. He questioned whether she had any heart in her. “What’s inside you, woman?”

  Dover moved as if to rise, her lips a tight line, eyes flying up from him in exasperation. She half-turned, but that was as far as she got. She turned back and gazed at him. Her eyes wide, pupils so large they nearly filled the circle of her irises. “You don’t mean that. Sugar, you know what’s in me. You. You are. Always have been.” She said this so gently that William forgot himself in staring at her, awash with emotion and yet confused by it. How can love come so fast upon anger?

  “I don’t understand anything,” he said.

  “I know,” Dover said, touching her fingertips to his forehead and tracing his hairline. “I know it. It’s not much longer now and you will. We’re coming through this. May not feel like it to you, but we’re walking through it. You trust me on that? Cause you’re gonna have to. Tonight more than any night yet. You ain’t done being tested. So trust me, and we’ll walk through it all.”

  William held her gaze, unsure what she meant but hoping that trust was all they needed.

  The old man descended the steps ahead of Anne. He cleared his throat as he stepped into the room, as if he feared catching the couple during an intimate moment. He was bareheaded and in the dim light the gray streaks in his hair stood out with more prominence than their black counterparts. His beard was thick, tending even more toward white, a frame around his lower face that served to soften his otherwise sharp features. His eyes were somehow prominent beyond the norm, melancholy in their movements, lids slow in blinking, making of the downward curve a solemn act, a thing not done lightly but with forethought. His gaze touched on William and then Dover and then William again, not flighty in its motions but nervous beneath his deliberate calm. He cleared his throat and might have spoken, but then he remembered something. He looked down and checked the back side of his hand, the palm and then the back side. On his face there was no clear indication as to whether he found what he sought.

  Anne was the first to speak. She asked how William was. As the question seemed more directed at Dover than at him, William held his thoughts. Dover answered for him. He couldn’t take his eyes off of the old man and yet he kept trying to, looking from him to A
nne and then back, up at the ceiling and then back, to the tiny window and then back. He thought at first that it was just the incomprehensibility of this man helping them that drew his eyes. Or perhaps it was that he had seen him moving with such violent precision. Or the suspicion that he must yet have some evil intent. It might have been all of these things but it wasn’t. What drew him was the feeling that the man—this older, white man, savior to him and murderer of others—was afraid to look him in the face and meet his eyes. He still knew nothing about him, and yet from the hesitation in the man’s eyes he learned something, enough to quiet him and calm those other questions.

  While he pondered this, the conversation went on, both men mute while the two women spoke for all of them. Anne was much as William remembered, speaking easily with Dover, asking questions of the immediate, as to whether Dover needed anything else. There was water warming upstairs for her to wash his wounds further with, although she should seat herself and let her take care of them both. There was a nervous pitch to her voice, a quaver at the tail end of some of her words. She disguised it with small movements of her hands, with laughter placed at the end of sentences that wouldn’t otherwise have been humorous. But this could not go on forever. The silence of the two men was too strong a force. It was heavy with all the import of the world outside that room.

  “Well,” Dover said, having taken a seat at Anne’s insistence, “you two was up there talking. Whatchu done decided?”

  He cleared his throat. When he spoke William was startled to recognize his voice. Of course, he had spoken before, in the gaol, but the easy cadence of the man’s words surprised him still. His voice did not match his sharp features. It didn’t suit his violent actions or the lanky strength of his body. If it balanced any part of him it was his eyes. His tones had something of the same deliberate nature, each word clearly formed and executed. No sentence was rushed. Instead it was placed before them complete, irrefutable and pre-reasoned.