The river brought the man, but Grace let him spend the deep night on the softly-ferned bank, refusing to budge from the tuff walls of the old granary to bring him in from the darkness. Hunger clawed at her belly. She had not been outside for two weeks. Morning light was slow to pierce the valley but as it did, the ferns glowed with the gold and amber, no matter how meager.
She walked barefoot into the ferns, the ground damp with dew, and her feet made no sound as she approached, so he did not stir from his slumber. He was tall and lean and bleeding and made little more noise than she had when she dragged him back to the granary by his arms. A lump of deeply brown dirt mounded across the entrance ramp when she paused; the dirt smoothed under his backside when at last she hauled him in.
The scent of the blood was overwhelming in the small space that normally smelled only of old wheat and dust. She took a step back from him and then another, covering her mouth and nose, and casting a look about the room. She saw little that was helpful at first glance, her heart hammering in her chest; the room blurred a little, so did her morning hunger seek to pull her to her knees. But there— A cloth on the worktable, wrapped around her face, erased most of the scent. She could not see where the darkness had injured him, only watched the steady rise and fall of his chest as he somehow continued to breathe.
He was dirty with both blood and filth, the stench of battlefields rising warmly from him. Shit and bile lingered under the blood, every crescent of his fingernails caked with blackness that seemed to seep into the floor beneath him. She pictured the floorboards absorbing the stench of him, the muck that seemed to sluice from jacket and pants. The tread of his boots slowly vomited mud and stones onto the floor, as if sensing its journey had come to a momentary end. The clods of mud oozed water in every direction, eating the dust that lay in its path. He was a mire and her stomach clenched. She should have left him at the river. Should have let the darkness have him. Should have. Should have.
The only bed in the granary was her own, and that two stories up, so she left him on the floor and went barefoot up the smooth stone stairs, through the empty halls and chambers of the first floor, to the somewhat occupied dormitory on the second. Beds that had once held workers had now collapsed into dust and rust on the old stone floor. Her own bed balanced upon a layer of old text books, the mattress packed with ferns, straw, and old clothes that smelled still of blood. She sank onto the mattress edge, watching the meager light outside the glass-less windows for a long while before pulling a pillow against her chest. Should have left him at the river. Should have.
Quiet as ever, the granary rose around her. Its stone walls did not move like the last cabin she had sheltered in. The cabin had groaned with every stray gust of wind, but the granary was tall and true, sunk deep into the world. She sat long enough to mark the passage of the light across the floor, watching how the shadows of the ferns and vines that cloaked the granary moved as the day passed. The days were shorter now, brief passages of light through long hallways of darknesses, and though she needed to move supplies and tend to the man, she still sat. She could not smell him at this distance, but his presence filled the once-empty granary to near overflowing. She did not want him here and when he woke, she would send him on his way.
But he did not wake, not when she walked downstairs nor when she tucked the pillow beneath his head. She dragged him the rest of the way inside, into a puddle of thin sunlight, and pushed the mound of dirt outside before closing the door. He seemed to occupy the entire room, his breathing deep and resinous as if he were fighting a wound to his lungs. She did not move closer to determine where the darkness had eaten him, even knowing he was presently safe in the spill of sunlight. She watched until she could watch no longer.
The far side of the room was lined with shelves, and these shelves held what little she needed: candles, flint, boxes of chaff and debris. There were no bandages, no blankets, and every tin of food was outdated, by months if not years. She touched each can in turn though, only looking at the man when she had finished. He had not moved, his breath hitching in his throat. She returned to the second floor, to fetch a blanket from one of the collapsed beds. She picked up a boot and a helmet, and returned to the main floor, where the man no longer occupied her pillow. She stood on the final stair, searching the room for him, until she found him in the brightest corner, hands pressed to the window’s cracked glass. The daylight was already starting to fade.
He turned and when he saw her, his breath hitched in his throat again. He held up his hands, as if to ward her off, but she did not approach, watching the trickle of blood that painted him through the dirt from temple to jaw. It was so bright, so red, and she watched long enough that it made a striking line down his neck, across his collarbone. She knew the sound that bone would make upon breaking, but could not say how she knew. The muck that covered him made a trail across the floor, and blossomed around his feet where he stood, a rotting growth in her once-empty granary.
She stepped down the final stair and set boot and helmet upon the table, extending the blanket to him. “You should probably rest,” she said. “Are you . . . Did you come down from the . . . ” None of the questions seemed right, so she stopped, adding the blanket to the pile on the table when he did not move to take it. “There is food.” She pointed at the tins.
The shelves became his focus; he held the edge of one shelf, as if to keep himself from falling over as the light in the window continued to fade. “Where . . . ” But his own questions also seemed false or useless, so he did not finish them, instead touching the tins as she had only moments before, pressing his fingers to each before at last lifting one. They were none of them labeled, and most of them dented, but she thought at one time the tin would have held fish. It was short and round and there was no opener, which he discovered in his secondary perusal of the shelved items. He grunted and swayed on his feet.
She caught him before he fell, the warmth of his body startling against her. She nearly dropped him in her panic, for it had been a long time since she had held another body so. Her stomach churned again, her throat tight and dry with the hunger she had not yet eased. Her hands tightened into his coat sleeves and dark water squeezed out, pattering on the floor. She eased him against the table’s thick edge then down to one of its benches. He held hard to the table edge now and she did not blame him. She only looked at her hands, wet and fragrant with him.
“The darkness,” she said. “How long were you . . . ”
They both looked to the window, where it grew darker, shadows gradually gobbled by the rising darkness. She had once tried to make a clock upon the glass, to chart how long the sun lingered, but every day seemed different; every day the darkness came with more speed.
“I don’t know,” he said and then rested his head atop his folded arms against the table.
He allowed his eyes to close and when they did, she looked away from the window, latching her attention onto him, onto the blood that still lined his face. Part of her thought she should wet a cloth, that she should wipe it away, but she did not move. She told herself she should guide him upstairs, to the rusting shower she had found, but she did not move. She pictured herself doing this, pictured stripping him out of the muck that enfolded him and washing him clean, and this made her hunger worse. She drew in a breath.
Around them, the darkness rose, though it had been only morning. She reminded herself they were at the bottom of the valley. She told herself a story, that the high valley walls would hasten the days, and that beyond those walls, all was perfectly well. The war, the story said, could not change the course of the sun in the sky, even if every night there were fewer and fewer stars.
She did not picture their world falling through the heavens, away from everything that had once anchored it; she did not picture the steady retreat of every star and galaxy in the universe, the inexorable creep of the darkness everywhere. The darkness, she told herself, could not swallow the sun entire, for the sun would burn its way free. It was, she decided, too large to swallow, but this brought to mind other things surely too large to swallow—other things that had been cut down to size, bite by bite. Should have left him at the river. Should have.
He did not move in his slumber, his breathing now deep and even. She did not move for the longest time, not until the windows went wholly gray, the valley sinking into twilight. She went to the door first, ensuring that it was closed and bolted, and pressed a blanket against the gap at its bottom. She went to each window in turn, rolling the flour-sack curtains over the cracked glass. She lit candles and placed them around him as if in a protective circle, but there would never be enough to fully sweep the dark from every corner.
Upstairs, the windows were glassless, and she despaired at them as always, but still rolled the flour-sacks down, to keep out what darkness she could. The door had no lock, but she closed it even so, and pushed the one filled flour sack she had kept in front of it.
In the darkness that came, she felt unmoored. She floated in the blackness, trying to will herself into sleep so that the dark would not find her, would not claim her. She thought of the man downstairs, safe in his ring of candles, but then, the sound— The familiar sound of the consumption, the rattling of a building that should have not moved, as the darkness swept inside, as it consumed what it found, no matter the light.
The awful sound of suckling reached her ears, the sound of a mouth placed against a body, of a tongue wetting filthy skin, of teeth breaking through that thin barrier and ripping. A tongue delving into muscle, down to bone, where it cracked, plundered, and sucked marrow free. Marrow never smelled the way she thought it would; it smelled like life, like the darkest soil of a garden, wet and humming with potential.
How was the blood bright even in the darkness? Should have left him at the river. Should have. How was it all so bright even in the darkness? The candles—
Was the light a beacon? Was the darkness drawn to it as a moth? She whimpered and tried not to picture the certain wreck of the room, candles scattering one by one as the darkness claimed victory over them; wax spilling as light was snuffled, as life was snuffled within the gobbling dark. She closed her eyes but this made it worse; she could picture everything, clear and distinct, her eyes well accustomed to the black. When at last she wrenched herself from false sleep and dared touch the man, he was warm with fresh blood, this blood slowly saturating her as she pushed his coat back to see where he had been injured, where he had been eaten. The cage of his ribs burned bright in the dark around them.
He groaned low in his throat, in his belly, and she closed the coat around him. She fumbled to hold him against her. She wanted the candles but also feared them, for in the dark, the thing that moved within it did not approach them, its hunger momentarily becalmed. She did not sleep, his blood drying on her skin, though come morning she was clean, as if in her slumber the darkness had licked every smudge away.
“I thought . . . inside, it wouldn’t . . . ” He rasped the words in the first light of the new day, dirty fingers curled around the edge of his coat. She would not let him look; would not let him see.
“It doesn’t usually,” she whispered. Inside, with candles, the darkness did not usually come, and yet, the more the stars went out, the more the darkness seemed emboldened.
“Come away with me—you cannot stay here. You are not—”
“I tended soldiers here, and you cannot—”
She broke off when he tried to stand, when the pain in his side flared and he staggered back to the floor, as if taken by a gunshot. She did not go to him then, but let him writhe a little, for the pain in her stomach had returned. The hunger. She looked at the tins on the shelves and went to them instead, counting them one by one by—
His hand closed over hers. “Come with me.”
His hand was hot, cleaner than it had been last night, the darkness having licked the long journey from his skin even as it ate him. Should have left him at the river. Should have. “Maybe it would not have found you in the water,” she said, “but there are stories, stores that the dark water is as hungry as the dry dark, and you—” Every dark was hungry, so hungry. “You—”
“Will go alone, if need be.” He pulled his coat open then and looked at the wreck the darkness had made of his body. He fingered the visible ribs and marveled aloud at the way it did not hurt, but one should not be able to touch their own rib bones and it was this, this, that made him weak and trembling, fear flooding out of him.
“You cannot,” she whispered, and outside the windows, the new day began to darken.
“It comes more swiftly now,” he said, pushing away from her, until his back was against a wall. “What is it? Do you know? You tended soldiers? In this place? How long? Was it always thus?” He looked at the windows again, their panes darker. “There are fewer stars, the shapes of them are being . . . ” He did not say the last, perhaps could not.
She circled the room, closing the windows up one by one. He smelled like fear now, for he could not go but neither was it safe to stay. “It is only the darkness,” she said, and turned from the windows, picking up the candles from the previous darkness, pressing them into his hands, his arms, until he cradled them all.
“It must be something more—”
“Come,” she said, smoothing the last curtain into its place. “Upstairs. We shall make it climb.”
She did not know what she meant, for the darkness was not like water, it did not lap to a certain level and go no further. Darkness was all and everything once the sun was swallowed—no, no, it would burn its way free—but still she climbed the stairs and heard him behind her. They climbed into the dormitory where she had him spread the candles on the floor, where she lit them one by one, each flame pushing the encroaching darkness back.
“What is it?”
He crossed to the window without its glass and stretched a hand into the darkness that was not quite full. She stared, expecting to see the flesh eaten down to bone, but the darkness could not assemble itself yet, the daylight trying to push its way through even now. What great heavenly battle, she wondered; clouds of darkness pushing against and through the rays of sunlight.
“Did the war do this?”
He pulled his hand back inside and she rolled the flour sack over the thin window, pinning it to the frame at the bottom. She covered every other window and he shuffled behind her, through the debris of the before that cluttered the room. The broken beds, the footprints of soldiers come and gone, the piles of books and rucksacks left behind.
“The war did this,” he decided as he sank to the edge of her own mattress, clutching an arm across his middle. “The war made us all monsters.”
She did not know, but sat beside him on the mattress, waiting for the full darkness to fall upon them. She imagined it now like an ocean tide—this idea came into her mind and would not leave, the darkness filling the lowest level of the granary first, rising to fill the staircase, to lap against the top step where the candles burned brightest. She imagined the darkness being repelled by the light, imagined the flames burning the darkness should it creep too close.
“Did you . . . ” She exhaled, trying to find the word. Talking to anyone was difficult. Unfamiliar. Those who came to her were usually too injured to talk, and so she discovered them in silence, came to know their movements against her more than their words. “Were you a solider?”
“Some would say I still am, but how do we fight this?”
The darkness grew and he lay back on the bed. His coat fell open, his hand coming to rest on his exposed ribs, and she looked away, seeking the darkness where it pooled at the top of the stairs. Surely the entire bottom floor was filled, flooded. She dragged in a hard breath, but it all felt like drowning, as if she were being pulled into the darkness. She sat straighter, but could hear his fingers rubbing over each rib. It sounded like a whisper. A plea.
She thought it would be better upstairs, but as the candles guttered and went out, she understood it never could be. From the end of the bed, she could see the other ruined beds of the room, could picture how the occupants of each had met their ends in the darkness.
The darkness slipped so easily over the edge of the stairs once the candles went out, rushing cold over her feet where it lingered. She drew her legs against her chest and wrapped her arms around, but it was too late, the darkness gobbling every gleam of light from the room. She pushed herself away from the end of the bed, closer to where he sprawled, but she could already hear the darkness at work, resuming the excavation of his ribs. He cried out and though she pressed a hand over his mouth, over his belly, the darkness persisted, churning around him as it fed.
In covering his body with her own, there was a breath of respite, but hunger of another kind invaded her then, for he was hot and wet and solid beneath her. She did not move until he moved, just a hand against her backside, but she rocked back into it, and bent her mouth to his, but this unleashed a new kind of darkness: the darkness of her mouth, the abject blackness of her womb.
He delved into both, and she felt him falling apart inside of her, her body whittling his to near nothing before she, in mid-climax, pushed herself away and curled to the other side of the bed. She could not see him in the darkness, but could hear him, his breath ragged, his hand reaching to finish what she had started, though there was nothing for his hand to enclose.
They huddled in silence until the light broke through the darkness, until she could roll the flour sacks up to look upon the world below. In the valley, nothing had changed, the river running as it always had, past the granary and on toward the town where . . .
She could not finish that sentence, for she did not know; she had not been to the town in more days than she could count. Weeks? Years? She looked back at the man upon her mattress, his hand splayed over his ribs, though the wound could not be entirely covered that way now. His mouth was bloodied where she had kissed him, and his lap he had covered with his coat.
“I thought you would hurt,” he whispered. “They told me to find the mills. That you would . . . ” His hand pressed his ribs and lap both. “We fight for so long, it is sweet to surrender.”
She left the room then, going down the stairs without a word. She walked to the granary door, unlatched it, and stepped outside, turning her face to the sunlight. It did not burn her, only warmed her cheeks and filled her with a glow more familiar than the man in her bed. She stretched her hands into the light and did not evaporate and could not believe that she was the darkness, that her body harbored such malice.
The war had made them all monsters, he’d said. The war. The war had made them, made her. It shaped them in different ways, pulling the darkness out of a person till none remained. Or, she thought, pulling the light out of a person till none remained, leaving only the dark. She exhaled and felt the darkness inside her and it was like a great warm body enfolding her against its chest after a long absence of not being touched by anything at all.
She did not have to close her eyes to see the countless dead before her, to remember the stench of battlefields strewn with living and dying men. The nearest battlefield was four point eight kilometers away; she knew this the way she knew the taste of the man in her mouth even now. He lingered like a map inside of her; she could access any part of him, just as she could the roads around the valley, beyond the valley, into the town where the streets stood empty, already cleansed. If she reached farther, she could recall the taste of every dead soldier on every sodden battlefield, those across the ocean and those not. It was a fever dream, she decided, a sickness the war had put inside of her.
The sky moved above her, endless and blank until the clouded darkness crept up the horizon. It was not natural, the way it climbed the vault of sky, the way it darkened the world around her and pushed more stars into eternal black. With the darkness came a low humming, a rattle that moved the ground and the granary behind her. A rattle that loosened trees so the darkness could swallow them as it had every other thing. The darkness came slowly, inch by inch across the valley, and she did not move, though heard the man in the granary cry out as the darkness wended its way into the building, and barefoot up the stairs.
Her mouth across his own smothered his cries. She swallowed the sound as if it were water, cold and terrified as it pooled in her gut. Her black gut, she thought; every space inside her absolutely black in the darkness, no light piercing skin to make her heart glow pink, to make her liver burn purple. Darkness without end when she swallowed him, he who like the sun seemed to large to swallow at once, but could be handled in pieces. She made pieces of him in the darkness, and took these pieces into her, for he was a solider and like the others, deserved a proper burial.
“Come with me,” he begged when the light had come again—though it was less light than she had ever known, the darkness leaving a permanent stain upon the sky above the granary. In the dark, she had unearthed his collarbone, that beautiful curve of ivory against the tender bruise of skin and muscle. She pressed a finger against the bone and he shuddered, but whether in want or terror, she did not know.
“Come with me,” she echoed, and his eyes closed and he exhaled and the strength seemed to leave him then.
“There’s nowhere to go, is there,” he said, and opened his eyes to the expanse of rotting timbers above them. “The war took it all.”
“No war can be won, not truly.” She bent her head to his throat and though the darkness had not come, she fed, for the war she had tried to avoid in the granary walls had come to her after all. She had tried to leave the way she knew, had tried to abandon the dead her body hungered for, but he had come to her, had come inside her, and she was as trapped as he. “They sent you to me? They?”
She and he walked into the night, his bony hand clutched in hers, and they walked where the valley greenery made large and looming shadows against the darkening sky. Show me, she said, and he guided her through the same shadows they had once cringed from, he resigned and she thrilling as the dark sky pressed down upon them. That sky was largely absent of stars, though she picked out a few in the growing distance, the spaces ever-expanding as the Earth did fall away from all it had known. She did not know the why or the how, only felt that plunging motion as they walked upon the falling globe of the world. Her feet seemed to possess a new weight, even as she felt lighter than ever, felt as though she would be free of something terrible at long last. She looked back at the granary twice, its pale walls swallowed by the darkness, its uncovered windows overrun with shadows. When she looked a second time, the granary was gone.
Walking alongside the constant river, they came up and out of the valley to feel the wreck of the world around them. Darkness lay upon everything, growing thicker the longer it lay. The streets had long been without lights, poles standing useless and rotting; old storefronts collapsed in on themselves, though in some high and covered windows, she saw the persisting lights, some family huddled here or there. She smiled to think on it, how the light did guide the darkness to where it needed to be. Eventually.
He took her out of the town rubble though, and they walked until fatigue knocked him to his knees. She suckled him in the long grasses that tangled among the roots of an old tree, finding him sour and soft, though his bones were a kind and familiar sustenance when she reached them. She suckled him until there was nothing left but for his pointer finger, the bones leading her north, through more long grass riddled with spent ammunition, abandoned single shoes, rusting hubcaps. Where a tank rose against the sky, she found the men, three of them circled around a campfire they continuously fed despite the day’s thin sunlight.
It had been like this in the early days, biding her time. But the battlefield needed clearing, and darkness was patient, claiming one and then another when they wandered away from the campfire. Into the long grass, unhitching their trousers, pissing their names into the dirt. Darkness took them one by one by one, the last collapsing the way she imagined the sun would, screaming rage and fury though she easily swallowed both.
The town was not her domain; she had not been made to cleanse homes of families, though she thought about it, crouched just beyond the shine of those vague lights. She pondered skin and muscle and bone, the way a body came apart beneath her own, the way a hand fragmented and an eye dissolved, the way everything gave in to the dark in the end. Her body was heavy and full of what she had so long denied it and she turned her gaze to the sky, where darkness reigned but for a scattering of distant stars. They had no pattern now, for those closest had been devoured first. She thought that if she unfurled, that if she stretched herself to cover the sky entire, she could reach them and so she pushed herself up from the bloodied ground, and into the sky. Pushed herself past the clumsy shape that had always held her until she, too, dissolved into darkness.
Uncaged, she could go anywhere, so spread herself across what stars remained. Reached for them until their heat filled her to overflowing. She swallowed one by one, some bit of disappointment flaring inside her when she found the sun was not too large to devour after all, that it went down as easily as anything she had ever swallowed. The sun’s light fueled her, allowed her to expand, and when she turned her gaze back to the world she had always known, she picked out the few lights that remained.
She fell to the earth, rising from the ground cloaked once more in clumsy skin and bone. Her hands did not look like her hands, but she used them even so, to sink herself into the river where it flowed close to homes with windows still burning with light. She drifted upon the face of the river, through the reeds and toward the riverbank. She waited, for darkness could be patient; darkness could outwait all things. And when soft hands touched her back, rolling her over so she might be better seen in the light of carried lanterns, she exhaled a breath of water and reed. She could picture the ivory curve of their ribs and knew the sound their collarbones would make when she exposed and snapped them to suck the marrow. It would smell like life, that marrow, like the darkest soil of a garden, wet and humming with potential.
Lifted and carried by these marrow-heavy arms, she trailed water through the town streets, through the ruined first floor of the building, and up every step as they took her where she should be safe, they whispered. They placed her within a ring of candlelight, the stench of the river rushing from her clothes and over the floor, and she reached a trembling hand for them.
“Should have left me by the river. Should have.”
Originally published in Prisms, edited by Darren Speegle and Michael Bailey.
