One
Dear Kara,
Perhaps you are the lucky one, not being here...
"Eh, what's the point..." he whispered and crumpled the piece of paper in his fist and put it in his pocket. The wind howled cold; an amber sky glooming over. As the pallid sun fell adream behind the horizon voices grew louder from the shades of trees and umbrage of the underbrush.
"Time to go."
"Right behind you," the girl replied. Timeworn boots hit the grassy asphalt and on they went, with each stride an orchestra of clatter from their backpacks. Moss-grown cars on the road like metallic beasts made to sleep. They approached a town and could see a hint of smoke with an amber glow.
"A campfire?"
"Too big for a campfire," he replied, making sure the pistol remained snug in his pocket. Decayed window frames croaked and swayed in the winds; forget-me-nots sprouted from the curbsides. A thick blanket of autumn leaves lay over the streets and cars and building tops as if stockpiling over eons; yellow weeds as tall as the girl played in the breeze. An ancient water tower rose high. Rusty cars lay strewn about building walls and pavements, with squeaks and other sounds coming from them as if housing critters. Greens sprout from bones of dead things. Bug buzz.
They carefully snuck through damned and broken things to get a glimpse of what burned. Peeking around the quoin of a brick house they spotted the charred ruins of a building still smoldering. Inside sat a silhouette that blurred by the heat of the dying flames. They approached curiously as it rose out of the scorched remnants of walls and pieces of roof strewn about and its features unveiled: a man in a long dark monkish robe stared vaguely at them, with black sunglasses nestled on his nose and a rice-straw hat adorning his temple.
"Who approaches?" the figure uttered with a calm, smooth voice.
"Uh, just us," replied the man, surprised. The figure seemed to look not at them but at a certain nothingness; his face tilted in their direction but off, like a scarecrow fluttering in the wind.
"Keep your distance."
"Why? Are you okay?" the girl asked with concern.
"It's still much too hot," he simply uttered as he rose; the falling ash seemed to avoid him. He looked about eighty winters old with a silver beard drooping from his jawline.
"The flames…brought you to me," he spoke, shuffling through the sooted doorframe.
"What were you doing there? How did you survive?" the man asked with certain disbelief.
"I was...simply meditating and fell asleep. I awoke…heard you two approaching…and here we are." He spoke slowly and with a thick accent the girl had never heard.
"But how are you alive?" asked the man.
"Some things we will never know," the elderly man replied as he took a candle out from his robe pocket and slowly knelt and lit it by touching the string to a small piece of smoldering wood afore creaking back up again.
“The dark is close,” he said with a grunt as rumors of children laughing emanated from shadowed nooks and strange women ushered them into darkness. The candled monk began walking as though he knew exactly where to go.
"Where are you going?" the man asked concernedly.
"No idea," replied the monk.
“Do you need help?” asked the girl.
“Help would be nice.”
She took his wrinkled hand and led him toward some houses. In his other hand the glim flickered and trembled in the wind as if a great wood-mad beast was trying to blow it out from the murk. Rows of wooden double-storey houses sat on each side of the macadam with lawns knee-high and mailboxes that squeaked with each push of the breeze. The nearest one—a little house with overgrown golden-green vines and a grass roof like hair. Dark whisperings called the girl through the basement windows. The man opened the squeaky iron wrought fence and led the way up the rotted wooden stairs. Winds blew stronger now and the candle flickered with vigor. Her flashlight clicked on and shone through the dusty kitchen windowpanes as the voices crawled closer with each step of dying daylight. He knocked on the front door.
"Hello?" he asked loudly, hoping for silence. The whispers got louder, now repeating, "Hello, hello, hello..." with voices imitating his like an ensemble unholy and inhuman. They went inside the dust-filled house and he deadbolted the door behind them. Family pictures, a tall grandfather clock, chestnut stairs, red divans, a dusty television. Decayed plants hung in pots, floorboards creaked and croaked under their steps. Dust in their throats, cobwebs in their hair. He checked the entire house; it seemed safe. The girl shone her light through the window outside and it melded with the dark after a few steps. The night seeped closer and closer, bringing the voices with it.
The man locked all the doors and prepared the grimy divans. Sounds of an elderly woman’s mumbling came from the upstairs bedroom amid the circus of wretched voices. He put the monk’s glim in a glass jar with holes in the lid and fashioned many such glims to keep the room alight. With all the windows and doors closed there remained still an ominous breeze—a darkness that oozed through the cracks as if to smother the lights with a personal vendetta. In the room the shadows danced with the candlelight: an eternal game of the light and the dark. The man opened a can of beans and put a spoon in it and put everything in the monk's hands; the eld man returned a smile and dug into the beans with childlike joy.
"How have you survived for so long?" the girl asked with a curious brow.
"I don’t know, child,” he replied with a mouthful of beans.
"What kept you going?"
"This..." The monk slid out a smoky black book from his wide sleeve—its cover faded and the title with it. He extended his hand toward the girl with the book in it and she opened it and found the pages littered with dots.
"What kind of book is this?"
"A book…for the blind," the monk said. "A book for the darkest days and the loneliest nights. A book of hope."
"Blind…" the girl muttered. The monk took off his sunglasses and revealed the two snow-white pearls sitting in his eye sockets. The pair sobered. How could a blind man survive in such a world?
"You should come with us. What's your name?" she asked with an innocent smile.
"In the old world..." he paused as a wave of memories hit him, "...they called me Reo."
"I'm Nura, and this is Sam. We haven't met anyone in a while…" Her smile faded.
"When was the last time you met someone, Reo?" asked Sam.
"Someone real? Too long..."
"What do you mean?"
"I can see...them, the shadows in the dark…flickering, frail. Hundreds, thousands, countless. They try to look like us. They try to sound like us. I can see them now."
"See them?" asked Sam almost mockingly, convinced the old man had lost his mind to the darkness long ago.
"I see only them. Maybe…that's why they don't take me," said the monk, looking at a dark nook behind a cabinet out of which came whisperings of a little girl.
"What is it?" asked Sam.
"Nothing," he murmured, turning his pate toward the couch where the two rested. In the silence now became apparent all kinds of eldritch rumors around the house and in dark places inside it. Only mimicries, as if the jesters of the devil had nothing finer to do. Afore they could ask anything else, the monk let out a roar of a snore.
"So what was that all about?" she asked, a bit dispirited.
“I don’t know. His mind must have betrayed him long ago. There’s no room for a man of his age in such a world. It must have broken…”
“But how is he alive then?”
They both turned a gaze toward the snoring man.
“How indeed?” he replied broodingly. “Maybe we’ll ask him tomorrow. You should rest now, kiddo.”
They ate and brushed their teeth and spat the paste in dusty cups, for oral hygiene was important now that dentists were extinct. She put on her ears seashells held together by duct tape, the body of a headset, cushions, and warm wishes, which she referred to as shellphones. She then wished him a good night and hugged him and tried to sleep. He spent the night pondering the happenings as the voices raged on relentlessly like demons lost, speaking under the bed, in the shadowy corners, inside walls, upstairs, in the basement, outside, and twisting thoughts in his head. “Sam… Sam… Come here, Sam…” one repeated under the divan as if a hundred voices speaking at once. Some laughed in closed cabinets while others wept in unseeable corners. He closed his eyes for a moment and awoke to birdsong and morn light; the monk no more.