Lanterns And Shades - Part 4: The Dead Quarters

"We're not begging for too much, I don't think. Just need a goodbye kiss before we sink."

“I hate this,” I say. “I’ve never liked it, you know? But now I hate it. I can’t stand to do this.”

JD nods. She’s not really listening. Her face is blank, and she stares straight ahead into the darkness, bouncing nervously on the balls of her feet.

“Thirty seconds,” I say.

She assumes the position like a sprinter waiting for the starting pistol, right leg bent before her, left stretched out behind. I can see her trembling.

“Five, four, three, two…”

And she is gone, racing into the darkness. In seconds, I can no longer see her. I take off at a jog. With JD so far ahead of me, the risk is much lower than it could be. As long as I don’t arrive at the hill to find the path crowded with Shades, I am comparatively safe. Even if that situation did arise, I would have the option of returning to the Curfew Bar.

Along the path at the same leisurely pace, turning right and taking it easy down the hill, feeling my muscles loosen and the tension rising up through my belly and making my heart beat faster. The second right turn is in the dip that marks the halfway point, and this is where I am slowest, more than prepared to stop in my tracks and turn back. The hill is clear though, the moon shining like a beacon. No Shades, No JD, no nothing. I could be out for an evening run.

Nonetheless, I accelerate. I put my head down and release the energy that’s been building inside me, relax and let it flow, let it carry me up the steep gradient to safety. The fear is there, but in extremity it recedes. Unless a Shade were actually waiting for me with its arms open, I am going to make it. They are quick, but as yet there is no sign of them. With a running start like this one, the chances of my being caught tonight are getting lower all the time.

It’s an easy night, the kind of peaceful run you dream about. The kind of peaceful run I needed. It is as I am silently thanking JD and the Gods of chance and fate that I spot the shoe by the side of the path. I don’t stop. I don’t even slow down. But above my burning lungs, my heart is ice. There are probably a million reasons why a lone shoe would be lying there, but the only one I think of is the one that makes me find the strength to accelerate still further as I crest the hill and sprint down to the Lantern Truck that awaits, JD and Old Dennis waving and cheering me on.

“See? Nothing to worry about. Last night was a blip.” JD is smiling at me, her words barely carrying over the growl of the engine as we pull away.

I let her statement hang a few moments, getting my breath back.

“There was a shoe. A girl’s shoe,” I say.

“So?”

“It wasn’t there last night and it wasn’t there on our way to work.”

“How do you know?”

“You’d notice. Where it was, you’d notice. I’d notice. I know I would.”

“Ken…”

“I’m not shitting you, JD. I think they got someone.”

She stares at me, smile fading, and I feel like the worst kind of bastard. I am forever the cynic and the pessimist, forever the bearer of bad news.

“Well it wasn’t us,” she says, with surprising vehemence. “There isn’t anyone else that has any business being out there after dark.”

I shake my head, let it fall back against the cab, feeling the sweat drying on my skin, my lungs shrinking, my heart slowing. We pass the rest of the journey in silence.

On Abbot street, JD hops out of the truck and says goodbye only by throwing an angry wave over her shoulder. I watch her disappear into her house and climb slowly out myself, feeling old and tired. Every night seems like a drama now.

“I’ll see you tomorrow, Ken,” Old Dennis calls.

“No doubt,” I reply, my thoughts elsewhere.

I walk down the driveway and hear the sound of the Lantern Truck’s engine expressing its enthusiasm for a run at wherever Old Dennis goes after he drops us off. I turn and call his name, and he leans out of the window, that roar dropping to a low growl. Aware of the late hour and the fact that my father and the rest of Abbot street are probably sleeping, I walk back to the Truck.

“Did you speak to my dad?”

“For a minute or two,” he replies. “He’s worried about you, that’s all.”

I nod, trying to find the words to frame the ideas and questions in my head. Dennis watches me expectantly, wearing a smile that conveys a kind of weary amusement. I’d guess he’s a little younger than Shelley, but that’s based on the timeframes of stories I’ve heard. If you were to take it on appearance, you would say Dennis was ten or even fifteen years the elder. His face is lined and damaged, and though he was probably once a large and powerful man, a manual labourer with an education that was all physical, he is now a bent and broken specimen. I rarely see him walk, and even sat in the cab of his Lantern Truck, he seems withered and ancient, a shadow of the man you can see behind his eyes if you look hard enough.

“It’s getting really dangerous,” I say, looking for a way to start a conversation. “I’m worried about JD.”

“Don’t need to worry about that one, son. She could outrun this truck if she was of a mind.”

“It doesn’t always matter how fast you are.”

Now he really does smile. It takes years off him. I know that’s a cliché, but it really does. Suddenly I understand why my dad says that he always kept my mum away from Old Dennis, who wasn’t so old back then, and was known mostly for his incredible feats of drinking and for the amount of times he was rumoured to have crept out of some young lady’s window in the dead of night.

“Your dad’s always telling me you’re the curious type. Waiting up for you, is he?”

“No. He goes to bed early. Doesn’t like the dark, you know?”

“Then hop in, I won’t keep you too long.”

This is one of the opportunities I’ve been waiting for, and I can’t believe it was as simple as mentioning my concerns about Witches Path. As I make my way around the truck and jump into the passenger seat, I’m wondering if talking to Shelley would ever be so easy.

“Where are we going?” I ask him.

“Town centre,” he says. “Then I’ll take you to the outskirts of the Dead Quarters. Won’t take you in, mind, even with the Lanterns.”

I look at him. “It’s that bad?”

“It’s that bad. If we had the newer Lanterns, the ones old Cartwright goes on about, then maybe. With these old things, not a chance. There’s a lot of ‘em down that way.”

“Shades?”

“Shades.”

Dennis drives to the end of Abbot Street and takes a left, down onto a different main road and past the library, the furthest I have been from my house since I was a child. The scenery after that is only vaguely familiar, like a landscape I might have once dreamed. There are no houses here, and therefore no Lanterns. Only once do I see a Shade, hanging in the moonlight in such a way that I’m reminded of a black dress my brunette sometimes hangs on her washing line. It seems to turn and follow our progress, but it makes no move to follow.

“They tend not to chase you if you’re moving fast enough,” he says, as if reading my mind.

“Why?”

He glances across at me, amused. “I’m no expert, Ken. I only know what I see. That’s why your friend back there is safer than you are. Back in the day, I reckon she’d have made a fine runner.”

“It must seem like a big difference to you. You were around before this happened, right?”

“I was.”

Frustrating silence in the truck as we come up onto a roundabout and head right, past a sign that tells me we’re heading for the town centre. Several abandoned cars sit by the side of the road, and a lone Lantern spits out a quick burst of light before dying again.

“So…what was it like?”

“It’s useless to ask, son. Especially me. We’ll not be going back to that, and I don’t remember much of it anyway.”

“You drank a lot,” I say, a statement, not a question.

“I drank a lot,” he agrees.

As in most places, the town centre’s Lanterns seem to work periodically and without much spirit. Some are on, some are dead, and some flicker in the last throes of life. It is not the apocalyptic scene I sometimes paint it as in my mind. It is deserted and silent, but most of the cars have been left parked neatly, and most of the shops have shutters pulled down, as if they’d simply closed one night and then never re-opened.

“What happened, Dennis? Why did we retreat? I don’t know anyone that even comes here in the daytime anymore.”

“They come here sometimes, for supplies and what-not. The Lanternmen take parts.”

“But it’s safe in the day.”

“So are the Dead Quarters. People aren’t sure, though. There are always rumours and no facts. Night may be the problem, but that doesn’t mean people don’t try to stay where it’s brightest. Even on cloudy days, we don’t go out. Sometimes people just disappear, and sometimes it was light when those people went out.”

We pass the cinema and I can’t help but shudder, remembering the screams of my recurring nightmare.

“Have you ever seen one in the day?”

“I sleep in the day. I’m up when they’re up.”

Dennis nods at one of the dead Lanterns and I see a group of Shades beneath it. Again, they seem curiously lifeless, drifting aimlessly, occasionally bumping into one another. I am used to seeing them in flight, in pursuit, and the contrast is stark. Still, I shiver to look at them. I hate them.

“What do you think they are?” I ask him.

“Our dead. That’s why there are always more. Every time someone gets The Touch, they turn into one, don’t they?”

“I had The Touch.”

“But not the way it is when you don’t get away. Nobody dies if they get away. After a few days or a few weeks, it goes. Where it stays is in your head. That’s why your dad worries, Ken. He’s seen what’s happened to others.”

“So if you get Shaded, terminally Shaded, you become a Shade?”

“If you don’t, then what happens to you? They’re ghosts.”

We’re leaving the town centre behind now, negotiating another roundabout and heading south towards the Dead Quarters. I’m thinking about what he’s just said. It isn’t a controversial opinion, though it’s not exactly popular. The theory that has been in vogue for as long as I can remember is that the Shades are living creatures of some kind, a new species that we will eventually find the weapons to confront. Still, I remember the books I’ve read and the films I’ve seen, horror tales about zombies and ghosts and the various other kinds of creeping undead that are so prevalent in fiction. I remember watching Dawn Of The Dead with JD one night, remember how the phrase, “when there’s no more room in hell, the dead will walk the earth” had left me frightened and thoughtful. Maybe the Shades are our shambling, mindless zombies, the remnants of our dead come to drag us into the forever sleep that is our destiny.

The Lantern truck stops, jerking me out of my reverie. I look up and see that we have pulled over in front of a sign that proclaims this place Quarter D.

“See them?” asks Dennis.

How could I not? They are at the edge of the truck’s Lanternlight, almost motionless in the same way as their brethren in the town centre. There are hundreds of them, maybe thousands. You can only see so far in the dark.

“God,” I whisper. “I’ve never seen so many.”

We are both breathing hard, both staring.

“The Lanterns went out,” Dennis says, in a low voice. “All at once. There was a failure in one of the generators. It was only just dark.”

“They didn’t have back-ups?” I ask. I know we have back-ups. I’m trying not to think of hundreds of people running screaming through the dark streets or cowering in their homes, unsure as to whether every window is tightly closed, every door secured.

“There was a dispute. The Lanternmen had threatened a strike. It almost always seems to happen when the government fails an area. There’s community, alright, but someone always wants to be in charge. The Lanternmen have skills that would have been worth a hell of a lot of money in the right climate. A hell of a lot of money.”

“You’re saying it was deliberate?”

“I’m saying there’s no obvious reason for all the Lanterns to fail at the same time. I’m saying that there are only so many Lanterns, and nobody’s manufacturing those parts anymore, so far as I know. I’m saying that after the Dead Quarters went down, there were a lot of Lanternmen in our neck of the woods that hadn’t been there before.”

We watch a Shade dare the Lanterns. It suddenly charges at the truck with the speed and intent I am familiar with, getting maybe a quarter of the way into the Lanternlight before it seems to become confused and directionless. It veers off course and misses the truck by twenty or thirty feet, disappearing into the tangled limbs of its kin beyond the far edge of the luminescence that protects us. For a moment or two, I had stopped breathing. I know the Lanterns protect us, but the way they rush at you is just a horror. It's awful.

“Dennis, that would be murder,” I say.

He nods and starts the engine, throws us into reverse gear and turns around to head back up the road and away from the Dead Quarters.

“Those things have no motive, Ken. They’re just things. They’re not smart like you or I.”

“Or the Lanternmen,” I say. It’s cold in the truck.

“No,” Dennis says.

Conversation turns away from Shades and Lanternmen and the Dead Quarters on the way back to Abbot Street. Dennis asks me about the Curfew Bar and about my father and my friends. I ask him about his work driving the Lantern Truck. We’re just filling the silence, really. He drops me at home with a customary goodbye and heads off up the street before I can offer anything more in return than a wave.

I let myself back into the house and sit down in the kitchen. I’m hungry, but too preoccupied to concentrate. At the centre, JD and me and the Curfew Bar and Witches Path. Beyond that, our families and friends and community. Inside and outside and twisting through all of those things, the Lanternmen and the mystery of what happened in the Dead Quarters, a mystery that may well contain the answers to all of my questions.

I have to talk to Shelley now, to explore the knowledge that she has. I have to talk to Cartwright and understand a little more about the Lanternmen. I have questions that demand answers, possible conspiracies that make my head hurt, and an intense feeling of loneliness that makes me wonder if anybody else ever thinks about these things at all.

I know my dad would turn me away. He is a part of the Daylight World. Only people like JD and Dennis and I really understand the night. We might not talk about it too often, and we might find it terrifying, but we are the only ones that ever confront it. I must also talk to JD. I need to tell her all that I am thinking and all that I have discovered. I need to make her listen and understand. She is, in the end, perhaps my only partner in this, and she needs to know.

These thoughts, they’re haunted by those dark spectres. I see the Shade we passed on the main road, the group in the town centre, the army of twisted shapes that surrounded the Lantern Truck outside Quarter D. There are more of them than I had ever really believed, more than I thought possible. If Dennis is right, then every shoe I see lying by the side of Witches Path, every mysterious disappearance and unexplained absence means one more. How long before the situation becomes impossible? How long before we are caught between the blank, silent inevitability of the Shades, and the power-hungry conspiracies of our own kind?

I go to my room and pick up a book, hoping to lose myself in some other story. I know I won’t be sleeping tonight.