ELIJAH
I have two horses but still say I am alone. Elijah supposed he could understand that. He knew his preference for the company of animals said more about him than everyone else’s preference for the company of humans said about them. It was just what he was accustomed to. His ears were alert, tracing the man’s movements.
Christopher snorts softly, and then a few leather clad footsteps, and a rustle as the man settled somewhere nearby. “I am blind, yes,” Elijah confirmed. It didn’t bother him to talk about it. He would rather people asked the obvious question, rather than awkwardly edging around the topic. He was aware that when people first met him, it would be the first thing they would want to know. In a way, sometimes it was flattering.
As a stableboy, nobody ever asked you about yourself. You were handed the reins, and largely ignored. Perhaps he might receive a coin if he worked particularly hard. But since the accident, sometimes people paused and asked what happened to his face. In a sick way, it made Elijah happy; as though he was important, worthy of note. Maybe it was the most interesting thing about him, he wasn’t sure. “I-I know little. I was workin’ in Easton, and we heard that something real bad happened in Saint Clemens. They said the dead had risen, but the barkeep told me it was all rubbish, it was just a sickness that got outta hand. Y’hear all sorts comin’ through the saloon, so I didn’t pay much mind to gossip. But… well, clearly there was some truth in the rumours.”
His face was still turned to the stranger’s, eyes shifting sightlessly. Something in Dov’s heavy accent made Elijah think he knew things, even if he didn’t know the word for blindness. It must take a real smart person, Elijah supposed, to know two languages.
“Blind?” he repeats back, mimicking the American accent before he laughs suddenly. He shakes his head, forgetting Elijah would not see it, “Sorry! I do not mean to laugh. In German it is blind. Blind. Blind.” He repeats the word a couple times, alternating between pronunciations. He feels silly for forgetting it, but in that moment simple enjoys the novelty of the similarity between the two languages.
He listens to the boy’s short story, the stark contrast from that blip of laughter and the grim details. It was a terrifying perspective to be going through... this. Dov smelt the un-dead, heard them some nights, and found it even more horrifying than actually seeing the creatures the sounds and smells came from.
“Clearly there was,” he repeats with another solemn nod, “I do not the, uh, the details. I know people are bitten — get ‘bit’ —” he repeats the phrase he’d heard another resident of this town use to ask if he was going to turn “— and then they die before ‘waking’ up.”
“They wake up wrong.” Dov says, not sure how to fully articulate the horrors he witnessed. He thinks of the mother ripping into her own son’s throat, his attention wanders back to his own horses, wonders if an animal can be haunted by seeing humans commit violence. He hopes not. He likes the animals.
“It is not... safe to stay outside, I think. Especially you. Can not see them coming.”
