Daniel was a knight in this, the new world. His armor was a tattered trench coat he'd found one day on a dead body. His sword and shield were madness and silence. He was hunting an ancient evil. And he was getting closer.

The spoor of this great evil in the dying city were the corpses of wasted human lives. Many of these people continued to move, to dance their scuttling dance like the cockroaches on his floor, but they were dead. And Daniel could tell. He alone, it seemed, saw that these people were not merely destitute, or lonely, or insane, but dead. That their souls had been consumed by something which roamed free in the night. Something vast and dark and older than even the crumbling bricks of this disintegrating town. The roaches told him it was near. They whispered in the sibilant rasp of their running legs, always running. "Soon," they said. "Soon I will have your soul. Come to me. I will consume you, and your corpse will be free to serve me." Daniel listened to it as he drifted off to sleep in the mornings and as he was dragged into consciousness in the evenings. "Soon."

The darkness of the dying city had been cordoned off and hidden by the owners of that city. It had been rationed and encircled. It was a precious national treasure, Daniel figured, and it needed a preserve where it could grow. A national darkness preserve where evil could exist in the open and the living citizens in their flimsy protection could gaze at it and wonder that they had escaped it, as it ate out their insides without their noticing. So the owners of this city had tried to crush the darkness. To destroy the rotting parts of their town and bury them. The old waterfront with its bars and its tenement houses was mostly gone now. Centuries of trappers and sailors had used it and left. But the darkness was still there, under the clean new buildings, behind the shining glass. And here, in this corner, it was above ground still.

It seemed to come up out of the ground with the subway. The trains screamed up along the dirty tracks onto the elevated rail and shook dirt down onto this darker part of town. Under the tracks it was almost always night. Pigeons, those winged rats of the city, roosted overhead and shat into the twilight murk. The beams and struts of the rail were dirtied with exhaust, smoke, excrement. The blood of the city. This is the night Daniel emerged into as he left the skittering shadows of his room and entered the world.

This was the night he had been inhabiting since he first started to hunt the darkness. Since he had found that first corpse.

*            *          *

It called him by name. "Danny," it said in the voice of his dead mother, "Come here son." He turned from the dumpster he had been pulling empty six-packs from and stared. The corpse was a long time dead. Half buried in trash. Its eyes were gone, consumed by rats or ants or worms. Its skin was blackened and drawn back. Through a hole in its right cheek Daniel could see its teeth. He found himself thinking oddly that its teeth were perfect. If, when it was living, it had known it would soon be a corpse then it could have saved itself some time brushing its teeth, and even perhaps skipped a couple dentist appointments. He didn't know why these pointless thoughts were running through his mind, but he knew he was already mad. After all, that corpse had called him by name. And it did it again, this time in a voice he didn't recognize.

"Daniel," it said, its cheek blowing obscenely in the warm wind of breaths from worm eaten lungs, "you have a quest." Daniel knew about quests. He'd seen a movie years and years ago with knights and horses and a quest. It didn't seem like the kind of thing one was given by a grotesquely talking corpse. "There is a darkness in this dying city, and you must hunt it."

Daniel didn't want to talk to this corpse. He was vaguely afraid that in the years since he had talked to anybody he might have forgotten how. "Quiet." he said silently. "Be quiet. You're dead. Lie down. Be dead."

But the corpse ignored him. It began to sit up, uncovering itself from the trash. It stood unevenly on legs which, from their thin and brittle look under the expensive slacks, might not have had any muscle on them at all. "You are a living knight for order." it declared. "Take this your armor. Go forth and hunt the evil which lurks in these shadows." It began to undress, and Daniel was afraid for a moment that this walking corpse, this dead thing, intended to rape him or something. But no, it only took off its jacket. And handed the jacket to him.

Daniel backed away and tripped over something. He came down in a clattering of cans as one of his plastic bags burst. He crawled backwards into the comfort of a pile of trash and whimpered. "No. no, no. Don't touch me."

The jacket descended like a blanket, like a flag over a good soldier's coffin, it covered him in its murky depths. He was strangely comforted by this, and he heard his mother's voice again, but this time he heard it within his own head, and not coming out of that dead thing. "That's alright Danny." Her voice said, "you're alright. Go back to sleep." It was something she'd said to him in his childhood he supposed. And now that he was going mad he was hearing it again.

He didn't remember going to sleep, but he woke up alone in the ally with his armor. and he felt a purpose surging in him. As the sun went down that night he felt the darkness calling to him, and he knew that he would go to it.

*            *            *

Daniel didn't collect cans any more. He was given gifts. Not gifts from the living. Not from the humans he had shunned and avoided all of his adult life. These were from the dead. From other knights. From the ones who held this tenuous line in the heart of the dying city against the creeping blackness which threatened to consume it. He received money, and food, and advice.

*            *            *

So it was, when Daniel had seen her every night for a week, when he turned every corner to find her there, that he began to suspect. He was following her. And she, in turn was leading him. On this night, with the voice of the darkness still echoing in his mind, he followed her consciously, and would not let her escape his sight. He watched the graceful purpose of her determined steps. He saw how she carefully arranged her dirty hair and held it back with borrowed rags. He saw the spark of her eyes and a quirk of her lips when she noticed him following her. Who was this living thing he had found?

She led him through the streets on a wandering course. Through deep pools of shadows where lamplight didn't reach. Dangerous places. But not dead places. Because wherever she was, wherever this strange woman went, the dying city seemed to catch its breath. Its pulse would become steady and the color would return to its clammy cheeks. She accomplished this with small waves of her hand like an idle magician producing flowers in his sleep. Here she would right an overturned trash barrel and clean the streets with her bare hands. There she would shoo the flies from the corpse of a dead bird and bury it in the loam of a dirt-filled gutter. She was silent, but Daniel almost felt a tune humming out of the air where she walked. A lullaby for the city.

At last, as dawn began to light the grime of the streets and carve the smoggy clouds into red palaces which trumpeted day's coming, she stopped. She turned to face Daniel and she smiled.

His heart froze. The hunt, the careful tracking, all the night was lost to him. He felt isolated in the growing light and longed to retreat back into the shadows. And then she did what nothing except corpses had done to him in years. She spoke to him.

"You've been following me, haven't you?" She nodded to herself and didn't wait for an answer. "Yes you have, and I know you, don't I?"

Daniel was terrified. He turned to go, but didn't know where. Where was the darkness which had been so close. The evil he was sworn to defeat somehow. Why, when it was so near, was he now stranded in the dawn with this woman? A woman who spoke to him. A woman who claimed to know him.

"Don't go yet," she said. "I want to show you something. I know who you are. Yes. Come here." Slowly, unthreateningly, she pulled something out from under her vast jacket. A white binder, only slightly stained. And as she opened it and began pulling out yellow newspaper clippings she said, "this is you, isn't it? You've been doing these things. These terrible things." She wasn't angry. She held the newspaper out to him, and because he thought perhaps she'd go away if he looked at them Daniel took them.

He couldn't read them, but he could see the pictures. And they stopped his heart. The first one was Professor Helm. With all of his flesh on, smiling his perfect teeth at the camera and wearing the jacket Daniel now wore. The next was a youngish couple in what looked like a prom picture. He had met them soon after the Professor. A pair of bare skulls found in the gutter which chattered at him and grinned cheerily in his dreams. And there was the garbage man who had been so freshly dead that Daniel had thought he was only sleeping until he saw the hole in his chest and the blood soaking into his uniform. And the waitress. And the schoolboy. And the wasted old man with the cigar. All the folks who peopled Daniel's dreams and led him through the night. All printed in newsprint dots on yellowing paper.

As he looked Daniel tried to lean on the wall next to him. He missed and fell harshly to the sidewalk in a fluttering rain of newspapers. He closed his eyes to think, just for a moment, but that made things worse. He felt the darkness behind his eyelids, pressing eagerly on him. Pressing to get out from inside of him.

Somewhere somebody's electric alarm was going off. The smell of cooking eggs swept down the quiet street and was gone. A siren whizzed by in the distance. And at last Daniel opened his eyes. The woman was still there.

"I knew it. I know things sometimes. And I knew when I saw you following me, you're the one what killed all those people." Daniel shook his head slightly in denial. "Killed them for months, and the police couldn't find you, could they. But you found me. Couldn't have little old Angeline going around cleaning things up, could you. So you had to come get me. Knew you would." She stopped her speech and looked at him, waiting for him to reply.

Carefully, slowly, he gathered words from his mind and put them together. He opened his mouth and modulated the scream of his fear frozen mind into rusty words. "Didn't," He said. "Never killed. Anybody." A remote part of his mind was wondering at the brilliance of the darkness, turning even this miracle of light against him. As if to appease her, to prove his innocence, he held out his bare and dirty hands. "I never killed them."

She looked down at him and huffed to herself. She reached out suddenly and grabbed his outstretched arms and pulled him to his feet. The shock of being touched, flesh to flesh, made Daniel leap back, and almost fall again, but she caught his jacket cuffs and held him there. Not letting him fall or run. Trapped by his own armor.

So he sort of sagged in his coat and looked fearfully up into her eyes. And he found there, amazingly, a kind of grudging kindness. "Hush then," she said, "so you didn't kill them. Okay. You're a poorly one, aren't you. Come on then. It's your bedtime, I'd guess, and you'd best be heading home."

Daniel stumbled home in a daze, half leading this strange woman and half leaning on her for support against the weight of his shock. She came right up into his apartment and started to tidy it up as if she'd been living there all her life. Yanking the sheets off his squalid bed and beating the mattress mercilessly with her shoe. Gathering cans and dirt up off his floor. Dusting off the blinds on his windows, although thankfully she didn't open them and let the dirty light of day in. And as she worked she spoke to him constantly.

Her name was Angeline Carter. She'd been on her own in the city for a long time now hadn't she. Yes she had. Cleaning things up, she was. Always putting things right. And when she heard about all these killings she said to herself "Angie, you gotta clean that up too. Nobody else doing anything about it. You just gather all the loose ends and it'll come clear somehow." So she gathered the newspaper clippings. And she attended the funerals. She saw the families and the futile police.

Daniel listened to all this. It was a sort of shocking whirlwind lullaby which carefully beat him to sleep. He might not be the type to clean up things. He might be just a knight living alone here in his pit of a castle. But he wasn't a killer. Mad but not a killer. He kept reminding himself of that as a gentle cleansing rain began to fall outside and he fell asleep curled in the corner of his room.

*            *            *

He didn't know quite what to do with himself. The cockroaches didn't dance their usual dance. The darkness which had been so close, so achingly close, was gone now. Daniel scooped cold chicken noodle soup out of a can, not wanting to defile the cleanliness of his room by even cooking it, and as he did he began to understand something.

The darkness, the heart of the dying city, it had been coming for him. It had been claiming him even as he sought it. But now it was gone. It had arrived at last, and found an unexpected prize. Instead of taking him it had taken her. Taken Angeline in his place.

He started out at once, drawing his armor about him and quickly tieing it. He left the house and didn't notice the stench of fresh rain corrupted by city soot. He walked hurriedly towards the elevated train tracks, searching for the way into the darkness. He knew he would find her there, under the city. Knew it in the same way that he knew if he didn't hurry she would be another corpse. He would meet her and she'd speak to him after death. And she wouldn't blame him for her demise. But she'd never clean anything again.

Soon he was running, almost slipping on the slick pavement. The tracks were above him, and here, between a pair of filthy buildings it went down and was swallowed up. Here he paused, by the rusted barbed wire which kept idle hoodlums out of the underground. He knew the darkness was down there. He hadn't had to follow it down before because it was hunting for him as much as he was hunting for it. But now he would have to go in. Into the dragon's lair. Because it didn't have to come out to beat him now. All it had to do was kill her and he was beaten by default.

Daniel knew the way things would work out then. The police would find her corpse too. And they'd find him. And no amount of madness would get him out of a jail cell or a padded room. He wouldn't be able to fight the darkness, or even to walk the streets and track it. And it would engulf the unwitting city whole. Without him it would consume everything. And Angeline would be quite utterly dead. That was the most certain, the most final thing. She wouldn't pick up cans or clean rooms. Or speak kindly to strangers.

Daniel climbed the fence, shrugging off the tears to his coat and the fresh blood which the wire cut from his hands. He turned his back on the shadowy lights of the city and looked into the maw of blackness before him. Deep in the city's belly he could hear the metallic scream of trains filled with lost souls. Some electric lights lined the tunnel for a way, but then there was darkness, and only darkness.

Soon he was enveloped in the strangely warm arms of terror. With his eyes vainly open and seeing nothing she shuffled along one wall. The wall was dirt, clay which came apart in his hand. He had turned a corner and left the last of the nighttime city lights far behind. His stumbling feet, the swish of his jacket, his quiet puffing breath, these were the only sounds. He tried without success to disguise his breathing. He couldn't hold his breath for long, but if he could just be quiet, stealthy, maybe he could creep in with the darkness unaware. So he took shallow slow breaths, and stepped slowly deeper. One step, then another.

After a while he began to suspect that he wasn't on the tracks any more. He couldn't hear the trains. He couldn't hear anything except for himself. He wanted to step away from the wall a little and feel with his feet. Maybe the tracks were still there, just a couple paces away. He could reach them simply, and they'd be a link to the outside world. To the light he had left behind.

But he was also struck with a conviction that if he left the wall he'd get turned around. Without something solid beside him he could walk unknowingly into another tunnel. Without light he'd be lost completely. Maybe he'd starve here, alone. And nobody would ever talk to his corpse, would they?

No. He couldn't think like that. He couldn't let himself think at all or he'd turn back. He had to simply walk forward. Step, step, step. The floor under his feet was soon raw soil. The wall he felt with his hand was damp clay, old clay. This was not the subway. Something older must have been there. Something dark. Something Daniel had to desperately not think about.

In the dark and clammy cold he paused. He realized that he was trembling. His breath was a stuttering whisper. Somewhere ahead of him he heard a soft dripping. Echoing around his still body in the darkness like muffled wet footsteps. Careful, methodical, steady footsteps which never got any closer. Hovering before him.

Soon he was suffocating. The damp was creeping into his clothes, setting its hands against his bare skin. Any second, he was sure, the damp old walls would collapse under the vast weight built on top of them and he'd be crushed in a clammy embrace. Not dead, but dying, unable to breathe. Carefully, slowly, he turned around, with one hand on the wall.

And then came the scream. As if the earth itself was crying out to him in a hoarse, dulled voice behind him. With that scream, which filled the darkness and pumped blood anew into his veins, came the comforting caress of madness. Fear and thought and preservation were torn away by a deeper, more primitive beast. A warped and twisted silent lurker somewhere in Daniel's make up which was woken by the scream and drove him on.

To turn, leaving the support of the wall, was a relief. To almost fly through the darkness with a cold breeze caught in his armor was freedom. Daniel found that he himself was screaming as well in a high pitched wail composed of years of solitude. For the moment he was no longer flailing against some amorphous evil in the dying city, walking the dirty streets alone. He was alive with purpose, and his entire being was a desire to find Angeline, who he was convinced was calling to him.

Before he was aware that he could see again he saw the wall in front of him looming suddenly. He slammed into it almost running, head first without any caution. The force of his collision threw him back several feet and sprawled him on the floor. Pain blossomed in his head and under his nose as if sprouting from inside, pushing white spikes through his eyeballs. For a dull moment he lay there washed in new blood, stunned. His forehead pounded, and his right cheek felt slick and sharp. To his left he heard a soft moan, and he turned his head to see her there in the soft red light.

He couldn't understand how he could see her. The glow seemed not to come from the darkness but to be the darkness. As if somehow he could see in a new and different way, see the pitch black emanating from the walls. And what he saw was Angeline, here in the center of the reddish glow, under the earth. She was buried alive. Buried in a living, dying mass of flotsam. Roaches. Rats. Great black beetles. All climbing over each other, consuming each other in an insane writhing frenzy.

Daniel saw now that she had cried out because the mass was rising, washing up like a tide to overcome her. Now only her tousled hair and wide frightened eyes could be seen. How could she breath through that stinking pile? But her eyes followed him in the darkness, she lived still. And she screamed without making a sound, just looking at him.

He waded without thought into the living morass. Although the animals seemed unable to harm Angeline they swarmed to consume him as soon as he came into contact with them. Bugs streamed up his arms until he was wearing a living jacket. Rats and mice chewed on his flesh. But Daniel took no notice of their futile attack. For the most part they could not penetrate his armor anyhow. So he waded into the room and reached in to dig Angeline out. Excavating with his bare hands like a mad child on a writhing beach. Many of the animals were dead. Suffocated or crushed.

As he uncovered her mouth she coughed, spitting out legs and wings. But she did not scream again, only stared at him. Her skin was unblemished, untouched. They had not bitten her as they were still biting him. Soon her arms were free and she struggled to pull herself out. And the animals began to scream.

The rodents cried out in unnaturally long and scratchy wails. They bugs chittered and hissed. "Ours!" they cried out, "ours, ours. Give her back. Leave us be." Underneath his shirt and inside his pants the bugs were biting Daniel now. Digging in by the hundreds for a meal of his flesh. He saw his hands in the bloody light and they were torn and bleeding, almost skeletal. His face burned with the attacks of claws and teeth. As Angeline became free he swatted blindly at his attackers. He crushed the struggling bugs with his bare hands. And the pitch of the dark screams changed. They became a continuous wail of death. Sweet, sublime death. Daniel killed rats and roaches and beetles. Their bones snapped, their bodies ruptured, their wet screams were suffocated. The darkness' blood mingled with his own. It was a release, like a huge pressure lifted from his soul. To kill. And kill.

Angeline was free enough now to begin moving, half swimming, toward the way he had come in. But he wasn't digging any longer. He was thrashing out, crushing bugs and rodents alike with his bleeding hands. In an ecstasy of pain he smashed everything around him, spreading death through the room. He opened his mouth to scream and began to laugh instead. A horse, barking laugh which tore at his mind. He had one large rat by the tail and was flailing about with it. It was dead, and might have been to start with, and its broken body smacked wetly into is living brethren. He laughed again and fought the darkness. Not having enough limbs to kill with he began to strike with his face into the mass. Gathering up bugs and corpses in his mouth and biting down on their tangy acidic innards. Crunch, crunch, crunch. They ate him and he ate them.

Angeline pulled herself to the edge of the light and out of the pit. She turned and reached out an unblemished hand to Daniel, calling out over his laughter for him to come out. He looked up from his grisly meal. For a moment he was still and quiet, looking at her with sane eyes. She was a ruffled goddess, covered in dirt and filth. Her clothes were torn, her hair was matted and wild, but her eyes were alive and he reached out his skeletal claw to her.

She helped him out of the chaos and back into the dry bare tunnel. Carefully she cleaned the blood off of his face and bandaged some of his cuts with strips of his coat. The madness which had driven him began to leave and with it the brightness of the dark faded. The unnatural glow of the walls drifted back into blackness as Angeline slowly rocked him in her arms. His aching and torn limbs were glued to the ground with a great weight of exhaustion. Soon he could barely feel the pain, except for a distant sort of throbbing. But his mind was clear and unclouded. "I'm alive," he said, "aren't I?"

"Yes, dearie," said Angeline, "so you are." And she rocked him gently and dabbed the dirt from his eyelids until he had stopped breathing and he was just still and peaceful. "So you are."

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