Darkwalker

I AM A DARKWALKER By John Urbancik I crept through the dark, pen in hand, notepad tucked under my arm, in search of a drink or a lonely corner or a girl. It's hard to remember exactly. It was, after all, a long time ago. Smoke filled the air, music pulsed through my bones, strobes broke reality into an unsteady staccato simulacrum. I don't remember the name of the bar or the name of the bartender, but I know it was long and narrow and old, as old as a thing can be in a city standing less than a century. I'd caught an image. I'd captured an idea. This isn't unusual, not in any real sense, but it was particularly vivid, a girl in gothic black with red lips, soul-trappingly powerful eyes, and a victim. There might have been some truth to the image. There may have been some vague whiff of reality about it. Gothic was the most common shade of black in a bar like this, and crimson the most common shade of red. The smoke, the darkness cutting the light, the phantom faces around me seeking their own drinks, corners, or lovers, intoxicated me and, more importantly, ignited my imagination. A girl (a special girl, not just any random, freshly-met bar girl) asked me, "Have you ever seen the sun rise?" I told her I had, of course, been up that late. "And these things you see, or think you see," she said. "You're a night walker." It sounded wrong. It sounded wrong then, and it sounds wrong today. I'm not a night walker, I told her. "I'm a DarkWalker." The pieces came together rather swiftly after that. Untouched, invisible in the night, like a young poet without verse, not just ignored but protected-but where's the story in that? Hunted. There, that's a story. That's got tension. Possibility. Opportunity. Jack Harlow evolved in my head over a period of time. He didn't arrive fully formed, appearing suddenly in the dark corner of a bar instead of that girl. He didn't sit in the low, sagging sofa propped against the bar's outer wall, soaked with sweat, beer, and whiskey, and say to me, "I'm your man." He didn't throw me a grin or a wink. No, he wasn't that kind of man. He came gradually. He revealed himself slowly. He was a recluse, after all, unaccustomed to human contact, possibly skirting the edge of sanity. The things in the periphery of his perception, you must realize, include the darkest, most damnable things that have ever walked the earth. He, not I, had seen the girl in gothic black, and knew her for what she was. But Jack's got more to him than a mere ability to walk untouched through the dark. He's got to grow. He's got to learn. He's got to love and lose and fight and struggle and win and die and discover undiscoverable things. In "DarkWalker," he begins that journey. In the first of a series, Jack Harlow learns what it truly means to be a DarkWalker-what it means when the things that bump the night can, quite suddenly, touch him, hurt him, and kill him. He trades his immunity for love. He begins to dream of normalcy even as the rhythms of his abnormal life are about to be ripped apart. He is targeted. He is hunted. But even in the dark, even in the night, he is not alone. For the record, I did, that night, find the girl. That's another story. -JU