All Was Darkness

David put out a hand for his smart phone. He found nothing but the upholstery of his overstuffed recliner. Frowning, he looked away from the television to find it, but the slab of plastic and glass was gone. A push of a button froze his show on the screen. The press of his palms against the cushion started him to his feet.

He stretched, arms crooked over his head as he twisted languidly and carefully passed gas. Middle age meant learning never to completely trust a fart. Experience had affirmed that truth more often than he would ever admit. Loose and expressed, David renewed the search.

A slow turn let his eyes pan over the entirety of the living room, revealing nothing. Hands wedged like blades between cushions accomplished as much. With rolling eyes, David lowered himself to the carpet by way of the armrest of his chair and the scarred edge of his dead father’s bequeathed coffee table, careful not to let a respectable paunch overbalance him. He smiled in passing at the rings left by decades of the old man’s coffee mugs and beer cans. To the late Mr. Duppy, senior, coasters smacked of the bourgeoise; they were not to be tolerated. Material things, like the people who owned them, were meant to age and pass in their own time.

Pressing his cheek to the carpet, stained but clean, David squinted into the spaces beneath the chair and the table. There was nothing there but shadows and dust. Rocking back on his heels and haunches, he patted the pockets of his brown sweatpants to find his phone and switch on its flashlight. A few light slaps leaving him feeling quietly stupid, David took hold of the armrest and table’s edge again and leveraged himself upward.

David chastised himself, “Come on, dufus.”

Scrunching bare toes with unconscious pleasure in the cool carpet, David reached a hand beneath a navy-blue t-shirt, faded until it resembled denim, to scratch his navel with the unashamed freedom of solitude. Turning on his heel to face the kitchen, he searched his memory; which of three junk drawers held an actual flashlight? There wasn’t a lot of ground to cover, his home a two-bedroom ranch style built in the same year as his mother was born. He opted for the closest, nonetheless. David wasn’t one to waste steps.

Funny, he thought, I don’t think I’ve actually used a flashlight in years. What’s the point when smartphones do the same thing? Crap. I hope the batteries aren’t dead. Pete’s sake, do I even have spare batteries?!

The thoughts died away when David noticed the television was turned off. He faced the screen fully, mounted on the wall like a masterpiece. Where the frozen image of a woman young enough to be his daughter, if he had bothered to have any, would have been, there was only a void of black glass. David scratched his shaggy, salt and pepper mop of hair, then rubbed at his stubble until his palm prickled.

“What the hell?” he asked, then decided he must have switched it off. Losing his phone was enough of a distraction that the error seemed plausible. He didn’t think of himself as particularly absentminded, but to err was human.

Putting the anomaly behind him, David headed into the kitchen and opened the nearest junk drawer. Silverware clattered, startling him so that he took a step backward, jerking his hand away like he’d nearly stuck it into a trap. Cautiously, he edged forward and looked over the cutlery as he repeated himself.

“What the hell?”

It wasn’t just that they were in the wrong drawer. Those weren’t his forks. Those were a stranger’s spoons. Panting with nerves, David reached out a shaking hand and closed the drawer. Closing his eyes with the first two fingers of his hand still wrapped around the little handle, he took a breath, let it out slowly, and opened the drawer again.

The contents of the drawer were as they should have been, a random collection of twist ties and lighters, paper clips and rubber bands, tape and a bottle of glue and all the other things a home needs, but do not merit a place all their own. He reached in cautiously, as though there might also be some hidden danger. When nothing out of the ordinary happened, he rummaged in earnest.

Pulling out a pen light, he flicked it on to test the batteries, “Must be tired. What time is it anyway?”

David patted his pockets reflexively. He frowned when he didn’t feel his smart phone, then rolled his eyes and felt stupid. Slipping the little flashlight into one of them, he looked toward the clock centered amid the stove’s controls; two in the morning.

He cocked his head, “That can’t be right.”

Certain he’d been enjoying a quiet afternoon in front of the television, David looked toward the dirty, bay windows of his living room. All was darkness. Automatically, reasonable thoughts sprang up to comfort him. I must have passed out without realizing it. I’ll just find the remote and go to bed. Nothing to freak out over.

Content with the lies he told himself, David walked back into the living room to resume his search. He couldn’t take his eyes off the bay windows. The closer he got to them, the harder it became to keep pretending he was looking out at the night. When he was close enough to reach out and touch the glass, the sight was too wrong for his imagination to keep up.

There was nothing out there. No lights, no cars, no buildings, no nothing. Even the tiny expanse of his front yard was gone. Beyond the glass, it was perfect, unbroken blackness.

Bizarre as it was, there was something else about the unearthly sight that tickled at the man’s mind. Not daring to get any closer to the void, David peered, eyes squinting in thought as he worked it through, then growing wide as it clicked. It wasn’t just that there was nothing outside; the absence was deeper than that. There was no reflection.

As dark as it was out there, David knew he should be able to see himself as through a mirror dimly. There was only the blackness. None of his things were reflected, either. When he waved his arms, there was no image of himself waving back.

Then, David jumped backward, a scream escaping the gravitational pull of adult decorum and male ego. Just for a moment, it seemed as though something had responded with a wave of its own. He couldn’t have said what, couldn’t be sure he’d actually seen anything at all, but he had the distinct feeling that something out there had shifted in response to his movement.

Only his heel kicking up against the baseboard stopped David’s retreat. He kept trying anyway, pressing his back against the wall like he was hanging his toes over the edge of a cliff. Suppressing a terrified sob, he thumped his fist against the drywall, then did it again. The impotent acts of aggression didn’t make him feel any better, but staying still was worse. He kept closing his eyes, only to snap them open again at once, unable to shake the thought that if he didn’t keep looking out there, he wouldn’t know it if something decided it wanted to try to get in.

Someone, he assured himself, not something.

“Probably not even a burglar,” he said aloud, “Just some punk kids playing ding dong ditch, seeing if I’m home.”

David stayed there, trying to believe his own explanation, staring out into the blackness until he couldn’t stand it any longer. He had to do something. It was either that, or go crazy, so he pushed off of the wall and advanced on the window. Drifting like he was in slow motion, the man raised a shaking hand and reached for the hanging chain at the side of the frame. It seemed to take days, but then his fingers wrapped around the tiny steel beads of its length and he pulled the blackout drapes closed.

The heavy fabric slid in place with a whisper like a shroud pulled over the face of the dead, and no light remained within. Alone in the darkness, David patted his pocket for his phone, then pounded his fist against his thigh, idiot instinct making him its fool. Wincing against the throbbing pain spreading over his quadricep, he felt for the pen light and switched it on.

Nothing happened. He flicked it off and on again, pushing hard with his thumb, insisting he’d just checked it. Still nothing. In a flash of rage, he cast it away and shuffled toward his best guess at a light switch.

All the while, David refused to respond to the questions his mind kept screaming. If it’s pitch dark outside and I didn’t have any lights on because I fell asleep during the day, where was the light coming from before I closed the curtains? Biting his lip to keep from admitting the riddle, he moved without lifting his feet, fearing if he went too quickly he might trip and fall. The idea of being in such a helpless pose bunched his shoulders until his neck throbbed with tension, but he didn’t let himself step farther than the blindly waving worms of his fingers could reach. At last, his fingertips, and then his palms, pressed up against cool drywall, and he slid them in a whispering caress until they met the ridge of switch’s plastic plate.

He flicked it. Nothing happened. He did it again. Still nothing.

“Crap,” he breathed, not daring to raise his voice above a whisper. Not with that presence outside. He told himself it was a blown fuse, maybe a local power outage, that monsters weren’t real, that he was alone. But what if I’m not?

David closed his eyes and clenched his jaw. He tried to push the fear back down into his gut with his will and the feel of the roots of his teeth shoving hard into his gums. Keeping a hand on the wall, he turned and headed down the short hallway toward his bedroom. The fuse box was in the other direction, through the kitchen and down the stairs into the basement, but he had had enough. Frightened into a twisted echo of boyhood, David wanted to find his bed, get under the covers, and simply wait until the bad things passed him by.

He heard his short, careful steps echo off the porcelain surfaces of the bathroom now beside him and knew that he was close. A few more shuffling paces, and he turned in place, waving his hands like a blind man in the nothingness, feeling for the open doorway of his bedroom.

He whined in pain and surprise, a fingernail bending, then lifting from his finger as his hands jammed up against a door he never kept shut. Muscle memory coming up short, he bashed a knuckle against the doorknob. Trembling, he grabbed it like a drowning man and turned.

It didn’t move. He pushed and pulled, but the fixture and its door may as well have been carved from stone. No matter how much he threw his weight into the struggle, breath hissing between his teeth, sending out flecks of spittle to patter onto his lips and the stubble of his chin, it was as though he wasn’t there at all.

David only stopped when he heard the woman screaming. He couldn’t tell where her voice was coming from, only that she was afraid. Sometimes it seemed as though it came from behind the sealed door of his bedroom. Other times her cries echoed hollow from the bathroom. Shrieks lunged down the hall from the living room. The sharp sounds lashed at him so that he shrank against the door, pressing himself against it so he wouldn’t fall to his knees.

Then it was as though the woman was directly behind him, the terrible sound of her fear piercing his ears, her breath stirring the hair on the back of his head. Screaming himself, David spun around with his forearm extended in what his reflexes meant to be a desperate clothesline. He didn’t want to hurt her. He’d never hurt anyone, but he was supposed to be alone and he wasn’t and nothing had ever left him feeling so vulnerable in his life.

His arm swept through the place where his mind screamed someone must certainly be, encountering nothing except for the hard of edge of a picture frame. He thought it might be the selfie he’d taken with his grandfather, the last one before the old man died. It wasn’t the best lighting or the right angle, but it was from when they were together. Even if it was only out of the corner of his eye as he went to take a piss, he liked to see the two of them smiling together.

It occurred to the man that he’d never hung a picture along that particular stretch of wall, and then it didn’t matter. He felt the frame topple over his fist. David lunged for it, but in the black he had no idea where it went until it crashed to the floor and invisible daggers of shattered glass leapt in every direction.

Terrified to cut his feet wide open in the dark, without anyone there to help, without a phone to call 911, David lunged backward from the unseen shards and his bedroom door thumped wide open beneath his weight. He screamed as he fell over the threshold, eyes squinting against the sudden brilliance of early morning streaming through the gossamer curtains.

Gasping, breath hitching as he began to sob, David rolled on his side and looked at the bed that wasn’t his. The light fixture on the ceiling was familiar, as were the windows and the general layout of the space, but everything inside his bedroom belonged to someone else. He put a hand on the wall and made himself stand up, eyes darting over a white dresser, its top littered with jewelry and makeup, the open closet overflowing with skirts and blouses and high waisted skinny jeans, the pink paisley comforter spread over a bed that stood a foot taller than his own.

Then, he saw the shape of a woman beneath the blankets. He followed the curve of her hip up the gentle slope to her shoulder. Soft, brown hair obscured her face. The only part of her that was visible was the ridge of an ear where it poked through the auburn tresses. David walked to the foot of the bed, drawn as if by gravity, one hand held out as if in supplication.

Who is she?! What is she doing in my house?! What’s going on?!

He wanted to take the woman by the shoulder and shake her awake so that he could ask her those things. More than that, he wanted to touch another person. He lived alone and he knew it was crazy, but he was so afraid that David couldn’t help the need to feel that he wasn’t alone in that madness. Whoever she was, even the touch of a complete stranger would be a comfort. If he frightened her, so be it. She couldn’t be more scared than he was.

David shuffled sideways along the narrow path between the bed and the wall. He held his breath as he moved toward her, as though she might vanish if he woke her too soon. He put his hand down on the blankets where her shoulder would be and they collapsed under his hand.

The man watched in horrified fascination as the comforter slumped down to the mattress. He looked up at the pillows and the brown hair was gone. He wondered if he’d imagined her, if his fear strained mind had invented another person, if only for the sake of not having to suffer alone.

“No,” he breathed, stepping away from the bed so that his back pressed against the wall. It was cool despite the bright sunlight, as if the day meant nothing to it at all. David tried to tell himself he’d never seen the woman, but he could see the concave roundness where her head had lain on the pillow.

“It’s not possible,” he announced, as if there were some unseen witness that might affirm him. When all that followed was the sound of his own panicked breaths, he lunged and threw the blanket from the bed, looking for her, “That’s impossible!”

Like the pillow, he could see how the mattress and sheets suggested someone had been there. David spun in a circle, his racing mind wondering giddily if she might have snuck past him somehow, cursing as he barked a shin against the bedframe. He toppled howling to the mattress, his weight erasing the woman’s shape from the bedsheets.

Sitting up at once, David snatched up the pillow and threw it across the room, “Where are you!”

Needing to prove something was real, that the woman had been real, the man shoved himself off the bed and crossed the bedroom in three quick steps to stand before the dresser that wasn’t his. He yanked open a drawer and grabbed at random; a handful of women’s underwear. Laughing, he threw it over his shoulder, slammed it shut, and opened the next; t-shirts.

“I knew it!” he shouted, pulling the drawer out completely and tossing it onto the bed, heedless of how it rebounded and smacked into the wall, punching a hole in the gypsum board, “I know you’re here! I know you’re real! Please, I won’t hurt you! Just come out and talk to me, okay?! I need to know what’s going on!”

David froze, certain he’d felt a sense of presence behind him. Spinning about to face the doorway, he saw a young woman standing at the threshold. He knew it was the same person who’d been in bed, under the covers. She had the same hair he’d seen draped over the pillow, but it didn’t hide her face anymore.

The woman was beautiful, but it was hard to see it through all the silent screaming. Her blue eyes were wide with horror, her mouth open so that he could see her uvula shaking with the force of her cries. She didn’t make a sound. The woman may as well have been a shadow, barefoot in little gray shorts and a white tank top.

He took a step toward her, holding out his hands with the palms up to show he meant no harm, “Please. I won’t hurt you. I’m sorry about the mess. I was just freaking out. My name is David and I’m really, really scared. Please, can you tell me what’s going on?”

He took another step, but the woman didn’t see him at all. Her eyes panned around the room, looking through him. David looked with her and saw the space was in shambles. Did I do all that?! I thought I just opened a couple drawers.

David looked down at his hands and saw his nails were ragged and bloody. Everything the woman owned was scattered and torn. There were claw marks along the walls. He walked up to one and extended his fingers. The marks fit his hands exactly. My hands are beat to hell, he thought. Why don’t they hurt?

Remembering the woman, he looked back to the doorway to find her crying without a sound. It was eerie, like someone had pressed the mute button, but his eyes lit up when he saw a phone in her hand. He took a step toward her, “Miss, please! Let me use your phone! Oh, God! I need to call the police or something! Please?!”

For no more than a moment, their eyes met and David knew that she had seen him. Elated, he smiled and took another step, but she backed up quickly until her back rammed up against the wall on the other side of the hallway. Again, there wasn’t any sound at all. The impact and her renewed screaming were so utterly quiet that David realized for all his panic and exertion, he couldn’t hear himself panting.

Then, before he could do anything else, the woman turned and ran. Crying out in fear and despair, David ran after her, but when he left the bedroom she was gone. The woman had vanished, just as she had when she’d been in bed.

Shouting wordless sobs, David started running back down the short hallway to his living room, but it wasn’t his home anymore. The carpeted floors were hardwood now. The walls were painted a complimentary gray. He dragged a hand along the wall as he ran for support and the pictures he knocked down weren’t of anyone he recognized.

“You need to stop.”

David stopped as if he’d hit a wall, but there was nothing in front of him. He thought he’d hit his head on something, but when he rubbed his ragged fingers across his forehead there was no pain. When he looked again, there was an old woman, bent with age so that she was half his height. He tried to look past her, but she fixed him with her stare so that when he tried to look anywhere else, all he could see were the blurry shapes of furniture he knew couldn’t be his.

“You need to stop,” the woman said again, her voice smooth and rich though she couldn’t have been less than eighty, “David, I know this is hard to understand, but you need to listen. You don’t live here anymore.”

“I don’t understand,” David sobbed, “I’ve lived here for years. Please, I’m so afraid. You’ve got to tell me what’s happening.”

“Come with me,” said the old woman, and the man found he had no choice but to follow. She was like gravity, drawing him along inexorably. In one hand, he saw she held a rosary of crystal beads, each of them blazing like a miniature sun. In the other, she held a silver wand, the tip crackling with electricity. He knew it was impossible, but the objects were there just the same.

She drew him down the hallway and into his living room. He looked around, but other than colors and blurry shapes, it was hidden from him. He saw a human silhouette by the windows and thought it must be the woman he’d seen before. Desperate and afraid, he tried to call to her, but suddenly the old woman was standing in front of him again.

“No,” she said, “You need to stop. This is not your home, David. You don’t live here anymore, and you must come with me.”

David tried to lunge past her, tried to throw himself away from the ancient, but she lifted the wand and he saw how the lightning at its tip extended to him. It connected with his chest and disappeared into his body, tethering him like a leash. The beads of her rosary flared when he struggled, and he understood they were like a battery that powered the wand.

Snarling in desperate anger, he lunged for the wand, but the old woman simply gave it a twirl and he screamed as the electricity burned his hands. Howling in frantic fear, he threw himself toward the rosary, but she simply offered it. He couldn’t touch it any more than he could the wand, the heat of it beating him back lest it sear his skin.

Beaten, David went limp, letting himself drop to the floor. He wouldn’t take another step until he understood what was going on. After a moment, he realized he was being dragged. No, he thought, I’m sliding! The old woman had simply started walking again, passing through the kitchen toward the front door, and he had glided along behind without any kind of friction between his body and the floor.

He screamed and thrashed, lashing out at anything that might anchor him. Mostly, his hands simply slipped away from anything they chanced on, like everything was made of ice. Now and then, he managed to hook something, but it simply toppled over and drug along for a bit until he lost his grip and it got away.

“I’m sorry for the mess,” said the old woman, “This one is confused. He doesn’t understand what’s happened. His fear gives him strength, but you must be brave, else you’ll just keep adding to it, understand?”

David realized she wasn’t speaking to him. He followed her gaze and for a moment, the silhouette by the window became distinct. It was the brunette woman. She was barefoot in black leggings and a loose t-shirt, and she was staring down at him in wide-eyed, open mouthed astonishment.

“Please,” he begged, “do something! Get her off of me! Make her let me go!”

Then, the world blurred and all at once, David was standing side by side with the crone at the threshold of his front door. He looked around, but everything was dim and indistinct; shadowed. Then, the old woman opened the front door and ushered him through, prodding at him with her wand as though he were cattle.

Outside, the darkness was absolute. He couldn’t see or hear anything, exactly, but he could sense things shifting in the blackness, watching him with hungry, sightless eyes. He whimpered, some primitive part of his mind awakening with the danger, just the way early man might have reacted to a saber-toothed tiger. He knew he had to get to shelter, and fast, or something would snap out from the void and gobble him up.

The only light left was what streamed from the front door of his home, and from the woman’s wand and rosary. Those she used as a shield, shooing him back like a pest as she pulled the door closed behind her. Then, the crone’s tools were the only thing left that he could see. David hovered by them as a moth to a flame, drawn to them though he knew if he came too close, if he touched them, that he would be destroyed.

“Please,” he begged, “just tell me what’s going on?”

The old woman only looked at him sadly. David looked around fearfully, begging, “You have to say something! You can’t just bring me out here without any explanation! Please, I’m so afraid!”

“I’m sorry, David,” the crone said at last, “but you died.”

David opened his mouth to argue, to tell her she was crazy, but the moment she said it he knew it was the truth. Instead, he huddled in close. The light of the old woman’s tools hurt, but instinct told him the things that stalked the void didn’t want to be near them either.

“When did it happen?” he asked.

“Years ago,” she answered, inclining her head toward the house, “Took me awhile after she called to look you up, but the obituaries said it was peaceful. You had a lot of alcohol in your system, and a heart defect.

“Congenital,” she added, “It wasn’t your fault. You couldn’t have known. You weren’t an alcoholic or anything. Records said you were in okay shape, and fairly young. It was just a bad combination. Just one of those things, you know?”

“Just one of those things,” David repeated. He felt a giggle bubbling up, but kept his jaw clenched against it. He knew if he started the mad laughter, he’d never be able to stop and the void things would have him for sure. Instead, he swallowed it back and asked, “Who is she? What’s her name? What’s yours?”

The old woman shook her head at once and tsked, “No way. Names have power, David, and you were a big enough pain to exorcise as it was.”

“Exorcise,” he repeated dumbly, and looked down at his hands. They looked real, seemed solid, but he knew it was the truth.

The crone nodded, “Pretty dug in, you were. More so than most. I’d feel terrible for that poor girl if I gave you anything you could use to latch on again, and I sure as hell wouldn’t want you trying to sneak into my house. No, thank you!

“Alright,” David said, his panic drowned in sudden sorrow, “then what do I do now? What comes next?”

The old woman spread her hands, “Heck if I know! I never died before. Go toward the light, I guess.”

“What light?” he asked, “Where do I-“

The words died on his lips. The crone stopped looking at him, muttered a blessing he half-understood, and slipped her tools into a small purse. The moment she did it, the old woman vanished, and with her, all the light in David’s world.

All was darkness. The void was absolute. David tried to find his house, but when he waved his arms and took a few hesitant steps, nothing was there. Then, he felt the things in the darkness move. They were stalking, drawing slowly closer, feeling for him just as he was feeling for something to help himself.

Go toward the light, she’d said. David looked all around, peering in every direction; nothingness. Utterly lost, he whimpered before he fled, the void things drawing ever nearer, “But there isn’t any…”