What is it about darkness that takes away the "truth" one knew in daylight?
Lynn told herself that the crinkled lump sitting in the moonlight over there was just a garbage bag, and not a face smiling at her with a wicked gleam. But the rational knowledge of adulthood is never found by someone alone in an empty apartment in the dead of night. It's something given by a comforting parent with a soothing voice and a flashlight.
Parents with soothing voices were things that, being 25 and long out of the nest, Lynn didn't exactly have handy at the moment. Unfortantely, she didn't have the flashlight, either.
People take for granted the things that make them feel safe. For instance, before this night, Lynn had never slept without a stuffed animal. In fact, she'd slept with the same animal, a stuffed rabbit, since she was five. It had been patched and stitched so often she didn't think there was a scrap of the original material left anywhere on it. She also had an old blanket, one her mother had cross-stitched bunnies on, that she had kept from her childhood bedding. But right now both of them were packed lovingly away. She sat wrapped in her roommate's sleeping bag, arms wrapped only around herself.
The shadows smiled at the form huddled in the worthless cloth.
Lynn shivered, pulling the bag tighter around her. It wasn't that it was cold — far from it, on this hot August night.
Stop it! Stop being such a little girl! she chastised herself. What are you, two?
This was her last night in Albany Park, a low-rent neighborhood where hookers hung out across the street from their place and drug deals went down outside their window. Where gunshots went off in the night, and the streets were blocked every now and again with crime scene tape. And yet she'd never really been afraid of living in the neighborhood — there were still families in the area, balancing out the gangs. The criminal element had never shown any interest in her or her roommates, either. So while the apartment creeped her out sometimes, she had never truly been afraid to be in it — until now.
She half-wished the neighbors would play that music she hated so much, just to chase away the silence and let her know there was life in the world. For once, she wanted them to turn on the spotlight that usually shone through all the windows on one side of the building, keeping her and her roommates awake at night. The neighbors didn’t oblige.
Wood creaked, and she told herself it was just the house settling. No one's in the house, silly. The guy below us works nights, the bottom flat is empty, and the others left in the car— you would have heard them in the driveway if they'd come back ....
As if to reiterate her point, she heard the passage of a car as it came down her street, saw the lights of its headlights pass down the wall in front of her, momentarily revealing its stark whiteness. Nothing there, nothing hanging on the wall, nothing leaning against it. Nothing in the place but herself, plus some plastic bags and the few meager boxes they couldn't fit in the rental truck to keep her company, as she waited for morning. The car turned, the light gone once again. Darkness gave life to that empty wall; As she stared blindly at it, she couldn't shake the feeling that it was watching her in turn.
She tried her best to ignore the presence of the plastic bag, tune out the sound of it rustling in the breeze.
They'd already had to give their keys to the landlord, so she had to stay with what they had left to move, since they couldn't lock the door from the outside. Her roommates had most likely already unpacked the truck and returned it, and were now sleeping comfortably in the new place. Their new home. Maybe that was the problem — this was no longer her home, so she no longer felt welcome. She wished she could go to an all-night diner or something. If only they hadn't had the power turned off that day, closing their account with the power company!
I could light a candle ... yeah, and watch it burn the house down when I go to sleep. Assuming she ever managed to fall asleep.
Water dripped from the faucet in the kitchen, painfully loud in the stillness. Then the wind picked up, whispering to her from the window. It was an ominous sound, not at all soothing. Again she shivered, not welcoming what little release it gave from the heat as it came through the window screen.
It felt like someone was breathing in her ear.
Get a grip!!!
She stifled a cry as she heard the grandfather clock in the flat below begin to chime, breaking the quiet. She counted the chimes, trying to calm her racing heart. ... Ten ... eleven ... twelve. Midnight. She suppressed another shudder.
It's just a time, nothing special. Hell, It's summer, so it's really only 11, right? Somehow the thought didn't comfort her.
The shadows continued to taunt her, creeping across her skin. The timbers of the old house moaned in anticipation. So long, so long since anyone had stayed within these walls without protection.
Old childhood fears haunted her with a vengeance.
She fell easily into old habits, and drew the blanket over her head. She found the action didn’t offer the peace of mind it had in her youth.
Still, she didn't entertain the notions she had as a child — that a blanket her mother had embroidered for her was a magic shield, or that a trusty guardian with patched faux fur could hold the monsters of the night at bay. She didn't believe in those monsters anymore, either. That's what she kept telling herself.
All she really knew was that her borrowed sleeping bag didn't make her feel safe.
So long as there was light and eyes to see, the "boogeymen" had to be still. The same moon that she thought played tricks on her mind could have been said to protect her, by revealing the things that go bump in the night. Being seen robbed them of their power. But by hiding her eyes from those things, they were free to roam in the dark halls of her imagination.
A nagging pressure in her belly gave her the bravado to give up her inadequate sanctuary. She peeked out from beneath the cloth, shrugged off the vague whispers in the shadows, telling herself it was just the wind again, and that she most certainly did not sense a tangible disappointment coming from the room the moment she'd peeked out from under the covers. Finding herself unable to banish her misgivings, she scrambled to find the lighter and candle stub,her breathing getting more frantic as she searched, the darkness seeming to close in on her as a cloud cruelly seperated her from the moonlight. Her hands stumbled across the cold plastic; she almost pulled back, fearing, for a moment, that it was something else — the chitononous shell of a waterbug perhaps, large and horrible and all too real. Realising it was, in fact, what she'd been looking for, she barked a laugh, the sound harsh and loud in her ears, and seeming to echo, like the darkness was mocking her. After a few desprate tries, she managed to convince the lighter to spark to life, and quickly located her candle. Candleflame, she found, really wasn't all that comforting in the dark. If anything, it took as much as it gave. It allowed the shadows to dance about, defining them more, adding dimension. On her way to the hall, she stumbled on something hidden just outside of the flame's reach. She bit her tongue to keep from yelping.
Just a shoe, Lynn, it's not a hand. Besides, there are no beds here now for monsters to hide under! She tried to laugh, tried not to think of the question such thoughts brought to mind. If the monsters had no bed to hide under, where were they hiding?
In the hall, she found the doors were all open. A lifetime of horror movies reinforced her paranoia, and she held her breath as she peeked into her old room. Her hand shook, causing light to shudder violently against the walls. There should have been a sense of comfort in the space she had spent the last year; instead, she felt foreboding. The closet door was closed, the door to the very same closet she had emptied the day before. She stood there in front of it, wavering between a fierce desire to assure herself that common sense was right, there was still nothing in it, and a deep-seated fear that she would find something there.
She flung the door open, and gasped. The chain for the closet light swung, having been stirred by the vacuum of air from the door. It cast crazy, swinging shadows in the candlelight, making her think of gallows. She peered into the closet, tensed for something to jump at her and bite her face off. Nothing did.
Shaking, she closed the closet door, then the room's door behind her as she stepped back into the hall. She quickly closed the other doors as well, a thought manifesting somewhere in the back of her brain that the squeak of an opening door would at least warn her if something was coming from the other side.
She went into the bathroom, putting her candle on the toilet tank cover, and tried to ignore the mirror. She had never liked mirrors, and seeing a frightful film adaptation of "Alice Through the Looking Glass" when she was young hadn't helped, nor had the tales her friends had told her of ghosts that could be called into mirrors. She knew it was silly, but she couldn’t shake the feeling that her doppelganger was watching her even when she wasn't looking, or that other things lived in that mirror world that weren't reflections of what was in her own. She forbade the words "Jabberwocky" and "Bloody Mary" entrance to her thoughts.
And the mirror in this place, more than any other, had always felt doubly malevolent to her. Her reflection seemed to move just a fraction of a second slower than she did. When she'd turned to the side, out of the corner of her eye she swore could see her image smiling at her, when she herself was certainly not smiling. And sometimes, when she looked in her own eyes, she swore that wasn't herself looking back, that sometimes the face in the mirror wasn't even trying to look like her. So she avoided steppinmg into view of it now, half afraid that things might come out of it because she wasn't watching it.
As she moved to sit on the amenities, She stepped in something wet and sticky. Not daring to breathe, she looked down. Her foot was in a small pool of some dark liquid.
Is that ...? She couldn't even bring herself to think the word.
Then she noticed the fallen bottle, a drop of the thick liquid half-suspended from the bottle's mouth by its own viscosity. Red liquid lip balm.
She cleaned her foot and the floor, then finished her business, trying very hard not to imagine cold hands reaching for her ankles from under the seat. She practically ran out of the bathroom when she was through.
There was a scrape on one of the doors, stopping her cold.
It was a waterbug, the German cockroach's over-an-inch-long cousin, running down the door and into the room beyond it.
Won't miss those. She was thinking of all the times the creatures had run across her in her sleep, scaring her awake. She hoped that one stayed in the other room.
For once, she wished she had a cell-phone; their land-line phone service had also been cut off that evening. She wanted desperately to hear someone's voice, sounds from someone other than herself or the wind or giant insects with sharp, serrated legs.
Coming back into the living room, where she was camped out, she decided to look through the boxes they had left for more candles.
This box only held art supplies.
This one, only knick-knacks.
This one had books, but nothing she really wanted to read even if she could manage to see them well enough in the dwindling candlelight.
She was starting to panic again. Her candle stub was on its last legs, the flame starting to gutter out.
The shadows leapt about gleefully. Light shining off the garbage bag gave it glistening teeth and shining eyes. The girl was teetering on the edge of rational thought, towards out-and-out terror. Once the candle died, all the shadows would have to wait for was another cloud to block out the moon, and she was theirs. Like a rabbit cornered, her heart would race until it burst. Her movements grew more frantic. Her fear was such a tantalizing appetizer ...
The last box was one of hers.
Inside she found scented candles, her blanket, and her stuffed bunny. She let out a whoop of joy, flinching at the hysteria in her voice. She gathered the blanket around her shoulders. She held out one of the candles to her dying flame to light it.
A fierce wind howled through the window, putting out the flame. The moon went behind a cloud, burying her in darkness. Plastic rustled, and she wasn't sure it was the wind's doing.
She reached out for her lighter, her last beacon of hope. The blanket fell from her shoulders.
The thick, palpable blackness wrapped around her. Her breath came in gasps as she swallowed it. She couldn't even scream. Her heart raced as she drowned in her fear.
Her probing fingers knocked into the lighter, sending it further across the floor. She crawled after it, hunting for it in long moments that stretched into forever while she stretched her fingers into the unknown.
At last, she found it, her hands shaking as she tried to bring it to life again. A spark, but nothing. Another spark, but still no flame. She shook it, feeling how light it was. There was no comforting sound of liquid inside. She tried to light it again and again, sobbing silently. Another few moments, the shadows knew, and her panic would send her mind hurtling into the waiting dark, where it would finally devour her.
The shadows didn't know her very well.
Sometimes a cornered rabbit's fear will turn to rage. Sometimes they fight back.
The empty lighter burst into life.
Lynn quickly lit every candle, setting them about her in all the corners of the room, as well as in a circle around her that she absetnly hoped was wide enough to sleep in, her fear of the dark outweighing her fear of fire. She settled herself in the center.
She felt a small, sharp pain in her leg. The needling sensation moved up her leg, crawling quickly. She stood, shaking, biting her tongue to keep from screaming, and batted at her legs, frantically. A large waterbug fell to the floor. She found her shoe and smashed the creature, feeling elated.
Her blanket and stuffed bunny had fallen perilously close to the flames in her throes. She moved the candles out a bit farther, and lay back down, praying there were no other bugs. She had no idea what other things waited, wanting to crawl across her or worse, much less that she had just thwarted their last hope of reaching her.
She pulled her mother's blanket around her and lay down on the sleeping bag with her bunny. Her cooling sweat soothed her in the August heat. Before long, she settled into an exhausted sleep.
The shadows huddled as far from the flames as they could get. Black plastic eyes glittered back at them with quiet malice, while twin bunny-teeth smiled their plastic grin in eternal satisfaction.
The next day, Lynn and her friends finished moving out, and a new family moved in.
"Toby, look, sweetie, here's your stuffed tiger!" Toby's mother held the newly-unpacked toy out to her seven-year-old son.
Toby, standing in the building's front doorway, was eying the boys playing with toy guns across the street in the fading light, ready to make new friends when the move was done. He looked back at his mother's offering and scoffed. "Please, Ma, I'm too old for stuffed animals! Throw it away!"
The doorway, from the street, resembled a great grinning maw as the boy carried another box inside.