Light and Dark

This is my world.

It is light when it needs to be light and when the dark, slithery, nightmare creatures come out, it is dark, slithery and nightmarish.

That isn’t to say that it is dark during the night time and light during the day time, oh no. That’s not how it works at all. The sun doesn’t determine whether it is bright, warm and cheery.

Something else determines everything.

From the flowers blooming eternally on the windowsill in the kitchen, never fading, never wilting and dying, always bright and beautiful, in my line of sight as I fill the kettle and look through the window.

To the sinister cold-spot at the back of the garage where the light never reaches, though there’s nothing to create a shadow. Even when the garage was empty, there was always a shadow cast in that corner. It is always dank and slightly slippery for some reason and no, I’ll NEVER touch that floor in that corner again. The memory of the feel of that on my fingers still makes me shudder and grimace involuntarily.

In the light, bright, cheerful place, there’s never any need to go into the garage. There’s no cause to remember the dark, dank corner where the slithery things reside. Everything is up-beat, happy, cheerful, bright and all is well.

But…

When the darkness approaches, you can almost hear it as it comes. When the thing that created and lives in the dark, dank corner of the garage starts to think about coming out and taking a slithery, slink about the house, that’s when you have to be on your best behaviour and be aware of everything around you.

When the dark pushes back the light – no matter the time of day – there’s no running away from it, there’s no escape. You will either survive or not, but you must at least try.

Whatever it is the dark wants, you must try your damnedest to get it and give it because the alternatives are too much for your brain to comprehend.

Though you’ve never seen what it can do if it doesn’t get what it wants, your mind is powerful and can imagine everything. The snapping of bone and the slurping noise as the marrow is sucked from those bones and the cries of utter despair and anguish of those that know.

Why am I writing these horrible things?

So that you can read them and you can see what the dark, dank something wants.

It wants more imaginations to feed on, it wants to be feared, loathed and abhorred. It wants you to imagine the sticky, slippery texture of whatever that was that marks the floor in the corner of the garage because my imagination is no longer enough for it to feed on. It used to be enough, I used to be able to keep it in check, but the visits became more frequent and longer.

It comes almost daily now… I’m tired and I need to rest, but it grows stronger and it wants to come out to slither and slink, pushing its cold black sticky-slippy tendrils into your ears to invade your brain, your mind, your imagination.

It wants to get into your dreams and make you wake in cold livid terror at 03:33 and be unable to move as you watch the shadow creep across the ceiling and down the side of the bed.

It will look at you, though you can see only the silhouette. It will hang over you though there’s nothing there for the shadow to be cast upon. It will breathe onto your face, the cold dead breath of graveyards and tombs long-since abandoned and then you will hear the whisper of a chuckle as it sinks below your frozen eyesight, down past the side of your bed and you know it has gone under your bed to leave the cold, sticky-slippery substance that you’ll never get clean because you cannot bear the thought of having to touch it, even with gloves on.

And you will go to bed believing that tonight it will forget about you and won’t visit your dreams.