The Dark is Better

It is dark now. Thank god it’s dark now.

This way is better. This way I cannot see them.They come out during the day, during the night. But night is better, so much better, because I cannot see them.

Sometimes I can feel their breath, sometimes hot, right down the base of my neck. Sometimes it is cold, an icy blast that chills me to my very core. Sometimes I can hear them breathing, at first distant, a slow, even pace. Then, as they get closer, excited, panting, almost. But I can feel no breath. I can always feel their presence. Even when I cannot see them.

I’ve known about their existence since I was six. Maybe longer. Some people call them ghosts, others; demons. I’ve heard the term shadow people tossed around. I refuse to accept this term. They’re not people. They can’t be people.

People don’t walk around with bleeding stumps of missing limbs and act like everything is fine. People don’t have fangs for teeth, and blazing red cores for eyes. People have substance, those things have none. No. They are not people.

I believe that there are thousands of them, though it has also occurred that it could be three or four that can all change shape. Some of them appear somewhat normal. The vast majority are horrible, terrible projections of some Eldritch Abomination that has long since been lost to the ages of time. Or erased, intentionally, from the history books.

It seems that every day they grow bolder. In the beginning they were nothing more than figments of my imagination. A fairy tale that I took a little too seriously, told to me by my uncle. They would simply hang there, in the corners of my eyes, never approaching, hardly moving. It was two years before one approached me. It had waved one of its four hands, bleeding and cut wide open down the center – as if somebody had taken a blade and run it down the middle finger to the palm in a straight line – extending towards me.

It had passed through me. There was nothing to it. I had to let out a sigh of relief which, as always, somehow managed to dispel that immense, gripping fear of death that every human being possesses. Since then, things have changed. They have become bolder.

After that incident, I thought little of them. Maybe they were just the projections of a fearful, possibly even diseased, mind. A mind rent with disorders. A rotting thing, filled with the stench of decay, the pulsating of maggots, just eating away. I suppose it doesn’t matter, in the long run. It was another stretch of time before they started moving things. Hitting things.

I don’t know how it works. I’m not a scientist, I hardly have a high-school education, but I’ll try to make a guess. I think they’re concentrating. Manifesting themselves into something more real every day.

But they started with breaking things in my house. Vases, chairs, the cat…

They progressed rapidly. They followed me everywhere I went.

It was then that I started to appreciate the true beauty of the night. I can’t see them at night. I can hear them, all right, but I cannot see them over my shoulder. I cannot see them breathing heavily and staring at me hungrily. Though sometimes I can see the eyes. And from those eyes I can imagine the rest. Eyes bright like the fires of hell. The drawn-out breathing enough for me to tell that it’s coming from a horrid, capsized chest, bogged down with rotten waters.

Had it simply been breaking things, and being horrifying, I may have just left this story on the corroded shelves of my mind, but something happened yesterday that made me realize that I need to share this.

They killed an old woman.

I saw it. I was outside, walking. I walk often, I can’t stand to sit still for too long without closing my eyes. She was on the opposite side of street and she interested me. Dare I say, she captivated me. She could see them too. She looked more frightened than I had ever seen anybody before. Her wrinkled lips were moving silently in something that I recognize, only because I’ve recited it endless times myself.

It is the chant of the faithful, of the damned, of those who don’t know what else to do.

She never finished it a second time. The things were upon her quickly. They devoured her. It was silent. It was bloody. I had to try and turn away, but I simply could not. This big one with blades for hands that hung crookedly, like some fucked-up version of a bug’s leg, started shredding her remains apart. Shoveling them messily into its mouth, which consisted of nothing more than a gaping black chasm, the lips, cracked inhuman things, tinged red.

It finally clicked that these things could, and would, kill me. That’s when I fled. I should’ve helped, but by the time that thought went floating through my shocked mind there wasn’t anything I could do. I ran back inside like the coward that I am. That’s where I’m at now. I had a mental debate with myself, some inner turmoil and anguish. But I’ve decided to share this. So that somebody else knows.

Often times I think back to my uncle. The one who told me the story. I never saw him after that. My parents maintained that he had gone on a long vacation, which I was content to believe, until my 16th birthday party when one of my distant cousins let slip that he had been murdered. Torn apart, they said. Limb from limb. A rosary in his hand.

And I wonder why he shared the story with me.

Why?

It’s been some time, but I have my rosary at hand. I know the chant. Our father, who art in heaven… The whole nine yards.

I don’t think I have anything more to say. If I die, somebody now will know how it came about. Over the last few minutes the fear has really been settling in, because it’s dark but I can see them now. I can see them, oh god and they’re glowing, they’re glowing. That heinous fucking yellow light of the sunrise.

I’m posting this now, as the sun rises higher, slowly. I hope for the best, but the outlook is bleak.

God, how I hate the sun. I wish I couldn’t see them. It would be better if I couldn’t see them. Somehow, It would be better.

Credit: SpongyWaffles