Looking into the Abyss

Night had usually come in long wisps of pastel. Tangerine and salmon bleeding together until they fell away into dusty rose and, finally, the deep indigo-black of the ocean. Night had usually come in on the soft rush of waves, the wind carrying in a fine spray that glittered beneath the street lights. Night had usually come in like a dream. But not that night.

That night there were no pastel skies. There didn't seem to be any skies at all. Or maybe there had been too many skies all at once. It depends on who you ask.

They say the ocean had turned on them first, it's gentle whispering crashing into a thunderous roar. The water had drawn back as though the little town had betrayed it, drawn back in fear and pain and confusion, drawn back into a hulking mass of black waves. Then it had lashed out, all bared teeth and sharp words and revenge.

If the town had not been tucked away on a cliff, it surely would have succumbed to its scorned lover, been pulled into the depths to rest beneath its waves with all the others who had betrayed it. The force of the waves that night must have knocked something loose, some vital part of reality that had been holding together the very seams of existence.

Sea spray blew in with a vengeance, a storm borne not of clouds but of dark waves and crumbling stone, but it did not glisten beneath the streetlights. It pulsed. It rippled. It ebbed with a darkness beyond the velvety space between stars. It ebbed with eons of nothingness, with an ancient unexistence. It wasn't something anyone saw, exactly. It was beyond sight. It was simply… knowing.

Those who had been inside when the sea first raged had been the lucky ones. Or maybe they hadn't. It depends who you ask. That first wave had carried with it a darkness not yet known to this world. To touch that darkness was to have been undone completely, to have been hollowed out, stripped of one's soul, and filled back in with something… unsightly. They say speaking to those poor, fragmented beings was like looking into a rippling void and hearing it looking back.

They weren't wrong. My mother had been fragmented, had lost her soul to a void that looked at her in a language she could not articulate, a language that had rattled around in her head until she had walked into the ocean and never walked back out.

That same void had pushed me out of my mother that night, birthed me onto the street in the midst of the rippling darkness, beneath the skyless multitude of skies. They say neither of us had cried.

I was raised among the fragmented, but I was not one of them. I had not been hollowed out. My soul had not been hastily carved from my very bones. Some believe I was never born with one to begin with, because when they looked at me they heard the void looking back. They heard it and they did not speak its language.

After a while people stopped looking at me altogether. They didn't like the shape of the things they heard when they caught a glimpse of me. They say it felt like something peeling away, like something sloughing off, yet they didn't know what. I believe it was their sanity. I could feel it falling away in small fragments, like little bits of glass pricking my skin on the way down.

Some left before they had shattered completely. They all returned, eventually. They all succumbed, eventually. They all became fragmented, eventually. They all, at last, understood the language of the void when they looked at me. Yet they never spoke back.

It's been thirty-three years since that night. I have seen many people pass through our little town by the sea. I've seen the disquiet on their faces, when they speak to the fragmented and none speak back, when they look to the sky and see there is something very wrong though they cannot put their finger on what. I've seen the disquiet when they look at me. I know what they must be hearing. I know they do not understand.

Some have stayed, drawn in by the way the sun never really seems to fully rise, by the unnatural quiet of the place, by the blackness of the ocean, by something they cannot even begin to comprehend. Some have stayed because of me.

I've had lovers who cannot bear to be away from me, yet they cannot bring themselves to look at me. They all speak of dreams full of monsters. When I ask them to describe these monsters it would seem they all look an awful lot like me, but I'm the only one who ever seems to notice.

Sometimes my dreams are also full of monsters, except I cannot see them. I wonder if they look an awful lot like me, too. They taunt me from behind the black veil of night, luring me down, down the rocky cliff face, down, down into the depths of the sea. Every time I follow them I find myself a little deeper, a little colder. I don't know what will happen when I finally reach the bottom.

It's been thirty-three days since I last dreamt of monsters, and there is a new soul in town. I find no disquiet upon his face when he looks at me. There is no brief moment of confusion, of concern, of fear. It makes me profoundly uncomfortable.

I do not know if he hears it when he looks at me. I do not know if he sees something wrong in the sky when he looks at it. He seems to look at it a lot. He seems to look at me a lot, too. He never speaks to me, just watches. I've heard him speak to others, though. His voice has crept into my dreams.

It feels familiar there. His voice in my dreams. Warm, like home, or at least what I imagine a home is supposed to feel like. Any bit of warmth my home had managed to have growing up among the fragmented had dissipated the day I followed my mother down the winding staircase along the cliff to the beach below, watched as she silently walked into the black waves and waited days for her to walk back out. Sometimes it feels like I'm still waiting, even if just to understand why.

I wonder, some nights, when I leave the windows open and I can hear the waves crashing hard against the cliff face, if my mother ever loved me, if she was even capable of it. Maybe she did before I was born, before the dark waves came. Before the abyss. If I'm being honest, I'm not even sure I'm capable of loving someone. I don't know what it looks like, what it feels like. The closest I ever got to what I imagine to be love was a short but fiery few weeks with a painfully pretty boy whose name I no longer remember. It's been thirty-three months since he disappeared into the night. I think the nightmares drove him away, the ones with monsters that look an awful lot like me.

On these nights, with the sea spray coming in through the open window, I almost think I can hear her, hear that voice I've never heard, calling for me. On these nights, I often find myself at the bottom of the cliff, my skin damp and my mind lost at sea. I can almost hear her voice above the deafening crash of black waves. I can no longer tell if these are dreams or reality. I always wake up soaked to the bone.

Tonight is one of those nights. I dreamt of my mother. I dreamt of monsters. I dreamt of the endless depths of black, black seas. Somewhere, amid the whitewater, I heard a voice. It was not my mother's voice. It was not the voice the monsters used. It was his voice.

He spoke to me in a language I had never heard, yet I understood every word. They rippled through my mind like stones skipping over a black pond. He spoke to me of the space between stars, of the bottom of the ocean. He spoke to me of the crushing darkness they both held. He spoke to me of abysses. He spoke to me of nothingness. Ancient, ancient nothingness.

I awoke cold and wet, feeling too small for my bones, too large for the world, too crowded to breathe. There was no space between anything. Everything was touching and it made me uneasy.

I scrambled outside, falling to my knees in the middle of the road, and stared up into the skyless skies. They stared back.

"Do you understand them now?" His voice felt different than it did in my dreams. Heavier.

I turned to find the beautiful man who seemed to have no issues with whatever he heard when he looked at me. "Understand what?" I asked.

"Those who've grown detached from your world. Those like your mother." The fragmented. "They saw it through you. The exquisite emptiness. No, that's not quite right. They saw it because it is you." He reached forward and grazed a finger over my cheek. "It convulses just beneath the surface of your skin. Can you feel it?"

I touched my cheek where his fingers had been, but I felt nothing. I felt nothing. Nothingness.

"Who are you?" I asked hoarsely.

"Your kind forgot my name long ago, just as you forgot the space beyond your atmosphere does not belong to you." I opened my mouth to speak, but he pushed on. "Our void was perfection. The exact right amount of everything and nothing. Until your little ships began probing and prodding and tearing little holes in the darkness. Those little holes began seeping, didn't they? The darkness began spilling through into your world. It spilled into you."

He knelt down before me and took my face into his hands. His eyes were too deep and too dark to be anything but abyssal, and they felt like home.

"I came to mend the holes in the darkness your people ripped open. Yet, when I got here, I felt a tug so powerful I lost all track of my mission. Imagine my surprise when that tug pulled me to you."

"Me?"

"Where is your favourite place in the entire universe?"

I didn't understand. I simply pointed toward the ocean. He smiled, as if he understood.

"Imagine you met someone who was, somehow, the sea itself. My beloved darkness has crept its way into you." He sighed and it sounded like the breeze blowing in off the ocean. "I have been alone a very long time. Could I stay with you? Just for a while."

I didn't know what to say. He was the only one who had ever looked at me and not found something wrong. He was the only thing that had ever felt… right. "But the holes in the darkness…"

"We can mend them together. Or we could let the darkness take back this world. Look," he said and gently pulled me to my feet. He pointed up to where the sky should have been. "A wound that large will take a very long time to heal. It is still fresh."

"It's been thirty-three years," I said.

"That is but a moment to the darkness. Whether we begin mending it now or let it heal on its own, the darkness will continue to spread. Your world will never be as it once was. You can already feel it changing, can't you?"

I could. The fragmented. The dreams. The monsters. It was all spreading.

"What will it be like?" I asked. "When the darkness takes over."

"Home."