The Delicate Sound of Darkness

I don’t even know how to start this… I’ve never been one to consider existentialism as anything more than a hobby. And religion? PLEASE! But, I’ll tell you this, for someone like me to be sitting here, in a musty, concrete basement, writing my last words that nobody will ever see, the concepts of existentialism and Hell are two things I wish I would’ve spent more time on. Who knew?

I can’t tell you how long it’s been, there is no day or night in this world anymore. And the horrors that I’ve seen are right out of a Wes Craven film. Part of me wonders if he may still be alive in this hellscape, somewhere in the ruins of Hollywood, shitting his pants in the expectation that Freddie Kreuger is actually going to come for him. Singed fedora pulled down low over his bloodshot eyes and scorched skin, that God-awful red and green striped sweater, and the jarring squeal of his finger blades as he stalks Craven through some ramshackle boiler room. It sounds ridiculous, I know, but I wouldn’t doubt if it’s true. Not here.

It wasn’t always like this. Not that long ago, in fact, I was standing out on my back porch tending to a barbecue. My daughter, 16 years old, was relishing summer vacation in the pool, and my wife was out and about doing a couple of Saturday afternoon errands. She had told me to start dinner without her.

“I won’t be gone long, babe,” she told me as she pecked my cheek and pinched my rear end. “Just keep it warm for me for when I get back.”

Kelly sauntered off to her SUV, looking back at me and giving me a wink. It’s difficult to believe that would be the last time I saw her. Well, saw her as she was… my Kelly. I blew her a kiss and said, “Hurry back, my love!”

As she drove away, I turned back to the grill and closed my eyes, listening to summer. Birds tweeted, the breeze whispered through the leaves, lawnmowers roared in the distance, and my daughter splashed in the pool. I took a deep breath, smelling and tasting summer. Fragrant lilacs and honeysuckle, the robust scent of freshly cut grass, faint undertones of overheated asphalt and chlorine, and the in-your-face aroma of sizzling sausages on the grill. Then I opened my eyes and drank in the vision of summer. The bright green of lush leaves and grass, decorated with the yellows, purples, and blues of the summer flowers. The deep blue of the summer sky bordered on the horizon by dark, billowing storm clouds.

With a smile, I returned my attention to the sizzling ribs, foil-wrapped potatoes, and the slightly blackened corn on the cob. I had figured there was an hour or two before the storms rolled through. The heat of the day was becoming oppressive, and a dip in the pool after eating was absolutely warranted. Then maybe, just maybe, I considered hanging out in the rain and doing a little singing.

“Hey, Hil,” I shouted to my daughter, “can you go inside and get the plates ready? We have about ten minutes.”

Hilary stood up in the pool and squeezed the water out of her hair. Making her way to the ladder, she said with a smile, “Sure, Dad! It smells great!”

Now, don’t get carried away with your initial reaction to Hilary. She was a sixteen-year-old girl, on her way to her junior year of high school, and she only did things happily so long as it benefitted her. She could whine and complain with the best of them, and my voice had to often be raised to get her to do the simplest of chores. But, this time, she quickly dried off and ran into the house, no doubt her stomach was growling in anticipation of the coming meal.

As Hil and I sat down to eat, there was an ache in my heart that missed Kelly. She always had errands to run, and she always did them with a smile. But I missed her smile and her laugh, even though I was blessed to see both every day. The ache was assuaged by savory ribs and spicy potatoes, and by fun conversation with my daughter. She told me excitedly about the lunch date she had with Troy the next day, followed by a small shopping spree at the outlets in Center Valley. Troy was a good kid, and he was good for Hilary, too. He didn’t let her get away with her whiny manipulations and helped a great deal in keeping her focused on her future. Little did I know that that future, and any real and normal future, would soon be impossible.

As we finished eating, my cell phone notified me of a message. It was Kelly. I should be home in about an hour. Keep my dinner warm! And batten down the hatches, the storms are gonna be bad! She ended the message with a kiss emoji. It seemed that my guess at an hour or two for the storms to arrive was way off. I put the phone down and began washing the few dishes before I sat down to wait out the coming storm.

The picture on the television was snowy, cutting in and out every couple of moments. It was then that Hilary came out of her room, not with her usual pout, but with a genuine look of concern. “Dad,” she said, brow furrowed in confusion. “The cell network is down. This isn’t normal for a storm, is it?”

I reached over and picked up my phone and was greeted with the same thing, no network. The little icon for “emergency only calling” wasn’t showing, either. I was about to respond to her when the television, too, went blue. In my younger days, when the internet was not nearly as robust, we referred to these events as “the blue screen of death”.

“I don’t know what’s goin’ on, kiddo.” I rose and crossed the room to the radio and turned it on. Static…

Another moment of regret surfaced, not having a ham radio. Not that I’d know how to use it, and I would probably have been bullied off of the air by the “professionals”. But, no cell phones, no television, no radio? I was always one to face a mystery with gusto and determination. This, however, seemed a little too big to studiously work out what the problem was.

All I could think to say was “Let’s go find your mother.”

Before I could say another word, Hil had turned and sprinted to her room. Apparently, she didn’t want to go searching for mom in her bathing suit. That’s when the electricity was lost. I heard the air conditioner and the refrigerator compressors spinning down and the hum of the electrical box disappear.

“Shit,” I said to no one. “C’mon Hil! We just lost power! We gotta find your mom!”

She came bounding down the hallway, her expression of fear and confusion clear.

“Dad, what the hell is going on?”

Hell was going on, we just didn’t know it yet. “I don’t know, sweetheart. Let’s go.”

As I reached out to open the front door, the sky went dark. My heart caught in my throat. You’ve seen the way the sky darkens when the gust front of a summer storm finally eclipses the Sun. This wasn’t that. This was a total darkness, like a clouded over midnight. Even the light of the blue sky that was still visible through the dining room window seemed drained and powerless. Hil’s face drained of all color.

“Daddy?” she asked, sounding like the little girl I hadn’t heard in years.

I grabbed her hand and bounded through the door. It’s funny that, when you’re in a hurry, things seem to continually happen to prevent you from moving forward. Sort of like when you’re rushing to not be late for work in the morning, but every single delay possible happens, and you sit in the driver’s seat and curse the world as you watch the minutes tick by. A delay like that would have been much preferred to what stopped us in our tracks in that moment.

The sky above roiled with black, liquid-like clouds. But it wasn’t spreading out from Spook Central in New York City. No, this was everywhere. There was no source, and I doubted that we had to worry about Gozer showing up as the “nimble, little minx”. The terror that welled up inside of me screamed Cthulu, or something worse. In the distance, within the inky blackness of the encroaching storm(?), I saw flashes of light. I can’t describe as lightning because that’s not what it was. It was like thunder had become the light, and there was no sound to accompany it. Hil and I ran to the truck and hopped in, her eyes locked on the clouds and the flashes of light.

I turned the key and nothing… Not even a click of ignition relay. Not understanding why in the moment, I pulled out my phone. It, too, was dead. All the power had been drained.

“Hil, your phone. Check it.”

She pulled it out, barely able to look away from sky above. “I got nothin’, daddy. It’s dead.”

“So is mine. Nothing is working.” Now I looked out her window at the sky. The flashes got closer and closer, and, where I had heard no sound before, there was now a muffled, tinny noise that accompanied. Almost like a speaker trying to work but failing.

“Back in the house!” I commanded. “I don’t wanna be-”

“What about mom?” Her voice shook.

“Back in the house, Hilary. I don’t wanna be outside when God knows what shows up.”

“What do you mean?”

“Go!”

We exited the truck and made our way back to the front door, me leading. Two steps from the door I heard Hil scream. I snapped my head around and saw her staring at her hands. No injury could I see, but there was a problem with them. There was, in fact, a problem with the whole world. I looked down at my hands as my heart skipped a beat. Not only had the storm knocked out the power and sucked up the light, but it also drained the world of its color. It was like being inside a black and white television, with the exception of the lightning. Every flash, closer and closer they came, was in hues of purple, yellow, and white. The rest of world now languished in shades of gray and black.

“Let’s go!” I screamed. But Hil didn’t look up. I screamed it again, louder. The sound wasn’t traveling. At least not far. I could hear myself scream, but only as though I was hearing it through a pillow. I could only guess that, at her distance, she couldn’t hear a thing. It was so surreal… I remembered all the times I was outside during a snowfall. The sounds of the world were dampened as the snow piled up. But this was as though the world put on a pair of ear muffs.

I ran the few steps to Hilary and pulled her to the door. She tried to yell at me, but I could only hear a muffled sound, like the teacher from Charlie Brown. I didn’t bother to try and figure out what she was saying and just pusher through the door. I sat her down on the couch and ran to the bedroom. On the top shelf of the closet was where I kept the pistol. I had no idea if the bullets would be effective on whatever awaited us, but I had to try. I also grabbed the rifle from the back corner of the closet and made my way back to Hilary.

She sat on the couch crying silently. I knelt in front of her and handed her the pistol. She shook her head back and forth, not wanting to take the gun. I couldn’t yell at her, for obvious reasons, so I put down the rifle and forced the pistol into her hand. Her tears flowed freely as I showed her how to operate it. All she could manage was a small shake of her head. I put my hand around her neck and pulled her into a hug. The lightning flashing outside highlighted the ash now falling out of the sky like snow. Hell on Earth, but no demons… yet.

Hilary and I sat in the living room, quiet and unmoving. My thoughts focused on Kelly. Where was she? Was she walking home through darkness? Was she safe? Was she dead? The wink she gave me before she left flashed in my mind and the lump in my throat began to grow. Kelly hadn’t even told me where she was going, but I could guess. She was a creature of habit, and her Saturday errands were no different. By this time, she was probably at the thrift store on 4th Street. She loved her baubles and knick-knacks. But if I was so worried about her, why was I still at home with Hilary? We should be out there looking for her! The answer was that we still had no idea what was out there.

Lightning flashed directly over the house, and Hilary lifted her head and looked me in the eye. The fear in her face was as palpable as the silence we now found ourselves in. Then something caught her eye. She stood in disbelief and walked slowly to the window in the dining room, overlooking the backyard. I followed her gaze and stopped short. Descending from the sky was a figure. Lit from within by the same light as the lighting, this light ebbed and flowed like flames in zero gravity. It beat like a heart within a creature of smoke. All I could think of was that it was a miniature Balrog from Tolkien’s epic work. Shadow and flame, he described it. And that’s what this creature was. Visible wings, but as ethereal as smoke. Its face was also smoke, but more like a shadow, and where its eyes should have been there were simply two white orbs. Wispy, black horns rose from its head, and, in its hand, it held an axe of black obsidian. The thing landed in the grass without a sound, its feet scorching the earth as it touched down. It began to turn its head towards the house and I quickly wrenched Hilary to the floor.

I was surprised by the determination that now seemed to penetrate Hilary’s fear. She mouthed, or maybe she spoke, I had no way to tell, “Mom! Now!”

We rushed to the front door, hunched over so as to keep ourselves out of sight of the creature in the back yard. Hilary had put her hand on the doorknob, but I grabbed her wrist before she could pull it open. I shook my head “no” and craned my neck to look out the door’s window. I saw nothing but the darkness and the ash falling from the sky. I let go of her wrist and told her to wait. Taking position behind her, I raised the barrel of the rifle and readied myself to shoot anything that may be on the other side of the door. Then I gave her a nod.

Hilary flung the door open, causing it to slam into the wall without a sound. The creature stood there staring me dead in the face. I could barely make out a mouth, but I knew it to be much like the maw of a cat, and I could sense sharp, black teeth behind the ethereal lips. The two white orbs the thing used for eyes stared directly into my soul, and I shivered despite the warmth of the surrounding air. The fire of its chest pulsed slowly, not bright but still painful to look at. I fired the rifle, aiming right between its eyes. I wasn’t even sure the gun would fire, but it did. The bullet tore a hole dead center of the creature’s forehead, then the wound disappeared. One of the perks of being a creature made of smoke, I guess.

Unfazed by the gun blast, the creature raised its obsidian sword, meaning that there was more than just the one out back, and stabbed through the screen door and into Hilary’s chest. As the clothes on her dying body ignited from the heat of the blade, I lost control. I brought the barrel of the rifle down on the sword’s blade, freeing it from the creature’s grip. With the remnants of the screen door still in between us, I was able to grab the sword for myself and stab at the creature. If a bullet to the head wouldn’t take it down, maybe its own sword to its pulsing heart might do the trick. The blade slipped into its body like a knife into butter. Its chest flashed as the lights in the sky and went out, then both the creature and the sword dissipated like a quenched fire.

I didn’t take a single moment to think about what I’d done or seen. I bent over my little girl’s body, patting the few flames out with my hand. The fire never spread beyond the wound, but that fact wouldn’t save her. The blade had gone all the way through her body, soaking the carpet red beneath her. I screamed silently again and looked into her eyes. Hilary mouthed the words “Go find her” as the last spark of life ran from her body. I closed her eyes with my hand, barely able to see through my tears. The thought of turning the gun on myself flitted through my mind. I couldn’t save her! But before I could even raise the gun to my temple, I thought of Kelly, my wife.

I was still scared as I made my way out of the house, but anger and vengeance had taken over the front seat. I had forgotten about the axe-wielding creature that landed in the backyard, but somehow, I was ready for it. I caught the axe on the rifle’s barrel and forced it to the ground. The creature took its free hand and raked its claws across my exposed back. I took the injury as I picked up the axe and swung it into its chest from through its oblique. It, too, went up in a wisp of smoke, taking its axe with it.

The pain in my back seared as I gave it a moment’s attention, but I didn’t have time to dwell on my injury. I hung a right out of our front yard and began the descent down the road toward the town proper. By now there was already about an inch of ash covering the world, and I could actually hear it hitting the leaves of the trees. Thankful for the distraction, I stopped and listened some more. Then I screamed at the top of my lungs and barely heard it. Yet, the sound of the falling ash never wavered. Standing there, in darkness lit only by the ever-flashing lightning, I learned that the quieter sounds were now the louder ones. Knowing that was more disconcerting than looking up at the constantly roiling and boiling sky.

It was a quiet walk to the bottom of the hill… quiet, as in uneventful. But that ended abruptly when I saw two more creatures waiting for me. The one on the right held a sword just like the one I had killed at the top of the hill, the other had a mace whose spiked ball was as big as my head. Knowing that the only thing I could kill them with was their own weapons, I thought better than to come on a full-frontal assault. Perhaps, if I could get behind them, then I might have the possibility of disarming one. We just stood there, me and the two creatures, sizing each other up. Their chests pulsed in unison, flaring within their bodies and smoky auras. Then they began to walk towards me.

Unsure of how to proceed, I decided that I would just fake a frontal assault and see if I could flank them with speed. I began walking slowly, their eyes locked on me. At a range of about thirty yards, I began to scream and run at them. Of course, my scream was barely audible, as were my heavy footfalls. But the charge seemed to disorient the creatures. They stopped and began to look around slowly when it was clear that I was headed straight for them. I used it to my advantage.

Slinging the rifle across my back, I aimed to the outside of the creature on my left, the one holding the mace. Hoping that I judged things correctly, I slid alongside of it, grabbed the mace, and immediately stood and swung the weapon into its back. As it disappeared into a puff of smoke, I grabbed the sword-wielding hand of the other, swung its arm up and spun around. I now had its arm trapped under mine and I ripped the sword from its grip. I spun again and brought the sword down into its chest and watched it vanish.

I stood in the black silence panting heavily. Holy shit, it worked! I felt like a hero in an action movie! Out of left field, which is something my mind tends to do often, I remembered a scene from an old Kevin Smith film, Dogma. After killing an adulterer on a tour bus, Matt Damon’s character Loki exits the bus and begins to sing. I decided that I’d sing, too.

I smiled at the darkness and crooned, “Whose house?... Run’s house! Whose house?... Run’s house! I said ‘Whose house?’… Say what? Run’s house!”

You think that’s a bit over the top? Well, I think that I’d just seen my daughter murdered by demonic creatures in a Hell on Earth, and I had no idea where my wife was. I think I deserved a little psychotic break with a song. Don’t you? But it also wasn’t lost on me how these creatures were a bit like Tyrannosaurus Rex was thought to be. The T. Rex, in theory, couldn’t track anything if it didn’t move. The demons(?) seemed to not be able to track anything that was loud. In an odd way, in this new place, that made sense. At least I knew a proper defense. Would it help me survive this world? I’m writing this story down right now, so yeah… it did.

The question I face now, after all of this time, is do I want to survive? I haven’t seen a single living soul in this hellscape. I’ve seen those that were once living souls, but these creatures have been able to change them, to corrupt them. Damnation, indeed! And the first of these ‘undead’ that I witnessed was none other than my very own wife. They hadn’t killed her the way they killed Hilary. I don’t know what they did to Kelly, but I was certain that it wasn’t really her at that point, so killing her… it… wasn’t such a devastating act.

Growing up as a part of the human race, we’re often told that “there’s a reason for everything,” or “everything has a purpose.” Does it? What was the purpose of this Hell on Earth? What was the purpose of these creatures, these mini Balrogs? And what was the purpose of killing some humans, but transforming others into whatever my wife had become? I don’t know… Except that, maybe, if life is always supposed to have a purpose, then the opposite could also exist. But what would have no purpose? What would be the nemesis of life? I called it the anti-life. If life is purposeful and orderly, then anti-life has to be purposeless and chaotic. All of these thoughts flashed through my mind like the lightning above in the aftermath of killing the thing Kelly had become.

I had trudged through the thickening layer of ash in the silent darkness of this new world, up Wasser Road and onto Tagart Road, following it into town. I saw a lot of dead bodies, or at least the parts that were still visible above the ash. I had also run into a couple more of the demons, but instead of engaging them, I simply made a huge ruckus to get around them and slightly altered my course. I eventually made it to the thrift shop on 4th Street, but all I saw was Kelly’s burnt out SUV buried under several inches of ash. Her body was nowhere to be seen. Then I heard the low growling.

I turned and looked up the street. There she… it… was. It still had her hair, though it looked greasy and wet. But I saw no clothes, only a blackened cinder of a body that seemed to smolder within the cracks. That body was not its normal size, though. The Kelly-monster stood a foot taller than I, and the underlying musculature brought to mind the She-Hulk. Its eyes were as black as the clouds above. The rumbling growl came from the Kelly-monster, a sound almost like the sliding of one cinder block over another.

If you’re reading this, you’re no doubt waiting for the heroic battle between me and the Kelly-monster. It wasn’t so heroic. Actually, it was rather anticlimactic. Something told me that just because my wife had turned into some hell-created creature, the thing was still human at its core. So, I challenged it. I got it to charge me as I had charged the demons not too long before. Then I calmly raised the rifle and placed a bullet between its eyes (a sharpshooter medal from the Navy does come in handy once in a while). Without a brain, even that creature couldn’t continue its existence. But I was able to continue mine.

As I said at the beginning, I don’t know how long I wandered. Surely, it was days at least, but it could’ve been weeks. I lived off of canned food from the local grocery stores, but even that seemed to be in a state of rapid decay. The world, as it was, did not change much. I killed many of the demons for no other reason than to kill them. Same for the human monsters that my wife had become. I made it as far as the Jersey Shore, amazingly enough, but I didn’t stay there long. The ocean was black ink, much like the sky, and a noxious odor floated over its syrupy consistency. Growls and other foul noises came from those waters(?), from creatures I didn’t want to know existed. The ever-flashing lightning, and its hushed, tinny thunder, had long ago stopped being a headache-inducing annoyance, and my eyes had adjusted to the new flashbulb way of life.

Eventually, though, my continued existence warranted a more severe focus from Earth’s new masters. Whether it was simply the demons acting on some weird instinct, or if there was some higher intelligence controlling them (Lucifer?), I couldn’t guess. Regardless, the pursuit of me became more intense, and my ability to evade them became more limited.

So it was that I found myself in a basement of a home in West Chester. It’s only a matter of time before they find me, so I thought I’d write my story down, in the hopes that humanity may one day regain control of the Earth and somebody is able to have an account of what happened. But, I’m not very confident in that dream, and I fear that I’m writing this for no reason other than I have to, for my own sake.

I can hear them now, upstairs, searching for me. I don’t have much time left. In the time that I’ve been alone, I have gone back over those thoughts of existentialism and religion. Is there a God? Is there a reason that the Anti-Life has come to our home and utterly destroyed it? Was the human experiment all in vain? I don’t know… At this point, though, I also don’t care. I survived in this world for a long time, just for the sake of survival, the basest human instinct. This world of darkness will finally have its victory over me. It’s been an experience, one I’m happy to say I won’t have to repeat. The silent black of the world will continue without me. Of all the things humanity had proposed for its ending, never did it believe that it would be…

The delicate sound of darkness.