The Dark is Never Empty

I meant to go to sleep at a decent hour, you know, before the monsters began to slip their ragged, icy fingers through cracks in the floor and pull ancient, cracked tiles away from their foundations

I didn’t make it

I sat in the dark awaiting something unspoken, sipping weak kombucha tea brewed in dusty bottles left fermenting in a cobwebbed cellar beneath the stairs until uncorked and poured in thick red rivulets of liquid into eldritch crystal cups

It tasted of death and nightmares

The sort of dream where running, you cannot see the danger in pursuit, you know, like life the way it is when you go to bed oblivious and awaken in the wee small hours knowing something you cannot see has changed…Danger has gained its mile and looms over my dreams, dark alleys and a dearth of promises

Hearts drained of hope and filled with trepidation

The kind of danger you see reflected in dark mirrors and crystal balls, swirling in that viscous mist with eyes that glitter like creatures in an ancient twisted forest, the kind of life where one day you believe your younger relatives will outlive you, remaining behind to light candles to your eternal soul and pour libations from chalices chipped with time, and the next day you are standing alone in the darkness

The dark is never empty

Darkness is dense with dancing molecules of danger surrounding small bodies of unseen things and, reaching out, my hand pushes the tiny specks of flashing lights moving in and out of the darkness, knowing without seeing that I am not alone

I want to close my eyes

Sounds of scraping tiles and imperceptible whispers carry icy fear into my midnight heart, and still I sip and savor and swallow the metallic taste of blood — what terror this?

The emptiness is coming…

No…

The dark is never empty.

Don’t close your eyes.

Don’t sleep.

A sudden noise, a subtle brush of something cold against skin and fully-formed corporeal shadows slip past peripheral vision; these are not figments, they are not imagination, surely something shifted in the depth of the cold earth, walking

Something chthonic, eldritch

The gray-white morning twilight reveals the bones of dreams forgotten, but the truth will soon be spoken, words enflesh the fears and dress them in tattered funeral shrouds — in the distance someone cackles, someone’s screaming

I hear the cracked bells ringing

It’s the phone.

I dare not answer.

Do not answer!

I pick up the receiver slowly…

Death rattles on the line.

© Suzy Jacobson Cherry, 5.13.2024