In the Dark

Light, that was the first thing I saw when I was born, bright sunlight streaming in through the windows as I screamed and cried waving my pudgy fists. Light that seemed to emanate from my body as my father cradled me in his arms. 18 years later, that’s the most vivid thing I can remember of my youth. The other thing I remember is the dark. Dark, the first thing that really scared me. 18 years later, it still does. It’s not so much the darkness itself that frightens me, it’s what’s lurking inside the dark that does. The shifting shadows and the voices that seemed to creep out of the darkness, I heard them as a child, I still hear them today. My mother always scolded me whenever I mentioned these voices, she’s also the reason why I’m turning 18 in a mental hospital.

My father never scolded or mocked me about the whispers I heard in the dark. He’d stroke my hair and tell me, “Don’t let the darkness catch up to you Solis, for you are the sun in this dark world, it’s inside you, feel it.” I never understood what he meant exact.y, but my father was also the light in my world, but he disappeared when I was 13 and was never heard from again. And without the protection of my father, my mother, who had had enough of my “childish claims” sent me to the looney bin where they tried to convince me that there was nothing in the darkness, that it was just my imagination, and try to make me sleep in the dark or fill me up with pills. But what they don’t know is that before one of the other patients in the hospital tried to off herself, I saw the darkness wrap around her and heard the frenzy of excited whispers. They also don’t know that I see shadows entering the eyes of someone new every single month. Everyone here has eyes swirling with black now, everyone except me. Sometimes, I even wonder if I really am crazy.

Now that I’m an adult now though, I can finally escape this place, I can stop pretending to eat pills, I can stop seeing the shadows inside all the people around me. The shrink assigned to me leads me out. He guides me to the elevator and gives me his well wishes. I enter the elevator alone. When the doors close and I’m alone in the flickering elevator, I breathe a sigh of relief and watch as the floors go by, 6, 5 . . . every time the light flickers, I hear a whisper, 4, 3, BOOM! The light flickers out. I scream, I can’t see, I’m trapped in the darkness that’s suffocating me. The whispers that have haunted me since I was a child are now deafening screams. I desperately jab at buttons hoping to hit the emergency button to no avail. For some reason, I hear my father sobs among the screams, “I told you not to let the darkness catch up to you!” And then I’m swallowed whole by the dark.

I open my eyes  struggling to remember what happened in the dark. The elevator, the voice in the dark. I gasp and sit up. Where am I? The darkness here is so thick it’s almost tangible. It also feels evil. 

“We knew we’d get you eventually”, comes a gravelly voice all around me, “Solis, one of three sun vessels still alive. We got your father, we knew we’d get you too”. 

“M-my father?” I stutter.

“Oh yes, he was a sun vessel too. Sun vessels, the most dangerous thing to the dark besides light itself, the very flames of the sun course through your veins, and with it an unimaginable power”.

“Who are you? I’m not a sun vessel, whatever that is! Let me go!” I shout, but deep down, I knew that what the voice said was true. It would explain why I had seemed to glow as a child, heard the whispers in the dark, saw the darkness claim the people around me, and now why I was taken by them.

“I? I am everything that haunts the world, I am the shadows, the nightmares, the deaths in this world! I am everything dark that lurks on this earth. And you? You must be killed. The energy you will give me will help me conquer the every single person in the farthest reaching corners of the world,” the darkness let’s out a maniacal laugh, “of course, it was you humans who woke up my thirst for the world, the pollution, murders, misery that you wreaked upon the planet and each other strengthened me and fueled me into consciousness. And with the power from you? I will be invincible. Enough talking I tire of this already.”

And all of a sudden, I’m suffocating, darkness oozing into my pores, through my ears, nose, skin. I gasp desperately for breath but only choke on darkness instead. I think of my father who might have gone through this as well. My father, I miss him so much. 

“Don’t let the darkness catch up to you Solis,  for you are the sun in this dark world, it’s inside you, feel it.”

My father’s words echo in my head.  I feel something, a longing for the times I spent with my father, a slow warmth spreading across my entire body.

WHOOSH! Blinding light explodes out of me, cleansing my body of darkness. I hear the darkness scream in agony as the rays of light shooting out of me punch holes in the dark. I slowly get to my feet, the light pouring out of me growing brighter and brighter as the darkness’s screams grow louder and louder. Soon the darkness around me begins to fade, and the darkness whispers, “Impressive, you’ve managed to channel the sun inside you, but how will you, one tiny girl stop me from taking the whole world, especially when I have trapped you in the dark the moment I took your father. I personally possessed the shadows around you, claimed the people around you, convinced your mother to reject you. You can’t win, I will conquer everything on this planet and you won’t be able to stop me.”

 Suddenly I’m back in the elevator. The lights flicker back on and a few seconds later, a pleasant voice announces that it is the first floor.

I stumble out gasping for breath, stagger outside, and collapse on a bench. With the sunlight warming my face I know what I will have to do, I will have to find the remaining sun vessels the darkness had mentioned to keep the darkness at bay. For now though, I enjoy the basking in the light, enjoy the last few hours of the day before the sunsets and this city is cast in the dark.