The Hooded Man  

I tried talking to the hooded man once, many cycles ago when he came to replenish my wood supply. He always comes from behind, slow and icy as a glacier, silent as the Mariana Trench. That day, I felt his merciless chill slink up beside me.

“Why am I here?” I asked him, gazing at his misty figure. His cloak was even blacker than the sea of darkness that surrounded us. Where his face should be was only a clouded opening, its mist opaque but tantalizingly fluid. Behind the cloud of his face I sensed the answer to my question. The hooded man paused for less than a moment, before dropping the wood and turning to leave.

“Who are you? How long do I have to do this?” I begged him to answer.

“The answers lie in the head,” his oily voice surpassed my eardrums and seeped deep into my brain, as if controlled by a sense beyond my comprehension. I grasped at my skull, crazed by the vitriol beneath his words. I knew the terrible power his voice had, for I’d heard it once before, but the extent of its pain and wickedness had faded in my memory.

I have no concept of time, besides his visits and the time it takes for a log to be reduced to ashes, both of which I’d lost count of long ago. I could have been here two months, two years, two decades, or two centuries; I suspect the latter options.

The sand beneath my feet is soft and fluid as an ocean swell; perhaps it is responsible for the sound of waves crashing in the distance. No stars grace the sky, nor does a moon or a sun provide any light. I don’t know how long I’ve been here, wherever here is.

I stoke the fire dutifully, log upon log upon log, as I’ve been commanded. That memory seems the only one tethered to this unreality, when the hooded man spoke—if you can call it speaking—“if the fire dies, so does your wife.” His slimy intonation seared into my brain that first day, and its purpose drove me through this depraved existence. But lately I’ve been questioning.

He told me the answers lie in the head, but all that’s in my head are memories, and every day these disappear in droves. Soon, I suspect, nothing will remain but the hooded man and the fire.

Margaret’s face fades in my memory little by little, like a camera losing focus ever so slowly. Her eyes were hazel, yes, but what was the pattern of her irises? There was a time when I was obsessed with those eyes, painting them into my art in such detail that you might mistake them for real if the rest of the paintings weren’t abstract. But if you gave me a paintbrush today, I would draw completely different eyes.

Her smile, though, radiant as freshly fallen snow; I remember that clearly. And her bellowing laugh that you could hear from the opposite end of the house, which turned to a squealing giggle when she really got going. I always loved making her squeal like that.

Margaret was better with the kids than I was, her heat warmer, her patience a vast lake to my small pond, her love as infinite as the darkness in which I now sit. She’d stay up late helping David—bless his frantic and loving heart—with his school projects. She’d rub Grace’s back while she cried about school or friendship drama, she’d braid Anna’s hair and help her manage her anxiety.

My children’s faces have dwindled to a single defining feature, as if I only heard one instrument in a ten-piece band. David’s bright smile (he got that from Margaret), Grace’s stony gaze, which she called her “resting bitch face”, Anna’s gorgeous curly auburn hair (also from Margaret). I wonder which features from me have faded into oblivion.

“Put another log on the fire for me; I made some breakfast and coffee-ee-ee.” Strange that I remember a David Bowie lyric, as I lay more wood on the flame, but not my children’s faces.

All there is to do here is remember, and yet, each moment another memory is swallowed by the suffocating space and time that surrounds me. I pass time by exercising—pushups, burpees, calisthenics—or messing with the sand, more gentle and porous than any sand I’ve encountered.

I want to walk beyond the light of the fire, but I am afraid, for when I reach past the light of the flames, I’ll have nowhere to go. I could follow the sound of the waves, but they seem to come from all directions at once. I am trapped in this bubble of light, and my only escape would mean a slow death, cold as a Chicago winter’s biting wind, which rips through your layers to chill your bones. And death is not an option if I want Margaret to live.

But is it? If they’ve held me as long as I suspect, Margaret is long dead anyways. What’s the use of stoking this pathetic fire, my last and only purpose in this monstrous game? It’s time I fought back, devised a plan to counter my captors’ wicked game. If I don’t, I fear that Margaret, the kids, my memories of a better life, will disappear behind the shadows of the fire.

The answers lie in the head. I’ve contemplated the hooded man’s reply ceaselessly and still have no explanations. But I do have an idea, a desperate idea for a desperate man.

Time passes—days, weeks, who knows—and I am at last down to my final log. I position myself behind this last log and to the left; it lies beyond my reach, where the hooded man will feel comfortable.

Soon, I feel his glacial presence slither behind me; gooseflesh prickles my neck but I don’t flinch. The hooded man’s advance is painfully slow, like an old man climbing a high tower. I wonder if he senses the strategy that’s formulated in my mind. Presently, the hooded man stands at my side.

He pauses to drop the wood, and I use this moment to strike. I shoot to my feet and grab hold of the log I’ve buried in the sand—the loose sand that moves like a wave—which parts easily. My movements are precise, thanks to my daily exercises done to pass time, and I twirl around, clench the log as tight as my grip allows, and whip my arms around with all my strength, aiming for the hooded man’s head. He senses my movement, but the logs in his hands slow his reaction and prevent a counter.

The hooded man’s wood drops and a hand reaches towards me as my log arcs through the air. Luckily, my weapon makes first contact, a cracking blow to the cranium whose sound ripples across the abysmal darkness like a crash of lightning in a tropical storm. The cloaked figure screeches and reels, the mist remaining in the air where his head was, while he drops to the ground, just right of the white-hot embers. I haven’t a second to waste; I leap atop the hooded man, push his injured head towards the coals. I want to hurt him, I want him to scream for mercy.

But he doesn’t scream or even resist as I shove his face into the flames. His hood is ablaze now, and he lets out a sickly laugh, a high-pitched shriek of a hyena. The sound is terrible, but I must get answers.

“Who are you!? Why am I here!?” Suddenly his shriek shifts to a low bellow, a sound that shakes the air, vibrates the sand; I’ve never heard a laugh so loud. But more than that, the timbre is familiar. Where have I heard this before? The hooded man keeps laughing, deafening as the front row of a heavy metal show; it takes all my strength not to cover my ears in agony. His laugh shifts to a squeal, a high-pitched giggle that I associate with one person alone. It can’t be.

The fire has burned his hood away. I yank him out of the fire, turning him over on his back, and I see that it is not in fact a hooded man, but a hooded woman, a ghastly woman who puts a pit in my stomach. I stagger back and release the woman, certain that my mind is playing tricks on me. I am going insane from isolation; it must be.

Otherwise, something much more horrible than insanity has occurred. For in front of my eyes, I see the woman I loved, the woman whose life I thought I was saving by tending this fire for years or decades or centuries. It is Margaret, but not the Margaret I knew. Her hazel eyes are red, vile, and deep with fury. Her radiant smile has turned sardonic, twisted into a shape beyond my recognition. Her auburn hair is gone, she lies bald on the ground, face half burned from the embers.

“Wh—” I start, stepping further back into darkness.

“Hello, Michael,” she snivels in that unnatural tone that pours like syrup into my surroundings. Then, before I can ask any questions, the mist that was left behind when I smashed her returns to her head. In the instant before it clouds her face once more, I see the face morph into something else, some anonymous blob, and I realize that it wasn’t my wife; how could it have been? The hooded man rises, backhands me with a skeletal arm, knocking me to the ground.

I do not know who my tormentors are. Whatever that thing is, it is not human. And I know now that my wife is dead. I cannot explain how, but I know it; perhaps she has always been dead. I will not play their game anymore. One by one, I lay my logs on the fire, waiting for the previous one to catch before adding another to the top. Soon, I’ve laid all 10 logs on the fire, and the once measly flame has tripled, and tripled again, in size.

The light from the dancing flames illuminates the dreadful black a bit farther. I look out in all directions; still nothing. Smoke fills my lungs, the once-sweet smell turned sickening by decades or centuries of no other scent. The fire’s crackles and pops drown the sound of the waves. I pick a direction randomly and walk deeper into the ever-expanding chasm of darkness. Looking back, I see my fire grow smaller and smaller, until it is merely a speck surrounded by nothingness.

Then, it disappears. The absolute darkness envelops my senses, my soul, my body, my mind. I feel nothing, not even the sand beneath my feet as I walk through the abyss. I wander further and the darkness above my head soon illuminates, first a pale circle, then specks of twinkling white. Constellations shimmer, a full moon breathes light into the sky, but I still see nothing on the ground. I move my legs through spacetime (can you call it walking if your feet don’t touch the ground?), breathe a lungful of blissful nothingness. Gazing into the sky, I glimpse for an instant Margaret’s smiling face in the stars; I return her smile, filled with love and memory and knowing. My children’s faces crystallize in the darkness, guiding me toward some destination unfathomable after a cosmic eternity of torment. The sound of the waves dissipates, and with it, my consciousness.