There Is A Light

The flames of the fire danced in the pitch black of the night. Seamus could feel them on his face and not for the first time did he worry that his back was exposed to the horror of that night.

When John was here, it was far better. It wasn’t just the company, but John was fair company. No real sense of humour. Quiet. Dour even, but he was there and he was real and he did have a story or three in him when pushed to tell them.

Now John was gone, and Seamus was beginning the think that in his cynicism he had been right. Frighteningly correct, in fact. John however, had accused him of cowardice. He’d not lead with that, but that was where he’d been headed from the off. He’d begun with scared and mentioned fear more than once. Now Seamus thought of it, it might have been him who had introduced cowardice into it, but that hadn’t been the point. In the end, the point had been lost in a sea of anger and then they’d been separated by a storm of their own making.

Orders was what he should have talked about. They’d been ordered to stay put and keep the fire burning, and until they were told otherwise, that was exactly what they should have been doing and should have continued to do come what may.

It was a simple order, and Seamus had taken to it with gusto. Seamus liked fire. There was something about the flames that spoke to him even before he experienced the warmth that they bestowed. Flames danced to their own tune and if you stared long enough into the hypnotic fire you could almost hear its music. The song was as old as the Earth itself and was that any wonder when the Earth’s heart was a raging ball of fire?

Yes, the flames were as much a part of the Earth as anything could be. Seamus sometimes felt bad for the trees that were burnt. The ancient and quiet trees with their own song that played out in the susurrating wind, but then, in the end everything went back to the Earth. Fire was purification. A return to an elemental state.

Dust and ash.

Seamus shuddered despite the heat of the fire. The problem with fire like this was the distribution of heat. His front was almost too hot and yet his back was cooler than he would have liked. He was loathed to turn around though. The thought of meat turning over a fire sickened him, it reminded him of his current predicament. He may as well have been meat, after all, meat was senseless. It had no clue as to what was happening beyond the flames it was cooking on.

Seamus was just so much meat right now.

Reluctantly he turned away from the seductive flames until he could feel the warmth on his back. He lied to himself for a short while, the lie he told was that the flames had affected his night vision, and he could have almost believed that lie, except that his vision did not improve. 

The reality was that his eyes had nothing to see. There was nothing beyond the encampment. Nothing at all. 

This was not pitch black. Seamus had experienced pitch black as a boy. He’d gone adventuring with his friend Tommy and they’d found an old chest freezer that had been dumped a few yards into a small copse. It were as though it had been thrown from a speeding truck and rolled its way in amongst the trees, but the positioning of the road and the angles seemed all wrong and there were no marks or scars from that sort of violent progress. That was part of the allure for the boys. They knew the freezer shouldn’t have been there and it was a mystery as to how it had gotten there, which made the question of why it was there all the more intriguing.

The off-white Pandora’s Box was ripe for the opening and there was very little discussion as to the merits of opening such a thing. As Seamus remembered it, both boys acknowledged the very strong possibility of this being a coffin. The final resting place of a violent gangster or ruffian of similar inclinations and standing. Boys of a certain age are possessed of worldly knowledge beyond their years that they supplement with an overactive imagination. They could both vividly envision a defrosted and decomposing homicidal criminal, he was fat to the point of obesity, but not at all tall, and there was a relatively small hole between his eyes. That hole was relative to the crater in the back of his head. His eyes would of course be open and the thousand yard stare they’d be greeted with would also hold an unknowable accusation that would make them feel awkward, guilty almost.

They knew all of this independent of each other and the similarities of their expectations were remarkable. This eerie commonality was the real reason why they eventually fell out and sacrificed their fledgling friendship. They were too alike and people don’t like being around someone who is a reminder of themselves. They only get comfortable with that sort of thing if they start liking themselves and become comfortable in their own skins, and there’s not nearly enough of that about.

The one thing that Seamus and Tommy made sure they talked about prior to opening the lid of that freezer was that they should both open it together. There were various reasons for that. Not just that they both really wanted to be the one to open it and recognised a selfish desire to do so that was casually veering towards the deeply unpleasant. There was a flipside to that one though. Neither of them wanted to be at fault if anything went wrong as a consequence of doing anything to this modern day sarcophagus. Also they were both scared to the point of shitting their pants. They could hear their tummies gurgling and roiling and much of their bravado was an egotistically dumb act. This needed to be a joint venture if they were going to go through with it. Neither of them could shoulder all the responsibility for it. 

And so it was that they placed both their hands on the edge of the freezer lid, nodded to each other and lifted. The seal on the lid held fast and threatened not to give. The boys paused their efforts, bent their backs into it and heaved to a soundtrack of grunting and groaning. They were rewarded with a strange tearing noise that sounded for all the world like the flesh of a fresh kill being torn open by terrible jaws and the lid at last rose up into the dappled woodland air.

To say that the freezer was empty would be so far from the truth as to be an untruth. Not a lie as such, but wrong all the same. As the lid lifted, the contents of the freezer escaped. The escaping contents hit both boys, smack in the face, making them let go of the lid and stagger backwards. Their eyes watered as they doubled over and gasped in an odd agony of discomfort.

“Something died in there!” wailed Tommy.

“Some things died in there!” echoed Seamus.

They exchanged a look and grinned. That stench of death alone was worth the preceding fear and anxiety. As one, they returned to the open cask and peered in eager to see what it was that they had uncovered.

“It still stinks,” observed Seamus.

“Like yer Ma’s knickers,” chimed in Tommy.

Seamus shook his head, it was a great jibe. He was miffed he’d not come up with it himself. 

There was some disappointment due to the absence of their imagined executed gangster. The silver lined freezer was devoid of anything other than the remnants of that stink of decay. There wasn’t even a pool of death juice lurking in the bottom-most corner. This freezer really hadn’t made much of an effort for the boys.

Into that expanse of disappointment Tommy uttered words of adventure, “we should get in it.”

Seamus turned to look at his friend. This was a very bad idea. This was a very exciting idea. This was an idea worthy of exploration, “freezers close on kids and they die in them,” he reminded his friend.

Tommy scrunched his face up, “der! One at a time, bozzo!” 

“Oh,” said Seamus, “right.”

And as he uttered these words quietly he had this sudden certainty. He was going to be the first one in. Seamus’s certainties had a habit of being on the nose, but only when they were to Seamus’s disadvantage. He was never going to make a living as a professional gambler. His luck was not of that sort. In fact, his luck was a feckless thing and work shy with it. A taker and never a giver.

Climbing into the foreboding stink box had not been easy, and he had not been elegant in his efforts. Once he was inside, he really did not want to be there. His initial thoughts of the object being a coffin now haunted and cajoled him. This was a place for dead things, as all freezers were. This was a place where someone could easily die. Thoughts of the process of such a death kicked and prodded him, and it was all he could do to portray a boyish mask of manliness as Tommy asked if he was ready.

He nodded solemnly and hoped he looked stoic, if not heroic.

The closing of the freezer lid was an event that would live with Seamus forever. Tommy seemed to close it impossibly slowly, but it was shut in no time all. Seamus looked at the world beyond that box and he missed it before it was ever gone. The narrowing vista horrified him and he believed with his entire soul that he’d never see that world again. He tried his best to keep himself together as the darkness enveloped him, but he soon realised that there was no longer any him to keep together. He sat in the dark and he forgot how to breath and then he lost how it was to be. And there were no cues to help him out. They were gone. Everything was gone. He thought he’d lifted his hand up towards his face, but there was nothing there, and so he wasn’t sure whether that was something he did or he imagined. All he knew was that there was nothing there and if there was nothing there then there was no him. He was as real as that smell.

He was that smell.

That stench was all there was. He felt it around him. Then it was brushing against him.

Something was brushing against him! 

Touching him.

Trying to get in!

That was when he began screaming.

Screaming and beating against the lid of the freezer. Oblivious to the fact that Tommy was sitting on it to prevent him bottling it too soon and getting out. That suspicion would come later and would add momentum to the dissolution of their friendship, that and his shame at how scared he’d been.

He’d been terrified. So terrified that he’d thrown himself against that lid and launched Tommy from it. He didn’t remember getting out of the freezer, only that he’d run and he’d not stopped running until he’d got home. Quite why he’d bolted into the back garden and hidden himself behind the shed eluded him to this day. But that was where he’d been when he’d come back to himself and the world he’d thought he’d lost had reluctantly returned to him.

Seamus had never been the same again. He had to concede that John was right. He was scared, and who wouldn’t be? Coward he was not though. He’d volunteered for this, despite his morbid fear of the dark. Or as he would put it, his first-hand knowledge of the darkness.

The quality of this darkness, the darkness beyond the flames, was somehow ethereal, and Seamus didn’t think that should be possible. Light was ethereal, darkness was supposed to be a lack. There was a lack here and that lack was oppressive. It was oppressive in a strong and threatening way. There was a brooding power in it, and Seamus knew that something was going to happen in that darkness, that something was already happening and it was only a matter of time before he found out what was going on. He could feel all that going on. He had this notion that he had a pending meeting with the darkness, or rather, an interview with whatever the darkness contained.

Without knowing he was doing so, he sniffed at the air, but there was nothing there and that in itself was unnerving. If he were to turn back to the fire his nostrils would be filled with the smell of the burning wood. Reassuring. Natural. That he could not at least smell that in such close proximity to the fire was disconcerting. Another thing that was wrong. Another absence. The darkness swallowing everything up and leaving almost nothing. 

Almost.

There was something there though and now Seamus felt it moving.

“John?” he said tentatively, “John, is that you?” his voice was louder now, more steady, but he could still hear the hesitancy of fear within it.

“Mate,” he said, “if that’s you, quit pissing around and say something!”

But there was nothing. Instead there was the forced silence of something waiting. Something listening. Something circling. Listening. Observing.

It would pick its moment.

Redundantly, he looked into the darkness, turning his head this way and that. Looking out towards the village where there had been so much light. Searching for the fires of the other sentries. Looking again for the flame that John had taken with him when he’d gone to find out what was happening. One after the other, they had all faded until there was nothing left. There was something shocking and terrifying with the way those lights had faded. None of them had gone out. Instead they had dulled and grown dimmer and dimmer until Seamus doubted his own eyes. He knew the light was still there, it was his inability to see it that was at play here.

He shook his head. It was that thinking that had seen John go out into the darkness. That certainty that the lights were still there. That the village was still there. That all that was needed was to walk back the way that they had come and they would return to the village and all would be well again.

It sounded simple, and Seamus was never in complete disagreement with John. He would’ve done the same thing, if it were not for the quality of this darkness. His darkness. Seamus knew this darkness. Knew what it was capable of. A darkness like this was not the absence of light. 

This darkness was alive.

It moved.

Seamus’s cheeks itched under tracks of tears he hadn’t realised he’d shed. He raised an arm before him and looked at his hand as though it were a curio. A wonderfully monstrous object fit for a Victorian travelling circus. He held it there before him as he took first one step and then another. There were so few steps before the tips of his fingers dimmed. He snatched his hand back, questioning the sensation he’d experienced in the moment of his fingers dimming, but there was nothing of substance. 

He stood for a while and considered the darkness before him. Then he raised his hand once more and slowly and deliberately pushed it forth. The darkness began to envelope his fingers more quickly and more completely this time. 

He stepped back and almost overbalanced, flinging his head to the side to assess his proximity to the fire. It was close. Too close. He could feel the heat of it. But so too was the darkness. He cast his eyes around the camp. Now, there was no camp to speak of. 

The fire. The fire must be fed. Those were his orders. Simple orders. Keep the fire burning. The flames must remain in order to keep the darkness at bay. Seamus looked towards the fire. It was burning just the same as it had when he’d set it. Only now the big pile of logs was gone. 

Everything was gone.

The tide of darkness was inexorably rising and the islands of light were diminishing. He’d thought the darkness was laying siege to his position and that of the other sentries and the village itself. That it lurked and slithered around the pools of light. He’d thought it was awaiting the opportunity to move in. Waiting for the lights themselves to go out.

But it was stronger than that. Much stronger than that.

And it was hungry.

Ever so hungry.

He turned to face it. His back to the fire. The heat just as powerful on his back as ever, but the light was dimming all the same. Dimming as the darkness closed in from behind him and to either side of him.

“Seamus…” a sibilant approximation of something that was once a voice. A familiar voice corrupted.

“John…?” whispered Seamus as he looked up towards the source of that horrendous sound.

The darkness loomed over his head, a lazy cobra swaying this way and that. No need to strike. Its prey was utterly trapped.

The darkness moved closer.

That was when Seamus felt something brush against him.

This time there was nowhere to run.

No escape.

He opened his mouth wide to scream his last…

…and the darkness rushed in. Filling him like the stench from that freezer all those years ago. 

Filling him. 

Possessing him as only the true darkness can.