When Darkness Comes

by Wilbanks, G. Allen

  At the moment of my death, my essence left the dead matter of my body behind. Though I had no eyes or ears, I could see and hear, and as I rose upward I looked down on Andi still straddling my lifeless body. I watched her lower her head to claim whatever remaining sustenance she could from the corpse beneath her.

  I felt no emotion as I watched. I simply accepted. She needed to survive, and I was dead. I felt no anger. She had done nothing except free me from my cage of flesh to go … where? Heaven or Hell? I don’t know. I will never know. Before I could begin my journey to discover my reward, I saw an inky blackness seep from my body. Tendrils of roiling shadow reached up to reclaim me. I paused as they drew close, wondering what this new presence could be. As soon as the darkness touched my spirit self I knew my opportunity to flee had already passed. I was trapped. The shadows enveloped me and pulled me back down to the body I had just escaped. I could sense the corruption of this new force as it infused my soul and lodged me once more firmly in my own corpse. My moment of freedom and enlightenment ended as quickly as it had come.

  I plummeted into unconsciousness.

  CHAPTER 6

  I awoke in total darkness. A blackness so complete that I felt its weight pressing down on me, as if the inky surroundings were more than mere lack of light, but an actual physical presence; a shroud fully encasing me. In such a situation, I knew I should have been panicking. In the past, I certainly would have. But now, for some unexplained reason, the dark felt comforting. I was enfolded by it, but not crushed by it. I had no idea where I was or how I had arrived here, and I certainly did not know how I was going to get myself out of my current situation, but still, surprisingly, I felt utterly calm.

  Although slightly disoriented by my blindness, I knew I was back in my body. I was not merely a spiritual presence in this place. I could feel hard earth beneath me, pressing up against my back, buttocks and legs. My fingers curled into claws and raked through loose dirt, a final – though largely unnecessary – confirmation I inhabited a physical being once more.

  At first, I did not try to get up. I lay still and listened, reasoning that if my eyes could offer me no information about my current location, perhaps my ears could. But there was only silence to compliment the dark. No sounds of any kind reached me where I lay. There was a perfect nothingness surrounding me. Just as there was a complete lack of light, there was also a complete lack of sound.

  With a shock, I realized it was actually too quiet. Even in perfect stillness, there should be normal pervasive noises of simple existence: the beat of a heart in one’s own chest; the pulse of blood rushing through the ears. Ordinarily they are tuned out since they interfere with the brain’s ability to concentrate on other things, but if I focused I could always find them. At least, I always could before. As hard as I listened now, I could hear absolutely nothing. I had no heartbeat and no pulse. I did not breathe. My body, inside and out, lay perfectly motionless.

  Memories came rushing back into me, and with them, understanding of my current condition. Andi had killed me. As much as I wanted to believe I was merely waking from a graphic and frightening dream, I had to accept that every moment of the event as I could now recall it had been all too real. Andi tore out my throat and drank my blood as I died. That had actually happened.

  I was … dead.

  And yet, not.

  I could feel dirt under my back and a slight chill on my skin. I was definitely corporeal. I was conscious and thinking. Yet I could not deny I was not completely alive, either. So what was I?

  My soul animated my own human shell as far as I could tell, but this time not freely. The life force that had once served as its anchor had dissipated. Now, only the oily black presence I had accepted from Andi when I drank her blood held my essence to my flesh. So, again, what was I?

  As an experiment, I forced myself to draw a breath; in through my nose and out through my mouth. I repeated this process a few times. I felt it enter me and heard it as I released it from my lungs, but there was no sense of relief or comfort from the activity. I discovered I could breathe if I wished, but it seemed pointless. I had no need for air. When I stopped, I felt no sense of oxygen deprivation, no panicked desire to inhale. My body seemed content to be dead.

  The next sensation I became aware of was smell. As I experimented with drawing air into my lungs, the foul odor of urine and feces assaulted me from somewhere close by. The smells origin was not a mystery for long. A feeling of wetness beneath me told me I had soiled myself. My bowels and bladder had emptied as the muscles of my body relaxed into death. A perfectly normal process. Although, normally one’s consciousness did not remain long enough to experience the phenomenon first hand. Under the circumstances, I was thoroughly disgusted and humiliated.

  At last I sat up. With nothing more to be gained from internal exploration, it was time to move. As I raised my head, the darkness remained impenetrable, still leaving me no hint of my location or situation. I lifted my hands and placed them over my face, then I blinked my eyes several times to be sure they were open, feeling for the movement of my eyelashes as they lowered and raised. As a final experiment, I pushed the palms of my hands against my closed eyes, causing pain and an internal burst of light as my optic nerves reacted to the physical pressure. Everything seemed to be working correctly. I relaxed slightly, knowing the darkness must be an exterior condition. I had not gone blind.

  Next, I tried to stand. Before I could rise up completely, the back of my head struck the ceiling of my dark prison and the jarring impact knocked me back to the ground. I was further rewarded with another brilliant flash of stars through my optic nerves. With a tentative hand, I gently rubbed my throbbing skull. I didn’t feel anything wet so I assumed that despite the knock I wasn’t bleeding. Assuming I even could bleed in my current state. I stood again, but this time more carefully. Though my body had died, I still apparently felt pain and I did not care for a second blow to the skull. Standing in an awkward, crouched position, I estimated the ceiling hung only about five feet above the floor of the room.

  I settled back down onto my knees, figuring it would be easier to move by crawling on the floor than to lumber forward crouched over like a bad actor in a cheap zombie movie. I shuffled slowly forward with my hands stretched out in front of me, anticipating that at any moment I was going to come into contact with a post or wall and not wanting to break my nose against it. Inch by inch, I carefully worked out the dimensions of my room. It appeared to be more or less a square, about twenty feet across on each side. As I touched each wall, I noticed that they, like the floor, consisted of hard packed earth. The ceiling, however, had felt like wood, held in place with at least three support beams running crosswise.

  It was during my slow, crawling exploration of my dirt prison that I made my next unpleasant discovery. While running my hands in front of me along the ground I began to recognize an odd lack of sensation. My left hand did not feel quite right. Literally. I felt the dirt under my palm, but my brain was only getting partial messages from the rest of my hand. Realizing that something was wrong, I paused. I thought for a moment I might have sustained some type of nerve damage in my left hand, so I sat back on my feet and cradled my left hand in my right. I attempted to massage the feeling back into the faulty limb and discovered two flat stumps where the middle and ring fingers of my left hand used to be. Two fingers were gone. And the remaining stubs were too even for the missing fingers to have been accidental in their removal. They had been cut off.

  I clasped my hands together and pressed them against my chest in frightened anticipation of a bolt of pain lancing up my arm from my injured hand. Nothing happened. As I knelt in the dark, I came to the confusing understanding that there was not going to be any pain. Two fingers were missing on one of my hands, but I did not feel the injury. Even while I was scrabbling along the ground and running the stumps of the missing digits through the dirt and across all types of rough surfaces there had been absolutely no pain. How was that possible
? Was it an old injury? Had it already healed over? How long had I been in this underground trap? Obviously, I still felt pain. That had been made all too clear when I cracked my skull on the ceiling a few minutes ago. So, why didn’t my hand hurt?

  And why would I be missing fingers, anyway?

  On the middle finger of my left hand, I had worn a plain gold ring. It was my grandfather’s wedding band that my mother had given to me when my grandfather died four years ago. Had Andi stolen my ring? Did she loot my body after she murdered me?

  Maybe. But that didn’t make a lot of sense either. Why cut the finger off to get the ring? It hadn’t been so tightly secured to my finger that she couldn’t have slipped it off fairly easily. So why cut off the finger? For that matter, why cut off two fingers?

  There were too many questions, and I had answers to none of them. And given my current situation, there were much more important things to focus on right now than a couple of missing body parts. I still had to get out of this hole.

  I was in some type of covered pit, and logically the only way out had to be some method of going up.

  Partially standing again, I worked my hands across the ceiling a second time, this time searching for any kind of break that might indicate a passage out. As my eight remaining fingers explored the wood above my head, I discovered a smooth metal plate, about two feet wide and two feet long. I could not find a handle, but I guessed the plate had to be a door of some type. I found nothing else in my exploration that even hinted at being an exit.

  I pushed tentatively with no result. Placing both hands on the hatch, I pushed with all the strength I had, which wasn’t much at the moment. Still it did not budge. Hunched over as I was I could not exert enough upward force to make a difference. I decided to try something a little different. I squatted down under the metal hatch and extended my arms straight up. I stood up until my hands pressed flat on the metal surface above me, then bracing my arms straight I pushed again, using the stronger muscles of my legs to do all the heavy lifting. The door moved. Excitement filled me and I pushed harder. The hatch began to rise slowly.

  “No!” Someone shouted and the door slammed down on me, forcing me again ignobly to the ground.

  “Stay there. You must not come out now.” It was Andi’s voice. “The moon is up and you are still too sensitive to the light. You have to wait a few more hours. Just rest and I will bring you out when it’s safe.”

  “Let me out!” I cried. Or at least, I tried to. My mouth moved around the words, but no sound came out. It took me a moment to understand my problem: with no air in my lungs there could be no sound. I concentrated and inhaled deeply to try once more. The breath had an unintended calming effect and I was surprised at the steadiness of my voice when I finally did speak.

  “Andi! Why am I down here?” I shouted up to her as I sat on the hard-packed, soil floor. I felt like a child being punished for some transgression I did not understand.

  “To protect you. Please, stay down there until I let you out. You trusted me enough to take my blood last night. Trust me now.”

  Last night? I had lain comatose in this dirt hole for twenty-four hours. That was one question answered. Up until then, I had not felt overly claustrophobic despite my situation, but with freedom now potentially so close, the thought of remaining in that damp pit, so much like a grave, any longer began to terrify me.

  “Please let me out, Andi,” I begged, reaching above my head to touch the metal door as if I could coax it open with a caress.

  “Oh, Gregory. You are not safe up here, yet. I have to leave for a while, but I will come back and I will take care of you. I promise. You’re safe where you are.”

  Safe? How could I be safe trapped in a hole? And what could threaten me outside that offered no danger to Andi? I desperately wanted my freedom, even if only for a moment. But Andi stood between me and that freedom. She asked me to trust her, but what had she done to earn that trust? My hands went to my throat as I remembered the manner of my murder. I felt the gaping wound still there and remembered the feel of her teeth cutting through my flesh. I saw her again in my mind as she had been, hunched over my helpless body, feeding on my blood. No. I had no more trust for Andi. I had to act to protect myself, and that meant getting myself as far away from her as I could manage.

  She said she was leaving. If I was going to escape I had a better chance of success while she was gone. But where was she going, and how long would she be away? I needed to wait long enough for her to get far enough away so she wouldn’t hear or see me leaving. But I did not want to wait so long that I ran into her on her way back if she was only going a short distance. I could only guess at my actual time frame and hope I was correct. I waited in silence, counting out fifteen minutes in my head. When I felt enough time had passed – or at least as much as I dared let go by – I called out.

  “Andi?”

  No response. I called again, louder this time. Still no answer. Hoping she had truly gone, and wasn’t just waiting to crash the trap door back on top of me if I raised it, I stood and pushed as hard as I could against the metal cover. It lifted and fell away with a crash as it struck the floor beside me. I froze at the sudden explosion of sound and did not move again for several seconds as I listened for Andi’s voice or the sound of her footsteps running back toward my location. I became aware of a dim, almost nonexistent light surrounding me, but coming from a place of total visual deprivation it seemed like a white nova of brilliance touched my eyes. I could see again.

  A quick look around told me I remained in the same mausoleum from the night before. My dark prison must have been concealed under the carpet I had lain on during my last moments of life. There were no sounds or signs of movement around me as I visually searched the crypt from where I crouched in my hole. I was alone. Andi had really gone. I climbed from the pit, naked and filthy, like some subterranean ghoul rising to terrorize the innocent. I saw my clothes where I had discarded them, but I left them where they lay. It seemed pointless to dress before I could wash the filth from my body. At least for the moment.

  The door of the tomb stood open like an invitation, beckoning me outside, so I climbed up the three stone steps that had tripped me on my way in, and walked out of that tomb. A few more paces placed me back in the open space of the graveyard. I paused to gaze up at the sky, savoring my regained freedom. The moon hid from me behind a thick patch of clouds as I stared heavenward and considered what to do next, but there was still plenty of light to see. I stood pondering my plight and wondering how I was going to get back home when the cloud cover broke slightly and unfiltered moonlight touched me. Pain exploded through me, sudden and fierce. I screamed with a shocked exhalation as every nerve in my body came awake at once and fire raced over my exposed skin. Tongues of blue flame licked over every part of me that the moonlight touched, searing and burning without mercy. My flesh blackened and charred, cracking and flaking from my body in a shower of dark ash.

  I fled for the protection of the dark mausoleum, leaping back through the open door and crashing to the floor inside at the same time the clouds reclaimed their hold on the deadly moon. Another few seconds of that light and I was sure my existence as a creature of the night would have been tragically brief. I dragged my burned tormented corpse back to the safety of the earthen pit. Lacking the strength to close the trap door or even properly lower myself back down to safety, I let myself fall to the cool soil five feet below. I landed hard, collapsing into a broken heap on the dirt floor. Without the energy to do any more, I curled into a ball, shivering in pain and misery.

  Moaning and shaking, I must have remained huddled in the dirt for hours, and I was still in the same position when Andi finally returned.

  “Oh, Gregory,” she cried as she looked down at my burned body. “I warned you. Why didn’t you listen?”

  In answer, I was able to generate only a soft whimper.

  She dropped down beside me and lifted me onto her shoulder. Pain flared through me anew, and
I felt strips of my burned skin tearing away where she touched me. Andi leapt straight up, carrying me to the main floor of the crypt effortlessly. I would have marveled at her strength, but agony and the fear of the moonlight finding me again overwhelmed conscious thought. I struggled against Andi’s grip, fighting to crawl back to the safety of my hole.

  “Gregory, relax,” she said, holding me in place. “The moon is down. No light here can harm you.”

  She repeated these words over and over until I finally heard them and ceased my struggling. When she felt me relax, she set me down and released me. I sat heavily, still too weak to stand.

  “Good. I brought something for you. I’m sorry we don’t have access to a human right now. Perhaps soon. For now, this will do.”

  Andi stepped outside, fumbled briefly with something I could not see, and returned leading a large, gray-haired, dog on a leash. A Great Dane, I noted peripherally; still more focused on my pain than on what was happening. She led the dog to me and pulled out a folding knife from her back pocket. With a flick of her wrist she snapped the knife open.

  “Your teeth are still too flat to bite cleanly. They will start to sharpen up in a week or so, but for now you need a little help.” She pushed the huge dog onto its side and casually stabbed it through the neck.

  Revulsion welled up in me when I realized what she intended for me to do. I looked at the poor animal lying helpless beneath her hands and I could not help sympathizing with its plight. It had not been so very long ago that I had been in that same position: pinned to the ground and bleeding to death at Andi’s hands. Blood poured from the puncture in the dog’s neck and the sharp coppery scent filled the air around me. My guts turned and clenched in me, crying out for the thick red fluid. I realized I was hungry, starving actually, and the blood flowing in front of me suddenly looked like ambrosia. Logical thought was quickly drowned out by more basic instincts as I gave in to a crushing need to eat. I scrambled to the dying creature to bury my face in its furry throat.