A World of Darkness
Michael Dissieux
translated by
Irene Ilse
Imprint
Original Title: GRAUES LAND
Copyright Complete Edition
© 2014 LUZIFER-Publishing, Bochum, Germany
All rights reserved. First Published by LUZIFER Publishing, 2011. Luzifer Logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of LUZIFER Publishing. The work - or parts of it - may not be reproduced without the publisher’s permission.
Cover: Timo Kümmel
Illustrations: Nenad Becarevic
Translation: Irene Ilse
Bibliographic information of the German National Library:
This publication is registered in the German National Library; detailed bibliographic information available under: http://dnb.d-nb.de
“The world has moved on.”
Stephen King
Daryll
I can see Daryll from afar. He is standing on his bike while rushing down the sandy path down to the house at a breakneck pace. His blond hair is streaming in the cold autumn wind and his coat is ballooning around him. The clatter of his bike breaks the morning silence while I’m waiting at the fence, wearing only my tattered bathrobe.
“Good morning, Mr. Jennings”, the boy shouts at me, breathing heavily. Then he, like every morning, brakes vehemently, leaving behind a dusty skid mark on the path.
“Hello Daryll. You like always are on time.”
He looks at me with his bright eyes and his cheeks being reddened and nods. He has my newspaper ready inside his hands.
“I hope that you bring better news this time”, I smile, handing the boy the obligatory dollar, which I give to him for his labour every morning.
Still out of breath Daryll shakes his head, looking at me seriously.
“I think it’s getting worse”, he says, while he takes the bill and pockets it carelessly. “There are reports about these cities in Europe. I can’t remember their names. But if I’m right, our country is in acute danger, too.”
He looks at me and something in his gaze frightens me. Perhaps it’s the fact that I’d never lived to see the boy so earnest before. Or perhaps it’s the fear I recognize inside his eyes.
“You shouldn’t take everything you read in the newspaper at face value”, I try to calm Daryll down, yet feeling how wrong these words sound even to myself.
“I hope you’re right, Mr. Jennings”, the boy whispers, turning-over his bike and looking back at me over his shoulder. “I got to get ahead. It looks like rain and I want to be home before it starts.”
“Thanks”, I answer, waving him goodbye with the newspaper.
Daryll gives me a short nod, at which our eyes meet longer than they used to meet at other days. He then rides his red bike over the sandy path back towards the street, in order to do so having to lean forward powerfully.
While the chattering of the mudguards is gradually fading away and the autumn silence is returning to the hillside, I ponder about the boy’s frightful gaze. It’s the same fear that I myself had been feeling for days alike a second, cold skin onto my body. Something is telling me that this morning I had seen Daryll with his shiny red bike for the last time, but I block out this thought as fast as it had occurred out of the quagmire of my thoughts.
While I slowly return to the house, in doing so feeling the damp grass running over my ankles, I read anther ominous headline.
Murphy
I
I don’t know if one might be able to dream the future. But I believe I have being doing so all of my life.
Even when I had been a little boy, I at night had woke up crying for the ghastly image of a dumb and empty world, whose ashes were eclipsing the skies had been haunting me.
It had just been my mother’s consoling words and her familiar, warm scent that had let the horrible scene fade away from my mind, making it creep into the darkest corner of my naïve mind, just to arise again in some other night. Being cradled inside my mother’s arms not only the distortions of this dumb, degenerated world but also the creatures, which were hiding in the darkness, disappeared.
I miss my mother a lot. Even now, being an old man of nearly seventy, I often remember this unique woman. When I dream of them today, there’s nobody, whose body heat was able to comfort me.
Until two years ago Sarah had done this job that my mother had used to do before her. We have been married for forty two years now. When she got to know me it had already been with me having my horrible dreams. And yet, or maybe even because of them, our marriage has lasted that long. Looking back now, I believe without my Sarah I would have lost my mind long time before.
Any night that I woke up with a hoarse cry on my trembling lips, my body shaking, my forehead damp with sweat and having wet my bed, which – as I have to confess ashamedly – during the last years had occurred more and more often, she soothed me with the same warm voice and the same tender touches that my mother had used to before her.
Not minding the fetid that was arising from my sheets, she had been running the wet hair out of my forehead and cradling me in her arms. We often kept lying in bed in that calm way, one can only achieve in more than forty years of marriage, until the break of dawn; without saying a word, just looking after each other and waiting for the dim morning to take the cruel nightmares away with it.
I never told Sarah what I was dreaming about; although I couldn’t have longed for something more eagerly than having someone, who would dive into the black swampy pond that was inside my sub consciousness with me. But I hadn’t been able to do it. Sometimes I think something prevented me from revealing my nightmares. Perhaps it was even them, who gave me that mental anathema to open myself even to people I adore. They – these horrible creatures, who are creeping trough the darkness of this depopulated dream world and who are torturing me at night.
I never dared to think about this aspect, because such a confused and eerie line of thought would have chiselled the last brains out of me.
Today I think differently about it.
Meanwhile I am completely committed to the thought that what prevents me from telling about my nightmares is not through a fault of my own.
Some time I thought that what was trying to protect me against the mock of my fellow men was some kind of godly shelter. We all know how cruel people can be if they get a chance to look behind their counterpart’s curtain. And what people are best in is ripping this curtain apart and digging out the fears and phobias that should have stayed hidden behind it. But if it had been some god that had been trying to protect me, why did he allow my dreams to haunt me again and again? Didn’t they preach at church that god was almighty? Didn’t he have the power to ban these horrible monsters from my dreams and to destroy this grey world inside my head?
I soon dismissed the thought of a godly protection. I never have been a very religious man. But reflecting on heavenly help and drawing the conclusion that it didn’t exist anyhow surely would dispossess me of my last bit of biblical believe. I quickly came to the conviction that I had been barred by something outside of myself. I just wasn’t able to talk about the beings out of my dreams. Even the slightest attempt to do so caused me such incredible inner fears that I broke into a sweat and began to tremble. And the only way such a barbarous fear could have come over me was through a curse of the creatures, which were living in the dark corners of my mind.
All I ever could tell Sarah was that I was dreaming of a terrible place, where there were no people. I couldn’t say anything further – and I still don’t know if Sarah had ever believed in what I told her.
But they never allowed anything further.
I don’t tell Sarah about my dreams nowadays. Because
she had used to stand patiently to me and my peculiarities for more than forty years, I think she now – in the last time of her life – deserves some ease of my psychoses. I therefore since more than two years cope alone with my dreams. Up till now I get along with them. Asides some extreme nightly fits, I until now used to be proud of being able to control my traumatic thoughts all by myself.
But since a few days everything is different.
While I’m thinking about the incidents that happened last week I automatically prepare Sarah’s dinner – warm porridge, a mashed banana and a pot of tea. The larder doesn’t contain many things above to that anymore.
Once ago, in the times when Sarah and me still had filled our little house on the hill with laughter and any kind of silly jokes, the evening tea had belonged to our daily routine. When we had built the house with its low-ceilinged rooms and its rustic clinker bricks in the first time of our marriage it had been Sarah, who desired an open fireplace in the living room; and as I had been a young Romeo in love. I naturally had anticipated her every wish.
So in all those years we had spent nearly every evening sitting in the small, rugged wicker chairs in front of the crackling fire. While drinking our tea and looking at each other over the rim of our teacup, in doing so not able to bear down a smile, the sizzling and crackling noise of the logs in the fireplace played us their own melancholic symphony.
Having some low music playing in the background we only sat there and talked about the day that had gone by. To feel my Sarah next to me, to hear her calm voice and to watch her talking, in doing so once in a while smiling and her white teeth flashing, was all a lucky man needed.
I climb up the stairs to the bedroom. The dishes on the tray chatter and I stand still.
The omnipresent silence again hits me hard. It seems as if I had wrapped myself in a deeply black coat that kept every sound of the world away from me.
Balancing the tray on one hand, my eyes browse the half-light that fills the corridor. There are just some candles standing at the small closet, onto which we before had carelessly used to throw our keys and letters. My shadow on the wall looks like it had been thrown by a meagre giant. When the silence had started, the house had resembled me like a dull grave.
Where once the familiar lamps had been shining and the also familiar shadows had been packing into the corners, now hide hordes of invisible beings that wear coats, which can’t be penetrated by the light of some isolated candles. Sometimes I imagine hearing the tripping sound of their steps in the darkness. Then I get the feeling as if they were trying to get near to me, but in doing so never leaving the protective shadows, so that I could catch a glimpse on their abnormal bodies.
I’m aware of the fact that all this is pure fancy. It seems as if I was just unable to bear old age in combination with darkness and sudden silence. I hardly succeed in abandoning the nightmarish feeling that haunts me every single evening when I have to light the candles.
By day the rooms are not much brighter. The dreary grey light that falls in through the windows seems even more distressing to me than the flicker of the candles, which remind me at least partly of the evenings in front of the fireplace.
But what is worst of all is the silence.
Apart of an occasional moaning of the woodwork and a deep groaning of the cellar’s fundament the world seems to have been covered by a dense cloth out of silence.
With my free hand I rub my eyes and feel a deep tiredness behind my lids. My fingers tremble. For a moment I stare at them and then I clench my fist and look upstairs, where a single kerosene lamp, which is standing on the baluster, is throwing its soft light onto the highest stairs. With a sigh I clumsily climb the rest of the ancient timber stair.
The creaking of the middle step like every evening resembles me like the best noise that could ever be found in this world. Even the tired scraping of my feet inside my slippers is an acceptable change to the omnipresent silence.
I eagerly suck up everything, which makes me think of a normal world. But there isn’t much of normality left to this world. Not much to keep me upright. In a book of an American author, which I had read years before, I had found the words: “The world has moved on.”
I often have to think of this sentence that even then had affected me to the core. It might sound crazy, but I in private choose this sentence to be my catch-line for the last days gone by.
If I’d still get my newspaper this sentence by Mister Steven King would surely be its bold front-page story; below this you’d find a photograph of a black, silent and empty world, whose sky being covered by ash clouds.
But I don’t get a newspaper anymore. Young Daryll, who, with his hair streaming around him, had used to make the stony way through the hillside on his red bike to deliver his newspapers in each of the far-flung houses had not come here for more than a week. I wonder if the boy is still alive. And his brightly red bike, for which he had been saving his money for such a long time – is it standing in the garage of his parent’s house? Or is it lying on some street or in one of the newly grown ditches?
I really miss the boy.
Chatting with him whenever he had brought me the newspaper all the way through the front garden up to my door even on rainy days had done me good. His youth often had made me forget about my old age. But what I miss even more is the newspaper. At the same time we had lost the newspaper we also had lost electricity. But I don’t dare to actuate the electric generator in the shed. To be honest, I don’t even believe that it would still work after it had been corroding neglected behind shelves and boxes for years.
Sarah and I had never thought so far. We had had everything we needed to be happy, enjoying the loneliness of our home and the pleasures of modern civilisation and would never have wasted a thought on the possibility that everything could change; that the world keeps turning, like Mister King had said so aptly many years ago.
As I reach the last step I pause for some seconds to rest my mistreated bones. Then I take the kerosene lamp off the baluster into my free hand and walk down the corridor towards the bedroom.
The shadows shy at me respectfully. The lamplight that is dimmed by a glass cylinder smoothly lightens the old wallpapers, whose floral design had been modern about forty years ago. There is so much that reminds me of Sarah. Some days the pain aches like fire. I then try to avoid setting my eyes on her collection of figurines or the framed photos on top of the mantelpiece that try to tell me stories of times gone by.
In front of the bedroom door I stand still and look up to the dark ceiling. As I enter Sarah’s room I desperately pray to god, even if he might not exist at all. As I mentioned before, I never had been a religious man. I always accepted God and the church as something, which belonged to my next surroundings – maybe like the big lawn behind the house that extends to the wood’s shadows or old Murphy’s battered general store, where Sarah and I had used to do our shopping and after that to have a cup of tea with Murphy.
All these things had simply been part of my life. So had been God and his preachers. But he had never been special to me. I had never been able to relate to the deep sensations that other people had towards him. I can’t tell why I address to him today of all days.
A man with my kind of religious faith normally should be first to claim that God had abandoned his own creation. I should typically accuse him of letting mankind down. And I would have probably even have done that loudly, wouldn’t it have been for Sarah lying behind the door.
She’s all that is left to me.
God took everything from me: The sounds and smells of the world, which I had used to know for seventy years. He took any kind of light and cosy warmth from me. And not least he took off any hope that I could live to see my future. Sarah is all he left me, even if she is not the person she once had used to be.
The words I address to God are begging. I just wish that when I enter the room and sit down beside her I might be able to feel her breathing and to see her chest faintly lifting a
nd lowering. I don’t say any prayers and don’t ask any questions about the reason of this all – I only wish not to be left all alone in this world. If God isn’t dead he will make my wish come true.
As I push the door open with my hip stale air hits my lungs. I feel a dry heat onto my face and smell the sourly aroma of sweat and urine.
The door gently squeaks in its hinges; another sound reminding me of better days. It had been Sarah, who always had wanted me to do something against this nerve-racking squeak. And I had used to nod …and to forget about it.
Through a gap in the closed wooden window shutters I can see a rest of dark grey daylight, as if a brackish mass was trying to enter the room through the openings. On a table in the corner a single candle is burning. As I stir up the calm air in the room its flame begins to dance hectically.
Suddenly the rigid shadows on the walls come to a desperate life. The old oak wardrobe, which we had bought only a few days after our wedding, the small makeup table, at which Sarah had still been making herself up a few years before or the massive bedposts, which tower the wall like silent guards and accommodate the dearest thing in life I ever had.
I deposit the kerosene lamp next to the candle and look at the bed. From somewhere outside a drawn-out howl breaks into the room. I throw a short glance onto the dark gap between the wooden shutters and then look back to the bed. All I can recognize is the thick duvet, over whose patterns scamper the shadows of the candle and of the lamp. As I get closer I see that the duvet is slightly lifting and lowering. I exhale in relief and only then notice that I had been holding in my breath ever since I had entered the room. I throw a short glance up to the ceiling, address an equally short and simple “Thank you“, to the being, which commonly is referred to as God. As I sit down beside Sarah the springs of the old bed are squeaking low. I put the tray onto my knees and, while hesitatingly feeling around for Sarah’s pale face, hold on to it with one hand.
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