Going Down

I have decided to begin by republishing a story which was first given to me by a young man after entering it in a public reading at his university, a reading I had the privilege of attending. More than the content of the story, what interested me was the way he read it. He started reading normally, but as the story progressed begun to take on a level of actual fear, displaying emotion that called to mind the fear of a child who has lost their family, wide eyed and confused. He returned to normal following his speech, but he had gained my attention and I asked him for a copy of the speech. I republish it now, exactly as it was given to me by an eighteen year old boy whose name I never asked.

My room was soft and warm in the night time air. It was quiet, with the rain that had for most of the day held the world hostage gone, leaving a wet world in its wake. Lying on my bed, I found myself missing it, the subtle yet unpredictable pitter patter of the rain on the tin roof outside my window, a constant melody of discord which so often lulled me to sleep.

With its absence, the silence was almost oppressive; all the more noticeable since the rain had so recently stopped, filling my ears with the absence of sound. To distract myself from my thoughts, I lifted my water bottle for a drink. To my annoyance, the bottle was empty, so I lifted myself from my bed, and walked from my room. There was a sink in the bathroom opposite my room, but out of habit I walked to the stairs, to refill the bottle in the kitchen.  I reasoned that I might as well have a snack while I was there, and I begun to wander down the stairs. The stair below my foot creaked loudly, and I reached out to the banister, taking my weight from the stairs so as to stop my parents waking up.

From the stairs, I could see down the stairs into the darkness below me. The bottom floor of my home became dark and lifeless when my family abandoned it for their beds each night, and from the light at the top of the stairs I could not see into the almost oppressive dark that lay below. I paused again, this time without regard for my parents slumber. It was the darkness that held me back, that black wall before me stopping me in the light. I shook my head, to try and tell myself that I was being childish, and pressed on down the stairs. I stepped down the last four steps, releasing the banister and being rewarded with loud creeks from the stairs which I would have laughed at in the day, but tonight sent a small wave of fear to my heart. I was standing in the darkness, surrounded by the suddenly unfamiliar shadows of my daytime home. The silence which had in my room seemed oppressive was almost tangible, physically pressing down on me in the darkened world. Worse than the silence were the smallest sounds, the creeks and tweets of the world, which the silence amplified and concealed, hiding their source even as they amplified them to set my heart on edge, thumping harder as I stood in that first room, stopping as my eyes begun to adjust to the dark.

I shook my head again, believing even less that I possessed the confidence to back up the action, as I wandered into the living room, which separated me from the kitchen. The floor here was wooden, not carpet like the room before me, and my steps were accompanied by dull thuds and the occasional creek of wood as I crossed the cold floor. I was afraid, then. It would be pointless to deny it, no matter how much I would like to. The room was malevolent in the dark, and as surely as the ear listens harder in silence, my eyes strained to see shapes my mind whispered must be there. I was afraid of the things I couldn’t see, the shadows that stretched all the further without lights to bind them to shape and form. Shadows, my mind whispered, that watched me walk in the dark, without eyes or minds but, it told me, still watched. I walked faster, passing the dark shapes of a couch with a familiar shape made foreign by the night and a bookcase that concealed dangers in the dark. I turned around the corner and stepped into the kitchen, where I turned on the night.

With the return of light, reason came flooding back, I smiled, even though I knew nobody could see me, and wandered over to the sink to fill my bottle. With my drink filled with water, I walked to the fridge, and got out a tub of strawberries, opening it and eating one slowly, stopping in the light for longer than I have admitted to publicly. I looked through the door, back into the darkness. The living room beyond was darker, my eyes adjusted to the light of the room, and now as I looked the thought of leaving the light of the kitchen, going back into the dark terrified me for reason I would have trouble explaining, even now. Perhaps it was the way that the shadows lengthened in the light of the door, longer than I could remember seeing them before. Perhaps it was the way that the light shifted the colours of the things I could see, casting them into half darkness and making my home seem almost ethereal in the dark. Or perhaps, as I now believe, it is because I was starting to believe that voice at the back of my mind that told me that deep in the shadows, something was still watching me in the oppressive silence.

I stepped from the kitchen and switched the light off, immediately regretting that I had not switched on the light in the living room the first time I had walked through the room, as I was once again blind in the dark. This time, though, the silence was louder in my ears, ringing loudly in my ears. An in the ringing, I heard noises, whispers and cries, coming from within the ringing. Maybe I imagined it, my fear overriding that which I actually heard, but that night, alone in the darkness, I knew that deep within those shadows which even the kitchens brief light could not dispel, I was mocked by the darkness. I pressed on through the dark, each step making a noise that pushed back the silence, but left me scared of what laughed in the moments I could not hear the quiet. I was almost running, but I remember the room seeming longer, stretching into the dark. I did not look but I knew that behind me, something was moving. I imagined faceless things, stretched in the dark places, watching me try to escape them and whispering their taunts into the silence that oppressed me from all sides. I reached the door, and stepped through onto the carpet before the stairs.

It was then that I ran, giving up my calm appearance and running in terror up the stairs. Looking back even now, I tell myself that there was only silence in the darkness behind me, only shadows and dust as I ran up the stairs to the safety of my room. I tell myself that I heard nothing move onto the carpet behind me, and that the stairs I ran up did not grow longer with every step; that if I had stopped then and there I would have been safe in the darkness that night. But it is easier to whisper lies than believe them, and I have never been a convincing enough liar to fool my heart and the truths it holds.

I slept with the light on that night.

 As he told me in the only conversation we have ever had, the author told me that this was a recollection of one night when he was nine, and as the story suggested, he had tried very hard to tell himself that nothing had happened that night. Take from this story what you will, but consider that even after nine years of convincing himself that it was a trick of his youthful mind, it still brought fear to his heart to remember this short walk through the night, so many years before.