A World of Darkness Read online

  I stopped abruptly. For days the only things that had moved in this world had been my reflection in the mirror and Sarah breathing slowly. Some days even the trees and bushes resembled me to be paralyzed. The meadow behind the fence was covered by damp fog that resembled me like cotton. I was no longer able to recognize even the edge of the wood.

  At first I couldn’t believe my eyes. I blinked and in my thoughts scolded me an old fool, who began to see ghosts. But how hard I blinked my eyes and in the end even rubbed my face with the sleeve of my bath robe: the appearance wasn’t mere illusion. In the middle of the meadow, vailed by a grey haze was standing a brown, erected creature. At first sight I had thought the being’s gaunt body to be covered with fur, but the longer I looked at it, the more certain I became that the creature was completely naked. Its skin was brown and littered with black spots, like the being’s flesh had been pressed firmly together and then it had been skinned. The form of its crown on the distance reminded me of a dog’s skull. Its copped ears were standing out like stings; its fang was slightly opened. I could see the being’s condensing breath melting with the fog. Its eyes that were set on me resembled me at a carnivore’s yellow eyes.

  We looked at each other.

  I wasn’t able to move. In these few seconds time seemed to stand still.

  My brains were floating easily and I automatically thought of the eerie howl I had heard in some nights. One night I had thought I had heard some noise at the French window. It had been somewhat like clumsy steps and claws scraping on wood. But they had been over so soon that I went back to sleep, being sure to have only been in the fangs of one of my nightmares. Could these noises come from this ghastly being?

  When the giant creature stared at me across the fence, its breath coming in fits as a grey exhalation from its fangs, and I suddenly could recognize sharp claws where there should have been fingers, I knew that I hadn’t been just dreaming that night. I can’t tell how long we had been standing there in the morning cold, for that moment time didn’t seem to mean a thing. Somewhere down the road the being uttered an angry snort. A flood of white clouds rose from its nostrils. Then it shook its head, so that I even from the distance could see tiny drops of water spreading. The haze began to move like it was a theatre curtain. In the end the being turned away, holding its skull aslope as if listening to something, and with large steps ran towards the edge of the wood. Even before the creature had reached the first trees it was swallowed by the dreary grey of the haze.

  I had been standing there for quite a while, holding the tin buckets in my hands and staring into the direction towards the being had disappeared. But the day had then had regained its old, ghastly silence, the surrounding stretching motionless in front of my eyes. Only the haze was lazily moving above the large meadow.

  I don’t know why I had thought of the Shoggothen when I first stood vis-à-vis of that blasphemous being.

  Ever since my childhood H.P. Lovecraft had been my favourite writer. And this creature on the meadow didn’t have anything in common with the man-made protoplasm, which Lovecraft had described in his Cthulhu legend as a creation of the “Great Forefathers”. According to the legend the Shoggothen were able to create temporary extremities out of their tissue, what made them effective tools for the “Forefathers”. This being on the meadow didn’t seem like stupid protoplasm, but rather like a spawn out of hell that had come over earth. I since that day nevertheless immediately think of Lovecraft’s Shoggothen when I hear the terrifying nightly howl from the wood.

  As I reach the Pick-up and try to insert the key into the lock I recognize how badly my hands are shaking. To open the door with a creaking noise takes me several attempts. Stale air that reeks of tobacco hits me from out of the cab.

  I put my gun onto the passenger’s seat, which whenever the two of us had had a ride to Murphy’s shop, had always been Sarah’s seat. Since she had become ill nobody had ever sat there. The seat is some kind of a holy thing to me, like is the rusted car, just because it had been our car.

  The moment I want to get into the car I get an idea, which is so simple but yet lets me shout out inwardly. I as fast as my old age admits to me run through the waving grass back towards the back door.

  When I enter the kitchen my eyes need some seconds to get used to the darkness inside the house. Then I search the drawers of the old cupboard without admitting to me that my movements become more and more agitated and nervous. I don’t like the thought of being here in this dark room and not having a weapon and a candle.

  In the few days, in which the world has moved on I had learned that the creatures are only howling by night. From that I draw the conclusion that the beings, if there should be more than one of them, by day withdraw to the woods – or to other dark and quiet places.

  When I had seen the creature on the meadow the daybreak hadn’t been finished yet. This had probably been the reason why it had disappeared so fast into the protective wood. Who knows whether I would be still alive if this being had espied me at night.

  I finally find what I have been looking for.

  When my fingers close around the cold handle of the torch I instantly feel better. I check its functions and when a bright cone of light cuts the twilight of the kitchen grasp of relief. Although the day has already begun I have no idea about what the world beyond the fence is like.

  Even if I would never allow me this thought I am sure that the life in the hillside, as I had known it before, has turned into a terrible nightmare. I can’t say if this depends on the horrible news I had seen at TV before everything had fallen apart. This is another thing I refuse to think about.

  Times have changed, that much is true, and all that counts is to survive every single day without in doing so going mad.

  Armed witch the torch I step out onto the porch and pause there. It’s an instinct that I had acquired in the last days. I glance throughout the run to seed garden, through the tree tops, to the shed and over the edge of the well; that is to say everywhere, where might hide danger. After that I regard the large field behind the fence, but the meadow is still, its grass looking dried. There’s not a single stem moving in the cool morning breeze.

  As I go back to the car the smell of damp grass and steaming soil comes to my nose. While I start the engine and its rusty rattle breaks the silence of the world, I look back to the house. My eyes move up the façade out of decayed, colourless planks until they reach our bedroom window.

  Leaving her alone goes against me. Even to walk only to the well to fetch some water resembles me to take ages, in which I have to let her alone inside her quiet room.

  By car covering the distance to Murphy’s shop takes fairly fifteen minutes. That means that if I want to do all my shopping and to ask after Murphy I won’t be back before at least one hour.

  “Pay attention to her”, I whisper, in doing so gazing at the grey sky. I don’t know whether I really address these words to God, but he seems to be the only one, whom I still can ask for help.

  Throwing a last glance onto the wooden shatters of the bedroom window I go into reverse, what brings about a protesting creak inside the gearing mechanism, and drive the car over the narrow, paved path to the front of the house. With a bad feeling inside my stomach I let the Pick-up roll down the sandy path towards the street. The metal moans beneath me and to prevent the car from breaking away I have to keep hold of the stirring wheel with both of my hands.

  As I reach the asphalt road, I browse to all sides. But somehow I know that I’m alone on the road. While I’m driving down the hill towards Murphy’s hut, my right hand automatically sets onto the cold barrel of the gun.

  III

  As the street’s decayed, grey belt is rushing me by I get the absurd feeling that I am venturing into a surreal world. I had known our hillside surrounding for more than forty years now. Each tree and every bump in the street up till now had been an essential part of my life. But this morning, which is the first that I leave my house since it all
had begun, the world resembles to be a strange, horrible painting; as if God had been trying to mock his own creation.

  The heavy clouds admit only little daylight to leak through them. You can only guess the sun, which a pale shadow behind grey mist gives the sky an unhealthy glow. Deep shadows are covering the land, turning the woods and fields into a ghastly work of art. In the hollows of the black fields hangs a pale haze that resembles long forgotten lakes.

  Nothing is like it had been.

  The land to me seems strange, as if there had grown a gap, showing off a terrible, empty world. Spots and trees that used to remember me of my time with Sarah suddenly look menacing. The air that used to smell off grass and soil is now austerely stinking of decay, the forests are black.

  While the land, which resembles a surreal nightmare, is passing me by my hand searches its way to the ancient radio that had used to accompany Sarah and me through many full moon nights, in which we had stopped at the roadside, just enjoying the glory of the silent and clear moonlit night. It might sound old fashioned, but to us lovers those moments had been heaven on earth.

  After the button had clicked loudly there is just a random noise. What had I hoped for?

  My fingers turn the channel search, but I know that I won’t even receive the small radio station in Devon. I nevertheless keep turning the button for a while, in which the random noise alternates to high-pitched whistles. There is no music, nor are there some silly jokes of the kind, which had never made me laugh but that I suddenly long for now. No news to obsess my nightmares.

  As I turn off the radio one hears only the rusty squeaking of the driver’s cab and the noise of little stones that are beating against the bottom of the Pick-up. The lazy hum of the old machine suddenly resembles me to be the most beautiful sound throughout the entire world – it is one of the few things from the olden times, which survived.

  To clear my thoughts I shake my head. The good old times … Wherefrom should an old man living offside each larger city know if the good old times are gone? Who at all had told him that they were gone? But the most important and at the same time most frightening question, which like a flashy neon light shines up inside my head, is: what will come in the aftermath of the good old times? What might be better than “good”?

  The aftermath of good is bad, I tell myself and at the same time feel a dark haze, which is trying to eliminate any upcoming despair, getting over my thoughts.

  With blank eyes I stare out into the weird world beyond the windshield, which is greasy with flies and dirt, and avoid looking over to the trees or to the fields. I don’t want to be reminded of the fact that I perhaps never would be able to get the familiar sight of my home or feel secure when making my way to Murphy’s shop. But perhaps I am only afraid of meeting another Shoggothen. My eyes are fixed onto the street that resembles me like an orphaned and for a long time unused grey belt. When might the last car before mine have made that route? I try to remember if during the last days I had heard the sound of an engine or of rumbling wheels.

  But all that I can find in my memory is the silence that had become Sarah’s and my permanent companion. No car. No red bike carrying little Darryl up the hill, so that he with an exhausted smile could hand me my newspaper. His smile had used to become a bit wider whenever I had offered him one or another dollar as a tip.

  The world has moved on.

  But to which direction did it turn?

  I feel sleepy, without music and the diversification of nature, which I had used to enjoy. I don’t want to see what’s passing like a horrible farce in front of the windows of my car.

  As my hand again tries to make its inevitable way to the radio button, I think back to the evening some days before, at which I had looked into the enraged and exhausted face of the young female TV news anchor …

  I had hurried up to wash Sarah and dress her up for the night. I felt lousy against her, because she now was lying much earlier in her dark room than she had used to – if she noticed it at all. But I wanted to get my daily work done soon, so that I could watch the news at TV. I didn’t know why I was eager to do so, but the news of the last days had excited even an old fool like me. Up till now I had always been living in the assumption that all the bad things one could see in the evening news confined on the rest of the world. I had never admitted the thought that one day the mephitic breath of a world going to the dogs would slowly, but inevitably creep up the hills and through the forests and soak our thoughts with fear.

  But that was exactly what had happened.

  It has been for around a week now that the young, female news anchor, whom I had always in secret referred to as charming and pretty, had reported with an earnest expression on her face on terrible assaults in Europe. She with a voice that had lost all of the eroticism, which I had used to like at it, had narrated about a so far unknown Arabic terrorist group having committed assaults with nuclear and bacterial weapons in different European cities.

  That evening I hadn’t been able to make much from this news, because they nearly were part and parcel of the news from the world beyond our hills. But it had been the tremulous voice of the pretty young woman and her gaze, which resembled the intimidated gaze of a child that had inevitably attracted me to the TV. I had felt like being caught inside a nightmare one, in spite of screaming out awfully, wasn’t able to escape.

  She had been alluding to a nearly unthinkable number of dead persons. But it was not until she with an upset voice reported that the cities of Montpellier and Enscheda didn’t exist anymore that let the enormous dimension of these assaults soak into my mind. Of course I remembered the assaults of Nine-Eleven or Oklahoma City. But the pictures of destruction that only hardly could make their way into my head and that had been taken with an unsteady camera let these crimes look like simple shopliftings. The focus of the camera panned over smoking weld puddles and collapsed houses, whose smouldering girders were poking into the sky like the demolished teeth of a giant. Streets had changed into blazing fields. Everywhere in this surreal surrounding one could see burned trees that resembled black skeletons, which could have easily served as the setting of a horror film. Because there no longer were streets and highways there were a lot of helicopters swarming across the black sky.

  Through this chaos and destruction were rushing people in grimy banana suits, in doing so looking helpless like tiny insects. On the pictures it seemed to be night, but according to the time that showed below them they had been taken in the early afternoon. On the left upper edge of the display shone forth the logo “Montpellier”, which from now on would replace the atrocities of “Ground Zero”.

  Then the TV displayed pictures of Enscheda that had as well been taken around midday, although they also looked like night had already fallen over a broken and smouldering environment. The camera had difficulties to break away the dense haze out of ashes and grime. But then I already had turned around, with my head buried inside my hands, trying to stop the thoughts that were raging through my mind.

  Although I already some days before had heard about postings on the internet and warnings by an Arabic terrorist group against the western world in the evening news and on the car radio my feelings about the horror of daily life had – like it probably is with the most people of our time – been reduced to a minimum. In the last years just too many terrible things had happened.

  My eyes had seen too much of blood, my ears had heard too many cries of dying persons – adults and children.

  There had been Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma bomber, who in 1995 had tried to blow up the „Alfred P. Murrah Building” in Oklahoma City and by doing so had killed mostly kids. Or the gas attack on the underground of Tokyo, which had also happened in 1995. And of course “Nine-Eleven”, how the biggest terror attack in history today is called so frankly.

  All these incidents and news had deadened us and perhaps let us even die inwardly without even getting aware of it. Had it then been so astonishing that all these threats from the r
adical Eastern world against the West hadn’t been able to provoke the same horror in us like it probably had twenty years ago? One listened to the speaker’s fierce voices, but their words didn’t make their way into the depths of our vulnerable mind but shipwrecked at the bastion out of our ignorance.

  But that last evening, at which I had been watching the news on TV, something had changed. The horrible pictures from France and the Netherlands had fanned a nameless and to date unknown flame of archaic fear inside of me. I sat there in my old, battered favourite armchair, whose old fashioned cover had been haggled for many years and for first time was thinking about what dying would be like. I was thinking about the world as I had known it coming to its end. And it also had been that evening that I first saw this damned sentence from that damned book before my eyes, shining like bathed into the dazzling light of an illuminated advertising:

  “… The world has moved on …”

  The reports from Europe had been followed by the usual hectically summoned meetings of heads of state and the statements of most different people, who were trying to outmatch each other in importance and whose gazes were only boosting my fear. For all of them just described the horrors one had found in two former cities that had already been recorded by a trembling camera before. It was a helpless description of the obvious. Even their trained brains weren’t able to do more.

  The only thing I still remember was the American president delivering a speech, his features looking slim and exhausted. Instead of retaining his composure I could recover that in his eyes there was a deeply felt fear. When you got as old as I am, you without having any problem are able to recognize see man’s emotions inside his eyes.