C. M. Rosens

October 19th – Hugh Walpole – ‘The Tarn’ (1936) – Read it here. The challenge list is here.

I really enjoyed the inevitability of this one. From the first, you could see where the hatred was going, and then the descent as it spiralled into the dark, watery oblivion. I really enjoy stories about how people become consumed by their worst selves, I find these fascinating and chilling.

For this one, I thought about the themes of darkness, oblivion, inevitability, and being consumed by your negative emotions, your shadow side, if you will. I thought I’d share a piece from Pagham-on-Sea, set in the council estate on the edge of the town.

This is maybe a companion piece to The Sound of Darkness.

A Dark Place of One’s Own

I don’t know what I want anymore, was what Kayleigh wished she had said, instead of: I don’t want to be with you anymore. But even if she’d said the first, Lou would have heard the second. The only thing Kayleigh didn’t want was loneliness, but with Lou’s departure, that insidious companion had moved in, uninvited.

I don’t think we can stay friends, Lou said. I think I need time on my own. 

Except Lou was never alone; Lou was a bright light in a gloomy room, a warming attractive glow, a beating heart brimming with desires and wishes and dreams.

Kayleigh was a cold stove, an uninviting grotto of silence and echoes and jealously kept secrets. Open her up, and it was all disappointingly small and hard and hollow. Lou’s light never filled those places of her with anything. It only showed her how dark her shadows were.

The first time Kayleigh saw the face in the ‘dark place’ was like stepping down onto a stair that wasn’t there – the awful heart-lurch stomach-flip of glancing into the garden and seeing something staring back that shouldn’t be there. Kayleigh had stopped, frozen, her hand on the light switch. 

The features weren’t clear, but it looked exactly like a face. Not a human face. Not an animal. Something else. Something that shifted as she stared at it, something made up of shadow and layers of absent light, something that formed a mouth and two eyes that didn’t see so much as suck, pulling her in. Then a breeze caught the buddleia, and the face dissipated in the brightening of that little corner, and it didn’t come back for a while.

But it had seen her, and she had seen it, and Kayleigh started to come into the kitchen without the light on in a perverse attempt to recreate that moment, just to feel something. 

The problem was that she got used to it.

The apparition, if that was right word, was the same every time – no body, not that she could ever see. An illusion, a phenomenon. A phantom. Some trick of her eyes or reflection from the glass creating a face in the dark. 

It never moved. She never saw it anywhere else. Only in the dark place beyond her kitchen window. And since she saw it, she stopped feeling so alone.

Walking home with Lou, they had always kept to the lit streets. Lou didn’t look into the darkened gardens. These were few and far between on the estate, anyway – everyone had some kind of lights at the front and back of their houses, every little side alley was lit with fairy lights or solar lamps, and the kids all had those glow-things on the wheels of their bicycles. Teens wore Hi-Viz and glow-in-the-dark clothes like it was a uniform, tweens plastered on UV makeup like they were going to raves, just to hang out under streetlights where it wouldn’t even show up. 

One or two still disappeared. 

Kayleigh walked past their ‘missing’ posters on her way to her car when she couldn’t find a place to park on her street. Rumours flew – they had walked into a dark place for a dare, and hadn’t come out. 

Kayleigh knew about the dark places on the estate. She had lived there for five years, and couldn’t remember anyone telling her about them. Perhaps nobody had. It didn’t matter. Like everyone else, Kayleigh just knew. Being told about it would make it too real, too weird, and then she would have avoided the bearer of this unhinged bollocks like the plague.

Lou always tried to be sensitive, always knew how to talk to people in ways Kayleigh didn’t. Lou got tired of correcting her, tired of trying to make her see other sides to things, and finally got tired of being tired.

And then she was gone. 

Kayleigh wasn’t surprised. She had spent their whole relationship waiting for Lou to leave, waiting for her to turn the whole world into a dark place.

Lou was the only thing that made Kayleigh smile; other people irritated her, animals were a dirty annoyance, kids pissed her off. Lou was a patch of sunshine that Kayleigh had never felt before, warming her, thawing her, but she’d clung to it jealously like a tourist staking a claim to a spot on a busy beach. Lou was hers, and without Lou, she just snapped back into cold, hard gloom, reverting into her old shape like memory foam. Lou had left before all her own light was snuffed out entirely, and in doing so, stole all the sun from Kayleigh’s world. 

What a bitch.

Stubbornness kept Kayleigh in the house without her, clinging to the best place she’d lived in for years, the kind of house she’d desperately wanted as a kid. Like a lot of people in Jubilee, Kayleigh was stuck there, although in her case more through inertia than lack of means. 

It was also that the darkness, and its strange, unspoken-of quality, suited her. 

She had even created a dark place of her own.

Turning out the light in the kitchen, Kayleigh stood facing it, her own dark place.

She had made sure this was the only room in the house that did not overlook a source of light – the streets were lined with glaring LEDs, and almost all the neighbours had twinkly lights in the gardens. Hers did not. Lou had liked them, so Kayleigh had pulled them all out after she left and threw them away in a moment of sheer perversity, creating the dark place on purpose out of somewhere that had been safe and bright and cheery.

She didn’t know why.

Her chipper neighbours had asked. She had said something rude to shut them up and hadn’t spoken to them since. 

Where the bedroom window above was high enough to look over the wall and catch the light pollution of the brightly lit council estate, the kitchen was overshadowed by some out-of-control buddleia bushes that created a near-impenetrable screen.

It was her dark place, her spot to control, and she could kill it with light whenever she wanted, but for now it existed because she allowed it to exist. That made her feel something, even if the face’s appearance no longer made her stomach flip. Sometimes, it even made her smile.

Kayleigh stood in her pyjamas, bare feet planted squarely on the linoleum, and waited for the face to form. It wasn’t a human face. The features were never clear, but they were obviously features.

While Lou was there, even when the garden lights failed, as they did occasionally, the darkness had no face. Not that she’d ever noticed. There had been other things to think about, to talk about, to laugh about, and now Lou was gone, and it was just Kayleigh in her empty kitchen, there was nothing to distract her from the dark beyond the glass. 

Kayleigh looked into the dark, counting to ten with her hand on the light switch, and waited for the dark to look back. 

One. 

The garden was silent. The faint traffic noise didn’t disturb her. The darkness almost had its own sound, or at least, created its own quality to the air, but Kayleigh wasn’t good at listening. Lou had grown tired of that, too.

Two.

The window reflected some of the kitchen back even with the door closed. Was it really a face, or just a distorted bowl, or something reflecting off the kettle into the glass, distortions on distortions? She had moved everything out of sight this time, put everything away. Nothing rounded or oval or square. Her counter was clear. She had checked the garden in daylight and tried to make a face out of the branches of the bush, but without success.

Three.

It was there. 

She could have sworn she hadn’t blinked. A fluid shape of shadow had gathered in a pattern; a mouth, oval, open, and two eyes, also oval, also open. The edges blurred into the night. There was no body, nothing else, but three holes in the dark that stared into her. 

Four.

It didn’t make her heart race like before. It was always the same. It had become an experiment, some puzzle that had lost its mystique despite still being a mystery. She had almost convinced herself it was not the same thing that made the hairs stand up on the back of her neck when she got out of the car at night, not the same thing that waited on the edges of the brightly lit streets, not the same thing that made her want to run all the way home when she got off the train.

This could not be the thing that stalked the estate in the dark, triggering the fight-or-flight instinct, the primordial part of her brain.

This was just some illusion that appeared in her kitchen window, something she controlled. 

Five.

Kayleigh took her hand away from the switch and came closer to the pane. She could still dart back and hit the switch if she got freaked out. The face in the dark place did not move. She stepped sideways, trying to see it from another angle, but it was static. She didn’t know anything about refraction or reflection, but surely if it was something weird with the glass, it would look different if she moved around. It did not. Almost as if someone was standing there, someone made of shadow, with a face full of holes. 

Six. 

There was an arms’ length between her and the window now. If she reached out, she could touch the glass. What if she opened it? Something rebelled in her, and she pulled her hovering hand back. She looked back at the dark place, and couldn’t see the face anymore. Her movements had disturbed it, broken the effect. 

Disappointing. 

Her gaze slid out to the lawn, and her stomach lurched. It was there. 

It was directly in front of her, the holes in the darkness swallowing up the pale outlines of her own eyes and mouth, so her own reflection had neither. She jerked back, reflection briefly restored, and the shape outside remained still. 

Kayleigh lost count. It was time to turn the light on.

She darted for the switch, and there was a pop and a bang. 

The flash of light came and went, and Kayleigh didn’t see what happened to the face in that moment, but stood clutching her neck, pulse battering her throat.

Lou had always changed the bulbs. Lights, spiders, and crochet, that was Lou’s domain; Kayleigh fixed things and broke things. Lou said there was nothing Kayleigh broke that couldn’t be mended, and Kayleigh hoped she was right. She had certainly broken something in Lou, or Lou wouldn’t have left. 

Power cut.

Even the streetlights were out. The whole street had become a dark place. 

Kayleigh looked back at the window, where her reflection ghosted pale against the deeper darkness beyond. 

Two holes of solid darkness stole her eyes. It was there, growing solid, pressing against the pane and obliterating everything beyond it. There was no garden now. There was only darkness. 

Kayleigh’s eyes had already adjusted, but the drawers still eluded her. She fumbled around for the handles, groping for the emergency matches. She had never kept emergency matches before moving here, and nobody had told her to do it, but it was like the urge to stay in the light; an instinct born of some primal panic. Except she wasn’t panicking. She should be. Her hands were clammy, for sure. Her heart pounded. But it wasn’t panic. Was this excitement? She had butterflies, like the moment Lou had texted her back, the moment before their first date, the moment Lou had cracked a stupid joke and Kayleigh had actually smiled. 

There was something out there, and it had no name, but it was looking at her. She had made it, somehow, or conjured it, but either way – she had created space for it, and it had come. It was here. Still, she fumbled for the matches to remind it that she still held the power, that she still controlled the light.

The first match snapped in half. 

The second wouldn’t strike. 

The third flared and Kayleigh raised it to see herself in the window, to assert herself over the thing in the garden, but it wasn’t there. It could be anywhere. Her whole house beyond the tiny flame was a dark place. 

The match-flame ate up the bare inch of wood until she dropped it on the floor and died on the tiles. 

Kayleigh struck another, and it snapped almost through, lighting up but hanging by a splinter. It was pathetic. A pathetic, tiny light for a pathetic woman in her pyjamas, going to bed alone and waking up alone in an empty house, because she couldn’t love someone without smothering the life out of them. 

The urban legend of the estate rang in her mind like a mantra, a warning.

If you go into the dark places, you never come out.

She put the matches down, closed her eyes, blew the flame out, and stood barefoot in the dark. 

When she opened them, the darkness filled her empty kitchen. 

Empty, except—

—Except she wasn’t alone anymore. 

She felt it, rather than saw it. She couldn’t see anything, but there was a solidity to the air, and a sound she had never heard before, or had heard but never listened to. It was beneath her breath, behind her heartbeat, another breath that was not hers. She was sure that in other places darkness never sounded like that.

It breathed around her, a whisper brushing her ear. It didn’t care who she was. She was an irrelevance to it, just something else to cast a shadow. Something for it to surround, to envelop, to flow through, to consume.

Kayleigh opened her eyes as wide as they would go, straining to see, and opened her mouth as far as her jaw would reach, as much as her lips would stretch, wider, wider, wider, into a smile that became a grimace, that became a rictus of desperate invitation to something, anything, that would change her, that she could keep forever.

She turned her mouth into an oval hole, pupils dilating to let in the dark, and it rushed in to fill her. Her mouth stretched in a parody of a smile. She was darkness, and to darkness she belonged, and now she could finally find her place.

Her lifeless body hit the floor, the stretched rictus of her lips gaping up at the ceiling, eyes open and staring, staring, staring, into the heart of all the dark places.