 |
| philomel |
When I was small I was scared of the dark. I once was on holiday in Wales, staying with my parents and brother in a cottage in the middle of nowhere. There were no streetlights, no passing cars, no moon that night. I was in bunk beds with my brother. A nightmare of being trapped in a cave-in, pinned down by rocks, unable to see. Smacking desperately against the rockfall, trying to escape. When I woke up, screaming, I couldn't see anything in the pitch black. Flailing around, whacking my hands against the walls and the upper bunk, utterly terrified and lost. The next day my parents tried to get me to go down an old mine. Ha! How phobias are born...
Anyway, blah.
---
This is real darkness. Her eyes open to blackness, an endless drowning pool of nothing. She can feel her eyes blink, the bat of the lids closing and the lightest brush of the lashes on her cheek. She is sightless in this dark place.
She stretches her eyes wide open. She thinks she sees shapes at the corner of her non-vision, tricksy figures in the nothing as her senses strain for stimuli. When she closes her eyes colours dance across the inside of her eyelids, electric violet and blue and bright circles of white, pulsing internal suns.
The room is empty. The air is cool. Her heart sounds loud in the quiet and she listens to the thud-thud as her chest rises and falls. Even if she could raise a hand it would vanish into this clinging black. Her body has fallen away and she is anchored only by the breath and the beat against her ribs and the hairs on her arms that stand and bend like reeds.
She is lost in the blackness, paralysed by the infinite weight that presses down on her and keeps her still and silent. The hiss of her breathing calls the monsters from the shadows. They creep around her. She lies as still as marble, movement forbidden.
She is there and not there. She waits, every second stretched out, every minute an age. The shiver of breath at the back of the neck. The familiar hand on the lock.
