Edited! Old, but edited.
(8th October 2010)It was one of those dark nights, the ones that seem to creep in through your clothes and go inside your nose so you smell the pine around the paths, hear the darkness itself, the cousin of silence, and feel the bare chill; this darkness enters through the nostrils as much as it sweeps through your pores and blows through your mouth, scaring all the screams out of your body until you’re just another corpse in the woods.
It’s the kind of darkness writers love to write about and shiver as they imagine it, but it’s the kind of story you can’t get too involved in, else before you know it you’re that very same corpse on that very same muddy path through the crowds of waiting trees. (They wait for someone to drag you through them, lay you down on their roots, and then goodness knows what will find you there. It’s entertainment for them, like soap operas.)
I bet you wish you were at home watching your soaps now, don’t you? Wishing you were sitting in your living room on that squeaky old recliner, with your feet up near the fire and a cup in your hand, curtains drawn so the only world you know is the tiny one coming out of a fourteen-inch wide metal box nearby. But, no, you sigh, you’re walking down this trail that leads to goodness knows where, and goodness knows why, but you’re walking anyway. You wish you could stop. Don’t. They all wish that. And then they do, and that’s when the darkness plunges into them, seizing its chance-the wind lays you down, and the dark covers your eyes and pins you down like a strong, slow rape. You can’t escape. That was your first mistake-to think you could defeat the darkness. By just going out in it you were challenging it. The birds know better. Didn’t you wonder why there were no birds around, not even owls? Not even the silent passing of a shadow, not even the brush of an owl’s wings as it swooped down on a rat like the darkness was swooping down on you?
Your second mistake was being naïve. You never realised how powerful the darkness was. You never realised that you were its prey. You didn’t even know it had a name. But it does. It’s too late to tell you what that name is. It doesn’t matter anyway. You’re a prisoner now. And now you’re making your third mistake. You’re thinking that if the darkness has a name, it must have a face.
The most powerful forces are the ones without faces.
