Young Writers Society

I reclined atop my queen-sized bed with my comforter peeled halfway off the mattress while propping my body up with my arms and having my legs stretched out. Also, in each of my ears was an earbud with its black cord running down to my smartphone. My phone’s screen was blank and black, but music played in the background. While the rhythmic dance music streamed into my ears, my head beat back and forth with each exciting drumbeat coupled with the humming bass, the few little guitar notes scattered expertly throughout the song, and the voice of Mr. Levine. As my head bounced on my neck, and my shoulders flicked around, a bystander might have thought that I were a puppet to Maroon 5’s body-rocking music.

I must have been sitting there for at least half an hour now, but I didn’t have any pressing matters to attend to. Meanwhile, I scrolled through texts, noticed two or three new ones, and replied, giving my words not much thought. Then I sat up and sighed. I was sitting in darkness, and for the time I had been staring at my phone, I had forgotten that. The blackness had evaded my notice as long as my attention was on that dim screen. Now I gazed about in the confusing, nonsensical, uninformative abyss that we call darkness, or shadow, if you prefer that word. Demons, hobgoblins, bats, dark wolves, and skeletal monsters all seemed to leap out at me in the dark. Occasionally, one unpredictable, fluid form would thrust itself violently toward my eyes and make me jump; but mostly I remained calm. “This is stupid!” I thought. “Am I so easily startled by the dark?” I stood up from my bed, traversed the carpet a few steps, and flicked the switch for my ceiling-fan so that light now filled the room. “You big baby,” I exclaimed only in thought, “don’t you realize it’s the same in the dark as in the light. Blast, David, the only difference is what you can see. All is the same.” I flicked the light back off. “How incredibly immature!” I thought and climbed back onto my comfortable bed. The music of Maroon 5 echoed in my ears as my phone still played it for me. I briefly allowed the music to continue before tapping the pause button. Then I laid myself out. “What is wrong with me?” I wondered. Suddenly, a voice seemed to whisper blasphemies to me in the darkness. I was startled but laid myself down again. “What the heck, David?”

I stood up and made my way to the kitchen which was downstairs and one room away. All the while, irrational fright pervaded the fibers of my bones. When I arrived in the kitchen, I walked to the fridge. I was guided to the water-dispenser built into its door by the pale glow that emanated from it. As I pressed down on the lever of the dispenser, water jetted into my cup. My cup full, I pressed the rim of the glass to my dry lips and poured the cool water down my throat. It felt as if not only a taste but also a fragrance now entered my body. I felt rejuvenated but within minutes had to urinate. I was yet standing by the fridge at that time and had my phone in the pocket of my pajama pants and earbuds still in my ears.The bathroom was just some feet away in the room adjacent to the kitchen. Thus I stole away in the darkness and entered into it. I sat quickly down onto the toilet, pulled the earbuds out, and stuffed them in my pocket. Then I began peering out through the blinds of a nearby window and into the ghastly, dark sky of that night. “Pretty,” I said in a quiet and guttural voice, but I only partly meant that comment. I was shaken by my childish fantasies in the blackness. I rose to my feet and felt the need to turn on the light. “Wait a minute! Nah, no way am I doing this! I can stand the darkness!”

I left the bathroom with not even a dim light to go by except the most miniscule amount of it radiated from the moon which allowed me distinguish no more than the vague shape of everything. I was making toward the stairs and ready to return to my room when, suddenly, I espied, through the glass of my front door, a certain house across the street. It had no especially interesting details and just one or two lights on its exterior. It appeared vacant and seemed to call my name. “I am not doing this,” I thought forcefully but lost resolve instantaneously and unlocked the door. Then I swung it silently open and slipped out.

In the same sort of darkness that had been in my house—with exception of a few dimly lit houses about me, I proceeded onto the asphalt street and crossed it. As soon as my foot pressed up against the border grass of the neighbor’s yard, I wondered, “Whoa! What am I doing? What reason do I have for doing this?” A respectful sense of wrongdoing pulled me away from the tempting house's lawn and admonished me. I reassessed the situation and, for whatever foolish reason of mine, decided to go forth anyway. That house seemed to glow now with a cloud of colored smoke I could only describe as demonically red. The sanguine vapor wrapped itself about the house, and I began to walk toward it! My feet bore me across the lawn, over the walkway, and onto the porch where I stood motionless. The scarlet smoke leapt up to lick my shoes and pajama pants. Once again, I started reconsidering. “Wait! What am I doing?” I exclaimed inwardly. “I am venturing onto someone else’s yard past midnight and even plotting to break in. What is this madness? Am I insane? God help me!”

I stared at the door. “I’ll bet it’s not even locked,” I thought with almost no recollection of my fear. Only the deep, perplexing attraction of that place begged me onward; and I listened. I stopped just before the knob and turned my Maroon 5 music back on. Immediately, I decided against music and pulled my earbuds out as quickly as I had put them in. I opened the door and entered. Voices shrieked and whispered in the darkness and beckoned me forth. “I am not doing this,” I said to myself and almost smiled in excitement, but I was terribly afraid. I stepped a few steps, and the shrill voices of some unknown enemies made their way to my ears. “What am I doing? What am I doing?” Suddenly, I heard the drumming—the mind-numbing drumming!—of a beating heart. It was as loud as the voice of a person talking to me if anyone had been. I thought for one second, heard the sharp voices again, and fled onto the porch. I had left the door open while passing out. I stood on the steps now and was catching my breath. The red cloud was not surrounding the house any longer. Had it been my imagination originally? I looked back into the frightening shadow framed like a photograph by the doorway. I gazed and thought. No, I did no thinking at all! I was feeling; I was working up courage to go back. In fact, I was suppressing sound thinking as much as possible. Those voices had been real; that beating heart also had been. They were still real.

I sprinted back into what seemed to be nothingness. I swept into the house through the front door and made my way toward the sound of that heart! I could almost feel it beating within my own chest. As I moved spasmodically toward it, I found myself in the living room where I imagined I could hear its potent beat summoning me onward. I then stumbled into what I thought was a bedroom. I could not exactly tell, for it was too dark to. I thought of turning on the flashlight app on my cellphone, but I had dropped that device somewhere in the darkness when I was frantically running throughout the house. Nonetheless, I would not go back to my phone--not while the call of the heart was so strong! It almost seemed more frightening to venture through this hellish shadow while searching out my phone than to stay and discover the heart--which could only be a relic of demons!--without light! I moved to the beat of the heart and found it. My eyes fixed on the sight of a double-door closet which I walked hesitantly—yet quickly—to and opened. I drew back the doors only to see a line of coats, jackets, collared shirts, and formal pants uniformly arrayed in a straight line across the pole on which they hung.

The heartbeat—it was now as loud as a shout! I had to listen to it! I peeled back the clothes on the hangars and saw a horror. What did I see? Oh, it was a skeleton—not a full one! This was all that was there: a vertebral column stretched from the carpet floor to the ceiling, and in the middle of the column was a rib cage with only its bones. The bones were colored, as well as I could see in the blackness, like gray and black ash. An eerie chill surged down my spine as I noticed that no sternum bound the ribs together at the top; they were not connected in the center. Through the empty slats between the ribs and the hole where the sternum should have been, I saw the heart! There it was—black and white and gray, unhealthy, beating energetically! It was anchored on the back of the spine but had no blood vessels streaming out from it. In fact, there was no other feature of a human body at all; there were just the ribs, the overly long spine, and the heart anchored on it.

Voices began calling again and grew more intense. They all seemed to command me to touch the heart. I looked at the lone, eerie organ. “No, I will not touch that! What am I thinking?” The voices grew louder. “Touch it! Touch it! Touch it, damn you!” The cries seemed to be of the devil and his demons! “No,” I shouted back mentally, and suddenly, my protests were audible and quite boisterous. “No! I will not do that!” I now stared weakly at the heart as it seemed to beat faster and harder. I reached out my hand and almost touched the ribs! As my fingers drew close to it, the heart slowed to almost stop beating and expanded greatly as if it were trying to reach out to me and make it easier for me to accomplish my task. The voices called more vehemently: “Touch it! Touch it! Damn you! Curse you! Touch it!”

I took one step back. “No, this cannot be real. What am I so afraid of? These cannot be the voices of fiends; I have imagined all this! I can touch the heart! What am I afraid of?” I grabbed the rib cage and pried back the two sides of it which swung back like doors. I could see the heart clearly. I stretched out my fingers. They almost touched its sweaty, sticky surface. Suddenly, as if my arms had been nudged from behind, my fingers collided with the heart. As an act of bravery, since I had already touched the evil bit of flesh, I opened my whole left hand like a claw and clutched and took hold of it! It still hung on its frame, but my hand wrapped around it. In the exact same instant that my hand was fully around the black heart, I felt a wave through my body like a shock of electricity. Also, strange sensations pervaded my body as I began to heel and as my head lost blood-flow. I was fainting; but this was not typical fainting. It had been induced by something altogether eerie and unearthly. I was feeling other things than the normal symptoms of fainting. In just a second, I plummeted and fell hard onto the carpet floor. Immediately, my mind and my senses were out. I was completely gone in a fretful, unforeseen sleep.