When the Dark Speaks

Light sliced through the dark and left him reeling. It bewildered the senses. It rattled the brain. It was altogether unpleasant. Then came a strange, unyielding pull, starting deep within his skull, spreading to his chest, and coursing through his limbs. Slowly, the blinding haze shrouding his vision began to recede as if it were a curtain unveiling a stage. The reveal was garish and jarring—followed by sharp, repugnant clarity. Consciousness, as it turns out, fit like a pair of bad pants—tight in all the wrong places.

The urge to scratch his nose was immediate and urgent, yet his arm stubbornly refused to comply. With fists clenched and uncooperative, he wiggled his toes instead. Realization hit: I can’t feel a thing. And yet, of all things, my nose itches? There was no sensation, no fear, no anger, no despair—just an overwhelming absence. He might have called it indifference, had he the capacity to name it. He floated on the edge of thought, his mind a scatter of fleeting musings.

The space was narrow and uncompromising. As he twisted and writhed, hoping to loosen himself, his confinement became glaringly obvious. He extended an index finger, scraping against the surface of the dark—rigid and grainy. He was trapped in a box, a revelation that did little to soothe him. His thoughts circled back to one singular question; Where am I?

The question surfaced like a bubble in still water, but the answer eluded him. He had no memories of anything. Instead, a cascade of feelings—or imitations of them—followed: frustration, hunger, indignation. Yet each felt hollow, words recited from a script he didn’t understand, compelled to force meaning on this new world. Fury swelled, or something like it, and he drove his foot forward in defiance of his ignorance. Wood splintered with a satisfying crack as dust spilled into the air and faint light seeped through the fissures. Crackling echoed through the darkly open space beyond as he kicked again, finally breaking free.

Hoisting himself upright as he gripped the edge of the box and eased onto shaky legs, he stood atop a stone slab built into a cavern floor. This block was surrounded by stairs on three sides, and each corner was attached to a crumbling pillar. A dark cavernous expanse stretched before him, the walls were slick with moisture and bore rusted sconces tangled in ivy. They were fixed against broken bricks and stone that stretched and vanished into an unseen void.

All was quiet here, except for the occasional light tapping of droplets colliding with a watery surface somewhere unseen. Scanning the chamber, his gaze caught the faintest sign of movement; a shiny black beetle with a blotchy white pattern on its back that resembled a skull crawled from a crack in the far wall. It scaled a patch of ivy before perching itself on a leaf.

Spurred to action by the arrival of this creature, he moved to step down but found his movements to be stiff. His body appeared to be wrapped tightly in a grimy brown linen. As he maneuvered to descend the stairs, his ankle snagged something thin and taut.

Snap.

Fire plumed from beneath his feet, enveloping him in flames and sputtering sparks. Everything above his waist gyrated as he flailed his arms helplessly above his head. The vivid display of orange and red reflected brilliantly off the cavernous walls and in the eyes of the beetle—who watched with aggressive indifference.

As the flames danced wildly, there was a commotion from the far side of the cavern. Frantic steps reverberated from a once darkened tunnel in the corner of the room, now brightly lit as the sconces animated to life of their own accord. In hurried a palpably small, homely red man with a large nose and jagged pointed ears that bounced up and down with each step. Ferociously hobbling as quickly as he could manage—not very fast—each step supported by the long wooden staff he held in one hand, dragging an oversized sleeve behind him with the other. Gazing up at the platform as he approached with glee, there was almost a skip to his step.

He beamed up at the burning mess from the foot of the stairs with a crooked smile that exposed blackened gums and missing teeth. His beady black eyes, clouded and saggy, peered from behind spectacles so dull that the flames barely shone on them as he gawked at the person burning alive in front of him.

“Morveth’s bosom… you’re awake!” the creature intoned. His words were spoken through gravelly shakes and carried the faintest air of sophistication. “ I could feel it almost immediately.”

Still burning, the figure moved to again walk down the stairs, and instead, immediately falling forward. He tumbled down each step before hitting the ground at the base not with a ‘thud,’ or a ‘bang,’ but with a god’s damned ‘squish.’

Ignoring this display, the red man snorted. “A little late. Ah—but my faith did not loosen, not for one single moment. A decade or two longer than planned, but just look at you! In all of your…” the red man paused as he eyed the twitching mass curled up on the floor at the feet, “... wretchedness.”

He thought long and hard about how to best respond to the red man looming over him.

First impressions are always important, he thought. He knew that—somehow—felt it deep in his bones. His reply would need to be thought out, eloquent, and dignified. Slowly, he raised his head, stared deeply into the wrinkled face inches from his face, and did the only thing he could; he screamed something unintelligible.

Raising one of his bushy gray eyebrows as he chewed his lip, a hand slithered out from the sleeve of the red man’s mulberry-colored cloak. Snapping his fingers, the flames slowly contorted into a smooth cone that spiked out, twirling before vanishing into a jagged red stone on a ring that adorned the red man’s index finger. His beady black eyes twinkled as he marveled at the once silvery metal band now, pulsing red hot, as he turned his hand over a few times.

“Isn’t that something…” he said in a somber voice as if to himself.

The figure’s life was saved through a stunning display of mystifying power that defied logical explanation. The beetle, however, remained unimpressed.

“More suitable, no?” the red man said, his gaze still fixed on his ring before pivoting to help the figure to his feet. He said as he produced a smudged beige cloth from his robe and pointlessly patted at the flaky black residue on the charred wrappings—staining an already messy rag.

If the figure could place a word to what he assumed should be feeling at this moment, he found ‘shock’ to be most appropriate. Being cooked alive should have been troubling, yet he couldn’t shake the thought that this need to assign meaning to things was a reactive impulse. He quieted the nagging voice that kept telling him what he should or should not feel.

Bad pants, he thought, thinking back to uncomfortable trousers.

This world seemed entirely too bright, noisy, and—above all—wrong. Lifting his hands to his face, he was no more surprised with what he saw; wiggling his fingers, they appeared to be stripped of any identifiable flesh. Thin, grimy phalanges, yellowed and slick, curled as he tensed them. As he stared at his skeletal fingers, the hollowness inside expanded. The itch, the absence of sensation—it wasn’t just physical. Something vital was missing, though he lacked the words to name it. Ever curious, he touched a finger to his face with a hollow ‘clink’ as he poked his cheekbone. His jaw dropped to the floor, in a literal sense, in a ‘clatter.’ Tottle circled to pick up the now detachable mandible.

“There is some slight cosmetic damage,” he said as he tip-toed to reattach the missing mandible with one hand as he shakily balanced on his staff.

“Aaaand there…” he said as he wedged the jaw back in its place with a click. “Nearly all of that pesky flesh has been burnt away. I’m quite envious. The trappings of a mortal shell can be burdensome. The aches that come with age get worse with time. And it is unrelentingly itchy.”

Out of some foreign sense of politeness, or maybe because he lacked the wherewithal to find the appropriate gesture, he moved his jaw and teeth in a way that he thought, would convey a smile. He cocked his skull, jaw falling open, and conveyed nothing at all.

Opening his mouth to respond before letting out a breathy chuckle, the red man meekly gestured toward the tunnel. “We’ll sort it over tea.” As the two shuffled to the tunnel, the small red man glanced back at the skeleton behind him. “I’m Tottle.”

The beetle hopped after them out of sheer excitement, even if it didn’t show.