He wasn’t sure.
He had no idea how long he’d been in the darkness. When he’d gone to sleep the last time — or at least what he thought was the last time — it hadn’t been completely dark. It had never been completely dark, at least not that he could remember. Always, there had been some kind of light. The night-light from when they were babies, first sleeping in the same crib, then in the twin beds that were as alike as they were.
Could he really remember sleeping in a crib?
Or was the memory just another one of the dreams that drifted out of the darkness?
The darkness… don’t give in to the darkness… remember the light…
Even after the night-light was gone, after his mother had said he was too old for a night-light, there had still been the lights outside the windows. Wherever they’d lived, there’d always been some kind of light.
He could remember a streetlight, a glowing yellow globe at the top of a cement column. It hadn’t been right outside the window, but a little way down the block, so its light drifted up the wall across from his bed, and across half the ceiling.
Another room, where the only light came from headlights of cars passing in the street outside, sending shadows racing across his wall in an endless chase. Those shadows had brought bad dreams with them, dreams in which he was the quarry being chased, but it never mattered how hard or how fast he ran, he could never get away. But back then, back when there was still the light, he always awoke from the dream, always escaped from the nightmare back into the light.
The last room, where the light flooded in all night, from the white, bright streetlight, from the cars and trucks that droned down the street all night long, from the skyscrapers that loomed blocks away, even from the moon when it was the right time of the month.
Those were the lights that had brought the nightmares he’d finally gotten lost in.
The nightmares where he couldn’t run fast enough, where he always got caught and no matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t escape from the torture that followed his capture, tortures that went on until he thought he was going to die.
Tortures where he could feel his life slipping away until he finally faded away into the blackness that closed around him. But even then the light would finally drive the dream away, except that after awhile he couldn’t really tell when he was dreaming, and when he was awake, because even when he was awake he could still feel his life slipping away.
Then had come the night when he hadn’t escaped the darkness at all.
By then the nightmares were coming so often that he was afraid to go to sleep, but it didn’t matter because no matter what he did, he always slipped into that horrible place from which there was no escape, surrounded by indistinct figures that poked and prodded at him, made every part of him hurt as if he was being stuck with a million needles, whispering among themselves, uttering words he could hardly hear, but that made him more fearful than if he’d heard a wolf howling outside his window.
Now he was trapped in the nightmare, and everything was backward, and it was the light he was afraid of, because now when the light came — any light at all — it brought the figures, and the voices, and the torture.
Was that what the breathing meant?
Were they nearby, and coming for him again?
He opened his mouth.
To call for help?
To beg for someone — anyone — to answer him?
But it made no difference, for no sound escaped his exhausted body.
The breathing came closer, and the sound of whispering voices swirled around him. His nerves began to tingle as he sensed the closeness of the tormentors, and he tried to make himself smaller, to shrink away from them.
A light — dazzlingly white — flashed on, and in the instant before the light blinded him as surely as the pitch blackness of a moment before, he saw the shapes.
The figures circled around him, edging closer.
Trembling hands ending in gnarled fingers reached toward him.
It’s a dream, he told himself. It’s only a dream, and I’ll wake up.
Wake up to the darkness?
He felt himself being lifted, raised from the hard bed on which he lay.
He was being carried now.
Carried to the torture room.
His mind cried out, but once again his exhausted body refused to obey the commands of his mind.
Now the figures were circled close around him, and the whispering voices grew louder and more excited.
For the first time, words emerged from the babble.
“Mine,” someone whispered. “I have a claim. It’s mine.”
The babble increased, and now the jagged nails were digging into his skin. He felt something press against his belly, something hard and sharp. Then he felt a slight popping sensation, and the pressure stopped, only to be replaced an instant later by something far worse.
A terrible pain, slashing upward from his belly, then downward. Almost as if—
He tried to push the thought away, but even as he tried to shut it out of his mind, the image came. It was as if he were hovering in the air, looking down at the carnage that was his own body:
His own body, slit open from his crotch to his throat.
Blood oozing from the gaping wound, trickling through his entrails.
His diaphragm, torn half away, twitching feebly as it tried to draw air into lungs that lay inert in the open cavity of his chest.
His heart, throbbing wildly, then slowing, its beating no longer rhythmic.
Stopping.
Stopping!
He was dying!
This time he was truly dying!
But it was only a dream! A nightmare from which he would awaken into—
The dark?
The terrible dark, where nothing, not even time itself, existed.
He could feel it now, feel the darkness gathering around him. The terrible image of his mutilated body was beginning to fade away, but from somewhere else — somewhere above him, a tiny point of light appeared.
A point that expanded and grew brighter, but was still far away.
He started toward the light, turning away from the terror and the darkness and the phantom figures.
He was running now, running as fast as he could, flying toward the light, a feeling of weightlessness buoying him, lifting him, raising him into the white brilliance.
The dream, the long nightmare from which there had seemed to be no escape was finally ending, and at last he was free.
Free to drift into eternity.
