“Grandma,” I remember asking when I was only six, “why do you always carry a flashlight? You’re the only grownup I know who does that.” At the time, I was sitting on a carpet that my grandmother had made herself, surrounded by her peculiar, but familiar, living room.
Despite being in her early seventies at the time, she lived alone and did everything by herself, be it cleaning, cooking, bathing, or even maintenance. But that’s beside the point. I remember that she stopped her frantic and careful knitting after I asked that question. I also remember her turning to look at me, letting out a puff of cigarette smoke, and giving me an answer that I – for the better part of my life – assumed to be a joke.
“To keep the monsters at bay.” She said with an uncharacteristically meek tone before locking her mouth once again with her cigarette and resuming her knitting as though nothing had happened. I didn’t care at the time. I just went back to playing with my toys.
…
This was a question I would always bring up every now and again as I grew up, with the answer changing every time. “To banish darkness away.” She told me once. “To keep the man in the suit lost.” She told me another.
“To make sure the little boy doesn’t knock!” She spat once. And so on and so forth. By all means, senile was the last word that came to mind if you knew my grandmother, so I always thought that she was just fucking with me.
As we both got older, and saw less of each other, I found myself always thinking back to that flashlight that always slung from whatever she was wearing, be it a dress or a pair of jeans. Manageable at first, the curiosity was, but as it does all too often, it boiled over one day. A day which happened to be my grandmother’s 85th birthday.
April 27th.
I was a senior in high school, and although tomorrow would be a school day, I still went and visited her after finishing my classes, fully intending on celebrating well into the early hours of the upcoming morning. No one from my family would be present, opting instead to hide behind the cover of school or work, or some other commitment. Given that, I think you can imagine the beautiful smile that bloomed on her face when she opened the door and so me with a cake box on my right hand and a few balloons held in my left. The sun had already been sucked under the horizon by the time I had lit all eighty-five candles on her cake, our conversation still nowhere near any end. One gust of breath, great enough to make even the Big Bad Wolf envious, was all it took to snuff out every last orange flame. But it was at that very moment that every light in the house turned off. My grandmother lived in the outskirts of town, and given that it was night, both of us were shrouded in a thick blanket of darkness. Before I could even get up to find a candle or even say a word, a loud CLICK pierced the air, as did a wave of bright light. I let out a small chuckle as she placed the old vintage flashlight on the table. “What?” she asked, confused by my sudden expression of amusement. “No,” I said, taking a brief moment to stiffen my voice, “I’m just disappointed it took you God knows how long to finally use that thing.” I’d meant it as a joke, but my spirit wavered like the flames of the birthday candles when I saw a heavy gloom drip down onto my grandmother.
“How right you are…” she said absentmindedly before trailing deeper into her thoughts. Her skin, normally like unironed cloth, seemed to hang even more loosely off of her bones after this, while her eyes seemed to glaze over. “Grandma,” I remember asking at that moment, “why do you always carry a flashlight?” She looked up at that moment, and I saw a vague smile creep up to her bony cheeks, but before she could give a reply, I held my hand up. “The truth, this time,” I asked,” you’re not getting any younger, and there’s no better time for you to tell me, so please, feel free to say whatever it is you’ve been holding in.” Like a feather gradually falling towards the ground, my grandmother lost her smile. Instead, a dead serious look molded itself on her face as she leaned in closer, inviting me to do the same. “I will tell you the truth,” she said in a voice more befitting of a heavy chain smoker such as herself, “and that is my choice. Your choice is whether or not you believe it.” I nodded, and that’s all it took for her to start weaving the following tale.
…
“It all started on a day long before you or even your mother were born,” she said.
I tried to ask for the specific date, but my grandmother feigned ignorance. Eventually, I had to relent, just for the sake of her finishing the story.
“Even now, I remember it as though it happened just a few hours ago. Sometimes I forget, but it’s moments like these that remind me of it. I lived with my mother and my younger brother, who was only six. I myself was about thirteen or sixteen. I know that’s a large margin, but again, this happened so long ago. I find it hard to grab the specifics from my memory. All that I can say for sure is that our mother had to leave for the day and wouldn’t be back until the next. We had food in the fridge and that was about it. No TV or books. Not that we didn’t have those things, it’s just that back then they weren’t as interesting as they are today, so one would get bored with them fairly quickly. Night came oh so suddenly. My little brother, Kyle, had to be put to bed, and put to bed he was.”
She gave an odd pause, and I resisted the urge to state the obvious. That she had no younger brother that I knew of.
“But unlike my brother, I had yet to be visited by the Sandman. The clock was nearing midnight, and still, my eyelids felt just as light as they had felt ten hours before. And then, without warning, a blanket of darkness clouded my vision, and I was sure that I had fallen asleep, but then I felt my eyes blink, and frowned. I stood up, and it hit me that it was a blackout. Sighing, more annoyed than anything, I just assumed that a switch had fallen, so I made it a point to go outside and turn it back on. It is while doing so that I stumbled upon the first red flag. When I stepped out of the front door, my skin was immediately grated by the cold and harsh air. This happened around July, so it’s no surprise that I was caught completely off guard. I swear, it felt like I had been thrown in a swimming pool full of sewing needles. The second red flag was the darkness. I’ve told you about my childhood in the grand cul-de-sac full of rude neighbors, haven’t I?” I nodded. “Well, all you need to know is that there were countless streetlamps keeping that neighborhood lit at all times, even in the dead of night, and even in previous blackouts, those lamps always gave us light that couldn’t be taken away. But that night, they had been taken away. I looked left, and I looked right, but there was no light whatsoever, be it from a house or from a streetlamp. Even the sky above was devoid of any stars. Not even a single sound from the highway near came to my ears. And it was at that moment that I felt a feeling I wish had come to me earlier while I was still in the house. Fear. A sense of wrongness so powerful that I questioned if I was even breathing right.
I slammed the door shut and made sure to lock everything in the first floor. I dared not care if I woke up my sleeping brother. But even after locking everything, I still felt as uneasy as I had when I had been standing outside in the brisk and sharp air. I was still coated in darkness, and I knew that the only thing that could possibly calm me down was light. So downstairs into the basement I went, the fear nearly suffocating me, and a small candle along with a matchbox I retrieved. I hoped that the light would quell that loathsome feeling, but alas, it did nothing. Can you imagine? Darkness. Darkness so dark and abysmal it swallowed you right up no matter how much you tried to flail. Knowing that there’s nothing you can do, but you still do it because you desperately hope that it will do something, anything, just one thing that’s better than the nothingness that would otherwise await you. I really want you to imagine that if you want to understand how I felt. Imagine yourself alone, bobbing up and down in the vast ocean. The silence of the waves, or of breath in this case, feel like deafening explosions that flatten you. I still felt like that, even after I lit my candle. My house looked foreign, the rooms I had spent nearly every bit of my life in creaking under my feet as though I was an intrusive stranger. I felt no need to sleep before, but now, I wished for my eyes to close so that I could wake up from that nightmare. But they never did. I waited. And I waited. And I waited some more. But when I looked at the clock in our living room, not a single second had passed.
Its arms didn’t move regardless of how much I stared at them, and even though I knew that hours had passed, and that the sun should have come up by then, my candle still remained the only source of light, perhaps in that whole world. And so, I waited, and waited, flailing as much as I could, even though I knew that I had no hope of making it out like that.
I wanted something to happen. And something did happen. But something I now wish…hadn’t happened. There was a knock at the door, and so entrenched in my trance I was that I leapt without a second thought, ready to open it, thinking that our mother had finally returned after a hard day’s toil. But the moment I found myself standing in front of it, I froze in place as though someone had suddenly slapped me in the face. I couldn’t move an inch. There was another knock, and I felt my bones stiffen and my bowels liquify. Three more knocks came and went, but I was no closer to that damned door than when I had heard the first one. And then there came another thing which made the rest of me, even my rigid young bones, melt like my insides. “Hmmm…,” the voice of a child cooed on the other end,” a smart one.” I was as silent as a cat, and didn’t dare make a peep. All I could do was hear the voice speak whatever it had to tell me. “I must commend you,” it squeaked like a rat,” you wouldn’t believe how many people in the exact same predicament as you have answered my knocks. Desperation does funny things to you, doesn’t it miss?” Even now, decades later, I can still remember, clear as the light I longed for on that dreadful night, the words that were said.
“I was lonely miss,” the voice chirped with a taut tone,” and that’s why I answered my door. You have someone in there, don’t you?” That last part made me gulp as though I had to swallow a watermelon. “Well good for you. Being alone is just the worst, isn’t it? I can sure tell you that.”
I remember that a harsh silence ensued those noxious words. Imagine going under in that dark sea, and not being able to see the surface. You feel ready to take a deep breath, to just end everything, but right at that moment is when the lord above gives you air instead of salted water. “Listen,” that voice that I hear in my nightmares continued, “I’m going to do you a favor. Call it a reward if you want. That candle you have is bad news. Snuff it out now while you can, before the man with the hat shows up. And trust me when I say that he doesn’t knock before entering, like I do. Politeness isn’t something he’s known for.” And with that, I heard a pair of feet – small feet, baby feet – scamper away until they faded into nothingness, engulfed by the darkness that shrouded my mother’s property.” At this point, my grandmother herself seemed shrouded in a gloominess I had never seen before. The lights had yet to come back on, and even though her flashlight illuminated her face perfectly, I couldn’t help but notice a darkness in my grandmother’s features, as though the memories of that terrible night covered her face like an unwanted veil. “I,” my grandmother continued, as though she was trying her best to hold back tears, “just…stood there…dumbfounded. That child had come and gone. The knocks came and went. But I was still no closer to the door, or to anything else, as when they had first begun. I stood there like an idiot, my back pressed against the darkness of my house, and I didn’t take a single step.
Only one thing made me move, and that thing is the reason why I still move and why I’m afraid to stand still for too long.” Without warning, her bony fingers wrapped themselves around my petite wrist with the might of pythons, and her eyes pierced mine as though they had become the fierce spears of a warrior.
“I’m scared,” she said, her fingers tightening and her gaze sharpening, “that it’ll come back if I ever do so.” Only after saying those words did she let go. My grandmother sighed and leaned back in her rocking chair, smacking her dried lips in preparation of the many more words to come.
“It was light.” she said, “I was so startled by it at first that I didn’t register it immediately. I approached that window like a newborn doe and looked outside. And there in the distance, some thirteen houses away, a singular street lamp rained down its light like a waterfall. But that’s not all.
Under that lamp stood something. Too far away to make out the details, but close enough for me to see their silhouette. But just as my eyes were adjusting, the light went away, just as suddenly as it had come. I didn’t have time to feel disappointed, because no sooner had that lamp gone out did it come back again. This time, I could make out a few more details before it went out again, and the next time, the third time, I was able to make out that the shadow under the lamp was a man whose face I could not recognize. He wore a fedora and a dark suit with vertical lines, and it was only when the light went off and came back on for the fourth time that it truly hit me what I was seeing. He was getting closer. Every time a lamp would go out, the next one, the one ever so closer to me, would turn on, beckoning that man closer and closer towards the house. Another lamp was all it took for me to come back to my senses, and by the time the sixth lamp had turned on, with the man only five street lamps away, I let go of my candle and jogged upstairs faster than any sprinter ever could.
I left the cover of light, my blanket, and stepped into the cold darkness I’d tried to shield myself from. He was close. Like a hungry moth. I realized that the only way I could possibly hide from him would be to lose myself in deep muddled darkness and pray that he wouldn’t find me.
And so, I went to the only place in our little old quaint house that had no windows to speak of. My brother’s closet. In that cramped thing I hid, my thighs tightly pressed against my ticking chest and my knees grazed repeatedly by my fluttering and uneven breath. So quiet was the house that you could even hear the noise that the carpet didn’t soak. I heard my brother sleeping, the clock ticking, my own heart beating, but most of all, I heard my own thoughts, roiling and boiling as they were, twisting, churning, and chewing my mind into oblivion like a hungry dog. There were many things I pondered in that moment which I don’t care to repeat, because although they have stuck with me all these years, I cannot bear to let anyone else hold a weight that is solely mine. Seconds were all that passed, but they may as well have been entire lifetimes.
But then, with little warning, something happened which made every single thought halt, like decapitating a hoard of stampeding buffalo. The front door downstairs clicking open before being shut again. Those footsteps, as silent as mouse’s, came ever and ever closer to me.
I thought I was safe. I thought I had a chance. But those thoughts disappeared when I heard the bedroom door open and a wave of soft candlelight bleed through the cracks of the closet I was hiding in.
Oh how that light crept nearer and nearer, like the paw of a tiger, ready to pounce without the slightest warning. Every second more that I could see my trembling fingers and that ghastly glow oozing in, the more imminent my demise became. I felt like I had been cast into hell, my skin sweating so much that my clothes suffocated my body. The noose was tightening ever so more, and when the glow became its brightest, my trembling body at its most visible to my tear-soaked eyes, then…”
My grandmother firmly and forcefully clapped her skinny hands together, generating a loud sound much like a gunshot. I was caught off guard of course, and almost fell back in my chair, but the story seemed to have an unshakable grip on me. I wouldn’t be allowed to stand up, or even pull my head back, until it was finished.
“The light flickered out, snuffed with an almost imperceptible sizzle.” With that, the old woman licked her index finger and made a snap almost as loud as her earlier clap, enough to quiet down an entire banquet of unruly guests with its deadly and sharp authority. “Just like that, I was back in the darkness I oh so wanted, but it felt different this time. It felt a way it didn’t feel before, like tasting your mother’s food, but it ain’t got the same taste you remember. You know that it’s wrong, even though you don’t know why at first. Perhaps she just happened to use another ingredient, or put in something new. In my case, I understood that nothing had been switched or added. Something had been taken. Something so important that made me feel a loneliness that seldom mills about on this world. But as lonely as I felt, I didn’t dare step out of the closet. I was too frightened. I didn’t dare move. I didn’t dare make a peep. I didn’t dare open that closet door till bright white light shined in through those cracks like rain in the dessert.
Only then did I burst out of my prison. And only then did I realize why I felt so alone. I was alone, Rosie. My brother had been taken from me. He’d been in the very same room, but I’d hidden like a coward.” My grandmother leaned in closer, closer than before, and I saw that no tears leaked out of her eyes, and I understood that she had no more tears to shed regarding this matter. “The man was attracted to light,” she said, her voice like the hiss of a dying snake,” and who could have possibly shined more than my little brother. Like a lighthouse he was, full of dreams and joy, things the man had neither of, while I was nothing. I was scared. I was hidden. And I was dark, like a burnt-out bulb, and the man didn’t want a friend like that. He didn’t want another one like himself. He wanted someone else to keep him company as he walked through the darkness that always followed him. Someone to guide him.” My grandmother leaned back, and for once, I noticed how dry her eyes looked. Her lips, stripped and sanded by age, quivered as her index finger which she had snapped before nervously fiddled about, making a noise almost verbatim like the ticking of an analog clock. I could have said many things in that moment. I could have called her crazy or comforted her. But instead, I only asked one thing. I knew the lights would come back on soon, and my instincts pushed me to ask the question which had been prowling in my mind for the better half of the story. “But Grandma,” I said, “why do you carry a flashlight then? If the man comes in darkness and is attracted to light, won’t you be leading him straight to you?”
For the first time since starting her story, my grandmother smiled. “Exactly child,” she said,” that’s exactly what I’m doing. You have no idea how much I’ve wanted to see Kyle again. I just hope that man will come knocking before God or the Devil, because I know damn well my little brother ain’t nowhere near heaven nor hell.” And with that, the lights came back on, our words forever banished in the darkness that the light had expunged.