I’m lying in bed, but I can’t sleep. No matter how tightly I shut my eyes, I feel as though I need to open them; and glance towards the corner of my bedroom: I have to make sure nothing’s changed. It’s dark over there, but not like the regular kind. Stand in a room with the lights off, and you’ll acclimate eventually. Shapes start to appear, things become clearer. This isn’t like that at all—the shapes have been sucked out. Stare at it as long as you’d like, nothing comes into view. Darkness is defined as the absence of light, but this is so profoundly black that I begin to wonder, if the opposite hasn’t always been true. I refuse to believe that this is the absence of anything. It’s unquestionably a presence, something encroaching.
I can’t quite discern its edges, so it’s difficult to reason whether it’s growing. I feel like it might be, but not with any comfortable degree of certainty. Does it watch me, too? It’s teasing me with concepts, creeping outwards at the corners of my vision. My eyes dart to the side—did that part of the room ever exist? It’s futile to ponder, because it’s dark now.
I can’t tell how close it is, either. Something so featureless, is near-impossible for my eyes to bring into focus. How far through am I looking? My depth perception is scrambled. It hurts to see.
Last night, I tried to put something in front of it. You know, cover it up so I didn’t have to look. The thing is, it’s gone now, and I’ve forgotten what it was. There’s just more dark. The night before last, I tried turning off the lights to soothe my eyes. For a moment, it worked—but then, my furniture slowly came into view… and it started to sting again. I feel like it’s reaching into my head, and slicing out a piece of my retinas—like I’m not really seeing it, it’s just missing.
Maybe, that’s the problem: Perhaps there’s a tiny part of my brain being hollowed out—the exact series of neurons that fires off every time I perceive that part of my bedroom. I can imagine a little black insect, slowly chewing through my synapses with a cuspidate maw. As he engorges, he swells and bloats like a tick, growing fatter as my awareness dims. My skull is going to crack like an egg, and the bug will unfurl its fetid wings—slough off my flesh—and fly intowards the pit it’s created.
Was my house always so bare? My dreams and waking life are back-to-front now. When I sleep, there’s other people around. I’m living my life, having conversations; there’s no inkblots eating up my walls, and no insects crawling through my brain. My house is orderly, and coherent. When I wake, though, there’s noone around. I can’t remember if there ever was, but the names of my dream-people are always on the tip of my tongue. The black bug eats them, before I have a chance to speak aloud.
Everyone misplaces things, from time to time—but I think I’ve been forgetting them, too. I mean, I own a car—but no car keys. I’ve never had car keys, so why do I remember driving so frequently? Why would I even own a car, if I didn’t have any keys? My theory, is that the bug swallowed them up. Chewed right through the spot I left them—and digested the bits of me that remembered they existed. I can piece that much together, at least.
It’s the same with my home. I can’t access all of the rooms—some are locked. For as long as I can remember, they’ve been locked. Why hasn’t it ever bothered me until recently? In my dreams, all doors open freely: The other people have keys. When I’m thinking on that further, though, I start to feel a sharp pain behind my eyes—like I’m tensing a torn muscle.
I’m sick of feeling this way; paranoid—as though something’s shuffling up my thoughts, behind my back. I can’t keep staring into that lightless blotch creeping through my bedroom—it’s grinding through my sanity. I can’t keep on like this: I need to do something.
~~~
I must have dozed off earlier. I dreamed again—it was a little out-of-the-ordinary this time, though. I remember feeling frustrated; because I couldn’t ignore the darkened corner. It felt like something was drilling into my skull, whenever I looked away. So, I sat up, got out of bed, and crossed the room towards it. I was fed up with pretending it wasn’t right there, every time I slept—I was going to find out what was inside.
I remember that much, at least. I woke up in my bed at a jolt, and only loosely recollected those events after deliberating on them intently. I’ve got a splitting headache just thinking about that, but it was so out of place, and bizarre next to my regular dreams, that I felt as though I needed to rifle through my thoughts, to string it out.
I know for sure now, though. Feeling around in my mind, I can find the chewed-off ends: Stark nerves that sear inside my head, evidence. My dreams, I think they’re what the bug hasn’t finished. He’s span them up in tar-black webs, kept something to savour. I know this, after my last dream. I was fed up, angry in it—and I reached through to touch the black- I’ve already mentioned this, haven’t I? I can’t keep anything straight, and it’s so frustrating. My head feels like it’s been thrust into the depths of the ocean—pressure threatening to crush it into nothing. I’m a dilapidated, worthless car—the cold metal edges of the compactor press and push against every square inch of my skull; directly at odds with my brain as it screams to get away from the pain of shrinking confinement. My world is spinning, and there’s a roaring storm of unfiltered thought that fogs over every coherent thought I have, threatening to snuff it out. Please, bear with me.
My fingers, that’s what I’m struggling to remember now. That moment—where my dream ends—it’s the last thing I can bring to mind. Every second I fight to keep it in my mind’s eye, burns like the white-hot tip of a needle sliding between every knuckle on my hands—it feels as though somebody, carefully, is wrapping a scorching length of metal wire around each one of my fingers—held down to their base—and slowly pulling, tightening, as my flesh sizzles and parts, like a knife through soft butter. I can feel blackening bone start to melt away—thick, viscous droplets oozing down—and sick-yellow marrow bubbling beneath.
When I woke up, I was missing those fingers. The pain’s still there, but as far as I’m concerned, I’ve always lived with it. I can’t find a single bile-coated memory of ever having fingers, but that doesn’t check out. The bug just hasn’t finished gorging himself, yet.
I’ll probably pass out before long. My sheets are soaking through red, but I know there’s no major arteries in your fingers. I’ll be worse-for-wear, but I should live. What I’m afraid of, though, is that while I’m sleeping—and my hands clot then knit—the thing in my corner is going to swallow these vestigial memories. The echoes I experience each night are going to be rationed out while I heal, and I’ll awaken as a functionally-dementiac shell. I can only guess at how many times I’ve been in this position: How long has this thing been eroding me? I’m going to fall down and die—lobotomised and debilitated—surrounded by incomprehensible, and abject darkness. I don’t know when, and I never can. There’s no frame of reference—no way of knowing how much I started with—to take inventory of what’s missing.
I wish it would leave me alone. I’m tired of it rummaging through my head, and trespassing on my home. The only thing I want, is to get some sleep.