Board Thread:Writer's Workshop/@comment-26423665-20150604190112

Eyes in the Darkness

It seems that almost everyone on the planet has a similar fear, if you’ll allow me to set the scene: You lie in bed at night, the darkness embracing every single inch of you, and you feel a little tingle on the back of your neck. Of course, on the surface at least, you dismiss it as nothing but there’s a small part of your brain which seems to be more active at night that tells you it’s more than nothing. That tingle, far from being a slight breeze that wafted gently over you, becomes a gut feeling trying to tell you that you aren’t alone. You try to fight it every single time and sometimes you beat it, managing to convince yourself that it’s a ridiculous thought, but at least as often as not the thought will sit there and begin to breed and feed on your fear to grow stronger and stronger. You shut your eyes tightly against the outside world and try to stave off the paranoia just long enough to fall asleep but once you’ve reached this point you know there’s no falling asleep and you reach the epitome of the night-time quandary; do you lie there for hours trying to drop off or do you open your eyes and look around the room to prove that there’s nothing there? Logically you know that the former is the only real option, that if you glance around you into the darkness there will be no intruder in there with you and you’ll be able to go to sleep unhindered. The problem is that the logical part of your brain seems to reach the ever-elusive unconscious state long before the rest of you does leaving just that primitive, child-like portion of your mind which gives full credence to the fears that have used the time to take firm hold within you. Somehow you know for a fact that if you do sit up in your bed and slowly, fearfully open one of your eyes just enough to take a peek you’re going to be met with two dully glowing eyes staring right back at you emitting just enough shine to show of the hideously deformed face they’re embedded in. You’ll see the long, slit-like nostrils below them, quivering at the scent of your terror, the scarred and pointed ears listening to the strained whimpers trapped inside your lungs desperately trying to become a scream and you’ll be able to just make out the wide grin not from satisfaction at having found the next meal, though that will be evident, but being contorted into such a shape from the sheer number of needle-fine teeth crammed into it. Finally, the last thing you’ll see is the horrendously twisted, gnarled hand reaching out, just inches from your cheek waiting to strip the flesh from your bone and eagerly devour it. Your only option then will, of course, be to whip the covers up over your head and hope that this final barrier will be enough to protect you as it always did in childhood or that whatever that thing was kills you before you have the chance to suffer. Now this scene is fully set in your mind you pre-emptively protect yourself anyway, drawing your duvet above your shoulders and beyond until it sits over you like an eiderdown force field. However, this is no solution and now you become convinced that the creature that is absolutely, definitely there is now just perched on the edge of the bed and is hunched over you waiting for you to pull your protective covering back down so it can snatch you away or it’s sliding one of those crooked hands with its filthy claw-like nails under your “impenetrable cloth barrier” at the foot of your bed, a weakness in any night-time bastion, to slowly wrap around your ankle and secure its prey that way. You heart skips a beat, a wave of cold terror and nausea sweeping over you: did you just feel something compress the mattress at the edge? Was the sound of that spring creaking because of your borderline hyperventilation or did something just climb closer to you?

Another half-an-hour passes of the knot tied down in your gut conspiring with the images in your head to keep you awake and, deciding enough is enough, you force the logic back to the surface and determine to prove that you are indeed alone. Clenching your eyes tight and your teeth tighter you slowly pull the covers back down and expose your sweaty flesh to its mercy. The relative coolness of the room flows over you; you hadn’t realised just how hot you’d been making yourself under there. This slight relief steels your resolve just a tiny bit and when your throat doesn’t get ripped out you open one eye just enough to let some of the ambient darkness in. So far so good. You open it up fully, soon followed by the other and see a total lack of anything staring back at you. Feeling more confident by the second you lift yourself up onto your elbows and look around the room. Absolutely nothing; no grotesque, toothy grin, no gnarled claws and, above all else, no dimly glowing orbs watching you from beside the bed, across the room, through the cracked closet door or anywhere else. All you are faced with is the absolute darkness of the room and the nothing that dwells within. You chide yourself for your foolishness, for letting the frightened child of your psyche get the better of you and flop back onto the bed, relieved. Now when you feel that tingle on your neck you accept it as the movement of cool air that it obviously is.

Now, outside of the situation I just described I can’t really claim to understand much about how the human mind works. Still, I need to know: Why on earth do you think my eyes would glow? Actually, never mind; maybe I’ll just ask you in person tonight. 