The Darkness

I am writing this with the hope that you might somehow believe my story. As I write this, I am not entirely sure how much time I have left. The Darkness is near. I can feel him in the sudden, localized drop in temperature that makes my breath bloom in the warm room, and in that faint, copper taste of static electricity that coats the back of my tongue. Soon we will meet for the last time, and only one of us can survive. I know how that sounds. I know what you're thinking right now, sitting there reading this. You're thinking I'm crazy, or desperate, or maybe both. I need you to push past that. I really need to start at the beginning and, hopefully, convince you of what has happened to me.

The beginning is October 6th, 1978. That was my fifth birthday, and that was the night everything changed, though I didn't understand it that way at the time. I didn't understand much of anything that night beyond the frantic, electric sugar buzz still humming in my blood and the sudden, heavy crash into that overwhelming, bone-deep exhaustion that comes only after a child has been celebrated for an entire day. It was a dizzying shift, moving from the high-pitched ringing of laughter and the sticky-sweet rush of frosting to a heavy, dragging physical weariness that pulled at my very marrow. We had a big party. My whole family came, aunts and uncles and cousins I only ever saw at holidays and birthdays, everyone packed into our small house with its warm yellow kitchen light and the smell of my mother's cooking threading through every room. There was a cake with five candles and a pile of gifts stacked on the dining room table, and I remember sitting in the middle of all of it feeling like the most important person in the entire world.

Brian was there too. His mother and my mother had been close friends since before either of us was born, so Brian was always around. He was a part of my life the way the wallpaper was a part of my life, just there, constant and unremarkable. I called him my best friend, and I meant it the way only a five-year-old can mean something, with the full weight of an uncomplicated heart. The fact that he was mean sometimes didn't change that. Kids are mean sometimes. That's just how it is when you're little. At least, that's what I told myself.

Earlier in the day, during the party, Brian had gotten hold of my new Speak and Spell. It was the gift I'd been most excited about, a sleek slab of orange plastic that hummed with potential, featuring a little keyboard that clicked satisfyingly under my thumbs and a screen that glowed with a soft, inviting light. A strange, robotic voice spat and crackled from its tiny speaker as it spoke to you, a sound that felt like it came from the future. My parents had given it to me that morning and I'd barely put it down all day. Brian grabbed it from me when I set it on the coffee table for just a minute, and he held it above his head and laughed when I tried to reach it. He kept it until I cried. That's how it always went with Brian. You waited him out or you cried, and eventually he gave back whatever he'd taken. I got the Speak and Spell back. By the time the cake came out, I'd already forgiven him, because that's what you do when you're five and the person who hurts you is also the person you play with every single day.

By the time my parents carried me upstairs that night, I was barely keeping my eyes open. I remember my mother tucking the blanket up around my chin, the way she always did it, smoothing it down with both hands and then patting my chest once like she was making sure I was real. My father sat on the edge of the bed for a moment and ruffled my hair. They both kissed me goodnight. My mother smelled like her perfume and a little bit like birthday cake frosting, the best smell in the world. Then my father reached over and clicked off the lamp, and they walked out, and the door clicked shut behind them, and I was alone in the dark.

I wasn't afraid of the dark. I want to be clear about that. I was a kid who slept with the door closed and the light off and never thought anything about it. The dark was just the dark. It was where sleep lived. So I lay there with my eyes open, letting them adjust the way you do, and I started to see the shapes of things. The dresser. The window with the curtain moving just a little from the heat vent. The blue glow of the Speak and Spell on my nightstand, that small, soft, rectangular light that I'd left on without realizing it.

And then I saw him.

He was sitting in the chair in the corner of my room. The chair that was supposed to have my jacket thrown over it and maybe a pair of pants. He was just sitting there, very still, very calm, watching me. I didn't scream right away. Looking back, I'm not sure why. Maybe I was still half-convinced I was already dreaming. Maybe something else kept me quiet. Whatever it was, my voice didn't come.

"Who are you?" I asked. My voice was small in the dark room.

I couldn't see him do it, but I knew he smiled. I felt it somehow, the way you feel the temperature of a room change. "Well, Josh," he said, "that is an answer you would never understand. Let's just say I am a friend of sorts."

His voice was low and even, not threatening in the way a monster's voice should be threatening. It was almost pleasant. That was one of the things that confused me most about him that night, how calm he was, how completely at ease. Like he was exactly where he wanted to be.

Over on my nightstand, the blue light of the Speak and Spell pulsed once. I heard the little mechanical keys clicking on their own, one by one, and then the computerized voice spoke into the dark room. It said one word, clear and flat and robotic: "Darkness."

The man in the chair laughed. It was a genuine laugh, warm and surprised, which was somehow more unsettling than anything else that had happened in the last thirty seconds. "So that's where it came from," he said, almost to himself.

I squinted toward the corner, trying to see him better. Part of me wanted to yell for my parents. There was a voice in the back of my head, the voice that sounded like every warning my mother and father had ever given me about strangers, telling me to scream as loud as I could. But another part, some quieter and older-feeling part that I couldn't explain and still can't explain to this day, told me to wait. Told me he wasn't going to hurt me. Not yet.

He stood up from the chair and walked toward my bed. As he got closer, I could make out more of him. He was tall, though everything is tall when you're five. He had a muscular build, broad shoulders, the kind of size that fills up a room. When he got close enough that the blue light of the Speak and Spell caught the edges of him, I could see that his smile was kind. That was the strangest thing. His smile was genuinely kind, the sort of smile a person gives you when they're glad to see you, when they care about you. He looked familiar in a way I couldn't place. Like someone I should know but didn't.

He sat down on the edge of my bed. The mattress dipped under his weight. That detail still gets to me, even now. The mattress actually dipped. He was physically there. Whatever he was, he was real enough for that.

"Josh," he said, "I needed to see you before I do anything. I needed to talk to you and be sure everything I believed in my mind was true." He paused, letting that settle. "I know you don't understand this now, but someday you will. I am here to help you, Josh. Some of the things I am going to do will scare you, or make you doubt that I'm helping you. I know you're still little, but just try to understand and trust me."

He reached out and touched my hand where it lay on top of the blanket. The moment his fingers made contact, I felt it. A prickly, electric tingle that shot up my arm and spread across my chest, like when you drag your socks across the carpet in winter and touch a doorknob, but deeper than that, more alive. It wasn't painful. But it wasn't nothing either. It was a feeling that said, very clearly, that this man was not like any person I had ever touched before.

Everything my parents had ever told me about not talking to strangers, about yelling for help if someone made you uncomfortable, all of it just sort of dissolved. I was five years old. I still believed in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny and the possibility that magic was real. And this man, whoever he was, was magic. That much I was completely certain of. So of course I listened. God, I wish I hadn't done that.

He looked at me and his eyes came into focus for the first time. They were intense in a way that I didn't have the vocabulary for at five years old. Looking back now, the only word I can use is piercing. Like he wasn't just looking at my face, he was looking at everything behind it, at all the thoughts and feelings and memories I had, reading them the way you'd read words on a page. It made me feel very small and very exposed, and I pulled my hand back under the blanket.

"Has Brian ever hurt you, Josh?" he asked. His voice was gentle, conversational. "I bet he has pushed you around. Did he ever take something from you and refuse to give it back until you cried?"

He glanced over at my Speak and Spell on the nightstand, and then back at me. My stomach dropped. He knew. He knew about the Speak and Spell, about Brian holding it over my head, about me crying to get it back. I had only gotten that toy today. How did he know? Had he been at the party? Had he been watching me? The thought of it made me feel cold in a way that had nothing to do with the temperature of the room.

"Josh," he continued, his voice still steady and calm, "what Brian did today was only a little bit of what he will do to you and to others. Brian is bad, Josh. I know you think he is a friend and you care about him, but he is going to hurt you and he is going to hurt others. That's why I'm here, Josh. I am going to fix things."

I stared at him. My five-year-old brain was working as hard as it could, processing all of this, and what it landed on was loyalty. Pure, simple, uncomplicated loyalty to my friend. Brian was mean sometimes, sure. But he was my friend. He came to my birthday party. He gave me back the Speak and Spell when I cried. That counted for something, didn't it?

"You leave Brian alone," I said. I tried to make my voice sound big. "Brian is my best friend and he ain't done nothing that bad. He gave my toy back. And you're the one who's bad, mister. You're in my room and you ain't supposed to be here and you better leave right now or I'm gonna tell my mom and my dad and they're gonna call the police and you're gonna be in big trouble."

He looked at me and he laughed. Not a mean laugh, not a mocking laugh, but the kind of laugh that comes when something is genuinely, unexpectedly funny to you. It was the laugh of a man who found my defiance charming rather than threatening, and somehow that made it worse. He wasn't afraid of me at all. He wasn't afraid of my parents or the police or anything I could throw at him.

"Josh, you're five," he said, still smiling, "and your little attempt at protecting your friend is admirable. Unfortunately, he is not a good person and never will be. Trust me, Josh. I am only here to help you."

Something shifted in me right then. Up until that moment, I had been uncertain, caught between the strangeness of him and the comfort of that smile, between the electric warmth of his touch and the cold logic of everything my parents had taught me. But that laugh, that patient, dismissive laugh that said my words meant nothing, that was what did it. I looked at him and I felt it clearly for the first time. He was dangerous. Whatever he was planning to do, whatever "fixing things" meant to a man who appeared in children's bedrooms in the middle of the night, it was not good. It was not safe. He was not my friend, no matter what he said.

I opened my mouth and I screamed. I screamed as loud as I could, the kind of scream that tears itself out of you from somewhere deep in your gut, the kind you can't fake. "Mom! Dad! Help! There's a man in my room! Help me, please, help!"

He stood up slowly from my bed. He didn't rush. He didn't panic. He just rose to his full height and looked down at me with that same calm, steady expression, and the smile on his face was patient and almost sad, like he'd expected this and forgiven me for it already. "Josh," he said quietly, "your parents can't stop me. No one can."

He laughed once more, low and certain, and at that exact moment the bedroom door burst open. The overhead light snapped on, flooding the room with sudden brightness that made me squint and throw my arm across my eyes. I heard my mother's voice, tight with worry: "Josh, are you okay? What is going on, did you have a bad dream?"

I dropped my arm and looked at the corner where he had been sitting. Empty. I looked at the edge of my bed where he had sat, where the mattress had dipped under his weight. My blanket was smooth and undisturbed. I looked at every corner of the room, every shadow, every place a person could stand or crouch or hide. He was gone. Completely, utterly gone, the way a light goes when you flip the switch. One moment there, the next not.

"Mom," I said, and my voice was shaking badly enough that she crossed the room in three steps and put her arms around me. "There was a man in my room. A very bad man."

My father stood in the doorway, his hair slightly messed from sleep, his expression caught between worry and the particular skepticism of a parent who has been woken by a nightmare before. He looked around the room the same way I had, taking in the closed window, the undisturbed closet door, the perfectly normal darkness of a child's bedroom at night. I could see it in his face, that calculation, the weighing of what I was saying against what his eyes were telling him.

"Come on, buddy," he said, coming into the room and putting a hand on my shoulder. "Let's search the house."

And we did. My father took it seriously enough that we searched every room, every closet, every possible hiding place in that house for the better part of half an hour. He checked behind the couch and under the beds and in the basement with the lights on. He rattled the back door to show me it was locked, then rattled the front door. He checked the windows on the ground floor, every latch, every lock. He was thorough and patient and calm, and by the time we had gone through the whole house and found nothing, absolutely nothing out of place, I felt the certainty of what I'd seen beginning to loosen at the edges.

That's the thing about fear in the dark. It doesn't survive the light very well. By the time my father had me back in bed with the lamp on low and my mother sitting beside me rubbing my back, the man in the corner felt less real. The conversation felt less real. The electrical tingle in my hand, the blue glow of the Speak and Spell spelling out that single word, all of it was starting to feel like the kind of dream that was very convincing right up until the moment you woke up and then slowly drained away.

"It was just a nightmare, buddy," my father said, standing in the doorway with his hands in his pockets. "Sometimes after a really exciting day, your brain keeps going even when you try to sleep. You had a big birthday. Lots of people, lots of sugar. Your brain just needed to burn it off."

I looked at him. I looked at my mother. They were so solid and warm and present, so completely real in the way that the man in the chair had not quite been real, despite the mattress dipping, despite the tingle in my hand. I wanted to tell them everything. I wanted to tell them what he had said about Brian, that he was going to "fix" Brian, that I didn't know what that meant but I knew it was nothing good. Something stopped me. I don't know what, even now. Maybe I thought they wouldn't believe that part either. Maybe I thought that if I told them, they'd look at each other the way parents look at each other when they think their kid has said something that requires a doctor's appointment. Maybe I was just tired.

"Okay," I said. "It was just a dream."

My mother kissed my forehead. My father said goodnight again from the doorway. They left the lamp on low this time, and they left the door cracked open so I could see the light from the hallway. I lay there in the warm, quiet room and I stared at the ceiling and I thought about the man's eyes and the way he'd said No one can with so much certainty, the way you'd say the sky is blue or water is wet. Like it was just a fact. Like stopping him was simply not something that existed in the realm of possibility.

I looked over at my Speak and Spell on the nightstand. The blue light was off now. It sat there silent and still, looking exactly like the birthday present it was supposed to be, plastic and ordinary and completely harmless. I reached out and touched the edge of it with my fingertip. Nothing happened. No clicking keys, no mechanical voice, no single word spoken into the dark. It was just a toy.

I pulled my hand back and tucked it under the blanket. I closed my eyes.

I never told my parents what the man said about Brian. I want you to understand that. I never told them that the man in my room had a specific plan for my friend, that he had used the word "fix" like it was a simple, uncomplicated thing, like fixing a broken toy or fixing a leaky faucet. I never told them about the way he'd looked at the Speak and Spell and then back at me, like he already knew exactly what Brian had done that afternoon. I never told them about the tingle of electricity, or the way the mattress dipped, or the way he laughed at me when I tried to defend Brian with my five-year-old bravado.

I wish I had. That's the honest truth of it. I wish I had sat up in that bed and told them everything, every single detail, and made them believe me even if it took all night. Because what happened to Brian in the years that followed, and what happened to me, and what has been happening to me right up until this moment as I write these words, all of it traces back to that night. All of it started in that room with the blue light and the shadowy figure in the chair and the Speak and Spell spelling out a name in the dark.

The Darkness. That's what I've called him ever since, because that's what the toy called him, in its little flat robotic voice, and because it fits. He lives in the dark. He comes in the dark. He does his work in the dark and then vanishes before the light can catch him. I don't know what he is. I've spent decades trying to figure that out, and I'll tell you what I've learned in time. But in 1973, on the night of my fifth birthday, all I knew was that something had found me. Something had looked at me with those piercing, terrible eyes and decided that I was worth its attention.

I didn't sleep well that night. Every time I started to drift off, I'd feel that prickly electric tingle running up my arm and I'd jerk awake with my heart slamming against my ribs. I'd look at the corner of the room where the chair was and it would be empty, just my jacket thrown over the back like always, just the ordinary dark of an ordinary room. And I'd lie back down and try again. I did this maybe four or five times before sleep finally took me somewhere close to dawn.

In the morning, my parents made birthday pancakes, the kind with the chocolate chips in them that were my absolute favorite. My father flipped them in the pan and let me try to flip one myself, and I dropped it half off the spatula and my mother laughed and caught it before it hit the floor. It was a normal morning. A good morning. The kind of morning that makes the night feel very far away.

Brian came over that afternoon to play, and I watched him the whole time, looking for whatever it was the man in my room had seen. Brian was loud and a little pushy and he always wanted to go first at things, but he was also funny when he wanted to be, and he knew all the best hiding spots in the neighborhood, and when we played army men on my bedroom floor that day he let me be the good guys without even arguing about it. He seemed like just a kid. He seemed like my friend.

I didn't say anything to him about the man in my room. I didn't say anything to anyone. I tucked the whole thing down somewhere deep inside myself where it sat like a stone at the bottom of a cold lake, heavy and still and hidden. I told myself my father was right. I told myself it was a dream. I told myself that the Speak and Spell had probably just malfunctioned, that toys did that sometimes, that there was nothing strange about any of it.

I was five years old. I was good at believing what I needed to believe.

But here's the thing about stones at the bottom of cold lakes. They don't dissolve. They don't go away just because you stop looking at them. They sit there in the dark and they wait, and the water around them is always a little colder than it should be, and every now and then you reach down for something else and your fingers brush against them and the whole memory comes flooding back like a punch to the chest.

For years I reached for normal life and kept finding that stone. I'd be sitting in school or watching television or eating dinner with my family and something would catch the light wrong, some shadow in the corner of a room, and I'd feel it. That low, electric prickling. That sense of being watched by something that saw all the way through you. And I'd look, and there would be nothing there, just the ordinary shadows of an ordinary world, and I'd tell myself again that it was nothing.

I got very good at telling myself that. It was a skill I worked on for years, and I thought I had it mastered. I really did.

I was wrong about that too.

I've thought a lot about why he came to me on that particular night. Why my fifth birthday, of all nights. Why that room, that house, that child. I've turned it over in my mind so many times that the edges of the question have gone smooth, like a river stone. The best answer I've ever come up with is this: he came because he wanted me to know. He didn't have to appear to me that night. He could have done whatever he intended to do to Brian without ever stepping foot in my bedroom, without ever touching my hand or looking at me with those eyes or making my Speak and Spell say his name in the dark. He did it because he wanted a witness. He wanted someone who would understand, eventually, what he was and what he did and why, even if that understanding took years.

He wanted it to be me.

I don't know if I should feel chosen or cursed by that. Most days it feels like both.

So that's where it started. October 6th, 1973. A birthday party and a birthday cake and a Speak and Spell glowing blue in the dark, and a man in a chair who smiled too kindly and touched my hand and left electricity behind. A man who told me he was my friend and meant something entirely different by it. A man who laughed at my five-year-old defiance and vanished when the light came on, and who has been circling my life ever since like a shark circles something bleeding in the water, patient and certain and completely without mercy.

I should have told my parents everything that night. I know that now. That one choice, made by a five-year-old boy who was tired and confused and a little bit afraid and a little bit enchanted, that one choice set everything in motion. Every terrible thing that followed started with my silence in that room with the low lamp and my mother's hand rubbing my back and my father's voice saying it was just a dream, buddy, it was just a dream.

It wasn't a dream.

It was never a dream.

And the Darkness has never, not once in all the years since that night, let me forget it.