They Are The Darkness

Chapter Two: A Bad Dream

            She wasn’t there after nine o’clock when Steve called, either. He decided that he would try again in the morning. Later, in bed, he tossed and turned restlessly, the words running through his head over and over. They are the darkness. What did she mean by that?

           Steve and Sara had been close once upon a time. That changed after the divorce. The way he saw it, no one was to blame for the failure of his marriage to Ginny. As cliché as it may sound, they’d simply grown apart. Sara was fifteen then, and perhaps she needed to blame someone. Maybe placing blame was the only way for her to make sense of it. He, it seemed, was the one she chose to place that blame on. She stayed with Ginny when he moved out and into the house he currently occupied. After graduating from high school she married Chris Morton, her sweetheart since the tenth grade. Steve never did like the Morton boy, and that certainly didn’t help to close the gap between Sara and himself. When they split up a year later, even then he was careful not to utter a word against Chris in front of Sara, lest he receive a lashing of her acid tongue in return.

           When Ginny died it put an end of sorts to the cold war between father and daughter. Not that their relationship was repaired in any way, just that Sara stopped communicating with Steve altogether. He didn’t hear from her for over a year, when she called him to let him know she was living in New York. Every six months or so she would get in touch with him, letting him know which city she was in now (and which she always insisted was the place she would be staying for good), giving him her new number, and sometimes her address as well. Twice he sent her letters attempting to explain his thoughts on what had created this gulf between them. Both letters went unanswered and he never sent another.

           Now this strange letter. Why just that one line? Had she assumed he would know what she meant by it? He was still turning it over in his head when he fell asleep. His dreams were bothered by nightmare visions of dark things, shapes that were backlit by flames. They were moving, living things. He thought he could hear their thoughts, but he didn’t know what to make of them. Their thoughts were strange, alien, and full of madness. Suddenly one of the shapes broke away from the others and started toward him. It came closer and closer, and he knew that it meant to rip him apart, limb from limb. Whatever this thing was, it knew nothing of mercy. It was close now, so close…and then everything went dark. In the darkness, a voice:

           “Daddy!”