A Name Out of the Darkness

Everything was dark. Without a speck of light, he couldn’t even see his hands. His head hurt. Where was he? The thoughts in his mind lapsed, and he wanted to pass out.

He remembered...playing. Why did he have to play? The darkness. The shadows. It was playing in those shadows. It was nothing. It was silly. It was stupid. It was for a kick, a laugh—it was game.

Can’t see. Can see. Scratches. It was just a game. It was searching. He didn’t like it. He felt in the pitch darkness. There was a cold cement floor. It was damp.

It would be fun, he had thought. It shouldn’t have been done alone. Everything is better with friends. No one wanted to play. Everyone was scared. Some laughed it off, yet they were still scared.

He reached out carefully. There was air in front of him. The cement floor was more than damp, it was covered in water. There was nothing else. He crawled along the floor slowly, thankful for his blue jeans, feeling for the edge of the room; there was surely a wall somewhere. First, he felt something rubber, probably a garden hose, then a stack of wooden boards.

There was more junk in the room. Boxes, cardboard, metal strips—window frames, maybe? He had to move slowly to be careful not to cut himself on something sharp he would only know was there after touching the thing. There was metal, yet he didn’t want to feel for what it was, in case it was a sharp blade, perhaps for cutting the wood.

It took awhile following along the path of junk and wall before he found a cement and wood construction. There was rounded, polished wood running vertically up. There was soft fabric along the edge of a cement block. There was a particularly large wooden beam with deep lines carved upward. His hands followed the structure up, until his left hand touched a carving of some sort, and with his right hand following the fabric, he realized he had found a banister and stairs.

The intense silence was shattered by a thunderous bang. At the top of the stairs a door swung open, striking the wall hard. Light shone down the stares, not daring to illuminate the rest of the basement. A red carpet, ornate with golden flowers and vines, lined the cement stairs. The carving resting on the banister was a wooden bull no larger than his hand.

He could see his hands. There was watered-down blood. The cement floor had had blood on it. Whose was it?

His name...he remembered his name...it was Derick. He remembered the game. No one wanted to play with the spirit board. It was a waste of time; they said. It was silly nonsense, everyone insisted. Derick remembered the board, with his hands on the planchette. An ordinary wooden board with red calligraphy letters, the weighty device for the hands that would rest on it was intricately carved with runes and the wood red-stained. In his new apartment, he had been alone. He was moving the planchette, listening to it grind against the board, waiting for...something. Everything stopped. The electricity had gone out. The planchette, stuck to the board, held him too in place. He became lightheaded and disorientated. Then all he felt was pain. Then nothing. Then...here, on this cement floor. His apartment had no basement. And yet, through that door up at the top of the carpeted stairs, a tall bookshelf and antique record player he owned were in the hall where he had placed them, in his ground-floor apartment. There was no basement, no door in that hall.

Then scratching and growls echoed in the basement darkness behind him. It became colder, darker as the door started to close itself. Derick bolted, grabbed the railing with his left hand and pushed himself up with his right hand on the second step. Like the planchette, his jeans stuck to the floor. Derick tripped and fell, his hand slipping over the bull whose horns sliced his hand. He was bleeding.

He heard a whisper in the dark, a deep gravelly voice. “Hesitation,” and a laugh came from nowhere. Long claws clutched his right leg. However scared, he was too confused to panic. When the door clicked shut, the all-encompassing darkness returned, and he forgot his name.