Alone in the dark

He wakes to profound silence and total darkness.

His head hurts: splitting pain behind his eye sockets. His temples throb with his every heartbeat.

Considering how bad each pulse hurts, he’s surprised he can’t actually hear it beating like a bass drum….

But the silence is deep.

Must be a migraine.

A bad enough migraine, to overwhelm his senses and temporarily shut them down.

He holds one clammy hand to his forehead and moans.

He calls for his partner, “babe, turn on the light!” …

But he doesn’t hear his own voice, so how will he hear an answer?

And he didn’t hear his own voice? The panic that had been welling up begins to break the surface.

He calls for help, he screams so hard his throat feels raw and torn.

But he hears nothing, not even a whisper.

The silence is not merely deep, it is absolute.

It is as total as the darkness.

Can a man wake up suddenly deaf and blind?

He sits up in his bed.

Hyperventilating, he tell himself it must be a dream.

He pinches the skin on his forearm with sudden, clumsy strength: adrenaline drives his nails right into his skin… like dull kitchen shears through a raw flap of chicken.

The pain is terrible, but the sudden feel of tacky-wet blood on his finger tips is somehow worse.

He’s not dreaming. This is too vivid to be anything other than real.

But why can’t he see? Why can’t he hear?

He needs help!

He feels air moving through his raw vocal chords, he feels his tongue shrieking the words: “What’s going on, someone help me!”

But shouting into the void is making his headache worse. It feels like his eyes might burst.

Tears roll down his face and he feels that too.

Panic.

Explosive panic.

What was roiling right beneath the surface is now rising to the sky like a mushroom cloud.

His chest hurts. He can’t tell if he’s having a legitimate heart attack or if it’s just hurting from the strain of galloping so damn hard.

Each heart beat is like fist punching his ribs from the inside.

He wails with full the force of desperation, he can feel the vibration in his throat, he knows the sound he’s making should be high and shrill, like a human claxxon.

But.

He.

Hears.

Nothing.

He begs for some fucking light.

He needs to find help.

So he flings his legs out to the side, and they dangle over the edge of his bed, into a bottomless dark, with unknowable depths.

He inches towards the edge of his bed, and reaches down till he feels solid ground.

Dimly, he notes that his bed wasn’t supposed to be that far from the floor.

Trying to cope with his frantic heart, he lowers himself to the hard, flat surface. Not carpet. This feels like concrete.

And it is cold on his bare feet.

He can’t walk.

He finds he is paralyzed by the darkness and his disorientation.

This isn’t his bedroom.

And where the fuck was he?

He raises his hand to dry the tears that are flowing from his eyes but gasps when his fingers brush tender bruises in the flesh below each eye socket.

Trembling now, he brings his hands up a little higher.

Higher…

Just a little higher…

He squeezes his eyes shut so he won’t poke himself, but flexing those muscles is agony.

His tears smell coppery now, and they’re tacky on his finger tips.

He presses his fingers to his eyelids. They are swollen, oozing something sticky.

And

—He grimaces so hard his cheeks hurt—

His eyelids are stitched shut.

He presses his fingers against them, pain flairs again. Had he thought it was a migraine?

They are the wrong shape, and the wrong texture.

Far too concave. Too soft.

His eyelids have been stitched shut over nothing.

His sockets are empty.

He doesn’t remember lowering himself back to the floor, but he feels the cold hard ground against his knees and his elbows and that’s how he knows he’s bowed forward in desperate supplication.

He’s praying for the first time in years— loud and silent at the same time.

The only words he’s trying to push out are “please” and “God” in stark, pleading repetition.

But he can’t hear his own thoughts let alone his actual words.

Can God hear him?

Can anyone?

Please.

His throat feels too sore for intelligible speech.

God.

For all he knows he might be praying— or croaking— in tongues.

His bloody fingers climb like spiders across his throbbing skull, and he finds his hair has been shaven off.

And then he finds more stitches behind his ears.

He adds three more word to his ceaseless prayer and those three words are: What. The. FUCK.

And he lays there on the floor sobbing, tears and blood leaking through his stitches.

This has to be a fucking nightmare.

He just needs to turn on the lights.

Please.

Then he can wake up.

God.

He just needs to find the light switch.

What.

His head throbs so bad he can barely think.

The.

It’s just a migraine.

Fuck.

It’ll feel better once he takes some painkillers.

Please.

First he needs to turn on the light.

He gropes blindly, raking the heavy darkness with splayed fingers.

God.

He feels cold metal, the legs of a… table?

What.

He follows those cold legs up, to what feels like a big flat piece of steel.

The fuck?

There’s fluid on the metal, much tackier than the stuff on his fingers and face.

PleaseGodwhatthefuck.

He begins to know what that fluid is, but then he pushes the thought away.

He doesn’t care.

It doesn’t matter what that fluid is. He can’t clean it until he finds the switch to turn on the lights.

It doesn’t matter right now.

He stumbles back to his hands and knees, scuttling across the floor until he find a wall.

Then he follows the wall until he finds a door. Shaking like a leaf in the wind, his fingers work their way towards the handle.

Please God!

But the door is locked.

What the— FUCK!

He pounds on the door as hard as he can and he screams for help.

It remains locked.

He groped further along the wall and his heart leaps for joy when his fingers glance over a light switch.

He flicks it but the lights don’t come on.

He flicks it again.

Everything stays dark.

Impossible.

This has to work.

PLEASE, GOD!

He flicks the switch again.

And again.

Again.

***

The researchers watch their subject through the observation window. A computer monitor presents his vitals.

The lights in the operating theatre flicker.

Their subject is hunched agains the wall, attacking the light switch.

They listen to his hoarse voice over the intercom.

“Please. God. What. The. Fuck. Please. God.”

He flicks the switch.

He does not know his eyeballs have already been sent through the incinerator.

And he does not know that there are no miracles here.

One researcher nudges another and whispers: “If at first you don’t succeed.”

And the researchers watch their subject try, try… again.

***

***

***

Authors note:

This was initially intended as a stand alone but as I was writing it sorta ended up being a sister story to this:

My head cannon now is that these two inhuman studies were actually conducted by the same researchers, though the studies are built in opposite directions... In Null Hypothesis a human is raised in sensory emptiness and then thrust into the light. In Alone in the Dark, an average human is plucked from society and stricken of their own senses, but left with their consciousness intact.

In any case, for me, the villains are the same people.

Also: the inclusion of my own hand drawn illustration for the cover art is deliberate! I can’t control or condemn what other writers do, but personally I will never EVER use ai for the images attached to my writing. I’m as opposed to that as I am to using ai for the writing itself.

Both are a bit fat no from me dawg.

I’m glad vocal gives us access to unsplash, there’s amazing human photography on there. But once in a while I like to do my own visuals just to publicly contradict the proliferation of ai in creative spaces.

While the I did draw the cover art by hand, I wasn’t actually happy with the result, it had too much color. So I took the digital picture and used the editing sliders to adjust exposure, contrast, brightness, and saturation. Kind of how the art would look if I took the picture in the dark.

In the interest of transparency, here’s the original and more accurate picture of what I drew:

You can see the raw image is pretty goofy in comparison to the edited photo. But goofy or no, I would always rather see human art than ai art. At literally any talent level. I’d rather see stick figures than ai art.