The Owl’s Nest

The germ of this story was previously expressed in at least one of my micro-fiction pieces on Twitter. But I was keen to explore the character’s nyctophobia in more detail, as I’ve tried to do in this story of about 1,700 words.

I had always been unaccountably afraid of the dark. I recall that I always slept with a nightlight as a child. And until the moment when sleep would overtake me, I tended to keep my eyes half-open and focused on tiny light source as if it was the only thing keeping me tethered to the world of daylight. As I grew older and my parents sought to start weening me off of it, I would scream like a banshee when the bedroom door closed and plunged me into a deeper darkness than my fragile mind could tolerate.

Eventually, burgeoning adolescence brought with it a sense of pride that prevented me clinging to such childish comforts any longer. But that only turned out to mean that thinner threads anchored me to that which lay outside the darkness.

For a person wracked by nichtophobia, one fortunate truth about the modern world is that it’s remarkably rare to find oneself completely isolated from the light. In my bedroom at home, as well as in those rare instances when I found myself sleeping someplace unfamiliar, there was always something that I could fix my eyes upon in order to feel that I still had a modicum of protection. It might have been a distant streetlight shining into the window, or even through the gaps in the blinds; or it might be the numbers on a digital clock.

From time to time, I could even be made to cling to the indicator light on a piece of electronics switched into standby mode. Although it felt like clinging to the ledge of a building by my fingertips, I think what those items lacked in brightness they made up for in continuity. I would peer into them on the edge of sleep until their color was burned into my dreams, and the lights would remind me that darkness had not severed the items in the room from their purpose or their identity. They would wait patiently through the night and greet me unchanged in the morning.

A faint glow could be sufficient, even if it caused me to wake up feeling shaken in the merciful daylight, as though I had survived the night by the narrowest of margins. The darkness always seemed to pose a tangible, if ineffable threat. The moment it descended upon a room, a prickling sensation would erupt in my mind and spread down my back and into my extremities, intensifying moment by moment. My senses rang alarm bells to tell me of the unidentified, perhaps unimaginable things that were surely crowding around me from all the places that couldn’t be seen.

Sometimes I even felt that bony fingers or claws had come to hover over my motionless form, and in those moments, it was the thin protective sheen of residual light that kept me from harm. As long as that light was in my eyes, it was part of me. And as long as it was part of me, perhaps the emissaries of darkness could touch my skin, but they could never let themselves be seen, much less find their way inside.

On some level, I went on believing this throughout adolescence and into my adulthood. And in view of that faith, I kept myself in reach of the light at all times. Thus I did not experience complete darkness, not even for a moment, until I was 23 years old.

At that time, I was between jobs but I was working off and on at the Owl’s Nest Café. You may have heard of it. I wasn’t on the books, but I had a friend who’d been a line cook there for years. From time to time when they were short staffed he would call me to do food prep, busing, and other menial tasks. I was happy to show up at a moment’s notice, and sometimes I could work a shift with hardly another soul realizing I’d been there. Often, the work required me to run up and down between the kitchen and its basement, which contained dry storage and a walk-in freezer.

It was the only basement I had ever allowed myself to set foot in that had no windows whatsoever. It was essentially a large concrete vault into which no light could enter, but from which none could escape either. Had I given it any thought, I would have surely realized the place’s potential to trigger my fear. But before the door to that basement ever so much as opened, a person flicked a light switch at the top of the stairs and illuminated the room from corner to corner with the brightest, warmest white fluorescents I’d ever seen.

The light was so powerful and so all-encompassing that I felt not only comforted but positively swaddled when I ventured into that basement alone. There were multiple bulbs on the circuit, and if one burned out, it barely would have diminished the brightness of the room as a whole. I also knew that my friend and the café’s other employees weren’t the type of people to play childish pranks like turning out the lights on me deliberately.

I didn’t consider the dangers of simple forgetfulness and random chance. But I’m sure those were the factors at play late in the evening on October 20th. You may have heard of that date.

I don’t know for sure who it was, but someone, perhaps the energy-conscious nighttime manager, evidently took a look around, noticed that all of his scheduled employees were accounted for on ground level, and then closed the basement door and flicked off the light.

Few people can claim to have had the experience of being instantaneously transported from trivial workaday activity to the perfect realization of their greatest terror. Perhaps I would have been saved if I had cried out, but I was struck dumb by the incomprehensible completeness of this plunge into the dark. My mental alarms resonated with such intensity that I seemed to have no mental capacity left with which to form words or even to move.

Whereas my childhood experiences involved the night’s unseen figures creeping slowly, steadily toward me while I clung to the light, now they all rushed forward in an instant, obviously eager to exploit the sudden absence of any frustrating barriers between their world and my mind. The familiar, nervous tingling came over me and was indistinguishable from the feeling of dreaded fingers and claws realizing their ambition and laying themselves coldly upon my scalp, or probing for a way under my skin.

I stood there trembling for a long moment, wracking my brain for a clear sense of where I had been standing when the lights went out and which way I would have to run if I made an attempt for the stairs. Still I didn’t move, not even when, among all the sensations lingering on my skin, one came to stand out above the others. Reaching through the darkness with an air of purpose, something took hold of my hand and rested there, imparting a coldness that soon spread throughout my body.

Then came the whispering, at first sounding like little more than the hiss of escaping steam but gradually coalescing into words, which groped for their place within the room. At first I strained to hear them, but in time the source of the voice seemed to encircle, speaking at once into both ears. “I have been waiting for you for so long,” it said.

As if on cue, light rushed back into the room as one of the café’s employees prepared to join me in the concrete enclosure, a place that could be at once a crypt and a womb. I blinked but did not recoil at the sudden revelation of the inhuman face before me, though I came to recognize it as the warped reflection of my own face in the door of the walk-in freezer. As my hand relaxed its grip on the cold, metal handle, I realized that that reflection was smiling.

I can’t say with any confidence how long I had been down there before the waitress switched on the light and came down the stairs. I also can’t give a clear account of whether she said anything to me, or I to her. I can only say that she never went back up those stairs. Neither, for that matter, did I, or rather the version of me that clung to life throughout those many long years spent cowering from the darkness.

Perhaps my descent was too abrupt, my confrontation with the dark too haphazard and unwitting for it to rightly be described as immersion therapy. But the experience yielded realizations more profound than any psychologist could provide. For as long as I had experienced my fear, I had also misunderstood it. Each night, I felt certain that there was something terrible waiting in the shadows, yearning to come out into the open. But now I realize: that was not what I was afraid of. Instead, I was afraid of something that lay dormant inside me, waiting to be awakened by the long-withheld darkness.

My time in that basement was revelatory, and I was keen to share my newfound insight with the world. I shared it first with the waitress by strangling her under the oppressive light and bashing her head against the cold, metal handle of the freezer. Then I revealed my newly fearless self to the cooks in the kitchen, before slipping out the back door, barricading it from outside, and returning through the front to teach three patrons and another server about the godlike power that had been freed from within my anxious and willfully incomplete mind.

If you didn’t before, I suppose now you remember why you’ve heard of the Owl’s Nest – the massacre that took place there in October. The killings that were never solved. You see, no one knew that I was working there that night. Hardly anyone knew I ever did. It’s the reason why someone didn’t think twice about shutting off the basement light, but also the reason why my friendship with one of the victims didn’t warrant more than passing acknowledgement by police investigators.

Those who know the crime best have declared that every person who was in the building at 10 PM was dead by 10:47. For what it’s worth, they’re not wrong. They just don’t realize that during that time, someone in the building was also born anew.