The Ready Guardian

The door closed and filled the temple with darkness, flooding the interior with a thousand echoes. Flinching, Daniel peered over his shoulder nervously. He wasn’t sure he was allowed to be there; he wasn’t sure anybody was around. Maybe the temple was filled with some sort of congregation he was interrupting, and maybe it wasn’t. Whatever the circumstances within, the door closed loudly and mostly everyone is shy of an accidentally-slammed door. 

But Daniel wasn’t interrupting—the place was deserted. When he did turn around, he had to squint through the darkness to confirm it, but it was apparent almost at once. The shadows of the expansive room betrayed little besides their loneliness, and Daniel was not accustomed to loneliness, so it put him off. Regardless of how he felt about the slammed door and the lonely hall, he was trapped. The heavy, medieval door wouldn’t budge no matter how he fiddled with its lock or pulled and pushed against its bulk.

Suddenly, Daniel was aware of the thickness of his breathing and felt childish. It was only a dark room after all, but he’d always been nervous of the dark… he saw things in it, things he readily discounted as conjurations of his imagination, but still they were there and they inflated his unease. For a moment, with his back to the dark room, Daniel put his head against the door and contemplated his next move. The answer seemed obvious: on the one hand, go through the building and find another exit, hopefully before he was late to work; on the other hand, he was impeded by a cowardly voice from within pleading for him to stay by the door and wait for someone to come along and open it.

He didn’t like waiting, so he faced the room. Row after row of pew all led up to a front-and-center platform raised by a few steps. Upon the platform there was a podium and behind the podium, a table. His eyes, having adjusted to the dark, were just able to make these things out. They were aided by a thin band of golden light streaming in from beneath the main door and by a faint aura emanating from the stained-glass windows—dark red, black, and blue monstrosities soaking up the light from outside and glowing as though irradiated. Across the room, to the right of the raised platform, there was a small wooden door leading into the back of the temple; its body was outlined by a dull blue from the next room.

Even if it didn’t lead to another exit, the promise of a well-lit room goaded Daniel into crossing the darkness. Like a moth, he kept his eyes trained on the door’s blue-light and strode amongst the pews. He wore a face that was professional and unafraid, but the beading sweat on his brow betrayed him. He was embraced by the unnerving sensation of being watched; the eyes were everywhere and felt just like they'd always been described to him: an uncomfortable pinching between his shoulders and waves of tingles flowing through his arms and legs, as of a sleeping limb awoken. It also gave him a couple of feelings he’d never really heard described, and wondered if they were related. For one, his head felt heavy, a charley horse between his eyes that made his head hurt and stifled the flow of oxygen through his nostrils. For two, he found himself in sudden need of the facilities.

In any case, the peculiarities of his emotional response didn’t push Daniel to peer into the surroundings searching for his unseen watcher. Instead, his focus narrowed on the door and he doubled his pace and subsequently smashed his toes against the lowest step at the corner of the raised platform.

“Dugh!” he cried, collapsing forward onto his forearms. His knee landed first, and the patella screamed when it struck the tile. Gritting his teeth, Daniel grumbled, “Christ…” and picked himself back up. As it was with the “accidentally-slammed door”, he peered over his shoulder again, embarrassed of his clumsiness.

And still no one was there.

With a minor kick, a vengeful tapping of the side of his foot against the protruding lower step of the platform, Daniel got back on track and reached the door just before the darkness caught him.