In Parched Gardens: Book 1

Chapter 2: Another Time

Lying there, he saw dim lights coming through the window and crawling in thin bands into the far reaches of the room. He heard the soft buzz of a car whose headlights sent in gleams that crept along the ceiling and the tops of the walls. He listened intently, now also hearing the bugs and the moans of the structure around him. He squinted and strained into the room. Save the emaciated light, he was shrouded in total darkness. The bed beneath him seemed to grip him, like rigid bones. Straining more, he thought he heard something, faintly, indescribable, in the dull quiet.

In an instant, the faint streaks of light were gone, the car turning a corner, replaced by a dense and heavy darkness. In this darkness, as though the desolate and lonely ocean, he strained still harder to hear. And as he lay, eyes burning and aching through the fog and weight of disturbed sleep, he strained his eyes also, searching, blindly, into the black recesses of the room. Near the door, he heard something, felt something, as though the stifled groan of mourners behind the door, and he half leaned up on his side, desperately searching the impermeable darkness.

His heart started to beat more deeply, more disturbed, his breathing louder, and he tried to quiet and calm himself. Nothing was happening, he thought. Nothing was there. Now, as he strained, the moon's frigid light writhed into the crooks of the room. A cloud had drifted, and the fullness of its silvery veil dripped through the window frame. Searching the room, scanning the door, he saw nothing. And as the silver specter of moonlight quivered through the room, he felt the gentle chill of the nighttime air as less than a breeze, like a breath, passed through his thin window and over his blankets. In the far corner of the room, he heard the door rustle, pushed and pulled, he imagined, by the breath in the room. Yet, to him it seemed like the silver veil both exposed and concealed something just beyond the door, some rustling, moaning thing in the fissure of darkness there.

He leaned forward more, sitting up almost completely now, unable to fully stand under the weight of the room, under the weight of his mind. But he could strain, and he did, into the pale emptiness around him. And as he looked and listened, the moon's watch returned behind the clouds, and again the room sat in wretched darkness. And as the darkness fell, almost trembling and shuddering into the room, beyond the door, he heard scratching, as if the nails of some wild animal clawing wildly in its wayward dreams. It was as if the scratching of unknown things in sealed crypts, revealing and obscured.

Breathing even louder now, spiraling, he reached for the phone on the nightstand beside his bed, but felt nothing. Stretching his hand uncomfortably across the stand, frantically searching, there was nothing there. He quickly checked under his pillow, the blankets around the bed, all the dark areas around him, but there was nothing. As he searched, desperately quietly, he tilted his ear toward the dark doorway. And though he was not sure, he felt like he heard soft dragging, like dry palms upon wood, against the door. And though he wished to scream, he was stricken as if mute by some sick deity of the darkness.

Again, after a moment, soft silver contorted into the room. The cloud had passed, for a moment. And as the silver, like liquid, filled the space, he felt he saw some slender, spindly thing, like fingers, or talons, or something, stretch from off the door into the dark cleft behind it. At that, he froze, almost without breathing. The night ticked away in infinite moments as the silver curtain was slowly pulled away from the room. And as the last light was dragged over and beyond him and the darkness enveloped him, he thought he saw something crawling, some distorted and incongruous mass, on the ceiling above him. And at the last, as the light failed completely and the darkness reigned, from the twisted mass, he heard the start of some scream, both high pitched, as though from agony, and low, like a growl, in the desolate dark. It was like gnarled and knotted wind through untold rows of brick lattice in the graveyard's garden. And then he woke up, half-choking, half-gargling the drink of dreams.