Apantomancy

The Darkness

Once, when she was a little girl, she had brushed against the darkness. She had been in elementary school, although she couldn't remember which grade now (funny how some things blurred like that), and the friend who she was meant to go home with did not show up for school. The school should have called her parents but the teacher Mrs. Tyson was going through a divorce and her mind was full and somehow the girl was overlooked. So, she ended up sitting at the bus stop until late, watching the sky turn colors. She remembered being scared but not that scared because as a child she had expected certain things to be true and one of those things was that her parents would always come for her. So she waited, and she expected, but she never expected the darkness to come first.

She remembered that the sky was a very interesting shade of pinkish-purple when the darkness stepped out of the growing shadows and smiled at her with teeth that seemed very, very white.

"Hello." It said, in conversational tones.

As a child she expected certain things to be true and one of those things was that bad people tried to lure little girls into vans with candy. Bad people didn't live in shadows and smile with white, white teeth, although any sane adult would have run screaming in the other direction if they had gotten the chance. So, she replied, but she didn't smile back.

"Hullo." Her voice was high and childish, no match for the gravelly baritone of the darkness. It began to congeal, take form, until the darkness stood before her wearing the shape of a pleasant-faced young man possibly three times her age. He wasn't startlingly handsome, or shockingly ugly, although maybe he had been and she just didn't remember. He still smiled, although it seemed like his smile looked more normal now, in his normal face.

"It's strange to meet a girl like you here, at this time of the day." He continued on.

She watched him, looking for signs of candy or vans. "I am waiting for my mom and dad."

"Oh? Are they late?"

"No."

The young man, perhaps, wasn't used to dealing with childish frankness. Certainly, he never dealt in it himself. He wasn't visibly taken aback but somewhere inside, he was a bit surprised at her bluntness.

"Then why are you waiting here, alone, as the sky grows darker?"

"Mom and dad don't know I am here. They'll come, though." Even as a child, she was beginning to understand that there were some things that weren't quite way they appeared and she had begun to realize this young man was one of them. Somewhere deep inside she understood that she should be afraid but somewhere even deeper, somewhere primordial, her instincts were telling her that fear would do her no good. That if the darkness was here to take her away there was nothing that could be done, so she should try to be a pleasant as possible.

"Did you ever think that it might be dangerous for a little girl to wait alone at night? That a bad person might come along and try to take you away?" His question wasn't malicious. He was, quite honestly, curious to the dealings of this girl's mind.

"Of course. But everyone knows that if a bad person comes and tries to give you candy you run away shouting 'this is not my daddy' or 'this is not my mommy'. Duh."

Duh? One eyebrow arched up, an eyebrow that unlike the rest of him, was startlingly, shockingly exquisite. He looked at her closer, seeing something in her that made her either the most delicious prey or painfully, unbearably forbidden to hunt. Suddenly overcome with the desperate urge to know which, he asked her one more question.

"Little girl, do you know that your mommy and daddy are dead?"

She was already looking at him, but if she hadn't been, he was sure her head would have whipped around so fast it would have come off her neck. As it was, there was a faint stirring of her hair, a tribute to that whipping, that followed in the wake of his question. When she didn't say anything for a long time, he began to wonder if she had understood him, but to explain it further would have made the question irrelevant. So the silence stretched on.