The Fallow Soul

Pale sunlight fell through the window and landed in a square across the floor. Susan stared at the square and imagined stepping into it. She closed her eyes and pictured holding inside of its boundaries, staying warm and staying safe.

But that was only a wish, she knew. The child inside of her, desperate to see any path to that imagined safety, would see the square of light as a refuge. But the child would soon learn that the light would not protect her. It would fade, as so many other things do, and leave her alone and unprotected in the dark.

The panic would then set in, with the knowledge that she had missed her chance to escape, and the ever present feeling that all was lost would settle over her. But that wouldn’t last for long. Soon, the terror would begin to worm its way through her gut, finger its way along her nerves, touching each one just a little, and push her down into the forest that she had spent her life trying to escape. Terror would wrap those long, icy fingers around the base of her spine and pull itself into her chest. Her heart would freeze then, and she truly would be lost to the darkness that came for her.

Susan opened her eyes. The square of light lay over the floor, but it was pushed a little further from the window.

As a child, she had felt the darkness. When she grew older, she was sure that all children could feel it, could sense it, and they believed because they were children and had no reason to doubt. Animals could feel it too, which anyone will gladly tell you. But they won’t let you believe once you’ve passed an age. They won’t listen to you when you tell them that it’s real. They do whatever they can to not hear you, to block you out or to send you away. What children and animals know is too much for them to bear.

It began when her parents soothed her in the night after she woke screaming, holding her, whispering soft lies to her, telling her that bad dreams could not hurt her, even though they remembered the dreams that they had when they were children. Even though the dog barked madly in her room at the wall with no picture and no window.

Later in life, as the dreams became more real, Susan felt more alone than ever. She tried to tell another and spent the better part of a year in the office of a quiet woman, hours at a time in a too cold room, describing the forest in every horrible detail. The woman said little at first, allowing Susan to paint a full picture. Then the woman turned the forest into a metaphor and made what Susan had described to her seem utterly trivial and nonsensical. The woman idly listed a series of events that she suspected had happened to Susan as a child, and then eased back into her leather chair, smug, and content to resume her silence.

Weary of those who denied, Susan turned to those who did believe and were not silent and uncovered a shadowy world of conjecture that scared her almost as much as the dreams. Anecdotal stories of a thousand forests and more assailed her, begging her to believe, as she wanted to be believed. Unexplained events, impossible occurrences and dark apparitions were as common as bread at a market. But in the end, the bloodshot eyes of those that believed lied to her as much as her parents had, as much as the smirking woman in the cold office.

The bloodshot eyes did believe, and did want for these things to be real. But they had not experienced what Susan had, not really.

The hollow bells of religion rang through the town by day, but they were never more than a herald to the dark that would come. Their comfort was less than what her parents had brought her as a child, their explanations less convincing than those of the woman in her office, and their followers less passionate than the cults of wild eyed believers.

It occurred to Susan that if the church rang those bells at night, then she could believe in the salvation that they had to offer. But they left her alone then, like all of the others, and in the end, offered only a more passive denial.

Susan watched the light eek across the floor, fading as it always did, giving up its fight to light the world and hiding as the darkness came to replace it. But the light fading today moved Susan differently than it had before. Tears slid down her cheeks at the same speed that the light left the room.

Last night, when the darkness came and Susan crashed through the forest around her, everything changed. Amidst the running and the thrashing, the terror and the panic, and the inevitable moment when the darkness closed in, Susan discovered something, and she was eager to find it again tonight.

After all of the lies, false trails and un-kept promises, Susan found a tiny place inside of herself that had a will to fight back.

Last night, Susan felt the desire to destroy. She wanted the darkness to burn, and when she flicked out with a tiny flame of her intent, the darkness flinched. Then it redoubled the terror it brought over her, stealing her breath and coming close to failing her heart. Then it disappeared.

And Susan slept then, for hours, untroubled and peacefully. She woke with a clear mind and a new understanding of what could be. For the first time in her life, her fear was mixed with a tiny bit of hope.

But as the day wore on, that tiny bit quailed in the face of what she knew had to come. As the last of the light drained from the horizon, Susan felt for the anger that had welled in her the night before, for the flame that would light her way through the darkness. She searched for some time, but the flame was elusive and did not come. Susan slumped in the chair she rocked in and let her heavy eyes close.

It came as a stirring deep inside of her, plucking its way around her heart and running up and down the well-worn path along her spine.

Susan felt for the will to resist it, but it would not come. What did come was a sinister knowing, a recognition that she had singed the darkness with her hate the night before and, and a glittering black glee in discovering that she no longer held the flame to wield.

The forest coalesced in front of her, mist shrouding the ground that she knew would tear at her legs and feet, and Susan felt her panic rise as she looked for any way to escape.

But as always, there was no place to escape to, and as she spun around she saw that the forest now surrounded her, holding her in, and the darkness that was blacker than the night was coming.

And she knew that tonight, different that any other night before, it would catch her.

Susan’s heart raced like a cage animal in her chest, he nerves sending impulses to move in too many directions at once and she cried now, cried and knew that when the darkness finally dragged her down, it would be a horror that eclipsed anything she had ever known before.

She realized that she knew this because the darkness wanted her to know. The trees grew dense around her, black, clawed monoliths that slashed at her face and body as she ran. Gnarled roots tangled her feet, biting into soft flesh and chewing.

Thunder cracked above her, sudden lightning flashing to light the path before her, and she wished more deeply than she ever had for anything that it hadn’t.

In that brief flash, she saw the path ahead. The trees had parted and the roots pulled back, clearing her way toward a dense shadow.

Susan crashed to her knees, cutting them among the rocks and rough soil, and the rain began to come down, mixing her blood into the ground. The shadow grew before her, darker than anything around her, and a cruel but seductive laughter came from it.

Images flashed through her mind of her body in the forest, drained white but peacefully sleeping beneath an old, bent tree. The seductive laughter promised her peace within that vision. It had tasted enough of her fear and was willing to let her go, let her sleep.

Susan was badly tempted to give in, to stop struggling and give up, but the lie was thick in its whisper and she knew better than to believe that she would ever know peace in this place. She knew better than to believe that the body she saw was sleeping.

She cried as she pushed up, scrambling out of the mud and stumbling back away from the shadow. She felt its hate just before its grasp, and then felt the fire flood through her veins. It had been prodded. She felt the keening interest of the shadow as it flared and cringed from its delight as it built up inside of her.

But Susan didn’t care. She didn’t care and she let that fire build until it hummed along her skin and became something she could use to burn the thing in front of her.

She spun to face it, stretched a hand toward the dense darkness, and let the fire go. The fire was black, as black as the shadow it sped to consume and it was part of her. She wrapped it around the shadow like a thousand arms and when black fire met darkness, the shadow screamed in her mind. It screamed and let images of pain flood through her, hurting her as much as it hurt, and she still did not care. She willed the fire hotter, thrilling as the shadow began to ash and dissipate. The pain was nothing to her after so many years of torment and fear.

Red tinged the edges of the flames now, burning through the shadow as it screamed and dissolved into ash.

Susan poured everything she had into it, everything until there was nothing left of her, and then had to let the fire go. Her hand dropped and she sank to the ground, staring at the smoldering ashes that still popped and sparked along the forest floor.

The rush of the fight flooded through her still, adrenaline pumping through her veins like fuel, but as it ebbed, she felt a deep satisfaction and she smiled. But as the rush faded, so did the feeling of having been satiated and a desire for more cut into her with a hunger she had never felt before. Susan gasped at the intensity of it before it suddenly disappeared and left her empty and cold.

The ashes in front of her grew dark once more, like black blood pulled from the earth to fill them, and the shadow rose.

It prodded her, sparking the flame to build within her, but she was spent and there was no fire to stoke. It prodded her again, like a child poking at the body of some lifeless animal, but Susan had nothing left to push back with.

Bitter disappointment filled her, acrid with contempt and then idle regret. The thought filtered through her mind that she had at least provided some entertainment. Then, frost tipped fingers wrapped around her chest and squeezed, crushing any thoughts from her mind and the breathe from her body.

Susan died in that moment, but as her body was released from the physical torment it had suffered throughout her life, her mind found no such release. Susan’s awareness of the forest grew and true horrors that it had hidden came out from the shadows like spiders that had been starved before a feast.

Susan screamed, but that meant nothing here. She turned and ran away from the shadows, plunging back through the forest, but she could feel them at her heels, cackling in pleasure as they inched closer to taking her. Her thoughts bleached by terror, the soul that had been Susan propelled its way through the forest and wailed. Had she possessed the presence of mind to realize that the sun’s rays never touched this place, she would have screamed even louder.

***

Neighbors watched as the gurney rolled down her driveway with three belts tightened over the sheet-covered body.

Some would say that the lady that had lived there was always a little off. Some would say that she had always been pleasant, but all would agree that she had always seemed sad.

She was far too young to have suffered a heart attack, but that was what the coroner had ruled.

Once the gurney was loaded into the ambulance, the doors were slammed shut.

The neighbors stood in their doorways and sipped coffee in their robes as they watched the ambulance pull away. Some reached up to rub eyes that were tired from not sleeping all that well the night before. Some went back inside to check on a child that had woken during the night, screaming. Some had something new to discuss at their weekly appointments and others bowed their heads in prayer.

As the ambulance drove down the street, dogs barked and howled at its passing.