The Descent of Night

“But your dead will live; their bodies will rise

Your dew is like the dew of the morning; the earth will give birth to her dead

Go, my people, enter your rooms, and shut the doors behind you;

hide yourselves for a little while …until his wrath has passed by”

Isaiah 26: 19-20

We were told go home and stay there.

But for how long?

Well, that was to be determined. To everyone around me, as we were packing our things up in the office, it seemed like the world was coming to an end.

“This is it.” A coworker said nearby, hastily tossing the things from his desk into a small cardboard box.

This was especially true for Marty.

“What?” I asked, a small smirk on my face, knowing what was coming next. From reptilians running the world to conspiracies that had to do with prominent government figures sacrificing political enemies and children in an effort to summon a nameless death god from the underworld to raise the dead and rule over us all, he knew, just knew how the world was going to bite it.

Marty’s mind was a relative breeding ground for the most far-out apocalyptic ideas.

“Dude, you can’t tell me you don’t know what this is.”

“A long vacation?” I said with a shrug. We were at least going to be working remotely until further notice, which had its challenges, but I remained optimistic. I always tended to be optimistic about things, even this situation, and that seemed to rub Marty the wrong way. Nobody planned for a global pandemic, so there was naturally no plan to effectively do our jobs around it. But I remained transfixed on the positives of the situation. No more hour-long commute, better food (if I could manage it), and I wouldn’t have to deal with Marty’s doom and gloom all the time. He had that distinctive quality that could, upon first greeting, turn a bright and sunny morning full of possibility and hope into a writhing cesspool of anger and fear, making one quite certain the world was going to end at any second. The guy just brought me down, and I was happy to not have to deal with him, at least ‘until further notice.’

“This is part of the plan. The plan, my friend. Don’t you see it?”

He also always called me ‘my friend.’ Though I was friendly towards him, as I was to everybody, I sure as hell wasn’t his friend.

“It’s the culmination of the signs. We’re all being sent home to begin the incubation period of fear and doubt. It’s to lower the protective vibratory field of the world to…” He looked at me expectantly as if I knew what he was about to say.

“Um… to prevent the spreading of a potentially fatal virus?”

“To reawaken in the nameless death god. Come on, Gabe! It’s plain as day, written right on the wall in front of us.” I looked at the wall in front of me at a poster of a kitten holding onto a ledge with the words, Hang in There printed just below it.

“Well, not that wall. Figurative, Gabe. Figurative wall.”

 Then he gave me another look, and this one told me all I needed to know about Marty. It told me that he could have a severe cardiac event at any moment, his eyes nearly bugging out of his head. He was sweating profusely, which to me was his natural state.

“I’m getting out of town. I gotta get my affairs in order. Something serious is about to go down.” He sighed, looked at me for a moment, and then, after wiping a handkerchief across his face, he reached into his box of belongings and began rummaging around. He pulled out a strange metal ornament that I had always seen on his desk but didn’t know what it was. He handed it to me.

I looked down at it.

He didn’t say anything, so I asked the only thing that came to mind.

“What the hell is this?”

“Not a damn clue. Something protective from the looks of it. I’ve been meaning to give this to you for a while now, but always forget, so uh… here you go.”

I studied the thing in the light and noticed nothing but weird etchings under a significant amount of rust and pockmarks from age.

“Ok. Thanks.” I said, not knowing what he was talking about or what else to say, honestly. I felt that after today, I probably wouldn’t be seeing Marty anymore. We packed our things, and after putting the strange metal pan or whatever in my box, I shook Marty’s hand for the last time, which was clammy and sweaty, as though he had just washed it without drying afterward. Then I went home where I would remain ‘until further notice.’

The first week was kind of hectic. Getting used to the schedule and getting the programs to work on my laptop was frustrating, but soon enough I had a flow and things started to go rather smoothly around the middle of the second week. I noticed, mostly during our livestream meetings, that my neighbors in the apartment upstairs could be quite noisy from time to time. Maybe they were getting as antsy as I was. It had barely been a month when I started to feel the stress of the confinement. Sure, I had friends I could talk to over video chats and all, but it just wasn’t the same as being there with a person. I lived alone and had no pets as my apartment didn’t allow them. A cat or a dog would have been a welcomed companion during that time.

Though if I had a dog, they probably would have barked their head off at the noises coming from upstairs. The first month I barely noticed them, but it was within the second month that things began to get out of hand. It got to the point in which the screaming and slamming of things got so bad that I called my landlord to file a complaint. Of course, he didn’t answer as it was nearly two in the morning, but I left a message and waited for a response the next day. He called back the next morning and told me he would give them a call and tell them to keep it down, and to next time just call the police for a noise complaint. I didn’t hear anything else from him after that and went about my work, which had become streamlined into a daily schedule, but had also become dull and monotonous. The same thing day in and day out. Around the beginning of month three I had begun to see the effects of the quarantine-life. My eyes seemed wild and sunken, my face narrower, and my usually shaved face unkempt and wild. I wasn’t eating very well, if at all. I was starting to feel an ominous feeling pass over me from time to time, as if this was what life was now, and how it would remain forever more. I became depressed and found it hard to pick up my old optimism, though it would eventually return and my hopes would rise yet again.

The neighbors were quiet for a time. I guess they got the message. That was until the beginning of the fourth month. Things had started to get bad again and I had a hard time trying to sleep. I tossed and turned, but the most I could successfully do was close my eyes and wish for my brain to shut the hell up and long for blessed unconsciousness to take me away.

But it just wasn’t happening, so I opened my eyes to turn on the bedside lamp. I reached over, but as I did so, my hand froze. I couldn’t be sure because of the darkness of my room, but I could swear that I saw a figure standing in my open doorway.

This was odd because, one… oh hell no. And two, I always close and lock my bedroom door upon going to bed, despite living alone. I snapped the light on instinctively and shot up in bed, and as I did so, I watched as something dark flit away, vanishing soundlessly down the long hallway. I didn’t hear the door open or close, so I grabbed the only thing I had in the room to protect myself, a damn broomstick. I held it out in front of me as I slunk into the hallway, swiping at the light switches as I went, illuminating my tiny apartment and banishing the concealing darkness.

It only took a matter of seconds for me to bathe everything in light, and I couldn’t tell if I was relieved or concerned that I found the place to be entirely empty.

Just a hallucination. I figured. Maybe I was closer to sleeping than I thought? I walked back down the hallway, turning the lights off as I went, but nothing could stop that inevitable chill on the back of my neck as I walked back to my bedroom, my back exposed to the sightless darkness behind. I looked over my shoulder more times than I would care to admit, but each time produced the same result: nothing there.

I settled back into bed after making damn sure I shut and locked my door this time. It may have been a hallucination, but the lingering fact remained that hallucinations don’t open locked doors.

They didn’t even open unlocked ones.

I pulled the blanket back over me and settled into what I knew was going to be another sleepless night when the most horrid, ear-piercing scream cut through the silent night. It was followed by a house-rattling thud, and it didn’t take me but a second to realize that the sound had just come from upstairs.

The awful scream came again, and I could tell it was from the woman that lived there. The only way I understood that it was a man and a woman living up there was from their voices during the night. I never saw them during the day, and being locked away as we were, there was little chance of that happening anyway. I didn’t hesitate and called 911. I told them it sounded as though someone was being murdered upstairs. What helped was that the screaming and massive thuds happened twice while I was on the phone with the dispatch. They sent officers right away, and it took a few minutes for them to arrive. They immediately went upstairs to the second-floor apartment as I waited in my living room, still clad in my pajamas. I checked the time and saw that it was nearing one in the morning. Only about an hour had passed since I woke initially. I could hear the thumping footsteps of several officers upstairs and the murmuring of their voices. Some of them were coughing and I immediately thought of the virus, as we all couldn’t help but do at the slightest cough or sniffle.

More police cars and an ambulance pulled up outside and that’s when I knew what happened didn’t just happen in my head. After about an hour, there was a knock at my door. I answered it seeing that it was one of the masked officers that first arrived on the scene. He looked pale, almost sick in the dim light from my tiny front porch. He looked shaken and uncomfortable and was very tight lipped about what they had found. He eventually told me that there were several victims upstairs and asked me if I had seen or heard anything in the last few months. I told him about everything I had heard, but I saw no one go upstairs. The stairwell to the second-floor apartment was right outside my living room window. I did tell him that I thought I saw someone in my bedroom about an hour earlier when I initially woke up and he seemed concerned, but I told him I searched the place and found no one. He radioed another one of his fellow officers and told me to stand outside while they searched my place. I asked him how serious it was, and he simply told me that in the seven years he had been on the force it was the worst thing he had ever seen. That was all he was willing to tell me and I stepped outside, while they had a look around. They found nothing, as I knew they would, and soon they went back out and I back inside. I didn’t want to see it, but I couldn’t help but watch the macabre parade of body bags as they brought the corpses down the stairs an hour or so later, of which I expected to see two, not seven. One after the other they hauled them by my living room window and I just knew I was going to have to move now, the sight was never going to be erased from my mind and possibly replayed every time I looked up at the window.

I thought whatever happened was finished. The awful thing done and over.

I was wrong.

I saw in the light of the streetlamp, the body bags of the murder victims laid out on the pavement, oddly illuminated by the flashing of the emergency vehicles’ lights.

This was the last thing I saw before the power went out.

For a moment I found myself plunged into a realm of absolute darkness, the world becoming an unyielding wall of sightlessness.

The first thing that entered my mind in that moment was, I’m blind, but I soon realized that there was just enough light for me to see the edge of the stairs outside. But what horrified me the most was that even the flashing lights of the police cars outside has gone off in that moment and I knew that this was not a normal power outage.

My understanding of this produced a shock that had nothing to do with anything supernatural. It was something Marty had told me several months before the lockdown. He had told me about EMP strikes, electro-magnetic pulses, that could totally cripple the infrastructure of our country in a matter of seconds. I didn’t fully understand the science behind it, but it had something to do with a nuclear weapon being detonated high above the atmosphere, and that explosion would send out not radiation, but a powerful shockwave of supercharged energy that would fry nearly everything electronic. Power plants and substations would go down, basically anything with a running computer would be toast. The sun had the capability of doing this as well, and it did so back in the 1800s, but all we had back then was telegraphs, and those even caught fire in some places.

This was Marty though, and everything he said seemed to blown way out of proportion, but he said that the timeframe to getting the power back on was dependent on the area, and it would take anywhere between a year to ten. The idea of ten years without power and running water seemed unfathomable. As I was dwelling on this dawning horror, I heard something that caused my body to become numb. It was the sound of choked laughter echoing from the dark hallway behind me. I turned, my heart racing, but saw nothing. The sound of yelling outside caught my attention and I spun again to peer sightlessly out into the dark. More sharp cries, orders, followed by screams, then to my surmounting horror, several gunshots exploded into the silent darkness with brief blinding flashes. I ducked down, instinctively as three blasts cut through the night. The tinkling of glass above me let me know that at the last shot flew wild and went through my window, right where I had just been standing.

The screams coming from outside were incomprehensible, inhuman, though I knew it to be coming from the officers. They were the kinds of sounds you hear from animals when confronted with unendurable pain and certain death. The laughing from behind me grew stronger and I could just make out a dark figure standing only feet away from me. It began to slink towards me in an uneven, shambling gait, and I could see the eyes, a weird ominous glow that flickering behind them.

As it grew closer, I began to see the face of the awful thing and it took everything within me to not to join the screaming from outside. It was a demon, or at least, it looked like one. The face was elongated, had a long drooping snout with sharp tusks and tiny sunken eyes. The arms hung nearly to the floor with long dagger-like nails at the end of each gnarled finger. The feet weren’t hooved like many demon creatures are depicted, but more of a lizard-like claw. The thing moved towards me, and despite its towering height, moved silently. The features of the thing horrified me and before I could even think, I grasped for the doorknob. The creature, whatever it was, moved faster than anything I had ever seen. It pressed the door closed and pushed me away from it, sending me to the ground.

“Are you stupid?” The thing croaked, it’s voice low and rumbling. I heard the creature locking the door.

“What?” I replied, stupidly.

“Do you hear that shit? Stay in here. Stay safe.”

I scrambled to my feet and backed up against the door. Standing now, I could see that the thing was a good two feet taller than me.

“What—what is this?”

“This is me saving your pathetic little life, mortal.” The creature grunted. Turning back into the room and opening the palm of its hand. A greenish light ignited there and I saw with full horror the extent of the thing’s face.

“Holy shit.” I murmured, feeling my knees going weak.

“Oh, get a damn grip. You humans and your weak sensibilities.” It groans and rolls its beady little eyes. “You are the one with the offering plate, aren’t you?” The thing nods its head over towards the kitchen counter where I turn to see the strange little metal plate that Marty had given me. I look back at the creature with the glowing green flame in its hand.

“Not much of an offeror, are you?” It says with a huff, glaring at the tower of dirty dishes lying beside the thing. “Regardless. I’m here to offer you protection.”

“Protection?” I ask, still staring at the thing that looks like it just sprouted out of Jim Henson’s Creature Shop. I swear it looked like a mix between a Skeksis and one of those fire demon things from Labyrinth, only it was naked and that just made it twelve times weirder.

“That’s what I said, yes. I’m bound to you.”

“But why? And, if I may, what exactly are you?” I ask, growing more confident. The thing sighed as another horrid scream cut through the darkness outside.

“The why and the what can be answered in one explanation, I suppose. I’m here because of a sworn duty to protect your ancestor, a crotchety old wizard named Argus. What I am is a Figment, something he created.” It said with a derisive snort.

“I’m related to a wizard? A real wizard? So am I—”

“No, you aren’t a damn wizard. This isn’t a letter to Hedgewart or whatever the hell you call that wizard school thing you kids are all on about these days. A wizard or witch is forged, not born. It takes years of intense seeking of knowledge and sensible application. Even that dingbat old bastard Argus knew that. Kids these days… just want to be handed free shit.”

The figment then grumbled on and on about how back in the old days people were just eaten by creatures like him and forgotten about, and how feelings are nonsense and other curmudgeonly things.

“So… you aren’t a demon, and you are not trying to kill me?”

The figment laughed, though humorlessly.

“Oh, I’m no demon. You people wouldn’t know a true demon if it sat down beside you. They’ve been closed off from this world for ages now. If I had been trying to kill you, I would have done it months ago.” It said with a wave of its gnarled hand.

“Ok.” I said, trying to acclimate myself to this weird new normal.

“So, what’s the plan?”

“Stay alive, and stay inside, until this all blows over.”

I look outside.

“How long will that take?”

“A few minutes.”

I blink and look back at the creature.

“A few minutes?” I say, incredulous.

“Yeah, this,” it said, waving its hand outside, “this is just the start of the things that are going to start happening around the world. The lights will soon come back on, I’ll go back into my little plate and things will eventually go back to normal.”

I sigh with relief.

“Don’t get too relieved. Like I said, this is only the start. This is a taste of what is to come. By all means, this,” it motions to the screams and moans outside, “is a preemptive spiritual strike on your world, though you have been so disassociated with the spirit realms, none of you have any idea how to defend yourselves against it.”

“The stuff upstairs…”

“That was the result of someone playing with forces they really didn’t understand, and why you spotted me earlier checking in on you while you were sleeping. Your neighbors were a pair of serial killers and were using the bodies to summon something incredibly dark, but long story short, they created what is known as a ‘dip’ into the nether realm. And that killed them and created this momentary hellscape.”

I think then of what Marty has said, about how everything has been so negative lately. Even my mood has been affected by all this.

Could he have been right all along? Nameless death gods and all?

“I know.” The thing says. “It all seems pretty crazy, doesn’t it? Well, if you think this is crazy,” it said, motioning to itself, “you are in for one hell of an awakening. The time of selfless indulgences and blind ignorance are coming to an abrupt close. Your world is tearing itself apart right now because the foundation in which it rests has been seeded with hidden horrors and atrocities that cannot be forgotten, nor forgiven, even by the dead. Humans have neglected their place in the grand order of things for so, so long, and now the time has come to reap what has been sowed.”

“So, if all of humanity is doomed, why are you trying to help me?” I ask, beginning to feel hopeless.

“Because there are some of you with the potential to turn things around. Actually, all of you have that potential, which makes it all the more frustrating, but only some of you have the willingness to see that the faults of this world reside within and not without.”

“Now you’re just talking in riddles.”

“I know. Sucks doesn’t it? Anyway, it is time for the façade—I mean the lights to return, at least, until further notice, so I must leave you. Whatever you do, don’t loose my damn plate. The world may return to some kind of order, but never let your guard down. Keep that thing with you always, no matter how awkward it is. It’s only weird if you make it weird, and believe me, kid, things are about to get really fucking weird.”

“Fair enough… What is your name, anyway?” I ask, without really thinking. To this, the figment just laughed.

“Oh, that’s something I can’t give you so willingly. Know this, never just ask spirits for their names. It’s a good way to royally piss them off. Study that plate over there and you’ll figure it out soon enough. Until then, I’m just Figment to you.” And with that, it closed the palm containing the green flame and in the same instant, the lights came back on. As it did so, my ears popped and for a moment I felt extremely dizzy. A cacophonous sound radiated through my apartment and I realized it was a pounding on my front door.

I looked out the peep hole in my door, not knowing what to expect, but found that it was only the police officer from earlier. He looked frantic. I opened the door and was greeted with an explosive apology. It took me a moment to realize that he was talking about my window he had shot. I told him that I was fine, but he would have to talk to my landlord about getting the window replaced. To be honest, I wasn’t so much worried about the window, but more so at the state of the bodies that had previously been in body bags – they were now scattered all over the street outside. People were peering outside their front doors at the horrid sight. The officers and emergency personnel worked hastily to cover the mangled bodies and return them to the bags. No one, from what I understand, ever got an explanation for the abrupt power outage that effected three nearby towns, nor explained the abrupt reanimation of the dead. There were rumors from mortuaries and morgues that bodies had started moving on their own accord and one medical examiner even died from unusual circumstances. Nothing was ever explained, and everything was covered up, despite the weird blip in the matrix.

Thankfully, I didn’t get eaten by a demon and my broken window was eventually replaced. Though the world hasn’t returned to “normal,” I try to do the best I can with the way things are. Keeping my hopes up makes a world of difference in the midst of chaos, but I remember to keep the offering plate with me, because I have a feeling that it’s only a matter of time until the lights finally go out.