What Waits in the Dark

Three stories, one question: what stirs in the dark when we stop looking?

What Waits in the Dark

Three stories, one question: what stirs in the dark when we stop looking? A quiet study of fear, isolation, and the unseen.

The Old Relay Station

Click. A switch, faulty but working. The light pressed against the dark, sinking into the flesh. Each step carried Elias deeper into the relay station’s groaning stomach.
To distract his mind, Elias took notes and muttered to himself. He spoke of voltage readings and overall hazards.
For a moment, he saw a yawning rusted metal staircase, and a battered and cracked hallway leading towards the control corridor. The next, consumed entirely by darkness. The emergency lights pulsed on defiantly, a blood-red glow that took a long breath before it failed.
For a moment, the dark felt total–thick enough to press against his skin. Then he heard it, the wet drag of something shifting across the concrete behind him. The station creaked. Something malfunctioned. It was the wind.
Elias fumbled for his flashlight. Click. Like a single needle, it threaded through the teeth. The dark opened like a maw, revealing nothing. But the sound didn’t stop. It only paused, as if waiting for the mouth to close again. It was the wind.
He felt a breath on the back of his head, cold and long. He spun. The corridor bent where a wall once stood. The hallway distorted into a face looking back at him. His flashlight cried as it flickered. The battery. He had forgotten to check the battery before he had left. He ran. The dark followed.
With every sad sigh of the flashlight, it fought against the open maw ready to swallow him. The corridor twisted pipes into teeth, and smiled at him. The once short corridor turned into the tongue of a hungry beast. With each step he swore he heard the metal grate thud like wet flesh. The flashlight cried a final tear, before it died.

The wet drag resumed. Inching toward him. He listened. He stepped back. He hit a wall. It laughed at him. With every second passed the station groaned his name. It spoke to him in tongues. It whispered secrets he could not unhear—and in the silence between them, the dark learned his name.
 
The Water Reservoir

Mara isn’t afraid of the dark. Everything that exists, lives in a system. But when she opened up the hatch, the dark looked back—and it had many eyes.
The bulb near the hatch flickered, spraying weakly into the black below. The darkness moved, slowly crawling out of the way. She gripped the metal ladder and began her descent. Metal groaned beneath her weight. Just like any other day, she whipped out her notebook. Routine. She noted the corrosions and the smell of rust, scribbling it into her journal. The city's inspectors never came down here anymore, not since the accident. They had found the last inspector fractured. Babbling like they had seen a cosmos older than ours.
Setting her bag down, the light from the hatch blinked. For a moment the dark crawled before the light steadied like repellent.
She unzipped her bag, pulled out a flashlight and clicked it on. The catwalk cast long web-like shadows across the pools below, stopping just before the water. Sound reverberated through the reservoir as she stepped across the catwalk. A shadow moved against the beam. Her eyes were tired. However, just below, came the sound of skittering. A creaking of the reservoir. A lost bat. The rippling water. Though it made no sense how the sound could come from below when the reservoir was full. It did not make sense.
She threw the beam down but it drowned before touching the surface. Instead she heard the sound again. And again. Louder. And before she had come to realize, she turned around. The bulbs of the reservoir breathed and exhaled. One by one, they died. Second by second, the walls distorted. Threads spun. The dark blinked—watching. With each breath the flashlight took, the railings' lattice turned into webs. Insects. Her flashlight wheezed once, against the cocooning dark. The flashlight died. Something brushed against her. Tiny legs prickled under her skin. She wanted to scream. There was no system. Only breathing dark.
Mara wasn’t afraid of the dark.
 
A House Without Windows

The walls were smooth, seamless. Even the air felt thicker inside. Atop a lonely hill stood an abbey of stone — its structure interlocked like clasped fingers, sealing whatever lingered within. The masonry was pale and patient, untouched by moss or time. There were no windows. It had been built that way by design. Only a single door faced the world, narrow, unwelcoming, and never seen open.
The village below had never visited. Not out of fear, nor superstition, but something deeper — a compulsion to ignore. To pretend the abbey was not there. To believe it had never been. If you ever find yourself in that town, you do not see the stone Abbey. You cannot.
When wind passed over the hill, the walls creaked, and moaned like old lungs. The towers seemed to shift their height by inches, as though they wanted to be seen. From every corner of the cowering village, the abbey stood plain in view — stark against the pale horizon, unblinking, and undeniable. And yet still it did not exist.
Eyes slid past it. Thoughts refused to land upon its shape. The villagers averted their gaze toward the cobbled streets where reality still obeyed. They would not notice the vein-like growths that crawled across its skin, nor the faint shimmer beneath the stone.
At night, the air carried sounds that did not belong to the wind — the low grinding of stone upon stone, the sigh of the towers contorting, and the slow rhythm of the abbey walking through the night. Doors shuddered in their frames; animals cowered to the earth and trembled. And yet, by morning, no one spoke of it. No one ever would.
Because the abbey did not exist.
It never did.
And still, it waits.
2.
The door opened, though it never should have.
A boy stood at the threshold. The light in his hand, sharp as a blade, cut through the black sinew of the air. The floorboards called out when he stepped into the beating heart of the abbey. Or was it his own beating heart? He felt his veins tighten beneath his skin, his throat closing around his breath. Still, he walked on.
The narrow beam, like a scalpel, pierced through the open wound of the house and revealed nothing but furniture — ordinary, waiting, wrong. The door closed behind him. He turned, casting the light toward it, but the dark revealed nothing. Perhaps it was the wind. Perhaps the weight of the house itself.
He moved forward. But in the back of his mind, the sound echoed again — not in his thoughts, but in the walls. It came from above, below, and all around. Not the sound of the door, but the creaking of the abbey itself, resembling a heartbeat older than darkness itself.
He wished to scream, to run, to weep — but he did not. He was compelled. Compelled to go deeper.
Each step made a noise that was part wooden and wet flesh. He did not look down. The scalpel of light threaded through the bending corridors where the walls curved inward and paintings distorted into shapes he could not name.
Somewhere ahead, a door opened — his doing, though he could not recall the act. Beyond it waited a whispering blackness that consumed the light in his hand. Every nerve in his legs screamed, every thought pressed against his teeth to keep him from breaking into a scream. Still, he walked.
The floor creaked — or he did.
With each step downward, the sounds joined in a rhythm: a pulse, slow and vast, echoing through the stone. Louder. Closer. Until he knew the light was gone.
In the absence of everything, there was only a beating presence before him — the pulsing dark.
It did not exist.
And neither did he.