Darkness Be My Friend

• Leah Riches, Grade 11
• Short Story
• 2012

Darkness was no friend to the light. Locked in a constant battle over day and night. The darkness was self-loathing and calculating, where as the light was only pure. Energy and soul bound together as if they were a life force. The darkness left us with only questions, and the light gave us the answers.
My silhouette followed silently behind me like a ghost taunting its prey. I resisted the urge to turn my head to sneak a peek. Though I knew it would only cause my already erratically beating heart to accelerate to an even more alarming rate. My breaths were shallow and raspy, I was parched and panicked. The endless shadows around me seemed as if they were watching me with invisible eyes, touching me with soft caresses to the skin, smooth and silky. The frigid night air was no better. Biting at the exposed skin of my toes like a hungry rodent. No doubt would those four-legged fiends be shrouded away somewhere in this ceaseless maze of empty rooms and continuous corridors. I shivered involuntarily, wrapping my arms around my torso as my armour against the horrors that crept along the halls, playing hide and seek with the century old portraits that lined the walls like soldiers, their glass-like and starry eyes a constant reminder that you were never completely alone. I felt as if any moment now I would reach a dead end and step off the edge into a deep, black abyss, filled with the monsters that haunted my childhood dreams. My grandmother’s house was haunted. I remember the spirits that wandered the halls when I was a young girl. I was able to see them, feel them. And now I couldn’t. I had lost the sight the very day that I became of age, soon thereafter the townspeople ceased talk of the girl who had lost her mind. The rumours had been horrid. I could not see two meters in front of me now, let alone the dead wandering aimlessly through the night, stirring up dust and biding their time, trapped in the Netherworld. Between a heaven with blinding, holy light too pure of grace for to them enter, and a hell that represented death in more ways than one would think, which was too punishable for the mere souls of the lost. Instead, they travelled through limbo, simply watching and waiting. Trapped in a forever changing society. Having to watch on while others lived and died, before the next generation brought new entertainment. The thought that they were all around me and yet I could not define their chalky white figures against the outline of the glowing moonlight frightened me. Goose bumps littered the skin of my upper arms. It was only another few hours until the sun peaked over the horizon. If I could just go back to bed and to sleep, I would be greeted once more by the beautiful light of dawn. I welcomed it like nothing else.