Darkness

• Sophie Port, Grade 10
• Short Story
• 2016

3:45am
She awoke shaking, sweating and struggling to breathe. Her sleepless nights are a joy to me, a lovely little game I like to play that slowly continues to taint her once beautiful soul with darkness. It’s thrilling to see the prominent exhaustion on her face.
She slowly crawls out of bed, wrapping her frail arms around her body to try and capture the warmth I stole from her. She stares at herself in the mirror; I stand right behind her; lingering and staring right into her soul. The ticking of the clock goes on – tick, tock, tick, tock – slowly blanketing her in the darkness until it finally happened.
This was the night that she broke.
She expelled the content on her stomach on her bedroom floor and ran, her hands fumbling along the walls of her dark hallway, desperately seeking escape. She’s frantic as she tries to unlock the door, but the sheen of sweat on her palm causes her to lose her grasp over and over again. When the door finally clicks open, she runs towards the only place that makes her feel sane; the forest.
I laugh at her weak attempt to escape me as I watch her struggle; the trees ripping her silk night gown and scratching her delicate pale skin.
The moonlight was bright, the night air crisp. She is fleeing for her sanity, the twigs snapping beneath her bare feet. She gasps for breath as I sit on her chest, making it harder for her to breathe, from both exhaustion and the panic she’s drowning in; the panic caused by me. Her cheeks are wet with tears and rosy red from the cold and I laugh, making her shudder.
Her knees collapse from under her; her body begins convulsing and she grips the hair on her head tightly, looking up to the sky.
“Get out of my head!” she screams pathetically, but her voice is merely a whisper inside a tornado. Her angry tears stain the forest floor and her eyes are wide and frantic; she’s completely overthrown, overwhelmed, but most of all, she’s overpowered.
I look down at the girl whose life I ruined; a beautiful, sweet girl with eyes once the brightest shade of green, now as black as the night sky, and I’m irrationally addicted to her panic. It fuels my hunger.
Desperately clawing at the brown sodden earth beneath her, her futile cries become merely a whimper. I am invisible, yet I am all that she sees. I have consumed her, weakened her, and she can no longer fight me.
Her lips are blue from the cold, her teeth violently chattering as her rapid heartbeat dulls, like the sound of a watch wrapped in cotton wool.
She now lays, broken and weak on the dirty forest floor.
It is a dark victory.
I have finally destroyed the girl whose soul was once as bright as the sun, and now I get to take her home.
To darkness.