Darkness

• Bridget Wegner, Grade 9
• Short Story
• 2018

Darkness Surrounds
Darkness. Darkness engulfs the energy of the infinite, helpless universes in which they float, aimlessly, through a sea of nothing. I can sense every soul contained in these realities echoing through mine: their laughs and their cries overwhelming me with a cataclysmic tsunami of emotion, obliterating every structure in my vulnerable soul. I can feel it, not on my skin- if I only had skin. Merely taking the form of a luminescent blob, I am drifting through a space that no one else in existence has ever experienced. I should feel a sense of achievement. But I don’t. I don’t even know what existence means anymore. I’d never think a place so full of nothingness was possible. So full of nothing that possibility even seems to be irrelevant. This darkness, it is more nothing than the vacuum of space, yet I can only comprehend it as the darkest shade of black a billion times blacker, that is extended across endless nothingness. Yet I know it is more than that; I can’t see, touch, smell nor hear but I know. I can feel the blackness, as it envelops my soul and yields an odourless but foreboding scent, resonating a low, monotonous hum. Pitchless. Textureless. After all I’ve been through, all I’ve done, you could say I highly deserved this fate…
“Are you sure you want to do this? It doesn’t have to be you- we can get a random jailbird to test it first!” Veronica frantically proposed, but, following a brief moment of hesitation, he shot belligerent daggers through his dark eyes and steeled his determination with a charming smile. Veronica cowered and, remembering how bickering with him would end, tapped her security card onto the panel. With Veronica uneasily fixed to the doorway, he glided into a luminous room reminiscent of the Tardis- spacious, immaculate, sterile. Positioned in the centre was the Huge Hadron Collider, it stood there like the podium for an Olympiad. He had worked tirelessly for this moment and now would receive his prize- who would turn down an Olympic medal?
Instantly thoughts danced through his mind- doubts. What if you aren’t right? You haven’t even thought about what you are going to do IF it works. You are going to die. He shoved these irrationalities into the far corners of his mind; he would not be deterred, his relentless desire for fame urging him on. As he lowered his body into a seat between the two colossal poles that were to ignite this magnificent machine, speakers boomed from the glassy box over 100 metres away:
“We are making the future ladies and gentlemen, what mankind has strived towards for centuries…...Our first. Ever. TIME TRAVELLER….. Lenard Noire!”
The machine reverberated through him and a deafening, high pitched buzz ascended in intensity until finally an incredible blast ruptured the building. The city. The Earth. The Universe.
I can still touch the residue of despairing screams. A never-ending stream of every single emotion you can think of all at once clawing and shrieking at my soul. Then the next wave hits, harder, faster and devours me into a shrivelled mass of guilt and self-hatred. In the place between all universes, a setting of complete nothing, my emotion is stronger than ever, and each seems to be battling it out to dominate the most overwhelming position. The war ascended into madness and it was as if my soul was going to ferociously rip apart. The darkness seemed to be the only thing keeping me in one piece as all the energy inside me was hyperactively charging into a colossal explosion. Then it stopped.
My soul became quiet as the darkness before me. My emotions retreated and I was simply content. Eerily content. The hopeful lights that gleamed the energy of the encompassing universes began to diminish, and eventually all became replaced by the nothingness, as did where I used to call home. All that was left was the low, monotonous hum and me.