A Dark Imagination
One after the other, the icy, slow, calculated steps of a chill made their way down my spine, into my core. But there was no apparent reason why these unwelcome visitors were stirring my emotions. The hallway of the house stretched away from me as my gaze plumbed its depth, with no unusual sights or sounds whatsoever. The slowly wavering light of the fire behind me lit up most of the hall but darkness had claimed the last few metres as its own mysterious territory, stretching the trails of its cloak over the house. The house that should be mine was slowly being claimed by the icy fingers of the master of the night as the fire died down and burnt away the last remaining fragments of wood. Now that they were gone I was truly alone. The time had come for me to venture into the grip of darkness to fetch the wood for the fire, now my only consolation to take away the chills of night. But it was a useless weapon against the chills of fear.
I reached for the lock of the door. The echo of the click distorted as it ricocheted through the empty old house, an aural compliment to the visual uncertainty of darkness. I reached for the light switch and the echo returned, haunting me, daring me to step outside. And in that moment I took the dare. The sickly dim yellow light may have captured the visual effect of darkness but the inky black wraith had left his calling card of the night cold behind as he wove away from the light.
The wheelbarrow stood oblivious to all my fears a few metres away from me, containing in it all the wood I needed to stoke up the fire and repel the slowly reaching darkness. All I needed to do was take a few simple steps and I would have what I had come for. Walking is such a simple thing, just placing one foot in front of the other as many times as is required, but somehow I could not bring myself to do it. The chills seemed to have frozen up my joints as the distance between me and the wheelbarrow distorted and stretched, taking me away from my goal as if it were the last defense of darkness to win the battle for my house. I shook my head to clear my thoughts and reality came back to me. I reached out my right leg. Then my left passed it by but the right leg claimed its position in the front once more as I walked to the wheelbarrow. With all my senses alert I reached for the wood, my whole being as tense as a coiled spring. I took three logs but just as I was about to make a dash back inside I changed my mind and reached for one more log. I was going to thoroughly eradicate the darkness and the more firepower I had the better. I cautiously reached out my leg to take a step, on edge like a meerkat. The door responded to my touch and slid closed, and once again the echo returned as I relocked the door. The fireplace door creaked open to admit new residents but before the wood could go to the coals and exaggerate the movement of the flames, there came a roaring noise like thunder coming to visit. My previous instincts of fear must have been a warning for me to go and hide, to merge into the earth of the trees where the passing of time or the prying of eyes would never find me. I knew I had to do something. But what I could do was the question.
The front door moaned in protest as I forced it open. The roar returned and what I saw answered my previous question. With tail lights pointed at me I realized that the roar was just a car. The tires screeched as if in fear to be discovered and within a few seconds I was left with only dust clouds as to why the car had come unexpectedly to me this night. As my gaze scanned the verandah, I was proved wrong. There were not only dust clouds left behind but also a mysterious box. For the second time in only a short matter of minutes, I nearly forgot how to walk. This was not just a routine trip to get wood. I had to know what was in this box, so I immediately forced myself to walk towards the foreign material taking up some of my living space. Could it be a bomb? Or perhaps the contents were a gaseous virus that would creep under my skin and consume me from the inside out. Innumerable possibilities ran around randomly inside my head, sometimes colliding to form an even more sinister idea. But in my fantasies I never even imagined what could be contained and hidden for my view in the box. But when a noise emerged from the shape's depths, it nearly caused me to jump out of my skin. Bombs and viruses don't whimper. My inquisitive hands peeled away the lid as the rest of my body tensed. Looking up at me through disproportionately large eyes was a Maltese puppy. I think the air released in my sigh could have floated a hot air balloon such was my relief as to the contents of this box. I wasn't sure how anything could change this innocent, naïve bundle of fur into a bomb, but then again, imagination is an unfathomable power.
Joshua Page
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