Alex couldn't recall if it had ever been in her nature to be afraid of the dark.
She remembered little, after all, from before the deaths of her parents - a world she had barely been naturalized into before it had shifted.
And after the accident, it had been sensible for her to become fearful of the dark.
She hadn't been there when it had happened. She had barely been introduced to the concept of death - particularly that of human beings. Death was what happened to a spider if you accidentally closed your book on it; you couldn't do that to a person. Death was what happened to your fighting fish after a few years, and left you finding it floating on its side at the top of its tank, unceremoniously, fins tattered; humans, by comparison, were immortal.
She was once a fool, indeed.
As far as she knew, some void had simply opened up and swallowed Mom and Dad. Something dreadful, which could suddenly make whole people no longer there anymore. Something so powerful which could open up at any time, and swallow up anyone or anything it wished, and close again without leaving a trace. And it never spat anything back out.
But nothing, she thought, really happened without some sort of sign, did it? This was part of why parents and grandparents and teachers always told you to be careful. Pay attention to your surroundings.
Quickly, she'd come to start looking for signs of that void lurking in the shadows.
And there were many, many shadows in Grandpa's old mansion.
Hence that she had hated the place when it had first become her home, too.
There were shadows everywhere, lights on or off.
There were hallways she couldn't pass down without seeing brass doorknobs at their ends as staring and unnaturally-round eyes holding pinhole pupils straight down at her; she would gawk back at them, head turning until she passed them, afraid to blink, and then she would hold that gaze for a few more seconds, in case something turned 'round the corner behind her to give chase.
In bathrooms and spare rooms with broken lights, the backs of closets had looked like they could be anything - doorways into somewhere that the light was eaten by, or trick mirrors that reflected nothing, or were perhaps reflecting some massive thing that her eyes couldn't see; the bottoms of tubs and sinks looked like places where things might be sleeping, or like if she happened to drop her mother's ring, it would fall spinning and flashing below where she knew it should logically skitter to a stop - she would hear it clink and ring against some invisible wall, and then flash further and further below her before… dark, and no further sound.
For a while, she'd slept with the lights on - even after Grandpa had provided her a night-light; the scope of its glow had been neither wide nor powerful enough to eliminate any source of temptation to keep her eyes awake all night, examining the planes around the far corners of the ceiling for those spots where faces, human or creature, emerged.
And with lights on, she had still barely been able to sleep.
Too aware of a desire to hold perfectly still, knowing that the halls outside her door were all pitch-dark; her senses pricked as she listened to ensure that she could not hear the scrape of her own breath in the backs of her sinuses or that the bed did not creak under at some minute move, thereby giving away her position, at times she swear she thought she heard the shadows themselves gaining density, pressing at her door and causing the wood to crackle and whine as it moved like water and fog around whatever void-creatures lurked and patrolled through it.
Of course Grandpa had noticed.
Lightly, first. Betraying that he noticed quite little. Beginning with her fear of entering the basement - he had chuckled; "Well, that's good… I suppose I won't have to worry about you getting into my brandy," he had said.
And he had given her the night-light - although in retrospect, she wondered if, somehow, he had discerned on its own that it had not been a sufficient help to her; she hadn't had the heart to tell him.
Many years later, she believed she now recognized what he had been doing.
He hadn't wanted to embarrass her by asking until he was certain of the problem, with situations being as delicate as they were already - any more than she had wanted to embarrass either of them through admittance. A man of science as he had been, he'd been observing first, for the most gentle way of addressing the problem, or at least otherwise the most appropriate.
Truly, he had found it, as it would take some time for her to consciously be grateful for what had occurred after the first night that it had been approaching nine o'clock, and she had passed by him in the study, tottering between the dread itself at the idea of being sent to bed again - shut up in a case to be plunged into the dark for the night, as if into water teeming with sharks - and the desire for it to impose itself quickly, to end the suspense.
Grandpa had looked up and smiled, still hunched over the open book at the top of his pile, a pen beside it atop a stack of already-grayed papers of notes and thoughts on obscure subjects she hadn't been able to begin to understand.
He hadn't made any sort of move to rise, which was unusual for any time he told her to go to bed. No, he always rose and approached, informed her of the time lightly and with a gentle dual clap on the shoulders, before escorting her to the bathroom to brush her teeth and wash her face - this barely helped the feeling of threat to those dim and rotting rooms, although help by a measure, it did - and then to the bedroom to kiss her goodnight and tuck her in, and depart to finish his studies for the evening, leaving the light to her.
Perhaps, she realized further now, it hadn't been so difficult to make assumptions sufficient to put that piece into place, with regards to evidence of her aversion to the dark.
He had, however, spoken to her lightly and invitingly.
"How would you like to stay up late for another few hours tonight, Alex?" he'd asked her.
It had been in exactly the right tone to make it feel rather purely positive, rather than as any response to any behavior that warranted discussion - in other words, to her child brain, as any sign that she had been caught at something. On the contrary, it was the sort of tone Grandpa had used when he was offering something which felt more like a reward, such as a sample of dessert before dinner with a chortling non-insistence that she not tell the cook, or an opportunity to perform a task or temporarily take on a superficial responsibility which she perceived as arbitrarily adult.
She had paused not because she hadn't been glad for the offer, but because she had been perhaps too relieved, in conjunction with the inevitable surprise at something that had not happened before.
"Really?" she had asked.
Grandpa had beamed an amount brighter, another trace of laughter in his voice. "Yes, of course!" he had said, waving her in with the hand whose digits were not pinching the corner of the weathered page of a book on some arcane discipline like psychology , or psychiatry , or philosophy , three subjects and, accordingly, terms which Alex had at the time only had the barest sense of true distinction between. "Sit here," Grandpa had continued. "Or wherever you like. I think anyone's entitled to a particularly long night enjoying some good reading every now and then, don't you?"
He had ended that with another subtle rising note of humor.
He had then stood, and Alex's muscles had all tensed, freezing from the inside, bracing for the instinctive impact of dread at the expectation that this was the moment wherein Grandpa was going to change his mind, pat her on the shoulders, and tell her that perhaps it might be best for her to go to bed and wait out the dark in that manner after all.
Instead, however, he walked past her, crossing the study in the direction of the kitchen.
"Here," he said, smiling over his shoulder. "I'll make us some tea! Chamomile, yes?"
Tea had been one of those things which Alex had thus far primarily only indulged in as something which had seemed adult. Between Grandpa enjoying it during the day before taking out the flask at night the fumes off which smelled of poisoned fruit, and between Alex herself only finding it about half as harsh on her young senses, she would drink it when offered and do her best not to cringe, as a test of her mettle.
She'd recognized chamomile, however, as barely tea, rather than as somewhere between a candy and a medicine.
She enjoyed it.
And could not help but react as if she had, in fact, been offered one of Grandpa's additional desserts for the day. She'd smiled and nodded, the fear of bedtime quickly outweighed by the promise of sweet tea and books. This promise had been smoothly fulfilled - the kettle had screamed, and Grandpa had come back with their respective favorite mugs, passed to their owners before they took their seats, Grandpa returning to his studies by the fireplace and Alex choosing another chair with an old adventure book.
She'd fallen asleep comfortably despite the chair, with warm tea in her system under the orange lighting of the study which had kept in a state of perpetual dusk as opposed to true night, and then woke in her bed, curtains of the room drawn and illuminating it fully with the white-blue light of day.
He had offered the same the next night, as well - because she had seemed to enjoy it so much, he'd claimed. Although it had been unexpected, she had eagerly accepted. She had woken in bed again, feeling as if the last twenty-four hours had been the happiest she had had in quite some time. Another warm chuckle somewhere in the low centre of his throat, Grandpa had told her that if she'd been having so much fun, then she could ask to read with him whenever she liked. She had of course asked to put off bed-time again that night.
She had not forgotten her fear in two days, but it had already become distant with this new refuge so readily available, ensuring that she would be neither alone nor left so in dark places from sundown to the bright of high morning.
Therefore, while it had certainly snagged on her brain enough for her to have thrown her attention over with great focus, both rapt and urgent, it had not felt accusatory or as if he had found her out on anything when he'd begun to say that night, voice turning with curious and thoughtful inflection, barely looking up from his book to begin with, that he had been reading for the past hour - objectively true, and in retrospect, therefore, perhaps some sort of rhetorical trick, to provide further illusory sense of distance between the statement and its purpose - on the fear of the dark.
She, on her part, had looked up from her book fully - to him, large-eyed, subconsciously for him to say, despite not knowing her plight (or so she'd thought), that he would be able to fix it.
A very common fear, he'd told her - and an utterly understandable one. He'd told her of the five primal fears: extinction, he'd said, in a retrospective example of particularly judicious circumstantial word use, and mutilation (being severely hurt, he'd said, also gingerly), loss of autonomy, abandonment, and shame.
Any source of the unknown, he'd said, therefore easily becomes a source of fear.
"Think of how we sometimes might dislike people because we can't trust them not to make us feel embarrassed," he'd said. "Likewise, we dislike the dark because we can't trust it not to contain other things which might hurt us - such as other things we're often afraid of. The likes of bugs, and monsters ."
This, she now knew, had likely not been an accidental contrast in examples. She knew now, truly, that small and familiar things could be just as impactful as massive things daunting in their unknowable complexity.
For the better and the worse, of both.
"It doesn't help," Grandpa had further explained, "that there are certain phenomenon that cause us to see the worst in what we already don't trust; when we are scared, or confused, or simply don't have enough information to understand what is going on around us."
Pareidolia, he had called it, likening it to hearing an unfamiliar word or, in fact, an unfamiliar set of words, and making an unrelated inference as to the meaning - seeing familiar objects in unfamiliar or unconnected ones, in letting one's eyes fall on what is, in fact, nonsense or simple and making it into what one expects to see.
It certainly had helped, the next day, in reminding her that the gloaming eyes at the ends of the hallways were the knobs of doors; later, when she snuck into her room experimentally to look at the corners with the lights off, and deconstruct the creature-like faces and perceived ripples of movement into cracks and imperfections and peeling-points in the wallpaper and plaster.
While they did come to grow less-frequent - not even as their necessity wore off but due to Alex's own increased business as a growing youth keeping her preoccupied in late study sessions of her own, which she more and more simply brought to her desk - these nights spent together in the study over dense volumes and tea never ceased across Alex's years as Grandpa's dependent, not until the day wherein she finally left for college without a sleepness night the fault of the dark in as long as she was able to remember, but always one to look and likewise interpret twice, the shapes and sounds she perceived in it. To that day, she had not found any truly undefeatable, unpredictable, unknowable void.
To this one, she had found one that she could, at the very least, could be kept at bay, and strategize against, and begin to know.
He had certainly known her fear - perhaps, in certain respects, even better than she had.
Knowing now as much as he had, in a multitude of ways, he had known that there was little use in treating the symptoms for fear of the darkness or attempting to apply a balm onto the cause.
Better had it been to provide her with a haven of light as he had assisted her early on in equipping to confront it as much through strength as through wisdom and perceptiveness.