The Dark Corner

In the pale light of the dawning sun, the pain flares anew.
The sharp, stabbing pulses — that plagued me through the night, contorting each step into a clumsy lurch — erupt into ceaseless, burning agony.
I clench my hand around the wound on my thigh and press the ragged edges together. The pain intensifies, and for a fleeting moment, is almost too much for me. My vision blurs and the world inverts on itself, an overexposed negative, etched with thin red capillaries.
I resist the urge to vomit, coughing at the burning acidity in my throat.
Then, in a sordid imitation of the dawn, my head clears. The fresh, self-inflicted agony overpowering everything else. It surges, euphoric, through my veins, and reality shifts back into focus. A brief clarity bought with the lingering reserves of my tortured flesh.
I must keep moving.
It isn’t safe here. It isn’t safe anywhere. But especially not here. Not now.
~
The night is dark and full of nightmares. Skittering shadows flickering in and out of
existence, straying just close enough to awareness to attract attention. But never close enough to be truly perceived.
Teasing. Taunting. Terrifying.
Breaking.
~
That is their game.

The night is their playground, their domain. The hunting ground where they toy with their prey, tormenting and harrowing until hope becomes only a distant memory, and death a welcome mistress.
But the dawn, that is where the true danger lies.
In the wan, ashen light of the quickening day.
In that sublime, liminal space spanning the gap between dreaming and waking.
While the soul still wavers on the brink of sleep; the fragile precipice that marks the boundary between life and death.
Some say that the lowest ebb of the soul is between three and four am.
Those people have never been hunted. Never stood on the edge of hope and seen it recede into the distance. Never felt the tantalising touch of salvation; its spectral caress nothing more than an illusion, a phantom sensation; the crumbling detritus of memory and reason.
That is when they are most dangerous. When they close in for the kill.
~
I’ve delayed too long.
My legs are numb as I force myself forward, breaking the cover of the trees and
stumbling into the open.
Ahead of me, the ground slopes steeply towards the bowl of the valley below. A dense, low fog conceals the lake and the small, clustered settlement that clings to its shore.
Home.

Somewhere behind me a branch snaps in the undergrowth, a loud sharp sound, echoing dully off the hills; amplified and attenuated by the rocky terrain.
It is a lie.
A deception.
A misdirection.
They are never where you expect them to be. Your senses are not to be trusted. You see only what they want you to see. Hear, only what they want you to hear.
But my body does not know this, and I feel myself flinch away from the sound. My
shoulders hunch in expectation of the inevitable assault that never comes.
That is their way.
~
I begin my slow, clumsy descent.
The screams follow behind me.
Not their screams. For they slip through the night and the growing dawn like phantoms, leaving behind only whispers and a lingering fear with their passing.
No, these are the screams of those I have lost. Those they have taken.
Their agony, their torment, haunts me as I stumble on.
~
Reality fractures as I fall through the dew slick heather.

Above me, the clouds shift and deform, tracing nightmares across a sky still in the throes of daybreak. Dragons emerge from the maelstrom to devour the stars and they in turn are ravaged by vast, formless leviathans. Inevitably, those monstrous beasts too succumb to the abhorrent discord, torn asunder by unending celestial currents.
Beneath me, the earth quakes and is rent by gaping chasms that spew fire and ash,
tainting the air with putrid odours. Demonic howls issue from the sulphurous clouds. The desperate, tormented cries of their enslaved thralls follow; a hellish chorus, born of feverish nightmares.
Twisted shadows dance in my peripheral vision; perverse mockeries of life that harass and mock me as I flee. They merge, then split, then merge again. Amorphous and ever-changing like smoke in the wind.
I feel their fetid, oily touch upon my skin.
They enter inside me, through my eyes and ears and mouth and nose. Forcing their way in. Leaving scalded, blistering flesh in their wake. I can feel them slithering in my veins, filling every part of me with their corruption. They steal the breath from my lungs. The blood from my veins. The strength from my legs. They turn my own body against me; my nerves transformed into a wretched instrument of pain and misery.
~
Then they come.
I do not see them.
I do not hear them.

But they are there.
They are behind me, snapping at my heels like a baying hound on the scent of their prey.
They are beside me, laughing at my failing body as they stride tirelessly alongside.
They are ahead of me, watching and waiting.
~
The world shatters beneath me and I fall, swallowed by the endless void that reaches out to claim me as its own.
~
I wake in my bed. The sheets damp with sweat and the lingering stench of my terror.
Afraid to open my eyes, I reach blindly for you. Aching for your comfort, for your
warmth, for your touch.
For reassurance that this is the real world.
That the relentless hordes were nothing but fragments of my imagination. Just driftwood, clinging desperately to the shores of night.
I find only cold sheets, and a gaping wound in my heart.
You are gone.
I turn my head and force myself to look.
The pale dawn light, shining weakly through a crack in the curtains, illuminates your absence.

And I grieve.

Keith O’Sullivan is a writer, poet, father, husband and general purpose nerd, living in the scenic wonderland that is West Cork.
An avid consumer of Horror (especially the weird and the Gothic), Fantasy and Science Fiction, they are currently splitting their time between finishing their first novel and producing a speculative fiction podcast, Tales Under A Broken Sky, where they explore the horrific, macabre and fantastical in prose and poetry.