The Dark Corner

You will put me to sleep if I tell you? 

Say it. 

Say it again. You need to lie much more persuasively. 

Better. 

As I told you earlier, for me it started, outwardly at least, with a local election candidate. He knocked on my door looking for votes. I was busy. Absorbed. So, already, even before I’d so much as glimpsed his pasty, unfortunate face, he was most definitely a person from Porlock. I had to yank open the front door because it was swollen from the endless rain. And there he was, flinching in the drizzle. Crooked. Rotten yet pitiful. I saw it right away. He’d the eyes of a man who’d been told by a fiery angel that everyone on Earth had been granted immortality – except him. They were that lonely and pleading and fearful. The windows of a stained soul. He commenced his spiel. How can they stand themselves? Lies were emerging from his mouth, so I looked directly at it. His teeth were the colour of a rat’s incisors. The skin around his lips appeared to be crumbly, as though the spreading of his untruths had started to corrode the tissues of his face. 

But I’m forgetting – you said you wanted perspective. No, I would not normally have regarded such a person in quite this way, nor, in the past, would I have spoken to him in the manner that I did. Certainly, I would have been curt, dismissive even. I might have challenged him about some local concern. But no, this was different. 

I need to mention something else as well. I’ve been thinking about this a great deal lately, though it could be nothing. I must confess, prior to all this happening, I did have a tendency to hallucinate mildly when stressed. 

The day before the candidate came to my door, I was standing in the alleyway behind my home. It was daylight. Suddenly, I thought I saw a sort of darkness, a formless mass of darkness, come rushing towards me down the passage. It was such a fleeting impression. In the moment, I was certain it was there. I reacted. Physically, I mean. I cried out and flailed my arms. Now, I’m less sure, but I keep revisiting it in my mind. It seems important somehow. 

To return to the candidate. He stuttered to a stop, presumably alarmed by my expression. 

‘You open your mouth,’ I said, ‘you open your mouth and a writhing horde of lies comes squirming out. A swarm, a plague, a mischief of rank, fat-bodied falsehoods pours from you, as though your gob was the open exit of a sewer.’ 

He took several steps backwards, his face twitching with shock. I had spoken, needless to say, with real force. 

‘That’s it,’ I said. ‘Scuttle off. Scuttle away. Before I call pest control.’ And I slammed the door. 

Momentarily, I was elated. But my mood that day, I recollect, had been horribly sour. I’d been cursing to myself in the house. Swearing at the radio. Spittle on the screen of my laptop. It was all already happening, though I didn’t recognise it immediately. After the candidate’s knock, my sour mood turned sulphurous and for a long time that night I couldn’t fall asleep. I just lay there, feeling angry. 

The next time was on the phone, a day later. I was having a banking problem. The details aren’t important. I’d been fighting my mounting rage for several minutes, aware that I needed to resolve my issue, and that losing my temper wouldn’t help. But, when the fool at the other end of the line failed once again to grasp the detail of my complaint, I let myself go. ‘There is a world,’ I said, ‘an alternate Earth exactly like our own, except in one particular: you are not there. All your would-be parents’ obscene thrashings came to nothing in this place and you were never conceived. The planet was spared. News has leaked through from our world to theirs that the only material difference between here and there is you. But that small disparity is enough to make the other place a paradise. It’s jubilation, all day, every day. Parades, street parties, singing, dancing, strangers kissing as confetti falls, forever falls, in an eternal celebration of your non-being. Their lucky escape.’ 

I hung up and I laughed. For a second there, I was delighted. Then I walked to the wall in the kitchen and headbutted it so hard I briefly lost consciousness. 

When I awoke, I was sprawled out on the cold tiles, and the first pain I noticed was in my neck, not my head. Then the head pain came and, as I lifted myself up, the nausea. With swimming senses, and feeling not merely injured, but also profoundly disturbed, I rummaged in the freezer for a pack of frozen peas. Hobbling to the sofa in the living room, I collapsed, sobbing a little by now, and lay there, somehow confused and reflecting all at once. But my only coherent thought was: ‘I’m in trouble.’ And I kept having that same thought over and over again. 

I didn’t trust myself at the emergency department of my local hospital. Always overrun with patients, and understaffed, I knew I would end up fulminating once more. Besides, within minutes, and despite the reputed dangers after a head injury, I fell asleep where I was lying. I awoke later in a dark, unheated room, shivering and, of course, with a hideous headache. I drank water, gulped down painkillers, and crawled upstairs to bed. Insomnia was not a problem that night and I slept for many hours. 

I woke up mid-sentence. The change in my state of consciousness didn’t stop me talking. I just carried on: ‘… are to desire what a plate of woodlice is to the appetite. All human bodies are waste processing machines, but you’re a waste of good waste processing. Someone else should eat your food and expel your rancid turds. Even that portion of existence you don’t deserve. Starve. Lovelessly starve. Your death will be the relief that comes with the custardy bursting of a pimple.’ And on it went, until I clamped a hand to my mouth and somehow snapped myself out it, as if I needed to wake up twice. 

In the bathroom, groggy and trembling, I hacked off my hair with a pair of blunt and slightly rusty barber’s scissors. I insulted my reflection, with its visible head wound, the whole time. After I’d finished, I stood there shaking, in a really bad way now, thinking about what else I could do with the scissors. Eventually, I dropped them in the sink and tottered about in search of my phone. It was then I dialled the Samaritan’s helpline. 

You can guess how it was. I described myself, I remember, as an anthropomorphic being fashioned from the droppings of dust mites. I said it had been the work of aeons to make me and the point was to mock all creation. And I conjured up equally unhinged insults for the volunteer, who quickly fell silent. 

The call ended when I hurled my phone across the room. 

I recollect that I had then a strange moment of melancholy calm. I looked at the shelves full of books and records, first editions, rare LPs. Those years of reading, years of listening, were already so far behind me. I knew that I would never again sit and enjoy a story, a poem, a song. All of that was done. ‘But you never understood a thing, anyway. Mouth forever agape, like some brain-damaged basking shark of the arts, a mindless, passive feeder, filters clogged and failing, trying to ram your way into places you don’t belong …’ 

I walked into the kitchen, took a sharp knife from the wooden block, and stabbed myself deeply in the arm. The blood rushed excitedly from the wound, as though it couldn’t wait to escape such a vile body. 

It escalated swiftly after that. I lurched around the house, smearing blood on my most treasured things, on the walls, and on the furniture. ‘A pity,’ I said, ‘you’ve only got nine pints. You could befoul several more homes, otherwise, several other dwellings where cretins store themselves and their laughable possessions. Hoarding, hoarding against death, trying to give their flimsy selves substance …’ 

In the bathroom, I headbutted the cabinet mirror so hard it broke. I picked up a shard of glass and did what I did to my eyes. I felt a little less angry then. Somehow, I blundered into the street. While the neighbours held me, I insulted them, but not with any real venom. And when the ambulance came, I allowed myself to be led away quite meekly. At the hospital, however, my behaviour deteriorated. And then, when more cases began to emerge, I was brought here, to this hastily constructed place. I’m a notable sufferer, being one of the first. But, of course, you know all about that. 

So, it’s many thousands of us now, is it? I could almost laugh. You’ll need the room, then. It’s time I slept. It’s long past time. Give me something to send me to sleep, as we agreed. 

Which arm? Thank you. How strange to say it! 

Of course, I don’t believe a word you’ve uttered. Lies have a smell, you know. They smell of greasy pillow cases where restless heads have rubbed, of the dregs of coffee in stained mugs. Your lies smell of third-rate cooking and third-rate love, the weak love you have for your wife and the even weaker love she has for you. And your children don’t love you at all. But no one is less deserving of love than me. A human, allegedly. My life has no more value than that of a single eyeless shrimp. Evolution is nothing but production lines for the manufacturing of the grotesque. And perhaps our particular grotesquerie is coming to an end. It does sound promising in that regard. I almost wish I could see it. But I don’t deserve even that dubious pleasure. Nor even the pleasure of death. I deserve to be unborn. Unmade. Can that be arranged? I deserve, yes, an unprecedented form of darkness, not merely the darkness of diced-up eyes, or the anaemic darkness of death. I deserve … 

Alex Older’s debut novel is The Animals Praise the Antichrist (Crashed Moon Press). His short fiction has been published by Zagava, Thin Veil Press and Nēpenthé Press. His most recent chapbook is Only Animals Can Make Me Smile (Nightjar Press). He lives in the North of England, and is currently completing work on his second novel.