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The line between what is alive and what isn’t grows thinner in the dark.
Creatures grow in strange, unnatural shapes, uninhibited by the harsh light of the sun to narrow them down, fix them into a form that is recognizable, understandable, finite. In the dark, things can stretch and change and alter, reach through shadows with no regard for logic. Who is going to notice? People will only blame the confusion of their own senses for what they can’t explain, after all.
In the dark, things still think that no longer have heads. Things still move though their spines have been crushed. Things still eat, though their mouths no longer have stomachs to fill.
Kadokura has been dreaming of the dark ever since the Cofdeece bobbed back to the surface.
It started before then, maybe, in what little snatches of sleep he got in those chaotic final days. It’s difficult to remember: the difference between sleeping and waking blurs in his mind. Both had morphed into nightmares. That’s what he tells the psychiatrist, at the company-mandated appointments to assess his recovery.
My perception of reality was warped. It’s difficult to say what did and didn’t really happen, especially after the lights went out. I was injured, and we were short on food and water besides.
Yes, I think I was suffering hallucinations.
No, they haven’t recurred since then.
It isn’t a lie, not completely. The sun burns away his fear, until he wonders if he really was just hallucinating. On the surface, breathing clean air that smells of grass and dirt and the sizzle of gyoza from a street vendor, he can almost believe it was nothing but a nightmare after all.
At night, though, behind the inevitable darkness of his own eyelids, those formless, hungry shapes come alive again. They crawl out of the corners of his dreams, scratching at the fragile shell of his reality, staring at him with jealous, craving eyes. He hears things, distorted and watery, echoing directionlessly throughout his room. Sometimes they’re strange, inhuman sounds, more reminiscent of the mournful call of a whale or the chittering snap of a crab’s claws. Sometimes there are voices. Sometimes he thinks he recognizes them.
More and more, he begins to believe the darkness itself is alive.
Not that paltry thing that settles into his room and disappears with sunrise or the flick of a light switch. There is no true darkness in the surface world, only shadows, a pale imitation of it. In his dreams, though, he remembers the real darkness, the monster beneath the ocean.
It does not breathe. It is not warm. It has no heart to beat. Yet it moves—it writhes, it struggles, it entraps—it lives, and above all, it hungers.
He dreams of it, the all-consuming darkness of the bottom of the ocean, a place untouched by light for millions of years. That crushing, eager beast with a thousand gnashing mouths and a bottomless pit for a stomach. He dreams of it, and dreams of it, and dreams and dreams and dreams—
He wakes up cold, soaked in sweat. He rolls out of bed and stumbles to the bathroom, swatting blindly at every light switch along his path. They snap uselessly into place: the power is out. Kadokura reaches his bathroom, groping near-blind for the cool edge of the sink. He grips it when he finds it, anchoring himself to it, breathing shakily and ignoring the way the shadows twist in the corners of his eyes.
Something is coming. He doesn’t know how he knows it, but he does, he can feel it in the prickle of every little hair standing up on the back of his neck. Something is coming, clawing its way out of the ocean. That cold, ravenous, crushing beast of darkness is going climb up out of the water and blanket itself across the land. It’s going to find him. And it’s going to take back the dead thing that belongs to it.