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In The Dark

  By Cory Hiles

  Copyright 2012 Cory Hiles

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  This story is a complete work of fiction. Any similarities to real people or events are strictly coincidental.

  IN THE DARK

  Is it dark in here? I can’t tell. I can’t see. I used to be able to see all the beauty that the world had to offer. I have even seen the Threshold of the gates of Heaven. Beauty…brightness…colors. All of them are things that were once precious to me, and now they are gone. Darkness is all that is left to me; darkness, pain and sorrow. Torture, despair and misery are my only companions here in the dark.

  My wife, Elena; where is she? Have you seen her? Is she safe? God how I miss her—how I long for her. I would cry out for her, but you would not hear me. You would not care. You insensitive Bastard! I need her. I am wracked with pain, with an oversensitivity of the flesh, yet I know that one gentle caress from her loving hand would sooth me. I may never be whole, may never be healed, but she would sooth me.

  I am the rich man. She is my Lazarus…let her come to me and dip her fingers in the cool waters and sooth my burning throat. Let her come to me. Would you let me suffer? What is my crime? There is no crime yet you have punished me beyond the limits that any mortal man could possibly bear. You inhuman Bastard!

  And what news of my daughter? Where is my Anna Marie? Have you punished her as well as me? Do you punish the child for the supposed sins of the father? Do you torment her flesh, anguish her spirit, and destroy her very soul as well? For what? What do you hope to gain?

  It is dark. I am sure that it must be dark for the remaining flesh is cold, and it must only be cold in the dark. I cannot see…but I can feel. The darkness you have imposed upon me has weight. I feel the dark as though it were a viscous entity. It weighs me down, pressing suffocatingly ever downward on my empty chest.

  I cannot scream. You have taken even that from me. And for what? To what end? Is it only my suffering that you desire? I have no money, no estate, no privileged knowledge that you may acquire. And yet you have condemned me. Mine eyes have seen the Glory and now all is black. I stood upon the very Threshold, and now I lie in the coldness of the dark, suffering and in pain.

  I suffer in silence. No sound reaches me. I have heard the glorious cacophony of sparrows in the spring. I have heard the thunderous roar of the mighty ocean. I have heard the exquisite ecstasy of Beethoven and The Beatles. Now I can hear nothing. All is silent as a tomb, without even the sound of a creeping worm boring his way through my empty skull.

  Darkness, silence, suffering, pain, loneliness. For the love of God, why would you do this? I declare my innocence. I would stand before God Almighty and declare my innocence had you not taken that chance away. I stood at the Threshold. I saw the Glory. I heard the chorus. You took it away. You are a Bastard.

  Where am I? I cannot see. I cannot scream. I cannot hear. And if I could see, what vision, exactly, would meet my frightened eyes? Would the torment of the sight drive me mad in a way that your tortures could not?

  And if I could scream, who would hear me? You? Elena? Anna Marie? Are they here? Are you here? Are there others? I will never know, for you have robbed me of my sight, and they will never know what you’ve done for you have robbed me of my speech. I would beseech God of such matters if you had not taken me from the Threshold.

  What sounds fill this chamber of horrors? Are your instruments of torture mechanical and clamorous? I would think not. I should think you would not want the exultant sounds of your tortures to be attenuated by such drivel. You would want silent tools. You would want to hear the rending of my heart as you ripped it from me.

  In all your tortures you have striven to drive me mad, and yet you cannot succeed. I will not be mad, for in madness I may miss my opportunity to escape. I will suffer silently in the silence, but I will dream of escape. I will not run away. I cannot run away…you have taken my mobility, but I will escape.

  A canary will sing in a cage, but I will not. I cannot. But I can dream, even now, I can dream. I dream of my wife and my daughter. I dream of the Threshold of Heaven. I dream of freedom. I dream of revenge, though I know that this last dream may cost me my very soul.

  I find it hard to care about my soul. You have trapped my soul as well as my body. You have taken my past, my present, my future, and possibly my eternity. I cannot forgive you and I don’t desire to. You are the purest form of concentrated evil on this planet. I firmly believe this. Dreams of revenge help to keep me sane.

  I cannot overpower you. I have been reduced to little more than vapor. I cannot strike out at you—you have taken my once strong hands; hands that were work calloused as I endeavored to provide for my family. Hands that were once capable of caressing Elena and holding Anna Marie. But no more…no more. In the immortal words of Mr. John Wilkes Booth, “Useless…useless.”

  This darkness is heavy. I cannot draw breath. You have taken even my breath. Dear God, how can I exist through this? What macabre horror have you created here that I should endure to feel this? The Threshold…the Threshold was before me, then it was gone and there was only you.

  I must retreat from my bitterness. I must pull away from the hate. The bitterness will surely drive me mad as the pain could not. You must not be allowed to win. My revenge will be complete only in your failure, and your failure will only be manifest in my continued sanity. I must retreat from the anger.

  Elena… I will retreat to Elena. Perhaps her fingers cannot be dipped in the cool waters of my need, but my memories will bring some measure of comfort. You have taken so much from me, but you cannot take my memory. My mind is ethereal, you would not understand. You are a narrow-minded Bastard.

  In my mind I still have sight. I can escape the dark. I can see only into the past and I can imagine a vision of the future, but because of your greedy sadism I can never see the present again…not even in my mind.

  I can see Elena. She is beautiful. Her auburn hair encircles her cherubic face like a saintly aura. Her pearlescent teeth are revealed in her smile. Her laughter is the tintinnabulation of angels.

  Her body curves and swells like the mysterious ocean and her fluid grace is a field of golden wheat in the breeze. She is mine…she is my world. This vision is mine alone and you cannot take it from me.

  Are you angry that you cannot take my final vision of my wife? Are you upset that the last memories of sight that I have are of images so profoundly beautiful that a beast such as yourself could never understand them? Does it bother you that even in the midst of the suffering you have imposed upon me I have a quiet reserve of joy left within me?

  You will not win. I will not go mad, even though the pain is maddening.

  Elena is not my only vision of joy. Have you forgotten Anna Marie? Yes. I’m certain that you have. The twisted carcass of a mind that you possess cannot hold fast to beauty and joy. And Anna Marie is the essence of beauty and joy. She is beyond your ken.

  My next to last memory of sight is rapturous. In the mirror I am enveloped by Anna Marie’s huge dark eyes. Her angelic face is swaddled in her black hair. Her cheeks are flushed with her laughter. Her blue lollipop is stuck to her chin. She thinks it is funny. It is funny. Dear God she is wonderful. I loved to hear her laugh.

  Have you ever taken delight in another’s laughter? I think not. I think you are a joyless monster. You have no heart, and with no heart
one cannot truly laugh. Joy comes from the heart, and laughter doeth a man good, like medicine.

  I will never laugh again. You have taken my heart. You have taken all but my sanity. My sight, my mobility, my hearing, my heart, and my eternity; all stolen from me by you with surgical precision. You are a Bastard.

  What crime did I commit that you would find reason to do this? Can you not even answer this one simple question? You would take me from the Threshold and submit me to the knife without provocation?

  You have left me empty, hollow, and charred from the inside out. You have destroyed me. I had joy. I had peace. Now I have nothing but pain and darkness, suffering and distress; and though I have lost my heart I am still left with heartache and loneliness.

  I would hear your reply to my questions. I would entreat you to give me a reasonable excuse for your actions. But I can never know your reasons. I cannot hear. And you can never know my questions for I cannot speak. You have taken my speech.

  I must step away from the ledge. I feel that I am on the precipice of hatred and from the pits of Hell that lie beyond the precipice I can sense the madness as it snakes its way upward like thin tendrils of sulfurous smoke towards me.

  In madness, you