When the light switches don’t work at dusk, something evil is usually there. Waiting. Smiling in the gloom of near-dark. Full dark is less frightening – something as tiny as a match flame can disperse most of it. But at dusk, when the top of the sun has been below the horizon for only seconds, vision is partial and can play tricks in ways that don’t exist in full dark.

When the lights don’t work at dusk, one has a false confidence because visibility isn’t gone altogether. What waits in that deceptive half-light is the kind of thing that makes a normally light voice respond in deeper tones of horror when demanding to know who – or what – is there. A grey flash of movement seen in the corner of the eye, a self-propelled smear of dust, and the hand resting on the light switch starts to move it up and down in frantic motions, as if somehow all that flicking is going to make the lights work again. Futile waste of energy. Futile waste of time.

Leave the stupid switch alone! Put morbid curiosity away! Ignore the pull, resist the temptation to seek that which for the moment is hiding! Block it all out and run! Run the other way, out of the house, down the block, to someplace where the lights are working and people are in abundance and breathing!

Please? This isn’t a game, my friend! There will be no second chances – go! I can’t say it any clearer, and yet you continue to stand there, trembling, playing uselessly with the light switch and staring, bug-eyed, into the growing shadows of early nightfall. What do you want? Anything in particular, or are you simply scared mindless? Paralyzed, perhaps, with fear of this bizarre unknown that – there! Again! Another flash of something darker than the room across which it rushes! You must be a cat, and not because you have multiple lives, but because your curiosity borders on suicidal.

I’m on the cusp of defeat, of giving up entirely on trying to make you leave before something disgusting and horrendous happens to you – something you really don’t deserve. But are you listening? Do you not hear me screaming warning after warning in your head?

And now the gloom deepens into almost total darkness. You seem to have come to your senses because your hand drops from the wall where it was wearing out the switch. You move…forward? Are you insane? That which waits for you has stopped moving, and its smile broadens seeing you approach. Oh, lord, it’s ready for you now. You’ve taken its bait, and oh, why are you doing this? The first clue was the light; it didn’t turn on, and you should have immediately gone the other way. Worse, you’ve been warned, yet now, safety firmly behind you, you walk slowly toward its polar opposite. Toward something you’ll never understand, will never even have time to understand because within seconds, you’re going to be…

Ah, my friend, stop screaming. You were given enough notice and have brought this upon yourself. I’m so sorry, even if you do taste remarkably delicious.

 

Impressum

Tag der Veröffentlichung: 14.07.2011

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