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CW: none.
My friend and client Hana, before she passed away, used to tease me about my fear of the dark. Hana was DeafBlind, and when I’d come to her home to work with her in figuring out some new appliance, or going through the mail, or whatever errands she wished to take care of that day, I always felt startled and unsettled on entering—her house was always dark. I’d fumble around, and when she signed to me, I’d swipe my hand across her arm—“No, no,” I’d tell her, “I can’t see your signs.” And she’d tickle my shoulder in laughter and mock-scold me for my lack of tactile perception, but then would flip on the lights for me.
I never told her how terrified I was until she turned those lights on. How my heart battered my ribs like a panicked bird fluttering in a cage.
Once, when we attended a conference where I was her sign language interpreter and co-navigator (or CN, as my job is called), we were in a windowless, interior room. One moment the fluorescent lights bathed the world in artificial sun, the next gasps and exclamations as a crack of thunder plunged us into perfect blackness. Hana felt me jump next to her, and her hands reached for me, questioning. I shakily signed, “B-b-blackout. Power gone. I don’t know, emergency? Everyone is talking . . . ” I was tense, hyperventilating, and then she laid her hand on my chest and took a deep breath, her hand mimicking the motion of lungs expanding, releasing. “Breathe,” she urged. “In, out. Good . . . keep breathing . . .” To keep my mind distracted while we waited for the power to be restored, she reached into her purse and pulled out two small squares of paper, one of which she put into my fingers.
Her hands led me through folding a paper crane, and when the power finally came back on, I looked at the squashed mess I’d made and laughed. It was more ugly duckling than crane.
“You’ll have to teach me how you do that in the dark,” I told her, admiring Hana’s perfectly folded origami.
“It’s only in the dark to you because you don’t know how to feel the paper.” Her fingers swirled in taps of rumination on my knee, and she asked, “Sunny, why does darkness scare you so much?”
It’s a long story. Having to do with my family. I wasn’t sure how to tell it believably. “I’ll tell you soon,” I promised her.
But I never did.
Hana passed away from cancer without ever knowing the reason. Her paper crane sits on my desk, a reminder of my unfulfilled promise.
And maybe that’s why I feel like . . . I need to tell this story now. Even if I am late in the telling.
You see, the dark, for most people, is just the dark.
But that is not true for me.
The dark has always hunted my family.
And it was recently that the dark really came for me.
• • • •
If I could tell you this story now, Hana, I would take you back in time, my hands brushing your arm along the timeline back, back, back—to when I was a little girl. I used to visit my grandmother at her enormous old mansion. It was a beautiful house, full of stately oil paintings and embroidered furniture. But the carpeting was wine dark, the wood a dingy shade, and the overall impression, much like those oil paintings, was one of an ancient gloom.
And sometimes, when the lights were out, the darkness was a predator.
My parents never believed me. They told me that I sleepwalked. You see, every time we visited, I’d wake in the dead of night to use the bathroom, and when I ventured down the hallway . . .
(If you were here, I’d tell you this by walking my fingers along your arm in tepid footsteps)
. . . I’d follow the soft glow of the bathroom nightlight. And just before I reached the bathroom . . .
(I’d splay my fingers along your arm like radiating light, only to snap them closed)
—the light would go out, leaving me swallowed by the dark.
I’d try and feel for the doorknob, or retrace my steps, but I’d always find myself bumping into things until I’d finally fall asleep on the stairs, or on a couch, or under a table.
Some of the furniture I bumped into was truly strange, like a chair so creaky and brittle it seemed centuries old, with curving clawed feet. Or a curtained four-poster bed layered in cobwebbing. Or a glassy surface that was either a window or mirror, ringed in a round frame that felt like intertwining bones.
But most terrifying of all was how the darkness itself coalesced into a presence that chased me on those nights . . .
I could hear it just behind me—its clacking nails and popping joints as it absorbed all light. The scrape of its head or fingers along the ceiling made me think it must be very tall. Once, I felt strands of long hair brush me as it passed by. I avoided it by keeping low to the ground and hiding under furniture.
“The long-arm hag,” my grandmother called it.
She said the thing in the dark always followed someone in our family. Supposedly it snatched her brother, Peter, when he tried shining a light on it.
My parents assured me that her stories were nonsense and that dementia caused her to confuse dreams and reality. I never actually had a great-uncle named Peter.
After my grandmother passed away, the house fell to my aunt. Our annual visits ceased, meaning I no longer had to fear night excursions. But the story of what happened to my fictitious great-uncle Peter lurked in my mind, even decades later when I met you, Hana.
When you asked me about the dark, I felt silly. I just didn’t know how to tell you this story.
• • • •
Recently my aunt passed away and the house fell to my branch of the family. Since my parents are in ill-health, my brother and I are dealing with the sale of the old house. We decided we should take a hands-on approach and agreed to meet there to plan the estate sale and make all the other arrangements. On walking in, I remember feeling astonished at how bright it all was. My aunt had made some changes in her time, transforming gloomy gothic décor into bright modernism.
Gone was the stiff upholstered furniture, replaced by white couches and glass tables. The cedar floors gleamed, the windows lined with sheer, airy curtains.
It was also significantly smaller than I remembered.
I wandered up the stairs, mentally listing what we’d have to pack up and sell, what we’d leave, and what else we’d have to do to get ready. My brother was due to arrive in the afternoon, but his flight got delayed so he wouldn’t get in until morning. I settled myself into one of the rooms and, after brushing my teeth and slipping under the covers, was reaching for the lamp when my great-uncle Peter slipped into my mind. I’d checked the family tree. My parents were correct that he was entirely fictitious.
Even so, I left the light on.
• • • •
Discomfort in my bladder woke me (I can never go through the night without getting up to pee at least once). Groggy, I pushed myself up, wondering why the pillow and comforter felt different than I was used to until I remembered I was at my aunt’s house. And then, patting the fabric of the bedsheets and feeling for the bedside table, I realized something else—
It was dark.
Pitch dark.
But I’d gone to bed with the light on.
I must have turned it off, I told myself, trying to quell the rush of panic that sent my heart into spasms. Or maybe the bulb burned out. The breaker tripped. Something. There had to be a logical reason. I reached over to the base of the lamp, fingers flailing until I found the switch. Clicked it. Still darkness. Tried again and again, and then crawled across the bed to the other side, with another lamp. Clicked that one, too.
Nothing.
“Shit,” I hissed.
The soft fall of that single voiced word through the air, like a dropped pin, only accentuated the silence further. Made it deeper. Scarier.
My breathing hitched up.
It’s just dark, it’s just dark, it’s just dark, I lied to myself, swinging my legs out of bed and feeling around. I thought of all those times you and I navigated a room together, Hana. Feeling our way, hands gliding across landmarks—walls. Tables. Couches. I tried to remember how you did things as I now patted my way to the wall, and then to the door to the hallway. Felt the carpet under my bare soles give way to wood flooring.
I can do this, I told myself—
—until I hit the stairs.
I almost fell down them.
They weren’t supposed to be there. Didn’t match the map in my head. With a sharp intake of breath, I felt the edges with my toes, leaned and felt the steps below.
No.
Something told me if I took those stairs, I’d wind up lost just like when I was a little girl. I retraced my way down the hall—
Only to find stairs again.
Stairs to the front, stairs to the rear. And only walls between. No doors.
This can’t be real.
My pulse skyrocketed. I sank down to the floor, breaths coming fast and shallow. Would time eventually run out? Would dawn come? Would I be stuck forever? There was nowhere else to go, the darkness had me trapped! And finally, eyes running with tears at the unfairness and impossibility of it all, I surrendered to my lack of options.
Clinging to the railing, fighting down sobs, I felt with my toes each tentative step and descended.
When I reached level flooring, dusty wood creaked under my bare feet. I edged out into the room. Bumped against furniture. The leg of a couch. The ribbed backing of a chair. It felt like my grandmother’s old upholstered furniture. Was this where my aunt had stored it all after renovations? But there were other things, too . . . older things . . . My fingers found a glass surface ringed in a frame of ribbed and interlocking bone—oh, I recognized this one. If I kept looking, would I find the skeleton of poor imaginary Peter?
Click . . . clack . . .
Every hair on my body stood on end.
That clicking . . . it was the faint popping of joints . . . and with it a rustle of something gliding along the ceiling. Hands. Arms maybe? I imagined the long-armed hag reaching out and touching the walls, seeking flesh. When I was small I’d been able to curl up, tucked into a corner by the desk, or under a chair, and only her long hair brushed over me as she passed. But I was too big for that now, too clumsy . . . And my breathing was so loud.
God, my breathing was so noisy! Hitching! Almost sobs! And then, I swear to you I felt the touch of your fingers fluttering at my chest as I still struggled to breathe—in, out. I imagined your hand, drawing out, pushing in—breathe! And then your hand slid under mine, guiding me to the wall, nudging me to lower my arm and fumble around so that I found the dusty vase at knee-height as I passed it by, and then upwards feeling the protruding shelf so that I did not knock into it. I glided right by the thing dragging its arms along the ceiling, and then—and this is the strangest part—I’d swear your fingers traced out a map along my arm. A corridor. Clutter on the left side, easy to knock over. Your hand swiping a negative—don’t go that way. On the right side, doors. Second door. Your hand patting that door in the affirmative. As you guided me to the entrance to the hallway, the wood creaked.
The hag shrieked behind me.
I cannot remember if you smacked my shoulder in the gesture to GO, or if I took off on my own as the darkness heaved after me, my fingers brushing the wall along the right side—bump, doorframe! Wall! Bump again—aha, the second door! The knob! I turned it and flung myself inside just as the clicking and clacking was bearing down on me—
Dawn’s faint gray light peeked through the windows, illuminating the rumpled comforter and sheets of the bed. I slammed the door and flung myself into the covers.
Only when the sun was high in the morning sky and the hall brightened by natural daylight, spilling out from the bedrooms, did I dare come out.
• • • •
The house is up for sale now. I cannot in good conscience surrender the deed to a new owner without offering some word of warning, and that is another reason I have chosen to tell my story. Especially now that I looked up my family tree again. My grandmother never had a brother named Peter—but after researching more thoroughly, I discovered she had a cousin. Cousin Peter who lived with her until he mysteriously disappeared.
• • • •
And you, Hana . . . did you really help me to navigate through the dark? Or was that my imagination? In my need for something to steady me, maybe I simply projected my memory of you. But . . . how could any version of you, imagined or real, have known the hallway well enough to map it? Or is it that when you die, you know more things than you do when alive? I always imagined that when I die, I might see things beyond what I could see in life. Maybe in the same way, you can touch things beyond what your fingertips could reach. And maybe that’s how, too, you sensed I needed a co-navigator.
I don’t know. Maybe it’s all wishful thinking on my part. Can a thought, sparked out into the universe, call for help?
Well, I wish I’d told you this story a long time ago. I wish a lot of things. But one thing I did finally learn—you’d be proud of me, Hana. It’s . . . kind of marvelous. I’ve been practicing. And now, I fold them in the dark. Fold them while lying in bed. Fold them while resting with my eyes closed.
At last, my cranes come out perfect.
