Whispers of the Night

By Thomas Williams 

Hornsgatan by Night, Eugene Jannson, 1902

 In the light of day many mysteries are hidden from sight. Like a mask, the sun's rays slip over the face of the world and shine with a saccharine brilliance that dazzles the corporeal senses into a stupor. The daytime was never my cup of tea. Instead, the night, untouched, and untainted by the sun is where I feel most at home. I have become a haunter of dark places, of dilapidated tenement houses and empty lots. I intrude upon the shadows. But the secret depths of forlorn spaces do not reject me. In the cradle of flooded basements and leaking roofs I am made welcome and the midnight kingdom coughs up its gifts. Bobbles and trinkets, dolls’ heads and faded photographs, which now line my shelves and fill the trunk beneath my bed. When my uneasy nerves keep me awake or my nightmares rouse me from sleep, I can always find an antidote in the cool embrace of the night. I jaunt across the shadowed streets until I find my way back home to rest. Then dawn pushes the night back to its black corners. It had never occurred to me that there might exist some other dimension to this eccentricity of mine, that the source of my attraction to the evening world was a product of a greater blackness infesting the substrate of the decrepit kingdoms I tread. 

I believe the evening began like any other. The familiar moon rose as the deep crimson sunset bled out of the western horizon, revealing the stars arranged in their twisting constellations. I smiled as I recognized the Pleiades and Sirius. After suffering nightmares whose content was hard to recall, but whose unsettling impact lingered, the natural light was a comfort to me. I hoped to forget my restlessness over the course of the night, enjoying the autumn breeze that blew down the empty streets and the glow of the yellow streetlamps. I have always found the experience somehow therapeutic. The stillness and silences of the city at night transform the concrete mundanity into an entirely different animal. Busy, burning day gives way to the contemplative darkness which seems to murmur with new intentions once the moon shines down on it. The world of midnight and early morning becomes one of exquisite solitude which calls to a handful of lost souls, who I have chanced to see on my walks. On rare occasions I have glimpsed a thin figure turning down an alleyway, or a distant speck of a man disappearing over the horizon; I always feel a sense of comradery with them and I hope their next night's sleep is not as troubled as mine.

My late night wandering always took me somewhere new, or at least a familiar space now deconsecrated by the veil of shadows placed over it. I quickly left the streets I walked down during the day. And as the full moon grew brighter and the dark became deeper I couldn't shake the feeling that something was different than on previous nights. Down certain avenues and vacant parks I could hear the faintest sound. Like a voice whispering the unknown syllables of a secret ritual. It bounced out of gloomy corners and I followed. I made turns and detours that I would not make otherwise, stopping to try and find the source of this sound. I found myself intrigued by the depths of an alleyway and, with only the slightest hesitation, I stepped over the threshold. The moonlight could only reach so far into the narrow corridor. The shadows quickly grew thicker, the insubstantial whisper louder. I felt almost as if I was being crushed as my shoulders grazed the sides of that crucible, or maybe it was just the cramped sensation created where the darkness was thickest, like the obsidian chitin of some grotesque beetle.The tone of the tiny voice changed too. In the complete darkness the beckoning whisper swelled to a low, hideous murmur. It surrounded me, filling the peripheries of my hearing with a sound that was some unholy patois of insect scuttling, shrill wind chimes, and storm clouds rumbling. I couldn’t make out a word, but I was sure the voice was welcoming me. It wanted me to place my hand into its abyss and drag me to whatever hell waited at the end of the alley. I regained control of my senses and then, realizing how far I had gone into the blackness, hurriedly tried to return to the path. A black wall of shadows encircled me and I could no longer tell which way I had come from. I choose a direction and I ran in panic. The path seemed longer than it did before, it stretched like serpent across battered concrete and grimy walls. I had no clue how long I spent running, but by the time I exited the alleyway the sky was an inky black and the stars were only pin points. 

Though I had left the alleyway behind, the impression of those soft whispers still echoed in my mind. They harmonized with the recollections of my nightmares and made me shiver. My journey had become winding and long. I was in a part of town where I had never been before. The streets had become menacing and strange. The warm glow of the streetlights seemed colder and dimmer, the light no longer brought any warmth or comfort to me. The wind whistled through the limbs of dead trees, creating an eerie melody. Odd collections of garbage cast suggestive shadows over the sidewalk, which I became uncomfortable walking on. Each new street betrayed more decay and ruin, another broken pane of glass or boarded up doorway. The houses were aged and decayed, their vacant windows gazing like blind eyes out at the black night and the high stars, their doors gaping open in the shape of mouths in awe. Beneath the lamps, whose glow now resembled the pale face of a corpse or the bloated full moon, I observed the darkness closely. Within the long shadows cast by the moonlight and the deep splotches of black something was moving. It was as if the very darkness was writhing with a life of its own. Each filament and tendril of night danced within this cursed part of the city. And the whole beast gathered around that small circle of light, each writhing part extending with an unknown impetus. 

Behind it all, from every corner and shadow from which bled the black pus of the night, I could hear a whisper. From all sides the faint noise grew stronger and the wind grew still. As the voice gained strength I could tell it was meant for my ears only. It called for me to follow it, to partake in the monstrous festival about to take place. In my delirious state, overwhelmed by the dull silver moonlight and the frolicking darkness, I followed that tiny voice. As I was pulled deeper into the contorted web of the city, the whispering grew louder, and many small voices joined its chorus. They called out from the darkness itself, from the very heart of the night air. They all chanted, at different paces and rhythms, divulging the secret horrors and pleasures of this midnight landscape. They sung of dismal sub-basements and graveyards, suspended in the silence of the moonlight, where the most heinous rituals of the night were performed. Each raging voice had given itself to the absolute darkness and each had been rewarded with an eternity of torture in the dark corners of the world. For me only, the voices of the night described their annihilation, the agony of being burned to nothing but a shadow. Freed from flesh, they could do anything. No freakish obsession was beyond them, no chaotic whim was denied them. And I glimpsed it all. Every horrendous act through every vacant window, every terror celebrated across the crooked roofs. For all time they would dance, chaos feasting on chaos, over and over again. Their perversion was absolute. What was this that had enchanted me? Was this why I had been pulled into this desolate place? I didn’t belong here, I didn’t want to. But there I was. I was welcomed by a song more profound than any daytime noise. I could tell, by the demented, tortured cries muffled by consuming gloom, by the excited murmur among the wraiths that they were in love. There was nothing of love in the sounds of their damnation, but every line that dripped out of the blackness was a poem of unending rapture in an eternal midnight kingdom, where the sun was overthrown and all the insane fancies of dream and paranoia ruled rampant. The chorus eulogized the great hanging moon and the bustling stars and the jet black sky, for each was like a jewel in a twisted crown. They sang odes to the festival without end and the palaces of crystalline darkness where the jester court of nightmares would play for all time. I was enthralled by the visions dancing across my ears and imagination. I could not help myself. I never could.

With me, their captured prey, the whispers led me towards even darker oblivion. My eyes widened in the darkness. They opened further than I can ever remember. The voices of the night began to grow in intensity, in the power of their mad rhetoric. I was borne up by the shrieks and we all paraded, slaves to a sublime madness, further into the embrace of the night. Their excitement was a fevered howling, a plea for deliverance. And the rows of buildings were swallowed by blackness. And the lamp lights finally went dark. And the voices hushed. It was almost time. The final event in the night's festivities was about to blossom into life. One by one, the streetlamps came back on, but now their empty sockets hosted stars, brilliant and dim, points of alien energy forming lines through the darkness, new constellations to be hung in a night that never ends. Then the voices rose in celebration and the very blackness began to erupt in commotion. Their many songs coalesced into a single hymn. A hymn for salvation through destruction. How I wanted to join in the procession. How I wanted to learn the mysteries hinted at by the formless voices. There I was, there I was within hellish paradise, not at its gate but at its center. The Cathedral of the Night. It’s obsidian gates yawned open. The black pit welcomed me with its perfect and endless darkness and the soaring chorus pushed me on, to join them, to be saved the mundane suffering of the day and to be rewarded with a pain infinitely more pleasurable: horror without end. So badly I wanted to be free, so close I came to the edge of that hole, but part of me had recoiled when I first heard the holy whispers. It was the part of me that knew the sun was rising far away from here. Even with that orgy of shadows engulfing me, it still remembered the warmth of the day and so it turned away and ran, shattering the spell.

When I fully regained my senses the sun was reaching towards the horizon, reaching with its chafed fingers. The whispers and the strange cathedral had evaporated as the light hit them. But when I next slept I found that there had been a terrible convergence in the landscape of my mind. I could no longer tell the difference between my worst nightmares and my best dreams. Both had been made a chimera of fear and adulation. Vistas of eternal blackness stretch out before my sleeping eyes, filled with joy and horror. As I write this, all my ruined treasures watch me with a vacant gaze. The dolls’ rolling eyes, the satisfied expression of the old photos, they see the end approaching. They have already seen the beginning. I know that I will soon hear those whispers again and will find the strength to take the final leap of faith. I belong with them, not in sunlight but under a moon that never sets. The abysmal kingdom that has been crying out for me since first I breathed the moon touched air is calling me back home, for the content of my dreams has not truly changed. I have only glimpsed the basis for my nightmares with my own eyes.

Bio

Thomas Williams is a writer and improviser, but mostly student from Toronto. His writing is deeply inspired by the short stories of Thomas Ligotti, the novels of Halldór Laxness, and the mythic poetry of Finland and Scandinavia. He is currently enrolled at the University of Toronto.