The Dark: Excerpt (Chapter 1)

(copyright etc., etc., so on and so forth, by John E. Simpson)

Webster was in a stall in the men’s room at work. He had selected the middle one of the three, as always — he’d always leave and come back later if someone else was in there ahead of him — the one with the shelf-like thingum on which he could rest his wrist and elbow and his cup of coffee, the one with the everlasting drip from all the chromework behind the seat, a cozy little island of peace, sanity, and predictability. It lacked only a sampler on the wall.

The local neighborhood freebie newspaper was spread open across his otherwise bare knees. He’d been here for ten, fifteen minutes so far, feigning absorption in the impassioned amateur journalism about zoning outrages and police protection, notices of pets lost and found, reviews and previews of rock concerts by unheard-of bands whose names sounded like failed experiments in semantic eugenics. Not that anyone was going to, well, check on him here — “Webster? What the heck you doing in there, anyhow?” — but you never knew. Someone might note his absence from his desk; someone else might say, “Oh yeah, Webster, I saw him go into the bathroom but that was ten minutes ago, you think he’s all right?” When the search party arrived and began to question him through the walls of the stall, Webster imagined rattling the newspaper and reassuring them, “Yes, yes! I’m all right! In here, just reading this fascinating investigative piece on the failure of The City’s landmark-preservation activities…”

He was, however, but dimly aware of the words on the page, rather attending primarily to the consequences of what his college roommate used to call the “cold fusion” which occurred within twelve hours of eating too much frozen lasagna. (His wife — for Webster was married then — had apologized, last night being the second successive one on which they’d had frozen lasagna. But they’d really had no choice, both of them getting home from work far too late to do anything more like menu planning than to stare dully into the open freezer, willing the wisps of frosty air to coalesce into something at least edible, if not actually nourishing.)

Meanwhile, other men entered and exited the restroom — some of them, for all Webster knew, more than once — but Webster had paid only as much attention to their activities as mandated by his inviolable laws of self-consciousness: clearing his throat, shaking the newspaper pages, peeking through the slit between the stall’s painted-metal door and doorframe in order to be sure that no one was peeking in.

He’d been alone for a few minutes, but now someone entered the stall next to Webster’s; he felt the toilet seat shift beneath himself as the other man, evidently of a large build, sat down upon his creaking seat. Webster lifted the corner of the newspaper, crouched a bit, and twisted his head in order to glance down and over at the other man’s shoes. They were none of Webster’s business — but (he rationalized) how many chances did modern life, conducted out in the open, give us to observe our fellow man without knowing if they were watching us? Right. None. This was it: the lavatory stall.

The man’s shoes were brown, scuffed in a way that made it clear that the scuffing had been built into the shoes from the start. Gnarled. “Distressed leather,” Webster imagined it was called: intentional scuffing. That, together with the tan crepe soles, bespoke a literally careless wearer, one who cared exactly zero per cent what people thought of the way he dressed in the business world. (Or, more likely here in The City, someone who cared one hundred per cent about it, desired one hundred per cent that he be noticed, even if in scorn.) What was odder, the shoes were wingtips, a bizarre hodge-podge of classicism and affected ruggedness.

Webster didn’t like the shoes at all, and sniffed loudly and rattled the newspaper to signal his disapproval.

Meanwhile he looked down at his own shoes, twisted his ankles about. What would the other man be able to tell about him from looking at his shoes? Suppose he sees my ankle writhing around here, he thought, He might know that I’ve been looking at—

That was when the restroom lights went out.

Webster’s heart lurched involuntarily, and the man in the next stall said, loudly, “Oh for Christ’s sake.” Each word, each consonant, pronounced explicitly.

Definitely a fuss-budget, Webster thought. But then the lights did not come on right away, and he forgot about the other man, began to feel restless and — well, oppressed. Why didn’t they put restrooms on the outside walls of buildings anymore, where they could at least have light from the windows for emergencies like this? Cripes but it was dark, impenetrably dark, and Webster touched lightly at the metal walls to reassure himself that they were still there and not gone, receding, or, more terrifyingly, closer.

Should he get up, or stay? He wasn’t done yet, but it felt weirdly indecent to do what he was doing in the dark. A throwback to the Neanderthals, maybe: like a bear, you went in the woods, not in the cave — and you went in daylight. If you were going to make yourself vulnerable, to put your most precious anatomy at the mercy of the natural world, you had to be able to see exactly what dangers might be at hand.

Snake in the toilet, he thought, recalling a series of homeowners’ advice columns on the subject. With the lights out I’d never know, it would just—, and at that moment the seat of the toilet shifted and creaked again. His heart thudded uncomfortably once, twice, before he heard the man in the next stall muttering, moving around, rumbling in seismic disgust at the state of the building’s electrical system. Preparing to depart, evidently. There was a clink of metal on tile, which echoed louder in the dark than it would have if the lights were on, a miniaturized version of the sledgehammer and stamp at the conclusion of “Dragnet,” then a faint zzzzzzzzzzip!, and the toilet next door flushed. The door of that stall whumped and thudded open and closed, the door to the restroom itself did likewise — a tantalizing instant of gray light from the hallway — and then Webster was alone.

When he was a boy, Webster had had only one recurring dream that he knew of, one that he now recalled although he tried to hold the memory away from him:

Webster, alone. The basement of his parents’ house.

Nighttime; a single bare low-wattage light bulb glowing from the ceiling. Webster’s attention riveted to the small window set up high on the basement wall, through which he can look across the mostly dark street. Galloping across the pavement now toward Webster, passing beneath the yellow light from the street lamp, a legless apparition, black, the size and general shape of a large dog and galloping despite the leglessness, bucking like a hovercraft a foot or so off the ground. Galloping quickly quickly in his direction, yet tormentingly slowly too until there it was, hurling itself against the frame of the window of Webster’s parents’ basement, thumping, growling and snapping, black shiny teeth a-flash like sharpened licorice jellybeans. There for him, for Webster.

The dark.

Unbidden, unwanted, irresistible: the memory of that dream returned to him now. Exposed — even in the dark — helpless as he was, he huddled over his bare thighs, clasped the newspaper like a blanket around them. He had been sitting here for so long now that the backs of his thighs and his rump itself were sweating, and they now felt clammy, damp to the touch, like the painted cinderblock walls of his parents’ basement…

Sometimes when he’d be playing by himself down there in the basement, lost in a fantasy world in which all the plastic soldiers and jeeps were life-size and firing and dodging real bullets and rockets, the old oil furnace behind him would suddenly click on, and little Webster (remembering the dream, startled to find himself alone, in the basement, what am I doing down here) would nearly jump out of his skin. Now here in the dark restroom he was immobilized, adhesived in place by a horrible confluence of sticky haunches, ruined digestion, and lurid mental images of reptilian mandibles mere inches away from his convulsing skin, and now here in the restroom, overhead, the ventilation system suddenly whooshed into action. Webster barked out a sharp cry and leapt up, shedding newspaper pages like gingko leaves, scraping a thigh painfully on the wooden shelf and apparently ripping from the back of each thigh some four to six inches of epidermis, lurched forward, rammed his forehead against the coat hook on the inside of the stall door. Something wet dripped onto the back of one of his calves, sweat or worse, he didn’t even want to think about it, lunging blind for the chrome door latch that he knew had to be yes here it was, staggering with his pants and underwear around his ankles into the middle of the darkened restroom floor where he stood, gasping, hands spasmodically opening and closing into fists at his sides.

The door of the men’s room swung open, silhouetting a figure there. A masculine voice, twanging with surprise and amusement: “Whoops, sorry!” The figure backed out and the door swung shut again.

Good God. Gotta get a grip here, Webster, I’ve gotta, have to, have to get back into the stall, clean up, get out of the middle of the darned floor— Staggering back now, hands outstretched like a Karloff parody, retracing his path, almost but not quite losing his footing on the sheaves of loose newsprint, back into the flapping mouth of the stall, leave it unlatched but at least get inside anyhow, standing shivering, eyes tearing a little, breath coming in great fishlike gulps, and vowing (on the memory of his platoons of dear departed toy plastic soldiers) never never never again, for the rest of his life, to let his wife talk him into so much as thinking of the phrase “frozen lasagna.”

Slowly, still standing, he regained his wits. He opened and closed his fists one final time. He shut his eyes — shut out the dark — took a breath; counted to ten; released the breath. He faced the rear of the stall, bent at the waist, groped for and found the whatchamacallit, the flush-handle, flushed once, twice, and finally sat down again — hands placed in a mature, adult (albeit white-knuckled) fashion, squarely on his knees: awaiting the return of vision.

When that moment came, Webster had actually screwed up his courage to the point where he was considering re-latching the stall door. The lights came on, the vent fans shut down, and Webster (with a smirk of confidence) reached out and accomplished the latching without further incident.

He surveyed the wreckage. The thigh that had scraped the wooden shelf or armrest or whatever it was, that thigh had actually been gashed, on the shelf’s corner he guessed, confirming that the stabbing pain in that leg was not a product of imagination. He dabbed at it with some toilet tissue. His forehead throbbed like crazy — at least the hook had missed his eye, something else he didn’t even want to think about. Whatever it was he had felt, or thought he felt, on his calf was now gone, absorbed into sock or trousers.

Newspaper had gone every which-way, most of it still on the floor of his stall but some out into the middle of the restroom floor and a couple-three-four sheets into the neighboring stalls. Crouching, carefully ascertaining first that those stalls were indeed unoccupied, he stretched out his fingertips, pulled the pages in his direction, gathered them up into a semblance of order. He folded the mangled result carefully, and placed it on the shelf for the stall’s next occupant. He stood, cleaned himself with toilet tissue, and flushed once and then again. He bent to raise his shorts and trousers, and saw on the floor a memo-sized leaflet of paper.

It had not been here, he was sure, when he first entered the stall (days, weeks, lifetimes ago). It must have been in that stall there, the one on his left where the guy with the banged-up wingtips had been sitting when the lights went out; it must have been dragged in here beneath the newspaper pages. He picked it up.

The note was unsigned, and the memo paper contained no other identifying information, not even a letterhead: no sender, no addressee. The message was handwritten, in a manic cursive script of thick blue felt-tip ink, words floridly capitalized, underscored and double-underscored apparently at random. At several spots in the text the writer — or the recipient? — had pushed a sharp object through the paper, carving out the hearts of o’s, dotting i’s with a literal vengeance, and on one corner was a smear of what might have been dried blood or fingernail polish or coffee or might have been just plain mud. The note said:

Please I know you think “this” is right but NO “it” isn’t. And “it” won’t be not for a long time anyhow, you know how I feel but I can’t let you do “it.” I am so sick of the whole thing I want to scream but I WON’T SO YOU WON’T do it! Take a day if you want take two days even three but keep LOOKING OVER YOUR SHOULDER I’m telling you.

—-

It was not easy for Webster not to think about the note for the rest of the day — placed, as it was, in his shirt pocket, where it reminded him of itself every time he reached for his fountain pen.

He couldn’t believe how many times he used the pen in the course of a single afternoon. Four, he might have estimated. A half-dozen. But jeez, the left side of his chest today was positively tingling from the constant abrasion. (He hoped he wasn’t developing a blister there, but it almost felt that way.) And every time he used the pen, feeling the now-folded and -refolded note crinkle softly through the pocket fabric, he thought, Oh yeah the note, no point, throw it away.

When he entered the train station on the way home from work, he did come close to discarding it. Half-consciously, automatically, he was reaching up to be sure he hadn’t left the pen on his desk at work — wow, do I reassure myself like this every day? — when he felt the note again and (he was now determined) for the last time. He was moving toward a trash receptacle, note in hand, when there was a sudden voice. Addressing him.

“Why thank you sir.” A pan-handler standing by the trash can, grimy weatherbeaten — distressed — fingers outstretched. Looking, and grinning, unmistakably at Webster. “Thank you very much, very kind and generous. Sir.”

Webster halted, retracted the hand holding the note, wavered. “No, well, that is, you don’t under— I mean…” Phooey. He stuffed the note back into the shirt pocket, grabbed a handful of change from his pants pocket, and flung the coins in the beggar’s direction.

Although he had plenty of time, he then sprinted to the train, seated himself, panting, staring at his pale translucent reflection in the window. What a con, he thought, great routine, stand by the trash can and just nail people like that, suck the handouts right in. The skin of his left breast itching, itching, itching.