When I was young we lived in a very old house. It was beautiful. Two stories tall with a full basement. It had cabinets built into the walls in a way that doesn’t seem to exist in newer houses. It had the most amazing woodwork, climbing up the stairs, lining the huge dining room, everything about the house had an old-world charm.
The basement, though, was the stuff of childhood dreams. It was broken into three or four huge rooms, mostly empty, and ready for adventure.
In the back corner was a room that had been used for coal storage, and it was the stuff of nightmares. The floor was black and gritty, crunching underfoot, like walking on ancient bones. There was a pile of coal left in the far corner, small and lifeless, it could have been the fresh covering of newly occupied grave. The walls were covered in black dust and when you turned on the feeble, weak light bulb the light was swallowed, absorbed, giving the room an appearance of an infinite black nothingness. At night when you went to bed and turned out the lights it was easy to imagine the darkness spreading from the room in the basement and swallowing all the color and light from the house, maybe the world.
Much later there were 4 of us living in a small one-bedroom apartment. It might have been a two-bedroom apartment, there was a room next to the living room about the same size as the kitchen and the bedroom, but it was dark. For some reason, they didn’t put a window in the room, even though it had two exterior walls. The walls were painted in an odd, peach color, and there were a couple of old movie posters, “The Thing from Another Planet,” and “Gone With The Wind.” When people came over we would send them in to look at the posters.
“Those are really old posters, man.”
We kept a chest of drawers in there and there was a lamp sitting on it. When you flipped on the light the rays always stopped short of the walls. You could move the lamp closer and see the walls, but when you moved it back the night would rush in again. It wasn’t impossible to consider someone going in there, closing the door and never being seen again.
Now I work in a very old building.
In the basement, there is a room off to the right of the main chamber with three steps leading up to it. When the elevator door opens there is a switch that controls the lights in the main room. They don’t penetrate the darkness that consumes the room at the top of the steps, an inky pitch that radiates from someplace outside of reason. The lights in that room are controlled by a switch in the room, so you have to go into the darkness to turn them on.
Nobody wants to do that. For one thing, there is a mannequin in there. Her eyes are huge, like they’ve seen everything there is to see and she has no room for anything else. She is wearing a blond wig that always looks clean despite the dust and grime. And, she moves around, she is always in different places.
2020 has nothing on me, it has been following me around for years. But, I do think we need a little more light.
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