TenebrousWritten by EmpyrealInvectiveLionel Upton Xion grew up like most children; as a child he had a healthy fear of the dark. The peculiar thing about Lionel was that his fear of the dark didn’t evaporate, or at least get relegated to the dark corners of his mind as he aged. Instead, it intensified. His neurosis multiplied and insidiously entered itself into his life. He wasn’t able to sleep with the lights off and whenever he found himself in darkness, he was reduced to a shrieking, sobbing mess. His parents hoped that this irrational fear would pass with time, but it only seemed to dig in deeper and grow roots in the young boy’s mind.His parents became increasingly distraught over their son’s plight. They tried to cure him of his fears, but their attempts were met with resistance. They brought the boy to doctors who referred them to psychiatrists. Psychiatrists diagnosed the now teenage Lionel with nyctophobia. Pills were prescribed liberally to no effect and talk therapy uncovered no secret traumas. (One therapist was insistent that Lionel had been raped, but social services managed to dispel that theory.)After that incident and subsequent interview with child protective services, Lionel’s parents decided against pursuing the issue any further. Thus Lionel’s fear of the dark was left alone by his parents. He did his best to avoid making his fears known and his parents did their best to not force situations. With time this problem became something that was in the background and easily overlooked. It was a closely guarded family secret.Time passed and Lionel led a reasonably fulfilling life. He completed college when he was twenty-two years old and landed a well-paying job that he neither enjoyed nor hated. He found his mental state smothered in ennui which he combated with new things and new experiences. He blamed it on his growing up and becoming an adult, but he could never puzzle out the nervousness he felt. When he was twenty-five, his grandfather died and being an only child of an only child, he inherited his house. It was in that house, living by himself that he started to lose his mind.Lionel’s madness started small like all psychosis. He had the feeling that someone was watching him whenever he was in his house. He chalked it up to living in a small house in a relatively elderly neighborhood. His octogenarian neighbors treated him as if he would suddenly start throwing raves and doing that drug that killed a lot of revelers. (They watched a lot of news programs dealing with this almost non-existent issue.) Lionel did not make a lot of friends among his neighbors and instead chose solitude. When he wasn’t working, he was alone. He ate by himself, he slept by himself, and even when people tried to intrude on this solitude, Lionel felt like he was alone.A few weeks into living in his new residence, Lionel started to notice that he could never find anything in his house. He would buy and leave light bulbs on the counter after coming home and he would find them on top of the television. He brought home a pack of steaks to cook, only to find one rotting in a closet a week later. He began to research his family lineage for Alzheimer’s, but found no real influence of it in his immediate family. Lionel eventually decided the stress of his job was toying with his mind. He continued on with his life.When the lights were next to become mischievous, Lionel began to feel tinges of panic rising up from the pit of his stomach. He brushed it away as childish fancies that he hadn’t been able to bury, but had been able to ignore. He would go to sleep in his bedroom with the lights on and would wake up in the morning with them turned off. He figured that there was some sort of timer function used as an energy saver, but found nothing in his investigations.As part of Lionel’s ritual, he would turn on every light in his house as soon as he got home. He would start in the kitchen, moving on to the bedroom, then the bathroom. Every room he was going to use was lit up. Upon returning to the kitchen, the lights would be out. This didn’t happen everyday, but occurred with enough frequency to be noted by him. He explained it away as a slipping mind, but knew that something had begun to gnaw away inside him.Lionel’s anxiousness finally reached a pinnacle when he was reading a magazine in his kitchen when the room was bathed in a fast flash of light and then darkness swallowed him whole. He went to the switch, thinking it needed to be flipped, but found it could not be resuscitated. The longer he spent in that darkened room, the greater his unease grew. His hairs stood on the back on his neck, his bowels tightened, and he felt his testicles retract. He threw himself into the light of the living room and took fifteen minutes to slow his breathing. Upon examination the next day, Lionel would find the wires severed to the switch.Lionel’s anxiousness turned into panic. He had the wires repaired, but a week later they would be split again. Electricians were dumbfounded as to the cause. They thought rats were chewing up the wires (The house had its fair share of rats.), but the pattern was more similar to a cut and not gnawing. Then the lights in the living room would go out of operation. He had been able to deal with small moments in the darkness, but something about this darkness in particular was extremely upsetting. It was suffocating. He felt eyes on him when he was in the darkness, he imagined breath on the back of his neck.It didn’t take long for Lionel’s panic to turn into pants-shitting terror. That terror fulminated while he was taking a day off of work. (He noticed that he had been doing that more and more, but could not help it with everything that had been happening.) He watched a rat scurrying across the floor. He was not good at cleaning house and wasn’t phased by creatures crawling around. It passed under the shadow of his chair. A large squeak drew his attention to it. The rat had made it five bounds beyond the shadow when it reached the limit of its body. Lionel stared at the corpse in horror. Two of its legs had been torn off and it was missing half an ear and one of its eyes.Lionel spent the rest of the day avoiding shadows. Whatever was in there was the cause of Lionel’s terror and it was the presence in the darkness. It had been watching him for a long time. He knew that it had started by toying with him. It moved his things around to play with his mind and its pranks on the lights was it escalating the situation. Lionel dry-heaved when he realized that it had probably cut the lights while he was sleeping. It was alone with him while he slept. What did this thing want? He shuddered because a part of him knew exactly what it wanted, whatever creature did that to the rat had a new target. It wanted Lionel.He sought to escape the house, but knew before he had even reached the door that it would be a fruitless struggle. The door was bathed in shadows. Lionel could feel it there. It was waiting for him. Waiting for him to stick out his hand and grope for the knob of the door so he could pull back a ragged and bloody stump. He knew that it wouldn’t kill him. It would maim him. Whatever was in the shadows wanted to take its time with him. It had been playing with him for weeks and now the game had reached its crescendo.He wouldn’t be taken so easily. Something told him that if he could make it to sunrise that he would be able to escape. The creature hid in the shadows and if Lionel was right, when the sun rose it would be left with nowhere to hide except where it hid during the day. He prayed to God it couldn’t walk in the light. He just had to make it until five A.M. He had to avoid the dark for just a few hours. The sun was beginning to set and before that could happen, he would have to make sure he would be ready to deal with this threat.Lionel ran all over the house, trying to collect everything he could use to make it through the night. He knew the lights would not hold out for long. They would eventually be cut. He grabbed a lighter, match boxes, candles, and batteries. He looked out the window as the sun slowly sank beneath the horizon. He had just one last thing he needed before he was ready to confront the darkness. The only problem was that it was in the closet in his bedroom.The door swung open and the light that streamed into the closet was almost instantly consumed by the hungry darkness. There was no light bulb in this place. He had wanted to install a light in switch in every single room of this house when he moved in, but then the trouble had all started and he was side-tracked. The closet was about six feet long and the coincidence of that did not escape Lionel. The item he wanted sat on the shelf in the back corner. In the murky darkness, he could just make out the flashlight.Lionel knew he would have to enter the darkness if he wanted to retrieve the flashlight. He stepped forward and felt the oppressive darkness begin to circle around him. He pulled out his lighter and struck it. The flame illuminated a radius of around a foot. He walked slowly in that space, afraid that whatever was in the shadows would lunge out at him any second. His eyes wandered all around him as he edged closer to the flashlight. He grabbed it off the shelf and when he turned around, he saw the thing in the darkness.It was on the border between the darkness and light, but Lionel saw it clearly enough. Its entire body was jet black like it had been made of obsidian ink. Its eyes were a dark red that resembled a blood red ruby, dropped into clouded water. Its body was emaciated. The sight was quick, but burned itself onto his mind. Its sudden appearance caused his finger to slip off the button that was depressing
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