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You’re Not Scared of the Dark, You’re Scared of What’s in It

“Everyone have their phones out and powered on?” Lore asked.

They did. They also each checked again to see if they had any service—

Still nothing.

No way out, and no way to reach out. Fine. So we push through . But pushing through had to be smart. They had to have strategy. Not like Nick, wanting to just bum-rush every room. If this was really like a game, like a dungeon, they needed to take it room by room, and do it slowly . Check the corners. Check for traps.

Lore always thought that in movies and games, the characters never did the right thing—more to the point, they never did the smart thing. It’s why she loved tabletop role-playing way more than video games, even though she was more a video game designer by trade. (She would gladly have designed pen-and-paper RPGs instead, but the money there was lower than Lowly Worm. She could not afford cool cross-body bags and magic shrooms and bougie-ass sex toys on the pennies tossed at her feet by the RPG industry. Not their fault, of course. Mostly.) At the game table, you could bring strategy, you could make plans, you could try crazy shit to help solve a situation or just stay alive. So here, in this situation, she knew they had to do this the smart way.

It would not behoove them to go stumbling around blind, here more than anywhere. But moving ahead with lights in front of them wasn’t enough. Not in a place where a dead girl crawled out from under a bed.

The plan, then, was this:

She wanted lights in every direction.

They’d walk forward in a diamond configuration.

Her at the front.

Hamish and Owen behind her to the left and to the right.

Nick at the back.

They’d point their lights in their respective directions: forward, left, right, and behind them.

Their last problem, and this was one she could do nothing about:

The light from their phones’ flashlights was a weak, sad thing. They offered pale, wan light—thin like moonlight. But it was better than nothing. She asked Nick if he had his Zippo, and he flinched. “No,” he said. “I, uhh, I lost it.”

“Okay, no lighter,” she said, taking a deep breath. “This is what we got. Let’s do this.”

She opened the door. It drifted open, the unoiled hinges whining.

The room ahead was pitch black.

Her heart pounded as she stood on the verge of darkness. It felt mad to be so scared of it—she’d long conquered her fear of the dark, like most adults, even though sometimes she still felt that little twinge of primeval fear, a tweak of certainty that something was hunting you in the shadows. That was the funny thing about a fear of the dark: you weren’t really afraid of it, but rather what lurked within it . A perfect emblem of the fear of the unknown.

A smell scurried through the opening to meet her. An antiseptic smell, but something else, too. Something sour—the pickling brine of sweat, piss, and sickness. Like what you might smell in a hospital room. The cleaning chemical scent was strong, but not strong enough to beat back the perfume of death.

“Ready?” she asked.

They were.

And with that, she stepped into the room.

—

Lore went in. Then Hamish.

Owen was next.

He stepped forward—

Gazing into the dark, a darkness slowly lit by the thin blooming light from Lore’s and Hamish’s phones. He saw furniture, like a dresser. A bedpost. A bed.

Owen stood in the doorway. Not going through. Not yet.

Because the smell hit him then—

It was a grotesquely familiar scent. It hit him deep, like a hand thrust into water, stirring up mud. That bleach smell, the way it didn’t cover up those ill odors, the rancid tang, but underneath it all, a smell of shitty dark instant coffee, the kind you might put on a bedside table and never drink, because you couldn’t drink it, because you were too full of meds and your body puked up anything you put into it anyway. And as the lights of Hamish and Lore turned to converge on the bed, and the shape of the person lying within it—

No.

Owen panicked—

He took a step back and slammed the door.

“What the fuck?” Nick asked, pushing past him.

“I—I—” I know that room. I know that person. Dad. That was Dad. “It was just reflexive, I didn’t mean to—”

Nick opened the door.

The dark room was gone. No bed, no smell.

The next room was now a playroom, by the looks of it. Sunny-yellow walls. An IKEA-looking low shelf on the one side, full of toys. Another shelf on the other side, full of picture books. In one corner, a cozy white recliner, like for a parent watching over a child, maybe even for a nursing mother. And in the corner next to it, a Christmas tree, ratty and dead, a carpet of dead brown needles littering both the floor and the unopened gifts tucked beneath its now brittle branches. No Lore. No Hamish.

“They’re gone,” Nick said.

No, no, no—no no no.

But Nick said it again: “They’re fucking gone. Owen, what did you do?”