Part 2

Originally posted on r/nosleep in 2018. Edited for spelling, grammar, and flow. It's still not great, but it's old. Cut me some slack.

CW: Child abuse

I didn't go to work on Monday. Management, upon finding out what had happened, was uncharacteristically kind and empathetic and gave me an extra week's vacation to recuperate from what happened. I hoped that Garry would be held responsible for his actions, but as usual, the gods of douchebaggery were on his side. The building's security cameras had been mysteriously turned off a few hours before the incident, leaving no proof that he had even been on the property at the time.

I shut myself in and stewed in my emotions for hours. Garry had to be punished, but how? What could I do to make sure this pathetic narcissist learned a lesson while simultaneously making him never want to look at me again? Physical violence was out of the question, and since I didn't want to stoop to his level, so were verbal or emotional attacks. Not that they would have done anything to him.

The hours passed, and night approached faster than I'd realized. My house, a small 5-room bungalow, was always kept brightly lit, warm, and free of drafts. But that night, the air in the kitchen and dining room was frigid. The air conditioner must be acting up, I thought, but when I checked the thermostat, I realized the air conditioner wasn't on.

The cold air seemed to emanate from the crack under the basement door, which was situated between the two rooms. Curious, I opened the door and came face-to-face with the stone being that had assaulted me two days earlier. I screamed and fell back as its long fingers attempted to grab me. The fingers recoiled in pain. The light acted as a force field that kept it from reaching me.

I scrambled to my feet and slammed the door shut. I knew it had been following me for years, but never had it invaded my home. To be fair, it never had a chance to. Every room except the basement was lit up like a Christmas tree, and my electricity was provided by solar panels, leaving very little chance for a power outage to leave me in the dark.

"That bastard," I muttered. My thoughts were on Garry now. Had he not pulled that little stunt earlier, I could have just gone on with my life as I always had. Sure, it wasn't much of a life, but it was peaceful. "That bastard," I said again, choking back tears.

Then the idea came to me. Maybe it was time for the bastard from work to meet the bastard taking up residence in my basement.

One phone call later, and it had all been set up. Garry would come over the next night, "just to hang out." Knowing him, he probably thought it was a booty call. Maybe it could be, depending on how well he and the face got along.

⇺⭑☽☼☾⭑⇻

Garry arrived around 8. He wore a maroon button-down shirt, only half buttoned to show off a meager tuft of chest hair, and tight black slacks. His hair was slicked back, and his goatee was trimmed extra pointy. He looked like a cartoon devil, and if I had been a different kind of woman, I may have found him appealing. But I saw him for more than just his looks. He brought with him a gift of three bottles of cheap red wine, probably to help loosen me up. Unfortunately for him, I don't drink.

We sat and chatted for a while, a little about work, but mostly about our coworkers. He wouldn't shut up about various coworkers' appearances or who was sleeping with whom. He would delve into deeper, darker subjects from time to time as well.

So you know how Jim's wife is dying of cancer, right? Well, he's been fucking Nancy on the break room table before the rest of us come in. Ew, right? He could do so much better. Oh, and you know Georgia upstairs in accounting? Probably not. You don't have a reason to go up there very often. Well, her 16-year-old son is being charged with possession of child porn! Better they catch him now than in another 10 years when he starts molesting kids, right?

The more he drank, the darker and more personal the gossip got. I had enough of it after a while, so I decided to change the subject.

"I don't know if you heard," I said, "but I was forced to face my own biggest fear last Friday night."

His eyes grew wide in a failed attempt to look shocked. "Were you? What happened?"

"Doris, Randy, and I were cleaning, and someone barricaded the door and cut the power to the entire building."

"You don't like the dark," he mumbled. It wasn't a question. It was a statement. An aha! moment.

"Yes. It stems from childhood trauma. I had the worst panic attack when it happened, you know? When Doris found me, she wanted me to go to the hospital, but I declined."

"Oh my gosh, you poor thing." He poured himself another glass of wine and sat back in his chair. He looked so smug. It took all my willpower not to break a glass over his head.

"Yes, well, that's why I invited you here."

"What do you mean by that?" he asked. His smug expression vanished instantly.

I moved to the chair next to his and held his hand. With a fake sweetness in my voice, I looked him in the eye, smiled, and said, "you've always been so kind to me. You put so much trust in me the way you opened up about yourself, and I've always been so shut up, never letting anyone in. I figured I should change that."

I took a framed, partially burnt photo from a nearby table and handed it to him. "You know how I don't have family pictures in my cubicle? Well, that's because I don't have any family. I mean, I do. Everyone does, but mine died when I was 5. I was at school when a gas leak vaporized my house with my parents in it. Officially it was ruled an accident, but I did some research last year, and I think it was murder-suicide."

"Oh my gosh," he said, clutching imaginary pearls as he glanced down at the singed picture.

"This photo is all I have left of my parents. A neighbor found it in his yard the day after the incident. It took him years, but he tracked me down and gave it to me as a Christmas present two years ago. It's sad to say, but I'd forgotten what my parents looked like until I saw this picture.

"The only other family I had were some distant cousins in Michigan, and they had no interest in taking me in, so I spent the rest of my youth in and out of foster homes."

"Were you abused?" he asked. He sounded more entertained than concerned.

"Yes, in a couple of them," I replied. His question irritated me. "Most of them were okay. Not home, obviously, but it was better than being out on the street. Anyway, when I was 12, I was sent to live with a family in a very out-of-the-way, backwoods town. I can't even remember what it was called. I think there were only 50 residents. That's how small it was.

"Have you ever heard of the Disciples of the Holy Death? No, probably not. They're a fringe Christian sect, sort of like the Amish or Hutterites but more strict. This family were members of the sect. Disciples usually live in compounds in the mountains of West Virginia and a few places in Ohio, so it was weird that this family would be living alone, with no other members of their sect, in a little shithole town in Slower Lower Delaware.

"They lived in an old farmhouse that looked nice from the outside. Basic, white with black shutters, no beautiful landscaping, not even flowers, but well-kept all the same. Inside was drab. Gray-beige walls, dark floors, exposed bulbs hanging from the ceiling, and not a single decoration on the walls except crosses above every door frame. Everything was plain and boring. Even the crosses were just two sticks tied together with twine.

"The family wasn't much better. The mother, two daughters, and grandmother were snow-white, as though they'd never seen the light of day. The father and son, on the other hand, had some color to them. I later found out that the women very rarely left the house. Worse than the way they looked were their personalities. I mean, they had none. The parents were so stern, the kids had this perpetual thousand-yard stare, and Granny was an invalid who could hardly hold her own head up. Nobody talked just for the sake of talking. Every word that came out of their mouths had to have a purpose. The women had to keep quiet. They could only speak to the men when spoken to, and none of them ever smiled. According to them, fun and happiness on Earth were sinful.

"So, life in that house was about as good as you'd imagine. No talking, no entertainment, no comfort. The only book allowed in the house was a heavily edited version of the Bible that we read from every night after supper."

"What do you mean 'heavily edited'?" Garry asked.

"It had rewritten passages, missing books, even entirely new books. Like it was rewritten to fit an agenda.

"Anyway, there were countless rules in that house. The only things you could do that didn't break a rule were the things you were told to do. We had an hour of school time, and that only consisted of reading and transcribing a few passages of the mock Bible and counting things like eggs. The son learned carpentry, but the girls were expected to stay in the house and clean. Not that the house needed it, of course. The damn place was spotless. But it was one of the few things we could do, so we spent hours sweeping, dusting, wiping down the walls, cleaning the windows, and when we were done, we had to do it all over again

"One time I decided I needed a break, so I went outside on a warm day and picked some wildflowers that were growing near the tree line behind the house. Bad move. Breaks are a sin, apparently. The key to Heaven is constant, backbreaking work. At least that's what the old man said when he whipped my arms with a knotted stick.

"After that, everything I did was wrong. I could be doing nothing but cleaning, just like my foster sisters, and the parents would find some reason to punish me. The worst was when we read the Bible. They would randomly ask me to read aloud, and sometimes I would mess up. There were a lot of weird words that I'd never seen before. Of course I'd mess up. My punishment for 'disrespecting the world of the Lord' was no food for an entire day and no sleep, just cleaning and prayer.

"It didn't take long for me to grow bitter. The other girls got punished occasionally, but I was the punching bag. The old man never showed emotion except when he hit me. I'd look at him and I'd see an intense fire in his eyes and his thin lips pulled back in a faint grin. He enjoyed hurting me. Maybe it was sexual.

"Eventually, I just got sick of their shit and spoke up. One day, the old man was whipping me with the stick again. Not on the arms like before. No, he'd taken to lifting my dress and whipping my bare back. I still have the scars from it. And after the twentieth or so hit, I just exploded. I turned around and grabbed his hand and socked him right in the eye. He fell back and damn near hit his head on a mantel. The son tried to grab me, but I took the stick from the old man and whipped him across the face with it. Then I screamed. I think it was the loudest sound those walls had heard in a long time. So loud that the windows rattled and the floors vibrated. The family was in shock. Even the half dead grandmother reacted.

"I started shouting at them, 'HOW THE HELL DID PEOPLE LIKE YOU EVER BECOME FOSTER PARENTS? YOU'RE A BUNCH OF FUCKING PSYCHOPATHS. I'M CALLING CPS, AND WHEN THEY SEE WHAT YOU DID TO ME, THEY'LL THROW YOU ALL IN JAIL. DON'T YOU EVER FUCKING TOUCH ME AGAIN, YOU DISGUSTING INBREDS!' But while I was in the middle of yelling and swinging the damn stick around, the old man came to. He grabbed me and knocked me out with a punch to the back of the head"

I had to stop for a moment. Telling Garry the origin of my fear, a story I vowed to never tell another person, got to me more than I thought it would.

"You ok?" Garry asked.

I took a deep breath and nodded my head. "Yeah. I just haven't told this story to anyone. Anyway, I woke up, god knows how long after the blow, on the ground in front of the cellar doors. The family was standing over me. The daughters looked terrified. The old woman opened the cellar doors while the old man lifted me up by my hair. He looked me dead in the eyes, and the fire I saw when he whipped me was gone. At that moment, there was just darkness. Death. He said, 'if you value your mortal soul, you will thank me for this later,' and threw me down the cellar.

"I landed on my back, gasping from the force of the fall and all the dust I'd kicked up from the dirt floor. There were cave crickets in every corner of the cellar and a few other bugs that made a mad dash across my hands. By that time, I wasn't afraid of the dark. Bugs bothered me more. I tried to get up and run for the doors, but the old man slammed them in my face and padlocked them shut, leaving me alone down there. My only light source were some dull rays of sunlight from a couple dirty basement windows.

"I didn't know what they were trying to pull. Isolation punishment, maybe? I thought my biggest worry would be the bugs, so I sat there for a while and carved shapes in the dirt. I figured they'd leave me there overnight, so I kept myself entertained by humming songs and watching flashbacks of movies and shows in my mind.

"After what I assume was 30 minutes, I started getting the feeling that I wasn't alone. The cellar only had one entrance, so it couldn't have been the old man or another member of the family. I passed it off as an animal. A rat or opossum, maybe. After another 30 minutes, I heard something sharp scraping the stone foundation. It was far back where the light didn't reach, and it echoed. Again, I passed it off as an animal searching for a crack in the foundation so it could get the hell out of there.

"It went on for a while. Scratch, stop, scratch, stop, drawing closer and closer with every passing moment. Then the scratching stopped, and the cellar went completely dark. It was like night had fallen instantly or something was blocking the windows. I figured the old man was doing something to scare me, so I sat back against the foundation and stared into the pitch black, letting my mind make up shapes in the void.

"A few minutes passed, and the blurry visions of clouds and bunnies and familiar people were broken by a single solid shape that seemed to appear out of nowhere at the back of the cellar. It was circular and white and swayed from side to side. At first, I thought it was a flashlight, but it didn't throw off a beam of light. Whatever this thing was, it stayed in one spot and just swayed.

"The air in the basement was cool to begin with, but when that darkness fell, I could have sworn it was the dead of winter instead of late July, and something about that white circle turned my blood to ice. It wasn't natural. Something in the back of my mind told me it wasn't of the earth, but something older. Something dangerous.

"The circle began moving forward, still swaying. Slithering like a snake. It weaved around now invisible boxes and ducked behind shelves. I scurried back towards the corner farthest away from the circle and made myself as small as possible. I didn't know what that thing was, but I got the feeling I didn't want it to find me. I was about to put my hands over my face when I realized I could see myself! Despite the pitch-black surroundings, my body was completely visible, as if I had a spotlight shining directly on me.

"The circle was much closer now, close enough that I could see it wasn't just a plain white circle but a face with hollow eyes and a small mouth. It stopped in what I believed to be the middle of the cellar and turned towards me. The face stood or hovered eight feet off the ground and didn't have a visible body.

"The damn thing had no eyes, but I could feel its gaze burning into my soul. It tilted its head side to side like it was trying to figure me out, then it suddenly fell eye level with me. I screamed, but nothing came out. I reached for the foundation in a vain attempt to stabilize my quivering body, but to my horror, the foundation was gone, as was the dirt floor. I was no longer in the cellar, but in a vacuum where nothing existed but that face and I.

"The face stood still for a few minutes, then lunged towards me. I tried to move, but I stayed in place as if suspended in midair. It stopped only a few inches in front of me. My eyes fixated on its own hollow pits. In my mind I asked, what are you?

"'I... am... the darkness...' it said in a raspy, breathy, inhuman voice."

"And for a moment it was just there, staring at me, making no movement. Then I felt them. The fingers. God, they came out of nowhere. They were long and cold and slithered up my legs like snakes, and there were hundreds of them. I tried to fight them off, but I couldn't move my legs. Next, the fingers immobilized my arms. The two groups met halfway down my torso, then started making their way up my neck. I glanced down, and every part of my body that had been engulfed in fingers was gone, vanished into the pitch-black void. Once up my neck, the fingers wrapped around my head, covered my mouth, forced themselves down my throat until they became a part of me. The only thing they didn't cover were my eyes.

"Once I was completely covered, the darkness moved even closer, until it just touched where my face should have been. I was forced to stare into its hollow eyes until the face itself disappeared, and I was alone in that cold, black void.

"I don't know how long I was left there. It couldn't have been long. I woke up face down on the cellar floor, a bit of daylight shining through the dusty windows. The doors opened, and the old man lifted and dragged me out by my hair. He looked me dead in the eyes and said, 'That was just a taste of the fate that awaits a sinner,' before sending me back inside to help the others prepare dinner.

"After that, nothing was the same. I wasn't the same. I felt dead inside and always tired. I couldn't sleep at night. All the bedrooms had nightlights beside each bed to keep the darkness at bay, but that didn't stop it from stalking us. I wondered if it had always been there, stalking my foster sisters and I just couldn't see it until I finally met it. It stood in the darkest corner of the room, watching us. Its fingers squirmed as they tried in vain to reach us. The only thing that kept us safe were the nightlights.

"You'd think after that I was a model foster daughter, right? Well, I was. For a while. But early one morning, when no one was looking, I ran. I didn't know where I was going, but I ran until I found a place with a phone, and I called the police, who called CPS, and once they saw the scars, they took me away. Don't know whatever happened to the family, and quite frankly, I don't fucking care."

Garry remained silent, a look of bewilderment and disgust on his face.

"Well, that's what set me off when I got locked in the office. The darkness came back, and it got me for the first time in years."

"Oh my God," he finally muttered. "You are fucking crazy! Is this some kind of PTSD? Does PTSD make people hallucinate?"

"It was not a hallucination," I replied.

"Ok, Meg. You want me to believe that you were abused by a weird cult and nearly sacrificed to some kind of demon? I mean, the cult thing I can believe, but that... face? Have you seen a therapist?"

"Yes, I-"

"Ah, hold that thought," he said as he stood, drunken legs wobbling. "I gotta take a piss. Where's the bathroom?"

I smiled sweetly and said, "The toilet on the first floor is broken. I've been having to use the one in the basement."

"Basement toilet?" Garry said with a snort.

"It's a furnished basement, Garry. It serves as a guest room with its own bathroom." I stood and led him to the basement door. "Just turn left when you get to the bottom of the stairs, and the door across the basement is a bathroom."

He clumsily shuffled down the stairs, holding tight to the railing with both hands. Once at the bottom, he stared at the dirt floor and exposed beams that made up the basement. "What the hell is this? Where's the bathroom?"

"Oh, sorry, Garry. I forgot, there is no bathroom in the basement. Silly me. Say, while you're in there, why don't you say hello?"

"Hello?" he asked. I flipped the light switch and closed the door, locking it with a newly installed deadbolt. Garry ran up the stairs and banged on the door. "What the hell, Meg?"

"Revenge, Garry, plain and simple. I want you to know what it's like to face my worst fear. You know, like what you've done to me and all our coworkers."

Garry banged on the door some more. "Let me out, you crazy bitch! I'll break through one of the windows if you don't, and then I'll have you arrested for false imprisonment!"

The banging stopped and he muttered, "why the fuck do you have the air conditioner on so low?"

A sly smile crept across my face. "It's not."

"What the... what the fuck is that thing?" he cried.

"A circle of white piercing the black void? That's the darkness, Garry. That's what I was telling you about. It's time you learned a lesson. So say hello to it for me. You two are going to get very well acquainted." Behind the door, Garry muttered a few swears directed at me. The muttering turned into whimpering, and the whimpering into screaming.

⇺⭑☽☼☾⭑⇻

A half an hour had passed, and Garry's screams had dissipated into pathetic whimpers. I suppose it's had more than enough time with him, I thought as I got up from the couch to let Garry out of the basement.

I felt the presence behind the door the moment I touched the knob. When I opened it, I was face to face with the darkness. Its emotionless white, mask-like face parallel to mine, its eyes never breaking contact with my own. I felt its energy try to push its way through the threshold, but the light from the kitchen acted as an impenetrable barrier.

"Okay," I said, "he's learned his lesson." I reached my hand into the darkness to find the light switch. I could feel the being's long, wispy fingers wrap around my arm and try to squirm their way up, only to recoil when they touched the light. A wave of goosebumps covered my body. I wanted to run, but I couldn't just leave Garry down there, no matter how much I wanted to. So I flipped the switch, and suddenly, my old friend was gone.

I found Garry huddled up in the farthest corner from the stairs, hacking and gasping for air. His eyes were bloodshot and sweat poured from his body. His shirt had been ripped open completely at some point, leaving a few buttons scattered across the floor.

"W-w-w-w-what is that thing?" he stammered.

I squatted beside him and placed a tender hand on his cheek. "The darkness. I don't know where it came from or who brought it into our plane of existence, but it's here. It's a curse and it's a part of me. Now that you know what it is, it'll never leave you, so you'd better get used to sleeping with the lights on."

"Why?" he asked. He started crying.

"I told you, Garry. Revenge. Karma. What you did to our coworkers, your so-called friends, was no different from what I did to you tonight. Maybe now you'll change your ways, won't you?"

He scrambled to his feet and ran to the stairs. "Oh, and Garry," I said, "it'd be best if you didn't tell the authorities about this. They won't believe you. Trust me, I know from experience."

"Fuck you," he growled before flying up the stairs and out of the house.

⇺⭑☽☼☾⭑⇻

I returned to work a few days later. My coworkers seemed happier and I realized the office was much quieter. On our lunch break, Doris gleefully told me the news. Garry had stumbled into the police department, drunk out of his mind, rambling about being held hostage by a coworker and tortured by demons. Seeing as he had driven there, he was arrested for driving under the influence and subsequently lost his job.

Sometimes I wonder if I'm a bad person. Did I stoop to the same level as my foster family? Was the inevitable damage to Garry's mental state, the loss of his job, and a criminal record really worth it? No matter what I think of myself, I choose to believe that the pros of what I did outweighed the cons. I've heard the proof through the grapevine. Garry had changed his life around. His narcissistic traits seemed to vanish after his arrest. He stopped bullying people and spends his spare time volunteering for various charities. So even if what I did was just a bit evil, at least Garry changed his ways. All it took was a little taste of the fate that awaits a sinner.