The night was thick with owlspeak. Darkness the texture of molasses dripped from bare branches. Black winds hissed through tortured thorn and toads draped themselves voluptuously over the black mudbanks like crone-scrawny concubines swaddled in greasy brown paper. The oily obsidian of the lake's surface stretched on to the rougher vertical monolith of the sheer cliff face, a straggle of coarse fringing its silhouette; a more solid slab of darkness against the darkness of the sky. A flock of egrets flashed white as lightning, migrating away and not looking back, not one. Oppressive images and archetypes of Philomel dominated her thinking. Nothing much happened and yet her barely-contained panic was total.
She was awoken by a strangulated yelp, and lay stock-still and listening but there was just the sloppy-drunk slur of a Levantine conversation below and the distant traffic growling like a lonely animal in anguish. A thrust of courage and she opened her eyes to her bedroom, it's contents bathed in sickly orange by the streetlight outside. The familiar London knot of people and the objects they made, and no such thing as darkness. Realisation dawned, abating and concentrating her terror, that the yelp must have come from the front of her own face. A nightmare then, albeit a particularly vivid one. And a stupid one too, based upon nothing more than a threatening atmosphere.
She sighed and decided she needed a glass of water. She swung her legs off the bed and planted her bare feet in the peaty mud. Unknown things - segmented, bloated and bristling with legs - crawled between her toes. The snuffling of nightanimals came from under the furniture. There was darkness here, a sodium darkness selective in what it revealed.
This time she was unable to stifle her scream for long. This time it did not wake her up.
She was awoken by a strangulated yelp, and lay stock-still and listening but there was just the sloppy-drunk slur of a Levantine conversation below and the distant traffic growling like a lonely animal in anguish. A thrust of courage and she opened her eyes to her bedroom, it's contents bathed in sickly orange by the streetlight outside. The familiar London knot of people and the objects they made, and no such thing as darkness. Realisation dawned, abating and concentrating her terror, that the yelp must have come from the front of her own face. A nightmare then, albeit a particularly vivid one. And a stupid one too, based upon nothing more than a threatening atmosphere.
She sighed and decided she needed a glass of water. She swung her legs off the bed and planted her bare feet in the peaty mud. Unknown things - segmented, bloated and bristling with legs - crawled between her toes. The snuffling of nightanimals came from under the furniture. There was darkness here, a sodium darkness selective in what it revealed.
This time she was unable to stifle her scream for long. This time it did not wake her up.
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