03 Down In The Darkness by Dean Koontz

Author:Dean Koontz
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Horror
Published: 1986-08-12T05:00:00+00:00

3

WEDNESDAY MORNING, MAY FOURTEENTH, I RETURNED TO THE HOUSE to walk through it with the former owner, Nguyen Quang Phu. I arrived an hour ahead of our appointment, in case the cellar door was visible again.

It was.

Suddenly I felt that I should turn my back on the door, walk away, ignore it. I sensed that I could make it go away forever if only I refused to open it. And I knew - without knowing how I knew - that not only my body but my soul was at risk if I couldn't resist the temptation to explore those lower realms.

I braced the door open with the two-by-four.

I went down into the darkness with the flashlight.

More than ten stories underground, I stopped on the landing with the flanking archways. The stink of rotting vegetables came from the branching stairwell to the left; the foul aroma of rancid fish heads arose from the right.

I pressed on and found that the peculiarly substantive darkness did not thicken as quickly as it had done yesterday. I was able to go deeper than before, as if the darkness knew me better now and welcomed me into more intimate regions of its domain.

After an additional fifty or sixty steps, I came to another landing. As at the landing above, on each side an archway offered a change of direction.

On the left, I found another short hall leading to another set of stairs that descended into pulsing, shifting, malignant blackness as impervious to light as a pool of oil. Indeed, the beam of my flash did not fade into that dense gloom but actually terminated in a circle of reflected light, as if it had fallen on a wall, and the churning blackness glistened slightly like molten tar. It was a thing of great power, enormously repulsive. Yet I knew that it was not merely oil or any other liquid, but was instead the essence of all darkness: a syrupy distillation of a million nights, a billion shadows.

Darkness is a condition, not a substance, and therefore cannot be distilled. Yet here was that impossible extract, ancient and pure: concentrate of night, the vast blackness of interstellar space decocted until it had been rendered into an oozing sludge. And it was evil.

I backed away and returned to the main stairwell. I did not inspect the branching stairs beyond the archway on the right, because I knew that I would find the same malevolent distillate waiting down there, slowly churning, churning.

In the main stairwell, I descended only a little farther before encountering the same foul presence. It rose like a wall in front of me, or like a frozen tide. I stood two steps from it, shaking uncontrollably with fear.

I reached forward.

I put a hand against the pulsing mass of blackness.

It was cold.

I reached forward a bit farther. My hand disappeared to the wrist. The darkness was so solid, so clearly defined, that my wrist looked like an amputee's stump; a sharp line marked the point at which my hand vanished into the tar-dense mass.

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