The darkness was pervasive. It was a living thing, oozing and sucking about among the trees, working its fingers through the underbrush and around the tree roots. It was also in the air, flicking and flying lightly around the boughs and in the crowns, silent birds nestled into their hallows paying the dark no mind. There was a dichotomy of the dark being both the tentacled monster of the ground, and the mist in the air, both present and harmonious, yet acting so different. They were the same.
I saw the dark for what it was. Not an absence of light, but a living thing.
As a child, the darkness would come every evening, and my father and mother would shutter the house, stir the hearth, and go about their business. In the winter, we were further removed from the dark, even though it lasted longer through the day and night. The house would stay shut, and I foolishly thought the dark ‘out there’ would have a harder time getting ‘in here’. The summer was scarier for me. My parents would keep the windows open long into the night, and the screens would only keep the bugs out. It would not keep the dark ‘out there’. My nightmares were always the worst in the summer.
When I went to camp as a preteen, I saw the darkness eat for the first time. I was at the camp fire with fifty of my classmates, and we sat laughing and talking in our ring of fire light. I was uncomfortable being out in the dark, and I thought I was outgrowing the fear of the dark. I thought I was finally maturing to the point where I would leave such childish things behind. But as I sat there, watching the sparks travel upwards in one of those inevitable lulls in conversation and carrying on, I saw an owl sitting on a branch watching me. Not the group. Me.
It’s eyes were tawny brown, nestled in the white and brown speckled feathers of the plumage of a common barn owl. Next to it, another owl, made of inky blackness. I thought at first it was the firelight shadow of the owl, but it was not. It was a simile of the owl… a shifted copy of it. As I watched, the brown owl faded, becoming less and less real. And the dark owl, the fake, it became all the more solid. It was but a shadow, but as it formed, it gained depth and mass, and its eyes went from an absence of dark to a deep black, reflecting the fire below.
I screamed in terror. My scream wrenched my throat, tearing at my vocal cords, my breath exploding out of me so fiercely that I was a bomb in detonation, my lungs felt near collapse with the violent expulsion.
My classmates startled and shrunk away, some falling off their perches on logs and timber, others standing, readying themselves for flight or fight. My mouth remained open as the scream faded to nothingness and my body finally remembered it could move. I shot upwards and ran like a lightening bolt to the cabins to cower under my covers fully clothed until morning.
Two things happened that night with the owl. My nickname became Screech, and my hair turned completely white. I was twelve when that happened, twelve. When my parents were called, I had to deal with years of therapy afterwards. Years of telling nodding old men and crotchety women what they wanted to hear.
I would like to say that was the last time I saw the darkness for what it was. Or I should say, see what hid in the darkness. As I got older, the therapy helped me realize I only had one chance in all this. Ironically, it was the therapist studying me that opened the realization to me. I could study the darkness, understand it, and perhaps fight it… or I could cower to nothingness. I could do something about it, or fail to do anything. I took the nickname as a reminder of what I was meant to do. It became a part of my identity.
I was Screech. My arms slowly became covered in tattoo sleeves of owls in all shapes and sizes. I never let my white hair grow out, keeping it closely cropped, the white stubble looking more blond than anything. Now being 24, and studying the darkness that I see, I can tell you what I have found.
The darkness is not some ancient evil. It is not a demon, or Satan, or some form of destruction and death. It is not an incomprehensible strangeness that would drive men mad. It is none of these things. It is in need of someone to understand it.
I was chosen to be that person. So I stand here, at the edge of my parent’s old cabin in the tangled old wood of British Columbia, watching the darkness approach between the trees. I extinguished all the lights long ago, waiting for the sun to set far behind me in the west. I stood a few paces from the porch, in the open area where we usually parked the family truck when we drove out here to vacation away from the hustle of Vancouver in the summers. I always was in fear of the darkness as it approached through the trees. Tonight, I stood before it.
I would like to say I was defiant or courageous. I was neither. I stood waiting my guest as a death row inmate would the executioner. I was resigned to it. After all my study, all my reading, and all of my thought about this, I knew that the confrontation was inevitable. I would have to not only face my fears, I would have to face the source of them as well.
The darkness was tentative, flicking in among the trees, running its fingers over the underbrush, moving from shadow to shadow, pushing itself towards my open area. It reached the edge of the grass and hung in the air like a curtain. Night within night. But the hesitation belied of something else, as it seemed that the fear may have been a two way street.
“I see you,” I called out.
“I see you,” the voice mimicked. It was soft, gentle, like a soft caress of a lover.
“I am not afraid,” I tried. It was…
“A lie,” the voice finished my internal thought for me.
“I am afraid. But I am not going to let that fear keep me from this,” I corrected.
The curtain waved lightly as if a breeze moved over it’s surface. There was no wind tonight, it was still. It was if the darkness regarded me. I smiled inwardly at the thought of it studying me.
“I am Screech,” I said.
“I want to know your real name,” the voice returned.
“Why?”
Silence.
“My name is Brian.”
“Why did you not like my owl, Brian? I made it for you.” The voice sounded sad.
“The owl that you killed?”
“I did not kill anything. That owl was my friend. Her name was Saskeneah. She died years later of old age, and I carried her to her ancestors on the highest branches of the forest.”
“I…” I did not understand. “Why did you make an owl?”
“I wanted to show you that I saw you, Brian.” The curtain lowered itself to the edge of the grass and folded around itself until a woman stood at the edge of the grass. Her skin was like moonlight, with hair of molten evening, stars dancing within it. Her eyes were luminous, with dark black irises that could see through anything. Including me.
And I realized that the thing that I had feared for most of my life was beautiful. She stood, draped in what was the curtain, only her hands, her bare feet, and her neck were visible from the shifting robes that adorned her lithe frame.
“You did not tell me your name,” I asked furtively. I ran a hand over my shaved head absentmindedly. I felt suddenly out of place, my feet shifting in the grass.
She grinned at my discomfort. “It is very long in my tribe’s mother tongue. But you can call me Unnuaq.”
“Unnakwok?”
“Close enough, Bareen.”
“You are teasing me,” I felt a smirk turn the corner of my mouth. “Say it again?”
Her voice was light, not a whisper, like the quiet slice of a wing on the air. “Unnuaq.”
“Unnuaq.”
She smiled widely at her name falling from my lips, her own parted to reveal perfect teeth. “Yes.”
“Why?” I finally asked. The question that I had held on to for fourteen years, and I was finally able to ask it.
“Why does the sun rise and the wind blow? Why do things grow and die?” She murmured. “I do not know. I know that I came to be, as you know you have come to be. We were birthed from parents who loved us, we were raised to observe and understand, so we can survive ourselves. We are no different from each other.”
“But I can see you, Unnuaq.”
“And I can see you,” she smiled gently. “Don’t ask why. Seeing is enough.”
I started to chuckle, and it shifted to a laugh. It surprised me. “All these years. All this time… I was afraid. I was… oh nevermind.”
“Me too.”
“Why do you say that?”
“I had a boy see me. See me! I… showed you a gift. An owl that I made from myself, a precious gift for my kind. And you screamed in fear. It broke my heart. I have been waiting all these years to ask you…” Unnuaq demurred.
“Why?” I finished for her.
“Yes,” her eyes focused on my face and she stepped closer, her bare feet barely touching the grass. She was not standing on the ground, she was deigning to alight her feet upon it.
“Don’t ask why,” I replied in kind, mirroring her own declaration. “I was a child that did not understand. And I will be honest, I still do not understand… this… but I would like to.”
“As would I,” she nodded, and her hair shifted forward, twinkling in the light. She raised a hand and pulled it behind her ear. Again, I suddenly felt very much out of place. “I, uh… would you like some tea?”
“I would love some tea,” Unnuaq laughed. She seemed as uncomfortable as I was.
I offered my hand.
Unnuaq took it.