"Lambs" - An Incredibly Dark Short Story

[This story of mine was published by J.New Books earlier this year. I'll include an excerpt below, but follow the link to read an incredibly dark story about a boy's exploration of a seemingly possessed building over the course of a year.]

A pregnant frog was the first sacrifice the boy submitted to the darkness that had taken up refuge in the abandoned building. He had wandered in from the blinding noon-light, his shoes and socks still wet from playing in the creek. The deeper he walked into the firmament, the more his wet footprints disappeared, leaving smaller partials along the way.

It had been the end of summer, the beginning of autumn. He remembered the rattling sound of the cicadas filling his ears and the smell of honeysuckle heavy on the air, each breath ending up sweeter than the last and equally as stifling. But he’d caught the frog and, without thinking, carried it inside the building nearby whose windows had been broken out, whose walls had been tagged by burgeoning street artists, whose doors had been knocked askew and never locked back up. Something had called out to him while he chased the frog through the creek bed. Something had reached out and slithered into him. It had touched his own little, growing pebble of darkness and helped it to expand.

The frog’s body shrunk and expanded within his two hands, croaking. Its front and hindquarters scrambled against his grip, limp and useless appendages compared to his. It was the first moment in his life that he understood the concept of control even though he was unable to put that feeling into words.

He walked through the dust and the dirt that had accumulated on the cement floor of the building. Inner walls had been torn down, steel beams had been left to stand and rust as time marched ever onward. More graffiti decorated the innermost walls and, since there was no electricity, the light of day illuminated less the deeper he went into the building.

He couldn’t say why he decided to go into the building, only that a little voice had spoken up inside him, soothed his loud thoughts and beckoned him toward the comfort of the dark. He’d always seen the building, played out in the fields surrounding it because they were close to home and the building always held an interesting sway over him. It seemed weird to have a structure like that just out in an open field close to a neighborhood, but what did he know?

Nothing.

Though this was the first time he’d bothered to explore the building, and though the daylight became less effective the deeper he explored, he seemed to know exactly where to go. Pentagrams and gang signs and names were scrawled along the walls now, marking up nearly every inch of wall space. Candles burned down into puddles lined the crumbling hallways. Tattered clothing, too. Faded polaroids had been glued to the walls; the faces of naked women prominent in all of them. He would forget later, but their faces would all have the same lifeless expression – eyes wide open, unseeing, and their mouths frozen in the brief moment before pure terror took hold.

Down the halls he walked until a large stairwell appeared in the middle of the building. It went down, the darkness swallowing all but the first three steps. Had he been any other child, the black below would have scared him off, and rightfully so, but he was not any other child. The deeper into the building he walked, the calmer he became, as if he were becoming a part of the darkness that boiled and bubbled below the surface.

He began his descent, his mind and body fearless as he allowed the darkness to swallow him whole. Each step he took was more sure of itself than the previous one, more confident. The air thickened, seemed to inhale him and pull him deeper into whatever room or hallway existed at the bottom of the stairs.

And then, he stopped. He couldn’t tell if he’d chosen to stop or if he had been forced to stop.

From the dark, a deep and breathy sigh of satisfaction…and then the frog was ripped from his hands. The sound of chewing, the spitting of tiny bones out onto the floor, the smell of putrefaction on the air. The boy stood in the dark, calmly, waiting.

More, the darkness seemed to whisper inside his head.

They say sunshine makes for the best disinfectant. And that’s probably true, but it kills the monsters hidden away in the cracks and the crevices of the surrounding flora before they’re ever confronted. Some would rather get lost in the dark; no moonlight, no starlight – only shadows. The sunshine might allow one to see everything around more clearly, but stumbling around in the dark can be a reminder of the other things someone is made of: their fears, their nightmares, their regrets, their mistakes. The blackness of night allows one to see themselves more clearly by putting a mirror in front of their face and saying “here is also who you are,” and that should never be forgotten.

So, when he walked back out from the darkness of the building into the blinding sunshine, he understood that things would forever be different from that moment forward. He had come face to face with himself, saw what he truly was, even though he would never be able to put that feeling into words.

He emerged from the building into the too-bright day; the surrounding field was more vivid than he remembered, its colors too much. An acrid taste filled his mouth and he spat – a blackish loogie smacked loudly onto the cement floor and he wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, streaking it with the same blackish substance. He stared at his hand for a moment and then shrugged. He hiked back down to the creek where he washed his face and his hands before heading home for the night.

---

Thunderstorms arrived that evening and stayed for nearly a week, preventing him from returning to the field to play. Rather than ruin his mood or his playtime, the darkened skies set him at ease. At night, the rain pelted the roof above his upstairs bedroom and the window overlooking the street out front. If, while lying in bed late at night, he squinted and stared, the rivulets slipping down the window appeared as a sticky black ichor, which made him think of the whole home being drowned in the stuff. It would fall and coat the home’s exterior like tar, building up at the foundation and then covering the windows and the siding and the porch and, finally, the roof.

Slowly the home would become a pitch-black edifice in a world of thunder and rain and it would soon find its way down the chimney, slip-sliding down into the living room and covering every stitch of carpet like a cancer. It would crawl up off the floor and cover the furniture and the books and the lightbulbs, removing the light from everything until the family had to move in darkness.

The ichor would spread, turning the food in the pantry and the fridge into mold and decay before smothering the refrigerator light, each food item covered in smoothest black. Slow, undulating waves of the stuff would find the stairs and crawl upward, becoming one with the carpet of each step and wrapping around the railing all the way up.

Upstairs, the black would slide beneath bedroom doors and into bathroom drains, making its presence known throughout every facet of the home before coating the boy’s room. It would cover every surface surrounding his bed before circling around him. It would reach up and out, undulating itself onto his bedspread. The weight of it would surprise him as it crept nearer to him. It would cover his bare skin, would be cold to the touch, and then it would part his mouth and force its way inside him, filling him from the inside out.

He would be made of black. He would be the black. And with these thoughts, he fell asleep easily and blissfully as the storms raged on outside.

---

Daylight returned, and with it came thick, choking humidity. He sat at the table eating a bowl of cereal his mother made him. Now she was the one preventing him from returning to the field, stating it would be too muddy just yet and that he’d be better off playing closer to home anyway in case the weather returned. The boy shoveled another spoonful of cereal into his mouth and looked out the sliding glass doors leading to the patio and saw that the skies were an electric, and completely cloudless, blue all the way to the horizon in every direction.

He chose not to argue, though he could have. Instead, he mumbled a half-hearted assent and finished eating his breakfast in silence.

Any other Saturday and he would’ve been in front of the television watching cartoons, but today he went to his room, got dressed, and strolled out into the backyard while covering his eyes. He turned to look in the direction of the abandoned building but could barely see it above the neighborhood rooftops. From here, it just looked like an old broken-down thing that didn’t belong in the skyline. It did, however, seem to have a kind of darkened halo surrounding it. He wondered if he was the only one to see it or if all those people who had marked up the walls also saw it.

Or if he was simply making it all up in his head.

He put on a jacket, pocketed some peanut snacks, and played pretend in the yard for a while, assuming the role of one of his video game heroes, a captain in a space army who had a seemingly unlimited amount of weaponry at his disposal. Just like in the game, he found a place high up (in his backyard tree) and surveyed the surrounding area. He knew that holding the higher ground was somehow strategically advantageous, even though he wouldn’t be able to put that feeling into words until much later in life.

He stared out towards the abandoned building from his perch high up in the tree and ate his peanuts slowly and without hunger. No one could see him from the ground, what with the limbs being so full of leaves, so he made himself comfortable and leaned his back against the trunk while his legs dangled on either side of the limb. He wondered what the creek looked like after so many days of rain. Had it overflowed? Would there be more frogs?

An orange-chested, black-bodied bird flew up into the branches noisily and startled him, nearly making him lose his already precarious balance on the limb. The bird had perched not far from him and seemed to stare at him as if he had interrupted it rather than the other way around. He stared back at it, noticing that its left wing had become lame and didn’t seem to lay flat against its body the way the right one did. The bird didn’t hobble, but it certainly didn’t move smoothly the way he thought a bird was supposed to.

He held out his hand, fully expecting the bird to fly off in distress at coming so close to a human. Instead, the bird hopped closer, but only in short, distrustful jumps. Each time he moved, the bird would cock his head the other direction and stare at him until finally, the bird leapt upon his hand and clutched his forefinger.

He rummaged around in his jacket pocket for more peanuts and found the package nearly empty. He crushed the remaining nuts still inside with his free hand and then brought the package out slowly so as to not disturb his new bird friend. He could feel the tiny, crushed pieces slowly spilling out into the area between him and the bird, who looked at the pieces, cocked his head downward and then began pecking away at the tasty bits on the tree limb.

He looked down and smiled at his new friend pecking away happily. A gentle breeze filtered through the leaves and displaced a lock of hair across his forehead. The limbs moved slightly and more sunlight fell through the foliage above. He looked up and squinted into the light, became blinded for the briefest of moments.

He shook his head to rid himself of the blindness and felt his grip on the limb slipping. Soon he was falling and clutching at things that weren’t there. He fell looking up and watched in slow motion as the tree seemed to move farther and farther away from him until he felt the earth against his back and his breath knocked out of him. He groaned and tried to breathe, failing at both as he laid there in the shade of the tree.

He stared off to the left as his slowly regained his breath and began to cough. The black aura around the abandoned building off on the horizon had returned. He felt movement in his right hand and realized that he had tightened his grip around the bird during the fall. It pecked at his hand, but he kept his fingers wrapped tight around its body despite the pain and the blood starting to show.

More, he heard inside his head, the phrase more a slither than a voice.

Once he’d regained his breath fully and could sit up, he began the long trek to the abandoned building with the bird in his hand, pecking away feverishly at a finger that was quickly losing skin and bleeding profusely.

The black beckoned. Time passed.

He didn’t know how he got back to his bed, but there he was, under the sheets and still wearing his clothes from the day. They were muddy from his jaunt through the field to the building. At least that’s what he assumed. He couldn’t remember much after he’d fallen from the tree. He couldn’t remember much after the day had stolen his breath.

He sat up and felt something catch in his throat. He tried to hack it up but began coughing instead. A tiny black feather flew out of his mouth and onto his lap. He sat there, stunned, in the dark and then blew on the feather. It went up and then spiraled down off over the edge of the bed and then it was just him and the quiet house and the nighttime.

---

When the snow came months later, it fell hard and turned the whole world white for weeks. If he played out in the backyard during the day, he couldn’t see the abandoned building way out beyond. The shorter light of the days meant a longer dark and the boy could sense more than see the building’s darkness better during the nights. Its black aura had strengthened and grown, as if the cold had bolstered it and kept it well-nourished. He thought it felt like calligraphy in the sky, especially on those nights when the horizon was a vibrant, deep crimson smashed between the black above and the white below. He felt most comfortable in his skin those nights, standing out in the backyard when he was allowed, though this was a feeling he wouldn’t be able to put into words until much later in life.

The winter was long and cold and wet. It also provided the random school day cancellation during the week if streets got too icy, though his mother would always have to go to work no matter what. On these days, he was to stay inside where it was warm, read on the couch, and try to keep the tv to a minimum.

Of course, he did none of these things.

While he never went all the way up to the building, he certainly made most of the trip through the fields, even though he couldn’t fully remember making the trek down there. The fields would be muddy and wet and his pants would be caked in mud. The cold would seep through to his skin and shock him back to the moment with its icy touch. He would remember leaving his yard, but he would not remember much else.

Hours would pass before he would return to the moment and realize what had happened. He would turn to head back home where the evidence of his unintended misbehavior would get tracked across the carpeted hallways. He’d barely make it home before his mother would slide into the driveway and get the car stuck halfway up every time.

He spent many days of the cold winter grounded in his room, left to his own devices and often looking off to the east where the darkness seemed to coagulate there in the sky. It didn’t seem like anyone else could see it or hear it. If they could, they ignored it and never spoke of it to him or in public. He didn’t understand the silence of others surrounding the darkness, didn’t understand why little bits of memory kept getting snatched away from him or why pockets of nothing were put in their place.

A mild thaw came just before school opened back up after the holidays. He’d spent Christmas cooped up and playing with toys he hadn’t asked for while his mother had, again, gone to work. She left when it was dark and returned when it was the same. He wondered if she ever got to see the daylight or if she was so busy that all she saw was the darkness too.

Neighbor kids had stopped by one weekend and asked if he could come out to play. From the doorway of his bedroom, he could hear her explain that he’d been grounded and wouldn’t be able to play for a while and that she was sorry about that. The disappointment in their voices carried through the home until she shut the door and then all was quiet again. From an upstairs window, he watched them walk away, dragging their sleds behind them through the melting snow until they were nothing but tiny specks of black far off in the dirty white field beyond.

He wondered how long they would stay out there.

He wondered how close they would get to the abandoned building.

He wondered if any of them saw the same darkness that he did.

He wondered if any of them had ever chanced to explore its deeper recesses.

He wondered if any of them heard the same voices.

The snow fell hard again at the end of February. His mother had fallen asleep, exhausted from a double-shift at work, on the couch with the television on hours ago and he remained awake, unable to sleep. He drank warm milk and counted sheep the way the cartoons did when they tried to sleep; nothing worked.

Eventually he returned to his room and sat inside his dark closet, a thing he did every so often to calm himself. No light could get in and the sound became muffled because of the clothing hanging above. He sat below the t-shirts and pants hung up with care by his mother after she did laundry. He could smell the fabric softener on the air, nearly choking him with its fragrance in the dark closet.

He ran his hands along the carpet in regular patterns, calming himself with the movement. Several minutes passed and then the pattern changed. His hand bumped into something long and cold and sharp – a nail. Where had this come from?

He picked it up and examined it by touch in the dark, letting his hands explore every inch of it. As soon as he wrapped his fingers around the entirety of it, the voice returned and seemed to slither into his mind with ease.

Carve…your…heart, it hissed.

His fingers clutched the nail tighter, its pointed end breaking skin and sending warm rivulets of blood down his palms and onto the carpet. At first, he thought he’d imagined the voice, but soon it urged him again to carve his heart and, without knowing how or why, he began using the nail to scratch bloody words into the wall hidden behind his hanging clothing:

And with that his hand stopped moving. He hadn’t realized what he was doing until the nail fell out of his hand onto the floor. The surrounding carpet beneath the wall was speckled with red stains and some blood still ran down the wall from the etchings he’d created. He reread the text and couldn’t understand what it meant much less remember that he’d done it.

He retrieved an old sock from his dresser and wrapped his hand so he wouldn’t make more of a mess than he already had. After scrubbing himself clean and putting a bandage over the wound, he returned to the closet and began rearranging the clothing so that it hid the wall more. After, he moved some of his larger toys to the bottom of the closet to hide the stained carpet below.

Satisfied with his handiwork, he soon fell asleep still wearing his clothes from the day, determined to do his own laundry from that day forward.

To continue reading, follow the link below:
https://www.jnewbooks.com/fiction/lambs?fbclid=IwAR23RlTfzd2NARplfF7ri6R6LfCwjLvA2fg7Klsvgf2dAxR7AwEJ66Eds50