[Back to the start.]

---

 

When the following morning came, Magnus was startled awake by a hammering on his flat's front door. It was an urgent, persistent hammering; whoever was doing it clearly wanted to come in right now.

He groaned and unsteadily pushed himself to his feet. He had all but passed out where he had fallen the previous night; he was still wearing the same clothes, and the crumpled bedsheets left an obvious outline of where he had slept. His mind was not fully alert as yet, but he knew two things: he was in a lot of pain, and he very much wanted that noise to stop.

Yawning, groaning and rubbing his face, he staggered to the front door pulled it open a crack without looking through the peephole first. He poked his head around the gap in the door, but kept the rest of his body in the warmth and safety of his home.

"What?" he said, his vision still blurred.

"Mr Magnus Thompson?" said the police officer standing in the hallway; a stocky, stern-faced man with a neatly-trimmed goatee beard. He was accompanied by a female police officer built almost as solidly as he was. Radio chatter burbled in the background, but was indecipherable.

"Yes," said Magnus, blinking the sleep out of his eyes, not fully registering what was going on.

"We were hoping to talk to you about the death of Stacey Barman," he said. "You are the one who reported it, correct?"

Magnus suddenly felt very awake, a rush of adrenaline shooting through him like an electric shock. How did they know?

"The number the one who reported the crime called from was registered to this address," said the female officer, speaking up for the first time. "It was you who called, yes?" she said, echoing her colleague's words.

"Yes," said Magnus in a low voice. "I reported it."

"May we come in?" said the male officer gruffly. Magnus got the impression that despite the polite language, it was not a polite request. "We'd like to ask you a few questions."

"You're not in trouble, don't worry," said the female officer. Magnus would have smiled at the obvious and clichéd good cop-bad cop routine were it not proving to be one of the more stressful experiences he had lived through to date. "We just want to get a better idea of what might have happened, what you might have seen."

"Okay," said Magnus. He stepped out from behind the door and pulled it open fully. He realised too late that the shirt and jeans he had been wearing since last night — the shirt and jeans he hadn't changed when he had got up in a hurry not five minutes ago — were both streaked with smears of dried blood.

 

*       *       *       *       *

Dora looked uneasily at the disheveled figure of Magnus visible through the glass, the guard standing mute and still as a statue behind him. She lifted the receiver. Magnus did the same.

"Hi," he said. "Thanks for coming."

Dora had been the person he called when they had brought him in under suspicion of the murder of Stacey Barman. He wasn't thinking straight and didn't know any lawyers, so she was the only person he could think to call. The offers who had brought him in — the man was named Wilkins and the woman was named Jensen — had allowed him to obtain the number from his phone, but the device itself had then been confiscated along with the few other personal belongings he had in his pockets.

Dora didn't know what to make of the situation. She didn't believe for a second that Magnus was capable of murdering anyone, but she was also fully aware of the strange happenings that had been occurring recently — and was certain that if her own strange experience she had had on the way home the previous night was anything to go by, Magnus was probably also in a peculiar situation where he needed to quickly learn how to control an enormous power he didn't understand.

It had happened unexpectedly as she was walking back to her car; a curious urge to run. She obliged the sudden instinct, surprising herself, but quickly found that the instinct was stronger than her conscious, self-aware mind: before long, she felt like she was out of control. She ran, rapidly speeding up until she had reached a velocity that should have been physically impossible for even the most well-trained athletes. She became dimly aware that she was heading straight for a solid-looking wall, and then the world was turned on its side as she simply charged up the side of the building as if it was a flat piece of flooring. Then she was atop the roofs of the city; she bounced and leapt from building to building, feeling an odd — and slightly frightening — sense of euphoria as she did so. It was an addictive, intoxicating feeling; initially, she didn't want it to stop, but as what little remained of her rational mind started to panic over the lack of control over her own body she was exhibiting, she wanted nothing more than to be back on solid ground.

And then she was; walking down the street where she had been before she had started running. Had she imagined it? A daydream? A hallucination? She wasn't sure, but the strange, frightening experience caused her to stop, pinch herself and whisper under her breath "I'm here, everything's fine, everything's fine," without caring if anyone around her heard.

"Hi," she said.

"I didn't do it," he said.

"I know," she said.

The two gazed awkwardly at one another through the glass. All was silent for a moment, and Dora became very conscious of the ticking of the clock on the wall behind her. She glanced around and looked at it. They didn't have long together.

"What do you want me to do?" she asked. "How can I help?"

"I don't really know," he said, his face clouded over with abject despair. "It looks pretty bad, doesn't it." He indicated his bloody clothes.

He had explained to her on the phone that he had discovered a dead body the previous night, and that due to an unfortunate series of circumstances was now under suspicion of putting it there. He hadn't explained the rooftop fight against his golden assailant or his conversation with the shadowy figure, though he had little doubt, after their conversation, that she would believe him.

"Whatever it is that those… people said was going to happen," he said, resting his chin on the palms of his hands, "it seems to be starting."

She nodded mutely. She didn't really know what to say about it. She didn't understand what was happening to her, and what was happening to Magnus. But she knew that this wasn't something she'd be able to just ignore and hope it would go away. She hadn't chosen this path, but she was on it anyway, and so was Magnus. They just had to follow it and see where it went; she hoped, sincerely, that it didn't simply lead to a life in prison for her friend.

Conscious of the guard standing behind him who, despite remaining stoic and statue-like throughout their conversation, was obviously listening in, Magnus refrained from giving a full account of his confrontation. If he got out of here, he resolved, he'd explain the situation fully. For now, however, he was just comforted by her presence; he felt more at ease than he had done all day.

A buzzer sounded, and the line between the receivers went dead. Magnus saw the door open behind Dora, and a police officer step in. Looking at Magnus for one last time with sadness in her eyes, she replaced the receiver and turned for the door. He watched her leave, waiting a moment before hanging up his own receiver and standing, following the guard back into the darkness.

*       *       *       *       *

Magnus was questioned by several police officers over the course of the rest of the day. By the time they had finished with him, night had fallen. He hoped that his answers had made it abundantly clear that he had no idea what had actually happened to Stacey Barman, and that the dried blood on his clothing was simply a result of him being near her and trying in vain to help her, but he didn't get an answer as to whether or not he had done a good enough job that day. Even if he were to be released, it seemed, it wouldn't be until tomorrow when the appropriate paperwork could be filled out. It looked like he'd be spending the night here, at least.

Eventually, the lights went out. He was the only occupant of the cells right now; although not a small town, crime had never been a big issue here. Between some ambitious and expensive youth projects and a close-knit community of residents who genuinely loved where they lived, faults and all, it was unusual to hear of even a robbery or mugging, let alone a murder case. Magnus was sure that what had happened to Stacey Barman would be all over the newspapers and Internet by the morning, if it wasn't already.

He stared into the darkness, contemplating his situation miserably. If he'd thought things were bad before, they were even worse now. He seemed to be sinking ever further into his own personal pit of darkness; how could he escape?

Did he want to escape?

The thought surprised him for a moment, and then several things started to make a certain degree of sense.

Despite everything, he was enjoying the excitement in a perverse fashion. And he realised, with a combination of fascination, horror and satisfaction, that he had been enjoying the bleakness for a while before this had started happening, too. It made him feel important and special; it gave him something to talk about that made him feel like he mattered; a feeling which he had been sorely lacking for many years prior. He had been wilfully embracing his own darkness for a perverse sense of pleasure; it was a drug to him, and one that he couldn't quit.

He blinked as his eyes started to adjust to the darkness, and was surprised to discover that he appeared to be standing on the other side of the bars to where he had been a moment earlier. He was outside his cell, which was still shut. He tried the door; it rattled slightly, but did not budge.

Was this another manifestation of his new power?

He found himself smiling to himself, even as his skin started to crawl at the prospect of explaining how this had happened should any police officer happen to see him. The adrenaline of both excitement and fear started to course through his veins as he walked towards the door; he reached out for it, but then paused before grasping the handle. It was probably locked anyway.

Instead, he closed his eyes and concentrated on immersing himself in the darkness that was all around him. He willed himself to become part of the night; to blend in; to disappear. He'd always been good at escaping people's notice, after all, though not always intentionally.

When he opened his eyes again, he was standing on the city streets outside the police station.

However it had happened, however he had escaped, it wasn't over yet. He needed to get away from here. Right now.

[Back to the start.]

---

 

His eyed darted one way then the other; his awareness heightened, his mind feeling more alert and agile than it had done for months.

He couldn't see his quarry; it seemed that they were long gone… or were they?

He stood up straight and clasped his hands together in front of him. Then he closed his eyes and took a deep breath. He reached out with his mind and felt like his consciousness was separating from his body, scanning the area, searching, probing. Then his eyes snapped open, and it was back where it should be.

A flash of golden light. Or, more accurately, a streak. It raced towards him at such a velocity that he nearly didn't have time to leap out of the way, but his heightened reflexes meant that by the time the golden swoosh had reached where his body was standing just a moment ago, he had already leapt high in the air and was gracefully floating down to face his assailant.

During all this, Magnus remained dimly aware of his own self, but at the same time felt as if he was trapped in his own body: his form a prison from which he could only look out and wonder how he could possibly ever perform such physics-defying feats. He could not find a rational explanation for it because there simply wasn't one; whatever was happening was simply ignoring what he had, up until recently, considered the inviolable laws of the universe.

He landed on the rooftop softly; first one foot, then the other, and gazed across at his attacker, who was standing on the next building over, hands on hips in a confident expression of superiority, for it was a humanoid figure — or perhaps even a human figure. It was difficult to tell for sure, since the radiant golden glow that seemed to emanate from within the figure's very skin made making any details out somewhat difficult, but he recognised the outline as a male form; trim, fit and tall, very different from the way he saw himself in his mind's eye.

For a moment, he simply stared at the figure, and it stared back at him; a second later, there was another golden streak, and the figure was standing right in front of him. The golden radiance dazzled him, but he also noticed that the figure appeared to be casting no light on the rooftop beneath his feet; he was simply glowing in an otherworldly manner that, even in his detached state, Magnus found somewhat unsettling.

"Hi," said the figure in a low voice. "I guess you're not happy." Magnus could, from this distance, barely make out a mocking smirk on the figure's face.

"To put it mildly," growled Magnus, the words coming out of his mouth before he was even aware what he was saying. The sensation was frightening; something was in control of him, and he seemingly had no influence over what was being said or done — or what was going to happen next.

Magnus lunged forward, the same dark tendrils that had brought him to the rooftop in the first place once again erupting from his hands, this time desperately seeking the golden figure. But it was too late; the figure had already moved to another rooftop with such rapidity that he may as well have been teleporting.

"Well, tough shit," called the golden figure in a mocking tone. "I got one of yours, and before they even knew what was going on. Oh, it was so sweet seeing the life drain out from behind those desperate, sad eyes; how she finally realised that her embracing of the Dark had brought her to the end of her own existence. Delicious. Anyway, got to dash! Later!"

The figure swept off over the rooftops, and before long was out of sight. Magnus considered giving chase, but even in his current state of consciousness, he knew that was a fruitless effort. Instead, he leapt from the rooftop and floated down into the alleyway, an incorporeal cloak of black flowing from beneath his outstretched arms as he defied the laws of gravity without a second thought. Then, as he touched the ground, the primal feeling was gone; he looked at his hands, and the strange, gnarled, mottled appearance they had taken on was gone, too.

He bit his tongue and winced, and realised that he was once again in full control of his own actions; though the biting of the tongue was accidental, it was a perfectly normal thing for him to do, and certainly a far cry from his unusual descent from atop the building.

He looked up and contemplated quite how high the structure was; not only was there no way he should have been able to get up there, thanks to the broken fire escape, but there was no way he should have been able to survive getting back down in the way he did, either. And yet here he was, without a scratch on him, considering the baffling events that had just transpired.

It took him a moment to remember the prone figure of the girl. She was still lying where he had left her; she was obviously dead, though he couldn't tell how long she had been that way.

"How tragic," came a voice from behind him. He jumped and span around. As he did so, the world seemed to shimmer and twist, and suddenly everything seemed different to how it had done a moment ago; the air was thicker and darker, and the walls seemed to be covered with things that had not been there before: both words and indecipherable symbols, splattered in the same carefree painter's hand he had by now seen several times, though they covered the walls with such thick, overlapping intensity that it was impossible to work out what — if anything — any of them were trying to say.

As fast as his heart was beating, he found himself unsurprised to discover the shadowy, silhouetted female figure standing in the alleyway, her pose making it clear that she was contemplating the situation somewhat philosophically, even as it was impossible to make out any of her facial features. She had obviously appeared out of nowhere, but it was already very apparent to Magnus that whatever he had found himself involved with did not involve rational explanations, so he didn't dwell on it.

"You… knew her?" he asked hesitantly, unsure quite how to address the figure.

"No," she said. "But I — we — could have done. A life cut tragically short before she could realise her potential."

A pause.

"Stacey Barman," said the figure, with the practiced, measured tone of a detective on a crime show. "Twenty-four years old. A wannabe actress, struggling to make ends meet in a scuzzy, cheap, traveller's hotel." Here, the figure gestured to the building on one side of the alleyway, which Stacey had apparently come out of before she met her demise. "She was born in the wrong place at the wrong time and made a lot of the wrong choices. Things were not going well for her."

This sounded alarmingly familiar to Magnus. He felt sorry for Stacey, but he felt that at least part of the empathy he felt towards the dead girl was self-pity because, even from that simple description, he related to her. He may not have been a struggling actor or working in a hotel, but he knew well the feeling of having made a series of poor choices that led to a seemingly inescapable bad situation.

"Our Stacey here may not have been having a lot of luck with life," continued the shadowy figure, by now pacing around the dead girl's corpse as if searching for evidence, "but, as I'm sure you know, that only helped draw her towards our side." She sighed. "She could have been a powerful one. All that dark energy, gone to waste."

Suddenly, the figure was in Magnus' face. He wasn't sure if she had simply moved quickly or had actually vanished from one spot and reappeared in another.

"This is what I was talking about," the figure hissed. "Stacey shouldn't have died here. She should have awoken. She should have been like you. But instead, here she is, and once again the Light mocks our efforts and desires for the world to remain in balance; the delightful chaos and unpredictability of existence, at this rate, will be little more than a memory for those of us who are even alive, or…" — here she paused a moment — "…at least aware enough to remember it."

Magnus wasn't quite sure how to respond. As he'd said to Dora earlier, the shadowy figure had previously explained the nature of the conflict between the Light and the Dark, but he hadn't understood what that meant. Now, the grim reality was starting to sink in to his mind; there was a war on, and he wasn't sure he was on the winning side.

The alleyway was silent for a moment as both Magnus and the shadowy figure continued to contemplate the corpse of Stacey Barman, the warmth of life rapidly leaving her still form as she continued to lie where she had fallen, exposed to the elements, seemingly unwanted and unloved.

Magnus felt an intense surge of pity for her, and seemed to feel something building up inside himself.

"No," said the figure, not turning to face him. "It's too late for her. But there'll be other chances. For now, you should see to it that she is taken care of."

The strange patterns and words on the walls seemed to twist and shift again, then the shadowy figure was gone, and Magnus was left standing alone in the alleyway.

He dropped to his knees in front of Stacey Barman's body and felt himself starting to cry. He wondered if this could have been him — why it wasn't him — and what all this meant. His mind was a jumble of complex emotions and confused interpretations of everything that had happened recently.

He let the tears flow; he knew better than to try and stop his emotions from overflowing when they were bubbling up like this. And, as he'd experienced so many times before, the storm eventually calmed; the pouring of tears slowed; gulping, sobbing gasps gave way to more regular breathing. It was always calm after the storm; he was always at his most rational after he had allowed himself to overflow and explode. He knew what he needed to do.

He pulled out his phone — which had somehow managed to stay in his pocket amid the earlier chaos — and called for the emergency services. He reported Stacey's body, and its location, and that she had already passed away. Then, once he was satisfied he had done his duty, he headed back up the alleyway he had earlier made the ill-fated decision to investigate; before long, he was back on the road, his pace quickening until he broke into a jog, then a full-on run.

He reached the front door of his building as he heard the howling of sirens in the distance.

"I'm sorry, Stacey," he said out loud to himself as he looked up at the moonlit, cloudy sky. "I wish I could have helped you. But I hope wherever you are now that you find happiness and peace."

He opened the door to his building, unlocked his flat's front door, went inside without turning any of the lights on and collapsed face-first onto the bed. He didn't wake up — or even move — until the following morning.

[Back to the start.]

---

 

"So."

"So."

Now the pair of them were here, neither of them were quite sure what to say. They both already knew the pertinent details, having shared them via chat message prior to meeting up. But, given the eerie similarities between their experiences — and the aspects in which they were complete opposites, too — they had both agreed that meeting up to discuss things in person would probably be more productive.

So far it hadn't been, largely because despite the strange happenings, it felt like just a regular, normal day. People were going about their business in the coffee shop; conversation was occasionally drowned out by the enormous coffee machine and its overenthusiastic milk frother; no-one gave Magnus and Dora a second glance. To any passers-by, they would have looked just like two people sitting together, sharing some time with one another, though the more voyeuristic might have mistaken them for a couple, given the amount of time they were spending looking directly at one another.

Eventually, Magnus spoke after swallowing a mouthful of cappuccino.

"There's more," he said. "More than what I told you before, that is."

"Oh?" said Dora, interested. There was more to her experience than what she had shared, too, but she was curious to hear what Magnus said first, so she didn't bring it up.

"Yes," he said. "It feels… kind of silly to be talking about it, though. I mean…" — here he lowered his voice a little — "…magic. Or whatever it is. Energy. Life force. I don't know. She explained it all, but it went over my head a bit."

"She?" asked Dora, one eyebrow raised quizzically.

"Yes," Magnus said again. "She. After that initial… dream, or whatever it was, I started noticing strange things happening. And eventually, everything seemed to sort of… black out. Though not like it being dark; more like… I don't know. The world felt kind of… wrong. I knew where I was, but things didn't look right. And there she was."

He paused. He wasn't quite sure how to describe the shadowy figure, since she was such an ill-defined presence. But he could tell that she was a woman, or at least a female presence, since he wasn't quite sure if being incorporeal allowed one to continue being called a "woman" or "man".

Dora had heard enough already. She felt comfortable about speaking up now.

"Did she happen to say something about our world, and how it was made?" she asked. She was surprised how confident she sounded asking such a peculiar question. "Did she happen to mention anything about the light…"

"…and the dark?" Magnus concluded for her. "Yes, as a matter of fact." He frowned. "Wait, how do you know that? Did you…"

"Yes," said Dora with a gentle smile. "The same thing happened to me. After a few days of strange happenings — in my case, really weird stuff like the little 'un falling over and scraping both her knees, then there being absolutely no sight of any injury moments later — something similar happened to me. There was… someone. I couldn't quite see them, not clearly, anyway, but there they were. Some sort of presence. A guy… or the ghost of a guy, or something. Hard to explain, really."

"Hmm," said Magnus. The two of them were quiet for a moment, and took the opportunity to have another sip of drink, neither taking their eyes from the other.

"Anyway," said Magnus after a moment. "There was some sort of fantasyland bullshit about the balance between light and dark, and how things looked like being thrown out of balance if things carried on the way they were, and…"

"I'll just stop you there," said Dora with a gentle laugh. "I don't think it's 'bullshit', not if we've both seen weird stuff like this going on. Unless we're both very, very ill indeed and having some sort of shared hallucination. Then that really would be bullshit; the sort of clichéd crap that's straight out of a cheap novel you'd pick up at the airport."

Magnus smiled. It felt good. He felt like he hadn't done it genuinely for a while, but despite the strange — and slightly frightening — situation in which he found himself, it felt good, particularly to have something private that he and Dora could share together. He wondered if she felt the same way.

As a matter of fact, she did; life had been boring lately and, while she hadn't quite had something as grandiose as whatever this was in mind, she was grateful for a little injection of excitement.

"What I don't get," said Magnus after another sip of coffee, "is how things are being thrown out of whack. I mean, have you noticed anything weird about the world lately?"

"You mean despite… everything that we've just talked about?" she said with a laugh. "No, I guess not. But perhaps we weren't in a position to notice. Perhaps whatever is happening to us is something to do with it."

"Mm," said Magnus, his eyes finally looking away from Dora. She realised that she had been tense all the while he had been staring at her, and suddenly relaxed somewhat. "Maybe."

"I wonder," said Dora. "All this light and dark business. I mean, obviously I'm light and you're dark, whatever that means. Are we going to end up fighting?"

"That's how these things tend to go," said Magnus, "at least in clichéd crap that's straight out of a cheap novel you'd pick up at the airport." He chuckled at his own allusion.

"I'm serious!" said Dora, pouting slightly. "I don't want to end up having to do anything weird or nasty to you. Not like that," she corrected herself quickly before Magnus could slip in a quick innuendo. "I mean… kind of seems like we're opposites, doesn't it?"

"Yeah, I guess," he said. "But that doesn't mean we have to go against one another. Opposites attract and all that."

 

*       *       *       *       *

It was getting dark — and several coffees later — by the time the pair of them went their separate ways. Concluding that they couldn't do much else with their respective strange phenomena until something else odd happened to one or both of them, conversation had turned to all things trivial: what had been on television the previous evening, how much both of them hated Magnus' ex — though Magnus always felt guilty any time he bad-mouthed her, even despite the depression and rage she frequently provoked in him — and the silly things little Alice had done. The socialisation had done them both some good, and they both left the coffee shop with smiles on their faces.

Dora had offered Magnus a lift back to his flat, but he had refused; he'd decided that he wanted some time alone with his thoughts. He often found that if he walked and thought, he could contemplate things more effectively than if he was just shut in his flat all alone, surrounded by memories in physical form.

Of course, there were a lot fewer of these left lying around now that she had been back and collected her things. The flat had felt disturbingly empty after she had been and gone, so Magnus had taken the time to rearrange the furniture as much as possible so it felt like he was in a different place. It had proven mostly effective, but the bedroom which, thanks to its built-in wardrobe, was harder to rearrange, still held potent memories. He found himself sleeping on the sofa rather than the cold bedroom a lot more these days, frequently drifting off to the low drone of inoffensive, mind-numbing late night digital TV.

His footsteps echoed as he paced along the street. He felt like he was walking with purpose, though he was in no hurry to get home; there was very little for him there. After a moment he slowed, then stopped. He wasn't sure why, initially, then he felt an overwhelming surge of curiosity.

There was an alleyway that he walked past every time he went from his flat to the centre of town and back again, and he had always wondered what was down there. He doubted it was anything interesting, so he had never just wandered in to take a look, but for some reason, now he found himself once again walking with a strong sense of purpose, this time towards the alleyway.

It was a narrow passage between two buildings, and in the fading light there wasn't a lot to see, since neither building had many windows on this side. There was the odd frosted glass window that Magnus assumed was a bathroom or similar, and occasionally these cast a small pool of light into the otherwise darkened alleyway, but for the most part the passage was unlit.

It was a dead end, though it opened into what appeared to be a small courtyard rather than simply terminating in a wall. The courtyard had a few dumpsters in it and smelled awful. Both buildings seemingly had back doors here, presumably to allow the occupants to take out their rubbish and throw them in the dumpsters. But there was something else; something lying on the floor.

"Holy fuck," said Magnus as he approached the lump on the ground. It was a person, and they didn't appear to be in a good way. He knelt before the figure and established that it was a woman, probably in her mid-twenties — about his age — clad simply in a T-shirt and jeans. She was lying face-down on the ground, and the area around her head was slick with still-wet blood. It was obviously too late for her, and Magnus started to feel panicked, both about being caught with her, and about whether or not whoever — if anyone — had done this to her was still around.

Then he felt it. He couldn't describe the sensation, but it was there. He looked in the direction he felt it was coming from; up and to his left. There was what appeared to be a fire escape on the side of the building, but it abruptly terminated two floors up from the ground and there was seemingly no ladder allowing anyone to get up — or, for that matter, down.

A primal feeling in his brain told him that he really needed to get up there right now, but the rational part of his mind — which, he felt, was rapidly losing influence in this situation — said that there was absolutely no way that he could possibly–

Before he knew it, he felt the strange sensation of energy surging through his hands. They took on the curiously odd appearance they had done any time the strange events had happened recently, but this time there was something more; it felt like energy was focusing in them, and the more it did so, the more mottled and marked they became, until eventually they looked like an old man's hands; gnarled and covered with varicose veins. A high-pitched whining sound assaulted his ears, and his head began to ache, as if it was about to explode. Was this the power that the shadowy figure had talked about? And if so, how on Earth was he supposed to control it?

Unsure of anything else to do, he clenched his fists and pointed them both at the fire escape high above him. Tendrils as black as night erupted from the back of his hands and laced themselves around the bars of the fire escape's guard rail, and before he could register his intense surprise at what he had apparently just done, he felt himself being yanked violently into the air, his heart in his mouth as if he was riding a theme park attraction. Almost before he knew it, he was standing on the platform of the fire escape, some two storeys off the ground.

And that primal feeling was still there; he needed to continue on upwards, to chase down whoever had done this, and to punish them.

His rational mind finally gave up trying and just slipped away quietly, and the primal urge took over as he raced up the steps to the rooftop.

[Back to the start.]

---

 

Dora couldn't sleep; a situation exacerbated by the usual thunderous snoring of her husband Donald on the other side of the bed. Every night, she found herself surprised that the racket didn't disturb their eight-year-old daughter Alice, but it never did: Alice was a heavy sleeper, a trait which she had apparently inherited from her father.

She sighed to herself and tapped on her phone, its screen springing to life at her touch. She frowned at the sight of the clock on the screen: two in the morning; she had to be up in four hours to make sure Alice was ready for school, that breakfast was ready for everyone and that she was in a position to go out to work straight after dropping Alice off.

For the most part, Dora enjoyed being what she thought of as a "traditional" mother figure, albeit one who held down a job as well as effectively running the household. Donald would be the first to describe himself as "useless" around the house, and she didn't mind too much; he was the one with the high-paying job, after all, so it was largely his money coming in that allowed the Miller family to continue to live in the manner which they had become accustomed to. Her income was a bonus on top of that; Donald had been initially resistant to the idea of her going back to work after Alice was old enough to go to school, but Dora had found herself so bored each day that she craved the opportunity to get out of the house and speak to other human beings that her office job offered, even if the work itself was considerably beneath her intellectual capacity. She eventually managed to convince Donald that it was the best for everybody involved.

At least the downtime in her job — and there was a lot of it — afforded her the opportunity to catch up with friends via text message and email; after an initial run-in with the company's IT department over the use of company equipment to send personal messages, she'd confined these activities to her phone, and no-one seemed to mind that too much.

She'd known Magnus for a short while; they'd met by chance through a social networking website, and quickly become friends. Magnus didn't seem to her like the type who made friends easily, but there was something about him that interested her; she knew quickly that he was someone who carried great sadness with him, but he often managed to push that aside and demonstrate a touch of cheeky humour of just the type she responded well to.

She could tell that he was attracted to her, and during some of the "down" periods of her occasionally rocky relationship with Donald, she'd contemplated seeing just what might happen if she allowed things to progress in the way he wanted. But she held back, even though she knew this might hurt him in the short term; he was going through a relationship breakup of his own, after all, and for her to be the "other woman" even as he suspected he had been cheated on would be somewhat hypocritical, to say the least. She didn't want to put him in a difficult situation, and she didn't want to break up her family life, either; it wasn't perfect, not by a considerable margin, but it was holding together for now.

She was worried about Magnus, though. He had not taken the break-up well, and their meeting the other day had only confirmed to her what she had suspected: he was starting to lose his grip on rationality. She didn't begrudge him his anger and sadness, of course — they'd had some long talks about how things had got to the state they were in, and she'd come to understand him perhaps even better than his partner had — but she was still worried, particularly after the strange things he'd described and asked her about.

The snoring was momentarily interrupted as Donald's imposing figure rolled over in the bed, but quickly resumed. Dora sighed, resigning herself to the fact that she probably wasn't going to be getting to sleep any time soon, stood up, walked out of her room and headed downstairs to the kitchen to fix herself a drink.

Decaffeinated coffee in hand — she had a weakness for it, particularly since Donald had bought her a capsule coffee machine a short while ago — she wandered into the living room and opened the curtains. Their house was right at the end of a cul-de-sac, and had a good view up the rest of the road. It made her feel like the lady of the manor, and she often enjoyed just standing here, looking out from behind the house's net curtains, surveying the rest of the street and seeing what everyone else was up to.

Tonight, though, things were different; as she pulled back the curtains she paused and drew a sharp intake of breath, because she was really not expecting what she saw.

It was light. But it couldn't be. She tapped on her phone and checked the clock again; sure enough, the hour digit still read "2". There was no way that the street outside should be lit in such a way, but the evidence was right there in front of her.

She guzzled the last of her coffee, not caring that it was still a little bit too hot and burned her tongue, and put the cup down on the windowsill. She was confused and a little disturbed by whatever the strange phenomenon was outside her front window, but she was surprised to find herself more curious than frightened. So curious that, before she knew it, and as if something else was in control of her body, she was pulling on her coat over the top of her nightgown and squeezing her bare feet into a pair of shoes that she'd left by the door.

She opened the front door and looked out into the street. It was light, but there was something very different about this light to regular daylight. The sky wasn't blue, for a start; it was pure, brilliant white and seemed to glow. This wasn't the white of an overcast sky, either; it was as if the sky itself was glowing, bathing the whole street in a soft light that felt calm, but cold.

It was cold, too; there didn't seem to be a breeze, but Dora could still feel a chill on her face as she stepped over the threshold of her house and into the front garden. She wasn't sure where she was going to go, but something was pushing her onwards, out into this peculiar soft light. There was something out there; something beyond what she could see, and she needed to know what it was.

The thoughts in her head surprised her; she wasn't usually the type to seek out mysteries or strange happenings like this, but there was something irresistible about this one. Perhaps it was simply the fact that it was a change from the drudgery of everyday life, or perhaps there was something more; she didn't know.

She was halfway up the street by now, and she noticed that the end of the road seemed to fade into a pale haze, like a thick, impenetrable fog that was glowing from within. Still she continued to walk towards it; answers were inside that strange cloud, she felt, and she wanted to know what they were.

She approached the haze; it almost appeared like a wall, but she knew that there was nothing to it, and that she could walk right through it, should she so desire. And she did desire; she took a step forward and was instantly surrounded on all sides by the soft but cold white light that had been illuminating her street.

The fog — whatever it was — was so thick that she could no longer even see her arms in front of her, and it didn't take long for her to feel disoriented. She could no longer feel the solidity of the ground beneath her feet; it was as if she had left her body and was simply floating in a void filled with light.

Perhaps she was; she couldn't explain it, but she felt completely at ease here. It felt natural and good, though still cold. It didn't feel like the warm, benevolent glow she had come to associate with the concept of "heaven" during her formative years; it was just light. A strange, calming light that seemed to be encouraging her to relax, to let it flow through her, to just…

Her eyes snapped open, and she blinked a few times. She couldn't see anything at all. Had she gone blind? No; it was just the darkness of her bedroom. She recognised the sound of Donald snoring beside her, the softness of the mattress beneath her body, the warmth of the duvet she was snuggled under. All was as it should be. Her eyes started to adjust to the darkness, and she made out familiar shapes, and she felt at ease.

A dream, then, she thought, but a very strange one. Then she paused, her mind slowly recalling some of the things Magnus had said to her regarding his peculiar dream. Her experience — for the memory was still fresh and vivid in her mind — felt eerily familiar as she recalled the details Magnus had described, only in her case, it felt as if she had had almost the complete opposite experience. Darkness was replaced by light; fear by calm. What did it mean?

She rolled over onto her side, trying to get comfortable again. She felt tired and wanted to sleep; she could think about this more when the morning come, and perhaps even talk it over with Magnus. For now, she just wanted to…

She froze as her eyes alighted on the wall occupied by her dressing table.

Written on the wall, in letters that seemed to glow without illuminating the room itself, and in a beautiful, elegant cursive hand, was a single word: "HELLO."

Suddenly, she felt afraid. The strange dream and the eerie, cold light didn't feel quite so calming any more; now, they felt like a symptom of something that was very, very wrong indeed — with her mind, or with the world, she couldn't tell. But it was frightening, and she wasn't sure what to make of it right now in her all-but-exhausted state.

So she curled up into a foetal position, screwed her eyes up and tried as best she could to put the strange happenings out of her mind. It was not something she'd ever been particularly good at: her mind was particularly active at night, and whenever she tried to send a signal to herself not to think about something, her mind usually interpreted this as a request to think about it as much as possible. Sure enough, after a moment, she couldn't hold herself back any longer; still curled up, she opened her eyes and looked at the spot on the wall where the beautifully written word had been.

Of course, there was nothing there; the wall was bare, and all she could make out was the rough silhouette of her dressing table.

Of course there's nothing there, she thought. It's just the last remnants of a dream. That's all it is.

[Back to the start.]

---

 

Over the course of the next couple of days, strange things continued to happen around Magnus. There was nothing so outrageous that the happening itself frightened him — indeed, in many cases, much like when the door had seemingly unlocked itself without him using the key a few days earlier, he failed to notice that anything unusual had gone on until after the fact — but the strange, scrawled and apparently hallucinatory messages that had continued appearing troubled him.

They hadn't added up to anything coherent as yet. So far there had been a "WELCOME", a "GOOD", a "KEEP GOING" and a simple "YES". The messages seemed to approve of what was happening, though Magnus still didn't understand what it all meant. He had become concerned for his mental health; he already knew that his emotions were in a somewhat fragile state following the collapse of his personal life, but had this crossed some sort of line into his brain actually not working properly, interpreting things that weren't really there?

The messages most certainly weren't really there. Sometimes they lingered longer than others, but usually they vanished as if they had never been there at all after just a single blink of his eyes. They were vivid enough that they certainly looked real, but if that were the case why weren't his walls, by now, covered in graffiti?

He flopped into bed, exhausted. He hadn't done much that day, but he had at least left the house and spent some time in a coffee shop in an attempt to feel like a normal human being. It wasn't the most productive use of his time, of course, but it beat sitting by himself and letting the darkness of his depression close in on him.

Now, of course, it was night, and as he flipped the bedside light off he was surrounded by literal darkness; for once he had remembered to close the curtains, so the usual glare of the street lamps from outside was just a faint glow through the material. The only real light in the room now was the glowing red numbers of the clock-radio, ever-present by his bed, a relic of a forgotten age when he had a reason to wake up early in the morning.

"Hi."

His heart immediately started racing. There had been no-one in the room when he had got into bed and turned the light off, but that was unmistakably the sound of someone's voice. It seemed to be a woman's voice; strong, but feminine, and not one he recognised.

"How's the darkness treating you?"

Panicked, he fumbled for the bedside lamp and ended up knocking it — and a coffee cup from a couple of days ago — to the floor. Eventually he managed to pick it up and, wielding it like a lantern, he flicked the switch.

Instantly his room was bathed in light, and there was no sign of anyone. He looked around and gave a momentary start at the sight of his own enlarged shadow on the wall as he pointed the lamp around like a torch, but it was clear to him that he was the only occupant of the room. The voice — if indeed there ever was one — was silent.

He replaced the lamp on the bedside table and switched it off again. He lay down, his heart still thumping in his chest, took a deep breath and tried to relax, eyes closed.

"Don't try to find me," the voice came again, this time feeling like it was whispering in his ear. "You won't be able to. Not yet, at least."

He kept his eyes closed — tightly, now — as fear gripped his body and his pulse quickened once more. He swore he felt a chill wind move across his body, and then the voice was in his other ear.

"You're making a good start, though," it said. "Really good. But I can see you're not quite ready for this yet, so for now I'll bid you farewell."

The breeze blew once again, but Magnus dared not open his eyes, even though he knew all he would see — even if there really was someone in his room — was darkness. It was several minutes that felt like hours before he felt his body starting to relax again, the adrenaline slowly draining and his muscles gradually switching out of "fight or flight" mode.

Still keeping his eyes closed, he rolled onto his front and buried his head in his pillow. It didn't take him long to succumb to sleep.

 

*       *       *       *       *

The following day was uneventful. Nothing strange happened around him, and none of the peculiar messages appeared. It was the same the day after, and the day after that, too. He began to think that whatever strange illness had been clouding his mind had somehow passed, and that he was over the worst, so he gradually let the weird incidents of the last few days slide from the front of his mind.

He had been grateful for the distraction, if nothing else; having the odd happenings to concentrate on had taken his mind off the other things that had been going on in his life. He was brought back into the cold light of reality by a simple text message, though: she was coming by to pick up her things, and recommended that he wasn't there while he did so.

The rational part of his brain knew that she was right, that it would be healthiest and safest for both of them if he were elsewhere while she went about her grim business of sorting out the things that belonged to her, packing them away and taking them with her, never to be seen again. That very act was definitively final; up until that point, he'd always carried the hope that she might reconsider and come back, even though she'd already taken a lot of her possessions — daily life things like clothes and toiletries — with her quite some time ago now.

He responded with a simple, blunt "OK" to her proposed time, which was later that day, and knew that he needed to make himself scarce as quickly as possible. But he could not bring himself to leave just yet; he could feel the emotions bubbling up inside him. A corrosive cocktail of intense sadness and burning rage, the toxic feelings quickly overcame him, and he found himself stamping around the empty flat, looking for something to release the anger on.

He settled on a pair of glasses that she'd left behind and had, until now, been avoiding. He knew she didn't wear them often — she'd have taken them with her, otherwise — but they were still hers. And, right now, they made as good a target as any for his ire.

He took them from the shelf where they had sat, untouched, since she had walked out of the door. He threw them to the ground petulantly, then stamped on them one, two, three times. He picked them up and squeezed them tightly between his hands, bending the frames and making them useless as a facial adornment. To his intense dissatisfaction, though, nothing broke; the lenses didn't crack, the frames didn't snap. All he was left with was a mangled, twisted mass of wire and glass that was still recognisable as having been a pair of glasses once, but which wouldn't be fitting atop anyone's nose any time soon.

He fell to his knees and started to cry. The tears came quickly and flowed down his cheeks, plopping quietly onto the carpet as they fell from his face. He collapsed forward, his forehead hitting the floor with enough force to make him slightly dizzy, but the physical pain didn't matter compared to the mental anguish he was currently in.

He didn't even really know why he was crying or what he was upset about. It was just everything about the situation coming to a head. He scrunched up his face as he sobbed and gasped: he'd done this before, and would probably do it again; he just had to ride it out. That rational part of the brain speaking again, even amid the most chaotic outbursts of emotion like this one.

Eventually, the tears subsided and the sobbing stopped. He felt exhausted, and it was all he could do to pull his head up off the floor and get back to a kneeling position.

He wiped the last few tears from the corners of his eyes and his cheeks, sniffed and opened his eyes.

He wasn't prepared for what he saw.

He was in his flat, but it was not as he knew it. The strange words that had occasionally been appearing on his walls were now everywhere, and the room seemed shrouded in a black mist, lighter than smoke but heavier than fog. Everything about this was wrong, but he still recognised it. Why? What was going on.

A patch of the black mist ahead of him coalesced into a humanoid figure, though it was nothing more than a silhouette; he couldn't make any features out, save for the fact that the figure was probably female.

"Oh, hi," said a voice he recognised immediately as that which he'd heard in his bedroom a few days earlier. "Wasn't expecting you quite so soon."

He didn't hear the last sentence, because he'd toppled backwards, the shock too much for his consciousness to take right now. He had passed out.

*       *       *       *       *

"There you are."

He wasn't sure how long he'd been unconscious, but he knew that he didn't want to open his eyes. The voice — the strange figure — was still there, and that presumably meant that he was in that terribly wrong version of his living room.

"Look, I'm not going to hurt you," said the voice, sounding a little put out by his lack of response. "I just need to talk. And you need to listen, otherwise you're going to be stuck here, and I don't think you want that. Sit up."

Eyes still closed, he uneasily raised himself up onto his elbows, then pushed his back up off the floor. His body felt stiff, heavy and uncooperative, but he complied with the voice's request nonetheless, even though his body was shaking with every movement. Then, he grit his teeth and let his eyes open.

The shadowy figure appeared to be crouched on the floor near him, and he could have sworn that if it had a face it would be looking concerned. Something about the way it carried itself and the attitude it was displaying towards him made him feel a little more at ease than he had been: maybe the voice really had meant what it had said, and that it didn't want to hurt him?

"There we go," came the female voice, somewhat softer in tone than it had been before. "That wasn't so difficult, now, was it?"

"Who are you?" he asked, his voice cracking as he did so. He felt like he hadn't drunk any water for weeks.

The voice chuckled. "Well, aren't you straight to the point. I like that. But before we talk about me, we should probably talk about…" — here the figure gestured flamboyantly about the distorted version of his living room — "…this place, and what you're doing here."

He blinked. The nightmarish vision before him didn't go away. He was really here. For some reason, though, he could feel his fear dissipating and being replaced with curiosity.

The crouching figure seemed to rock back onto where its knees would be if it was a normal human body. It looked like it was relaxing.

"Good," it said. "Welcome."

[Back to the start]

---

 

Magnus wasn't sure when it was he finally got back to sleep, but it must have happened at some point, because before he knew it he was opening his eyes and immediately squinting at the bright sunlight coming in through the bedroom window.

He groaned, rolled over, wiped his mouth — apparently he had drooled in his sleep, which he added to his increasingly long mental checklist of things that disgusted him about himself — and blinked a few times, trying to get used to the light.

As the room came back into focus, he glanced at the clock-radio. It was just before 9 in the morning. He'd woken up at a normal time for once.

He groaned again, sat up, stretched and unsteadily got out of bed. As he turned to look at the wall that had been emblazoned with the strange, dark letters last night — or had that been a dream, too? — he paused, looking it over as if willing the letters to appear again. Unsurprisingly, nothing happened. The fear he had felt last night was all but gone: now, the strange happenings were nothing more than the fading memories of a confused subconscious, and he attributed them to the fact that he quite literally wasn't feeling in his right mind at the moment.

He retrieved his phone from on top of the chest of drawers, where it had been charging all night, and pressed the power button. The screen sprang to life, the large numbers of the clock informing him once again that yes, he really had managed to get up at a normal person's time today. Not only that, but it was Saturday; a day where he always felt significantly less guilty about not working or, he felt, contributing to society in any meaningful way.

He tapped the "Messages" icon, then on the recent conversation he'd had with his friend Dora. He hadn't spoken with her in a few days, and he felt like he needed to talk. He knew that she worked, though, and didn't like disturbing her in the week, even though he couldn't remember the last time she had turned him down for an invitation to do something together, even if it was just hanging out watching a movie.

"Hey," he typed clumsily, fumbling for a moment over the auto-correct function. "Are you up to anything today?"

The message sent, and his phone informed him that it had been delivered, but not read. It was entirely possible, he figured, that Dora was still asleep; it was quite early in the morning on a Saturday, after all, and he certainly didn't begrudge her a lie-in after a week of juggling working and taking care of her family.

He'd thought off and on that he might be in love with Dora. He'd even considered confessing it to her at some point, before the rational part of his brain took over and told the irrational part — which held an increasingly large dominion over his overall consciousness these days — that he was being silly, that he didn't really love her, that all he was trying to do was replace that which he had lost, and that, given she was happily married with children, she almost certainly didn't feel the same way. The rational brain won that particular argument, but the irrational side often felt to him like it was biding its time to flare up again at the most inconvenient moment.

His phone buzzed, interrupting his wandering thoughts.

"Nothing much," came the reply. "Want to come over?"

"Actually," he wrote back quickly. "Would you mind coming over here? I need to ask you…" he paused, and deleted the last sentence. "I need your help with something."

He waited. Dora always took several minutes to reply, whereas he was inclined to treat text messages like online instant messaging conversations, feeling guilty if he didn't respond immediately. It frustrated him at times, but he was also conscious that not everyone out there had quite as much time on their hands as he did. He sighed dejectedly as he once again found himself contemplating his life situation; today was an upbeat day by his own standards, but there was still that background noise of hopelessness, that feeling that things were never going to just neatly work out like he hoped they might.

"All right," came the reply eventually. "I'll be over in an hour or so. That ok?"

 

*       *       *       *       *

Dora Miller was a pretty woman, blessed with a youthful face and shapely figure that had not yet begun to succumb to the ravages of time despite the fact that she was just the wrong side of thirty years old. She always made an effort with her appearance; her straight, golden-blonde hair falling around her face and down her back without a single strand out of place, her light touch of makeup complementing her natural attractiveness without seeming artificial.

Magnus always felt inferior when he was next to her, like they were polar opposites in almost every way. He was the scruffy, unkempt, no-hope male loser that, he feared, no-one would ever find attractive ever again; she was, he felt, radiant. He didn't know why she hung out with him or why she allowed him to call her "friend", but he appreciated it nonetheless.

He handed her a cup of coffee and sat down next to her on the sofa. He didn't look her in the eye; he'd always found eye contact difficult, but even more so since the events of the last couple of months.

"So," she said taking a sip of the coffee. "Ow, that's as hot as the sun, let me put that down a minute." She put it down and smacked her lips before speaking again. "What did you want to talk to me about?"

He thought for a moment. He wasn't quite sure how to put it.

"I, uh," he began, trying to think how he could express the things he was thinking about. "I've been feeling a bit weird."

Her eyes softened. "Well, we both know that," she said. "Is this something different? What do you mean?"

Her questions weren't helping. He still wasn't sure how to put it across.

He stood up, and looked down at his hands. While he was waiting for her to arrive, he'd noticed that his hands looked a little different to how he was used to them looking — at least he believed so, anyway. He couldn't quite pin down what it was that was wrong, but they certainly didn't quite seem right.

"I need you to have a look at something," he said seriously.

"Oh, God," she said, chuckling, obviously trying to lighten the somewhat heavy mood that appeared to be falling over the room. "You're not going to make me look at your balls, are you? I mean, if you're really, genuinely worried, I will, but,"

He laughed despite himself; a weak laugh that even he found unconvincing. "No," he said softly. He held out his hand to her. "Does anything look… strange about my hand to you?"

She gave him a quizzical look, complete with exaggerated raised eyebrow as if to emphasise how strange his question was, but she looked down at his outstretched hand nonetheless.

"No," she said after a moment. "Looks like… well, a hand. Your hand."

He blinked and looked down. They looked, as she said, like his own hands, just as they always did. Had he been imagining what he saw earlier? A trick of the dim light inside the flat, perhaps?

He sat down again, and began to tell her the tale of his strange experiences the previous night. Once he started, he found that he could not stop. Dora's eyes widened as he explained in great detail — the specificity of which surprised even Magnus — the sensations he had felt, the things he had seen, what he had been thinking. For a dream, he thought, it felt decidedly real; eerily so.

The feeling of dread he'd experienced the previous night started to creep up his spine again, but he tried his best to banish it from his thoughts. He finished his story.

"Wow," said Dora. "That's… quite a dream. What did that word on the wall say? 'Welcome'? Welcome to what?"

"I don't know," Magnus said with a shrug. "Probably nothing."

There was a momentary silence between the two of them. Then Magnus spoke again.

"I'm sorry to bring you out here for some bullshit dream," he said. "I feel a bit stupid now."

"It's all right," said Dora, smiling that warm smile she smiled when he knew she was being genuine rather than jokey. "I'm guessing you were feeling a bit lonely and could do with someone to talk to anyway, huh."

"Yeah," he said. "I'm sorry to keep bugging you like this."

"It's fine," she said. "What are friends for?"

*       *       *       *       *

Magnus and Dora spent a couple of hours together, heading to a local coffee shop for a change of scenery, before Dora had to head home and back to her family. As Magnus walked back in the direction of his flat, the grey clouds that had been gathering overhead as the morning had progressed finally started to spill their load of rainwater: gently at first, but quickly progressing to a strong shower that didn't take long to soak right through his clothes.

"Shit." It didn't help his mood, and much of the good that Dora's visit had done him was undone by the weather; it wasn't long before he was feeling bleak again, and by the time he reached his front door he wasn't sure he actually wanted to go inside. Although this place was still home, it also housed all manner of memories, many of which he didn't feel like he could particularly deal with.

As he reached out for the door, he noticed his hands again and paused. Something seemed "off" once again; was it really a trick of the light, or had they actually changed colour? Perhaps it was the cold of the rain; his soaking clothes were making him feel somewhat chilly, after all, so it's possible that it was just his body responding to the low temperatures.

Banishing thoughts of the memories floating around inside the flat, he decided that he wanted nothing more than to get inside and into the warm, perhaps even back into bed. As he reached out for the door, there was a soft "click" as it unlocked, and he pushed it open, reaching around the frame to find the hallway light switch as he did so and clicking the lights on so he didn't have to walk in to thick darkness.

It wasn't until the door slammed shut behind him that the fact he had never taken his keys out of his pocket registered to him. And yet here he was.

He glanced around the hallway, confused. Everything looked normal. Nothing seemed out of place.

That is, until he turned around to face the other end of the hallway, and there it was. Another word, scrawled in large, dark letters on the wall, plain to see.

"GOOD." it said.

[A note of explanation before we begin: for the past few Novembers, alongside the more organised campaign NaNoWriMo, I've been indulging in creative writing projects, aiming to write somewhere in the region of 2,000 words per day for a whole month in order to end up with something that is vaguely novel-length. This November, I didn't get started in a timely manner, so I decided to wait until January to pick things up. And so, for the duration of this month, this blog will be entirely creative writing-based rather than, you know, a regular boring ol' blog.

As usual, the creative writing for this project will be unedited and unplanned, since "improvising" is the means through which I enjoy writing the most. Expect unstructured, nonsensical occasionally inconsistent stuff to happen, though I'll try to keep it to a minimum. Normal business will resume on February 1, assuming everything is neatly wrapped up by then! Let's begin.]

---

The night was dark and almost silent, but Magnus Thompson could not for the life of him get to sleep.

He'd tried everything. He'd tried exhausting himself to the point where he felt he could barely keep his eyes open. He'd tried lighting candles with relaxing smells. He'd tried reading. He'd even tried an app on his phone that featured a selection of sounds designed to soothe the listener off to sleep — rain on canvas, muted traffic noise, wind in the mountains, even pure white noise.

None of it worked, however. Tonight, as with every other night, he found himself, eyes wide open, staring at the ceiling. Moments ago, he had glanced over to his bedside table to look at the aggressively glowing red digits of his distinctly retro clock-radio, and was unsurprised to discover that it was after three o' clock in the morning.

He knew that his body would eventually succumb to total exhaustion, but he could never predict when. And consequently, he could never predict at what time he'd be able to rise the following day. His worst ever day had seen him dropping off to sleep just as the dawn was starting to break around five in the morning, and him waking up just as everyone else's working day was coming to a close at five in the afternoon. That day, he'd felt particularly bad as he'd dragged his unkempt form into the convenience store across the road and had had to respond to the clerk's cheerful enquiry as to whether he'd had a "good day". He couldn't bring himself to admit that his day had only begun five minutes earlier and consequently hadn't been all that bad as yet, nor did he particularly feel like sharing his recent life story with the cashier, who was still pretty much a stranger despite how often Magnus saw him.

He'd lost track of the time since she'd gone. Days blurred into weeks and possibly even months; nothing felt like it mattered any more. He was alone, miserable and gradually sliding towards a situation where he would be unable to support himself any longer, and he did not want that to happen. He did not know what would happen should things get that far, so he tried his best to push it out of his mind whenever these dark thoughts started sneaking up on him.

But still they came, and at night they were the worst. The darkness felt oppressive, like it was a physical manifestation surrounding him, suffocating him and pulling him ever deeper into despair, making hope seem perpetually out of reach, and slipping further and further away with each passing day. He didn't know how to deal with it, so he just lay there.

At least, that's what he usually did. Tonight was different. He felt more awake, more alert than usual. His eyelids didn't feel like they had weights attached to them; his body didn't resist his brain's messages to move.

He sat up on the side of his bed and looked out of the window into the deserted street outside. There was no-one around — not even the drunken louts that occasionally staggered past at ungodly hours in the morning on the way back from an evening of drinking and clubbing — and all the lights in the other flats and houses that lined the road were extinguished. The only light came from the orange-tinted street lamps, bathing everything in a monochromatic glow and giving the vista from his window a curious, otherworldly, stylised feel.

He stood, pulled on the clothes he'd discarded before he got into bed — crumpled and worn, as he hadn't changed them for days by this point — and walked out into the hallway.

Something definitely didn't feel quite right. But what was it?

He picked up his keys from the small table by the door, stuffed them in his pocket and opened the front door of his flat. Before long, he was outside the building and on the street. The air was still, but cold. He couldn't hear a sound. But the feeling of "wrongness" was getting stronger and stronger. It almost felt like he could pinpoint the source of the disturbance, like a homing beacon in his head.

Before he knew what he was doing, he found himself following the invisible trail, walking down his street, down the middle of the narrow road. Although he'd lived here a while, he'd never really gone further than his own building, which just happened to be the first on the road. The residential buildings rose on either side of him; blocks of flats on the left, terraces of houses on the right. They made a wall against the sounds of the city around him and ensured that the street was, most of the time, pretty quiet and secluded-feeling, despite its rather central location. Tonight, of course, there was no sound at all; he could tell that even here. No cars were passing; no-one was walking down the street; not even a dog was barking. Nothing.

The curious sensation started to grow stronger as he continued to walk. He felt his skin crawling, though he didn't know what it was that he feared. There was just… something out there, and even though he suspected that it wished him ill, still he continued on his way towards it, following the beacon that was starting to throb inside his mind.

He reached the end of the road. Before him was a ramp leading down into a car park that occupied the space beneath one of the blocks of flats. There was one much like it underneath his own building, but he'd never seen this particular one before. He'd had no reason to, of course, but he felt like the dark signal was drawing him inside, willing him to come closer — perhaps even daring him to venture within.

He silently accepted the challenge and walked down the ramp. The car park smelled somewhat musty, and the electric lighting inside appeared to be broken. Just beyond the entrance, a faulty fluorescent light flickered a frustratingly inconsistent rhythm, making it clear to Magnus that the car park was, at least, occupied by a few cars. On the right of the entrance, a wall. On the left, the car park continued into darkness so thick that he could barely see beyond the small, flickering pool of light created by the faulty light fitting.

Undeterred, he turned left and walked in that direction. It wasn't long before the darkness surrounded him. It was a familiar sensation; the same he felt as he tried to get to sleep. The air felt thick, and the further he went, the more effort it was to breathe. It didn't feel like there was pressure on his body, but he felt like he was starting to suffocate nonetheless. But still he proceeded onwards, ever deeper into the blackness.

After several minutes of walking in silence, during which his echoing footsteps on the concrete floor of the car park felt like they'd faded out to almost nothing, he paused. He stopped walking, and he turned around to glance behind him.

He suddenly became aware of how long he'd been walking, and of the fact that the car park couldn't possibly be that big; it was a physical impossibility, surely. By now, he should have reached the far wall, or a row of cars, or something. But he couldn't see anything in front of him, and now, it transpired, he couldn't see anything behind him, either. All trace of the flickering fluorescent light appeared to have vanished, and he was totally surrounded by black on all sides.

He felt disoriented. He couldn't tell which way he was facing any longer. He span around desperately, the calm he'd been feeling a moment ago rapidly fading and being replaced by panic as his pulse quickened and his palms became sweaty. He became dizzy, his disorientation now extending to not being sure which way was up and which way was down, too. He felt like he was falling, but at the moment he thought he should have hit the ground, he felt nothing; he just stopped. There was no pain, no sensation, nothing.

He became aware of his quickening pulse and his ragged breathing, but he didn't know how to stand up any more, if indeed he was, as he thought, lying on the ground. His body no longer appeared to be obeying his commands; he wasn't even sure he had a body any more, because he couldn't see it to make sure. The darkness was everywhere, all around him. And now it felt like it was starting to bind him, as well: holding him down, preventing him from moving, making it harder and harder to breathe. He wanted to call out, to cry for help, to scream, but no sound came out. It was hopeless. This was the end. This was how he was going to die: in a way he didn't understand.

And as he started to feel like the life was fading from him, his soul departing where he thought his body was, the strange calm returned once again. This wasn't so bad, he thought. There would be worse ways to go. And at least this would mark an end to the pain. He wouldn't have to worry any more. And, he thought grimly, no-one would have to worry about him, either.

His eyes snapped open, and he found himself gazing at the ceiling. Orange light was coming in through the window, the curtains for which he'd forgotten to close as usual.

How long had he been asleep? He didn't remember passing out, but then he never did. He always awoke the next day, not exactly feeling refreshed but at least in a state where he could get up and do things again.

He glanced over at the clock-radio once again. The first digit still read "3", but he couldn't remember what the minutes had said the last time he'd looked. Regardless, it had apparently been less than an hour that he had been asleep, but after the strange dream he felt surprisingly awake, and certainly in no hurry to close his eyes again.

He sat up in bed and shuffled over to the side, dropping his legs to the carpeted floor softly. The air had something of a chill to it: he had been trying to avoid running the expensive electric heating as much as possible, and had, by now, reached a stage where he didn't really feel the cold any more.

Clad only in his boxer shorts, he stood and stretched, then looked out of the window. The street was as deserted as it had been in his dream, but he wasn't surprised at this, given the hour. Then he turned to face the door, intending to head to his kitchen to fix himself a warm drink. Before he could start walking, though, he froze.

Emblazoned in dark letters across the wall of his bedroom was a single word: "WELCOME." It looked like it had been hastily scrawled across the wall in black or dark blue paint, completely disregarding the furniture and decorations, and the word itself, though normally a friendly utterance, seemed to radiate malice and menace. It made him more scared than he thought he'd ever been in his life, and the fear froze him to the spot, simply staring at the dark letters, for what felt like several minutes.

Then he blinked. And the word was gone.