Being able to hear people?s thoughts has always been a little scary. But it?s what I hear when I?m alone that terrifies me the most.

You wanna know what?s funny? People have the ability to project their thoughts as invisible waves through space, and they have special little organs that let them receive these invisible waves? and it?s called talking and listening. People take it for granted. You only hear what people want you to for a reason. Skipping that isn?t a superpower. It?s not nice to see the link between everything you do, and the instantaneous emotional response it sets off in people around you. You don?t need to see the flush of blue-wave disappointment that rolls through your father?s mind when you show him the A- you got on a test. You don?t need to see how a lover feels when they see you in discoloured boxers and woollen socks. It?s good enough that they lie. You should be happy with those lies because a person is not just the sum of their thoughts. That momentary flicker of revulsion a partner feels when they walk in on you spewing your guts up into the toilet after eating some dodgy takeout. That?s not who they are. The fact they push that disgust aside and still help you up, that?s who they really are.
I hate seeing these things. I hate feeling other people?s intrusive thoughts, the parts they can?t filter, the parts they choose to ignore or lock up. Sometimes I get words, but I have to focus real hard. Most things look like colours that wash up all around me, although I guess that?s really just a metaphor I use for your benefit. There?s an element of taste, smell, touch, and even sound too, all rolled up in there. Envy is sharp and bitter. Love is like the twang of a guitar that blends the world around it into a peaceful harmony. Hatred looks like the after-effects of a nasty burn ? the pitted flesh, the glistening blisters, the gut-wrenching pain. Sexual thoughts are almost percussive, but it depends on the person. Some people have a pneumatic drill thumping away in their head, for others it?s more like the crashing of waves on the beach.
It would be better if I knew I could help people, but I?m no superman. I get a lot just walking down a busy street. Someone?s always getting hit, or coerced, or abused, or beaten or kicked or stabbed or?
Jesus, it?s always something.
Once, on a long road somewhere on the outskirts of Manchester, I heard a cry for help. It was more of a prayer, really. It?s so rare to get a clear broadcast, like something you pick up on the car radio. This wasn?t a mishmash of sensations. There were words, a litany screamed into the void in the desperate hope that God was listening. I spent weeks driving up and down those roads. I stayed in a hotel nearby, pausing my journey, my life, everything, in the hope I could find this poor person. I climbed fences and scoped out gardens. I broke into houses when people left for work. I got arrested, twice. But the police wouldn?t listen.
Please let me die. Please let me die before he comes back. I?m so hungry. He feeds me so little. Please let me die.
I never heard them again. Never found where they were, or what might be happening. The closest I came to figuring it out was a whisper of despair left floating on the air just outside an old brick building deep in the woods. It was small, a shed really, but with thick walls. And inside were all these thick iron pipes coming outta the ground and then going back into it. It might have been something to do with sewage. There were Keep Out signs all over the place. Something about the stains on the floor gave me a bad feeling. And it was probably just my imagination playing up but looking at those pipes I couldn?t help but picture someone handcuffed to them.
In the end I gave up. Whoever they were, they stopped praying. I never heard them again.
I?ve had to stop trying to help people in general. A lot of doctors have recommended I be locked up for my own safety. A few judges too. I think luck, and not a whole lot else, has kept me free on the streets. This power of mine isn?t radar. It doesn?t point me to the damsels in distress so I can bust down the door and save them. That?d be like pointing at a wave and tracing it back to its origin. Most of the time all I can do is listen and move on.
And even listening can be dangerous. Not everyone wants to be heard. The funny thing about psychopaths is that, despite being utterly self-obsessed, they aren?t involved in their own little world like everyone else. That?s because they can?t possibly imagine that they might need to share it. The world is theirs to enjoy. A great big complex challenging toy-puzzle, and people are the pieces they move around for fun. They?re sensitive to everything around them. And they are always, always, on the lookout. Sometimes for victims, sometimes to learn more about the lumps of meat they call other people, and sometimes because they?re afraid of getting caught.
It was an intake of breath that nearly killed me. A single slip up that forever taught me to be careful about how I react to other people?s thoughts. I was on the tube and people-watching, as I often did when I was a kid. A young guy had been on the carriage with me for about half-an-hour by that point. He looked a lot older to me back then but thinking about it, he was probably only nineteen. He had a baseball cap down over his eyes, but I knew he was projecting his mind into the whole damn train, drinking the world in. The grimy chairs, the rattling windows, the murky speckled floor ? he was observing it the same way a cat watches the street. He was only pretending to fixate on the floor, pretending to be disinterested in the other people.
I was too young to recognise the signs. I just thought he was another flavour of person. His thoughts tasted dull, devoid of recognisable emotion but filled with an astonishing detail. He was as lost in the process of appearing harmless as I was in drinking in his thoughts. It was only when the train slowed down, and the doors opened that his thoughts changed. No one else could?ve seen it of course. A young woman stepped onto the carriage and this guy?s mind just freaking exploded. There was recognition, anticipation, fear, excitement, arousal, and something I would later learn was a special kind of rage. It was like this guy had been sitting and waiting, seeing the world in grey. But now he was seeing it in colour. Some input had been fed into that robotic brain and it came alive with malignant intent.
It wasn?t just what he wanted to do to this woman that made him come alive. It was the fact that he?d planned it, and he was now waiting for the perfect moment to execute.
I gasped, overwhelmed by the madness spewing out of his head. And he never moved a muscle. Not once the whole time. But he heard. He knew. The consequences of my actions rippled through his mind as a single pulse of acknowledgement. He didn?t ask questions or wonder how it could be possible. He simply knew that I?d seen into his head. He knew it the same way he knew that the train would start up soon and I?d be stuck there with him. His certainty in the situation was terrifying. He wasn?t plagued by a single gram of self-doubt. I lurched up, leapt towards the doors, and in less than half-a-second he was following me. That I had somehow seen directly into his mind was no more interesting to him than the birth mark on my leg. A small detail that he might remark upon as he rolled my naked body into the sewer.
Cruelty looks like blood. It spills out of other people?s minds and into mine like red wine out of the bottle and into the glass. This guy made me feel like I was drowning. The worst part was knowing I couldn?t go home. I was close but I couldn?t do that. This guy was an apex predator, and he would?ve sat outside for days if he had to, waiting till my mum or my dad came stumbling out early in the morning. He would have watched. He would have waited. I couldn?t read his exact intent, but it tasted of copper and was warm to the touch. It made me think of licking a box-cutter. I knew leading home would be a bad idea.
I couldn?t hide, so I had to run. I had to lose him. I tracked a long circuitous route through the city?through parks and alleys and markets with sizzling meat and open produce?until at last it felt as if my legs were going to turn to chalk and crumble. I had to lose this guy; I knew it. So, at some point I doubled back and started heading towards the same platform I?d fled. I can sense large groups of people moving around, and I timed the journey carefully so that I was stumbling down the escalator just as the last passenger climbed aboard a departing train. I reached the carriage seconds before the doors closed, confident I?d given the guy the slip. When I turned back, he was standing there with a blank expression. He?d never relented during the whole chase, not once. He was barely even tired. If those doors hadn?t closed just then, if my timing had been slightly off, he would have been aboard that train with me. And I probably wouldn?t be here writing this.
True psychopaths are exceptionally rare, thank God. They?re actually the least of my worries now. Dead people are a bigger deal to me. They?re far harder to avoid. Cemeteries are a firm no-go. But at least the long-time dead have the decency of keeping it quiet. Their thoughts are like wisps of smoke. Recent deaths are a little more visceral. I drove past a car crash once and just blacked out. The police gave me a breathalyser cause they thought I was drunk. Thankfully I convinced them I just had a weak stomach and the blood-spattered windscreen had upset me. They bought that. How could I have possibly explained to them that the psychic shock of death had knocked me senseless? I had heard a man?s death cry. I could feel the scream he never finished as if it was trapped in my own throat. But that wasn?t the whole picture? the worst part was that the guy was still screaming. They couldn?t hear it. But I could.
He?d caught a glimpse of himself in the mirror as his corpse was hauled out. And he?d started screaming, not with his voice but with his mind, with his soul. By the time I started my car up he?d been at it for over an hour. When the ambulance drove his crumpled body away, he was still screaming. He would still be screaming in the morgue, and he?d still be screaming when his family buried him. And after that he?d scream for months, maybe years, until eventually the dark and the quiet and the total absence of sensory input would liquefy his mind and that scream would wither until it was nothing more than? well, a wisp of smoke.
I highly recommend cremation, by the way. The journey is the same, but at least it?s quicker. Whatever energy the universe gives to us has to go back. You have to be dismantled. Dust to dust, right? That doesn?t just mean the body. It means the very soul itself. Better to go quickly because if the sound coming out of a recently buried casket is anything to go by, it?s ****ing terrifying.
Everything is dying. It?s all going back one way or another. Something about a human mind makes it resistant to that decay. I figure that process must vary a bit person-to-person. Some places can even carry stains from things that happened a long time ago. You?re familiar with this idea, I?m sure. The notion that a really horrific death leaves a kind of spectre behind that haunts the area. It?s not uncommon. The freakiest thing for me is that the thoughts are indistinguishable from a living person?s. The only difference is they?re not ?live? thoughts, they?re recordings. Sometimes that means climbing a normal-looking hill and catching whiffs of an ancient Neolithic ritual, their cries uttered in a long-dead language. Sometimes it means hearing the Germanic bark of Old English as you cross a random street in London. In Scotland there?s even a place where you catch flickers of ancient Roman battle cries. That?s pretty cool.
What?s less cool is that sometimes you pick up on a stain that doesn?t belong to a human. You know what I mean. You do. Everybody has a little bit of what I have. Did you ever just randomly hate something as a kid? Usually, it?d be someplace like maybe the cupboard under the stairs, or the attic, or a well, or an old outhouse, or a spot in your garden where the patio floor has chipped away and you can see down into the crawlspace under your house. That?s not an overactive imagination. There are places where sunlight hasn?t reached for a very, very long time. Old houses abandoned in the middle of the woods. Deep pits carved into the Earth. The hearts of ancient forests, the boughs of trees so thick and old that nothing can grow in the stony soil because it is forever night on the woodland floor. You know the places. You don?t need me to tell you about them. Every one of us has intruded, at some point, on a part of the world that just feels indecent, even a little bit hostile.
I used to hate the space under the stairs in my first house. It was the way it descended into nothing, the way the ceiling got lower and lower, but the floor didn?t go anywhere. And of course, it was dark, so dark you never saw the back of it. Even when I was a teenager and helped my dad move out, I never took the time to see right toward the back. I just hauled stuff out best I could, reaching my fingers into the blackness hoping to hell nothing reached out towards me. When all bar one box was clear it occurred to me to maybe shine my light all the way in. I was tempted to push back against my childish fear and see the little nook all laid bare. I wanted to take that black lifeless pit and expose it to the light and see just how mediocre and boring it truly was.
Because, after all, it was just an overactive imagination, right? That was always what my father had told me when I came to him bawling my eyes out over nightmares of being dragged under there by grasping angry hands. When I thought something had moved under there?a box that was rearranged leaving drag marks in the dust, a coat that was neatly folded now thrown across the floor, a toy I hadn?t seen for years suddenly presented right at the very front of the pile of junk?it was just my imagination telling me something had moved when it hadn?t. There was always a mundane explanation... right?
But when I finally had the chance to pull that pile of crap apart and tease the darkness away, I discovered that shadows aren?t always silent. Whatever was down there had heard my thoughts, and it reached out with a message of its own.
You?re welcome to try, it said.
The solidity of those thoughts still haunts me. It was the way it felt like squeezing a diamond in my fist. Like the words were made out of the hardest stuff on Earth and would cut through my mind like a knife through butter if it so felt like it. I?d never had something speak to me before. I?d caught the occasional word or phrase from other people, but those were clear thoughts. They weren?t communications sent out with postage stamps and return addresses. They were more like graffiti in a public toilet. But those words were sent right at me, laser-guided and dispatched straight into my skull. I couldn?t begin to imagine what kind of mind had sent them. If there was an image or a sensation that accompanied those words, it was the taste of cobwebs and nothing else. God it scared the hell out of me. I didn?t raise my hand and challenge the shadows. Instead, I dragged the final box out and made sure to never lift my eyes.
I was too afraid of what I might see.
It?s funny but? on the drive home my old man told me that he was proud of me for clearing the stairs out. It wasn?t just because he knew I?d been scared of that place as a kid, but even he had to admit, as an adult, it freaked him the hell out too. Lots of people are like that. They get little vibes that they attribute to nothing. I once went out with a bunch of film students to help them shoot a final year project. The gear was heavy, and I had a car, so that?s how I tagged along. Anyway, the director (well, the dude in charge, I guess. He was hardly a professional) had spotted an old half-burned house out in the woods a few years back and wanted a few shots of it. We got lost out there looking for that house. The dude was obsessed with it. Funny thing is, after walking for three hours to find this place, when we finally got there no one bothered to go inside.
I always think that?s quite remarkable. First time I laid eyes on that place I figured I was going to have to pull some theatrics to stop anyone going in. I was close to something. Something smart, something old? something hungry. I don?t know how a house can look evil, but it just did. I didn?t want to be near it. What amazed me was that no one else did either. The director took one look and I could feel his artistic obsession melt away. He took a few photos, awkwardly asked one of the actresses to stand by the front door, and after a while he just mumbled something about the light being all wrong and we left. No one chided him about it. We were all just thankful to put some distance between us and that house.
If I have any moral or lesson to impart it?s this: go with your instincts. That guy was a hardcore atheist. But he didn?t try to prove to himself that the fear he felt in the house?s vicinity was rubbish. He had nothing to gain by entering the house, and some part of him told him he had plenty to lose. So he didn?t go in. How many lives were saved because of that one decision?
It?s not always that simple.
A few years back I helped out with a missing persons case. I don?t mean that the cops came to me and I held some scraps of old clothing to sense the victim out. I mean that I saw a poster, called up the number, and asked how to help. There was a volunteer search party going on and I wanted to be there. Even if my powers aren?t that useful, I really felt like I needed to be part of that search team. Maybe it was the fact it was a little girl?s face on the poster, about nine or ten years old. Maybe it was because I got a feeling in my gut when I looked at her eyes that was like being submerged in ice water, and I?d never felt that way from a picture. But I really wanted to help.
Police figured the girl had gone missing in this large patch of dunes by the sea. It was about twenty square miles of grass-riddled sand that went up and down and up and down and? well, you get it. It was a massive patch of hills and as soon as someone went over the lip of a dune they disappeared from sight. Dogs went missing there all the time and there?d been times when kids had been found shivering under some bush because they?d lost sight of their parents while playing at the beach.
It made it an absolute bitch to search. The terrain was awkward, a deliberately over-grown patch of wilderness under strict environmental protection. Flash-floods happened a lot, erasing well-worn paths in a single night and replacing them with small ponds or simply flat-expanses of nothing. And new paths would spring up where the water cut through earth like it was butter. And of course, the dunes themselves were never still. They were waves in the sand, moving too slowly for the human eye but always moving nonetheless. And sometimes that meant they?d reveal things that had been buried for years, decades even.
Like, say, an old military listening post that had been set up in world war II and quickly forgotten about. I didn?t know that?s what it was when I found it, of course. What I saw as I stumbled around in the dark, crying for this poor girl while hoping I didn?t get lost myself, was a door in the middle of a hill. There?s no other way to describe it, and it was every bit as surreal as you might expect. Because there I was in the middle of total wilderness when I swung my light and I saw an old doorway embedded in the rising sand.
The handle? God how I can put it? It looked warm? Like it had been touched recently. That?s how my mind picked it up. I just knew the second I looked at it that someone had curiously tugged at the metal until the latch gave way and the door swung open with a loud eerie creek. When I tried the handle it seemed somehow familiar, as if the sound and feel of it had already been committed to my memory.
Looking in I saw a stairway going down two or three steps before it disappeared into sand that had filled the tunnel like rising water. It was a dead end that I desperately wanted to ignore. Except something told me not to, and when I glanced down, I noticed footprints in the sand. They were clear as day. Little ones, smaller than my hand, scuffing an awkward gait. That made me look closer, even though I sure as hell didn?t want to. This place was wafting malintent towards me, practically blowing itself up like a puffer fish scaring away predators. I didn?t want to test it or push it. I wanted to leave it the hell alone.
But those footprints?
I got down on my hands and knees and saw that the sand didn?t quite reach the ceiling. The stairway descended for maybe a metre and must?ve levelled off because in one place I could shine my light through right to the other side. The sand filled the stairway like water in a u-bend, and where the steps rose up again there was an open space. The crawl there would have been gruelling with six feet of sand beneath you, and solid concrete right above. But if you kicked and wriggled, you could dig your way through. And for a kid that?d be even easier.
But why the hell would the girl do that?
I wanted to ignore it. I really did. But why was I out there? It wasn?t for fun. That was for sure. I wanted to help, to make a difference. Maybe on some level I?d felt that place all the way in the caf? where I?d first seen the girl?s missing poster. Maybe that was why I?d come. I reckon other searchers had walked past that door and seen it and just walked away. They never consciously chose to ignore it. It just had an effect on you. Something that if you weren?t used to, you wouldn?t understand. Maybe I was the only person who would?ve ever spotted it. Destiny sounds real nice sometimes, but even back then I was suspicious as hell.
Still, I knew I had to go in. I tried calling for the others, but the sea was less than half a kilometre away and the wind coming off it was something fierce. My voice was snatched away from me by the howling gale, and no one came to help. I could glimpse the odd light here or there, but I didn?t know if they were just over the next hill or too far away to help.
I took a deep breath and got down on my hands and knees. For a moment I nearly backed out. It was right when my head entered the tunnel and I realised it was way too damn small for me. I had this sudden flare up of claustrophobia and it was as if my whole body screamed,
You want me to go in there? Are you ****ing mad!?
But I had a shovel, didn?t I? We all had them. I grabbed the thing and used it to clear out as much sand as I could. It wasn?t hard work at all, but I found myself sweating all the same. Eventually I cleared enough space and got back down on my hands and knees. From there it was flat onto my stomach where I began to wriggle my way forward. My hands weren?t a lot of help since the sand gave way too easy. So it was up to my legs to push me further along. Like I said, it wasn?t far. Maybe no more than two metres, but the way the roof pressed down on me, not to mention the feeling I got radiating out of that darkness? I had to stop twice on the way and swallow my panic.
That place wasn?t quiet, either. Each time I stopped to collect myself it lashed out, and I saw images of the door swinging shut while I was stuck in a claustrophobic nightmare, pinched between unstoppable concrete and a cloying wall of sand and dirt. I saw my feet kicking frantically, my hands unable to find purchase as the whole tunnel pinched down on my midriff like a curious child crushing a bug. It would have kept me there. The search party would have never found the door, they would have never heard my cries. It would have kept me pinned in the darkness, and it would have relished my torturous death.
I could only hope it was bluffing. Something was alive down there, but it wasn?t the actual tunnel itself. It couldn?t force the door shut or rearrange soil and earth on a whim. I just had to calm myself and catch my breath, and when I did, I found myself able to wriggle free.
On the other side I climbed out into an open room. It was derelict, with only a few holes in the wall with trailing electrical wires to say where equipment had once stood. There were bits of old wood and metal on the floor, too rusted to recognise. But it was empty of anything meaningful. Whoever had cleared it out decades before had probably been the last person to ever disturb that room. Well? except for one person?
The sand in this place was scarce, but enough scattered the floor that I could see where disturbances had been made. The girl had entered, sure enough, and as I tracked her path I saw clearly that she had passed through this room and through another doorway, opposite to where I stood. This tunnel made an unequivocal descent, knifing through the Earth and straight into inky darkness. Standing over the stairs I could hear the faint drips of distant water and rustling echoes of every breath and movement I made. The sound of my own blood in my ears was deafening.
Death lived down there, plain and simple. You could smell it in the musty air. Hell, there weren?t even any cobwebs or signs of rats. Anyone could have stood there and felt something reaching into their minds, telling them to go anywhere else but down. For me it felt like I was an ant who?d just looked up and spotted an enormous eye, framed by a magnifying glass, bearing down on it. Something was looking at me. Something was looking right at me, just on the other side of those shadows. If I lifted my light, I knew I?d see something terrible staring back at me.
You?re welcome to try, it laughed.
I?d seen this thing before.
With trembling hands I raised the light and saw nothing. For a moment I nearly laughed. Could I have just imagined it? I wondered. Could all those moments of hearing inhuman thoughts be nothing more than an overactive imagination? I so wanted to believe that. No one has ever quite wanted to be alone like I did in that moment.
Except the stairs weren?t totally empty. There was a shoe, a little one. A brightly coloured sneaker, the kind of thing that would pad a young girl?s foot. The laughter caught in my throat. I was feeling unsure of myself. Had I really heard those taunting thoughts echoing from the dark? Did it even matter? I had to go down. I had to see.
I took the steps one at a time until I reached the bottom. My first instinct was to check the space ahead, to see further into the darkness. The dripping humid space that greeted me was as derelict as the room above. Except down here the walls weren?t as clean cut. Maybe water had run down and coated them in layer after layer of organic-looking limestone. Whatever it was, it leant the tunnel a slightly warped appearance, as if the very laws of perspective were twisted out of sync by the dark.
When I was content that the tunnel was empty, I let my eyes fall down to my feet where I examined the shoe. There wasn?t so much as a scratch. Even the shoelaces were still tied. I touched it and for a brief moment I willed myself into the object?s past, seeing what emotions still lingered close to its history. Nothing about the process is reliable, but it was my best hope. And that was when the strangest image came to me.
The last time that shoe had been with the girl was on the beach. She was with her father, running and giggling. He told her he had a secret and whipped her up into his arms. She felt happy in that moment. Safe. She hadn?t seen the man in so long. He promised her a vacation. But she mustn?t tell Mummy.
The funniest thought entered my head and I looked up towards the tunnel. The ribbed limescale that coated the walls was grossly discoloured. A peculiar rainbow of bone white and sickly purple, it stank as bad as it looked. And that voice, the one inside the shadows, it had shut up awfully quickly. Hadn?t I challenged it by raising the torch? For something whose thoughts had reeked of millennia old hatred, it had fled back from the light as if it had never had any power to begin with.
I took a step backwards and dropped the shoe. Could it read my mind too? Could it feel the realisation that had dawned on me, freezing my whole body in place as if a bucket of ice had been poured over my head? I think luck, once again, played a big part in my escape. Had I stepped just another foot forward, I would have been caught.
The tunnel snapped shut barely a few inches from my feet. For a split-second I saw nothing but a wall of muscle. And when it reopened, there was a quivering puckering hungry sphincter the size of a manhole. The rim of its muscular mouth was dotted with a hundred beady eyes that glared at me with rage. It had expected something so tasty, so real. Instead all it got was a mouthful of dust.
I was so frightened I scrabbled backwards on my hands and feet. For a brief moment the torch was loose in my grip and I lost sight of the gaping mouth that slobbered after me, only to turn back in an instant and see that it was gone! The only sign that anything had even been there was the trickling of dust and sand from the roof of a perfectly square man-made corridor. I could have so easily stayed there, frozen, debating with myself whether it was ever even true. Except the shoe remained clutched in one hand, and it had been spattered with a foul-smelling goo as the mouth slammed close. Even as I held it, the viscous milky fluid began to burn, and I threw the shoe down with a disgusted cry.
Lucky boy, the voice said. Lucky once in your house, standing by the stairs. Lucky twice in the woods, saved by a friend. Now lucky thrice in the dark. Just how lucky can you be? It asked. If you keep poking around in places you don?t belong, your luck will run out.
?**** you!? I cried. Whatever it was, it had made its point clear. It had set a trap, a clever one too. The girl wasn?t on the beach. She was with her damn father, somewhere in Ireland. I had sensed his intent buried deep within the memories that lingered around the shoe like second-hand smoke. The shoe had been taken by something else, put to use as bait for me.
And I still wasn?t safe. I?d crawled right into the belly of the beast like a God damn idiot. I hurried back up the stairs, trying to ignore the rising waves of emotion that were crashing through the bunker. It felt like I was escaping a flash-flood of oil. I could feel that thing, whatever or wherever it was, flexing its muscles just out of sight. What was it getting ready for? What did it want?
My light fell upon the way out and all the breath left my body like I?d been punched in the gut. For a brief second, a fractional moment of time too small to quantify, the tunnel I?d dug in the sand wasn?t there. Instead there was a mouth, just like the one down below, embedded in a wall of muscle that expanded infinitely out of view. But then the torch caught up with my eyes and the light revealed a plain mound of sand with a small crawlspace between it and the ceiling. There were no calcified spikes that threatened to skewer me. No bubbling ribbed oesophagus, slick with digestive fluids, waiting to swallow me whole. I suddenly realised I?d been a ****ing idiot, and I?d left my shovel on the other side of the sand. There?d be no digging; I had to crawl back through the way I came.
You?re welcome to try, the darkness said, sensing my thoughts.
I could feel it closing in on me as a kind of psychic pressure. I?m not sure I?d describe this thing as angry, so much as just cold and alone. It was everywhere and nowhere, something that wasn?t human, that had never been human.
It lived in the dark, and only the dark.
It was only my torch that kept me safe. Wherever it roamed I saw dusty concrete and not much else. But wherever the darkness encroached I could feel those ominous thoughts?that taste of dry cobweb?seeping back in like water through my fingers. I readied myself to leave, to keep the light fixed dead ahead, when I felt a waft of hot air blow past my shoulders. By this point the distinction between thoughts and real sensation was weakening. The things it suggested to me were starting to feel as real as the ground beneath my feet. I don?t know if I would have faced a psychic death or a physical one, but that thing was after me all the same.
Before I could let me nerves get the better of me, I ran forward and began crawling, and then wriggling. The torch was effective in such a small space, lighting it up as plain as daytime. But behind me was another story. I could feel warm appendages caress my legs, could feel the damp creeping through my trousers where it pressed moistly against my bare skin. There was a hint of suction, maybe, as if something was getting ready to clean me out whole like I was a chicken drumstick at a family BBQ.
My head emerged from the tunnel just as something snagged my foot. I lost all sense and reason, and in hysterics I tried to kick and scream my way free. It felt so stupid that some sand was between me and freedom. My arms were pinned close to my side (had the tunnel been so narrow on my way in? I wondered), but there it was! Freedom was so close and all I had to do was loosen some damn Earth!
But panic only made it worse. I hurt my shoulder as I struggled, hurt it bad, and tears welled up in my eye. Frustration was starting to overwhelm me. I tried everything to calm myself, but it wasn?t enough. Something had me, something had me in its jaws real good. My foot wasn?t just caught, it was being pulled, slowly, inexorably back into a waiting gullet.
Luck runs out, the darkness said.
I screamed so loud that I was coughing up blood for days after. It was rough. In that moment I felt all hope extinguish, all joy disappear. This thing?s mind was flooding into mine, kicking off its shoes and rifling through my memories like a rude guest. It showed me what it had in store for me. It showed me that I wouldn?t even be alone. There were others. So many others trapped down in the dark. At least I finally found out why I?ve never encountered anyone else like me. We make ourselves known to the predators that lurk behind every shadow. This thing had been stalking me for a long, long time.
Someone out there heard my screaming, although they never quite explained how. They said it just came to them as clear as day, and I reckon they might just have been a little bit sensitive to thoughts like I am to have been able to find me. Either way, someone came to my rescue. A hand, cold and clammy but so God damned welcome in the moment, grabbed my wrist and yanked me out. I didn?t even care that it was my bad shoulder they tugged on. By the time I slithered out of that place I was sobbing.
The darkness had done a real number on my head.
I don?t remember much else. They got me somewhere safe, and I got a mention in the paper for going the extra mile. Story was that I got stuck crawling through and freaked out, that was all. A severe panic attack. Whoever saved me didn?t stick around. I tried looking for them, tried asking for help. My guess? That thing set a trap for people like me, and it caught more than one. Like I said, there was no way anyone could have heard my actual screams through that door and with all the wind. Makes more sense to me that they heard my mental ones. Maybe they got a little too close to the darkness too. Maybe they glimpsed a little of what had me in its jaws. Who knows?
I steer clear of places like that now. Places that have that special vibe, you know the one. People who see me think I?m overreacting. They think I?m being a coward or superstitious just cause I won't go down into the basement, or take a lonely walk to an outhouse. I?d like to tell them the truth. Maybe even show it to them. But I couldn?t do that. Seeing this thing, noticing it, I think that?s what pisses it off. Anyone else could?ve gone into that place and had no trouble. It showed itself to me because I?d spotted it, years before. And who knows? Maybe it?s not the only thing like it. Like I said, we all have those gut feelings don?t we? Everyone, no matter where or when they live, have had those kinds of feelings. There are always places that will give us the creeps.
We should trust those feelings more often.


Source.