The Well of Mimir

You can’t have the lights on, it must be dark — your eyes must be blinded. That’s the only way to find them, because you can’t see them. They move at the speed of light, never standing still long enough for any fleshy human optics to glimpse, running through the wires. But you can hear them, humming and oscillating in the dark.

That’s why it has to be dark. They claim when one of your senses is lost, your other senses compensate. I don’t know if that’s true, but it sure seems you can hear better when your eyes aren’t distracted by light and color, shape and motion. You become more attentive to your the signals your ears are sending you.

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“Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”

My mother’s voice wavered as she began to read the poem aloud; her voice flowed thick from her throat but quick through her lips, slowly filling the room as her lungs found the air and with it strength.

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They were part of a game — a strange variant of chess discovered on a secret and disturbing corner of the world-wide web — played with friends who were as repulsed and fascinated with the strange forms upon the board as I had been when I had decided upon its purchase.

I kept them under a glass case, carefully locked away every night, the strange pewter figures sprawled across a plain of unsteady blocks of black-and-white abutted by red and nameless colors that seemed to shift position when one wasn’t looking at them.

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The clouds curdled thick and gray in the sky; somewhere, a patch of brilliant blue shone.

“You’ve been corrupted by the forces you seek to control,” he shouted hoarsely at the back of the figure atop the rise ahead of him, who stared out across the city below and sky above.

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He had put all his anger into the black dog. Every ounce, every trickle, every whisper; he filled up on it and put it into the dog, away from him.

As such, he didn’t like to think about what was out back, out in the broken little house that stood at the far edge of the long, narrow lot. He didn’t like to think about what spent its days hidden in the dark interior, behind rotting wooden planks, beneath loose, age-curled shingles.

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The following is a handwritten scrap torn from a journal. It is unattributed.

There are colors dancing in the darkness that no one can percieve. Tonight, only, I saw the deeper blackness drawing all things into it and shied away from depths blacker than space, blacker than the caverns beneath the Earth.

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I flicked off the lights as I descended the stairwell, the swiftly fading luminance leaving upon my retinas a faint and ghostly impression of the railed stair descending to the family room, but also leaving me to finish trodding them in utter darkness.

I had taken fifteen steps in the darkness, and I felt a nameless anxiety; at twenty steps, I began to worry; at thirty steps, ten frightened steps further in the blackness, panic took hold, for my stairwell only contained perhaps twenty stairs between the upper and lower floors of the house.

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The cabinet door creaked back open and I froze. Some trick of physics, I guessed…I hoped. The door was crooked, the hinges broken, it was just swinging back open because the panel had not found a point of equilibrium. The door stopped, hung silent, quiet, a quarter of the way open, leaving me a good look at the back of the head…and then it moved, the disturbed body falling out of the cabinet, pushing aside the cabinet door as it slid gruesomely, limply out to sprawl on the floor at my feet.

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The smell in the bathroom was hideous, as though someone or something had died in there. Well, perhaps not quite that bad. The stench was certainly unpleasant though not enough to gag…yet. Unfortunately, the janitor only came in once a week, and there was no one else I could complain to; this was the evening shift, the seven-to-midnight drag, so I would be alone in the building until sometime just prior to midnight. Hours to go.

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