Fifteen Steps
Jun 17
RATING
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.
I had been partway down the stair before the dim and diffuse light from the upstairs windows no longer lit my way and total darkness had engulfed my descent. I stood even more than ten steps further down that stair than was physically possible!
I turned and rushed back up the stairwell in panicked flight, but after counting thirty steps again, I did not find myself at the landing that should have been above, nor even see any of the diffuse light from the windowed rooms above that would usually have lit the space in dim and ghostly radiance. I knew I was mistaken and had simply miscounted the stairs all those years of traversing them.
Ten more quaking steps I took upwards…
Forty! Forty steps! I would be standing inside my own attic now if my count was accurate, and if the stairs had ever in reality ascended into the attic. The darkness pressed in around me, suffocating and terrible for all its formless potential in the way of nightmares and lurking childhood monsters.
My vision should have adjusted to the dark and the gray outlines of shapes, walls and railing; the deeper black of doorways around the landing should have appeared, but they did not!
I reached out and could feel the rough plaster of the walls beside me, the same rough plaster walls that were familiar to me, the walls of my own house…the house I was supposedly in, yet could not see, and which both my other senses and my memory of the steps told me was not the place in which I found myself now. The black stairwell simply continued on into infinity, wherever I could touch, above and below.
After feeling the solid, smooth plaster of the walls with my fearful fingers, I kept my hands gripped around the wooden rail, simple and round, smoothed from varnish and years of use. I found some small comfort in its solidity and presence, an anchor in the blackness between the sinister, empty gulfs above and below, both places that had once promised familiarity with few enough steps, and which now bred only the unknown.
I stood still and breathed heavily, panic-induced sweat moistening my brow and body. I was too afraid to descend once more, to try for the lower landing, to head down into the darkness again, for that way seemed hell and the gaping maw of some starved nightmare.
Though when I turned, it was no different from the depthless blackness above me, wherein lurked some terrible fiend waiting to do me harm. Or so I imagined, for nothing stirred in the thick, empty black around me – nothing above or below, nothing but the air from my breath and the unseen shaking of my nerve-wracked form.
I tried ascension again, to find the landing that must lie above me, foolishly tricking myself into believing the truth of the situation was that I had only climbed a few stairs and miscounted in the darkness and my own panic.
Another ten steps, fifteen, twenty-five! All carefully counted. I stopped and sagged, hands gripping the unseen, unending railing for support.
My mind began to wonder, had I died? Had there been some accident where I had tripped upon the stair as I descended it in the dark and broke my neck, leaving me now a spirit trapped in some hellish purgatory where I was forever ascending and descending an endless set of stairs in the dark?
Or I wondered if this were some mad jest, some trick inexplicably pulled off by overzealous friends even now watching from some hidden place and laughing uproariously at my predicament and their own cleverness. I cursed and threatened them aloud in the darkness until the silence of the unseen walls around me began to creep nervously into my mind.
I turned to descend the black stair once more, carefully gripping the railing for comfort and balance, horrified at the subconscious projection of tittering demons lurking like cobwebs in the unseen air, gathering to feast below, their arms outstretched in welcome above.
In that linear darkness, my stomach turned a sickening corner as I moved slowly down the stairs into the lightless throat that could not be escaped no matter which of my two possible directions I turned.
I reached out carefully to touch the opposite wall of the narrow stairwell, to assure myself it was still there, that some marvelous escape did not lie in that unconventional direction. Its rough solidity did not fail me once as I descended, always descended, into that dark and unseen maw I imagined in fright below.
I tried the stair again, climbing them further than they possibly could have gone, and yet I failed to find the landing that must be there. I stood in the darkness and I felt as though had not moved, as though despite all movement, all rising, I had not moved a single step from where I had stood.
I raced upwards and downwards, counting madly, stumbling and terrified in the darkness. I had lost count of the stairs I had traversed. Already it had begun not to matter, for I found neither direction held anything different, no changes I could measure or mark.
Finally, I tore off my shirt and tied it around the rail, descended steps, counting. Fifteen. Then I turned and ascended again, counting. Fifteen. I hurried further, up and down, feeling rail and groping the stair, though my shirt was nowhere to be found!
I ran up them screaming! Stumbling! How many? I do not know, I did not count. I fell on my knees and wept, hanging limply, teetering there on the edge of a step in the darkness, my hands above me clutched to the solid rail along the inside wall of…of what could not be my house!
Eventually, I wondered at throwing myself down the stair. Letting my grip loosen and allowing simple gravity to take its course. Could I do it? Would I have the courage? Would it even be the right thing to do? Would anyone ever find my body (for I did not plan to survive the fall)?
Would such a course free me at all, or I would I simply fall eternally into that black, empty pit I could not see below me, but stretched out forever beyond my sightless eyes?
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