Sample: Dying of the Light (2017)

The window is open. It lets in the warm night air, summer with only the faintest hint of fall. The air has not yet begun to slump under the weight of dead leaves. It never will.

A boy sits by the window. He is not quite a man, not exactly a child, and his pale, round face speaks to a life of rich food, little work, and even less sun. His hands are soft and unmarked, but for the ink stains at the fingertips. Cicadas call to him from outside the window, inviting him to step out into the open air. He rests his elbows on the desk, and his pen trails barely legible words over the page in front of him, thick parchment splayed between long pianist’s fingers. The ink is dark and strong, sinking deep into the paper and dripping from the pen’s tip, blotting small circles of black. He places the pen in the inkwell for a moment, glancing out the window.

Somehow, it’s the sounds that bother him more than anything. The rest he can at least make some sense of, but the sounds plague him constantly. Cicadas at night, birdsong in the mornings, even the sound of slow summer wind blowing through the green-capped trees that rise behind the house. That used to rise behind the house, he corrects himself. He can handle the rest for now, but the sounds…

A boy sits by a window, trying not to hear what his ears are convinced he is hearing, staring down at his paper. The words—disconnected, meaningless—overlap and intersect each other in increasingly random and confused directions. They grow smaller and smaller, the lines growing thinner to fit into the unmarked corners, until examining them becomes a strain on the eyes. Splatters of ink coat most of the bare surface of the desk, a remnant of frantic, hurried scribbling. For the moment, however, the boy’s hand is calm. He paces himself. The window is open, and the wind sometimes sounds like sighing.

He considers that maybe the sounds really are there, outside and unseen, just waiting for him to come out and explore. Or, if not there, then they must still be somewhere, surely? Starting somewhere else, wherever that other place is—wherever anything is, really—and filtering through to him? He carefully ignores the small little voice that asks, what if the sounds aren’t real? What if nothing is?

The page is nearly full now, the words overlapping again and again, until the parchment—the skin of some animal, stretched taut and dried rigid—is more ink than not. He leans back in his oversized, overstuffed armchair, tilting his head just so until it rests against the sharply winged back. His hand keeps moving, nearly of its own accord and independent of his exhaustion, letters and lines flowing out as liquid pigment before solidifying on the page. In the lamplight, flickering as the thin oil runs low, the white spaces left on the page look like the blank eyes of some cave creature, peering sightlessly out of the gloom. The boy pushes the paper aside with an involuntary shudder, resting it at the top of a tall stack of parchment. His hand shakes, more ink drips clumsily, adding to the accumulation of black stains on the large oak desk. He closes his eyes, running an ink-stained hand down his face.

The boy reaches out, taking a fresh page from the dwindling pile of unblemished parchment. Running out of paper won’t be an issue; he can start on the walls when the paper runs out, and after that there are the sheets, and the curtains. He doubts he’ll have to plan much further than that, but a lack of paper is not the main issue. A regretful glance into a desk drawer confirms it: he’s running out of ink. That poses a much more pressing problem. The small, scared voice that he can’t seem to ignore speaks up again from the back of his skull. What happens when the ink runs out?

He shouldn’t have waited this long, he knows that know. The cellar had held surplus stores of just about any necessity: ink, paper wine, wheels of cheese. If he had access to the cellar, he might never run out. That knowledge had made it even more crushing when, hurrying down the stairs to fetch more ink, he had watched the front door, lower landing, and cellar stairs slowly vanish into thick grey mist.

Of course, this had only surprised the boy to an extent; when the inevitable finally occurs, it can only come as so much of a shock. Still, he hadn’t expected the expanding void—or, from another point of view, the collapsing space around him—to reach the walls of his home so quickly. He had slowed in his writing, perhaps, and the encroaching grey had stolen away a few precious hours, and several priceless bottles of black ink. These days, the boy no longer dares to leave his study; the last time he paused to look out onto the landing, the kitchen and half the staircase had faded slowly into flat, empty grey. It seemed to pick up speed the closer it came to its epicenter, traveling mere feet in one night, yards the next.

The first sign had been a slow greying of the horizon, like a cloud-bank ready to burst with snow, unseasonable for a summer in Wales. He had been writing a letter when he first noticed the grey, and had originally thought it to be a thick fog, rolling in off the mountains. As his pen broke contact with the parchment—Dear father, all is well—the fog had come down from the hills faster, speeding over the flat expanse of farmland in the distance. It took the trees beginning to vanish from the hillsides to make him understand. Confusion had come first, and then panic. Out of some blind desperation, he had returned to his letter, to write something—a plea for help, maybe, or a last will and testament, he hadn’t had time to decide—and as he scratched out the first letter, the advancing wall of mist began to slow. Another letter, and it slowed further still. With every moment of pause, the wall came faster, and the boy began to understand. As it came closer, over the hours—days, maybe—the words did less and less to halt the grey’s advance. They needed to come faster, splashing ink into barely-legible phrases, losing coherence in favor of speed. The paper stacked higher and higher as the grey devoured the surrounding landscape, and the reservoir of ink drew lower.

Still, even the shortage of ink isn’t the main problem. The boy has been putting off sleep, hunched over his desk, helpless to do anything but scrawl his letters, losing all concept of time. Long before the ink runs out, he will have to sleep. When he does, he knows, the grey will take him too.

The boy sits next to a window. The window is open. Outside, the sounds of wind, of insects and birds, of occasional rain on leaves. Outside, a blank void, creeping at an ever growing speed, vine-like, up the brickwork of the house. His eyes drift closed for a moment, listening to the wind. There is sound, and warmth, but beyond that…

He shakes himself from his reverie, returning hurriedly to the new words on the new page—Dear father, all is well, Dear father, all is well, Dear—the writing as clumsy now as a child’s scribble. He can see his childhood home being swallowed up in his mind’s eye, piece by piece. Soon, there will be nothing left but him and his desk, and after that, nothing at all.

I wasn’t even supposed to be here, he thinks dully, in the morbid hope that some higher power is listening. I was just supposed to watch the house for father, while the maid is away… he almost laughs, massaging his cramping wrist with his free hand, the words on the page growing smaller, his thoughts growing blurry through his exhaustion. He won’t be happy about the trophy room.

Finally, as his eyes close without warning for the ninth time, he simply gives up. After what must be days, now, of sleepless fear spent drawing out the end, the boy knows what’s coming. He lets the pen drop, bent-tip first, to the floor, clenching and unclenching his fingers to relieve the painfully strained muscles. Already, he can hear the advancing stillness filling the air, as each step of the stairs to the attic is swallowed by the grey. The sounds of the house settling and shifting—sounds he had become accustomed to as ever-present—drift into nothing for a long moment, before returning as a distant, muffled echo. Like a distant conversation, overheard through a locked door and a few thin walls.

The walls to the boy’s study slowly shift from white to grey as the void surrounds him, snuffing out the bookshelves, the carpet, and the unlit logs resting in the hearth. He pulls his legs up onto the chair as the floor melts away, and wraps his arms tight around his knees. The only source of light left is the dim, flickering lamp on a shelf above the desk, only inches from the depthless grey. The last thing the boy sees before the lamp, too, fades away, are the sheets of ink-soaked paper, their black letters burned into his eyes like sun spots.

Somewhere else, where things like buildings and sunlight and life still exist, a window is open. In the distance, fog rolls in off the mountains, painting the countryside grey.