Estimated reading time: 3 minutes
Excerpt from Professor Jaeger's 'Analysing Controversies and Speculation over the Oro-Empirical and Pre-Dansk Psychological Treatise; Death, Magic and Allies', published 1295, Leid Press.
The dark is a frightening place. All logic and rationality crumbles, tensions hike, and we jump and flinch at the faintest things, even when we know it can't possibly be anything more than a creak of a contracting floorboard. We know this. In daylight, we know this. But at night, in the dark...how could it possibly be that simple?
But what triggers this betrayal of the mind? Is it chemical? Is it because we're diurnal creatures, and our bodies can't handle cortisol when, by all biological rights, we're supposed to be asleep? Or is it more basic than that - that we rely so much on sight that we cease functioning when it's taken away from us? But in that case, what about the blind? Or does it come down to some primordial instinct etched into our DNA from a time before locked doors, still trying to keep us safe from the wolves and bears that can no longer reach us?
Take your pick. They're all reasonable enough. But the dwarfs of the Chyrzonmarch present a fourth option - one that, in daylight, I'm sure you'll scoff at. One that, in daylight, I admit makes no sense at all. But it's one that I have researched, weighed and now present to you all the same.
The world around us changes at night. It gets dark. The usual day-to-day creatures sleep, and others you've never caught more than a passing glimpse of awake. The calls of one beast or another shred the black silence, those awful, blood-curdling screams you've heard in the spring. Why should an animal make a noise like that unless it was being killed by something worse?
Well, why shouldn't it? It's going about its business in its world. And, when the sun sets and the moon rises, we are no longer a part of it. The world...changes.
There are all kinds of stories about the night - werewolves, midnight wraiths, vampires... All kinds of strange things are said to wander the darkness. Stories that, in the light of day...well. I've said it already: they don't make sense. But it's more than just fanciful musing by idle writers, isn't it? What about the things you imagine? The grinning, disembodied faces; the claws reaching up from beneath the bed to seize a hanging foot; the big, black, red-eyed dogs staring at you from the edge of the dark when you turn around in bed; half-rotten skeletons with wide grins and necks three feet too long peering through the window; the slow, scraping tap at the door...
Why do these images not come to us in daylight? Why only in the dark? What spell are we under?
What spell indeed. And are they just images? We are in that strange world for half of our lives, and conscious for less than thirty percent of it. How much can you recall from your childhood but largely fogged fragments of things that, in hindsight, couldn't have happened? Perhaps it's the same phenomenon. I have never held a spiny-tailed tarantula in my life, and yet the image of one in my hand is far too vivid, and far too old, to be untrue. Why would it remain with me if there weren't some truth to it? Or is there a difference between truth and fact? I suspect there is, but that, dear reader, is a matter for another time.
I put it to you: the fear we feel at night, it's real. Our hearts race. We sweat. Our eyes flick around. We're convinced something's happening that is worth getting riled up about. It's not a sensation we feel without good reason during the day, and yet it occurs so much more readily at night. And perhaps it's there for good reason, too. Perhaps, what seems foolish in daylight, is peril in the dark. Perhaps, it's all real.
After all: the world changes at night...
This story is not to be copied or reproduced without my written permission. Copyright © 2021 Kim Wedlock
