“The Thing Outside” by Arlen Markob. Crayon and colored pencil on construction paper.
If Anton MacLeigh could have been called a fortunate man, his luck was little more than an illusion. To believe that some unnamed universal force was working in his favor, altering reality to his benefit, is to deny the appalling reality of his experience and to ignore the terrible thing that eventually became of him. To be certain, it seemed for the larger part of his life that there was some providence guiding that which affected him. He was born into a stable family and was naturally intelligent and sociable enough to make it through school comfortably, though not quite so intelligent or sociable to have been burdened by high expectations from his teachers or popularity among his peers. He floated through college in much the same way, and although his parents were not particularly affluent, they were able to cover his expenses easily enough until he could begin his career. He attained a healthy circle of friends, not too small to leave him frequently lonely, but not so large as to be overwhelming. Life was not difficult–at least, when it was, the difficulty was overcome quickly, and he was able to continue going forward with relative comfort and ease. It seemed that at every intersection, Anton knew just which way to turn–or perhaps that each direction he went molded itself to his interest. The effect of this easily-won fortune was that he felt little motivation to consider the implications of his actions, and hardly had any reason to explore the complexities of the universe beyond his minuscule inhabitance. As long as things mostly went his way, and as long as any inconveniences could be chalked up as anomalies in his facile existence, he was bound to live a life of happy thoughtlessness. What purpose, after all, was there in pushing the boundaries of his comfort, and risking that they might burst? Why open any doors that might spoil the perfection of his atmosphere? Or, as Anton might have stated it himself (his vocabulary was largely limited to cliches), why try to fix what wasn’t broken? It seemed that there was already a satisfactory plan in place for his life, a plan that he dared not challenge or alter. The universe, however, if it can be said to conspire at all, had a different plan for Anton–one that would plunge him into unfathomable depths of uncertainty, discomfort, and darkness.
The perturbations began some time after Anton graduated and used his business degree (as well as a familial connection) to secure a well-paying position at a large firm in the city. After only a few months there, he had enough savings (coupled with a contribution from his parents) to purchase a new house on a fresh suburban block. It was one of the contemporary neighborhoods with cookie-cutter houses, each one slightly different in decor but eerily similar in design, as if cast from the same mold but altered just enough so as to not appear identical. The one into which Anton moved was painted a pleasant blue-grey with white trimmings and was wedged between two other houses–one beige and one grey–that appeared to have the same layout, only mirrored. His new neighbors–the Dormer family on one side and an elderly couple named Boris and June Chaplain on the other–were unfailingly cordial whenever they encountered one another, and they became familiar rather quickly. Anton often received invitations for drinks with Terry Dormer, a fast food restaurant franchise owner, father of two bright young children, and husband to a glowing young wife. He was also frequently offered vegetables from the Chaplains’ backyard garden, and had brief but pleasant conversations with Boris, a retired foreman at an automobile plant. The Chaplain offspring, roughly the same age as Anton, had “chosen their own path,” according to the elder. Despite wishing them well, Boris did little to hide his disdain for their divergent lifestyles and told Anton that he wished they had been as “hard-working,” “diligent,” and “respectful” as the young businessman. Anton’s heart was warmed by the elder’s appreciation for his character. He felt truly humbled, and was happy to find himself in good company among his new neighbors in his beautiful new home.
That blue-grey house, well-furnished, equipped with all the modern appliances and amenities a young bachelor might want, could not have been more perfect. His robust income kept the cupboards and refrigerator stocked with as much food as a single man could enjoy. He purchased only name-brand items and was happy to be able to do so. There were moments when he felt lonely, as he had yet to find a romantic partner, but this feeling was less a type of sadness and a desire to bond with another person and more an anxiety about being by himself. When he was alone in that house, especially when there was nothing to watch on the television, there was little to do except think. Although he could not describe it nor begin to admit it to himself, having the time and space to think was terrifying. His mind, when idle, felt as though it was simultaneously being sucked into itself and pulled away from itself, as if there was a strong magnetic force within and without, as if he was precariously balanced between humiliating self-awareness and overwhelming understanding of cosmic infinity. In spite of the threat they posed to his internal sense of stability, these feelings came and went quickly, as it was never long before he was again surrounded by his coworkers, friends, or family. As long as he was distracted and entertained, he remained almost entirely invulnerable to suggestions of existential horror, and he could live his fortunate life unimpeded.
Anton’s sense of comfort and security soon began to chip away. This process was slow and easy to deny at first. It seemed in certain fleeting yet disturbing instances that, when he looked out of his windows or opened a door, instead of seeing his backyard or his bathroom, he would be gazing into an infinite gulf of starry blackness, as if the door or window had become a portal to an unknown location lightyears away from his home. These moments were very brief, and after being exposed to an alternate reality for only a moment, he was able to return to his senses and purge his mind of intrusive thoughts of endless nothingness with ease. After some time, however, his efforts to go about his day normally after these experiences became more difficult. At the start, the impression of peering into another plane of existence was gone in a blink, but as the weeks passed, it grew to last for several seconds at a time. These moments, as relatively short as they might have been, were enough to cause an exponential increase in the terror he felt once they were over. Whereas the initial glimpses seemed to be still images, they proved to be animated as their duration increased, and he was able to perceive movement in the blackness. The void before him was not static or predictable but was amorphous and chaotic, constantly changing in size and shape yet remaining infinite and indefinite. It swarmed with hints of insurmountable heights and unfathomable depths that could be measured not by feet or miles but only by vague, overpowering sensations. It bore implications of things unattainable yet at the same time irresistible, foreign yet familiar, distant yet just within arm’s reach. He could grasp those things. At certain times, he desperately wanted to do so. All he had to do was reach his hand out of that open window, or set one foot out of that open door. As simple as the notion was, he knew subconsciously that breaching the confines of his home to touch (let alone enter) such a boundless plane would open his simple and happy life to irredeemable complexities and irreconcilable knowledge.
The only comfort Anton could secure was in the fact that this void was separate from him. It always remained on the other side of the window, or past the doorway he had just opened. He had yet to act on the impulse to make contact with it, to see whether the blackness had any tangibility to it, and thus he could imagine that it was little more than a hallucination. This is the thought that allowed him to continue his daily routine largely uninterrupted in spite of the increasing anomalies he experienced in his empty house. His life was still largely under control. His employment was stable, his family and friends were dependable, and his home was still his own. With these constants in place, the terrifying moments in which he was forced to confront potential nothingness could be mostly ignored. Even so, these moments established a lingering presence in the back of his mind. He became slightly more nervous than usual, slightly more irritable. He still laughed with his friends, but not quite as loudly or as long as before. He found himself avoiding reflective surfaces as much as possible, as if he was worried he might see something other than a familiar form. The praise he received from his parents, his coworkers, and his neighbor about his work ethic and social value started to feel less heartwarming and humbling and more… disgusting. His visions, recurrent as they were, had created small cracks in the walls of his reality. Those walls still stood, but just enough blackness was seeping in to make his world feel significantly less real.
Life grew increasingly distressing when the nightmares began. The first of these nocturnal terrors was, like the first of his waking visions, brief and simple. He was floating in the midst of nothing, naked and untethered, with no point of reference except for distant galaxies and nebulae that seemed to dance around him mockingly. He awoke gasping and clawing in hopes of grabbing hold of anything that could serve as an anchor. It might have trebled his panic to open his eyes in his pitch black bedroom if his hands did not immediately take hold of his bedsheets, which were able to comfort and ground him. He hardly slept another moment that night, and went in to work the next morning groggy and agitated. Three cups of coffee weren’t even enough to enliven him again, and his coworkers quickly took notice of the change in his attitude. The security provided by the idea that the void he glimpsed in brief moments was something remote had been shattered by the dream. In it, he had felt its smothering emptiness and its mind-melting uncertainty. It had been a repulsively tangible experience. His body, inside and out, crawled with the memory of unfamiliar sensations, and his mind churned with confusion and doubt. A small voice inside him that tried to assert that it wasn’t that bad, that perhaps it could be understood, was quickly silenced. It was awful, he thought. It was beyond bizarre. It threatened everything he knew and loved. When he drifted in that ethereal space, his family, his friends, his job, his home–as steady and fulfilling as they were–were not even memories. They were mere abstractions, things as formless and indiscernible as the void itself. This dissolution of the constants that anchored his life was the most terrifying aspect of the experience. In the absence of those points of reference, he did not simply have nothing–he was nothing. He therefore determined that the void, however it presented itself to him, had to be rejected.
The dream recurred. It came back to him again and again, night after night, more and more vivid, ruining his slumber and rendering his waking hours dreadful. He made many efforts to mitigate the atrocious phenomenon, including sleeping with a lamp on and letting pleasant music play while he laid in bed. Nothing seemed to have any effect, and he grew to loathe the sunset and the prospect of rest. After a month, with his productivity waning and his coworkers beginning to comment on his constant tiredness and agitation, he gave in and made an appointment with a psychiatrist. It was an incredibly embarrassing experience, and he was careful to hide it from his acquaintances. Someone so stable and hard-working simply can not be mentally ill, he thought. He was a happy person. A normal person. Yet he found himself sitting in a doctor’s office, sharing accounts of hallucinations and delusions. He was careful not to share too much detail so as to make himself seem in need of hospitalization or a shamefully serious diagnosis. The specialist prescribed him an anxiety medicine and a sleeping aid, but he was back in two weeks complaining that they had hardly made any difference. Both were increased in dosage, but another two weeks later, with the nightmares growing worse and the daytime visions more frequent, he was given antipsychotic medication. This was even more humiliating–at least, it would have been if he had not become so desperate. At the start he spoke quietly and tried to hide himself when at the pharmacy, but he came to have little energy to practice such caution. He rushed home and took the new pills eagerly, praying that they would do something, anything, to alleviate his condition. What he failed to realize is that there was no medicine that could cure knowledge.
The terror culminated on a Friday. Anton had worked later than normal and didn’t leave the office until nearly nine o’clock in the evening. This was in part due to an effort to compensate for his diminished productivity (his manager was hinting at replacing him with a more “steadfast” employee), and because he wished to avoid his neighbors, who had been calling attention to his increasingly strange behavior, prying at him with questions he did not wish to answer. For the most part, however, he had a swollen sense of trepidation at the thought of returning to his nicely furnished blue-grey house. To be sure, he was mentally exhausted from the week’s work and he desperately longed to relax on the couch, in front of his television, with a cold beverage in hand. But this longing was outmatched by an even more intense desire for his home to be his own again. The inescapable torment to which he had been subjected for months was far more draining, both physically and mentally, than his weekly labor, and any semblance of comfort or safety he could have felt in his own dwelling had been stripped away. He could hardly eat, sleep, or traverse from room to room without feeling that he was somehow unwelcome, or that he might be somewhere other than his house. Every window and every door appeared to lead somewhere it should not, and every time he closed his eyes, he could feel nebulous blackness seeping through the gaps in the walls. He wanted nothing more than to feel safe there again. He hungered for the facile happiness he had so long enjoyed, the stability of his internal and external lives, the blindness from which he had once benefited. Even if he knew he could not attain those things again in that house, he nonetheless had to make an attempt. He had to defend his home. He had to combat the void. It was all he knew to do.
Nothing had prepared him to face such an unimaginable phenomenon. He had no strategy and no alternatives, and no choice but to return to that house and plead for a renewed sense of belonging there. He would rage against the visions and claw through the nightmares however he could. After parking his car in the driveway and ensuring that his neighbors were not outside, he hesitantly went up the front steps and unlocked the door. The first floor was quickly illuminated by the flick of a light switch. The house was still and quiet, but rather than feeling inanimate as it was supposed to, the abode seemed to be holding its breath, anticipating something dreadful and exciting. Anton walked softly through his living room and kitchen, looking over his belongings which, despite being exactly where he put them, suddenly looked strangely out of place. It was not that he had an instantaneous shift in his sense of interior design, but rather that his furniture, appliances, electronics, and decor had gained an air of otherworldliness. Touching and sinking his fingers into the back of his plush couch, he felt grounded enough to accept the home as it was and to think of it as his again. He doffed his shoes, set his wallet and keys on the console, then went to the staircase with the intention of going up to his bedroom and putting on some pajamas.
A shiver raked its way through Anton’s body as he stood at the base of the stairs and looked up. The light switch had failed to illuminate the ascending steps, and he would have attributed this to a bulb being burnt out if the second floor did not appear so shockingly dark. None of the light from the first floor seemed able to penetrate it, nor did it seem that any of the street lamps outside were shining through the upstairs windows at all. His stomach sank and his knuckles went white as he tightly gripped the bottom end of the handrail. For a moment, he considered sleeping on the couch in his slacks and button-up shirt. Tomorrow was Saturday, he thought, so he could wait and go upstairs to shower and change when it was not so dark. This idea was quickly drowned out by a more determined one. No, he told himself, he was not going to be afraid. The house was his, and he was not going to let anyone or anything take it from him. He was going to storm up that staircase, put on his comfortable clothes, and enjoy what was left of his evening. “I deserve this,” he said to himself. “I earned this.” He took the first step. “I am a good son.” The second. “I am a hard worker.” The third. “I am diligent. I am respectful. I am normal.” The fourth, the fifth, the sixth. He was halfway to the top. The rest of the dozen steps were coupled with further assertions of his character.
When he moved his foot forward to land on what should have been the floor of the second story, his toe struck another step. Assuming he probably miscounted, he took it without thinking, but found again that he was not yet at the top. Two, five, and ten steps later, he was still not at the apex of the staircase. He looked behind him. The landing at the base of the stairs was still there, but it already appeared twice as far away as it normally did when he looked down from upstairs, despite the fact that he still had not reached the next floor. Ahead of him was still a choking blackness. Suddenly, Anton’s chest welled up with a blend of terror and anger. He was simultaneously horrified by the void overtaking his life and furious that his efforts to resist it were proving vain. He began sprinting up the steps, letting go of the handrail and lifting his legs as rapidly as he could manage. “I am a good son,” he shouted. “I am a hard worker. I am diligent. I am respectful. I am normal.” Continuing up the steps, his thighs started to burn. The first floor of his house faded away behind him and a trillion celestial bodies came into view, as if emerging from the blackness as spectators. “I don’t deserve this. I didn’t ask for this. I just want to be happy. I just want to put on my pajamas,” he shouted louder into the void, but his voice seemed to dissipate as soon as it escaped his lips, overpowered by silent indifference. He refused to stop. He kept climbing up dozens upon dozens of steps, though his pace gradually slowed as his legs grew fatigued, and he kept screaming his discontent into the darkness as his throat became sore. “I just want my life back. I just want my home back. I just want to be me again,” he cried out hoarsely. The distant galaxies and nebulae grew closer, dancing and morphing without will or direction as they orbited the point in space where the frustrated man was drowning.
Anton coughed and sputtered. His throat was so tender that he could barely form another word. Hundreds of steps were between him and his starting point, although the staircase had vanished long ago, and his feet fell against nothing as he struggled to move forward. His legs threatened to give out at any moment, and finally, they did. Quivering with pain and wheezing frantically, he reached out to grab the handrail, but it was not there, nor was there a wall against which he could brace himself. He fell and began tumbling down the path he had climbed, rolling over himself and bludgeoning his head against the ethereal steps over and over again. For the first few bruises and fractures he received, he cried out in pain, but whether due to psychological exhaustion or physical trauma, he soon lost consciousness. His body continued its turbulent descent, but his mind found itself again floating in the darkness–only now, there would be no way for that all-encompassing blackness–that formless, endless, chaotic amalgam–to be rejected or ignored.
—
Anton’s neighbors were surprised to find his car still in the driveway Monday morning after he should have left for work, and his coworkers reported him missing after several calls went unanswered. That evening, Anton’s father entered the blue-grey house with a spare key and found the young businessman dead at the base of the staircase. His limp body was broken and purple, as if it had been thrown down a hundred flights of stairs and pelted with stones on the way. There were no signs of burglary or assault. The second floor of the house was normal. The staircase only had twelve steps. The windows and doors functioned as they should, as they did in every other house, at least as far as anyone knew. Anton was buried a week later, and at the memorial service, his friends and family remembered him fondly as a hard worker, a diligent, respectful, and normal person, as someone who could be counted on to be steadfast, consistent, and happy. Seven and a half billion years later, whatever might be discerned as his remains–as well as the remains of his friends and family, the office where he worked, the house where he lived, the furniture and appliances he owned, and whoever invented the phrase “don’t try to fix it if it isn’t broken”–were destroyed as the Sun grew into a red giant and absorbed Mercury, Venus, and Earth.
—
“I have seen the dark universe yawning,
Where the black planets roll without aim;
Where they roll in their horror unheeded,
without knowledge or lustre or name.”
-”Nemesis,” H. P. Lovecraft
Written April 20-24, 2020. Published April 25, 2020.
J.D. Smirl 