A Table Set and Waiting

No one knows who found the Dark Room first.

Maybe it found us?

Needed us.

We are taught to venerate first times. First time you lose a tooth. First time you taste alcohol. The first time you masturbate through angry tears zipped inside your sleeping bag at a youth group retreat. But even now I only hold the faintest smudge of a memory. A static film of the stairs down to the basement, a slash of yellow flaking paint that peeled away from a door handle, the suffocated rattle and wheeze of an air conditioning ground unit that leaked silent pools over time-polished concrete floor.

The Dark Room.

Even writing it out here, it loses some of the weight that it used to insert on reality. The memory, much like the word, has been erased and rewritten one too many times, its page wearing thin.

†

It was the summer Colin Haders bit my ear till it bled while I jacked him off in the sweet, musty sweat of the art room’s storage closet.

I remember standing in front of the door watching my friends enter it one by one. A glass security door covered with stickers and “No Shoes No Service” and “Bathroom is for customers only” signs this time, but the door itself never mattered. We were there for what was behind it.

Darkness enveloped each of them only a few feet into the room. The darkness did not take them gradually. This was not the receding of a figure slowly being shadowed by distance, time, or the absence of light. It was a sudden swallowing, a working of a throat pulling a mouthful down an esophagus in the space of a breath.  A delineated border of dark that pushed across the landscape of their bodies, like thrusting your face into a bathroom sink full of water during a dinner party so no one would hear your choked sobs. One moment they were there, bisected by dirty hallway light and flat impenetrable shadow, and the next they were gone.

It looked so beautiful.

Even in the dim hallway I could still see my skin, my blocky hands scratched from yardwork, my neon blue Swatch watch with the yellow stripes on the band that I said I wore ironically but really I just thought was pretty. My dick was sweaty and hatefully half-hard in my briefs. All the landmarks of polluted meat and bone that served as a trigger for my memories. Remembering the people I wished would want to see me, touch me, spit in my mouth...anything but look at me the way they did in hallways and grocery store lines.

†

Once you were inside, you could look back and see the door floating there. But I never looked back after the first time. The whole point of the room was what was coming to meet you in the Dark. The Thing that came forward slowly, towards your aching, throbbing body of meat and bones—towards your skin, your fevered needs, your wrung out dreams. Its approach felt like the change in air pressure before a storm. The building tension pressed against your eyeballs and prickled the nape of your neck.

And then it was there.

Always first slithering around your feet, snaking up along the sweat-lined tender skin at the back of your knee. Or long bending fingers encircling your ankles and rubbing back and forth as their grip tightens. I could never tell what the Thing looked like. In the Dark you couldn’t see shit...that was the point.

Then you feel the claws. Teeth? Knives held by a host of many small and hungry hands? It didn’t matter. They are tracing over your skin. Pressing through your clothes to draw a map of what was to come.

†

I would hold my breath drawing in gaping mouthfuls of need. My lungs would burn as I waited for the Thing to continue. I held so still, afraid if I moved it would dart away and leave me unfinished and ruined.

When the first cut began, something dry and leathery would push apart my lips to scrape like rustling paper through the cage of my teeth. Then talonsknivesteeth begin to slice along the lines they had been tracing and the thing in my mouth would push its way further and further inside of me, filling cavities that I hadn’t known existed until it was inside them. I would of course scream at this point. I would scream until I felt like every vein in my body would explode. I would scream up into the Thing as it entered me, a desperate keening of agony and welcome.

And then it would all fall away.

The skin. The meat. The time Colin Haders shoved me onto the hard linoleum of the school hallway and broke my glasses just because I leaned against the locker next to his and said “hey you” like a total fucking cum-drunk idiot. The Thing in the Dark would take all of it. After, I would still hear it moving, the slapping sound of meat rearranging itself close and warm; an invisible limb thrusting itself into a wet and welcoming glove. On the floor, free of everything, staring into the blessed Dark as it left in the husk of meat and bones I had entered with.

Sometimes, when it came back, our skins were battered or burned. Alex Caton’s was so ruined that he collapsed dead after. We left him in the parking garage and ran. Other times it would drag meat back into the room. Bodies, flensed and broken, joints cracked and bone poking from islands of wet meat like stark white seashells. The Thing wearing my body would stand over me chewing. It sounded more like forcing gristle through a meat grinder than human mastication.

It never let us stay like that. No matter how much we begged or wept. It would always come back and reclothe the blissful nothing it had made of us with the meat and sweat and shame it had taken.

Then it would be done with me, for the time being. Even if I knelt there in the all encompassing dark for hours, it wouldn’t return. So I would leave, the weight of my self-perception a raw seeping sunburn against a wool sweater.

Until it became unbearable and I went looking for the Dark Room again.

†

Each time it took longer and longer to find, until finally it just wasn’t there. I can’t blame it. I just wish I knew what I did wrong. What I need to change to be what it wants to consume again.

I never saw what the Thing in the Dark Room looked like.

There is a cloudy scratched mirror down here in the basement, hung over a chipped ceramic sink stained from generations of people trying to scrub the world off their skin. When I look at it my face is different. My jaw hangs lower, and when I move it, I can feel the bones in it clicking against each other like the ratcheting of an adjustable wrench, like a chicken bone cracking in the garbage disposal.

I like what I see.

I can feel myself getting hard. I hate it. I hate that I hate it. I rub the corners of my mouth with raspy fingers, letting it stretch open even farther, remembering the razor lines of cuts tracing over me. I think about what it must have looked like, walking around under the sun with my skin taut around it, and I unbutton my pants. I pull my shirt up over my head. The collarbones in the mirror are stark valleys rimmed by freckles. My reflection touches the place Colin Hader marked with his teeth and when it moves my hand away he is still there.

I like what I see.

I stare at my shirt, balled up in my hand, and throw it into the darkness of the basement's far corner, a chumming of the water. I step out of my pants and kick them after it, a baiting of the air. I push my underwear down my hips; my reflection slides one hand over my cock and the other inside my mouth. It probes my teeth, and the thick piece of meat that lies between them vibrates and slides against my stiff fingers as I moan.

I grasp the writhing worm of my tongue hard between two fingers and thumb and squeeze, the loose edges of my mouth shuddering as I scream into my hand. For a moment I think the darkness behind my reflection thickens and my cock jerks of its own accord, but then it is gone.

Come back

The muscles at the root of my tongue spasm but I tighten my grasp. I think about Alex Caton and what was left of him on the floor of the Dark Room—gristle clogging a drain. I think about what the Thing brought back with it, about the wet sound of its feeding. I think about how much of myself I will have to throw into the dark corner of my basement before it notices me again.

I think about my family sleeping upstairs and I pull.

© 2022 Jordan Shiveley

About the Author

Jordan Shiveley is the author of the Dread Singles (@hottestsingles) Twitter account. Their work has also been seen in a variety of short fiction collections and tabletop roleplaying games, the Old Gods of Appalachia and Caring Into the Void podcasts as well as the upcoming novel HOT SINGLES IN YOUR AREA from Unbound. They live and work in Minneapolis, Minnesota with a cat and partner both of whom often merge in ways unimaginable to the human mind. More at jordanshiveley.com