THE GREAT DARK - John Chrostek

A yellow ribbon hung from a willow branch outside the window of Carina’s house. Clearly her handiwork. Carina had always enjoyed speaking in codes and riddles. It was part of the reason she was Buddy’s best friend in the neighborhood. But he knew this one, unlike the others, wasn’t meant for fun. It meant the Great Dark had descended on her home. It was a warning to keep away.

They were sitting in the sparse woods behind the local private school when she first mentioned the Great Dark. She said it was something few could perceive. No one else in her family could tell when it came down to roost. She tried to point out the warning signs but they never listened. There were tells, small as they were at first. The floorboards creaked louder. Light bulbs seemed to hum and dim their reach into small pools like the shadow was thickening. There was a feeling in the air that something else was breathing. Eating up all the oxygen meant for them.

When he first saw the yellow ribbon hanging, he remembered the day she showed it to him. She’d laid it on top of his head, dangling over his face. They both laughed. Then she said:

“You ever see this ribbon again, Buddy, forget about me, okay?”

Like he could ever forget about her.

Still, when the yellow ribbon hung, he knew better than to wait for her to walk to school together. She missed class frequently as it was, always with some fanciful new excuse. Gophers chewed up my bed frame. I had a meeting in Spain. An alien came to visit and told me the secrets of Mercury.

The year before, she was absent for two weeks in a row. She came back acting as though she’d forgotten everything she’d ever learned. She even pretended she didn’t know him anymore. “Nice to meet you,” she said.

It hurt his feelings that she never dropped the bit, but they got close again with enough effort on his part. In a few weeks everything was back to normal, but there were times a paleness would flicker behind her blue eyes that made him believe she really had forgotten everything.

In music class he sang Stand By Me with the others, all the while watching her empty chair. Without her voice, high and bright, finding new notes he couldn’t begin to name, there was something missing in the sound.

That evening, walking slowly back home, he saw Carina’s mom standing in one place in the yard, staring firmly at the yellow ribbon. He thought about walking up and asking about Carina, but there was a strangeness about her mother’s posture, a dog-like hunch in her shoulders, that made Buddy walk away without saying hello.

All night he regretted his cowardice.

One day bled into the next. Soon it was Friday. Other kids in school noticed Carina’s absence, but no one seemed half as concerned as Buddy. They knew nothing about the threat of the Great Dark. Buddy didn’t try to explain it to them. Even he barely believed, but the fear persisted, fermenting within him until it burst one day during gym. He asked to go to the bathroom and cried hot silent tears in the furthest stall where no one would notice. Told his teacher he had to throw up from running too fast. She reminded him to pace himself. It’s not fitness if it breaks you.

Buddy decided he’d visit Carina, one way or the other, over the weekend.

He woke on Saturday morning to the sound of thunder. A monsoon tore through town, ripping the paneling off older homes on the street and scattering loose trash in all directions. He put on a raincoat and planned on venturing out when his father told him to stay indoors where it was safe. There was a tornado warning in the area.

The day slipped by.

Sunday came and it was time for church. He got dressed up and attended 11:30 mass with his family, hair parted down the middle. No sign of Carina or her family. The light behind the stained glass windows came through thin. Shallow.

It was 4 p.m. when Buddy had free reign of his time. He ran to Carina’s house without stopping for breath along the way.

There she was, sitting below the willow tree in an oversized t-shirt, hands in her lap. The storm had splintered the branch that days before held the yellow ribbon. The whole house seemed shaken, lifeless, wreathed in a heavy silence.

Buddy ran towards Carina, calling out her name. She didn’t stand or even tilt her head to look at him.

“Carina!” he cried again, now two feet away.

She looked thinner than he remembered. Paler.

He kneeled down in front of her to try and catch her gaze.

“It’s me. Buddy… Did you forget me again?”

He could see her eyes now. Coal-black from lid to lid. After a placid moment she broke out of her distant gaze and looked right back at him.

She leapt up, grabbing his throat with both hands and squeezing tightly, no betrayal of feelings on her face. The sudden anguish Buddy felt made it hard to fight back. She was really trying to hurt him.

Losing the feeling in his legs, Buddy risked a swift, full kick to her gut.

She crumpled into herself, drained of breath and fire before rising up again quickly on all fours. Where he had kicked her stomach was flush with new blood, as if some wound had been reopened. Her black eyes shone with tears.

She ran like a greyhound back into the house. Not knowing what else to do, he followed. The screen door was wide open. From the porch, he couldn’t make out anything inside.

At no point that afternoon did it feel like Buddy had much of a choice what to do.

The Great Dark had come. It had swallowed the house, rending the furniture and floorboards into frozen, floating splinters untethered from gravity’s command, scattered about remaining fragments of walls, all of it draped and festering in a dull gray-green moss. It was a murky void packed with the jetsam of a family home and old growth from some primeval forest clinging to the periphery of the light. The rules of architecture and spatial fidelity were tattered, too, as far as Buddy expected them. The house was larger than it had ever been before on his rare visits to the interior, time spent dodging the oceanic pressure of Carina’s parents, their tightly wound sadness and anger almost physically present in the air. Now, hallways and corners curled into suggestions of tunneled space with no fixed beginning or end. A hell bored deep by spiritless ants. It all seemed to go on forever. To the end of the world.

As his eyes adjusted, he saw Carina near some unplaceable source of pale light canted at an animal angle, clawing at the flesh of her stomach. Weeping. Her voice sounded like her own. Nothing animal or strange. Just devastated, terrified, but Buddy could not hear a word of what she said. It was as if the house was also whispering.

From some higher burrow there came a low moan by the strained voice of an older woman. At the sound of it Carina stopped her violent clawing. She frantically searched for the call’s source.

Buddy glanced back at the front door. He had no memory of stepping forward but the door already seemed a mile away. The ground between him and his return to life was unsteady. The paneling was loose, the light uneven.

A creak somewhere ahead. Carina was gone. A trail of her blood lay glimmering on the ground, snaking to the left. He followed it.

The walls of the tunnel carried sound like copper pipes. From ahead, he could hear his friend as she ran desperately forwards, speaking to herself.

“Where are they?” she cried. “Dad! Mom! I’m here!”

She was looking for them, not running away.

Buddy picked up his pace.

The tunnel grew shallow and thin, barely big enough for Buddy to run upright. His chest shuddered every time he stopped to turn or pivot down a bend. The air was thin, each breath depleting the total sum of oxygen available. He would soon begin to suffocate.

Carina screamed. She was close. Buddy picked up the pace.

The tunnel broke open into a long subterranean grotto. Strange bioluminescent growth clung to every visible surface, forming a net of life on the abyss of total night. Orange fires hung from above like falling teardrops, illuminating a tall altar wrought of cracked and ancient stone. On its surface Buddy could see the broken forms of Carina’s mother and father, their bodies split open and sewn together in a whirlwind of catalyzed ligaments, becoming a vortex cocoon of human flesh and bone, their faces gaunt and hollow but conscious, moving, looking down from their meeting point at their frantic, weeping daughter.

Some hulking form stirred in the further dark. The shaggy mass, larger than any bear Buddy had ever seen in a picture book or at the zoo, lumbered into view. Its front paws were like elongated human hands zig-zagging across the mossy netting on rows of multiple articulating knuckles, spiked with moon-pale hook blades for nails. From its matted fur shone subtle glimmers of light from a host a hundred open eyes all collecting and reflecting light. Its singular mouth ran the total width of its shoulders and it unfurled and exhaled hot steam that drifted forwards like an ocean fog parted by the seawall of the altar.

“Carina!” Buddy called. “This way!”

Carina turned to face him. She, too, was already hollow, her eyes two empty holes set in the face he had loved all his short young life.

“I told you to keep away,” she said, tears beginning to fall as the beast shuffled closer to them both. “I told you to forget me.”

 Buddy felt tears run down his cheeks, too.

“Go away, you idiot,” her voice barely a whisper. “Go home.”

You never choose to let the animal win. It just wins some times and loses others. What you think was your choice was always your weakness. Your nature. Nature is always what it is. Life and death are pure and total. You cast an eye upon the stone, call it light and shadow, but the stone is never hewn. It endures. It outlasts your gaze. You even think this surrender puts you ahead of the universal law. You are not proven wrong by it, you accept it! Are a part of it. But you can never fully commit. You can never be as nihilist as the coldness of space. You love too deeply, even after being wracked down and numbed to nothingness. You fear too much, even as you surrender your hope for escape. There is no rising out of the hole. You cannot surpass your nature because it is your nature. You cannot define your nature. You can never see its full shape through a reflection. You are forever unknowable to yourself.

In the years to come, Buddy would tell himself again and again that he’d chickened out. She’d needed him then more than ever and he had just ran away. When other kids talked about what happened to Carina and her parents, his head would get fuzzy. He’d look away. Let it pass through and beyond him like winter rain.

In quiet moments he told himself the Great Dark was something she’d made up to cover for the horrible truth. Another one of her fanciful stories. What he saw inside that house, what he felt, it’d been something he dreamt up later. A horrid lie he needed to believe. An untruth the mind insisted on to shelter itself from calamity.

But the Great Dark clung to him now. He could see it all the time.

***

John Chrostek is the editor of Cold Signal Magazine. He has a story collection, Boxcutters, coming out May 2025 with Malarkey Books, and a nautical dark fantasy horror novel, Feast of the Pale Leviathan, coming out later that year with Deep Overstock. Find his work at johnchrostek.com