A Game In Darkness

My friends encased me in an underground cavern for three days. It was meant only as a harmless dare; however that’s not how it would end. Focused on getting me to conquer my fear of the dark, my friends gave me a video game console to provide me with a small amount of light, a small jug of water, and a crusty biscuit. My friends are idiots. The console’s battery was half dead when they provided it to me so it can only last another hour. The jug contained only enough water for a day, if that. And the biscuit is moldy.

I think I did fairly well on the first day. I tried to ration the water so that I would have some left for the next day. I removed the moldy patches from the bread and ate it. Although I heard that fungi spread throughout their host, I wasn’t concerned. I figured that what I couldn’t see couldn’t hurt me, and I couldn’t see much of anything. I turned on the console after the first hour, at least I think it was an hour; I was left with no way of telling the time and no sunlight was getting past the dirt and stone that had been placed upon the hole I had entered. I kept the console on for fifteen minutes.

It was tempting to play the console since there was nothing else to do, nothing to distract my mind from the darkness pressing up against me. I ended up curling in a ball on the cavern floor and sleeping my time away. After waking and falling back asleep numerous times, I concluded that by now the first day must have closed and another had begun. Claustrophobia was working its way into me now. In the game of will, the dark was winning.

The dark was no longer the absence of light, but an evil entity bent on seeing me squirm and break down. I sat crouched in dark’s relenting embrace, felling the effects of the moldy bread on my stomach; it pinched and rolled until I had to take a swallow of water for fear I would throw the biscuit up. I sat not knowing if my eyes were still open or if I had already scrunched them shut in panic. I moved my hands along the rocky cave surface till they met the game console. I quickly switched it on and basked in its alien glow. I could sense my eyes constricting against my will to block out the harsh light. I found myself wishing I could force them to dilate, to absorb all of the precious light that I thrived on. I switched it off again after thirty minutes. Another fifteen minutes of light left.

Day two must be coming to a close…or was it? Staring at the pixelated screen had obstructed my sense of time further. I had no clue where I stood in time and space. I drank the last of my water seconds later, overwhelmed by the dark’s grip on me. It had me by the throat. It was trying to suffocate me.

Huff! Huff! Huff!

My breath came out in gasps reminding me of sound, of my own voice. I-I – my name! My name had escaped me. I scrambled around then, no longer concerned with conserving energy. I’d lost my identity in the darkness and I had to find it. My fingers clambered around the stony walls of the cavern until I felt the skin at the tips had worked itself off. My fingertips were bleeding and the pain was a reminder that I was alive, a solid form in this black mist. I relaxed then and my name returned. Claus. I was Claus Blackwell, thirteen years old, son of Vincent and Laura Blackwell. My breathing slowed and I settled down to sleep again.

*

Day three? There was no way of telling and as I awoke I now thought that perhaps I was still dreaming. Maybe I wasn’t really buried alive, maybe I was buried in the white bed sheets of my warm bed. The delusion dissolved away as rapidly as it arose. I had never had a dream in which I could feel pain and thirst and hunger. I never had a dream that I could wake from and return to on a whim. I wasn’t dreaming; I was in my grave. No food, no water, and surely I would soon run out of air. I hadn’t thought of that until now. I reached for the game console again and flipped the power switch on; however this time I didn’t just stare in wonder at the LCD screen’s luminescence. This time I played. I played for thirty minutes of glorious light, pouncing on adversaries, collecting gold coins, jumping up to bop my head into magical bricks. I played until my mind had forgotten my peril, forgotten my lack of necessities, forgotten the darkness.

As the console’s power indicator light began to flash signifying that the battery would die within minutes, I accepted that this would also be my fate. I’d die when my light went out...That was when I heard the shuffling, the movement of stones above me. My friends had returned. I didn’t die that day, but things did change. I became obsessed with video games for, as far as I was concerned, one had saved my life.

Alien Beetles

Before nightfall Candice had been visited by three unidentified flying objects, one of which was larger than her minivan. She was out exploring the Amazonian rainforests for her thesis. Just a little more research and she could finally finish writing it, she thought. As she crouched on the forest floor collecting the stamen of some rare flowers, a shadow abruptly overlapped hers. She looked up expecting to see a swollen rain cloud and was shocked when her eyes met those of an enormous beetle, wings beating hard enough to summon a small cyclone.

Candice managed to stifle her scream, reluctant to swallow the dirt and debris. She rapidly shielded her eyes and ran for her van. She had parked it about fifty feet away. She climbed in and jostled her keys out of her pocket, into ignition. Park to drive, she reminded herself. She couldn’t seem to tear her eyes from the rear-view mirror until she noticed that the beetle monstrosity was flying towards her. It was the largest beetle she had ever seen. Park to drive, she initiated the commands and, at once, was soaring through the trees at a speed much greater than the speed that the beetle could muster.

As she broke from the thick foliage, Candice cut her engine and stepped out of her car. The beetle was nowhere in sight. Perhaps it had gone off in another direction. Then again maybe it was just a hallucination from the heat, she thought. What were the odds of her finding an unidentified species of beetle, especially one with a size of that magnitude? Surely someone else would have known of them by now with scientific exploration on the rise.

She squandered her fear to the wind and set out back through the forest again on foot. She had only taken a few paces in when she heard the beating of wings. Her heart was in her throat as she turned to the source of the sound. A small, no tiny, insect was making its way towards her on miniature wings. The bug landed on the giant before it, right on Candice’s left hand. Upon closer inspection, Candice could see that the bug was a beetle similar in shape and color to the enormous one she had been pursued by. Like the colossal one, this beetle was a species unbeknownst to her. It couldn’t be a juvenile form of the one she’d seen earlier, could it?

The ant-sized beetle crawled along her hand. As it did she began to notice a tingling sensation in the areas it had passed its barbed legs along. She fought the urge to shake the sensation away, enamored with the small insect. The mini beetle, that had been creeping along her had initially, suddenly picked up speed and scrambled rapidly up her arm. She screamed as the insect trekked across her neck, her face, her chest, her torso. The tingling traveled with the beetle and it was growing more intense with time. Candice went to knock the insect off with her left hand and found that she couldn’t move it. A pink rash traced the insect’s path along her skin and everywhere the beetle had crawled she had been left paralyzed. By now it had covered every inch of her body. A statue inconveniently placed in the wilderness was she.

What she saw next startled her more than anything else she had witnessed today. A third undiscovered beetle species was marching towards her. The size of a large dog and, in stark contrast to the other two species’ ruby red shells, an exterior of a shimmering lime green. The most troubling characteristic of this new visitor were the numerous spikes on its back that were oozing what appeared to be some kind of venom.

Horror struck Candice’s heart like an arrow as she realized what was going to happen to her. The reason these three species of beetle remained unknown was because no one who discovered them made it out of the forest alive. The sluggish beetle trudged ever closer to her. She would have been trembling if she could; whatever the mini beetle had secreted seemed to have numbed her nerve endings. The oozing spikes were inches from her legs. She couldn’t shut her eyes, she realized. Tears swamped her lower eyelids and began to trickle down her cheeks.

Luckily the numbing effects of the mini beetle had done its job. She didn’t feel a thing as the spikes jabbed through the skin of her calves, didn’t feel the venom seep into her veins. In seconds the venom had caused her to black out and collapse to the forest floor. The gigantic beetle fluttered from the canopy of the trees to the catch that its fellow beetles had procured. It fed savagely on her until it was satisfied, leaving a few scraps for its comrades. They left not a trace of Candice. Having devoured their prey in its entirety, they returned to their nesting grounds, the location that the human had threatened with her meddling hands, their hidden flower bed.