The Night the Lamps Died

The town of Saltmarsh always smelled of brine and decay, but on the night the lamps died, that smell seemed to cling to everything like a shroud. I was thirty-one when I finally understood what happened to me as a child, but the memory had never left. I was nine, living with my mother in a ground-floor flat on Mermaid Lane, a narrow street of pebble-dashed houses that faced a grey, restless sea. The flat had two rooms: a bedroom where I slept, and a living room where my mother had her bed, a worn sofa that folded out. It was in that bedroom, with its peeling wallpaper patterned with faint blue anchors, that I first saw him.

I woke to a pressure in the air, a weight that made the darkness feel solid. The streetlamp outside cast a sickly orange glow through the thin curtains, but the corner of my room was untouched by it. He stood there, a figure so black he seemed to drink the light, a cutout against the wall. His eyes weren’t red like coals; they were the red of a warning light, pulsing faintly, fixed on me. I couldn’t move, couldn’t breathe. He didn’t speak, didn’t approach. He just watched, as if counting my heartbeats. Then he was gone, not a fade or a step, just an absence where he had been. I scrambled to my mother, my voice a sob, telling her there was a man in my room. She clicked on the lamp, its bulb sputtering, and told me it was a night terror, that I’d eaten too much cheese. She led me back, tucked me in, and I lay there staring at the corner until dawn.

I saw him again, three weeks later. I was playing in the courtyard behind the flats, a concrete square with a dead rose bush and a rusted swing set. The day was overcast, the sea a steel sheet. A shadow detached itself from the wall of the laundry room, a black shape that didn’t align with any sun. It stood at the edge of my vision, and when I turned my head, it was already there, closer. My heart hammered. I ran, and the shadow didn’t chase, but I felt it watching until I slammed the door behind me. My hands were shaking, and the hair on my arms stood up.

The occurrences grew bolder. He appeared in reflections—in the bathroom mirror behind my mother’s shoulder, in the glass of the TV when it was off. Always the same: a hole in the world where light should be, two red embers burning. My mother began to complain of headaches, of a constant chill, and the window in the living room would frost on summer nights. The lamps in our flat started to fail, one by one, as if the darkness itself was feeding on their filaments. I started sleeping with the light on, but it never helped. He was always there, just beyond the glow.

Then came the night the lamps died. I was eleven, lying awake, and the streetlight outside flickered. The bulb in my lamp gave a soft pop, and the whole room plunged into absolute black. I heard a sound, the first I’d ever heard from him: a dry, papery rustle, like leaves skittering across concrete. The darkness in the corner coalesced, and he stepped forward. This time he moved, a slow, deliberate step, and I saw him clearly. He wasn’t human. His limbs were too long, his fingers ending in hooks. He reached out, and I saw that his palm was smooth, like polished stone, without lines. A cold breath washed over my face, and I felt something inside me, a tug, as if he were pulling at a thread in my chest.

My mother burst through the door, holding a candle that threw wild shadows. She saw me, and then she saw him. For the first time, I saw fear in her eyes, a real, primal terror. She screamed, and the figure turned his head. The candle flame guttered, shrank to a blue spark, and died. In that instant, he was gone, and the lamplight outside flickered back to life. My mother stood in the doorway, trembling, the candle dripping wax on her hand. She didn’t say it was a dream. She said, ‘We’re leaving.’

We moved inland the next week, to a dusty town with no sea. My mother never spoke of it again, except once, years later, when she was sick. She told me she had seen that thing her whole life, that it had stood at the foot of her bed when she was a girl. She said it came for the ones who listened, and that I had listened too long. She died that winter, and I moved again, always inland, always away from water. I told myself it was over. But last night, I woke in my flat in the city, and the lamp beside my bed was off. The curtains were drawn, but the room was darker than it should have been. There, in the corner, a shape was gathering, the darkness thickening, and I saw two red points ignite, staring at me with a hunger that had waited twenty years. I closed my eyes, and when I opened them, it was gone. But I know now what I knew then: the lamps die first, and then the light, and then you.