Into Dark
When I was a boy, there was a theatre in a nearby town that had once been a malt house. It’s not easy, these days, to recall much of what it looked like, but there are a few images of this malt house that remain in my mind. There is an image of the main performance room, filled with hundreds of chairs in curved rows going up as they go further back, looking down over the main stage. There is an image of a light brown floor. Brown planks of wood, run through with a dark swirling grain to mark the time, and spotted with knots, to mark once fresh branches. There is an image of an outside also, though this is faint, and mixed. The passage of time has merged my recollections of building exteriors into a single memory, of bricks, cars, tarmac and trees. This memory could be any building, or many. Strangely, there is no image of the main entrance, even though there is a clear memory of myself, walking through that entrance for the first time. That moment, of walking through the entrance, is the strongest memory I have of the whole place. The core impression of it remains imprinted on my mind, and I suspect it will remain there after all the other little details have been vanished by time. This old malt house did something for me in that moment. It captured space, and showed it to me.
As a young boy, when I first walked into the foyer of the old malt house, I was shocked by the sheer size of the inside. I had never seen a room so massive before, with walls so far apart and a ceiling so high. Red brick walls and a red brick ceiling, and floorboards calmly resting underneath. All of these things were so far away from each other, yet they composed a single room. Even though I had been in the presence of far greater spaces than this throughout my life, when I stepped through those doors my stomach dropped and my heart leapt. Who could have thought there was a place in the world capable of containing this much empty space? Surely, such a vast emptiness could only exist in the middle of great plains or atop tall mountains. It couldn’t be constrained by walls. And yet here they were, these walls, capturing more space than they should have been able to capture.
Whenever you can see the sky above and in all directions on the horizon, you are in the presence of a space too great for the mind to comprehend. It hits you all at once, and if you were to truly notice how big it was, you would surely be struck still by this realisation, just as I was, walking into the malt house for the first time. Perhaps when you look at the sky you cannot truly see it because your perception is not designed to handle such massiveness. So in order to see it, and be impressed by it, you need a very big room, like the foyer of an old malt house turned into a theatre, to capture and constrain a tiny little bit of that space and show you how enormous it is.
What if the inside of the malt house was dark? Pitch dark, so that your eyes cannot adjust. You are at the entrance, the door shut behind you, sealing away the light from outside. You place your hand upon the door and step out into the darkness, and then you drop your hand. You are now standing in a vast empty space, and Nothing stretches in all directions. Raising your arm again, you find the door, and the Nothing disappears. I hear your movements, and make my own way towards you. And I take your hand in mine. I take a small torch from my backpack, and switch it on. The light is small, warm and yellow. There is no focus on the torch, it is merely a bulb, spreading warm yellow light outwards in a soft sphere. It illuminates the floor, the door and the adjacent wall. It lights up our faces. Our bodies. Holding it up, I try to seek out the ceiling, or a second wall. But the light only extends in all directions, yielding nothing but emptiness.
Perhaps if our light was stronger, we might see something else. But even as we wait, and allow our eyes to tune into the balance of light and dark, we only see the one wall, and the floor expanding away, running with the light. There is an impression, from this, that no matter how strong the light becomes, it will never show us the end of the room. We stand together, uncertain. We have to choose something. The door is still there, but we don’t want to go back. We could try walking along the wall to the left or right, but that seems disappointing. Truly, we know that we must walk away from the wall, somewhere into the centre of the room. We adjust our grip on each other’s hands, and look towards each other. Holding up the torch in front of us, we step forwards and begin our journey.
The torchlight extends before us. The light brown floorboards appear in front and pass underneath, and as we look back, they fade. We see also the door, and the wall, fading into darkness ever so slowly. It takes a long time, but eventually the wall disappears and we are truly enveloped. Guided now only by the floor, and a yellow sphere of light that reaches out beyond our sight. The wooden floorboards under our feet give us a sense of direction. We know that we are going forwards, if not what is there to be found. As we walk, our steps make a reassuring sound that quickly dissipates without echo, the sound moving on undisturbed into the emptiness of the room, until it can no longer make ripples in the air, and it dies. We shout, and our voices are carried away into the same nothingness. And things remain like this, for a long, long time.
We continue walking.
As we proceed into this soundless, lightless place, something slowly starts to change. The floorboards are fading away. In colour and in presence. To our left and our right. In front and behind. The grain of the wood becomes fainter and fainter and the colour drains out, leaving behind a grey, flat surface. And this grey surface begins to fade also, turning darker and harder to see, until the floor we walk upon is as black and lightless as everything else. It reflects nothing from the torch, seeming to absorb the light entirely, and our steps have become silent, such that we now appear to be walking on nothing. The only thing I can see is you, and all you can see is me. Even our shadows are gone, for the floor looks the same in the presence as in the absence of light. We only know the floor is there because we are standing upon it. Even so, we can barely feel it under our feet, and when we kneel down to touch it, the surface feels invisible even to our hands. It has no temperature, no texture, and when rapped with a fist, it makes no sound. It has no sense of being a surface other than the resistance it provides against gravity.
We continue walking.
The only sign that we are moving is in the feeling of our own weight, shifting from one foot to the other with each step. With no other evidence that we are going anywhere, walking is slow. Every step is an agonising leap into an abyss, a long, slow leap, that can sometimes take up to a minute, as we try to keep our sense of gravity, direction and balance. We reach out with our free hands, wondering if there is a dark, lightless wall just in front of us, like the invisible floor beneath. Maybe there is a ceiling, directly above, that has been there all along, just out of reach, absorbing all sounds and all light as effectively as the blackness of an empty universe. It is difficult to know between up and down sometimes, and I often feel myself tumbling through space where I stand and I have to stop walking, too nauseated to continue. Only the grip of your hand in mine stops me from tumbling where I stand forever. We don’t even know if we’re going in a straight line; turning back is no longer an option, since we may already be walking backwards without realising. So, all we can do is keep pressing on, in slow agonising steps, and wonder whether are going forwards, backwards, sideways… or perhaps just going in circles.
We continue walking.
We float in motion over a motionless floor, making soundless steps in an unechoing silence. We had been confident before. It had seemed like such a straightforward task, and so simple. Now that task has become tiresome in its absurd simplicity. Now, with every laborious step we take, each more dizzying than the last, a fear grows in my chest. There are no decisions to make anymore, there is only the inertia of proceeding with the choice we made. Turning back is impossible but I want to turn back. I yearn for the safety of the other side of the door of the old malt house, where space has not been captured. But we take confidence in one another’s presence. Had I been alone, I might have turned back long ago, when I still had that choice. If you were alone, I don’t know what you would do. Together, we find a strength that lets us proceed.
And we take another step.
You have drifted slightly ahead of me, leading me by the hand. You are mid step, bringing your foot down to find the floor and so complete another leap into another abyss. And your foot drops down further than you expected, and you fall over an edge. Your body drops from the abdomen as your free hand reaches up to grab something, and finds Nothing. I feel your body retreating away and down and as you cry out I instinctively grip your arm tight with both hands and yank you back from whatever is before us. But even as I pull you back to safety, you start to disappear in front of my eyes, fading into shadow. I have dropped the light, and it seems to have fallen off the edge that you stumbled into. Dropping to all fours, we crawl forwards until we find this edge, and peer over the top. The light is there, falling down and down. It fades and shrinks, all the while becoming fainter, until it finally disappears from view, and we are plunged one final time into absolute dark.
We shuffle back from the edge, staying close to the ground. When we feel safely distanced from the eternal drop, we lie down close to each other, and close our eyes. It’s the first time we have thought to close our eyes, and when we do so, the sensation of tumbling dizziness from before fades a little, and we are able to feel like we are in an almost normal place. Just a dark room. It’s only natural that we cannot see the floor, and it’s lack of physical presence gives us a faint sensation of floating, though we can tell which way is up and which way is down. So we stay like this, eyes shut in defence against the darkness, regaining some small sense of gravity, and weight.
And we investigate the edge. Once we feel safe again, we make a guess about our direction, and crawl forwards with great care until our hands come to a drop. The cliff seems rather even edged. One could say it was more like a large step on a large staircase.
We sit, and dangle our legs over the step.
Perhaps we can go over the edge. And we would just keep falling, and never hit the ground. We can hardly choose to go back. Though perhaps we could go left or right, and explore that way. But, we have been walking a long time, and so we decide to rest, before making a choice. We shuffle back from the edge of the step. And we sleep a while, lying close to each other. It is strange to close your eyes and find that, if anything, the backs of your eyes are brighter than the room you are in, and sleeping in such a place is not easy. But we sleep eventually, and we dream, together in the dark, and our hands do not part from each other.
We are woken by a light. Far off, and high up, a strong white light is faintly glowing. As soon as the light rests upon my eyelids they are open and I am up, looking with relief upon your face again. We look towards the new light, and carefully approach it until we come again to the edge of the step. It seems to be getting brighter and brighter as we look, until it reaches a steady, powerful glow. It is a strong light, and it must be able to reach far and illuminate many things. But apart from the two of us, not even a speck of dust, or the tiniest glimmer of some other kind of surface, is revealed. We cannot even see the step. We push down at an invisible floor and our hands meet resistance, and when we move them forward just a little, and push down again, they drop below the floor, reaching into the darkness that swallowed our old light. We look behind us. Presumably the door – the door that lead us to this strange room – is that way. And beyond it is the outside world, the one that we abandoned. Which is bigger?, I ask. The outside world, or this room?
We look back towards the light. A white sphere floating in the centre of an enormous blackness, blacker than the backs of our eyelids. How to proceed? Walk along the edge? Jump? Return? We hesitate for a while, filled with uncertainty.
It is as we are stood there, pondering whether to continue in some way, or to admit defeat, turn our back to the light, and try to return, that a sound arises. The silence up to then has been so great that we hear the sound almost before it is audible. A rushing. Like that of a distant wind, coming closer. I feel my hair and clothes becoming ruffled here and there, and a breeze upon my face. The rushing gets louder. Stronger. Fiercer. It seems to be coming from many directions. Sometimes from beyond the step, sometimes from above or below, or behind. As it grows in strength it begins to pull at us, tugging us this way and that. Standing hand in hand is no longer enough, and we find we must link arms, and root ourselves to the floor with deep, low stances to make sure we don’t get pulled off our feet. The wind tumbles into us from all directions, though one direction seems to be preferred. We stay at the edge, barely grounded against the gale, as it grows around us, becoming more powerful than anything I have known. Although I do not know what you might know.
The wind pulls and pushes. Its direction becomes more clear. Harder to resist. We look again at one another, and I know from your face, and you know from mine, that we have made a choice. Coming out of our grounded stance, and tightening our arm to arm grip, we stand proud, stepping forwards over the edge.
The wind does not hesitate.
Jack Paton