Night Lights

What is a monster? Is it just vampires and zombies, werewolves and Scottish lake critters? When we stand in the night, looking down a dark street; when we hear something scuttle in the shadows, perceive a distant whistle in the woods; what are we afraid of?

It’s not just the real terrors, the murderers and rabid animals, that frighten us. It’s the impenetrable darkness that contains all the possibilities our terror-prompted imagination can conceive. There, the shadows connect and stretch and scurry and stalk us to our doorsteps. We fear looking into the darkness and finding it—a thing we can’t control, or reason with, or even understand—looking right back at us. We, who have bent nature to our will and smoothed it over with acres of halogen-soaked concrete, are still afraid of the dark.

Why?

Because we, sitting in our temperature-controlled comfy cookie-cutter homes, know better. Nature cannot actually be tamed. And there is something out there. We can close our windows and turn on our televisions and cover our ears with headphones, but the darkness is still out there.

And it is looking at us.