Winner - Senior section

The Friends School

An arthritic finger flicks a switch, and a lone lightbulb flickers on, humming a pale orange glow in the living room of Sasha Sahnov’s farmhouse.

Sasha has refused to leave. He has lived here his whole life; he was born here, his father born here, and his grandfather. Eighty-two years he has lived in this house— he is far too old, he has told the grey-suited government officials who have tried to persuade him to leave, to pack up all he owns and spend whatever time he has left decaying in some cold concrete box of a government apartment.

If the dark gives up on its good graces and decides to swallow him, so be it.

Sasha ghosts his fingers along his bookshelf, over the spines of books, brushing dust from a picture frame whose occupant he cannot bring himself to look at for too long. Plucking a worn paperback volume of Gogol’s from the bookshelf, he settles into his armchair to read, and to wait.

It has been nearly a year since the darkness first appeared. There is no other village within a fifty-mile radius of this one, so it easily went unnoticed as it descended from the North and consumed the deeper parts of the forest, taking with it the deer and the hare and the boar. Then the more remote farms, the ones on the very outskirts of town, were taken, whole families disappearing along with their livestock. Only when the dark engulfed the rivers and creeks that fed their wells, and the drinking water ran a sickly, brackish brown, did people start to notice, and to talk.

Everyone else has gone now, flown a hundred miles south to Karachev.

The only sound identifying Sasha’s house as belonging to a living person is the low, throbbing hum of the generator. The curtain of darkness brought silence with it– nothing lives in that freezing fog, or at least, Sasha thinks to himself, nothing living has ever come out of it, and the curtain has never drawn back to reveal what it might leave behind. He knows that scientists visit it every day to study it, to monitor its inexorable progression, and there have even been reports of a few foolish children who dare each other to touch the fog, to enter it. Wasn’t that how Gregor’s grandson vanished?

The sitting room waits expectantly. Sasha’s mind wanders, the book uninteresting. He puts it aside and rises from his chair, makes his way to the kitchen and puts a frozen dinner in the microwave. 

The plastic container spins in an obedient circle.

Sasha finds his gaze drifting through the kitchen window. Outside, the final orange strands of sunset cling to the horizon as deep purples streak the sky from the east, but every corner of Sasha’s house is lit from the outside by a harsh manufactured glow.

The soldiers came to set up the floodlights two months ago. Four young men in ironed khaki, who assure him that all he needs to do if the petrol generator fails is to set off a signal flare, and assistance will be on its way as soon as possible. Sasha had smiled at them, and patted them on the arm in the way all old people do when given sensible advice by a person much younger than them. He’d wondered how old they were. Nineteen, maybe. Twenty at most. Younger than his grandsons. They’d set up the floodlights and driven off back towards Karachev, their eagerness to depart left undisguised. The box of flares the men gave him sits innocently on the mantle where he first set it down, coated in a thin veil of dust, and Sasha knows that he is never going to use them.

The microwave beeps.

Most of his meals are taken in the sitting room now; he is unwilling to eat at the kitchen table while staring at the empty chair opposite his. His armchair does well enough. He takes a few bites of dinner, but takes no pleasure in the greyish microwaved meat and bland diced vegetables. Here, alone, in his retirement, he can sleep and wake as he likes, and as winter settles in, night and day have become meaningless concepts to him. Still, he forces himself to keep a routine established, one of putting on clothes and of eating at regular hours, of shaving and brushing his teeth– all a pretence at personhood which he is starting to find difficult to maintain now that he is entirely alone.

He puts down his spoon, and gazes out the sitting-room window. A silent flurry of snow has started up, dusting the chipped paint on the window frames, each flake swallowing the glow from the floodlights and reflecting it back against the black sky in a shower of white sparks.

The darkness stares back at Sasha silently. Invitingly.

For the first time in months, he allows himself to leave his congealing dinner unfinished, walk over to the back door, place his hand on the cool brass doorknob, and turn it.

No matter how long it’s been since the darkness descended, Sasha is continually surprised at just how loud the squeal of the hinges can sound when he is the only thing living for miles– no owls left to sing their evening songs, or crickets’ clicks to fill the air. No wind.

He steps outside.

Darkness this far north is to be expected, but this is unnatural, obliterating everything, even the outlines of the leaves on the trees. There is absolutely nothing that can be seen beyond that black fog that creeps closer to his home every day. Nothing above it, nothing at its base. An immense wall, a curtain to hide what has always been there, paddocks and livestock and homes and families, or maybe to take them for itself, every day swallowing a little more.

He walks across the yard, and over to the animal pens, the sound of the generator growing quieter with each step. Months ago, his cows and goats would have slept here, huddled together in their pens, oblivious to the danger. He remembers the day the first goat disappeared, remembers his certainty that one of the demonic children from the Bobrik farm had stolen it with a fond smile at his own foolishness.

Now the pen stands empty, gate closed, old straw rotting gently into the frozen ground. His feet take him past the pens, across to the edge of the manmade illumination. Gazing up, the thick steel poles holding up the 400-watt glare tower above him; they in turn are dwarfed by the churning wall of fog they hold back, the darkness testing the lights edge and recoiling as it hits the artificial orange glow.

He walks as close to the wall as he can, peering into the black, trying to see anything beyond its billowing surface. Like the rebellious teenagers the soldiers used to scold, Sasha reaches a gnarled hand slowly towards the fog.

He twists it slowly as he watches it fade from sight, first his fingertips, then his thumb, then his wrist. It felt like nothing at all– vaguely cold, but neither uncomfortable nor soothing. He draws his fingertips along the edge of the curtain, smiling at the swirling trails his fingertips leave on the surface.

“Hm,” he says, inspecting his hands as if they belong to someone else, someone not quite human, then looks up at the darkness. He stands there for a moment, contemplating the pros and cons of testing the fog further. If he enters, is it possible for him to come back out? There is something enchantingly calm about the fog, now that he sees it up close. Its tendrils eddy and twist around his breath.

Sasha stays within the protection of the light as he walks along the edge of the curtain, running his fingers through it, the way a dog throws its head out of the window of a car to enjoy the breeze in its fur.

He walks a mile or more, to the edge of the Bobrick farm, until the hum of the generator completely fades and he stands alone, in total silence, at the edge of nothing.

Time passes; Sasha turns, and walks back towards his farm, the question of how one might go about turning off the generator slipping across his mind, like a lover carding fingers through his hair.