HOME | DD

Description
    What makes a home safe?
    When you tuck yourself in a night, comforted by a warm blanket and soft pillows, are you really safe from the terrible things that exist in the darkness? Think about this, because in truth, you’re never safe. Comfort is not safety.
    Your home is no barrier for darkness. Your locks are man made and useless against forces you can’t even comprehend. Walls, no matter how thick, doors, no matter how strong, windows, no matter how tightly shut, curtains no matter how completely closed, cannot stop evil.
    Nothing can.
    Evil is an ever marching, ever present, ever powerful force in the universe, one which humankind will never truly understand, for we are not creatures old enough in our limited history to even begin comprehending the ways of the cosmos.
    However, that does not mean that other, far older and far fouler beings in other realms of existence cannot reach out to us.
    When they are called, when their names are mentioned either in mind or in tongue in this world, they know. They’re always listening, always watching, always ready and yet, never detectable. Our eyes and ears and minds are too small and young to see them.
   And yet when they hear their names, they come, they answer, they reveal themselves to the one who called them.
   And beware, for as humans slowly but steadily advance towards opening more and more forbidden, blasphemous secrets, supposedly hidden by time, more and more of these beings, these things that are not alive nor dead by any human standard, are turning their attention towards our tiny, insignificant planet, and the host of fresh, unsuspecting souls that dwell here.

.........

    The young man, again, looked around his room with an almost paranoid glint to his dark blue eyes. The night was quickly settling in, casting its dull gloom across the land, and the cold wind could be heard, howling and roaring outside, imitating the most vicious and enraged of predators.
    The new flat was one of those young professional type places, designed by some young mind fresh out of some architect university course, designed to be comforting, modern and as homey as one could make a flat be. The walls were a reassuring light brown and the floors made from a faux wood while the couch and chairs were white, clean and almost flawless, reflecting the newness of the place.
   The flat however, was still in the process of truly being born. Boxes filled every corner and loomed like towers over every doorway. They were like the dying bones of some scattered monster, or like the remaining columns of some collapsed temple. Their corners jutted out and often caught the shoulder or elbow of the occupant.
   The boxes themselves seemed like relics next to the naïve youth of the flat. Their old, creased, stained, ripped sides, bulging from their weight and contents seemed completely out of place within the rooms of the flat, yet, they seemed to occupy every room and thus, seemed like they were almost spreading out throughout the apartment, breeding and infecting every possible space they could find.
   It gave the place an almost claustrophobic and imprisoning feeling, especially to the owner, who had to constantly remind himself that they’d soon be gone once he’d finished unpacking.
   However, although he’d been unpacking boxes since he’d arrived that day, he hadn’t seemed to have made a dent in the canyons of stacked boxes that turned his roomy flat into an odd, dark maze with long shadows reaching out like fingers, waiting to grab him.
   This was clearly affecting the poor man who lived within. He was tall, thin and scrawny in his build. His deathly pale face was sharp, as were his cheekbones, while his dark blue eyes sunk into his face, creating dark rings beneath them, giving him an impression of permanent sickliness. He had a straight, plain nose and a pair of pink lips with a small, but healing, cut on his lower lip. His dark brown hair was wavy, curly almost, and clearly unwashed and uncombed and it came down to his neck were it ended in tendril-like strands.
    He wore a dirty white shirt which seemed to hang from his terribly thin body and a pair of dull blue pants, held up by a belt. On his feet he wore a pair of simple black socks. A dull blue jacket was hanging on the back of his chair, as was a matching dull blue tie.
    The man was sitting at a computer desk with a slightly dated looking laptop resting on it, the only thing that seemed to be plugged in and unpacked in the whole apartment and itself, watched over by an additional three towers of boxes. Beside the laptop lay a small number of printed and laminated photographs, each with a curious set of computerised notes written on them and with further added notes written onto the pictures themselves, presumably by the man himself.
   The man slowly turned back to the screen and raised a bony hand to rub his tired eyes and it seemed, for a moment, he considered putting on the glasses which sat, neatly folded, in the small space between the laptop keyboard and the screen.
   The words on the page before him reflected in his eyes, shining up from the artificial light given by the screen. It was an email, with several attached documents, all of them pictures, and the man seemed to be finishing the last of the written contents of the email himself.

    ‘Dear Mr. Lovecraft.
                       I have made the most astounding of discoveries, possibly one of the greatest, most important archaeological discoveries of this centaury. As you well know, the excavations at the Ayer’s Rock/Uluru in the Northern Territory of Australia has been an amazing, first time chance for anyone in the world to finally get a unique perspective of what the rock is really made of and to look into the past of the local Aboriginal tribes who honour and worship the rock.
    We were allowed to excavate upon the west side of the rock, in particular, along the path of the Kantju gorge that formed naturally upon the rock-face and served as a waterfall. However, this was not the season for rain upon the Ayer’s Rock and we were free to take our time examining and searching the huge gorge.
    While examining the rock, we found little to suggest anyone may have been along it and nor did we find any evidence that there was any reason as to examine this side of the rock at all. We all began to feel cheated by the clearing of this side of Ayer’s Rock and we suspected the tribesmen may have done this purposely to stop us from finding anything of any real cultural or spiritual value.
    Yet, towards the ninth day of our searching, upon the left side of the gorge (picture included) we discovered something truly unusual. While using Ground Penetrating Radar on the sides of the walls, particularly on the large collection of rocks that had gathered along there, we found that a huge collection of massive rocks seemed to be blocking the entrance to a large tunnel which went directly down into the rock.
    This discovery was extraordinary, as it was the first time anyone had ever found any natural way into Ayer’s Rock and we proposed that it must have been formed by the water running from and now through the rock over millions of years. We soon began to move the rocks covering the entrance, but this itself raised an interesting question. Why would the tribesmen wish to block any way into the rock? And how did they move such huge stones without the help of modern equipment, which itself struggled to perform such a task.
    However, as soon as we could get into the tunnel we did so, making our way through a tiny gap in the moved rocks and being immediately greeted by the narrow walls of the passage, reminding me of my student days, venturing into the darkness of the tombs of the Valley of the Kings. I was accompanied by a Dr. Frances Gardener, an expert in aboriginal culture and a Professor Ted Branderson of Oxford University who was well versed in the archaeological field in Australia. We also had with us four other local hired men who were helping us with the grunt work of the project and carrying samples and finds back and forth.
    The only light were the ones we brought and the air was rancid and caused many of us to cough, but I tried to hold back, knowing we where in a place not visited in uncounted years. Excited chatter immediately broke out amongst our small excursion group. We all knew that we were on the verge of finding something world changing and so, even in the cold, dead, ancient tunnel of darkness we stood before, we readied ourselves with great vigour and excitement. Our footsteps and voices echoed within the long cavern, bouncing down the walls and into the black before dying in the shadows, somehow, it felt as if we were violating the sacred, tomblike silence that was held here by the gloom and so, through some subconscious fear, our voices soon dropped to being merely harsh whispers.
    At first, when we turned our torches to the walls of the tunnel, we could see only the cold stone looking back at us, but as we walked further into the tunnel, it became obvious that this tunnel was not made by the many unknown years of rainwater. The floor was dry and smooth and seemed to fall, twist and turn as we moved on into the unknown rock. The walls too were straight, as if made so by design, not by nature. The ceiling displayed no signs of algae or other life that seemed to exist on the outside walls of the rock.
    Oddly, our eyes did not manage to adjust fully to the twilight around us, which gave the unnerving impression that the darkness was something imposing and oppressive, infecting and existing within every last inch of this long chamber.
    We heard no wind, so we knew there had to be an end somewhere inside Ayer’s Rock itself. Also, we heard no sound of dripping water, or any life at all. Well… I do correct myself, but there was something. As we where travelling, one of the men who was walking out in front of me suddenly shouted and screamed and pointed into the blackness of the tunnel.
   We all, of course, jumped and quickly asked the man what was wrong. He answered that he’d seen something before him, a single eye in the dark and a movement, like a tail of some kind before it’d disappeared into the shadow.
   Dr. Gardener was quick to shout at the scared man, telling him not to make up such nonsensical lies and threatened to remove him from the team should he do so again. The man calmed, but still, he became far more paranoid, convinced in his own mind that something was watching us from the looming shadows.
    I must admit, even to such a learned scholar such as yourself, that I too was shaken by the very atmosphere around us. There was definitely something… wrong about that cave, that long, forever deepening tunnel stretching on into the cold blackness of the heart of the rock. It was a similar feeling one would get when venturing into the tombs of ancient kings or graves of long dead men, but this… this was different. It was as if all things down this dark, almost unnatural, tunnel were not just long forgotten, but purposely forgotten, as if the local Anangu tribes did not wish to remember what eldritch secrets the darkness that Uluru Rock held.
    It must have been at least half an hour’s walking into the depths of the rock, the path we followed leading further down as we went, until finally, relief and luck came to our small party by the lights of our torches falling on, engraved directly into the rock, symbols and patterns of a clearly Aboriginal nature.
   We did not cheer loudly, for it was if we did not wish to awaken anything that could be listening. It was I and Dr. Gardener who first approached the cave paintings and immediately we began to translate and decipher the pictures that hadn’t been seen by human eyes in so long.
    What we found however was somewhat… disturbing.
    The paintings we first found seemed to depict the closing of the mouth of the tunnel, with drawings very closely resembling the Wati-Kutjara, or mythological lizard men of aboriginal mythology, magically placing the rocks at the mouth of the cave. As we moved down, it slowly became apparent why they’d sealed the cave.
    Anangu tribes in the area around the rock claim it is so sacred because a terrible battle, mostly between serpent or lizard-like people took place and the blood spilt was said to have raised in the form of the rock. Ayer’s Rock itself is said to be cursed, and anyone removing any stone from the place is said to take the curse with them.
    It seems that this legend goes back further than many thought, as the paintings on the walls of the tunnel gave much evidence to this supposed battle of the lizard-beings. As we ventured further down the hall, the paintings became less and less, well, aboriginal and took on a whole new, undocumented style. The patterns, the markings, they all became completely unreadable and disconcerting to look upon. The only way we could even tell what was going on was by the pictures and our combined knowledge of the myth and education in such areas.
    We could translate little from the markings, and the further we moved down the less readable and more alien the markings became. It seemed that the great rocks, beyond any age we could even think, held their story tightly, refusing to let our eyes and minds in on it’s vastly eldritch secret.
    All we could get was that the Wati-Kutjara once existed in this realm before something terrible, some horrible catastrophe befell them and, almost it seems overnight, they where gone, vanished into this vast fog of time and memory.
    As our team journeyed further into the cave I believe we all began to hear a… whispering, coming from the shadows. Although, I do believe now that it must have been the wind moving through the tunnel, but it certainly had enough effect for the man who was first frightened to run from the main party, back down the tunnel and into the pitch black, screaming about demons.
    Dr. Gardener seemed clearly unaffected by it all and showed that he was truly a man of great bravery and fearlessness in the face of these ancient secrets. As we continued, despite our shaken resolve, we all seemed to wordlessly place Dr. Gardener as our ‘leader’ being as he now strode on, into the pitch black, no longer wishing to waste any more time with distractions while on such an important find.
    We pushed on, into the dark, into the almost freezing cold rock and stone of this mysterious tunnel. By now, the darkness had completely swallowed us and it was almost as if the shadows themselves were trying to surround us, cut us off and swallow us whole. The chill was something that crept not just at your skin, but into your heart and soul, causing every bit of you to crawl and cringe at the very air you breathed in this place.
    The markings on the wall began to take on an…inhuman quality, signs and markings that were unlike anything my eyes had ever fallen upon. These signs seemed to almost shimmer, as if caught in some intense heat, and glow with a light not shone from any natural source. They seemed to be made of a separate, turquoise substance which had somehow been fused into the rock itself. We could not identify what this new mineral was, or how the original tribes had managed to come upon it and
    And yet, as we moved on, I couldn’t help but keep my natural scientific wonderment about me. The feeling of an unnatural, unnerving, ethereal horror waiting ahead of us could not dampen the basic scientific urge to know, to learn, to discover and unravel more of this immensely captivating mystery. Even though, in a way, we sensed that this was a secret perhaps too old, too dark and too long forgotten to be discovered by just us mere humans alone. That this one, long chamber, these markings, even perhaps the shadows that pervaded and ate away at all around us, belong to something else, something beyond our primitive understanding.
    And then, finally, we hit upon it. Our long, almost timeless trek through the darkness and gloom, through the unnatural, bone chilling cold and tomb-like silence, finally we came upon the epicentre of this find.
    The main chamber of Uluru rock.
    The room was perfectly round and the walls impossibly smooth and completely adorned in those strange, alien markings. The chamber was large and yet, not huge, and one of our helpers guessed that it must have easily been around one thousand feet squared at least, possibly more. The floor was covered in dust and the remains of things, people and animals perhaps, that had rotted to dust over thousands of years. However, the one thing that truly drew the eye was the giant totem pole that rose through the middle of the chamber like the trunk of a great and ancient tree.
     The totem pole was decorated like nothing I’d ever seen, sharp spikes and needles coming off almost randomly, and yet, seemingly forming some sort of mind-numbing, dizzying pattern. Markings and images were engraved into it, such sights I have never seen in all my years of archaeology. This was truly something unique, new and yet, old beyond anything I could imagine. The pictures marked on the totem seemed to describe some kind of story…and yet, we could not read what it was, as we’d never seen any writing like this and so, we had nothing to try and even guess at a translation. Even myself, a specialist at decoding the words of ancient tongues, could not understand the completely alien lettering I saw here.
    However, luck was, amazingly, on our side. Around the curved walls of the room, sketched under the strange, unnerving turquoise language and patterns where very faded barely readable letters of an aboriginal origin. It seemed those who had walked the earth long before any of us here had seen fit to provide their own translation from this other, stranger language which had been long forgotten by the mists of time. The room itself seemed to be far colder than one would even expect, and its chill went through a person, making their whole body shiver with an internal bitterness that gnawed at the bones and mind and made one think of beings old and dead even long before humanity stood upright on the plains of Africa.
    The strange markings filled us all with a sense of eldritch horror and dread, such writing and language was so new to our knowledge and yet, it was far older than anything we could think of. The story that was held in silence by the ancient rock and stone that was bound by word, literally, to the great and terrible totem pole in the centre of this dark, foreboding tomb-like cavern underneath Ayer’s Rock was easily something of which had only been whispered and rumoured through time, turning from sacred to myth and from myth to legend until it had been forgotten by mankind’s memory altogether.
    Immediately our small team set about archiving, photographing, sample collecting and in my own case, translating this momentous find. Never had such a large and eldritch and unusual case been uncovered in the history of this land, perhaps, in the history of this planet with the possible except of that old pseudo-scientific find of the great rumoured city buried within the terrible mountains of the Antarctic. Professor Branderson would not stop whispering to the rest of us about the importance of this cave and how he’d never seen such ancient and unique markings.
    The sight was truly unnerving and yet, exciting. Fear was raising every hair on our necks and yet we still couldn’t stop smiling. This was something truly beyond what we’d ever dreamt of. This was truly something that, each knowing in our own selfish way, would put our names on the lips of every archaeologist in the world.
    We began gathering up as many samples and pictures as we could, in one way, desperate to gather as much evidence and paraphernalia of this lost world as we could, and yet in another, desperate to get out of that dark, foreboding cavern. It was if the air was growing thin and sparse as many of us seemed to be taking deeper and deeper breaths. The longer we remained in that deathly tomb-like chamber, the more we could feel the warm being sapped and drawn from us.
    It was if our presence, our life, was somehow offensive to the long death-like sleep this chamber and the archive secrets it held within. The noise of the living had disturbed something within this tomb, buried deep within the dark heart of Uluru.
    We exited and began our long walk back through the perpetual night of the long, steep tunnel. It was strange feeling, almost as if all time had stopped within this darkness and we were suspended beyond the trappings of the world beyond. Nothing moved and no sounds of animals or other life apart from ourselves were heard. It was as if we’d truly stepped into something beyond earth, beyond our feeble human conception of space and time, and into a place were life and death are none existent, only nothingness, only the great void and silence existed here.
    And still… the feeling of ancient eyes upon us did not leave our party. Perhaps it was just our own paranoia brought on by the momentousness of our find, but we all felt like we’d be better once we’d exited out of this cold, dead tomb-chamber and back into the light and warmth of the living world.
    When we finally spotted the heavenly pure light from the entrance of the tunnel, we all cheered. The light there meant more to us than the find below, as it allowed us to finally escape from the dead silence of that dark void below and the maddening symbols of that long dead language.
    We were greeted by several of our hired hands who quickly inquired about our finds and subsequently cheered in joy when we told them of the cave and the markings, missing out the feelings of dread and bone chilling cold that we’d felt there. However one of our party inquired about the man who fled from the cave in pure fright.
   The men assured us that no one had come out of the cave.
   The investigation for him started immediately, which was why we returned back to England so quickly. How our assistant managed to disappear is still a mystery, nothing of him seems to have been found and no one on the excavation site has seen nor heard of him.
    Furthermore, once the cave had been opened, well, strange things began to happen during the night. Our crew would wake up to find equipment thrown about and precious archaeological evident completely destroyed or missing. Men began to go into fits whenever they lay down to sleep, or they’d wake up at the latest hour screaming and howling in their sleep. Many of the men began to complain of hearing whispers, or seeing things move within the shadows of their lanterns.
    The locals began to avoid us and all who were connected to the dig. When confronted, they told us that they saw us as cursed by the rock, a claim we were all beginning to believe. Only Dr. Gardener seemed completely unaffected by it all and has remained steadfast and calm throughout all of this. He dismisses us as being scared by superstitions and claims the heat is getting to us all. Professor Branderson however seemed to become increasingly withdrawn and sickly looking, it seemed that the stress of the mounting unusualness of our situation was getting to him.
    However, when he suggested we return back to England and the University with our finds, I quickly agreed. Both of us were glad to be away from that dark, foreboding place, he perhaps even more than I. I have yet to hear from him however, not since two days ago when we unloaded our finds for the good people at Oxford University have I, or anyone else for that matter, managed to get a hold of him.
    I must tell you; once I have handed over these translations I shall be quitting this team and moving on completely. This whole ordeal, while being groundbreaking in its field, has truly unnerved me. The psychological effect on the men, the disappearance of one of our own team and the sudden silence of Professor Branderson has me deeply unnerved.’

    The man blinked as he read the last of his words and sighed, his eyes moving down to the dark keyboard, typing out his name and clicking send. The email was lengthy and would probably bore the pants off Mr. Lovecraft, but he would send it anyway. As soon as he’d finished translating the last picture he had.
    His eyes glanced over at the picture that lay at the side of his laptop and his eyes narrowed in an annoyed, almost hateful expression. The picture was of a strange sign, simple in its design and yet, somehow disturbing to the eye. Every time he blinked, the man was sure it changed ever so slightly and even in the dim light the picture, the markings still stood out, glowing almost.
    He hated looking at them, but he knew that soon he could throw them in a suitcase and never have to cast eye other those unnerving markings again.
    He picked up the picture slowly, as if scared to even touch it and lifted his glasses up, wishing to look at it with his own eyes. He knew that he could just figure it out if he compared it to something of a similar age… but he had yet to even find what that age was.
    The man’s eyes narrowed even more, determined to find something, anything that he could pick out in markings. Its secrets taunted him, mocked him, knowing that he’d never find out what he was looking for. He grew frustrated with both the picture and himself, wishing he could retire to some much wanted sleep and forget these eldritch markings and the powerful hold they seemed to have on him.
    He shook his head, deciding he needed to get himself something to eat and drink. He couldn’t translate on an empty stomach, or so he told himself, when truly he just wanted something to distract him. Standing up, the man winced at the ache in his legs from sitting down for so long.
    His eyes travelled down the short distance between himself and his kitchen and he realised that he was flanked on both sides by boxes towering above his head. The man frowned, never remembering putting so many boxes in his new home… or even being able to stack them as high as they were.
    He blinked and rubbed his eyes before putting his glasses back down, he must be growing tired, or perhaps the events as of late had occupied too much of his mind and attention. It was true he was starting to grow uncomfortable even within his own apartment. Every shadow seemed to leap out at him, every corner seemed too sharp and every creak or moan the apartment sounded like it was made by something other than the apartment itself.
    Or maybe he was just becoming paranoid. Maybe his trip had taken more from him than he thought… Maybe he just needed to call his girlfriend and be with her for a little while, especially since he’d been away for so long. Shaking his head again, the man made his way into his kitchen were he yanked open the fridge only to find that it was almost completely empty, the stark whiteness and the artificial light mocking him about his lack of forethought of actually buying some food for his new kitchen.
    He glared and muttered something about going down to the nearest co-op as soon as he’d had some nice warm tea. It again, gave him something other to do than work on his translations. He didn’t care that he’d have to go out into the ever-angrier sounding winds outside, or the dagger-like rain that was assaulting the earth, as long as he could get away from that picture and those ethereal markings.
    The man shut the fridge door and straightened up, stretching as he did. However, above the howling, roaring winds and above the machinegun-like chattering of the rain at his windows, he heard a noise.
    It was the sound of something being knocked over in his hall.
    The sound made the man jump and his whole body spun around, almost as if he expected something to be behind him, ready to jump out at him. However, he was only met with the dark shadows of the many boxes clogging up his apartment. He took several deep breaths before moving to investigate what it was. He guessed it must have been a box falling over perhaps, and yet, he couldn’t help but feel silly at his fear. This was his apartment! This was where he lived now! He shouldn’t be afraid of the random events of his own space!
    Although… he still felt that nagging sensation at the back of his mind… telling him to not go and investigate, to just leave his flat and go somewhere, anywhere else. It was the kind of feeling you think that people in horror films should get before they go wandering off into cold dark basements only to be killed five minutes later.
    He looked down and scowled to himself. This was HIS home! And he would not be scared out of his own home, not by some stupid boxes falling over, not for anything. Dr. Gardener had been right, there’s no such thing as curses or any superstitions. He was a man of science, a man of rationality, and boxes falling over were not scary!
    With this renewed confidence, he stormed out of his kitchen, determined to put that box back wherever it’d fell from and to stop being such a fool. Even if the wind outside seemed to howl louder and the rain pound the windows so much one might think they were on the verge of breaking though.
    The box in question was actually at the end of a small corridor with doors leading off to a bathroom, a spare bedroom and the man’s own bedroom. By the looks of it, it’d been a box filled with CD’s and DVD’s. The man frowned at this and hoped that nothing had been snapped or broken.
    However, he paused before he stepped into the long, dark path ahead of him. Something seemed… different and out of place within the corridor… he couldn’t tell just what it was, but he could just… feel it. A terrible coldness entered him, just like when he was back in Australia, deep in the heart of Uluru.
    His eyes widened and a terrible fear gripped him. Again, he wanted to leave, to retreat back so some warm, lively, bright place and stay there. Again, the same feelings he’d had when he was down in those perpetually black tunnels. The feeling of ancient eye’s upon him and the sense, that basic survival sense, telling him that something was hiding, waiting for him to walk into some kind of trap.
    But, the man’s hands suddenly gripped into fists as he reminded himself that this was his home and nothing here could harm him, nothing was going to get him, nothing would happen should he walk down the seemingly ever darkening corridor. He told himself that he’d look back on this and laugh at his silliness.
    He took a step into his corridor and he grinned when, as he predicted, nothing happened. His faith in his own confidence was instantly restored; however, a lingering fear remained at the back of his mind, warning him that he was just fooling himself and that something truly terrible awaited him at the end of the long corridor.
    As his whole body became enveloped by the shadows, he could almost feel something crawling around him, in the very air and atmosphere and yet it was so subtle that his mind still didn’t allow him to react to it. It was as faint as the lightest breeze and it had the same softness as a tiny wisp of silk, but yet it send a shiver running down his spine and put an extra hop into his step.
    This strange, unnerving fear caused him to quicken his walk until he was almost breaking into a run. He knew that he couldn’t put up with this any longer and in his own mind he cursed his own work for tying him to this place. He’d do anything to leave and to go to his loved one but his sense of duty to his work kept him here, where he knew he’d find no rest from his own paranoid mind.
    He reached the end of the corridor and the light shining from the outside hit him, freeing him from the grasp of the shadows coldness. The man truly felt like he’d thrown some kind of shackle from him and he could almost feel the darkness falling from around his neck.
    His eyes turned to his room were, to his satisfaction, his prediction of a box falling over had come true. It was one filled with books and a large bronze award from something he couldn’t remember doing. Either way, the sight reminded him that nothing was out of the ordinary in his home and that the world did not contain monsters in closets or aliens or any other paranormal, superstitious rubbish.
    As he righted the box, putting the books and the award back in place, he smirked and almost laughed at himself. He would have to tell his friends when he saw them again of this whole ordeal, if only to justify why he was afraid of his own corridor.
     The fear of anything attacking him now was washed away completely as he turned his head to peer out of his window. Even though the rain battered down and the wind roared like an enraged beast and the sky was pitch black, for a split second it all seemed to let up and the bright moon almost peaked from behind the terrible clouds, letting a sliver of glittering moonlight dance its way onto the world.
    Then it died.
    He was unsure what caused him to turn his head back to the darkness of his home. Perhaps it was the smell that first hit him. The smell of old dry desert stone, of air beyond ages and of something unknown to him entirely, something ancient and terrible… the same kind of smell that had intoxicated the tomb chamber of Uluru.
    Maybe it was the coldness, the kind that crawled its way into ones bones and remained there for all time, reminding one on dark nights of the horror that you once faced. It gripped his whole body like a claw grasping its prey and drained him of all warmth, sapping away the life from his body and drawing the very breath from his lungs, making him see it before his eyes in a small cloud of perspiration, before letting it vanish into the air.
    His eyes fell upon nothing, and yet, at the same time, something. There was movement in the shadow…wait, no, it was the shadow itself that was moving! The very darkness, the very gloom that covered his home, was coming alive and uncurling like some terrible snake.
    Horror unlike anything he’d ever bore witness to before seized him, every last part of his mind and heart and soul was taken by pure, unreal terror.
    Eyes opened in the dark, eyes of a terrible void and blackness like no other stared back at him, eyes that had looked into the infinite of time and space and had survived, immortal, untouchable, invulnerable, for uncounted eons. To even look upon this… thing, that moved from the darkness was to look upon the essence of eldritch evil itself.
    It had no shape, and yet, the ones it formed seemed to be of terrible and impossible angles, shapes and contortions. The young man was brought to the point of insanity as he witnessed the thing, forming from the dark gloom of his corridor, mould and push and float and slide itself into the perfect moonlight.
    Something inside the man’s mind kicked, and his instinct told him to move and shut the space between them, anything to block its progress towards him. The man, with little or no thought other than his own subconscious obeying his basic will to live, grabbed the handle to the door and slammed it shut.
    He stood back, but the cold and the smell and the fear remained, despite his logic telling itself that he’d stopped it. He needed to protect himself… more. He needed to make sure he put as much between himself and that horror as possible.
    The boxes. His eyes immediately flew to the box towers that crowded around the entrance to the room. It’d taken who knows how long to stack them so high and orderly, but it took less than a minute to topple them until they piled against the doorway, completely blocking anything wishing to get in.
    Or anything wishing to get out.
    For a second, the man thought he was safe, the barrier being so solid and reassuring provided some comfort to his fears and he even allowed his mind to doubt what he’d just witnessed. If he could doubt what he saw, perhaps he’d be safe.
    If he didn’t believe it existed, it couldn’t get him.
    Ignorance may indeed be bliss, but than again, ignorance has a terrible way of always hitting you the hardest when reality knocks on your door.
   Or perhaps in this case, moves though it.
   The cold got colder, the smell got stronger, and the man’s fear reached into his every atom as he spotted it, oozing and sliming through the cracks and spaces in the piled boxes, pushing and shaping its way through the impossibly tiny crevices and from beneath the tightest of spaces within the makeshift blockade.
    The darkness. The living evil. The thing from the void. It was coming for him and nothing of this earth, nothing that a human’s tiny mind could think of, would ever stop it. An eye bubbled up from the thick, fog-liquid body of the thing, and it locked onto the man.
    He screamed and yet, no sound would come from his mouth, it seemed trapped and the scream rattled within his throat hurting him. He could not, for all the will and strength within him, look away from that terrible eye and the gaze that bore into his very soul.
    His body wanted to move, it wanted to escape, it wanted to live… but his mind, his heart, his soul, they were caught in the enthral unblinking gaze of the eternal darkness. This was death, this was the void, this was the dread that existed in the minds of all humans. That old age fear that perhaps humans fear above all animals, the fear that within the dark, when shadows fall across the world, something is watching. Some unnameable terror watches the world from the gloom and the darkness, something which has always been there and will always be there.
    The thing, unnameable, unstoppable, immortal. The thing of darkness and of evil and of fear. The thing that is not of mankind’s understanding of the universe and all that happens beyond his meagre grasp on reality. The thing that feeds on the souls of those whom it has preyed upon for as long as memory can serve.
    And now, it came for this man who had stumbled upon its secrets, secrets that no human should ever know.
    The thing had now completely moved through every opening and crack and gap it could find and was pulsating its way towards the man, reaching out in all directs and expanding in all directions, stretching and reaching in all directions, coving all it touched in perpetual shadow and darkness.
    The man saw the darkness and even as it reached up over him, lurching like some terrible wave just on the verge of a breaking, words managed to steal away from his lips.
    “That which is not dead, can eternal lie… and in strange eons, even death may die.”

.........

    Nothing was ever found of him, only the screen from his laptop reading that last fateful message and the photo’s lying beside it.
    No one could explain how someone had managed to barrage themselves within a single room and vanish into thin air from a five story building.
    But than again, it is perhaps better not to ask, and to simply leave some mysteries to the infinite knowledge of the universe.
    So, tonight, when you turn off your lights and wrap yourselves deep within your beds, take a moment just to think of the fate of this poor man, taken by forces beyond our comprehension, and do contemplate leaving the light on as you rest.
    Because, you never know what is watching from within the pitch blackness of the deep shadows…

Description
    What makes a home safe?
    When you tuck yourself in a night, comforted by a warm blanket and soft pillows, are you really safe from the terrible things that exist in the darkness? Think about this, because in truth, you’re never safe. Comfort is not safety.
    Your home is no barrier for darkness. Your locks are man made and useless against forces you can’t even comprehend. Walls, no matter how thick, doors, no matter how strong, windows, no matter how tightly shut, curtains no matter how completely closed, cannot stop evil.
    Nothing can.
    Evil is an ever marching, ever present, ever powerful force in the universe, one which humankind will never truly understand, for we are not creatures old enough in our limited history to even begin comprehending the ways of the cosmos.
    However, that does not mean that other, far older and far fouler beings in other realms of existence cannot reach out to us.
    When they are called, when their names are mentioned either in mind or in tongue in this world, they know. They’re always listening, always watching, always ready and yet, never detectable. Our eyes and ears and minds are too small and young to see them.
   And yet when they hear their names, they come, they answer, they reveal themselves to the one who called them.
   And beware, for as humans slowly but steadily advance towards opening more and more forbidden, blasphemous secrets, supposedly hidden by time, more and more of these beings, these things that are not alive nor dead by any human standard, are turning their attention towards our tiny, insignificant planet, and the host of fresh, unsuspecting souls that dwell here.

.........

    The young man, again, looked around his room with an almost paranoid glint to his dark blue eyes. The night was quickly settling in, casting its dull gloom across the land, and the cold wind could be heard, howling and roaring outside, imitating the most vicious and enraged of predators.
    The new flat was one of those young professional type places, designed by some young mind fresh out of some architect university course, designed to be comforting, modern and as homey as one could make a flat be. The walls were a reassuring light brown and the floors made from a faux wood while the couch and chairs were white, clean and almost flawless, reflecting the newness of the place.
   The flat however, was still in the process of truly being born. Boxes filled every corner and loomed like towers over every doorway. They were like the dying bones of some scattered monster, or like the remaining columns of some collapsed temple. Their corners jutted out and often caught the shoulder or elbow of the occupant.
   The boxes themselves seemed like relics next to the naïve youth of the flat. Their old, creased, stained, ripped sides, bulging from their weight and contents seemed completely out of place within the rooms of the flat, yet, they seemed to occupy every room and thus, seemed like they were almost spreading out throughout the apartment, breeding and infecting every possible space they could find.
   It gave the place an almost claustrophobic and imprisoning feeling, especially to the owner, who had to constantly remind himself that they’d soon be gone once he’d finished unpacking.
   However, although he’d been unpacking boxes since he’d arrived that day, he hadn’t seemed to have made a dent in the canyons of stacked boxes that turned his roomy flat into an odd, dark maze with long shadows reaching out like fingers, waiting to grab him.
   This was clearly affecting the poor man who lived within. He was tall, thin and scrawny in his build. His deathly pale face was sharp, as were his cheekbones, while his dark blue eyes sunk into his face, creating dark rings beneath them, giving him an impression of permanent sickliness. He had a straight, plain nose and a pair of pink lips with a small, but healing, cut on his lower lip. His dark brown hair was wavy, curly almost, and clearly unwashed and uncombed and it came down to his neck were it ended in tendril-like strands.
    He wore a dirty white shirt which seemed to hang from his terribly thin body and a pair of dull blue pants, held up by a belt. On his feet he wore a pair of simple black socks. A dull blue jacket was hanging on the back of his chair, as was a matching dull blue tie.
    The man was sitting at a computer desk with a slightly dated looking laptop resting on it, the only thing that seemed to be plugged in and unpacked in the whole apartment and itself, watched over by an additional three towers of boxes. Beside the laptop lay a small number of printed and laminated photographs, each with a curious set of computerised notes written on them and with further added notes written onto the pictures themselves, presumably by the man himself.
   The man slowly turned back to the screen and raised a bony hand to rub his tired eyes and it seemed, for a moment, he considered putting on the glasses which sat, neatly folded, in the small space between the laptop keyboard and the screen.
   The words on the page before him reflected in his eyes, shining up from the artificial light given by the screen. It was an email, with several attached documents, all of them pictures, and the man seemed to be finishing the last of the written contents of the email himself.

    ‘Dear Mr. Lovecraft.
                       I have made the most astounding of discoveries, possibly one of the greatest, most important archaeological discoveries of this centaury. As you well know, the excavations at the Ayer’s Rock/Uluru in the Northern Territory of Australia has been an amazing, first time chance for anyone in the world to finally get a unique perspective of what the rock is really made of and to look into the past of the local Aboriginal tribes who honour and worship the rock.
    We were allowed to excavate upon the west side of the rock, in particular, along the path of the Kantju gorge that formed naturally upon the rock-face and served as a waterfall. However, this was not the season for rain upon the Ayer’s Rock and we were free to take our time examining and searching the huge gorge.
    While examining the rock, we found little to suggest anyone may have been along it and nor did we find any evidence that there was any reason as to examine this side of the rock at all. We all began to feel cheated by the clearing of this side of Ayer’s Rock and we suspected the tribesmen may have done this purposely to stop us from finding anything of any real cultural or spiritual value.
    Yet, towards the ninth day of our searching, upon the left side of the gorge (picture included) we discovered something truly unusual. While using Ground Penetrating Radar on the sides of the walls, particularly on the large collection of rocks that had gathered along there, we found that a huge collection of massive rocks seemed to be blocking the entrance to a large tunnel which went directly down into the rock.
    This discovery was extraordinary, as it was the first time anyone had ever found any natural way into Ayer’s Rock and we proposed that it must have been formed by the water running from and now through the rock over millions of years. We soon began to move the rocks covering the entrance, but this itself raised an interesting question. Why would the tribesmen wish to block any way into the rock? And how did they move such huge stones without the help of modern equipment, which itself struggled to perform such a task.
    However, as soon as we could get into the tunnel we did so, making our way through a tiny gap in the moved rocks and being immediately greeted by the narrow walls of the passage, reminding me of my student days, venturing into the darkness of the tombs of the Valley of the Kings. I was accompanied by a Dr. Frances Gardener, an expert in aboriginal culture and a Professor Ted Branderson of Oxford University who was well versed in the archaeological field in Australia. We also had with us four other local hired men who were helping us with the grunt work of the project and carrying samples and finds back and forth.
    The only light were the ones we brought and the air was rancid and caused many of us to cough, but I tried to hold back, knowing we where in a place not visited in uncounted years. Excited chatter immediately broke out amongst our small excursion group. We all knew that we were on the verge of finding something world changing and so, even in the cold, dead, ancient tunnel of darkness we stood before, we readied ourselves with great vigour and excitement. Our footsteps and voices echoed within the long cavern, bouncing down the walls and into the black before dying in the shadows, somehow, it felt as if we were violating the sacred, tomblike silence that was held here by the gloom and so, through some subconscious fear, our voices soon dropped to being merely harsh whispers.
    At first, when we turned our torches to the walls of the tunnel, we could see only the cold stone looking back at us, but as we walked further into the tunnel, it became obvious that this tunnel was not made by the many unknown years of rainwater. The floor was dry and smooth and seemed to fall, twist and turn as we moved on into the unknown rock. The walls too were straight, as if made so by design, not by nature. The ceiling displayed no signs of algae or other life that seemed to exist on the outside walls of the rock.
    Oddly, our eyes did not manage to adjust fully to the twilight around us, which gave the unnerving impression that the darkness was something imposing and oppressive, infecting and existing within every last inch of this long chamber.
    We heard no wind, so we knew there had to be an end somewhere inside Ayer’s Rock itself. Also, we heard no sound of dripping water, or any life at all. Well… I do correct myself, but there was something. As we where travelling, one of the men who was walking out in front of me suddenly shouted and screamed and pointed into the blackness of the tunnel.
   We all, of course, jumped and quickly asked the man what was wrong. He answered that he’d seen something before him, a single eye in the dark and a movement, like a tail of some kind before it’d disappeared into the shadow.
   Dr. Gardener was quick to shout at the scared man, telling him not to make up such nonsensical lies and threatened to remove him from the team should he do so again. The man calmed, but still, he became far more paranoid, convinced in his own mind that something was watching us from the looming shadows.
    I must admit, even to such a learned scholar such as yourself, that I too was shaken by the very atmosphere around us. There was definitely something… wrong about that cave, that long, forever deepening tunnel stretching on into the cold blackness of the heart of the rock. It was a similar feeling one would get when venturing into the tombs of ancient kings or graves of long dead men, but this… this was different. It was as if all things down this dark, almost unnatural, tunnel were not just long forgotten, but purposely forgotten, as if the local Anangu tribes did not wish to remember what eldritch secrets the darkness that Uluru Rock held.
    It must have been at least half an hour’s walking into the depths of the rock, the path we followed leading further down as we went, until finally, relief and luck came to our small party by the lights of our torches falling on, engraved directly into the rock, symbols and patterns of a clearly Aboriginal nature.
   We did not cheer loudly, for it was if we did not wish to awaken anything that could be listening. It was I and Dr. Gardener who first approached the cave paintings and immediately we began to translate and decipher the pictures that hadn’t been seen by human eyes in so long.
    What we found however was somewhat… disturbing.
    The paintings we first found seemed to depict the closing of the mouth of the tunnel, with drawings very closely resembling the Wati-Kutjara, or mythological lizard men of aboriginal mythology, magically placing the rocks at the mouth of the cave. As we moved down, it slowly became apparent why they’d sealed the cave.
    Anangu tribes in the area around the rock claim it is so sacred because a terrible battle, mostly between serpent or lizard-like people took place and the blood spilt was said to have raised in the form of the rock. Ayer’s Rock itself is said to be cursed, and anyone removing any stone from the place is said to take the curse with them.
    It seems that this legend goes back further than many thought, as the paintings on the walls of the tunnel gave much evidence to this supposed battle of the lizard-beings. As we ventured further down the hall, the paintings became less and less, well, aboriginal and took on a whole new, undocumented style. The patterns, the markings, they all became completely unreadable and disconcerting to look upon. The only way we could even tell what was going on was by the pictures and our combined knowledge of the myth and education in such areas.
    We could translate little from the markings, and the further we moved down the less readable and more alien the markings became. It seemed that the great rocks, beyond any age we could even think, held their story tightly, refusing to let our eyes and minds in on it’s vastly eldritch secret.
    All we could get was that the Wati-Kutjara once existed in this realm before something terrible, some horrible catastrophe befell them and, almost it seems overnight, they where gone, vanished into this vast fog of time and memory.
    As our team journeyed further into the cave I believe we all began to hear a… whispering, coming from the shadows. Although, I do believe now that it must have been the wind moving through the tunnel, but it certainly had enough effect for the man who was first frightened to run from the main party, back down the tunnel and into the pitch black, screaming about demons.
    Dr. Gardener seemed clearly unaffected by it all and showed that he was truly a man of great bravery and fearlessness in the face of these ancient secrets. As we continued, despite our shaken resolve, we all seemed to wordlessly place Dr. Gardener as our ‘leader’ being as he now strode on, into the pitch black, no longer wishing to waste any more time with distractions while on such an important find.
    We pushed on, into the dark, into the almost freezing cold rock and stone of this mysterious tunnel. By now, the darkness had completely swallowed us and it was almost as if the shadows themselves were trying to surround us, cut us off and swallow us whole. The chill was something that crept not just at your skin, but into your heart and soul, causing every bit of you to crawl and cringe at the very air you breathed in this place.
    The markings on the wall began to take on an…inhuman quality, signs and markings that were unlike anything my eyes had ever fallen upon. These signs seemed to almost shimmer, as if caught in some intense heat, and glow with a light not shone from any natural source. They seemed to be made of a separate, turquoise substance which had somehow been fused into the rock itself. We could not identify what this new mineral was, or how the original tribes had managed to come upon it and
    And yet, as we moved on, I couldn’t help but keep my natural scientific wonderment about me. The feeling of an unnatural, unnerving, ethereal horror waiting ahead of us could not dampen the basic scientific urge to know, to learn, to discover and unravel more of this immensely captivating mystery. Even though, in a way, we sensed that this was a secret perhaps too old, too dark and too long forgotten to be discovered by just us mere humans alone. That this one, long chamber, these markings, even perhaps the shadows that pervaded and ate away at all around us, belong to something else, something beyond our primitive understanding.
    And then, finally, we hit upon it. Our long, almost timeless trek through the darkness and gloom, through the unnatural, bone chilling cold and tomb-like silence, finally we came upon the epicentre of this find.
    The main chamber of Uluru rock.
    The room was perfectly round and the walls impossibly smooth and completely adorned in those strange, alien markings. The chamber was large and yet, not huge, and one of our helpers guessed that it must have easily been around one thousand feet squared at least, possibly more. The floor was covered in dust and the remains of things, people and animals perhaps, that had rotted to dust over thousands of years. However, the one thing that truly drew the eye was the giant totem pole that rose through the middle of the chamber like the trunk of a great and ancient tree.
     The totem pole was decorated like nothing I’d ever seen, sharp spikes and needles coming off almost randomly, and yet, seemingly forming some sort of mind-numbing, dizzying pattern. Markings and images were engraved into it, such sights I have never seen in all my years of archaeology. This was truly something unique, new and yet, old beyond anything I could imagine. The pictures marked on the totem seemed to describe some kind of story…and yet, we could not read what it was, as we’d never seen any writing like this and so, we had nothing to try and even guess at a translation. Even myself, a specialist at decoding the words of ancient tongues, could not understand the completely alien lettering I saw here.
    However, luck was, amazingly, on our side. Around the curved walls of the room, sketched under the strange, unnerving turquoise language and patterns where very faded barely readable letters of an aboriginal origin. It seemed those who had walked the earth long before any of us here had seen fit to provide their own translation from this other, stranger language which had been long forgotten by the mists of time. The room itself seemed to be far colder than one would even expect, and its chill went through a person, making their whole body shiver with an internal bitterness that gnawed at the bones and mind and made one think of beings old and dead even long before humanity stood upright on the plains of Africa.
    The strange markings filled us all with a sense of eldritch horror and dread, such writing and language was so new to our knowledge and yet, it was far older than anything we could think of. The story that was held in silence by the ancient rock and stone that was bound by word, literally, to the great and terrible totem pole in the centre of this dark, foreboding tomb-like cavern underneath Ayer’s Rock was easily something of which had only been whispered and rumoured through time, turning from sacred to myth and from myth to legend until it had been forgotten by mankind’s memory altogether.
    Immediately our small team set about archiving, photographing, sample collecting and in my own case, translating this momentous find. Never had such a large and eldritch and unusual case been uncovered in the history of this land, perhaps, in the history of this planet with the possible except of that old pseudo-scientific find of the great rumoured city buried within the terrible mountains of the Antarctic. Professor Branderson would not stop whispering to the rest of us about the importance of this cave and how he’d never seen such ancient and unique markings.
    The sight was truly unnerving and yet, exciting. Fear was raising every hair on our necks and yet we still couldn’t stop smiling. This was something truly beyond what we’d ever dreamt of. This was truly something that, each knowing in our own selfish way, would put our names on the lips of every archaeologist in the world.
    We began gathering up as many samples and pictures as we could, in one way, desperate to gather as much evidence and paraphernalia of this lost world as we could, and yet in another, desperate to get out of that dark, foreboding cavern. It was if the air was growing thin and sparse as many of us seemed to be taking deeper and deeper breaths. The longer we remained in that deathly tomb-like chamber, the more we could feel the warm being sapped and drawn from us.
    It was if our presence, our life, was somehow offensive to the long death-like sleep this chamber and the archive secrets it held within. The noise of the living had disturbed something within this tomb, buried deep within the dark heart of Uluru.
    We exited and began our long walk back through the perpetual night of the long, steep tunnel. It was strange feeling, almost as if all time had stopped within this darkness and we were suspended beyond the trappings of the world beyond. Nothing moved and no sounds of animals or other life apart from ourselves were heard. It was as if we’d truly stepped into something beyond earth, beyond our feeble human conception of space and time, and into a place were life and death are none existent, only nothingness, only the great void and silence existed here.
    And still… the feeling of ancient eyes upon us did not leave our party. Perhaps it was just our own paranoia brought on by the momentousness of our find, but we all felt like we’d be better once we’d exited out of this cold, dead tomb-chamber and back into the light and warmth of the living world.
    When we finally spotted the heavenly pure light from the entrance of the tunnel, we all cheered. The light there meant more to us than the find below, as it allowed us to finally escape from the dead silence of that dark void below and the maddening symbols of that long dead language.
    We were greeted by several of our hired hands who quickly inquired about our finds and subsequently cheered in joy when we told them of the cave and the markings, missing out the feelings of dread and bone chilling cold that we’d felt there. However one of our party inquired about the man who fled from the cave in pure fright.
   The men assured us that no one had come out of the cave.
   The investigation for him started immediately, which was why we returned back to England so quickly. How our assistant managed to disappear is still a mystery, nothing of him seems to have been found and no one on the excavation site has seen nor heard of him.
    Furthermore, once the cave had been opened, well, strange things began to happen during the night. Our crew would wake up to find equipment thrown about and precious archaeological evident completely destroyed or missing. Men began to go into fits whenever they lay down to sleep, or they’d wake up at the latest hour screaming and howling in their sleep. Many of the men began to complain of hearing whispers, or seeing things move within the shadows of their lanterns.
    The locals began to avoid us and all who were connected to the dig. When confronted, they told us that they saw us as cursed by the rock, a claim we were all beginning to believe. Only Dr. Gardener seemed completely unaffected by it all and has remained steadfast and calm throughout all of this. He dismisses us as being scared by superstitions and claims the heat is getting to us all. Professor Branderson however seemed to become increasingly withdrawn and sickly looking, it seemed that the stress of the mounting unusualness of our situation was getting to him.
    However, when he suggested we return back to England and the University with our finds, I quickly agreed. Both of us were glad to be away from that dark, foreboding place, he perhaps even more than I. I have yet to hear from him however, not since two days ago when we unloaded our finds for the good people at Oxford University have I, or anyone else for that matter, managed to get a hold of him.
    I must tell you; once I have handed over these translations I shall be quitting this team and moving on completely. This whole ordeal, while being groundbreaking in its field, has truly unnerved me. The psychological effect on the men, the disappearance of one of our own team and the sudden silence of Professor Branderson has me deeply unnerved.’

    The man blinked as he read the last of his words and sighed, his eyes moving down to the dark keyboard, typing out his name and clicking send. The email was lengthy and would probably bore the pants off Mr. Lovecraft, but he would send it anyway. As soon as he’d finished translating the last picture he had.
    His eyes glanced over at the picture that lay at the side of his laptop and his eyes narrowed in an annoyed, almost hateful expression. The picture was of a strange sign, simple in its design and yet, somehow disturbing to the eye. Every time he blinked, the man was sure it changed ever so slightly and even in the dim light the picture, the markings still stood out, glowing almost.
    He hated looking at them, but he knew that soon he could throw them in a suitcase and never have to cast eye other those unnerving markings again.
    He picked up the picture slowly, as if scared to even touch it and lifted his glasses up, wishing to look at it with his own eyes. He knew that he could just figure it out if he compared it to something of a similar age… but he had yet to even find what that age was.
    The man’s eyes narrowed even more, determined to find something, anything that he could pick out in markings. Its secrets taunted him, mocked him, knowing that he’d never find out what he was looking for. He grew frustrated with both the picture and himself, wishing he could retire to some much wanted sleep and forget these eldritch markings and the powerful hold they seemed to have on him.
    He shook his head, deciding he needed to get himself something to eat and drink. He couldn’t translate on an empty stomach, or so he told himself, when truly he just wanted something to distract him. Standing up, the man winced at the ache in his legs from sitting down for so long.
    His eyes travelled down the short distance between himself and his kitchen and he realised that he was flanked on both sides by boxes towering above his head. The man frowned, never remembering putting so many boxes in his new home… or even being able to stack them as high as they were.
    He blinked and rubbed his eyes before putting his glasses back down, he must be growing tired, or perhaps the events as of late had occupied too much of his mind and attention. It was true he was starting to grow uncomfortable even within his own apartment. Every shadow seemed to leap out at him, every corner seemed too sharp and every creak or moan the apartment sounded like it was made by something other than the apartment itself.
    Or maybe he was just becoming paranoid. Maybe his trip had taken more from him than he thought… Maybe he just needed to call his girlfriend and be with her for a little while, especially since he’d been away for so long. Shaking his head again, the man made his way into his kitchen were he yanked open the fridge only to find that it was almost completely empty, the stark whiteness and the artificial light mocking him about his lack of forethought of actually buying some food for his new kitchen.
    He glared and muttered something about going down to the nearest co-op as soon as he’d had some nice warm tea. It again, gave him something other to do than work on his translations. He didn’t care that he’d have to go out into the ever-angrier sounding winds outside, or the dagger-like rain that was assaulting the earth, as long as he could get away from that picture and those ethereal markings.
    The man shut the fridge door and straightened up, stretching as he did. However, above the howling, roaring winds and above the machinegun-like chattering of the rain at his windows, he heard a noise.
    It was the sound of something being knocked over in his hall.
    The sound made the man jump and his whole body spun around, almost as if he expected something to be behind him, ready to jump out at him. However, he was only met with the dark shadows of the many boxes clogging up his apartment. He took several deep breaths before moving to investigate what it was. He guessed it must have been a box falling over perhaps, and yet, he couldn’t help but feel silly at his fear. This was his apartment! This was where he lived now! He shouldn’t be afraid of the random events of his own space!
    Although… he still felt that nagging sensation at the back of his mind… telling him to not go and investigate, to just leave his flat and go somewhere, anywhere else. It was the kind of feeling you think that people in horror films should get before they go wandering off into cold dark basements only to be killed five minutes later.
    He looked down and scowled to himself. This was HIS home! And he would not be scared out of his own home, not by some stupid boxes falling over, not for anything. Dr. Gardener had been right, there’s no such thing as curses or any superstitions. He was a man of science, a man of rationality, and boxes falling over were not scary!
    With this renewed confidence, he stormed out of his kitchen, determined to put that box back wherever it’d fell from and to stop being such a fool. Even if the wind outside seemed to howl louder and the rain pound the windows so much one might think they were on the verge of breaking though.
    The box in question was actually at the end of a small corridor with doors leading off to a bathroom, a spare bedroom and the man’s own bedroom. By the looks of it, it’d been a box filled with CD’s and DVD’s. The man frowned at this and hoped that nothing had been snapped or broken.
    However, he paused before he stepped into the long, dark path ahead of him. Something seemed… different and out of place within the corridor… he couldn’t tell just what it was, but he could just… feel it. A terrible coldness entered him, just like when he was back in Australia, deep in the heart of Uluru.
    His eyes widened and a terrible fear gripped him. Again, he wanted to leave, to retreat back so some warm, lively, bright place and stay there. Again, the same feelings he’d had when he was down in those perpetually black tunnels. The feeling of ancient eye’s upon him and the sense, that basic survival sense, telling him that something was hiding, waiting for him to walk into some kind of trap.
    But, the man’s hands suddenly gripped into fists as he reminded himself that this was his home and nothing here could harm him, nothing was going to get him, nothing would happen should he walk down the seemingly ever darkening corridor. He told himself that he’d look back on this and laugh at his silliness.
    He took a step into his corridor and he grinned when, as he predicted, nothing happened. His faith in his own confidence was instantly restored; however, a lingering fear remained at the back of his mind, warning him that he was just fooling himself and that something truly terrible awaited him at the end of the long corridor.
    As his whole body became enveloped by the shadows, he could almost feel something crawling around him, in the very air and atmosphere and yet it was so subtle that his mind still didn’t allow him to react to it. It was as faint as the lightest breeze and it had the same softness as a tiny wisp of silk, but yet it send a shiver running down his spine and put an extra hop into his step.
    This strange, unnerving fear caused him to quicken his walk until he was almost breaking into a run. He knew that he couldn’t put up with this any longer and in his own mind he cursed his own work for tying him to this place. He’d do anything to leave and to go to his loved one but his sense of duty to his work kept him here, where he knew he’d find no rest from his own paranoid mind.
    He reached the end of the corridor and the light shining from the outside hit him, freeing him from the grasp of the shadows coldness. The man truly felt like he’d thrown some kind of shackle from him and he could almost feel the darkness falling from around his neck.
    His eyes turned to his room were, to his satisfaction, his prediction of a box falling over had come true. It was one filled with books and a large bronze award from something he couldn’t remember doing. Either way, the sight reminded him that nothing was out of the ordinary in his home and that the world did not contain monsters in closets or aliens or any other paranormal, superstitious rubbish.
    As he righted the box, putting the books and the award back in place, he smirked and almost laughed at himself. He would have to tell his friends when he saw them again of this whole ordeal, if only to justify why he was afraid of his own corridor.
     The fear of anything attacking him now was washed away completely as he turned his head to peer out of his window. Even though the rain battered down and the wind roared like an enraged beast and the sky was pitch black, for a split second it all seemed to let up and the bright moon almost peaked from behind the terrible clouds, letting a sliver of glittering moonlight dance its way onto the world.
    Then it died.
    He was unsure what caused him to turn his head back to the darkness of his home. Perhaps it was the smell that first hit him. The smell of old dry desert stone, of air beyond ages and of something unknown to him entirely, something ancient and terrible… the same kind of smell that had intoxicated the tomb chamber of Uluru.
    Maybe it was the coldness, the kind that crawled its way into ones bones and remained there for all time, reminding one on dark nights of the horror that you once faced. It gripped his whole body like a claw grasping its prey and drained him of all warmth, sapping away the life from his body and drawing the very breath from his lungs, making him see it before his eyes in a small cloud of perspiration, before letting it vanish into the air.
    His eyes fell upon nothing, and yet, at the same time, something. There was movement in the shadow…wait, no, it was the shadow itself that was moving! The very darkness, the very gloom that covered his home, was coming alive and uncurling like some terrible snake.
    Horror unlike anything he’d ever bore witness to before seized him, every last part of his mind and heart and soul was taken by pure, unreal terror.
    Eyes opened in the dark, eyes of a terrible void and blackness like no other stared back at him, eyes that had looked into the infinite of time and space and had survived, immortal, untouchable, invulnerable, for uncounted eons. To even look upon this… thing, that moved from the darkness was to look upon the essence of eldritch evil itself.
    It had no shape, and yet, the ones it formed seemed to be of terrible and impossible angles, shapes and contortions. The young man was brought to the point of insanity as he witnessed the thing, forming from the dark gloom of his corridor, mould and push and float and slide itself into the perfect moonlight.
    Something inside the man’s mind kicked, and his instinct told him to move and shut the space between them, anything to block its progress towards him. The man, with little or no thought other than his own subconscious obeying his basic will to live, grabbed the handle to the door and slammed it shut.
    He stood back, but the cold and the smell and the fear remained, despite his logic telling itself that he’d stopped it. He needed to protect himself… more. He needed to make sure he put as much between himself and that horror as possible.
    The boxes. His eyes immediately flew to the box towers that crowded around the entrance to the room. It’d taken who knows how long to stack them so high and orderly, but it took less than a minute to topple them until they piled against the doorway, completely blocking anything wishing to get in.
    Or anything wishing to get out.
    For a second, the man thought he was safe, the barrier being so solid and reassuring provided some comfort to his fears and he even allowed his mind to doubt what he’d just witnessed. If he could doubt what he saw, perhaps he’d be safe.
    If he didn’t believe it existed, it couldn’t get him.
    Ignorance may indeed be bliss, but than again, ignorance has a terrible way of always hitting you the hardest when reality knocks on your door.
   Or perhaps in this case, moves though it.
   The cold got colder, the smell got stronger, and the man’s fear reached into his every atom as he spotted it, oozing and sliming through the cracks and spaces in the piled boxes, pushing and shaping its way through the impossibly tiny crevices and from beneath the tightest of spaces within the makeshift blockade.
    The darkness. The living evil. The thing from the void. It was coming for him and nothing of this earth, nothing that a human’s tiny mind could think of, would ever stop it. An eye bubbled up from the thick, fog-liquid body of the thing, and it locked onto the man.
    He screamed and yet, no sound would come from his mouth, it seemed trapped and the scream rattled within his throat hurting him. He could not, for all the will and strength within him, look away from that terrible eye and the gaze that bore into his very soul.
    His body wanted to move, it wanted to escape, it wanted to live… but his mind, his heart, his soul, they were caught in the enthral unblinking gaze of the eternal darkness. This was death, this was the void, this was the dread that existed in the minds of all humans. That old age fear that perhaps humans fear above all animals, the fear that within the dark, when shadows fall across the world, something is watching. Some unnameable terror watches the world from the gloom and the darkness, something which has always been there and will always be there.
    The thing, unnameable, unstoppable, immortal. The thing of darkness and of evil and of fear. The thing that is not of mankind’s understanding of the universe and all that happens beyond his meagre grasp on reality. The thing that feeds on the souls of those whom it has preyed upon for as long as memory can serve.
    And now, it came for this man who had stumbled upon its secrets, secrets that no human should ever know.
    The thing had now completely moved through every opening and crack and gap it could find and was pulsating its way towards the man, reaching out in all directs and expanding in all directions, stretching and reaching in all directions, coving all it touched in perpetual shadow and darkness.
    The man saw the darkness and even as it reached up over him, lurching like some terrible wave just on the verge of a breaking, words managed to steal away from his lips.
    “That which is not dead, can eternal lie… and in strange eons, even death may die.”

.........

    Nothing was ever found of him, only the screen from his laptop reading that last fateful message and the photo’s lying beside it.
    No one could explain how someone had managed to barrage themselves within a single room and vanish into thin air from a five story building.
    But than again, it is perhaps better not to ask, and to simply leave some mysteries to the infinite knowledge of the universe.
    So, tonight, when you turn off your lights and wrap yourselves deep within your beds, take a moment just to think of the fate of this poor man, taken by forces beyond our comprehension, and do contemplate leaving the light on as you rest.
    Because, you never know what is watching from within the pitch blackness of the deep shadows…