Wednesday, October 27, 2010

Lighty-light

The springs inside were nearly rusted through. Alan searched frantically for something in the dilapidated shed with which to clean them off, at least to make sufficient contact with one of the two nine-volt batteries he had brought, and discovered a broken metal file.

He bought the two-pack of nine-volt batteries at Walden's Hardware on a whim as he and Alice trolled through the near sepia quaintness of the town of Bright Falls. A sepia that had quickly burned to the darkest black beyond what even the most remote dark room could offer.

Alice. His heavy breathing became her own. The pulse in his forehead, his rapidly beating heart: hers. The echo of her screams still rang in his head, and he moved with an efficient urgency that was nearly as foreign to him as the creeping darkness that bandied about the boughs of the blue spruce that covered these mountains.

The door flew open and he ran. The new battery inside Lighty rattled, then settled as the springs decided to push back, and was quiet. Only his pounding footsteps reached through the darkness, beyond the numbus of Lighty's beam. In his panic, he felt a brief moment of nostalgia; unwelcome, unwarranted, but there nonetheless. Like contemplating a forgotten grocery item while flailing about in a car crash. A sort of slow-motion dichotomy.

Among the nondescript towns Alan had grown up in during his fathers stint in the Navy, few were more like Bright Falls than Erwin, Tennesseee. His fear of dark had begun there. The nightmares were always there, it seemed. Their point of origin beyond his memory, ever present, ever feared. Erwin was the timecapsule of the darkness, and someone...something, had opened it.

The crudely molded blue plastic still had his initials on it: AEW, burned into the casing by his father with a soldering iron. On the bottom, embossed letters said "Chance Lantern." He was five again. His mother tucked him in, turned out the light, left his door open a crack and whispered into the darkness, "Nitey-nite."
"Lighty-light." Alan whispered back, turning the flashlight on under his covers as she left.

Lighty had been destroyed in a freak accident. Their camper caught on fire one year when he was seven. At Alans insistence, his father sifted through the ash and found the melted remains. The only salvageable part of the flashlight was the metal push-button switch that had turned it on. Alans father nearly threw it away, thought better of it, and presented it to his son the night of the fire.
"Whenever you get scared of the dark, you click this button and it'll turn on the light inside you. It's a brighter light than anything else in the world."

Alan had no explanation for the sudden appearence of Lighty in the tool shed, nor did it seem as bizarre as it should, considering the days events. Yet there it was, clutched in the near-panic grip of his right hand, throwing an impossibly bright beam of light into the growing night. Alan kept running until the forest seemed to engulf even the sound of his footsteps.