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| Enid didn't like the night; it brought too many unknowns into the picture for her comfort.� The dark played tricks on your eyes, walls and shadows took on varied forms little resembling their daytime characteristics.� Wide-open spaces became dark pools of indefinite possibilities, while small sounds echoed large in contrast to the hush of night, tensing one with the rough expectancy of an intrusion.�� No Enid dreaded the night, its unfaithful mysteries, that dark and subdued dimension of supposed rest and relaxation that made her nerves sing with apprehension. All these things crossed Enid's mind in a matter of moments as she sat in her candlelit room, watching the passionate interplay of flame and shadow dancing across the rich woods and soft velvets.� The fire crackled with a comforting sense of normalcy while Enid's mind resonated with anything but ordinary thoughts.� Those voices of un-reason tormented her each night, long into the small hours of the morning.� Hours when Enid sat frozen in the pre-dawn chill, awake, alone and terrified, the embers of the fire burning low, her eyes red and hot with lack of sleep, and she convinced she had finally come to the edge of madness. Here it was evening again, Enid thought, as she looked down at her slender hands resting calmly against the arms of her chair.�� Darkness, the enemy would be so much longer this night with no moon to light the sky and brighten the shadows.� A feeling of despair swept over Enid and she shivered with an intuition of doom. The fire spoke in soft whispers and creaks, and the gloom dipped a little deeper as the night wore on to the arcane hour. Enid ever vigilant held her unread book tightly as she stared into the quietly moving dark.� There was a sound, a rustle of cloth against air so slight as to be almost imagined and Enid?s head turned in that direction desperately searching for the source of the noise.� For long moments nothing happened and Enid almost felt a sense of hope, a release from her constant vigilance, when a stain of night appeared on the wall across from her.� Enid stared, mesmerized by the sight, the sight of night running down the wall like spilled ink.� Large rivulets of the darkness gathered in long tendrils and pressed into the room, a face formed in the glittering drops and night smiled sharply at Enid. In that moment Enid knew what she had waited for and watched for all these years, she knew beyond a doubt that she was now staring it right in the face, and that it was evil and impossible, she knew no way to free herself from it.� Night's grin deepened as it read Enid's visible terror and Enid watched, unable to move or speak, as more and more of the gelatinous shiny tendrils of Night spun closer and closer together forming a column of glassy darkness.� Slowly the column took shape, structuring its-self into the semblance of a woman, unlike any woman Enid had ever seen, for she seemed to be made entirely of the gloom. |
| Enid |
| Enid watched as light slid over the woman-like form without being absorbed by it, as if it was only able to highlight the inky darkness leaving most of it's discernible features cloaked in shadow.� All that is except for the softly gleaming smile that appeared to shine with an unhealthy light of it's own.� Enid stared, mesmerized as a hand reached out and clasped her arm pulling her up and out of her chair.� She found herself standing, facing the impossible creature, her terror screaming across raw nerves, unable to move as the insidious darkness drew ever closer until it was only a breath away from her face. Desperate and terrified, Enid prayed fervently, seeking help from any quarter, she asked every God and Angel she could think of to save her from this creature, but it seemed no one heard her as it drew closer still, then Enid felt the lips of Night brush across her mouth with a dark and sensual caress.� Everything went dim for Enid, she could neither see nor hear, as she was wrapped in an icy cocoon of Night.� For an eternity Enid was held in Night's cold embrace, feeling the dark fill her mind and body, questing for every last vestige of who and what she was. Dimly Enid realized she was standing alone in her room, the creature had gone, leaving her to wonder what it was that had just happened to her.� She watched candlelight play with shadows and pick out gleaming highlights in the dark woods, her unread book she saw, lay on the floor where it had fallen from her lap.� It all seemed so normal, the room as it should be, the fire crackling in the fireplace; the hum of thought replacing the blankness of the dark, except Enid was cold, so very, very cold.� Thinking to warm herself Enid walked towards the fire, her steps swift and un-natural brought her instead, to the mirror on the wall next to it.� Enid looked into a face no longer human. �Her skin she noted was the light gray of evening shadows with strange patterns swirling across like tribal tattoos, her eyes were black velvet night framed in wings of darkness.� She was no longer human, Enid realized, somehow she and the night had merged.� Instead of the darkness devouring her she had absorbed a portion of it, become a being made in part human and darkness, something never before born.� Enid felt it then, the dark half inside warring with the human part of her; it gave her a sense of wildness, fey and strange.� Enid ran across the room and threw the window open wide, pushing her head into the night she drew in a deep lungful of midnight air, oh the taste of it, wild and dark called to her and Enid slipped out the window and into the night. � Linda H. Lawrence |
| The Paper Dragon |
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