But one night it began to seem to him that even as most of the darkness faded somewhat, some of the shadows not only remained resolutely dark but became darker still… more solid, more real… as the night wore on. More, they seemed to move and grow. Never when he was looking, of course, and never in too obvious a way, at least at first.

After night after night of this, he eventually managed to convince himself that he was seeing nothing out of the ordinary… that it was just his imagination, or that this was just how darkness worked, and he’d never noticed it before.

Then the night came when it didn’t happen, and that tender illusion was stripped away, though all he felt was relief that whatever had been transpiring in his bedroom every night was over.

That relief lasted until the next night, when it all began again. The darkness crept out from under his dresser, from beneath his closet door, and from behind the chair in the corner. It pooled together and slunk slowly across the floor towards his bed… never quite reaching it, though coming quite close. There was no kidding himself about it now. He’d seen what his room was supposed to look like in the dark, and it had seemed too right and natural for him to pretend that what he was seeing now was anything like normal.

That first interruption wasn’t the only time he was given a respite. Sometimes they happened quite frequently, and other times weeks would go by without the unnatural darkness taking over his room. At first he prayed each night that the darkness would pass him over, but eventually he came to dread those nights just as much, if not more.

The beshadowed nights had become normal to him, and on those nights he could at least see the darkness reaching for him. He knew better than to let his foot hit the floor on those nights, or relinquish the protection of the covers. He could see his doom coming. He knew where the shadows were.

The other nights… who knew where the shadows got to on those nights? Who knew where they lurked? Who knew where they waited for him? He certainly didn’t, and that terrified him in a way that all the tendrils of darkness creeping across his floor never could.

He dutifully bade his mother goodnight as she turned off the lights. He closed his eyes involuntarily and ducked under the covers, not willing to see at once what sort of a night he was in for.

Beyond the covers, the shadows in his room were just shadows… but outside his window, a pool of darkness deepened, and then seemed to straighten and stand up. A figure strode out towards the sidewalk, carefully skirting far around the circle of amber light cast by a lamp pole. Another dark figure flitted across the street towards it. The two came together in what could only be seen as an embrace, had any human eyes been watching.

“So, where do you want to go tonight?”

“I don’t care, I’m just happy to get out of the house for a while.”

“I know what you mean… it’s a good job, and an important one, but it’s like, we can’t spend every night scaring kids.”

“Yeah. Honestly, I think their little minds can use a break. We’re supposed to be teaching them how to cope with fear, not driving them up the wall with it.”

“True that.”

The light from the kitchen illuminated a few feet of bare gray wall on the left side of the stairs. The first two steps were visible, and the two below that faintly so. On the right, there was nothing but darkness. Somewhere in there was the big looming shape of the furnace, which could roar to life with such sudden noise and ferocity that it could be startling anywhere else in the house.

“I have nothing to fear but fear itself,” the child repeated, leaning into the darkness to reach for the switch on the gray wall. Unable to hit it from the relative safety of the kitchen, the child stepped down onto the first step and reached out again to flip it.

The old switch made an audible click. At the bottom of the stares, a bare, clear bulb burst forth with light then went dark with a pop, leaving the child with an afterimage of itself and a jumbled impression of the cluttered basement.

“I have nothing to fear but fear itself,” the child said, with much less certainty.

There was a shelf straight ahead with a great big flashlight on it, three feet from the bottom of the stairs. All the child had to do was grip the handrail and follow it down, then follow the wall to the shelf.

“I have nothing to fear but fear itself,” the child said, moments before taking a big step up and back, closing the door, and backing out of the kitchen.

Fear, it transpired, was scary enough in and of itself.