Silent Hill
There must be a reason why I keep doing such things.
Are you afraid of the dark?
Between pale streaks of moonlight
Are You Afraid of the Dark? (Running By Night)
Between pale streaks of moonlight, everything looks like a path. And there are…sounds. Bearings regained at a crossing, the path runs steeply uphill from there for so long that it feels like forever. High up at last on the narrow track winding toward the ridge, the sounds have gone, and what little wind there was has died down. Then that eerie moment when, ever so subtly, dead leaves pick up movement in your wake and start following you along the path—a hushed, persistent rustling closing in on you from behind. Glancing over your shoulder, there’s nothing there, but something’s got to be there there. Of course it’s dead leaves, you think, but it feels so darn weird and it certainly can’t hurt to run a littler harder, and a little harder yet when the rustling speeds up, gets louder and more menacing, until you catch yourself running at full speed through the dark like deer fleeing from a sweeping wildfire, toward that treeless patch on the ridge where the city lights flicker in the distance, and when you stop and turn around to face that rushing swell, there’s nothing there in the full moonlight. The hills are silent except for your breath, and it must have been dead leaves all along even if you can’t see any and the path is clear.
Come to think of it, that would make a good vignette for a short story I might come up with in the future.
Are You Afraid of the Dark? (Running By Night) by J. Martin (11/2011) is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.
If you have something valuable to add or some interesting point to discuss, I’ll be looking forward to meeting you at Mastodon!
When it is dark outside i like to do my workout there some times. In winter when it is turning dark very early i have no chance to go jogging after work in the light. So i use my very bright headlamp and i´m doing my workout with it. It is great because it is silent and you have enough time to recover from a hard day at work.
Hmm a headlamp… curiously, I’ve never thought of that. I think I’ll give it a try, because I too love to go running at night, and surely would do it more often if I was better prepared. As I not only appreciate the silence but also the dark itself, I’ll go and try to find a headlamp that’s dimmable. It should be just bright enough that I wouldn’t lose the path or bump into things.