As children most of us are afraid of the dark because we don't know what could be hiding there. Even as adults it can be hard to shake the feeling that somewhere beyond the inky veil lurk unseen eyes and malevolent creatures. Sometimes, in the middle of the night, as we shuffle from one room to the next, we feel them watching us, and resist the urge to turn around and catch them in the act of disappearing. And, of course, if we ever did we wouldn't see anything, because there are no eyes hidden in the night.

But we should stop telling our children that there's nothing to be afraid of, because I know now that's not true. We're just not afraid of the right thing. While we have nothing to fear from what the veil may hide, we should all fear the veil itself.

***

There's a forest behind my house where the children play in the summer. I played there when I was growing up, and the opportunity to do so may be the most valuable thing I lost when I became an adult. So I jumped at the opportunity when my friend Rob suggested we take a camping trip there one weekend. It promised to be a cheap and brief vacation, but a vacation nonetheless and so that night I set about gathering all of the necessary materials with an alacrity altogether surprising to my wife Julie.

"Somebody's in a good mood," she said as she passed me in the hallway.

I nodded by way of reply and continued heaping supplies into a big pile in the middle of the floor. Julie did not have the stereotypical reaction when I told her what I was planning to do that weekend. She didn't nag me or insist that I was needed at home for this or that reason. She even helped me pack. It didn't take long. Camping was nothing new to me and most of the things I would need were already close at hand, left over from my last trip.

That night, while we lay in bed, falling asleep, I could have sworn that I heard something just outside our window. It was nothing more than a gentle rapping sound, but it startled me in that way you're prone to being startled when you're just on the edge of falling asleep.

"What is it?" Julie asked, sitting up.

I stood and walked over to the window, opened it, and peered out into the night.

Nothing. Silence.

"It's nothing," I told her. "Go back to sleep."

***

The next day my 8 hour sentence in that cubicle seemed to stretch to infinity. Time has a nasty habit of bending away from you the more you try to chase it down. Finally, lunch came and then, after several eternities, quitting time.

Rob and I walked out of the office, waving goodbye to everyone as we did so. We had both driven to work in my van, within which I had stuffed everything we would need for the trip. I offered to drive, but Rob insisted and I acquiesced without much resistance. It had been something of a long day and, truth be told, I would probably have had to work twice as hard on Monday to supplement the halfhearted job I had done because I had been so distracted.

It started to rain lightly as we drove and I watched the droplets run together on the windows with the same fascination with which I had done so as a child. Perhaps I hadn't lost all of the important pleasures from childhood after all.

"I hear Liz is going to get fired," Rob said, snapping my attention back to the present.

"What's that?" I said.

"I said, I heard that Liz is going to get fired," Rob repeated.

"That's too bad," I replied, a little annoyed that he had disturbed my thoughts for something so trivial. Neither of us even really knew Liz, and besides it had been obvious for at least a month to anybody who was paying attention that she was going to get the sack. Gene had cut her as much slack as he could after her husband had left, but eventually enough is enough.

"I've always liked Liz," Rob said, absently.

"No you haven't," I responded. "You've never even talked to her."

"And now I'll never get to."

***

By the time we arrived at our campsite it was already getting dark. This was a problem that we probably should have foreseen.

Any hiking trail or sign of civilization had long since disappeared. This was supposed to be a "real nature experience", as Rob had insisted. I had declined to point out that a real nature experience would never include tents or lighter fluid.

Setting up our tents and fire took longer than it should have as the light waned and we were forced to stumble in the dimness until the latter had been lit. But we managed it and soon enough we were sitting on the ground in front of the flames and eating pre-prepared dinners -- another aspect of the trip which seemed to fly in the face of Rob's expectation of authentic ruggedness. I didn't mind. It had been hours since lunch and my sandwich had that fantastic taste food only seems to acquire after a period of starvation.

"So... you and Liz?" I asked, after an awkward silence.

"Well not anymore," Rob said, his mouth extremely full. "She's going to be out on her ass by the end of the week."

"I guess that gives you an incentive to shoot your shot now."

"But what's the point? I told you -- she's going to be gone soon."

"She's not going to be dead, Rob. Besides, you shouldn't shit where you eat, and if she says no it'll only be awkward for a few days as opposed to the rest of time."

He laughed, a method of deflection which he had perfected over the years.

"Come on, man. There's no way. Absolutely no way."

"You'll never know unless you try."

And we spent a good amount of time going back and forth like that until we both agreed it was time to get some sleep. A lack of artificial light always has the effect of putting me to sleep well before midnight, something I did not do under normal circumstances.

It took another sizable chunk of time to find a comfortable orientation for my sleeping bag, but I managed it. Sort of.

In a few minutes, I was on the edge of sleep, and I can't help thinking that if it had come just a little sooner, there would be no reason for me to tell this story. But I have no way of knowing that. In fact, it's possible that had I fallen asleep I wouldn't be alive to tell the story at all.

Once again, I was roused from that half-conscious state that precedes sleep by a sudden noise. This one, however, was much more disturbing. A voice, seemingly inches from my ear, whispered softly,

"We're coming. We're awake." Then, an awful scream rent the night, one which was at once human and alien. Several pitches, some mutually incompatible, which could not have been produced by the same person, overlapped.

I sat bolt upright, fumbled desperately for my flashlight and flicked it on, wheeling back and forth. Nothing.

For the next few minutes I sat, shaking slightly, partly from cold and partly from fear, before I convinced myself that it had been some kind of strange, half-conscious hallucination. I lay back down and found myself once more about to fall asleep.

Then, something poked at my tent from the outside.

"Rob?" I said. "Is that you?"

Another poke.

"Cut that shit out, Rob."

There was the sound of something large falling over, and then silence.

I figured that it really had been Rob and was preparing, once more, to lay back down, when my tent began unzipping and I really started to panic. I picked my flashlight up and steeled myself to use it as a blunt-force weapon when the canvas door opened fully and... Rob's face poked in. I put the flashlight back down.

"Jesus Christ, Rob. Are you trying to get me to piss myself?"

"No," he said.

"Then what in God's name are you..."

"No," he repeated, and I noticed that something was decidedly wrong with his eyes. They were fixed on a point just above my head and remained so, unmoved by anything I said or did.

"Are you going to explain..."

"No," he said, again, stepping fully into the tent.

And, he brought with him... something. It was truly bizarre to witness, and much more so to attempt to explain. The light cast by my flashlight, which had fallen to the ground was pierced by darkness, much the way shadows are cut by light. Creeping tendrils of blackness flowed from Rob back towards my end of the tent, and then his arm stretched outwards and they flew forward and, notwithstanding my attempts to pull away, enveloped my head.

Words are really only good for relating experiences other people have some basis to understand. Words are just abstractions of feelings and ideas we have had. So, how do you go about explaining something that has no common basis? If you had suddenly seen a new color, how could you relate what it looked like?

This is the problem I have with attempting to explain what happened next. Immediately, my mind seperated from my body until my arms, my hands, my thoughts became alien and not mine. The tendrils wound over and through my mind and whispered a thousand things at once. Ancient, terrible and long-forgotten things. Cities burning, children tortured.

And, through it all, an ungodly scream, in several impossible pitches at once.

It was agony and eternity and I never wanted it to stop.

Somehow, I recovered enough agency to drop my arm, pick up the flashlight and point it at Rob. Instantly, the tendrils retreated and Rob stumbled backwards, clutching at his eyes. I ran past him, and shoved him to the ground. As I did so, that voice whispered once more directly into my ear,

"We're coming."

I picked up the pace before realizing that I had absolutely no idea where I was going. We had driven a long time to get to this point in the woods and, truth be told, I hadn't really been paying attention. But, it didn't matter. All that was important at that point was putting as much distance between Rob, or whatever Rob had become, and myself. And so I continued running until I saw that same, strange black mist appear once more in the light cast by my flashlight.

Whirling around, I saw it behind me as well, and to my left. Only my right side remained uncovered and I turned in that direction, sprinting as fast as my legs would carry me. I have never been the athletic type, and this exertion was burning my lungs and I could already feel cramps forming in my stomach and legs. The rush of adrenaline could only dull the pain from these and the sharp icy sting of the night air for so long.

Still, I hadn't the faintest idea where I was or where I was going. That's when I heard Rob again, somewhere in the distance, shouting in that impossible voice:

"WE'RE AWAKE! WE'RE COMING!"

And it startled me so badly that I tripped, cutting my hands, arms and face on the ground. The flashlight skittered off in front of me and I watched, helplessly, as it tumbled into a pool of water and sputtered out.

My only weapon against this thing was gone.

"We're awake. We see you now," the voice whispered into my ear.

I was trembling with terror, and this made it difficult to stand. Snot ran down my nose, partly from the same unbearable fear and partly from the cold. But, I stood once more and continued running, with no way of knowing where I was running to or even where my unseen enemy might be lying in wait.

But then, I did see it. A patch of the night just a little darker than the rest, a blot of ink on the canvas of the world. I turned and continued running away from it and -- my God! I saw a streetlight!

I was almost there! It was maybe 500 feet away. But my lungs were really burning, and my throat was painfully dry and my legs hardly worked anymore. But I was almost there. Just a few more feet.

Then, without a sound or any indication of his approach whatsoever, Rob appeared next to me and threw himself on top of me, tackling me to the ground. I looked up into his face, and saw his eyes for the first time. At that distance it was very clear. They were entirely black. And, little by little, that darkness was leaching into the rest of his face.

His mouth opened, and, without any movement whatsoever from his lips, that impossible voice issued once more:

"We see you now!" And, along with the words came a rush of the darkness, thick and of a blackness so total it drowned the moon. As it poured from his mouth into mine, I felt it drowning out my light as well, suffocating my soul in its tenebrous shadow.

In an instant it would have me. I could feel it.

Once more, my arm responded to my command just in time and shoved at Rob with a strength neither it nor I should have been capable of mustering. He fell backwards, and I staggered to my feet and into the streets, shouting like a madman for anyone to help me. Finally, someone came outside to see what all the fuss was about, and I collapsed onto the ground at his feet.

"I need to get out of here," I wheezed.

"Alright, take it easy, pal, I'll call an ambulance."

Those were the last words I heard before unconsciousness at last claimed me.

***

When I woke, it was in a room filled with glorious light. White walls, white bedsheets and blaring fluorescents. I almost wept with joy. Julie was there, and she rushed over to me upon seeing me awake, peppering me with questions. I answered as many as I could without sounding insane, and repeated the exercise with several doctors and policemen, who were interested, respectively, in my mental state and Rob's whereabouts. I assured them of the strength of the former, but could be no help in the latter case. I could only say that last I had seen Rob, he was in the woods.

Finally, with all the formalities out of the way, I was allowed to be released and Julie drove me back home. Immediately upon entering the house, I turned all the lights on to their highest setting and asked for some time alone.

Since then, I have been writing this account, hoping that it would make more sense that way. It sounds even more insane on paper, or word processor, or whatever.

I just need to tell you, whoever is reading this, that you're right to be afraid of the dark. Those little moments, alone in dark hallways, or back alleys in which you feel watched and endangered? They aren't a holdover from some childhood paranoia. They're a survival instinct. And you should listen.

I'm sorry, I think I may have to stop writing soon. I've been feeling very strange ever since that last encounter with Rob at the edge of the forest. But, please. Stop telling your children not to be afraid of the dark. Take it from someone who's had the darkness poured into him that it's no trivial thing.

Because, WE'RE AWAKE. WE'RE COMING. And WE SEE YOU.