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No. 845
In the dark past before history began, humanity learned to fear. Huddled in the darkness on the plains of Africa, our earliest ancestors listened as lions stalked through the night around them. Deep in the caves of Europe, later men kept watch around their fires in the snowy winter, telling stories of horrors living hidden in the gloom outside. In the Middle East, just as the Sumerians began to scratch cuneiform on stone tablets, farmers sacrificed their livestock to demons they believed lived in the desert.
Over time, we’ve learned to control our fears. To take them down to size. The lions in Africa were held back by fences of barbed plants, then hunted down with guns to near extinction. The horrors in the snowy winter of Europe were cast aside by the retreat of the glaciers and by the flaming torch of human progress. The demons living in the sand lost their sacrifices as time went forward.
In the twenty first century, we have the internet, we have half-mile high buildings, we have networks of roads spanning continents and air traffic going around the world. We look to horror stories, thrill rides, and late night television gore-fests to satisfy our psychological need for fear here in the western world. It’s almost like fear is a toy for us now; we only know true fear a few times in our adult lives.
But all of those terrifying stories our ancestors told around fires? All of the things they saw when they looked out into the blizzards of the ancient past? They aren’t gone. Where the lights don’t reach, where the shadows dominate, they still live. They crawl in their eternal crypts, dreaming horrible, dark dreams as the ages pass them by. Outside of the range of cell phones, away from all the commercial flight paths and shipping lanes, where no one can see, they build their kingdoms. Underground, they feast on whatever crawls by them. Nightmarish masses of twisted flesh and muscle, dark even against the darkness, they wait.
Because one day, the lights are going to go out again, and they aren’t ever going to come back on.
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