The Dark Grey Alleyway

I had woken up that day feeling strange. I was noticing things I wouldn’t normally notice, from stains on building walls to trash blowing in the wind. There was an electrical wire over the road, with three crows sitting on it. I don’t think I had ever noticed that line before, or those crows. I woke up that day feeling tired, having had some intense dream which I didn’t quite remember. It took all my effort to get out of bed and head out for the grocery store, but it was my day off, and I needed to get things done today.

As I walked past various stores and buildings on the way to the store, I continued to feel like my mind was a bit off that day. I saw a woman walking down the sidewalk in the opposite direction I was walking, and I saw something strange in her eyes. I don’t know what it was, but I imagined that she was possessed somehow, like the intelligence I was seeing behind her eyes wasn’t her own. After blinking my eyes a few times, the impression disappeared, and I kept walking.

The street seemed wider than normal. Normally, the road was quite narrow, but now it felt like there was a lot of space. I could sense that the space had always been there, though, and that my mind was perceiving it for the first time. I was noticing little things like that, which my mind would normally have filtered out. As another example, I saw a squirrel, and I could have sworn it had six legs, rather than four. But it didn’t feel to me as though I was looking at a mutant squirrel. Rather, it felt like all squirrels had always had six limbs, but that I just hadn’t noticed the middle two before. My mind felt somehow more open to my sensations than it had been in the past.

Close to the store, I noticed a dark alleyway that I thought – that I knew – was not there before, between two buildings. Normally, I remembered, the two buildings were joined by a brick wall, which was dark due to the roof overhead, and in this little area, garbage cans were often kept. But today, there was no wall, and no garbage cans, though the roof remained, making the alleyway darker than any alley I’ve been in before.

I was curious. The alley was clearly there, in front of me, and yet, it was also clearly impossible. No construction could have occurred since I saw the wall here last night, and yet the wall was gone, and a new passageway stood in its place, which seemed to stretch on very far into sheltered darkness. With the other things I had seen that day, I could chalk them up to my sleepy brain playing tricks on me, but in this case, there was a passage that was not present before, and blinking my eyes didn't make it disappear. I wondered if I walked toward where the wall had stood, would I bump against the wall, and finally see through the trick my mind was playing? Or would I be able to keep walking?

I tried it. I stood with my toes right in front of where the wall had been – only gravel and darkness seemed to stretch out ahead of me now. Cautiously raising my foot, I pushed it through where the wall should have been. Nothing stopped me. I was able to take a step past where the wall usually was. I must have looked strange to the people walking by, but I didn’t care. I took another step. And another. Nothing stopped me as I headed into the alley, which was pitch black after only a few steps.

I was curious what would be back there. It seemed to stretch back further than the buildings went, and I wanted to see where the alley would emerge, if anywhere. Despite feeling uneasy due to the lack of light and the strangeness of the alley’s existence, I kept walking, darkness consuming my vision, hoping in vain that my eyes would adjust to the blackness. I walked for several minutes, without coming across anything of note.

As I walked through the dark, I couldn’t help shake the feeling I was being watched. I turned my head to check over my shoulder, but I had come far, and aside from the pinprick of light where the alley opened to the road, the alley was very dark, and while I spotted nothing, for all I knew at that moment I was making eye contact with some strange creature hiding in the dark. The dark, I for some reason knew, is where monsters hide. Literally, for one thing. But also metaphorically, in the dark just outside our conscious awareness, in the spaces between spaces. I couldn’t tell if the prickling feeling on my neck was just nerves, or if some horrifying being was making contact with me in a way I could only barely perceive. The thought caused my shoulders to tense and my steps to quicken.

I was determined to find out more about this place, to find out what was back here. I was still certain that this passage was not there before, and I would know, since I walk down this road every day. This alley was not here before. I know it wasn’t. Yet there I was, walking down it, the gravel crunching below my feet, which were barely visible in the dark.

It was then that I heard a faint hissing noise from ahead of me. I stopped to listen, but couldn’t make out what I was hearing, so I continued on through the blackness. Again, I heard it. I cautiously approached its source, which was a ways away. My head was turned, so I could listen better, and my eyes were wide open, despite the fact that they could see nothing. The hissing continued intermittently, and as I got closer, I realized that it was a whisper. It didn’t sound like a whisper, it sounded like the faint hissing of gas escaping from a pipe, but I knew it was a whisper. I knew it was coming from some intelligent source.

“Hello?” I queried into the dark. I received no response. The hissing grew louder as I approached, and I could begin to make out – not words exactly, but concepts, embedded in the hissing. Ideas which, while definitely present, I could not identify, ideas which my mind chewed on, but failed to make out.

“Hello?” I asked again. Nothing.

Finally, the source of the whispering was only a foot or so in front of me, and I could make out a lump on the ground. It was hard to see in the darkness, but the sound of the hissing was now deafening. Not to my ears, but to my mind, which was growing fatigued from trying and failing to make out the strange concepts embedded in the hissing. I was being spoken to in a language I couldn’t quite understand, but I could tell it was speech, and I could almost make out a word here, an idea there, but not quite.

I bent down to get a better look at the source of the whispers, and though it was very dark, I swear I saw a rotting corpse, with its eyes open, lips moving, whispering to me. Begging me for help.

I turned toward the entrance and ran. I had used up what was left of my curiosity, and all that remained was fear, and a desire to return to my normal, comfortable life. I could hear the hissing get louder – screaming, I now realized – as I ran back the way I came.

Eventually, the screams receded and I eventually got too far for them to be audible, though I swear I can still hear them faintly even now. I kept walking through the darkness. Strangely, however, I could not find the entrance from which I came. I should have been able to see it faintly in the distance, even from the point where I found the corpse, but there was no light at the end of the alley now, only darkness.

I walked, searching for the entrance, for hours. My heart pounded for a while, as I panicked. I feared being trapped in that strange place, that place that wasn’t supposed to exist, forever. I feared the hissing screams I might one day make. But as hours passed, my anxiety naturally calmed, and over time I even became bored. And tired, from all the walking. I just wanted to be home again, safe and comfortable under a blanket. I kept walking, and my legs became sore.

After hours of seeing nothing, my eyes were playing tricks on me. I would see, for a brief moment, the rectangular entrance to the alleyway, and then I would blink, and there would be nothing. I saw many faint motes of light floating past my peripheral vision. At times, my entire visual field would become filled with colours, or white stars, and then fade again to that colour that your eyes see in the dark, that colour that isn’t quite black. Eigengrau, it is called. The greyness of the mind. It’s what the mind perceives in total blackness, and so some say it is the colour of the mind itself. I think maybe that even if my eyes were perfect like a camera, and could perceive true black, that alleyway would still have been eigengrau.

The thing I hallucinated most of all as I wandered through the dark was the rotting face of the corpse which sat on the ground, eyes alive but skin and muscle festering. I felt the horrible eye contact. I heard the terrible hissing noise which came from its rotten lungs, and now I could understand some of the words. “Help me,” it screamed, "please." From its voice, I realized it was a woman. Was.

Finally, my legs were sore, and I was exhausted, and sleepy, and so I decided to sleep on the ground. I felt around for something soft to sleep on, maybe some grass or something, but my surroundings were gravel in all directions. I made sure to lay down with my feet facing the direction I believed the entrance to be, so I could resume walking in that direction when I awoke, and I let myself succumb to terrible dreams.

I was more exhausted when I woke up than I was when I fell asleep, but to my surprise, I awoke not with my body in the gravel, but sitting upright, with my back against the wall, and sunlight in my eyes. Touching my arm with my opposite hand, I could feel the indentations from where my arm had been lying in the gravel, but now I was sitting on pavement, up against a dimly lit wall. The bright light outside the shade stung my eyes, but I looked around, squinting, and saw people passing along the sidewalk in front of me. The wall I was against, I realized, was where the entrance to the alleyway had been the day before. I was safe, and back to reality.

As people walked by, they looked briefly at me sidelong, and then looked away and kept walking. They must have thought I was a homeless man or something, taking shelter against this wall under the narrow roof above. I didn’t feel self-conscious, being stared at. I just wanted to get home and get some real rest.

As I stood up and stretched my aching muscles, I wondered how long I had been asleep for, and for how long I had been wandering in that strange alleyway. I saw a woman in business clothes walking close to me, and I stepped out of the shadows to ask her the time. When I did, however, she just stared at me, confused.

“Do you have the time?” I asked again.

She didn’t respond, just staring at me. She took a step back, away from me. I thought she must be scared of me, because I was a strange, apparently homeless man who just approached her from out of the shadows. I dismissed her with a wave of my hand, and she walked past me, tightly clutching the strap of her purse as she did.

A very tall man in a suit came down the sidewalk next, and I asked him the time. Like the woman, his eyebrows furrowed, and he looked down at me, confused. I asked him the time again, but he made a brief hissing noise in response.

I spoke again, frustrated. “The time! I just want to know the time! What time is it?”

In response, he let out a long hissing noise, which, like the hissing I had heard in the alleyway, sounded like some kind of speech, but which I could not understand. I tried once more to speak to him, but the result was the same.

I shook my head, and decided to leave the man alone and go home. He must have found me frightening. As I would later find out, just as I heard bizarre hissing noises when he spoke, he was hearing the same thing when I spoke. And when I was home later and checked my clock, I found that my mind could not parse the numerals, nor make sense of the position of the hands. The symbols that were supposed to be numbers seemed alien, and offensive to my mind. I couldn’t read a text message I received either, which I could tell was from my mother only by the picture of her face. I eventually found I couldn’t understand any writing, speech, or numbers. However, when I would hear the groaning of the furnace, or the creaking of a tree in the wind, I would hear sentences, whose meaning was mostly beyond me, but I could tell that they were sentences, and they were mostly unhappy, pleading phrases.

I decided to keep this madness to myself, and to immerse myself in normal language again in order to regain what I had lost. But in my present state, I could neither show up for work, nor call in sick. After two days, people realized I was missing, and the police were sent to my house to do a wellness check. A check which I failed. I now reside, temporarily, in a mental institution. It has been a few weeks, and already I have regained my ability to understand certain words. The English word for “food”, for example, has become familiar to me. “Medicine”, also. Under the care of Dr. Chambers – his name was also a word I could recognize – I was slowly getting better. I heard the term “neurological”, which I understood, and I knew meant that they were treating me as a neurological patient rather than a psychological one, which was somehow a relief to me. I am not crazy. Not like some of the other patients.

I don't mind it here. My only frustration is that they keep confiscating the things I write. The last time I wrote down the unusual events that had occurred to me, the nurse looked at the glyphs I had written, horrified, and took the pages away. Evidently, the things I write are as alien and unsettling to them as their words still are to me. I will try to hide these pages, so they are not taken away.