Out of the Dark: Guest Post by Katherine Reilly Mitchell

Invisible monsters will follow people for years, lurking silently in the shadows of the mind, and rearing ugly heads when they're least welcome.

As real as the humans they hunt, these beasts are much longer lasting.

Such a villain crept up when Alice was only 15, and for nearly a decade slunk behind her without even an audible breath.

His name was common, known and even taken for granted most of the time by most people. In fact, Death was desired and sought in that era of widespread depression and trendy gloom. It was the end of the century, and Alice was just another child looking for something to cling to. Death saw her desperation, and stretched out his delicate hand.

It began in the dark…

* * *

Alice was afraid of the dark, and drawn to the things she was afraid of. Dark bedrooms, dark school hallways, dark cemeteries… they were all so unsettlingly familiar. She inhabited these places with an odd satisfaction – a delight in the detachment from normal teenage life, which she couldn't understand anyway.

It had been fitting when Alice's father died that mid-February. December might be the darkest month, but February is when the bleakness catches up with people. The monster that had burdened the dead man since his own father's demise some 40 years earlier now needed a new home. How fortunate that this older daughter was such a willing partner.

Death liked following Alice. She was small, didn't make much noise and respected his obscure presence. She nurtured his ego through the books she read and the poems she wrote. Sometimes she could sense the silent entity that was already there, though at that time, he was a friend, an idea characterizing her adolescence. She attended him at the funerals of aged relatives, smiling quietly at the somberness of it all, until it was time to stand up and accept that life went on.

As life progressed, Alice continually returned to the comfort of Death's invisible influence. She loved the contradiction of the barbarism disguised by his formality – nothing so strange about it, but her first notion of such a facade. He'd come to her at a pivotal point, and she depended on him to know who she was.

She was his; Death's daughter.

For the first few years after her father's passing they went along together – she walking farther and farther from, but still hand in hand with, those days of loss and struggle, and he, waiting like a dormant virus for the right moment to manifest.

After a time, he let her find some happiness, at parties, with a boyfriend, in school. But if ever he suspected that her acceptance of him was waning, he'd taint her joy with his breath, like a fire burning the edges of a happy photo. It was in these instances that she began to see his shadow. And as the years went by, she caught him more and more often out of the corner of her eye.

When she was 25 and married, Alice tried to turn Death into a concept – a neat package she could wrap in a term paper and discuss in a context. She referred to him constantly, but as a past acquaintance, and she refused to look at him directly, aware that he waited around every dark corner.

Death knew this resistance, and pushed back with greater strength.

He forced himself upon her – in news stories about young mothers stricken with terminal illness, or when a former classmate dropped after a few dizzy spells – and she felt a rising hatred for the monster who had once been a companion. Suddenly he was all too real, this father who had replaced her own.

Death tormented Alice with visions of her own life. Any thought of the future he dampened with the knowledge that it would all end. At times she was so overwhelmed by his power that she couldn't recognize her home, couldn't talk to her husband. She could only think about how he would die, how she would die. Everything about them would die, and Death would go on to haunt their children.

And so the darkness returned to envelop her.

About Katherine

Katie is a mysterious writer from my own neck of the woods. I cam across her blog – Human Textuality – and instantly fell in love with her writing.

Here's everything you need to know about her:

She is a writer by trade.


She is a Midwesterner.


She is a blissful wife.


She is half Dutch, a quarter Irish, an eighth German and an eighth Welsh.


She has two cats and a very small, very old house.


She finds cooking and gardening very therapeutic, and does not like taking unnatural shortcuts in either.

Katie writes about health, food, sex, death culture, human progression in these areas, history, being Irish, budget and natural living, and myself.