Outer Dark

by Cormac McCarthy

He followed it down, in full flight now, the trees beginning to close him in, malign and baleful shapes that reared like enormous androids provoked at the alien insubstantiality of this flesh colliding among them.

And she waited again at the front door with it open, poised between the maw of the dead and loveless house and the outer dark like a frail thief.

What needs a man to see his way when he’s sent there anyhow?

Late in the day the road brought him into a swamp. And that was all. Before him stretched a spectral waste out of which reared only the naked trees in attitudes of agony and dimly hominoid like figures in a landscape of the damned.

He wondered where the blind man was going and did he know how the road ended. Someone should tell a blind man before setting him out that way.