THE LAST DAY

 

 

 

The darkness advanced like a collection of gray shadows. Juan looked at them attentively. Before it all began, I used to think that the last hour of the day had something poetic about it. A certain gloomy beauty that he appreciated with a nostalgic delight. But now the mere thought made him smile bitterly. The nagging feeling that a part of his mind had died so long ago that he couldn't remember when it had actually happened.

He heard them screaming. A mixture of pleas and tears. He shook his head, a shiver of fear and anguish running down his spine. Couldn't they understand it, she thought with her jaw clenched, her hands stiff against her body. Couldn't they understand that I couldn't do anything else? He wondered if he would have to explain it again. In the shadows, there was something agonizing about that thought, an uneven echo that moved through his mind from one place to another. Explain what? How can we put into words the horror of such a simple, inevitable decision? How could he make everyone see that in all his dark simplicity there was something of beauty? Maybe he couldn't, he told himself with a shudder of regret. Perhaps that was the worst of all that was happening.

He closed the door. He heard the wind blowing, the rattling sound of windows and doors shaken by gusts. The cacophony was the only thing alive in the sepulchral silence of the empty building, which floated adrift in sudden abandonment. He took a moment to listen to the rattle of the wooden leaves, the way an artificial and violent vitality spread in all directions from his intention to listen to her. For the first time since it all began, Juan felt a deep sadness. A mixture of physical exhaustion and a deep spiritual sorrow that surprised him with its intensity. Maybe that's how you know the end is near, he thought as he latched and passed the key. The metal crunched under the weight of his fingers, one dead mechanism among many.

The screams again. Now the woman was crying between babbles. Did he call his mother? Juan didn't know it, and it was better that way. He walked into the building and rested the axe on the ground. It looked disproportionate to the lustrous luster of the stone. A rudimentary weapon, devoid of all beauty. When he first held it, John thought it was heavier than he thought it was and, of course, much less elegant. For years he had seen it suspended in its small glass box and had believed it had some beauty: with the polished wooden handle and steely blade, the smooth metal in immaculate that glistened under the white lights of the hallway. Of course, at that time Juan did not know that he would have to break the security glass and take the axe, that he would have to wield it to save his life. Had he done that? There was something melodramatic about that phrase, as if the mere fact of its artificial and vulgar depth could save it from cruelty. Was that what it was about? A life for another life? Juan didn't know, although he thought about it several times since it all began. What am I saving? At what price?

They are not reflections that anyone has in everyday life. Or, at least, he never thought that he would have to fight against the inner resistance that was crying out for him to drop the axe, to run in the opposite direction, to forget what he had seen. As the crowd ran around him shrieking, pushing each other, falling to the ground in a kind of deadly tumult, he acted only on instinct. Is that the feeling called? That irrepressible urge not to die? Juan ran like everyone else, screaming, his hands over his head. Without knowing what was happening. Suddenly, he tripped and crashed headfirst into the wall. The pain poured out as an immediate relief from fear. He lay there, while they trampled and beat him. Someone kicked his head, a woman stuck the heel of his shoe in his hip. He screamed, tried to get up, couldn't. Someone pointed at him. An arm that reached out to his face. He struggled until he was able to free himself. Fear, fear everywhere. The fear like an unbearable stench, the fear that sustained him when he managed to lean on his knees and get up in fits and starts. The fear of open hands, the glass that broke under the fingers. The texture of the axe handle under the palms. Fear, fear.

Juan would only remember later how he made his way through the screaming crowd, how he managed to walk the long corridor to the outside and finally find himself alone. By then, it seemed like many hours had passed, but in reality it was only a few minutes. He had the feeling that real time was being replaced by another, full of patches and broken at the edges. An unreal chronology of misfortune that sustained reality with difficulty. He ran among the lying bodies, ignoring those who begged for help. With the axe in his hand he climbed the limits of the colossal tragedy that surrounded him and escaped as best he could to the place where the darkness could not touch him. His heart was beating fast as he dropped down on a street corner, his axe pressed to his chest and his breath wheezing. He was alive, miraculously alive.

It took him considerable effort to muster up the courage to look back. Now silence reigned. Death was everywhere: bodies lay scattered everywhere, some motionless, others shaking in the throes of death. Blood splattered the whitewashed walls, the polished concrete of the hallways. A nightmarish landscape that Juan contemplated with his eyes wide open while sobbing through gritted teeth. Is what I see real? Is this real... devastation? A severed arm lay in the middle of the garden surrounding the building. It looked like a terrifying tribute to the gods, palm turned upwards and fingers twisted. Blood flowed from the clean, monstrous wound that had severed from his body in a slow crimson spring that turned black as the darkness advanced. Darkness! Juan understood this with effort. Had that been it? He leaned his head against the axe blade, cold and solid. A slice of reality. Was it the darkness that caused all this...? Era...?

A few hours earlier, when fear was not everywhere, Juan had heard two men talking about the phenomenon. "An eclipse, the last of the year," said one without interest. The other shrugged. "I don't understand so much interest in the subject." Juan passed the broom and had the desire to stop to ask about the phenomenon, to ask the questions that tormented him. But he didn't. Strangers had their heads together and laughed with each other. Incredulous of the effect of such a portent. Of its effects.

"It's just a piece of advertising shit," the first speaker went on. All that about the darkness of the eclipse is almost medieval.

- People are ignorant, they have fun with those little games of artifice.

They both laughed, apparently very pleased with their boastful disbelief. Juan looked out of the window to the right of the cafeteria. There were still a few hours to go before the eclipse occurred and the sky already had a gray appearance, petrified in an eerie silence. He approached and had the impression that the clouds were not running, that the sun was floating motionless in the midst of the lights and shadows that surrounded him. Darkness, Juan thought again. An eclipse. Fear.

When he heard the first screams, Juan was sitting at the back of the cafeteria. They did not surprise him. Had he waited for them? He would never know or it wasn't something he was interested in now, if anything. He looked out of the small window that opened to the right in the corner of the employees. Storm clouds swirled around the dark sun. The radiant slit of the sun that the moon had not been able to cover palpitated in the semi-darkness like an agonizing heart. He knew it very clearly. It wasn't normal. What was happening was not normal. The darkness was here to stay, in the form of an ancient omen that no one understood, that this young, unbelieving world was completely ignorant of.

Someone shouted. A woman. Then another. A slow, terrified moan. Fear. Juan stood up slowly and felt the wind hitting the glass of the small window with force. A hoot that extended to the large window of the doctors' cafeteria. A violent gust that, moreover, brought darkness. Juan ran outside and saw her arrive like triple threads of a dark matter that slipped slowly where the sunlight disappeared. More screams. Someone was pointing out the phenomenon from one of the tables. One of the men I had heard speak earlier was standing, his cell phone held up and photographing the gloomy silhouette that stretched out on the other side of the glass. Darkness, Juan thought terrified. The end times, an insidious voice whispered in his head. That's what it is, haven't you always known that?

Yes, he had always intuited it, with the crystal clarity of his restless mind, lacerated and hurt by fear. He knew, without anyone telling him, that darkness would come into the world and take everything, that it would spread like the tentacles of an impossible monster in all directions, that it would devour the world of light with ease. And so it had been, he said to himself as he ran to the window. The shadows had come! The end of the world! Juan had always known this, who feared the gloom like nothing else. He had known about it and now he was there.

And he, of all the people who could understand horror in its full extent, had to face them. Should I have what? I didn't know that. He rested his hands on one of the trays of food abandoned by some careless diner. He found a plastic knife among the food scraps, the glass of orange juice spilled over the table's plexiglass. A long pool of color that disappeared as darkness came. A woman screamed and laughed standing by the glass door that opened onto the garden. She was a nurse, the pretty blonde-haired one who always smiled at him when he brought him medicine. She was the one who had screamed the first time.

- Isn't it beautiful? - he said - Isn't it something beautiful?

His back was turned, his uniform impeccable marking his skinny and young body. Juan appreciated her: she was the one who from time to time allowed him not to take all the pills, the one who gave him affectionate winks. "For once, no one will notice that you didn't take it," he murmured, squeezing her cheeks. As if he were a child. And he was smiling, grateful and fascinated by the nurse's chubby hands, her kind, pale face. He saw her now, surrounded by darkness, almost swallowed up by her, and he knew that he must save him before anyone else. I had to prevent it from disappearing, consumed, destroyed, forgotten forever.

He approached her. I was a little separated from the group that photographed, watched, and pointed. She turned to look at him, glaucous eyes wide. He approached him, said something. Your name? Come here, come see this. He beckoned him. He smiled and for a moment saw her floating in the light, with darkness behind her. He found her beautiful, tender. The darkness did not deserve it. He plunged the plastic knife into her right eye. A quick and firm movement. She let out a strange sound, as if she were choking, while Juan moved his wrist and, with his free hand, held her arm to keep her upright. Blood gushed out in a black stream. The darkness was already in her! And Juan tightened the pressure. Go away, let her go! She moaned very quietly, shook, tried to move away. The impeccable uniform was covered with crimson threads like the most delicate lace, the mellifluous face acquired color and, for once, real attractiveness.

Juan saw all this as he pressed the knife tightly against his eye with increasing force. The white, bloody mass spilling onto the woman's cheeks stained her fingers. But darkness had renounced it, John knew. Death was so near, so beautiful, alive, beyond the darkness that surrounded him, that threatened to consume the world quickly.

Another shout. This time a very sharp one. Juan dropped the nurse and saw that the man with the mobile phone was looking at him with his mouth wide open, terrified. The darkness behind him, like a long shadow that spread down his feet towards the tumult that continued to admire the sky in darkness. He lunged at him, and the knife cut with difficulty through the skin of his face, the firm stem of his neck. Now the blood was a radiant spring, glistening under the powerful lights of the room and facing the darkness. Like this! Like this! Juan shouted with joy for the blind and total conviction that he had won at the end of all the stories, at the same time that he had stopped running. The bright blood moved the infinite mechanism that kept the world alive, safe from its final dissolution.

Juan did not know clearly what happened next. In reality, everything seemed to happen at the same time, like a sequence of superimposed images. The man with the telephone fell to the ground, convulsing, his hand resting against his neck. Two women shrieked as John pounced on them, trying to pull them away from the now total darkness that had engulfed the sun. One had her head smashed on the ground. He dug his fingers into the other's throat and squeezed with all the force of the fury that shook him. A man in uniform lunged at him, club raised. John recognized the darkness in him, the tentacles of horror peeking out from his wide, horrified eyes. She threw herself at him with open arms, dug her teeth into his cheek. Bit. He bit and bit until the darkness left the man and the body collapsed limp under his.

The crowd was running outside. The darkness was brighter now, a velvet trail against the hospital's gigantic window beyond its gardens. Juan took one of the chairs and tore it from the ground; the force of fear turned into a mysterious engine of pure despair. He struck left and right. He heard moans, shrieks of panic. He saw bodies falling. He struck and struck, as darkness disputed those poor souls, as it hid in his twisted fingers, their faces disfigured by panic. He struck and struck until he freed each of them, until the blood gushed out and its warm smell conjured up the end of the world he glimpsed from the darkness.

The crowd rushed down the aisle. Some pointed at him and ran away from him. Others tried to stop him. Juan found himself reduced, hurt, but the strength of fear was greater. He smashed a man's head against the wall, felt the bone break under his knuckles. He ran among them, between the screams, between the tenacious decision to save them and the resentment that this disorderly, sad flight, devoid of all meaning, inspired in him. The darkness is here! Can't you see it? Here! The sun has disappeared, the end of the world has come, and only I see it.

The axe in his hands. Heavy, firm. A redemption in blood. The edge that shone under the last vestiges of the sun. The darkness was now coming in a slow succession of endless layers that only John could see. And as he struck, cut, killed, John tried to save the world from its clutches, from the hidden, sinister caves that lay beneath the dying sun, from reality that collapsed into fragments: a fragile surface beneath which fear dwelt like a blind monster.

Now the light was slowly returning, shining on the pools of blood that stretched across the floor, the open stairs to the garden, the half-open doors of the consulting rooms on either side of the corridor. Juan looked at the glass door that closed the hospital's internal quarters from the outside world and felt relief. The darkness was still there. For now contained, waiting to slip into the safe place that John had built with death. Beyond, the crowd ran, escaped, ran towards the throat of the evil that was waiting to engulf them. John felt sorry for them.

"Please don't!" - it was the woman who cried and begged - Don't do it! Don't kill me! Don't do it!

John turned and smiled. A feeling of placid relief ran through him. At least the souls in his care were safe, he thought as he raised the axe again. The blood again. Silence as an echo in the midst of redemption.

 by Paya Frank

The end