There is a very inconspicuous building at the edge of a street in a town inhabited by people. At random times throughout the day, random people walk the sidewalk in front en route to some other destination, and get caught up on the building. It is white or grayish white and blends easily with the gloom of rain clouds. The building is fairly tall, not safe to jump from, and there are no windows visible from the sidewalk. But every now and then, something about the shape of it, maybe the fall of its shadow, draws eyes towards it and people are drawn to it.
On a Tuesday, a man named Winston – he has a medium build and he is a middle aged man with brown hair and fair skin – walked to his son’s tee-ball game at the baseball diamond just a block from his house. He was entranced by the building that he had never noticed before, and he wandered toward it on the sidewalk. He walked along the wall facing the street, curious if he would find a door, until he did, and when he pushed it, the door swung slowly open. Winston walked inside without thinking, he displayed no caution whatsoever.
Inside was dim. There was a candle burning on a table and Winston jerked around when he heard the door close behind him. It was easier to see with the door closed. The room was empty, the walls were the yellow of the flame from the candle, though his surroundings were mostly black.
From the darkness, a man appeared. He stood very close to Winston, close enough to kiss him, which made Winston very uncomfortable and confrontational and the man from the darkness shrunk away, smiling.
The man from the darkness spoke in a very clear voice, then, “I will just get to business since you don’t seem very friendly,” and he offered Winston a chance to make a lot of money.
Winston was skeptical when the man from the darkness told him, “You can walk away with $50,000 right now.”
Winston did not ask what would be required of him, he was more curious about strings.
“50k scot-free? I could just walk away with it? You rich or something?”
The man from the darkness took a step closer and he continued, ignoring Winston’s question.
“I have a loaded gun,” the man from the darkness said.
Winston took a step back.
“Whoa man, put that thing away,” he said with his hands in front of himself.
The man from the darkness assured him, “I am not shooting anyone today. I was hoping you would.”
At one point in his existence, the man from the darkness was a very regular human being. Both of his parents were poets, so he grew up to hate poetry and opted for philosophy instead. This man read and was confused at life as he knew it, life where every moral principle was blurred or stretched to encompass so much gray that it might as well be as fleeting as a cloud. The man refused to become an embittered pessimist until Nature visited him in his backyard one afternoon while he was enjoying a beer alone.
Nature is a very elegant thing and took a very elegant form to be with him on that day. She had been resting in a tree, she liked to watch him and absorb his thoughts because he truly believed that he could blame all of man’s ills on something as fleeting as the times in which they live. Nature knew that if she ever went toe to toe with the old man, Time, he would be dispatched easily.
She finally decided to talk to the man who would eventually be from darkness after months of listening to him write his treatises on goodness and the importance of the symbolic human heart. She tried to convince him that man is nothing more than an animal with fancier toys.
“Dangle money in its face and it will rip anything that tries to get in its way to bits, like a rabid dog.”
And the man who will eventually emerge from darkness cannot believe that he is speaking to Nature and that she could be so misguided. Obviously man is not so savage. Nature, having spent little face time with humans – she had discussed them with Death and God, both of whom had taken human form many times to both learn from and teach lessons to them – was insulted by the man’s boldness to blatantly disagree with her and doomed him to a fate that would constantly remind him of the greatest failure of the human species: selfishness. And he would only be free if a human ever proved her wrong.
Winston did not prove her wrong and as result, an entire ship off the southeastern coast of the United States sank when the captain mysteriously died at the helm. After the ship was recovered, tests revealed strange results. The captain of the ship seemed to have been shot in the head despite the absence of bullet holes in his skull.
And because Winston did not prove her wrong, the man from the darkness is back to it. Winston was rewarded, sent richer on his way to his son’s tee-ball game.
Winston told everyone about what he found inside the building. Few believed his story.
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