TRANSCRIPT -  Episode 178: Chiaroscuro

January 19th, 2021

Kristen Zaza

[Eerie theme music]

What a nightmare I was having.

What a strange one. What a restless sleep.

I'm glad to see that you're here, my friend. To help me through it.

You see, I was curled up under the snow, and the snow has been piling up. I was curled up under a mountain of it, under ice, close to the ground, and I find that because I am a strange monster of the seasons, I was not cold, I was just sleeping, sleeping so much and sleeping so deeply. And when I sleep so deeply, I am prone to nightmares, because I think my imagination needs to do something, needs to be active, even when I am not.

I was dreaming that I had entered a little cottage

A pleasant one, warm and orange inside, with a lovely fire and a lovely friend just like you

Except suddenly everything went silent and quiet and dark, and someone said the phrase:

"He's coming for you now."

And I knew that I should hide. I knew that I must hide.

But I didn't.

Because, though terrified, I was also

excited.

So I sat down and said

"That's fine. Let him come."

And it stayed quiet and dark

And I felt him coming, creeping in like a shadow

It seemed to take forever for him to arrive

And I refused to run.

That's unusual for me. Normally, I run, in my nightmares. I usually scream and run. Or flail. Or fight. I do something.

It's not that I wasn't doing something in this one.

But I wanted to see him.

Whoever was coming for me.

I wanted to see him.

So I waited.

I woke up before I did.

Perhaps I'm a little relieved. The fear was deep and palpable.

But I'm also a little...disappointed.

Whoever it was, I wonder if he'll be back, in another nightmare.

It's an interesting dream, too, given the card that I drew recently.

I asked my cards for a birthday message.

Not for me, mind you, I don't have a birthday, because I don't exist in time the way creatures with birthdays do. But, I do have an anniversary of the day that I began speaking with you, and that is what I celebrate. In that way, it was my fourth birthday. "Me", being this whole...thing. This show. Whatever you consider it to be. And for this fourth birthday, I simply asked my Tarot cards for a birthday message. That is all. I thought I'd leave it up to them to decide what exactly I need to see on this anniversary of my speaking with you.

I drew the Nine of Swords.

The Nine of Swords is Fear, Depression, Isolation, Anxiety, Negativity. And Nightmares.

Don't be afraid. Don't worry. I'm not. It is a valuable birthday message, despite its fearsome nature. Because you see it is about the act of fear. It is about restless nights spent wide awake, frightened, worried, obsessing. It is about literally having nightmares; when one is worried or over-stressed, nightmares come more frequently. And so, this is a card of nightmares.

But it is a reminder that you are perpetuating your own fear. You are expanding what you are frightened of into one big, insurmountable monster. You must break the cycle of being afraid. You must break the cycle of being kept awake from your own worry. I cannot presume to tell you how to deal with your own fear. I do not know what keeps you awake at night. But I can tell you that you are not alone. We all have those awful nights. We all suffer those night terrors, whatever they are. Reach out to someone. Speak with someone. Do not believe the lie that you are alone in this. In solidarity, perhaps there can be some clarity, too, and clarity can make the shadow you're afraid of not quite so mighty.

So, I have a story for you. A bedtime story about nightmares.

Don't be afraid of that.

Sometimes, as it is with certain unnameable night terrors, we are afraid that if we speak of them, they will visit us more readily.

Let them.

As I said in my nightmare: Let them come. Let us see them. Let us see what all the fuss is about.

This story is about an artist.

This story is about an artist who used little charcoal sketches to draw the little things in his imagination.

This story is about him and those drawings.

[A plaintive song on piano]

As it is often with those who dedicate themselves to art, he found that money was scarce, and because money was scarce, his little home was cold, and his belly was hungry, and his sleep was fraught. He lived in a little apartment in an otherwise mostly deserted building in a big city that should have felt alive and full of people, but it felt desolate and solitary somehow, still. At least to this man, it did. Perhaps it was the street. The part of town. Perhaps it was how he felt about it. But he felt quite alone indeed. This wouldn't have been so bad, if it wasn't for the threat of creditors, of bankers, of whoever owned this awful building, coming to bang on his door and demand why he didn't have enough. He was trying, every day he tried to sell his drawings, his extraordinary talent that he'd spent years developing, his little black and white images of loneliness and beauty that were objectively fascinating. He tried to find work elsewhere, but the world around him was in such chaos, that there was no steady work to be found. There was no opportunity in sight. So he drew, more and more, as it was the only thing he could do to fight that emptiness around him, the hopelessness that drew ever closer. Art can suffer when it is made out of necessity, sometimes, but in his case, it did not. But perhaps that's because I think all art has immeasurable value. And perhaps that's because I also think that money has none. More on that another time. Or never. (I'm sick to death of talking about that.)

All of this was difficult enough for our humble artist. But, lately, he had become so haunted by the threats he faced in his daily life, that his sleep began to suffer. At first it was merely sleeplessness; a painful problem, an unhealthy problem, but not a fearsome one. The thing about nighttime was that it was the one time he did not fear knocks on the door, or unpleasant letters. It was merely the solitude he had to contend with. And that was painful, not fearsome. But because of that solitude, he could make his sketches.

I tell you, my friends, I do not know much about art, but his was exquisitely shadowy. He used charcoal liberally to create more darkness than negative space - and in the few places where he chose to let the paper peek through, it shone so brightly one could swear someone was holding a candle behind the drawing. He laboured over the darkness with such love and patience, that the light became all the more beautiful for it. Images of haunted forests, crumbling manor houses, nighttime lakes. A creature after my own heart, this artist.

Sleep eventually crept back in. It had to.

But when it did...

He had dreams.

Terrible dreams.

He dreamed of his sketches, you see. Now, it's difficult to tell; was he dreaming of these locations because he had already created them in a drawing? Or was he drawing them because he had first visited them in a faraway dream? Ultimately, it doesn't matter, because the places were within him all along, and they were a part of him.

But then, there were the others.

People.

In his dreams, in his sketches.

[Sighing, ghostly voices, in a minor harmony]

He could not make much of them, for they were simply shadows. No faces, no clothes, no details, but shadows only.

One such night, he had gone to bed quite begrudgingly. He was half-done a sketch, one of his forests of trees with branches like spider legs and clouds like ink and a shockingly crisp, white moon. He didn't want to sleep. He'd fought it off for hours. He wanted to draw. He wanted to draw the place he wished he actually was. But his body cried for rest, so he stopped his process and allowed it.

He was at first overjoyed to dream of the very forest he'd abandoned.

He didn't realize it was a dream, of course. He simply felt he was escaping into a place where he did not feel worry and stress, but rather...

a cold,

quiet

calm.

The calm of a solitary winter's night in a haunted forest.

The trees sighing, The wind whistling,The earth groaning.

Perfection.

But then, he heard footsteps. Behind him, crunching in the snow. And then they stopped.

He turned around to see a figure, standing in that intense moonlight. All shadowed, just a silhouette, of someone very tall

And that was all he could tell.

They just stood there and watched him.

He raised his hand to wave; they did nothing. He could see that whoever it was was breathing, slowly; their shoulders curling up and down with each breath a little, hands dangling at their sides.

He turned around and kept walking. He did not want to waste his time in his dream-forest.

But the footsteps resumed and the shadow kept following him.

He turned around periodically to check, and each time he did, the shadow stopped in its tracks as though waiting for him to do something. His heart pounded and he feared that it was chasing him; but it did not seem to run, nor did it appear to be overtaking him. It just walked with him when he walked, and stopped when he stopped.

He looked at it, frightened finally beyond measure, thinking to communicate with whatever it was, and he cried out: "Hey!"

The creature cried back, but with a deep and awful roar, a gutteral cry in response, painful and decidedly inhuman.

The artist's eyes widened in horror. This is a nightmare, this is a nightmare, this is a nightmare.

He ran.

And the creature ran after him.

No matter how much he ran, the trees were unchanging. He could not make his way out of the forest. He was stuck here, runnning, running, ever onward from the roaring, screaming shadow that chased him.

When he woke up in a cold sweat, he ran to finish the sketch

And he drew the tall, looming figure

He finished the forest. He put it on the wall. It made him tremble.

But it was done.

It had taken him the whole day, in fact, and no one had come to bang on his door. No one had sent him a nasty letter. Nothing. He had passed through an entire day without fear of worldly abuse, and he hadn't even realized it.

Another night, when he had been working on a drawing of one of his beloved manor houses, he felt sleep itching at him yet again. No, not yet - he thought. I haven't finished the crumbling west wing, the library, or the dirt road...but sleep itched  and itched and scratched and scratched, and he had to give in once more.

[Distant piano, more sparse than before]

And he found himself in that very manor house!

What joy! He wandered hall after hall, parlour after parlour, whether it was abandoned but for the autumn leaves blowing through it, or singed by an imagined fire from a time that never happened, or overtaken by cobwebs and dust and ravens. He loved each and every one of these rooms and he wished harder than anything that he would never ever be forced to leave this place.

He found himself sitting in the gallery by the fire, and the fire was so bright, but not warm at all. And he found rest in that dream, just sitting there, just watching the fire, and not fretting about a single thing

Until he had a strange feeling.

A distinct feeling

that he was not alone.

Someone was with him.

He looked up and saw the figure of a woman, sitting on the couch, rather politely, hands in her lap, her head bowed.

he could not make out much more about her, not with the way the shadow from the fire masked her face. In fact she too seemed to be made purely of shadow.

She sat very still, almost imperceptibly breathing.

After a period of staying still as stone, just observing her, he finally mustered the courage to stand. Perhaps he ought to go to another room.

She stood with him. Just staring at him. Just darkness, but not empty darkness; someone was there, indeed, but just not quite in the same way that he was here. Just how was he here, anyway?

He backed away, heading for the hallway, but she followed him where he went. His heart pounding, his breath coming faster, but he did not cry out. He did not run. He was not as afraid as last time. He went to the front door, to stand on the front porch.

She joined him at his side as he stared out at what was beyond

[The sighs from before, returning]

A vast forest

With a looming figure

Breathing

Standing in the moonlight...

When that figure, in time with the woman on the porch, dropped their jaws open wide

And shrieked

And the artist woke with a start, sitting right up in his bed.

He went to the manor house drawing

He finished it

He more than finished it

He made a series of drawings based around this one house and the ghosts within it

And in every room, the shadowed outline of a sad, polite woman

Except on the porch.

On the porch, she screamed at the sight of something watching her from the woods.

Another day passed and he survived it. He had survived it rather easily this time, in fact, when usually it was such a struggle. Exhausting. Difficult. And terrifying.

His nightmares had made even the dreaded daytime not so bad.

And he had spent all day working so intently that sleep came all the more readily the next night.

Finished his drawings, he felt perhaps that he might be free from nightmares this evening.

If I don't work on something before bed, I won't dream of it, he thought, and so he did.

But there was something missing. It wasn't quite right.

Nightmares be damned. He had to look at something. SOmething he made. Something he loved. Something that made the fear worthwhile.

He pulled out an old sketch of a lake at night

The moon shrouded in clouds

The light across the water dazzling.

Take me there.

And he dreamed of the lake, just like that.

He stood on the shore, looking out.

The sound of the tide drawing itself back and forth, the sound of crickets and sleepy water fowl, toads and snakes and everything else making their music

He smiled.

No matter how terrible my daytime or nighttime terrors, he thought to himself, no one will ever take this from me. This? This is mine.

He looked up for a moment at the moon, sometimes revealed against the blackness of the sky, sometimes hiding behind a veil of misty grey clouds. If only he wasn't so lonely. But then, nothing was perfect.

He looked back down to the lake, and someone was standing in it, waist-deep.

A figure

About his height

About his build

Only he couldn't see their face.

Only silhouette, Only shadow

Breathing calmly

Watching

Standing with him.

Being with him.

He waved and, much to his surprise, this time, the shadow waved back.

He heard breathing on either side of him now

The tall man and the sad woman stood on either side of him

Looking out at the lake, too. Just shadows. He supposed that they would remain shadows until he drew faces and clothes and details for them. But it didn't matter. What mattered was that they were here.

He took a step forward and, as if choreographed, each of the three others - the one in the lake and the ones on the shore - took a step forward, all at once.

He glanced at them one by one, and they did the same.

He was so afraid, but he did not want to run. He was so afraid, and so lonely, and so sad, and so worried,

So he once again

Just because it was the only thing he could do

Screamed.

[The sighing again, but overlapping/echoing]

And all three others screamed too, with him.

Inhuman and unclear screams, ear-shattering, but honest and not (as he originally assumed) aggressive.

Just all those other things.

Afraid, lonely, sad, worried

maybe angry, maybe ecstatic, maybe confused

It's all right.

It doesn't matter.

They just did it

And he woke up in the middle of the night

In a cold sweat

Sitting up in his bed

Heart racing.

It was so dark out and his candle had gone out.

He fumbled for it on his nightstand, tryinng to catch his breath from the nightmare. He found a match and he lit the candle

And in his room were three figures

One tall and on his right, one sad and on his left, and one just like him at the foot of the bed.

In the candlelight, they were only shadow

Just shadow people, standing around the bed.

He cried out and backed up against the wall, brandishing the candle before him

But slowly

Hesitantly

And a little sheepishly

The three figures raised their hands and waved.

[Music; the piano and voices, all together]

In the morning, he'd look at his drawings and consider selling them. They were so gorgeous, and unique, and unlike anything he'd ever made before. Someone might buy them.

But he looked up at his guests, who were beginning to look a little more clear in the daylight. They grew more and more clear the more he sketched, and he couldn't help but tweak these drawings, add just a little more detail here and there. Perhaps sketch another room of the house with its phantom hostess, or a closer view of the lost person in the lake, or a different angle of the man in the woods. And he found he couldn't sell them.

They were his guests, after all

And when he slept, he was theirs

And he couldn't give that up.

I'll sketch something else, he said aloud and smiled. I'll draw other things and sell those.

And somehow he knew, perhaps because the images in his mind were becoming clearer and clearer by the second

That they were smiling back.

And that's that.

Perhaps that helps me understand why my own nightmare was not unwelcome

If something has gone to the trouble of seeking me out in a bad dream

SHould I not at least stop and listen to what it has to say?

Goodnight, my friends.

I hope you do not have a nightmare tonight, but if you do, try to enjoy it.

And don't-

Oh

Hello.

There you are.

There you all are.

I can see you so clearly.

What a blessing. What a gift.

Do you see them, too, my friends?

If not, who is it that you see, I wonder?

As I was saying

Dream well, my friends.

[Eerie theme music]

(Host speaks as Kristen:)

Hello there, my friends, and thank you so much for listening to Episode 178 of On a Dark, Cold Night. This is your host, writer, composer, narrator, podcaster, producer, team of one, all the voices, etc, behind the show. How are you this week? I hope you're well, and not too overwhelmed with sleeplessness or nightmares or the Nine of Swords. But if you are, that's okay, too. We have to see it to move on from it, don't we? Or perhaps we can find that it's not so frightening after all. Maybe our nightmares aren't so terrible to live with, after all?

I'd like to send some thank-yous this week. First of all, thanks so much to everyone for making our fourth anniversary on Monday so special. I appreciate you listening so much, my friends, and your support means the world to me. Thanks so much to all my patrons on Patreon, and a big welcome this week to two new patrons - thanks so much to Copper Crow and to Teo for supporting the show on a monthly basis. I'm so grateful for you wanting to help me create the show, my friends. If you'd like to support via Patreon like Copper Crow and Teo, I'll just tell you about some of the perks available - for every patron of $1 or more a month, you can receive downloadable access to my ever-evolving soundtrack.  And for every supporter of $5 or more a month, you get that perk, as well as a monthly tarot reading video that I upload for every full moon. To learn more, head on over to patreon.com/darkcoldnight. And if you'd prefer to donate only one time, without those perks but with the same online and on-air shout-out, you can donate instead via Ko-fi.com - and I'm sending out a big thank-you this week to an anonymous donor who supported the show via Ko-fi on our 4th anniversary yesterday too. Thank you so much, Anonymous coffee buyer. You can learn more about donating in this way by visiting ko-fi.com/darkcoldnight. And we have t-shirts and hoodies available at bonfire.com/on-a-dark-cold-night.

Another great way to support the show is to leave me a rating and a review wherever you can. You can do this through itunes, Spotify, our Facebook page, just to name a few. I'd really appreciate you sharing word of mouth in that way. You can also follow me on social media; I'm on Twitter @ADarkColdNight, instagram at darkcoldnightpodcast, on Facebook and YouTube at my pages just called On a Dark, Cold Night, and I'm on TikTok at kristenzaza.

Thank you so much for listening this week and always, my friends. I hope you sleep well tonight, whether that's now, or whether it's later. I hope it's nightmare-free - but if it's not, I hope they're lovely nightmares in their own way, too. I have those sometimes. They're not that bad. Lots of love, and sweet dreams.

[Eerie theme music]

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