He gone with the light

Back when I was in high school, we had to move on short notice. It was just me and my mom, and she was struggling to keep a job down. After getting tagged with a DWI, we ended up moving in with my aunt in the projects. It was the only way to make ends meet.

It was by far my lowest point. I slept on the couch in the living room while my mom took the bedroom. My aunt spent most of her time at her boyfriend’s place anyway, so she was rarely around. It was rough, to say the least. Everything can be rough at that age, but changing schools and getting thrown down a couple rungs on the class ladder was a bad combo.

I was a pretty normal kid. I played a lot of basketball, but I had no hopes of going pro. I had no idea what I was going to do. College was a pipe dream, so it was mostly about passing my classes and hoping for a miracle. Or a job. A job works too.

 

The area was pretty bad. One corner shop with welded windows and half a dozen hand-written signs stapled to the front door. No carts or baskets. A wall of pictures by the entrance showing who’s barred from entry. One of them had a little blue cross sign painted on, with a faded “R.I.P” beneath.

There was this sandwich place that must’ve been there since the 70’s. The place was tiny, with a lowercase ‘t’. I’ve seen refrigerator boxes that’s bigger. Basically a door where you can hear someone talking on the phone, with a sign that says “Yes goddamnit, we’re open”. Only two items on the menu; meat or no meat. I got nothing bad to say about that place though. Mr. Barker’s sandwiches are, to this day, the best damn street food I’ve ever had. I’ve tried recreating his pickled garlic salsa for years, but I can’t get the zest right.

Then there was the high school. There were metal detectors, and one of our teachers openly smoked in the classroom. The less I say about that place the better.

 

All that aside, it wasn’t like you couldn’t live there. I mean, yeah, it wasn’t pretty. You can sort of feel the eyes on your neck when you walk down the wrong street, but once you learn what street you’re not supposed to walk down, you’re gonna be okay. It’s not the kind of place where someone gets shot every day. I mean, it happens, but it’s not as random and sudden as people from the city think. You know who’s gonna be trouble by the look of them.

There’d been a couple of ideas on how to revitalize the area. There was an office at the far end that they tried to make into a sort of mini hotel. The kind of cheap place second-grade tourists stay at when they want the ‘authentic experience’. The place lasted for a couple of years but closed by the time we moved in down the street. There were still signs up when we got there, so it wouldn’t surprise me if some folks got tricked into thinking it was still open.

I wouldn’t say I had any friends, really. Not at first. I had some guys that I knew, and that I knew wouldn’t mess with me without a good reason. There was Kieran, for example. Pretty stand-up guy, we made a good team on the court. There was Holland, tallest guy in class. Nice, but a bit slow, and his hand-eye coordination was shot to shit. Guy could barely spell his name, but without him we couldn’t play three-on-three. There were a couple of others too, but most of them blended into the background.

 

When I’d lived there for about three months, there was a new push for revitalization. They put up new streetlights. Or at least, that’s what we thought.

First time I saw them was on a Thursday night. People were out and about. Someone was playing music, and I could hear someone yelling and whooping, but I couldn’t make out which apartment it came from. I had homework to do, and I wasn’t feeling sociable. My mom and aunt were out, leaving me to watch TV and procrastinating over equations.

I remember looking out the living room window, only to see a streetlight. At first I didn’t think about it, until I realized I’d never seen one there before. That’d been a problem for my mom when we first got there; she didn’t feel safe without them. At some point, the city must’ve fixed them. It was right there, bright as ever.

I watched a guy come wandering down the street and stopping underneath that light, looking up at it. He raised his hand to shield his eyes. He seemed to be a bit out of it, so maybe he just didn’t register what the hell he was looking at.

Then, the streetlight went out, just minutes after first spotting it. I blinked, adjusting my eyes.

There was no man there anymore. He was gone.

 

Over the next few days, I’d see the occasional streetlight here and there. Rarely the same one, and rarely for a long time. It’s as if they just came on momentarily, and only a few at a time. It felt appropriate, in a way. Of course the city would mess up trying something new. No good deed goes unpunished.

People around school were talking about it too. It was a known fact that the only streetlights that actually worked were the ones near the school, so to see any others was noteworthy. Not just because it was something new, but because it seemed inconsistent. They weren’t the only thing that’d happened around the neighborhood lately. For example, there was a full wall where they’d cleaned up the graffiti. They’d put in new windows in a couple of buildings. They’d moved one of the broken-down cars in the lot behind the gym.

Little things, but enough to show that something was going on. Kieran didn’t like it.

“It’s bad news,” he said, shaking his head. “I don’t know how, but it’s all bad news. It’s gotta be.”

 

Later that week, I was out with the guys. They were dropping by a house party and wanted me to come along to meet some new people. It was mostly Holland pulling the strings on that one, he was invited pretty much everywhere. We spent almost a full hour getting there, just because he got stopped by so many people he knew on the way. It was ten minutes away at a light jog.

It was a pretty chill party. I ended up with a lukewarm beer, sitting in a cheap white plastic deck chair, texting. Holland was inside, trying to figure out just how many people he knew there. Kieran sat in the deck chair next to me, but he’d already finished his beer. We were talking about school when a streetlight came on, just a bit down the street.

There was something else in the air. Something like static. My phone started charging, and I went from two bars of coverage to five. I could feel the screen going hot.

“You seeing this?” I asked, showing him my phone.

“Told you,” he said. “Something’s wrong. Some mind cancer bullshit.”

Holland came rumbling out of the house with what looked like a quarter bottle of whiskey. Two guys were right behind him, one of them insisting he could take him in a fight. A lot of people wanted to fight Holland, just because he was the biggest. Holland waved them off and walked up to us. Kieran pointed down the street, to the light. Holland looked for a while, then took a step back.

“Shit, they got it working?”

“I dunno,” Kieran huffed. “Don’t like it.”

”Gotta be brand new.”

Before I could say anything, he walked off to check it out.

 

Kieran and I got out of our chairs and followed him. A little group from the party tagged along. The closer we got the warmer my phone went, like we were walking up on a power source. I stopped a couple of steps away while Holland stepped right into the sharp cone of light. It felt less like a streetlight and more like a spotlight. Center stage. He looked straight up, like he was staring at the sun.

“I don’t get it,” he said. “It ain’t new. There’s stickers and shit.”

“They probably just fixed the bulb,” Kieran added.

“Nah, there was nothing here. You mean they put in a busted and tagged light from some other shithole? Come on, man.”

“I don’t know what to tell you,” Kieran shrugged.

Holland tapped the streetlight a couple of times, shaking his head. The light went out. We went from burning bright to murky street corner in the blink of an instant.

And when we looked a little closer, Holland was gone.

 

At first we were just confused. Not just me and Kieran, but a whole bunch of people. We looked around like he took off running. I called him, but I couldn’t connect the call. Kieran snapped him but got nothing. Here one moment, gone the next.

While the others went looking for him, and calling out to him, I took a closer look at the streetlight. I noticed something. There was no bulb, and the glass was broken. A moment ago, it’d been whole. But we hadn’t heard any glass break, and there were no shards on the pavement. That, and there were more stickers on the sides. Different stickers. It’s like I was looking at a completely different streetlight.

We walked around, calling out to Holland. Kieran elbowed me, showing me his phone.

“We walk this way, I get more bars,” he said. “Bet there’s another light.”

“Think he went there?”

Kieran didn’t answer. He just shook his head and looked down.

 

We walked around for a couple of hours, trying to find Holland. He wasn’t answering anything, and we couldn’t get a hold of him. Some folks ended up calling his uncle, who he lived with, but he wasn’t home either. Holland was gone. Out, like a light.

Just like Kieran predicted, we found another streetlight by the corner shop. It was only on for a couple of seconds, but in that time I saw a stray cat walk through. It didn’t come out the other side. As the streetlight went out, I made the same observation as before; it looked completely different when it was on. There were two different lights; one functioning, one broken.

People started taking this seriously. A couple started to track the lights down and film them, hoping to see something weird. Others tried to dare one another to mess with them. I wasn’t there for it myself, but apparently an older kid went missing the same way that night. They stepped into the light, and they disappeared.

 

This was no joke. People were calling not just one another, but parents, friends, family, and even the police. There were a couple of videos that started to circulate the group chats. Videos of a guy standing in the streetlight, making a peace sign, only to disappear when the lights went out.

“I’m out!” was the last thing you hear him say.

They’re laughing in the video; until they ain’t.

That first night it just felt weird, but the next day, it was real. Holland was missing. People were out looking, calling one another, asking where he was last seen. I got four calls from people asking what happened and where he went, and I had to tell them all the same thing. One moment he was there, then he wasn’t. It didn’t make any sense, and it’s not the kind of thing you can tell a worried guardian in a neighborhood where people have been known to get in trouble over nothing.

Kieran went over to Holland’s place. I wasn’t along for it, but apparently he’d had a long talk with the uncle. All of a sudden the streetlights weren’t a fun quirk, there was something seriously wrong with them.

 

While we were at school, someone called city management to ask what the hell was going on. There were no answers, and no one was willing to come down and talk to us. There were no squad cars going around, no one knocking on doors asking questions. There definitely was no project to get the lights back on. Instead, while most of us went to school, some guys around the neighborhood brought hammers and saws and took down the last remaining lights. The broken ones, that is. To an outsider it must’ve looked like vandalism. For those of us who knew, it was a rare act of solidarity. Hell, even Mr. Barker was out on the street, leaving the sandwich place vacant for the first time in forever.

There was this feeling like, yeah, this neighborhood was shit. But it was ours, you know? Even I, who just got there, was still part of it. We were in it together and if no one was gonna have our backs, we’d do it ourselves.

But that didn’t stop something strange from happening. Most nights, you could see the lights go on. Not all at once. Few and far between, if anything, but they were there. Every now and then, someone would disappear. It could take hours before we noticed, but by the time we did, it was already too late. In that first week, we lost something like… five people?

 

It got bad enough that people outside the neighborhood started to notice. We saw new cars passing through, looking around. A couple of folks showed up at our school just to tell us we were full of shit. They saw the broken streetlights and thought we were making it all up to get attention. They didn’t understand.

But the consequences were real as real can be. Holland was gone from class, and no one knew what to make of it. Sure, people skip school all the time, but Holland wasn’t like that. He may have been slow, but he wasn’t negligent. He gave it an honest shot, and he was there every day, come hell or high water. Kieran and I had a couple teachers come up to us after class asking us if we knew anything. What could we say?

“He gone with the light,” was the best way Kieran could describe it. “Like we keep telling you.”

 

Some people started walking in the middle of the street, hoping to stay out of the lights if they suddenly came on. Sure, people had always had a tentative relationship with jaywalking, but this was a whole new level. You could see an old woman with two grocery bags walk down the middle of main street, and no one looked twice. It was amazing how fast people adapted, and how fast something turned from rumor to threat. But I guess if you’re used to threats, another one isn’t that surprising, no matter the shape or form.

I went out with a couple of people every now and then just to see what was going on. We could use our phones to kinda spot where the next streetlight would pop up. You’d get a small charge and better coverage just moments before it came on, so you just had to pay attention.

We usually saw them from down the street. Even if the light itself had been cut down and removed, a working one would stand there like nothing happened, shining down. Some people would run from them. Others would stop to take pictures. And once, I saw a girl being held back by two of her friends, screaming at the light to ‘give him back’.

We would do our part. Whenever a light came on, we’d throw things at it. Rocks, bricks, whatever. We’d break a couple. Maybe it helped, maybe it didn’t; I don’t know. But it felt good doing something. Anything.

 

One evening when we were out looking, a signal came on, stronger than before. We were right by the corner store, where the cat had gone missing. Kieran pulled me back as a streetlight a couple of feet ahead of us lit up. I could hear the crackling from it and saw a TV in a nearby house flicker through a living room window. The emergency lights on a parked car started blinking.

And there was someone standing there.

Holland.

His skin was almost gray, and his lips were cracked like dry paper. His eyes were sunken and pale, full of dust. He was wearing nothing but shorts and a single sneaker. There was dry blood coming down his left arm. I could tell he had trouble breathing, like he’d been running, or choking.

Kieran was about to run up, but I grabbed him by the arm. Something felt off. The other guys filmed it.

“Holland!” Kieran called out. “Holland, what the fuck?!”

Holland shook his head, biting down on his lip. He covered the wound on his arm as he spoke; his voice barely a wheeze.

“Tell uncle I didn’t leave him,” he cried. “It’s fucked. S’all poison, but I didn’t leave. I didn’t go.”

“Just walk! Get over here!” I called out. “Come on, let’s go!”

“S’all poison,” he said. “Dyin’. S’all fuckin’ poison.”

Holland took a step forward. As his body crossed that sharp cone, something happened. Parts of his body dissolved in a dithery cross-section. Slices disintegrated the moment they left the light, swallowed by the dark. I remember the moment his face went from weeping to a death’s head grin. His voice collapsed in a rattled falsetto, like someone poked a hole in his lungs halfway through a final wailing. Then the light went out.

Kieran freaked out. The others were too, sharing the video with people from around the block. I just stood there, trying not to piss myself. It took me ten minutes to realize Holland’s shoe and shorts were still on the pavement.

This had been real. The proof was right there.

 

Some people thought the video was fake, even though there were three different angles. Others thought it was some kind of sick joke, or a performance piece thing. Holland’s uncle got pissed beyond belief. He showed up at one guy’s apartment screaming his lungs off, demanding the video be taken down.

Meanwhile, Kieran and I were making plans of our own. I figured if something like clothes can come back from whatever that is, then maybe we can film it. That was our working theory. Kieran got a hold of a spare phone from his sister, and we decided to give it a shot. We got a selfie stick and chased down a streetlight, hoping to time it just right.

It took us a couple of tries, but a few days later, we nailed it. Just beneath the streetlight outside Mr. Barker’s sandwich place, we managed to sneak in a recording phone. We put it on the sidewalk facing upward, making sure not to have anything but the phone and the selfie stick go inside the light.

As it turned off, I grabbed the selfie stick and pulled the phone in. The screen was fried, but we managed to get the files off it.

 

The video footage was strange. We’d only filmed for about thirty seconds or so, but the recording was well over three minutes. In it, you could see my face as I turned the video on. Then there’s this bright light as the camera looks straight up. There’s a static crackling and you can hear what sounds like a spinning fan going higher and higher. You can hear Kieran and I talking in the background.

Then, around twenty seconds in, the screen goes white. There’s this crackling noise that rises and falls like an electric pulse. The white light would flicker with shades of blue and green, only to grow stronger and fade in waves. That’s all there was.

Kieran and I sat on a bench and turned up the volume, using one earbud each. We maxed out the volume, trying to discern some kind of detail. Kieran gave up on the fourth try.

“What if we speed it up?” he asked. “Or slow it down, or whatever.”

“Why not play it backwards?” I scoffed. “Could be some Pink Floyd shit.”

“What?”

“Fuck it.”

We tried a couple of things. Slowing it down, speeding it up. Low pass filter, high pass filter. It wasn’t until we tried a noise reduction filter that we realized what we were listening to. It wasn’t a wave, or a pulse. It was a noise of some kind. It sounded like someone talking.

“An eye,” Kieran mumbled. “Sounds like they’re saying ‘an eye’.”

“They?” I asked. “Who’s they?”

“I dunno, someone,” Kieran shrugged. “Someone talking.”

I didn’t like it but he was right, it did sound like a voice. And it did sound like it was saying something. I just didn’t like what I was hearing.

 

A couple of folks were escalating things. There was this neighborhood watch kind of deal with some guys walking the streets with guns, taking shots at streetlights that appeared. Some probably just did it for fun, but some of them were serious about it. Holland’s uncle was one of them. Kieran and I didn’t have the heart to hand him back the shoe and the shorts. The man looked like he was about to tear someone’s head off whenever we saw him.

We tried to do a couple more recordings. There weren’t as many streetlights around, but we caught a couple. It got scary though, Kieran was a bit rough around the edges. He almost stepped into the light once; I had to hold him back. I think if you see something enough times you start to think it’s no big deal even when it can kill you. Like he was somehow exempt from danger.

We got two more videos, and they were pretty similar. The sounds we got were a bit different, and the length of the recording changed, but we couldn’t get a clearer image. We tried putting the phone on the side, but it was difficult getting it to work without a working screen. We kinda had to guess where the record button was.

After the third recording, the battery exploded.

 

It was a late Friday when I was out with Kieran, trying to figure out what to do next. We were standing outside the corner shop, but they’d closed early. It was getting dark, but we were keeping an eye on our phones. No sign of lights. We stood on the same corner where we’d last seen Holland; a couple of folks had put flowers on the sidewalk. Mostly roses, and a couple of sunflowers. The petals were already sprinkled across the street.

“Think we can try again?” Kieran asked. “We can use my phone.”

“What’s the point?” I asked, kicking some flowers around. “It’s just light and noise. Don’t mean shit.”

“So we just go home? Then what?”

“Could play ball,” I shrugged. “Dunno.”

“We’re one man short for three-on-three.”

A rose petal got stuck to my sneaker. I kicked it off with a sigh.

“Fine. We’ll use your phone.”

 

We walked around for little over an hour. We heard a gunshot and saw one of the lights go out further down the street. I don’t even think it was part of our neighborhood; it was way too far off. I bet a couple of innocent lights got busted in the process.

Kieran and I walked round and round the block a couple of times, trying to find something on our phones. Not a peep. Maybe the watch got them all. I mean, there had to be an end to the lights at some point. We ended up right where we started, outside the corner shop. Kieran was pissed as all hell. He was calling people, asking them to check their phones to see if anyone was picking up something.

Meanwhile, I was checking my socials. People were talking about the lights like it was some kind of urban legend. Even people who lived in the neighborhood were talking about it like it was an excuse. It was this attitude of ‘we know what’s really going on’. Like Holland was some kind of gangster who had it coming. Didn’t matter how many people came to his defense in the comments, the memes and shitty jokes were all that remained in the top comments.

After ten minutes or so, Kieran put his phone down and frowned. Then he looked up.

“Hey,” he said. “Your phone okay?”

“Yeah,” I nodded. “98%.”

“We’ve been out for hours, man. It shouldn’t be 98%.”

My hand felt warm as I looked down. I got five bars of coverage. Sweat trickled down my neck as my hair stood up from the static air. I realized I was leaning back on something that hadn’t been there a moment before. Something metallic, and tall.

The light came on.

 

My throat immediately closed off, like my body was protecting me from something. I couldn’t even exhale, it was just this thick miasma sinking into my lungs. The light was blinding me, turning the entire world a burning white.

I could see an outline of the street, even then. I could see a shadow of what looked like Kieran just a couple of feet ahead, but the world was too bright to make out the details. He looked like someone had spilled an ink blot in his likeness.

It was the same neighborhood. The corner shop, the sandwich place; but it all looked different. Cleaner. Different names on the signs. More screens in the windows. Bigger sun in the sky.

Kieran was moving around, but slowly. He was reaching for me, screaming something. It came through as this static, where only a couple of syllables made sense. He was panicking, but it was like seeing it in slow-motion.

 

I turned my head, looking for something. Anything. I didn’t even know what, just whatever could save me. My skin felt like it’d been dipped in boiling water, turning from a searing heat to an icy cold. I could feel the moisture in my eyes and mouth evaporate, and the skin around my gums tightened as my teeth strained against the sudden pressure.

There were people there, dead in the streets. Most of them made it a couple of steps from the lights. Others were still sitting under them, as if waiting for them to come back on. One dead man looked more like a burned log than a person, leaving a seared imprint on the concrete.

It had only been a couple of seconds, but my head was swimming. I could see heat swaying on the horizon, and the sky beyond as a distant mirage. It was mid-day, and it was killing me.

There were no clouds, no sky. It was just a pale white and a black hole, like I was staring up into an all-encompassing eye. Blood vessels the size of distant galaxies. An impossible attention, turned our way.

I remember trying to say a word, but I could only click my tongue. An eye. An eye. An eye.

 

I took a step and fell forward. I’d slipped on something. Even now I could see the flowers on the street; the rose petals and the sunflowers. They’d turned a strange blue and curled in on themselves, like dying bugs under a magnifying glass. Kicking out with my leg, I realized why I’d slipped. I’d stepped on something. Holland’s second shoe.

I kicked it. It bounced a couple of feet and lost its color. Maybe I was going blind. My eyes were swelling shut, but even with my eyes closed the light burned through my mind. It was this otherworldly feeling, like I was falling, but not from the world disappearing beneath me. It felt more like I was growing smaller and smaller at such a rate that the air around me couldn’t keep up.

Something shifted. I heard a thump, like rubber hitting glass. Kieran had thrown the shoe at the streetlight and made it flicker – if only for a second. He yelled something, but I only heard the first word.

“Hold-”

I just lay there, trying to force air in, or out, of my lungs. I couldn’t. It all felt like poison.

 

This place was wrong. It was made for something or someone else, at another time and place. People weren’t meant to walk those streets or sit beneath its lights. It must have been some kind of mistake. A huge, terrible, mistake. And all the while, something was watching me break into pieces. An eye.

I remember the last sensation of touch leaving my fingers as the concrete faded away. My mind was shutting down, racing a hundred ways per second. Maybe that’s what it feels like when you’re dying, I don’t know. Maybe that’s what I was doing. It wasn’t really panic, or euphoria. It was more like anything, everything. The rubber taste of a pacifier, the smell of batteries, the feel of a freshly made bed under my fingers. Like my mind was grasping at whatever straws it could find, hoping to keep me kicking for just a little longer.

Then it slowed. And slowed. And slowed.

 

Now, I’ve heard about this next part from some guys in school. No one knew Holland’s uncle used to be in the navy. No one knew he could hit a streetlight from all the way down the street, one handed, with a handgun. He barely had to aim, he just pointed, clicked, boom. Done. It was the only light he shot, and he hit it right on the mark, first try.

And thank God he did. The moment the streetlight popped, I could feel a flush of cool air. It felt like I’d come up to the surface after a long dive.

The moment my lungs opened I exhaled this black powder, straight from the bottom of my lungs. Kieran was already dragging me into the street, calling for help. I couldn’t see anything. Everything burned, like I’d pressed my whole body against a hot stovetop and only just now released the pressure. Some people were running our way, calling out to us. I heard someone mention my name. It hurt when Kieran shook my shoulder, but it was nice to feel something real.

When I finally got enough soot out to gasp for breath, I could feel the world returning to me. My thoughts mellowed, and the pinprick in my dry eyes widened.

 

They had my mom and aunt come pick me up. They had to drive me into the city. By the time I got to the emergency room I was so tired that I couldn’t remember my name. I just sat there giggling like goofball, falling in and out of consciousness. They probably thought I was on something.

When I woke up the next day I was on the couch in my aunt’s living room. Mom was stroking my hair. The TV was running, but they’d lowered the volume. There was orange juice on the table, and one of Mr. Barker’s sandwiches. The meat kind.

I remember everything hurting. My eyes, especially. I could barely keep my hands steady.

But man, was I happy.

 

I moved out of that neighborhood a couple of years ago when I got a job in the inner city. Some folks may have heard the rumors of those strange lights, but most thought it was a hoax. I think the total number of missing people was somewhere around nine, but at least one of them turned out to be someone who skipped town. Didn’t really help the credibility of the real victims.

If you talk to the right people, and mention the right names, I’m sure they’ll tell you all about it. Not because it’s the most interesting thing in the world, or the strangest thing they’ve seen. No, they’ll tell you because it was something we managed to deal with as a community. After a couple of weeks, there were no more streetlights. We got them all, and they never came back on. Holland’s uncle got the last one, and thank God he did.

I haven’t been there for some time now, but from what I hear, things are pretty much the same. Mr. Barker is probably closing in on 80 by now, but he still works the sandwich stand. Some folks still leave flowers by the corner shop. And if you ask the right person what happened there, they’ll tell it like it is.

Holland, he gone.

He gone with the light.