I Am Eight

This story is part of Twenty-four Doors: Advent of Shadows, a collaborative seasonal ghost story series curated by Nathan Hatch.

I died on the eighth of December, 1888, at 8:08 PM. It was eight days before my 88th birthday. You may be tempted to think that I’d somehow engineered this numerical tidiness — being an accountant of some renown. But I’m afraid I can take no credit. I hadn’t realized it, any of it, until the very moment it happened.

In the span of my dying breath — the last of life’s air expunged from my lungs — I was flooded by raw understanding. Not knowledge in a universal sense — I didn’t suddenly bear the weight of mankind’s collective scientific triumph or grasp the cosmic mathematics that undergird galaxies. I hadn’t suddenly awakened with keen awareness of the deep mysteries of life. No, my understanding was confined to myself and myself alone.

The ledger of my life had been laid bare and in its pages I found complete self-awareness. Every moment. Every word. Every thought. Every deed. My pride, selfishness, indifference, guile, and fear juxtaposed against my love, generosity, kindness, charity, and compassion. The sum total of it all — the tally of the figures, the weights, the means, the measures, the scribbles in the margins — was precisely and perfectly eight.

Crushed under the weight of the truth of that sum, I was not afforded a legend or a key by which to understand its meaning. Eight simply was. I simply was. I was eight. I am eight. And it was that number that brought me here.

The world itself that I find myself in carries the same permanence as my number. It always has been. It always will be. It now is — and is somehow more substantive than the very earth I once called home. An expansive plane of perpetual shadow and unending twilight — rolling hills of ankle-length grass and stark sky above are painted a uniform blue-black, as if the gods knocked over a great inkwell and all of existence was drenched in its dye.

I had arrived at the outer edge of this world — at great steel bars extending into the heavens. The bars, the diameter of ancient oaks, appeared to arc inward ever so slightly as they climbed. Whether optical illusion or meeting at some unseen point high above, I cannot say. My intuition tells me it’s the latter — that I am surrounded by bars. Caged.

Reeling, as I was, when I first arrived, it was some time before I noticed the light — minutes or centuries or millennia, I can’t be sure. The passage of time, or perhaps the presence of time itself, is very different here. Whatever time had elapsed, the distant pinprick of warm luminescence willed me forward.

My legs moved as if clockwork, steps ticking away with no perceptible effort. Blades of grass pierced my feet — bare and aching cold like the rest of me. With every step toward the light, the cold deepened, and the dark thoughts of my life assailed me with greater intensity.

I hadn’t noticed my nakedness until I saw another’s. I was startled when I noticed I was elbow to elbow with a young man — in lockstep as if by cadence. What had been a smudge in my periphery had taken the shape of a man. At this distance, he was stark naked and semi-transparent. His face conveyed severe distress, anguish, and surprise.

I tried to speak to him and found that I could not. And in so doing, I discovered that I was not breathing. I could not breathe. I stopped in a panic and grasped my chest and throat in absolute horror. Whether I had no lungs, or this world had no oxygen, I could not say. I recovered and resolved that dying again was probably not something I should be concerned with. Once I’d regained some semblance of composure, I saw them. I was in a colossal crowd of beings like myself — upright smudges and streaks of translucency moving ever closer to the light. As with the young man, I could only discern the spirit’s physical appearance when they drew very near.

I pressed on, in silent solidarity with a thousand-thousand spectral men and women — pilgrims of darkness bound for light in a solemn parade. As we drew closer to that light, I noticed something floating above each of them. A hand’s breadth above each smudge, a Roman numeral tattooed the air like a dark halo: VIII. They too were eight.

The sound of my memories followed after me as if spun on a gramophone. They collected in a heap, stacked atop each other and played simultaneously — each layer distinct. It wasn’t only my words that haunted me, but my thoughts also, given voice like the rest. As vivid as the sound was, the accompanying imagery of those events was just out of reach. I tried in earnest to conjure images of Mother, of Margaret, of the children, but they stayed beyond my grasp. There were no pictures attached to the words that attacked me and no imagination to even approximate faces around those words or events. Only sounds — vivid and rich, as if plucked from the events of my life. I wanted to weep and I surrendered to it, but there was no release.

Preoccupied, as I was, with the superabundance of my folly trailing close behind, I had not noticed the source of the light until I’d drawn very near. It was a vast structure — akin to a cottage hewn from logs like mighty sequoia but at tremendous scale. It stretched like a great wall, as far as the eye could see to the left and to the right. Its one story was lined with pairs of tall windows, and from these windows spilled yellow-gold light and the sound of merriment.

As I moved closer to the building, I was caught up in a throng of beings seething forward. Instinctively, I ran — moving through the others, seeing flashes of their nakedness and torment until I came to the solid and unyielding wall of smooth timber. I slid to my left, hands touching cold logs, to the nearest of the windows.

The light that shone through burnt with a bitter cold. We all fought for a view. At times there were five or ten, or maybe more, of us atop each other — such that it was difficult to see beyond the jostling bodies. Because of the chaos, I could only see inside the cottage in short bursts. But even the momentary flashes of the cottage’s interior were almost too glorious to bear.

The room inside was finely appointed. One contiguous table seemed to stretch on for miles — stained mahogany and a red table runner trimmed in gold, adorned with candlesticks, sprays of flowers, and gleaming silver serving trays. The tinkle of forks on plates, conversations, and laughter carried through the windows, along with the crackles and pops of fires in hearths that lined the wall. Every seat was occupied by people. Not smudgy shades or specters, but solid people, clothed in robes of many colors, and all feasting on meats and vegetables and fruits. The main course was almost over, and everyone’s glass was full to the brim with wine.

I didn’t hunger or thirst. Still, I longed to be at that table. I ran along the wall of the cottage, through hundreds of others like me, in search of a door. Each of the windows I passed showed the same view, with a different group of people — every ethnicity, every age, every shape, every size.

It was a fool’s errand. I stopped running. Nearby, a young girl clutched a doll and stared through the window. I moved directly in front of her. We were eye to eye. I slapped the window repeatedly. A woman holding a swaddled infant to her left turned to the girl and asked her to sit. The girl lingered for just a moment before taking her seat. It was then that I noticed it — a shimmering and nearly invisible number floated over the girl’s head: VII. She was a seven. All of these people were seven.

I fell short. One number kept me from the feast. What was it? What did it mean? How could there be such a chasm between two numbers? As I grappled with this, the voices of my memories reached a crescendo. I was drowning in rage, regret, and madness. I began to throw myself at the window, over and over again, with a scream that wouldn’t come.

I was eight. I am nothing now. I am zero. Forever.