The Suburbs: 3:00am

You jolt awake, a dream already forgotten. Oddly bothered by this, you pull yourself into a seated position, feet dangling off the bed. Though gone, the dream nags still. You glance at the bed promising easy release from your worries but a curious sensation propels you quietly to the window.

Pulling aside the curtains a suburb sprawls out like a body lit by the sodium lamps. The only movement, the only sign of life, is the breath on the cold glass. The difference is so striking you feel that you have not seen this place before. The night has never bothered you before but now you take your coat off its hook and drift through a dark house towards the door.

As you leave, chilled night air rushes in to your lungs and a shiver shakes you roughly from this reverie. What are you doing leaving the house after 3:00am? You half expect someone to shout like you would to a child testing the limits of their curfew. No one does. No one cares now.

In the streets the silence and shadows move about in dark tides. Caught in an eddy you are pulled towards something in the distance. Lurking shadows hazy and indistinct in the day take on sharp focus after sunset.

A yawning hole that never caught your attention before now looms in your path. The centerpiece of darkness; shadows gather at its edge before flooding down into a vast network of tunnels and chambers. Hesitating briefly, you cross into an underworld of our own design.

Later that night you return home, but a piece of the darkness will stay with you. The earth that once seemed so solid has become an insubstantial crust, barely concealing a sick reflection of our world; a mirror we built long ago reflecting our own horrors, forcing us into hiding behind barriers of concrete and asphalt.