I was walking home in the dark when I first saw those lights. A pillar of pulsating red lights, far off in the distance, past the tops of the houses row upon row, past the shadowy silhouettes of the trees. Seven scarlet lights, slowly blinking in and out like the uneven blinking of a lizard. I stopped and looked out at them, past the horizon. And then I turned the corner onto my street and marched on up to the door of my apartment without thinking about it.

When I left in the morning and walked toward the bus stop, I thought to stop and look down the street again. Cars rushing past filled my ears, and I saw nothing. The bus ride to work was uneventful.

I didn’t think much about it until a week later. I was out late, hanging with my friends, one of us streamed himself playing some shitty arcade game, with an evil skull that would pursue him, cackling. It was just an excuse to see each other, really. His overreactions and the bitcrushed laughter the background track to a night spent in conversation and smiles. But when I got to the street next to mine, I saw those pulsating lights again. They reminded me of the bulbs in darkrooms, something I had only seen in movies. The closest I ever got to processing film was dropping off rolls upon rolls to the counter at CVS. The image of a hapless sap caught off guard in a room lit only with red, the only image, however abstracted, actually attaching me to this process from which I had been so alienated, so separated. A pillar of seven red, red darkroom light bulbs, so far off in the distance that even though their lazy blinking was so obvious at two in the morning, I couldn’t even see their source during the day.

It really didn’t seem like that big of a deal at the time. I only ever saw them when I was walking home so late at night that what was too late and what was too early bled together. The street lamps I walked under cast their orange glow on me, but at 3 A.M. with a half-empty Dr. Pepper in my hand, those seven pulsating lights cast their distant glow from miles off. Whether I was drunk or high, still giggling from the memory of hours-old jokes or silently trudging through the mud thrown up by passing cars and careless boots, whenever I was alone after midnight, those lights were there with me, miles and miles away.

But then I noticed, maybe I should have noticed it sooner, but a few weeks later, after I had gotten kind of used to my silent throbbing companion of light, I saw that it had gotten closer. I had seen it maybe four, five times prior to that point, I wasn’t exactly in the habit of walking home past midnight every single night, but this time I could tell that it had moved. The lights, those flashing orbs, were larger. Their pulsating brightness was cast upon the shadowy evergreens far off in the distance. Too far to make out the needles and the leaves, just close enough that when the lights would blink open, like lazily awakening eyes, I could see the individual tops of trees like distant points. I just stopped and watched it for a good ten minutes.

And it kept getting closer. Every time I was out on the yellow-lit streets, those bright red lights would have inched just a bit closer. First they were flashing over the distant trees, then the rows of houses with their sloping roofs like sloping hills were cast in the lights’ baleful glow. Every night, without fail, whenever I was on the street around the corner from my apartment, those lights were there, and crawling ever closer. I began to ask my friends to accompany me home, fearful of the lights, fearful of their continual crawl, and at first a few agreed, but they never saw the lights. Only I ever saw the lights. I tried a nervous laugh, tried to point out the lights to them, tried to get them to see the lights and their uncanny blinking, like a row of seven staring eyes moistening themselves miles off but ever nearer. None of them ever saw them. They’d laugh, they’d say I drank a bit too much that night, say they were glad they were walking me home, but they never saw the lights. And the lights grew ever closer.

One night, I could see the lights only five blocks away. They were at the foot of the hill now, the sloping road that meanders down past my apartment’s street. Their crimson glow casting deep, stark shadows on the street, terrible reflections shining back from the windows of apartments and parked cars. I never saw anybody else walking on the street beneath the pillar of lights. And yet, they still loomed over me. Even though the lights were at the foot of the slope, these seven lights loomed like a tower miles tall, each point of light a roiling electric star that cast a glow that nobody could see but me. And no matter how long I stood there, no matter how far back I craned my neck, when I stood at the top of the slope, I could not see past the topmost point of light.

After staring, sweatily, at the pillar of lights, impossibly tall and impossibly bright, I broke out in a fearful scamper in the direction of my apartment. The street lamps were useless now, the produce of their flimsy necks adulterated with the glowing blood. Out of the corner of my eye I thought I saw something disappear around a corner, a squirrel? No, it had no tail, but despite my heaving chest I could not bear to guess that it was a little humanoid. The air was completely silent. Not a buzzing fly nor screaming cicada could be heard. And then, in my fitful tumbling, my blind and mindless feet felt a crunching, a loud crumpling noise filling my ears. And when I looked down, I saw a plastic bottle filled with gore, the broken bones and pallid skin of something I could scarcely recognize peeking through the collapsed walls. And out of a crack in the side oozed the poor thing’s intestines, like a reel of film violently yanked out.

The whole world was spinning around me, struggling to order itself as I stumbled forward, pushing the thorny vines which hang down low over my sidewalk out of the way with my numb hands. After clumsily futzing with my keys I finally got the door open and collapsed to the floor, my breath haggard and panicky, my eyes bloodshot, my hands shaking uncontrollably and my wrists afire with pain. And through the window which faces the street, the distant red glow crawled its way in, its tendrils finding me no matter where I went.

I struggled to fall asleep but ultimately my body had the better of me. The next morning, the lights were gone. When I anxiously inched my way down the street, the plastic bottle of gore was gone, but a dark red stain on the rough concrete remained. I tried to ask my friends, all of them, my fingers a frenzied flurry of typing the whole day, I didn’t even go to work, I just needed someone, anyone to be with me, to just see the lights, just to see the lights just one time. They all had some excuse. Some of them didn’t even put in the effort to make up a lie, some flimsy story presented as if I wasn’t even worthy of their presence. As the sun began to set, I sat on the floor of my apartment and cried.

The lights appeared at thirty minutes past midnight. Their bloody hues seeped in, brighter now. They had trundled their way up the hill, pulling themselves up like an octopus on land, a heavy dead weight out of its element. I stood on my front step and watched the roiling electricity gurgling, just peeking past the corner of the house at the end of the street. I stepped out and walked towards it. Everything was cast in the bright red glow. And there was nobody outside. Not a dog walker, not someone just walking to the gas station for a late night snack. Doors, shut. Blinds, pulled tight against the glass. Then, I saw it.

Halfway down my street, in a drab utilitarian apartment block, a light was on in a window above a closed garage door. Its digital blue shone out, the one respite from the creeping red, a computerized glow blurted out into the street. The blinds were partially down, but pulled to the side. They were watching me. It was a ghost town, but they were watching me. They watched as I walked down the street, stepping over the gross stain from whatever it was I had stepped on. They watched as I grew closer to the horrible gurgling lights, as the lowest of them blinked into darkness with a loud metallic clang before reopening a bare minute later. They watched as I stood there, staring at the lights. And I could see their eye. Their one peeking eye, their one voyeuristic eye, staring at me fearfully from between their blinds. And I was all alone after midnight, all alone with them. But they were too afraid to be with me.

When I woke up the next morning, everything was red. The horrible blinking redness hovers over my head like an accursed evil eye, like a personal depressive cloud, isolating me into nothingness. I am wretched to be around. Strangers cross the street when they see me, friends make excuses not to visit, animals hiss and bark and react with disgust to me. Nobody ever bothered to clean the dark stain off the sidewalk. Everything is red, and I haven’t seen the real sun in weeks. The loud metallic clanging of the blinking of the eyes is the only sound which accompanies me. And yet, even though I can tell, with every upturned lip and glance to the side, that in their heart of hearts everyone else can see the lights, they never acknowledge them. The glow cast long dark shadows on all around, and none of them can see it. And yet this glow is always following me. And I am always alone, and it is always after midnight.

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