It was a dark night at the campground. The moon and stars were shrouded in clouds. The campers had hiked for hours to get there, through the rocks, the mud, and the mosquitoes, and and now they were all spread out in their sleeping bags around the campfire. The franks and beans were long gone. The marshmallows had all been roasted on sticks and devoured. It was storytime.

“Tell us a ghost story.”

“I don’t think so.”

“Aw, come on! Why not?”

“I don’t think you kids can handle it.”

“What do you mean? Of course we can.”

“No, I don’t want you all getting nightmares. I’m a really scary storyteller. There’s a camper from last summer who’s still in therapy from the Monster in the Lake story I told at last year’s campout. Another one still sleeps with the lights on.”

“You’re making that up.”

“Oh, am I? Ha, ha, ha, ha!”

“Please?

Somewhere in the distance an owl hooted.

“Well, O.K., but no crying or whimpering.”

“Deal.”

“Fine, everybody get comfortable in your sleeping bags and fasten your seatbelts, because it’s going to be a wild, freaky ride.”

“Just tell the story already.”

“All right, all right. It was a cold, dark night at Camp Nissim—“

“How dark was it?”

What?”

“You said it was dark. How dark was it?”

“Oh, it was extremely dark. Black dark.”

“That doesn’t sound so bad.”

A twig snapped loudly somewhere south of the campgrounds.

“It was the kind of dark you only see far outside of town on a moonless night, where the wind itself seems to be speaking to you, and every sound is amplified like it might jump out and grab you.”

“That’s not so bad.”

“Oh really? It was the kind of darkness you experience during a blackout, when everything just goes dead, and you have no idea where you left the flashlights and the matches. And for all you know, there’s something creepy, crawly lurking just beyond your grasp. I’m talking dark, with a capital “D.”

“Yawn.”

“It was like black hole black. You know, a region of space where the gravitational field is so strong, nothing can escape its pull once it enters its event horizon, not even light. We’re talking the end of the world as we know it black. That’s seriously dark, my friends.”

“I’m just not convinced it’s very dark.”

“Are you serious? O.K., you asked for it. It was primeval darkness. The kind of darkness that only existed before God created the world. I’m talking tohu vavohu, baby. Absolute darkness, before the sun and the moon, before the creation of light itself. How’s that for dark?”

“I suppose that’s adequate.”

Miles away on some distant road, a car backfired, releasing a sound that closely resembled a gunshot.

“You kids are tough. I’m impressed. I’ll give it one last shot. It was so dark, it was like Makat Choshech, the Plague of Darkness from Egypt. I’m talking serious malevolent darkness, like the kind in a horror movie. Some say the dark was so thick, you couldn’t even move. It was like being held chained in the spot where you were. It was a choking darkness, like you could barely breathe. It was like a foreshadowing of death, that’s how bad it was. Absolute, total, terrifying, deep, black, in-your-face, murky, malignant, pernicious, darkness. Fade to black.”

For a moment, all was quiet.

“Wo, that’s dark.”

“Tell me about it.”

“So, go on with the story.”

“As I said, it was dark in camp. Then suddenly, someone let out a loud scream—“

“What kind of scream?”

“Blood curdling and high pitched.”

“That doesn’t sound so bad—“

Larry Stiefel is a pediatrician at Tenafly Pediatrics

By Larry Stiefel