You cut yourself on the broken glass as you pull yourself through the window, shallowly in several places on your arms and quite deeply on your left knee. You put too much weight on it, put too much trust in the stiff denim of your jeans, and long fingers of glass peeled apart fabric and skin and found the bright ocean underneath. It’s almost painless. You make a bandage out of your handkerchief and tie it as tight as you can. You remember hearing that there’s an artery in your knee, or anyway a lot of veins.
You’re pretty sure that it’s night. The sky is empty of stars, but flickers dully red like the last embers of a fire. It’s windy out here on the street, cool and blustery and uneasy, bits of paper washing against the shuttered store fronts and plastic bags trapped in the weirs of trees. You keep catching suggestions of movement out of the corner of your eye, black shapes that dart from building to building and might be either more paper or people hurrying home ahead of the storm. You know there’s a storm coming, you can feel it in the wet weakness of your left knee.
The wind blows one of the papers into your face, and you grab it out of the air without thinking. The light welling from your hands gives you just enough light to read:
Welcome to Dark. What do you do?
It might be an advertisement for a night club. It might be many things.