"How to be Afraid" by Jackson Everist

 You are, I assume, familiar with the peculiar human emotion of fear. At this point in your education, you should be well versed in its evolutionary roots in the survival of the homosapien species, as well as the strange obsession with the use of fear for recreation held by many modern humans. If by now you are not an expert on fear as an abstract concept, then I suggest you consider a different field of work. However, if you think yourself truly qualified to take the place of a human being, then this lesson will serve as your final training for that role in our invasion.

 Humans are unlike us in a seemingly infinite number of ways. Obviously, humans exist in a physical manner completely different from our own, but that is not what I am concerned with today. No, when I say humans are unlike us, I am referring to the wide and intriguing spectrum of emotions humans possess. They experience joy, an emotion whose low efficiency shows itself through how quickly it fades once it has been attained. They experience greed, a burning desire which serves no purpose other than pitting human against human, demonstrating a remarkable lack of species wide coordination. And of course, as previously mentioned, they experience fear. To replace and emulate a human, you needn’t truly understand joy, nor do you need to fully understand greed. Plenty of humans go through life lacking significant expression of both of these emotions. But fear, that is the most universal human experience there is. If you are not afraid, then you are not human.

 In the current stage of your education, I can say with certainty that you are not afraid. You may be able to name an untold number of phobias or describe the fight, flight, or freeze response in humans, but you do not know what it is actually like to experience fear. Of course, that isn’t your fault, we as a species simply aren’t wired to be afraid. Humans fear the shadows, we thrive in them. Nevertheless, if you want to contribute to our invasion of human society, you must learn to truly understand fear.

 The following exercise has been designed to teach you how to be afraid. Each of its stages will train and test your ability to experience fear through the use of guided imagination. If by the end of the process you have felt a genuine sense of fear, then you will have the go-ahead to seek out and take the place of a human being. Take a moment to prepare yourself, and when you are ready, continue on to take the exercise.

 To begin, imagine a human. It doesn’t matter what they look like, they can be any age, gender, race, and can have any variety of physical characteristics that you would like. The one thing I would advise is that this human should remind you of yourself. In other words, if you were told to take the place of this human, you should feel it natural to live their life and pretend to be them.

 Now, imagine your human on a city street sometime after midnight. The size and location of the city street is up to your imagination. It could be in a large and overwhelming population center, or it could be in the part of a small town which likes to pretend it's a big city. Whatever you decide, the one detail that must absolutely be present is that your human must be completely alone.

 I will now provide you some additional assistance with imagining this situation. Though they are alone, the sounds of sirens and buzzing lampposts hum in the ears of your human. The air is frigid; your human was not expecting the cold, so they are dressed in clothes which make walking in this cool nighttime air uncomfortable. It's a new moon, so the only light on the streets comes from the spaced out lampposts and the few glowing windows of the surrounding buildings. Your human walks down the street at a brisk pace, seemingly in a hurry to reach their desired destination. The sound of their shoes clacking against the sidewalk can be heard after each step. As they travel down the city street, they pass an alleyway. When they walk past it, they pause and watch the alley out of the corner of their eye. The alley is dark, pitch dark, its deeper reaches untouched by the light of the lampposts dotting the streets. A gust of cold wind brushes against your humans side.

 Stop. Why are they afraid? Can you tell me?

 Good. Let's continue.

 We are now going to put your human into a more private situation. Imagine your human has reached their desired destination and is preparing to go to sleep. They have finished their nighttime routine—the details of which you can fill in yourself—and have just exited the bathroom ready to go to sleep.

 Your human stands at one end of a relatively long hallway. The bathroom door they just exited is behind them, and the door to the room in which they sleep is near the other end of the hallway on the opposite wall. The hallway can be decorated however you want, but the one necessary detail is that the space is lit by a single white LED lightbulb in the ceiling above.

 The switch which controls the overhead light sits directly next to the door to the bathroom. Your human doesn’t want to leave the light on in the hallway overnight, so they turn to flip the switch off, their back facing the long stretch of hall they must soon travel through. They reach to turn off the light, but as they place their thumb on the switch, they hesitate. They look over their shoulder in the direction of their destination, stare into space for a moment, then turn their neck back to the lightswitch before flipping it down. The LED glow filling the hall disappears, and the space becomes enveloped in darkness. Your human spins toward the room they are heading to and moves through the hallway at a pace which could almost be considered a run. The floor chokes out noisy creaks with every step the human takes, piercing the silence of the pitch black hallway. Stop. Why are they afraid?

 What are they afraid of?

 Well done. I think you’re prepared to move on to the final stage of this exercise.

 Thus far, I have prompted you to imagine a human from the outside looking in. What they look like, what they are doing, where they are located, et cetera. While being able to imagine a human as an outside observer is a valuable skill, there is one more step you will need to take to be qualified to steal the life of a human being. You have demonstrated that you are prepared to take that step. Because of that fact, I won’t delay the last stage of this exercise any longer.

 Imagine that you are a human.

 Become the human that you were imagining in the previous stages of this exercise. See what they say, feel what they feel. Know the answers to the questions I asked you, and feel the dread that lies behind those answers. You lived those moments, and in them, you felt real and palpable fear.

 Now imagine that you are lying in your bed in the room where you sleep. I don’t know what this room looks like, but you do. You know the size of the room, the location of the bed, the view of the space you have from your bed, the distance to the door, and in which corner of the room the shadows of the night seem the darkest.

 This is a place of comfort for you, it's the room in which you lay down and rest after a day of living has worn you out. Yet tonight, nestled under the uncomfortably warm sheets of your bed, you can’t shake the feeling that you are not safe in this room. After spending multiple minutes reminding yourself that there's no reason to be scared and that there's nothing else in the house with you and that you did indeed lock the back door, you finally work up the courage to shut your eyes tightly and try to force yourself to sleep. As you lay there with only the darkness of your eyelids visible, you cannot seem to shake the intense feeling that somebody is in the room with you. Watching you.

 When eventually the feeling of being watched grows too intense, your eyes fly open and begin to scan the darkness of your room. Your body is perfectly still, but your gaze darts rapidly through the shadows surrounding you. Your sight settles on the door for just a moment, and you ponder if you should just get up and turn on the light. But at that moment, something in the corner of your eye prompts you to lurch your view back toward the part of the room opposite to the door. The corner is empty, there's nothing there. But just a moment ago, you could have sworn that there was a tall dark figure looming in that corner. Watching. Waiting.

 You stare intently at the spot where you thought something had been a few seconds before. Your body is frozen, you don’t move a muscle. Not even your gaze moves anymore, it stays fixed on the spot in your room where the shadows seem to fall the darkest. You stay like this for what feels like hours, paralyzed by the feeling that you are not alone in this room. But eventually, your muscles relax, your eyes begin to blink more than they had previously, and you finally feel like you might be able to get some sleep. You aren’t sure what had come over you, but all that matters to you now was that it was over. You are safe. You close your eyes, get comfortable, and are almost able to drift off to sleep, when suddenly, it all comes rushing back.

 Stop. Why are you afraid?

 What are you afraid of?

 Correct. You are afraid of us. The creeping fear of the dark, the irrational dread of being alone in a shadowy room, the figures you see out of the corner of your eye. You don’t know it, but that fear you can’t explain is us, lurking in the darkness. Watching you. Waiting for the chance to take your place.

 Congratulations. The exercise is complete, and that human you imagined is out there, ready to be replaced. I don’t know where they are, what they’re doing, or if they know you’re lurking in the shadows. But I can promise you one thing. They are afraid.

Jackson Everist is a student in his first year at Waldorf University who is double majoring in Creative Writing and Communications. He is extremely happy about the chance to submit his work to the Waldorf Literary Review and feels incredibly lucky for the opportunity.