Ernest Eugene Block

Ernie Block is a retired Marine, a devoted husband, and the proprietor of the remote Tranquility Motel in Elko County, Nevada. At fifty-two, he finds himself gripped by a fear he cannot explain and is ashamed to admit: darkness seems to press in on him as though it were alive. His effort to conceal the fear from Faye, and finally to confront it alone, sets his formidable public strength against a private vulnerability that has begun to organize his days around the coming night.

Identity and Background

Ernie is physically imposing: six feet tall, squarely built, with brush-cut gray hair, a thick neck, massive shoulders, and a barrel chest. In high school he was a football star, known as Bull; during twenty-eight years in the Marines, he was so commanding that even some people of equal rank called him sir. He has been retired for six years. That history makes his present fear especially humiliating to him: he believes his size and record of toughness ought to leave him afraid of nothing.

His toughness also governs how he understands illness. He has rarely been sick and was hospitalized only once, after being shot in the butt and back during his second tour in Vietnam. With no family history of mental illness, he refuses to imagine himself seeking psychiatric help. He is certain he can outlast the strange condition, however unsettling it becomes. The certainty is not evidence that he has control; it is the defense he uses to preserve an identity built around endurance.

The Fear and Its Progression

The darkness frightens Ernie both indoors and outside, but the open night of northern Nevada is worse: an immense blackness that seems to surround him. By day he prefers rooms with many windows and lamps. At night he wants fewer windows, or none, yet closing the drapes cannot reassure him. He knows the darkness remains on the other side, waiting. The fear turns an ordinary window into a boundary he cannot trust and makes concealment feel less like safety than a reminder of what is outside.

The change comes gradually. In September, dusk begins to bring a vague uneasiness that lasts until dawn. At first it does not happen every night; by the middle of October, however, the approach of evening reliably brings inexplicable spiritual distress. By early November the distress has become fear, and in the last two weeks before the story's Friday afternoon scene, anticipation of darkness has come to define his days. For ten days he has avoided going out after nightfall. The progression matters: what he first treats as a passing oddity increasingly dictates his choices, even as he insists it is temporary and will be conquered.

Marriage and the Motel

On the Friday after Thanksgiving, Faye is away in Wisconsin visiting family and will not return until Tuesday. The couple have been married for thirty-one years, and Ernie misses her not only as his wife but as his best friend. He loves her more than he did on their wedding day. Without her, the nights seem longer, deeper, and darker; at the same time, her absence gives him space to keep the fear secret. He does not want to worry her or reveal what he considers a shameful weakness, believing he should overcome it before she comes home.

The motel makes that private struggle concrete. It is the only lodging within twelve miles, set on a knoll north of Interstate 80 amid sagebrush plains and rising meadows. Elko is more than thirty miles east, Battle Mountain forty miles west, and no other building can be seen from the parking lot. Ernie finishes cleaning the rooms and changing the linens, then tends scratches on the oak check-in counter with wood stain, keeping busy while he waits for travelers. The work is modest and familiar; its practical routine helps keep his thoughts from turning toward the early November dusk.

The office is arranged against the dark. Lamps burn throughout it: a fluorescent work lamp, a brass floor lamp, ginger-jar lamps turned to their highest settings, and a ceiling fixture. The large front window admits the declining sun, whose honey-colored light falls across the room and glints on the lamps and table ornaments. When Faye is present, she switches some lights off to save electricity. Ernie tolerates the unlit bulbs without telling her why he wants them burning. His bright office is both a working space and a refuge carefully maintained around a fear he cannot bring himself to name.

Confronting the Night

Ernie's instinct is to meet fear as an enemy. He has long thought of himself as someone Faye can rely on, a rock who must not let her down. He believes that boldness, confrontation, and endurance have worked before and will work again. So, rather than leave the drapes closed, he opens them and looks out across the uninhabited meadows and hills, where starlight is the only illumination.

At first he tries to read the scene as vast, cold, and pure, but not malicious or personally threatening. Then the darkness seems to shift and gather: denser black forms appear within the greater blackness, not quite visible but seeming solid, like phantoms that might rush the fragile window. Ernie clenches his jaw and presses his forehead to the ice-cold glass. The moment brings his chosen method of recovery to its limit. He has made himself face what terrifies him, yet the night does not become reassuring; it appears to answer his gaze with shapes he cannot clearly see. His scene therefore leaves the conflict unresolved, balancing the discipline of a man accustomed to confronting danger against a fear whose source he still does not understand.