Ernie Block's growing fear of darkness

Ernie Block’s growing fear of darkness turns a man who has measured himself by endurance into someone unable to remain alone in a lit motel office until night. Its gradual arrival, its secrecy from Faye Block, and the failed attempt to confront it make the fear more than a sudden fright: it steadily reorganizes his days and exposes the limits of the courage on which he has relied.

Identity and Background

Ernie is fifty-two and lives in Elko County, Nevada, where the open night feels more threatening to him than the darkness inside a room. During the day, he prefers rooms with many windows and lamps. At night he wants the opposite: few windows, or none, though curtains cannot reassure him because he knows the darkness remains outside. He imagines it pressing against the glass like a living creature that wants to get in and devour him. The fear attaches not to a particular object he can identify, but to darkness itself and to the helplessness of knowing it is there.

The phobia clashes with the formidable identity he has built over a lifetime. Six feet tall and powerfully built, he had been a high-school football star and spent twenty-eight years in the Marines before retiring six years earlier. His fellow players called him “Bull”; in the service, even some people of equal rank addressed him as “sir.” He had endured combat in Vietnam, where he was wounded by bullets, and had rarely been ill. In his own reckoning, fear of the dark is therefore not merely uncomfortable: it is humiliating evidence that his body and mind are no longer obeying the image of the dependable, tough man he believes himself to be.

A Fear That Takes Hold Gradually

The change begins in September as a vague uneasiness that rises with nightfall and lasts until dawn. At first it does not come every night. By the middle of October, dusk reliably brings spiritual distress; by early November, distress has become fear. In the two weeks before the scene, anxiety has grown so dominant that his days are measured by the darkness to come. For ten days he has avoided going outdoors after nightfall. The progression matters: the fear does not arrive as a single shock but narrows his life step by step, turning evening into an approaching ordeal.

Ernie does not understand what caused it, and he is ashamed that it has appeared without an explanation. He also refuses to regard it as serious. He is determined not to seek psychiatric help, reasoning that he can endure the condition until it passes. That resolve leaves him alone with a problem he cannot name. He keeps his fear from Faye because he does not want to worry her or expose himself to humiliation, and he assumes he will overcome it before she returns from Wisconsin.

On the Friday after Thanksgiving, Faye is away visiting family and will not return until Tuesday. The separation gives Ernie a brief chance to hide the symptoms, but it also leaves him alone in the motel office as daylight drains away. When Faye is present, he tolerates some lamps being switched off to avoid drawing attention to his need for light. Keeping the secret means accepting small daily discomforts as well as the larger fear; it cannot make the night feel less present.

The Failed Test of Courage

As sunset approaches, Ernie tries to anchor himself in the person he remembers being: a Marine who has faced war and survived. He tells himself that he will not panic simply because night is coming. But the changing light and his body tell a different story. As afternoon darkens, his heart speeds up and his rib cage seems to tighten around his organs. At the motel desk, his hands tremble, his stomach churns, and he cannot keep still. The ordinary duty of remaining at work becomes unbearable because the office windows and glass door offer no way to keep the darkness out of sight.

At a quarter past seven, he gives in to the anxiety: he switches on the motel’s NO VACANCY sign and locks the front door. He then turns off the office lamps one by one and retreats upstairs, moving faster as shadows spread across the room. The gesture is both practical and revealing. He is trying to remove the exposure of the office and reach the enclosed safety of his apartment, yet every extinguished lamp makes the darkness more immediate. By the time he reaches the top of the stairs, he is panicking, slams and locks the door, and braces his back against it, gasping and shaking.

Even there, concealment is not enough. He believes that the only way to beat the fear is to confront it, applying the battle-tested principle that has served him elsewhere. From the apartment window, he looks across uninhabited meadows and hills, lit only by the stars, and pulls the drapes open. At first he tries to regard the blackness as vast and cold but harmless, neither malevolent nor personally threatening. Then parts of it seem to shift and gather into denser, pulsing shapes, as if phantoms were forming within the greater darkness and might lunge at the window. The scene keeps the threat indistinct: what terrifies him is not a clearly seen creature but the darkness acquiring the appearance of intention.

Change and Significance

The attempt at confrontation does not restore his command of himself. The darkness seems to press inward, and Ernie screams and throws himself away from the window. The curtains fall closed; with the view hidden, he is again surrounded by light. He drops to his knees, shudders, and gulps air before crawling to the bed. His heartbeat gradually slows, but the recovery is only physical: the episode has worsened the problem he meant to master. On November 22, he stares at the ceiling and asks aloud what is happening to him and what is wrong.

The episode draws its force from the contrast between Ernie’s public strength and his private, mounting dependence on light. A man who regards duty and courage as sacred can survive bullets and bombs yet cannot remain at the desk until nine or look at the night through a window. His efforts to hide the fear from Faye and dismiss it as temporary leave him with no explanation or support in the moment when it overwhelms him. The repeated boundary between light and dark—the lamps, the office glass, the stairs, the locked door, and finally the opened and closed drapes—gives the fear a physical shape while showing that barriers can conceal darkness without making it disappear.