Estimated reading time — 10 minutes

Most people think of the dark when they imagine where monsters hide. They fear the shadows, the closets, the space beneath the bed where the sun doesn’t reach. They are wrong. The worst things don’t hide in the dark. They hide in the light. Specifically, they hide in the refraction.

I learned this because of my brother, Elias. Elias disappeared twenty years ago, when he was seven and I was twelve. The police called it a runaway case, then a cold case, and finally, a tragedy without closure. My parents withered away under the weight of the ambiguity, ghosts in their own home until they eventually passed, leaving me the sole custodian of a house full of dust and silence.

It was during the cleanup of the attic that I found the journal. It was a Composition notebook, the black-and-white marbled kind, buried inside a box of busted Christmas ornaments. It was Elias’s. I sat on the floorboards, surrounded by fiberglass insulation and mothballs, and read the scribblings of a seven-year-old descent into madness.

The early entries were normal complaints about homework, drawings of dinosaurs. But around October of 1994, the tone shifted. He started writing about “The Rainbow Place.” At first, I thought it was a TV show or a playground game.

“The Rainbow Place is where the colors live,” he wrote in messy crayon. “Mr. Prism says I can go there if I’m good. It’s always sunny there. No bedtime.”

As I turned the pages, the crayon drawings became intricate, almost impossibly precise for a child. Geometric shapes, refracted angles of light, and doors that looked like they were cut into the air itself. And then, on the very last page, written not in crayon but in a dark, rusty substance that I prayed was just dried marker, was a list.

“HOW TO GO TO THE RAINBOW PLACE:”

It wasn’t a game. It was a ritual.I should have thrown the book away. I should have burned it. But grief is a toxic thing; it rots your logic. I needed to know what happened to Elias. I needed to know if this childish ritual was just a game, or if he had actually tried to do it and fallen into the hands of someone or something evil.

The instructions were specific. Absurdly so.

1. You need a room with one window facing West.

2. You need the Pure Glass (a prism).

3. You must wait for the Golden Minute (when the sun hits the horizon line).

4. You must feed the colors.”Feed the colors.” That was the part that chilled me. Beneath that instruction, Elias had listed seven items, one for each color of the spectrum.

Red: A drop of fresh blood.

Orange: The peel of a fruit that has never touched the ground.

Yellow: A lock of hair from someone who loves you.

Green: A leaf from a poisonous plant.

Blue: Water from a storm.

Indigo: Ink from a squid (Elias had crossed this out and written ‘Pen Ink’ instead).

Violet: A petal from a dying flower.

I spent three weeks gathering the materials. It felt insane, manic. I was a thirty-two-year-old accountant hunting for poison ivy and pricking my finger with a sewing needle. But the house felt heavy, as if the walls were holding their breath, waiting for me to finish what Elias had started.

Yesterday was the day. The weather forecast predicted clear skies. The sunset was scheduled for 7:42 PM.

I set up in the guest bedroom. It faced west. I had cleared all the furniture out, leaving the room barren except for a small wooden table in the center. On the table sat the prism a high-quality optical glass triangle I’d ordered online. Arranged in a semi-circle around it were the offerings.

7:30 PM. The sky was turning a bruised purple.

7:35 PM. The sun began to dip, casting long, fiery orange shadows across the floorboards.

I stood before the table, my heart hammering against my ribs like a trapped bird. I felt foolish. I felt terrified.

7:40 PM. The sun was a blinding eye on the horizon. The beam of light hit the window, sliced through the dust motes, and struck the prism.

Instantly, a perfect spectrum erupted on the white wall behind the table. Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Indigo, Violet. The colors were vibrant, hyper-real. They didn’t look like light projected on a wall; they looked like a hole cut into the plaster.

I looked at Elias’s notebook, open in my hand. “Say the words,” it instructed.

I cleared my throat. The air in the room had dropped twenty degrees. The silence was absolute; the birds outside had stopped singing. The traffic noise from the highway was gone.

“Red for the flesh,” I whispered, dropping the blood onto the red band of light on the table. It hissed, like water hitting a hot pan, and vanished into the light.

“Orange for the taste.” I placed the peel. It withered instantly, turning to ash and dissolving.

“Yellow for the bond.” My mother’s hair, saved from a locket. It curled and smoked.

“Green for the venom.” The poison ivy leaf. Gone.

“Blue for the tears.” The storm water. It boiled away.

“Indigo for the story.” The ink. It didn’t smear; it was sucked into the glass.

“Violet for the end.” The dying petal.

When the petal touched the light, the room didn’t just change. It broke.

A sound tore through the air not a scream, but a hum. A frequency so high it made my teeth ache and my vision blur. The rainbow on the wall expanded. It didn’t spread outward; it pulled the room inward. The white walls of the guest room peeled back like dead skin, revealing pulsing, gelatinous bands of color beneath the reality I knew.

Gravity shifted. I wasn’t standing on the floor anymore; I was falling forward, toward the wall, toward the spectrum.I hit the ground hard. But it wasn’t wood. It was soft, warm, and yielding. I scrambled to my feet, gasping for air that tasted like ozone and burning sugar.

I was in a hallway. But that word is too small. I was in a corridor that stretched into infinity in both directions, curved like the inside of a massive artery. The walls, floor, and ceiling were made of light solid, tangible light.

The section I stood in was Violet. The air smelled of lavender and old perfume, choking and thick. It vibrated with a low, mournful cello note that I could feel in my bones.

“Elias?” I called out. My voice didn’t echo. The violet walls absorbed the sound immediately.

I began to walk. The notebook said the “King of Colors” lived in the Red, at the far end. I was at the bottom, the ultraviolet edge. To find my brother, I had to ascend the spectrum. Passing from Violet into Indigo was physically painful. The air grew heavier, colder. The smell shifted to deep ocean salt and ink. The sound became a rhythmic thrumming, like a massive heartbeat.

And then I saw them.

The Residents.

In the Indigo zone, shapes were embedded in the walls. Humanoid shapes. They weren’t trapped behind the light; they were becoming the light. I saw a man, his face stretched in a silent scream, his body dissolving into blue-black pixels. He was reaching out, but his hand had already merged with the floor.

I ran. I didn’t want to look at them. I didn’t want to recognize anyone.

I burst into the Blue zone. It was freezing here. The light was blindingly bright, the color of a computer screen crash. The sound was a high-pitched whine.

“Help…”

The voice was faint. It came from the wall to my left.

I stopped, my breath hitching. Embedded in the azure luminescence was a girl. She looked about ten. Her eyes were gone, replaced by pools of swirling sapphire light. Her mouth moved, but the words were out of sync with her lips.

“Don’t go to the Red,” she whispered. “Mr. Prism is hungry.”

“Where is Elias?” I screamed at her. “Where is the boy who came here twenty years ago?”

The girl giggled, a sound like breaking glass. “Time is a color here, silly. It doesn’t move in a line. It moves in a circle. The Green eats the Blue. The Yellow burns the Green.”

I scrambled away from her, stumbling into the Green zone.

The atmosphere changed instantly. It was humid, tropical, smelling of rotting vegetation and crushed mint. The floor was sticky. The “people” here were moss-like, their limbs fused together, their faces blooming with emerald fractals. They didn’t speak. They just swayed to an unseen wind.I pushed forward, driven by a madness that wasn’t my own. I had to see.

Yellow. The heat hit me like a physical blow. It was a desert of light. The brightness was searing. I had to squint, tears streaming down my face.

And there, sitting in the middle of the Yellow zone, playing with a pile of golden dust, was a boy.He wore a striped t-shirt and corduroy pants. 1994 fashion.

“Elias?” I croaked. My throat was parched.

The boy looked up. It was him. It was my brother. He hadn’t aged a day. His face was unblemished, his hair a tousled mop of blonde. But his eyes…His eyes were just holes. Behind the sockets, there was no brain, no skull. Just a blinding, white light that shone like a star.

“You’re late,” Elias said. His voice wasn’t his own. It was a chorus of a thousand voices layered over one another. “We’ve been waiting for the final color.”

“I came to take you home,” I stepped forward, reaching for him.

Elias laughed. The sound knocked me backward. “Home? This is the Rainbow Place. Everything is better here. We don’t have to be sad. We don’t have to grow up. We just have to be bright.”

He stood up, and as he did, the Yellow zone began to bleed into Orange. The heat intensified. The smell of burning oranges and sulfur filled my nose.

“Mr. Prism wants to see you,” Elias said. Pointing behind me.

I turned to look toward the Red zone.It wasn’t a corridor anymore. It was a mouth.

The Red zone was a wall of writhing, crimson muscle made of light. It pulsed and throbbed. And stepping out of the crimson fog was a figure.It was tall, impossibly thin, dressed in a suit that shimmered with every color of the spectrum, shifting from oil-slick black to blinding white. Its head was a geometric shape a pyramid of glass where a face should be. Inside the glass head, a single eye floated, dilated and frantic.

“You brought the offerings,” the entity spoke. It didn’t use a mouth. The voice vibrated inside my skull. “But you forgot the most important one.”

I stumbled back, gripping the notebook. “I brought everything! The list! I followed the list!”

“That list is for the ticket,” Mr. Prism said, the glass head tilting. “Admission is paid. But exit? Exit requires a trade.”

Elias walked over to the entity and took its hand. The boy’s skin began to glow, his edges blurring, merging with the entity.

“Elias was the Indigo,” Mr. Prism intoned. “He has been a wonderful shade. Deep. Melancholy. But he is fading. We need fresh pigment. We need… Grey.”

The entity pointed a long, prismatic finger at me.

“You reek of it. The grey of adulthood. The grey of depression. The grey of a life unlived. It is a rare delicacy here. We have too much brightness. We need the shadows to make the colors pop.”

The Red walls began to close in. The floor turned to magma.

I realized then that this wasn’t a playground. It was a digestive tract.

I didn’t think. I ran.I turned my back on my brother on the thing that wore his face and I sprinted back toward the cool tones.

“Don’t leave!” Elias shrieked behind me. The sound was a siren, distorting the air.

I tore through the Yellow, the heat blistering my skin. Through the Green, the sticky vines grabbing at my ankles. Through the Blue, where the eyeless girl screamed, “He’s coming! He’s coming!”

I could hear footsteps behind me heavy, crunching footsteps that sounded like glass being ground into pavement.

I hit the Indigo. The pressure was immense. My nose burst, blood spraying onto the floor.

“The blood!” Mr. Prism roared from behind. “Red opens!”

The blood I spilled didn’t splatter; it opened small portals, tiny swirling vortexes of crimson. I jumped over them, my lungs burning.

I reached the Violet. The end of the line. The air was thick as tar. I could see the seam in reality the jagged tear where I had fallen through. It was closing. The wall of my guest room was visible through the rift, hazy and distant.

I dived.

Something grabbed my ankle.

It felt like a hand made of dry ice. I looked back. Elias or the stretched, distorted version of him had a hold of me. His arm had elongated, stretching through the color zones like taffy. His face was right there, inches from mine, though his body was miles back in the Yellow.

“Stay,” the face whispered. The light in his eye sockets was burning my skin. “It’s so quiet here.”

I kicked him. I kicked my brother’s face. I felt the structure of it collapse under my boot, like kicking a paper lantern.

He let go with a wail that shattered the air.

I clawed my way through the rift, tumbling onto the hard wood floor of the guest bedroom.

I scrambled backward, away from the wall. The prism on the table was vibrating, glowing with a violent, unstable light. The spectrum on the wall was thrashing, like a snake trying to break free.

I grabbed the lamp I had left in the hallway and threw it.

It smashed into the prism.The glass exploded.

The sound was like a gunshot. The rainbow on the wall vanished instantly. The room plunged into darkness, save for the weak moonlight filtering through the window.

I lay there for hours, shaking, bleeding, waiting for the wall to open again. It never did.

That was a month ago.

I burned the notebook. I sold the house. I moved to a city where the smog covers the sun most days.

But I’m not safe. I know I’m not safe.

The ritual did something to me. It didn’t just show me the Rainbow Place; it changed how I see this one.

I have been diagnosed with a rare form of color blindness, or so the doctors say. But they are wrong. I’m not blind to color. I see too much of it.

When I look at a red stop sign, I see the pulsing muscle of the wall. When I look at the blue sky, I see the drowning girl. When I see yellow flowers, I feel the blistering heat of that desert.

But the worst part isn’t the flashbacks.

It’s the refraction.

Every time light hits glass a window, a mirror, a water glass I see them. Tiny, distorted figures dancing in the glare. They are watching me. Waiting for the sun to hit the right angle. Waiting for the Golden Minute.

Yesterday, I cut myself chopping vegetables. The blood dripped into the sink.

It didn’t wash down the drain. It swirled, defied gravity, and formed a shape. A tiny, red door.

And from the drain, I heard a voice, small and tinny, vibrating against the porcelain.

“Red opens…”

I live in the dark now. I have taped black garbage bags over every window. I have smashed every mirror. I only use candlelight, and even then, I am careful.

But I know it’s only a matter of time. You can’t hide from the light forever. Eventually, the sun will rise, a beam will find a crack in the plastic, it will hit a dust mote just right, and the Rainbow Place will come for its Grey.

If you find a notebook with a list of colors, don’t read it. If you see a rainbow that looks a little too bright, a little too solid, look away.

The dark scares you because you can’t see what’s in it. But you should be scared of the light. Because in the light, they can see you.

Credit: Ixoithaas