The story of ‘The Darkness Out There’ is a tale about the fear associated with a local wood. It is described through the eyes of a young girl, who alongside a young boy, is helping to clean and tidy the house and garden of an old lady. The girl talks about ‘witches and wolves’ that she imagined lived in the wood when she was younger.
“Sometimes they’d go there for a dare (the wood), several of them, skittering over the field and into the edge of the trees, giggling and shrieking, not too far in, just far enough for it to be scary, for the branch shapes to look like faces, and clawed hands, for the wolves to rustle and creep into the greyness you wouldn’t quite see into, the clotted shifting depths of the place”.
As she has grown older, those fears have been replaced with a memory of a crash during the war of a German plane in the woods, along with other things like attacks on young innocent girls.
At the end of the story, it becomes clear that the old lady was responsible for the murder of one of the German pilots who was involved in the plane crash. She and her sister failed to get help for the soldier over a period of two days, and eventually he died.
The story of the ‘Black Veil’ begins with a young doctor in his comfortable home, dreamily thinking of his ambitions for the future. The language is gentle and happy for he is sitting by a ‘cosy fire’ and his wife’s voice is ‘merry and sweet’. However, almost immediately the writer transforms the mood of the story to something tense and secretive. The doctor is wrenched from his dreams and is presented with a mysterious woman dressed totally in black, her face covered by a black veil. The scene becomes clear in the readers mind, with the cold, dark night bringing forth a hopeless and desperate female. The doctor is thrown into a strange situation full of questions, but no answers.
The mood of helplessness is conjured up with the women’s physical and emotional description and words. She is ‘shrouded and concealed’ in black, and she is ‘saturated in mud and rain’. The tone of her words are full of despair. She ‘beseeches the doctor’s aid’; she sees the ‘hopelessness of human assistance’; and there is a ‘desperate earnestness in her manner that goes to the young man’s heart’.
The plot builds up by keeping the reader puzzled about the unknown person who needs the doctors help. The doctor cannot understand why he cannot help until the following morning, especially as the woman is in such a distressed state. The doctor explores various thoughts but cannot find a logical explanation.
“He speculated a great deal and to very little purpose on the possible circumstances of the case.”
The mood of the story is further darkened by the images of Walworth, which is the location of the tragedy. The village is full of poverty, decay and ‘questionable characters’.
“His way lay across a marshy common, through irregular lanes, with here and there a ruinous and dismantled cottage fast falling to pieces with decay and neglect.”
The writer uses assonance and imagery that emphasises the dreariness and sense of no hope.
“After plodding wearily through the MUD and MIRE.”
“A small low building, one story above the ground with a desolate and unpromising exterior.”
The sense of mystery is kept up as the doctor is told that he is ‘too soon’ to help the patient rather than too late.
“Am I in time? ‘Too soon’ replied the man. “The surgeon turned hastily round, with a gesture of astonishment mixed with alarm.”
But then the puzzle is suddenly solved and the reason for the tragedy becomes clear.
“The truth flashed suddenly upon him.”
The tone and pace of ‘The Darkness Out There’ is much slower and less intense. The descriptions and conversation are about everyday things. The setting is much more modern and the language is casual rather than formal.
“She would go to this old Mrs Rutters and have a bit of a giggle with Susie and come home for tea and wash her hair.”
The writer uses lots of alliteration and assonance to create a lighthearted mood that reflects the country setting.
“Polleny summer grass that glinted in the sun.”
“Pattern and petal.”
This style is used to bring the characters to life as well.
“She seemed composed of circles, a cottage-loaf of a woman, with a face below which chins collapsed.”
There are lots of contrasting images as well, because the young girl is frightened of the wood. There are some nasty things as well as pretty colourful flowers, and the dark side of the wood is described to remind the reader about the main theme of the story.
“The dark reach of the spinney came right to the gate there so that she would have to walk by the edge of it with the light suddenly shutting off the bare wide sky of the field.”
The chatty conversations move the plot forward, and the young girl finds out things about the old womans past. The writer uses similes to build up an image of the womans dead husband, which the girl sees in a photo.
“The girl saw a man with a ‘tooth-brush’ moustache, his army cap ‘slicing’ his forehead.”
Although the old woman seems to be plump and harmless, as the story goes on, a harder side starts to come out. The young boy who is helping with the cleaning, starts to pick up on things about her that make him feel uncomfortable. His opinion turns out to be correct, for her ‘darker’ side is very unpleasant indeed.
She and her sister heard the plane crash and they went to investigate. They ‘cheered’ when they realised it was German plane. The writer starts to build up a mood of fear and tension as they are exploring the crash. The language becomes more harsh and sharp, and reflects the hatred that the old lady felt.
“Bang there goes some more bastards.” “Tit for tat.”
The old woman tells the story without seeming to feel as though she did anything wrong. But the horror of the young boy and girl comes across in the description of their reaction.
“The boy’s spoon clattered to the floor; he did not move.”
At the end the writer sums up the different kinds of darkness that can exist. She emphasises that things are not always what they seem to be on the surface. This makes sure that the reader fully understands what the story has been about.
“You could get people all wrong and there was a darkness that was not the darkness of tree shadows.”
There are some things about the stories that are similar. There is an element of mystery and secrecy in them both which makes the reader want to continue reading and see what happens. The endings are both tragic as well. Both stories are about death, but one of the main characters causes the death, and the other one is the victim of a death.
The tone of the stories are very different. The ‘Black Veil’ is much deeper and disturbing, and the characters are frightened, helpless and in great pain. The mood of The Darkness Out There is quite colourful and bright, but this actually covers up the evil act of the old woman.
The stories are written at different times, and so the Dickens tale uses words that are formal and outdated. This compares with the chatty, colloquial language which goes on between the characters in the other story.
The endings of both tales are very powerful. The reader discovers a dreadful tragedy has occurred. However, the Black Veil ending makes you feel sad as absolutely nothing could be done to save the womans son. In contrast, the jolly old woman turns out to be a murderer, and like the boy and the girl the reader ends up hating her.
“It makes you want to throw up’ he said, ‘someone like that.”
