The Lovely Shadow

by Cory Hiles

  It would slither its slimy mass to where its acidic tentacles were slowly dissolving my flesh and weakening me so I couldn’t fight any more, and then it would simply slide over my body, encasing me in its slimy depths where my screams would be muffled by virtue of the creature’s own attenuation and I would be slowly dissolved; I would, however, be alive and aware of the slow dissolution of my body until my vital organs were dissolved. It would be horrible.

  I stopped moving. I was too afraid to go any further and I made up my mind that I would just go and sit happily on my chair until the end of the world, thank you very much, when it dawned on me that I’d already braved the dark once when I came for the chair. Nothing tried to eat me then, so why should I be so afraid that something would try to eat me now? I sighed deep and long, knowing that I was going to go into the darkest regions of the basement and that I would still be scared, but I would not be terrified.

  I chastised myself for being silly as I shuffled deeper and deeper into the depths of blackness, but my chastisement did little good, for I was still scared. I finally reached the back wall-o-junk but the journey took me a lot longer than it should have since I had stopped in fear so many times along the way.

  Once I reached the junk I had no idea where to start looking for something as small as a roll of tape, or how I was even supposed to recognize it in the pitch blackness, so I just stood there stupidly.

  ‘Ok, Dummy, think!’ I thought to myself. ‘Where would you find tape in the middle of all this crap?’ I thought for a bit and finally got a pretty good idea.

  “In the Christmas supplies,” I shouted out loud, startling myself. “Of course it’s in the Christmas crap. Good old clear tape, in the same box as the wrapping paper!”

  I felt around for a bit, being very careful not to bump my right hand into anything. I pulled out and opened every box that I thought was in the same vicinity as the Christmas supplies, and stuck my left hand blindly into each of them, feeling around, trying to discern the contents.

  This might sound like a simple task, but it was actually a terrifying ordeal. My imagination was acting up again. I kept imagining that I was going to stick my hand in a box and hear a slight scuffling noise as a large, hairy hand with cracked yellow fingernails came reaching up from the bottom of the box to grasp my hand and pull me into the box. I would find that it was not just a box, but a magical door into another world, like Lucy’s wardrobe to Narnia.

  I was afraid I was going to be pulled into a dark cave that smelled of mildew, sweat, and decomposing flesh. I would land on my back on a pile of human bones and the last thing I would see before dying would be the huge, square face of a troll as he grabbed my head and twisted it sharply to snap my neck.

  In my mind’s eye, I could see the troll’s face in vivid detail. His skin was the color of an army convoy truck—a brownish green color. His lanky hair was brown and greasy, and was hanging down along the sides of his huge head to his massive shoulders in wavy, stringy clumps. As he leaned toward me to deliver the death snap some of his hair would swing across his face, obscuring his eyes. He would toss his head to get the hair out of his eyes.

  Then he would focus his bulging eyes on mine, making certain that I knew who it was that was getting ready to take my life. His eyes were as big as pool balls, with cream colored irises, and big, pitch black pupils the size of nickels. The whites were not white at all, but rather, they were yellow and had blood vessels weaving about in them like some sort of bloody road map.

  Below his nasty eyeballs sat his flat, pudgy nose. It looked like a regular, human nose looks when you put a finger on the tip of it and smash it down towards your upper lip, except it was about three times larger. And his lips were almost the size and shape of bananas. They were be wet with saliva and pulled back into a wide, stupid smile revealing brown and yellow teeth, the size of dominoes. His teeth were all crooked and chipped. A few were missing, and there were chunks of rotting meat caught in the gaps.

  That was what I saw in my mind’s eye every time I stuck my hand into a box. Thus, just like getting to the boxes took me a good long while, going through the boxes took me a good long while as well.

  ‘If I ever get out of this basement,’ I thought, ‘I’m really going to have to cut back on the scary movies!’

  Eventually, though, my perseverance in the face of possible death in every box paid off. After boxes of old plates, outgrown clothes, miscellaneous knick-knacks, and one box full of old books, I found the box with rolls of wrapping paper in it. I pulled all the paper tubes out and set them aside and felt around in the box until I found two rolls of clear tape, still in the dispensers, lying at the bottom. I pulled both of them out and quickly scuttled my butt out of the darkness and back towards my chair.

  The process of getting to the boxes, and then going through them had taken me so long that the washer had already run its full cycle by the time I got back to my chair. I set my tape on the chair and headed straight for the washer. The last round of self induced terror had brought my thirst levels back up considerably.

  I got to the washer and opened the lid and gave a cursory sniff inside it. All clear! There was only the faint smell of detergent and no more sour stink. I carefully reached over (with my left hand) and turned the washer knob around to the start position again and pulled the knob out to turn on the washer.

  Water began pouring into the machine instantly. I had no cup handy so I just cupped my hands under the flowing water and then pulled them back to my face to suck up the water from them like a horse sucks up water from a trough. It took about a dozen handfuls of water to abate my thirst since I always managed to lose most of it before it reached my mouth, but I didn’t care. I was so thirsty that the water out of the machine tasted like liquid gold to me. Hands down it was the best water I’d ever had in my life.

  After quenching my thirst, I decided to wash my head and face since they were feeling particularly grubby after a day of beatings and crying. The cold water I splashed on my head felt marvelously refreshing. When I was all done bathing I closed the lid and let the washer complete its cycle on the previously soured load of clothes. Not because I really thought the clothes would benefit from a second washing, but because I was just too lazy to put them in the drier.

  I started to head back to my chair but realized that I couldn’t see it nearly as well as I could only moments before. I looked up towards the door and saw that the light shining underneath it was much dimmer. I only puzzled this out for a second before I realized it was getting late in the day and the sun was going down.

  ‘Well, it’s as good a time to get some sleep as any, I suppose, but first let’s get those fingers taped up’, I thought to myself.

  So I shuffled my way over to my chair and felt around for my tape and sat there in the dark wrapping tape around the last three fingers of my right hand.

  With my fingers all taken care of, I unfolded the chair until it was almost completely flat, (only the head portion was slightly raised) and lay down to get some shut eye. That was how I ended my day on June 12, 1990, my first day in the dark.

  CHAPTER 7

  I fell asleep almost instantly; my traumatic day having worn me out, but unfortunately didn’t stay that way for very long. I awoke after about two hours of sleeping because my bladder was full to the point of bursting.

  I rolled over onto my back and stared up at what would have been the ceiling, if it hadn’t been so dark that I couldn’t see it at all.

  ‘Well, crap,’ I thought to myself. ‘Here’s a problem I hadn’t considered. Just where the Hell am I supposed to pee?’

  I lay there for several minutes trying to decide where I was going to pee, and finally decided that if I didn’t go pee somewhere, I was going to pee wherever I was.

  I had considered going to the back of the basement to try and find an old bucket or something, but now that the entire basement was completely dark I decided that the risk of trolls and tentacle wielding blobs had increased signifi
cantly, and I’d rather wet myself than face those beasts.

  With the idea of searching out a bucket shot down, I could think of no other viable alternative. I figured I was either going to be forced to pee my pants or just pee on the floor. I didn’t like either of those choices. I crossed my legs and kept trying to think.

  ‘Well,’ I thought miserably, ‘if I wet myself, at least I can wash my clothes in the washer.’

  As soon as that thought had finished racing through my urine soaked brain I reached up and smacked my forehead as a symbol of my oafishness. As if to reinforce the reality of my oafishness, I used my right hand to do it.

  “Ow! Sonofa…!” I hollered out loud. My right hand was still damned sore and did not like impacting my forehead so violently.

  In my pain I temporarily forgot the need to pee until I realized I was starting to pee just a little bit, though unintentionally.

  “Ah crap,” I muttered as I stood and approached the washing machine. I had to move slowly, feeling my way, because without the faint grey bloom of light shining in from under the door, the nebulous darkness of the basement was treacherous and I knew there was a stool nearby, waiting to trip me up.

  I managed to stem the flow of urine as I moved—but just barely—until I reached the washer and climbed up on my stool. I flung open the lid of the washer (careful to use my left hand this time) and proceeded to try desperately to get my fly down.

  As soon as my body was aware that it was going to get to pee soon my amazing dam-like control over my bladder seemed to weaken by an appreciable amount, and I began losing the war against wet trousers in small squirts.

  Finally managing to get myself freed from the prison my jeans had become, I aimed to where I was pretty certain the opening of the washer was, (at this point I really didn’t care if my aim was off,) and let loose. The amount of relief that came from accommodating that simple biological necessity was tantamount to the level of pain I had endured throughout that miserable day.

  I stood there for what felt like hours, and when I finally finished my business I kicked my shoes off and stripped my trousers and underwear off and threw them in the washer on top of the already thrice washed towels. I closed the lid and felt around for the knob. It was tricky to get it set right in the dark but I finally managed, and got the washer going.

  I wasn’t about to try and go back to sleep laying there exposed, in nothing but my socks and a tee-shirt, so I felt my way over to the linens cupboard that stood near the washer and found a blanket which I wrapped snugly around myself.

  I had just hobbled back to my chair when I remembered that there was an old mattress leaning up against the wall, very near the linens cupboard. I dithered for a moment on whether or not it was worth the effort tonight to drag it over to where my chair was setting, but the kink that was already developing in my neck from laying on the chair made me decide that it was, indeed, worth the effort.

  Dropping my blanket on the chair, I went and found the mattress and dragged it over near the chair. There wasn’t enough room for a mattress and a chair so I had to fold up the chair and slide it out of the way; no easy task in the pitch dark, I assure you.

  With that done, I plopped the mattress down in place of the chair and searched around a bit for my blanket. Once I found it I plopped myself down on the mattress, snuggled as deeply as I could into the blanket and fell promptly back to sleep.

  I slept through the rest of the night, but was plagued by a horrible dream. I dreamt that I was running through an endless hallway, dimly lit by wall sconces set about five feet up from the floor on either side of the walls. All the sconces were shaped like the Snoopy night-light in our own hallway, only much larger. Every sconce showed Snoopy peacefully sleeping on his doghouse and each Snoopy would have been about a foot tall if he were standing on his hind legs.

  There were doors on both sides of the stone walls spaced at intervals of about ten feet and set directly across from each other.

  Something was chasing me. I couldn’t see it, but I knew it was there. I could hear it making slurping and dragging sounds behind me, leading me to believe it was the tentacle ridden blob that I imagined beneath the boxes.

  I ran as fast as I could, but it was not fast enough. The sounds behind me kept getting louder. I stopped and tried a couple doors—they were locked. The monstrosity was gaining on me. I kept looking over my shoulder to see if I could see it in the dim light, but behind me was all darkness. The Snoopy sconces were shutting off as I ran past them, leaving nothing but a black void behind me.

  I was running out of breath, my lungs and legs were burning, but I knew if I stopped whatever was behind me was going to get me for certain. It was already very close. I could hear it just behind me. I looked, but saw nothing. As I swiveled me head forward again I had just enough time to see that the hallway ended abruptly in a solid stone wall before I plowed into it and fell down.

  I landed flat on my back, but quickly rolled over and sat up, and pushed my back as deep as it would go into the stone wall behind me.

  I could see nothing in the darkness but I could hear the monster getting closer as I cowered into the wall, trying to scream without success.

  Suddenly the creature went silent. I had a feeling it had intentionally stopped just far enough back so that the light from the two remaining Snoopy sconces that were still lit would not illuminate it.

  Then the light changed. It didn’t get brighter or dimmer; it just shifted. I risked diverting my eyes from the dark depths of the hallway for a quick glance up at the Snoopy sconce to my left and finally found enough voice to scream.

  The light had changed because Snoopy was no longer sleeping on his doghouse. His departure from his sleeping position caused the light to shine differently through the plastic walls of his doghouse.

  Instead of sleeping peacefully on his doghouse, Snoopy was standing up on it staring at me with eyes that glowed red like coals. He was shaking a paw at me like an old man yelling at teenage kids that drive too fast up his street and his formerly peaceful smile had transformed into a snarl.

  I glanced at the sconce on my right and saw that the Snoopy there was up and about as well, but instead of standing there shaking his paw at me he was pacing back and forth on top of his doghouse, evidently looking for an easy way down.

  The second Snoopy looked just like the first Snoopy with the exception of a snarl. Instead of contorting his mouth into a snarl, he was moving his mouth as if he were trying to speak. He made no sound.

  I watched, horrified, as the second Snoopy paced to the edge of his dog house and began to climb down from it, hanging from the peak of the roof.

  He hung there for a second and I thought he was going to drop to the floor, but he didn’t. Instead, he started swinging back and forth, the lower part of his body disappearing into the entrance to his doghouse briefly on each forward swing before swinging back out again on the back swing. Every pendulous arc caused him to swing further and faster than the previous one, with more of his body entering his dog house every time.

  When more than half his body was entering the doghouse on each forward swing he let go and disappeared completely into his house. When I could no longer see Snoopy number two, I looked frantically back to Snoopy number one and found that had followed Snoopy two’s lead and was now mouthing silently at me while swinging from the gable of his house.

  Once Snoopy number one let go and flew into his doghouse I glanced back to Snoopy two’s doghouse. It was still devoid of demonic cartoon canines so I switched my focus back to the hall again.

  Staring down the hall I thought I saw a slight motion at the very edge of vision, right where light and shadow collided. It was just a quick shimmer, like heat rising off the road in summer—impossible to focus on, yet visible nonetheless.

  The motion happened so fast that I wasn’t sure I’d really seen it. I stared as hard as I could into the dark, furrowing my eyebrows as if that would increase my vision, but saw nothing else. Whatever
was down there did not want to be seen…Yet.

  I was so focused on the darkness ahead that I almost failed to notice the small noises I on either side of me. The noises went on for several seconds before I finally recognized that there was something happening that I should pay attention to.

  I looked to the left and saw that Snoopy number one was now descending from his doghouse on a thin rope, apparently tied off to something inside the house that hung down out of the entrance and nearly to the floor. I glanced to my right and saw Snoopy two doing the same thing.

  I was utterly terrified. I had nowhere to go; the wall was to my back, twelve inch tall demonic beagles were flanking me on each side, and in front of me was the unseen terror.

  Both Snoopy’s hit the ground simultaneously and turned towards me. They started walking towards me, slowly; seeming to savor the incremental increase in terror that arose within me with each step they took.

  I was trying to scream, but had lost my voice again. I was trying desperately to push myself through the wall at my back, sitting on my butt with my back smashed against the wall, and my feet pushing with my feet.

  The Snoopy’s stopped advancing when they were about three feet in front of me and just slightly off to either side. They stood in front of me working their snarling mouths up and down, glaring at me with their burning coal eyes, and pumping their fists at me.

  I sat motionless, staring at those abominations with slack jawed terror. Then I heard the shimmering beast from the shadows start moving again.

  Slurp—drag…slurp—drag…It was coming closer. My eyes were opened to their maximum limit, bulging out of their sockets. My mouth dried up and I began to shake with fear.