MicroHorror

Shadows follow time. Have you ever watched them as they move across a room, across a field, cast slanting rainbows through glass? Have you? I have. A day of shadows is indiscernibly slow. I have watched them very closely and with dread for I know what it is they do. Many think that shadows are driven by time. They are not.

It happened the night Button died. I looked at her little broken body in the hospital. I watched the hours tick by and the angles change until there was no more light to see by and even hope darkened. When they switched that machine off, a shadow crossed my heart, a darker shadow than I had ever known, a thing of hatred and rage–a vengeful clamor that would not be silenced. It was a shadow in deep shade, a pit of blackness within the dark, bitter and slow–so slow it clung to the floor and demanded my attention.

As I watched, it took form, lifted itself up onto the wall, wavered before my eyes welled with tears and held me still in my sorrow and despair.

“What would it be?”

I didn’t really hear a voice. It was more like a breath exhaled.

“What would it be?”

“What?” I asked.

“Your will. Speak it,” breathed the shadow.

I felt a sob rise in my throat, stifling the words I thought to speak.

“Speak it.”

“That bastard should die!” I said. “That damned driver should die for the death of my child!”

“You will this?” said the breath. “You would see it done? And in your turn you would aid others?”

In that moment revenge was all my heart, was all my soul, was all I had. But the shadow needed me to speak the words and it drove me on.

“You will it…?”

“I do will it,” I said, “with all my heart!”

What happened then was as a dream. I saw the man enter a cell. His head was hung with remorse but I felt no pity. He lay on the bed. My little girl did too but she breathed no more. He stirred suddenly and looked around him as if he caught a glimpse of… something. I witnessed the approach of many shadows and his eyes grew round with terror. They crawled velvet black across the floor and he recoiled, drawing away to avoid their pall. He called out but his voice was muffled by this darkest of clouds. They pooled around his feet and crawled upwards paralyzing him slowly from the feet up with icy cold, fearful fingers, reaching his torso, then his throat. He screamed horribly as blackness filled his eyes. I saw them there inside him, the shadows, filling his whole being. They turned his flesh to blood and rendered him lifeless on the floor.

I found myself once more by the bedside of my beloved daughter but the moment I beheld the innocence of her face, I knew I had done a great wrong in her name.

Half a century I watched the shadows creep until they came for me and I became one with them. I had learned their discipline. Shadows are not driven by time. They are outside of it. Eternity is their plaything. But they are not permitted to act alone. They must await the summons of a vengeful heart and exact from it a terrible price. Yet there are always those willing to pay. God help me, I cannot warn them for the promise binds me and all darkness is blind.