Stella Moon Weiss turned five years old the day she first saw the shadows in her bedroom hallway move. A bladder full of milk, birthday cookies and cake drove her from sleep to careful steps to the bathroom. Her heart froze as wood creaked from some unknown corner. From the closet at the end of the second floor poured black liquid from the bottom of the door. Shapes crawled forward from the puddle growing larger, emptied slow from a glass big enough to drown her in. Her screams cut through the rooms of the house. As soon as the hallway light came on, both the puddle and the arms that pulled from it, were gone.
Both mother and father comforted her, each with a passing caress of her hair, even then a platinum blonde. She would find safety in their arms until her body lost the fight to welcome the sun and sweetly collapsed. For months, they told her to not be afraid of the dark. She wanted to be brave, but they had not seen what she had; something that moved against the presence of light, a special black that poured from the darkness, sometimes as fingers, or arms, even a half formed face with lips that mumbled horrible nothings.
The days piled atop one another until they felt like stone. Their attempts to console began to wane as repetition increased. Stella soon turned six, then seven. Her mania increased as the stories of other children her age began to vanish in the night. There was talk of a single man, draped in dark who would come to steal the children away. She knew better than the newspapers and the whispers of the old ladies at bus stops and corner stores.
The children at school, the dull, listless, creatures that she spent what felt like endless hours of endless days with, spoke of the vanishings. Each made their own stories to disappear into the ether as the words of the adults. Nothing was proven. But Stella had seen the shadows move. She had seen what others could not. A cute boy by the name of Philip had shared his same dreams of moving dark arms and they formed a bond. Play dates in the park and bike rides through the neighborhood they had only recently realized they shared had created a shield from the menace that pressed against their bedroom doors.
One day, Phillip took his webcam and left it on during the night. His laptop was set to record any event that would take place in the room. Stella wanted to watch it with him. The next day, he showed her the footage recorded. A lurching black that covered the room, and soon the floor, the wall, the windows, the camera itself. They gripped each other tightly in the playground as the other children laughed and screamed. The darkness covered the lens of the camera, but the few seconds of footage remained showed nothing but the chattering of endless teeth, gnashing and gnawing, ravenous for any food pulled beneath the black.
There was no webcam anymore, he told her. From then on, she could not keep her silence. Her parents were forced to act by the wishes of the schoolmasters.
Therapy and medications dulled her senses and helped her focus on assignments and chores. Time passed differently. Within a few weeks, Phillip had stopped trying to get her attention. Days later, he too was claimed by the same invisible force churned up by the public. Doctors stored her accounts, her illustrations of the blackness and submitted them to psychiatric study. Phillip was gone, laptop included. The results of her study came back inconclusive, all the trouble written off, considered another overactive imagination. Stella learned that she would need to wear a mask that they created if she was to carry on.
She hadn’t forgotten any of it. In time, she learned to use the light against her enemy. Countless hidden lamps burned through bulbs. Hundreds of candles burned on until morning until she began to cough up soot at the breakfast table. The whispers were gone. The scratching of nail on wood had ceased. The threat of the black had disappeared, defeated by habit, by routine. Sleep was no longer sound, but simply the turning of a switch from ‘on’ to ‘off’. Her parents silently mourned for the death of her dramatic energy and creativity and learned to welcome the meek smiles requesting approval and new desire for knowledge.
The shadows may have never left, but the girl had stopped fearing them.Until the day her family disappeared.
shadowart 