Lanterns And Shades - Part 3: The Scream Of Silence
"I'm a searchlight soul, they say, but I can't see it in the night. I'm only faking when I get it right. 'Cause I fell on black days. How would I know that this could be my fate?"
The breeze pushes through the branches of trees divided and bordered by Witches Path. They have long since shed their leaves, and where a summer wind would result in the soft and almost musical sound of rustling foliage, winter’s breath is harsher. The only sounds are the creak and groan of arthritic branches and the dry, hollow impacts that occasionally ring through this tiny forest when the wind gathers enough strength to slam one wooden limb into another. Behind this senseless, rhythmless percussion, there is nothing. The loudest sound of all is the unbroken howl of utter silence.
Judy Nicholls is on her way home from Quarter A, where she has spent the day visiting with her father. She is aware that she is running late and that night is falling, but for Judy these are distant, relatively unimportant thoughts. As she walks quickly and quietly down Witches Path, she thinks not of fear or darkness or her distance from the safety of Lanterns. Instead, Judy thinks of her mother.
Samantha Nicholls suffers from what the local newspapers call The Touch. It is a disease of a kind, Judy knows, but more psychological than physical. Her mother has told her the story perhaps two or three hundred times over the years; how she was out on a date with Judy’s father, how they’d gone walking after a quiet dinner in a Quarter A restaurant, losing track of time in conversation and the rhythm of footsteps until Samantha realised with a start that they had gone beyond the range of the Lanterns.
Samantha was forever explaining to Judy how a fear of the dark was not ingrained in her generation, how when she was a child it was still safe to be out after the sun had gone down. Young Samantha knew of Shades, but they were not a constant reality back then. Not until that night.
Henry, Judy’s father, hadn’t really seen the thing that floated out of the shadows and settled over his wife’s shoulders like a blanket. Judy had asked him about it once, and he had shrugged, claiming he’d seen a shape and nothing more. She had screamed, he remembered, reaching to grab at the thing and then snatching her hands away as if burnt. He had also tried to grab it, but it had slipped through his fingers. It had substance, he said, but it wasn’t something you could hold in your hand, especially when touching it numbed your fingers and sent this awful cold crawling up your arms, slowing your muscles and freezing your blood until you moved like you were underwater.
They had clung to each other, the three of them, and Judy’s parents had staggered and stumbled two or three hundred metres back down the road, her wild screams mingling with his hoarse, braying cries for help. Samantha remembered little after that. A screech of tyres, the road suddenly flooded with Lanternlight, then unconsciousness.
Over time, they had both recovered from the physical effects of The Touch. Henry regained the feeling in his hands and was able to go back to work, while Samantha was released from hospital after only a few weeks. It was her mind that had never recovered, her memory of what happened doomed to play on a loop in the theatre of her mind until the day she dies. It‘s all she talks about, probably all she thinks about, and Judy understands exactly why her father left them, even if she still occasionally resents him for it. She is eighteen in three months, and if she can find a job, she too will leave. She loves her mother, but in living forever in a moment where she was touched by death, her mother is cold and empty and possibly insane.
It isn’t a sound or a smell that makes Judy look over her shoulder as she crests the hill that marks the end of Witches Path. It is something deeper than that, something like a sixth sense. She stops walking and turns to face the trees, narrowing her eyes and leaning forward. She’s thinking that it’s like one of those pictures that changes into something else if you look at it a certain way. At a glance, it is the small wood, the fractured concrete of the path, moonlight falling on skeletal branches while an old council Lantern flickers intermittently in the distance. At first, the movement of the shadows seems to be a result of that, a trick of the light and the wind. But then she makes out a figure, misshapen and somehow wrong. Once she sees one, she realises that there are many, that the darkness in the belly of Witches Path is literally teeming with odd, warped shadows that creep between slivers of light with a smooth, easy grace that is strangely beautiful.
Judy is shivering, but she’s more fascinated than afraid. There is distance between the creatures and her, and they seem ponderous and apathetic. What she is seeing is like a parade or a dance without purpose or reason. There is no pattern to their movements, no goal or destination. They seem charged somehow, full of an energy they must constantly move to dispel.
It is only when one of the creatures, one of the Shades, drifts out onto the path that Judy’s breath catches in her throat and she has to hold back a scream. It is humanoid in shape, like a shadow in three-dimensions, but that is where the similarities end. The Shade’s feet hang a few feet above the ground, and it seems to move without any physical effort, floating aimlessly, as though controlled by some scientific or supernatural force Judy does not understand. The breeze seems to pull at its body, subtly warping its shape and pushing it gently around as though at play. The most horrifying thing, though, is the way it seems stretched somehow. The creature is tall and impossibly thin in the torso. Its arms are too long and end in hands that hang limply at its sides, hands that are little more than five long, spidery fingers that she can suddenly imagine caressing her warm skin and freezing her where she stands, making her its kin. They are not fingers for grabbing. They are for reaching, for touching and stroking, for painting flesh with its icy black intent.
As if hearing this thought, the Shade stops moving. It is as a statue. Its brethren in the trees are also still. Judy becomes aware of the darkness, of the cold, of being alone. She remembers a night many years ago; her mother screaming and thrashing in the throes of a nightmare, eleven year-old Judy waking her and holding her and listening to her babble about how they have no eyes, how they don’t see. The Shades, her mother had said, the words garbled with sleep and tears, absorb changes in light and dark. They know where you are, even in what seems like pitch darkness. Where light touches your skin, your hair, your jewellery, they feel it. Like bats, her mother had said, they are blind. Yet they see everything.
Only now does it occur to Judy that she must run. Only now, when it is already too late.
The Shade on the path turns and moves towards her, races towards her. It does not seem to accelerate at all. One moment it is still, the next it is flying up the path, travelling at a speed that is terrifying to behold. Others come from the trees at the foot of the hill, and still more from the shadows around her, where they must have been lurking all along. Judy turns and runs straight into a Shade. Its long arms embrace her, fingers linking at the back of her neck, their touch on her skin somehow liquid, like smears of thick jelly. She looks up into its face and there is nothing there. No features, no emotions, no nothing. It is blank. Judy tries to scream and what comes out of her mouth is little more than a sigh.
It is not a violent death. It is not even a painful death. The Shades surround Judy Nicholls and simply touch her, their fingers finding every inch of exposed skin, never returning to the same place twice. The cold hurts a little at first, and Judy struggles as best she can. Her attackers are weak and insubstantial, and in those first few moments, she finds she can literally tear them apart. But her hands and her arms are freezing. In moments they are numb. In less than a minute she can no longer move them. Judy’s breathing becomes laboured and her struggles weaken by degrees. She can no longer feel her legs, and when they buckle beneath her and she falls to the ground, there is no pain at all. In the silence, she hears her own heartbeat inside her head. It is slowing. Her body is entirely numb. She is no longer breathing. Death, in these moments, is inevitable, and Judy feels a kind of peace. She is drowning, and she will not break the surface again.
The cluster of Shades remain at the spot where Judy fell for perhaps three or four minutes, covering her body like a shroud. Presently, they begin to drift away. They are apathetic and aimless again; twisted, elongated forms without rhythm or destination. They seem to gravitate to the shadows, to the darkness, to the places where they are invisible. The path itself is empty. There is no body and no sign of struggle. Once again, Witches Path is undisturbed. The breeze, an errant child, resumes pulling at the elderly limbs of the trees, their creaking complaints lost beneath the scream of silence.
The breeze pushes through the branches of trees divided and bordered by Witches Path. They have long since shed their leaves, and where a summer wind would result in the soft and almost musical sound of rustling foliage, winter’s breath is harsher. The only sounds are the creak and groan of arthritic branches and the dry, hollow impacts that occasionally ring through this tiny forest when the wind gathers enough strength to slam one wooden limb into another. Behind this senseless, rhythmless percussion, there is nothing. The loudest sound of all is the unbroken howl of utter silence.
Judy Nicholls is on her way home from Quarter A, where she has spent the day visiting with her father. She is aware that she is running late and that night is falling, but for Judy these are distant, relatively unimportant thoughts. As she walks quickly and quietly down Witches Path, she thinks not of fear or darkness or her distance from the safety of Lanterns. Instead, Judy thinks of her mother.
Samantha Nicholls suffers from what the local newspapers call The Touch. It is a disease of a kind, Judy knows, but more psychological than physical. Her mother has told her the story perhaps two or three hundred times over the years; how she was out on a date with Judy’s father, how they’d gone walking after a quiet dinner in a Quarter A restaurant, losing track of time in conversation and the rhythm of footsteps until Samantha realised with a start that they had gone beyond the range of the Lanterns.
Samantha was forever explaining to Judy how a fear of the dark was not ingrained in her generation, how when she was a child it was still safe to be out after the sun had gone down. Young Samantha knew of Shades, but they were not a constant reality back then. Not until that night.
Henry, Judy’s father, hadn’t really seen the thing that floated out of the shadows and settled over his wife’s shoulders like a blanket. Judy had asked him about it once, and he had shrugged, claiming he’d seen a shape and nothing more. She had screamed, he remembered, reaching to grab at the thing and then snatching her hands away as if burnt. He had also tried to grab it, but it had slipped through his fingers. It had substance, he said, but it wasn’t something you could hold in your hand, especially when touching it numbed your fingers and sent this awful cold crawling up your arms, slowing your muscles and freezing your blood until you moved like you were underwater.
They had clung to each other, the three of them, and Judy’s parents had staggered and stumbled two or three hundred metres back down the road, her wild screams mingling with his hoarse, braying cries for help. Samantha remembered little after that. A screech of tyres, the road suddenly flooded with Lanternlight, then unconsciousness.
Over time, they had both recovered from the physical effects of The Touch. Henry regained the feeling in his hands and was able to go back to work, while Samantha was released from hospital after only a few weeks. It was her mind that had never recovered, her memory of what happened doomed to play on a loop in the theatre of her mind until the day she dies. It‘s all she talks about, probably all she thinks about, and Judy understands exactly why her father left them, even if she still occasionally resents him for it. She is eighteen in three months, and if she can find a job, she too will leave. She loves her mother, but in living forever in a moment where she was touched by death, her mother is cold and empty and possibly insane.
It isn’t a sound or a smell that makes Judy look over her shoulder as she crests the hill that marks the end of Witches Path. It is something deeper than that, something like a sixth sense. She stops walking and turns to face the trees, narrowing her eyes and leaning forward. She’s thinking that it’s like one of those pictures that changes into something else if you look at it a certain way. At a glance, it is the small wood, the fractured concrete of the path, moonlight falling on skeletal branches while an old council Lantern flickers intermittently in the distance. At first, the movement of the shadows seems to be a result of that, a trick of the light and the wind. But then she makes out a figure, misshapen and somehow wrong. Once she sees one, she realises that there are many, that the darkness in the belly of Witches Path is literally teeming with odd, warped shadows that creep between slivers of light with a smooth, easy grace that is strangely beautiful.
Judy is shivering, but she’s more fascinated than afraid. There is distance between the creatures and her, and they seem ponderous and apathetic. What she is seeing is like a parade or a dance without purpose or reason. There is no pattern to their movements, no goal or destination. They seem charged somehow, full of an energy they must constantly move to dispel.
It is only when one of the creatures, one of the Shades, drifts out onto the path that Judy’s breath catches in her throat and she has to hold back a scream. It is humanoid in shape, like a shadow in three-dimensions, but that is where the similarities end. The Shade’s feet hang a few feet above the ground, and it seems to move without any physical effort, floating aimlessly, as though controlled by some scientific or supernatural force Judy does not understand. The breeze seems to pull at its body, subtly warping its shape and pushing it gently around as though at play. The most horrifying thing, though, is the way it seems stretched somehow. The creature is tall and impossibly thin in the torso. Its arms are too long and end in hands that hang limply at its sides, hands that are little more than five long, spidery fingers that she can suddenly imagine caressing her warm skin and freezing her where she stands, making her its kin. They are not fingers for grabbing. They are for reaching, for touching and stroking, for painting flesh with its icy black intent.
As if hearing this thought, the Shade stops moving. It is as a statue. Its brethren in the trees are also still. Judy becomes aware of the darkness, of the cold, of being alone. She remembers a night many years ago; her mother screaming and thrashing in the throes of a nightmare, eleven year-old Judy waking her and holding her and listening to her babble about how they have no eyes, how they don’t see. The Shades, her mother had said, the words garbled with sleep and tears, absorb changes in light and dark. They know where you are, even in what seems like pitch darkness. Where light touches your skin, your hair, your jewellery, they feel it. Like bats, her mother had said, they are blind. Yet they see everything.
Only now does it occur to Judy that she must run. Only now, when it is already too late.
The Shade on the path turns and moves towards her, races towards her. It does not seem to accelerate at all. One moment it is still, the next it is flying up the path, travelling at a speed that is terrifying to behold. Others come from the trees at the foot of the hill, and still more from the shadows around her, where they must have been lurking all along. Judy turns and runs straight into a Shade. Its long arms embrace her, fingers linking at the back of her neck, their touch on her skin somehow liquid, like smears of thick jelly. She looks up into its face and there is nothing there. No features, no emotions, no nothing. It is blank. Judy tries to scream and what comes out of her mouth is little more than a sigh.
It is not a violent death. It is not even a painful death. The Shades surround Judy Nicholls and simply touch her, their fingers finding every inch of exposed skin, never returning to the same place twice. The cold hurts a little at first, and Judy struggles as best she can. Her attackers are weak and insubstantial, and in those first few moments, she finds she can literally tear them apart. But her hands and her arms are freezing. In moments they are numb. In less than a minute she can no longer move them. Judy’s breathing becomes laboured and her struggles weaken by degrees. She can no longer feel her legs, and when they buckle beneath her and she falls to the ground, there is no pain at all. In the silence, she hears her own heartbeat inside her head. It is slowing. Her body is entirely numb. She is no longer breathing. Death, in these moments, is inevitable, and Judy feels a kind of peace. She is drowning, and she will not break the surface again.
The cluster of Shades remain at the spot where Judy fell for perhaps three or four minutes, covering her body like a shroud. Presently, they begin to drift away. They are apathetic and aimless again; twisted, elongated forms without rhythm or destination. They seem to gravitate to the shadows, to the darkness, to the places where they are invisible. The path itself is empty. There is no body and no sign of struggle. Once again, Witches Path is undisturbed. The breeze, an errant child, resumes pulling at the elderly limbs of the trees, their creaking complaints lost beneath the scream of silence.
posted by Michael at 9:16 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home