THE SHADOW

By Neil Davies

From an original idea by Cathy Davies

      The first time Richard Hamilton realised he had a problem with his eyesight was on a cold Wednesday morning.
      The clock/radio alarm woke him and he reached blindly to the bedside cabinet and hit the 'snooze' button. Fifteen minutes later when it burst into life again he wanted to do the same. It was only by conscious effort that he kept his fingers spread over the empty pillow alongside him.
      It had been empty for two weeks now, ever since Lisa had walked out on him.
      He stroked the pillow, remembering how he would stroke her hair first thing in the morning, catching his fingers in knots caused by her restless sleeping. She was a natural blonde but her long hair never seemed to stay one colour for longer than a month. Last time he saw her it had been a deep red, shining in the strip-light of the hallway outside as she walked out without even looking back.
      He felt tears welling beneath his closed eyelids. It hadn't been that long since the last ones had dried.
      An irritatingly cheerful DJ announced that it was 7:30am and Richard realised that he really had to get up. He couldn't face losing his job as well as his girlfriend all in the same month!
      He rolled onto his back, reached out and hit the 'off' button on the clock/radio, wiped the tears from where they had run down his cheeks, opened his eyes and saw the shadow.
      At least, that's what he thought it was at first, a shadow off to his left. Nothing particularly worrying or disturbing, just a shadow, but a shadow where there shouldn't be one. There was nothing there to cast a shadow and the dim grey light that filtered through the closed curtains was hardly strong enough to throw one anyway.
      He turned his head towards it, curious.
      The shadow remained off to his left.
      He turned his head back again.
      The shadow followed.
      Only, not a shadow. Something in his eye perhaps?
      He sighed and pushed the bedclothes back with his feet. Walking across to the small dressing table the shadow walked with him, always to his left, there but vague, shapeless.
      He leaned into the mirror, pulling his left eyelid down, rolling his eyeball. There didn't seem to be anything there, nothing visible anyway.
      Perhaps it was tiredness.
      Perhaps it was the after-effects of the huge amount of alcohol he had poured down himself last night while watching some instantly forgettable romantic comedy on TV. The film had been crap. Nevertheless, he had cried through most of the first half and all of the second. If a bit of a shadow in his sight was all he had to suffer with after that then he was grateful. Preferable to the pounding head he had been expecting. The shadow and a slight fuzziness in his brain. He'd got off easy!
 
 
      The shadow stayed with him all day.
      At the office several of his co-workers had accused him of daydreaming when in fact he'd been trying to get a better look at the greyness hovering at the edge of his vision. He knew it was stupid. How could you get a better look at something that wasn't there? Something that was just a trick of the eye in the first place?
      By mid-afternoon he'd been aware that his boss was watching, which was all too easy in the open-plan building. He forced his concentration back to his ever-increasing in-tray and away from the shadow. It wouldn't do to lose his job through some strange twist of "the morning after," however curious.
      At 5:30pm he headed straight for the underground and home. The last hour his head had begun to pound with the effort of ignoring the constant intrusion of the shadow on his vision. He needed aspirin and rest.
      In the morning it would be ok. He'd never had a hangover last longer than one day.
 
 
      "Richard?"
      It was Lisa, calling him. Wanting him.
      They stood in a field, facing each other, just too far apart to reach out and touch fingers. The quiet bubbling of a nearby brook and the songs of birds high in the trees at the field's edge were the only sounds. There was no traffic, no police sirens, no voices. Nothing and no one but the two of them.
      It was idyllic.
      Even in the midst of the warmth that spread through his chest at seeing her again he knew it was a dream. What else could it be? She'd walked out!
      "Richard. I made a terrible mistake. I should never have left."
      "Lisa..." the words caught in his throat. How cruel could his own mind be? It would have been so nice to have believed this to be real at least for a while. Why this time did he have to know it was a dream? Why did the fantasy before him have to be scarred by the truth?
      He stepped towards the dream Lisa. It would mean so much to feel her arms around him again, even if it wasn't real.
      She changed before he reached her, her features fading, her colour draining away until she was nothing more than the shadow of a person. The shadow!
      He stepped back, horrified, as the edges of the shape before him blurred, curling tendrils of mist twisting away in the sunlight, until the thing was shapeless, drifting.
      It took him a moment to realise it was drifting towards him!
      He woke twisted and tangled in his bedclothes, sweat making them stick to his body. He breathed heavily, wiped more sweat from his face with his hand, and peeled the bedclothes away.
      He trembled. He couldn't calm his racing heartbeat. He was scared.
      What the hell was all that about?
      The room was dark. It was not even morning yet.
      He reached for the bedside lamp and flicked it on.
      He groaned.
      As the small light allowed him to see he noticed that the shadow was still on his left eye.
      It had darkened!
 
 
      He tried not to blink as he followed the optician's light with his eyes.
      "Well Mr Hamilton, there’s nothing there I can see."
      The optician, a small grey-haired lady dressed in a dark suit that seemed more business than medical, took the light away and he finally blinked.
      "Your eyesight is fine, better than average for your age, and I can’t see any evidence of a foreign body. Nothing that would explain the problem you describe.”
      Yet it’s there right now, thought Richard, blurring everything on that side. And I’m sure it’s getting darker!
      He said nothing out loud, afraid it would sound accusatory, as though he were calling the woman incompetent. Afraid, even more, that it would make him sound crazy!
      She seemed to take his silence as doubt in her diagnosis.
      "I'm very sorry Mr Hamilton, but there really is nothing physically there in the eye. Whatever this thing is it's not something I'm able to treat. Perhaps a doctor....."
      Richard was stung into speaking. This was getting too close to his own fears to be comfortable.
      "You think it's all in my mind? You think I'm hallucinating or something?"
      He was aware his voice was perhaps too loud. He hadn’t meant it to be. He felt he was losing control.
      "Mr Hamilton." The woman spoke calmly, smiling at him, but backing away slightly all the same.
      She thinks I’m crazy!
      “All I can say for certain is that there is nothing physical interfering with your eyesight. It may be that more investigation needs to be done.”
      He saw the face of the receptionist from the outer office peer around the corner of the examining room and then disappear just as quickly.
      Probably getting ready to phone the police in case the crazy person loses it!
      He pushed himself out of the chair and rushed out of the office, not even stopping to pay.
 
 
      He phoned in sick to the office the next morning, the third morning in a row.
      How could he work? He felt he was going blind in his left eye, the shadow creeping further across each day, darker, more impenetrable.
      He sat on the edge of his bed, forearms on the top of his thighs, head down, sobbing.
      If only Lisa were here. She would know what to do. She would take control.
      Christ he missed her!
      He curled up naked on the unmade bed and closed his eyes, crying himself to sleep.
 
 
      This time there was no field, no sunlight, no quiet bubbling brook.
      This time there was the darkest of dark alleys and a thick, greasy fog.
      Shadows moved ahead of him, around him, but with a wonderful wave of relief he realised there was no shadow on his eye. To be able to look around without that blackness always there, to feel that he wasn't, after all, going blind…
      As before he realised he was in a dream, but it felt no less real for that, and despite the darkness, the threat of the dream, he found he did not want it to end. Just to be able to see clearly again, even if it couldn’t last.
      There was one thing missing. One person.
      She was there.
      Lisa! Standing in the alley just ahead of him, vague but unmistakable in the fog.
      She was wearing some kind of long dress and what he could only describe as a ‘bonnet’ on her head. The whole look was decidedly Victorian. The whole dream was Victorian.
      As he drew closer to her, his beautiful Lisa, he lifted his hand to touch her gently on the shoulder, to feel her softness, her warmth, once again.
      There was no hand! Only a black, barely definable shape leaving trails of oily dripping darkness as it moved. It was his. It moved under his control. But only by the furthest leap of the imagination could anyone call it a hand!
      He opened his mouth to scream but no sound came out. Instead he vomited thick black bile into the air that burned his throat, blistered his mouth. He looked down at his body. Saw only darkness.
      Lisa began to turn towards him, finally aware of his presence, and suddenly his fear was gone.... replaced by a foul tasting surge of anger and hatred.
      How could she leave him? How could the bitch just walk out like that! No one else would have her. No one else could have her!
      The black shapes he still thought of as his arms rose up, long blades sliding from them, not so much held as grown.
      As Lisa turned he plunged the blades into her eyes.
 
      He woke.
      He screamed!
      He checked his hands, his body, shaking with fear and panic.
      Fingers. Thumbs. Skin. He was normal, himself again.
      The shadow was back in his eye.
 
 
      "Richard, you are clinically depressed."
      Doctor Charles tapped on his computer keyboard as he spoke, glancing up at Richard who sat, head down, in the consulting room's other chair.
      "I think the stress of work, of a relationship breaking down, has just proved too much for you over these last few weeks. I'm signing you off work for a month and giving you a course of anti-depressants. Nothing too strong to start with, but we'll see how things go on those."
      The dot-matrix printer in the corner whirred and clattered as it printed out the prescription form.
      "This 'shadow' you see in your eye is just a manifestation of that stress, of the chemical imbalance in your mind. As we treat your depression and relieve the stress around you I'm sure you'll see an improvement in that. In time it will disappear altogether."
      He handed the prescription over and rose to escort Richard to the door.
      "Come back and see me in a month. In the meantime, think about getting away somewhere, away from your flat. Away from the area even.”
      The doctor smiled at him.
      “Take a vacation."
 
 
      It had taken most of his savings but as Richard stood at the hotel room window and looked out over the small town of Benodet in Brittany, past the old church, along towards the beach, he knew it had been worth it.
      Already he felt better and he had only just unpacked!
      The shadow was still there but somehow it seemed less threatening, less frightening than when he was sitting in his flat back home in London. France was in the middle of a heat wave, people were walking around in shirtsleeves and sunglasses and the cafes and shops along the front bustled with life. He couldn't have timed it better if he'd planned it months in advance. For a last minute booking it was amazing.
      Perhaps things really would start to improve now.
 
 
      On the third day of his vacation, while he bought an ice-cream from the cafe on the corner and watched fellow tourists lining up to board the boat for a river cruise, he suddenly realised that the shadow had faded back to a faint, vague grey.
      It was now no darker than that first morning, perhaps even lighter.
      He grinned a "merci" at the cafe owner, not even worrying how bad his French accent was. He smiled as he crossed the busy road, dodging teenagers on scooters, and sat on the wall facing the beach. The doctor had been right. He was going to be ok.
 
 
      Her name was Sally and she was from Devon.
      They had started a conversation for the simple reason that they were both sitting alone in the cafe and they were both obviously English. They took the conversation out of the cafe and round the shops, up to the local market, down to the beach, and eventually for an evening meal at a restaurant overlooking the quayside.
      She had long black hair. She had a face that was pretty rather than beautiful, but with a smile that sparkled and shone. She had a body to die for!
      When he woke in his hotel room after their first night together, Sally still sleeping peacefully at his side, the shadow in his eye had gone.
 
 
      Saying goodbye to Sally had been hard, but the two weeks of his vacation had finally finished.
      They promised to keep in touch, exchanged phone numbers, addresses. He had every intention of keeping that promise when she finally reached her home a week after him.
      He thought of little else but Sally on the flight home. Lisa was an ever fading memory, sometimes a happy one, sometimes a painful one, but receding further and further each time. He had all but forgotten about the shadow in his eye. That was part of the madness, the depression that had taken hold after Lisa had left.
      He was happy.
 
 
      The second morning back in his flat he woke to the noise of traffic outside, of distant police sirens, of people.
      He opened his eyes.
      A cold fist of fear clenched in his chest. His stomach churned. He shook. He felt a need to urinate.
      He screamed.
      The shadow was back, bigger, darker, blacker than before.
      He was completely blind in his left eye!
      "NO!" he cried out, pushing himself out of bed, stumbling against the bedside cabinet. The lamp crashed to the floor, the bulb popping.
      He staggered towards the mirror, the sight in his right eye misty, distorted. He could see himself only as a blurred shape in the darkness of the room.
      His knee hit the dressing table and he stepped backwards onto a shoe he had carelessly thrown to the floor the night before. He fell, his back hitting the floor hard, his head jarring, his breath forced out of him as hard as if he had been punched in the stomach.
      He rolled, groaning, gasping.
      The darkness in his left eye moved, swirled, writhed.
      He no longer felt blind but rather that something was covering his eye, preventing him from seeing.
      The something took on the consistency of oil, dripping and oozing, reminding him of his hand in his dream, his nightmare.
      He raised a hand to his eye and tried to scream but was still struggling to find enough air.
      He could feel it, welling up around his eyeball, oozing out of the socket through his fingers. It felt as if it was trying to suck his eye out of his head.
      Then it was gone.
      His fingers were dry. The only thing he felt on his face was his hand. Cautiously he withdrew it, opened his eyes, looked into the darkness of the room and saw it!
      A figure, constantly shifting its shape, liquid in its movement, solid as it stood before him. As tall as a man. As broad as a man. Vaguely following the shape of a man. But not a man.
      The shadow!
      Richard could not move as he watched the blades slip from the ends of its arms. He could only watch open-mouthed as the thing moved towards him, each step splashing as though through puddles.
      He couldn’t even scream as the blades buried themselves deep into his eyes.

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Neil Davies is in his mid-forties and lives in the North West of England with his wife and two children. After many years of writing stories for his own amusement, with an occasional half-hearted and unsuccessful attempt at being published, he finally decided, in 2004, to start taking it more seriously. He now writes whenever he gets the chance, in-between his day job and his family, and is trying hard to be noticed. He has several stories currently under consideration by various magazines and/or websites and he hopes for the best....Check out his web site at http://www.nwdavies.co.uk

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