Shadow’s Survival (part 1)

It was one with the shadows. It was all shadows, and yet it was none. I moved like a liquid pouring along the ground as if the long, lithe legs were for decoration and not for actual walking. Its long, thin, shadow-like tail whipped back through the air, fading into the air without any actual end. It raised its head, staring at the moon. It was hungry. Very hungry; it had not eaten more than trifles in a long time. It sniffed, once, twice, then again. Something like a smile split its fangs before it slithered on towards its new goal. It had found a mind like none other, and soon it would feed.

• • • • •

I stepped lightly down the stairs with a little bounce as I went. I was pretty excited, but I didn’t want to show it. I could sense Eric’s presence below me, but refrained from reaching out to him telepathically, not wanting him to get cross at me. He wouldn’t say it, but he was afraid of my telepathy, and it was all my fault.

I neared the bottom of the stairs that led to the nine grid, trying to whistle but failing. The nine grid was Eric’s and my name for the nine identical rooms (or nearly identical) arranged in a three-by-three grid in the northern corner of the house. They each had four doors, even though the rooms in the corners of this three-by-three grid had two useless doors that opened up into the wall like an inch-deep closet, and two that led to other rooms. They were weird and easy to get lost in; it was like they moved when you weren’t looking.

Eric let out a shout when I was about to open the door. I broke my no telepathy rule and frantically called out in my mind to him.

“Eric, are you okay!?” I thought of him.

He picked it up and reluctantly responded in the same way, “I am in room six the one that leads to the stairs.” we had taken to giving each room a number it was easier to talk about them that way, starting from the northernmost corner of the grid with one we counted along the rows assigning each a number so six was the farthest right one in the middle row. Eric continued, “Try opening the door to room six.”

I pulled on the handle, but the door wouldn’t open. I noticed sometimes the doors in these rooms would randomly not open for the world one moment. Then, they would pop free the next. After the door released, I opened it and proceeded to open the next door behind it. The rooms in the grid had two doors for some reason. Just another thing about this house that made no sense.

My father had bought it from some rich guy who’d had it passed to him from a long line of ancestors; he sold it amazingly cheap, even for a fixer-upper. I mean, it was a mansion! I guess maybe he didn’t want to have to fix it, but that seems like a silly reason. Either way, he was desperate to get rid of it, so it came almost completely furnished at a low price. Eric had always thought the reason was ghosts, because I pretended to be one when he’d first come to stay with us, by talking to him telepathically. Until, that is, he met me, and now we didn’t know why the man had practically given it to my father.

I thought fondly of the brief time when we used to communicate freely with telepathy (by far my favorite means of communication). But I had ruined those good days.

I glanced around the room, calling out loud, “Eric?”

He gave a muffled answer from room five, the center square on this grid. I opened the door and went in; he was hanging from a series of bungee cords to the ceiling. He grinned, “It moves!”

I stared up at him, “Eric,” I said, “I would ask what you are doing, but I’m not even sure you know.”

Eric, my cousin, was four years older than I, but sometimes with the crazy stuff he did, it seemed like I was the sixteen-year-old and he was twelve. Even with our age difference, we’d always gotten along well. My father had not let us meet when Eric came to stay with us (while his parents did an archeological dig in Saudi Arabia) because he thought Eric would find out I was a telepath. So instead, I had to stay up in the small tower in my giant room in the southern end of the house. My father had always told Eric that I just didn’t like strangers until Eric found out about me himself. We usually just talked telepathically, but we saw each other sometimes when my father went out, and now that he had plans to be gone almost all day, every day this week, to see about selling some new invention of his. Eric and I were going to spend the time exploring, and I was finally going to see the house and grounds I had been living on.

“No,” Eric said, trying to figure out how to get down. I was more interested in how in the world he got up there in the first place. “The room moved!”

“What do you mean, the room moves?”

“I hung this whole thing up in room six. I was even in room six when you started to come down the stairs, then while you were trying to get the door open (hmm… I wonder if that is a coincidence or if they do that to stop people from figuring out), anyways the important thing is that this room slid backwards to become the center square!”

I folded my arms. “Seriously?”

He nodded, “That explains so much about these rooms, why they have four doors, even the ones that lead to nowhere! Why every doorway have two doors! Why you sometimes can’t get the doors open! And I was in the sixth square and now I’m in the fifth.”

“How sure are you that you were in the sixth? I sometimes get so turned around in here that I open one of the doors leading to the blank wall, thinking it should be a staircase.”

“Nah,” he said, trying to get himself down, “I even felt myself move!”

I was going to say something more when the doorbell rang. We had a very loud doorbell, yet I heard it faintly in the distance, which should give you an idea of how big this place was. Eric heard it too and struggled to free himself some more.

“Hold that thought,” I said and jogged out through the eighth grid room down two halls through a large empty room sort of like a gymnasium (my father said it was some kind of ball room but these days the floor was missing) through two more smaller rooms with a piano and two stools between them, and down into a large reception hall with two staircases leading to the uper floor in a curve. The same upper floor as the one that the sixth square led to.

Panting a bit from my run, I paused to breathe, only to be nearly struck with another ring from the doorbell. My father, something of an inventor, redid our doorbell to be heard across the house; now, standing too near to it could be dangerous, at least it felt that way.

I walked towards the front door, using my mind to feel ahead and see if I knew who it was. I felt nothing; no one was there. Puzzled, I turned around to leave. I wanted to leave before the short-circuited doorbell went off again. A knock sounded. I stopped dead in my tracks. Someone had just knocked on the door: someone my telepathy said wasn’t there.

I opened the door cautiously, thinking briefly about projecting my thoughts forward to create an illusion of someone intimidating, but threw that idea out quickly. I had given up illusions since the incident.

A man stood on the porch. His face was bland. His hair was bland. His clothes were bland, and his attitude was one of emptiness. Even as I opened the door, he didn’t notice and pushed the doorbell again. I covered my ears against the ringing and then cleared my throat. His brain gave off no pulse nor thought. It appeared he literally had nothing in his head. I’d never met someone this blank. Even small babies or people in comas had some activity, just no specific English thoughts. He had no activity at all.

I cleared my throat again. The man finally glanced at me, reluctantly tearing his eyes from his shoes. We stared at each other for a minute or two.

“Yes?” I asked.

“Really?” He said, his face not showing any change, “Okay.”

“What?”

“You agreed.”

“To what?”

“To allow me to begin the work.”

I blinked several times. “Can we please start from the beginning?”

He nodded, face still bland, and looked at his shoes as he waited. I cleared my throat, “umm… What do you want?”

He stared at me, “Want?”

I was starting to understand why his brain was blank. “Why are you here?”

“Here?”

“Do you need something?”

“For you to say yes.”

“To what?”

He blinked and shrugged.

“You want me to say yes for no reason.”

“You said that you wanted to restart, and we started with you saying yes.”

“Yes?”

“Really? Okay.”

I pinched the bridge of my nose. “What do you want my permission to begin?”

“I need your permission because permission is needed when you need permission. Because it is impermissible not to attain permission to begin what is…”

“Skip to the end, please!” I said.

He blinked a bit and stared at his boots. I was starting to wish I had just let him finish. He looked up, “Well?”

“What! You didn’t ask me a question!”

“You said to skip to the end.”

“I meant skip to the question part.”

He blinked a bit, then finally looked at his boots again. “Will you allow us to begin the work on your plumbing?”

From what I knew of him so far, I was disinclined to let him anywhere near my plumbing. Instead, I went to close the door, “Sorry, I’m not the one to be asking, can you wait a moment out here?”

He nodded glumly, as if he were being sent to time out, and I shut the door. Breathing heavily, I quickly and silently locked it (just to be safe) and ran to find Eric. I bumped into him on the way to the front door. He had come to see who it was.

“Oh,” he added after I told him about the man, “in hindsight, you probably should stay out of sight of strangers; we wouldn’t really want your father knowing that I know about your telepathy or that we met.”

I frowned and folded my arms. “You know you said you would convince my father to let me come out and interact with you or the neighbors, but you haven’t even started.”

He winced, “I’m looking for the right moment to bring it up.”

He went to the door and talked to the man before returning to find me kicking my heels against a chair and sitting on the table, “You said we’d explore the house! Let’s go!”

Eric nodded absent-mindedly, “That guy was weird.”

“What did ya expect?” I said, flopping backwards and putting my head upside down on the other side of the table. “He had no thoughts. Anywho, what did you tell him?”

“He had no thoughts?”

“None.”

Eric folded his arms, and I looked up at him, sighing when I realized I was in for one of his reprimands.

“You read his mind?”

“Yes, Eric! I’m a telepath! That is what I do!”

Eric flinched slightly at the word telepath, which only made me feel more guilty about what I had done to him before. He shook his head, “So? That doesn’t give you the right to invade others’ privacy!”

I rolled my eyes, sliding off the tabletop to stand in front of him. He was a lot taller, but I tried not to let him gain the upper hand just because of that. “It isn’t like I can even pick up on thoughts unless they want me to: I just sense activity.”

I could tell he didn’t believe me as he turned and walked away. And why would he? Not after I had betrayed his trust like that.

It had been a prank, a joke on my part, proving how nasty and childish a person I was. I had created an illusion in his mind when I entered the room. He’d just told me nothing scared him, so I felt around his mind and found his greatest fear. I created an illusion of it standing in front of him, manipulating the sensory areas of his mind to make him think he saw it.

The whole room seemed to fall apart as I had done so. I watched as Eric’s parents stood there in front of him, saying something I wasn’t sure what, I watched as men with guns grabbed them and took them away, I watched as some kind of storm raged all around him. Then there was a flash of pictures as one scene or another surrounded him. His parents were leaving on a boat of some sort, then men with more weapons, some coffins. The illusion just kept building on itself. I tried to stop it and finally did so. He knelt on the floor, gasping. He looked up at me, anger and hurt on his face. Since then, he’d never talked to me telepathically except when absolutely necessary and never instigated a conversation. And he’d never trusted me.

I sighed, getting up, “So what did you say to that weirdo?”

Eric paused at the door, “If he were a real contractor, he would have just told us he was beginning the work, not asked for our permission, at least in my experience. I told him he could begin if he contacted whoever called him in, and they said he could. The only person who could have called him in would have been your father, so if he calls your father and he agrees, the plumber will begin the work. At least I hope that is how it works.”

I shrugged, “Are we… going to explore the house?”

He shook his head, “Actually, I should start on dinner. Maybe we can start tomorrow.”

I looked at the clock, “Well, it better be a good dinner if you start it at three O’clock.”

He shrugged. I wasn’t sure what that meant, but I headed off to explore my home alone. I suspected his hesitance had more to do with our argument than his time-consuming culinary dishes.

I strolled confidently through a maze of rooms barely small enough not to get lost. Eventually, a few hours later, as I passed the nine grid rooms, Eric’s theory came back to my mind. I opened the paired doors and went into the eighth room. I opened the next two doors to the middle square, but it wouldn’t open. I yanked and tugged, but nothing budged. Then the handle engaged and swung open, I opened the second door and stepped in. Eric’s harness thingy was missing, but I didn’t notice until I opened the next door and found the contraption hanging from square six. My eyes widened. I checked all four doors to make sure I was in room five, and I was. Heart racing, I went to find Eric to tell him I had seen the rooms move. When I exited the grid, though, something seemed off. The air crackled slightly to my telepathic senses.

I reached out tentatively through the house, calling out mentally, “Eric? Are you there?”

A soft buzzing drew me to the window, and something dark moved into the shadows. Night fell quickly and early here. It was only five o’clock, and the sun had mostly set. Even so, I could detect it. Black on black as it slithered like liquid forward, something dangerous, something hungry.

“Maria…” It whispered.