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Days passed. Weeks, maybe months. For ages I searched for any kind of surface that I could mark, a way to scratch proverbial notches into the wood, to count out the units of time that comprised my imprisonment. It was solitary confinement, in essence, with a set of silent, faceless companions. I didn’t know if a truly solitary sentence would have been worse, compared to being surrounded by people who weren’t truly people, but just mindless extensions of myself. Really, just different parts of my shadow.
As for mundane concerns, other things that marked the regular passage of human time – sleep, hunger, bathroom breaks – none of that truly mattered. It felt like I could sleep forever if I wanted, but I never needed to. If a cup of Thai tea appeared before me in the Dark Room, I would have gladly sucked it down. But I didn’t feel thirst. For all intents and purposes, I was exactly as Hecate had described. I was something in between: not quite human, yet not quite divine, either. A godling.
But I could feel sorrow, and loneliness. By God could I feel the crushing loneliness.
On more than one occasion I found myself crying out in pained frustration. And a few times I caught myself actually weeping, hardly caring to feel embarrassed anymore. Who was there to judge me? Certainly not my shadows.
But one of them approached me, once, holding out its arm, clutching a little rectangle of something soft between its wispy fingers. My cells had remembered what tissue paper was, and this was my shade behaving the way I would as a friend, in someone else’s time of need. I took the black square of shadow, feeling it disintegrate into nothing between my fingers, then mimed wiping under my eye with it. My shade, still faceless and featureless, nodded in silent approval. I couldn’t begin to explain how I knew, but it was smiling.
Over time, I saw them making an odd kind of progress, the five of them interacting in unusual ways that mimicked human behavior. At first in made me angry, thinking of this term within the Dark as some kind of punishment, where I was surrounded by remnants of my personality that mocked the parts of me that still believed I was human. But more and more, I could see that they were evolving in ways. Learning.
Without fail, the very moment I expressed any kind of melancholy or loneliness, the shades would wander towards me, giving me the eerie, voiceless comfort of their companionship. I couldn’t count the number of times I’d curled myself up into a shuddering ball on the ground, my face pressed to my knees, waiting for the embrace of madness.
Yet I would open my eyes to find that the shades had gathered around me, staring at me through sightless faces. It was shocking, the first few times, terrifying enough that I felt impelled to curse at them. But there was something so very primal about the way they reacted to things, almost animalistic. They were like dogs, in that sense, despite my acknowledgment that it wasn’t very healthy to see fragments of myself as pets.
And yet as pets they presented themselves, or at least as playthings, shallow companions. Don’t ask me how I managed, but I taught one of them to play rock, paper, scissors. The whoop of delight that rocketed out of my mouth that day was the first time I’d laughed in ages. I realized that it was also the first time I’d used my mouth to do anything other than moan, or scream in frustration into the endless void.
It was like a domino effect, and one after the other, the remaining shades learned to play the game themselves. Once I woke up to find the five of them playing freeze tag. It gave me the chills. Was someone lurking in the shadows, giving them instructions on how to play this childhood game or that? But then I finally understood. The shades were going through the motions of who and what I was as I developed as a person myself. I used to play tag, sometimes, when I was a kid growing up in Valero, raised under the love and care of Norman and Diana Graves.
It made me wonder how far I could take the shades, what lengths I could go to truly turn them into companions, and not just bodies to fill the spaces of the Dark Room. I bit my nails ragged, just considering the possibilities. Would they ever be able to talk, to communicate beyond gestures and body language? Would they some day learn to use magic on their own?
But baby steps. As Herald once told me, a step at a time. And one of those most important steps, I found, was discovering one of those exact doors that Hecate had described. It was as I saw it in the distant past, a swirling white portal suspended in space. I don’t know how my shadows and I eventually found it, but I liked to think that my strengthening bond with them was granting me a better sense of perception. And that thing about the tissue paper, too – that was one shade trying to be sympathetic, yet proving that it was capable of creating solid matter out of raw darkness. It was something worth looking into much more closely.
But first, the portal. I recognized it as one of several that Herald and I had shut down ourselves, back when I had to sacrifice the lingering specter of my own mother to seal away the Dark Room. Instinctively I understood that this was one of the gates I needed to guard, to ensure, as Hecate said, that the Old Ones could never return to our world again. It was the link between them and the earth.
I reached for the spinning portal, unsure of what I was doing, but very aware of the skeins of shadow emanating from the palm of my hand, from the tips of my fingers. I held my breath as my shades – my brothers, as I was starting to think of them – raised their hands as well. More ribbons of shadow emerged from their bodies, joining with those that I released into the portal.
The gateway absorbed the strings of darkness as it spun, the shadows turning its gleaming ivory white – the color of the Eldest – into a consuming black. Still it whirled, but slower, and slower still, until the spinning stopped entirely, as if the spiritual concrete my shadows and I had poured into it had started to set.
That was it, then. We had to find these doors, and seal them all, and guard them from the scourge of the Old Ones. And as the thought came to me, something like satisfaction flared in my chest. Responsibility. I was discovering my sense of purpose in the Dark Room, just as Hecate said. I was understanding the ins and outs of my new home – my domicile.
I turned to leave, puzzled and stopping when I realized that only four of my shadows were following. The fifth stood by the gateway, waving his hand towards the rest of us, as if telling us to leave him there. “Go,” the gesture seemed to say. “I’ll be fine.” I don’t know what came over me just then. I saluted my shadow, and laughed when it mirrored the gesture, giving me a snappy salute in return.
“We’ll visit you,” I told it. “We’ll come by and keep you company.”
My shadow nodded. Again, I couldn’t see its face, but I knew it was smiling. The shades were the friends that Hecate had been hinting at from the beginning.
I left with the others, heading to what I’d come to think of as the Dark Room’s nexus, a central hub to the dimension, despite the utter lack of directions, milestones, and features to mark things like left, and right, and center. But as we approached, I faltered mid-step, sensing that something was – well, it was off. Changed. Different.
For one thing, there was the tantalizing smell of hamburgers. Not just any burgers, either, but the familiar, mouthwatering scent of a double cheeseburger from the Happy Cow, along with the comforting fried aroma of both french fries and onion rings. I turned in place, scanning my surroundings for signs of physical change, but there was nothing. And despite my vessel no longer needing food to survive, the smells triggered something in me. I wiped at my mouth with the back of my hand, then again with the sleeve of my tattered jacket, careful to dab away a streak of drool.
Where was that smell coming from? I scratched the back of my head, marveling at the odor, then further confused by the sudden influx of sound. Utter silence had been my unhappy companion for so long that anything other than the sound of my own voice was welcome, almost musical. It all sounded like gibberish at first, until the noises and clicks assembled themselves into familiar arrangements of words, then phrases, then sentences. I frowned as I strained to understand them. My mouth fell open when I recognized who was speaking.
I ran towards the voice, noticing for the first time in forever that my shadows weren’t following me. They watched as I ran helter-skelter towards the sounds and smells of life, of humanity, and as I sprinted madly through the infinite nothing of the Dark Room, I thought I saw a pinpoint of light: an exit.
I ran harder, harder than I ever had in my various lives, in the spaces of time between my first and my second birth, my first and second death. Because more than anything, more than godhood, I knew that my body and my heart longed to be reunited with the best thing – the best person – that had ever happened to me.
The white speck of light ahead of me grew and grew, until it was the size of a window, then a door. Warm, fresh tears blurred my vision as I leapt from the Dark Room into the blistering heat of reality, shadowstepping for the first time in an eternity.
I fell heavily to the ground, unsure of where I was leaping or e
ven aiming, only knowing that I was dying to cross over from the black dimension I called home to the familiarity of earth. My fingers dug into the soft fuzz of an apartment’s carpet. I blinked rapidly to work the glare out of my eyes, coming face to face with the mortal who had summoned me.
The blinking came harder and faster as I fought away a steady trickle of tears. I beamed at the sight of the summoning circle he’d drawn with the geometric perfection of his magic, at the pile of greasy fast food he’d placed in its center as an offering, at the sight of the knife he’d used to draw a single speck of his blood.
The man I loved stared at me with huge, terrified eyes, dropped his knife, then sucked in air like he’d only just remembered how to breathe.
“I thought you’d never come.”
