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Shadow
A Guest Quarters story
by
Brendan Detzner
I
 Shadow's head was made of plaster; it had three sides, three identical faces painted in three different colors. It was propped up into the air by a long length of black tubing, Shadow's neck, which led down to a large pile of gravel, Shadow's body, and continued through it, emerging from its side and snaking outward. The end of the tubing was covered with a strip of duct tape, and poking through the center of the tape was a pair of spindly, daddy-long legs fingers.
Those fingers were hovering in between the knight and the rook.
"I don't think that's check, Andrew. I think that's checkmate." Her voice appeared in Andrew's left ear and did not seem to be coming from any particular direction; it was as though he was wearing a pair of headphones, and the right speaker was broken. Andrew examined the board. She was right. He'd made a checkmate without even realizing it. She had thrown the game- he never beat her unless she let him. She probably wanted to talk about something. "Good game," Andrew said. Shadow's head made a single clockwise rotation, and the space around her eyes was momentarily shrouded by darkness. The chess pieces faded, losing their color and then their shape, and finally vanishing as they sunk down into the ground. Andrew checked his watch. It was five o'clock. Shadow knew he'd have to go home in a few minutes. "Did you have fun at Jeremy's house yesterday?" she asked. "For a little while," Andrew said. "But not really." It was difficult for Andrew to admit to this - he didn't like to speak badly of people. But he couldn't lie either. "Did something happen?" "Well... There were three other kids there. For a while we all just hung around playing video games. There were only three controllers, we passed them around. We did that for a really long time, then Jeremy got bored, and we all left and went outside." Andrew had been the last to stand up; the only one didn't know exactly what was happening. "We just started walking. I felt funny asking where we were going, but after a little while I did ask anyway. Then they all started laughing. They said we were going to go jump somebody. They said his name, but it wasn't anybody I'd ever heard of. I asked why they..." He noticed that Shadow's fingers were shivering. Their vibration filled the chamber with a dull moan. This was the sound they made when Shadow was confused, or deep in thought. Andrew tried to figure out what could be confusing her. "Jumped... It means that they were going to surprise him and beat him up. Hurt him." "Why did they want to hurt him?" "I don't know. They wouldn't tell me. They started making fun of me when I asked, so I left." "Why?" "You shouldn't hurt people. I don't want to be friends with someone who hurts people." The noise went away, and Andrew knew it was time to go home. "Thank you for coming. Have a good night and see you tomorrow, Andrew." Shadow's head spun around, counter-clockwise this time, and her eyes were again obscured. Andrew felt a rush of fresh air pour in from behind him. When he turned around, a portion of the wall had disappeared. He could see the park outside, fully in autumn, giant red trees and an overcast sky. "See you tomorrow, Shadow." The opening disappeared as he passed through it. II He'd arrived in Wisconsin two months ago - his parents dropped him off at his grandmother's, assured him that everything would be sorted out by the end of the summer, told him that they loved him, and left. Right away, he asked his grandmother if he could go for a walk. She suggested the library and the park. The park was farthest away from the house, so that was where he went. He went to the gazebo as soon as he saw it and ran up the stairs, pounding on the wood, feeling the blood rush up through his knees. He'd been crammed in the back of a car all morning driving up here, listening to public radio and answering his parents' questions. He was ready to burst out, to tear down walls and break windows, his heart pounding and his lungs heaving, and he jumped up hard, and he waited for the for the soles of his feet to smack against the platform. He fell. He landed hard on a thick concrete slab. He looked up, saw the sunlight peaking in through the cracks in the floorboards, looked down again, and immediately started coughing. The air was so dirty he could hardly breath, could hardly see this thing in front of him. A scarecrow, or a machine. It did not occur him that it might be alive. It moved. Its head started spinning, and the dust was pushed to the ground by an unseen force. "Hello?" He wished that it weren't so dark. The moment that the thought crossed his mind, the air in the room was suddenly filled with the smell of bleach, in and out in less then a second, leaving nothing behind. Light appeared from nowhere; he could see everything inside the chamber as though it were open daylight. He took another look at the monster. "Did you do that?" He got no answer - its head had stopped spinning, and it was as still now as it had been before. "I need to leave here. My grandma is going to be worried. Can you make a way out for me?" The wall directly to Andrew's left vanished, revealing a cross section of the dirt beneath the park. There was a strip of sky at the top just big enough for him to crawl through. "Thank you," Andrew said. As he reached up, he saw the thing's neck bend, suddenly and sharply, like a dandelion stem in a vase. He didn't know what that meant, but felt obliged to say something. "I'd like to come back. I just moved here and I don't know anybody except my grandmother." The creature's neck straightened out. Andrew came back the next day, and the day after that. He talked to it; uncertain of what to call it, he used the name and gender of his dog back home, which had died not too long ago. Soon, Shadow started talking back. He visited her almost every day now, all the school days and on weekends too when nothing else was going on.
Andrew ran home. He had three blocks to cover before dinnertime, and he didn't want to be late. III He stopped running and stood still for a moment, letting his heart slow down. He didn't want his grandmother to see him gasping for breath; she got worried easily.
There was an unfamiliar car in the driveway. The hubcaps looked nice - they were polished brand new, shining like four full moons- but the rest of the machine was a wreck, a thick coat of sheer black paint filling in a hundred dents and scratches. The windshield had a bullet hole going through the center of it.
He climbed up the front steps. The doorknob jumped away from him like a scared animal as he reached for it.
"You must be Andrew."
The man in the doorway had pale blond hair that identified him as a member of Andrew's family, but Andrew had never seen him before. His clothes matched his car - black jeans, black T-shirt. His eyes were small, submerged in their sockets, the tips of icebergs. There was a tiny gold ball fastened to his right earlobe.
"Your grandmother's in the kitchen. Mom! Andrew's here! Think it's time for dinner!"
Andrew heard his grandmother's voice.
"I'm not quite ready yet. Andrew, did you introduce yourself to your Uncle Paul?"
Paul interrupted him before he could speak.
"You bet, Grandma."
"Well." That was all she said; she said it quietly.
Paul crouched down, so that his face was level with Andrew's.
"It looks like your grandmother isn't quite ready. How about we wait in the living room for a few minutes until she's ready to go?"
They waited in the living room for a few minutes. Paul sat in a chair and read the front page of the newspaper.
"Time to eat!" Andrew's grandmother spoke more loudly then she had before, but less naturally. Her voice was high and shrill, and she seemed to be short of breath.
Paul's arms snapped down like a mousetrap.
"Don't have to tell me twice." He smiled at Andrew without showing his teeth, and got up.
There was only one way into the kitchen- Andrew had no choice but to follow him.
The table was very neatly set. Andrew could imagine his grandmother with a ruler, checking the distance between the plates and the silverware. She reached into the middle of the table with a large plastic serving spoon, dug into the casserole she'd made, and put a generous portion onto each of their three plates. Paul dug in enthusiastically. Andrew hesitated, working up his courage. Just as he was about to take his first bite, he felt something wrap around his ankle, over his sock and then suddenly under it. Its texture changed as it moved up his leg- a soaked washcloth one moment, a piece of metal the next. Andrew shoved himself away, striking the countertop and scraping the bottom of the chair's legs against the kitchen floor. His grandmother flinched at the sound.
There was nothing under the table. Paul ate, talking in between bites.
"I'm sorry your folks aren't getting along." IV "He was like that the whole time," Andrew said. "He would talk about my parents, or other parts of the family. He asked me questions and then didn't let me answer, he just kept talking."
Shadow listened. They were well past the opening of their game, right at the point where Andrew felt Shadow might start overtaking him, when she'd asked if anything unusual had happened to him the previous day. It was the first time she had ever interrupted a game in progress.
"Describe him to me." Andrew described him.
Her neck swayed.
"Shadow, do you know him?"
Her arm moved towards the board. She advanced her bishop to the right three spaces.
"Shadow?"
Her neck was so far bent over it looked ready to snap. She moved her hand towards the chessboard again, as though she were about to make a move, then stopped. Her fingers hummed at a very low pitch, just for a moment, and her head spun around, once, clockwise. Andrew felt something circle his calf, sandpaper and dry ink.
"Is that what it felt like in the kitchen?" Andrew nodded his head yes. "Did your Uncle Paul say he was going to be leaving with you and your grandmother?" Andrew shook his head no.
Humming again. "You should stay away from him, as much as you possibly can." Still humming. "And you shouldn't come back here. It would probably be safer if you left right now."
The humming stopped. Andrew looked down, away from Shadow.
"We're not even done with the game yet."
"Yes we are." He took another look at the board. The pieces had been rearranged. He now had Shadow in checkmate.
Andrew looked Shadow in the eye and stood up, shaking with anger.
"You changed the board. You cheated."
"You won, Andrew. You should leave now." Andrew looked over his shoulder. The wall had disappeared.
"I'm coming back tomorrow."
"You shouldn't. It isn't safe. You won't be very hard for him to kill."
He hesitated, but only for a moment.
"I'll see you then."
"Why are you going to come visit me when I've told you it isn't safe?"
"Because we're friends, Shadow." He crawled out through the opening.
It was a beautiful day, a taunting flashback to spring. Andrew closed his eyes. He wondered if it was right or wise to wait, if he should be running home already. One moment, he decided. One breath. Just as his lungs swelled to their fullest capacity, an adult hand closed around his shoulder.
"Your Grandma's decided to spare us an evening of her shitty cooking," said Uncle Paul. "So how about we get ourselves a pizza?" V Andrew and his uncle were sitting at a table in the space between the front door and the counter, a table so small and delicate that Andrew suspected that it was only meant to support the elbows of waiting customers. The pizzeria wasn't really a restaurant, just a take-out place; other customers had come in, picked up their food and left, but they were the only ones who'd just stayed where they were. Paul had his back against the wall. There was a black briefcase on the table next to his plate. His food was caught in its shadow. "What's the problem, you don't like pineapples?"
Andrew didn't like pineapples, but he knew that this was the only dinner he was likely to get. He took one small bite at a time, trying to confine the food to the back of his mouth where he wouldn't taste it as much.
The girl standing at the counter was old, probably old enough to be in high school. She was wearing a light gray T-shirt and a pair of jeans, and had blonde hair with brown roots showing. She'd been giving them black looks ever since it became clear they weren't leaving the waiting area.
Uncle Paul pulled another slice of pizza from the pie in the middle of the table. Then, very quickly, he put the briefcase down on the ground and pressed a button. The briefcase fell open - there was nothing inside it except for an immaculate black felt lining.
"Watch." Andrew felt that same feeling brush across his knee for just a second, a skinny finger bypassing his clothes, pencil lead then chicken feathers then dirty glass. He looked over at the girl. Nothing happened at first. She brushed her hair off of her face, patted her shoulder. She patted her shoulder again. Then, suddenly, her face tightened. Her eyes bulged out and her teeth clenched. She clawed at her neck, desperately, but her fingernails were unable to gain any purchase against her skin. After a minute of struggle, her hands flew towards the floor, as though they had just been released. She turned around and ran as fast as she could, plowing through the kitchen doors, leaving them swinging. "Damn," said Uncle Paul. "I was hoping she'd scream." He whistled, waited a moment, and closed the briefcase. "Easy trick," Paul said. "Nothing like..."
A squat, middle aged fat man wearing a baseball cap stepped through the door and looked around. He walked up to the counter.
Uncle Paul closed his mouth. His eyes narrowed.
"I don't think anybody's manning the register right now, friend."
The man looked Uncle Paul over with some suspicion, straightened up, and shrugged. "Sign says the place is open. She ain't here right now; I guess I'll have to wait." He turned towards the cash register and settled into place.
"I'm pretty sure you're wasting your time," Uncle Paul said, but the fat man stayed put.
Paul fingered the clasp on the briefcase.
"Uncle Paul," Andrew interrupted. "Maybe we should leave now and eat while we walk."
He relaxed as his attention moved from the fat man down to Andrew. A smile crept onto his face.
"You got a point." VI "You got the right idea." They were walking away from the restaurant, pizza in their hands. It was dusk. "You don't know everything that's going on, but you see things the right way. I can talk to you." He tapped Andrew hard on the forearm. "So here's the deal."
They approached a river, and Andrew could see the line where the stores stopped and the houses started up again.
"We have a lot to review, the two of us, later on. But that's later on. Right now, I need you to stay away from that park. Stay away from him. Can you do that for me, Andrew?"
It came to him in between bites, as they reached the apex of the bridge. It had swelled like a balloon in his brain, ready to pop. He had to say it.
"Her."
Paul stopped. "Excuse me?"
"Shadow's a her."
"You gave it a name?"
For a moment he was more embarrassed then afraid. Paul slapped him in the face, and he fell hard, driven down towards the pavement like a hammer in a man's hand. "You gave it a name, you fucking kid... shit..."
Paul ran off.
Andrew watched him go, listened to his footsteps after he turned the corner. The birds on the river shore were singing, and the water was cascading over the top of a small dam a few hundred yards away.
He got up once he was sure that Paul was gone. It took him a moment to figure out what to do. He remembered the direction that Paul had taken him from the park, tried to reverse the route in his mind. He started jogging.
When he finally made it to the gazebo, there was a hold on the side of it were a few boards had been pried off. He looked inside.
"Shadow!"
The hole was empty.
He ran home to his grandmother's house. VII The next morning, Andrew got out of bed, got dressed, ate breakfast, and walked to school. The house was empty as he moved through it.
When he arrived, the students were standing in the playground. His teacher rushed out and grabbed him by the forearm. She brought him through an opening in the chain-link fence that surrounded the school, and placed him in line with the rest of his class. They were taken into the building, one row at a time, down a flight of stairs and into the basement. The lights were dim, the bulbs covered with dust. All Andrew could see were shelves, old desks, electrical boxes, warning signs.
By the time Andrew reached the bottom, the rest of the basement had already been filled. There was a long line of students in front of him and a teacher behind him, blocking the exit. The students were issued instructions. Andrew got down on his knees and covered his hands with his head.
The teacher by the stairs was listening to the radio. She'd set the volume very low, so that the students wouldn't be able to hear it, but Andrew still could. Static burst through the transmission.
"Stay in your homes..."
"...emergency services..."
"...several feet off the ground..."
"...yellow, also green..."
"...we're being... it's..."
"... ambulances, firefighters, and police..."
"... decayed... raining..."
"I don't know what to tell you people at home..."
"... come alive..."
"... my God..."
Time passed. The radio began to yield less disturbance, but although the words were clearer the people on the other end had less to say. Whatever had happened was finished now.
Andrew looked up at his teacher. Her hands had been clenched around her kneecaps, and had now loosened, unconsciously, like a piece of rubber shrinking or expanding to answer the temperature.
She looked down at him.
"Stand up, Andrew," she said. "Time to go." VIII The students were led back upstairs. There was a fleet of cars surrounding the school, their parents waiting for them. Andrew was able to slip away without anyone noticing. He ran home through familiar streets.
His grandmother was sitting in the front living room, watching television. She turned her head as Andrew came through the front door and stared at him like he were something supernatural, an angel from heaven. He walked over to her side and put his hand on her shoulder. She squeezed it as hard as she could.
They were showing pictures of downtown, the same downtown his Uncle Paul had brought him to last night. He hardly recognized it. The buildings had been cut into geometric pieces and reassembled, incorrectly but with a strange precision, as though a plan had been set in motion and then abandoned. The street was lined with tall glass cylinders. The sidewalk oozed back and forth like melted wax down the side of a candle. Everywhere there was smoke.
The men and women living and working within the radius of the destruction were unharmed - they had found themselves suddenly elsewhere, with no memory of how they'd been transported or what had taken place. There'd been only one person to rescue, a man they'd found standing in the middle of a major intersection. He was physically unharmed, but otherwise obliterated. He was mute and unresponsive. They had to carry him away on a stretcher. They showed a picture of the man's face. It was Uncle Paul. The ice in his eyes had melted. IX Andrew waited until his grandmother went to bed and snuck out, went to the park. The hole in the wall was gone. He walked up to the gazebo and brushed his fingertips against the paint. The gateway appeared, and he slipped through it. The lighting within the chamber had not changed- it seemed more solid, more permanent, then the walls themselves. Shadow was there, in her usual place. Andrew approached her. He could hear her thinking. Her voice appeared in his left ear.
"How are you, Andrew?"
"Shadow, what happened?"
She was quiet for a long time. The dull moan coming from her fingers grew softer. Only when it had become inaudible did she begin to speak.
"Your Uncle Paul came back. He tried to give me instructions, but he already knew that he wasn't going to be able to just tell me what to do."
"He tried to convince me to help him. He said that there were things he could teach me, things only he could know. He brought me outside to show me. It was interesting, but he started showing me ways to hurt people, and I didn't want to do that. I was scared. I was scared that you wouldn't want to be my friend anymore. He got mad at me, and we fought. I tried not to hurt him too much, only as much as I had to..."
Shadow's neck had nearly doubled over, burying her head beneath the surface of her body.
Andrew exhaled. "I'm still your friend, Shadow. He would've hurt other people if you hadn't hurt him. What you did was okay."
Shadow's neck began to straighten itself out.
"Do you want to play chess?" Andrew asked.
They played until it was time for Andrew to go home. Shadow won every game. END  Brendan Detzner lives, works, and writes in Chicago. He went to school in Beloit, Wisconsin, and if you happen to be passing through you can check out Shadow's gazebo in the park a little ways northwest of the college campus on the edge of downtown Beloit. His work has previously appeared in Chiaroscaro and Gothic.net. He is also featured in the Twilight Tales anthology Dead Things, and likes to make himself known at the Twilight Tales reading series and over at Kate the Great's Book Emporium. You can find contact him at brendandetzner@yahoo.com.
Story by Brendan Detzner, Copyright 2007
Image by Rory Clark, Stopped Motion Photography, Copyright 2007
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