A barista in a bright green apron calls a my name and I'm yanked back to my body. I try not to look back into the dark places and I try to smile when I take my coffee from the girl behind the counter. She has a tired, haunted look in her eye. Not the look that you get when you see the shadows, just the one you get when you don't sleep enough, and you work too much, and the world is turning a little too fast for you to keep up.
Outside, the sun is devilishly hot in the sky. It's the kind of scorching hot that makes it hard to breath and to think and to move. The blood in my veins feels exhausted with the force of being pushed about in this body to keep it going. I try not to shrink away from the alleys as I pass but I can hear them whispering. I can hear the voices long before I see their empty inkpot bodies curled up in the dark places. That's the thing about darkness, it's never truly gone. Even on the brightest day when eyes squint shut and skin begins to roast, there are pockets of the stuff around every corner. Under every awning, in the shadow of every person walking on the street, in the tight spaces between the buildings. There is nowhere that the darkness can't find me. It's better out on the coast. Better but not perfect. I've spent half my life looking for a place to run where the sun has free reign and darkness is banished eternally.
I moved to Norway six months ago on my journey to follow the sun. The Land of the Midnight Sun, they call the place where the sun doesn't set for nearly three months. But the monsters that hide in dark places are here too. It's a kind of eternal sunshine that someone who doesn't hear shadows might think is soft and quaint and peaceful. It'd be picturesque if the shadows of the buildings weren't screeching at me every time I walked past.
There's a certain kind of isolated loneliness that eats at you when the shadows come alive as well. No one wants to talk about the monsters under the table in a restaurant or the things screaming in the dark on a cool afternoon stroll around town. And at some point, I guess the shadows got louder than the will to try and ignore them. So, I let them in. I listen to the whispers, and I look them in the eye, and I shudder when the sun goes down and the world is theirs to control. I have six locks on my apartment door and L.E.D. lights that run along every wall in every room. Motion activated lights line the bottom of the cabinets and there are lamps and candles and bright white lightbulbs in every place I can get them. When the sun inevitably sets outside, my world stays a blaze with light, light, light everywhere in every nook and cranny.
I saw the first shadow smile when I was six. There were dark eyes in the corner of the kitchen, and I screamed so loud my mother dropped the knife she was using and sliced open her hand. She tried to calm me down in the car as we rushed to the emergency room and tried to calm me down while they put six stitches in her hand. She tried to calm me down when we got home and I refused to walk into the house because I was petrified to see the thing again. When it was clear nothing she could say would help, she left me alone in my room. I left the lights on all night with the curtains drawn closed, and I didn't sleep a wink.
I saw them everywhere after that. Big monsters, small monsters, anywhere they could fit they were there, in the darkness, waiting and watching and learning. They still are, everywhere I mean. It was like someone took scales off my eyes and showed me something I wished I could forget. I tried to tell people, but no one listens when the little girl with the big imagination says the shadows are making faces at her. No one listens when the little girl is screaming because the monsters in the corner are reaching out. No one listens when they can't see for themselves.
The shadows didn't talk to me then. The whispers started later. On the night of my sixteenth birthday, I crashed my car driving at sunset because of the voices. They came out of nowhere, louder than the radio, louder than the dull rumble of the street beneath me. I jerked the wheel, and they called to me, they wanted me to join them. They wanted me to fall into the darkness and never come back out. But I woke up under the stark white lights of the hospital.
The space between that night and this morning feels like a hundred million years. I don't know that girl anymore. I don't think I'd recognize her if I passed her on the street. It feels more like an old movie, hazy around the edges with the sound off, than it does a memory. That girl had hope. She believed that one day the shadows would go back to being inanimate things that she could walk by on the street without another thought.
We were never inanimate. The shadows whisper as I pass an abandoned building. The darkness inside is thick, heavy with them. I can feel it. I can feel them. I repeat the promise to myself even though I don't believe it.
Darkness is the absence of light. Darkness can't hurt you.
I repeat the words over and over and over until I'm humming them under my breath like a prayer. I don't believe them. Not really. Not when it matters. But that's what they taught me to say the first time they locked me away because I wouldn't stop talking about the shadows.
Darkness is the absence of light. Darkness can't hurt you.
We can. We will. My own shadow whispers up at me from the ground. I feel the fear shaking loose inside me, like the foreshocks that preempt an earthquake.
Darkness can't hurt you. Darkness can't hurt you.
To their credit, the shadows have never made a play for me. Not yet. They've just been there waiting and watching but lately they feel more antagonistic. They feel ready to leap. Ready to take me.
