Baffled, I stood there with the bottle of holy water clutched in my fist, trying to decide what to do. Eventually, the only thing that came to me was to start forward in search of Jane. As I neared the boulders, I gasped for breath. They were not boulders at all, but structures made of bones and withering flesh. The shadows were tucked tight between the bone and skin like viscera. I stood there staring, and then one of the bones—an arm bone—moved and flexed its skeletal fingers, snatched at the air, and reached for me.
Startled, I let out a sharp cry and stepped back.
The structure pivoted, and a thousand eyes opened in the worn skin. It was a living thing made of bone and skin and shadow. As it slid along, a gray slime oozed out from beneath it like the trail of a slug.
I flung the holy water violently against the thing, but the only reaction I got was a broken bottle and water leaking ineffectually down its side. As it turned, I saw sticking out from it a shape that had yet to become bone and dried skin. It writhed like a worm in tar. Then it screamed and called out.
It was Jane, attached to the departing thing like a fly stuck to fly paper.
Other mounds of bone and shadow and flesh were starting to move now, and they were akin to hills sliding in my direction. They were seeking me, mewing as they went, their sliding giving forth that horrid shuffling sound I had heard years before from the running shadow. The sound made me ill. My head jumped with all manner of horrid things.
I realized escape was impossible—that no matter which way I turned, they were there.
Now the shadows, as if greased, slipped out of gaps in the bones and skin, moved toward me, their dark feet sliding, their arms waving, their odd, empty, dark faces turning from side to side.
I knew for certain that it was over for Jane and me.
And then I remembered the laser pointer in my pocket. I had brought it because shadows are an absence of light, and if there is one thing that is the enemy of darkness, it is the sharp beam of a laser.
That said, I was unprepared for the reaction I received when I snapped it on. The light went right through one of the shadows, entering it like the thrust of a rapier. The shadow stopped moving, one hand flying to the wound. The beam, still directed to that spot, clipped off its hand at the wrist. It was far more than I expected; my best-case plan had been that the light would be annoying.
I knew then that I had a modern weapon to combat an ancient evil. I swung the light like a sword, and as I did, the shadows came apart, fell in splashes of inky liquid, and were absorbed by the gray ground. Within moments, the shadows were attempting to leap back inside the structures, but I followed them with my beam, discovering I could cut flesh and bone with it as well, for what had once been human had been sucked dry of its essence, and was now a fabric of this world.
As I cut through them, the bones were dark inside, full of shadow, and the skin bled shadows; the ground was sucking them up like a sponge soaking up water.
I darted to the beast that held Jane. It was sliding along at a brisk pace. I grabbed one of Jane’s outreaching hands and tugged. I was pulled to my knees as the thing flowed away. I didn’t let go. I went dragging along, clinging to Jane with one hand, the laser with the other.
Eventually, I lost my grip, stumbled to my feet, and pursued the monster as it moved into a gray mist that nearly disguised it. A shadow came out of the mist and grabbed me. When it did, an intense coldness went over my body. I almost passed out.
I cut with the laser. The shadow let go and fell apart. I had split it from the top of its head to the area that on a human would have been the groin.
I ran after Jane. The mist had become so thick I almost lost her. I ran up on the creature without realizing it, and when I did, its stickiness clung to me and sucked at me. I was almost lifted off my feet, but again I utilized the laser, and it let me go.
Aware of my determination, it let go of Jane, too. She fell at my feet. My last sight of the thing was of it moving into the mist, and of bony arms waving and eyes blinking and shadows twisting down deep inside it.
I pulled Jane upright, and it was purely by accident that I saw a bit of true light—a kind of glow poking through the mist.
Yanking her along, I ran for it. As we neared the light, it became brighter yet, like a large goal post. We darted through it and fell to the ground in a tumble. Making sure Jane was all right, I cautioned her away, and stuck the laser in my pocket.
I pulled out one of the cigarette lighters I had bought. Shadowy arms reached through the gap in the trees, into the light. The dark fingers snapped at me like the fangs of a snake. I avoided them with an agility I didn’t know I possessed.
I bent low and clicked the lighter and put the flame to the spot where I had poured gasoline. A blaze leaped up and engulfed the tree in a ball of fire.
With a shaking hand, I went around to the other side of the H tree and put a lick of flame to it. Coated in gasoline, it lit, but weakly.
I flicked off the lighter and grabbed the can with its remaining gas and tossed it toward the fire. The can exploded.
My ears rang. The next thing I knew I was on the ground and Jane was beating out tufts of fire that had landed on my pants and the front of my shirt.
We watched as the tree burned. Shadow shapes were visible inside the H, looking out of the gray, as if to note us one last time before the fire closed the gateway forever.
The tree burned all night and into the next morning. We watched it from where we sat on the ground. The air was no longer heavy with foreboding. It seemed . . . how shall I say it? . . . empty.
I feared the flames might jump to the rest of the trees, but they didn’t. The H tree burned flat to the ground, not even leaving a stump. All that was left was a burned spot, dark as a hole through the center of the earth.
Jane and I parted the next morning, and for some reason we have never spoken again. At all. Maybe the connection at that time of our young life, that shared memory, was too much to bear.
But I did hear from her lawyer. I was offered an opportunity to buy the house and property where the H tree had been. Cheap.
It was more than I could manage, actually—cheap as it was—but I acquired a loan and bought the place. I felt I had conquered it, and buying it was the final indicator of this.
I still own it. No more shadows creep. And that spot of woods where the tree grew? I had it removed by bulldozer. I put down a stretch of concrete and built a tennis court, and to this day there has not been a single inkling of unusual activity, except for the fact that my tennis game has improved far beyond my expectations.
Finished, Dana leaned back in her chair and sipped from her drink.
“So, that’s how I got my start as an investigator of the unusual. Beyond that revelation, I suppose you might want me to explain exactly what happened there inside that strange world, but I cannot. It is beyond my full knowledge. I can only surmise that our ideas of hell and demonic regions have arisen from this and other dimensional gaps in the fabric of time and space. What the things did with stolen flesh and bone is most likely nothing that would make sense to our intellect. I can only say that the shadows appeared to need it, to absorb it, to live off of it. However, their true motivation is impossible to know.”
With that, she downed her drink, smiled, stood up, shook hands with each of us, and left us there in the firelight, stunned, contemplating all she had told us.