There is a shadow behind me.
But it is not shaped like me, nor is it the darkness left astray from my body standing in dim moonlight. It is of a creature with skin pasty, sickly white. I, thirteen years of age as of nineteen-twenty-two, had skin rosy and warm to the touch. It stands at exactly one-hundred and ninety centimeters, while I stand barely half its height. Every night, it makes strange noises: it murmurs and giggles in my ears, and drops strange items from high above. Its eyes are rolling white spheres like the rattling cue balls on my father’s weekly billiards: shiny, pallid, and featureless; my eyes are muddy blue like the rain puddles on King’s Street. And yet, for some unfathomable reason, it is always behind me, watching.
I once mentioned him to my father as he twiddled with his Capstan cigarette, the kind that blew out gray plumes of smoke like those Huntley and Palmer factories down the road. He frowned and said, “Elizabeth, surely you haven’t broken into the dockyards and had a pint of gin? Your mother would be murderous if you believe in demons. There are no devils in this house.”
I frowned, and looked behind him. The shadow was standing there, completely still, and was rumbling in peculiar speech. Its hands held a queer little thing that smelled as though it was emitting a dull rot, as strong as the lingering fulminata of imported Garam Masala my mother would douse our food with. It made my eyes squint, and then he released it. It has wings, I realised as it flew through the air; I winced and noticed that it had a malformed beak. My father took a long drag of that cigarette. “Just listen to that darling pet cuckoo, dearest, and forget.”
Birds meant the onset of spring. Yet spring was not associated with the gripping paranoia that haunted me under the shadows, the way the buildings dripped with sweat from hot rain; frost was now made nonexistent as the fields of York ran far in seas of mildew, the kind that was sticky and damp with dirt and unearthly things: the crittering worms and ghastly bugs, and the crayfish that swam in creek-cracks in this mountain of stinking sylvan.
A hand stretched out in front of me. I looked up and saw the shadow wearing an inhuman grin. Its hand opened and dropped something onto my lap, and I realised it was a damselfly. Yet it was more than a sheer mockery of what a damselfly was supposed to be: it was grossly malformed, at least thrice the size, and had bulging, shining compound eyes. I wanted to scream, and yet my voice eluded me till I grew silent and numb. The shadow giggled raucously.
“Elizabeth! What on earth are you doing?” Called a familiar voice. My mother strolled in. She was not with my father. She peered over at the fly in my hands, the fly I desperately wanted to fling away, and suddenly… cooed. “What a lovely little damselfly! She looks gorgeous, have you named her? Your science teacher would love this.”
I shakily stood to my feet. She pushed me through the endless field towards the quaint estate we were to stay the night in. Fear began to settle in my stomach as I glanced to the side, only to see the shadow-creature watching.
“Hear that? We should bring her home, Elizabeth.” Those were its words. But what terrified me was not its sneer, but rather the fact that its voice sounded like me.
Every day passed sluggishly, as though time was slowly evading my desperate clutches. More and more of these strange gifts would pile up in my room. But my parents adored it, the way our house began to overflow with these unfathomable specimens, constantly harping about ‘giftedness’ and ‘improvement’. I cried when that creature would stick those foul critters into my bed, and dangle them in front of me as I struggled to sleep. My father, however, would always guffaw as I cried, talking about the wonders of childhood. I would then notice the shadow-creature giggling before smiling cruelly in my direction.
But no human wants to live in piles of refuse. I couldn’t live like this anymore — no, I would not. And so I burst into the dining room after drawing a little picture of the shadow-creature. I had rehearsed my speech: “This devil is strange, it sounds like me, it has been growing ever since January, nineteen-twenty-two, and it’s—“
“You made a drawing of your sister?”
I looked up and saw my mother setting down a pie at the table. The steam wafted upwards to that ghoulish cretin that had tormented me so. In the oblong, bony thing that was oh-so-close to my father’s face, I saw slivers of silver emerging from its ghastly jaws, and from these teeth came an eerie breath that stunk of rot and foul things. My father was unperturbed. In fact, he seemed almost enamoured. At the creature’s feet were crumbs of puff pastry and bits of mash, strewn and painted across the floors and walls like childish graffiti.
“How sweet!” My mother sang. She seemed like she was dancing on air before frowning. “Are you quite alright? You look like you’ve seen the devil.”
I hid the paper behind me. It walked forward and placed its hand on my skull, before pushing down, hard.
My heart was thumping slowly, ice gathering in my stomach. The pressure on my head grew stronger.
“No.” I said. My knees were shaking and I squeezed my eyes shut.
”You’re right. There are no devils here.”
“There is only big sister.”
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