The Man Who Was Afraid of His Shadow (a fantasy short story)

 

Harry Fenton had a habit of arriving early at The Black Crow, at least an hour before any respectable patron could reasonably be expected to have finished his day’s work and show up for a pint and a chat. As far as Harry’s day’s work went, well, his employment was a subject of some debate among the regulars. David Rhys allowed as to how Harry was independently, though modestly, wealthy, supported by some mining interests he had secured during his early days as an exploration geologist in Brazil, during which explorations he was reputed to have been made a full member in good standing of a Tapirapé tribe and to have married at least one of the locals. Barry Dravit alleged that Harry still did consulting work here and there—the college occasionally had him serve as a guest lecturer, though Harry maintained this was just a charitable exercise on his part.

Harry himself stubbornly refused to answer directly any such questions about his occupation, always falling back on the excuse that the details about his occupation were classified, though he never confirmed by whom, and judging by the content of his stories, he might as easily have been employed by the Vatican, MI6, or the National Security Agency. If we were to take the first person nature of his stories seriously, and of course we all took him in deadly earnest, it might easily have been all three.

Whatever he did with his days, his nights were often enough demonstrably free, and he usually managed to beat us all to the bar. Whenever I arrived, and this was never much before a perfectly respectable five o’clock, he was already slumped back in his customary spot, a dark little booth in the corner opposite the mirror behind the bar.

So when I wandered in to The Black Crow at a very respectable 4:45 p.m. last Wednesday, I didn’t have to see Harry to know he was there in his accustomed booth, the last of the afternoon sun slanting in through the tiny window behind him and throwing his shadow across the room all the way to the taps, and Harry was playing a little game with Brent, dropping the shadow of his hand on the tap each time the barkeep reached for it to draw someone a pint. Brent managed to ignore the gesture well enough, but David Rhys put an end to it when he suggested that if Harry just kept doing this another month until the winter solstice, the sun would shift enough so that Harry could open the door to the gent’s room for him.

That was too much for Harry, who tried to maneuver his hand’s shadow in the direction of David’s throat and nearly upset his pint of bitter in the process.

“What do you know,” David said with a smirk. “It actually did something that time.”

“If you’re impressed with that, you should have been with me at Tolerant a couple of years ago. You’d have seen a bit of shadow boxing there, I can assure you.”

“Tolerant? The insane asylum?”

“We don’t call them that anymore,” William Brace said.

“I thought they closed that place down,” Brent said.

“They certainly did,” Harry confirmed. “At least to general admission. But you might be surprised to find that it’s not actually deserted, even today.”

“Somebody want to fill me in?” Barry Dravit asked, just returning from the gents’ and ambling up to the bar.

“Tolerant is an insane asylum, the classical model,” Rhys said. “Which is to say that it was full to the rafters with the real thing, the most thoroughly insane in the land were sent there for warehousing. They accepted only the cream of the crop. Nothing less than full blown psychotics need apply.”

“I heard it said that no one committed to Tolerant ever left alive,” Dravit said.

“That’s supposed to be true. The focus wasn’t really on cure—you can’t cure what the inmates there have. They’ll keep the place in service until the last inmate dies. But it begs the question—what do we do with the truly insane these days?”

“Best not bother asking,” Harry replied. “Just make sure you avoid eye contact when riding the metro. But about shadows. . . .” He took a long slow sip. “They had an inmate, Leonard Filby, who could tell you everything you would ever want to know about shadows. Until his own shadow killed him.”

*

“Filby was a physicist, principally interested in optics, and a theoretical mathematician, so he didn’t need a laboratory, and in fact performed most of his best work as far from the bright lights and city streets as he could. He rarely did research during the school year, preferring instead to devote himself to teaching. He reserved his research for the long holidays, which he spent on walking tours ambling along country roads and lonely lanes from village to village until some idea or other began to assume a form that could be put to paper, and as soon as he got that far, he would rent rooms or a cottage wherever he happened find himself, preferably in some lonely remote spot, sit down at a table with a pad and pencil, and work out the numbers. He would emerge a week or a month later, his work committed to paper, and he would send it off to The Journal of Optical Researches, and then return to his college and settle back into a year’s undistracted lecturing.

“Filby had worked his way west across the Cotswold’s and had nearly got as far as Wales before his latest—I should say his last inspiration finally crystallized for him, a knotty problem in optical trigonometry, and when he was ready to settle down at last with scarcely two weeks before the beginning of the next term, he couldn’t afford the time to be particularly choosy about his housing, so he rented the first thing he could find in a little place in the foothills along the Welsh border just outside a village called Lesser Hobbs, which seems somehow appropriate. . . .

“Filby was missed right away when the term began and he didn’t show up for classes, but it took the college a month to locate him. Seems the local charwoman in Lesser Hobbs was accustomed to eccentricities of all kinds, so she wasn’t too surprised to find that he refused to show himself at the door when she arrived to clean just a week after he moved in, and she wasn’t particularly impressed to find all the windows closed and the doors barred. He spoke to her only through the door, and he gave her a letter (there was of course no electricity at the cottage, let alone a telephone, and his cell phone battery was long since dead). He gave her an order for some food which she eventually brought along, but she neglected to mail the letter for a week or two, and then it languished in the Lesser Hobbs post office for another week, and then the college had the devil of a time finding his cottage, tucked away in the Welsh foothills with nothing but the Lesser Hobbs postmark to go by, and that was printed none too distinctly. It was a good month between the time he went—shall we say dark?—and the time the school finally got him into a hospital. The records indicate he attacked the provost when he showed up to convince him to come home. He was transferred to Tolerant within a week and he died there a month later.”

“He died? Of what cause?” Rhys asked. “And what was in that letter he sent the college? Why didn’t he just give her a message and a phone number? Why did it take them so long to find him?”

“He was mistaken about his new address, which delayed even more his college locating him. The letter simply explained that he couldn’t leave the cottage because his shadow was trying to kill him.” Harry said, stopping for a sip of bitter. “I expect he didn’t want the village in on the matter.”

“I think I knew Filby,” William Brace muttered from the back.

“Well, then, you should have called in on him when he was in hospital, shouldn’t you? I did. Wonderful fellow, and his latest discovery might well have gone down in history as his greatest.”

“Might have?”

“I told you he was dead. Now we’ll never know, and I’m not talking about the problem in optical trigonometry.

“I was retained by a—a consortium, we’ll call it—who asked me to ascertain the precise nature of Filby’s illness.”

“Ah,” Bryce exclaimed. “I have been meaning to ask you about that. What exactly is it that you do, Harry?”

Harry settled back, his eye wandering towards the Tiffany glass lamp that stood by the door. “Some times, I’m not really sure what I do myself. . . . At any rate, the consortium had secured for me complete access to the facilities at Tolerant House, easy enough since one of their members provided the bulk of the funding for the operations there. I was provided an escort, Dr. Lansbury, a Jesuit and psychiatrist on the staff. And an interesting fellow in his own right. Dr. Lansbury had been on the staff at Tolerant for only eight months, yet he already had developed that sunken-eyed demeanor and haunted gaze so characteristic of exorcists and soldiers in the foreign legion and other men-who-have-seen-too-much.

“Tolerant is a quiet place. They house very few of the raving, shrieking lunatics who populate the commoner sorts of asylums. Tolerant is for a more refined crowd, a kind of patient with too much on his mind to waste his energy raving and thrashing about a padded cell.

“And so Filby fit right in. I was ushered down a long stone corridor, right on ground level where they keep the new arrivals that they want to watch closely, and we waited while the attendant unscrewed the plates that secured the heavy iron door to a steel lintel set in the foot-thick stone walls. The whole process of getting a door open at Tolerant takes a good three minutes, and I tried to ignore the loud buzzer that sounds while opening any door there by occupying myself with classifying the stone in the walls as a particularly dense, dark granite. The entire hall was made of this stuff, the floors, walls, arched roof—everything that wasn’t iron or steel was granite.

“The place was rather hard to light as a result of the dark stone, and when the great black iron door swung open I found my eyes quite dazzled by the light within Filby’s cell. The room was ablaze with light, rows of tiny harsh white lights strung along the tops of the walls, more rows of lights along the foot of the walls at the floor, more lights strung all the way up each corner from floor to roof, and for good measure, all of the walls and the inside of the door had been covered with white paper, carefully taped to the stone. Only the fire system sprinklers on the roof, the emergency lamp on the wall, and the observation and feeding slots in the door were uncovered. Some things have to bow to regulation, after all, even at Tolerant.

“The room was completely unfurnished. Filby sat on the floor, which was also covered with white paper. He was wearing white trousers, white tennis shoes, and a white shirt. His head was shaved bald, and his head, face, neck, hands and arms were covered with opaque white make up, like a Kabuki dancer or a clown might wear, like diaper rash ointment. So far as I could see, he had simply painted himself from head to toe with the stuff.

“Thus, the lighting in the room was very bright and perfectly even in every direction. And curiously enough, if you were a little nearsighted, the white-on-white effect made Filby a little hard to see.

“Dr. Lansbury found a convenient corner and sat down, and as he did, he dislodged a piece of paper fixed to the wall, exposing the dark granite beneath, behind his back.

“I can’t say that Filby turned pasty white when the paper tumbled to the floor. How would one be able to tell? But in a sudden burst of energy he leapt to his feet, flew across the room, threw poor Dr. Lansbury to the side and slapped the paper back into place, carefully pressing it against the tapes that held it to the stone wall.

“The uniformity of his odd wallpaper restored, he once again seemed as placid and mild as a lamb. He helped Dr. Lansbury to his feet, who accepted the offer without a trace of irritation or alarm.”

With this Harry stopped for a long slow drink. “Have you ever noticed that a man whose face is painted white like that, no matter how healthy he is, always looks a little jaundiced? It makes his eyes look yellow. And his teeth. Curious thing. So imagine that face, gentlemen, pouring out the story you are about to hear. Mr. Filby didn’t require much introduction. He wanted to tell me what he had discovered. And so he did.”

*

“ ‘It’s my shadow, Professor Fenton,’ ” Filby began. But then the conversation took a strange turn, right with his second sentence: “ ‘I have to protect us, you see.’ ”

“Of course I looked at once for this shadow of his that he insisted he had to protect us from, but there was none to be seen. All the lights ensured there could be none.”

“ ‘You have to protect us from your shadow, Professor Filby?’ ” Dr. Lansbury prompted.

“ ‘Indeed.’ Then Filby addressed himself to me. ‘Let me explain myself. My shadow will, if it is given the opportunity to form, attack us. My only defense is to prevent my shadow from forming at all. Hence the lights. With even illumination from all directions, there is no possible chance for a shadow to form in this cell. And so there is no danger to us.’ ”

“ ‘And how long has your shadow behaved like this, Professor Filby?’ Lansbury asked. ‘I assume this is a recent development?’ ”

Filby seemed to marshal his thoughts very carefully for several minutes before continuing. “ ‘Last summer, during the longs, it began. I . . . found my shadow then. In a cottage a mile or so distant from a very remote village just west of the Wye, in the foothills. Beautiful place, no electricity, no phone, perfect peace. But so terribly lonely.’ ”

“The pale faced professor Filby shifted a little closer to me as he became more animated. ‘Now, there was a well in this cottage, Professor Fenton, set most oddly right in the middle of this one room cottage. Not very deep, filled with beautiful clear sparkling water, and a bucket sitting right there on the stone ledge. Lowering this into the water, I found myself soon enjoying tea and making great progress in my work. I continued late into the night, until the first candle had burned to a stump, guttering in the slight draft, the smoking flame throwing flickering shadows dancing about the walls—I saw none of it. I was so enraptured with the work, my mind flew! I could scarcely write fast enough to keep up with my thoughts.

“ ‘I stopped for a bit to make another pot of tea, and I noticed as I emptied the bucket into my teapot that something fell out of the bucket with the last of the water and into the pot. It splashed enough to throw a few droplets of water on my notes, in fact. I emptied the pot back into the bucket to fetch out whatever it was, and imagine my surprise when I came up with a gold ring, bearing a small green gem, perhaps an emerald, but it was uncut and unpolished, just a simple crystal mounted on the ring, like a Celtic copy of an old roman ring.

“ ‘I couldn’t resist the thing, of course—it was quite a beauty, and so I slipped it on my finger, as it just fit the smallest finger on my left hand.

“ ‘And so busy was I admiring it that I was caught quite unawares when the candle flickered badly in the draft and the light, little more now than a wick standing in a final puddle of beeswax, tipped over and the candle fell dark. The room was plunged at once into inky blackness. I lit a match, found another stump of a candle in the cupboard, sat back down and, after another glance at the ring, I set to work again. And in just ten minutes more, I had done.

“ ‘I was suddenly quite exhausted, as the weariness and excitement of the day fell on me in a single moment, and I pushed away from the table and flung myself on a narrow cot alongside the wall. I turned my face to the planks and immediately fell fast asleep.

“ ‘I then dreamt a most curious dream. Or rather, two dreams. The first: I saw a perfect, flawless, hollow sphere, completely and perfectly mirrored on the inside. And a single photon was let loose in the hollow sphere, where it simply reflected back and forth and all around, forever, lighting the place up, but of course, it could not be seen, or it would have been absorbed, would it not? But it never was seen.

“ ‘The second dream was . . .  different. I was asleep in the cottage, on the very cot where I lay, and a woman approached me, a lively woman, with hair as black as jet and hard green eyes like those of the emerald in the ring. She saw the ring on my hand and she said that it was her own, but we might share it together, if I liked. Then she reached to my hand and slipped her hand into mine, I mean into mine, Professor, her hand moving into my own hand, and my fingers felt as cold as ice as she slipped her finger through the ring even as I still wore the thing, and then her arm came to rest in my own arm, and then her body, and at last her head filled my own as she lay down on the cot, filling up my frozen and paralyzed body with her own body. I felt a momentary final icy chill as she lay down inside me, and then I felt nothing at all, except freedom from the pressure of her body. For she had pushed me out of my body and I lay beside her, my body now dark and flat, and wavering. She was saddened by this, and she said there was not room enough for us both in my body. But she promised me . . . ecstasy and bliss beyond imagining if I would but share my body with her. But she had pushed me out of my body, and now I was nothing more than a shadow, a dark place where there was no light at all.

“ ‘I woke from this dream abruptly—I had no idea how long I had slept, but the candle, none too long when I lit it, was flickering low, my shadow dancing on the wall before me. The night was still dark, and I remember hearing a nightingale outside. I confess that the sight of my wavering shadow on the wall, after that dream of course you understand, made me a little uncomfortable.

“ ‘I noticed that my little finger, the one that still bore the emerald ring, was dull and cold and lifeless. I put this down to the fact that the ring was a little tight, and I went to remove it, but could not. So I slid off the cot to fetch a bit of soap and water from the well to grease the thing so it would come off. . . .

“ ‘And then I saw my shadow, before me, on the floor between me and the candle. There was no light behind me.

“ ‘The shadow—my shadow. . . ! I thought I had just somehow mistaken all this in my addled, weary head, and I got out of bed—and then, and then . . . the shadow . . . placed its cold, wet hands round my throat and as I kicked out at the table it began to tighten its grip. . . .

“ ‘I awoke just before dawn,’ Filby said. ‘The room was dark, my throat was badly swollen, I could scarcely breathe, my head pounded. . . . I must confess, Dr. Fenton, that I wondered if I had lost my mind.’ And he smiled winsomely as he recalled this. ‘The candle had been knocked from the table and the room was dark. So I lit the candle again, and this time I saw clearly, my shadow on the floor before me, the great dark thing, arms raised and menacing, outstretched, then it began rising over me. . . .

“ ‘But this time, I knew at once what had happened. There was a spirit in my shadow, and when it took form, it sought to kill me. I knocked the candle from its holder only just in time. . . .

“ ‘And now I am here. Somehow, I can’t imagine how, but somehow, there is an intelligence, an agency, in my shadow. It’s something malevolent, something powerful, and it seeks to kill us, and I don’t know why.’ ”

*

Harry stopped for a long sip of his pint. “There was little left to learn from Professor Filby. He stopped speaking, and he wrapped his arms about his knees and rocked on the floor, a blissful smile on his face. After a few minutes more, I rose, Dr. Lansbury called for an attendant to open the door, and we left. I glanced only one last time back at Filby, his arms still wrapped about his knees, the emerald ring still on his cold, ashen finger.

“I let Dr. Lansbury show me out. He asked me what I thought, and of course I asked him why he hadn’t simply put the thing to the test. Why not turn out all the lights but one, and let Filby cast a shadow, and demonstrate to him that it was of course quite harmless?

“But Lansbury had already thought of that. Filby had indeed been terrified when confronted by his shadow, and he tried to talk to it, to cajole it, to convince it to wait, to give it a try, as he put it. His speech to his shadow was alternately seductive, whining, threatening, pleading. This struck Lansbury particularly. The sight of Filby cringing in a corner, his shadow behaving perfectly, small and dark behind him right where it needed to be, was too much for Lansbury. When Filby started shrieking ‘Stop hurting me!’ over and over, he turned Filby’s lights back on. Filby’s weekly medical exam did reveal long scratches across his back, but the physician supposed he might have got those writhing against the stone wall.

“And so there the matter rested, for I could not return to Tolerant for a while. I finally found a chance to go back a week later, bad timing as it happened, for that was the night of a furious thunderstorm that was knocking power out all over the county. And the power had gone out at Tolerant.

*

“I arrived and found the place in chaos. Battery-powered emergency lights blazing away everywhere, no electricity other than that, and two fire trucks parked round the side, lights flashing away, blinding me as I ran briskly up the walk.

“Lansbury met me in reception, his hollow eyes a little more vivid than the last time I saw him, perhaps due only to the garish emergency lighting flooding the otherwise darkened halls. You could hear the inmates crying for attention in the distance, and that was curious, for as I said before, the patients at Tolerant are a quiet, contemplative lot, mostly. Lansbury had no time for me, of course, as an emergency generator for the southeast wing had blown, setting a small fire in a wiring closet. He and the rest of the staff were heading over there to remove the patients in that ward, a long job requiring every hand, because remember, those door locks took every bit of three minutes each to open.

“That was no matter to me. Filby’s wing, though deserted of attendants, was not in any immediate danger, so I headed down there.

“I have to confess I didn’t much care for the place. There were no lights except for the emergency lamps on the walls, and no attendants anywhere. But I found Filby’s room readily enough, and I called through the grill to see how he was managing.

“ ‘Could you perhaps open the door, Dr. Fenton?’ Filby asked.

“I looked over the mechanism for the door, but it was hopeless. It looked like, in addition to three minutes of practiced effort, opening the thing required two different keys as well, and the attendants were all gone, of course. I explained the situation to him, and he took it in good grace.

“Filby must have been leaning against the door, for I heard him sigh resignedly, “ ‘I have lost my lights, Dr. Fenton.’ ”

“Of course it was just as Filby said. The only light in his room, like that of all the others, was a single emergency lamp.

“The shadow in the room must have been stark, to say the least. Filby must have been horrified.”

“ ‘It’s watching me, Dr. Fenton,’ Filby whispered. ‘It’s watching me now. It knows you’re here. I know this sounds like the ravings of a lunatic. But he is going to attack me if you can’t get this door open.’ ”

“ ‘Can’t you disable the emergency light?’ ” I asked him.

“ ‘No. It’s behind an iron mesh.’ ”

“I wanted to tell him that it would not attack him, but I knew that there was no point. And oddly enough, I couldn’t sense much fear or terror in Filby’s voice. I mean, consider. You think you’re trapped in a room with a supernatural specter of some unknown type, your world view has been shattered beyond recovery, you think you’re facing death at the hands of a ghost, and you discuss it like it’s a regrettable problem in optics?”

“ ‘Dr. Fenton,’ Filby asked me, ‘could I ask a favor of you?’ ”

“ ‘Just hang on, Professor Filby. I’m sure they’ll have the lights back on in a moment. While we wait, why don’t you give me the gist of your work in optical trigonometry?’ ”

“ ‘Would you—would you mind terribly just holding my hand? He never would.’ ”

“Filby didn’t wait for an answer, but slipped his hand through the slot for the dinner plates. Of course I took it. His hand was cold, his fingers cold, and he trembled at first at my touch, but then he settled down. I studied the emerald ring on his smallest finger, and I wondered why the hospital had let him keep it on.

“He sat quietly for some time, gently stroking the back of my hand with his thumb. Frankly, I began to feel a bit uncomfortable about the whole thing. His touch seemed somehow wrong, somehow hungry. I began to loath it, though I know that mental patients will sometimes want contact with you, and they will caress your face and hands if you let them get close.

“Then he spoke again, his voice odd and dream-like, and as he spoke, my hand in his, I began to feel I had made a terrible, terrible mistake. . . .

“ ‘Dr. Fenton, I would wager that you wouldn’t have minded this so very much as he did. Would you? You know, we could have known such ecstasy, if only he—’

“Whatever Filby intended to say, he never finished, for he suddenly started, his hand gripping mine with an incredible strength so that I could not pull free of him. His strength was astonishing. Did he truly hope to pull me through the slot in the door? I wrestled to get away, but I was still caught in that irresistible grip. He twisted, writhed, pulled at me as if he would haul me whole into his room, drawing my hand into the slot so far that my knuckles and wrist and arm were skinned nearly to the elbow.

“And most horrible of all, he made not a sound. I called out to him repeatedly, but he would not answer, would not let me go. I called for attendants, anyone who could hear me, but no one came.

“And then Filby became quite still, as though he had suddenly given up on the project of pulling me bodily through the slot in his door, though his grip on my hand remained strong and he did not let go, and the wounds on the back of my wrists were beginning to bleed.

“After a while I noticed that his fingers were growing colder, and struck by a horrible presentiment, I gently drew his hand back through the slot—he did not resist—and I checked and could find no pulse in his wrist, and after several minutes more, his grip finally relaxed and his hand slipped away, and as he fell, the emerald ring slipped from his finger and was left in my hand. I could hear the sound of his body slump to the floor.”

*

“The power was restored some hours later, just before dawn. Eventually the attendants returned, and Lansbury found me there, sitting outside Filby’s door. They opened his door, and of course Filby was dead.

“Filby had been strangled, his face dark with lividity, angry fresh bruises marking his throat on both sides, clearly the marks from two hands. The coroner attributed the death to suicide, though it took him some doing to make the case that a man can throttle himself to death without fainting first. And of course they couldn’t accept my statement that I was holding one of his hands all through the ordeal—or rather that Filby was holding one of mine. And you know, I have come to wonder about that detail myself. . . .

“And there the matter rests, except. . . . I told you I was sent there on behalf of a client who wanted to ascertain the facts of the matter, remember? And I did, including briefing them on what I believed to be the truth in the case.

“I suppose they got what they wanted, for I journeyed out to the Welsh border a few weeks after. I found the cottage easily enough. I had to break a window to get in, however, for the place had recently been purchased by a large private trust and locked up.

“The inside of the cottage was just as Filby described it. I fancy that the matches and stump of candle that I saw on the table were his. I found some scraps of notebook, as well. The writing on them was not very distinct, like a child trying to master pen and ink for the first time. Or like someone who hadn’t written anything for a very long while. Or perhaps that was just the result of someone trying to write in the dark. Is that wishful thinking on my part? I don’t know. Perhaps it is. The longest fragment of the text that I could make out was ‘. . . with this ring. . . .’

“And I saw the well. I stood beside it for several minutes. And then I pulled the emerald ring off my finger and dropped it into the water.”

With that, the room fell silent. Harry rose from his seat in the corner and began to pull on his coat.

“You just left it at that, Harry?” Barry Dravit asked.

Harry shrugged. “The whole business struck me as so sad and lonely. I decided—I’m embarrassed to admit it—I decided to give her one more chance. I expect that she never imagined Filby would hate her so much for what she had done that he would strangle his own body to be rid of her.”

“Wait a minute,” Rhys said. “I thought you said he couldn’t choke himself to death one-handed. You said there were two sets of bruises on his throat! And you were holding his hand through the door all the time, right?”

“That’s what I thought, at first. But I wasn’t holding his hand at all, Rhys. Not his hand.”

“What do you mean?”

Harry sighed wistfully. “Have you ever watched a woman try to make a man jealous so as to provoke him into action? I’m afraid she wasn’t very good at it, but she didn’t have to be, because Filby wasn’t very good at resisting it, either. Anyway, it worked well enough. She certainly got a reaction from him by flirting with me. Just not the reaction she wanted, I expect.”

In the gloomy silence that fell over the room, Harry turned for the door, pausing only to catch sight of his reflection in the mirror by the coat rack.

Harry stared at it for quite some time, as if he was trying to make out just who it was that he was looking at.