The Shadow Man (Part 11)

“Well…” Jesse began, feeling very awkward about telling someone—especially a stranger—something that would make him sound crazy. “I saw someone in the woods. Just behind the first few trees over there,” Jesse pointed towards the woods behind a house where he ran to chase after the shadow figure that hid in the cave. By this point, he wasn’t sure if he should explain everything exactly as it happened, or to leave out the part about the man he saw being a shadow.

“Okay,” Officer Perez led Jesse to continuing his story. “What happened after you saw this person?”

“I thought the might have had something to do with Olivia’s disappearance because he was staring at me in the area where I found her watch.”

Jesse had a sudden thought; if the shadow man had Olivia, then where was she when the two encountered each other? Had the shadow already hidden her in the cave? Was he waiting for Jesse to come look for her?

Officer Perez wrote down notes in her notepad about Jesse recounting of the story. When she noticed that he’d stopped, she asked him if he was okay thinking he might have a concussion.

“Do you need to sit down?” She asked.

“No, I’m fine. I was just wondering…”

“Yes?”

“If he had Olivia, where was she when he was watching me pick up her watch?”

Perez had no idea how to answer that. In fact, she was wondering the same herself. The police officer had an inkling that Jesse was trying to counteract his story by asking such a question when he realized part of his story didn’t add up, but he seemed sincere. Instead of calling him on it, Perez wanted to get his entire story down on paper before she started speculating.

“Let’s hear your entire story first, then we’ll worry about that,” she said with a smile.

“I followed the man into the woods to a cave that was on the other side. But then I started feeling dizzy. I think I was hallucinating, or something. I saw some big grey cats that looked like they were shadows, and they attacked me while the man went into the cave.”

Jesse chuckled at the last part thinking if he played it off he could tell her as much as possible without sounding too crazy. Perez stared at the young man with a bewildered expression on her face. She’d heard a lot of crazy things in her nine years as a police officer, but nothing like that.

“Cats? Shadow cats?”

“Or something…I know, it sounds crazy. I think it was just part of a dream I had when I passed out. I’ve been taking Percocet that was prescribed for pain…”

“And you think maybe they had something to do with this…dream?”

Jesse nodded. He didn’t know what else to say. He didn’t think his story was believable, so he did his best to retell it so that something that didn’t makes sense would sound normal. The only way he could think to do that was to say it was a dream and blame it on his medication. ‘What now?” Jesse thought. ‘Am I gonna get committed? For all she knows, it was a weird dream I had when I passed out.’

The young man stared at the ground feeling incredibly stupid for saying anything at all. He wondered if this feeling he had was what people who had psychotic episodes felt. Knowing no matter what they said from that point on nobody would believe them.

“Alright, I think I have everything I need,” Officer Perez said realizing for the first time that Jesse had blood dripping from the inside of his shirt in three parallel lines. She smiled again and reminded Jesse “If there’s anything else you remember let us know,” handing Jesse her card.

“Okay,” Jesse returned the officer’s smile. He looked down at the business card she’d handed him. ‘I didn’t know cops had these things. I thought they just wrote their number on a sticky note, or something.’

Jesse felt a hand on his left shoulder, causing him to jump in fright.

“Whoa, whoa, it’s just me,” Jesse’s dad laughed. “The officer told me that you used your Percocet.

“Yeah, why?”

“You think maybe the does is too high? Or…maybe, possible, you took too much?”

“What, you think I’m a drug addict now?” Jesse asked in annoyance as he stuffed the card Officer Perez gave him into his back pocket.

“Nah, buddy. It’s not that. I’m just shocked you took it when you said you didn’t want them. You feeling alright?”

Jesse thought about his answer for a few moments. “Yeah, Dad, I’m alright. I just had this weird ache on my left side. My ribs haven’t fully healed, yet, I guess.”

“Alright. But, you let me know if it gets worse, eh?”

“I will,” Jesse said, his father pulling him in for a bear hug. Jesse hugged his father back, wincing at the pain in his side.

“Where’s your brother?” Jesse’s father asked surveying the dissipating crime scene? “He usually follows you everywhere…”

Shadow Man (Part 6)

“And you brought friends?” Jesse looked down to see several shadow figures walking around at the Shadow man’s feet. There were seven of them, and they all had a distinct quality that Jesse had never seen before. Instead of the usual creatures that were composed of a uniform darkness, these looked more like smoke. Black at the bottom, lighter toward the top, as if the shadows were evaporating. The three shadows in the front that appeared to be cats of some kind were the strangest, with the likeness of oil being poured into boiling water.

One of the cats slowly walked up to Jesse, circling him and rubbing its face on his leg like a house cat before running away and passing through a wall. ‘So only the big one can break things…’ Jesse thought noticing that he didn’t feel the shadow cat touch his leg. He felt comforted by the idea that not all of the shadow figures could potentially murder him. But only just a little. For a while, Jesse had been wondering if they could somehow shift between normal shadows—or as normal as shadow figures could be—and the solid type that break desk lamps.

Jesse took a small step forward, watching how the shadow man reacted to his movements. By this point, he wasn’t even concerned with the smaller shadows, although part of him imagined one of the cats growing twice its original size and being made of fire for some reason. The shadow man made no effort to move, so Jesse took another small step forward. Still no reaction.

‘Maybe it only reacts when I’m scared?’ The idea crossed Jesse’s mind as he remembered some of the things that had happened in past encounters with the shadow man. Whenever it had taken Jesse by surprise it would move, going so far as to break things when Jesse was the most afraid. But he also noticed that when he wasn’t scared the shadow stood still. Well, the big one did. The shadow cats did their own thing just as real cats would. Then another thought ran through Jesse’s mind: ‘Why cats? I fucking hate cats.’

To test his hypothesis, Jesse walked calmly toward the shadow man, looking at in directly where he assumed its’ eye would be.

‘I’m not afraid of you. I’m not afraid of you. I’m not afraid of you.’ He thought as he came to a stop a foot away from the hulking mass of darkness. ‘But I am a little hungry.’

The two stared at each other for quite some time, Jesse staring into the shadow man’s blank slate of a face. The more they watched each other, the more Jesse noticed two grey specks on the dark figure’s face. They never became any lighter, but they did get bigger. Or were Jesse’s eyes playing a trick on him? He stared a little while longer, watching the specks become the size of a pencil’s eraser. The grew until they were the size of a human’s eyes. As he stared, Jesse couldn’t help but remember something he’d heard someone on a television show say: “The longer you stare at the lights, the longer they stare at you.” Except, in this case, the opposite was true. And it was freaking Jesse out.

“I’m gonna pretend you aren’t real for a while.” Jesse whispered to the shadow man. “I can only take so much bullshit in one day.”

With that, Jesse turned to walk into his bedroom, closing the door behind him without looking. But, just to see what the shadow man did when he wasn’t looking, Jesse opened his bedroom door a few inches to peer into the hall. The shadow man, and all his minions, were gone. Jesse closed the door again, breathing a deep sigh of relief, then stared at his bedroom door for few seconds studying the patterns in the white painted wood; his mind blank. Wanting to think, but not being able to at the moment, Jesse went over to his desk, stood his lamp back up on its base, and brushed the glass of the broken bulb into the trash can on the floor. A part of him wanted to talk to Izzy. The part of Jesse that felt like he was losing his mind. The other part didn’t want to bother his younger brother just yet, so he sat at his desk.

“I’m not even taking the Percocet anymore, and shit’s still nuts.” Jesse told himself. “And now, I’m talking to myself.” He looked down at the drawer to his right where he tossed his prescription. Because it was so full of files, and papers that Jesse never threw away the drawer never closed, the cap of the medicine bottle preventing it from doing so. Jesse pulled the bottle out of the drawer and stared at the label, reading the instructions describing how much he should take.

“Alright, fuck it.” Jesse opened the bottle with a bit more difficulty than he should have had with a safety cap and poured two pills out of the bottle into his hand. He tossed them into his mouth, trying not to think too much about what he was doing. And swallowed them, with some of the water in the water bottle he kept on his desk next to the lamp. Then he took two more pills from the bottle, and took those, too. He took the full amount of Percocet for a day in one dose. Closing the bottle and leaving it on his desk, he stripped down to his boxers and got into bed.