Penumbra

Good morning, Doctor.

Yes I'm fine, thank you. Really fine, not just the fine you are when you think there’s nothing else to say. No one actually cares, usually, if you’re not fine. But I guess you do, don't you? You look like a good doctor.

Doctor Martin was a good doctor too. He cared. Really cared, right up until he—well. You know.

So I suppose we talk now, don't we? That's how these assessments go? Are you going to ask me about my father? Whether my mother gave me enough hugs? No—right, no, of course. You don't need to hear about them. You want to hear about my brother.

They did, by the way. Give me enough hugs, both of them. Our parents have moved to Portugal now, but Desmond has always been there for me. And I’m there for him. Always.

He used to climb into bed with me, back when we were kids, when he got scared. Even though I was the younger one, three years. And a girl. I was the one he trusted when the lights went out.

You know how it is with children. Monsters under the bed, monsters in the closet. Not big scary monsters with fangs or scales or claws, Des wasn’t—hm—visual enough for that, I think. For him it was just something there, something in the shadows.

Not much new, is it? Only a kid whose fear of the dark followed him to sleep, I knew that. Even back then.

It started off just the odd couple of nights, here and there. Des not liking that mum and dad said he was too old for a nightlight, not wanting to sleep alone. Darkness, they always told us, it’s the absence of light, nothing more. Nothing scary to it. But that’s not what Des told me.

He said, once, after mum and dad had gone to bed, breath barely there against my ear, holding my hand so tight my fingertips tingled, that he could feel it. The darkness. Like the cold on the outside of the window. Like the water under the bottom of the boat, not getting through, but always rocking under your feet, so that you never forget what it can do.

It got worse, after that, after he started talking to me about it. Got harder and harder for him to sleep, because of what was there. What he knew was there.

Fingers, twitching at the soft edges of shadows, growing, reaching toward him. He told me more, the two of us with my blanket pulled over our heads and dad’s spare torch between our faces, about the thing in the dark that crept closer and closer. Empty wispy hands that grasped for the pieces of him, yearned to pluck him empty from the inside out, until his veins were hollow and his bones flopped as soft as used paper straws. Until there was nothing left but a shell, where the shadows could hide.

But Doctor. I wasn’t afraid of the dark. Only Des.

I understood that, you see, as I left on the torch for him, as I made sure he'd managed to drift off before turning it out. I knew, even back then, it was only Des’s fear. Not mine. Even when the shadows started to shift in the corners of my eye too, when I too started to catch their edges writhing where nothing in the light moved, I understood.

Do you believe me, Doctor? Doctor Martin believed me. My lawyer says we should claim self defence, but it wasn't. I won't lie.

I will tell you the truth, Doctor. There are things I can prove.

So what happened, after all that? Nothing. Nothing happened. Des grew up, went to high school. He stopped needing his little sister to help him sleep. He stopped being afraid of the dark. That was it.

That was all. Until last year.

We stayed close, my brother and I, no drifting apart as we got older. You can talk to him yourself if you want, although I’m sure it’s in my file. Desmond loves me. If it had only been up to him, he’d never have pressed chares.

Do you remember the night of that first big city-wide blackout? I was beginning my Masters of Biochemistry, Des was still working at the gym. I’d just finished an assignment and crashed out early, slept through the whole thing. Des didn’t. He was at work, staying back late after closing, the only one in the building.

He got trapped there, that night. The electronic locks wouldn’t let him out. They didn’t have any torches on hand, not at the gym, no candles to be conveniently pulled out of drawers. He had his mobile, but it had been a long day. It didn’t last much more before it died. Maybe that made it worse, actually. To have some light, just a little, to hold it in his hand, before it too went out.

In the end, it was only a couple of hours. He strolled right out the door, once the locks went back up. He made it home.

He went three days before showing up at my flat.

Doctor Martin told me, he talked to Des. He saw that he could trust I was telling the truth. He was a good doctor.

Did they tell you that his, whatever it was, it happened during one of our sessions? He was right in front of me when he—well, yes, of course they did. That’s probably in my file too, isn’t it. Do you know if they ever identified the cause of death?

Anyway.

It took Des a while, he said, before he thought of the thing in the shadows. Sitting there alone, after his battery gave out. Did I recall it too, from when we were kids? Yes, of course I did. It found him again that night, he said, leaching through the dark walls of the dark room in a dark city. He recalled it. It was back.

Recall. What a curious word. Re-call.

Are you starting to understand, Doctor? I think you will. I knew as soon as we met that you were someone who could understand, just like Doctor Martin. Have you also seen something, once in your life, that couldn’t be fully explained in the light? Do you also have questions you’ve wanted to ask, not to a textbook or conference or journal, but into the void of the sky? Or, is it simply just that you trust what you see in my eyes?

Thank you, Doctor, for understanding. I knew you would.

I only have a studio. Just about room enough for one—student life, you know—but I piled some blankets on the ground between the desk and the wall. I let Des have the bed, when he tried to sleep. It wasn’t often. He refused to go to work. Some of his friends asked me if he was on drugs, I told them he wasn’t. He wouldn’t talk to them himself. It came upon him so fast, this time.

Sleeping with the room lights on took me some getting used to, at first. But eventually they stopped bothering me. Then, the days I had to go to class, I started coming home to find Des unpacking boxes. Deliveries. Lamps, lanterns, extension cables, that he shoved into every corner of my tiny flat. I told him I was worried, about him spending this much money, about us running out of room to put all of it. The boxes kept coming.

Here was the thing. Once upon a time, all it had taken to keep the thing out was me and our little torch. During the blackout, Desmond had made it through hours with nothing but the half moon through the skylight. Now—now he froze when he saw the space behind the door as I was opening it. Now he stared with the rawest, skin-crawling horror when I accidentally knocked a lamp askew, eyes trailing from the darkened corner, tracking something as it snaked slowly, slowly across the ceiling—until I managed to set the light back to rights in time.

Do you see, Doctor? Do you? That the more he tried, the worse it became?

And that was before the sleepwalking. At least, I think he was sleepwalking. He didn’t remember what he was doing afterwards, but the surprise would have been that he was sleeping at all. I woke up the first time, so used at that point to the glaring bulbs stacked on every free surface, it actually jolted me from sleep when half of them turned off.

Des had unplugged one of the powerboards. He was reaching for a second one, when I asked him what he was doing. When I grabbed his wrist after he didn’t answer. I looked into his eyes, and watched as the glassiness left them, as his limp hand went taut under mine. As he started to scream.

I knew, then, that this couldn’t go on much longer. It was closing in.

Have you worked it out, now? I did, all the way back as a girl.

There is a gap in this world, Doctor. A gap on the edge of existence itself. It’s where Des found his shadows. It’s where a different boy, clutching his own sister’s hand, finds his beast in the wardrobe, or his ghoul out the window.

Des’s thing in the shadows was here—because he called it in.

Here's how it is, Doctor. There is something that bridges this gap. Us. What we look for, when we gaze past the void. What we expect to see, the way we expect to see it, it pries at those edges. What we believe, it gives the things inside what they need to come through.

It’s a powerful thing, unimaginably so. That which fuels the forms that have not yet been formed, leaves them solid and strong and hungry. And that kind of belief, the kind that hammers at the boltholes in the very hinges of our world—well. It comes at a price.

It isn’t a thing we decide, Doctor, what we believe in. Try believing that the sky is green, or that the grass is purple. But, that doesn’t mean we’re unshakeable. You’ve seen it, I'm sure? The other side of faith? You know how it crumbles, how doubt can catch in the barest sliver of purchase and not let go. Like a seed that finds the single crack of soil in a rock, thickens to a root, and brings down the mountain. That’s what I needed to do. For Des.

They’d been talking about it for weeks—grid instability, the likelihood of a recurrence—when the second blackout came. Des was asleep. I’d actually managed to get him to drift off a bit after sundown that day, that was the real miracle. But I knew I couldn't have much time. I went to my kitchenette.

I’m not a doctor. I have studied some anatomy, though. I knew where best to do it. Where to use the carving knife.

Desmond came to, while we were waiting for the paramedics. I was holding his abdomen, pressing the bedsheets down over where his body gushed hot red that I could feel but not see, and I was laughing.

I told him it had worked. The lights went out, and I saw the thing in the shadows. I saw it come. I saw it dig its way inside him.

I cut it back out.

And I showed him, all around us, the pieces that I’d cut the thing into. Des looked where I pointed, like he could really see something there. Then he laughed as well, until his blood bubbled up his throat, spilt over his lips like drops of black candy.

You’ve read the medical report, Doctor. I told you I could prove it. Des and I didn’t fight, there was no struggle. The paramedics will tell you, he was smiling when they strapped him to the gurney, in the dark.

I saved my brother. I set him free. He believed that the thing of horrors was just behind his shoulder, that there was no hope left. I gave him an out, to believe that it’s gone. That I would keep it gone. And so, it is true.

But you and I, Doctor. We know, don’t we?

You're a person of science, like me. And science knows, there are forces in this universe that exist whether you believe in them or not.

So, how did I do it? How could I know that something is real enough to be believed in, but not by me? How did I chart, like an explorer, that gap that's known only by natives and settlers? I don’t know. I don’t, Doctor. I don’t understand everything here.

Unless. Unless I did believe. Not like Des did. I believed in me.

I will tell you, Doctor, there was a moment. When I told Des that I’d cut it apart, there was one moment I—I almost saw it too. Like when we were children, and I could just make out Des’s thing on the edges of the light, back when I was young enough to almost believe too. Almost.

It was pitch black, that night, the second blackout, except for the moon through the curtains that I’d opened. Too dark to see, but how else would you see darkness itself? And there, in that space between the shadows, I did see. The pieces of jagged umbra around us, raw and bleeding inky tendrils of night and fear and hunger. The pieces I’d told Des I’d cut and torn with my own hands. I saw, like there was something really there.

Like I put it there.

I believed that I would protect my brother, and so I did. I believed that I would kill the thing in the dark. And there, somewhere not quite in the shadow and not quite out, I could.

I—became something that could.

Something else. Something near enough to its plane to touch it. Something stronger. Something worse.

So what, then, does that make me now?

Well there we go, Doctor. There’s my story. I heard Des got out of hospital and into rehab last week, they told me he’s doing well. He’ll be good. I know it.

You do believe me, don’t you, Doctor? I can see you do. Maybe you don’t want to, but it’s not a thing we decide. You don’t believe in the shadows, not like Des did. But you believe me.

You've been very good to me, just like Doctor Martin. He believed me too. Believed in me too.

Belief like that, it gives us form. Leaves us hungry. And it comes at a price.

You look tired, Doctor. Why don't you rest. Why don't you let me turn the lights down.

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