Volume 2 – Chapter 8: The Weight of Shadows

[April 26 – 10:00 PM]

The dark closed in, dense and claustrophobic. At that moment we’re still all stuck, unable to move, unable to make sense of what just happened. “The lights, the figure — it was a blur, a dream we could not wake from.” That’s how I was breathing then, loud and echoing silence, but there was something else — something happening, more visceral, more real.

The smell of the figure’s words trailed us like an iron chain. No way out. No escape. What did that mean? Was it some kind of threat? Or was it the truth?

But Rika’s hand quivered in my grip, an iron cage but a weakening one. It was so hot, I could feel it radiating from her palm, fear dripping down onto my skin. She didn’t say anything. She didn’t need to.

I turned in circles slowly, my mind unable to form focus on everything, anything but the gnawing feeling of dread that was settling in. The dark around us felt alive, breathing with us, to what end?

Finally it was Rika the it, her voice a distant whisper. “What now?”

I swallowed and couldn’t erase the lump in my throat. “We keep going,” I declared, hoping I sounded more certain than I felt. “We can’t stay here.”

The city stretches ahead, a jumble of darkness and bent, wrecked buildings. It was as if navigating through a nightmare — a world where logic no longer worked and nothing seemed right. I glanced up towards the streets but there were no signs, no labels comparing where we were, or where we were moving.

“Do you think we’re safe?” Rika was nervous and unsure about how her speech would go.

I stared at her, my mind falling apart as I tried to hold it together. “I don’t know,” I said, weighed down by it. “But we have to keep moving. “We’re going to need to find a safe place.”

The city wasn’t a city; it was a funhouse, its battered infrastructure, its desolate sidewalks, the air thick with quiet, a more insidious quiet than serene. Streetlights flickered dimly above the others, casting errant shadows long down the cracked asphalt below. Intrigue enveloped me, but I couldn’t shake the idea that we weren’t alone, that the dark, the dark itself, was watching us, waiting.

We walked the Empty Streets, our footsteps echoed around and the silence extended on all sides to infinity the air smelt of rot off life good out of it one dying at a time. In the ashes of the dying city, we were two lost souls.

“We have to get to the outskirts,” I said, struggling to remain focused, to keep a plan in my wayward head. “They’re last hope we have.”

Rika nodded, her eyes shuttering with doubt. She didn’t want to say to my face that’s what I saw — that same doubt eating at her that was eating at me.

“How do we know it’s safe?” her voice quiet, the words hanging in the air between us.

I didn’t have an answer. The truth was, I didn’t know. But I had to believe it was. The alternative was too horrible to contemplate.

“We just have to keep going,” I said, trying to comfort her, even though I didn’t really believe it myself.

The city was a maze, and every toehold a hypothesis, every view sutured by doubt. There was no indication of anything alive, no trail to trace. Everyone else had sunk into a black dimension, and we were the only two floating through the disturbance. And there, out at a distance, that feeling of being watched — of being hunted — remained.”

We rounded another corner and there it was again. The shadow. It climbed, moving along the deformed angles of the buildings, its body all but obliterated in the penumbra. My heart skipped a beat. Is this the same guy from the last time? Or was it something else?

I called for Rika and instinctively stepped behind her. “You stay close,” I said, low and urgent, whispery. “We’re not alone.”

The shadow stilled, and for a moment I half-expected it to step forward. But poof, it evaporated into the darkness, vanished without a trace. I breathed out one swallow with my heart in my throat, my nerves alive.

“Was that—?” I'm sorry, I interrupted Rika who had begun to say. We couldn’t afford to stop. Not now.

“The thing is, we’ve got to keep going,” I said again, the voice winding itself tighter this time. “I didn’t know what else was available at the time, but we had no time to waste.

We walked down the road, one footstep heavier than the next. The quiet pressed in on us, thick and hungry, the feeling of being surveilled more inescapable with every step. It wasn’t just paranoia. It was real. And there was something out there, and it was coming closer.

We were passing by a dark alley, and I saw movement in the corner of my eye. It was instinct that made me grab Rika and pull her into the alley before I was thinking.

“What’s going on?” panic settling int her voice.

“I don’t know,” I said, tearing up. “But we need to hide. Now.”

We crouched down into the darkness, huddled against the frigid, wet walls of the alley. Then far up I heard footsteps, footsteps that got louder and louder by the second. Holding my breath, I listened closely.

The footsteps came nearer, nearer, nearer, only inches away. The air was so thick with tension it was practically suffocating, and I felt the hair on the back of my neck lift.

And then, as suddenly as it started, the footsteps stopped.

For a long moment, there was silence. No movement, no sound. Just the haggard, oppressive stillness of the alley.

My heart racing in my chest, I took a deep breath. Looking down at her, Rika’s face was a haggard white, her eyes dialated from fear. She didn’t need to ask, but I could see the question in her eyes. What was out there? What were we running from?

I didn’t have an answer.

But one thing I knew for sure: Whatever it was, was not done with us.