Title: Shadows

Genre: Urban Fantasy

Summary: There are shadows in that forest. There are demons. The dead should not be left alone there. So I stayed, all night.

Inspired by Gail Carriger’s Parasol Protectorate series and Laurell K. Hamilton’s Flirt.

Image by wolfgangphoto

I knelt on my knees in the forest, one bare hand on the body as the sun went down. The moans of the dying man behind me annoyed me. For once, I wished that I had spent more time in target practice. I wished that when I took the shot at the man who killed my lover, my lover laid out dead on the forest ground, it would have killed him cleanly.

The shadows lengthened, then danced. As the sun withdrew, the shadows giggled over the groans. They whispered to me.

Let us have it. Let us have fun. Let us play. Let us play with it.

I ignored them all, like I ignored the dying man’s pain. The dying man whimpered, clutching his stomach. He begged for me to take him to a doctor. Mocked me for standing vigil over my lover. The shadows that the dying man couldn’t see yet sidled up to him, tasting the sweat of a mortally wounded man. The sun still glowed over the tree line.

Not yet. Not yet. Let us have yours.

They waited for the true darkness.

I waited for the morning.

The sun disappeared completely. The sky overhead turned black. No moon, no stars. There wasn’t anything to see.

Then the dying man screamed. The shadows feasted upon him. They ate his skin and pulled out his intestines, and they kept his heart beating and his lungs breathing as long as they could so that he could witness it. The destruction of his body.

A clean shot would have been better. Then he’d be quiet.

“How can you enjoy it without screams?”

I didn’t answer the demon. It preened, although I couldn’t see it, needing attention. The shadows continued their game. His screams died into gurgling as the nibbled at his voice box. That hardly made a difference.

“They’d leave him alone if you gave them that.”

But I kept my hand on the body and the shadows had to keep away. Until the morning, when the shadows departed before the sunshine. Before they slumbered below, unknown to any traveller, wary or unwary. I just had to stay awake the night.

The demon wandered off to begin its attempts to lure me away. I stayed, kneeling, my hand on the body.

Hours passed. The dying man became the dead man. The dead man became the puppet. The puppet, filled with shadows, danced about the clearing as the other shadows clapped a jaunty tune. Blood from skinned flesh and deeper wounds rained to the ground.

It would be so much better with two.

But they wouldn’t come near. They had to make do with just the one, and made it do all sorts of naughty things. And they did do every naughty thing that the shadows could think of, with just one.

The puppet’s soul was gone, devoured by the shadows as they had devoured his flesh. There wasn’t any afterlife for him. It was hard to feel sorry for him. I had long gotten used to not having a soul at all.

There’d never be any afterlife for me.

The demon came back, trying to startle me from out of the dark. I didn’t move, as still and concrete as a rock. If my hand left the body for one second, the shadows could have their fun. Would they have his soul too? Or had I devoured it, simply by touching him?

I hoped it had already escaped into the afterlife.

I could never know.

They tried to tell me stories, with punchlines I didn’t get. Feelings of intense lust and pleasure at hurting others, of seeing their ruined bodies. Of making others do nasty things, only to laugh and mock and point. Of things they had done to other travellers in their forest. Of the blood sacrifices the previous inhabitants made to bring them all here. They were long dead, and the shadows and the demon told me in smarmy detail how that came to be.

Yet still, I kept my hand on the body. They tried to frighten me, but I didn’t budge. The body had grown so cold, colder even than the chilled night air. The human-feel of it disappeared, becoming more and more of a corpse as the hours passed. He wouldn’t just wake up. They couldn’t escape in the night.

“You’re just like us. Why don’t you join us? Enjoy your lack of soul, your innate demon.”

I ignored them, their taunts and their jabs. They used their puppet to make scary faces. They told me that my companions were long dead, like their puppet, in their hands of their comrades as they celebrated the chaos of a black night. If I had just followed them instead of protecting the body, they would be alive. Didn’t I owe it to them to just check? But I couldn’t worry about everything. I couldn’t move from that spot.

They tried to trick me, they tried to taunt me, they tried to disgust me with their puppet. They jumped from behind bushes, getting ever closer to me until even in the moon-less and star-less night, I could see them in front of him. More daring, they came closer, and closer, and closer, until I felt the air stirred from their passing over my bare skin. Until I felt their breathe on the back of my neck.

They could try their best, and their worst, but unless they did the impossible and physically moved me, my hand would remain on my dead lover’s body.

After the sun crested the trees and morning finally descended into the clearing, they came back for me. My companions. They asked me what was wrong, only seeing me and the corpse. Why had I not fled back to the camp so that we could come back for his body now? The enemy was about. They could have captured me.

“There’s a reason no one comes here.”

I finally stood.

They stepped into the clearing, my companions. Then their jaws dropped as they finally absorbed the sight. All the trees surrounded stripped bare of leaf and bark, the only decoration the skinned and mutilated body the shadows had left hung in the tree.

The End

Okay, that was one of my creepier stories. Did it give you chills too? I meant it to be under 500 words long, and it’s still too short. What else would the shadows and the demon attempt to scare off the protagonist?