creepy forest with no leaves in cerulean light silhouette .jpg

Others Within 3: Cast the Shadows

Adele sat and stared at the boy in front of her.

The tiny thing, wide eyed and far too serious, stared past her and into the two-way mirror.

“Ezra?”

He ignored her once more, dark eyes still staring far away and willingly lost. He was a lanky boy, short for his ten years, and everything about him seemed so small. From shoulders that poked through the shirt, to a stomach that looked like it could do with more filling, it was easy to tell something weighed him down.

She tapped her pen against paper. “You don’t have to say anything just yet, Ezra, but I want you to know that you can talk to me.”

“Let me guess. You’re my friend, right?” The words, clipped and harsh, were accompanied with a special sort of pain. She’d seen it before, but rarely so raw. The boy looked away from the mirror and into her eyes. There was fear in his eyes. Eyes that had seen too much. Adele couldn’t explain it, wasn’t sure what made her so uneasy around the boy, but there was something about the way the light reflected off Ezra’s eyes, something about the glint and echoes of the reflections in his voice. Something, somewhere, somehow was…off.

Adele swallowed. “Yes. I’m your friend.”

“Bullshit.” His words were older than his age. He's had to grow up fast, Adele thought. Perhaps he'd had a hard life before the incident.

Ezra leaned his head forward, hair falling across his face. He buried his face into his hands. “You’re just like the others. You believe I could possibly be responsible for—” The words caught in his throat, a noise akin to disgust choking out.

“Ezra, we’re all just trying to help. We need to understand what happened. We just want to know.”

“And what am I supposed to say?” He whispered the words, so low that she barely heard them. She leaned forward to catch everything he said. “How do I even begin to try to explain? You won’t believe me. No one will.”

There was an other-worldliness around him. He’d been touched by the Other, of that she was certain. Humans didn’t graze that side of the realms and come back unscathed. “Try me, Ezra.” She whispered the words too, away from the ears of the police that were listening on the other side of the mirror. They’d sent her to find out what the child was capable of. This was her way to find out. “You’d be surprised what I’ll believe.”

He looked at her between fingertips. “You’ve seen it too?”

“I’ve seen…” she hesitated. “I’ve seen things. Look into my eyes. We can always tell others who have seen the doors.”

He looked at her, really looked, and she felt that familiar sensation of layers being stripped away. He was seeing things humans weren’t meant to see. Finally, he nodded. “Can you save them?”

“I don’t know, can I?”

Ezra’s eyes filled with tears. “No. I guess not.”

“What happened?”

He shook his head, tears pooling in his strange eyes and spilling down his cheeks. “I can’t. I’m sorry.”

Adele nodded. “When you’re ready to talk, I’ll come back.”

“Are you going to go back there?”

Adele didn’t answer him as she scooted her chair back and stood. “Get some rest, Ezra.”

“Just…” he hesitated, searching for words. “Just, don’t. Don’t look into the lights that cast the shadows.”

The words caused a tremor to run along the length of her spine. She wasn’t sure she wanted to know what he meant. The sentence followed her as she made her report to the detectives. The detectives frowned, demanding she at least get some sort of explanation for the gore they’d found him in the middle of. No one wanted to believe a child was capable of that. As the child psychologist, she was their only hope left to try to figure out some sort of explanation. But, she’d done the best she could, and they knew that as much as she did.

Tensions ran high because everyone knew what they dealt with wasn’t something natural. Even the cops that weren’t superstitious could feel the Other touch on the case. Nothing human could be capable of what was left behind in the home.

Adele had seen the pictures.

She needed to understand, and she feared that whatever had happened could repeat. Adele fought the urge to play hero, but knew that she would lose in the end. Ezra’s fear was real, and she wanted to help the boy. She wanted to make sure it never happened again. She wasn’t a fan of going to a crime scene. Memories left moments scarred into the land she’d rather not see. It wasn’t even a crime scene anymore, not really. It had been investigated, torn apart and cleaned up. But, those memories had left lasting imprints, and the scars left on the world would be fresh. Fresh scars festered infections. Infections festered openings between the realms.

What will this really accomplish? Adele thought. She sat in the idling vehicle, eyes on the home’s doorway. It’s not like I’ll find evidence that'll help that boy.

“Curiosity,” whispered a voice, not entirely in her head. It was a dry, dead voice. A voice she remembered from the edges of a nightmare. A nightmare that had taken who she was and twisted it up inside. “You are curious to see what could paint the walls red with only human blood. Once you’ve been touched by the Other, my dear, you’ll always be drawn to it. Irrevocably so.”

“It’s not curiosity,” she whispered. She rubbed a hand down the scar on her arm before feeling the wooden prayer beads that wrapped around her wrists. “I just have to make sure the door is closed. This can’t happen again.”

“Then come, little Witch.”

Adele took a shaking, shuddering breath and turned the car off.

Gravel and sand crunched underneath her boots as she approached the door. It was an unassuming home, beige and two story. Windows stared at her like blank eyes and her skin prickled as if something looked beyond those glass panes. She placed a hand on the wood, feeling the warmth and pulsing heartbeat of the home within. It fluttered, quickening and slowing, whispering entices she couldn’t perfectly understand.

Adele didn’t need to unlock the door. The home let her in. A slow and faint cerulean glow emanated around her. It came from everywhere and nowhere, casting long and winding shadows against the walls.

Adele blinked into the lights, putting a hand up to shield her eyes.

The house in front of her shimmered, wavered, as if she looked past the heat of the desert air. There, in the glow of death, was a door to the Other. Things blurred past the barrier, and it was as if she looked through dirty stained glass. Beyond that doorway was the living room—movements flitted just beyond clear sight.

She reached a hand out and grazed against the tremoring edge of the entrance. It sung to her touch, a pure and solid and deep chime. There was warmth in that touch, wetness and life. Adele hesitated for a moment as she ran a hand against the beads that wrapped her left wrist once more. Whispers wrapped around her in the room, and she was just beyond the point of hearing the words. She steeled herself and stepped past the threshold.

Beyond the barrier, in the Other, sounds echoed in her ears. The air had a dampness to it, making it much more difficult to breathe. The home seemed claustrophobic with walls that echoed in impossible ways. They clenched around her in time with her frantically beating heart. A part of her that Adele was not fully aware of felt the echoes of the life fluid that pumped through the home, that had been spilled in the home, that had brought the thing to feed in the lights.

Colors were simultaneously sharper and duller in the Other. There was a terrible beauty in the mirrored world that mocked her own. Tendrils of shadows and thorns reached and beckoned, tearing at her clothes as she stepped forward. What was real, what wasn’t, no longer mattered—all tied together and formed at her will in this pocket of nothingness of the Other. All that kept her tethered to reality was the cold beads that she squeezed into her skin, leaving imprints.

“Little Witch, with your gods’ prayers on your arm,” whispered a voice. A voice made of many voices, small and young and hurt and twisted into one. “We built this world for you. Won’t you stay with us?”

In front of her was the faintest glimpse of trees in the shadows. Massive and impressive things with more branches than there were stars in the sky. Roots snaked and coiled into the ground. So many trees with branches thinner than a razor’s edge to cut the lights ahead.

The Lights Ahead.

Circular. Perfect. Somewhere in her mind, she knew these things weren’t kind things, but she was drawn forward, stepping on the wet and breathing ground that strummed her heart’s beat. The shadows followed her with those whispered fancies and thorns, tugging her clothes and skin.

Don’t. Look. She thought the words in drunken pauses and squeezed her wrist, hard, to feel the bite of wood beads on skin. Adele drug to a stop, wavering on her feet and fighting the desire to fall to the ground. She had the feeling that if she fell, she would never stand again.

“I’m closing this door,” she said aloud, using her peripheral vision to look forward. The words hung on the shadows. Something with too many legs scuttled in the perfect lights ahead.

“We come now, regardless. It makes no difference to us.”

“What do you mean?”

“This land has been fed, plumped as one would plump a boar for a feast. My roots have twisted deep into the fabric of this realm. Close the door, if you wish, but we may pass.”

Adele took a few steps back, until her back was against the barrier to the Other, where her world sat plain and unremarkable. She unwound the prayer beads from her wrist, feeling that comforting coldness, and wrapped both her hands in the beaded rope. She closed her eyes and began to pray.

The first sign the Other faded was the silence. She no longer heard the echoes or heartbeat. The doorway struggled in the dampness of the air, but soon that faded too, leaving the arid Arizona air in its place.

Adele opened her eyes and wrapped the beads around her wrist once more. She stood in an empty, normal living room. Most of the furniture, likely unsalvageable from the crime scene, had been removed. Long shadows rested in the corners of the room.

She turned to leave when, in her periphery, she watched a shadow move. In the depths of the darkness, a small cerulean light blinked into existence, bobbing up and down. It briefly illuminated the face with each upward movement. A face made of mostly maw and pincers and eyes, the fangs smiled at her.

A massive thing, coiled around a spire of shadow with long, spindly legs reminiscent of tree branches. More legs made cages beneath it where faces glimpsed in and out of existence, crying and dying in moments of time. Feeding it.

“The scroll writes for the Mother, for the Witch, for the Scholar, and for the Little One. We cannot take you—you are not meant for this time. You will come to us another time.”

Adele couldn’t speak, watching the light that had enticed so many souls to rest in the cages beneath their body. The question lay unspoken between them.

Sounds chittered around her, and she realized that the creature’s expanse filled the circumference of the room. Adele turned a half circle, seeing a long, sinuous body with faces screaming between the legs. The shiny body blocked her from the doorway.

“Names, they come and go.” Despite the words echoing in her mind, pincers clicked with the words, giving them a sharpened edge. “We've been called countless names through the civilizations we’ve watched rise and fall. You would not care to know.”

Her heart beat in her chest, painful and fast. She kept her eyes diverted from the blue sphere, watching from the corner of her eye. “What are you going to do with me?”

“Nothing, little Witch. Pass by this home. You’ve blessed it and we will leave it to die on its own. There are things in the realm we must tend to. You will be needed at a later date. We shall show you.”

The creature shifted in the shadows, the light flickering. Adele squeezed the ring of wooden beads. There was a wrongness in the air that choked her. Heavy in the aura of her realm, her skin prickled as the Other tore at the flimsy shields that separated her world from theirs.

The realization stuck in her throat, twisted its way through her heart and squeezed. This home was not the first, was not the last, and was not the only. She stumbled to her knees. “Oh gods,” she whispered, the sentence broken.

It chuckled, shaking the many-legged body. The souls cried. “Now you see what lies ahead, or at least the path to it.” It didn’t wait for her to answer, uncoiling from the shadows of the home. The lights flickered once, twice, before blinking out of existence. Adele lifted her head, seeing that she was alone in the dark of the living room once more.

“The mother, the witch, the scholar, and the little one,” she said to herself. She coughed in the silence of the empty home and stood on weak legs. She half expected something to reach out and touch her or to grab her as she made her way out. There was something about the silence that was unsettling and prickled against her.

Adele got into the car and let out a long, frustrated sigh. Her hands gripped the steering wheel, knuckles turning white. Something had grazed her world. Touched it and left it tainted. So many openings to the Other. How could the two realms coexist with so many tears between them? The beings that existed beyond the barriers behaved outside the realm of human understanding. There was no good, no evil with them—simply their will, and the will they exercised on what they saw as less than them. Adele had no illusions that they believed humans beneath them, simply tools for whatever plan they had for this world.

Adele was not afraid. The emotion she felt was much older, more primal. The sort of creeping dread her ancestors no doubt had felt while being hunted by bigger, stronger predators. Worse, she knew she had a bigger part to play in whatever games the Others had devised.

She had no doubt who the Witch was. She leaned her head back on her seat and closed her eyes. In the shadows of her eyelids, she could still see the cerulean lights bob up and down.

Don’t look in the lights that cast the shadows.

Adele sighed. A bit late for that, she thought. She turned on her car, pulled out of the driveway and onto the road. The house stared at her from her rear-view mirror, silent and accusing. Late and I’ll see them again.