Falls the Shadow by Stephen O' Reilly

Author:Stephen O' Reilly
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Publish on Demand Global LLC

BETWEEN THE CRAVING AND THE SHUDDER

BETWEEN THE POWER AND THE EXISTENCE

FALLS THE SHADOW

5

PURPOSE

A single pencil of light pierced the blackness, distant, a mere pinpoint in the envelope of this endless night. And still it was enough to offer a ray of hope. The light meant that there was something beyond the darkness, the endless darkness. The light gave the tunnel a vague shape, obscure parameters, and it gave the man something tangible towards which to crawl.

Here in the tunnel the man felt at home and comfortable, although this sense of security was false and hollow. It was false and hollow because he knew the tunnel was a temporary place. It was not a home.

Yet here he reigned as king. He was everything. Alone, yet surrounded by bodies, his subjects. And this new sense of light, of purpose, of something other than contemplation of the vast darkness of the void, also felt comforting.

He closed his eyes, smiling in the darkness. It felt good to smile. His facial muscles were stiff and moved mechanically, but formed the smile—which he felt compelled to touch with his fingertips in the darkness—nonetheless. Then he turned and looked toward the pinpoint, the pencil of light. There, from whence it emanated, wherever that was, was his goal.

Movement at first seemed foreign, similar to running just after arising from a deep sleep, but his body soon became accustomed to it and carried him along with ease. He began crawling over bodies and soon felt strong and potent, vital. His hands became deft at scaling the human refuse. His mind was closed, save for the one purpose: crawling toward the light. His concentration narrowed to a point, just like his goal. In his mind he pictured it growing larger and larger and leading somewhere, anywhere, out of here.

The skin of the bodies felt rough and tanned, like leather, to the touch. This somehow made the bodies inhuman, impersonal, and subtly made the crawl less traumatic than it otherwise might have been. The tough leather was easy to grasp, easy to push off from, easy to scale … easy to forget. He did not slip; he rarely faltered. After a while, it felt almost natural to climb and crawl over the bodies. These inanimate objects, his subjects, trapped as he was, were a vehicle upon which he would ride to the end of the tunnel and out—a roller coaster of flesh. Thoughts of their tough hides boomeranged in his mind, reinforcing his own humanity, his separateness, his uniqueness in this strange, lifeless, dark, narrow world.

He crawled along for hours, agile and powerful, gliding like a panther in the jungle at night. He blanked his mind with surprising ease. It helped him to feel relaxed and released the pressure of the concentration which was necessary for scaling this refuse for so long. He paused in a space between bodies. These spaces were purposeful; he could feel it. They were placed at intervals that perfectly matched his increasing endurance and speed. There was something, he felt, something larger at work here.

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