She Walks in Shadows by Silvia Moreno-Garcia & Paula R. Stiles

Author:Silvia Moreno-Garcia & Paula R. Stiles
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Innsmouth Free Press
Published: 2015-10-13T05:00:00+00:00

CHOSEN

Lyndsey Holder

“KEZIAH,” I WHISPERED and my body vibrated with the thrill of saying her name in the space where she once lived, in the grounds that were still permeated with the thick miasma of her power.

I’d dreamed of her since I was small, though “dream” seems too insignificant a word to describe what we shared. She visited me at least one night a month, she and her strange familiar, always when I was asleep, but our time together wasn’t disjointed and vague like the dreams I was used to having. I was scared of her, at first — what child wouldn’t be? A haggard crone, and a rat with a monstrous face and menacing teeth, should have no place in the dreams of the innocent, yet here they were in mine.

I was afraid at first, but my fear dissipated quickly and I began to look forward to our visits with excitement. She told me all sorts of stories about gods and dark things and creatures that sounded more terrifying than any monsters I’d read about. I’d never heard of those creatures, or the places they came from, but I believed in them with all my heart.

Ancient, important-looking books covered every available surface of the room we met in and a ghostly, violet light whose source I was never able to determine cast an unearthly glow throughout the space. Everything looked wrong and weird in that light — I wondered, sometimes, if the books scattered around were innocuously pedestrian, and it was only the ethereal glow that made them seem as though they contained instructions for dark rituals. I could easily have looked over at one of the many that lay open and read from it, but doing so seemed as though it would be a horrible breach of etiquette for some reason I couldn’t quite explain. I was terrified of upsetting Keziah -- initially, because she was such a frightening figure, but later, because I worried that angering her might cause her to stop visiting me.

At first, I was distracted by the strange geometry of the space. I lived with my parents in a rectangular room inside a rectangular apartment inside a rectangular building full of rectangles. I had never seen the kinds of angles and curves and half-walls that outlined the space in which Keziah lived. I made up my mind that I would have a room like hers one day.

It must have made for a bizarre picture: a gnarled old woman in a shapeless brown robe with wispy grey hair; a rat-bodied creature with a distorted face, grizzled beard, and murderously sharp teeth perched on her shoulder; and a dark-haired and bright eyed girl in cheerful, pink pyjamas.

Often, I wondered if she was lonely. Was she spending time with me because she didn’t have family, because she didn’t have her own daughter to teach these things to? I think I always knew that she was dead, though at that age, I didn’t really understand what death meant. I understand it even less now that I’m older.

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