This is Part 6, the penultimate chapter of “Shadowloss,” an original serialized novella. If you need to catch up or refresh, find:
Don’t read this one in the dark.
[Est. reading time: 6 minutes]
The house was empty. No Kat, no dogs. Some leftover Thai food spoiling in the fridge.
I wandered into the bedroom and found the bag I'd brought to the hotel room sitting on the bed, with a note on top. It was from Thea.
Reg--
Writing this in case you can't access VM for some reason.
Told Kat what happened. She's with her parents in WI I believe. You should call her.
I'm sorry. Should have been more careful. Hope you're OK. Call me, too, if you can.
-T
I plugged in my laptop and was relieved to find the wifi still worked. There were three voicemails from Thea, and one from Kat, along with a handful of texts from both of them. Suds had also sent some texts and left a message. All of it was timestamped a least a week prior to my own calls out in the parking lot.
I typed out responses in all three threads. Thea didn't respond, and neither did Kat. But Suds got back to me right away.
You're ALIVE! Very good news. Was extremely worried about you. How can I help? What do you need? I'm coming over.
Twenty minutes later, I opened the door and Suds grabbed me by the shoulders. "My man," he said, then looked past me into the house. "This is bleak. Time to go."
He took me downtown to a restaurant that was surprisingly busy, considering it was the apocalypse. We had to wait 90 minutes for an outside table.
I couldn't help but glance around at the flickering light of the sconces nearby. Nobody had any shadows.
Suds had lots of questions. I did my best to answer them.
"You were early," he said when it was clear we'd reached the bottom of my well of knowledge. "Very early. But it spread fast. I haven't seen anyone with a shadow in two days."
"What do you think?" I said. "You think we'll get used to them being gone?"
Suds laughed. "Who knows! I'm used to it. You're used to it. But still, the world is ending." He leaned in. "Have you heard about the shadow holes?"
My skin crawled. I did not want to hear about the shadow holes.
"Some videos started popping up this morning. Just a couple at first, but there's at least a dozen of them now. Places where the light stops. Hallways, tunnels, doorways.... Portals."
"Portals?"
Suds nodded. "You can't light them up. It's just black. Shine a flashlight, throw in a freaking molotov cocktail -- nothing. Complete darkness. Check it out."
He pulled out his phone and showed me a few examples, scrubbing through videos of people shining lights unsuccessfully down darkened hallways, and through doors, the inky blackness swallowing everything.
"What's that one?" I asked, pointing at a newer video on the sidebar.
By way of response, Suds pulled it up and let it play.
It was a group of teenagers standing outside the entrance of an old brick building at night. They were speaking in a language I couldn't understand and trying the same kinds of things things, but only demonstratively, to establish that this was indeed a "shadow hole." One of them was wearing a vest fitted with a couple dozen LED lights. It became obvious that he was going to walk through that door.
The pitch and fervor of his friends' voices rose steadily as he got closer, and I could not look away.
As he stood at the threshold, his friends went silent. He looked back at the camera one more time, then stepped through. I made a sound, an involuntary yelp of warning across space and time. In that one step, the darkness overtook him. All the lights he had been wearing were gone. It was as black as before.
Eyes bulging, I waited. His friends waited. Then someone shouted, "Amir!" His name, I guessed. But there was no response. More shouting, more nothing. Suddenly, there was panic. The guy holding the camera (probably a phone) rushed up to the door and pushed it into the darkness. More shouting, and then the camera came back out to briefly survey the pandemonium attendant to a bunch of teenagers who had just made a huge mistake. Then it cut.
I looked up at Suds. He shook his head.
"It could have been a prank," I said, knowing it wasn't. The looks on those kids faces...
Suds gave his head a tiny shake and put his phone away.
I swallowed. "Have you heard of anyone going into those things and then coming back out?"
Before he could answer, a hostess came out to let us know our table was ready.
"No," he said after we'd ordered. The menu seemed a bit thinner than it might have been. "Rumors are that that's where everyone's shadows are going."
"Any videos of that? Shadows going in or out?"
"A few, but it's really hard to tell. I mean, they're shadows. Some people have set up spotlights around them, to try to make it more obvious, but I haven't seen anything convincing yet."
While we were waiting for our food, Suds explained that people were pretty sure it had started in Los Angeles, or thereabouts, and then spread outward. A little bit like a virus, but way harder to track. As though viruses were easy -- we weren't even done dealing with Covid yet, which, at the end of the day, wasn't all that exotic. Shadowloss (the common vernacular describing my condition) didn't seem to require person to person contact. And yet, the spread vectors weren't entirely location agnostic.
It all sounded very complicated, but the gist was that it had gone all the way around the world and back, igniting a whole spectrum of responses ranging from "hm, interesting" to "oh god the world is ending." But, as Suds explained, it only takes a marginal percentage of headless chicken responses to upset the delicate balance of global systems.
And it only takes a little bit of unbalancing to set off wars.
"We'll feel it here later than a lot of places," Suds said. "Poor people are getting screwed first, like always. But it'll come for us."
"How long, do you think, before...?" But I didn't really know how to finish the question.
"Till you can't buy food with money?" Suds offered.
Before he could answer, the food arrived. I realized my appetite was not as strong as it had been. Our dishes seemed impossibly gratuitous. A chicken filet laying in a creamy balsamic reduction, with a side of roasted carrots and seasonal greens. Bubbles worked their way up the side of the craft beer I had self-consciously ordered.
Suds snapped out his napkin,
"I don't know," he said. "No one does. That's the problem." Then he dug into his vegetarian chili over baked yam.
We ate in silence for a while. It was good, I think. I felt pretty lost.
"What are you going to do?" I finally asked him.
"My brother and I have a little land in Wyoming. Pretty remote. I'll probably head up there in a few days."
I nodded. He looked at me. Please don't ask.
"Come with us," he said.
"No," I said. "That's...thank you, but you don't have to worry about me."
"Well then what are you gonna do?"
I had no idea. "I want to get in touch with Thea. Maybe patch things up with Kate. If things get bad, I should probably go try to take care of my parents."
"Admirable. Do they have a garden?"
I pictured the weedy backyard of the house I grew up in. "I don't think so."
"You should tell them to start a garden. And get solar."
I wasn't sure how successful solar panels would be in Canton, Ohio, but I didn't bother to object. It was sort of beside the point.
This is your last chance to invite a friend to catch up with you so you’ll have someone to talk to about it when you reach the end.
Love the shadow holes.
I'm not sure how this will wrap up in one more installment..... But I am looking forward to it!