Shadows Move When Light Falls
When the storm rolled in, the old town of Greymere seemed to exhale, a tired breath across windowpanes and chimneys. I stepped across the threshold of the family manor, expecting dust and silence, but the air vibrated with something almost metallic—the taste of old memories waiting to be spoken. The generator coughed, the fuse box flickered, and with a final crack, the lights surrendered to gloom. In that moment the shadows did not retreat; they stretched their fingers, testing the room as if waking from a long sleep.
I watched the shapes gather along the walls—beyond the lamp's reach, they learned to walk. Not with feet or steps, but with intention: a shadow leaning toward the stairwell, another curling around the edge of a doorway, a tall silhouette standing just beside the frame, as if the house exhaled a second family that moved when the sun fled. The absence of light did not erase them; it offered them a map, a map they followed with patient, almost ceremonial care.
There are things the dark remembers better than we do, and it speaks in the creak of a hinge and the sigh of a curtain.
In the quiet between thunderclaps, I kept a notebook, silly habit of a skeptic, documenting what the room did when the lights failed. What a fool I was to think fear could be quantified. The shadows did not merely linger; they rehearsed. They lined up along the mantel as if awaiting an audience, stretched along the corridor like a chorus, and at the far end, a single figure detached from the rest and moved with the slow dignity of a memory returning to its origin.
- A doorway that breathed, its frame expanding and contracting as though inhaling the corridor's damp air.
- Shadows that touched the edges of furniture, nudging lamp globes to tilt just enough to reveal a glimmer of something unspoken.
- Footfalls that did not belong to the house's living: a rhythm too deliberate, too old, as if the past were practicing for a scene it never completed.
- The ceiling resembling a dark ocean, where the chandelier drifted, then settled, a ship of inky silhouettes gliding across the rafters.
When I finally spoke to them, it was not with courage but with surrender. I asked what they wanted, and the reply came not as sound but as a sensation—a cold draft at the back of my neck, a whisper of a name I never knew I carried. They wanted a witness, a marker of truths not meant for daylight. And in answering, I found the truth inside the shadow: light is a fragile rumor, and shadows are the ones who remember who we are when we forget.