The Lovely Shadow (6 page)

I finished the last of my pointless tirade
against an inanimate object just as I was drawing my foot back to
kick the machine, and as I finished my tirade and pulled my foot
back it dawned on me that I was an idiot. Not because I was
chastising and preparing to beat up a machine, but because if that
machine could deliver water to clothes, then it could certainly
deliver it to me!

I felt an absurd impulse to apologize to the
washing machine for my unfounded behavior, but quickly suppressed
it.

‘I’m not going to be crazy like my mother!’ I
thought to myself as I approached my new savior, (a savior that
looked remarkably like a washing machine).

I pulled the lid open and recoiled at the
smell that came from it. Apparently I had put a load in the wash
quite some time ago and had forgotten to take them out again to be
dried. They had soured and the smell blasted up out of the washer
and smacked me across the face.

I recoiled at the smell and took a step
back.

‘Well,’ I thought, ‘I’m just going to have to
be thirsty a little bit longer, ‘cause I ain’t drinking anything
that comes out of something that smells like that!’

I reached over to the drier and found my step
stool which I grabbed and placed in its proper place in front of
the washing machine. I climbed the stool and grabbed the soap off
the counter above the washer and got everything ready to wash the
stink out of the clothes. I marveled at how much my thirst had
abated just from knowing that there would be water soon enough.

I was still marveling this psychological
phenomenon as I reached over to grab the knob on the washer and
turn it on, but being as distracted as I was I grabbed at it with
my right hand and jammed my broken fingers into the control panel
of the washer.

It hurt so bad I couldn’t even scream. My
chest tightened and a small groan of air squeaked out of me that
sounded similar to air leaking out of a balloon. Tears immediately
sprang up in my eyes. I jerked my arm back and banged my elbow on
the top of the washer, making a resounding ‘bong’ sound.

That time I found a bit more voice and
emitted a growl of pain. I pulled my arm back a bit more carefully
and tucked my elbow into my side just below my ribs. Every muscle
in that arm was rigidly flexed and my face was contorted in a
severe grimace.

I stayed that way for several minutes,
waiting for the pain to recede and wondering if it ever would.
Eventually it did, slowly. I could feel the pain leaking slowly out
of my arm and hand and as it did, I relaxed my taught muscles in
direct proportion. When the pain finally reached a level I could
bare, I used my left hand to turn on the washer and I made my way
back to my lawn chair and sat on it.

As I was wiping the tears out of my eyes and
off my cheeks I knew what I had to do and dreaded it. I had to try
and set my finger bones back into their proper places. I had seen
it done on a survival show once, where the host had fallen down and
dislocated one of his fingers, so I had a vague idea on how to
proceed, but I was terrified to do so.

It looked pretty damn painful when that guy
on T.V. did it, and I really didn’t think I needed any more pain. I
sat for a bit pondering whether to actually do it or not and
finally decided that if I didn’t do it I was just going to keep
banging my useless fingers around in the dark, and that pain would
outweigh the pain of trying to fix my dislocated digits.

I steeled myself for the coming pain by
squeezing my eyes closed and gritting my teeth. I took a deep
breath and held it as I reached out gingerly with my left hand and
wrapped it tightly around my ring finger on my right hand. It hurt
like Hell to grab it, but not nearly as bad as I’d been
expecting.

I exhaled slowly and tried not to move the
finger I was grasping. I sat there feeling indecisive for several
seconds before deciding it was a now or never situation. I took
another deep breath and yanked the finger straight out, away from
the hand in one quick jerk. I felt the bone sliding across the
knuckle socket that it was supposed to be connected to as I pulled
it. Then I felt the bone slip into alignment with the socket.

It’s hard to describe exactly how that felt.
There was just a slight pressure all the way around the socket of
the knuckle and I knew that the finger bone was sitting on the rim
of the socket, waiting to be popped in.

As soon as I felt that pressure I rammed the
finger towards it, holding it as straight and rigid as I could and
felt it pop in. I let out a holler that was somewhere between a
scream and a growl as I thrust it in, but found that that the
scream was not actually necessary as it hurt a whole lot less than
I thought it was going to. The pain relief that came after setting
the finger in place was instant and tremendous.

I was much less apprehensive about setting my
second finger and it went back in place in much the same way, and
again, the relief was tremendous.

Now that my fingers were happily back in
place I knew I needed to find a way to tape them up or I’d just pop
them out again, and God knew, I didn’t ever want to go through that
again. So I started shuffling towards the back of the basement
where I’d found the chair.

I didn’t like going to that end of the
basement much because it was pitch dark and with my penchant for
scary movies and books over the last few months my imagination had
a field day with the dark.

In my mind I could clearly see three long,
black, slime covered, tentacles that were coiled beneath the piles
of clutter. The pointed tips were just poking out from the clutter,
watching me. Tasting my scent as I drew nearer, twitching like a
cat’s tail does when it’s hunting. I could sense the excitement
growing within the tentacular beast as it waited patiently for me
to get within striking distance. I knew it could probably reach me
from anywhere in the basement, since I couldn’t get out, but I
didn’t think this beast was intelligent enough to know that, so it
would wait.

It would wait for me to get within a few feet
and then it would lunge out of the clutter, spraying debris in the
air as it flew towards me faster than a striking snake. I knew it
would hit me square in the face, and it would have suction cup
grips on the bottom side of its tentacles that would grip my flesh
and start secreting acid. Once it had attached itself to me with
all three tentacles it would pull the remainder of its gelatinous
body out of hiding.

It would slither its slimy mass to where its
acidic tentacles were slowly dissolving my flesh and weakening me
so I couldn’t fight any more, and then it would simply slide over
my body, encasing me in its slimy depths where my screams would be
muffled by virtue of the creature’s own attenuation and I would be
slowly dissolved; I would, however, be alive and aware of the slow
dissolution of my body until my vital organs were dissolved. It
would be horrible.

I stopped moving. I was too afraid to go any
further and I made up my mind that I would just go and sit happily
on my chair until the end of the world, thank you very much, when
it dawned on me that I’d already braved the dark once when I came
for the chair. Nothing tried to eat me then, so why should I be so
afraid that something would try to eat me now? I sighed deep and
long, knowing that I was going to go into the darkest regions of
the basement and that I would still be scared, but I would not be
terrified.

I chastised myself for being silly as I
shuffled deeper and deeper into the depths of blackness, but my
chastisement did little good, for I was still scared. I finally
reached the back wall-o-junk but the journey took me a lot longer
than it should have since I had stopped in fear so many times along
the way.

Once I reached the junk I had no idea where
to start looking for something as small as a roll of tape, or how I
was even supposed to recognize it in the pitch blackness, so I just
stood there stupidly.

‘Ok, Dummy, think!’ I thought to myself.
‘Where would you find tape in the middle of all this crap?’ I
thought for a bit and finally got a pretty good idea.

“In the Christmas supplies,” I shouted out
loud, startling myself. “Of course it’s in the Christmas crap. Good
old clear tape, in the same box as the wrapping paper!”

I felt around for a bit, being very careful
not to bump my right hand into anything. I pulled out and opened
every box that I thought was in the same vicinity as the Christmas
supplies, and stuck my left hand blindly into each of them, feeling
around, trying to discern the contents.

This might sound like a simple task, but it
was actually a terrifying ordeal. My imagination was acting up
again. I kept imagining that I was going to stick my hand in a box
and hear a slight scuffling noise as a large, hairy hand with
cracked yellow fingernails came reaching up from the bottom of the
box to grasp my hand and pull me into the box. I would find that it
was not just a box, but a magical door into another world, like
Lucy’s wardrobe to Narnia.

I was afraid I was going to be pulled into a
dark cave that smelled of mildew, sweat, and decomposing flesh. I
would land on my back on a pile of human bones and the last thing I
would see before dying would be the huge, square face of a troll as
he grabbed my head and twisted it sharply to snap my neck.

In my mind’s eye, I could see the troll’s
face in vivid detail. His skin was the color of an army convoy
truck—a brownish green color. His lanky hair was brown and greasy,
and was hanging down along the sides of his huge head to his
massive shoulders in wavy, stringy clumps. As he leaned toward me
to deliver the death snap some of his hair would swing across his
face, obscuring his eyes. He would toss his head to get the hair
out of his eyes.

Then he would focus his bulging eyes on mine,
making certain that I knew who it was that was getting ready to
take my life. His eyes were as big as pool balls, with cream
colored irises, and big, pitch black pupils the size of nickels.
The whites were not white at all, but rather, they were yellow and
had blood vessels weaving about in them like some sort of bloody
road map.

Below his nasty eyeballs sat his flat, pudgy
nose. It looked like a regular, human nose looks when you put a
finger on the tip of it and smash it down towards your upper lip,
except it was about three times larger. And his lips were almost
the size and shape of bananas. They were be wet with saliva and
pulled back into a wide, stupid smile revealing brown and yellow
teeth, the size of dominoes. His teeth were all crooked and
chipped. A few were missing, and there were chunks of rotting meat
caught in the gaps.

That was what I saw in my mind’s eye every
time I stuck my hand into a box. Thus, just like getting to the
boxes took me a good long while, going through the boxes took me a
good long while as well.

‘If I ever get out of this basement,’ I
thought, ‘I’m really going to have to cut back on the scary
movies!’

Eventually, though, my perseverance in the
face of possible death in every box paid off. After boxes of old
plates, outgrown clothes, miscellaneous knick-knacks, and one box
full of old books, I found the box with rolls of wrapping paper in
it. I pulled all the paper tubes out and set them aside and felt
around in the box until I found two rolls of clear tape, still in
the dispensers, lying at the bottom. I pulled both of them out and
quickly scuttled my butt out of the darkness and back towards my
chair.

The process of getting to the boxes, and then
going through them had taken me so long that the washer had already
run its full cycle by the time I got back to my chair. I set my
tape on the chair and headed straight for the washer. The last
round of self induced terror had brought my thirst levels back up
considerably.

I got to the washer and opened the lid and
gave a cursory sniff inside it. All clear! There was only the faint
smell of detergent and no more sour stink. I carefully reached over
(with my left hand) and turned the washer knob around to the start
position again and pulled the knob out to turn on the washer.

Water began pouring into the machine
instantly. I had no cup handy so I just cupped my hands under the
flowing water and then pulled them back to my face to suck up the
water from them like a horse sucks up water from a trough. It took
about a dozen handfuls of water to abate my thirst since I always
managed to lose most of it before it reached my mouth, but I didn’t
care. I was so thirsty that the water out of the machine tasted
like liquid gold to me. Hands down it was the best water I’d ever
had in my life.

After quenching my thirst, I decided to wash
my head and face since they were feeling particularly grubby after
a day of beatings and crying. The cold water I splashed on my head
felt marvelously refreshing. When I was all done bathing I closed
the lid and let the washer complete its cycle on the previously
soured load of clothes. Not because I really thought the clothes
would benefit from a second washing, but because I was just too
lazy to put them in the drier.

I started to head back to my chair but
realized that I couldn’t see it nearly as well as I could only
moments before. I looked up towards the door and saw that the light
shining underneath it was much dimmer. I only puzzled this out for
a second before I realized it was getting late in the day and the
sun was going down.

‘Well, it’s as good a time to get some sleep
as any, I suppose, but first let’s get those fingers taped up’, I
thought to myself.

So I shuffled my way over to my chair and
felt around for my tape and sat there in the dark wrapping tape
around the last three fingers of my right hand.

With my fingers all taken care of, I unfolded
the chair until it was almost completely flat, (only the head
portion was slightly raised) and lay down to get some shut eye.
That was how I ended my day on June 12, 1990, my first day in the
dark.