Despitebeing a dead thing, night was more uncomfortable for Samuel as a spirit than ithad ever been when he was mortal. He was banished to the darkness after thetenants shut off their lights, and not even the distant glow of thestreetlights could illuminate the rooms around him. The eye’s natural abilityto dilate when the lights went out didn’t carry over into the afterlife forSamuel. The darkness around him was stronger than it had any right to be,which is why it took him a long while to become aware of the snakelike thingdarting in and out of the shadows throughout the bedroom of the crib-boundinfant. Samuel had been peering out the window with his arms clasped behind hisback when something moved out of the corner of his eye and there was a suddenchill along his spine. Later, he would realize this was the first physicalsensation he had felt during his re-emergence. He would also realize that chillwas directly associated to the presence of the long shadow, as it made its waytoward the child.
Throughthe faint aura of streetlights, Samuel watched as the shadow spiraled aroundthe crib, disappearing entirely in clumps of pure blackness like an Amazonianbeast stalking its prey through the underbrush. The roving shadow – had itdripped over Samuel during his stay here as a living thing? Had this been whathad seeped into his dreams, perpetuated his wife’s illness? A memory of emotionbecame reality, a dull spark burned in his chest. He imagined he could feel hisheart beating. The reason he had come back, the reason he wasn’t with his wifeand his children was there. In that child’s bedroom, within a physicalworld he could no more influence than an old woman’s prayers.
“Begone!” Samuel shouted, his mind conjuring up an image of a priest screaming ata scaly demon. It was worth a shot. Nothing within the bedroom and all thatblackness changed, until a moment later when the door burst inward and theinfant’s father stumbled in.
Drunk,Samuel could tell from the way he staggered. A light switched on and the manpeered over the crib. Samuel made to stand beside him just as the father beganscreaming and sobbing, shaking the crib and the soundless, still thing within.The shadow was a thief of more than pleasant dreams. It was a coward, snuffingout all that was weaker than it. Samuel faded through the floor then, his mindnearly scrubbed blank by the horror of what he’d just witnessed.
After the child’s death, the entire building seemed alive with those rovingshadows, hovering over shoulders and cradling ears. The building’s twenty-onetenants all went through their various stages of grief, tears staining thefloorboards around them as they’d sob and speak to one another in hushed tonesbefore tossing and turning the night away. A few weeks later the doomed,now-childless couple moved out of the building, the father drunk as ever.Samuel, helpless, began to cling to the rekindled memories of his wife anddaughters, and how they were stolen from him.
Hefirst fell in love with his wife, Livy, when her brother showed him a portraitof her while they were aboard the USS Quaker City Steamship. It had been mostlya chance encounter, the man had heard of Samuel’s celebrity status, read someof his novels, and sought him out. It’s funny that Samuel never made a point ofgetting down the name of the artist who painted that portrait of Livy, whocreated a longing in his heart through a few expert slashes of paint and oil.
Hehardly believed his luck when Livy’s brother agreed to introduce them. A fewyears later, when she told him she was pregnant, oh his luck, where did it gowrong? His daughter Suzy died first, before the illness began to invade Livyand his other daughter, Jane. It took them both longer to die, Samuel having tolie to Livy about Jane’s condition. The doctors with their halfwit diagnoses,deeming it necessary that Samuel not spend Livy’s last few weeks with her; overconcerns that he would “overexcite her”. Samuel would slip her notes with thefinest, most cheerful writing he could drive himself to produce. He recalledLivy’s heart giving out. Jane’s final seizure occurring in the tub she then drownedin. The years alone, before he died. Watching Halley’s Comet come to mirror hisbirth, and complete his cycle. He remembers the warmth of the grass meeting hisface as he collapsed, the sweet spring scent of an impending bloom. The momentof dying wasn’t so bad, given the pounds of grief that had come before it.
Didthe shadow hound Samuel because of the deaths that would overshadow all of hisachievements? Was it warning him, those nights that he and Livy comforted eachother after Suzy’s passing? Or was it just sniffing him, admiring that whiff ofimpending misery? Samuel found himself howling, in a building where no onecould hear him, with lungs that would never give out. He tilted his head to theceiling, rising to the fourth floor and howled and howled as the days turned tonight and Samuel could feel again, still dead but numb no more.
Settlingdown, he began his investigation anew. He had returned to this particular placefor a reason. He couldn’t face Livy and his daughters without proving to themthat he could confront the roving shadow. That he could beat it back, and freethem. Wandering from room to room, eyeing the dark spots that lingered in everycorner, Samuel thought of his friend, the blossoming young scientist andinventor, Nikola Tesla. The young man was surely older now, unless he died too,but what he had proven to Samuel still rung in his newly awakened mind. Theelectricity that the human body produces is awe-inspiring. Once, during a visitto Tesla’s lab, Samuel was given a demonstration on how the human body can actas a conductor when holding a wire in one hand and a phosphorescent light bulbin the other. Several photographs taken of Samuel holding the illuminated bulbin the air were the
