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The Shadow Underneath Us

A Prologue for my Next Book, Please Tell Me If I Should Continue...

By Danny GrangerPublished 3 years ago 6 min read
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Curiosity is a strange beast indeed. If we were never compelled to explore the darkest regions of this world, to open the mystery box, or investigate the eerie noises that fill the night, it’s certain we wouldn’t be where we all are today. Every waking minute the mind is hungry for the unknown. It fills with a longing to be filled. But you can never fully fill it. That you could say was my first revelation, and even in good intention it was nevertheless a step on the road to darker dreams.

My name is Daryl. Like many kids, I used to be enchanted with fantasy and would spend too much time escaping into the worlds of movies and books. The possibility of a Bogeyman under my bed or a raven above my door was welcomed with reverence. I found fear fascinating.

There used to be a little path that ran from the field my house overlooked, deep into the nearby woods. The trees that stood each side of that path were solid oaks and sinewy maples, intertwining with each other in wooden handshakes above, giving the impression that the trail had been carved by a jungle warrior’s blade. There were parts of the path so overgrown it was hard to walk through even for a 10 year old boy and for that reason I never imagined it to be a regular footpath. Instead it was oozing with mystery and suspense, a trail used by countless fantastical creatures to cross from their world to mine.

Many days in late summer as the golden sun was lazily reclining in the September sky, with fluffy cumulus clouds for pillows, I would equip myself with my Swiss army knife and set out to test my courage. Sometimes my fear would catch up with me and drag me back only minutes after I began. Other days it would be trailing just behind my lengthening shadow, and not until I arrived at the furthest point I had reached before, and stopped to contemplate, would it creep back around my legs and flow into my veins again.

Curiosity and adventure were my walking companions. I can almost believe that they, embodied as real people, used to plod along merrily at my side. Chatting about what may be around the next spidery branched corner. Pointing out mystery footprints in the mulch. Savouring the many forest smells and sounds.

But I was a loner back then, I guess in some ways I still am now.

I remember one day, at the very latest in September. The sun was, like me, due to go to bed extremely early that evening as the holidays were nearly over, and according to my mum I had a whole summer of adventures to sleep off and recover from. I was determined to walk until my legs ached, to go deep into the forest, past every point I had ever turned back, no matter how terror snagged at my clothes, or how my sense of homeliness diminished as the shadows took me into their care.

Soon, the branches above ceased their calm handshakes and turned sharper. As if I were walking through the front lines of a medieval war of nature, the outstretched arms of oak clawed at each other, bark against bark. It was a particularly windy day as I recall, and even in that tunnel of trees the wind seemed to speak and hurry me back out the way I had came.

On the ground black beetles scurried out of my way, as dark as the wrong side of the moon, and yet still glinting as if they took with them into their holes small splinters of light from the day, to help them through the treacherous night ahead. I banished my fear, and left it behind. I no longer cast a shadow. I remember looking down as I ran and wondering if it was still there stitched to my running feet, clinging onto me, black against black.

Even in childhood we begin to recognise fear for what it really is. It is the mind trying to tell you to be wary in case of pain, or loss, or evil. The possibility of falling forever into a world you cannot control. The chance that unless you obey it and steal yourself into safe haven, your life as you know it will never be the same.

As I ran, silhouettes danced in thick brush at the base of the trees, giving impressions of lurking predators, slyly watching my every move. Should I veer too much to the side of the track they would leap at me and have their fill for the day. The snarled branches grabbed out again and again, but nothing could stop me.

And then a change. Instead of predators lurking in the brush I saw prey. A fantastic feeling overwhelmed me, that I was the predator, that this was my world.

A rabbit scurried for cover in a mass of tangled deadwood. A squirrel curled itself into the knotty base of a large oak. A fox, running just metres ahead of me, frantically searching for a place to hide. All shadows, and yet my mind relished them as if they were real, as if they were the actual animals that lay elsewhere out of sight in this dark forest.

I’d passed the place I’d turned back only days before without realising, this was new territory to me now, although it seemed my instincts had empowered me to keep running. Stones and crawlers littered the path, nature’s traps for the slow footed, but they too could not deter me. I was the king of beasts, and also the spy in this jungle. I was the fleeting shadow amongst the shadows. For the first time in my life I was completely unafraid.

Still running, power coursing through my blood. My eyes became enraptured by the twisting wood-scape ahead. Avoiding the snakelike feelers that dangled in my way, I sprinted and leapt and almost dropped to all fours in some apelike run. My head was filled with excitement, and my nostrils reaped the air raking it for scents. I almost felt like an animal. And still I ran…

Sunlight.

Thick orange sunlight bathed me, and I turned a hand up to shade my eyes before I realised I’d left the trees behind. Abruptly I stopped and turned around. Panting, my lungs screaming for air, and with the last tangerine segment of sun sinking behind me, I saw a new world.

I’ll never forget how small that forest looked. How timid a mark on the landscape it impressed, and how tall I towered on that day.

There was nothing this side apart from an empty field. No chasm of eternal terror, or valley of the damned. No throne room to the dark underworld of Hades. Nothing.

All the days past since I was first allowed into the field behind my house I’d dreamt up nightmares innumerate, fears layered upon fears. And there I was, standing on the other side, breathing the same air, standing on my own chasm in my mind.

Even now I don’t have any regrets that I was able to run so far that day, so fast. There was no matching the triumph my head and my heart felt, waiting for my terror to finish it’s race with me and catch up.

I waited for maybe a half hour until the sun had finally slunk away leaving only the scarlet sky above for company. And then I returned home by the edge of the forest, never once feeling that I was avoiding the depths within out of anything more than practicality.

My mother always told me curiosity killed the cat. I couldn’t have imagined then how right she would be, as I realise now. I didn’t understand any different. For me, the cat that day… had won.

My name is Daryl Spencer, and I am now 20 years old. What follows is my story, as unbelievable as it sounds. You see, back then, I stopped believing in shadows. A year ago, I began to believe again….

Adventure
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