STALKER

Chapter 2 - 12th May 2022

Even as a child I knew that what I sometimes saw and heard wasn't normal. I knew that others didn't see things the way I did. I realized early on to keep the whispered voices and the moving shadows to myself. My mother knew, she told me I was born with a caul and that I was special, I had a sixth sense. It ran in my father's family. I didn't like being special and I ignored everything that wasn't human, ordinary and explainable. I did it so well that by the time I hit my teens I'd lost all my special abilities and for years I was like everyone else. The world was three dimensional and I was satisfied with that. Until my Grandmother passed a few months ago I hadn't thought about that sort of thing for a long.

Then one day it all came rushing back and not in the simple form it had been as a child but a full blown power surge, a jaw rattling punch in the face that reminded me what I had locked away.

I knew the second it stirred. It was just as I gently prized an old photograph from where it had been hidden under the inside cardboard cover of an old book. As it slipped from under the cardboard sheet - I imagined I saw a dark form that had been sleeping peacefully, wake abruptly. I quickly looked at the faded sepia image of two young men - the dark form shook and twitched. When I turned the photograph over and whispered the name on the back, my whisper boomed through eons. The dark form stood, it turned and searched the boundless abyss between God and man....and then it found...ME.

The dark figure turned towards me and started sprinting in my direction, through time, space, and all dimensions humans theories about to explain the unexplainable. As I sat on my bedroom floor gazing down at that photograph. I could feel it rushing towards me like a speeding train, the space around it vibrating and rippling out like a shock wave, invisible and terrifying. I knew the moment it arrived and stood behind me. Felt it move as it knelt close against my back, making the hairs on my arms stood on end. Shivered under the the pressure of its incorporeal black hand on my shoulder, making my breathing faltered. I watched frozen in panic as slowly its other hand came forward and pointed at the name on the back of the photograph with a black shadow finger....Jules Willems. 

.....

Surprisingly, after the initial shock of the Spectre's arriving, it didn't take me long to get use to him roaming around the room and then tentatively wondering out into the house to explore.  I felt strangely calm, sensitive to everything around me.  I could feel and hear the house creak, the windows vibrating, the tiniest shifting in the floor boards beneath my feet as the house foundations moved infinitesimally.  It was as if I could now sense the house as a living thing.  I remembered this sense of closeness to everything, it had been like this when I was very young.  Everything back then had a shimmer to it, a pulse and silent breathe, it had been so normal for me back then. I never questioned what I heard and saw.  Until I grew older and became aware it wasn't the norm for most people and I shut it out.  It's returned now and I felt it settle back into me like a missing piece, finally restored to where it should be.  

The dark Spectre did not speak again.  His smoky form moved away after saying the name and he circled the table and the items laid out on it, oblivious of me, of everything else.  Wisps of black smoke swirled constantly within his human shaped form.  Sometimes, he lost definition  smoke drifting away and coming back.  He moved slowly around the table his long transparent fingers running over the black suit, then the cap.  He stopped at the bundles of letters.  His  hands reached out to pick up one of the bundles but his diaphanous hands dissipated as if blown away by the wind.  I felt waves of sadness emanating from him.  I light a cigarette and stood back to watch him and I began to wonder if my original assumption was correct.   He kept circling the table, every now and then he would try to touch something and his smoky fingers would spiral and disappear.  My new spare shadow looked as if he very much wanted to hold the signet ring.  Eventually, he wondered out of the room to explore the house, the feeling of sadness followed him like Jacob Marley's chains.  

Suddenly, it dawned on me that I had been mistaken thinking the dark form was Jules Willems who had been awakened by hearing me speak his name; who had pursued me through time desperate to identify himself as the man in the photograph.  In fact, it was John Morrison, my Grandfather.