Jack's Shadow

Spring: Five

Night. Jack lay calmly in his blankets, wrapped in the clean sheets his mother had put on his bed. The voices moved like enchanted waves around him. As heavy as they felt, there was some lightness in them. Jack understood that they knew he was about to undergo a test. They knew he was nearing some difficult feat—perhaps his last—and they supported him in it. They wrapped themselves around him to ensure his safety. He knew they weren't necessarily on his side or off it; they only sensed danger, and they reacted to it. They juxtaposed the impartiality of the night and the shapes that moved seemingly pointlessly through the room.

A forgotten yet familiar sound rolled into hearing range beneath the whispers. It reached out to Jack, murmuring low, leaving deep reverberations lapping against the walls of the room. Threatening, reminding the boy of an instant months ago that had caused such dark, difficult change. It caused his bones to tremble, the very make-up of his heart to falter. It was calling to him, as it had called to him all that time ago, in the fall, when the leaves were brittle metallic colors and the winds were knives against his pale cheeks. And yet, this time was different. This time, Jack knew all too well how dangerous the black hole in the backyard was. And though he shook in his bed, he felt a courage that was new. He felt an understanding and tolerance which, until he'd lost hearing, would never have come to him. This thing—this hole behind the confines of his house, sitting on the edge of his stability, demanding to be acknowledged—was as desperate to restore balance as Jack was.

This realization gave him hope.

Jack sat up in bed abruptly. His breath had quickened considerably. Some fleeting recollection had passed across his memory. A piece of light in the darkness that hung like a sun-touched crystal in the night of his mind. What it was, he couldn't word. Words had little use in expressing true wisdom.

Before the feeling entirely left, Jack stepped out of bed and across the floor to his window. Palms and fingertips to the glass, he stared down into the black below through the markings his breath left on the windowpane. This moment hung in midair, glowed in his mind and heart.

There, in the backyard, moving across the dark lawn, a black shadow in the night, was a figure resembling his brother. Just as it had been so many months before, when he'd been lured to the sinkhole in the fear that Kyle had wandered out and was in danger. Now, though, this figure in the yard could not be Kyle, for it moved as if on stable legs, not as if in a wheelchair . . .

It was then that Jack knew for certain that, on the night of his brother's accident, his brother had not been the one to cause him to leave the house. Whatever had been in the yard that night was there now, again; it had never been human at all, but instead a shadow of Jack . . . the very same black-cat shadow that had been hovering around the house for months—the same shadow that he had disappeared into days earlier and lost his human hearing in!

As this knowledge formulated in his mind, as the connections pieced themselves together, Jack felt a deep fury open inside him. An anger such as he'd never before held blossomed like a dark flower in the pit of his stomach, and his breath quickened.

The clouds of condensed breath on the pane thickened.

He'd come to trust this . . . this thing! He'd allowed himself to become a part of it, to be embraced by it, to grow fond of it! He'd truly come to believe this shadow was a thing there to help him! But now he saw that his initial misgivings had been correct: it was this shadow—this splotch of darkness—that had caused all the pain to begin with. And now, here it was again, threatening to bring back all the horrors of the early fall. Jack knew—had always known—that what he saw and heard and felt were never necessarily good or evil, but he'd begun to believe in his heart that perhaps this black-cat shadow had been good toward him. That it was something he'd needed for help to get through his test, as Miss Collins had said he'd undergo. That it had, for some reason, been almost a friend to him, or sent for him from some great unknown. But now, it was quite clear that this thing was an impartial tease. It had no rhyme or reason. Any friendliness Jack had believed he'd sensed in it was his own false hope.

With a sharp, pained intake of breath, Jack shoved away from the window and fell into the room, scattering the black blobs that had gathered around his ankles. He was going to put an end to this all. He was going to end all the difficulty his family had been needlessly put through. At last, at long last, he knew exactly what to do. A resolve as firm as the moon in the night sky had settled in him, and it was a boy a hundred times stronger and more set in mind who, at the strong urging of the hundred thousand voices in the room, left his bedroom, walked purposefully downstairs and out of the house, and stepped in bare feet across the cold, dew-drenched lawn.

This was the night of Kyle's fall, the night that had changed the lives of four human beings trapped in a world of physical realities. Bound by laws of nature and physics. All but for one unaware of the falsity of the world around them. This was the night that a shadow had deceived a boy and led him to harm those he loved most. This night Jack had begun on a journey of pain and confusion that had locked his mind into medicinal cages and chains. He'd been led away from himself and turned into a shell, a zombie, because a shadow had led him to lose his brother in a hole in the backyard. A hole in reality. A hole in the world . . . a hole that he should've fallen into instead.

Kyle had never been the one who was supposed to fall. Kyle was not supposed to be out that night. It had not been Kyle's shadow out there in the backyard but Jack's. Jack's shadow, drawing him into the dark.

It was supposed to have been Jack that fell.

He stood at the edge of the sinkhole, now, staring at the star-reflected pools of water in the sunken tarps. A moment of second-guessing fluttered through him but vanished as soon as he saw the black-cat shadow; it had crept up to his side and, pausing first as if making sure it had been seen, darted under an upturned corner of the tarp and was gone.

No hesitation. In the velvet spring darkness, the frail boy, his white face and bare arms glowing against the vibrations and black silhouettes of unfathomable worlds, crawled beneath the tarp and was gone.