Of Lights and Shadows (Book 4)

26) Eyes of a Snake

It was an incredibly bright-lit room, with the light causing everything to appear to shine white, with not a single shadow anywhere to be found in the whole room. It was also freezing. Little icicles hung from the ceiling, shining and sparkling in the light, a thin cover of ice lay on the floor and any other bare surface in the room. It was, what you might call, an ice room, or freezer, and meat was what was kept in there.

Traditionally it had been a bedroom, and before that a junk room, and before that a storage room which wasn't too different from the junk room it became, and before that it was a very secret room. Now it held meat, which wasn't too different from the room's very first job.

A bed stood along one wall, one of those tall, metal framed ones on wheels that were used in really old hospitals before they moved with the times and upgraded. It was rusted in places where the paint had peeled to expose the metal underneath to the ice. It was made, and neatly at that, with crisp, white sheets that were cold but not quite frozen. A body lay tucked up underneath them, nice and warm as the Shadow would say for a joke as it watched the sleeping child.

It was a beautiful child, the Shadow couldn't deny, curly brown hair, not at all like his mother's and blue eyes which were like his mother's. A tragic pity but if he didn't go then someone else would have taken his place and the process would have started all over again. There was no point feeling pity. They were dead. They had no need for anything.

The Shadow hadn't quite cleaned up the mess on the boy's head, it had been touched up so as not to leave too much of a stain on the sheets. Blood was hell to wash out of white. But enough of the blood was still dried and caked on his head where his lovely brains had leaked out to put some more beauty to the creation. And before he was released to float away on that endless river until disturbed, he would be cleaned up a bit more and returned to his usual state. The Shadow had a mind for details and he would look exactly as he had been when he had been taken. Not that anyone was around the see him and remember what he had looked like beforehand, but that didn't matter. The Shadow did it for its own pleasure.

But with all things, things done often enough, you shortly become tired of the same routine. Things go well and there are never any hiccups, you want a challenge to spice up your life. If no challenge arrives then there is just no challenge and no real point in continuing. Not that it felt like stopping, there were still plenty of children out there. And besides, if it stopped then the challenge would end. At least, as the Shadow stared at the child, it hoped that the real fun had started and there really was one. It had managed to get Dastardious Hollow released from prison through the words of Oliver Bourgins; it would be all for nothing if the Shadow decided to stop before the game was complete.

Leaving the child sleeping, as it liked to call it, the Shadow moved out of the bedroom into the connecting room which was also cold, but not as cold as the previous one, and locked the large, steel metal door to the room before heading casually upstairs.

In the main room for the entire world to see, because sometimes the best place to hide things is in plain sight, a map of Central Park had been laid out on the dining room bench. A plate with half a left over sandwich held down one corner with a half filled mug of cold coffee held down another corner and a knife held the other. The bottom left corner didn't have anything on it because that was the corner that didn't annoyingly roll up.

The lake had been circled, including the land just around it, and a smaller circle marked a spot near the woods where it ran down to the lake. There was a bench that was set up right next to the water, when it rained hard the water would rise and you hardly needed to move from your seat to get your feet wet. It had an almost clear view of the whole lake, but enclosed in enough trees that it was hardly discernable from anywhere else. Easy enough to slip a small boat into the water with the body without being seen, and it being the woods it would be easy enough to disappear as soon as you were done.