Black Alice II: Interlude One

The thing about sharing head space with the shadow is that she never stops. She doesn’t do anything that even resembles sleep. She doesn’t even do anything like rest. She’s in constant motion, like a shark swimming round and round so it doesn’t die.

Which means I don’t ever stop, either. I haven’t actually slept since I was a little girl, in the hospital after the storm that vomited me up onto that beach in Galveston. Even then, I wasn’t asleep. I was drugged. But we’ll get to that later.

When I was young and the shadow and I were new to each other, I used to kind of zone out for a few hours once in awhile. It wasn’t really sleep, but I wasn’t quite conscious, either. It was a sort of fugue state, my mind shutting down to get some relief from the constant, never-ending input from the shadow. My brain would sort of fade into a dull dial tone, and a few hours later I’d snap back awake.

Sometimes I’d wake up bloody with injuries. The shadow once broke both my hands, battering at a door and trying to get out because she couldn’t figure out a doorknob. Sometimes I’d wake up miles away from where I’d started. The shadow would just sort of steer me along towards the next thing that caught her interest, and then the next, and then the next. It was horrifying. She didn’t know about pain, for one thing. Or hunger, or thirst, or the million ways a human body is a fragile thing. When I was a little older, I started my life-long love affair with coffee. Stimulants helped to fight off the fugue states. Later on, I learned better methods.

I remember coming to one day, back when I was… thirteen years old? Maybe fourteen? I’ve watched other people wake up. My foster families, my first husband. It looks very sweet and easy, a gradual process. I never had that. I was suddenly alert and aware and it was like time had flashed forward without me. I hated it.

Anyway, this time I woke up knee deep in a creek in a cow field in central Texas. I knew the area. I’d sometimes come out here at night just to get out of the house. I could watch the stars while the shadow played with crickets and spiders and counted all the blades of grass. I don’t know if I ever mentioned this? I grew up in Texas, out in the ass-end of nowhere. A series of these teeny little one-horse towns in the desert. I loved the desert nights. The cool breeze, the animals that would come out, and the quiet.

It was very different in the daytime. The shadow loved the days in the desert.

I blinked and realized I was standing in a huge circle of shade, as though there were a huge disc up above me somewhere blocking the sun. Only of course there was nothing up there – the shade was just her. Everywhere, her. Gods, I was in the center of a circle that must have stretched out a hundred yards in every direction. She was so big, and so powerful… it made my breath catch in my throat.

See, it’s complicated, the way my shadow and I coexist. Complicated and unnatural, so it’s not like we had any references to guide us. Back then I knew she was dangerous, and that I had to keep her contained. Keep her weak enough that I could control her. She knew that I was cruel and harsh and kept her always hungry and weak. She wanted to kill me, maybe more than anything else, but without me she couldn’t live in this world. We struggled for control, and I… I didn’t always win.

She feeds on energy, you know. People assume a shadow’s weakness would be light, or fire, or some stupid shit like that, but they’re wrong. That’s a shadow’s food. Out there in the desert? The sun was beating down on the flat, hard-packed soil. It had to be a hundred, maybe a hundred and ten that April afternoon. The soil had baked hot and dry in the sun all day, and the stones were hot enough to burn your skin if you touched them. Lots and lots for her to eat, you know? So it was cool in my circle of shadow. Maybe seventy, seventy five degrees? 

She can eat the warmth to make it colder than that. A lot colder, if she applies herself, but it’s more effort than it’s worth to her. Like, imagine drinking your meals, thin and weak broth, let’s say, through a fifteen-foot straw. You’d burn more calories than you consume.

Fuck only knows how long I wandered around out there, but when I came to, she was a lot more powerful than I like her to be. A lot. When she was that strong, she could sometimes force me down, lock me away in another trance-like fugue while she did whatever she wanted with my body. I hated that.

So the first thing I did, I made her freeze the water. To use up the power, see? I remember the way she squealed in my head, like a pig. She’d barely had time to realize I’d awakened, and suddenly I was in her head, controlling her actions. I was punishing her by doing to her exactly what she’d done to me… you can see why it took us so many years to arrive at a working relationship.

The creek froze a good forty feet in both directions, and all the scrub grass frosted along the banks and out into the field on both sides, where it was hot enough the steam just boiled up from the ground like a fog rolling in. Not gonna lie; it was kind of impressive. The circle of shade constricted, too – eighty yards, forty… ten.

So there I am, standing in a slushy hole in all that ice, heart in my mouth, shaking, ’cause I’m scared to death and I have a pissed off shadow screaming bloody murder in my skull. I’d zoned out again, and for just that split second, I’d been vulnerable. I could have been gone. Forever. The shadow could have hollowed me out, right there, while I was out. She was certainly trying to right that minute, but I’d weakened her until I was stronger again. For now. I mean, the sun was still shining. She’d get strong again.

I think the only reason she didn’t snuff my mind like a candle when she had the chance is because she hadn’t quite figured out what was going on. We fought – fight – all the time. It’s a constant struggle over who’s in charge. And I think those first times, I was only getting away with it because she thought she’d won, understand? I was gone, and she thought she’d gotten rid of me at last. Then awhile later, I’d come back. I had to be so careful those times, because if I thought about that too long, she’d figure out what I was thinking, and she’d catch on to what was happening. She’s not thoughtless, like a dog or a trained animal. She’s sentient. She doesn’t quite grasp language, but she’s quite cunning in her way. And especially back then, she didn’t know much of anything about humans.

I sat down on the ice – my shorts were already soaked, so it made a better place to sit than the shore, where I’d just get muddy. I had a crumpled pack of Lucky Strikes rolled in the sleeve of my tee shirt, and they were still dry, so I lit one and tried to remember what I’d missed. Yeah, I smoked back then. I’d steal them from my foster parents, a few at a time. It was handy to have an excuse to carry a fire source around with me. It was an easy way to bribe the shadow into behaving, letting her snack on a trashcan fire or a burning newspaper.

See, I’d been out of it but the shadow hadn’t been. And she doesn’t forget. Anything. Ever. The trick is getting information out of her in any kind of meaningful context. She’s blind, of course, and words are just noise to her without having me around to translate them into something meaningful.

I had a little pink watch, but the battery had died (or been eaten) and the digital display was blank. The sun was still fairly high, so it had to be early afternoon…

I finally remember I’m supposed to be in class. Well, I say class. It was actually an honest to fuck one-room school house. It was, oh, ’89 or so, so you didn’t find those too often, except out in those itty bitty little hick towns. We went there up through eighth grade, and then the county bussed us up the highway to the high school in the next county over.

I pulled myself up out of the hole in the ice, slipping and sliding the whole way. Skinned my knees up something awful and ruined my last few cigarettes while I was getting off the frozen river, got soaked to the bone, because she’d frozen the whole section solid as far as she could reach, but the water was still flowing on the upstream end, so it was washing down over the ice and flooding out the banks. I crawled up over the bank, fell in the mud – just made a hellacious mess of myself, so you can imagine the mood I was in by the time I was back on two feet and walking away from the river.

Terrified. I was in a terrified mood. That close. I’d come that close to just ending. Forever. And I didn’t know why, or how, or if it would happen again tomorrow or in ten minutes or never again.

But I couldn’t even think too much about why I was afraid, or she would hear. And then the next time I slipped up and zoned out, I’d be gone for real. So I cussed and swore and stomped through the mud and concentrated real hard on how annoyed with the whole thing I was as I walked the four miles back into town to see if I could sneak back into class or something. I skipped a lot and they were going to flunk me if I wasn’t careful, and I was double-damned if I was going to get stuck in that little hellhole for another year…

That’s the kind of thing I have to concentrate on. Had to concentrate on. Then. Not now, obviously. But then? Yeah, it made me behave erratically, sometimes. There were just so many thoughts I couldn’t let myself dwell on. I even got sent to a doctor when I was fifteen. My teacher thought I might be schizophrenic. Thought I needed help. Long story made short – the doctor saw it my way. But that’s another story.

‘Town’ consisted of two bars, three churches, a post office, a tractor-and-farm-supply shop with a dazzling assortment of John Deere hats and cowboy boots, a gas station and a general store that could pass for a liquor store in bad light.

Other than that, it was just shacks and trailers and sun-bleached houses. Nobody could work up to much of a yard, particularly in the summer when the heat would burn the grass dead, so nobody much bothered.

Most of the alleged town was off my path, but when I looked down Main Street toward the only real intersection in town, I noticed that the traffic light was out. That made me frown. My shadow had been big and strong, but if she’d knocked out the town’s power, drank it all down until she blew a transformer or something? Well, she should have been a lot stronger. It made me wonder where all that extra energy went. I wracked her memory, and got only confusing jumbles of noise and motion… too much for me to sort through back then. Today, I can replay the memory and understand it just fine. I could, anyway. But I won’t.

It wouldn’t make of whit of difference, and all the screaming would probably give me a headache. So no point, really.

I finally made it back to the school, this big red brick building with a black shingle roof instead of a tin one like almost everyone else had. It even had a bell tower on it, but we didn’t use the bell anymore. They’d wired the place up with an electric bell in the 70′s. Apparently it was quite the big deal, like oooh, fancy, we had an electric bell.

The first sign of trouble was that the power was out here, too. The second sign I noticed as I walked up to the school. The windows were wet. They were dripping with condensation, and fogged over on the inside. That’s when I knew I had a problem on my hands.

The school had two doors – a big double set of doors out front, and the back door that went out into the play yard. The play yard was fenced in so the toddlers didn’t wander off, but we older kids got forced out there twice a day, too. I spent most recesses sitting in the shade along the back wall of the school and scowling if anybody talked to me.

I climbed the fence and hustled across the yard, trying to figure out what to do. I thought about standing around in the play yard until Ms. Tiller – the teacher – let the brats out for afternoon recess, then going back in with them, but I didn’t know if I’d missed recess yet or not, and those wet windows had me worried.

I called it a one-room schoolhouse, and that’s about right, but it had been a big room and sometime in the last couple of decades, they had put up a wall, splitting it into two smaller rooms with a big archway between them. Ms. Tiller taught the older kids, fifth grade and up, and Mrs. Snyder taught the brats, fourth grade all the way down to toddlers, because the place was basically a daycare, too. We only had two toddlers while I was there – not many people in town, so not many kids. Maybe twenty students, all in all?

It was quiet. I opened the back door, and cool fog spilled out around my ankles. It was like walking into a walk-in freezer. I sighed. I knew what had happened, now it was just a question of seeing it for myself. I walked past the restrooms and straight into my classroom. There was no point in trying to sneak in anymore.

Everyone was dead.

I said, ‘God dammit, again?’ or something to that effect. No, I wasn’t really upset. I’d suspected something like that from the instant I’d seen the traffic light was out. Ice radiated out from my chair like crystalline flower petals. Some of the students were frozen in place, gawking in the general direction of my desk, others were looking up or toward the windows. They were probably wondering why it had gone so dark before they died. The teacher, bless her, was readying a shotgun, her frozen corpse locked in place stepping halfway out from behind her desk. 

Near as I can figure, she and my classmates had seen me, drinking from the outlets and light fixtures through tongues of living darkness, gorging on electricity until the grid itself went down. Then there had been a lot of noise and confusion, enough that the shadow had felt threatened. Then it had used all that energy to deal with the immediate threat.

What’s that?

Yes. The ‘immediate threat’ included the preschoolers in the next room over.

But this was a long time ago. Over twenty years, even. I’m much better at controlling her now. It was just growing pains, really. We had to trip and fall before we learned to run.

You’re staring. Stop that.

Tags: Black Alice, James Agle, Marci Sischo, serial novel, urban fantasy