Stone's Shadow Read online

  Published by Gecko Print Publishing (2018)

  Copyright © 2018 by Martin McConnell

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form – except in the case of brief quotations embodied in articles or reviews – without the express written permission of its author or publisher.

  Don’t be a pirate.

  ISBN 978-1-946938-10-7 (Paperback)

  ISBN 978-1-946938-11-4 (E-Book)

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Dedication

  I set out to write the quintessential horror story of the twenty-first century. I elicited the opinions of horror fans to test the idea of a previously unknown antagonist. Thanks to everyone who cast an opinion, suggested a fix, or stayed up all night to finish the story in its earlier forms. This one’s for you.

  A Note from the Author

  About fifteen years ago, I experimented with a forty-eight hour day while finishing college. Working forty hours per week in a gas station off campus, and exploring the ruins of a dilapidated area of St. Louis, combined with an insatiable lust for terrifying grit, an idea was seeded.

  Hallucinations, philosophical studies, dabbling in occult sciences, the whole gambit. The terror became real when, for the first time ever, I related some of the illusions to which most of us never pay attention with very real spiritual entities lurking in the dark.

  Off the edge of the map, wading in the wasted waters between the continent of the cosmic and the shores of mundane reality, like a fifteenth century sailor lost in the Atlantic, something struck me, and the monster was born.

  I pride myself on the release of new ideas and unexplored literary themes, on realism over idealism about reality in storytelling. I wanted something new, something fresh, a dark presence that had never before been written about. I’ll let the reader decide if I succeeded.

  When you finish, let me know what you thought, either via email (in my bio at the back of the book) or with a review on Amazon or Goodreads. Enjoy the story, I hope it keeps you up all night and leaves you wondering about the world around you for the next few weeks.

  Stone’s Shadow

  a novel by

  MARTIN McCONNELL

  1

  It was the first time he saw us, and it should have been the last.

  A young man, like so many others, lost in college life. Worries hung on his mind about the future, his failure at finding love, and at the moment, the nature of reality. Stalked by the stigma of being the boy who should have been stuck in a bubble, his illnesses made him the butt of every joke. Allergic to everything, afraid of human interaction, and most of the time scared of his own shadow. Then the nightmares started, interrupting his infrequent hours of sleep, and sending him into screaming fits only to forget the terrors that shook him awake a moment later.

  In the dark room, lit only by the light of the laptop screen, his fingers attacked the keys with purpose. He shook the dangling blond bangs from in front of his glasses and finished the the last few sentences of a philosophy paper due the next day. He stopped after the final line to sip cold coffee from a to-go cup while scanning for errors.

  Therefore, a belief, when properly justified by ruling out all other immediate possibilities, counts as knowledge, whether it’s true or false. Truth can never be verified beyond all doubt, but we can still grasp knowledge and wisdom without “truth” as a prerequisite. There is no way to verify true or false, so the actual truth of a belief is irrelevant to justify it as knowledge. Knowledge is at best an approximation of truth.

  Sounded fortune-cookie enough for Dr. Landers. He always told them to speak their mind, and if the old fart was going to harp on how impossible it was to judge truth, then why should it matter? The epistemic problem trickled into his daily life as well. No matter what anyone said, or what source they quoted, or what the source had to say about a topic, anyone in the information chain could be lying. Sometimes they lied straight to his face. And sometimes, whether they were lying or not was irrelevant. Speaking from ignorance wasn’t technically lying, but it wasn’t truth, or knowledge, or even a verified belief.

  The phone hummed its gentle ring-tone, soft enough to avoid attracting unwanted attention in public places. Maria’s face appeared on the screen. Her gentle Spanish smile, sharp eyes, and coifed black hair made her look something like Jackie Kennedy in old photos, the biggest difference was her skin being one shade darker. He tapped the green button on the display, and put her on speaker.

  “Where are you? Mike and I have been hanging out here for an hour.”

  “I was finishing a paper.” His incisors dug into his lower lip as he wondered if the excuse would be enough.

  “You have to leave that apartment sooner or later. It’s not like we’re miles away.”

  “I know. I just—I need to finish this.”

  “Bring it with you. You have a laptop.”

  “A laptop in a bar?”

  “Sure. You can type away while we throw darts. Are you coming or not? We aren’t going to be here forever.”

  Something flickered in the corner of his vision. His eye twitched, either from dehydration or the fear of being coaxed into a busy environment by the barista who thought he needed to get out more. He looked toward the optical disruption. Nothing there.

  “Maybe steam rising from the coffee cup,” he mumbled.

  “What?”

  “Nothing. Talking to myself.” He looked again. Just another hallucination. Cold coffee doesn’t make steam, bonehead.

  “Well,” Maria continued. “You’re up all night anyway. Might as well come and hang out with us. We’ll wait a little longer if you’re on your way.”

  “I don’t know. I’m not feeling up to it tonight. Maybe tomorrow.”

  “Okay. You’re going to meet up with us one of these nights, if I have to drag you out of that apartment.”

  The corner of his lip twitched upward. Real friends were hard to come by, and they kept trying despite his resistance. He knew that if he failed to make an appearance, eventually she would give up, but tonight wasn’t the night. All of this, of course, assumed that she wasn’t one of the people lying to him.

  “Let me crash out. One day this week, for sure.”

  Maria let out a gentle sigh as a short tone marked the end of the conversation. She always tried to drag him out of his shell, but lately it was a bit much. Tossing him into a den of drunken humans, where his ailments would be the center of attention, was not his idea of progress. If anything, he might relapse and start avoiding her as well. On the other hand, he’d never find a girlfriend if he stayed home every night.

  He turned back to the laptop, scrolling to the top of the paper to verify that “Scott Stone” was written in the header, a point he often overlooked. He counted four pages of rambling philosophical arguments, perfectly nestled within the three-to-five requirement. His eyes fell on a tiny clock at the bottom corner of the screen as he reached across the desk for his nine o’clock dose of anxiety killer. His fingers found only empty pill bottles.

  “Sixty-three hours,” he said.

  Maria’s words reverberated in his mind. She was his only friend. Yet even on nights like this, he couldn’t bring himself to meet her. He wasn’t afraid of Mike, though he secretly hoped the dude would drop out of the picture. His belly deflated with a sudden emptiness. You’d be too much of a chicken to ask her out anyway, Scary Scott.

  Going beyond friendship into dating territory came with the risk of having
no friends at all. She was forbidden territory. Maybe if he had gone out, he would have seen the other girl: the blonde. Maybe Maria could have coaxed him into talking to her. Maybe she could have introduced them. He’d sell his soul to get her number. Anything could happen among other humans, but unfortunately that included panic attacks, rude outbursts, assault, or losing his only friend to social awkwardness.

  His chest swelled with an influx of air, irritating his throat. The agitation erupted into a string of coughs. “And stupid cold weather.” He huffed. His breathing became audible and short-tempered as his fingers scrambled through the pile of medicine bottles in search an inhaler. He grabbed it from the the corner, and took in a long gasp of lung medicine.

  A lightning flash from outside strobed a flood of blue light into the room. He pulled open the desk drawer to the roll of thunder, and hunted through the orange bottles for the right prescription. There it was. A quick shake verified the contents. The cap popped from the top, and the last two pills tumbled from the tube onto the back of his tongue. He swallowed them with the aid of cold coffee, and tossed the bottle into the growing pile. His breathing slowed, and the comforting tingle of numb skin coated his anxiety. It was routine at this point. The pills could have been made of sugar, and they would have still provided the preemptive calming effect of knowing that he was about to feel better.

  His fingers wiped the outline of his eyelids under the black plastic frames, picking at hard grains crusted in his tear ducts. He adjusted the glasses until they found their normal seat on his nose, and spun in the chair to face the bed. It was the most notable feature in the tiny studio apartment, the only feature. The corner posts doubled as coat hangers for his jacket. The room flashed with another cool glow from the dry thunderstorm outside, and something scratched from behind the corner of the bed. As he scanned toward the paint-peeled window frame, the scraping stopped.

  “Sixty-three hours,” he said again.

  He sat up straight and stared outside. Bright flashes of jagged cloud edges appeared intermittently against the black sky. The pattern of droplets on the glass hadn’t changed since the last time he looked. The lightning bolts were invisible, lurking somewhere beyond the veil of cumulus plumes. Another flash, and a hint of something else appeared over his bed. He fixed his eyes toward it for a moment. No smoke, no dust, nothing. It must have been one of those delusions that showed up from time to time in the corner of his vision. He became used to sensing movement, only to see nothing when he looked directly. It was a side effect of long hours and lack of rest.

  Then again, who was he to say that something very real didn’t lurk in those shadows? Philosophy classes opened his mind a new universe of possibilities. Maybe the shadows were part of an alternate reality that his tired mind could touch, even if the entities didn’t bounce light rays off the cones and rods in the back of his eyeballs.

  The scratching continued.

  “I need to set traps again.”

  He never could figure out if the drugs made the illusions worse. Remembering his younger days at Mom’s house, little nothings sometimes danced in his periphery. The influx of questions from epistemology class left him wondering about even the most common human quirks. He’d researched the eye jitters, and remembered being surprised at how few people on the Internet experienced the phenomenon, or fessed up to it. Floaters in the eye could cause it, as well as other medical issues.

  Lack of sleep enhanced the senses, magnifying their sensitivity. The slightest blast of cold air felt like ice. Scratching an itch made it worse, and street lamps were torture on night-adapted eyes. Excitability ramped up from increased perception, stirring it into a perpetual feedback loop until he reached the next sleep period. In all of his research, nobody ever provided a reasonable solution to the ghostly wisps that appeared from the shadows.

  “Maybe too much coffee and not enough sleep.”

  He ran his fingers through tangled hair to untie the knots. As he glanced down to pick the stray fibers from his fleshy comb, he examined his palms: clammy and sweaty, with an odd marbling of pink and white. He wondered if everyone found patches of pink skin as disgusting as he did, or if the odd coloring would mean anything to those fortune-teller types.

  Weeks ago, he would have laughed at the idea of palm reading, but the philosophy class put everything in question this semester. What if there really was some connection between those creases of skin and fate? He cast the offending thought aside, and rubbed his hands dry on his jeans.

  He spun back to the laptop and clicked the save button seven or eight times, just to make sure the operation completed. He double-checked that the file was in the right place. He emailed a copy to himself, providing both a secondary backup, and easy access to the free printer in the school library. Another flash of lightning filled the room with an instant of bright light. Thunder shook the tiny apartment a moment later.

  He hopped up from the seat and grabbed his jacket while scratching at the coarse hair on his cheek, wishing he'd shaved before getting to the point where his mental state, combined with shaky hands, couldn't be trusted with a razor. They couldn’t even be trusted to brush across the bristles without bumping his eyeglasses.

  He swung the jacket around himself, and the soft interior of the leather garment glided over his skin. The weight of it tugged at his shoulders. He whipped his hair from view with a quick flick, readjusted his glasses, and again spotted movement in his peripheral vision.

  “Where are you, Mister Mouse?” This wasn’t a hallucination. Delusions didn’t appear in the same spot after moving, unless this was some new variety. The instances of odd happenings increased linearly with the the amount of time he stayed awake. Hallucinations generally started after forty-eight hours, and persisted until the next sleep cycle.

  From the door, he scanned over the bed and out the window. The space was filled only with air. Maybe a stray current in the room carried a few flecks of dust or strands of hair. Maybe there was another world out there, one that could only be seen when the mind was brought into the proper mental state. Sleep deprivation and dark skies seemed like the perfect conditions. Perhaps they facilitated the human spirit loosening enough to see past the physical plane. Maybe it was a subtle perception that manifested only when tired enough. Or perhaps he spent too much time thinking about epistemology.

  The air moved again, this time while looking directly at it, or through it, or—whatever. Not so much a physical object, but a sensation of motion. It had no shape, color, or distortion, but something was there in the room with him, sending a chill down his spine with the thought that not only was this subtle energy real, but it was also conscious, and watching him. His neck hairs stood at attention like an army of soldiers.

  He turned off his brain, and darted out of the apartment.

  Downstairs and outside, the air retained a chill from the cold front that had moved in earlier. The ground was soaked. Water that failed to dry before sunset settled into slick puddles around grains of concrete that poked above the flat, reflective layer. Some broke through completely, like tiny islands, while others sat only high enough to swell the puddle oceans a fraction of a millimeter. “Surface tension.”

  Learning about something like that in school, and giving it a common name, seemed to suppress the magical force that made liquids do quirky things, like forming a meniscus around the edge of a glass. Depending on the container material, it could be more or less pronounced, sometimes reversed, causing the level of his coffee to drop a hair where it met a paper cup. Looking at the world through the new vision granted by philosophical studies was akin to staring through the eyes of a child, still curious and ignorant about everything. Anything was possible. No theory was too outlandish until discussed to death through discourse with a bunch of other child-minds in the classroom, or the forum in Rome.

  He didn't have far to go. The café was next-door to the apartment building. Steel tables spotted the sidewalk around the place, covered in dew-sized icy droplets.
Once inside, he took note of the usual night crowd. The quiet guy with the laptop sat in his normal spot, looking annoyed by the louder discussions that, under drier conditions, stayed on the patio. A group of girls, who were always in there late at night, laughed about one thing or another. A group of engineering students who liked to pull tables together sat studying. She was there, too, walking toward him with a red pack of cigarettes in hand. One of the white sticks hung from her lips as her free hand reached toward the door. Her sapphire eyes caught his, and she smiled.

  His gaze darted toward the thin puddle in front of the entrance rug. Out she went, lighting the cancer-filled tube before the door shut behind her.

  He admired her through the glass. Long blond hair that rested against the cream knitted sweater-dress. Soft skin, and always elegant. His tongue locked against the roof of his mouth, as it did every time he spotted her. Her body turned toward him, and he snapped toward the counter, considering any number of pleasant things he might say to spark a conversation on his way back out. He’d have his coffee before she finished smoking.

  Just say “hi” to her. That’s all. But what if that seems creepy? You’re creepy.

  The employees all dressed the same. Buttoned white shirts under black smocks, with a coffee cup printed neatly on the front in white. Stains congregated on the lighter parts, streaking the company logo in brown scum that refused to wash out. The human behind the counter looked familiar. He was the only employee with a goatee and long hair.

  “Tall cap,” said Scott.

  “How many hours you on now?”

  As soon as Scott's mouth opened, gassy noises from the cappuccino machine blasted an interruption that forced him to put extra air behind his voice box.

  “Sixty-three.”

  “You going to sleep soon?”