Only the Light Casts a Shadow

The teacher dug in the dead of night. It was a slow process—it not being his trade—but slowly and inexorably he had carved away at the earth that had lain still beneath the stars, so that he was only half visible above the ground. The cadence of the biting shovel could hardly be called steady, nor even a cadence really, as he took frequent rests, arching his back with two hands pressing into the small. But persistence was key; he had doggedly been chewing away at this bone for quite some time. The wheeling stars kept count of the passing hours, but he did not, and there was no vigil to give him pause. Not even those classically judgmental celestial sparks staring down could pass any judgement he would heed. Not this time. This time they had taken it too far. He paused for breath once more, leaning on the edge of the torn earth, sweat glistening even in the cool dark of this night. What had they done? Well, what hadn’t they done was the real question.

He had had an illustrious career, he reminded himself, with that usual twinge of pride, in which he had served the interests of a multitude of his clients in the business of education. The highest priority a man could strive for! Or so he said, often. He had served his Purpose faithfully, avidly, and without incident for 27 years, with nary a blemish to his name. It was only now that these sorts of accusations were being levelled, not at him but the Institution that had served as his bedrock all his working life. “Toxic culture of silence,” they said, “an environment where silence was bred like puppies, and then fed and cared for into mongrels of despicability ready for the next whelping”; “a boys’ club, geared to engender the worst attributes of the human race”; “incalculable wickedness, derived from incompetence, the result: to inculcate a man afraid of everything, especially betrayal of his friends.” Or the one that stung the most: “Seemingly unsupervised, the boys of the school run rampant through the night hours, staffing a lucrative underground network of drugs, pornography, and reprisals for ‘snitching.’” The notion! What dastardly lies! As a House Master of a boarding house, this struck him to the very core of his pride, to his very essence, to the foundation of his existence. The emotions boiling up once more drove him back into the dirt, shoveling ferociously at the injustice of it all. It was all a load of utter nonsense, written by outsiders who had no idea of the complexities of his work in a boys’ boarding school environment, the lengths he had gone to, the strides he had taken. They just had no idea, and for them to even suggest anything of the sort was just an indication of the ignorance and moral bankruptcy of the modern media, happy to take pot shots at the Elites, while sheltered behind the guise of “telling the news.” It absolutely sickened him. As if anyone working with children could ever be so neglectful as to allow a child to come to harm. The thought itself was insulting; to write it out publicly was a travesty. Dirt flew from the hole much apace.

There had been trouble, of course, but this was no different to what normally went on in schools, and certainly, if anything, it was a rather better picture if it were a reflection of the outside—where drugs, violence, and hatred were no longer even considered vices!

Well, they wanted solutions, they were making demands and asking questions, and he had the answer. He just needed to keep on digging.

He could sense he was getting close now. He had been at the funeral; he knew they had buried him deep, but he had been at this since sunset. Sure enough, there came a hollow echo as his shovel hit something covering an empty chamber—something wooden, now barely covered by half a foot of red soil, gilt with starlight. How fortunate it was that the school graveyard was so far from the rest of the school. Keep the immortal souls at peace from their charges, no doubt. But it meant that no one would see him now. He lifted his shovel, taking the last layer of dirt up with it, exposing the rotting face of the coffin. Suddenly, the air was rent by a scream, ripping through the air. It sounded like a screaming babe, but wild and vicious, feral, as if that infant had heard no tongue of man in its short life. It lifted the hairs all over his body as if they were on a string with superstitious dread.

“Harbinger!” he gasped, eyes wild in the starlight, teeth bared in a hideous grimace. If the Night Ape screamed, It was near. And It waited for his next move, to see the fulfilment of his sin before. He turned back to the coffin—he was panting now, a mania now on him that the time had come, sweat flowed freely off his brow, his hands shook, some from exhaustion, mostly in terror. It was time now, time to bring It in, time to unleash It. He closed his eyes—time enough to consider his next moves. His mind raced, but always the strongest images were of the humiliation he felt, the stinging words of accusation, the burning chastisement of an ego marred. “Boys running rampant at the school,” “sneaking out after lights out,” dealing, drinking, having a ball—all whilst their exhausted carers tried desperately to cling to their sanity by daring to sleep in their beds. It was insolence. It was unforgivable, and it was unstoppable. But he would show them—he would show them all. He knew just how to keep them in their beds.

He raised the shovel above his head and with a great yell he smote the rotting wood of the coffin and gagged as the fumes poured through the thin crack. Decay, sweet and rotten. He could’ve sworn that the escaping air was warm on his cheek, it was so fetid.

“I am sorry, friend,” he coughed, tears springing into his eyes, “but this is the only way…” His colleague had been buried in the school cemetery not two years ago, so the soil covering his final resting place was the loosest compared to the wall-like shrouds encasing the other denizens of the graveyard. He said sorry, but he didn’t mean it, the tears were from the stench. Whatever statement of shame he made now was purely sarcastic. He had been a prickly cunt anyway—died alone, unmarried and forgotten, vaunted in his memorial as ‘one of the greats,’ a “legend of the teaching profession.” Well, he was just stinking ooze now.

The desecration of a tomb was of the highest sacrilege. Enough to bring to him a punishment that had lurked in the African bush before man descended from the trees. It had driven man to find fire so he could huddle in its halo of protection, driven him to explore the planes beyond the waking world to wrestle with forces Unseen, giving to him the powers that were now called ‘witchcraft,’ but which were first used to combat this ancient menace. It had always been. It had always held in service of the Darkness that men feared. It had chased them from the dark and into the light, until they had lit their world so completely that they had forgotten the darkness. Forgotten what had lurked there. Forgotten It.

He jammed his fingers into the crack, and they came away wet and reeking. He started pulling the wood apart. The Night Ape screamed again—this time right in the great tree standing in the centre of the graveyard—so that the gaping hole of the exhumed grave reverberated with the infantile scream. “Almost here now,” he thought to himself. The Harbinger, the Night Ape was called, but it was misnamed; rather, it should be called the Warner. For the Night Ape was no servant of It, but called ever when It was near, perhaps out of a forgotten loyalty to his ground-dwelling relative born out on the African savanna. The teacher tore open a hole big enough to shove his arm into, and for the final time, he paused. Once it was here, there was no going back—once he committed the sin, it was over. This ground would be stained with it, and haunted evermore by what he would unleash. Not until a powerful nyanga could be found to put the genie back into its bottle, so to speak. But they had been driven to ground long ago, when the People of the Light chased them into criminality, trusting ever in their blazes to protect them, failing to consider the forces that could only be battled on planes beyond their experience. He plunged his arm into the black hole of the coffin and the monster descended into the hole with him.

He watched it crawl, spider-like, down the side of the hole towards him. A skeletal body jutted out in all angles with sharp bones and spines, ribs flexed against grey and red flayed skin above a belly stuck to the spine. Long arms tipped with claws dug into the red soil, filling the open grave. Its face stared into his. Lidless eyes, lipless mouth—both leering at him in the starlight. A tokoloshe. He stared into the orbs of Its great insect eyes and mad rolling tongue, and was unafraid. They had to learn once more—this was the only way. All beseeching, teaching, and imploring had failed. It was for their own good. They had to learn to be afraid of the dark.