Always address the Shadow

TW: murder

To whom it may concern,

My name is Rob Conway, and I’m a monster.

We all were back then. Monsters with an insatiable appetite to hurt others. But it wasn’t our fault. At least that’s what I tell myself at night to fall asleep without dreaming about him. It wasn’t our fault. It was the Shadow’s fault.

But let me tell you everything from the top…

It all started in 1956, in Newberry, a small, coastal town where the cliffs met the sea, and the everlasting green hills were dressed in groves and rivers. It was a nice town to live in. Not as busy as the major cities, and not as dull as the villages of the area.

But, despite its beauty, Newberry didn’t offer us much: a few record stores, one or two pubs for the drunkards, and nothing more than that.

So, my gang (Billy the Dull; Smith the ‘Smithie’; Davie the Bigfoot) and I had to find other ways to pass the time.

First, it was bike rides around town, but that grew dull very quickly. And then—it was Smithie’s idea I remember—we built a fortress in Newberry Grove.

We spent most of our time there, fencing with twigs, talking about the girls we liked, smoking our first cigarettes, and having a first taste of beer. We called it, the Newberry Saloon and it was a lawless land where we were the outlaws, the sheriffs, the knights, and the kings! That’s how life went by in Newberry. And it was oh-kay, I gotta admit, nothing wrong with all that, right?

Well, there was nothing wrong with Newberry, except for the Shadow.

You see, the Shadow was always there as we grew up. We saw it in the windows of stores, in the woods, and in remote parts of the city. Sometimes the Shadow followed us home. The Shadow never picked one person to follow. It somehow managed to follow all of us.

I don’t remember when I saw the Shadow for the first time. It must have been before the time I started to form memories, but it was always there, following me, watching me when I was sleeping.

But how can you tell something like that to others? Some would call me mental, or worse. But that was a good scenario. I was mortified that someone would confirm my story, and that’s when the Shadow would become real.

I always called myself crazy, because I thought that the Shadow was of my own making, a twisted vision of my mind trying to trick me, until the summer of 1956.

We all sat down, cracking a six-pack of cold ones, having our second-ever smoke. It was the smoke, the beer, maybe it was the heat of the summer, but I decided to share my crazy.

“Screw it,” I said and stood up.

I turned and pointed at the Shadow, and I saw it in their eyes.

“You can see it too?” I asked.

They all nodded with somber eyes. I could see it engraved within them: they knew where I was pointing at.

I wasn’t crazy. And know, you can think that this was a children’s story, but let me tell you what happened after that.

That same night, when I came home, my father was in his armchair, with the local paper in his arms, and the Shadow standing right behind him like a guard. My mother strolled inside with an anxious smile, serving him a drink.

She glanced at and left back to the kitchen.

“Where have you been?” my pa asked.

“The Saloon,” I said.

My father rolled his eyes, lowering the paper, “This nonsense again…”

He took a sip of his drink and eyed me carefully.

“You see, Robbie,” my father said, staring at me along with the Shadow. “Your mother and I…we know.”

“What do you know, pa?” I asked.

“That you can see the Shadow,” my pa said and leaned closer.

I swore that I heard the Shadow chuckle and grin. I could feel its hunger, its longing for something that I couldn’t understand at the time.

I remained silent and my father smiled.

“You see,” my father said. “I think it’s time I tell you what my pa told me.”

“Okay,” I said uncertainly.

“We all see the Shadow, son,” my father said almost compassionately, and he was never so compassionate. “We all see it, and we must obey it. He is the one in charge. We do not resist, and we do not ask, we just do, do you understand?”

“Why?” I said with terror.

“Because I said so, Robbie!” my father shouted, slamming his glass of whiskey on the table beside him.

He cleared his throat and rubbed his tired-looking eyes.

“Look,” my father said, calmly again. “We never address, and we never challenge the Shadow, do you understand Robbie?”

My father was scary, and I didn’t feel I had a choice.

“I do,” I murmured, and at that moment, the Shadow became clear as day, dark like a stormy sky or a nebulous, winter morning.

“Attaboy,” my father said, as he always did when I said something that he approved of. “Let’s have dinner now.”

And so I did. Ever since I could not only see the Shadow, but I could hear it, whispering things to me during the night. Its slimy, rotten voice pierced into my mind, like a parasite feeding from my own sanity. At first, I didn’t understand what the Shadow said, but the more the days went by, the clearer I could understand its meaning.

When I met with the gang again, they all had the same terror in their eyes, but it all affected us differently. Davie seemed colder, distant. Billy became harsher as his jokes were insulting and he shared all sorts of crazy ideas. Smithie was like me: mortified.

The Shadow became a part of our gang. We never talked to it. We never talked about it, but we let It follow us around.

It followed us to the fortress and when we took our bikes out for a ride. It followed us when we bathed in the river. And it took all the joy away from the little things we did, replacing them with vile thoughts we didn’t want to have. But we obeyed the Shadow.

One day, a new kid came to town. George DeWitz was his name, and his smile is still engraved in my mind. George was not your typical 1950s boy, and certainly not a typical Newberry boy. George was always dressed in lighter colors and one day we saw him wearing a dress. We all noted how George behaved more like a girl than a boy. We didn’t mind George. He seemed like a good boy.

But the Shadow didn’t agree with us.

“He is not normal, Robbie!” my father had shouted at me when I told him that I wanted to invite George over for dinner. “No boy like that will ever set foot into my home! And if you are like him, you better pack your things and leave!”

The same night, the Shadow repeated those words; words that I do not care to write here, and words that no one should ever write. It said all types of words for the boy we knew as George.

I didn’t believe that George was any of those things, but the Shadow had a weird way of poisoning us. Eventually, I cracked, and I didn’t want to go against the Shadow.

We started calling him names; the names Shadow taught us. We started hazing him, hunting him down, striking with sticks. Whatever the Shadow commanded. One day, the Shadow even ordered us to throw him into the river and we did, without asking, without addressing the Shadow, because we were all afraid of it.

That’s when the Shadow made us take it too far. It told us to haze George and trick him, make him believe that we will hang him. We took George out to our now ravaged fortress. We placed a noose around his neck, and we pulled him up, and up.

We were laughing I remember, and I can’t feel more disgusted by that memory. If you had been there, you’d see children believing to do the right thing—what the Shadow commanded. It was Davie and Billy who enjoyed it the most, but we were all laughing because the Shadow told us to.

We were laughing and poor George was choking. We would stop, pull him down, let him leave. But the Shadow never told us to stop, so we never did until George was no longer fighting. Until George was dead.

No one ever pinned the murder on us, and George’s parents simply skipped town. We were never punished for our mistakes, and that was our punishment. We all felt ashamed. Dirty. We wanted to be punished. We wanted to be thrown to jail and rot. Poor Billy even went to the police and told them what we did. They all laughed and let him leave. Billy told us that some even thanked him.

Our crime went unpunished, but we deserved punishment. We never talked again with the gang. We all left for college, and no one ever returned to Newberry.

Years later, I learned that Billy took his life, tired of listening to the Shadow. Davie joined the Army and never returned home. Smithie tried to redeem himself, track the family down, and George’s father killed him with a shotgun on their front porch. George’s father went to jail and Smithie died the way George died. But we all deserved what happened to us.

Me, I’m still here, and now that I write all that I know that it was our fault. Because I escaped, but it took me many years to do so. All I had to do was address the Shadow, and I did one day.

It was a day that the Shadow commanded me to kill another boy like George. It was the same thing my father had told me one day: “These men should be put down like sick dogs.”

And for the first time, I asked.

“Why?” I asked with tears in my eyes. “Why do you call him that? He is a person! Why do I have to kill him? He is just like me and everyone else!”

The Shadow’s grin vanished and its eyes didn’t glow as hot anymore.

“Why!” I shouted, louder than my throat could handle.

And a why was all it took for the Shadow to retreat to its smoky, dark home, away from me. Why was all I needed to ask to make the Shadow go away.

If we had addressed the Shadow, George would be alive, Billy and Smithie would be alive. Davie would be here, with us, and we would all be a happy gang.

But we never dared to do it, and that was our fault. Our fault. It wasn’t my pa’s who told me to not to address the Shadow. It wasn’t George’s who chose to be who he wanted to be. It wasn’t the Shadow’s fault for being there.

It was my fault for not ever asking why. I can’t write another word without thinking that it was all my fault. And I can’t live with that burden anymore.

I might have won the Shadow, but it took everything from me. Whoever reads this, remember. Always address the Shadow, even when everyone tells you not to. It’s the only way for you to live.