The Shadows

It was 2:00 am. As I was leaving my lab, the bell housed in Burruss Hall – the main building of the College of Architecture and Urban Studies – had rung twice. It was strange for the main building of a university campus to have bells ringing like this one. But then, nothing about Blacksburg was usual. It was a small college town. Like any other college town in the middle of a semester, this one also usually bustled with students at all times of the day, odd or not. Not tonight, though. Fall break was supposed to start that day which explained why the streets looked like they had been robbed of their charm in the middle of the night.

To a PhD student like me, fall break didn’t really mean anything. In fact, it had become the norm for me to leave my lab around this time every night since the past two months. I had just taken up a new project in my PhD. My long-running experiments had mercilessly usurped my daily routine. They were now slowly getting on my nerves. The cancer cells I was genetically modifying seemed to be incognizant of my efforts. It would have been nice if even one of my experiments had worked. But no, it wasn’t my day today. Neither was it my night.

Since I didn’t own a car and bus services had stopped at midnight, I started treading along my regular route through Toms Creek Road to get to my apartment. This was always a 25-minute walk for me. And that included the time devoted to my shenanigans on the road.

I liked taking the Toms Creek Road because it was always empty at this time. No traffic, except for the occasional one or two cars. This road boasted of running alongside a graveyard, closely followed by an elementary school and some not-so-useful streetlights. It probably explained the unpopularity of Toms Creek Road among pedestrians at night. Since this road got me to my apartment ten minutes sooner than the other, more happening road, I couldn’t afford to be so picky.

Two streetlights immediately outside the elementary school on Toms Creek Road kept flickering every night I walked back from my lab to my apartment. The flickering streetlights made me uncomfortable every single time. It was just an eerie spot. The fact that the streetlights that flickered were right outside an elementary school didn’t help the situation. Neither did the fact that the lot next to the elementary school was a graveyard. It was even more unsettling to think that these lights – that were motion-sensitive and supposed to turn on when a pedestrian walked towards them – turned off whenever I walked in their direction, and on after I crossed them. I had never been accompanied by anyone when walking on that road, so I wasn’t sure if other people had noticed this. To ease my discomfort, I had even created a story in my mind, explaining the fickle lights. That the light behaved this way only for me. That I had some unusual kind of power over the lights.

I always pretended to myself that the graveyard didn’t affect me. I believe that the dead deserve respect and not fear, which is also something I say to pacify myself after every horror movie I watch. But being a fan of horror movies, I have the same two problems as most other fans of the genre. One, I love being scared, and two, I have a very active imagination. Any unusual, stranger than fiction event that may have a hidden scientific cause becomes a scary twist in my conversations with friends.

Nevertheless, I always tried to enjoy this time – walking back to my apartment after a long, hard day at work. In fact, the two streetlights had kind of become my pals. No matter how my day ended, I always stopped next to these two streetlights – almost like a religious ritual. I would look around to ensure that I was all alone on the road and once convinced that the coast was clear, I would start dancing. I am a good dancer, but it is a preciously guarded secret for some reason. I used to dance in my room in the apartment all the time, until my downstairs neighbors came knocking one night. Now, dancing on this abandoned road had become my way of throwing caution to the wind and unwinding; my way of forgetting what happened at work and happily looking forward to my five hours of sleep. The two streetlights cast two long and flickering shadows of me on the road. Each night, I would be amused looking at my shadows as I danced. They reminded me of the synchrony of a dance trio I had seen on World of Dance.

However, this was not any other night. Something was different. Perhaps it was the repairmen I had seen in the morning when I had walked the road from my apartment to the lab. Well, run, really – because I was going to be late for a meeting with my PhD advisor. So, while running along Toms Creek Road that morning, I had noticed a few repairmen from Appalachian Electric Power hoisted atop their crane, repairing (I hoped) the streetlights that flickered. ‘Great! It will finally be a horror-less walk back to the apartment!’, I had thought to myself while waving at my friend from the lab next door. I had soon forgotten all about it because I was late to the meeting, and my advisor had ripped me a new one.

The lights had now stopped flickering. ‘Good job, repairmen!’, I said to myself while in the midst of my usual dance routine next to the streetlights. As I was savoring the synchronized dancing of my two shadows and myself, both the lights turned off. I stopped for a second to see if the lights would turn back on. I was about to take my phone out and continue my walk when someone called my name. I didn’t recognize the voice, but I could have sworn it was a kid. ‘Here I go again, imagining a scene out of a horror movie!’, I tried to convince myself, now thoroughly stressed. More so because I discovered that my phone was dead.

It was too dark to see anything – pitch dark, and a cloudy night too. My dilated pupils didn’t help me much. As I heard the kid call my name for the second time, a whooshing sound startled me. My breathing became labored, as I was worried now that what was happening was absolutely real.

Panicked, I started running in the general direction of my apartment when both the lights turned back on. I looked around trying to locate the kid who had called my name in the dead of the night. But the kid was nowhere to be found.

Out of sheer habit, I looked at the ground beneath me to glance at my shadows.

I only saw one.

The mystery of why there was only one shadow, when science – and the fact that I had seen two shadows right before the lights had gone off a couple of minutes ago – said otherwise, was something I couldn’t fixate on when other strange things were going on. There must be a scientific explanation that was eluding me, just like my interest in horror movies had eluded me a minute ago.

I mustered some courage and decided to continue the walk. The walk metamorphosized into a run as my skin gave way to a million goose bumps. The ground had just begun to slip under my feet when the two streetlights went off again. I dared and stopped again. Within a second, my decision seemed foolish as a terrifying shriek came from the darkness – another kid, screeching my name.

The hair on my arms resembled the spines of a porcupine in those moments. I couldn’t move even though I very much wanted to disappear, hoping I hadn’t watched The Nun two nights ago. Within a few seconds, the two streetlights were back on.

As I turned to look at the lights, I saw an eerily dark figure crawling away, from the spot where I stood towards the playground of the elementary school – perhaps on all fours, or perhaps gliding away in a supine position inches above the ground, I couldn’t tell. My voice seemed to have deserted me. Terrified, I flexed my eyesight to look at my shadows another time.

Not one shadow. None.

The trio was down to a solo dancer now. The most disconcerting thought yet came to me in that bone-chilling moment. It seemed as if invisible kids from an elementary school next to a graveyard were stealing the members of my ‘dance trio’ one by one.

As I began to shudder uncontrollably, a third voice bellowed my name into the night. I ran, deciding not to stop at any cost this time, even as someone seemed to be pulling the ground from beneath my feet.

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