The Loop

When the shadow had fallen over me I'd lost all sense of time and space and self, but I hadn't lost consciousness. Instead I'd existed in a jumbled heap of thought and sensation that even now, several days later, I was having trouble parsing and comprehending.

Somehow I'd ended up back at my parents' house, upstairs in my room, and I'd almost cried with relief. Only I hadn't been able to cry. Strange, I'd thought, realizing I didn't have a body.

At one point I heard my parents downstairs, they sounded tense, worried. They were speaking in Korean and a voice whispered in my noncorporeal ear: translate.

They're saying they're worried because I didn't come home from work yesterday, I said, feeling strangely emotionless about the content of their conversation. What day is it? How did I get here?

Never mind that, said the voice. Perhaps I should silence you again for a while.

Okay, I said. There was a deep part of me that was screaming at the surface level part that was so calm, like the true me had been buried under miles of tranquilizers and sedatives and it was trying to warn the conscious part of me of something.

Shannon? asked a third voice. Shannon Park? Is that you?

I recognized this voice, or at least I realized I was supposed to, but before I could force my muddled brain to figure out who it belonged to, everything went dark and I felt myself dissolve again. Just as my consciousness was slipping over the edge of infinity, I saw my mother open the door to my room, look around with worry on her face, then shut the door again. She hadn't seen me. Strange, I thought again, not really appreciating the depth of my situation.

A day later, or a year, or … some time later, I found myself surfacing again. I had more feeling this time. More of my mind was present. I heard voices arguing downstairs.

"If you don't perform precisely as I've directed you, I'll make you watch her perish."

A bolt of panic shot through my still-groggy mind. My parents' English wasn't that great, and this man—Dale, I remembered—spoke in such a peculiar way, I worried they wouldn't even understand what he was saying. I wanted to call to them, to reassure them in Korean that everything would be okay. I couldn't make my mouth work, couldn't even be sure I had a mouth.

I heard my mother crying. I heard my father pleading.

"No pleas will change my mind. Do as I've prescribed if you love your daughter. Talk to the police."

Prescribed? I thought. Why not 'described'?

I looked down and realized I had hands again. They weren't solid; they were monochrome and strangely translucent, but they were hands. I looked to my right and saw a woman … shadow … thing looking back at me.

"Gabriela," I said aloud, surprised that I could speak aloud, surprised that I recognized her in this state.

"Hi, Shannon,” she croaked, her voice weak and raspy.

"What the hell is going on?"

"He'll be back soon. If he leaves us for too long we start to take shape again. He doesn't want that happening."

"Is it … is it really Dale?" I asked, almost but not quite unable to believe he was capable of … whatever this was.

"Yes. I'm afraid so. Oh, Shannon. I'm so scared. My son is all alone without his mommy."

"Now you profess to care about your child?" asked Dale, coming into the room.

"No. You're past the point of caring. But worry not, for your son will grow and prosper in a world where mommy is just a memory. And I'll have given you purpose beyond any petty child-rearing. I'm giving you all purpose."

"Peter, what the hell are you doing? What's going on here?" A voice spoke from the other side of me. I looked down to see a woman I hadn't been aware of sitting on the ground and leaning against the wall. She was wheezing heavily.

"Don't call me that. My name is Pitch! And you, mother, are only here to witness my power. To see what I've become without you. That's your purpose. And when I'm finished with you, you'll be purified."

A startling change had come over Dale, or Pitch, or Peter. He was almost unrecognizable from the mild-mannered man I'd known at work. I had had an uneasy feeling about him from the first time we spoke, but I had assumed he was just a garden variety pervert. I could have never guessed he had it in him to turn into this. He was monstrous. He stood taller and straighter than he had before, the shadows underlining and outlining all his features were dark and deep, mostly obscuring his face and making him seem almost to blend into the background of the unlit room. His voice, too, had taken on an inhuman quality; it sounded like fast water crashing down against jagged rocks, it crackled and snapped like firewood bursting.

"Why are you doing this?" I asked him. I spoke quietly, almost hoping my voice would go unheard, almost wishing he wouldn't notice me, wouldn't address me directly.

"Why?" he asked. "Because I have power, and power is permission. Because my parents chose to procreate and made me, and then they made me plead and beg for their love and affection. My father left, and my mother was pitiless and pernicious. Inhuman."

"That's not true, boy. I gave you everything and you—"

He stopped the woman's voice with a punch to the mouth. She gasped and fell silent. From what little I could make out of his face, he looked almost as shocked as she was.

"When I was young, I was bright, precocious, but she couldn't perceive that. Do you know," he said, with a small, bitter smile on his face, "I had a small speech imp-p-pediment?" He laughed at his own joke. No one else did.

"The most peculiar thing," he continued. "It was a stutter that only affected my ability to pronounce the sound produced by the letter 'P.' Couldn't even say my own name without fucking up. What did my mother do? Take me to a speech pathologist?"

He laughed a laugh with no joy in it and struck his mother in the face again, this time with no more provocation than his own recollection of the injustices of the past. She whimpered softly but remained otherwise silent.

As he went on, I felt my body becoming more and more solid. Outside of my non-corporeality, I wasn't bound in any way that I could sense. If I could just become solid enough to strike him, or to run out of this room …

"No," he said, his voice shrinking to a whisper. "No, she made me drink soap whenever I slipped up. Piss, if it was particularly bad. Don't ask me why."

"I didn't know how to help you. I was barely more than a kid myself," his mother said, her voice even smaller than his, her cheeks shiny with tears. If his story was true, I didn't feel much sympathy for her. He didn't bother responding to her.

"Eventually I forced myself to do better. Through nothing but the power of my will, I got better. And do you know what? It didn't make a lick of difference. She didn't treat me any better. Made me kill my beloved pet on threat of punishment much harsher if I didn't do it when I couldn't procure some things she wanted from the store."

He wasn't even looking at us, now. Wasn't even speaking to us, not really. I wanted to make him talk longer, to drag it out, to get my body back.

"That's awful," I said.

"Poisonous. Pernicious," he said.

"Must've been painful," I said.

"Yes. Plenty of pain."

He looked into my face, studying it.

"But that's the past."

"Of course he doesn't mention the animals," said his mother. "Of course he doesn't mention the photos he took of girls in the locker room."

"Shut up," he whispered.

"Nor the piles of bones in his underwear drawer. He wasn't right, you know? Right from the start he was off. Sure, I hit him. Sure, I did things I ain't proud of. But he was always going to be this way—"

He struck her once more, full force directly in the face. Her head rocked back and struck the wall, then lolled forward and came to rest on her chest. I saw blood oozing from her nose and the corner of her mouth. I couldn't hear her breathing.

But then I realized something: if his fist had been able to make such a solid connection with her face, then that meant I was probably solid, too.

While he stared down at his mother with pure and seething resentment in his eyes, I popped to my feet and took off running for the door. I decided against trying to overpower him.

I made it through the doorway and halfway down the hall toward the stairs when I saw something out of the corner of my eye that made me turn back. In my parents' bedroom, on the bed, two unmoving bodies.

I fell to my knees with tears of rage and pain and shock welling in my eyes and an inhuman cry of anguish welling in my throat as the shadow descended upon me once more.

———————

When I came back again from the deep down place where my thoughts were barely thoughts and only images of dark, uneasy oceans and profoundly black skies kept me company, I wasn't nearly as close to the surface as I had been the last time. No chance he's letting me become fully physical again, I thought.

I could hear his thoughts in my mind and I realized he and the others were with me here, in this shadowspace. I looked around but it was futile, I was blind as long as I was here—or maybe there just wasn't anything to see. I had a sense of my body as something large and indistinct with a shape only vaguely suggestive of a human being. Still, I had some other sense in this place—beyond sight or touch or sound—and with that sense I knew that the others were close at hand.

Why are you doing this? What do you want? I heard this question at once in my own voice and in the voice of Gabriela.

The three of you represent a trifecta; a model of the world I'll create. Images of his mother drifted into my mind. Here we have the evil mother of the past. His mother's face dissolved and blurred until its features became those of Gabriela. Here we have the evil mother of the present.

Finally the face shifted and became my own—only not quite my own, I noted; the features were exaggerated, the epicanthic folds more prominent, the hair blacker, the eyes and nose smaller. It was an overly asiatic caricature, and I realized with a small measure of horror—surprising, really, considering everything else about him—that along with being a psychopath, Dale was also just a garden variety racist. And here we have the perfect mother of the future.

I'm not a mother, I said.

At this he said nothing, but I felt a sensation radiating from him that made me distinctly uncomfortable.

Changing gears to avoid elaboration in that direction, I said, And why have you brought me—us—here?

This is your home. I wanted you to be comfortable. This is all for you, after all.

Since he'd started talking—or thinking, or whatever this was—there'd been something nagging at me about what he was saying. Something in addition to the horrifying implications of his words. I finally realized what it was: he wasn't obsessively choosing words that started with the letter 'p'. So maybe that was just an act when he spoke aloud. Or maybe what I was hearing here weren't really words so much as his feelings filtered through my own brain's language processing center. It was puzzling, but hardly my biggest concern right now.

You say this is all about me … all about me how?

As I said, you're the perfect mother of the future. The others need to be ritualistically purified in this space so that your offspring can come into the world in a clean home, in a better, brighter world. And this is only the beginning. This is how we'll make the world a better place.

And my parents … If I were capable of tearing up or losing my voice in this state, I would've done so now. As it was, I was oddly at peace … serene, even. Why'd you have to kill them?

They were of no consequence. They had no part in the ritual, except to ensure that the police would give us time to complete it.

So what are we waiting for? Why not do it now?

No, I heard Gabriela's voice. Why would you say that? Please, no. Not now.

Quiet, you, he said.

I've been waiting for a chance to explain the plan to you. I spent a few days figuring out how to wake you all without bringing you all the way up. As you know—I felt a sensation close to a laugh steaming out of him—we've had some issues in that regard. But all the kinks are worked out now.

Something about this reasoning rang hollow for me. It seemed—and I'll admit that I might not have understood his plan that well, as it was the plan of a psycho and it inherently rebuffed attempts at logical analysis—that he planned to simply discard the other two women and … Well, I didn't want to think about what he had planned for me. But there wasn't really any good reason he couldn't have done that yet. He could've brought us all the way out of the shadow and used the time while we were still recovering our senses to act out his ritual. No, I thought. He's not sure if he can really go through with it. His mother had said something about animals. Well, killing animals was one thing, but people were quite another. He was stalling while he tried to work up the courage to do it. I didn't know exactly how long it had been since he'd lured me to the office and abducted me—time moved strangely in the shadowspace—but it felt like at least a few days. How much longer did we have?

You've raised a good point, he said after several minutes of silence. I can see no reason to delay any longer.

Well, I thought, that answers that question.

I felt my body coalescing around my consciousness as the room around me took shape. In my peripheral vision, I saw several other shapes becoming solid. We stood in the center of my kitchen, only it was nothing that resembled a kitchen anymore. All the furniture had been pushed off to one side, by the sliding doors that led to the backyard. The blinds were closed and the lights were off, so the only illumination came from a circle of candles sitting on the floor in the middle of the room where the table and chairs should have been, and sitting scattered around on the countertops. The shape of the circle at the center of the room wasn't just created by the candles, though; I noticed hundreds or thousands of small animal bones laid out with care and precision, making the circle more solid.

The circle was probably seven feet in diameter, and at its center, standing with his arms held wide, shadows circling around him and becoming his body, was Pitch. Tendrils of smoky darkness encircled his head and torso, some of them reaching out like probing tentacles, striking out at or otherwise gently caressing random objects in the room. Over his face was a mask of shadow, leaving only his eyes and mouth visible. His extremities, too, seemed to trail off into shadow, giving the impression that they were much longer than they were. He was no longer a man.

"Let us proceed," he said.

His mother screamed. Gabriela screamed. I remained silent.

From down the hall, I heard a pounding at the front door. The look on Pitch's face—or what little of it I could see—changed. No longer triumphant, but enraged, and, perhaps, scared.

A voice shouted my name. "Shannon! Are you in there?"

Linc, I thought, but could not say aloud. I'm here!

The shadow man grew larger, grew impossibly tall.

"Not now," it said. "Not when I'm this close."

It let out a roar of rage, and stalked, half physical man and half horrible shadow, in the direction of the front door, just as that door exploded inwards.

Vaguely, I felt my body collapsing away again, sinking back into that deep, dark, impossible place. I only hoped Linc had seen my face one last time, before I disappeared completely.