Within the Darkness

James spent days practicing sounds, not feeling thirsty the entire time. This made sense since his body couldn't even retain liquids all that well. He did start to feel hungry though. So once night fell James went out to explore the forest around his cave looking for something to eat. James hoped an animal would satisfy his needs as the thought of willingly consuming a human was extremely unpleasant to James. It would make his stomach churn if he had one. It was an overcast night with no moon or stars to light it, but despite the darkness James could see just fine.

Although the way he saw things was different then he was used to before his transformation. The level of detail he could see in things was almost like being able to touch them from a distance. The complex texture of an object, even parts that one would not normally be able to see, were on full display. Because his senses were mixed and part of his senses worked like echolocation he was able to see things behind other things and even in pitch black darkness. Nothing could hide from him as long as it was in his field of view. He could even detect temperatures from a distance. How hot or cold something was changed the hue of it a bit with brighter, more vibrant things being hotter and duller things being colder. Since he moved at night, most colors were dull and almost lifeless unless it was from an animal.

This made endothermic or warm blooded animals stand out. This body was definitely that of a predatory hunter. James had a hard time imagining having a natural predator. The way he moved felt loose at times, almost like he was fine sand moving in the wind. He could probably fit his body into and through extremely small spaces. So it was hard to picture anything wanting to or trying to eat him based on that alone. James also imagined he'd be hard to kill. Most conventional weapons would pass right through him. So outside a bright spotlight, a sonic disruption device, or fire, it was hard to picture taking damage. James was suddenly pulled from his thoughts when he spotted a familiar shape in the distance. A deer, grazing in the woods.

James went for it, easily able to keep up since he didn't have to worry about most obstacles. He grabbed it by the back leg and lifted the animal off the ground by it. The deer kicked and bucked while being held off the ground by a single tendril on one of its back legs. It let out sounds of panic as it drowned in its own fear. James grabbed it by its other limbs and started breaking the poor animal down for consumption, eventually ripping its head off and putting it out of its misery as he crunched and munched the parts. Meat and bones. Nothing solid went to waste as all that remained of the deer was a bloodstain in the grass. However, James barely felt a difference. The deer was just a drop in the bucket. There was a difference though, albeit small. So James continued to hunt.

Deers, bears, turkeys, horses, cows. The larger the animal the better. Or so James thought. And yet, even after spending all night up till he saw the sun starting to rise, no amount of animals seemed to truly satisfy his hunger. The number of livestock and wild game James killed wouldn't go unnoticed. James returned to the small cave under a large tree before the sun came up enough to hurt him to rethink his next move.

James had plenty of time to think, since he didn't seem to need sleep. Sure, he could enter a sleep-like rest mode but all that did was buy him more time before he had to eat. It was more like hibernation than regular sleep. Shutting down as much as possible to reduce how many calories you're burning. James didn't even know if calorues were even applicable to him. Since the amount of mass consumed was not the issue. There was some factor he was missing. Something that aided his digestion to make it more efficient? Or maybe this body needed something besides solid subsistence to satisfy its dietary requirements.

“(Maybe… it has to be a human for some reason?)” James shivered at the thought. Cannibalism was definitely wrong. Eating animals was at least debatable. “(Then again it's not exactly cannibalism anymore since I'm not exactly human. Still, we are talking about the consumption of a sentient and sapient individual. A person with a deep and complex personality with dreams, aspirations, and a family. But if I don't eat, then what? Do I starve to death? Go on autopilot and eat whoever is unfortunate enough to be the closest? I've already experienced that horror once. Being a helpless observer as my body acts without my will. There may even be a chance I would lose myself to the baser instincts of this body becoming nothing more than a mindless beast praying on whoever I found.)”

James was mortified by the possibility of his body going around on its own and eating people. The person he was effectively experiencing death and leaving a heartless monster that could kill hundreds of innocent people. “(No, I can't risk that. If I must feed then I'll be the one to choose. I'll hold on to what humanity I have. There are plenty of people in the world that deserve death. Monsters in human skin. Plenty of unwanted people no one would miss. The best and most logical thing to do is choose the lesser of two evils. I'm already a killer, so I might as well reduce the number of killers. Drug dealers, pedophiles, disease ridden homeless people with no hope of ever climbing out of their miserable lives if I'm desperate. I mean… it's not like I'll get sick from eating them.)”

James floated around, waiting for night to fall once more. Once the sun was setting he could start making his way back to the city to find someone worth killing. While he had time to think, James couldn't help but wonder what his family and friends thought. I mean he's been gone for several days now and someone definitely noticed he was missing by now. Were the cops searching for him as a missing person? Was he presumed dead? What happened to his original body when he changed? Once the sun was setting James was setting out to the city and refocused himself on the task at hand.

James had hit the farms on the outskirts on his first day but had not tried to enter the city proper since his transformation. Once there he stuck to the shadows. Streetlights didn't seem to bother him that much though. James found this interesting as it indicated he was only sensitive at either a higher intensity or specifically to ultraviolet light. “(I'm kinda like a vampire. A reluctant vampire.)”

James continued to carefully stalk dark alleyways and backstreets looking for an unsavory individual. When passing by an alleyway that led to a dead end he stopped halfway to the other side of the entry to the dead end. He saw two individuals. One was female, oozing fear all over the place. The second was a male, oozing some strong emotion James wasn't able to identify since he's only sensed strong fear from a distance before. The man looked like a thug from a movie and even had a pocket knife he pointed at the woman as he grabbed her neck with his free hand. He brought his face close to hers and licked it. “Come on now sweet thing. I promise I'll make you feel good. Just stop struggling and be a good little girl. You can pay with your money and your body, or you can pay with your life.”

The woman looked up at something behind her attacker and went pale, then a low distorted voice came from the shadow behind her attacker. “How would you like to be the one on the receiving end of some unwanted penetration?” The thug's eyes widened as he spun around to point his knife at whoever interrupted him, but there was no one there. He pointed his knife and moved from side to side looking for whoever just spoke. “Why don't you come out of hiding then if you're so brave?” The thug then felt something tighten around his leg before pulling and landing him on his back on the ground. He went pale as he saw a black mass wrapped around his leg like a snake. Then suddenly he was pulled down the alleyway into the darkness, screaming out as he flailed and clawed at the pavement.

The woman shook in fear, her eyes clenched shut as she continued to hear the man screaming in the distance along with what sounded like branches snapping and phone books being ripped in half. The screaming stopped and the woman slowly opened her eyes while still shaking. She slowly pried herself off the wall and walked to the alleyway intersection. She looked down each direction seeing nothing of note outside one of the street lights flickering. “Hello?” She spoke timidly. Then after a pause she shouted “Is anybody there?!” To no response. She scrambled for her phone to call nine-one-one before bolting out of the area.

James sat hiding in the darkness. He rid the world of a rapist and satisfied his hunger. It seemed only humans did the trick for some reason. Something to look into later. James had to be careful. Drawing unnecessary attention was definitely not a good thing. In fact any kind of attention was risky. If word got around about some man eating shadow monster who knew what would happen. As he made his way to the edge of the city, James realized there was one thing he wanted to do before going back to his cave. He floated his way through the shadows all the way to the place he once called home.

The building was blocked off by police tape and two cop cars were just sitting there. All the lights were off and no one was in the building. It seemed as if the two cops were simply sitting there and watching the place in unmarked cars that were out of plain sight. James made his way to his bedroom window which looked like it had been busted open and flew in. The room looked about the same as he left it except for the massive bloodstain on his bed and crime scene flags in different places. They definitely noticed he was gone and probably assumed it was a murder or something like that. He figured he was declared missing and presumed dead at this point.

James floated back out the window and finally started to slowly make his way out of the city and back to the cave. One there he thought about everything he's learned. “(From the bloodstain left behind that reminds me of what I leave behind when I eat… I think what I am now ate the old me from the inside and I somehow kept my sense of self. Considering my appetite leading up to it it probably started a year or two before then. My former body becoming nothing more than a cocoon for what I am now.)” James stressed a little bit, not really any closer to the why and how of his current plight.

James paced back and forth in the darkness of the cave, unsure if he would ever discover the how and how of his condition. “(If there's no way to figure it out then there isn't really a point in thinking about it. I'm stuck like this with no answers and no way back. All there is left is moving forward and adapting to the situation. I'll take things one problem at a time if I have to. For now my only problems are keeping myself fed and keeping myself hidden. Bring discovered by others is not an option.)” Thanks to a “trial and error” like approach, it didn't take long to figure out his current dietary requirements. James noticed that after feeding it took at least three days before he started to feel hungry again and he could go a full week at most before that hunger reached a point where it became concerning.

This meant in order to retain his sense of self, his sanity, what was left of his humanity. James needed to feed once or twice a week. This meant one or two people would be going missing every week because of him. Would this be noticable? Especially with James intentionally targeting the worst people he could find. If he had access to the internet he'd probably look up the local sex offender registry. This way even if anyone noticed the increase in missing people, they wouldn't care. A higher percentage of the ones going missing would be criminals who some would argue should be permanently removed from society. James couldn't just eat someone who was actively in prison, not without leaving evidence and traces of his existence. So this meant either catching people in the act or waiting for them to be released or escaping prison on their own.

James was not about to test his luck to see if or how a camera would record him. Just because he had a hard time seeing reflections didn't mean he didn't have one. In fact he had a lot of questions as to how he saw the world and colors. It was obvious that he was seeing things he didn't or couldn't before but most of it was due to sensory bleed. Everything he saw, felt, or heard was also picked up by his other senses because his body had a hard time telling them apart. Also the strange purple glow that came really intensely from the sky during the day but was subdued at night raised a lot of questions. The best answer James could come up with is that what he was seeing was something outside the normal visible spectrum for humans.

“(Maybe what I'm seeing is ultraviolet light. So light at lower lumon counts and less intense UVs are fine but at higher levels are dangerous to me. Still not sure why but that's like asking why sunburns happen. Yeah there is a scientific explanation for it, but even if you don't know it has to do with your body's inability to produce melanin you still know sunburns are bad and should be avoided. I'm not a scientist, I don't need to understand the intricacies of my anatomy. Sure I may have a lot of questions but with no way to answer them I'm just wasting time and mental energy. Not that I don't have a surplus of time to think about things like how a so-called shadow monster would replicate and reproduce.)”

James then had a sudden and horrible thought. (“There's never just one.)” Something that applied to ants and mice. If you spot the one there is always more. This suggested the possibility of other monsters like himself and perhaps even not like himself. Just hiding somewhere out there. Within the Darkness. Creatures that go bump in the night. Then he remembered that nightmare he had as a child so many years ago when he was just in the first grade. The nightmares that came after those students died. The monster in those dreams… was just like the one he was now. “(Was that… actually real? I always denied it because monsters were works of fiction. But now I'm living proof of the falsehood of that belief. Not only are monsters real, but it is more than likely that the government is aware of that fact. Not only are they aware, they most likely have weapons made specifically to combat monsters like myself.)”

James had no real way to get answers at this time, but now he was confident they were out there. Maybe in the future he could investigate it without being noticed, but for now his main objective was survival and maintaining self control. Though if he thought about it the old version of him could definitely be considered dead. His emergence in this new monstrous form could be considered a sort of rebirth. James Holden was dead, and from that death a new entity was born. One that would take on a new name befitting his shadowy form. “From now on I am no longer James Holden. From this day forth I shall go by the name… Pitch Black.” “(That's kind of edgy and cringy sounding but whatever I'll run with it. There's worse names I could have come up with.)”

Pitch settled down into a divot of the cave, squishing himself into it like a sort of shadow puddle. He then decided to enter his sleep mode for a bit during the day in order to preserve whatever energy he used to get around and obtained from killing and eating humans. As he started settling in he still had a number of thoughts about the way he instinctively did things with this body. “(I always seem to play with my food and keep it alive when I start the process. I always make sure my victim sees me and is fully aware of what is happening and going to happen to it. I feel myself gaining some measure of sustenance during this time. I'm fairly confident that fear is a major component to my diet for some reason. Since animals with higher intelligence and understanding have better comprehension of their situation the fear would be stronger in humans then other animals. Dogs, dolphins, and cephalopods would likely be second. Maybe this is why humans work best. I feast more efficiently if I feed on a significant amount of fear first.)” Pitch managed to reach the equivalent of sleep for his new body after several moments of sitting in silence.