A story post!
Falling asleep on the sofa was fine.
Ben leaned forward slightly, trying to get his head at a more useful angle in the tiny reflection in the butter knife.
Falling sleep on top of paperwork was also fine, even if he did now have a kind of office-warpaint in biro printed on his nose.
He made an unsuccessful attempt to pull one-handed at his cheek and ear at the same time, and blinked blearily at the fragment of a reflection.
Falling asleep on paperwork, which had on top of it the smart, thin, black, and overall very sticky-backed letters he was supposed to be fixing to his door - now this was a problem. The R seemed to have done something complicated and epidermal with his face during the night. He finally managed to hook a nail under the letter, then pulled it free very abruptly and dropped the knife as the door slammed back, collapsing a pile of boxes behind it into a slightly more ordered heap.
“Shit! What the hell’ve you got against locks?”
Ben had half-leapt to his feet at the crash - which would have been far more effective had his shin not encountered the coffee-table on the way up - and now dropped down again, swearing as he grabbed at his leg. He glared up, other hand clutching the letter-shaped red mark on his cheek .
“What’ve you got against doorknobs? No one else opens the door with their size-nines!”
The response was a derisive snort as Deb came into the room, returning his glare over the pile of assorted cardboard in her arms. She dumped most of it on a clear end of the desk, and tossed a large paper bag in his direction.
“Women do not tend to have size-nines, Sherlock. And it is eleven-am, even my housemates are awake, and it’s about time you rejoin the conscious world.”
Ben ignored her, instead examining the bag’s contents. Being based this close to one of the bigger Starbucks was going to be a problem for his nervous system, he was quite sure, but it did mean easy-access to latte and pastries. Halfway down the second danish, he finally looked up, frowning at his sometime-assistant as she hunted through the proto-office mess, muttering to herself.
“Don’t you have lectures on Monday?”
“It’s Wednesday.” She tossed an empty pizza box in the direction of the pile that had engulfed the bin, and made a face. “Honestly, d’you even care what your clients think?”
“It’s Monday somewhere. Probably.” He swallowed the last of the pastry and balanced the bag on the table. “And no, not really.” The coffee was working - he felt almost human. Always a good trick, he reflected, then shrugged. He stood up, picking his way over to where Deb was arm-deep in a box of … envelopes?
He had envelopes?
“Not that I don’t appreciate the coffee, but why’re you in, Debs?”
She straightened up and looked at him, exasperated.
“Because I honestly think you’d starve to death in a big pile of unpaid bills if I didn’t kick you occasionally.”
He considered this.
“Alright. But - ”
But what, he didn’t get the chance to ask, as the door crashed open again, and they both looked up. An unfamiliar figure stood, or rather, drooped, in the doorway, thin fingers clinging onto the frame like it was about to be snatched away from him. Pale hair hung lankly over an even paler face, yellow-shot eyes staring out from behind the greasy fronds, and he swayed, contriving almost to lurch whilst standing. To say he looked awful would be to reject terms like ‘terrible’, ‘dreadful’, or ‘half-dead’.
That had happened once, actually.
“Er… hello…?” Deb began, and the man’s head jerked up, the staring eyes focusing on her, wide with panic.
“Sssherlock? Theysaid….you…help…” He cut off and slumped onto his knees, hands still locked onto the frame above him, arms stretched up and wide. He groaned.
“Shit!” Deb scrabbled at the desk, pulling a handset out of the debris. “I’m calling an ambul - ”
“No.” Ben grabbed the phone back, and tossed it at a box. “I need you to shut the curtains.”
“We’ve only got blinds.”
Ben blinked.
“We don’t have curtains? Tomorrow, buy curtains. No, whatever, never mind.” He shook his head. “Block the windows, or something. It needs to be dark.”
She started rooting in the desk again and Ben left her to it. He made his way slowly over towards the half-crumpled figure, who was still making odd groaning noises. It wouldn’t be a good idea to get too close, not until he knew what was actually happening, but he could guess. The rune-scars under his skin felt odd - the strange hot, almost-fizzing sensation along the length of his spine and ribs - and he bent down, twisting to see more of the carpet underneath their sudden visitor.
Not a thing.
There was the sound of ripping sellotape as Deb began to stick torn cardboard over the windows. As the light began to dim, the man suddenly looked up, meeting Ben’s gaze with his pale eyes. Very pale eyes.
“…you…help…”
“I’ll try.” Ben moved forward and crouched, gently wrapping an arm around the thin shoulders and taking some of the man’s weight. There wasn’t much weight. There really wasn’t enough, not for the shape. It was like lifting a mannequin made of pumice.
By the time he got the sickly arrival over to the sofa and deposited him there, Deb was taping the last bit of card over the main window. She dropped down off the desk, and Ben nodded towards the door.
“That too.”
“What for?” she hissed as she passed, and he waved at the slumped figure. She looked for a moment, and shook her head.
“I don’t see it.”
“You don’t. Usually, I mean, it’s not there in a there sort of way.” He realised she was glaring at him again, and waved a hand again in a hopefully-disarming gesture. “He’s not casting a shadow.”
Deb looked again. The light still spilling in from the hallway lit the room dimly, concentrated in a long rectangle, with the man’s feet in the middle of it. The bright area continued, sharp, unblocked, and it may not only have been a trick of the eye that could follow the edge through the too-pale skin. Even that vanished as Deb hurried over to the door, closing it and taping more card over the small window and the few forlorn letters Ben had managed to stick in place. As the final bits of light vanished and the room plunged into gloom, he sat down on the arm of the sofa, and folded his arms.
“Deb, third drawer down, leather sachel with wooden toggley bits,” he said, and returned his attention to the visitor. The man was barely visible in the gloom, and he had his head in his hands. He’d at least stopped groaning.
“What happened?” Ben asked, not unkindly. The man shivered, but his voice was a little stronger in the darkness.
“…lost cards. Got drunk, seemed alright idea. Cards in the graveyard.”
“Who with?”
The man gave a jerking motion that might have been a shrug.
“Dunno.” He coughed. “Jus’some bloke.”
Men in pubs. Ben shook his head. While it was probably possible to meet random people in drinking establishments who wouldn’t turn out to make life suddenly complicated, he’d not seen it happen too often.
Of course, he didn’t get people coming to see him with stories of ‘I had a few pints, and a laugh, and I went home. Yourself? Oh, I spent the evening finding and sealing all the energy lines in my office, and accidentally glued signage to my face’. Never mind.
Deb appeared by his side, and shoved a bag into his lap.
“Second drawer, it’s almost a handbag, and the toggles are falling off.”
“Thanks.” Ben started to sort through the bag’s contents by feel, and glanced up at the man, who was watching him with an odd expression barely visible on his face. “Was it just your shadow? You didn’t bet anything else?”
“How -?” he stopped and groaned again. “I mean, yeah. Got weird, I sodded off. S’morning…”
“The light hurts?” He got a nod in return. “Where’d you live?”
“Lenton.”
Ben whistled under his breath as he tried to disentangle a piece of chalk - from…wool? Something like wool.
“Good distance. They told you about me?” He glanced up, pulling two candles, a long narrow bag and a lighter out of the sachel. The man nodded again.
“Thought it was’a joke.”
“So does the tax office. Quite useful, apparently. Here Deb - ” he handed her a candle, and lit it, prompting a fresh groan from the visitor. “ - don’t let go of that. I mean it.”
The faint scent of vanilla began to drift through the room. He couldn’t see her expression, but he could guess.
“They were on offer. At least I didn’t get the pink ones - I think that might be negatively occult.”
He lit his own candle and stood up, hefting the narrow bag in his free hand as he carefully kicked the coffee table to one side, making space. The tingling began to spread down the back of his arms as he raised the candle towards the ceiling, lips moving soundlessly. There were words for this sort of thing, but they weren’t really much more than a guide, like the little extra side-wheels for the mind, if you stretched a metaphor a bit. All you really had to do was know what to look for.
He stared into the candle flame, unblinking until his eyes prickled with the strange over-amplification of colour and light in a long stare. Then he tossed the candle in the air, keeping his gaze focused on the now-spinning point of light, and swept his other hand around him, pivoting as he did, and released a thin stream of silvery dust from the bag. The candle reached the top of its arc, spinning, and began to fall, as the last motes of dust swirled together -
- the moment froze. The candle flame froze, as if it were suddenly nailed against the backdrop, and the light seemed to congeal in paused, broken halos, like Ben were suddenly standing in the centre of some faintly golden crystal. Around him, the silver dust glittered in the air; out of the corner of his eye he could see Deb holding her candle up to her face, the frozen light turning her dark skin to a furnace-bronze.
The air dragged like static over his skin as he turned to face the seated figure. Or, where he had been. Now there was just a dark… no, not just a dark space. This was darker than dark should be, and deeper, somehow. A different kind of blackness than the absence of light, light rejected, not simply missing.
It was also, undeniably, looking at him.
Ben gave a small smile, and nodded to it.
“Thought so. Morning.”
There wasn’t a sound, as such. More a space for sound to be, and the ears filled it in as needed. It wasn’t pleasant, but it was possible, like speaking while breathing in.
“We thought you would know.”
Ben grinned.
“Oh, sharper than I look, me. Must say, I didn’t think there were many Shades around now. Halogen lamps didn’t do much for you lot.”
The deeper darkness rippled slightly. It might have been a gesture. It might as easily have been part of whatever process was causing the whole shape to creep slowly down the sofa, extending out gradually from where the man’s feet had been.
“We can learn.”
“What I don’t get,” Ben continued, as if he hadn’t noticed the advance, “is this ‘betting your shadow’ thing. Who was that fooling? A shadow’s just getting in the way of light, but you can’t do that. You can hide from the light though, in flesh. Losing the lesser shadow’s a symptom. Do the photons really go through him; or round, or what?”
“Clever.” The approaching tendrils of darkness were very close now, and had clearly given up on subtlety as they began to twist, tracing around the edge of Ben’s glittering circle. Even the candle flame was starting to look more faded, hanging against the ever-darkening room, and Ben swallowed.
“So. Telling him my name. I’ll have to log this as a personal visit, then?”
“Funny man.” The coils of darkness were very close now, beginning to spiral upward around him. Between two closing twists, Ben caught a distant glimpse of something pale, but the sofa suddenly seemed a long way off. Everything did, and he tried to push away the distinct impression he was hanging in a tiny droplet of light in some vast blackness. Difficult to ignore what very much seemed to be happening, of course.
Thin lines of darkness, like filthy cracks in glass, began to snake through the crystallised air. They stopped before they reached his face, a good few feet away, but new lines started again, crept forward, stopped. They were definitely getting closer. Ben licked his dry lips.
“Why me? There’re others.”
“This is only the beginning, for the end of your kind.” There was a sense of gloating in the not-voice, a malicious confidence that made Ben’s spine crawl. He reached up, slowly, and wrapped his fingers around the frozen candle. Amusement joined the suffusing black emotions.
“Little light, little… ‘man’.”
“Yup.” Ben nodded, and grinned cheerfully. “It is. It is a tiny light, floating in the air of my breaking ward. But see, I’ve been focusing very, very hard on it during this exchange. So - ”
There. A shift in the attention, a moment of confused focus on the candle… and Ben let the rest of his narrow bag fall to the ground, and swung what it revealed up and round. White light exploded in the void as he wielded the torch like a master play-act Jedi, but around him the darkness suddenly screamed.
“ - you didn’t notice this one.”
The air broke, the dust collapsed, and the dim reality of his office flooded back. The trails of white brilliance hung in the air for a few seconds, as something like black cobwebs of fog fled from them, and Ben turned, grabbing part of the cardboard curtains and wrenching them free. Sunlight, filtered past several buildings to this level, but still bright after the gloom, flooded in, washing away the darkness and the brilliant lines alike, and there was a final, fading echo of a shriek.
Breathing heavily, Ben slumped back against his desk, knocking over an old mug, and let the torch thud onto the table. His spine ached fiercely and something in his sternum seemed to be on fire. He winced.
“What the hell just happened?” Deb was suddenly next to him, grabbing him by the arm, concern and irritation mingling on her face. “You just… blurred. And - ” she stopped and looked down at the desk “ - you have a maglite?”
“A damn good one.” Ben patted the metallic blue case. “Candles are alright, but if you know what you’re doing, there’s a hell of a kick in LEDs.”
“Hey! Who the hell are you? Where am I?”
The visitor - and only him, now - was standing up, and Ben grinned a bit as he noted the brown hair, and red-flushed face. Deb reacted first, flashed a broad smile.
“Oh, that’ll be all. Thank you for participating, market research is really so important, don’t you think? Your coupons will be in the post, Mr…?”
The man stared at her, then at the office, the cardboard hanging from the windows, small piles of silvery dust heaped on the carpet, and seemed to come to a decision.
“Whatever. Freaks,” he muttered, wrenching the door open and storming out. They watched him go, and Deb looked back.
“He doesn’t remember?”
“Apparently not.” Ben yawned, placing a hand over his mouth. “’scuse me.”
“Do you remember… whatever happened?” she asked, and at his vague nod, poked him in the arm. “Well? Are you going to tell me what that was about?”
Ben frowned. She had a point, there.
“Not sure. I mean, yeah, Shades, I’ve seen that before, but it said…” he stopped. He looked round at the wreck of his office, then shook his head. “Never mind. Tell you what, you find the laptop - which I have not been using as a coaster anymore, see, I do listen to you - and we can go grab more coffee. Or, odd, fruit-leaf beverage. Thing. In your case.” He grinned again and struck a slight pose. “And we’ll see if we can’t shed some light on this.”
Deb pulled a face as she began searching for the computer. “That was awful.”
“Yeah, I know.”
“And you have biro on your face.”
The door swung closed behind them, and a few more letters fell off.
B. Sherlock
Pa nor al Inv st g t ons