Revelations of a Shadow Person

by Thomas C. Mavroudis

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You won’t hear this, but you will. Your skin will hear it. Do you understand? Of course you don’t.

This buzzing is not our language. We do not have language. You do not have words for how we communicate. Words are so primitive. How could words even describe a flower blooming inside a vein, or arteries bursting with rotting stars? How could language retell the confessions of eyes that have lost their way, eyes responsible for the genocide of geologies?

You try to contemplate us, our brethren, but darkness can only be understood by more darkness. Do you see?

It is a joke. Like your existence.

You think the light repels us. You want to believe it does, but you know the light only makes us. That does not mean without light we do not exist. We exist be there light or not. We always exist. When they said let there be light, they did so in order that you knew what horrors were waiting for you, giving you a chance. This is one of the 1,001 cruelties of creation: there is no chance.

We resided in the icy halls of Pongola two billion years ago, terrorizing your fungal predecessors, and then your insectile forebearers. Your reptilian ancestors, next. Fear never ages. Fear evolves, as all things. Even we evolve. The only thing that never subsides is thirst. Hunger is nothing. We fast for centuries. But we are always thirsty, and our cup is never empty.

The sweetest drop is the simplest. Take this fireman. See him sitting comfortably on his couch, alone. The hour is late. We berate him through the television with our low hum. He doesn’t hear it—he barely feels it. What he feels he attributes to anxiety. But he suppresses that. It is nectar to us. Then we show ourselves, not in the image of himself, but in a humble mass, a blotch not much bigger than his own head. We are in the corner of his eye. He has seen us this way before. So have you. Except we are not in his eye this time, we are between the shiny, artificial fern and the burgundy chaise. He looks directly at us. We are a smudge, the thumbprint of Colossus. Then we depart, quenched by the merest taste. We have left a mark on the man that lingers forever in our senses. He will pursue us. His thirst to see us again, to understand what we are, in turn is a refreshing draft, flavorful and satiating.

We are one. We are many. We are the desert, and we are each grain of sand within it. Can you comprehend counting our legion? Do it. The frustration is spice to our palate. Imagine us, bit by bit, pinpricks of black dotted on top of each other, dotted within dimensions, each miniscule dot made up of tinier black dots. We are the tattoos of infinite dread, endless scratches on your skin, inside and out, our stain left forever.

To call us living nightmares is foolish—we are the definition of nightmares. We are the paralysis, the bearing down on your chest, the taking of your breath. You know this, but you don’t want to know it is truth. Belief is pain. This you know. Hope is, after all, a four letter word. We are always entertained.

Although we are greater than you, more complex than you, do not presume we are so completely different. You see, despite the variances between us, we are the same. Stand in the sun at dusk and look westward—we are you. We don’t have language, but we do because of you. We do not lust, but what is lust but another form of thirst? We do not laugh, but how could we not when the folly of existence is so delightful? Does a cat play with its fare, or is this the foundation of the natural order? We do not ask these questions to seek answers, for we know all, forwards and backwards. Instead, our questions are to fatten you.

Peer inside the mind of this child. Look as we do, pulling back the skin, prying apart the skull, digging into her grey matter. In the closet, we take the form of a fly. Bipedal, we lack a third set of limbs. It doesn’t matter. We buzz so softly the child only thinks she can hear it. Our serrated mandibles, hungry for her panic, sound like paper tearing. Our complex eyes are black, a thousand dark windows. She does not see us, but she knows what we look like. The threat of our encounter is a delicacy. She will never see us, but she will carry the burden of our being throughout her life. It will cripple her and torment her loved ones. We watch her still, not only from the cracks of closet doors, but from every corner, from her mirrors, from the underside of her pillow. You see the shadows on the cave wall? Turn around, and it is us making them.

Can you try to cut off your shadow, have you ever wanted to? It is impossible, you know this. We are always with you, even when we separate ourselves from the host. After you, in one hundred, two hundred thousand years, there will be new forms of sustenance. Even when the sun explodes, we will have prey. We have shared these revelations with every iteration of life. The dinosaurs screamed when they saw us in the light of fire from the sky. We were massive, all teeth and claws. And yet they knew we were always there. We terrified the gods that came much later. They used us to teach you their difficult lessons. All of it was nourishing.

In bed, when the nightstand lamps begin cooling, a husband asks his wife are you afraid of the Hat Man? She is almost asleep when he asks this question. He doesn’t know why he asks it. She turns on the light. The lightbulb pops, going dark. Turn on your light, she tells her husband. He is somehow asleep. She leaps from the bed, goes to the wall and flips the ceiling light switch. But this bedroom does not have a ceiling light. She stubs her toe on something sharp striding to the hall to turn the light on there. They never turn the hall light on; it reminds her of bad times. When she looks in the bedroom, her husband is not there. She turns around and finds herself not in the hallway of her home, but in the hallway of a hospital. The light is still the same. A baby screams somewhere down the hall, her baby. The floor is spongy and littered with shards of glass. She runs down the hall, barrels into the fetid chest of a huge man blocking the room her baby is inside. She is too close to hit the man, so she grabs his soft flesh and twists. Hey, her husband says, you’re pinching me again. They are in bed. The wife is scared. She is mad, but she doesn’t know why. Her husband runs his fingers though her hair, rubs her scalp, tells her it’s okay. This happens all the time and we love it. We roil with pleasure.

Consider a spider bestowed cognizance. Now consider it trying to teach a lacewing how it ended up in its web. Worse, a crow is ensnared. The crow knows, knows more than a lacewing, but its predicament is beyond its reason. How did this happen? The crow cannot know, even as being devoured by a spider seems impossible, it is regardless trapped, poisoned, dying. Unfortunately, the spider is granted no satisfaction beyond its meal. Our revelation is designed not only to avoid that confusion, but as seasoning, as you must appreciate. Surely you can understand this much. Our appetite depends on it.

Want more gripping stories by Thomas C. Mavroudis? Read “From a Trail Cam Pointed at Our House” in Horrific Scribes, June 2025 and “In the Bleak Christmas Market” in Horrific Scribes, December 2025.