The Shadow that Follows

Cold and starvation are covetous things. So is the creature that lurks in the gloom.

Photo by Georgy Boldyrev on Unsplash

The dusk was blue and murky. Snow and sky merged together in the failing light. He shambled into the village.

Waterlogged boots encased his freezing feet. One foot was clubbed, and that one dragged behind — the pain had long ago dissolved into an uncanny prickle. His blue eyes wandered. His caved cheeks drew tighter. His sharp nose ran with mucus. Starvation tunneled out his stomach.

Icy mist rendered everything suspect: that pattern of wicker fence, thatched huts ahead with their faint internal glows, the shape of a chapel’s crooked steeple, a distant and uncertain treeline. False contrasts. If he approached they might dissolve.

His eyes flew behind him again but then came another coughing fit. He fell to his knees. The chill gloom, or something darker still, was taking residence in his chest and on his shoulders. In his delirium he almost hallucinated coughing himself away into smoke and vapor.

“Ho, there!” came a man’s voice up ahead.

He looked up and saw a shadow emerging from a hut. “Please…” he retched.

“Who are you, Sir?”

He pulled his hat off to reveal his tonsured head. “A Servant of God! My name is Maroczy!”

“A monk?”

“Aye… I am… I was… afore the Magnate disbanded our monastery last spring.”

The shadow’s voice fell. “You should turn back, Brother Maroczy.”

“I can’t!” Maroczy coughed again. “God’s mercy, I’ll die!”

“There’s naught for you here.”

“I’ve nowhere else to go! Please… I’m starving! And…” he descended into coughing but fought to speak more, “and something’s out there! I…”

The coughing took his breath away. His head grew lighter, his body heavier, and he collapsed.

***

Ague afflicted his wits. Time turned slippery. He had only vague memories of what followed. Coughing. Feeding on soup and cream. More coughing. Warm ale. Thick tea. Coughing.

Lucidity found Maroczy lying in a poor man’s bed beneath a hoary light cutting through the shutters above his head. Late morning. Or early evening.

He bolted upright in panic. Despite the lingering sickness he snatched his bag off the dirt floor and took inventory: a few tattered clothes and a rectangle wrapped in velvet. His hat and coat sat folded nearby.

He sighed. Nothing stolen. He’d been on the road and fearful for too long.

Through the frame of the bedroom door he could see the hut’s entrance and before that the faint glow of a cookfire. An old man of thick constitution sat there slicing roots into a small pottage cauldron. Maroczy arose and walked there, and his host regarded him with one eye — the other lazed away toward the door as though wary of another visitor. “Good morrow, brother,” he said.

Maroczy recognized the voice as the man he’d met on the road. “Good morrow, Sir. I… I…” he put his sleeve to his mouth and coughed again.

“I wasn’t sure you’d live. Three days you were abed.”

“Fie, three days?!”

“Aye, save for an hour yesterday where you found time to explore the village.”

Maroczy remembered none of this. He begged for details and learned there were blessedly few: apparently he’d shambled out just after nightfall, made idiotic grins at everyone he’d encountered, and found his way back to his host.

“By Hall’d Kaszi…” Maroczy shuddered. “How mortifying!”

“Aye? We thought it amusing.”

“What do I call you, Sir?”

“Stanomir.”

“Stanomir.” Gratitude stopped Maroczy’s throat — months since he’d last received charity as this. “I owe you my life, Stanomir. You’ve sheltered me, cared for me, fed me…”

“Aye, but now that you’re awake I’ll be off,” his host snorted. “Our village has enough, but not more. Winter has scarcely begun. ‘Twouldn’t be proper to feed one who won’t work.”

Maroczy inhaled as though struck. “We Clavian monks aren’t mendicants. I would never ask you to feed me forever…”

“I see that club foot of yours. I wager you won’t be laboring in the fields.”

“The fields aren’t the only place where work can be done.”

“The other monks who came here said the same.”

“Other monks came here?!”

“Aye.”

Maroczy swallowed. The Magnate’s seizure of monastery lands had displaced monastic clergy throughout the country. The thought of facing the cruelty of the road again racked his heart. “I’ll stay. I can earn my keep.”

“Doing what? Praying?”

“Is prayer so unwanted? I saw your steeple only fleetingly, but it looked derelict. I could be your minister, tend to your poor…”

“You’ll get no food for that.”

“I am also an illuminator.”

“A what? A Lumineer?”

“Nay, an illuminator. Here…”

He fetched the velvet item and carefully unwrapped. A prayer book lay in his palm, its fine goatleather binding embossed with gold letters. “I make these.”

Stanomir hardly looked at it. “Doesn’t Tenvun have printing presses?”

“A press can’t make this! This was crafted as… as…” He was afflicted again by coughing.

“Well,” his host said, “when I’ve need of… whatever you are, I’ll call on you.”

Maroczy had heard this before. He wrapped the book carefully and sat down. “I can’t go back to vagrancy,” he whispered.

“And I can’t continue feeding you.”

The fire spat.

“You said I was abed three days?”

“Aye.”

“Then that makes today Rosday.” Maroczy stood. “Commons Prayers begin soon. I’ll begin there.”

“Doing what?”

“Holding Commons, of course! At yon chapel.”

“You’re a fool, Brother.”

“We’ll see.”

***

Icicles hung from rooves. Dawn’s red light stained the sky and the frozen ground broke beneath his feet as he trudged toward the crooked steeple at the village’s far side. He made a crisp good morn to all whom he encountered. He stopped only once to weather a coughing fit.

The chapel was empty, drafty, littered with cobwebs. Swallow nests in the rafters. Dusty floorboards imprinted by rodents and felines, a palimpsest of pawprints.

He checked the alms coffer: empty save for dust. He brushed the inside and outside and closed the lid. Then he crossed the sanctuary rail, stood up the overturned pulpit, and unwrapped his little book.

He paused on the soft cover, running his fingers over the indented letters. He remembered making them.

He opened — despite the abusive road the binding had held up wonderfully — and began to leaf through to the proper spot. Page after page showed the black ink rows of letters, then vibrant reds, while the margins hosted every kind of art: trees and vines, animals and fishes, halloweds and sinners. The nimbuses around the heads of the holy ones shined golden. They were real gold leaves. Maroczy himself had laid them there.

As he looked at each, he recalled what time of year he’d made it. This one he’d drawn in winter. That one had been half-finished for awhile, for he’d gotten hay fever that spring. His fellow monks had to bring him tea in bed for a week and he delayed his labors for fear he might sneeze on the pages.

His fellow monks… they were instantiated in this book, too. Maroczy hadn’t made this alone — the whole community had, in its own way, made it, from the gardeners to the scullery boys to the prior. A monastery lay between each fold, a monastery long gone.

This was more than a book, more than a memory, more even than a work of art. It was Maroczy’s very soul.

And not long ago, he’d considered trading it for just a heel of bread…

He left the tear on his cheek, swallowed, and began to sing the words written there.

The walls had not heard Ailinic prayers in many years, but no villagers showed. He prayed anway, and quietly contributed his own petitions: Lord, let your servant not languish. Already I’ve lost my brothers and home. Abandon me not to the unforgiving road. Abandon me not to death…

He spent the rest of the day going door-to-door, introducing himself, asking for work. Some gave a polite no. Others were rude. Still others never answered. He expanded his solicitation out to more distant houses. No luck. As the sun declined on the last one he found himself running away from a dog on his clubbed foot and had to leap over a stone fence to escape.

Panting on the other side, he briefly thought he saw a dark figure in the distance, standing perfectly still, watching him. But as he squinted it seemed to fade into the background.

He was beginning to realize that he was not only unneeded, but unwanted. He was lonely, hungry, and afraid.

***

It was late evening when he finally returned. Stanomir was ladling pottage for himself and barely looked up. “There’s not enough for you,”

Maroczy could see that there was, but said nothing. He sat across the cookfire and opened his hands to the warmth. The heat pricked at his fingers and his stomach growled.

“Don’t think me cruel, Brother.”

“I don’t,” he gently lied.

“Even the Sacred Texts say those who cannot work shouldn’t be fed.”

Maroczy looked back at the door. Wind scraped against it from the outside like an animal essaying its fortitude.

If a club-footed monk could but prove his own worth… “Stanomir, it’s Rosday. Why did nobody come to the chapel?”

“‘If a monastery is too far to walk, then Rosday may be celebrated by each in their homes.’ So the Prior has decreed.”

Maroczy had heard this argument in every rural village through which he’d passed. “...Unless a clergyman is present, like myself.”

“Don’t harry us. I liked you better yesternight fevered and out of your wits. And you did have a congregant. Surely Jurand was there.”

“Nobody was there.”

“Jurand didn’t come?”

“Nobody came.”

Stanomir frowned. Firelight made black shadows across his brow.

“Who is Jurand?”

“He lives a distance out yonder. But he always comes for Rosday. Perhaps he’s still sick… ‘twould be a shame to lose his weaving talent. That said, he is a queer one…”

A soul in need, and one of importance to the village. ‘Twas a thin thread of hope, but Maroczy could still prove his worth. “Sir, you’ve done so much for me already—”

“I won’t feed you…”

“Three days… three days of food and shelter.”

“I’ve already given you that.”

“Three more, then. Food and shelter. For a beleaguered Servant of God.”

“I’ll give you five days for that little book of yours.”

Maroczy blinked. Without thinking he took it out and gently unwrapped it.

Five nights… was that the value of his soul? Five nights?

He closed his eyes to dam the tears.

“Well?” Stanomir’s greasy paw was already open.

“You cannot have it.”

“There’s no cause for offense, Brother.”

This book was worth twenty huts like this one along with their land, but to say so would be too strong. “This… is worth more than five nights.”

“Seven, then?”

Maroczy folded up the book.

“I’m merely trying to be realistic, Brother: Tenvun has printing presses.”

“Can Tenvun’s presses draw golden art? Do its operators even speak Ailinic?”

“That’s not real gold, is it?”

“If I cannot stay three nights, then two more after this one?”

Stanomir sighed. “One.” He held up his finger. “One.”

***

Beneath a pale red dawn Maroczy set out to find Jurand the Weaver.

The day was not windy, but as he walked the clouds gathered to blot out the sun. His boots became waterlogged again but he pulled his coat tighter and pressed on. Here was a task befitting a monk. Here he could show his worth.

It was miles before he reached the crossroads, and miles more until he reached the row of sharp pines separating the road from a pool just beyond. Not quite cold enough to freeze, mists curled about the water’s surface.

Maroczy stopped momentarily to watch the mesmerizing play. Like chill smoke it moved.

The water rippled. A single ring grew across the surface then vanished on the banks.

His mouth went dry. He told himself it was a catfish and moved on.

Jurand’s hut was just beyond. No light burned inside and the whole place was shuttered.

The monk stopped some distance from the structure. It looked abandoned. “Hullo!” He tried to sound cheerful.

No answer.

“Hullo! Jurand?”

“Who’s there? God’s blood, who’s there?”

The fellow’s terror was palpable. Maroczy swallowed before continuing. “I am Brother Maroczy! I heard you might be sick, I’ve come to care for you!”

A long pause, then the grate of a hasp on the opposite. “Open the door.”

Maroczy suddenly looked at the entrance. Something about it seemed sinister, as if a trap lay on the other side.

“If you don’t open it, you can’t enter.”

The monk swallowed, lifted the latch, and pushed.

The door yawned opened, the hut inside dreadfully dark. The humid stench of unwashed chamberpot wafted out. He could hear the tenant’s raspy breath inside.

“Now,” said Jurand. “Enter.”

“I… I can’t see you.”

“If you be man, enter.”

Maroczy clutched his coat tighter, reminded himself of his station and charge, and stepped inside.

He paused within the shadows, holding his breath. His neck tingled, waiting for the ax stroke. None came.

“God’s blood,” said a figure sitting in the far corner. “I thought for certain…”

“Sir, what is happening?”

“I had to…” he paused and took a raspy breath, “I had to know if you could cross the salt line.”

“Salt line…” Maroczy turned around and saw the thin white row sprinkled just within the threshold. “You are Jurand?”

“Aye.” The man sat up and raised an arm like a twig.

“By Hall’d Kaszi, man, you’re starving!”

“As are you, Brother.”

“You’re worse off. Where are your supplies?”

“I can’t fetch them. Each time I step outside… it’s there.”

“What is?”

Jurand’s face was cloaked in darkness, but Maroczy could feel his gaze. “You’ve not seen it?”

“Seen what?”

He could hear the hermit’s labored breathing. “Surely… if you’re one of the displaced…”

“Sir, what have I not seen?” But even as he asked he recalled the shadow, that vague phantasm stalking through the gloom.

The shutters clicked in their frame from an icy breeze. A thick sheet of gray clouds was rolling over them.

“Aye,” said the man, “you’ve seen it.”

“Sir, I can see your health is critical. Please, in the village we—”

“No. ‘Twill find me out there. I’d rather die than be taken by it.”

“Taken by what, Sir?”

Jurand’s head drooped, and Marozcy realized he was struggling to breathe. “I don’t know… I don’t know. But I could feel it. Feel it watching me, studying me, as if it would not know what to do. I keep to the shadows lest it see my face.”

“You’re out of your wits, Sir! Please stop!”

“... and if you’ve seen it, then it’s been studying you, too.”

The shutters clattered again. The outside grew darker.

“You seem a better victim. After all, who would miss you?”

A bump from behind. Something moved by the door.

Maroczy wheeled around in terror, but it was only an empty spool fallen from the shelf.

He turned back, but Jurand had fallen over.

“Sir?”

The breathing had stopped.

“Sir?!”

Naught but the ambience. Jurand was dead.

The shutters moved, then knocked against one another as the wind rose. Something approached.

Maroczy lost his wits. Out the door he ran, fleeing painfully on his clubbed foot as around him the pines crashed and the pool’s surface ripped and the clouds were cast in mad patterns above him.

He made it barely a hundred yards before the coughing began, so violent that it racked his body and pulled at the dregs of his gullet. He slipped in the frigid mud and fell on his face and still he coughed until his vision dissolved into sparks and then blackness.

***

At dusk he awoke, cold as the ground itself. The world had gone still and the gelid blue mist had returned. The trees were still and silent. The pool behind them was still and silent. Jurand’s hut was still and silent. All else lay behind the veil.

He rose painfully to his feet, then checked his bag. His prayer book was undamaged.

Then he felt it. That primal instinct.

Something was watching him.

He could feel it. He could feel its eyes.

Down the path toward the village, fifty feet ahead, directly in the middle of the road, something stood.

A human shape. About Maroczy’s height, but posture skewed. Feet too widely spaced. A stooped and unsupported head. One dropped shoulder. Arms slack. Face invisible. Naught but blackened silhouette.

It stood still, so perfectly still, facing him. Its breath spilled out and dissipated.

Maroczy’s mouth was dry. His heart kicked. His ears burned. He could feel it. He could feel it staring.

The shadow moved.

Maroczy screamed, but the thing ran not for him, but for the trees. It galloped bandy-legged beneath the branches and toward the pool, followed by a single splash.

Maroczy still could not move. He continued to scream several more seconds, then settled into gasping. In the dim light he watched the pool’s ripples communicate, then vanish.

It did not reemerge.

***

Stanomir arrived late to his hut to find Maroczy shivering by the cookfire’s embers. “Ah, Brother!” he saluted. His lazy eye seemed to meander farther due to his obvious drunkenness.

“Sir… you said other monks have come through here?”

“Eh?”

“Two nights ago, you said other monks have come through this village. What befell them?”

Stanomir puttered out his lips like a horse and went to his shelf.

“Please, Sir! There’s something out there.”

“Aye, you said that when first you arrived.”

“Did the other monks say the same?”

“... Aye, they did.”

“And what befell them?”

Stanomir took a small coin from a clay jar, pocketed it, and turned back to his guest. “You must know?”

“I must.”

“You won’t like it.”

The monk swallowed his fear. “Please. Tell me.”

His host sighed and rubbed his forehead.

“Please, Sir.”

“Very well. You’d likely learn eventually.” He took a deep breath. “Most kept wandering. But a few… a few are among us now.”

“Pardon?”

“They set aside the frock. They put down their books. They let their tonsures grow out. A sound recourse methinks, given the Magnate’s distaste for the clergy. They found work at nearby farms. They labor. They’re like anyone else. What choice had they?”

Maroczy looked at his clubbed foot.

“And now you know why I didn’t tell you. That choice cannot be for you.” Stanomir sighed. “Now what will you do, Brother?”

The monk closed his eyes. “What I shall do… is be gone in the morrow.”

Stanomir nodded and turned to the door. He paused before exiting. “I don’t hate you, Brother. We are, all of us, struggling.”

“I know.”

“I won’t be back tonight. Help yourself to the pottage.”

***

Maroczy slept in a bed of exhaustion and despair with the precious book he’d made cradled in his lap. He dreamed of sinking into the muddy road while folk passed by on either side, looking straight ahead, ignoring his screams and pleas. The bedsheets absorbed the warm tears he shed in his sleep.

He woke when the door creaked open. ‘Twas still pitch dark outside. Somehow he knew immediately the thing at the door was not Stanomir.

The shadow stood at the threshold for some time, peering in. The moon was shrouded by clouds but by its muted light the black figure contrasted against the frozen world outside.

Maroczy lay still. He could see it through the doorframe of his room.

Into the absolute darkness of the hut the shadow stepped.

Maroczy’s heart beat within his throat. He wanted to scream, or run, or do aught, but found himself paralyzed as the shadow drew closer and closer. It passed the extinguished cookfire. It passed the shelves where Stanomir kept his coins. It reached his room and now Maroczy could hear its strange breathing, as though driven by habit rather than reflex.

It stopped above his bed.

Maroczy could not breathe.

A breeze outside. The shutters rasped and shifted on their hinges, admitting a vertical sliver of light that slid momentarily across the creature’s face.

Blue eyes. Caved cheeks. Sharp nose. Tonsured head.

It was he.

It was Maroczy himself.

His exact likeness leered down at him with an enormous, idiot grin.

The man in bed screamed and screamed and shot up and crawled back against the wall. The imitator reached out but the man — Maroczy — grabbed the shutters and tore them open, narrowly slipping the creature’s grasp and spilling out the window into the snow.

He wailed like a madman, like an animal, and ran into the village with his prayer book still pressed to his chest.

Behind him the creature stumbled out the front door. It flung its head back and forth, then tipped its eyes on the fleeing monk. Maroczy saw his own likeness grin at him and make chase.

“God preserve me! Help! Someone help!”

He reached the chapel and nearly tripped upon the steps. He had no shoes and the ankle of his clubbed foot burned from the exertion, but he ducked to the side of the commons and huddled in the shadows, trying to halt his breathing.

He watched the shadow lengthen up the doorway and into the church’s commons. Again it stood with its shambling gait and contorted posture as though waiting for something. Then it entered.

Feet plodded. Head bobbed. Its fingers — exactly like Maroczy’s fingers — straightened sporadically as if their owner didn’t know quite what to do with them. It walked a little ways in and seemed to look up at the sanctuary. Not with understanding, nor intelligence. But some consumptive quality marked its wayward gaze, itemizing what it saw. Cataloguing. Consuming.

Then its eyes fell to the dusty floor, printed by Maroczy’s footfalls, including the shoeless marks Maroczy had just left there.

Its head whipped sideways, and with its mindless smile it looked directly at the hiding monk.

Maroczy bolted for the doors, but the creature reached him first. It snatched his shirt and he screamed and beat it away. It released him.

Out into the cold he dashed, then realized:

He’d dropped his book.

He looked back. His book lay open on the floor. The creature was no longer pursuing him. Now it stared down at the carefully rendered text and the art adorning every page.

It lifted the book close to its face. Then it opened its mouth. And opened. And opened. Its jaw sank lower and lower until it hung free of his face.

Then it placed the book into its cavernous mouth.

“No…” Maroczy whispered.

The creature was bending the book further into its mouth. Its fingers crinkled the pages to better fit. Ink flecks unpeeled from the paper about his lips. The binding began to audibly tear.

Maroczy’s feet moved beneath him. “No. No! You’ll not have it! You’ll not have it!”

The creature saw him charging. Its warped mouth rose at the corners and its arms went wide to assume monk and tome alike into its hideous gray embrace.

A single, final howl echoed through the night.

***

“What’s all this noise?” shouted a villager.

Four men in various states of inebriation emerged from a house nearby the chapel after the cry.

“I heard something.”

“Aye, so did I.”

“It came from the chapel!”

They fetched a lantern and ran to the church. When they reached the doors they saw it.

“Brother?” said Stanomir, stepping to the front.

Kneeling on the steps, sated by its recent meal, it grinned.

***

On an overcast day in mid-spring, a different monk traipsed into the village, his body thinned out from starvation. He was still a little ways away when he saw someone working out in the field.

“Brother Maroczy?” he called.

The figure in the field paused. It looked up from where it was plowing.

“Brother Maroczy! It is you!” the monk nearly wept, leaping the wicker fence and running out. “Praise God! I feared all from our monastery had died on the road! You would—”

The monk stopped some thirty feet from the figure. Sooth, it looked like Maroczy. It had his blue eyes, his caved cheeks, his sharp nose…

But something was different. Something uncanny touched this one’s eyes, less like a human and more like a figure met in a dream.

It stared back at him emptily.

“Oy, what’s this?” shouted Stanomir from a nearby hut.

The monk swallowed his disappointment. “I… I’m sorry. I thought it was someone I knew.”

“You’re a monk?”

“A Servant of God, yes.”

“This one was, too! His name’s Maroczy!”

“Maroczy… but…” he looked back at the figure before him incredulously. “It can’t be. The one I knew had a clubbed foot.”

“I thought this Maroczy did,” Stanomir answered, “but now it’s gone. I too was shocked, but I must have remembered incorrectly. And thank God for that, for the Maroczy I first remember wouldn’t have survived!” He eyed the visitor. “You’re a vagrant?”

“Aye, I’m looking for work.”

“There’s naught for you here. You would best wander on.”

The monk swallowed hard. He looked down at the neat rows he’d disturbed in his foolish departure from the road. “Aye… I suppose I would.” He addressed the figure. “I apologize. You look… you look exactly like one of my former brothers.”

The figure grinned. Not a true smile, but a shaped one, a cadaver with its features being pulled into an approximation. “God be with you on your travels.”

“Aye. I thank you.”

“Crethensdays here are wetter in the autumn.”

“What?”

It smiled harder.

“Pay him no mind,” called Stanomir. “He does that sometimes… says nonsense. There’s no harm to him, though. And he works well!”

The monk nodded. He went back to the road and continued on, having nothing more to say.

The figure watched him go, and grinned after him all the way.

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