Penumbra

Penumbra

A Story by Alan B.

People crowded the townhouse where the party was held. Some were dancing to the upbeat salsa music, others were talking and laughing and flirting. Everyone was drinking. Quincy drank, too, and he wanted to go over and start a conversation with the attractive dark-eyed woman in a yellow dress on the couch across the room that had been giving him smiling glances for quite a while now. Something was wrong, however. Above (or perhaps below) the music and raucous voices there was something else.


   He had begun to feel it a week before when he left the office uncharacteristically late because of the extra assignments his boss had given him. The below ground parking lot was nearly empty, and Quincy felt watched as he walked to his space. There was a thumping noise that seemed to come from behind a Mercedes he just passed and he whirled around, gasping, expecting some scruffy miscreant with a gun or a knife. But there was nothing but empty air waiting for him and his shielding briefcase, held aloft. He slowly lowered it, realizing how silly he was being.


  The parking area entrance always had a grate over it that was lifted only for employees by an ever-present security guard. Additionally there were security cameras, hidden and otherwise, that watched every corner of the building, along with more guards patrolling all entrances. These measures were no guarantee that a would-be thief couldn't get in, but why go to all the trouble when any convenience store would do for the petty low lives of this city? Quincy chalked up the scare to paranoia on the way back home, though he had no history with being paranoid. The city can give one all sorts of sicknesses, after all, and a lugubrious parking lot is very conducive to the imagination's ability to conjure up bogeys.


   He would've left it at that had the feeling not returned the next day when he was engaged in the most prosaic of daily activities: breakfast. Sitting at his dining room table, he lifted the mug of coffee when the overwhelming certainty came that someone was watching him from the hallway to his left. This was followed by a velocious flick of shadow that was caught by the sun's rays that came in through his bedroom window. Quincy flashed up, sending his chair crashing backward into the wall and his coffee mug breaking on the table. Again, there was nothing but empty space. But it had been there! He saw something in the periphery of his vision; he was sure of it.


   No. This couldn't be. He could not have visions or see things. That was for batty old ladies that had lived alone all their lives. Hesitantly he stepped over some of the coffee and pieces of mug on the floor. The apartment remained silent as he moved into the hallway. Another shadow flitted across his bedroom, then another going the opposite way. Shadows with wings. Birds. Quincy was looking at birds flying to and fro in front of his window as he walked into the room. Idiot. He walked back to the table, chuckling to himself, and kneeled to clean up the mess. The feeling of something softly slithering around as if in viscous mud did not leave him.


   The week continued and Quincy saw no more shadows nor heard strange noises. It was the corners and edges he couldn't see around that began to frighten him.


   Was this how nervous breakdowns started? But his job wasn't particularly stressful to him. In fact, he enjoyed the work. Quincy's aspirations weren't grand compared to the other corporatists, and he was driven by a need for stability, not greed. If this were the beginning of a crack up, he wouldn't give it a chance to get him. Staying away from shadowy places like the parking lot would probably help, he thought. With his apartment being a total of six blocks from the job, a walk was easily feasible.


   To be in the great movement of the morning crowds was what he needed. He would skirr with them and galumph with them, and in being jostled about and smelling colognes and perfumes and leather and cloth and washed hair and sweat, he would soon gestate out the unpleasant feeling. That next morning it seemed his idea was right. Quincy thought of nothing but what his senses told him in the bustle, all richly layered and mundane. It was fine till he approached the street he was to turn on where his building sat. When the green sign denoting “Wharten St.” in white letters became legible, the thing returned.


   Quincy knew if he turned the corner he would see it--something he had no words for. He tried to turn round and fight his way through the crowd, but it rushed him forward like driftwood on an inexorable sea. He screamed and clawed, not wanting to see it, as he passed the edge and looked yet saw nothing when a man in the crowd clubbed him with a heavy, metallic thermos, knocking Quincy unconscious.


   He awoke on a couch in an office. It was not his but Anne's, a timid woman he'd occasionally talk with who worked on the first floor. She was standing over him and nervously adjusting a wet rag on his forehead.


   “Oh! Thank God you're awake,” she said when he opened his eyes. “Will, the security guard, saw what happened and brought you in.”


   Quincy groaned and delicately touched the back of his head. A good-sized lump grew out of it but there was no blood on his fingers when he looked at them.


   “I didn't know if I should call the ambulance even though Will said you'd be okay,” Anne squeaked. “Why did you get in a fight with that man?”


   Quincy looked at her round red face.


“I didn't fight with him. He just hit me.”


   Anne squinched her thin eyebrows confusedly and said, “Will said it was a real scrap. You were shouting and throwing punches, he said.”


   He sat up slowly, spinning and nauseous for a moment.


   “That's not what happened. I--” He remembered the corner and feeling helpless. “I have to get to my office.”


   He stood unsteadily.


   “Do you need help getting there?” asked Anne, reaching for him. He waved her off.


   “I'm fine.”


   He took a firm step toward the door and stopped. The portal was just that, in this case a nondescript dark wood that led out to a carpeted hallway where nothing waited but bland faces, computing noises, and the smell of stale coffee. Quincy grasped the doorknob confidently and crossed the threshold.


   The bump on Quincy's head redounded happily, for the rest of the week passed normally, all ghosts banished to the nether realm of childhood fear. He went back to driving to work and even used the below ground lot, shadows be damned. His mood was so buoyant in fact, that he accepted an invitation to a weekend party from an old university friend.


  ----


  Quincy tried to ignore the feeling rising from his bowels and focus on the lovely woman in a yellow dress. Two other women had been seated beside here but were gone now. She was looking only at him with more than flirtation. She wanted him and he would take her back to his apartment. Yes, she'd be his. He got up but sat down again heavily when her left eye flashed brilliantly as if it were a diamond encrusted in her socket, and beautiful teeth in her smiling mouth seemed to rotate and grew in different directions.


   He sat trembling and the woman looked about the room, and sighed. She stood and began walking out, giving him a last sidelong, malicious oeillade. Against his will, he followed, seeing her walk past the other partygoers and out the front door. He followed to the precipice and looked out to see where she went. There was no sign of the woman but the thing was there, having conglomerated its titanic self from the place humanity collectively destroyed the memory of in its desire to make the world graspable. Quincy was being sucked along in its wake that was like billions of currents in a universe he could not comprehend the vastness of. The music of the party stopped and the busy, bright street went black.


   He no longer had any sense of where he was, only of a gargantuan pulsation just outside. A nitid hueing of yellow appeared and Quincy put his hands against the doorframe refusing to look. He shut his eyes against a pressure that threatened to pull them out and did not look.

© 2021 Alan B.


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Added on February 23, 2021
Last Updated on March 24, 2021
Tags: horror, existential

Author

Alan B.
Alan B.

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