Stone's Shadow

by Martin McConnell

  Half claimed that the spirits were demonic, while the rest maintained they were either benevolent, or at the very least, non-invasive. Watchers, one of the articles called them. Watchers observe from a distance, and run when spotted.

  Other pages listed attacks by the monsters during sleep paralysis, or sometimes the creatures diving toward a victim when spotted. No deaths, as far as he could tell, but when something appears from thin air, blaming it for someone’s death would be impossible. Who could say that heart attacks weren't a symptom of something scarier than medical science? As if having your heart stop wasn't terrifying enough, the monsters could kill with impunity as they pleased.

  Self-proclaimed experts suggested that the creatures might be some type of cryptid; that's what they called it. He searched cryptid:

  An unknown animal that hasn't been officially discovered by science.

  So-called scientists called them hallucinations and mind tricks. Apparently, psychologists received the question enough to have a consensus on the matter.

  He pulled out his phone, realizing that he'd been staring at the computer for far too long. He shut off the running programs and hopped up from the wooden torture chair, feeling his legs go numb in the same moment. He hobbled toward the printer on pins and needles while the world around him watched in jest at his dance of sleepy leg syndrome.

  His assignment was buried somewhere in a one-inch thick stack of paper on the printer tray. Students printed things all day long and left them. It was free, so who cared if you changed your mind about reading that 50 page cookbook after printing an illegal copy? People here were no different than the bastards at work who left sticky messes for him to clean up. They carried no regard for the poor sap stuck with the job of picking up their garbage. There were days when he thought he was the only sane soul of his generation, or perhaps the only human left that gave a shit about anything.

  He dug through the pile, and found four pages of philosophical arguments with his name at the top. The lecture hall wasn’t far. His legs would have to put up with the pain just long enough to sit in another uncomfortable chair.

  In the classroom, he walked to the little folding table near the podium and dropped his homework pages on a small pile of others. There were plenty of seats to choose from.

  Dr. Landers droned about epistemology, which could put anybody to sleep.

  This is a rock, but how do you know it's a rock? How do you know it's real? What if you are just imagining it? How do you know that you are real?

  He wondered how people could wreck their brains so much over inconsequential arguments about the nature of the universe. Science had to start somewhere. Maybe the old philosophers were rich old men with nothing better to do. Everyone around him seemed to have something halfway intelligent to say about Nietzsche or Descartes, but when faced with a real problem of reality and perception, they would probably answer very simply, “You're imagining things. It's sleep deprivation. You're off your meds, or maybe you need to get on some more. You're nuts.”

  Dr. Landers wasn't a typical professor, but he looked the part: old, bald on top, overweight from sitting too much and thinking about literally nothing instead of exercising. He wore wire-frame glasses with tiny square lenses. His gray goatee rounded out the picture, blending into the shorter hairs of the rest of his beard.

  He was different from the other professors, however. When he talked, he spoke from an unknown energy source that charged him with ideas and random thoughts. He paced quickly back and forth, stopping behind the podium for brief moments in between. Perhaps lecturing was his only opportunity to move around. His hands swung about as he talked, and he frequently lost himself on a tangent for the whole lecture hour, especially when nobody stopped him. A few students consistently redirected his derailed thought trains and got him back on the tracks. He probably kept a few of them on the payroll for that purpose alone. Scott could almost see Landers in his head, bargaining with a couple of students. “I’ll give you five bucks per class if you keep me from drifting away from the syllabus.”

  This was philosophy. Fun to some students, torture to the rest. Every class period, some war broke out between two or three of them, batting the puck back and forth, strong in their convictions, and never settling anything. Every class period but this one.

  Landers broke into a discussion with himself about the mind-body problem. Trying to separate the id from the ego. He preached that even if we could explain everything there was to explain about the human body, finding the soul would still be an inescapable paradox. What is it about the mind that makes it so mysterious? How does it interact with the brain and body to make us do the things we do? These were the questions of the day, and the class listened in relative silence amid a background of key-clicking from trust-fund babies that were so absorbed in their Internet connections they didn’t bother paying attention. They weren’t footing the bill, so it didn’t matter if they passed or not.

  The previous reading material from Harman talked about brains in vats, and the idea that all of reality was a fabrication: a cruel prank played on our senses by some evil genius.

  Maybe Mr. Evil Genius was injecting visions of creepy shadows into Scott's reality for amusement. Torment the sick kid. Everyone will think it's funny. Give him something new to gripe about. Last week, Landers was talking about Zen meditation and how there were monks in the Far East who could pull themselves free from the material world and see their body from a distance. They could interact with the vat, so to speak.

  Tripe. All of it. Like the playtime class in college. Scott didn't learn anything, but somehow made passing grades as long as he continued to turn in papers. Landers was probably the easiest professor on campus to please. If you jumped through his hoops, you passed. It was hard to imagine anyone failing epistemology, but then, did you really pass? Was the class even real? Those would have been fun questions for Landers to examine as part of the lecture.

  After class, armed with an extra thirty minutes, he decided to ask the professor’s opinion about the dark creatures. As the other students filed into the hallway, they lumped into small clusters of close friends. Scott walked alone. Dr. Landers walked alone, too. Up the stairs toward the Philosophy Department offices, Scott followed, keeping just enough room to not draw attention. Rushing up behind someone and tapping them on the shoulder wasn't in his nature.

  5

  “Dr. Landers. Question.”

  “Sure, come on in.”

  Landers wedged himself through a narrow path between the desk and filing cabinet in the cramped office to reach his chair. Bookshelves took the rest of the wall space. His desk was covered with papers.

  “Please,” he said, and motioned to an orange, plastic visitor chair.

  “How would someone know the difference between a hallucination and reality?”

  Landers frowned and squinted with one eye.

  “Between hallucination and reality,” he muttered.

  “Yeah. Say someone sees a ghost. They go and tell their friend about it, and their friend doesn't believe them. Add a little sleep deprivation, and everyone thinks that the guy’s nuts. That he imagined the whole thing.”

  “The ghost is certainly real to the person who saw it, but not real to anyone else because they didn't see it.”

  Unhelpful logic reared its ugly head, again.

  “I wonder sometimes,” Landers continued. “Sometimes I do little thought experiments about psychology. Psychologists get to decide what's real and what isn't. They're the ones who prescribe the medication. They get to say who's crazy. Tough job. Of course, the ones that make the most money likely dropped their philosophy major because it was too hard.” He chuckled. “And ghosts, that's a topic we could discuss forever. No solid evidence on one side of that spectrum or the other.”

  “I don't want to discuss it forever. I’m just curious. Is there some kind of test you could do? To see if the person is crazy or not? Or if their senses can be trusted when they see a ghost?”


  “Ah. Here's the thing about that. You remember the broken pencil experiment?”

  “Which experiment?”

  “When you shove a pencil into a glass of water, it looks broken, because you see part of it through the air, and the other part through water, which refracts light differently.”

  Scott thought back to the second day of class, and some argument over whether human senses could be trusted at all. Sight could be tricked, as could the other senses, and Dr. Landers gave plenty of examples besides the broken pencil that day.

  “People have been debating what's real and what isn't probably as long as there has been language. If you figure out a way to tell for certain, then come by here and tell me about it. We'll publish a paper together.”

  The dialogue was headed nowhere. Just as Scott stood to leave, the professor posed another question, interrupting his move toward the door.

  “Have you seen a ghost?”

  “I don't know what I saw. I’m not sure if I should even call it a ghost.”

  “What did you see? And when?”

  He spun facing the professor. “It looked like some kind of shadow thing floating over my bed. The lights were off. Might have just been my eyes playing tricks.” Admit insanity before he accuses you of it.

  “Shadow people? I've read about them. Did it run the moment you saw it?”

  “It didn't go anywhere. I thought it was going to attack me.”

  “That's strange. What did you do next?”

  “What do you think I did? I bolted.”

  “There's a lot of talk about ghosts and demons and apparitions. Most people say the best thing to do is try to communicate. Were you in bed when it happened?”

  “No. I was about to go to bed, but I was wide awake.”

  “You might have an honest sighting. If you see it again, let me know. I'm fascinated by that sort of thing.”

  “If I see it again, I might not live to tell about it.”

  He laughed, and rocked back in his chair. It creaked beneath him, straining under the stress of a body over capacity for the thin plastic.

  “People don't die from seeing ghosts. I don't think you have to worry about that. If you want, I know someone you could talk to. She's been investigating ghosts and ghost related stories for years. She's become quite the expert. I can make a call and get back to you.”

  Scott nodded. “Maybe.”

  “Maybe or yes?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “All right. I'll get in touch with her and let you know what she says. Just out of curiosity, what do you think it was?”

  “I don't know what it was. I'm not even really comfortable talking about it. But I figured. I mean, you talk about theories of how we know things or why we don't really know some things that we think we know. I thought you might be able to give me some kind of test, or some criteria to judge the experience that I haven’t thought about.”

  “Doesn't work like that. Philosophy is speculation. Usually by the time you think it's all figured out, someone else comes along and punches holes all through your arguments.”

  Scott nodded as he eyed the bookshelf. His mouth scrunched as if he'd taken a bite from a tart pickle. “I just hope it's gone. Thanks for the talk.”

  He rushed out of the office. Landers muttered something else, but the words drifted past him. Skittish Scott Stone.

  Walking across campus was a ritual. It felt like being trapped on the set of a really bad romantic comedy. All around, students walked in pairs, some of them holding hands, others holding private discussions. Some were friends, some were more, and some were much less. Some hated each other’s guts, yet it was obvious that they were in relationships. Someone like Scott, who would generally appreciate a partner, was passed over for assholes who wanted to drop their load and move on. He popped another pill. Water wasn't required to nurse it down the hatch.

  Math class passed even slower than Philosophy. He hated every minute of it. Numbers frustrated him more than logic. The two subjects were tied together by a thin but important thread. As long as he made it through the rest of the semester with a C or higher, it didn't matter. That would be the last of the math problems, hopefully for the rest of his life. He strolled through the quad again, this time on his way home.

  The sky had darkened, and the view at night would have been magical were he holding hands with a girl. Globe-shaped lamps illuminated the walk from their antique posts. Soft yellow light bathed everything in off-color hues. Red bricks almost glowed while the gaps between them became flat black, as if they were hovering over a void. The round concrete planters shimmered like magical islands in an endless sea of synthetic stones that was the quad.

  Everything was different at night. Normally he liked it, but every shadow he passed that night struck panic into a skipping heart. He watched bystanders as he walked, picking apart the details of their lives from a distance. A hooded man in the distance breathed out a cloud of smoke, and the ember of his cigarette drifted in an ark from his belt to his face and back. Each time it returned to the belt, another smoky puff drifted from his face. Maybe he worked in a nearby building, and this was his break. Maybe he was homicidal and waiting on the right victim to walk by. It was impossible to know the whole story about anyone at a glance.

  The darkness after twilight was most inviting when other humans weren’t around. Empty streets provided a calm setting for thoughts, but any animated person detracted from the serenity. Any one of them could be a serial killer, or worse. Anything that stirred, shadow or otherwise, was transformed into a potential nightmare from the darkest region of a sleep deprived mind.

  Tonight, he tried not to look at anything for too long. Every movement was something for his eyes to avoid. Any flickering of shadow could be the creature stalking him. Scared little Scott Stone.

  By the time he reached the apartment building, his body felt numb, a consequence of staying up too many days in a row. Fatigue riddled every muscle, including his brain, which tried to swell inside its unrelenting bone cage with no room for growth. Going too long without sleep forced a constant hangover. He was always thirsty. There was no such thing as a headache; it was full-blown migraine, or nothing at all. The long walk left his tongue dry, and the rest of his mouth coated in nasty film. He flicked on the light in the apartment, and walked directly toward the sink.

  He cranked the faucet, and grabbed a glass that waited patiently on the counter. He filled it, and his stomach emptied it four times, until a subtle sickness rose in the back of his throat. He pressed the bottom of the glass against the faucet handle to stop the flow, and put it back on the counter inside a perfectly matching white ring that had formed over time.

  He crawled into bed, rolled himself in the warmth of the comforter, and even though his stomach sent out pangs of hunger, he passed out almost immediately. His body had been through enough, and there was no stopping the imminent shutdown.

  He woke to a ringing phone, the soft purr attached to Maria’s number, and the arm of his glasses bruised against his ear. He rolled on his back to relieve the pressure, and the room spun around him. The glasses came free, and he dropped them on the nightstand. His body was numb, his shoulder sore, and he held the blurry white rectangle above him in bed.

  “Hello?”

  “Did you get any sleep?”

  “A little.”

  “Any ghosts?”

  “No. Nothing.”

  “Well that's good. Maybe it left.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Not in much of a talking mood are you? I woke you up?”

  Of course you did. But how can I tell you that without also letting you know it made me happy? He nodded. “Yeah. Sort of.”

  “Okay. Mike and I are going out tonight, so I have to get going, but I wanted to check in on you. Guess you’re skipping out on us again?”

  “I had to wake up for class. Need to sleep for at least a little while.”

  “No problem. Get some rest. I’ll drag you
out another time.”

  She hung up. He was still half asleep. The realm of the unconscious hung in his thoughts: burning buildings and suffering. It was always times like this when his brain would provoke paranoid and hateful thoughts about his station in life. Maria acted like his friend, but was she really? Nobody else paid him attention. Why should she? Why couldn’t people just be friendly to everyone, instead of segregating themselves into closed groups?

  His gut wrenched with a sudden lack of concern for other people. They didn’t care about him. He was a customer, not a friend. He didn't have a rapport with any of them. He was this guy that everyone knew, but he didn't know most of their names. He was always alone, and he hated them for it. Suddenly, he wanted to be forgotten. At least if he willed it, he couldn't blame them for ignoring him.

  He shut the world out. Let them have their laughter and stupid relationships. Every memory of someone bitching about a breakup filled his ears. Screw them all. Let them be alone for a while, and maybe they'll learn to appreciate what they have. Something he would never have. He wished they would all disappear, or die, or maybe just leave the city so he could be as isolated as he felt. A tear escaped, soaking into his pillow. The tiny spot grew cold against the corner of his eye as he drifted into his only escape from the pain of reality: the terror of his dreams.