The Stygian's Eye (Shadow Stalkers 1)
Page 6
CHAPTER SIX
DARIAN LOOKED AROUND the room and tried to adjust his eyes. It was so dark that the only thing he could make out was a small sliver of light coming from the window off to his right. He wanted to go to that light, but his body wouldn't move. He stood there staring at nothingness for what seemed like an eternity when the sliver of light started to expand.
The light slowly got bigger and bigger and started to reflect back into the room. Shapes started to form out of the corner of his eyes, remarkably familiar yet so alien to him that he couldn't get the courage to turn his head and see what they really were. Instead, he remained transfixed on that ever-growing portion of light coming from the window.
No, wait! It wasn't a window, but rather a door of some kind.
Darian slowly moved his eyes from the light coming in at the door towards the shapes that were starting to appear in his peripheral vision. As he did, he noticed that the light from the door started to shine into the room even more which made the once alien shapes start to take form.
They seemed to be shelves of some kind. Like the kind you would see in a grocery store, only shorter. There was the sudden smell of something cooking, like he was in some kind of restaurant. The light from the door lit up the room he was in, and he realized that he was standing in the gas station again.
In fact, he was standing in the very same spot he had been in when the man with the weird eyes walked in to rob the place. He glanced around to see if anyone was there. Hoping to see Lacey standing off to the side clicking away with her thumbs on her cell phone.
But no one else was there. He was completely alone.
Darian couldn't understand why he was standing in this place, but he knew there had to be a reason. He was a very logical thinker, but also open-minded enough to understand that there are simply things in this world that humans aren't capable of understanding just yet.
Searching around his environment for any kind of clue that could tell him what was happening to him and why, he suddenly heard the sound of a creaking door coming from behind him. It wasn't the typical "haunted house" type of sound that you hear in those B-rated horror movies all the time. The kind that announces to everyone in the theater that something scary is about to happen and they should take this opportunity to cover their eyes or grab the arm of the person next to them. No, this was something totally different.
This was more like the type of creaking you get when you are walking down wooden stairs late at night. Trying to stay as quiet as possible so that you don't wake anyone up and you hit that one step. That's the type of unexpected creaking that came from behind him.
Darian turned slowly towards the sound of the door, but there was nothing there. Nothing but a solid mass of shadow coming from the display case standing next to the door that went into the back office.
Darian had an uneasy feeling about the whole situation. Something wasn't quite right about that shadow, but he couldn't put his finger on it. He stared into the darkness in the hopes of seeing something, but there was simply nothing there. Not only could he not see anything in the shadow, but he couldn't even see the door or the wall behind the shadow. It was as if the shadow itself was so opaque that no light could be seen from the other side of it, no matter how bright it might be.
"Okay, I must really be freaking out now." Darian whispered to himself as he tried to look away from the shadow, but never really got his gaze all that far from it. "You could just walk over there and check to see if the door is locked, you know."
Darian took a step forward in the hopes that changing his position would change the viewing angle of the shadow and it was revealed the door that was hiding behind it. Nothing changed.
Darian took another step forward and then another.
"You do realize that, if this was a horror movie, right about now is when some scary monster or psycho killer would jump out of the shadow and scare the hell out of you?"
The thought of talking to himself in this manner made him smile. It wasn't every day that he could have a full-blown conversation with himself about something stupid he was doing and not have anyone else around to look at him strangely.
He took another step and could just start to make out the reflection off the metal door knob through the shadow. "There ya go. You were worried about nothing all along. You just had to get close enough to see the light reflecting off the..."
Just then, the shadow moved towards Darian in a flash.
He jumped back to where he had started and tried to scream out loud, but there was no sound coming from his throat. The shadow surged forward, through the shelves between him and the door and stopped suddenly in front of him.
Darian wanted to run, scream, fall down, and cry-anything. But his body wasn't responding to his mental commands. All he could do was stand there and stare at the cloud of blackness that hung in the air before him.
The shadow started to swirl before his eyes like cigarette smoke hanging in a room with no air flow. The swirling mass started to take on random shapes before his eyes like it was trying to show him pictures of objects, but it was impossible for Darian to make out what they were.
He desperately wanted out of the gas station, but his abject terror kept him in place. The shadow stopped swirling and hung completely still in the air before him as two small bits of light started to glow inside of it.
Darian's fear slowly started to change into curiosity as the small lights got bigger within the shadow. They were emitting a bluish hue as they grew closer and closer to what Darian perceived as the front of the shadow. Without warning, the shadow took on the shape of a human face, the two bluish orbs within coming together to make the eyes, rushing forward to within inches of Darian's hyperventilating face.
Darian knew those eyes.
He had seen them somewhere before.
Finally, his throat unlocked itself through the terror he had been feeling.
He screamed.