My Little Haunting chapter 8 by Emerson Van Wie

Chapter 8: .

Seth was writing in the living room at sunset. Behind him a long shadow began to appear. It stretched across the living room wall, tall and narrow, with one arm raised above its head.

He stood up and moved to the kitchen doorway, watching it move.

There was nothing between the wall and the window that could have cast it.

He switched on the lamp, the shadow remained.

He switched off the lamp, it disappeared.

He switched the lamp on again, it was back.

He approached the wall, the shadow's arm lowered. He stopped, so did the shadow.

He took another step, the shadow leaned toward him.

He backed away so quickly he struck the table. A glass toppled and shattered. He stared at the broken pieces, then at the wall. The shadow had vanished.

He spent the next hour examining the room. He moved the furniture, checked the windows, and searched for a gap in the curtains. Nothing explained what he had seen.

At midnight, he sat at the table with his notebook open.

The shadow was human in shape, and it moved independently of the light source.

He underlined the sentence.

“It was watching me.”

He hesitated, then crossed out the last four words.

He had not seen a face. He had not seen eyes. He had seen a shape on a wall.

He wrote:

“I am becoming unreliable.”

The sentence seemed to frighten him more than the shadow had.

He closed the notebook. Something moved in the hallway, he looked up, curious.

The shadow had appeared on the wall behind him once more. This time, it had no raised arm. It stood perfectly still, its head slightly tilted, as though listening.

He did not turn around this time. The shadow lifted one hand, then a second hand appeared beside it. Then a third shape, small and indistinct, reached from somewhere below.

He shut his eyes. When he opened them, the wall was empty. He went upstairs and locked the bedroom door.

In the morning, he found a photograph on the kitchen table. It showed his wife standing beside a window, the late afternoon sun casting her shadow across the floor.

On the back, she had written:

“You always look at the wrong thing.”

He sat down. He read the sentence until he could no longer see the words clearly.

Then he turned the photograph over and studied the window behind her.

The glass reflected a second figure. He enlarged the image on his phone, the reflection was too blurred to identify.

It might have been him. It might have been another person.

He put the photograph away.

That evening, when the sun went down, he sat with his back to the wall as he wrote.

“It’s no longer safe here. I must confront her.” 

He did not turn on the lights for the rest of the night.

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check out more creativity by Emerson at @evwphotos