Chapter 8 - The long whiteness and the empty shadow
Everything was so bright. And cold. The sun was no longer the right color and it wasn’t warm like it should be. The ground beneath Stewart’s feet was wrong. It was too flat and too smooth. And there was nowhere to hide. He hadn’t noticed that right away. The light had been so sharp that he had stumbled through the sneaky hole several feet before he started to wonder what was wrong with the grass. With his eyes half closed to shade them, he could finally see there was no grass, just flat, bright white, on and on and on. He turned and looked back the way he had come. The man wearing the shadow was still thrashing about in the pond. Between the pond and the sneaky hole was grass and rocks and dirt. He looked forward again. Everything beyond him was…different.
In the distance he could hear slapping sounds, voices talking too fast for him to understand, clicks and buzzes and clanging. All of it made him nervous. All of it made him want to hide. The only place that seemed possible was a shady spot beside a tall, thin wall so he scurried towards it.
His claws made tiny clicking, scratching sounds on the ground as he ran. His tail swished back and forth with the undulations of his long, narrow body. Once he made it to the shade he curled up and watched. It wasn’t nearly as dark there as he had hoped. He still felt very exposed with no grass hanging over him and no dirt and rock to blend in to. He looked at his front foot. It stood out against the white ground like a deep red-brown clump of mud. He looked up, searching for birds. There weren’t any and that was good.
After resting a few moments he peeked out and looked further down the long whiteness. He breathed in and out and it irritated him. Breathing in the water was so much easier. The water just flowed into his mouth, over his gills, and back out into the pond. Now he had to pull the cold, dry air into his lungs and push it back out again. The more he moved the harder he had to breathe, and his gills were beginning to stick to his sides. He hated how that felt. He looked back at the sneaky hole. It was still open. He could run back out and hide, then scurry his way back to his pond and be safe.
The man from the high, clear place climbed out of the pond and started back. He was dragging the two nasty sticks behind him and water glistened off the shadow he wore. He was not walking very fast. His steps were heavy and each time he raised his back feet water sloshed out of his legs. As he got closer, Stewart could see his face inside the huge clear eye and it made him shiver. The man was breathing hard, Stewart could hear it, and every breath he took seemed to hurt him. The man’s mouth was a long, straight line and he had deep grooves over his eyes. He stepped through the sneaky hole and the wall slid shut behind him. Stewart felt a deep sense of panic as he watched the grass disappear.
The man took three more steps into the long whiteness, dropped both nasty sticks on the ground and began to peel the shadow off. He pulled the shadow’s head off his own and let it fall to the floor, then he pulled on a loose piece in the front and tore open the shadow from beneath his neck all the way to his back legs. The whole thing made Stewart shake. The man pulled the shadow from his shoulders and let the shadow fall to the floor in a heap. He stepped out and then walked slowly down the long whiteness, his back feet leaving small puddles of water with each step. He turned and suddenly disappeared into the wall.
Stewart looked from the wall where the man had been to the lump of shadow he had left on the floor. Curiosity got the better of him and he crept toward the shadow with slow, tentative steps, swinging his head from side to side to be sure he was safe. All of a sudden a part of the wall further down flew out from the face and the long whiteness was filled with voices. The woman and two men poured out and began searching for something. Stewart scuttled into the folds and hanging down places made by the shadow and hid.
“Mason!” the woman shouted. “Mason where are you?”
Stewart watched from under an overhang of orange as one of the men started down the long whiteness in his direction.
“Look, he left the biohazard suit.”
“Don’t touch it!” the second man yelled and the first one stopped ten feet from Stewart and his hiding place. “Natalie, call the HazMat team to come take care of it. One casualty is more than enough, Rob.”
The first man nodded and then glanced at the floor. “He’s gone in there,” he said and pointed to the place in the wall the man had disappeared into. “Call the medical team, too, Nat. Send them to the men’s room. He’s gonna need them in a hurry.”
The woman nodded and tuned back the way she had come. She pulled the broken piece of the wall back into place, leaving the men alone in the long whiteness.
“What do we do?” the first one asked. “He’s a dead man. What do we do?”
“We go in there and make sure he’s there, we don’t touch him, and we wait for the med team. They know what to do. That’s their job.”
“I’m right, though, aren’t I.”
“Yeah,” the second man said as he carefully stepped around the water on the floor. “He’s a dead man all right. He’s got maybe 36 hours at best.”
“Shit,” the first man hissed and followed the other one into the open space in the wall.
Stewart stayed hidden for a few more moments before he realized just where he was. Slowly he crept out from under the shadow and then crawled onto its skin. He peered at the pile left by the man and he shuddered. There was nothing in there. The insides of the shadow were gone. No bones. No meat. No fat. Nothing. Stewart looked at the place where the sneaky hole had been and wished it would come back. He wished it would let him out. Then he remembered why he was in the long whiteness in the first place. The child. The warm hands and big eyes. If this is what the man had done to the shadow who knew him, what would he do to the child who didn’t? Stewart climbed down off the shadow’s skin and scurried down the long whiteness, hugging the base of the white wall as he ran. This was no place for a child. Not for his child.
~ Peace and spirit
Sorry--just picking this up again after a lapse over the holidays--read all the December ones with this. Now things are really moving. A suggestion--when you have a completed story ready for rewrite, you might consider starting here (at the beginning of Chapter 8) and work previous background material in as you go along. It's a dramatic, obviously dangerous situation, and makes us want to know more about Stewart, "the child," and the obviously doomed Mason even if it's the first we've heard of them.
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