A Dark Shadow

It was the summer of 1837. Rachel was walking home from her meander through the woods. It was nearing dusk, and her father’s plantation was a few miles away. She twirled her pale yellow parasol in her hands over her left shoulder. Her bonnet was making her head hot, so she untied it from under her chin. When she removed it, her amber hair cascaded down to just below her shoulder. Her dress was the same pale yellow as her parasol. The bottom of it and the bottom of her lace petticoats, were a light brown from the dust that rose off the dirt road. She wore no make-up over her almond shaped pools of azure, nor did she wear any over her lips.
Then the sunset had finished and it was dark. She heard the mourning cry of a wolf somewhere to the southwest. She arrived on the plantation about a half hour after nightfall. Her father got one of the house slaves to make her some dinner, and then sent his daughter to her room to change. There she stripped out of her dress and donned her silk nightgown. Suddenly she realized that she left her bonnet on the road. It was her favorite; her mother had made it for her before she had died. It was the girl’s only memento of her mother. She cried softly; the tears fell down her soft cheeks and past her slender body to the wooden floor where they landed with a splatter. She walked over to
her window after she had gone through most of her tears. When she looked down toward the slaves’ shacks, she saw a boy, a white boy, no older than herself, talking to one of the black women. The woman pointed up toward Rachel’s room and the boy followed her hand with his eyes. The girl quickly hid behind her curtain at this gesture but the boy had already seen her and made his decision.
Her father called her down for dinner. When they were starting on their dessert, pudding pie, they heard someone knocking on the large brass knocker. The girl’s father told one of the house slaves to go get the door. When she did, the boy Rachel had seen outside came into the house. Up close she could tell he was probably 20 or right around there. He turned to her father and asked for permission to marry the girl. The father replied by asking if the boy came from a wealthy family. No. He then asked him if he had anything to give him. No. The father was not pleased at all to hear this, and, though reluctantly, let his daughter decide whether to marry the boy or not. She began to say yes because she thought he was a handsome man, strong with black hair and eyes and cleanly shaved, but as she looked into his dark eyes the girl could have sworn she saw them flash red, and the longer she looked at him the more she could sense a dark presence about him. This frightened her and she quickly answered, “No”. In her head she tried to forget his demonic appearance and told herself, with all the firmness of the pudding pie on the plate in front of her, she had done the right thing. “ I mean, after all, I am only 17. Yes, that’s it, and I do fancy that Avery Wells.” She said this in her head so often she actually began to believe it.
The next day she had one of the house slaves bathe her and then went to her
quarters and donned a baby blue dress and a matching parasol. Today she ventured back to the trail in the woods to where she had taken off her bonnet. The girl had been walking for just under an hour when she let a small gasp and an, “Oh, no,” escape her lips. She had found her bonnet, but inside were three dead rabbit bodies, with their heads cut off and lying all across the road. The blood had been poured all over her bonnet. When she saw this she rapidly spun around and was caught in the arms of the boy she had seen the night before.
“Hello, Love”. She gasped again. He put his hand around her waist and told her his name was Darik Showad. She struggled to get loose, but his grip was too strong. “What are you trying to do then, Love? All right, I’m not one to hold a woman captive.” He then let her go and she ran home as fast as her dress allowed. As she ran, she could have sworn she heard him say, “ Not for too long at least.”
Once home she went to her sitting room and screamed. Sitting there, talking to her father was Darik. Her father turned around and said, “ Well, hello dear. What’s all the screaming for? Never mind, never mind. Why don’t you sit and have a chat with old Darik here and see if once you get to know him you don’t change your mind?”
The young lady didn’t pay him any attention and just ran straight out of the house and got some slaves to hitch her horses to the carriage and then she drove them fast as a wildfire into town. In town she went right into the sheriff’s office and saw Darik behind bars, holding the sheriff’s bodiless head, smiling satanically at her. She dashed back out, ready to drive the wagon to her aunt’s house to seek protection from this demon there, but, as soon as she got to the carriage, she shrieked and started running. She had seen her father’s head on a stake sticking out of the ground in front of the cart.
When she arrived at her mother’s sister’s house, she knocked rapidly upon the door. It was quickly flung open by a startled looking house slave who led Rachel, whose heart was just starting to end it’s marathon, upstairs to her aunt’s bedroom. She walked in because the door was open, but as soon as she did it slammed shut behind her and the girl was pulled into a headlock.
“Why did you have to say, ‘no’? WHY? See what you have done? Three lives! Gone! Just to get you here! If you would have just said yes all of this could have been avoided! Why did you decline? What, do have another man, you goddamned whore? I’m now, out of the goodness of my heart, going to give you one more chance. Say yes and I shall wed you but we shall never talk of our pasts again. Say no, and you won’t live to see what will happen.” Rachel was not stupid, she knew that if she gained his trust over the years she could slaughter him in his sleep. She accepted his cruel offer, but thought of it more as a demand.

10 years later she still lived with the evil man, in a dark house on a gray hill. All he seemed to want was a child. He had gotten Rachel pregnant many times, but each and every time she killed the child in her womb. Once she tried to get robbed and when the thief punched her in the, belly it killed the fetus.
She had been building up her time until the opportune moment to kill her husband. She hated him more than ever and though she was only 27 she looked as
though she were twice that because of the continued pregnancies and many stillborn children.
“Honey,” Darik called, “I’m going to sleep now. Good night.”
“All right, dear, good night.” That night was the night to do it. She took a long knife from the kitchen and carried it upstairs, quiet as a shadow, to the room they shared. She crawled into the bed, as if going to sleep, and lay there for a few seconds before jabbing it into her husband’s back ferociously. In her fury she slashed his backbone, his neck, and his wrist from under the pillow. After this he turned around, gleaming red wine in the light of the moon, and asked, “ Good, good. Now that you’ve killed me what do you expect to do?” She screamed as if she were dying slowly and dove backward onto the floor. During her reverse flight she had dropped the knife, so on her knees, hair covering her face, she groped around for the weapon but to no avail. As Darik got up she saw him start to change, slowly.
His black hair turned the same shade as the blood-ink that stained his skin. His eyes became flames that flicked on their own accord, his skin became the dark gray of a wolf, and his fingers became claws, razor sharp and thin and as long as sabers. Out of his back protruded 13 spikes four feet long and readily available to pull out and attach a head to, and his nose and mouth melded into one long snout, like that of a bat, with teeth that looked like the ribs of a small animal that curved under his chin. When he spoke, his voice was raspy as if his vocal chords had been scratched ceaselessly and some had been ripped clean in half. As he advanced toward her, she cowered in fright, as a dog would while his master reached out to hit him. Her amber hair suddenly looked wet, as if the life of her was slowly being sucked out, starting from the top. He seemed to glide, not walk, as he went around the bed. When he was only some feet away, he told her in his satanic voice, “No mortal weapon can harm me because I have already died. It was long ago that this happened, before you, or even this country was born. I am British, and I was guillotined during the Hundred-year War. I was accused of treachery when I asked the French to become a spy for them. Obviously nothing good came of that decision. When I died, in those last five seconds that my head stayed alive, I left my body. Although I did not know it at the time, that act made me swear my spirit to the king of the underworld. Now the only way to live on is, every hundred or so years, I must have a child to pass my spirit into his physical body. But you, you infertile little bitch, have ruined it for me. So now I must kill you and move on to someone else.”
“You beast”, she growled, “YOU GODDAMNED BEAST! Is there truly no way to kill you?”
“None that I know of, dear. Sorry about this though, you could have made many men very happy, in the bed a least.” He moved toward her. He stuck out his long gnarled left arm claws up, and pierced them through her chest and out of her back. She coughed up crimson blood that rolled past her lips and down her chin. Then Darik stuck out his right index claw and slashed it through the once happy girl’s neck. Blood erupted like a fountain from her severed neck; her body had a fleeting spasm then collapsed.
In the five seconds that her head stayed alive she had a vision of the demon’s only way of dying. It was for him to kill more than three people in one night. For the next four seconds she saw her life, starting with what she had seen right before she died. Her - 6 -
memories were flying in reverse, flooding her vision with images unseen to other people, sounds unheard to all but herself. She had time enough for the last 10 years of her life before the last four seconds ended. The last memory she saw was of that day, in the summer of 1837, when she had gone for a stroll in the woods, the last day she was happy. After he was sure that she had died, he ate her body; he ate bones and clothes holding no discrimination. After he finished his meal, he started to feel uneasy. In his stomach he felt things moving around. Things kicking to be let out, prisoners in his body, but then everything stopped. He went back into his human form but his skin stayed the same color. Then he climbed into his blood soaked bed. All of a sudden in a rush of light, brighter than the brightest star, with the sound of 100,000 hooves galloping, he was lifted into the air and was suspended there while, against his will, he was transformed into his demonic state. He tried to resist but resistance only made the pain worse. Then his head fell down and hit the pillow soundlessly for the noise of the stampede was much too loud. Then the light shone far brighter than before, and the sound got even louder and then all was quiet and dark. Darik was gone. He was finally put to rest, but in hell. He had thought he couldn’t die. He didn’t know that he could only kill three people a night but even if he had, he would be puzzled by his death. What four people had he killed that night? The answer, though simple was nonetheless unexpected. Rachel had that night not even known herself that she was pregnant, yes, but with triplets.