Catch Your Shadow

Nadim didn't really expect anything to happen when he built the shadow-trap. He did it mostly because he thought he could put it up on YouTube and get a few hits out of the whole project, maybe interest the people who were curious about magic and the people who loved fantasy novels and the people who just loved seeing other people do crazy shit on the Internet. And maybe, just maybe, he could use it as a way to find out who wrote the book he found with all the weird instructions in it. But he never expected it to work. Not really.

He said as much in his first video. "Hi," he said, waving awkwardly at the camera and crinkling his chubby brown cheeks in a nervous smile. "My name's Nadim Al-Hashim, and a couple of weeks ago I found this old book in a used bookstore in Cleveland." He held up the book, a small volume bound in worn brown leather that looked more like a journal than a printed novel. He almost thought it was a journal, at first, but the cramped, angular handwriting seemed too perfect to be written by a real person. Every brushstroke looked identical, every letter resembling every other instance of that letter so precisely that it had to be a font. Or just the world's most anal-retentive bugshit crazy person.

"The book, I don't know who wrote it-there's no publisher or author or anything, which is kind of weird-but it's got these instructions on a ritual that you can use to trap someone's shadow." It actually had a lot more than just instructions; there were whole chapters on the theory behind each aspect of the trap, pages and pages of narrow writing detailing the behavior of shadows as a species and their symbiotic relationship to the humans they spent their whole lives clinging to. It got seriously esoteric and more than a little bit fucked up, but Nadim didn't think his audience would be interested in the whole boring text.

Nadim flipped the book around in his hands, opening it to one of the pages he'd marked with a little tab. "And I know, you're probably like, 'Why would I want to do that?', but this guy, he um, he says that everything we think makes us, like, a real person, it's not really us at all. It's all just our shadow, moving us around like a puppet. He says that we're all just obedient husks, like, um... god, I don't want to use the word 'sheeple', but that's pretty much what he's saying, and that if you take away someone's shadow, they won't know what to do with themselves. They'll just do whatever you tell them to. Which is... I mean, of course it's wrong, but..." He shrugged. "Who hasn't thought about it, right?"

He set the book down, then picked up the ebony board from the floor where it sat below the camera's field of view. "So I'm going to try building a shadow-trap, just to see if it'll really work. I mean, it won't, but hey, if it does you'll get to see real magic caught live on video, and that's kind of cool, right? So anyway, the guy who wrote this-I mean, I don't know he was a guy, but the way he talks about women kind of makes me feel pretty sure he was-he says there are three aspects to a shadow-trap. You need a lure to get the shadow where you want it to be, you need a weapon to sever the shadow from its host, and you need a prison to keep the shadow in once you've cut it loose. This first video is going to be about the lure."

He took out a sharp knife with occult sigils carved into the handle and began to cut strips out of the length of thick, tough black wood in his hands. "I say 'lure', but the guy who wrote this actually says that it's really hard to entice a shadow. I mean, he goes on for a long time about it, how shadows really love their host body more than anything and they'd much rather stay inside and make us go get the stuff they want. So you can't just, you know, put a pile of chicken wings or a stack of money or a naked lady inside your shadow-trap, because the shadow's just going to pilot the person over to it and then they won't be separated. You've really got to frighten them into leaving."

Nadim looked down as he spoke, carving the ebony down slowly and patiently until the squared edges became gentle curves. It was hard work-the wood didn't yield to the knife easily, and Nadim had to be careful to keep his hands away from the direction he was cutting in. But he'd practiced on oak, and he knew he could make it work. "So, um, yeah, he said, setting down the wood for a moment and flexing his fingers to keep them from cramping. "Turns out that you make a shadow run away from someone just like we always thought when we were kids. You shine a light on it, and it tries to go the other way."

He demonstrated with a flashlight, chuckling as he shone the beam on his hand and watched the shadow lengthen on the arm of the sofa. "That's my shadow. I'm making it run away from me."

Nadim picked up the board again and continued whittling. "But this guy, he says that you can't just use a flashlight. It, like, doesn't get the whole shadow or something? Look, I didn't make any of this up. Someone did, but it wasn't me. The point is, you need a special kind of exotic wood that cost me way too much fucking money, and then you need to carve it into a rod exactly half an inch thick and exactly four feet long so that it burns at the right speed. Oh, and you need to use a special knife, too, and look, whoever this guy was, his experiments had to be just the most crazy thing ever, right? 'Oh, no, wait, that rod was three feet nine inches long and I didn't get the shadow. Well, back to the drawing board!'"

He chuckled. "But I guess he finally got it right, so I don't have to do all that crap." Nadim tried not to think about the last few pages of the book. He didn't really need to worry about all that anyway. It wasn't really going to work.

He continued carving, pausing occasionally to rest his hands or sharpen the knife with a whetstone. "Probably going to speed this part up in editing," he muttered, glancing up to notice that the afternoon sunlight had turned into a wan, dusky glimmer through his window. At last, though, Nadim had a smooth, thin rod exactly half an inch in diameter and exactly four feet long. He got up, wincing at the stiffness in his legs, and dragged over the plastic tub he'd picked up from the store last night.

"Last step," Nadim said, rubbing some of the exhaustion out of his dark brown eyes as he looked back at the camera. "I guess it's important for it to burn with the right kind of light, too, so I have to soak the ebony rod. I know, that sounds like the name they had for sex back in the 14th century or something, but it's really just putting the rod into a tub of brandy and herbs for three days and letting the alcohol seep into the wood." There was a lot more to it than that, an entire chapter on the qualities of different kinds of light and their effect on different shadows, but Nadim didn't really want to go into it all with the audience. He'd already done the calculations for his intended subject, and frankly he wasn't sure he wanted anyone else to know the details. Just in case it... but of course it wouldn't.

He dropped the rod into the tub. "See? Ebony sinks! That's your Fun Science Fact for today, kids." He smiled again, running his fingers in exhaustion through his dark curly hair, then brushing them through again to clear out the tiny wood chips he'd just deposited. "So that's all for now. Next time, I'm going to make something that can cut through a shadow."

He went around the plastic tub and switched off the camera. Then he took it over to his computer to edit the footage. It took him a few hours to get it ready to upload, but he didn't put it online just yet. Just in case Vanessa was watching. He didn't really think it was going to work, and he felt almost certain that Vanessa would find the whole thing entertaining enough to help out if he asked her to. But then he thought about the last chapter of the book. And Nadim decided to wait just a little while longer to show anyone what he was doing.

*****

"Welcome back, magic fans!" Nadim said, waving into the camera a little more enthusiastically than the last time. He wasn't sure if his confidence was exactly justified, but he felt like he was making headway in his new crazy obsession, and he couldn't help getting just a little bit excited at the chance to talk about it with someone. Even if 'someone' was an entirely hypothetical audience at the moment. "I've been super busy since the last video, making a whole bunch more ebony rods like the one you saw me whittle last time... is it still 'whittling' if it's a mystic ritual to carve exotic hardwoods with a dagger inscribed with ancient sigils of power? I feel like I should find a cooler word for it. But anyway."

He held up a half-dozen thin lengths of ebony, each one identical in size and shape. "My ebony budget has gone up, like, a million percent since all this started. I mean, technically it's gone up infinity percent, because I never bought any ebony before this, but you're probably looking at a thousand dollars worth of ebony here. I probably should have used mahogany or purple heart instead, but he said that it gave the shadow a chance of escaping." The author said a lot more than that, but Nadim didn't want to think about all the cautionary footnotes sprinkled throughout the book. Not when it wasn't really going to work anyway. It was just a, a game, or a hobby or something, one of those weird things you tried and put up on the Internet as a creative outlet. He didn't need to get stressed out about it.

"The point is, I made all these because the next step is severing the shadow from its host once it's out in the open, and the only thing that can cut a shadow is another shadow." Nadim shrugged. "I thought it was going to be, like, a laser or something, but I dunno, maybe the book was written before lasers existed?" He really had no idea how old the book was. The cover was worn, but the pages within felt like they were soaked in some kind of preservative that kept them from drying out or crumbling or turning yellow. It could have been written last year or five hundred years ago for all he knew. The spelling was a little archaic, but that could just mean the author was a little eccentric.

More. A little more eccentric.

"So I have these rods, and I'm going to put one of them here." Nadim brought the lengths of ebony over to the corner of the room, where he had set a floor sconce in a carefully calculated location. It was intended for candles, but Nadim was able to wiggle the butt end of the wooden staff into position without too much embarrassing effort. "The blade is going to go just about exactly seven feet away-I gotta tell you, this part involved so much measuring to get the angles right, it was so boring I didn't even film it on fast-forward. But yeah. The knife's going to go-" He took three big steps across the hardwood floor. "Here."

Then he went back over to the floor sconce, scooting a stand with a reflector disc into position just behind it. "I sourced this from a website that sells photography supplies," he said, adjusting its height to center it just at the tip of the ebony rod. "It's going to help focus the firelight to give me a really nice, sharp shadow-you know how sometimes shadows have fuzzy edges if the light is dim or diffuse? Yeah, apparently that makes for a nasty, ragged cut that makes the shadow thrash around a lot, and it's difficult to trap. Again, I really have no idea how this guy managed to research all this. Like, was PETA sending him letters or something?"

He paused. "I guess it'd be PETS, wouldn't it?" Nadim chuckled at his own joke. He tried not to think of the illustrations in the book, or the chapters about dissecting shadows to find out how they worked. It made for a pretty effective horror novel, he had to admit. But obviously the author had survived, so as long as Nadim did everything exactly the way he was supposed to, there wouldn't be any problems even if it did work. Which of course it wouldn't. He and Vanessa were going to have a nice big chuckle after he showed all this to her.

"So yeah, I've got the knife hanging from the wall here-" Nadim gestured, pointing to a large heavy blade hanging from a hinge drilled into the plaster near his window frame. It had more sigils drawn onto it, and a small gate holding it in place. "The gate's remote-controlled. So are these little thingies." He reached down onto his kitchen table, holding up a small metal ring with a device expertly welded on the outside. "They'll make a spark that lights the ebony on fire. I've got it all set up so that I just need to press a button and everything happens at once. Like that Mouse Trap game, but for shadows."

It was a lot of extra work that wasn't in the ritual book, but Nadim knew there was no way in hell he was going to do things the way the nameless author had described. Even if Vanessa wasn't a good friend, Nadim knew there was no way he was going to drug someone and tie them up and dangle them from the ceiling like some sort of serial-killer pinata long enough to get everything into position and do the chopping himself. That felt less like 'fun crazy obsession' and more like 'it didn't work so now I'm going to kill you and find a new victim obsession', and Nadim wasn't that kind of obsessed. Even if he had been thinking a lot about Vanessa lately each night when he went to bed, and just what a shadowless version of her might be like.

Not that Nadim wanted a shadowless, compliant husk of his friend who would do anything she was told, no matter how weird or kinky it was. He wouldn't really do that. He just... wanted to make a video, that was all. Everything else he thought about, the fantasies he had while he stroked his cock and pictured a blank-eyed Vanessa murmuring, 'Yes, Master,' as she went down on him-that was all just spank bank stuff. Just something to get him off. None of this was real. He didn't have to feel guilty about it. He didn't have to ask himself any awkward questions. It was just a bit of fun.

Nadim realized he'd been standing perfectly still for almost a full minute. He'd have to edit that out. "Um, so yeah, the rest of the rods are going to be placed in a few different spots around the room to make sure the shadow only has one place to go. I'll, um, I'll be showing how to make that in the next video, but for now you can just take my word that it's all going according to plan. Next time, I'm really going to be catching someone's shadow!

"Probably," he added. "Not," he added after an additional pause. "I probably won't be doing anything but making a cool light show that totally doesn't violate my lease or anything so don't even bother mentioning this to my landlord because it's all cool." Nadim smiled a big, fake, cocky grin and gave the camera a sarcastic thumbs up. "See you then!"

He stopped the camera and checked the footage, worried he might have to shoot it again, but it was fine. The video only caught him from the waist up. He loaded it into his computer, then headed off to his room to jack off before he edited it for release.

*****

Nadim turned the glass vessel over carefully in his hands, examining the copper surface for any blemishes or imperfections that might give light a path in or out of the vessel. "I think it's good," he said, looking up at the camera with a nervous tremor to his voice that he couldn't quite shake. "It's a nice even coating, just like the book says, and I've got the mirrored cork ready to go in just as soon as I see the shadow go into the bottle. Oh. About that."

He set the vessel down carefully, resting it on a cushion to make sure it didn't scrape against anything and risk even a fleck of the silver nitrate that lay under the copper coating chipping away to expose the interior of the bottle. "Look. I know what this all sounds like. It sounds like some weird student film, one of those creepy found footage horror movies where someone shoots a really amateurish video of themselves investigating supernatural bullshit and then goes over it and puts in really good CGI of spooky shit happening. If anything weird happens, you probably won't believe it's real. I get that."

He sighed. "But I'm being totally honest, here. I'm not an actor, I'm not a filmmaker, I'm not a special effects artist. I'm a dorky guy who moved from Kirkuk to Cleveland Heights when I was ten, and my only contact with supernatural bullshit is when I can't get my code to compile and I start talking to a rubber duck and suddenly it helps me understand computers. I think this book is just some weird avant garde horror novel, or maybe some crazy dude's dream journal, and I don't think shadows are anything but a shape formed by the absence of light. I really don't think anything is going to happen, anything at all."

Nadim picked up the bottle again, placing it carefully into the cradle on the far wall. There were mirrors on the floor, mirrors glued to the ceiling, sconces everywhere with ebony rods stuck into them and his homemade lighting rigs placed on top. He'd timed everything with a computer, right down to the millisecond. He'd put weeks into this-just silvering the bottle took almost six full days. His hands shook as he put the corking mechanism into position. He looked back at the camera one last time. "But if it does... I promise you. It's real."

Then he stepped back behind the line of torches and called Vanessa.

Twenty entirely editable minutes later, Nadim heard a knock on the door. "Come in!" he called out, trying to keep his tone light and casual despite the way his throat kept threatening to close up entirely. "Door's open!" His eyes were riveted to the red X on the floor. He could hear his heart beating, literally hear the physical sound of blood pumping through his body under the screaming tension of absolute bugfuck terror.

Nadim tried to tell himself that it was all exactly what he said it was, a crazy fantasy cooked up by a stranger. Shadows weren't living beings. They didn't hide inside humans, controlling their every thought and action. They couldn't fight to protect themselves, seeking out any renegades who had the knowledge of the forbidden ritual and used it to manipulate their hosts into trapping their fellow shades, then killing them and the humans they controlled in their sleep before they used their skills to imprison the inky, flowing darkness inside a vessel of pure light and reflection.

They wouldn't seek out a new host when they were severed, murdering the shadow that inhabited their captor's body and hollowing out the human being to use as a suit made out of flesh. They wouldn't skulk inside the bottle for decades, centuries, waiting for a moment of carelessness and the tiniest path to freedom. Vanessa wasn't about to become a mindless, obedient slave to his every whim, her will and volition shorn away from her as neatly as shearing a sheep. He didn't want to own another human being like a pet. He didn't dream at night about her wet, willing lips encircling his cock and sucking him to orgasm.

It wasn't true, none of it was true. There was no risk, no guilt, no dread or terror or shame because it was just a book. It was just a funny book and a funny video and he was going to laugh like hell about it in a few seconds when Vanessa walked through the door and watched a weird pyrotechnic show suddenly go off in front of her and then they'd get on with being just friends like she always wanted and this would just be a silly thing he uploaded to the Internet and-

Vanessa came inside. "Hey!" she said, stepping onto the X without even noticing it. "What's going on-" That was as far as she got before Nadim pressed the button. Things went awfully quickly after that.

The torch behind her lit up with a deep orange flame, casting Vanessa's shadow into sharp relief on the floor in front of her. She looked up at him, furious betrayal in her eyes, but the ebony rod behind the knife was already bursting into incandescence, just as the blade swung down and forward and sliced through the air in meaningless motion. It cast a long, sharp shadow. The shadow fell right at the ankles of Vanessa's shade. And with a sound like the echo of a scream, the darkness emanating from Vanessa was severed.