Most men can't make it through even five words of what I'm about to tell you (2 page)

Illustration b
y Nedroid

I stepped out of the bathroom wearing only a freezing layer of sweat. I surveyed my bedroom and saw nothing unusual.

I hurriedly dressed, pulling on khakis. Still naked from the waist up, I crept through the house, looking for signs of the

shadow thing. The only sound was a percussive hammering inside my ears. My own heartbeat.

I noticed two green beer bottles had been knocked off the coffee table, but I think they were already like that. The dog was

asleep in the kitchen.

See? There's nothing there.
Now.

I stood in the middle of my living room, breathing like I had run a marathon. Actually, that would equal no breathing at al

because if I ever tried to run a marathon I'd drop dead of a heart attack after the first quarter mile.

I final y retreated to my room, grabbing a black T-shirt with a store logo on the back. I had de-wrinkled it by leaving it on a

hanger for 24 hours.

On the way back through the living room I stopped and propped the front door open. I figured the dark thing might float out

on its own, like a fly. What else could I do? I was already late for work.

And as if all this wasn't bad enough, I couldn't find my name tag. Shit. And here I had just gotten onto a guy for not

wearing his not two days ago. It wasn't in my truck.

I let the dog out and slammed the door behind me, trembling al over, sweat drying in itchy patches all over my body.

Figures made of shadow flicked across my mind. I tried to push down my fear with anger, the only thing inside me strong

enough for the job.

Something came into my house
, I told myself.
An intruder came and scared the shit out of me, and it had no damned

right.

I never found my name tag. Maybe the Shadow Man stole it and was working the counter at the video store right now.

I threw myself inside my Bronco and pul ed away, watching my little bungalow shrink in my rear view mirror. Freaking

shadow people. In my house. And one thought pulsing through my brain, over and over:

It's starting again.

It's my own fault, everything that happened later. My first mistake was I didn't tell anybody about what I saw that morning,

not at first. And by "anybody" I mean my one friend, John, and my girlfriend Amy.

Amy would just get worried, I figured, and she had enough on her mind with college and al . John, he would go online and

tell all his internet friends about it. David saw a ghost again!
WoooooooOOO!

I hate that shit. I hate talking about it, any of it. The type of people who want to listen aren't worth telling the story to. Not you, of course, but the nutjobs, the ones who are just
so
ready to believe. How do they know I'm not crazy? It pisses me off.

The only ones worse are the people who
do
think I'm crazy. Arrogant bastards, they piss me off even more. Get me

talking about this and I wind up pissing in every direction. Set me in the yard and use me as a lawn sprinkler.

So I took what I saw that morning and stuffed it into the glove compartment of my mind, along with al of the unpaid

parking tickets and most of my memories of high school. Still, it made for long nights in that empty little house, laying in

bed and staring into the shadows. Like a little kid, studying the closet for monsters. You shouldn't still be doing that shit at age 25. You shouldn't still be working at a video store at that age, either, I guess, or signing petitions with the name Thong

Bonerstorm.

Anyway, my point is that by the time the Shadow People entered my life again a few weeks later, I had almost forgotten

about the incident. Almost.

What happened was I was visiting Amy, who - as I think I mentioned - was away at college. The school is a little more

than two hours from here.

(You'll notice, by the way, that I'm intentionally leaving out any city names along with any other clues that would help you

pinpoint where all this happened. The last time we went public with this stuff, kids started showing up here, driving past

the house and snapping pictures with little digital cameras to post on their blogs and leaving empty beer cans on my lawn.

Needless to say, the names aren't real, either.)

Where was I? Oh yeah, I was visiting Amy and we had to go to their on-campus clinic late at night because she threw out

her back after she "accidentally" had a "fal " from the "top bunk of her bed" while we were "porking." It's an amusing story that she has asked me not to tel . Anyway, I was in their waiting room and flipping through some kind of newsletter for

their medical school. Like a slap in the face I see:

Experiment Glimpses the 'Shadow Man' Inside

Researchers on campus are drawing worldwide attention, thanks to some new findings that

may shed light on the hallucinations and feelings of paranoia common in patients

suffering from schizophrenia and other psychiatric diseases. The experiment, conducted by

cognitive neuroscientist Marvin Welsh and assisted by psychologist Fredrick S. Pratt and

research assistant Kelly Glass, was performed on a 32 year-old patient with no history of

psychiatric illness. However, using electrical stimulation of the temporoparietal cortex,

researchers were able to reproduce the sensation of a ghostly "shadow person" in the

room.

The patient described the being as silent and of indeterminate sex, usually standing

behind him or otherwise "just out of sight." He spoke of the being as sentient and said

phrases such as, "It doesn't want us doing this."

"Here you have a schneiderian symptom of schizophrenia in a patient with absolutely no

history of the disease, brought on completely by electrical stimulation," said Dr. Welsh.

"But remember this is one patient and there are plans for a larger-

There was a black and white photo of two guys who looked like professors and a girl who looked like she was really hot. I

skipped to the end of the article and saw an e-mail address for the guy in charge, Dr. Welsh.

I dug a scrap of paper from my pocket, a receipt from a trip to the drug store that morning for Cheetos and condoms and

two bottles of Mountain Dew Code Red. On the back I jotted down the e-mail address and snapped the magazine closed

before Amy could come back and start a conversation about it.

That next day I drove back home, rushed in the door and turned on my television to watch Ultimate Fighting. I had

completely forgotten about the whole experiment thing.

A week later, though, I went through those pants as I was about to throw them in the wash and the scrap of paper fel out.

I sat down and fired off an e-mail to the guy, told him I saw a shadow person in my bathroom while it was taking a shower

and wanted to know if I could get ahold of the guy in the experiment to tell him he wasn't crazy. They weren't keen on that

idea, confidentiality I guess. They wanted to talk to me instead.

They convinced me to meet with them, partly by offering me money but mostly because I am a retard. They wanted to

hook my brain up to the machine with the electrodes, like the guy in the experiment. I agreed, in what has to be one of the

al -time most monstrously stupid decisions in human history.

I couldn't help it. Somehow the idea of gathering together smart people, in a well-lit lab, talking about al this... I don't

know. I don't know what I was expecting. I guess I pictured them making this shadow thing appear and somehow we al

see it, not just me, and then this whole thing would become someone else's problem. Also, they promised me money.

So I ducked out of town that Saturday and drove back to the college, tel ing John I was visiting Amy and telling Amy I was

visiting John, hoping I didn't somehow run into her on campus. Yes, I was lying to the people closest to me. I did it

according to this equation:

l = E x ∞

Which can be translated as "One smal lie saves an infinite amount of explanation." I use it al the time. I've used it on you already.

I had been picturing a big well-lit lab with huge computers lining the wal s with those reel-to-reel things on them. It turned

out to be a crappy little office on campus with broken air conditioning. I was sweating the whole time (this was in late

August). I got there at nine in the morning and they greeted me and shook my hand and thanked me for coming. I fil ed

out a stack of release forms a half inch thick. Then, the questions started.

It was excruciating. Hours passed. They asked me question after question after question, about my mom and how she

was in and out of institutions, about how I never knew my dad, about whether I had headaches and what kind of food I

ate.

The main guy was a huge man with a black goatee with silver streaks in it. He was Dr. Welsh, it turned out. There was the

Psychologist, Dr. Pratt, who asked me to cal him Fred. There was a girl there helping out, Kel y, who I remembered from

the photo in the newsletter. She had a tiny ring in her nose and black hair and an adorable, round face. She oozed

sweetness and kept giggling and touching my arm when we talked.

What a stupid bastard I was, not to see it coming.

Questions and questions and questions. All the way through lunch time. They even did the thing with the ink blots, like in

the movies, showing me ten pieces of white cardboard with blobs on them, the guy sitting behind me and tapping on his

laptop so fast I think he was trying to take down everything I said. All I could hear was that clattering of the keys and it

made me a nervous wreck. Was that part of the test?

____________________________

Dr. Fred: Just take your time. You can turn the cards around if it helps you.

Me: Okay.

It looks like a wolf, a mutant wolf with four eyes.