Things to Run Away From Really Fast

★★★★☆

12/07/10

The vibrant old neighbourhood straddles the line between dilapidation and gentrification. Places like this have colour and character completely unlike the sterility of the suburbs. Walking down the street, taking in the brightly coloured fall leaves on the unkempt lawns, you know that this is a place people consider home.

It's dead now. Shadows gather where they shouldn't beneath a cloudless blue sky. Trees whisper with the cold wind, and the world seems to be holding its breath, waiting.

Utterly boring, I decide, as I stare out the window of the second floor of an old house. I'm watching the shadows dance across the vinyl walls of a building across the alley, and I know that I'm being watched in turn. If I make a mistake, one small misstep, they'll attack.

I'm wondering what that step would be, because I'd really like to get it over with.

I see movement in the corner of my eye, and I carefully ignore it. Every light in the house is on, and they don't so much as flicker. I let out a breath, close my eyes.

He asked me to marry him. There will be a wedding on Friday, and I'm a friend, and isn't it terrible what happened to his fiancee?

A blade cuts through the air where my neck was. I'm halfway across the room in that instant, flickering through the shadow-world, disappearing and reappearing between blinks of an eye.

The shadows coalesce into a lizard scuttling across the walls, held in place by the rules of gravity that don't apply to them. It leaps from the far wall to the ceiling above me, strikes at me with its scythe-like tail and shrieks.

And I stand there, waiting. I will not be intimidated.

Shadows. Scare Factor: 3.