Preview
AUTHOR'S NOTE: An inevitable comparison will be made
between the fashion this story opens at first and the opening of another, much more famous story. I didn't intend this, but was at a loss to imagine this story beginning otherwise.
However, you will quickly see that any comparison becomes
irrelevant the further you read.
All the same I must acknowledge the works of
JAMES CAMERON and GALE ANNE HURD,
two of my favorite cinematic storytellers.
Chapter One: Late Arrival
Ink-black and foreboding, shadow collected in the unguarded urban pockets. The neglected spaces, nooks, and alleyways...the places where artificial light couldn't reach at night. Places uncared for, overlooked, all but forgotten. Places where refuse, living or not, was left to rot by the rest of civilization.
The shadow made its home in these areas of the cityscape comfortably.
The people of the city who lived under artificial light during the night ignored the shadow out of instinct...and fear. It was a primal reaction, and understandable. Why look to such places, and to the shadow that blanketed them? It was a fear that had been a part of the ROM of the mainframe that was human consciousness since the creation of the race. There was nothing to be gained from shadow...except for the implicit threat that the shadows offered. The threat that if one were to look into the shadow, something might look back at them.
Humanity had no idea how justified they were in holding that fear.
serve as a conduit. A portal to other places. Other realms where fear held hands with
nightmare atrocity, indescribable tortures, and the most unspeakable of evils.
It was 11:39 Post Meridian, Central Standard Time, on April the 14th, 2006. Good
Friday.
It was all about timing, of course...the timing of an unseen, unknowable hand.
There was no one in the immediate area of the alley bathed in shadow off Russell Boulevard close to the heart of St. Louis, Missouri, in the Midwestern region of the United States of America. God's Country. No one was there to see the shadow that bathed the alley just within its entrance congeal into a nearly solid thing. No one saw the
congealed substance issue a dull gleam of unearthly power. For a handful of seconds of time in this world, the shadow of the alley in the heart of God's Country became a portal. A gateway.
During that handful of seconds, someone fell through the gateway.
It was as if she was part of the transformed shadow in the split-second she pitched forward through it from where she came. She fell on her hands and knees to the rough and broken sidewalk that cared nothing for her arrival. The handful of seconds passed,
and the shadow of the alley resumed its ethereal nature.
The woman remained.
She was naked, breathing in heavy gasps the polluted urban air. She was surprised at first how painful the transition was...after a moment of time, her surprise was compounded when she realized the pain was diminishing. And then the pain ceased altogether, except for a discomfort that lingered from her hands and knees. The coarse concrete of the sidewalk had nearly scraped the skin in those places. As she steadied herself, surprise increased to astonishment when she registered the unseasonably warm April air. She felt the light wind that traveled through the urban canyons. The woman was ill-prepared for such things. She had known nothing but pain for so long...now to not simply escape that pain, but be host to other sensations? She did not wish to dwell on such things, as much as she wanted to...for now. She raised to a sitting position on her knees and began to take in the visual input of her new surroundings with deep brown eyes. Her expression was neutral, but her senses were at full alert, prepared for any possible threat.
There was no one in the immediate area...but if there were, an observer would have immediately noted there was a duality to this woman. She held beauty beyond question, both in her face of seeming Asian ancestry, framed by bobbed hair as black as raven's feathers, and in the supple curves and sensual features of the rest of her nude body. Nude in more ways than one: except for her head and her eyebrows, one would have had to look closer to realize there was no hair whatsoever anywhere else on her naked body, even in the pubic region; there was even the absence of the far more sublime and finer hairs. With closer inspection one would have noted there was more. It was most
apparent in her still-neutral face...of course it held the softness of femininity, but one could just as easily have interpreted that her visage was chiseled from granite. One would also have seen under the seeming softness of her nude skin the well-toned musculature that gave structure to her body. Both in form and presence, she exuded as much strength as she did allure.
She stood and continued to absorb the city around her...she deliberately avoided even a glance at the shadows from which she had come from.
After a few moments she began to walk, and proceeded down the sidewalk with an unhurried pace.
Toward South Broadway.