#still and lightless beast's friendly cousin named Licorice

[fellpyrean]

Advent Statement 6 - Shadow Puppet

oh boy we goin’. The original halfway point! I believe this one is actually a couple ideas I ended up fusing into one since I felt like some of the nuggets I had before couldn’t quite stand on their own? 

No particular warnings on this one I don’t think; general canon-typical violence and I suppose possession of a sort? 

Ah, almost forgot: this one is on ao3! Click here if you’d prefer to read over there! 

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I didn’t know my grandfather. 

I never really thought about it before, but  I’ve. Had to realize some things very quickly, you know? Largely that the man I thought he was? Has nothing to do with who he actually was, or what kind of life he lived. I didn’t know, and I don’t think I want to look. Not sure I have a choice now, though.  

He died last year. Outlasted my grandmother, which was surprising. Kind of thought she’d keep going to 103 out of spite; some old ladies are like that, you know. But no. She went quietly in her sleep a few years back, which left my grandfather alone in that big, old house. We still talked. I’m not going to pretend I visited a lot, because I didn’t. Once I moved out from my parent’s house, I went west and they all stayed put. I really only saw them when I could afford to fly out every couple years, with a few phone calls in between for the holidays. 

But he seemed happy. 

It came as an honest shock when he died, too. He’d been trucking along cheerful as ever, excited about his grilling, his gun collection and trips to the shooting range until the day he left. And, shocking as that was, probably the bigger surprise came when I was told he’d left me his house. 

His son was still alive. My father. And I mean, they got on alright, so me taking the house felt a bit like getting involved in some family drama in the final act without a clue of the script that had come before, but, I mean. I still did it. Things weren’t really working out where I was, I did kind of miss everyone, and I won’t lie, it felt really good to screw my dad out of something for once. 

It took about a month before I managed to tie up the loose ends and fly back out and take stock on my freshly inherited house. It seemed a lot smaller than I remembered, though it wasn’t small by any means. Just that the last time I’d spent time in it, I’d been maybe seven or eight. The front door had two glass windows on either side, and a landing with a high, vaulted ceiling and a bright, dusty light that cast nice, crisp shadows onto the walls - and above that, an overlook from the second story. I remembered they used to keep plants up there, since the sunlight spilled through the windows in the afternoon and made the whole space feel warm, open and bright. Welcoming. 

It was just kind of dark then, of course. My flight hadn’t been early or on time. I ditched my bags by the front door and just went through the house, flicking on lights as I walked along, and paused here and there to admire the photos on the wall. He’d always liked to take pictures. I think if I’d asked he would have set up a dark room honestly; that was just how he was with me. He even got me a telescope once. He was always so eager to have me join him in his hobbies, but I was a kid, and poking around in the dark wasn’t as exciting as video games. 

The house was a bit of a cluttered mess, but it was nice. Seeing these relics of his, left behind. Almost felt like I’d turn the corner and he’d be waiting there in the kitchen with a cup of black coffee, but, no. That was dark and empty too, and the stairs to go up were even darker. I never liked those stairs as a kid. The switch to turn on their light was half way up, which meant either a mad dash into the dark or a mad dash out of it if I was the last one to go to bed at night, or if I’d snuck down for a drink. My grandfather eventually stuck nightlights at either end, but I would still always run like mad. 

I joked that it was so nothing would catch me. I was too fast for it, I’d say proudly, and my grandfather would always chuckle with a little too much cheer. I just thought he appreciated my bountiful wit.

The light wavered a little as I headed upstairs, but stayed on. It was honestly a little strange heading up. It was… so quiet, and the shadows so thick, clinging to the edges of the light. It looked a lot like a film effect; some high contrast trick, to make the lights look brighter and the shadows so, so much darker than they should be. 

I actually had a little fun with it when I got to the top of the stairs. It reminded me of when I was small. We’d lived here for a while, my parents and me, when we’d first moved and money was tight. It was a big house and my grandparents were happy to have us along. I was given a big room above the garage, and oh, did I love it. 

And I remembered, standing there at the top of the stairs, that I used to love turning on the flashlight in the dark and playing with shadow puppets across the ceiling. My grandfather taught me. 

I liked making dogs the best. 

I made one then, too. Just a simple thing. Thumb up, forefinger tucked. The rest formed its, hah, its fearsome maw. They were always so crisp here, I recalled. No matter what odd eagles or rabbits I cast flying or running across the spackled ceiling, they were special. Vivid. 

Even that simple dog I cast then, barking idly at the edges of the shadow, seemed livelier than normal. 

It put me in a nostalgic mood. I mean, I already was, given that, you know, this was my dearly departed and beloved grandfather’s house, but it made me feel young again. Small and smiling on just another normal night as I played with shadow puppets on the walls.

I headed to what had been my room, all those years ago. The hallway was utterly dark - each side of the hall dotted with closed doors, locked, and the switch busted - and barely a sliver of light came from beneath the door to my old room. It honestly wasn’t all that different from when I’d lived there; the bed was gone, but when I looked up at the ceiling, I saw the cheap, glow in the dark stars that I’d stuck there more than a decade before still stubbornly clinging to the paint, and the old couches I used to roll across were still here, too. 

That light worked. Which I was glad for, because, admittedly, I was feeling a little spooked. It felt like something was waiting in the dark. The moonlight was so thin; it only helped the tree branches to cast shadows like grasping claws across the room, chaotic and tangled and absolutely unnerving when the wind rustled through them. I always thought those shadows would be all too happy to catch me as a kid. But it was light now, and the house was aglow with every switch I’d left on in my wake. It was practically cozy. I mean, minus the hallway right outside my room. 

I let myself wander the room for a little bit, finding my old left-behind marks before I called it a night, fetched my bags, and decided to crash on the least destroyed of the old couches. There was a lot of work to be done, and I sure wasn’t doing it tonight. 

It was maybe something like five days before something happened.

Just long enough for me to spend some time in nostalgic reminiscence before moving on to the simple fact that the house needed cleaning out, and I realized I didn’t have any of the keys for the locked rooms. I had the front and back door keys, of course, but anything on the interior was just… gone. I had some suspicions about that. 

The house keys had been given, at first, to my aunt - my grandfather’s sister - who had a very good relationship with a certain childish, spiteful little man who had made no secret how irritated he was at being skipped over on something he’d already regarded as his own. It seemed like just the kind of thing he’d do; make sure the legal keys were handed over, and then sneer at the idea he’d do something as petty as taking the ones for all the interior doors. I didn’t doubt that he still had them, but I can be petty too, and I had no desire to call him up and plead or whatever he’d want from me. 

Sooo, I, uh. Pulled up a video and found some of my grandmother’s hair pins in a bathroom drawer and picked the locks. They were all old and I mean, I’d be replacing them anyway, so I maybe busted a couple. Which included the real kicker; the door to my grandfather’s gun room. It was a lot darker than I thought it’d be when I first stepped inside and fumbled at the wall, shocked at the absolute blackness - I knew it had a window in there, so it was not a place I expected to be that dark. 

Turned out, at some point, my grandfather had put blackout curtains over the window. Had stapled those curtains tight to the wall.  

The bigger surprise was that every single gun my grandfather owned was scattered on top of the wooden table tops that bordered the room. Now, this was weird. As far as I knew he hadn’t died while cleaning them and he’d always been a real stickler about gun safety. He always kept this room locked, for one, and those guns were always, always kept inside the safe. One of those enormous things; so big and heavy he’d had to have the floor reinforced to put it upstairs, and the front of it emblazoned around the massive combination lock in old font with warnings for gunpowder. He’d told me it was so nobody decided to try and blast the thing open. 

But now, each and every one was strewn around, like he’d pulled them all out in a hurry. 

And the safe was locked. 

I’m wasn’t sure if it was worse that it was locked or not, on first sight. I mean, if it had been open, that would have kind of fit with the idea that maybe he had died up there while admiring his collection. Admiring it in, uh. A haphazard mess. But it being locked implied that there was still something inside the safe. And I had… no idea what it would be. Logical brain said, very helpfully, that it was probably just more guns. Maybe he’d just gotten a lot more than would ever fit in the safe when he got older, and what with his wife gone and him being the only one in the house just. Threw safety to the winds and figured a single locked door was enough. 

So why were his guns, some of his favorite things, strewn around like garbage? No idea! It’s argument was, as you can see, pretty thin, but what else could have been in there? My world view still had a few minutes left in its lifespan after all. 

I headed over to the safe, wanting to give the handle a tug and check it out, when uh. When the safe growled. Low and throaty and deep, and oh, did it send a chill up my spine. And then something began scratching and clawing at the inside, again and again, with enough force that the safe shook. I wasn’t exaggerating when I said how big and heavy that thing was. You’d need serious professional movers to get the thing out with serious professional equipment, and there was something inside it snarling and scrabbling so furiously that it made the safe tremble and my blood run cold. 

I could hear its claws scraping through metal. I had the wildest, clearest thought that whatever was in there - evidently alive and well after being locked inside a safe for over a month - it could absolutely get out if it just kept it up. 

So why hadn’t it tried to get out before? 

The light flickered. 

And I backed up, reached out, and turned off the light. 

The growling stopped almost immediately. 

Well, as you may imagine, I handled this like any adult would. I shut the door, wedged a chair I dragged out of my old room under the regrettably busted handle, went downstairs and had a truly awful gin and tonic. 

I did not like gin and tonic and I still do not. I like it less now, actually. 

But a couple large gin and tonics in, I came up with a plan. 

I would ignore it. Ta da~ 

It would be someone else’s problem. I would get a very nice lock. I would take out the light. Hell, maybe I could just take out the door entirely and wall it up and make an incredibly cursed forgotten room. I rather liked that idea. I told it to the door when I went back upstairs I think. 

I need you to understand that I was… very, very drunk at that point. A drunk person is never a great measure of their own level of drunk, but from what I remember… yeah, I was smashed. 

I left the locked and makeshift barricaded door alone and staggered back to my room and slept it off and then continued on with my peerless plan of Just Ignore It™.

I never bothered to examine any implications of my grandfather leaving me a safe with some kind of creature locked inside it, because I had other things to do. There were some nights where I would pull out that gin and drink again, though. The room and the safe were both quiet as long as I didn’t turn on any lights in the hall, so I started… I mean, humans are very adaptable, so I started drinking outside that room. I sat in the chair, actually. 

As long as it was dark, it didn’t care, so it was fine. And when it growled, faint and rumbling, when I turned on a flashlight, I turned it into something of a game? 

It was fine with candlelight. It only grumbled at that. So, as you do, I sat there with my candle and my gin and rambled at it. At some point it occurred to me that the growling sounded like a very large dog, so I started… Talking to it in that baby voice you use with pets. Making shadow puppets at it. It would growl and I would laugh and make my little shadow puppet dog bark and growl back. 

I’m not saying this was a smart thing to do. Or maybe it was. As far as I knew, it was locked up nice and tight. It even stopped growling as much after a while. It sounded more… curious than anything? Confused why this drunk dumbass hadn’t left screaming yet? I’m pretty sure it would have actually stayed fine and my bricking it up plan was actually good, but, well. Some people can’t leave well enough alone. 

I went out one afternoon. I had things to take to the dump, which was a bit of a drive, and on the way back I decided to grab some Mexican food from this restaurant down the street, so I got back well after dark, only to see the front door hanging open and an awful lot of dark, splashing stains leading off through the gravel walk and up to the street. They were smeared. Like something had thrashed desperately in the grass as it fled. 

This was not what I had in mind when I got my bag of tamales to go.  

I was tired, cranky, and my house was probably a… A what? A murder scene? Attempted murder scene?   

I’d just about dialed 911 to share my now very bad night with someone else when I thought of… upstairs. Of the door I’d not bothered fixing the lock to, and all the guns I’d never bothered moving. Of the safe I didn’t have the key or the combination to, but someone else did. I went very still. 

I turned back to the grass and raised my phone. The flashlight blazed white-bright in the dark, making all-too-clear the dark, dark red on the grass. And the single, familiar pistol that gleamed, smeared in blood, dropped just off the gravel. Of bullet holes I spotted, peppering the old, wooden beams that framed the porch. 

Of a dark, ink-black stain without a single hint of red that oozed across the landing tiles. 

And a growl that rose in instant, murderous fury. 

The light on my phone died. Flicked out like a snuffed candle and everything went black. It shouldn’t have been that dark. The moon was out. The neighbor’s houses were only a yard away. But in that moment, it was all gone. All that was left was a sea of pitch-dark shadow, so dark your eyes start fooling you. Because there must have been something to see. 

I could hear it. 

The growing, low snarl. The click of claws on cement. The crunch of footsteps stalking across gravel. 

I know I didn’t see it, but my eyes… invented something for me to see. 

A hound. Long and lanky, with sharp, pricked ears. 

Like the ones I made puppets of on the wall. 

It… hurt to look at. Its shape blurred at the edges, impossibly blacker-black than the void around it, and I knew what I was seeing was useless, so I. Closed my eyes. 

Its heavy, panting growls came closer and closer. I was honestly terrified. I’d been shoving back how scared I was of this thing while I joked about sealing it up behind a little devil door or a brick wall through a haze of alcohol, and I hadn’t let myself consider what would happen if it did get out. 

I felt its cold, cold breath on my hands. Like ice. Like a. A pressure that wrapped around me as I stood there, my eyes shut tight against the dark. And then it. It burned. I couldn’t move, couldn’t pull away as my arm burst into absolute agony, like a million needles sinking into the flesh and burrowing beneath it. As that ice cold held me absolutely still, fixed in place as well as a bug with a pin, and sank horrid, frigid fangs into me, again and again, until it felt like every bone in my body was freezing inside me, until the pain rose so high that I couldn’t think of anything else.

A-And then it was gone. I crumpled to the ground, my breath frosty on my lips, and I just lay there, shivering. 

It took me a while to realize I could see again. To realize there were stars and a moon in the cloud-streaked summer sky above and neighboring porch lights and their wreaths of moths. That I should feel warmth coming back. But… it didn’t. It was all gone. And then I felt myself move. It wasn’t me moving. And it wasn’t like someone pulled any strings. It was like. Like I felt that cold touch on me, sliding over my skin, and my body moved with it. 

And as I stood, I happened to catch a glimpse of my shadow. 

It wasn’t mine anymore. 

My shadow had become that thing. And all I could do was watch as it puppeted me back inside, my steps in time with its own. 

Do you want to know the craziest thing about this? I mean, aside from the fact that my shadow is a monster now that takes my body on joyrides. That there’s a goddamn cult in my grandfather’s hometown, and they were so, so happy to see me when my shadow dragged me to meet them. 

That night? It took me inside. It brought me up to the chair in front of its room. The door was open, the safe yawning wide. Guns littered the stairs and bullet holes peppered the walls. 

It sat me in that chair and lit the candle, and made shadow puppets with my hands. 

Eagles, rabbits. And a pair of dogs. 

A small one and a big one. Running around until it brought them together, and they merged into one.