Chapter Three
Julian woke to the alarm he’d set the night before, then immediately remembered he had nowhere to go.
Suspended. Probably for at least a week, given Julian’s observations about the way the library was managed. The lack of pay wasn’t an issue - just an annoyance – but everything else...
He stared at the ceiling, cataloging the familiar crack that branched from the light fixture toward the eastern wall.
The crack had grown three millimeters since he’d last measured it in September.
The building’s foundation was clearly settling unevenly, probably due to the construction project two blocks over.
His phone buzzed with a text from his mother. Hope you’re having a good week, sweetie! Love you!
Julian set the phone face down on the nightstand. He’d tell her about the suspension later. Or never. It’s not like he saw his parents very often, and under the circumstances, never seemed easier.
The apartment felt different somehow. Initially, Julian believed it was because he wasn’t moving around getting ready for work, but as he lay there contemplating the ceiling, he realized that wasn’t it.
It was more as if someone else was in the room with him, or a case of his apartment shrinking somehow since the night before - to make room for something else?
Unemployed and fanciful now?
Julian sat up, scanning the room. It didn’t look like anything was out of place.
His laptop sat closed on the small dining table.
The succulent by the window looked marginally less dead than it had yesterday.
The cardboard box from work remained by the door where he’d put it after he’d emptied it.
In other words, everything was exactly where it should be.
Except for the feeling that crawled up his spine, which left him feeling as though someone had draped a weighted blanket across his shoulders.
Am I being watched?
Julian knew that thought usually elicited a fear response, so he sat for a moment and waited for that feeling to register.
It didn’t happen. Instead, Julian realized his heartbeat and breathing were regular, and he felt incredibly calm.
It was the same sort of feeling he got when all his books were organized by subject and publication date, or when he’d finished cross-referencing a particularly complex archival index.
“That’s not normal,” he said to the empty apartment. “Although, with no frame of reference to suggest otherwise, it could be.”
The shadows in the corner near his closet seemed darker than they should be, given the morning light filtering through the window.
Julian stared at them for a full minute.
They reminded him of the being he’d met the night before.
He waited, wondering if the shadows in his apartment would move, but no, there was nothing.
“I need coffee,” he muttered, swinging his legs out of bed.
The kitchen was three steps from the bed - Julian appreciated the efficiency offered by a studio apartment.
He filled the kettle and set it to boil while measuring grounds into the French press.
Seventeen grams, precisely. The ritual of making coffee was as soothing as taking that first sip of the finished brew.
While the water heated, Julian’s mind drifted back to the alley.
In hindsight, he should have been terrified. Any reasonable person would have been screaming in terror and running away. A mass of living shadow consuming a man’s life force wasn’t something that appeared in a normal, well-adjusted reality.
It didn’t appear to bother me. Julian knew that because he’d noted his heart rate had only elevated to approximately one hundred and ten beats per minute. That could be considered high, but it wasn’t at panic levels, and the spike had felt less like fear and more like...excitement.
Julian had to sit with that idea for a moment. He wasn’t the type to get excited. Excitement was an inefficient emotional response that clouded judgment and led to poor decision-making.
And yet, he couldn’t deny he’d felt a definite form of exhilaration standing in that alley with that being. The sort of feeling he’d usually get when he discovered a misfiled document that everyone else had missed, or when he solved a complex research query that had stumped his colleagues.
The shadow-being had been a puzzle. Given that Julian had no idea what kind of being it was, he had simply reverted to his usual behavior and offered advice on the disposal of the body. That was his default setting, so there was nothing abnormal about that.
The kettle clicked off, and Julian poured the water over the grounds, watching the bloom as carbon dioxide released from the coffee. It needed to sit for four minutes, so he set his phone timer.
His gaze drifted to the window. The sun had fully risen now, washing the street in pale winter light.
There was nothing unusual there either. Just people going about their day as they made their way to work.
The only unusual things were that Julian was still home, instead of dashing out the door, and that the persistent feeling of being observed remained.
Julian pressed the plunger on the French press and poured coffee into his mug, the one with “I like big books, and I cannot lie” printed on the side. A gift from his mother that he’d never had the heart to donate.
He carried the mug to his laptop, opened it, and navigated to his personal research folder. The folder was organized into subcategories: Historical Discrepancies, Unsolved Archival Mysteries, Local Architecture Analysis, and - as of 3 a.m. this morning - Shadow Mythology.
Julian had spent two hours compiling sources before exhaustion had forced him to sleep. Now, well on the way to being caffeinated and clear-headed, he reviewed his notes.
Observation Log: Alley Encounter
Entity composition: Shadows, no fixed form, capable of condensing into a humanoid shape
Behavior: Predatory toward criminal element (Vane Syndicate member confirmed by tattoo)
Communication: Verbal, coherent, possibly ancient speech patterns
Response to human presence: Surprise, then curiosity
Physical markers: Referenced “corruption” as if it had a tangible presence/taste
Julian added a new bullet point: Entity displayed restraint when confronted by a non-threatening human. Did not attempt harm.
He opened a new browser tab and continued the research he’d started hours earlier.
Most shadow mythology fell into predictable categories Julian was already familiar with - beings such as demons, vengeful spirits, or even manifestations of human fear which were less tangible than demons, for example, but no less valid.
None of them quite matched what Julian had witnessed.
Then he found a reference in a digitized folklore collection from the 1800s. It was a passage about “Guardians of the Threshold” that described beings who existed between light and dark, and who fed on corruption to maintain cosmic balance.
“Feeding on corruption,” Julian murmured, highlighting the text. The shadow-being had said something similar - I eliminate problems - which suggested actions that were less like murder and more a form of cosmic pest control.
Julian sat back, processing the new information.
If the entity genuinely targeted criminals - defined as people who caused measurable harm to society - then its actions served a utilitarian function.
By removing the source of corruption, there was an improvement in overall community welfare.
Which was all very logical when considered in terms of the wider context.
A shadow moved in his peripheral vision, and Julian’s head snapped toward the window. The curtain hung motionless, but the shadow on the wall beside it had definitely shifted, curling in a way that went against a typical shadow caused by a solid object.
He stood, approaching the area slowly, but the shadow didn’t move again.
“Fatigue,” Julian murmured. “I only had four hours sleep. Visual hallucinations are a documented side effect of sleep deprivation.”
He reached out to touch the wall where the shadow had been, and his fingers brushed against something solid.
Julian jerked his hand back as an object fell, clinking against the hardwood floor. It was small - roughly the size of a quarter - and impossibly black. Not the black of ink or paint, but the black that came from an absolute absence of light.
Crouching down, Julian studied it without touching. The object was circular, smooth, and seemed to pulse with a faint rhythm that matched his own heartbeat - a token of some sort, or a marker. Something deliberately left behind because Julian hadn’t seen it before.
By what? The question answered itself. By whom. It had to have been the shadow-being. It had been here, in his apartment, while he slept.
Julian’s analytical mind immediately began cataloging possibilities.
There was the breaking and entering, although there were no signs of forced entry.
Could it be a form of stalking behavior?
If it were, that would be concerning but not immediately threatening.
Julian could be under some form of surveillance, but he had no idea why.
Underneath the analysis, Julian could still feel a strange comforting warmth, a feeling that intensified as he looked at the token.
A gift?
“That’s ridiculous,” Julian said to his empty apartment. “Unknown entities don’t leave gifts. They leave threats or warnings or…”
The shadow in the corner darkened again, just for a moment.
Julian grabbed a tissue from the box on his desk and carefully wrapped the token. He should dispose of it, throw it away, lock his windows, and maybe invest in better curtains.
Instead, he placed it in the top drawer of his desk, beneath the stack of unused thank-you cards his mother had sent him, stroking over the little package before quietly closing the drawer.
Back at his laptop, Julian opened a new document.
Behavioral Analysis: Shadow Entity
Hypothesis: The Entity is capable of tracking/locating individuals after initial contact. Demonstrates curiosity rather than hostility toward non-threatening humans. Left token - purpose unknown. Possible territorial marking? Claim of ownership? Warning to other entities?
Julian paused, fingers hovering over the keyboard.
Or a gift.
Wrinkling his nose, Julian deleted the last line. It was too speculative. But he didn’t remove the token from his drawer. If further evidence proved it was a gift, then getting rid of it would be rude, even if Julian was more comfortable with gifts that had a purpose.
His phone buzzed. Another text, this time from Colin, a colleague from the library: Heard about the suspension. Patricia’s on a power trip. You okay?
Julian stared at the message. He believed the appropriate response would be to express gratitude for the concern and provide reassurance. Instead, he typed: I’m fine. She was wrong about the provenance chain.
He deleted it and tried again: Thanks for checking in. I’ll be back next week. He hit send before he second-guessed himself again.
Colin would probably think he was being cold again. People always thought that. Julian had stopped trying to modulate his tone years ago because it never seemed to work anyway.
The shadow in the corner seemed to deepen, as if in response to his thoughts.
“You’re projecting,” Julian told himself. “Shadows don’t have opinions.” But he glanced at the desk drawer anyway, where the impossible token waited in its tissue-paper nest.
The day stretched ahead, empty and unstructured. No work meant no schedule and/or clear objectives, and if he didn’t complete his daily objectives, then his time felt rather meaningless. Julian hated it already.
He opened his research document again, expanding his notes. If he was going to have free time, he might as well use it productively. The shadow entity represented a significant gap in documented paranormal taxonomy. Someone should catalog it properly, and that someone might as well be him.
How many people can say they’ve bumped into a shadow person in an alley? Actually, that’s something else worth researching.
By noon, Julian had compiled 17 different cultural references to shadow guardians, cross-referenced their behavioral patterns, and created a working hypothesis about their feeding mechanisms. The Vane Syndicate member had probably registered as a high-concentration corruption source, making him an ideal target.
Which meant the entity was likely still hunting in the area.
Julian’s heart rate picked up, but again, he wasn’t feeling fearful. If anything, that flutter in his stomach could be classified as anticipation. “Stop it,” he said out loud. The shadows didn’t respond this time, remaining properly inanimate.
At lunchtime, he made himself a sandwich - turkey, Swiss cheese, mustard, and lettuce arranged in even layers - and ate it while reviewing his notes. The token in his desk drawer seemed to pulse, though that was probably his imagination. Possibly. Probably.
The afternoon light shifted, casting new shadows across his apartment.
Julian tracked each one, cataloging their movements against the sun’s position.
None of them moved independently. But the feeling of being watched persisted, a constant pressure between his shoulder blades, which was comforting in a weird way.
Julian felt as if someone was standing guard over him.
“That’s concerning,” Julian said to his reflection in the darkened laptop screen. “You should be concerned about that.”
His reflection didn’t look concerned. It looked...interested. He closed the laptop and retrieved the token from his drawer. In the afternoon light, it still seemed to absorb all light, like a miniature void.
He should research what it was made of, run some tests on it, if possible, and document its properties. Instead, Julian wrapped it carefully back in the tissue and returned it to the drawer.
A gift, his mind insisted. Julian didn’t argue this time, although he didn’t add that to his notes.
Night came early in winter. By four-thirty, the sun had nearly set, painting Julian’s apartment in shades of gray and amber. He turned on the desk lamp, creating a small island of light in the growing dark.
The shadows seemed to lean toward him.
Julian leaned back.
“If you’re going to watch me,” he said to the empty room, “you could at least introduce yourself properly. I already know you exist.”
The shadows didn’t answer, but the weighted blanket feeling intensified, wrapping around him like an embrace.
Julian opened his laptop and returned to his research, while the darkness gathered close and kept him company through the evening.