Shadows -teaser-

The worse fight me and my wife ever got was our last, not because we stopped talking or divorced over it but because she never lived to accept my apology. We were camping when it happened, nowhere too far or remote, just a few kilometres out of our town. We had been high school sweethearts, happily married for years, sure we fought but who does not? What made this fight especially bad was I was drunk and she was sober. She had told me to bring the extra toilet paper, and I had insisted she was in charge of that. It started off as just simple bickering, than due to my alcohol content it turned more and more into a yelling match, one that I continuously escalated. At the time there was no doubt in my mind, looking back though it really was not a big deal for either of us, we could have done without really. It was beginning to get dark and she screamed at me to get lost, so I told her that is just what I would do. I stormed off into the woods with a head swimming full of gin and ginger ale. I am not sure just how long I was walking around but it had to have been hours. I only found my way back because of the small flame she had kept going, with my head down in shame a fairly sober version of myself returned to the tent ready to beg forgiveness and sleep outside the tent. When I approached I could the camp site was askew she must have started throwing things around after I was out of sight. I stumbled to the tent and heard some groaning, the sounds of someone being tortured or restrained, my first thought was that some other men must have come across the site, I ran up to the tent screaming. Whatever was inside the tent had heard me, and a shrill hair rising laugh answered me, it sounded like my wife, if my wife had a tank of helium and a carton of cigarettes with her. I called out her name.

“Loraine?” I asked.

More laughter answered me a little more hectic as if my voice was the funniest thing my wife had ever heard.
When I got to the tent i pushed aside its half opened flap and peered inside, the light of the fire gave me sight of my wife, or what was left. What I saw I can only describe as follows; she was being eaten by a shadow, the shadows hand was inside her stomach making her mouth move and must have been producing the laughs. I opened my mouth to scream and immediately it leapt forward with its hand in my mouth shoving it further and further down my throat, I could feel its fingers wriggling inside me, I stumbled backwards and landed on my back in the fire. The burning pain of the embers roared up my back and with a gasp I let out a scream, I rolled over and put the budding fires out quickly, I sat up rubbing my jaw that felt seconds away from bursting apart and looked wildly around me. I saw nothing, but I heard the sounds all around me, laughing, screaming, crying and other unidentifiable noises. I grabbed a stick that’s end was aflame and whirled in a circle, attempting to cast out the shadow from anywhere around me. While spinning around, my ankle found a hole in the ground, and with a loud crack it broke. I fell to the ground screaming, flaming stick still in hand. Even with my adrenaline I was in massive pain, so I crawled and shuffled and hobbled as best as I could through the trees, I could hear the laughter all around me. Circling me at incredible speeds, sometimes between the trees I could see a vague shaping speeding by. The flaming stick was guttering out of life so I did what I thought reasonable, I set the nearest tree to me on fire. I held the flame above my head to the lower branches of a dying pine tree, instantly the red pines caught fire. The flames crept up the branches, and then jumped to the branches above and around. Within a minute at least half the tree was burning, another minute gone by and a few trees around the first one were starting to sputter with flames. Realizing that the entire place was soon going to go up, I began my hobbling crawl once again, I must have gone a bit too far out of reach of the flame of the fire because a shadowy hand shot out and grabbed my broken ankle.