The Shape in the Darkness

 

The Shape in the Darkness They said, about the property in question, that you needed to fine-tune the senses of sound and sight to experience the shape’s presence in the property’s unlit sitting-room, let alone the senses of touch, smell and, eventually, taste. But the prime venue definitely being the sitting-room was spoken into your ear by the Voice of Legend, rather than it being the lounge, front room, parlour or even breakfast room, as the property sported all of these rooms so-called on the ground floor. Apparently, any ‘small rooms’ on any storey, or the main kitchen or the upstairs bedrooms, master or not, bathrooms, en suite or not, or attic spaces would certainly not support the presence of the shape that many had put down simply and disarmingly as a mysterious one in a definite venue of darkness. They shrugged as if you knew exactly what they meant without you questioning them further as to the venue or the nature of the shape as sensed by all senses except the sixth. But what became a common factor of your senses would be the need up front in the brain to grasp proportion and context first and foremost, and whether you were alone or part of a party of people eager to experience it, even now as the shape began to appear out of the darkness in the said sitting-room you had finally chosen by effectively blind intuitive skills that it was the sitting-room.  There had been no need for anyone to describe the whole property itself as part of the required ‘proportion and context’, but simply for someone to itemise the names of the rooms and their assumed usages without properly seeing them, as the whole property had been plunged into the necessary incubation of the shape by utter darkness before your arrival. But you did hear water hissing in pipes quite close to your ear, and you turned to question your companions as they all turned to each other as well as to you and found nobody else there, judging by the apparent non-receipt of your proffered touch and voice. But a sitting-room had no live plumbing, surely, so as to be able to make such noises. Nor did most attics. Bedrooms often had separate sinks or en suite facilities, so maybe that was an explanation, but such thoughts put paid to the earlier assurances as to the required venue for the primest shape apparition possible. But, then again, ‘sitting’ may have been misheard for a similar sounding word involving which room as best possible venue if not for the shape itself. Even the strange moving between separate whole properties, without moving at all. Shape-sitting or what?

 

 

THE SHAPE IN THE DARKNESS (2)

I had already assumed the property to be a sort of mansion that the shape-in-the-darkness was said to frequent. By the way, I hesitate to use the word ‘haunt’ as ‘frequent’ seems better to suit what I understand it to be. But, soon, going back to the beginning, the Voice of Legend later spoke more clearly and I realised that the property might not be a mansion at all, but as soon as I discovered what the building structure actually was, housing the shape in such darkness, the sooner I would discover the nature of the shape itself in its ‘present’ state as well as its ‘before’ and ‘after’.

So, first things first, the property itself, with its identity hidden in plain sight, induced every visitor to turn a blind eye to its existence as a mansion or a simple terraced house or a factory or warehouse with its own series of attic spaces. I soon gathered, however, that the property’s world was its own oyster, but the pearl was hard to find, and would be even harder to hide once found, I guessed. It had walls, of course, and a roof, but I knew of many a mansion without a roof or a factory with its roof caved-in. Warehouses often had derricks as protuberances with hooks, chains and pulleys for loading goods to higher floors. And even a row of terraced houses often had attic spaces stretching the whole street without partitions between.

But such considerations brought me no closer to the crucial shape-in-the-darkness that the property harboured. I needed to establish the property first. Could it even be a dry dock or a covered market, and none of the buildings I earlier described above? It might even be a railway waiting-room or a habitable narrow-boat at a fixed canal mooring. So, to get my coordinates sorted out, I decided to write in long hand these essays about my first attempts at establishing ‘proportion and context’ for the shape-in-the-darkness, i.e. what it frequented. Needless to say, each essay will fail but as a cumulative world all the essays will eventually succeed. So don’t be surprised — if you pick just one of my shape-in-the-darkness essays to read at random — when it turns out to have an unsatisfyingly inconclusive ending like this one. Except today the shape does somehow seem nearer than ever.

 

THE SHAPE IN THE DARKNESS (3)

 

He was called Grettir, and why he was called by that name is a mystery, nothing to do with the more famous character with that name. Well, he watched what appeared to him to be a man wandering from dry dock to factory complex to canal boat moorings to mansions in the countryside to urban terraced housing and to other properties even further afield, as if he were trying to establish which property was the one he actually sought! The reason for such seeking was naturally beyond Grettir to judge and how he watched each of the other man’s sightings is a mystery unless Grettir was following him rather than accidentally seeing each of his sightings happen. 

The man, meantime, whom Grettir had thus ‘watched’ travelling on separate days between various properties, continued to mutter something under his breath about ‘a shape in the darkness’, but how Grettir heard such muttering must have meant he was closer to the one being followed than the terms ‘follow’ or, even, ‘stalk’ would normally imply. Sense itself seemed to stutter in its tracks. Foreboding a watchword for something far worse. Each property, in turn, was its own shape in the darkness to Grettir’s eyes and he wondered what the man — closer to each property than Grettir — could see better than himself. It was as if the man was following trails of breadcrumbs to reach each property, which might explain if all this was fate or fortune on Grettir’s part. He hated to think himself to be a stalker.

All was containable as far as emotions were concerned, until Grettir realised he himself was also being watched or perhaps followed … by what he at first deemed to be a ‘shadowy third’. A third seemingly, though, with sharpened elbows and knees that were etched by sharp lines, betraying a focus of precision that belied the sense of any possible amorphous shape-in-the-darkness. 

The property in question was at last established but its nature was a literal cliff hanging over an ancient North Essex coast. Not a building ON the cliff edge, but a series of zigzag slopes with a thus unsteepened to-and-fro gradient embedded into the downward cliffside — apparently a wall-less, open-roofed edifice with banisters in a series of tiers or balconies — leading eventually to sea level. Nobody called Grettir, though, but if they did, he never answered.

THE SHAPE IN DARKNESS (4)

If you feel somehow that you are the shape-in-the-darkness that others seek, you become bloated with pride that anyone should bother. You have noticed one particular crazy loon who juggles properties to be visited in all manner of different places as part of an obsessive search for a shape-in-the-darkness, as if such properties are counters in a snakes-and-ladders version of Monopoly. All he knows is something he can’t shake off — that you, as that shape, reside in darkness, and no manner of brightly lit abodes would do. Yet, that is your secret, a trick on your part, because you are literally hidden in plain sight, as you even now make clear by writing this fact down here for all and sundry to see. So, how is it a secret at all?

It is a secret because even those who read this tract turn a blind eye to it by retaining a high suspicion that it is a mere fiction, with its equally tricky game of pot and kettle counters in the ups and downs of a property market as covered by hedge-dealing, and a plinth with zigzag tiers-and-balconies and marram grass grown as large as bushes where a ship docks at night while ploughing dry seas to reach its own Captain’s shape-in-the-darkness with a silhouette sharper inside his soft-edged ballooning than any childhood comic could pass off as a roguish pirate character to believe in. The wide blue sky was a mere counterpoint to the dead sea below. It was the double eyepatch that gave the game away.

You are a ‘mutiny’ of readers as a collective noun for a crew of diverse intellects seeking meaningful messages from dark-web thinking or deep-state codes. Or you are just shapes in your own darknesses. Kept in fiction frissons without warders.

Regrettably THE END

THE SHAPE IN THE DARKNESS (5)

And, thankfully, it turned out not to be the end, but regrettable that it started at all, but having got this far, it simply needed to continue. Anyone passing as independent observer would not otherwise have become so implicated in the search of the shape-in-the-darkness, but at least you all now know that it wasn’t some trivial penny-in-the-slot amusement on a seaside pier involving a pirate ship captain coming out of the darkness to scare young kids. We can only hope the shape was more spiritual than that, perhaps an emblem of the Holy Trinity, a sign of God, a deeply religious vision that those of us who are deeply religious often found in caves….

Ah, the property in which the Regrettable One sought to seek a shape-in-the-darkness was not any property whereby an Estate Agent would be involved, because a cave is not man-made even though, on second thoughts, you could possibly furnish and live in it. However, on third thoughts, the cave could well be on someone’s owned land. Hmmm, a running river often passes through owned land, it is true, but does the owner own the river or just its banks? The law of Riparian Rights is a complex one, I guess. But what about a cave? Cavern Rights of Covenant create a whole minefield, I’m told.

Whatever the case, the Voice of Legend now tells us that the shape-seeker seeks not a shape-sitter or shape-shifter in a haunted property but something squatting in a forgotten cave, its muscles straining — a cave with such a shape as Platonic Form foreshadowed on its presumably craggy wall, a shape that was a shadowy third cast between the seeker and the REAL straining form without a visible source of light to cast any shadow at all.

A cave usually has only one way out: the way you went in. But the seeker froze mid-frisson. He had evidently sensed you independently observing him from behind. Regret was not even nearly strong enough a word to convey his emotions at that point. To be continued. Although promises can be broken.