Grotesque encounter · 4 min read · Set in Tavernier ·
Hollowmoth at the Tavernier
A barman at the Tavernier sees a moth the size of an overcoat settle on the lampshade above the bar, and by closing time every shadow in the room has been eaten and the lamps burn brighter and emptier than they should.
The Tavernier had been a coaching inn once, and the bar still had its low beams and its brass lamps hanging from iron hooks above the counter. Ned Harker had worked the late shift there for six years. He liked the room at closing time, when the last regulars had gone and the lamps were turned low and the chairs were up on the tables, and he could hear the old house settling around him like a sleeping dog.
On a wet Thursday in November a moth came in through the open kitchen door and settled on the central lampshade.
It was the size of an overcoat. Its wings were a soft dusty grey, marked with pale eyes, and they folded and unfolded slowly over the glowing brass, as if it were breathing the light in. Ned stood with a tea towel in his hand and watched it. The lamp did not flicker. The moth did not seem to be feeding. It only sat there in the warm glow, very still, and the room, which had been full of the usual sounds, went quiet.
By the time the last customer had left, Ned noticed the shadows.
There had been shadows in the bar all evening. The chair legs had thrown long dark lines across the boards, the bottles on the back shelf had cast soft shapes on the mirror, the cue rack had made a neat grid on the wall. Now they were gone. Not faded. Gone. The light fell evenly over everything, flat and bright, and nothing in the room had an edge to it. The bottles looked like bottles pasted on a photograph. The chairs looked like chairs drawn on paper. Ned put his hand out to the counter and saw his own shadow vanish from under his arm, and the skin of his hand, in that light, looked thin and pale and strangely unfinished.
The moth lifted from the lampshade. It drifted slowly across the room, over the tables, and where it passed the shadows that had been hiding under them were drawn up into its wings, and folded away, and were not seen again. Ned watched it settle on the wall above the fireplace, where the old coaching bill was framed, and feed on the dark patch beneath the glass.
He could not move for a while. Then he went to the back room to fetch the cash box, and found the shadows there had gone too. The mop bucket stood in a patch of brilliant light. The stacked crates had no sides to them. He picked up the box and felt it weigh nothing at all.
In the morning, the landlord came in to open up. He stood in the doorway and looked round the bar with a puzzled frown, and said the place looked very bright, very clean, as if somebody had been at it with a polish. Then he asked Ned why he was standing so still.
Ned said he could not see his own shadow.
The landlord laughed and said that was the lamps. They had been rewired in the summer and the new bulbs were too strong. He would ask the electrician to come and tone them down. He turned off the lights, and the bar went dark, and Ned found that he could see shadows again, faint and grey, lying in the corners of the room where the morning light did not reach.
But the moth was still there. It had settled on the lampshade again, small and grey and quiet, and every shadow in the bar was folded into the soft pale eyes of its wings. The landlord did not notice it. He was counting the till. Ned watched the moth open its wings, very slowly, and saw in the dusty grey patterns the shape of the landlord's own shadow, lying flat across the boards, like a coat that had been taken off and left on a chair, waiting to be put on again.
Ned has since moved his shift to the afternoons. The Tavernier is still open late. The lamps are still bright. Each night, at closing time, the moth comes back to the lampshade, and the room goes quiet, and the regulars, when they leave, walk out into the street with no shadows at all, and stand for a moment under the streetlamp, puzzled, before they go home.