Grotesque encounter · 2 min read · Set in Marchmont House ·
Lit Like a Surgery
A housekeeper finds her feet without shadows, and then finds what has been drinking them.
Ottilie Brandt had kept Marchmont House for twenty-two years and could tell, from the foot of the stairs, which lamps had been left burning in the night. That morning she stopped on the third stair with her hand on the rail. Every lamp in the house was burning, and the library was lit like a surgery.
It was the evenness that was wrong. In a room of old furniture the morning light makes a hundred small shadows: under the desk, behind the globe, along the spines of the books. This light had none. The globe stood in the middle of the floor as though it had been cut from paper and laid down. The grandfather clock had no darkness behind it. She looked at her own feet in their black housekeeping shoes and they were simply there, like two pieces of coal on a white cloth, with nothing beneath them.
She opened the curtains. She found the powder on the sill: fine, ash-grey, soft as flour. It came away on her fingers and left no mark.
She looked up.
It was folded over the top of the green-shaded reading lamp like a coat over a chair. She had thought of moths as small things. This one was the size of a winter overcoat, its wings the colour of old ash, each marked with a wide round eye-spot that was not an eye at all but a hole, a place where something had been taken out of the pattern. Its body hung beneath the wings, rolled and papery like a closed umbrella. As she watched, the wings drew in and out with a dry whisper, and the light in the room dimmed by a hair, and brightened again, as if the lamp itself were being drunk.
She did not scream. She remembered, afterwards, that she had thought, quite clearly, *It is eating the lamp's shadow, and it has not got to mine.*
She backed away with her hands out. At the door she turned and saw, on the wall opposite the moth, the one shadow in the room: a long, thin shape, the shape of a woman standing in a doorway, but facing the wrong way.
Three days later the shadows came back, one at a time. The cat came home with one slightly too large for it. Brandt had the animal photographed, in the end, because she could not bear not to know. In the photographs the shadow is a different animal. It sits where the cat sits and moves when the cat moves, and it is, plainly, something that has been learning to be a cat.
She keeps the library lamps shaded, now, with salt on the sill. She does not look at the wall opposite the lamp in the evenings. And she watches her own shadow when she climbs the stairs, to be sure that it is still going up when she is.