The Shadow

The paintings

The darkness was closing in on the daylight while I was swinging slowly by the lake. The rest of the day was pretty much uneventful. I did not enter the basement after that but, even though I was out of that place, for some reason my mind was still locked up in that unlocked basement.

I could not help but think about those paintings. I tried to push away the thoughts by concentrating on the calmness of the lake and the cool winds hitting me. But the paintings seemed to be dominating my mind. Every time i tried to think about something else, the brutal paintings swam up in my mind. I remembered each one of them so clearly. One of them showed a dead girl with blood all over her and now that i thought about it the room in which she was lying looked a lot like my room . Another one showed a girl swinging beside the lake, but this place looked a lot darker than it is. Just when I pictured that painting, I felt something. I looked at the house instantly and thought that wouldn't it be the same picture if someone looked out of the house right now? What if those paintings meant something. What if someone was trying to give a message. I jumped off the swing immediately and rushed inside the house almost impetuously aiming for the basement. I knew I would not be able to stop thinking about it until I had solved it.

I banged open the basement door and raced down the stairs. The paintings were covered up once again. I guessed mom and dad must have covered them up probably considering that they were not a pleasant sight for me and Leo. I uncovered them one by one examining each one of them very closely. One of them really got to me, it showed a middle aged man holding a knife in a girl's neck and the weirdest part was it was the same girl. It was her in every picture. I could not help but wonder, did she really exist? Did something so horrible really happened to her.

One of the pictures i could not figure out the place. In that one, the girl looked as if she was half dead and in great pain, the background was somewhat grey like the cement kind. the painting really spoke about her pain. It really hit my nerves and I thought that, that enough investigating for one day. As I turned to go I glanced at the piano once again, it had the same glossy surface. Every thing else had a logical explanation but the abnormally clean piano had none. I circled the piano, examining it from every angle and while doing that I was somehow scared by my own shadow. My shadow. It looked unusually dark. Then I looked away and told myself to stop thinking so much. To lighten the mood a bit i started making shadow animals with my hands. I was pretty good at it, I made a doe when suddenly a change in shadows startled me to death. I really needed to take a break I thought, for now i had started hallucinating. I paced towards the stairs and yet again by a very normal human impulse I looked at the same wall again. Now there were two shadows of me one lighter than the other. the darker one had somehow managed to maintain the same darkness even though I had moved away from there. Thanks to science I knew about the umbra and penumbra of shadows but here the darker one was abnormally dark and the lighter one looked like my real shadow. I chose to ignore it and went to my room.