The Night Reclaims Its Shadows by Dale L. Sproule
The nights after Lana left her were the longest that Rachael ever lived through.
She would climb to the loft and lie in bed, sleepless, as the cold arctic wind moaned through the eaves of their tiny A-frame house. The floors, the canted walls, the trees outside would creak and moan, the shadows shifting through the curtain as she hopelessly awaited her wife’s return.
Lana couldn’t take the isolation; days even lonelier than Rachael’s own, traveling from northern town to town, treating residents as best she could without the proper equipment and medications. Sometimes radioing for help and waiting for the orange helicopter to descend like a throbbing storm on a cloud of icy light.
A few times the weather turned and kept her home, which was when Rachael learned that as hard as it was for her, it was worse for Lana, trapped there, the students from her remote school indefinitely caught in quarantine until the pandemic passed. She only occasionally interacted with the kids on the oscillating and infrequent internet, wondering why she had to be here in person waiting for classes to resume. She could do this from the city, from a foreign land, from anywhere but here, waiting every night alone, pining for her absent lover, praying she would come back safe, untouched by the virus that crept between the trees, down the mineshafts and through the bunkhouses. She could walk all the way to the schoolhouse without seeing another soul.
Lana had waited until Rachael was home, then wept in her arms, all apologies, regrets, and sweet goodbyes before jumping on a plane. In her place, the shifting shadows, the endless nights, the howling wind.
When Rachel called, Lana’s phone rang upstairs. She phoned and emailed Lana’s family, their mutual friends, but found no answers. Pleading exhaustion, personal emergency, she took a few days off work that stretched into weeks.
Some nights, Rachael would eventually sleep; on others she would lie there, staring out the window. Somehow bidden from that place, a new warmth grew in the curling sheets, an urgent whisper darted through the rafters. One night she turned over, and saw something between her and the window. The sky was cloudy. There was no light source, yet as she gazed into the black on black she made out a vague round shape, blocking out the pale outline of the window sill. Not the whole thing, just the bottom corner. When she couldn’t hold her breath any longer, she inhaled a sweet floral scent; much fainter than Lana’s hand lotion, but enough to soften the perpetual hand sanitizer smell of her own hands. There was someone lying in the bed beside her. It didn’t upset her. It was just what she needed. She slept.
One night she woke up, holding the spectre close. She tried to be strong and not to sob and blubber, as soft hands stroked her cheeks and a river of kisses trickled down her neck, between her breasts, across her belly, moving inward from her hips, her thighs, the fluttering warmth a sacral spring melting her from the inside.
She started going to bed earlier and sleeping more deeply.
One night after a day at home washing, dusting, splitting wood in a drive toward exhaustion, she sat staring into the now empty dinner plate, with her back to the crackling woodstove, feeling almost at peace when the overhead lights began to flicker, at the verge of going out.
She saw a gentle motion, the air bending serpentine along the floor, like the pictures of a Martian dust devil Lana had shown her just before she left. Was this her nighttime lover come early, Rachael wondered, pushing back her chair and climbing to her feet as the apparition approached. She held out her arms, but instead of an embrace, there came a gutteral rush of wind; disapproving, admonishing, jealous. The air swirled to the high ceiling, to the shadows beyond the dangling lights, drawing down a column as frigid and unyielding as the air outside. Slivers of ice cut into her cheeks, driving her back, a blade of it piercing her breast. And from the stairs, a scream of terror – and a realization; this invisible being had not come for her. It had come for her shadow lover.
She’d already lost the woman she loved to this vast emptiness, and now again it homed in on her, intending to steal all what little she had left. With her arms outstretched, Rachael tried to corral it, hold it, guide it, the blades cutting into her like a thousand shards of glass as she pushed it to the front door and cast it back into the cold darkness where it belonged.
When she closed the door behind her, she was ravaged. Ice hung from her hair, icicles rammed through the flannel of her shirt as she tried to grasp them, pull them out, all pink with her blood. Turning to see for the first and only time, her shadow lover, as beautiful as she had imagined, even with bereavement dulling the spark in her eyes; she was there to catch Rachael as she fell and carry her back inside, laying her down on the warm patch of floor in front of the stove. Rachael could see her reflection in the glass door as it opened, reaching in to re-emerge with flames cupped in her slender hands as she dressed Rachael’s wounds with fire.
She looked so much like Lana, her hair shifting shadows across her face, her gown moving like a curtain in the smoke.
As Rachael healed, her lover, the daughter of the arctic night, moved more slowly, her arms reflecting the lights as they slowly came back on. Disappearing in the glare. The sleeves of her gown shifted like the northern lights fading back into shadow.
“Don’t go,” Rachael whispered to the face reflected in the glass door she had spent the morning scrubbing. And glancing toward the flame, saw her lover’s smile rising and dissipating, in a wisp of rising steam.
Rachael reached in, the embers igniting in her hands. She saw her own face reflected in the light from her burning sleeves and heard the passion she thought she had lost, rising in her screams.
“I’ll come with you.”
When the ashes stirred and were lifted on the wind, there was someone to catch her.
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Dale L. Sproule has over 50 published stories in markets ranging from Ellery Queen’s to Pulphouse the Hardback #1 to The Colored Lens and The Exile Book of New Canadian Noir. His collections include Psychedelia Gothique (2014) and Psychedelia Noir (2021). His first novel, The Human Template appeared in 2020. The second, Battle for the Carnivorous Forest. will appear in 2022.
