October 8, 2025

Shadows
by L.N. Hunter

Click here to listen to this story on the Kaidankai podcast.


There was no pain, just a numbness that covered the entire left side of Paul’s body. He lay at the side of the road, gaze oriented across the tarmac. He was unable to move his head. Later, he couldn’t recall if he’d even been able to blink.
But he remembered what he saw.
The blur of the road surface too close to focus on; farther away, the yellow Honda Accord on its roof. Was the horn blaring? There’s always a horn blaring in circumstances like these, but Paul could never work out if he was recollecting the detail from his accident or just some fragments of TV programs he’d seen. Or maybe it was just a ringing in his ears. The yellow Honda Accord… A woman was wedged in the windshield, half in, half out of the car. He had no memory of the crash though he had a sense of seeing her shocked expression – wide eyes behind thick-rimmed glasses and an ‘O’-shaped mouth.
Somehow, he ended up lying on the ground, while she was in the upturned car. He couldn’t tell if she was alive or dead, but there was something moving around her.
At first, he thought they were plastic bags or sheets. Translucent grey shapes two to three feet across with no discernible thickness, fluttering in the breeze. Except there was no breeze that day – he was certain of that.
The first sheet had wafted across from the other side of the road, creeping up on the upside-down car as if stalking it. The thing looked as if it was investigating the vehicle, probing around it for something worthy of its attention. It stopped at the woman. As Paul stared, another shape slithered into his line of sight from somewhere along the street. It exhibited the same sort of drifting, stalking motion towards the front of the car. Three more turned up as he watched, making their way to the shattered windshield, where they huddled. It looked like they were sniffing, investigating the woman’s body. The creatures started to wrap themselves around her. Were they eating her?
He saw the ambulance arrive. The sheets jerked back, as if startled by the arrival, but quickly returned to the woman. The ambulance brought another two of the things, which emerged from the back door when the paramedics opened it. The paramedics split up, one hastening to the car and one coming towards Paul, each with a sheet fluttering behind.
As the thing got closer, he could see a pulsing within it, a darkening and lightening, and a tracing of black veins trailing out to the edges. The corners flexed and stretched, extending into probing tendrils, putting him in mind of those stingray eggs he recalls seeing on the beach, mermaid’s purses he thought they were called. The paramedic leaned close and must have said something – Paul saw her lips move, though he heard nothing. Nothing but the ringing in his ears, or was it the car horn? The giant mermaid’s purse following her took up a position in front of his head. It didn’t totally obscure his vision of the paramedic, but blurred and distorted her face, as if he was looking through frosted glass. It floated closer, and he felt a clammy pressure on his face, the first physical sensation since the car had hit him. He heard a murmur, but couldn’t make out any words, and then he couldn’t remember any more.
Paul awoke in a hospital ward. He was told how lucky he was, suffering no more than a broken left tibia, concussion and some bruising. The doctor said he’d have to stay for a couple of days’ observation, and then he could go home with a lightweight cast.
The driver of the car that had hit him was dead. A vision of the woman’s startled expression flashed before Paul, then the shattered windshield, with those things wrapping themselves around her. He wanted to ask how she’d died – was it the accident, or had she been suffocated?
Pain tore at him that first night in the hospital, despite the drugs. As he drifted in and out of tortured sleep, he kept catching glimpses of the strange sheets. They glided along the corridors, following staff and other patients. Sometimes they clustered around other beds in his ward, but they left him alone. He thought they looked like a school of jellyfish canopies.
He told the doctor who came in the morning that he might be seeing things. She studied him with a mixture of sympathy and skepticism on her face. She shone a light in his eyes and got him to follow her finger as she moved it in front of his face. Everything seemed normal, she said, but she’d arrange for a scan in the afternoon.
As he was wheeled along endless corridors to the MRI room, Paul saw more of the sheets, though they seemed to be waiting in corners or at doors, rather than following any particular person.
His brain was pronounced healthy and uninjured at an initial glance, but the neurological specialist would study the scans in detail later that week.
He slept a dreamless sleep the following night. After that, he was sent home.
Although climbing the stairs to his second-floor flat was slow and agonizing, it was pleasant to escape from the hospital and from those… things. Those creatures. Paul switched on the kettle and popped a couple of painkillers. As he stood by the sink, sipping his tea, he let his eyes roam over the street outside his window.
He sighed. A couple of months of hobbling around in a plaster cast were ahead of him, then another few months of painful physiotherapy. It could’ve been a lot worse: that poor driver. He couldn’t remember the accident. How had the car hit him? His memory started when he was lying there, glued to the pavement. He shuddered as he remembered the sheets – was she dead already or had they killed her? Did they eat her, eat her soul? He opened the window for some fresh air, letting in the sounds from outside as well.
A cluster of schoolkids were piling into the shop across the road, laughing and shouting at each other. The seemed to be at the age where all conversation had to be carried out at maximum volume. A woman pushed a buggy containing a crying child, while she had her phone clasped to the side of her head. A group of men were striding towards the betting shop, one of them coughing and blowing his nose. An old man slowly hobbled along the other side of the road. Just a normal street scene. As he watched the unsteady elderly pedestrian, Paul half-smiled to himself and thought that was how he’d be walking for the foreseeable future.
Paul went pale and froze. A sheet creature had peeled itself from the ground behind the old man, to flap and writhe around his head. Another joined it, and the two took turns in fluttering at each other – it seemed as if they were communicating. He rubbed his eyes and looked again. There were lots of the sheets out there, almost perfectly camouflaged on walls and pavement. The only clue to their existence was the pulsing of their veins, visible only if he focused closely enough. Individuals occasionally emerged from their resting places to follow other one person or another.
Paul saw one sheet, a small one, sniffing at the corpse of a roadkill pigeon. Half a dozen of the apparitions followed the betting shop customers but were concentrated around the coughing man within the group. It was clear that the things seemed to favor death or illness – were they ‘ambulance chasers,’ out to get what they could from misery. Or did they cause suffering themselves?
The old man was about to pass close to some scaffolding on a building having its upper windows replaced when the sheets started to flap more quickly. They darted in front of him, and three more – no, four, then five – raced to join them. The man gave no sign of seeing them, but he seemed to react to the creatures’ presence nonetheless, hesitating and half-stumbling before he took his next step. Just then, a pane of glass fell from the scaffolding and shattered at the pensioner’s feet, dagger-like shards missing him by mere inches. One of the workmen called down, “Jesus, man, are you all right?” The old man looked up and mumbled something, before continuing on his slow journey as if the near miss was of no importance, while the sheets all faded into the background.
Had they been jockeying for position to be first to the old man had glass hit him? Or might they have been trying to save him? Another thought wormed its way into Paul’s mind: had they caused the pane to drop? He’d been so focused on the old man that he’d not noticed whether there were any of the creatures higher up where the glass had fallen from?
That evening Paul drank several shots of cheap vodka along with his painkillers. He knew he shouldn’t mix alcohol and medication, but he was sure he’d be awake otherwise, worrying into the small hours of the night, and he damn-well wanted to sleep with no dreams.
Paul felt surprisingly clear-headed the following morning. He’d convinced himself that the creatures were phantoms conjured by his overactive imagination since the crash. The sheets didn’t exist. He peered out his window, squinting as he concentrated on every shadow. To his relief, he saw nothing out of the ordinary.
Even so, half an hour later, he held himself at the front door, heart thudding, for several minutes before he built up the courage to twist the handle and take a step outside.
He was almost at the drugstore when he noticed the first sheet, lazily drifting in the wake of a hunched woman who looked like she was in pain. He twisted round, almost tripping over his crutches, to see if any of the creatures were following him. There were none, or perhaps they had scurried away before he could see them.
He knew he wasn’t mad. He couldn’t be. They did exist, but only he could see them.
His phone rang, startling him so much that he almost fell over. He fumbled the phone out of his pocket, dropping one of his crutches. It was his doctor, asking him to come in as soon as he could – they’d found something in his scan.
In the examination room, the doctor pointed to what Paul assumed must be a picture of the inside of his head. “We didn’t notice this before, because we were looking only for signs of injury relating to the accident. However, a review yesterday showed this.” The doctor tapped a finger on a dark patch on the screen. “We performed confirmatory tests on your blood and, I’m sorry, Mr. Jones, but it is a malignant tumor. Given its position, we can’t operate, but we should start chemotherapy as soon as possible. I must warn you, however, that the prognosis is not good.”
A dozen or more sheets followed him back from the hospital. Paul wanted to wave his arms, or his crutches, to disperse them, but then decided that the creatures didn’t exist. They couldn’t be real. They were figments of his unwelcome friend, the tumor. They didn’t follow people or cause misery; his damaged brain had fashioned them out of nothing.
At night, he could sense them hovering over his body, smothering him, even though there was no physical sensation. He deliberately kept his eyes clamped shut – he didn’t want to see them. Paul had peeked once and found the sight of them clustered above him so terrifying that he’d wet the bed. He’d been paralyzed, unable to move, unable to get out of the bed or wave them away.
Each night, he sensed there were more than the night before. He didn’t know how they’d crammed themselves into his bedroom, but he wasn’t going to open his eyes to look. One touched him and he shrieked, still refusing to open his eyes. Then others touched him. He could feel gentle strokes and caresses, and could hear indistinct whispering. Paul relaxed and drifted into sleep.
He awoke late the next morning, still covered by hundreds of the sheet things. The whispering became louder and more distinct, and he thought he recognized some of the voices within the murmuring. His parents were there, though they’d died many years before. Other long-dead relatives and school friends. The voices were soothing and welcomed him. They said not to be frightened and Paul would be with them soon.
                                                                         ***
The nurse tapped the medical notes, as he pulled the bed curtains closed and the porter preparing the trolley.
“This one’s a sad case. Do you remember the accident, oh, three weeks ago? It was in the news. This guy, Jones, almost made it – he seemed to be conscious when Marie and Colin picked him up, but lapsed into a coma after they’d managed to patch up his injuries. Oh, he was a mess – shattered ribcage, broken collarbone, his arms and legs were like jigsaw puzzles I tell you. Punctured lung as well, burst spleen. They did what they could, but he’d certainly never walk again. I’d say, the state his body was in, he was probably better off unconscious, poor guy.
“He hasn’t moved since he got here. The only sign of life was the pulse of the heart monitor.
“Last night, his body just gave up. No idea what happened. He seemed to be stable, but his heart just stopped. Mind you, see the smile on his face. First expression I’ve seen since we got him here. What do you think? He looks content, wouldn’t you say? I reckon he must be happier wherever he’s gone to now.
“Say, is there a window open in here? I felt a draught just now.”


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L.N. Hunter’s comic fantasy novel, ‘The Feather and the Lamp,’ sits alongside works in anthologies such as ‘The Monsters Next Door’ and ‘Best of British Science Fiction 2022’ as well as Short Édition’s ‘Short Circuit’ and the ‘Horrifying Tales of Wonder’ podcast. There have also been papers in the IEEE ‘Transactions on Neural Networks,’ which are probably somewhat less relevant and definitely less fun. When not writing, L.N. unwinds in a disorganised home in rural Cambridgeshire, UK, along with two cats and a soulmate.