There are shadow-things who dwell in the dance of a candle's flame, in the sigh of wind through a widow's veil, or in a moment of cold sweat like a fever devoid of sickness. There are spirits unlike the shadow-things; some may call them ghosts, but he recognizes them as another species of phantom. Ghost, he thinks, is a term reserved only for the restless dead. Many will say of the shadow-things that they are ghosts. This is untrue. They live—though in ways incomprehensible to their cousins of the human breed. They devour, they desire, and often these things are one-in-the-same. Ghosts, he imagines, are what remain of the shadow beings, when they die. They watch through borrowed eyes. His eyes, and the eyes of anyone else who will loan them.... They lurk behind shoulders, and he wonders if the meaning of salt thrown backwards is a reference to them. “You've seen her again...” the shadow says. And yes, the voice—like the sigh of a cat's whiskers across mold-dusted plaster—comes from the emptiness behind him. “Will you tell me about her?” The voice is inhuman. It carries no sound. They are not meat-creatures, and so their speech is not meat speech, dependent on lungs and air, and cords in the throat. The voice is raw with blood, desire, and claws that rake the insides of his ears; he feels the trickle of blood down the side of his face, down the side of his neck. Reaching involuntarily to wipe it away, his fingers meet only the collar of his shirt and flesh. There is no blood, but the shadow-thing's voice-claws always draw the sensation of wounds. “Later,” he says. “When it is darker...when I have more time to think.” Later. One word. A promise. The shadow-thing will hold him to it. *** *** As always, thank you for viewing, reading, and commenting. Especially since this was such a difficult image for me to discover. It's the cropped section of a photograph, heavily manipulated so that it more closely resembles a painting. I'm glad it's finally done, and I'm glad that it's spawned an idea that I'll probably expand upon later.