It was a night like any other when the moan of the wind was told to the trees by the old man, and the moon did not dare to light in the sky. Amelia Carter shut the door to her cozy antique shop, her lungs filling with the cold air. The quaint little village of Ravenswood had always seemed ageless, yet tonight it appeared to be stuck in an uncanny hush. She re-tied her scarf and then looked towards home and the sound of her boots on the snow-covered cobblestones filled the air.
The clocktower rang midnight, its sound bouncing off the darkness all around. Midnight had always carried a strange weight in Ravenswood, a time when the veil between the seen and unseen seemed perilously thin. Amelia knows all the stories about the Shadow of Night, who comes every midnight and haunts the town’s spaces for over 100 years. She laughed stories off as nothing more than folklore, but as if a little prickle at the nape of her neck, urged her to move, quicken her pace.
The side of her vision caught a flash as she entered Elm Street. Across the street, beneath a Gaslamp that sputtered feebly, stood a figure. It was unbelievably high and was covered in a shroud of black, and the shape was unblameable, but dread was palpable. Her body froze in place, each thundering heartbeat louder than the last. The figure did not move, yet its presence seemed to seep into the marrow of her bones.
She took a cautious step backward, her instincts screaming at her to run. The figure mirrored her movement, gliding noiselessly. Amelia’s breath caught, as she realized that the black shape wasn’t cast by the Gaslamp or any light for that matter. It was independent, alive.
Amelia spun around and took off running, her shoes landing on the frozen street. She wouldn’t turn around (but) she sensed it closing behind, a phantom stalker under the stars. Her house was just around the corner. If she could only reach the safety of her front door.
She slung it onto the porch, fighting to keep hold of the keys. The silhouette hung at the border of her garden, an insubstantial shapeless man, that bloated and shifted with the intensity of her terror. The lock slid, and she plunged into the interior, slamming the door behind her. She pressed her back against it, heaving, her gaze flitting about the windows. The shadow was gone.
Amelia lay in bed and the events of the night spun in her thoughts over and over. She had heard the stories—how the Shadow would appear to those who were marked. The labeled ones were described as having done something bad, and the Shadow was their punishment.
By morning, the town buzzed with rumors. Margaret Doyle, the baker, claimed to have seen the Shadow near the cemetery. Sheriff Carter dismissed it as a trick of the light, but Amelia knew better. She had seen it. Felt it. It wasn’t a trick.
Fueled by determination, Amelia went to the library to find the right answer. The structure was a vestige of Ravenswood’s former times, its bookshelves filled with faded volumes and lost wisdom. She sought out Mrs. Hargrove, the librarian, a woman who seemed as old as the books she tended.
As the shadow trembles at midnight,” Amelia said, speaking in a hushed tone. “What do you know about it?”
Mrs. Hargrove’s rheumy eyes narrowed. “Why do you ask?”
“I saw it,” Amelia confessed. “Last night.”
The librarian’s expression darkened. “You’d best leave it be, child. The Shadow is a curse, a result of lying and murder. It doesn’t come for no reason.”
Amelia pressed on. “If the clock hits twelve and time stops, then my pain will manifest,” she whispered.”
Mrs. Hargrove paused briefly before pointing to a bookcase piled high with a leather-bound book. “That one. ‘Legends of Ravenswood.’ It may contain the answers you need.
“There’s got to be some way to stop it for good,’ she thought. The guilty will be brought to account but there will be no solace for them all.
Amelia’s fingers trembled as she read. Accusations against The Shadow’s victims, all said to have disappeared without a trace, were that their defilements were finally cleansed only with death. But why had it come for her? She had done nothing to deserve its wrath.
That evening, Amelia got prepared with as much as she knew. She placed a circle of salt around her home, an old superstition she hoped would hold. She lit candles and whispered prayers, her heart heavy with dread. Midnight approached, each tick of the clock amplifying her anxiety.
When the clock struck twelve, the candles danced and died to the shadows. A chill swept through the room, and Amelia knew it had arrived. The Shadow oozed through the spaces in the walls, building into a figure that loomed above her. Its aura was a crushing presence, its core being a void with which light and hope blink out.
“Why are you here?” Amelia demanded, her voice shaking.
The Shadow’s response was not words but images—memories not her own. She noticed Tobias Grayson, lying lifeless in the snow. She saw Eliza’s anguish, her pleas for justice ignored. And there it was—her image, strangely bent and distorted.
Amelia’s breath caught. The Shadow wasn’t after her; it was after her family. Her great-great-grandfather, Samuel Harper, had taken part in the mob that condemned Eliza. The curse had moved through generations, but it had at last reached her.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I didn’t know.”
an offering of truth and penance. She plucked a sheet of parchment and wrote down a confession, recounting the ancestor’s acts of sin and her desire to make amends.
She laid the confession in the middle of the salt ring and lowered it to the bottom beside it. “Please,” she begged. “Let this end.”
The Shadow hesitated, its form flickering. Immediately it had been gone, it disappeared, leaving an overwhelming silence. The candles reignited, their light fragile but steady.
Amelia’s encounter with the Shadow became another whispered tale in Ravenswood. She never looked upon it again, but she brought all the weight of her family’s transgressions and their understanding of the existence of certain curses from which they could never fully recover. The Shadow would always walk at midnight, a reminder of the past and a warning to the future.
Also Read: Voices in My Walls
Every night, as the clock tower rang out twelve hours past midnight, Amelia would sit by her window, watching darkness, and she’d know that the veil was thin, and the shadows always heard.