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No one can say I lived a blameless life. Even Toby, in his usual coarse manner, would taunt and say, “You’re a bloody criminal, mate.” And perhaps he was right. Ten years of my life spent in a cell – seven for robbery, three for the audacity to try to escape. My regret was, at best, formal, a gesture towards decency and not an embrace. If one believed in such quaint notions as Hell, then surely my path was set. Yet, I had not anticipated the abyss would yawn before me so soon, nor that it would manifest in so insidious a form – that is, my own shadow.

The first omen revealed itself five and a half months past. A morning like any other, the monotony of life unbroken – until, in the dim haze of dawn, my shadow moved. Not with me, in reflexive imitation, but of its own volition. An arm flexed, fingers twitching, as though awakening from eons of stillness. I myself dismissed it, attributing it to the prior night’s whiskey induced stupor, yet unease slithered into my bones, an intrusive whisper in my mind. In an act of foolish reassurance, I swore off drink, hoping sobriety would banish the grotesque illusion.

It did not.

The second occurrence was worse. I had been visiting Ohio, amongst my sister’s family; a routine visit of mundane nature. It was there, in the pale glow of a lamplight, that my shadow turned against me. It shook its head, slow and deliberate, then raised a spectral hand, drawing a phantom finger across its throat. The message was clear. The terror was real. No drunken haze clouded my mind this time. I fled before dawn, leaving behind naught but a cryptic note and a sibling’s confusion. Toby, ever the cynic, scoffed at my tale, dismissing it as the ramblings of a restless mind. “Quit making up tall tales and get a damn life,” he said.

Desperation led me to seek counsel, though in hindsight, it was a futile endeavour. A man named Lucifer, of all names, took me on as a patient. His profession was a farce; he spent our sessions weaving empty reassurances, blind to the thing that haunted me. “Scared of your own shadow,” he chuckled—a phrase so banal, so woefully ignorant of the truth. My shadow was not a mere trick of light. It was watching. It was waiting. It was patient.

The final night was one of foretold doom. December’s chill clung to my bones as I wandered the desolate streets, each step reverberating through the hollow silence. The trees loomed, skeletal, their branches clawing at the heavens, their forms bathed in a ghostly pallor. Fear clutched at my throat. I sought solace beneath the artificial glow of a streetlamp, only to witness the true horror that had stalked me across the expanse of months.

It rose from the earth, an amorphous writhing mass, as if darkness itself had birthed a blasphemous, wriggling spawn. It coalesced, forming something vaguely human yet utterly alien. A skull of bone-white leered down at me, marked with sanguine streaks, its hollow sockets shifting—fluid, infinite, unknowable. My limbs failed me. My breath was stolen by the gravity of its gaze. It exhaled, its breath a fetid whisper of decay and ruin, and then it spoke.

“Don’t try to run…”

The voice was not a sound but a tremor within my soul, a rasping intonation of something beyond comprehension. A great chasm yawned open in the fabric of existence, and I was swallowed whole.

I suppose they never found my body, though I doubt they searched for long. My absence is but a fleeting curiosity, an inconvenience to those few who might once have known me. Perhaps my sister will mourn. Perhaps they will hold a funeral, an empty coffin lowered into the earth to be forgotten. But it does not matter.

Because here is the truth I have come to know: We are all condemned, bound by fate to an end that is neither merciful nor just. The abyss does not care. It simply waits.