Shadowfires

had always been out to get him, though they were even more determined
now than ever. Sometimes he thought urgently, Remember the mice,
the mice, the deranged mice bashing themselves to pieces against the
walls of their cages, and more than once he even said it aloud,
“Remember the mice, the mice,” but he had no idea what those words
meant: what mice, where, when?
    He saw strange things, too.
    Sometimes he saw people who could not possibly be there: his long-
dead mother, a hated uncle who had abused him when he had been a
little boy, a neighborhood bully who had terrorized him in grade
school. Now and then, as if suffering from the delirium tremens of a
chronic alcoholic, he saw things crawling out of the walls, bugs and
snakes and more frightening creatures that defied definition.
    Several times, he was certain that he saw a path of perfectly
black flagstones leading down into a terrible darkness in the earth.
Always compelled to follow those stones, he repeatedly discovered the
path was illusory, a figment of his morbid and fevered
imagination.
    Of all the apparitions and illusions that flickered past his eyes
and through his damaged mind, the most unusual and the most
disturbing were the shadowfires. They leaped up unexpectedly and made
a crackling sound that he not only heard but felt in his
bones. He would be moving right along, walking with reasonable sure-
footedness, passing among the living with some conviction,
functioning better than he dared believe he could-when suddenly a
fire would spring up in the shadowed corners of a room or in the
shadows clustered beneath a tree, in any deep pocket of gloom, flames
the shade of wet blood with hot silvery edges, startling him. And
when he looked close, he could see that nothing was burning, that the
flames had erupted out of thin air and were fed by nothing
whatsoever, as if the shadows themselves were burning and made
excellent fuel in spite of their lack of substance. When the fires
faded and were extinguished, no signs of them remained-no ashes,
charred fragments, or smoke stains.
    Though he had never been afraid of fire before he died, had never
entertained the pyrophobic idea that he was destined to die in
flames, he was thoroughly terrified of these hungry phantom fires.
When he peered into the flickering brightness, he felt that just
beyond lay a mystery he must solve, though the solution would bring
him unimaginable anguish.
    In his few moments of relative lucidity, when his intellectual
capacity was nearly what it once had been, he told himself that the
illusions of flames merely resulted from misfiring synapses in his
injured brain, electrical pulses shorting through the damaged
tissues. And he told himself that the illusions frightened him
because, above all else, he was an intellectual, a man whose life had
been a life of the mind, so he had every right to be
frightened by signs of brain deterioration. The tissues would heal,
the shadowfires fade forever, and he would be all right. That was
also what he told himself. But in his less lucid moments, when the
world turned tenebrous and eerie, when he was gripped by confusion
and animal fear, he looked upon the shadowfires with unalloyed horror
and was sometimes reduced to paralysis by something he thought he
glimpsed within-or beyond-the dancing flames.
    Now, as dawn insistently pressed upon the resistant darkness of
the mountains, Eric Leben ascended from stasis, groaned softly for a
while, then louder, and finally woke. He sat up on the edge of the
bed. His mouth was stale; he tasted ashes. His head was filled with
pain. He touched his broken pate. It was no worse; his skull was not
coming apart.
    The meager glow of morning entered by two windows, and a small
lamp was on-not sufficient illumination to dispel all the shadows in
the bedroom, but enough to hurt his extremely sensitive eyes. Watery
and hot, his eyes had been less able to adapt to brightness since he
had risen from the cold steel gurney in the morgue, as if darkness
were his natural habitat now, as if he did not belong in a world
subject either to sun or to man-made light.
    For a couple of minutes he concentrated on his breathing, for his
rate of respiration was irregular, now too slow and deep, now too
fast and shallow. Taking a stethoscope from the nightstand, he
listened to his heart as well. It was beating fast enough to assure
that he would not soon slip back into a state of