Shedding

Recovered Casefile #0054. Date, March 21st, 1991.
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Recording starts. Click. FIRST VOICE: State your name, age, sex, and today’s date. st SECOND VOICE: Quinn [REDACTED]. Sixteen. Female. 21 March 1991. FIRST VOICE: When did it all start? SECOND VOICE: 10th September 1990. My brother’s birthday. But you already knew that, right? And may I say, you look fantastic in those black suits. Very much like shadows.

FIRST VOICE: Let’s stay on topic. The purpose of your being called here is to obtain additional information about the incident. The Board at this institution will decide what action will be taken after hearing the recording of your statement. You’re not the only case, after all. You may begin.

SECOND VOICE: [AUDIBLE DEEP BREATH] Okay, then. My brother was born on one of those summer days that feel like autumn. It was the day I noticed it for the first time…

It was a simple shed at the back of our new house. I saw it from the window in my room, the night we returned from hospital. The house felt different. Colder, somehow. I remember my jumper reeked of bitter antiseptics and sweat, so I had rushed upstairs to get it washed.

It was when one passing car splashed it with a brilliant yellow light – a rare thing, since our new house was in a more rural part of town – that I saw the shed. The car revved, vanishing into the night, but I could still see the afterimage of it emerging from the shadows of the nearby pine trees, an unnatural swelling from the woods.

From that first day, my brother was a crying mess. My mum and dad were always slobbering all over him. As soon as he went back to sleep, both of them would make tea and look out the kitchen window.

I noticed them doing this on each day that followed. On the tenth night, I couldn’t sleep and went into the kitchen for some water. I found my father staring motionless at the back door, his hand on the lock, staring out toward where I knew the shed must have been. I slipped past him, grabbed a glass of water, and left. He barely moved an inch.

I asked my mother one October afternoon about the shed. She was in the kitchen at one end of the table breastfeeding my brother, eyes focused on his rosy face. He was only a month old; roughly the size of a small pillow.

“Don’t be silly, Quinn,” she said. Her gaze remained on him even as she spoke. She continued, voice lilting, “It’s always been there.”

“I swear, it wasn’t,” I insisted as I sat down on the opposite side of the table. “Maybe it was covered by the trees,” she said absently. “But mum, I swear, I didn’t see-” My brother widened his big eyes, and he burst crying. “There, there,” Mum said softly, caressing his small head. Without lifting her head, she spoke sharply. “Quinn, go see for yourself. You’re upsetting your little brother.”

I stared at her. “Fine,” I said. I stomped out of the kitchen, and as I turned to shut the door behind me, I saw her grinning at my brother. I saw her lips move as she coddled him.

I took a deep breath. A breeze blew air fresh with pine trees. Instantly I felt an urge to run into the forest and never look back. If I did run, it wouldn’t matter to them. I’d be gone from their lives and they wouldn’t bat a single eye. But the courage to run away never came.

Instead, I walked around the house. I stopped a few paces away from it, cautious. It didn’t look threatening at all, but there was a strange way the afternoon golden light seemed to bend around its small, quaint frame. Old greenish paint faded and peeled off in some areas, revealing dull, termite-eaten wood. It was just large enough to fit two people inside. There were no windows, and the two front-opening doors were sealed shut. What I couldn’t fail to notice was the long, silver, metal chain tightly wrapped three or four times around it, and the huge padlock dangling at the front doors, glinting in the afternoon light.

At that time, I couldn’t think of any possible reason why it would be wrapped in chains, and why my parents were acting so dismissive. Now I know why – and this is where people think I’ve gone mad, but it’s the only explanation. The thing inside was controlling them. I don’t know how or why it would do that, but it did. It made them sick.

I walked back to the front door with an odd feeling. The shed was not alive, I kept telling myself. It was just a place right outside the house. Yet it felt warm, like an old friend.

The days shrunk as winter grew closer. Three months passed without much happening. I went to school in the mornings and came back home early evenings, so I wouldn’t know what happened in the house during that time. But I knew my brother was growing, fast. He wolfed down all the food, and when he cried for more, they would give him more. Then in the evening, he would be put to sleep in his old wooden cot and my parents would busy themselves by making tea, looking out the window, cleaning the house, watching television.

As for the shed, I did not get any closer after that time. I would catch glimpses of it from my window from time to time, always giving me that strange, warm feeling. I tried to distract myself—doing homework, studying, playing video games. I sometimes went outside and watched the butterflies dance on the grass, as far from the shed I could get. I once caught one coming out from its pupa, its wrinkled yellow wings shimmering and unfolding. Change comes over everything, after all. Everything needs to adapt.

In spite of this, I was always acutely aware of the shed’s permanence, like it was waiting for me to visit it again.

It was around mid-December when the symptoms started. I developed a dry cough first. Then came the ear ringing. The constant, incessant, high-pitched ringing. It became harder and harder for me to concentrate on work. I would hear sudden noises around the house. Wood creaking, metal rattling, animals scuttling. My health worsened too. It still makes me shiver, remembering the bony hands I put up to my face to feel my gaunt cheeks and sunken eyes. Outside, the weather darkened, and for the whole week the grey clouds growled like some threatening beast.

It was the bad weather, I told myself. I was not used to the cold there. In our old neighbourhood, the weather would always be warm because there were many houses and many people. This new house was isolated. The forest made everything cold.

One dreary December night, I went to check on my brother. I don’t know why, exactly. I could only move slowly. The sounds of the television bounced around the house from downstairs.

I was feverish. My body dragged itself across the long corridor. Everything was spinning around me, lights and shadows, becoming two, then three, then whole. Two, three. Whole once again. My vision sharpened on my brother, sleeping in his old wooden cot.

His cherubic face looked so peaceful. There was a bit of drool on his small parted lips, and it dropped to the side as his tiny chest rose and fell.

His eyes opened gently, and to my surprise, my brother’s lips stretched into a smile I can never forget. It was a loving smile that reminded me he was just an innocent baby and, above all, my brother. For a moment I forgot my sickness. He reached out excitedly and I moved to grab his outstretched hands.

I didn’t realise the television noises had stopped, nor heard the bounding footsteps as my parents scuttled into the room, eyes wide with horror.

They pulled me out of their room and the door shut in my face. I heard my brother’s wail as clearly as if he was right next to me. My parents coaxed him, and I stood there in shock.

The aches returned. My head ached. My bones ached. This sickness… it consumed me. My skin was ablaze. I did not walk, my legs walked, and each step sent a shock of pain all over. The scenes around me shifted like storm clouds. Sight came to me in flashes. Walls, stairs, leaves. My legs stumbled, my legs moved, my legs stopped.

I stood in front of the shed. The doors were wide open. Chains, gone. There was a noise coming from inside. Something squelched; something thick and viscous. Black liquid oozed from the shed. I couldn’t tell where it was coming from until a shape materialised as if from nothing. Grey. Ovoid. It was fibrous, made of what looked like silk from a cocoon. The black ooze dripped from a small opening.

Then, the sound of ripping. Something was tearing through the cocoon’s thin membrane one limb after the other. It looked human, but I knew it was not. Its arms were too long, its torso too narrow, its grey skin too tight. Its movements were jittery and rapid. All I could make out from its shadowed face were two glowing eyes.

Its eyes haunt me. Even now, I remember their faint red glow, and how they were suspended in darkness like two distant stars on a moonless night sky. Maybe it was the fever but they seemed to get brighter the longer I looked at them. The light hurt my head, but I kept looking. Not in defiance, but because it felt like they were the only things that existed in the world. Two flaming eyes. Fear scorched my throat and the feeling sank to my stomach like a rock.

It put one arm slowly out of the shed and then the other, making horrible clicking sounds. It twitched like an insect, jerking its limbs and its head like a newborn wanting to take everything in. It stopped and I heard its low guttural breaths.

The grey clouds were overhead and the air had gone deadly cold. Flash. Thunder. The first rain drop pierced my body like a blade of ice.

For a moment I thought it hesitated. I thought it was scared of the rain and I could make a run for the house. I heard voices shouting but they were directionless – I wasn’t even sure they were human voices. They could have come from the forest for all I knew.

Then the beast came for me. Limbs snapping. Click. Click, click, click. I lurched to where I thought the house was, unthinking, fear rising in my chest and fever plunging me in a wave of dizziness. In front of me was a blurry facade of grey and green. I forced my legs to keep moving. My head was a throbbing pain and my heart bounced in an odd rhythm, hammering blood in my ears. All I heard behind me were those horrible clicks coming closer and closer, faster and faster, echoing and tormenting my thoughts. The rain sent painful shockwaves throughout my body. It wasn’t long before I lost my balance and my body tipped, crashing into the wet grass.

Above me I saw a burst of yellow light with human-shaped shadows moving through the mist. Body shaking, I pulled myself towards them. The shadows moved in flashes – hypnotic almost – their dance slowly lulled me to sleep. In the last images I remember I saw the beast scuttle past me and towards the house. The clicks grew further away and I saw its dark body merge with the yellow light—so much light it looked like sunlight. So many shadows I couldn’t count.

I woke up, and my brother and the beast were gone. I woke up and there were flashing red and blue lights all around me. They told me later what happened, but I didn’t believe them. They told me that I had ran out of the house, delirious with fever. My parents were shouting behind me but I kept going, not listening to them, right into the forest. The thick rain made it hard for them to find me, so they called the authorities for help. They found me passed out in the dense forest and brought my body back to the house.

What a load of crap. Am I right, sir? I asked my parents about my brother and the shed. “What shed?” they said. They didn’t even remember having a baby. But I still remember that soft smile so vividly. A few days after I recovered I went to the place the shed had once been to look for any evidence that it existed. Only grass grew in its place. I was beginning to question myself until I moved a bit of the grass with my foot and saw a flurry of footprints of some kind of animal leading into the forest. Some of those footprints were strangely human, and they blended in perfectly with the animals’ footsteps. What was even stranger was that it appeared that there was more than one human.

Then one of you found me lurking, pretended to be the police and arrested me. You brought me here. To the Board. It took a while for you to talk to me, but I waited patiently for the moment you would call me in.

Now, I can’t help but wonder about a few things. Maybe you can help me think through them, dear Board members. You were the ones who called for this interrogation, after all. There must have been details you had already known about, and others that you wanted me to clarify. Maybe something shouldn’t have happened.

I never really explained why the shed was wrapped in chains, did I? Nor did I tell you how the chains disappeared. I had asked my parents if they unlocked the padlock, but they didn’t have a key. Didn’t even remember they could have once had a key. It’s almost as if something—someone else—removed the chains.

And why did I get that fever, just a few days before I saw the beast? Why was it so strong when I finally saw it? It was like I was not supposed to see something. Something important. There was something else that happened that night. I caught a glimpse of it just before I passed out. Inside the house, what peeked from the yellow light were not shadows, but people wearing black suits.

And now, as you’re looking at me, I can feel it again. This numbness, this dizziness. Oh, my poor brother. My poor parents.

I am sure you know how the incident happened very well, dear Board members. I can see it in your eyes. SECOND VOICE: Stop the recording. Now. Click. Recording ends.