Page 1 of Marked By Shadows

Chapter 1

Silence can be defined in several ways. Sometimes it means late nights indoors with nothing but the sound of a sleeping pet or partner. Sometimes it is a relaxing bath covered in thick bubbles and warm water. Sometimes silence is more the tuning out of noise, like reading in a public place, or hiking down an active trail through the woods on a bright and sunny day.

Rarely is silence the complete absence of sound.

That had been my first mistake.

I had a handful of excuses: a morning fight with Tim; the chill in the air that whipped through my jacket; the vague memory of something someone said on our drive up to the park; and the annoying squawk of some kind of unidentified bird that no one else seemed to hear.

Preoccupied. Not paying attention. My fault.

Those thoughts echoed in my brain often enough as I recalled that day. Parts of it blurry, like the memory of morning sex which led to a fight and me not eating or having coffee before the hikehisfriends insisted on. I hadn’t wanted to come at all. Nature was not my thing. I liked cities, technology, and being near people even if I didn’t always want to talk to them.

The first part of the hike had been mostly uneventful. Teasing from his friends who weren’t supposed to know about the videos we did. I found myself embarrassed, not for the first time, and slowed my step until I was at the back of the group. I’d been planning on leaving sex work, moving on to other things, including a fun craft shop which would give me time to expand my hobbies into a full-time career. Tim pushed back, not wanting the change. My age, always a factor, had become a constant battle point. I was too young to make those decisions, he claimed. Not too young to have sex on camera, but too young to know what I wanted to do with the rest of my life. His gaze strayed to younger men often enough for me to know his interest in me was waning.

Another squawk made me pause and look up, searching the trees for a source of the sound. Never heard a bird like that before, almost like a monkey, or an unusual parrot. Having lived in a half dozen countries in my life, I expected to have seen and heard just about everything. Whatever made that noise, I had never experienced before. A chill raced up my spine and the hint of a cold sweat touched my brow. My gut ached, not from something I ate, but anxiety. Last time it hurt this bad I had been in a classroom in the middle of nowhere China, when men had entered the room with guns and pointed them at my mother who was teaching.

No one had been hurt that day, but fear had taken up solid residence in my stomach and left a lasting impression. I remembered being on my knees outside the building, surrounded by pigeons, thousands of them. Yet despite their numbers, they were silent, mostly still, staring with those dark and eerie eyes. The world had turned motionless, lasted forever, though probably was only a half an hour or so, then the men re-emerged from the school. The birds took off all at once. A terrifying flap of wings as though they would descend on us any second and rip us apart like the gruesome horror movies of old.

Some memories ingrained themselves inside your soul that way. The taint of emotion making them unforgettable. Like that odd squawking. Or the feeling of being watched, which I’d tried to ignore all morning, and brush off as the others looking at me.

High up in the trees, nothing moved that I could tell. No one else seemed to notice, adding to my irritation. I continued up the trail, thankful that it was a wide dirt path, unmistakable through the towering trees and scattered rocks.

I sighed, brain back on high volume as once again I was reminded why I had agreed to this stupid trip. Tim. Our relationship began as a spark. I knew it was a spark. That hot burning attraction, the need to taste him, and wrap my body around him. I had hoped it would blossom into more. It hadn’t. Why did I stay?

It came down to comfort, money, and control of course. Not a surprise really. He’d helped me a lot in getting settled in the USA with an income to support myself. The rest I’d done. Saved, built outlines and plans for things I wanted to happen in my life. None of them involved sex on camera. The fact that Tim wanted to film us this morning meant our conversation on the way up had fallen on deaf ears. Sex on camera was tedious. A show or an act. Turn this way, face the camera… not the intimacy I’d wanted with a partner. I often felt like a sex doll beneath him rather than a person. Used instead of cherished.

My mother had taught me to respect myself better. Love, she often reminded me, was a partnership. More than attraction or lust, it meant being comfortable with each other as only true friends could be. Despite how often she and my father argued; they were very different, him with his traditional Japanese values, and her a fiercely independent Irish woman. I could see their adoration for each other. Their affection made me long for something similar, a best friend as well as a lover, a partner and husband.

I gnawed on my lower lip as I followed the group up the trail, my pace a little slower than theirs, more out of my annoyance with them than my inability to keep up. My thoughts strayed back to the argument this morning. They’d wanted to know if we would have sex in front of them, put on a show. Tim’s response?Maybe.

More likenot a chance. If I’d had cell reception, I’d have called for a ride home. But I could grin and bear it for a few days. No big deal. Change didn’t frighten me like it did a lot of people. Too many years of moving around with my parents, experiencing other countries, struggling to learn other languages. The subtle comfort of very little change that Americans seemed to think was their ‘God-given’ right, didn’t really appeal to me. I had no desire to live in misery just to avoid a little discomfort of change.

I didn’t look forward to the upcoming fight about me leaving. And maybe it wouldn’t come to that. Perhaps Tim would change his mind. Or I would.

I questioned us a lot lately. Did I love him? Did he love me? Was it a relationship of convenience? Why stay? Why go?

The noise came again. So close I nearly leapt back thinking it was in front of me. Except again I saw nothing. Not even the other guys. Though I suspected they pushed ahead of my slow ass, likely annoyed that I wasn’t putting up with their teasing like the good little boy toy Tim claimed I was.

Gooseflesh broke out on my skin. An eerie sense of something watching me arched down my spine. For a minute blood pulsed in my ears. My own heartbeat and labored breathing echoing in my head. I made myself move, rushing to try to catch up, racing into the distance while trying to catch a glimpse of the guys. How far ahead could they have gotten? They wouldn’t have left me, would they?

I tripped, stumbling several feet. Not falling, but having to slow myself.

A prickling sensation danced over my skin. Not painful at first, a bit like walking through a spiderweb perhaps. I flailed, focused on it for a moment, fearing I had staggered into something. A thousand scenarios of deadly arachnids raced through my mind as the feeling intensified to the point of pain.

I didn’t notice the silence that overtook the trail. Unlike a silence of bugs and birds gone quiet because a predator was nearby, but complete absence of sound. No wind. No crunch of my feet on the dirt path. Not even the sound of my own breath, heavy from walking at a slightly inclined angle for an hour.

I don’t remember how I came to realize the silence wasn’t natural or that the rest of the group had vanished. Somehow I knew something was wrong, that they were gone and I was alone. I sucked in a deep breath, trying to calm the panic of some unknown bug crawling on me and collect myself. Not much frightened me. Why an uneasy feeling curled around me in that moment, I couldn’t begin to understand at the time. A bit like a rising panic attack, a sudden wave of anxiety flowing through me. The past few weeks had echoed the same feeling off and on. An odd sense of something on the verge of happening. Almost premonition-like, though instead of the vague deja vu, this was more of a horror movie something-is-going-to-leap-out-at-me feeling.

The sensation of being watched added to the prickling wriggle on my skin. Air didn’t seem to reach my lungs and my mind screamed for oxygen. I stood on the path, stopped, frozen almost, staring into the distance, straining for the sound of life, my skin on fire with prickling pain.

Fans of paranormal fiction sometimes asked if I’d seen or felt a change. Wavers in the road, or smelled a distinct scent. Anything to indicate a shift in dimension.

Big concept. Leaving one dimension for another.

That day I’d seen only the dancing waver of heat on the trail in front of me. I didn’t think anything of it at the time. Despite being cold enough to huddle in a winter coat, and walking on a dirt trail through towering trees, neither of which was conducive to heat waves from pavement. Had that been the change? Had I stumbled through some otherworld portal? Or had it happened when I first heard that terrifying monkey-bird cry no one else seemed to notice?

Perhaps it had been the pin pricks of dancing ants across my skin which had been the actual change. I’d spent far too many hours thinking about it, had endless nightmares about the feeling of being watched and sensing oncoming doom. Fears about what I’d missed, months vanished both from my life and my memory, echoes of running through woods and snow while something unseen chased me. Memories or simply things my mind conjured up to scare me?