The Shadow
Collector

Mara collected shadows the way other children collected stamps or stones or the small ceramic animals that came free in boxes of tea. Carefully. Systematically. With a catalogue.

The catalogue was a black notebook she kept under her bed, and in it she recorded every shadow she had found, pressed flat between sheets of wax paper: the shadow of a bicycle left in the sun too long, gone stretched and mournful; the shadow of a cat that had looked, briefly, like a lion; the shadow of a church spire at four in the afternoon, precise as a compass needle pointing somewhere important.

She had forty-seven shadows. She had been collecting for three years. She kept them flat and dark and sorted by provenance, which was a word she had learned specifically for the catalogue.

How she collected them is the sort of question that only children think to ask, and which adults never ask because they have already decided it isn't possible. Mara used a jar — a wide-mouthed pickle jar with a rubber seal — and patience, and the particular kind of quiet that makes things feel safe enough to stay.

Entry number forty-eight had not been collected.

Entry number forty-eight had collected itself.

It had happened on a Tuesday in November, which is the month when the light goes early and the shadows grow long and careless about where they end up. Mara had been walking home from school along Thistle Lane, her jar under her arm, not particularly looking for anything.

She had her own shadow in front of her — she always checked, the way another child might check for their reflection — and it was behaving correctly: small and dark and shaped exactly like a girl carrying a jar, pointing the way home.

She noticed the other shadow because it was pointing the wrong way.

Not the wrong direction. The wrong way. It was cast at an angle that didn't match the light. It was longer than it should have been, and wider at the shoulders, and it had — she looked again — it had too many joints in its arms. Not many more. Just one extra, at a place where arms don't have joints. And it was standing perfectly still on the pavement beside her, while everything else moved.

She looked at it for a long time.

It looked back. Shadows don't have eyes. This one had something like eyes — not bright, not glowing, just slightly less dark than the rest of it, in two oval places in the wrong-shaped head. They were patient. They had been patient for a long time.

Mara did the sensible thing. She walked home. Quickly, but not running, because she had read enough stories to know that running makes things worse and also she had her jar and didn't want to drop it.

It followed her all the way down Thistle Lane and around the corner onto Marsh Street and up the path to number fourteen. It was not attached to her. It followed at a distance of roughly six feet, which was far enough to be deniable and close enough to be not deniable at all.

She went inside and shut the door.

Under the door — the gap was small, barely a centimetre — the shadow slid in after her, the way water does when it has made up its mind.

The thing about the wrong shadow was that it was not frightening, precisely. It was wrong the way a word is wrong when it's spelled correctly but used in the wrong sentence. Something was off. Something didn't match. It sat in the corner of her room — shadows sit in corners; this one did it with intent — and it was simply there in a way that took up more space than its size.

Her own shadow behaved itself. It lay on the wall behind her, faithful and correct. The wrong shadow was in the opposite corner, which meant there was a light source illuminating it that didn't exist.

Mara opened the black notebook to a fresh page. She drew a careful outline of it. She noted: follows without invitation. Wrong angles throughout. Eyes (see sketch). Arrived November, Tuesday. Does not appear to belong to anything.

She thought for a moment, then added: Does not appear to want anything. Just — here.

She put the notebook away. She looked at the corner. The shadow looked back.

By Thursday she had stopped noticing it quite so much, the way you stop noticing the hum of the refrigerator. It followed her to school and back. It did not come into the school — she had checked, and the corridor shadows were all the right shapes and correctly oriented — which meant it waited outside, which she found she preferred not to think about.

By the following Monday she had given it a name, which was a mistake and also inevitable. She called it Else, because it was not like anything else.

Else did not respond to the name. Else did not respond to anything. Else simply was, in the particular corner it had claimed, patient as old furniture.

On Wednesday her mother came into the room and said, "It's cold in here," and Mara said, "Yes," and her mother left. Mara looked at the corner. The corner was currently warmer than the rest of the room by a small but measurable degree. She did not mention this in the notebook because she couldn't think what category it went under.

On Thursday she left an extra shadow in a jar on the windowsill — the shadow of a good oak tree she'd collected in September, calm and reliable. She left the jar open.

In the morning the jar was empty.

Else's corner was warmer still.

The wrong shadow was still there in January. And in February. By March it had acquired a quality Mara could only describe in the notebook as settled, which was not the same as comfortable, but was adjacent to it.

It had stopped following her to school, or rather it had stopped following her far from school — it stayed closer to the house now, in the garden or along the front path, as if it had decided that the house was its territory and the following had just been, at the beginning, an introduction.

Her shadow collection had grown by three new entries. The wrong shadow stayed in the book as entry forty-eight. She had crossed out Unknown and written Else in its place. She had crossed out Wrong under condition and left the space blank.

She thought about it for a week and wrote: Complicated.

In April she came home and found Else in a new corner — a better one, by the window where the afternoon light pooled long and amber. It was the first time Else had moved without her watching. It had chosen the warmest spot in the room.

Mara looked at it for a while.

It looked back, in its patient way, with its not-quite eyes.

"Fine," she said.

She opened the notebook and wrote, in the margin next to entry forty-eight, very small: Still here. Still wrong. Not leaving.

Then, after a moment: Neither am I.

She closed the notebook and went downstairs for dinner, and her shadow went with her, and Else stayed in the warm corner by the window where the light was good, which was, as far as Mara could tell, exactly where it wanted to be.