Shadows (1)

The story I'm about to tell you is true. The names and places have been changed. But this is an actual account, this is my ghost story.

It began on a cold January night at the local gas station. I was a clerk at the time working the graveyard shift. Truly my story has the makings of frightening proportions.

As I was saying it was a cold January night and I had just finished serving a customer when a friend of mine burst in, white as a sheet, and a little nervous to boot.

We'll call this friend of mine Jay.

Jay was well known around town, not always well liked, but well known. One of the things Jay was known for was his habit to stretch the truth. Usually he stretches it to its breaking point, but they were always good stories. When he told me this one I didn't quite beleive him.

He said that he had been walking earlier that night, there was nothing strange about Jay walking the streets at night, after all he was a freak like me. We always come out at night. But his earlier stroll took on a more sinister note, he said he had seen a demon in the park where the shadows were thickest. He said he had seen a demonic face peering down upon him. Strangely he told me this story not in his usual flamboyant way but with a queer sincerity which upset me a little. This was unlike him totally. I remember thinking to myself, the gleam of mischief wasn't in his eye this night. I played it off as a wild imagination. I then calmed him down and the sent him home.

The next night I was busy filling the coke machine with ice when he came in again pale and shaking and a story on his lips. Again he had been walking this time on the street near his home. Walking, and I'm guessing thinking on general things, a shadow rose before him. The thing grabbed him be his Army jacket, picked him up several feet off the ground, and then threw him, as one would a rag doll, about twenty feet away. After a harsh landing, and sometime picking himself up no doubt, he found no trace of his shadowy assailant. He had rushed to tell me about it, asking for my oppinion, so I told him he should pray. All the while thinking that he was stretchin' that truth as far as he could get it, I'm ashamed to say.

Later that week he had come to visit me, it being my day off, or should I say night off, when a peculiar thing happened. You see we had been walking around town that night and had arrived at my house at about eight, maybe eight thirty, and were talking by my front gate. An eerie feeling swept over me and the hair on the back of my neck stood up. Out of the corner of my eye I caught a subtle movement. So I looked up into the tree in my next door neighbors yard, and into the face of evil. There the very shadows came together forming a demonic face, leering down upon us. Jay's shadow was real. Jay catching my line of sight visibly blanched. I asked him into the house where we hid from the awful visage. He spent the night, and we both prayed against the shadow thing.

Jay learned a lot about religion that night and many nights there after. I learned to trust my friend just a little more. I don't know what happened to the shadow thing there after, I beleive that prayer worked.

A caution to those of you who walk the night, beware the darker shadows. For those who scoff at the notions of ghosts and ghouls, wether you beleive or disbelieve in anything, that does not determine what is real and what isn't.

Thats my story, maybe not the spookiest, but I'll tell you this, I wouldn't wish it to happen to anyone else.

Farewell.