They Never Hurt Her the story of the missing Nightshade.
“This little light of mine, Let it shine, let it shine, let it shine.Ev’rywhere I go, I’m goin’ let it shine-”
High summer is the worst. The heavy late July heat, the blinding sun at midday all makes it seem so nice. That moment, the one when you wander into the heavy notice of the Shade. For a moment to meet it in the heat of the day seems good. Bodies are driven to find it, we crave the cool velvet glide, the slices of dark in the naked light. Most shadows are okay they are part of the Shade, but they are not the Shade just as one leaf of a tree is not a
I learned about the Shade from my grandmother. Once in the door yard at the side of her house during a long too hot summer, I came running from the driveway heading straight for the tempting deep velvet cool of the shade. It was so hot in the sun I couldn’t resist the shade any more than I could resist running in the creek barefoot. Mawmaw saw where I was heading and stepped out the door brandishing a wooden spoon, “Imogene Kelly Nightshade, don’t you go over there.”
Like every other child in the family the moment i saw the spoon and heard her low slow tone I skidded to a halt to face her. “I’m sorry Mawmaw. I’m just so hot. Is it okay by the shed?” She nodded and gestured, “yeah. Just stay out of that one.” She pointed behind me and I turned to look. The Shade undulated like dark water, tempting and forbidden. I did as I was told. I was a good girl. The Shade couldn’t get me.
It wasn’t until near my 18th birthday that i found out that the Shade wasn’t just creepy dimness in the daytime, it had secrets it wanted to whisper. I always thought maybe it was just places where bad things had happened. A haunted place with blood in the soil. Mawmaw had 14 children with 5 surviving to adulthood, the others all died on the land she still lived on. I thought the Shade was a way for her to deal with her grief. One afternoon close to starting my senior year of high school I came running again toward the house, moving by the too deep shade near the shed and heading for the Shade.
I felt the cool pool of air around the Shade, I felt it see me and want me. When I got close enough, I saw the edges of the Shade, I felt invisible cool fingers brush my sweating face. That little kiss of relief made me close my eyes. I shouldn’t have closed them. Before I got more than a step or two into the deep cool of the Shade, it reached for me. First beyond the cooler air kissing my cheeks, I felt the Shade inside me.
In the hottest, most humid weather there is no feeling more soothing than the cool spread of a long drink of water. The spread of soft, cool comfort inside is a feeling not to be beat, except for the touch of the Shade. A touch from the Shade much like feeling the weight of its regard has meat, it feels you and even when you know better, you welcome its touch. The weight of that regard drags across your skin like moist sticky fingers trying desperately to create the same friction of the physical world.
I knew better. I should have just gone in the house but once I felt the regard of the Shade I couldn’t look away. When the Shade reached for me, I didn’t scream, I didn’t even flinch as I felt the curls on the top of my head ruffled, “oh shit.” The Shade absorbed my voice as I felt it move darker than dark and thicker than air but not flesh fingers through my hair and down my face, the Shade caressed my throat, and I felt it pull me in. There in the middle of the hot day everything started to fade around me, I felt myself fading too, moving back as smoothly as if I was on a conveyer belt. I knew before it was over I was gone.
Hours later my brother stepped out back and started walking and calling. “Imogene? Imogene!” I answered my voice hit the darkness and stayed there, stuck. I watched him walk by, I listened to him mutter. “She was right behind me.” I had been, I’d even called to him as he stepped inside and told him I was going to hose off. Then I was just gone. There wasn’t enough sun to know the time and the Shade conspired to keep me content in my dim velvet world.
For decades every summer people in town went missing. Often the unwary hiker would stumble onto a road blinking and dazed, often exuding beatific joy they couldn’t explain. There were the cryptid hunters, the ghost hunters, the nosy who all disappeared and then there was Imogene. You’d think with a name like Imogene NIghtshade she’d have been more cautious. Just like the others, she forgot herself and her place in the world just long enough for the Shade to claim her.
Inside the Shade, when her body felt the fall of night she found a shadowy clearing. She didn’t remember ever seeing it, she told herself her whole life she knew the family home from corner to corner. How many search teams had she led? How many times had she gone out in her waders and snake bite gaiters with her big brothers or uncles or Dad and been the one with her nose damn near on the ground tracking, once her father had proclaimed proudly to the sheriff. “Hell, my girl is better’n a blood hound. Tracks like somebody owe her money.”
In the Shade the nostalgia faded away as easily as the world did when it got her. Imogene curled up on a bed of soft tamped down grass, it was a warm little nest as if one of the dogs had been napping there in the sun. Around her she heard shuffling and struggled to lift her head; she was so sleepy. “Hey? Danny?” Of her brothers the baby would probably be the first out looking for her, he’d spent his entire childhood attached to her hip and rarely went a full hour without checking on her.
The soft mossy shuffling stopped, the air felt like it was breathing on her and waiting with her. She listened and settled back down, the Shade was so soft and warm against her skin. Imogene’s waking self knew she was too warm, too comfortable. She didn’t have to pee, wasn’t thirsty, not hungry. The only thing wrong was she was lost and sleepy. The Shade stood still around her, holding her inside it while time marched on outside.
Imogene had no concept of it. Weeks passed, the family property was trampled end to end by grids of searchers calling for her, “Jeannie! IMOGENE!” She didn’t hear. Instead, when she was awake and neither hungry nor thirsty she shuffled through the warm deep shadows of the Shade. Once she tried to pluck a pear from one of the trees in the old orchard and her fingers slipped through it dim as shadows.
She remembered something her nana had said her entire life, “you stay out of them deep shadows like you don’t go in deep water if you can’t swim baby.” She’d heard scared adults talk about it in whispers, how so and so was right there a minute ago and then they were gone. Most of them were never found, there was an entire hall at the county high school covered end to end with photos of the missing.
“Am I there?”
The Shade ate her voice as it ate everything else. Light, sound, reality. As it got darker, she settled down again and listened to them circle the clearing, her body tried to remain in flight mode, but she was exhausted. Imogene had no idea how long it had been. She found a creek and sipped from it, ate a few handfuls of wild strawberries and managed to snag a single fat tomato after spending forever weaving her hand through the fence to get to it. When her fingers touched the hot skin of it for just a moment realite flared behind her closed eyes.
For a suspended moment she felt hungry, knew she had to pee, felt the itchy bug bites and managed a weak mewling, no one was around to hear except one of the mean old barncats who hunkered down behind the tomato plant and hissed at her. Until that very moment Imogene felt no fear, the decisive mistrust of a usually cranky but not aggressive cat she’d held seconds after he was born made her afraid.
“Hey, hey Jr!” Imogene stood at the edge of the trees in the Shade jumping up and down, waving her hands over her head. Her oldest brother didn’t even flinch as he fed chickens, strolled just by her and she heard him talking. “Shit, come on Jeannie come home.” She still couldn’t settle into the kind of panic that might jumpstart her flight response enough to get her running, maybe she could outrun the regard and grip of the Shade. Deeper in the darkness she barely heard it, “Imogene Nightshade, so big.”
The little tickle of whisper stopped her in her tracks, and she almost felt the fear again. She knew that voice, didn’t she? Part of her was screaming, she whispered out loud. “Uncle Raymond?” The half empty whisper of a chuckle moved past her ear, a memory swam to the surface of her mind. Another time Mawmaw and she had been walking through the trees collecting herbs, Imogene thought she heard her name and stopped walking to listen, “you step on something again baby?” Imogene pointed at a deep shadow that was not the Shade, “did you hear that? Sounded like Lyle is over there sayin my name.” Mawmaw yanked her too hard, and they both stumbled, “you didn’t hear shit little girl. Let’s go back inside you know the rules.”
In the Shade Imogene started moving again, talking to herself with a smile on her pretty, dirty face. “You heard your name? No, the fuck you didn’t. That is not a fucking deer stay away from it. Don’t whistle. Stay in the light. Stay by the fire.” Overhead an owl hooted, she smiled to herself she loved the owls and how they muttered all night. She kept walking until she found another little clearing to curl up in and go to bed.
Like the other sleeps she was awake and settling then in dreams. Around her little hiding spot she heard the shuffling again, steps, murmurs. She held her breath listening trying to make out something beyond registering that there was a sound. Yet, Imogene remained somnolent and calm without thirst or hunger, she still hadn’t had to pee, she felt fine if unanchored.
Inside the family home her two brothers sat with Mawmaw’s feet. She had her lace tatting stuff out in her lap and the boys did the same thing they’d always done, they sat at her knee and stared at her nimble old fingers work. “You boys listen, I know we’re all so scared for Jeannie. I see either of you going near that Shade again, you both gettin switches. Stay out of the goddamn Shade.” The boys each looked down guiltily, they’d both been tempting the Shade to see them, welcome them in hopes it would spit out their sister.
Weeks turned to months, searchers popped up here and there. The police believed it was her brothers, that they’d probably hurt her badly and put her body in one of the deep ravines where once mother nature got ahold likely nobody would find her for decades. It was usual business in the county, Imogene turned into yet another pretty girl gone. She wandered in the Shade, constantly moving but never knowing where she was or how she got there.
The Shade changed in winter, what had been tempting relief from the hot humid summers turned to secret pockets of deep black ice, spots on the ground that once frozen didn’t thaw until May at the earliest but none of it touched her. Imogene never saw anyone, she babbled to herself to hear something in the muted darkness. One day after a restless night feeling herself being moved and cradled by something she paced a circle around one spot singing louder and louder, “this little light of mine. I’m gonna let it shine.”
She clapped and stomped, suddenly missing church. “Let it shine let it shine-” she trailed off, her voice crackling to nothing. It was only then that she realized the way the air seemed to just absorb the sound of her voice and her footsteps, how she’d been able to hear the searchers in that strange under cotton muffled way. As she stepped into yet another pool of cold darkness a hand, a warm hand trailed along her spine gently. “Shhh, quiet dear. We will not hurt you beloved child.” Imogene felt the terror for the first time since she got lost, fear crept along her nerves. She wandered deeper into the darkness, feeling the cold for the first time. She still felt no hunger, no thirst.
Forty miles away from the Nightshade homestead the Shade began to let her go. In the sharp cold of a frosty morning a man heading to his truck after making his security rounds found a set of footprints in the crispy, scattering of snow. They were small, a child or woman and seemed to lead in a circle through the darkest part of the parking lot. He squatted to pick a brightly colored bit of fabric off of the ground, something about the hot pink tickled his memory.
Imogene didn’t quite see him but the flap of hot pink from her shorts flared against the darkness, she tried to call, tried to wave but the Shade muted everything. “Hello! Sir! Sir help! Help me please!” He heard nothing but sat in the cab of his truck playing with the scrap of fabric frowning at it, then he opened facebook on his phone. He searched through posts in his community groups and found it, he sighed muttering to himself. “Imogene Nightshade.” it was the hot pink shorts he remembered and her gorgeous face.
He knew the police weren’t looking for her anymore. The ads for volunteers to search the Nightshade homestead had ceased by then, the rumours had started. Imogene might have been meeting menf rom the internet, she posted sexy photos so obviously she’d done something to be a victim. He hated it and decided to bring floodlights to search more the next night. He pulled his truck out of the spot and turned the headlights on the dark corner of the parking lot. He squinted, trying to spot any other clues then pulled away.
When he called police they scoffed at him, the detective still on the case fussed at him for picking up the clue. The police brought dogs and men, the Nightshade brothers brought cousins and internet friends and the search was on. The vast parking lot in the crumblig industrial park abutted a thick stretch of woods that was slowly expanding to take the area back, one man stood at the edge of the trees shivering.
“Hey you okay man?” The man turned huge glassy eyes on Detective Williams, he looked terrified. “I um, I-” she shook all over like a dog and stepped back, his movements a little out of sync as if he c ouldn’t control himself. “I can’t go in there. The Shade.” Williams like every one else knew the tales of the Shade the rumours of Black eyed children, he’d been admonished his whole life by his aunties about it. He smiled at the guy, “just don’t start whistling and if you hear your name, no the fuck you didn’t. Say it.” The terrified man was trembling so hard his teeth clacked together.
“Don’t wh-whistle. No the fuck I didn’t hear my name.” Imogene could hear them, she couldn’t follow the tracks of flashlight beams, the Shade was too thick. She understood then that it was reacting, pulling her back inside itself, like gentle hands around her waist. She heard it whisper, “we won’t hurt you.” Imogene wanted to go home. She had no idea how long it had been or where she was but something inside her broke through the velvet somnolence of the Shade and how it held her so loosely but so tight.
She felt like the hamster she’d held when she was five, she could imagine her uncle murmuring. “Gotta holds him loose so you don’t hurt him but don’t let him go.” She started to shuffle towards the lesser dimness she hoped was a beam of light from one of the powerful flashlights. The Shade reacted; darkness pressed into her mouth like an invading tongue to muffle her voice.
“Help! Help me here, here I’m here I’m here please help me. I’m lost help me.” Not a single human being heard but one of the dogs stopped in his tracks and stared into the deepest pool of darkness. Luckily for Imogene, the day was brightening. As if the sun itself searched and the light began to burn the Shade. She could hear it melting like a damaged glacier. She swore she heard it whimper and weep, a chorus of science fiction aliens dropped in acid.
The dog who’d failed official K9 training turned his head and stared into the darkness as he crept towards it, his big ears turning this way and that. Imogene couldn’t see him. Fueled by the new crackle of terror inside her she pulled at the Shade, trying to break the grip of it. Without thinking she reached into her wide open mouth with one hand and pulled the darkness off of her tongue and finally her voice broke through the darkness. “Help me! Here! I’m here I’m alive please.”
The dog heard and barked once before taking off into the pitch black woods, his handler started shouting. “There, there. Sheps got something.” The dog got to the edge of the woods and dropped to his belly, crawling slowly and growling. Imogene had she heard the growls may have run but she could see the outline of the dog and felt the embraceof the Shade get harder, “no please no I just want to go home.”
The Shade pulled at her clothes and skin, even her braids like the cartoon void. Shep couldn’t see her but he heard her and he took off again, men with flashlights and shotguns hot on his heels. Inside the trees there was the skeleton of a rotting shed, it was more than half gone but as Detective Williams caught up to the dog he stared into a blackness that made him want to run away sobbing.
It was as if he could feel it, as if the darkness inside the crumbling little structure moved and breathed and, he would never tell a soul but he could hear it whispering. “We won’t hurt you, beloved.” Just like the rest of the men present most of his childhood he’d spent hearing the tales of the lost. Hell he had a cousin go missing when they were kids and the story was that he’d been lured into the wilderness by something.
Williams refused to give in, he swiped the tears out of his eyes. He made himself go towards the whispers he couldn’t say he heard but he felt them against his ears, intimate and strange. “Come, yes come this way. This way.” Underneath it he heard something else, footsteps? Struggling? He followed Shep into the shed and when he ran into Imogene he screamed, she screamed and the dog started barking and snarling. “Ah no plrase don’t hurt me. I’m sorry I’m lost please, please help me.”
At the moment of contact, when the big solid man bumped into her a damn burst. All of the fear, all of the hunger, the thirst poured out of some hidden place inside her body and took her over. Williams caught her in his arms as her knees buckled, “no I’m here to help. Imogene?” Of course he knew her face, he’d been staring at it almost daily for months. She felt thin, her shorts and halter top were filthy and he did not understand how her bare toes weren’t frost bitten.
She was warm and squirming in his arms as he carried her out. Darius her eldest brother broke through the crowd first and snatched her out of the detectives arms and collapsed holding her against his chest sobbing, “Jeannie baby. Honey we been looking for you. HOw did you get here? Who did it?” She was glowing with heat, fever maybe and as the men surrounded her, several of them livestreaming she looked up with eyes that had turned from the silky deep brown Darius recognized to black. He was close enough to see the black bleed from her eyes and he almost dropped her.
“I’m alive. They didn’t hurt me. They didn’t hurt me.”
One guy managed a shot of her eyes but never uploaded it thinking something was wrong with his phone. The medics brought water and blankets, Darius refused to let her go and carried her to the ambulance. “I thought it got you.” She cried against his neck, “they didn’t hurt me beloved they didn’t hurt me.”
–
Six Months later.
After the hospital and hours of questioning Imogene finally got to go home. When she was too afraid to get out of the car Mawmaw tottered out brandishing her cane and hollering, “girl get the hell out that car. You know you can’t go back, they can’t get you come on baby.” it was summer again and as Mawmaw walked her inside, Imogene shivered and whimpered like a puppy. “Mawmaw they dind’t hurt me.”
High summer is the worst. The heavy late July heat, the blinding sun at midday all makes it seem so nice. That moment, the one when you wander into the heavy notice of the Shade. For a moment to meet it in the heat of the day seems good. Bodies are driven to find it, we crave the cool velvet glide, the slices of dark in the naked light. Most shadows are okay they are part of the Shade, but they are not the Shade just as one leaf of a tree is not all of them but part of a whole organism.
I learned about the Shade from my grandmother. Once in the door yard at the side of her house during a long too hot summer, I came running from the driveway heading straight for the tempting deep velvet cool of the shade. It was so hot in the sun I couldn’t resist the shade any more than I could resist running in the creek barefoot. Mawmaw saw where I was heading and stepped out the door brandishing a wooden spoon, “Imogene Kelly Nightshade, don’t you go over there.”
I didn’t move away like i thought i would. I thought about it, I checked rental listings in town and stayed in the apartment over Charlie’s Bar for a week or so but, like granddad used to say before the Shade took him home, you can’t run from the darkness. You can hide in the Shade, but you can’t hide from it. After Imogene came home, she was the one to pick up the story.
Late summer past the worst part Darius brought his son to her and sat him in her lap, “hey listen to your auntie now.” Imogene loved her nephew and absently started retwisting his locs while she talked to him. “You see that over there?” The child nodded, “yes auntie.” She moved a little to set him on the ground between her feet, he’d gotten too tall to have his hair done while sitting in her lap. “That’s the Shade, you feel me? You don’t go in there but you can go in the shade.”
The child thought about it before nodding a little, side eyeing the Shade. He murmured, “I don’t tell my dad but sometimes at night, when it’s real dark the Shade be talking.” Imogene felt his hand wrap around her calf, she knew the impulse. Since she’d been found and investigated and harassed on the internet, she too sometimes reached to touch another person. She picked up another of his locs, “I know. I hear it too.”
He kept his eye on the darkness while Imogene sang sotfly to him while retwisting his locs, he smiled sleepily mumbling along. “This little light of mine, Let it shine, let it shine, let it shine.Ev’rywhere I go, I’m goin’ let it shine-”
Authors note: this story was inspired by creepy youtube videos about strange ways missing people have been found, Negro spirituals and as ever Folk horror.