There are places and times where the sun never sets.
No, that’s not true.
There are places and times where the sun sets and lurks below the horizon, creating a perpetual half-day. One such half-day begins as I reach the end of ‘The Long Dark,’ exiting near Burrow and pressing the bike further, to the first no-name town and, past that, to the first side-of-the-road clearing underneath the sky.
It’s 2:00am and the sky is a back-lit gray. It’s cold and the air is still. I wrap my sleeping bag around my shoulders, lean back against the bike, and watch something that looks like a fox skirt the field. I fall asleep despite my better judgement.
The angry muttering of the Stranger’s truck wakes me. My cellphone reports the passing of several hours, though nothing else about the morning has changed. I rise on cold legs, legs that are stiff with disuse, and the crumpled-spider shadow shifts like dry leaves underfoot.
I watch the Stranger’s truck pass the clearing, rumbling like a small landslide, and I hear the engine’s hesitation just seconds down the road- a slowing to idle, an idling that becomes a pointed reversal. I have done nothing to hide myself, I’ve done the opposite, even, so now that the Stranger knows to look, he sees me right away. He parks carelessly and leaves the truck’s door gaping. It breathes stale air and smoke into the morning.
This is not the Stranger, but a shadow of the man the Stranger was- pale, hunched, and impossibly fat. The thing that slides itself from the frame of the truck is a dire amalgamation of the man I knew and the thing he has been running from. It is, like me, a being with no shadow, and it lurches in my direction on bow-legs and stuttered breaths. It can hardly follow me at a walking pace to the edge of the clearing, but it tries. There, we begin to circle.
In my traveling I’ve been subjected to a good deal of information on circles. Spiritualists and scientists alike see the universe in cycles. Circles act as wards against and prisons for demons and the otherwise demonic. A circle is just as likely to represent wholeness as it is to represent nothing. The Path is a circle, I think, or many nested circles. All this aside, I learned what I believe of circles in the only semester of college I ever attended, when an idiot I called a friend drank too much and we walked him in circles to keep him awake, or when the same idiot suffered a concussion for diving into a shallow pool, or when he experienced panic at the thought of growing older.
I walk the shadow of the Stranger in circles as the sun rises again to brighten the unending day, hours and hours of treading the border of this little space so that I know every bent blade of grass and every divot and pebble. I walk until my legs become indignant- they swell and ache. I walk until my toes blister in my boots. I walk until the false shadow finally tears from my socks and blows away like a dark, ethereal tumbleweed. I walk until the sun sinks again and the thing from the truck gasps and wheezes and follows, its own feet bleeding freely into the dirt until the clearing is darkly bordered.
I don’t know what to expect, but eventually, when the day becomes delirious, I look back to find that the only thing pursuing me is my own shadow, thicker, perhaps, than I remember.
I sleep fitfully in the cab of the Stranger’s truck and, finding it haunted, ride the bike back through ‘The Long Dark’ and toward the end of my journey.
-traveler
