The Shadow That Was Late

• 4 minute read
• Ages 10-13
• Horror Stories for Kids

I noticed it in a corridor at school, which is a very ordinary place to notice something like that.

The corridor had windows all down one side and the afternoon sun came through them, and everybody walking down it had a shadow going along the wall beside them, moving as they moved.

I was walking with Farid and I glanced at the wall.

And my shadow was doing what I was doing, and it was doing it slightly after I did it.

Testing it

I stopped. It stopped, and there was a gap. Not a long one. Perhaps a quarter of a second.

I raised my arm and watched the shadow raise its arm afterwards.

I did it four or five times and it happened every time, and I stood in that corridor with my heart going and told myself it was the light, or the angle, or that I was tired.

Then I asked Farid to stand next to me and raise his arm.

His shadow raised its arm at the same moment he did, the way a shadow does.

Weeks

I stopped looking at walls after that, which is harder than it sounds.

It did not get worse. That is the part I want to be accurate about, because I have told this to people who expect it to get worse. It stayed at about a quarter of a second for weeks.

I was tired all the time. I stopped sitting near windows. I got very good at knowing which side of a room the light was coming from before I walked into it.

And in the fourth week I told my mother, because I could not carry it on my own any longer.

What my mother did

She did not laugh and she did not tell me I was imagining it.

She listened to the whole thing, and then she took me into the front room and turned on the lamp and stood me in front of the wall and asked me to raise my arm.

My shadow raised its arm at the same moment.

We tried it in four rooms and outside in the yard and it was normal every time, and by the end of it I was almost crying with relief and my mother was being extremely calm.

The corridor

And then she asked which corridor it had been.

I told her.

She asked whether it had happened anywhere else, ever, and I thought about it properly for the first time and realised it had not.

Only that corridor. Only that wall.

My mother went to the school the following week and asked to speak to the head, and I do not know what she said, and I never found out.

But that corridor was closed for the rest of the year for what the notice called maintenance, and when it opened again the windows down one side had been fitted with frosted glass.

After

It never happened again anywhere and I am forty-one years old.

My mother is not alive to ask about it and I did not ask her while she was, which I regret.

But there is one thing I have kept, which is that when I told her, she believed me immediately, and I have never worked out whether that was because she trusted me or because she already knew something about that corridor.

And I think about the frosted glass.

Because you do not put frosted glass in a corridor to stop people seeing out.