You Are No Longer

What Remained in the Shadows

It is a Friday like any other—and Natan Tavares Giacconi waits for the company bus with a certain eagerness… It is his last day of work before his vacation.

A church behind him welcomes the faithful, and Natan, “observant like his grandfather”—his late mother’s words—seems able to draw out the unease, the pain, the melancholy each of them carries into that place of worship.

Immersed in the madness of feeling what others feel, Natan hears a loud horn, starts—looks back and sees the company bus waiting for him.

His soul seems to return to his body. Then he boards the bus and settles into the third seat, beside the window, on the driver’s side.

The bus begins to move… traveling through the entrails of Juiz de Fora, collecting workers who seem less to live in particular places than to be hiding from something inexplicable.

After some thirty minutes of climbing, descending, turning left and right, Natan, without knowing why, decides to draw back the window curtain… Perhaps he wants to see where he is.

What he sees at the very moment he opens the curtain makes him sit up straight. A cluster of abandoned shops appears beside the road.

There are no doors in the entrances, the windows are only empty openings, there is no sign of human activity. Only concrete, graffiti, and shadows. When the bus rounds the next bend, the place disappears.

But the feeling of having seen it does not. Throughout that working day, Natan catches himself thinking about the shadowy place.

“What is that place? I feel that… I need to understand. I’m going on vacation… I’ll take my car and go there. I need to do this so the place will stop inhabiting my mind.”

The eight working hours of that Friday insist on dragging themselves through time with a peculiar gentleness. This makes Natan all the more anxious—he glances at the clock from time to time, making that Friday seem endless.

On the way home, Natan decides he will take a photograph of the intriguing place, and this time he sits on the side opposite the driver. Fighting off sleep, he puts on his earphones and searches for something to listen to that will keep him awake.

When he realizes the bus is nearing the place, Natan takes out his earphones and readies himself in his seat. With his phone in his hands and the camera on, he keeps watch. The vehicle is close now, and Natan’s phone is pressed against the window, ready to shoot. This time, he will pass right beside the ruins.

Natan feels uneasy, anticipating that the shot will not work. The vehicle is moving too fast and, indeed, passes so quickly and so close to the place that the photograph comes out distorted… making it impossible to draw anything from that image of decay.

At home, he showers, drinks a cup of red berry tea, and sits down at the table to write.

Natan regularly writes for a personal website he calls darkholesun.com.

There, he publishes all kinds of stories—horror, psychological and dark themes, whatever comes into his mind that he can transfer into his own laptop.

That night, he feeds a work of cyberpunk fiction, which keeps him writing until around three in the morning. Then he stops… and goes to bed.

At nine on Saturday morning, Natan wakes in fright, thrashing—a horrible nightmare has haunted him during the night.

He gets up, goes to the bathroom, drinks some water, makes coffee, and feels, at that moment, that he is on vacation. For Natan, this is the perfect time to rest. Ever since he began writing, he has felt so caught up in it that he concludes, in that instant, that he truly needs to take a break.

From his apartment balcony, looking up at the sky, he makes out something in a cluster of clouds that connects him inexplicably to the abandoned building, the one that haunts him so.

He leaves the balcony and goes inside—picks up his phone and begins to study the photograph… the one taken from the bus on the way back from work the night before.

Looking at the photograph, Natan loses himself, makes out shadowy figures he cannot explain. The image, though nothing but a blur, seems to draw him in. After feeling almost hypnotized by the image on his phone, he decides that on Monday morning he will drive to the place.

The weekend passes. Some friends visit Natan on Saturday night. They eat, drink, and shoot the breeze… On Sunday, Natan goes out for lunch, naps in the afternoon, and, once night comes, feels uneasy thinking about the abandoned building.

With little to do on a Sunday night, Natan goes to bed and tries to fall asleep, for in the morning he will put an end to that strange feeling… He will visit the place and, by doing so, he believes the unease will pass.

On Monday morning, Natan is woken by his phone at seven.

He makes his coffee, bread and butter, and goes down to the garage, where he gets into his car, Érebos, to drive to the place. At around seven forty-five, he leaves the apartment complex and heads toward the western part of the city.

After about twenty-five minutes of driving, Natan arrives… He looks for somewhere to park and finds a vacant lot, where he parks his car and gets out, taking only a small flashlight.

Now standing before the building that so commands his attention, Natan switches on the flashlight and shines it into one of the many entrances at the front of the decaying structure. He goes in through the narrowest and feels a shiver down his spine—tries to ignore it, he needs to understand.

The roof has deteriorated. Rubble, roof tiles, heaps of sand—an aluminum kettle and many cans stained with scorch marks… A metallic, citrus smell makes him sneeze.

Natan looks ahead, and what he sees strikes him as bizarrely strange—a child is staring at him.

Black eyes, very pale skin, a broad forehead, red lips, and, on one cheek, a hexagon with a serpent inside.

“Why did you take so long?”

The child’s gaze seems to judge Natan for something he himself is unaware of.

“I took so long? What do you mean? What are you talking about?”

“The door can’t stay open this long.”

“What door are we talking about?”

“It was them, wasn’t it?”

“Them? Who are they? You… you’re confusing me!”

“They must be behind this. There’s no doubt.”

“You must be mistaking me for someone else. I don’t know who you think I am.”

The child tilts his head and seems to deepen his stare—his gaze seems to see things within Natan that Natan himself has no idea he holds inside.

“Yes, you are no longer.”

“What do you mean? Can you explain that? You’re confusing me!”

The little child moves away until he reaches a shadow—a region devoid of light—and simply… disappears.

“Hey, talk to me! Where are you going?”

Natan hurries forward and tries to see the boy again.

He concludes that the place is completely empty. He feels another shiver.

“What was that? The things the boy said to me…

He had some kind of tattoo on his cheek—a hexagon with a serpent inside. All of this is so strange!

He was a boy who looked about six years old, but he spoke with a disturbing clarity.

I need to get out of here—I feel sick.”

Natan hurries on, walking firmly, purposefully, he needs to leave the place… Passing through an opening, he enters another part of the building, where he sees dead animals. An unbearable smell makes him run. He runs through the place, feels himself gasping for breath, feels anxious…

But, fortunately, he recognizes the entrance he came through, the narrowest one.

He gets out without looking back—goes to where he left his car. He climbs in and accelerates as hard as he can to get as far from that place as possible.

Natan is left with the feeling that the place tried to corner him.

That passage that led him to the dead animals makes no sense. He does not understand how it could have appeared before him…

“A ragged, dirty child, talking like an adult and… who ended up disappearing into the shadows.”

Natan feels unwell, drives home as fast as he can…

When he arrives, he rushes to the bathroom mirror and sees that he is paler and more tired than usual.

His churning stomach makes him vomit into the toilet.

He throws himself onto the couch and eventually falls asleep…

At around three thirty in the afternoon, he wakes, gets up, and decides to go out for a walk through the streets… He wants to clear his mind, and he likes to do it by walking.

Downtown, Natan watches the people, senses chance walking beside many of them.

He studies the buildings. Juiz de Fora is a city that still has many from the last century.

On Francisco Bernardino Street, Natan studies the building in Station Square as though stripping the historic monument bare.

Suddenly, he sees a boy walking ahead of him. He thinks of the boy in the building.

He runs to catch up with the boy—the boy realizes that a man is following him and runs too.

At that moment, Natan is insane, running like a wolf after its quarry. Somehow, the boy manages to shake Natan off and disappear. Like prey escaping a predator.

“What was that? Which way did he go? It was him, I’m sure it’s the same boy.

How could he have vanished? He was right in front of me!”

Natan turns onto Fonseca Hermes Street, the street where he spent his childhood, and sees the boy again, though now accompanied by a man and a woman who appear to be his parents.

The little boy walks past Natan, staring at him with a sarcastic smile on his face and scrambling his thoughts still further.

“I think I’m going mad, that can’t be the boy from the building… Nothing seems to make sense, I need to go home.”

Back at home, Natan has something to eat and thinks about watching a series or a film.

He tidies the kitchen, sweeps the apartment, and goes to the couch. Just as he picks up his tablet to start looking for something to watch, his sister calls.

“Hello, sis, good evening! What brings you to call this late at night?”

“My dear brother, I’ve missed you so much! Are you all right? Tell me!”

“Yes, I am, darling. And you? How’s Emanuel?”

“We’re all well. I need your help with something!”

“Tell me, what can I do?”

“I really need the deed to the apartment in Vila.”

“Hmm… Yes, I think I can help you. I believe it’s here at home. I’ll rummage through a few drawers and let you know if I find it.”

“Oh! Thank you so much! I’ll wait to hear from you. God be with you.”

“And with you. I’ll look right now and call you if I find it.”

Natan ends the call, tosses the phone onto the couch, and begins rummaging through the drawers of the entertainment unit.

He looks in one, and nothing; in the second, nothing either. In the third, he finds an old greenish bag. He notices a collection of old documents inside it.

He takes the bag to the couch and begins examining each document. He needs to find the deed to the apartment in Vila. After about thirty minutes of looking through papers, Natan finds the deed his sister wanted so much.

He opens the timeworn papers and, after turning some three pages, swallows hard.

Time around him seems to slow. Natan lets the papers fall onto the couch, appalled by what he sees.

There, as a watermark behind the text on one of the pages of the deed to the apartment in Vila, is the hexagon with the serpent inside, exactly as he saw it on the cheek of the boy in the building.

This cannot be real. Natan closes the document, his mind spins… Natan despairs.

The words “you are no longer,” spoken by the boy, will not leave his mind…