Burial Read Free

from left to right. Still it stayed where it was, hunched, motionless, a shadow that refused to obey all the normal rules of light and shade.
    She put down the
menorah
and crossed the room to the wall. She placed her hand flat on the shadow, cautiously at first, then with more confidence. It was definitely a shadow, not just a dark mark on the wallpaper. So how come it always stayed exactly where it was?
    It was then that she noticed another, smaller shadow, on the far end of the wall, almost in the corner. This shadow remained motionless, too, although it was much more recognizable as a man. He appeared to be sitting with his back towards her, his head resting on his arm, as if he were thinking about something, or tired.
    After a while, the hunched shadow suddenly moved. Shestepped quickly and nervously away from it, one hand raised in front of her to protect herself
although how could a shadow jump off a wall
? Her heart was pumping so hard that she felt sure that everybody in the entire building could hear it, knocking against her ribcage. The shadow moved, dissolved, shifted and then moved again. It was still impossible for her to say what it was. It appeared to have an enormous bulky head, with strings of loose flesh hanging down from it. It reminded her of that terrible movie
The Elephant Man
, which Michael had once insisted they watch together. (‘It’s
culture
… you want to watch
The Price Is Right
for the rest of your life?’)
    Without warning, the hunched shadow lunged across the wall and dropped on top of the figure on the far end of the wall. She watched, mesmerized, as the two shadows appeared to struggle and fight. She kept turning her head, kept looking behind her, to see if there was anything in the dining-room which could be throwing such shadows, but she was alone; she and her furniture, and her flickering seven-branched
menorah
.
    It was like watching a struggle being played out in a 1950s detective movie, shadows against a window-shade. Except that this wasn’t a window-shade, it was a solid wall, and shadows couldn’t be seen through a solid wall.
    She was so frightened that she felt like running out of the room, running out of the apartment, bursting into the synagogue and begging Michael to come home. But the hunched-up shadow was tearing the smaller shadow to pieces, lumps and strings and rags, and she had to stay to see what was going to happen.
    She didn’t hear a scream. The dining room remained silent, except for the pounding of her heart and the noise of the city traffic.
    But when the hunched-up shadow tore off what looked like the smaller shadow’s head, she
felt
something. She wassure she
felt
something. A scream as white and as silent as a frozen window; but a scream all the same.
    The hunched shadow changed shape. She couldn’t understand what it was doing at first, because it was dark and two-dimensional. But then she realized that it had turned around — and not just turned around, but
turned towards her
.
    She backed away, two or three steps, then another. This was it. This was time to run. The shadow seemed to swell, as if it were coming closer. There was no sound, only the sensation of something approaching.
    She was just about to snatch for the door when one of the dining room chairs dragged itself noisily across the floor, caught her just behind the knees, and sent her colliding against the bookcase. Another chair slid across the floor, then another. Then the table circled around, its feet making an ear-splitting screeching noise on the wood-block flooring, and struck her on the right side of her head, so hard that it almost knocked her out. She tried to struggle up, but the furniture pushed against her, harder and harder, all legs and arms and corners, pinning her against the wall as painfully and effectively as if it had been stacked on top of her.
    She gasped for breath. The edge of the table was pressing so relentlessly against her chest