Preston and the Starving Shadows

[Preston_Penn77]

Here's a half-hearted crack at this idea:



Preston and the Starving Shadows

by
Alice Tilgoit


“Preston, stop laughing,” Penny yowled. “They ate the whole backyard. They ate your mother’s favorite flowers! It’s not funny, Preston.”
“Aaaaa heh-heh-heh-heh-heh. Aaaaa heh-heh-heh-heh-heh.”
The shadows elongated and chewed, black and hungry.
And Preston Penn could not stop chuckling.

*

Preston was a disciple of the bizarre. He inhabited an upside-down, inside out, sinistral, faintly askew universe. A world that was never tidy.
Penny Benton was Preston’s best friend. She tried to keep him out of trouble but that was a futile ambition. Penny lived down the street from Preston, a street that was cockeyed and habitually dotted with little bits of terribleness and woe. The street was called Crampton Lane.
The unfortunate episode of the starving shadows began one week ago, when Preston decided, for no reason in particular, to stop eating. His mother presented him with platefuls of his favorite foods, cupcakes and mussels and onionskins and dirt, in a fruitless effort to induce Preston into abandoning his senseless cessation of consumption and eating something. But Preston would only shake his head and batten his mouth, stubbornly refusing any and all victuals.
After four days of willful starvation, Preston’s body’s hunger disappeared entirely and never returned, retreating to whatever realm appetites go to die. His shadows, though, grew hungrier and hungrier, ravenous and avaricious, eager to gobble, and they eventually unstuck themselves from Preston altogether, no longer willing to live in his foodless shadow.
The starving shadows, as Preston came to call them, oozed horribly off of the floor behind Preston, off of the wall, off of the furniture, and trickled blackly into the backyard. They first began devouring the grass and trees and part of the sky. A frighteningly large wedge of the horizon in the Penn backyard was missing, and in its place a pinkish, glistening hole that seethed and undulated and wept red seraph-blood onto the clouds. The outside became fraught with an intolerably awful symphony – the shrieking of bitten cherubs, like tortured violins screaming.
Penny came to Preston’s house to convince him to eat. That is when she saw the shadows in the backyard, feasting upon Preston’s mother’s begonias and geraniums, gnawing at the stone lawn gnomes crunchily with their adumbrative jaws and shade-teeth. Dark shapes chomping and masticating the scenery.
Preston had been reading a comic book, a foul rag about necrophilia harkening back to the days of EC, and Penny had had to drag him by the arm to the backyard to witness the catastrophic banquet.
“Preston! They’re going to eat the house! What have you done?!” Penny squealed.
Preston’s laughing petered out finally. However, the maniacal grin and creepy absence in his eyes never left. These were constants with Preston: creepiness and mania. “They’re hungry, Penny. I’ve been starving them.”
“Well feed them! What are you waiting for for pete’s sake?!”
“Waiting for them to get to mom. I just want to scare her a little, is all.”
“Preston!”
“Aaaaa heh-heh-heh-heh-heh. Aaaaa heh-heh-heh-heh-heh.”

*

Her efforts thwarted, as usual, Penny fled to her house and left Preston to deal with his own black, stretching mess.
Preston’s father died when Preston was four, over at the wharf they call the Dead Dreamer, which was on the bad side of the railroad tracks. A mob of rabid pelicans swarmed Preston’s father while he was fishing off the wharf – they carried him up into the clouds and ripped him apart among the blue yonder and sky-fluff. It rained blood for four hours.
At least, that was the story Preston’s mom told him.
In actuality, Preston’s dad had been seeing a painted lady who lived near the wharf. He’d fallen asleep drunk outside the lady’s flat and a pair of teenage hooligans crushed his head with a cinderblock for fun. Preston heard this (true) story but preferred the fiction. The image of his father being shredded by pelicans aloft made Preston giddy and fuzzy-feeling.
A pity about Preston’s father. If Preston’s dad had been around, he would’ve clambered onto his bulldozer and started it up. He would’ve driven into the backyard in the bumblebee-colored machine and scooped up all the hungry shadows. He would’ve dumped them into the Grottesco River and they could’ve dined on coral and squid. Nice and tidy.
Things haven’t been tidy in a long, long time.
Preston, irresponsibility being part of his nature (among other things, like buying sinister toys from the Tower Red Toybox Store, or imagining the toys becoming tools for psychopaths and child murderers, or ants, or burning colonies of ants with magnifying glasses and sunbeams, or mutilating turtles’ shells with hammers and digging into the intestinal yolk beneath, or peeing on electrical apparatuses to see what would happen, or eating bark from trees sometimes to see what the texture would be like, or laughing at those playing cards men had with the pictures of topless women on them, or drawing pictures in pencil of what Preston thought his mom’s nightmares must’ve looked like, or stomach parasites, or praying to God for spaceship disasters to occur [Preston found accidents among the stars hilarious], or gravity’s grumpiness, or girls’ private parts, or wetting the bed and his mom howling about it, or setting fire to preschools that he doesn’t go to), fell asleep before tending to the starving shadows.
And so the shadows ate the rest of the backyard. Then they ate the house. They ate Preston’s mom in one big gulp. They ate the street and the neighbors’ houses and the mailboxes and the gutters. They ate the neighborhood’s ideas and thoughts. They ate everyone’s dreams because dreams taste like anise squares to shadows. They ate Penny and her parents and the Benton house.
They ate everything in the town except Preston. They couldn’t eat Preston Penn, because that would’ve been tantamount to cannibalism or suicide for the shadows, since they emanated from Preston in the first place. The shadows eating Preston would be like you eating God. It could be done; not advisable though.
And so Preston found himself in a blackness, an anti-existence, like floating in a starless and planet-less version of outer space.
Preston looked around at nothing. Absolute nothing.
“Aaaaa heh-heh-heh-heh-heh. Aaaaa heh-heh-heh-heh-heh.”

*

The shadows also ate this story. And Preston Penn was left to himself, alone, to think about things in nonexistence.
He thought about dread, and the human race and the conspiracy against it.
He thought about death and sickness and grinning martyrs.
He thought about salvation freaks and crayons.
He thought about puppet autopsies and preschool pessimism.
He wondered if nothing was something or if it was everything that wasn’t something.
He thought about black licorice and wondered if his shadows tasted like that. They looked like black licorice, after all.

*

The shadows that had become Preston’s landscape, his coat, his everything, breathed and swelled, heaved and radiated warmth.
And Preston felt very good here indeed, very alone and very content.
But over time, the shadows starved because Preston had nothing to eat and the shadows had eaten everything else. The shadows starved to death eventually, and now there wasn’t even soothing darkness or ravening blackness but true nothingness.
Nothing.


###

[Preston_Penn77]

Quote Originally Posted by Murony_Pyre

I want to say that I also really like all the ideas so far. I could possibly take a crack at illustrating it but I would need a description of each scene to be illustrated like in the old style illos. For example: "He entered the drawing room. Spencer was already there --lying in wait!" I feel India ink on thick paper would be just the thing for this. Actually it is most certainly a job for the late Edward Gorey. Let's have a seance!

Are you saying you want the job?

[Murony_Pyre]

Re: illustrations: No, please give it to someone more deserving than myself; I have the human problem of opening my mouth.

The Ligotti references within the story are not sitting too well--too cute--even if this is ostensibly a children's tale. Nor again the fact that Preston is already obviously pretty far gone at the beginning. You obviously threw yourself into it in a rush of output, I'm assuming. That's quite a good chunk of material you have there to further work with/prune.

[ramonoski]

I suspect Alice's books would be closer to Neil Gaiman's children books than to Ligotti's actual fiction—perhaps they'd also be illustrated by Dave McKean, or his equivalent in a Ligottian universe. By this I mean seemingly innocent fantasy stories that out of nowhere take a turn into the macabre and the grotesque.

In my hypothetical Preston Penn and the Starving Shadows, the story begins at the schoolyard. The settings are a bit crooked, as if the playground had been designed by Tim Burton. The kids are playing. Preston is trying to offer dead bugs to girls as if they were chocolate. It's noon, so there's little to no shadows to be found. Preston takes notice of this fact and wonders where shadows go when they are not here.

Then shadows begin to appear back into the world. Preston notices there's something different about his shadow. It's not that it has a life of its own (as in the Dracula movies), but that Preston can feel it. He senses that this shadow is different, not so much his silhouette but an actual thing that came from that unfathomable place where only shadows exist (not-so-subtle nod to Ligotti's core works, of course). This shadow has been out there for so long it is now starving. Preston decided to lend it a hand.

My internal logic tells me a shadow would eat other shadows and would potentially continue until it left the entire world shadowless... but this is not my story, and we know that the shadow has to eat actual flowers at some point. So... What if the shadows aren't really eating things, but somehow annihilating them? As Ligotti writes in This Degenerate Little Town: "And if it were possible to strip away the scenery that surrounds us, to pull up the landscape of every planet, to rip away the skies and shove aside the stars and suns, to tear from ourselves our own flesh and delve deep into our bones..." Maybe that's what the shadows do. They unmake things, return them to that state of primordial chaos.

Then, um, I don't know. I suppose Preston's shadow wouldn't be the only one (the title is plural, after all). But like I said I'm not a writer and my imagination only goes so far. But that's a rough outline of what I think this Preston Penn story might be like, were it to exist.

[Preston_Penn77]

Quote Originally Posted by ramonoski

I suspect Alice's books would be closer to Neil Gaiman's children books than to Ligotti's actual fiction—perhaps they'd also be illustrated by Dave McKean, or his equivalent in a Ligottian universe. By this I mean seemingly innocent fantasy stories that out of nowhere take a turn into the macabre and the grotesque. In my hypothetical Preston Penn and the Starving Shadows, the story begins at the schoolyard. The settings are a bit crooked, as if the playground had been designed by Tim Burton. The kids are playing. Preston is trying to offer dead bugs to girls as if they were chocolate. It's noon, so there's little to no shadows to be found. Preston takes notice of this fact and wonders where shadows go when they are not here. Then shadows begin to appear back into the world. Preston notices there's something different about his shadow. It's not that it has a life of its own (as in the Dracula movies), but that Preston can feel it. He senses that this shadow is different, not so much his silhouette but an actual thing that came from that unfathomable place where only shadows exist (not-so-subtle nod to Ligotti's core works, of course). This shadow has been out there for so long it is now starving. Preston decided to lend it a hand. My internal logic tells me a shadow would eat other shadows and would potentially continue until it left the entire world shadowless... but this is not my story, and we know that the shadow has to eat actual flowers at some point. So... What if the shadows aren't really eating things, but somehow annihilating them? As Ligotti writes in This Degenerate Little Town: "And if it were possible to strip away the scenery that surrounds us, to pull up the landscape of every planet, to rip away the skies and shove aside the stars and suns, to tear from ourselves our own flesh and delve deep into our bones..." Maybe that's what the shadows do. They unmake things, return them to that state of primordial chaos. Then, um, I don't know. I suppose Preston's shadow wouldn't be the only one (the title is plural, after all). But like I said I'm not a writer and my imagination only goes so far. But that's a rough outline of what I think this Preston Penn story might be like, were it to exist.

That's very good, sir. I like and agree with the notion that the shadows would "unmake" things, regressing them to a state of primordial chaos. A conclusion to this tale is difficult to fathom and make satisfying.

[Preston_Penn77]

ramonoski: the dead-bugs-as-chocolate is a great idea. Very Preston, to my way of thinking about him.

[Preston_Penn77]

I agree that the Ligotti references don't work well. Trite. I'd like to come up with names that sound like things/places from a Ligotti story though, names that COULD BE in a Ligotti story. I think that would work better, yes.

Not sure if I'd want to use the space to illustrate Preston's mental deterioration though. Since this is ostensibly one story in a continuing cycle, Preston's already been involved in a bunch of weirdness and sanity-degradation... so I think he should probably be quite nuts from the outset. IMO of course.

[Murony_Pyre]

That all sounds good.
Yes, I think you are right about him being stark raving/unpredictable/unreliable right from the beginning of the story after all.

Ramonoski: very well put thoughts and may I point out that you did write them.

[Preston_Penn77]

Quote Originally Posted by Murony_Pyre

That all sounds good. Yes, I think you are right about him being stark raving/unpredictable/unreliable right from the beginning of the story after all. Ramonoski: very well put thoughts and may I point out that you did write them.

Thank you, Ramonoski. I try.

[BigBagOCrabs]

Hey I know this is kind of late to the game but if you still need an illustrator for your story (which sounds pretty cool) I could do it. I'm new to this site but not to Ligotti who has and still is my favorite writer. Anyway, you can check out my stuff @ climbingupfromthebasement.wordpress.com (its not some kind of scam I promise) and see if you think it would go with your story. I use a few mediums and the site has several sections you can view. let me know and maybe we can get a pretty cool final project together!

Regards