The Shadow People Wait Until I'm Not Looking

They live in the corners of my eyes. I've had them for about a year, in the flat I moved into after a bad breakup, and the pattern never varies: in my peripheral vision, at the edges of rooms and especially in doorways, tall dark man-shaped figures — no features, denser than shadow should be, a wrongness in the visual field that reads instantly and unmistakably as 'person standing there.' The instant I turn my head to look directly, they're gone. Not fading — gone, as if they were only ever allowed to exist in the parts of my vision I wasn't using.

For most of that year I did the sensible, exhausting thing and dismissed them. Peripheral vision is famously unreliable; tired brains manufacture figures from coat racks and shadows; I'd been through a rough patch and wasn't sleeping. Every skeptic's explanation, I applied to myself, nightly, and mostly it held the terror at bay. I saw a doctor. My eyes are fine. My brain, per a cautious GP, is 'probably just stressed.' I chose to believe her.

Then I got the puppy.

The puppy changed the epistemics entirely, because the puppy cannot read forums about shadow people and cannot be stressed about a breakup and cannot manufacture figures to match my expectations. And the puppy tracks them. She'll be dozing, and then her head comes up and she FOLLOWS something across the room — a smooth tracking motion, eyes and nose, following a path from the doorway to the corner, the exact paths I see them take in my peripheral vision — and she'll fixate on a corner where I, at that same moment, can feel one standing in the edge of my sight. Sometimes she growls, low, at empty doorways. Sometimes she wags, which is somehow worse. She sees them directly. She turns her head fully toward them and they DON'T vanish for her the way they vanish for me, because she isn't bound by whatever rule says I only get them sideways.

I can no longer tell myself it's my tired eyes. My tired eyes and an eight-month-old spaniel do not share a hallucination, do not track the same invisible figure across the same room to the same corner at the same moment. Something is in the flat with us, at the edges, and the dog sees what I'm only allowed to glimpse.

I've stopped fighting the fear and started, weirdly, taking comfort from the dog. If she wagged, maybe some of them are all right. I watch her now the way sailors watched canaries. When she's calm, I'm calm. When she stares at the doorway and growls, I leave the room, and so does she, and we sit in the kitchen together with the light on until whatever it was moves along.