Shadow Collector

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★★★★★

★

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The rain in this city can’t wash out the grime,

Just pushes the sin to the next scene of crime.

I’m a P.I., a fossil, a gumshoe cliché,

But this case was a weird one, since yesterday.

The victims are rich, in a room locked up tight,

With no signs of entry by day or by night.

They’re not cut or poisoned, no blood and no gore,

Just a man on the carpet, and nothing else more.

Except for the walls, where the shadows are wrong,

Where the shape of the lamp is stretched out and too long.

The victim, he’s lit from above and below,

But on the bare floor, there’s no shadow to show.

It’s gone. It’s been taken. It’s ripped clean away.

The coroner scoffs and has nothing to say.

But I found a lead in an old pawnshop’s gloom,

A strange, silver camera inside a back room.

The owner, he told me with fear in his eyes,

It photographs things that the living disguise.

It captures the truth that our own vision lacks.

It shows you the ghosts hiding deep in the cracks.

I took it back to the last victim’s suite,

And I aimed it right there at the corpse’s two feet.

The flash was a pop, and the picture that slid

Showed the man, and the shadow that somewhere was hid.

It wasn't just missing; the photo made clear

It was peeled from his heels by a thing made of fear.

A creature of darkness, all angles and spite,

That hunts in the space just outside of the light.

My own shadow flickers beneath the street lamp,

It feels thin and ragged, unsteady and damp.

The lens of the camera is cracked on its face,

Reflecting the thing that is now in this place.