Postulate and Shadows: Halloween Collaboration - October 26th, 2014 Meet Up

The Quill's Penumbra - @TaylorGGibbs

The Quill's Penumbra by Taylor Gibbs

We stood beneath the looming “cover” tree. Nick ran up the stairs to the loft above the office kitchen; a light shadow of a man on the screen behind, opaqued windows. He produced the camera, “squeeze in guys, squeeze tight.” We all did as we were told. It was supposed to be fun. We were all smiling. Enjoying what was for some of us the first visit, tour, and encounter with the Wattpad office and team. Some of us very recent members of the site, where we would be posting our bared creative selves to millions of readers - we hoped. We all stared up, Jing Jing and Kevin, the other two staffers in the front with rest of us filed and stacked behind, staring up into the red eye of the lens.

The picture was taken and uploaded immediately to the Wattpad site section dedicated to the meet up and then circulated to each one of us. One by one we all pulled out our phones to inspect our group, and more specifically how we stood up to, and out, among the other talents in the room. The picture looked pretty good at first. A handsome group of aspiring fifteen minute of famers. That is, until Joflower casually piqued, and announced “what’s wrong with Jing Jing’s face? She’s just a gaunt shadow.” We all searched for Jing Jing in the photo in our phones. I found her but there was nothing wrong with her face in my phone. It was Kevin, he’d become a tonal blur of insipid red and flesh as if his face was vibrating on a super high frequency; his head a tuning fork tapped with an infernal hammer. It went that way around the room, each person’s glance turned to a balled up gasp as the pictured flesh of each staffer melted or smeared before their eyes. “There must be something wrong with Takatsu’s phone camera,” said Maaja, “try another.” Just then there was a slight rumbling in the floor boards like a small tremor, and a large thump. Mathias ran back through the door to the first meeting area with the couches where we all introduced ourselves. “What the hell!” he yelled, as a large black and fluid mass dissipated down the glass of the far meeting room which now had a large spiderweb crack emanating from a sparked pinhole at the centre. We all rushed in to look, but as Shazza crossed the threshold between rooms her eyes rolled back to whites and her jaw dropped with a click far lower than it should have been able to do. Out of her mouth crawled a creaking drone, which quickly ramped up into a blood curdling shriek. A lattice work of gore-red lines seared themselves into her cheeks like sore hash tags, then dissolved. The bright embers of the lines receding into her previous pallid rouge. Sepherene turned to Kaisareur who was trembling with a light dew on his forehead, “it is getting really warm in here.” Kaisareur nodded, and shuddered, teeth clacking together as the pupils in his eyes began to turn and swirl like water in a drain into @ signs. They had an orange aura around an obsidian so black it sucked the white out of his skin, and he turned a sour grey. Sepherene, in shock grabbed him and started shaking him, noticing without realizing it Kevin step from behind him, a fading smirk kissing his lips. “What the fuck, is happening here!” I cried, But Kaisareur had recovered and Sepherene was lapse. “What do you mean?” asked Nick.

“I mean it’s fucking hot in here, it wasn’t a few moments ago, and people are making inhuman noises, while weird shit is happening to their faces. And what the hell happened to the glass back there?”

“I dunno, couldn’t say. It is pretty weird though.” -

The lights went out.

“AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHgugugugugRRRRRRRRWSSSSHT!” 

“What the fuck was that? It sounded like drowning at the end.” 

One light turned back on swinging from the ceiling. A shadow walks without a person.

More glowing red lines appear out of the darkness of hashtags in flesh under the gasps and cries of the young Wattpad writers and readers. @ symbols glowing like the old cigarette lighters from the dashboards of old cars.