Bright Bo

Once he arrives you’ll find it hard to escape
what’s yours to see with is his to take
Driven by vengeance, anger and hate
Bright Bo will kill all those who quake.

They call him Bright Bo.

There’s no rhyme or reason to the people he chooses. You just have to be unlucky enough to switch on the light and find him there, a dark shadow in the bulb.

The longer you look the bigger and stronger he gets.

It can start as nothing. A speck that you notice.

Every day it grows, and everyday you spend more time looking.

Every day he grows stronger.

*

They say he’s driven by anger and hate for the human race. Some speculate it’s only adults he butchers but Bo always proves those who speculate wrong.

The truth seems to be his only proclivity is his prey have a beating heart, a working set of eyes and a well beaten amygdala. That’s what every autopsy suggests. Victims mouths are frozen in terror, eye sockets are bloody fibrous cavities. There is a hole the size of a small child’s fist where the heart has been wrenched through. The skull cracked open like shellfish, the dread centre scooped out, assumed to have been swallowed down like oysters.

*

The spot seems to follow you around the house. Every bulb seems to have a shadow, a spot. It becomes frustrating. You wonder if an eye test is on the cards until one day the spots are gone. Now something more sinister looms.

A shadow.

Every time you flick a light on a shadow races across the room. At first you think it’s a trick of the light, that it may be caused by the spot on the bulb but when you look, the spot has still gone.

Your eyes start to burn from staring at the bulb.

You look away and the shards of light skitter across your vision.

You rub your eyes and look back determined to find the source of the shadow, of the spots.

You know you’re not going mad. In the outside world you don’t see the shadows, shards of light don’t fiercely pierce your eyes when you observe a streetlight or the fluorescents on the train.

You focus on the bulb again. Determined to see what is happening, whether a bug has gotten trapped.

The hairs on the back of your neck prickle. The feeling someone has just run behind you sneaks up your spine. You turn instinctively and there is a noise, not quite a child’s laugh.

Shards of light akin to shattered glass pierce your vision. You rub your eyes desperately.

When you move your hands the world comes back into focus, and a boy stands before you. Smile stretched too wide, teeth too sharp, nose nothing but holes in a face almost comically round.

The shards of light that pierced your vision burn from eyeless sockets as a raspy voice of glass against stone says;

“What’s yours to see with, is mine to take.”