Shadows

Charlie woke up in the morning and knew something was wrong. It was not that he was in his new house and was still unused to it; it never took him very long to get orientated to new places. He knew the minute that he awoke that he had moved out the day before and that he was now lying in his new queen sized bed. But an uncanny feeling told him that something was out of place. Knowing that it was too early in the morning to care, he rolled over and tried to go back to sleep, catching a glance of his tin blue paint, in the corner. He smiled, thinking about what a good job he had done on the ceiling the night before. His eyes grew tired and he was to doze off.

Suddenly, he pulled himself awake, realizing what had bothered him. He turned quickly in his bed and looked back up at the ceiling to see whether his eyes had played an early morning trick on him. Much to his puzzled dismay, they had not. The night before, he had repainted the patchy white ceiling a beautiful navy blue. It had taken him a good few hours to cover everything and to make sure that nothing spilled while he was painting. Now wide awake, he looked up at the ceiling in wonder. it was the same patchy white that it had been before he had gone over it with the brush. several hundred back breaking times, in fact. 'How could it be?' he asked himself. He blinked and looked around him, wondering whether something strange had occurred when the pain dried, maybe causing it to crumble and drop to the floor in flakes. But seeing nothing of the sort around him, he sat there, something forming in the pit of his stomach. The thought troubled him.

he had been so tired the night before when he had finally finished, that he had simply thrown away the sheets of newspaper that had been on his bed and gone to sleep with some of the paint still wet. That would have been the last bit of redescrating that he wanted to do  to the house; he had not noticed how ugly the white ceiling was until he had already moved everything into his new room. he sat up in his bed and looked up, knowing that if someone had taken the paint off the ceiling as a joke that they would have had to set everything up around him and done it without waking him up. And that was impossible because he had been the only one in the house the whole night. His girlfriend would not be back from Thailand for another week and when she did come back, she would not have the key till he gave it to her. Besides, there were no other replicas of the key yet. He stared at the ceiling and for a moment, wondered if he had painted the ceiling at all. The very fact that the ceiling was still white proved that the idea that it could have been a dream was not far from possible. But squinting, he realized that something was different from the way it had looked before he had painted it. He soon realized that the cracks and all the irremovable stains of age, which had been there before he painted over the old coat, were no longer there. In fact, the white was of a bright and vivid sheen, nowhere near that of the old one.

He was suddenly very scared because he knew that the thought of someone repainting the wall was far less plausible than someone taking the paint off. If someone had painted the wall, they would have had to be very careful because he saw no spread of white anywhere on the newspaper spread around him. He jumped out of the bed and ran out of the room to get the ladder, which he dragged back to the room. Before doing that, he checked his front door to see if the latches, which could only be moved from the inside, were still on. He stepped up the ladder and intended to use the scraping knife he had brought in to scrape the paint off to see what was below. He held the knife in his right hand and balanced himself by placing his left hand on the ceiling above him. With a yelp, he removed his hand from the ceiling and saw, to his horror, that his palm was wet with white paint.

Fear rose up and froze his spine. His right hand, numb with shock, let go of the scraping knife, falling to the floor with a clatter. He stepped off the ladder and almost fell. He stared at the bright white ceiling, with still wet paint. Apparently, whoever or whatever had repainted his ceiling had only just left. He looked at his hand, which was covered in white paint, and then back up the ceiling where the shape of his hand was etched in the blue paint he had used the night before. He got up and ran out of the room. He did not know what to do. On reaching the door, he heard a strange noise coming from his bed. Curiosity overcame him fear. He quietly walked back to the room and to his horror, he saw a shadow of white light moving across his room. He gasped with fear and looked in again. There was no one. He scolded himself for being superstitious and looked up towards the ceiling. The mark he had left with his palm was now covered with white paint.