The Geometry of Shadows

  Aditi had always been drawn to the peculiar. Her apartment, nestled in a quiet corner of Mumbai, was a testament to this fascination, each room a carefully curated collection of the unconventional. Recently, her focus had narrowed to sculpture. Not the elegant bronzes or graceful marbles, but the odd, the jarring, the unsettling.

The first piece had been a formless mass of what looked like melted glass, shot through with veins of an unnatural violet. She’d found it in a dusty antique shop in Colaba, tucked away behind a chipped porcelain doll. The shopkeeper, a wizened man with ancient eyes, had offered no history, only a vague murmur about its “unusual form.” Aditi had felt an inexplicable pull towards it, a feeling that it belonged in her collection.

Next came the wire sculpture. A chaotic knot of sharp angles that seemed to shift and flicker in her periphery, a testament to the artist’s claim that he’d dreamt its form. He’d described it as a direct translation of a feeling he couldn’t articulate, one that was meant to create an optical illusion. Aditi could resonate with the prickling unease that was strangely compelling.

The final piece, and perhaps the most disturbing, was a sculpture carved from a stone unlike any she’d ever seen. It was cool to the touch, almost unnervingly so, and its surface seemed to twist and shimmer in the corner of her vision. Her friend, Sameera, had brought it back from a small, unnamed village in Romania. “It just reminded me of you,” Sameera had said, her voice filled with a genuine warmth, “so strange and beautiful.” The description on the small tag it came with was simply: “From a place that is not.”

As Aditi arranged her new acquisitions, she found herself instinctively placing them in specific locations. The melted glass on a low table in the living room, catching the afternoon light in strange refractions. The wire sculpture perched precariously on a high shelf in her study, its sharp edges a stark contrast to the books below. The stone figure rested in a darkened corner of her bedroom, emanating a subtle chill that she initially dismissed as the monsoon evening air.

Days turned into weeks. Aditi found herself drawn to the spaces between the sculptures. The way the shadows fell, the air seemed to thicken. There were moments of profound stillness, an absence of the usual city background noise that was almost deafening. Sometimes, in the dead of night, she would wake to find the shadows in her apartment seemed… deeper, more substantial, as if they possessed a geometry of their own.

One evening, as a storm raged outside, the power flickered and died. Aditi lit a few oil lamps, their flickering light casting long, dancing shadows across her collection. It was then that she noticed it. The empty space in the corner where the stone sculpture rested seemed to pulsate. The darkness wasn’t just the absence of light; it had a texture, a density.

A wave of nausea washed over her. The prickling unease she’d felt with the wire sculpture intensified, becoming a cold dread that seeped into her bones. The violet veins in the melted glass seemed to glow with an inner light, and their reflections on the walls twisted into impossible shapes.

Then, from the shadowed corner, something began to coalesce. Not a physical form at first, but a warping of the air, a distortion in reality’s very fabric. The silence in the room was no longer peaceful but filled with an alien anticipation. Aditi understood, with a horrifying certainty, that the sculptures themselves were nothing more than anchors, and the act of arranging them, the attention she had unknowingly paid to their placement and the spaces between, had completed a terrible, unseen ritual. The final “piece” wasn’t an object at all. It was the void she had unknowingly invited, and from it, something ancient and utterly Other was beginning to emerge.