Hey. This is a short I wrote. I really want to publish it in a magazine, so if you know any good sci-fi/horror story magazines, please share their presence with me.

Copyright © 2008 Thaddeus ohocinski. All rights reserved.




The Shadow man




The moon was shining bright.
The town of Ekanga, Pennsylvania was quiet and misty tonight. Not many cars were on the streets. The sound of laughter from college students sitting in their hoodless cars rang through the wet April atmosphere.
One man was walking down the street, in a large black and hooded trench coat. He was wearing his hood up, and dark sunglasses covered his eyes. He was clean-shaven, and had light brown hair that was gelled up in the front. He could barely be seen when walking in the dark, and when he walked under a streetlight, he looked like a shadow of an invisible being.
His name, Riddick Gladmane, was not in the phone book of this town. It was not listed in the names of residents. Riddick was not from this town. He was an outsider to Ekanga.
Riddick was smiling.
His skin seemed to glow with joy, despite being covered in thick, black clothing. He was happy, but he had no idea why. He was confused by his happiness. He was confused about everything, even where he was from puzzled him. Yet he still smiled like a man winning the lottery as he walked.
The shadow man turned down the street, to where the group of laughing college students surrounded their friend’s Corvette Stingray, seven of them with beers in their hands.
Riddick’s smile was not a dangerous, devilish grin of mischief, and he walked over to the students.
One, wearing a blue sweater vest, turned at the sound of Riddick’s footsteps. Then, all of them turned, and when the three girls saw the shadow man’s outfit, they started to burst out in adolescent giggles.
“Can I help you, sir?” the man in the sweater vest asked.
“Yes,” Riddick replied. His voice was low and raspy. It sounded like somebody sandpapered his throat, and this caused all seven guys and girls to grin. “Yes, I think you could.”
One in a leather jacket, the one sitting in the car, laughed and said, “Normal human’s clothing is sold down that street.”
All of them laughed, and Riddick flushed in his humiliation. He turned to the boy in the car and rasped without smiling:
“That was very funny.”
The boy stopped laughing and his eyes turned defensive and a bit scared.
“Now, if you could stop being an inconsiderate a******, I would appreciate it if one of you could point me in the direction of the train station.”
The boy in the car opened the door, and stood up. He was about a foot taller than Riddick, but the shadow man stood his ground.
“Don’t walk around big here in MY town!” he screamed. “You can’t talk no sh** to me! I’ll mess you up!”
Riddick laughed. He threw his head back and laughed hard at the pathetic boy. All of the students were silent, and the girls looked terrified. When Riddick laughed, it was worse than a werewolf howling at the moon.
“All right,” breathed Leather Jacket. “All right, wiseass you asked for it. All right.” And with that, he started to bounce up in down, raising his fists in a boxer’s position, and mocked jabs at Riddick’s face.
The shadow man stopped laughing, but a smirk was still engraved in his lips.
“By all means, if you will punch me, do it now,” he said. “I’m sure it will be quite painful for me.”
The leather-clad man, named Rob, swung a punch at Riddick’s face. Riddick allowed the impact of Rob’s fist to meet his cheek, and Riddick was thrown back.
Rob, in complete confidence for he had not missed the first punch, yelled, “Not so wise now! Go on, walk away before I really mess you up, boy!”
For the girls, Riddick thought with dark amusement. He’s only doing it for the girls’ attention.
Riddick got right back up off the ground, and now there was a ten feet distance between him and the students. He was still smirking, and Rob and the others were now recoiling a bit.
All of a sudden, darkness started to leak out of the shadow man’s open trench coat’s sides. Then, it started to pour out. Darkness. Dark pouring out and making a large puddle of shadows in the street. One female student screamed.
Riddick smiled, and lifted his hand. The darkness on the floor began to lift off the pavement, and crawl towards the students in the air. The darkness formed a tremendous claw, and grabbed Rob and picked him up. Now everybody was screaming, the most loudest of them was Rob.
The dark claw picked Rob up and held him ten feet in the air. It stopped and waited, as though looking for reassurance from Riddick that it could do a little trick…
Riddick jerked his head, and the dark claw threw a screaming Rob with intense force, into the Stingray. Rob landed on the metal with a muffled clanging sound and then, even though impossible in an everyday life, the car exploded. Rob, bruised and burning to death, ran around the dark street, screaming at the top of his lungs. He then crumpled to the pavement, and burned.
The others screamed and attempted to run, but Riddick’s darkness turned into six more claws, one for each student.
One claw fell upon the hapless bearer of the sweater vest, named Gordon, and began to punch him in the face mercilessly. Gordon scream in terror and pain, but the claw kept pounding his face. After many punches, Gordon’s head ripped in two, and gore splattered across the streets.
One of the girls, pretty cheerleader Mary-Anne, was grabbed by a dark claw, and jerked onto the floor. There, the claw began to feel her, all around, up and down. She screamed as the sodomizing hand continued, and she got up and ran again. The claw stretched for her once more, tackled her, and began all over again. It then dragged her into the puddle of darkness, to its’ home in Riddick’s trench coat, so it could continue in privacy, and so nobody could help her.
One of the other girls had her eyes ripped out, and soon another claw was tearing her to pieces. It took her arms and legs off. It ripped and tore at her stomach. And then, it wrapped itself around her head, and just ripped it off like taking the candy piece off of a popsicle.
Another boy was wrestling with one of Riddick’s dark claws, but the boy was no match, and the claw grabbed his neck and strangled him to death.
Now three were dead, and one was now with the claw in the Darkness, and the other three were getting away.
Let them, Riddick thought as the darkness crawled back inside his trench coat. He moved on.
When he was six, he had dug a hole in the woods. It was all going well until he fell through, and it turned out he had been digging on top of an old tunnel used to mine coal. He had been a homeless drifter even then, but what he found in the cave changed his life.
In the cave, he thought he would die. There was no way to see, and he could not see any sign of exit. He wandered aimlessly, when he was wrapped in cold, black mist. It gave him extraordinary abilities: to control darkness, and create his own world of darkness for shadow beings to live in his trench coat.
And after that…no memories were in his mind. He seemed to have forgotten.


The train station was filled with bleary-eyed people, yawning and zoning out. Riddick was among them. He was tired. A long day of wandering aimlessly paid off in a train ride to…aimlessness? Was that a word? To Riddick, it sounded like a perfect word. Was it, though?
The porter came into the waiting room and called, “Trains coming, quickly now, let’s move!!!”
As Riddick took a step forward, his grin grew wider, and he looked at all of the passengers about to board.
None of them came back alive.


“Drew, this is crazy,” Shelby said in exhaustion. They were quickly walking towards the train station, Drew leading and Shelby and Chris behind.
“No, Shelby,” Drew said calmly. “I gotta save Mary-Anne. I can’t let that creep take her away.”
Drew, Shelby and Chris had survived the horrific scene with the shadow man. It had killed Drew’s best friend, Rob, and two others. The man’s shadow claws took his girlfriend into the man’s trench coat, a dark abyss that scared all of them.
“Think about it, Drew!” Shelby said, tears now coming out of her eyes. “How can she still be alive? How?”
“I don’t know or care, Shelby, but I’m gonna try,” Drew said calmly. The horrific scene of the dark hand feeling his innocent girlfriend and dragging her into abyss to do it some more made Drew’s skin crawl. He had no idea how it happened, but it was not normal.
Chris, a quiet man, piped up, “What was that anyway? A freaking devil?”
“I don’t know, Chris.”
Shelby stopped walking, and began to cry.
“Stop it, Shelby,” Drew said harshly. “I have to do this. You don’t have to come along.”
Shelby sniffed, gave Drew and Chris the finger, and stomped away, leaving a trail of blood and tears behind her on the sidewalk.
Drew turned to Chris. “Are you leaving too?”
Chris shook his head and said, “Nah, man. We gotta do this. We gotta save Mary-Anne.”

Mary was in complete darkness, yet the pain and suffering was intense. She could not see, but she could feel everything. The way the darkness clawed her shirt off and formed into black tentacles that squirmed and slurped around her, in between her legs and around her chest and in her mouth…
She felt a tingling horror all of a sudden, and she felt herself lift off the dark floor and into the even darker air. Four hand-like shadows had grabbed her, one for each limb. Her long, dark hair pushed back, and then her legs were pulled apart, and a long tentacle slipped inside her.
She screamed as the darkness raped her, and claw all around her were now closing in, touching her everywhere, so many claws touching her she couldn’t move.
This is what you wanted, wasn’t it? A loud, booming voice rang in the darkness. Mary let out a squeal. This was exactly what you wanted. You wanted Mary-Anne Redman to get all the attention in the world. Well, now you’ve got it. Too bad it’s a bit too much, isn’t it?
Mary-Anne trembled, and cried out in her fear.


Riddick was on the dark red chair, smiling out the window into the night.
It was almost time.

“Are you sure this is it, dude?” Chris asked as he and Drew both got tickets for the train leaving for Point Pleasant in about ten minutes.
“The a****** said he was looking for the train station, and it’s only been about twenty minutes since he attacked us,” Drew explained as they walked down the hall towards the tracks. “Not one train has left yet. He’s gotta be here!”
Drew practically ran onto the train, and began to look around.

Riddick took a sip from his coffee that the train waitress had given him. She was a nice woman with a black bun and way too short shorts. She had been very polite. What a loss, Riddick thought and smirked and took another sip.
He closed his eyes and listened to his surroundings. Yawning young children, people talking about politics and current events, and someone was talking loudly, asking if they had seen a man in a black trench coat…
Riddick opened his eyes, a deep frown that made a crease in between his eyebrows on his face. He took off the sunglasses and looked behind his large chair. Two of the seven kids he had attacked earlier were talking to a big man who was shaking his head. Then, one with light brown hair looked up with disappointment, and his and Riddick’s eyes locked. Then, a dawning horror flooded on the man’s face, and he walked over to Riddick, with another boy with black spiky hair.
The man with the light brown hair asked, “Is this seat taken?”
Riddick looked up and smiled. “No, of course not.”
Both men sat down, and the train began to move.
“So…” Drew said. “What’s your name?”
“Riddick,” the shadow man said pleasantly.
“You, um, like girls?”
“Oh, yes, of course. Nothing to hit the spot like watching a babe in a bikini rubbing sun tan lotion on themselves,” Riddick said, and his smile was now a taunting smirk. Then, he said, “You got a bit of an injury there, bud. On your head. Might wanna check that out.”
“Okay, cut the sh**,” Drew said, and Chris nodded, looking worried. “I know it’s you who killed Rob, and took Mary. But, please man. Please.”
Drew’s eyes leaked tears, and his face was pale.
“I won’t tell nobody. Please, Mr. Riddick, please. Please just let go of Mary. The girl. Please. You’re holding the girl I love more than anything hostage. Please.”
Chris nodded, and his face was ghostly white.
“Now, now, boys. Of course I will return the girl,” the shadow man smiled. “You did not start that fight back there, it was your fool of a friend. Ah, hang on…”
The light above the three seats shone against Riddick’s body, causing a shadow right in front of them. The shadow morphed and curved, and then there was a quiet pop! noise, and Mary-Anne was right in front of all three men, Buck naked and bleeding out her mouth and lower half.
She looked startled, and she said with a quavering voice, “D-d-rew? Kuh-kuh-Chris?”
Drew stood up, and helped the girl up. Then, he embraced her.
“What a heartwarming moment,” muttered Riddick, and instantly his shadow became a dark spike, and went through both man and woman, going through Drew’s back and out of Mary’s head.
Chris let out a scream of terror, and soon everybody was looking, seeing that the two young adults were dead. A woman screamed in terror.
The shadow man grinned, and darkness dripped from his coat yet again. Chris screamed and opened the train’s window. He then attempted to jump out, but his shoe got caught in the windowsill, and he fell underneath the train, splattering blood and gore everywhere.
People screamed and cowered back as the shadow man stood up, grinning. The darkness in his coat became not claws, but terrible sharp things that stabbed and hacked at the people in the carriage. As the darkness dealt with the civilians, he went up front.
He walked through the doors, sending dark claws and tentacles to kill the people he passed. A trail of shadows was left behind in the hallways where he stood.
Quietly and happily, he pushed open the door to where the driver of the train sat, completely unaware of the murdering visitor that had just appeared in the darkness. In the shadows.

Shelby hurried along down the streets, biting her nails.
She felt bad, but why? She didn’t want to die, that was pretty understandable, wasn’t it? Wasn’t it? She just didn’t want to mess with that man. She wanted to go home and forget what happened, and maybe it would all go away.
She reached the railroad track. When she passed this, she would walk only another two blocks to get home. The lights weren’t on or anything. No warning that she should not cross. So she moved on.
Fatal mistake.
She did not know it, but right as she stepped on the tracks, the shadow man stepped on the speed, and the train came out of nowhere. Flesh his metal in a grotesque fashion, and blood spewed everywhere like popping a water balloon.
Shelby was taken away by the train, while her bloody flip-flop sandals stood on the tracks, one ripped in half.

As the train moved on with everyone dead, the shadow man jumped out and landed on cold, wet grass. He watched as the train ran and tipped over off the tracks. It hit the ground and burst into flames.
In the orange and burning ocean that surrounded him, the shadow man looked up into the April night sky and laughed. He laughed and laughed and laughed.
The moon had no shine to it. It had been covered by a shadowy fog.

I would appreciate some instructive criticism, maybe advice, or just comments.

Fifty-eight views but no responses? Don't leave me hangin' here. At least rate it at the top if you liked it or hated it.

Well, some of the people who view it may not be regeistered members.

That never crossed my mind. Thank you.

A lot of poetry lately. We need more horrors.

I am sorry for it's lack of indents. It had it on Works, but when I copied+pasted it it got screwed up into this mess.

Almost 200 views.

YEAAAAAHHHHH Made it to 200!

Good for you. But its a little dark isn't it?

Will you write about a good guy to fight the shadow man?

Sure, that was the initial plan. I just needed more replies from different people.