Beyond the Shadows by LaVerne Clark

Clearly intoxicated men draped themselves over her, their hands everywhere while she laughed, encouraging their antics.
    It never ceased to amaze him how relaxed people were with their personal security. It was an open world now. Information was given out so readily to anyone who cared to find it. Within a few minutes and with little effort, he found her address from a reply she’d made to a friend about her housewarming, and he made his plans. Jiggling the skeleton keys in his pocket, he grinned, thinking of the time he’d be spending with her the next day.
    The familiar buzz of excitement started to fizz through his veins.
    Plans made, he closed down his computer and prepared for bed. Before climbing in, he took his rosary off the hook above and fingered the beads. He sank to his knees, bowed his head, and fervently offered up a prayer for each station of the cross. Once the hundred repetitions were completed, he offered up one more, asking for God’s blessing and strength for the morning ahead. Then he lay down and slept like a baby.

Chapter Six
    Nate twisted and turned between the sheets, unable to surface from the half-world of dreams. Shadows danced all around him in a dark void, wordless, but insistent. Every time he tried to wake up, they danced closer. He swatted at them, his hand going through the formless mists and they flitted away, their laughter mocking him.
    What do you want?
    They didn’t answer but came closer, the brief glimpse of faces hauntingly familiar. Beyond them, a dark shadow lingered, watching. Dread churned and his body broke out in a cold sweat. The twisted sheets tightened around him. It drifted closer and the spirits parted as if in deference. But the shadow didn’t stop short like the others. It kept coming until it lay right on top of him, smothering him in darkness, suffocating him, invading his pores.
    He couldn’t breathe.
    Right before he started to panic, his lungs filled with oxygen and he sucked in a deep breath, but the shadow lay within him, weighting him down with its dark insidious presence. He tried to force his eyes to open, to break free of the shackles holding him in place, but he was powerless. Suddenly, he could see then realized in the next breath, it wasn’t through his own eyes.
    What the hell is going on?
    The body he inhabited stood as if in hiding. From his vantage point, he could clearly make out a man in a front garden, his face tilted up to a window in the house. A familiar woman stood there, undressing. A woman he recognized from the photos the anonymous neighbor had taken, incriminating Williams of her murder.
    His host’s hand lifted a mobile phone and photographed the scene, making Nate shiver. Déjà vue. He steeled himself, expecting to watch Williams enter the property, but instead, the man untied his dog from the fence where it had been tethered, threw the cigarette he’d been smoking on the ground, stubbed the end out with the toe of his shoe, and walked away.
    He wanted to keep watching him, but found the eyes he looked through fix back on the house and narrow. They were moving. Knees cracked as the unknown man knelt, reached out with a gloved hand, and picked up the discarded cigarette butt. And then, they were moving again. Horrified, he realized they approached the front door, and his host’s fingers shifted through a set of keys just before his world went black.
    Nate woke with a gasp to find the sun shining through a crack in the blinds. He sat up and ran a shaking hand down his face, his body protesting the effort. His eyes darted around the room, but he found nothing out of the ordinary. Clothes still lay over the back of the chair beside the bed where he’d shucked them off the night before. Streams of sunlight gleamed off the body of the acoustic guitar that had sat untouched in the corner of his room for longer than he cared to admit, and his wardrobe door stood open its customary crack because of the mess at the bottom preventing it