The Shadow of Death

[Peter Jackal]

I want to post some exclusive extracts of my new book, The Shadow of Death on this thread.

It’s the tale of a man brought back from the dead, only to find himself caught up in the hideous web of deception and death woven by the evil predator that saved his life. It’s a testament of torture, murder, incredible sex, unbearable darkness, and desperate love.

The introduction is given below. Gothic.net readers : feel free to say what you think. If you like it, I’ll add some more spoilers.



I was once a human being but now am not.

The Shadow of Death is my story: the tale of a creature condemned to rot in exile in a place far beneath the earth and beyond the minds of mortal men.

This is the chronicle of a curse that transforms people into monsters. It twisted my quiet and lonely life to make me a rapist, a murderer and a thief of bodies and souls.

I have become a dealer in black secrets, a taker of life and a servant of Death.

This book describes my inconceivable battles with the terrifying forces that shape the heavens and the earth. It shows what people will do to survive when there is no safety to be found, even in their dreams.

I will tell you the truth about the spectres that haunt a realm of ghosts and shadows, and about the predators that lurk with their faces pressed against the window of the cosy illusion of the human world.

I will give a voice to the silent lands of the lost and the damned.

I have lived as a fugitive in the beyond, tasted the incomparable pleasures of sex in other dimensions and chased after the desperate promise of fragile love in a world of seething hate. I have become less than a man, corrupted by the lust for the life-force of other beings and a thirst for murder, cruelty and revenge.

When you read what I have done, you may think me to be an evil thing or a devil, but I say: beware!

To sit in judgement over me, you will have to follow me to the darkest place. You must fall into the deepest pit where the memory of your human life will be like sparks dying in the night sky above the forgotten warmth of a distant fire.

Pray god it is a descent that you never have to make, for the truth about this world and the next is a horror that will possess your very spirit and enslave it in the service of torture and killing in ways that you cannot imagine.

Walk on. Look away. For if you discover what awaits you at the moment of Death then you will have no choice.

The blissful dream that is your life will crumble and the nightmare will begin…

[mindless1]

Wow. This is so good it hurts.

[Peter Jackal]

Thanks Mindless1. That is high praise indeed!

The book is available on Amazon - just search under Peter Jackal Shadow and you'll find it - paperback or kindle edition.

Here is an extract from Part 1: The Crack in the World. It describes my first encounter with the creature I came to know as the Shadow of Death.



“Wake up!” it whispered softly in my ear with wet velvet breath that smelled of the deep earth.

“Wake up! You are dying…”

I remembered the pain just before it bit into me again. It cut my torso in two and filled the halves with sickening fire.

“It hurts...” My voice was a growl, my dry throat a sandy hole. I knew my blood was seeping away and my thirst burned.

“Open your eyes. If you look at me then the pain will stop.”

I fought to obey. My eyelids felt like lead but I just kept forcing. I was desperate.

My eyelashes tore away from my cheeks with horrible, sluggish agony and revealed a blurry haze of half-light and damp shadow.

“I… fell…” A few fragments of an unwanted memory glittered in the darkness, and reason began to return.

“Yes, you fell a long way.” There was a smile in the voice, like an adult might use to comfort a child during the harsh lesson in a fairy tale. “Now Death is near.”

The comfort was gone. I groaned.

“Death is near and you must look at me!”

“Help me…” my eyes were too dry for tears as they pieced together the shapes that swam amid the gloom and floated in the hot copper stench of blood and soil.

Eyes. I could see eyes. Cold, black eyes, shining like the dead stare of a shark calculating its bite.

It’s not human, said a voice inside.

A sudden thrill of fear lit up the twilight in my mind. I had the horrible sense of having woken from a bad dream to the embrace of a giant cockroach. Panic choked me and I fought to struggle, to focus, to escape, but all I could see were those eyes and all I could move was my right arm that flapped weakly against cold stone.

I screamed with all my might but the only sound that emerged from my failing lungs was a soft moan. There was no strength left.

“Yes, you have no strength,” it said, reading my heart. “And you have no pain.”

That realisation came as a shock. The torture was gone from my insides, vanished like a spider into the dark crack of fear that those eyes had opened up within me.

“Who are you?” I asked, surprised again at the sudden strength of my voice and the lucidity of my thoughts, bright against the fading backdrop of my darkening senses. “Are you death?”

It laughed. Amid the confusion of so many disturbing unknowns, I’d somehow expected it to laugh. It was a strange sound, like soft music in a tonic from another world.

“I am not Death. She cannot know my shape.”

“She?”

“She is the seeker and knower of shapes, and She would know yours, and you will surely die.”

“I don’t want to die!”

“This is a good thing,” it chuckled. “I have seen this in your shape. I will teach you to hide your shape from Her. Is this what you want?”

“Don’t let me die…” My body could spare no moisture, so my voice had to do the weeping.

“We shall play together, you and I.”

The voice behind the eyes was resonant with a glee that contaminated my thoughts with delight and made me deeply afraid.

“We shall play and your shape will change, and when She looks for you, She will not see. You will live.”

“Yes,” I croaked and would have nodded enthusiastically if I could have moved my head. I didn’t care if it made sense or not. I just wanted to live and the voice had been right about the pain.

My heart sang with relief, as though the impossibility of it all didn’t matter. As though I could believe there was safety here in this place of terror, strangeness, and the threat of agony and death.

“Thank you…. Thank…” I gasped as my pathetic gratitude outshone the desperation that fuelled its helpless glow.

I felt what could have been hands on the sides of my head and I could no longer speak. As my awareness sank under them into a cool, dark lake of unknowing, I could feel the fingers pressing through my skull, like worms pushing through dead leaves, a sculptor moulding the clay of the conscious matter inside.

I was being pushed down through a hole inside myself. It did feel rather like a game. I laughed and everything exploded into reflected light and shadow.

I knew I was changed.

[Peter Jackal]

This extract is from Part 2 of my book, The Shadow of Death. It describes my first encounter with Death, the being that brings human life to its agonising end. I’ve split it into two smaller bites, because it’s just over the character limit for a single post.

Don’t forget, if you like it, you can buy it on Amazon. Yeah, I know I said that already, but even a monster has to eat, and I'm always hungry...




The cold sea air ruffled my hair and invaded my lungs with an edge hardened by the bite of winter darkness.

I’d been forced away to the sea front by town centre streets pregnant with the ill-tempered smells of busyness and late night drunks. It had been a tarmac hell decorated with dirt and litter, made even more foul by the driving wet.

I glanced back towards the harsh city lights and the grey rumble of distant trucks. Huge and disrespectful even of the rain, the orange-yellow blur was a looming insult to the night sky, a vision of industrial wrath that fertilised my own anger until it bloomed into visceral disgust.

I turned to face the waves and heaved a sigh of relief. Here, perched alone on the concrete cusp between two worlds, I felt at home.

On one side was the bright, crawling nest of a million empty lives, on the other the deep vanishing of the unknown: the constant, roaring vastness of the ocean that beckoned to the dormant sense of wonder from which men may hide, but always smoulders at the core of the human soul.

I trod that fine line for a mile or more, looking for something that whispered to me but couldn’t be seen. Then, bidden by a twitch from somewhere beneath my feet, I dropped into a squat and placed the flat of my hand on wet stone coarsened by a sprinkling of beach sand.

I reached out into the ground with all of my senses, searching for the source of the beckoning sound that began to madden me like an itch on a part of my body I couldn’t even locate, let alone scratch.

At first, I detected nothing except the chill of the damp and the smell of dead crabs and salt, yet eventually there was something. A vibration that swelled gently in my bones and lifted me to the balls of my feet like dry air filling a sail to the breeze. I turned and saw a small fire dancing against the dark. I could see the shadow of a man and my heart lit up with a blaze that mirrored the flickering light that jumped and flashed in the blackness.

Even as I knew that this figure was the singer of the haunting, subliminal song, I found myself beside him, bathed in the glow of his dirty oil-drum stove.

“Evening,” he nodded at me. His chunky red neck matched the stubby fingers that he meshed before the flames to wring the cold and the wet from them. His eyes shone bright from deep within a weathered complexion that complemented the grimy texture of his clothes.

“Cold one tonight.”

I nodded but had nothing to say as I breathed in the stench of his stale sweat and the burning rags in his fire.

I had no idea why I was there but I was drawn to those eyes spat with raindrops and street filth. The youth, the power that exuded from their inky depths assaulted my soul and sped the blood that coursed through the thick arteries in my throat. I moved closer and put my hands in my pockets to curl them into fists against the pounding of my excited heart.

He grinned and I knew he was aware of the exhilaration that consumed me. I felt in my essence that we were creatures from the same world and shared a secret that could only haunt the dreams of ordinary men.

He reached out a fat and powerful arm and touched me gently beneath my right shoulder, much as the Indian man in the bar had done. I felt a jolt, as if I’d been picked up an inch and dropped on to my heels.

Suddenly, he balled his hand into a fist and drove it through the skin of my chest, plunging his fingers down into the agony of my flesh and bone. I felt his grimy nails burst the deepest vessels of my lungs.

I wanted to scream out in desperate pain but no sound emerged from my ruptured breast. The defensive spasms of my arms were halted by a scorching paralysis that burned my muscles like terrible fire. Everything inside me was being pulled out through that awful hole and I could feel the strength ripped from my body as it flowed away up his arm and into him.

My vision darkened as I gave up the struggle to breathe, let alone cry out. The man and his fire faded to become a distant thing, a dream that seemed important but was frustratingly hard to remember beneath the shadow of such appalling hurt. I knew I was being eaten alive.

It was then that I saw Her.

She rose up out of the blackness of the sea: a vast, dark shape of indescribable, hideous beauty moulding and folding Herself towards me. She wasn’t so much a vision as a ghastly feeling, a deep, black smudge at the edge of all of my senses, as my mind collapsed like a punctured balloon.

There was nothing that could stop Her unbearable weight. She was inevitable, aloof, magnificent and utterly horrifying. And beneath it all was the sense of a creature that was somehow unmistakably and brutally female.

She was Death.

Continued in bite 2…

[Peter Jackal]

Continued from bite 1…



She had no eyes but She was cloaked in a palpable intent that scanned Her surroundings with hunger, an endless seeking that might be diverted by the finding of flesh, but would never end for as long as time continued to bring its unbending mass to bear upon the beating warmth of living things.

No sooner had I noticed it, than that awesome, deadly awareness flooded in upon me from all sides, to focus and lay down upon my wounded chest like a finger that weighed a thousand tons.

I felt the burning of Her attention as it started to invade the surface of my body. It was an intimate stripping away of the layers of skin, bone, thought and blood. She was seeking to know the very structure of my cells, to taste the salt of my body’s fat and suck the secrets from the marrow of my heart.

She evoked a terror so dreadful that it forced me to twist the numbed and pain-rusted bones in my spine to look away. As I turned, I saw the face of the dirty man once more. He looked different, taller, aflame with a red light that lit up his body from within and spilled out of his extraordinary eyes. Eyes that were wide with delight as a living being was devoured before them.

His mouth was open and his jaws dripped spittle mixed with rain. I could hear and smell the hot, bitter air from his lungs as he shivered with arousal in the shadows of his own inner glow. Yet the instant my attention was ripped away from Her, I felt a deep shift within the fabric of my self. There was a realignment of the energy that guided my body, my feelings and my mind.

I sloughed off the agony and paralysis like a fleeing lizard slipping free of its wriggling tail and I felt a deep and wordless knowledge take charge of my limbs.

It was as if I no longer fitted into the claws that She’d wrapped around me and I felt myself slide effortlessly from Her grasp, leaving an unbearable vacuum behind that I instinctively knew could immediately be filled.

I reached out and took his hand and the moment we touched, I saw the joy that shimmered in his flaming eyes flicker and die.

It was replaced by shock, then fear, and then the sudden realisation that the tables had been abruptly and horribly turned as my hands penetrated his flesh and sank into the swirling heat of his insides.

I took hold of everything that he’d stolen from me and tore it back into myself. It was as if the very force of his life was turned inside out and I could feel vital parts of him under my hands as I hollowed him out like a trout on a fishmonger’s slab. I listened to the pitch of his scream as it rippled through the bones in my neck and breathed deeply with the relief of escape. I tasted the dark pleasure of his warm blood in my throat as I passed right through him as though he were smoke, and delivered him into the clutches of the crushing spectre that he’d beckoned here by attempting to slaughter me.

I heard him drop to his knees as I walked away, careful not to turn around until I’d achieved a safe distance from the nightmare that was unfolding behind me. I felt the spot on my chest where his hand had pierced my body as though my skin were made of water. There wasn’t the slightest pain, nor when I looked, the merest mark.

I sat on the grassy slope that overlooked the beach and watched Death consuming the tramp.

The subtle shifts in my being that I’d made to eviscerate and feed him into Her incomprehensible jaws had somehow left us connected, and I drank the spatter of his ebbing power that escaped as She dissolved his living human form into unfeeling skin and bone.

His unspectacular body had contained incalculable energy, and though the vast bulk of that vital force was slowly gulped down the rasping throat of Death as She mercilessly ripped it away, the scraps that dripped into me were a feast of heart-pumping, living power.

As it filled me to the brim, his memories exploded in my mind and after them raced the feelings of countless other beings.

They were the fragments of a thousand stolen souls, liberated in a shocking stream of conscious food that trickled from the lips of Death and spilled into my own ethereal gullet.

I could literally taste the lives of the people he’d torn apart to satisfy his greedy thirst, just as he’d meant to do to me.

I knew I was profiting by a cruel man’s filthy life spent in the service of murder but I was filled with a vicious and vengeful ecstasy that transcended my guilt with its primal warmth.

I dimly sensed that I’d stumbled into something vast and done damage beyond my capacity to understand. But like a sound that was too high to for my ears to grasp, it was a screech of conscience that caused me no pain.

As his strength slowly failed, my own increased and I flickered between two views of the timeless scene below. Sometimes I saw a fat man on his knees, succumbing to the winter cold, coughing badly in the dark beside his dying fire. Sometimes the unimaginable face of Death Herself as She flayed Her meal upon the concrete slab like a raptor perched on a fencepost above the bloody meat of a sparrow.

I realised that I’d become more than I used to be, able to see things that were forbidden to the eyes of mortal men. I’d discovered the brutal, predatory monster that brought the ending of human life and had escaped Her jaws by ripping the life essence from a fellow thief of souls.

I’d stolen power to escape from Death, just as the monster in the mountains had foretold.

Numbed by the post-traumatic euphoria of it all, I was oblivious to the pouring rain, and my brain fell silent as a new day was born amid the crashing of the ocean waves.

When the ambulance arrived, I scrambled down the slope to join the small crowd that had assembled to watch. The tramp was unmarked but barely alive. There was a blanket across his barrel chest and his eyes were open but unrecognisable from the night before. They were dull, set in the aged face of a tired, defeated creature.

I could no longer see the apparition of Death as She patiently unravelled the tenuous thread of his life, but I could sense Her ongoing feast as it empowered me still, and I knew that he wouldn’t survive the day.

I felt renewed and vital, sharpened by the vigour of the salty air and full to the brim with energy despite not having eaten in more than a day.

I wanted to feel guilt and sorrow for the poverty and sadness of his lonely death, but all I felt was energy, power, and the ruthless good humour that comes from an invulnerable feeling of strength.

I walked off with a smile. The sun was up and my clothes were beginning to dry in the cold wind.

I wandered along the beach to track down the wonderful onion scent of hotdogs and mustard.




From The Shadow of Death by Peter Jackal