by Tom Dowd (1992)

Despite the efforts of the room's tungsten lights, darkness came. The corner of the room whispered a name.

"Knight…"

He looked up for a moment from the twin flatscreens inlaid beneath the plexiglass surface of the desk, and frowned slightly. Behind him, the sun cut through Detroit's fog for the last time that day and the city slipped into twilight. He sipped from a glass of pale gold liquid and waited. Nothing.

He looked down and the numbers danced again. Profits, losses, credits, debits, balances forward and in arrears woven together in a four-dimensional matrix. Projections birthed from the financial mandala as…;

"Knight…"

He removed the thin, gold-framed glasses from his aged face and placed them gingerly on the desktop. Unburdened, his tired eyes scanned the room and settled on the shadowed corner across from him. He waited. Nothing.

"Show yourself," he said, finally.

"As you wish," said nothing.

The corner's shadow became mist and flowed forward. It shifted, and silently extended a long and articulate part of itself into the room. Solid now, it clicked against the marble floor and found purchase. Another slim extension, hard against a nearby wall, dug in and pulled. Darkness entered from the corner and skittered against the floor. Slick and shapeless, it grinned.

"Damian Knight…"

The man stood slowly as it came, the pale color of his hair now matched by the skin of his palm pressed hard against the desktop. He licked his lips and nodded. "As good a name as any, I suspect."

"We all have many names, some truer than others. We all bear many faces."

"I doubt you came here to recite trite philosophies. What do you want?" His eyes flicked to the room's other corners and then back to the dark form stretched before him.