Figures in Peace Valley

Outside Najaf, hot winds swept sand and grit against rust-streaked tin rooftops.

This was a barren stretch on the edge of the Shiite holy city in southern Iraq, where the temperature difference between day and night was immense. Year after year, amid the cycle of daylight and darkness and temperatures that started at a full forty degrees, it felt as though even human hearts had been baked soft, then hardened into something heavy.

Yet today, that heaviness had been broken by something more complicated—a weighty feeling that even local veterans who had lived through years of war and unrest had rarely experienced.

Old Abbas crouched quietly behind the only window of his mud-brick house, taking apart his old companion once more, adjusting the barrel and rubbing on a thin coat of oil. The stock of the worn AK in his hands had gradually become surprisingly damp with sweat.

—For a veteran, that was an almost unforgivable mistake. Everyone knew sweat could make the hand holding a gun slip.

But honestly, he was not on guard against Amerika patrols, nor was he wary of searches by Shiite militias.

What he feared was the "shadow" people had been talking about in the valley lately.

Those who brought corpses into the valley for burial said that the shadow often appeared only after dusk, like a smear of thick filth sliding across the dunes. Wherever it passed, living creatures all fell. There were no wounds, no bloodstains—there was only... emptiness.

At first, it had been a few stray sheep. Later, it had been Amerika soldiers returning late—

When old Abbas saw a notoriously vile local moneylender sitting blankly on the doorstep across the street that morning, unresponsive to any call, clearly still breathing through his nose and mouth yet looking like a shell whose