The long shadows came creeping while we were sleeping. Stealthily slithering out of the night's darkness to lay beside us in our oblivious slumbering. Their invasion was slow and secret. They consumed us in silence. Clamped themselves to our souls like ravenous leeches. We had no inkling that we were being colonised until their conquest was complete and we were totally mired in their overwhelming melancholy.

Tediously lethargic days lay ahead of us. The skies seemed greyer. The days felt colder. We lay wide eyed in the wee small hours with the long shadows entwined about us in obsidian serpentine coils, dark tentacles poisoning the fertile furrows where once our dreams had flourished in technicolour. Their poisonous chemistry seeped through our pores like the crudest of polluting oils. Our destitution and despair became the desolate smorgasbord on which they feasted. They became engorged on the profound sadness they induced within us. Like bloated worms that weighed us down, the deeper they dragged us into that melancholy pit the fatter they became.

An epidemic of agoraphobia ensued. People went nowhere. People did nothing. People died of starvation in unmade beds they couldn't bring themselves to rise from. Everything ceased to function. Society teetered on the brink. No one protested. There were no riots. Cities did not burn. Apathy drifted us toward potential extinction. As the population thinned hunger drove the long shadows toward our animals. Tails no longer wagged on little dogs. Cats no longer purred. Urban foxes slumped wearily by weed strewn kerbs where the forlorn hulks of rusting cars lay bleeding like dying beasts.

But then, a small slither of hope. Rumours of a boy who could, by the laying on of hands, sever a shadow and release an incarcerated soul. I went. Reluctantly at first. Not yet a true believer, but curious enough to force myself over my doorstep. Sluggish against the suffocating toxins of my long shadow I joined the crusade. The pilgrimage. The long throng that snakes its way along the empty tarmac of motorways that are like frozen rivers of old. More join us at the tributaries of A roads and slip roads. We are legion. A multitude. A movement.

The long shadows know what we are about. They fill us with doubt and fear. Tell us the boy is a myth, a lie, a fiction. They whisper plaintive discouragements. Turn back. Give up. Go home. Spreading scepticism like a thorny rose brier within our thoughts. But somehow we cling to the idea of the boy and the possibility he is as true as he is real.

Rumours abound. He is to the east. He is to the west. He is in this town. Or that village. He is in a city. He is on the coast. He lives in a caravan. He lives in a castle. An army defends him. Nuns protect him. He hides in a cave, or in the branches of an ancient oak. He is the fluttering butterfly boy and the world is his sun kissed meadow. Believe all of it. Believe some it. But believe. Always believe.

Belief is our weapon in a war we never asked for. We chase the darting flitter of the butterfly boy. In that endless pursuit our procession can change direction instantly, like a flock of starlings. This way we go. That way we go. We seek him here. We seek him there. Hunting that elusive boy. Always hunting that elusive boy. He marches us up to the top of the hill. He marches us down again.

There are feast days. Days when we come upon convoys of HGVs abandoned on the hard shoulder. Left there when the drivers wandered off, seized by the fug of the shadows that snapped their will. The huge interiors of these Lorries are veritable Aladdin's caves, stacked with pallets of canned foods and dried goods. We are like the Israelites receiving Mana from heaven. We do not starve, as we might have done had we still skulked alone behind closed doors.

In the face of our determination our parasites do their best act as a drag anchor. The lead weight of the long shadows therefore drags at our feet and makes our progress ponderously slow. But it never stops us. At any minute a long shadow can coil vindictively and tumble someone to the verge to slump in hopeless defeat. But there is always someone else ready to take that person by the elbow and haul them back up to their feet.

The notion of the wondrous boy and his magical hands drives us onwards. Sever the shadows, the words are like a mantra, whispered on winds that carry his mythical scent. He is our brightly burning beacon. Our light in the darkness. The positive which counteracts the negative. That in itself weakens the dread grip of the long shadows.

Small motes of joy dance in tiny wedges of light. Sometimes, when their hold loosens sufficiently, someone manages to crack a joke. Sometimes those in the vicinity of that person mutter a muted nubbin of laughter. Sometimes that laughter is like a ripple, trickling incrementally wider. One day that laugher may become the rolling wave that finally washes us clean of the shadows. Till then we remain true to our glorious quest.

Some of us utter chestnuts of old cliches as encouragement.

"Resistance is not futile."
"Hope springs eternal."

"The darkest hour is just before the dawn."

The words become a chant, echoing back along the procession. The chant returns as a resounding roar. The boy exists because we say he does. Because we believe he does. And that is surely enough.