The Shadow Fabric

by Mark Cassell

“That’s what I thought, but—”

  “I know as much as you right now.”

  “Really?”

  Victor frowned. “You don’t have to doubt me.”

  I rubbed the back of my neck. It clicked when I stretched.

  “Are you okay?” he said again.

  I nodded, and a moment later, he stepped into the kitchen, avoiding an overturned bin. I followed. The stink of food—bad eggs—shot up my nostrils, and the echo of a dripping tap bounced off chipped tiles.

  “Sadly,” Victor announced, “this kind of mess isn’t unusual.”

  Microwave meal boxes and empty milk cartons, plus all manner of other rubbish, had spilled from an open refuse sack, and required a big stride to avoid. Bits of sticky fluff clung to the skirting boards, and in places, dubious liquids pooled on the linoleum. The worktop, littered with crusty plates and chipped mugs, acted as a playground for the flies. I counted six just on one congealed lump of ketchup.

  Before we left the kitchen, Victor reached out and tightened the tap.

  We paused in the hallway. To our right an uncarpeted staircase led upstairs, and in front was a closed door shielding us from the room where Stanley had vanished into the shadows. Victor went to open it, and a peculiar expression darkened his face. I thought of what we’d witnessed in that room. Almost stumbling, he shot up the stairs.

  “Search quickly, Leo,” he called from the landing. “Look for anything to tell us how Stanley came by the Fabric.”

  Squinting after him, I marvelled at his agility. One moment, he stood beside me, and the next, he flicked a switch. A bare bulb spotlighted his face and he disappeared round the corner. I headed up the stairs, my knee aching with each footfall.

  The area mirrored the lack of house pride downstairs: wallpaper, skirting and carpet revealed years of neglect. The landing reeked of damp, and reluctantly, I pushed open the bathroom door. The stink crawled into my brain. Nothing shone or sparkled—not that I’d expected it to. With a shower curtain half hanging from the rail, and a cracked toilet cistern lid, there wasn’t any recent evidence of use. No damp towels or pools of water in the sink or bath, nothing to suggest Stanley had been here of late.

  I left the room, breathing again, took a few paces and entered another room. Neglected as elsewhere; empty, apart from several cardboard boxes huddled in a corner. I knelt beside them and thumbed open the nearest. Dust leapt into my face.

  Wrinkling my nose, I whispered, “Dirty, filthy bastard.”

  Inside wasn’t what I’d expected, although I wasn’t sure exactly what it was I had been expecting. Porn mags. A whole load of them. I opened the next box: a few broken pieces of crockery and a spoon. Coat hangers, the wire kind, occupied the last box.

  “Leo!” Victor’s voice sounded stifled. “Anything?”

  I joined him in the main bedroom. “Nope.”

  Victor stood tiptoe on one leg, the other hooked off the ground. The rest of his body was in the wardrobe. A tongue of clothes licked him while hangers chattered like teeth. A double bed with duvet and pillows askew took up most of the room. On it sat a laptop, booting up. Apart from the wardrobe, the only other furniture was a scuffed chest of drawers with clothes heaped on it. Next to a blinking digital clock was something pink.

  I picked it up: a business card for an escort agency.

  “Nice,” I said, and dropped it, wiping my fingers on my trousers.

  “What’s under the bed?” Victor still had his head and hands in Stanley’s clothes.

  “Do I have to?”

  “Yes.”

  “He’s not been here for a while.” I crouched beside the bed. “Unless he never washes.”

  “Stanley’s hygiene has always been questionable.”

  “You’re not kidding.” The closer I got to the carpet, the more I wanted to puke. Under the bed lay a haze of dust, a few socks and some underwear. Nothing else. My neck ached and blood pounded between my temples. Slowly, I got to my feet. “All due respect to him being your brother, but this guy’s got issues.”

  Victor closed the wardrobe doors. “I know.”

  The laptop’s screen asked for a password.

  “Do you know anything about computers?” he asked, and sat on the edge of the bed.

  “Not much.” As always, such a question reminded me of the immense hole in my past. I didn’t even know if I’d worked in IT. I had a basic understanding of computers, nothing more. After a moment, I walked around the room and stood beside him. “You have any idea what the password could be?”

  His shoulders slumped. “No. This thing may contain a clue where he got the Fabric from. May even tell us where he is now.”

  “Guess,” I said. “You never know your luck.”

  “Knowing my brother, it’ll be something lacking imagination.”

  “Besides porn and prostitutes, what else does he like?”

  “Please, Leo.”

  I didn’t reply.

  “Something obvious,” he mumbled.

  The view from the window wasn’t much: houses, telegraph poles, an odd tree here and there, and a lot of back gardens. Most were as unkempt as Stanley’s, and next door’s featured a collection of busted and buckled toys. Every one a bold colour like chunks of broken rainbow tangled with grass. A garage clung to the side of the house.

  “What car does he drive?” I asked.

  “An Audi. When the TT came out, he wanted one immediately.” Victor straightened his back and pulled the laptop closer. “I never knew where he got the money from. He became obsessed with it. Given his otherwise slovenly nature, that car didn’t suit him.”

  “Try that.”

  Victor spoke out loud as he typed: “Audi TT…no.”

  “Without a space?”

  He tried. “No.”

  “Worth a shot.”

  His lips twitched as his fingers darted over the keys, and with each slam of the Enter button, his frustrations grew. “This is impossible.”

  “You find anything in his pockets?”

  “Receipts.”

  “Could be a clue on one of those,” I suggested.

  “What, for his password?”

  “No, where he’s been recently. I don’t know.”

  “They’re on the floor.” He flicked an eyebrow towards the wardrobe. “They all point nowhere.”

  I scanned the receipts while Victor punched the keys. Each time he hit the Enter button, the sound snapped. There were about a dozen receipts, mostly cash paid at the local supermarket—the guy liked his lager and pizza. One was for the purchase of a laptop. Others were for DVDs, each on separate occasions: The Matrix, The Expendables, and a few other similar movies all starting with the word The. The date of two particular receipts interested me.

  “Victor, strange question. Do you remember The A-Team?”

  “Eh?” He stopped banging the keys and glared at me. “Of course I remember. Stanley loved the series. Even if he was about thirty when it first came on TV. He’s always been immature. Why are you asking?”

  “He bought a DVD of the remake on the same day he got himself this.” I tapped the laptop.

  “I see where you’re going with this.”

  I shrugged. “Worth a try. I’ve done that before when it’s come to passwords. Anything I see on a desk.” It was all I could remember about my use of computers.

  He prodded the keys.

  “No luck,” he said. “Funny, when he got the TT, he used to call himself Mr TT. After Mr T. Get it?”

  “Yes.” I grimaced. Stanley had always been a fool, it seemed.

  Victor froze and we locked eyes.

  “Mr TT is too short for a password,” I told him. “How about M-I-S-T-E-R?”

  He punched it in and hit the T button twice, paused, and hit the Enter key.

  It worked.

  He threw gloved fists into the air. “Well done, Leo.”

  I moved closer as he popped up empty folders while the email program loaded. No more passwords, and soon Sta
nley’s personal correspondence crowded the screen. Victor used the cursor to scroll down a stream of junk mail, pausing occasionally. Going back a few days before the Shadow Fabric incident, a collection of emails with the subject header, re package, proved interesting. We read the most recent first.

  From: tulipmoon73

  To: stantheman

  Subject: re package

  I will see you then. Make sure no one follows you.

  TM.

  Victor clicked the column header and about a dozen emails between tulipmoon73 and stantheman listed on the screen. The first one referred to a telephone conversation they’d had. Others contained references to the package itself.

  From: stantheman

  To: tulipmoon73

  Subject: re package

  Thanks for all this tulip. victor and the others will finally listen to what i have to say. they’ll have me back in their pathetic group. thanks for giving it to me. Maybe you and me can meet up properly sometime. when I get the fabric i’ll have the power. we can share it.

  S

  Victor said, “Stanley never shares anything.”

  From: tulipmoon73

  To: stantheman

  Subject: re package

  I’m pleased you’ll put it to good use, Stanley. But no, we can never meet properly. I’m sorry. Know that you deserve the Fabric.

  And that the Fabric deserves you.

  TM.

  Stanley’s reply was short and to the point:

  From: stantheman

  To: tulipmoon73

  Subject: re package

  Don’t know what your missing.

  There were a few more exchanges before Tulip Moon suggested a time and date. It was on a Sunday night, two days before Stanley had shown his brother the package. The meeting place was a pub car park. I remembered the uninviting building as I’d driven into the area.

  “Tulip Moon,” Victor murmured, and accessed the other folders, finding nothing else of interest. Internet history provided us with no further clues.

  My neck ached and all I wanted to do was sit for a while.

  “That’s it,” Victor said and set the laptop aside.

  “At least our mystery girl has a name. Guess it’s the bitch who we’ve run into a few times,” I said.

  “Yes,” he whispered between tight lips, and folded the laptop. “Or who ran into us…”

  “I don’t get it. Why does she want us dead?” I thought of the cap-wearing driver, and the girl with the hoodie. One and the same, it was almost certain. Red cap, red scarf. I remembered staring down the gun barrel. “And why didn’t she shoot us when she had the chance?”

  “I’ve been wondering about that.” Victor stood up. “Why go to the trouble to run us off the road?”

  “Maybe it was a warning. After all, she didn’t come back.”

  We went downstairs. Victor was still hesitant about going into the only room we’d not yet searched.

  He flexed his fingers and pulled his gloves tighter. “We’ve got what we came for.”

  “No, Victor.” I put my palm against the door. “We should check everything.”

  He grunted, his eyebrows frozen above wide eyes.

  “We need as much information as we can,” I added. “If there’s anything else, it’ll be here.”

  I nudged open the door. An odd smell punched me in the nose.

  The open-plan room remained almost as we’d left it. The violin case on the table yawned wide, and on the carpet the bloodstains had dried black, yet those two reminders of what had occurred only days before was not what took our immediate focus.

  A shrivelled corpse sat against the wall. The skin wrinkled, tight to the bone, and grey as storm clouds. Naked. It was male.

  CHAPTER 14

  The stink of the corpse reached down my throat and threatened to pull out my stomach.

  “Shit,” I said. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing.

  “Quite.” Victor’s eyes were wild, and the scratch along his jaw wriggled as he ground his teeth. “If Goodwin hadn’t said Stanley visited him, then I’d assume this was his body.”

  “Whose is it then?”

  Victor’s frown deepened.

  My voice was small as I said, “You guys say Stanley isn’t a necromeleon?”

  It took him a few moments to answer, and when he did, he tore his eyes from the corpse. “The Fabric needs a body to inhabit. To possess. A necromeleon by definition is a changed corpse.”

  “Of course.” Again, I was annoyed. Over the last few days, that had been happening too often, which in itself annoyed me further.

  “This is someone else. Are you okay?”

  “Honestly?” I shook my head. Somehow, I managed not to puke.

  Victor grabbed my shoulder, the glove creaking as he squeezed. My head thumped with a heartbeat and my neck throbbed.

  To my knowledge, I’d never before seen a dead body. The sunken eyes were a pair of tiny beads inside a skull. Not a head, a skull. The skin shrivelled in uneven ridges of miniature peaks and valleys. Gaping nostrils in a nose cavity of shrunken flesh, and below it, the mouth; a rictus suggesting nothing short of terror. Sparse grey hair hung from the dome of the skull, clumped across the forehead. It reminded me of a Halloween mask.

  I allowed my eyes to drift over the torso, the ribcage in defined hollows and curves, the navel just a bowl of wrinkles. The genitalia, in amongst a patch of dark hair, only a fold of lumpy skin. The arms and legs were spindly, knobbly sticks ending in curled digits of a claw-like freeze.

  My palms were clammy, and there was a tightness in my throat.

  I helped Victor search the room for further clues. We came up with nothing. I often found myself glancing at the corpse, its wilted eyes staring at the ceiling as if in hope of an angel’s rescue.

  * * *

  Within an hour we were back at Periwick House, almost running towards Goodwin’s office. The image of the corpse would not dislodge from my head.

  As Victor knocked four beats into the wood, from inside the office, I fancied I heard a door thumping closed. Maybe. As we waited—me with a streak of impatience—I strained to hear something more, if indeed I’d heard anything in the first instance. Nothing. No voices. Goodwin wasn’t on the phone. At least I didn’t think so.

  “Dean said he was in here.” Victor knocked again, waited one second, grabbed the handle and pushed.

  On the opposite side of the office, the French doors allowed the evening sunshine to flood the desk. From the ashtray a stub of cigar curled off its final wisps of smoke. We strolled into the room calling Goodwin’s name. Behind us the door swung shut.

  Victor darted into an adjacent room.

  As I peered around the bathroom door, a peculiar whirring noise drifted towards me. A mechanical hum, loud at first, gradually reducing in volume. No sooner had I heard it, it stopped, or possibly faded. My ears were hot, and I guessed it was my imagination.

  “Where is he?” I said as Victor came back into the office and headed for the desk. Cigar smoke clogged my throat and I coughed.

  Victor grabbed some papers, his eyebrows twitching. In slow motion, he placed the sheets down. Both hands, their splayed fingers straight, supported his weight. His head lowered, and a strange noise drifted from his throat.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  He nodded at the papers. “Invoices.”

  Standing straighter, he took one gloved hand from the desk, while the other walked a short distance forward and stopped. The forefinger tapped repeatedly over a particular sheet. The drumming of the leather-tipped finger filled the office. I leaned over and read the page. The descriptions were nonsense to me. The only word I understood was hypodermic, and the quantity of the order was a hundred. There were three invoices from separate pharmaceutical suppliers.

  “Syringes?” I said. I didn’t understand. Why would Goodwin need those?

  “Tranquillisers, mainly,” Victor whispered. “Plus general supplies.”

  “W
hat kind of supplies?”

  “For hospitals.”

  “What?” This made no sense.

  “I don’t know what it means.”

  “This is crazy, Victor.” My hands became fists.

  “Welcome to my world.”

  I glared at him.

  “Goodwin hasn’t been sharing,” he said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Secrets.”

  I shook my head. “Okay. One day, I see moving shadows, and the next day, some crazy bitch tries to kill us. Then this afternoon, we find a dead body. Fucking great.”

  “Yes.”

  “And now this.”

  “Please, Leo…”

  “Shit!” So much noise in my head.

  Victor nodded. “These supplies aren’t for any ordinary hospital.”

  “And what does that mean?”

  “A mental hospital.”

  My heart wanted to explode. “What’s his signature doing on this stuff?”

  “Precisely.”

  “What’s going on, Victor?” No more madness today, thanks—I’d had my fair share so far. I’d had my fill for the week…and Thursday wasn’t over yet.

  “I really don’t know.” He stepped back from the desk and shook his head. “It’s not just these invoices troubling me…”

  “How about the corpse at your brother’s house?” My jaw muscles flexed, making my teeth hurt. “Does that trouble you?”

  “It does.”

  “What else then, Victor?” I managed to relax my fists. “Don’t keep me in the dark.”

  The corners of his eyes crinkled, his mouth humourless. “Dark secrets.”

  “What are you talking about now?”

  “I don’t think we can trust Goodwin anymore.” From beside the telephone, he grabbed a jotter pad. Holding it by the ring-bound edge, he handed it to me: a doodle.

  Goodwin had drawn an hourglass.

  CHAPTER 15

  With thoughts of an hourglass, we headed for my room. I didn’t understand it, and I felt sick. Victor said nothing else after we found the doodle. I doubted the hourglass meant anything to him, whereas to me it meant much more. Occasionally, over the last two years, the image of an hourglass haunted me; whether in a dream or memory, I couldn’t place it. Or was it all in my head? Why would Goodwin draw an hourglass? Was it just that, a doodle, nothing more? Was it coincidence? Polly didn’t believe in coincidence, perhaps Victor shouldn’t either. Not only was I facing corpses, I now puzzled over Goodwin’s place in all this. What the hell was going on?