The Shadow Fabric

by Mark Cassell

  Victor and I tore out the plugs, tugging the extension leads away, while Isidore continued to follow the cable. I yanked too hard on one lead and the monitor slid towards me. I threw an arm up and grunted. The monitor stayed where it was and I relaxed.

  Victor carried on untangling the wires.

  “Found it,” Isidore said. She had a hand hooked awkwardly under the desk, near the drawers.

  “What?” My eyes watered and I rubbed my nose. I managed to contain the sneeze.

  “A button,” she said, and pressed it.

  I winced, hoping it wasn’t an alarm, or worse; some kind of lockdown. I imagined blast doors shooting from the doorframes, sealing us in the office. Nothing moved. However, from somewhere nearby, a hum of motors brought us to our feet. It must’ve been about ten seconds, when eventually a bookcase behind the desk rolled sideways. The Witchblade box flew to the floor and broke at the hinges. It clattered near Victor’s feet.

  Lights from the clean, steel confines of a lift poured into the office. Reflected in the polished interior like the amusing warped images in a Hall of Mirrors, the three of us stared back with mouths agape. I never knew this existed. Incredible.

  At hip height on the wall, a panel revealed a red button—one destination.

  Without a word we stepped into the lift, with me wedged between Isidore and Victor. Bathed in artificial light, the almost futuristic walls reminded me of something in a sci-fi movie.

  Victor read my mind. “Kind of like Star Wars.”

  “I gather you two didn’t know about this.” Isidore stood so close, the smell of her shampoo filled me up. Apples? It made me hungry. Damn it, even in circumstances as crazy as this, I still found times to be a bloke—I annoyed myself sometimes.

  “There’s a lot about Goodwin we don’t know,” Victor said.

  On countless occasions, I’d been in that room without knowing the lift was a few strides away.

  Isidore moved slightly and with a rigid, pink-tipped finger, she prodded the button. The wooden panels of the bookcase slid back into place. A second later, the metal doors came together with a soft clunk. Victor’s reflection was on my left, and Isidore’s on the right, whilst mine had a vertical split from crotch to head, dividing me in two. Without a jerk, thump, or grind typical of any lift, a hum vibrated through the floor.

  “Downwards,” Isidore announced. “Exciting.”

  I couldn’t make the girl out. She caught me looking at her, which she had a knack of doing, and those dark eyes held mine for a moment. Then she lowered them.

  “I guess this is some kind of rescue mission,” I said, and ran my hand down the cool panels of the lift.

  Isidore held her gun to her chest.

  “Goodwin’s in trouble,” Victor replied. “Assuming it’s his blood we found. And Polly, assuming she’s also with Stanley.”

  “You think she’s here as well?”

  “I can only assume she is.”

  “And Annabel?”

  “Again, we can assume Annabel and Stanley are working together.”

  “You’re assuming a lot…”

  “I saw another person in the barn that night,” Isidore said. “It might have been him, it was difficult to see.”

  I thought about what she’d told us when witnessing the men stitch.

  “Quite possibly,” Victor said.

  The hum softened and the lift came to a stop as if resting on a cushion.

  “Comfy ride.” I’d said that to avoid saying anything else, like: I don’t want to do this. This is crazy.

  Victor slid the Witchblade from his belt.

  “Magic knife.” Isidore eyed the blade. The reflected light gave it a jagged appearance. Deadly.

  “We’ll put it to the test,” Victor said.

  My distorted image parted, and the doors gave way to a short corridor of yellow walls and glaring strip lights. The scuffed floor stretched ahead and ended at a door. It was ajar.

  I emerged from the lift, with Victor and Isidore following. A tangy, damp smell overwhelmed the scent of her shampoo.

  Having been a resident at the House for the past two years, I had no idea this area existed—Goodwin never once hinted. We moved along the corridor and I imagined Periwick House above, business as usual. Its daily routines, the normal lives of visitors and staff, of me calling it home, and the concert later that evening. A glance at my watch revealed it had just turned midday.

  Our footfalls bounced around the corridor. As I reached the door, I held my hand flat against its surface—I still wore Lucas’s gloves—and as I nudged it open, I expected it to creak.

  Silence.

  The frame was rotten in places, and there were scratches on the wall and on the door itself. Slowly, I craned my neck and peered in. Another corridor led off to the left and the right.

  No one around.

  When I walked through, Victor laughed through his nose.

  “Anti-climax,” Isidore said.

  With no markers or signs to indicate what lay in either direction, we huddled together, undecided.

  “Don’t split up.” Victor moved his head as though ready to cross a road.

  “Which way?” I asked.

  He headed left, his strides revealing bare ankles. I kept pace with him, Isidore close behind me. I suddenly wished I’d brought some kind of weapon. Victor had the Witchblade, which was okay for him, and he had a gun. There was no way I wanted to touch a firearm. Isidore still held her gun, the same one she’d waved in my face four days before. It’s funny how we can forgive someone without thinking about it. Things had happened at such a pace, it was ridiculous I hadn’t the foresight to protect myself. Knowing how fire had saved us from the Fabric back at Lucas’s bookshop, I should’ve at least thought about making myself some kind of flamethrower. I hadn’t even considered it, and there we were, the three of us beneath the House on a rescue mission, to face off someone controlling the Shadow Fabric.

  Victor paused, his back to the wall, and looked round a corner. He made a small noise in the back of his throat as he moved out. We followed him into another corridor, only wider. It ended at a set of double doors. A series of single doors lined one wall—ten at a quick count—evenly spaced. All of them housed a vision panel, most just a dark hole in the wood, and the furthest two doors sent distorted patterns of light onto the opposite wall. Along the corridor’s length were a number of trolleys, mostly empty. One of the strip lights was out.

  A damp stink clawed up my nostrils. Here black marks criss-crossed the floor, the walls chipped in places. One other thing occupied the area, and Victor had already reached it: a gurney. Its frame was rusted, wheels clogged with sticky dust, and stained linen heaped the mattress.

  My nose wrinkled. “Nasty.”

  “So is that.” Victor pointed to a leather strap, its rusty buckle protruded from beneath a pile of bed covers.

  “Hey,” Isidore said. “You need to see this.”

  She stood before one of the doors, her head framed in the light of its vision panel. On tip-toes, hands on the wall, her nose pressed the glass. I moved up behind her—the smell of shampoo much nicer—and peered over her shoulder. When Victor joined us, she moved aside.

  It was no surprise to see a man in a gown strapped to a gurney. He threw his shaved head around, lips quivering. The bare bulb above him gave his flesh a sickly glow and created the illusion of sunken eyes and hollow cheeks. He reminded me of the corpse at Stanley’s house, only his eyes weren’t dead. The pupils shot from left to right, up and down, searching for something. Maybe he wanted help. Whether he didn’t see us, or he didn’t have the lucidity to recognise we were there, we’d never know.

  My hand reached out to the door knob. Why was this guy in there? Where was he from? Was he one of the handcuffed men from a couple of nights ago? I wanted to yank it open and release the poor guy from his restraints, but a metallic clatter echoed from another room. It came from our left, from beyond the double doors.

  The three
of us backed into the centre of the corridor. My ears were hot. We heard it again, and maybe a voice this time. Victor and Isidore darted towards the double doors, and as they got there, Isidore raised her gun. She mouthed something to Victor. Witchblade in hand, he went to the opposite side of the doors.

  There I stood between the two of them, empty-handed. I straightened my back, mouth dry. I somehow managed a grin. More to reassure myself.

  The pair of discoloured, rubber-edged doors were scuffed along the metal trims. Black paint, chipped and peeling, coated the vision panels. These doors were like the ones in a typical hospital. Yet this place was not a hospital, this was something else. The cold, bleak expanse of corridor was at least laid out like one, although it lacked the atmosphere of a hospital. From what I’d witnessed down here, the patients weren’t the typical kind.

  Standing with my companions, without a weapon, I held my ear up to one of the doors. Isidore’s knuckles whitened around the grip of her gun, her jaw set and two vertical lines formed between her eyebrows. With Victor at my back, I knew I was in good hands.

  On the other side of the door, I heard nothing. Two, three, four seconds passed and still nothing. I placed a hand flat against the door, and with the slightest of pressure, I pushed a fraction at a time.

  When I looked into the room, my jaw dropped.

  CHAPTER 27

  On the furthest side of the room a nurse stretched over a gurney, unfastening straps. The buckle clanked and the leather slapped the floor. Although free from most restraints, the patient remained still.

  Patient and nurse, nothing wrong with that. Wearing a hat and hair net, a mask hiding her face, she looked innocent enough. As did the patient, gowned and rigged to an intravenous drip. Yet something about this scene wasn’t right.

  “What’s going on?” I said, and thought of the guy in the room behind us. And now this.

  Isidore and Victor squeezed beside me. I didn’t budge, not allowing them to see in. I sensed their impatience, but couldn’t move. My frown deepened.

  With most of the strip lights switched off or not working, the glare of a spotlight swamped everything.

  “Leo?” Victor said.

  I shook my head.

  The patient wore a kind of swimmer’s cap. A spaghetti-tangle of wires sprouted from it and coiled into a towering machine behind the nurse. A panel of instruments blinked rainbow reflections over her uniform. Other monitors sat on a desk with displays of patterns, charts, and text. Whatever I’d done for a living before I lost my memory, I certainly hadn’t worked in this profession. Her shadow leapt across the floor as she cranked the mattress to a seating position. The man remained utterly submissive, his legs still strapped. A tribal tattoo snaked up his neck and around his ear.

  “Leo.” Victor bumped against me.

  “Hang on.”

  There were other gurneys in the room. Most contained a patient. They were all men: shaved heads, blank expressions, intravenous drips stuck into a vein. Beyond them, an archway led to a corridor and a partitioned office. When the nurse turned her back, I nudged the door further open.

  “Look.” I leaned sideways.

  My companions edged in.

  “Oh, Goodwin.” Victor’s voice hissed. “You fool.”

  I peered over their heads.

  From a machine that resembled a coffee percolator, the nurse removed an hourglass. Its glass bulbs, framed between wooden supports, reflected the blinking instruments. Sand had collected in the lower section. Not white as you’d expect from a standard hourglass. The sand was black.

  The nurse tightened the handcuffs around her patient’s wrists. The ratchets echoed. His eyelids flickered, his head lolled, and the coloured wires quivered. Saliva bubbled at his lips. With her back to him, the nurse detached connectors which ran from the Hourglass. Each coil sprang back inside the main machine. Along the top of the equipment, with its steel surface bathed in the spotlight’s harsh glare, was a row of test tubes. Each contained a different level of bubbling liquid.

  “It’s like crazy Baron von Frankenstein,” Isidore murmured.

  The nurse placed the Hourglass back in its housing. She pulled on gloves and slid open a drawer at its base. With tweezers, she hooked out a small black square.

  “What is that?” Isidore’s breath touched my ear.

  “A shadowleaf,” Victor and I said simultaneously.

  The edge of her mouth curled upwards.

  After inspecting the leaf, the nurse placed it into a machine which reminded me of a miniature photocopier, though I doubted that’s what it was. She clicked a glass lid in place. The tweezers clattered as she dropped them and pulled a keyboard closer. With rapid key strokes, she typed a series of commands and a beep crackled from the computer.

  She walked over to the office. Her shoes slapped the tiles. Sitting in front of the window, she appeared to write something; keeping a record, I guessed. No doubt there were many records for the other men. Those poor bastards drugged, restrained on the gurneys. One of the closer ones had veins almost splitting the skin of his forearm, the leather straps cutting into his flesh. Maybe from repeated muscle flexing, whether consciously or not.

  None of this made sense. What was that woman doing to the guy? And what was Goodwin’s role?

  The nurse scratched her nose through the mask and stood up, tugging on a jacket and then slipping a handbag over a shoulder. The main room dropped further into darkness as she switched off the light. She returned to the patient and removed his cap, revealing a shaven dome like the others. The instrument panels blinked off. Bending, she prodded a switch and the spotlight went out. The room plunged into a murkiness lit only by several strip lights and the glow of monitors. Moving behind the patient, she pushed the gurney. Its wheels screeched. Pausing briefly, she tugged her mask. Its elastic snapped and she threw it on another patient’s stomach. Shadow hid her face and she kept her hat on. Again, the gurney wheels turned in protest, the patient’s stare unwavering, his mouth dribbling, and they vanished down the corridor.

  Screech…screech…screech.

  The three of us dared not move as we listened to the receding sound. We eventually entered the room. Victor headed straight for the Hourglass, while Isidore and I weaved between the gurneys, eyeing the patients. Each held a similar expression: vacant.

  “All right,” Isidore said. “Shadowleaf? What was that woman doing?”

  Her question reminded me we’d only explained so much.

  “A shadowleaf,” I said, “is what’s created by the Hourglass. It’s a refined substance of someone’s evil, extracted and made into something solid.”

  “Nicely put,” Victor said. He examined the Hourglass, his elbows on the counter.

  I zigzagged between the gurneys, not really wanting to see the patients. There was a lack of lucidity to their stares, no different than the patient who’d only moments before been wheeled away. I grabbed the nurse’s discarded mask and threw it to the floor, crushing it underfoot. “Stitch them together—”

  “And we have the return of the primordial darkness.” Victor stood back from the Hourglass, hands on hips. “The black void. The nothingness which existed before the words ‘let there be light’ were uttered.”

  “Serious?” Isidore’s eyes reflected the red of the monitor. Its display blinked on and off. The coloured half-light did little to diminish her good looks. “Actually, I believe it.”

  “Goodwin had the Hourglass all along.” Victor’s eyebrows twitched to his grinding thoughts.

  “At least we know where those men were being taken.” I shrugged. Was I getting too dismissive towards the situation, to the weirdness going on? Maybe, maybe not. Perhaps being in the presence of Isidore somehow balanced me.

  “And,” Victor said, “to what purpose is he extracting their shadowleaves?”

  “Where are these men from?” I said. “You don’t just pick random people off the street.”

  “Those men,” Isidore said, “aren’t off the
street.”

  “What?” I clawed my chin.

  “Have you forgotten what we found?” She pointed to the ceiling. “In your friend’s office.”

  “The list of names,” Victor said. “Of course.”

  Alongside each name and County, the third column on the list we’d found contained words such as, fraud, assault, manslaughter, murder, rape, and worse. An icy draft tickled my neck. I doubted it had anything to do with the dampness in the room.

  “That,” I said, “explains the black shadowleaf.”

  “Evil.” Victor ran a gloved hand over the Hourglass. “To the core.”

  “Are you saying the crime is in that little black square?” Isidore pointed at one of the hunks of technology.

  The machine was the one I’d thought resembled a photocopier, only with innards visible through the glass casing. The extracted shadowleaf sat in a cradle of wires and circuitry.

  “Not the actual crime,” Victor said. “The shadowleaf is an imprint of the evil mind behind the crime.”

  “On a sliding scale from white to black, with white being the purest,” he continued, “well, you can guess how evil that man was.”

  “Is,” I said, thinking of the way the poor bastard dribbled at the ceiling as the nurse wheeled him away. “He’s still alive.”

  “Barely.”

  “They’re all still alive.” I waved a hand towards the occupied gurneys. It was as if Goodwin collected these criminals to experiment on them. But to what end?

  Victor scanned the monitors.

  “I have no idea what any of this means.” He crouched before the Hourglass, hands on thighs, and ankles on show. “Or what Goodwin is up to.”

  I hadn’t taken much notice of the sand heaped in the lower bulb of the Hourglass. As the three of us stood there, the black sand greyed moment by moment. Within seconds, it became white again. Pure white, like any typical hourglass, or egg timer.

  Bad eggs.

  * * *

  We left the Hourglass laboratory and followed the corridor the nurse had taken. Assuming she headed home, seeing she’d taken her handbag, we could remain exploring. All the while keeping as quiet as possible—she had, after all, taken the patient somewhere else and we were uncertain if the woman had left entirely. We still had to find Goodwin, and perhaps Polly, if she was down here. I wondered about Stanley and what would happen when we found him. Or he found us.