by Mark Cassell
Ahead, I saw white stitches. Many stitches of light broke the nothingness. Glimmering imperfections in the dark turning the black to grey. Rushing like shooting stars, they streamed past me. My mind collided with the whiteness—the brightness—and my voice bounced back at me.
Isn’t infinity…Infinity. Infinity.
Light streamed in. It shifted the grey whorl of darkness ever lighter. Strengthening it, surely? My velocity dropped. Not stars, these were not stars shooting past, nor were they streaking fireflies. These were white stitches meshing with blackness. Forcing back the darkness.
Infinity.
My echoing voice twisted with the whiteness now clouding the dark. It churned like sour milk in the pit of my stomach; like poison tearing down my immune system, shutting my organs down one by one. Only the whiteness couldn’t, shouldn’t, wouldn’t be a poison to me or my mind. It would poison the darkness, and I didn’t want that. The expanse of darkness, beyond this intruding brightness, must remain. Into infinity.
This isn’t infinity.
In a flood of white, I sensed, more so than felt, my mind slam to a stop. I would be panting, gasping for air if my lungs had been with me, but they weren’t. They were somewhere outside myself. Somewhere beyond.
No more was the darkness all-devouring, no longer was there only a black void. Now there was light. It merged with the shrinking—retreating—shadows. It was the light of so many zigzagging white stitches. They enfolded me.
From outside this beautiful and inviting cocoon of pure light, the darkness of the Shadow Fabric continued to press in. The stitched whiteness restricted the onslaught of darkness. No matter how it tried to seep through the white threads, it failed.
Perhaps I heard its frustrations.
And that soothing brightness bathed my mind and cleansed my soul. It forgave my sins, whatever they had been. It freed me. Was this freedom? Heaven, maybe? Was this the entrance to the pearly gates everyone talks about?
Shadows approached from all directions. Familiar shadows, whispers. Voices. I couldn’t make anything out, yet they held promise. Hope. It all gave me hope. These weren’t shadows in the evil sense I’d come to know over the past few days.
These were memories.
My memories.
CHAPTER 50
Black and white, cross-stitching fibres unlocked…
And there I stand beside the white panels of my car as it reflected a fiery sunset. My fingers are curled under the door handle. Noises from behind, a scuffle of feet. And the stink of body odour washes over me as the blur of a crowbar swings downwards.
A detonation of agony bursts in my knee and I collapse.
The black and white rush of zigzagging stitches clouded the memory.
I lie on the ground, my head soars in a dizzy kaleidoscope, hearing Amy screaming. All I see of her is the rush of an image, and the man—green coat, blue jeans, white trainers—has her by both arms, shaking her. Her fingernails claw his face. She is strong. Fit. But the man—the carjacker—is stronger, and he shoves her. She flies backwards, stumbles over the kerb into shrubbery.
Her brown curls bounce as she scrambles to her feet. She again grabs for the carjacker.
Frustration roars in my head as I struggle to get up, my knee—my leg—a useless appendage. Pathetic…
White and black scratches of shadows envelope the image, overlapping to become infinity once again, and Amy’s scream fills my head.
My vision sharpens, and with me, sprawled across the tarmac, is Amy—her green eyes brimming tears, her hair clumped over bloody cheeks. Her puffy lips whisper my name over and over. Each time her voice floats towards me, it softens to become little more than quivering lip movements.
Black, white, grey shades interlink, rushing over the red and pink oval of Amy’s dead stare.
I am up with a cry of agony from inside and out, my leg useless, yet I have the man in my arms. Kicking, punching, I slam the bastard against my car: blood sprays across the dented bodywork of my VW.
I roar. I am an animal.
The familiar shift of darkness mingling with creases of white, wrapping arms around my mind and pulling me into another scene.
The carjacker’s face is a mess of split flesh, the jagged kerb beside his head, glistening, sticky, red. Another vacant, dead stare.
My trembling hands release the man’s coat, my fingers streak blood over the green fabric.
Black. White. Threads of fibres break away and a glinting light explodes before me.
I hold Amy’s limp hand in mine. The streetlight above me blinks on as if to spotlight my grief, and the ring—her engagement ring—reflects not only the roadside lamp, but a future denied.
White. Black. Flashes of shadow…
The brightness flares into shards of too many images, thoughts, and feelings. Grief, despair, fear. Self-defence. Suspended sentence. Prison.
Black and white, fleeting shadows. Mingling images and…
A white ambulance looms over me. Flashing lights. A car crashed…not the accident itself…just the wreck of a red car…not my car, though. My car was white. I was never in an accident. The accident was the carjacker’s death. He killed Amy. I killed him. It was an accident, not a car accident.
Brightness gathers around me.
A white room next, it’s my hospital room and the nurse has red hair. Red hair…Katrina? Victor’s yoga instructor. My nurse is Katrina.
There’s Goodwin and Katrina talking. She holds a hypodermic needle in one hand. In the other, she holds a leather strap.
White and black, rushing colours…red. Katrina’s hair.
An hourglass. Katrina straps the Hourglass to my hand, and her smile fails to reassure me. Machines and technology stretch behind her, and I know the other guys have died. Some went mad. Sometimes I hear them in the other cells. And I recognise the possibility of this being the end. I don’t care…I have no future. My future has been taken from me. This present can be my end. As the Hourglass links with the machines and connects with my sins—my past—I slip into a welcome oblivion.
My memories are taken, yet my life remains.
Darkness. Phantoms overlap one another, clouding my vision…
My grey shadowleaf clutched in a man’s hand. It’s Stanley. Victor’s brother, using me like a puppet. And there he is again, this time throwing my white shadowleaf down after the second time I was strapped to the Hourglass. This time without any machine or technology dreamt up by Goodwin’s crazy ideals.
A black and white flash, and there is Isidore. She cowers between the collected folds of stitching shadow. The new Shadow Fabric.
Darkness…entwining…stitching…
I am stitching.
Stitch-stitch-stitch.
I hurtle through the whiteness, my mind churning with the red of Witchblade flames…the crackle of so much fire…there are interruptions of blackness leaking orange…fire. Whiteness overcomes the searing orange, extinguishing the Witchblade’s cool flames in an ever-shrinking dome.
The orange, yellow, and red tongues lick and smother the black. The whiteness overcoming the blackness. The light flowing through my gloved fingers, pushing the darkness back into a tangle of chaotic shadows. The nothingness shrinks.
No longer like this into infinity.
NEW LIFE
The sound of approaching sirens crashed into my other senses as I sniffed, coughed, and choked on the foul air. My eyelids flickered open and there was the tear-streaked face of Isidore. Her smile was reassuring, unlike Katrina’s when she strapped me to the Hourglass, back in my other life. Before all this.
Georgie lay by her side and one of her hands absently scratched behind his ear. Her other hand clutched mine. She crouched, framed by massive trees.
“Leo?” she said. It reminded me of Amy, and my heart lurched as if my stomach had punched it.
My legs were stretched, my back against a red car. A familiar red car, though it didn’t belong to me. It wasn’t mine. Through the haze of a n
atural darkness, I spotted the ambulance, its bodywork a pale glow. Between unruly tufts of grass was a deflated tyre, squashed against a kerbstone.
Am I back in the car wreck? Dizziness drowned me in waves.
“What—” I coughed, my head thumping. It was as if I’d downed a pint of sand with a fire chaser. “How did I get here?”
And I remembered. I remembered all I’d seen while inside the Shadow Fabric, riding the nightmare within the stitched darkness. The car wreck had been staged to give me a new start. Goodwin had given me a new beginning. A new life.
Isidore ran a hand along Georgie’s back. “I pulled you out of the House. From the fire. You kind of stumbled with us, but you made it.”
“Yeah?” It hurt to move.
“I took you somewhere safe, away from the smoke.”
I glanced at the wheels of the ambulance, at the length of winding kerb and the stretch of roadway with its four white lines. The secluded area was hemmed in by conifer hedges, and in a corner, obscured by overgrown foliage, once stood two stone columns. Only one remained upright, threatening to collapse. Between them an impressive sheet of iron lay crushed beneath masonry which must have flown from the House when the Fabric tore apart the building.
On a neck made of rubber, I turned my thundering head towards Isidore.
“Leo.” She squeezed my hand. “It’s over.”
“New life,” I told her.
She nodded.
Speechless moments rolled by as I listened to my heartbeat and thought of everything that had gone before. Of all that happened to me. And the things which hadn’t happened.
Eventually, Isidore helped me up and, after a rush threatened to pull me back into darkness, I staggered towards the gate.
“Look,” Isidore said, holding me. My knee protested even the slightest of movements. She brought me into view of the pyre which was once Periwick House.
Flames. Lots of flames. I sensed the dwindling cries of the Entity. It had failed. The dome of its final prison now merged with the burning timbers of the House. The sound of approaching fire services grew closer, and we watched the darkness retreat and coil into the hungry flames. Tentacles of Shadow Fabric whipped the air, no longer growing. No longer self-stitching. Faint murmurs, an intrusion on the roar of blood in my head, echoed one last time and I felt the Entity’s anger vanish…into its own infinity.
I dragged a hand down my face. There I was with Isidore and Georgie in a separate area in the gardens of Periwick House, and behind me stood a crossover from my old life into my new. Here was a fragment of an unremembered past which leaked into my new life, a place once locked behind a massive gate, shielded from view. Shielding my memories. Here, a place where a car wreck and an ambulance had been hidden, both vehicles sitting on a false stretch of road. Goodwin had created that secluded area to build a fake memory, for any of us who survived his absurd experiments. It had existed as a memory for me, no matter how false. Now I knew the truth. Riding the Fabric had shown me my past, my life. Amy’s death. The carjacker and his accidental death.
I looked at Isidore: this was my new life.
Goodwin had staged it all while chasing his desires to cure humankind of its ills, the catalyst being the death of his father so long ago. There was me…and I knew what I had been to Goodwin, what I truly had been to him.
Isidore released me and I rested against the brick column, not thinking of its imminent collapse. She shrugged off her rucksack, sat down cross-legged, and wedged it in her lap. Opening it, she pulled out the Hourglass. Its leather straps flopped out and the buckles clanked.
“When did you get that?” I asked her.
She shrugged. “I have the magic knife in here as well.”
My whole body ached and my knee throbbed. I sat—actually, I fell—in front of her. I grunted.
She placed the Hourglass beside her, and from inside the rucksack, she removed something else.
“I thought you might want this.” She handed me a manila envelope.
Behind me, the flickering flames of the House illuminated it. In the top right corner, in Goodwin’s impeccable handwriting, was the name: Leonard Howard. Not Fox, but Howard. I never realised Isidore had it, never realised she had found it. My fingers wanted to move, the rest of me didn’t. All of me wanted to read its contents.
I wiped a hand across my mouth, eyeing her sideways. “I remember.”
“Everything?”
“Not quite.” I scratched my forehead. My hand came away black with sweat and soot, tinged with blood. I didn’t know if it was mine—I hurt everywhere. “I still don’t know what I’d been before I worked for Vic—”
Georgie interrupted me as he began to growl. He leapt away from Isidore and bounded across the grounds. He vanished into the darkness.
“Georgie!” she called. She leaned sideways and squinted at the Hourglass. “There’s something—”
The glass cracked. The sound echoed around the enclosure. My heart flew into my throat.
The Hourglass exploded.
In a miniature sandstorm, pieces of glass flew into her face. None came my way, although I shielded myself. Isidore’s screams filled my head. On her back, she clawed her face. She kicked her legs and rolled onto her side. Blood poured from the wounds. So many glass fragments stuck from her flesh, each sliver glinting. The one in her neck—the largest—gushed the most. And something else, something dark. Unlike the Fabric, unlike any sentient shadow.
This was different.
A scarlet puddle, shimmering with the reflected inferno of Periwick House, spread from Isidore’s body and crept through the grass. It reminded me of how the Shadow Fabric moved.
Her last breath floated into the night.
My vision shifted in waves of dizziness…and a bright flash momentarily blinded me. A searing agony shot up my arm. I yelled, and the smell of burnt hair and flesh drifted upwards. Hot, burning pain tore through me…
My hand. No, my arm. On the inside of my wrist, still smoking, I had been marked. Branded.
I stared at the curls of twisted flesh, the pain raging through me. A pattern. A familiar symbol: two triangles, apexes facing and separated by a curved X. The triangles, one solid, the other hollow.
My future, my demons. The symbol, the darkness.
SINISTER STITCHES
A COLLECTION OF
STORIES IN THE
SHADOW FABRIC MYTHOS
NEXT ON THE LIST
Through the reek of tobacco, stale sweat, and wet cabbage, the old man led Dan along the hallway. Shadows pressed in from either side where faded wallpaper curled—no portraits nor family photographs. The carpet crunched beneath each footfall. They entered a room with warped floorboards pushing into walls that bloomed damp patches.
“Please,” the old man said from a throat filled with phlegm, “sit.” He gestured at one of two threadbare armchairs that faced a tube TV.
A similar gloom to the hallway hung with the cobwebs, the dust, the emptiness. An afternoon sunlight attempted to infiltrate the yellow net curtains.
Meeting people like this made Dan hate his job. This was the next cottage on the list. The others had so far been surprisingly easy. He sank into the nearest chair, hugging his briefcase. A wooden ridge and too many springs dug into his arse.
“Sir,” he said, “thanks for letting me in.”
Either it was the armchair that creaked or it was the old man’s bones as he settled into it. Sadness tugged his eyes, and his mouth slanted into jowls. “Call me Henry.”
Straightening the briefcase on his lap, Dan flicked open the clasp. Its sharp crack echoed.
“It’s a pleasure to speak with you, Henry.” Dan straightened his back. “As I explained, I’m with the council.”
“You did.” He raised arthritic knuckles to a forehead that suggested a lifetime of frowning. “Something about the road.”
“Yes, the proposed dual carriageway.”
“I’ve been here a long time.” The old man presse
d the back of his hand against his forehead. The fingers twitched like a bloated, five-legged spider.
Dan nodded. “Sir—”
“I hate changes.”
Something brushed Dan’s neck. He shivered. It happened again, only this time up and into his scalp. A sharp pain and…
“Wha—” Dan jerked upright. The briefcase thumped the floor in a flutter of papers. Pens tittered across the floorboards. His heartbeat thrashed. A darkness washed over him and from every angle, colours squeezed inwards. His hands clamped the armrests. The old man seemed to shrink. The TV, the curtains, the damp patches, all diminished as the darkness churned.
Henry, slipping further away, still held the back of a hand against his forehead, those gnarled fingers curling, then extending, curling, extending…
Flashing colours, leaking darkness.
Nothing.
A dying sun pushed into Dan’s vision. From an open door, wooden and aged, the burning rays poured down stone steps and across an earthen floor. He gasped, coughed, and struggled to move. Bound tight, rope dug into his wrists and ankles. The cold floor pushed through his clothes. Grit and grime covered his cheek, and a bitter taste filled his mouth. His cry stopped at taped-up lips, becoming a muffled grunt. Through flaring nostrils, his breath hissed rapid desperation.
Then he remembered: the old man, Henry, and the cottage.
Squinting up into the sunset, out through nettles and brambles, the old man’s home squatted in the shadow of great oaks. What the hell? Why was he all the way out here? The rotted wooden panels surrounding him gave little away, and he guessed he was in a shed or outhouse. A sweet, almost tangy stink hung on the air, mixed with the heavy smell of earth and vegetation.
Managing to somehow calm his breathing, he twisted to look behind him.
Agony tore through his skull.
