“A real torch?” he asked. It seemed to him a stupid question, but he could think of nothing else.
She pulled him close and she kissed his cheek. He cried again, but followed this time as she led him through the dark. He walked hunched, aware that the rafters were overhead. Cobwebs brushed and stuck to his face and hair. The ceiling groaned whenever he missed a beam and stepped on the plaster instead, but he wasn’t as heavy as he’d been a year ago.
“Here,” she said.
There, in front of him, a box. He touched it first with his foot, then bent down to pick it up. Cardboard, he judged. A little moldy and damp. Not very heavy, nor big. Just a box.
“This?” he asked.
She kissed him once more on the cheek, then pulled him to his feet. He held the box one-handed, and her delicate hand in his.
The kiss lingered. Washed away some of the doubt and fear.
“You’re going, aren’t you?”
“I have to,” she said. “You know why, don’t you?”
“Because you’re dead?”
“Yes, baby. I’m dead,” she said, and then she was just a voice in his head again. He carefully wended his way back toward the dimming light from the hatch, down the stairs, and took a look at the box.
The quality of the light through the windows was different. Duller.
He’d been in the attic most of the day.
33
It was a box full of shadows.
On the lid was a child’s drawing of a pirate’s treasure chest, complete with doubloons spilling forth. The doubloons had once been yellow, but the color had faded over the many years since this had been a child’s treasure box.
It was hers, and her shadow was in every little thing within the box.
There was a hairclip and a half-stub of a movie ticket. A tattered old doll with a missing eye, three smooth stones, a piece of Lego, a peacock feather folded in half to fit, some other pieces of brick-a-brac he didn’t really understand, a cassette tape (Prince) without the case, and two objects that were heavier than the rest combined, heavy because they were full of memories and memories are big fucking weights that sit on your mind and push down your shoulders.
A sleeve full of negatives, and a diary.
Shadows that weighed more than he’d imagined possible.
34
Pictures and words.
A torch against the night.
He held up the negatives to the window, and, outlined in the dimming springtime sunlight, saw what she’d wanted him to see.
Them.
Keane and Teresa, younger, before the accident that had robbed her of the ability to walk. The two of them laughing, holding hands, pictured with drinks and cigarettes on holidays and in bars. At parties and in the garden, with and without friends.
Negative images of the present. The positive images of the past.
Keane cried a little, looking through those old photos up against the light, backward in tone but perfect in their message.
Then he opened the diary and read until it became too dark to read. Closed the diary and pushed himself up. He hadn’t realized his legs had grown numb while he sat cross-legged looking at the old photographs and reading the diary of a schoolgirl who’d got lost somewhere between here and there.
“I got it, honey,” he said, even though she was silent the whole time.
He closed the door to the house with a soft snick, got in the car, and drove to the supermarket, finally, armed. Loaded.
He came back maybe an hour later, in the full, hard dark, though the orange streetlights still glowed.
He couldn’t feel her, or him—Brother Shadow. But he knew he’d come. He’d come for this.
The perfect shadow, the contrast, the light, the dark.
Keane entered his old house for the last time, armed with a torch against the dark.
VI. To Bind the Shadows; ’07
You don’t beat it by hiding it in the darkness. Shine a light on it, whatever it is; be it Brother Shadow or the black dog or the demon that haunts your footsteps as you sit, walk, run.
Don’t hide, don’t let it slink off to lurk in the black places.
Life, you figure, isn’t dark or light. Isn’t good or evil, black or white.
It’s about the contrast.
35
Revenge is a dark, dark thing.
Love is bright.
Keane knew how to trap a shadow.
With light, and dark. With contrast, the thing that lets you see the shape of things and tell the difference, whether right or wrong or light or dark.
Full dark outside and heavy curtains. But so bright inside. A hundred flickering candles and lanterns and torches burned in the living room of Keane’s old house, and in the center of it all, Keane.
Cross-legged, once more. He didn’t know why he didn’t sit on the couch, but he wanted…needed…to be in the circle of light. He wanted to see him coming.
Brother Shadow.
Keane felt something pass through the gap around the closed door, something fast but sly.
Felt him.
He’s not you, Teresa told him. He’s not you.
Keane repeated the thought in his head, trying to figure out where he ended and his shadow began.
Within a circle of light casting a thousand wavering shadows, he called him.
And there, from the yawing darkness shattered by myriad lights, he came.
36
One by one Brother Shadow snuffed the candles. Keane smiled.
He called. He…it…came.
He smiled as the dark grew.
Finally, as he’d known he would, Brother Shadow was before him. No longer fractured, but bold and strong in Keane’s shade, cast against the wall by the sole remaining lit candle.
“Brother,” said the shade. His voice, dark and wet like drips in a cool, forgotten cave.
Keane did not reply immediately, but looked with his haunted eyes at the creature that lived in him. A demon, a parasite, a memory, a shade of him.
The shadow solidified until it wasn’t dependent on the candle for existence, but on Keane.
With an awful ripping noise, the shadow pulled itself from the wall. A flat thing that looked weak, but deep black with no features, long, flimsy in construction, yet powerful, in its way.
Keane smiled at the black outline as it, too, sat on the carpet, facing Keane. Despite the lack of eyes or mouth, Keane could tell the shade was happy.
Won’t be for long, he thought. Not for much longer.
“Brother,” said Brother Shadow again.
Keane’s heartbeat was steady. He was not afraid. Odd, that it should be like this. He wasn’t afraid. He wasn’t angry.
He was…
What, Keane? What are you?
Sane.
He was sane. Because this wasn’t him. This wasn’t some darkness within him, but an entity in itself, something that was perhaps coexistent, but not him. It wasn’t him.
And he could hurt it.
He opened the book on his lap.
“What are you doing?” said the darkness. “What is that?”
“Something you wouldn’t know about,” replied Keane at last. “Love,” he said, and read from Teresa’s diary, fighting his own shadow with nothing more than the words of a thirteen-year-old girl.
37
Keane read out the words written down in tight, girlish script in a clear voice, unafraid, at last, and ignorant for the first time of the creature seated before him. He allowed himself to get lost, for a time, reading the first and only entry still legible in the damp and mildewed diary of a schoolgirl falling in love.
I think I might be in love with a boy in the year above me. He smiled at me today. I don’t know his name.
The next entry.
I asked one of the older girls for the boy’s name. It’s Keane. Keane Reid. I’d like to kiss him. Actually, diary, don’t tell anyone, but I think I’d like to do more, too. Hehe.
And the next.
>
Me and Wendy followed him on break today. I think he saw me. I could have died. I didn’t, though. Obviously. Der.
And the last.
Mum told me last night to say hello. I did. He said hello. Like an idiot I told him I liked him. Just like that. I can’t believe what a twat I am.
But, get this, diary. He asked me out.
Asked. Me. Out.
What do you think of those beans, then, huh?
Keane closed the words and their light away with one hand, the book clapping shut and the light flowing from the words snapping off.
But the room was still bright. Not from the candle—that light was dimly orange. But from the rents in the shadow before him, light shining through. The shade poured light from a thousand word-shaped cuts in its black body. It screamed, but silent, like a shadow should.
“Get back in your fucking box,” said Keane.
The shadow burst into a thousand fragments, tinkling onto the carpet like shattered ice, cracking in a thaw.
Then, those evil black shards sank into the fibers of the carpet without a sound and were gone.
38
Keane stayed in the candlelight for the remainder of the night. His legs became uncomfortable, then went entirely numb. Sleep was impossible, sitting like that, legs folded beneath him, unfeeling.
A night spent in thought, without water, food, cigarettes. Without moving, relishing his discomfort.
Like a knight standing vigil against the darkness.
Sitting, honey, said his wife. Teresa was back in his head, where she lived and always would…where memories and true shadows were meant to live. Not out in the light. They weren’t supposed to escape.
Brother Shadow?
Gone. Nothing but cold spots on the carpet. Not wet, like Keane expected, but icy patches you couldn’t see. Deadly black ice.
What was he? What was Brother Shadow?
Was he real? Was he? Or was it all just some wicked fever dream of an insane and grieving mind?
Could a man’s demons take on life, roam free and independent…pull themselves screaming (that tearing noise…like a child torn from its mother…) from the very air, the darkness itself? Did the dark have a life of its own?
Keane didn’t know.
So he sat vigil, like some kind of knight to watch over the body of a slain brother-in-arms, to keep demons and dragons at bay with nothing but heart and steel and a thin wall of light.
Light was thin. A flimsy shield against the things that lived in the other places. Real, imagined, and those created by man himself.
Morning came with a gentle and slow sunrise he felt more than saw because of the heavy curtains. As night gave way to the day, the final candle sputtered and died where it had burned all night, on a coffee table. The table was covered in wax. Some had run onto the carpet. Real enough, thought Keane, grimly.
Whatever it was, it had been real enough, and he beat it.
It took him a full five minutes to stand without agony in his legs. When the pain of his vigil finally passed, he left their house behind with all its shadows and memories locked inside.
He threw the key into the undergrowth in the front garden. He never came back.
39
The following morning he wasn’t a new man, entirely, but something changed within him. A lightness grew.
He bought his first pair of trainers for perhaps twenty years. A thirty-nine-year-old man in a shop full of arse-less teenagers, trying to find a pair of simple white running shoes and coming out with something blue and silver and lighter than a pair of underwear.
He put on his new running shorts and white socks and sneakers and a T-shirt made of some kind of material that was supposed to stay dry. He stepped out of his bed-and-breakfast room, said good morning to the owner and grinned at the look he got at his new garb.
Keane stood on the pavement outside his temporary home dressed entirely in new clothes. Everything he wore felt shiny, like some kind of New Age armor. He had everything he needed on him, and nothing he didn’t.
He hadn’t worn a watch since…
Didn’t matter, he figured. He wasn’t running from time. He was just running.
He looked down at his feet, and with a smile, thought, Yes. Yes you are running. His shiny new shoes were moving. Plodding, but it didn’t matter how fast he went, where he went, or for how long. What mattered was that with every single jarring, pounding step he took, he was running.
Spring, ’07, Keane began to run. He kept going right until ’13, winning in his own way.
Until the heat wave came again, and a summer of bright burning shadows that followed him no matter how hard or fast he ran.
VII. The Blood Eye
Two lines from William Blake’s “Auguries of Innocence” play over and over in your head like a mantra or a ward whenever you are afraid. And you are afraid.
You are afraid of the light and the dark and the shade and the heat. Afraid for yourself and for others.
You fear the thing that lives in the dark places within you.
Some are born to sweet delight, you think.
Some are born to endless night.
The poem brings no comfort. It is not a pillow or a crutch or a blanket but an augury of things that abide, dormant, hiding in the dark, waiting for their time to come again.
That time? It is here. It is now.
40
Teresa was seven years dead, Keane six years reborn. He was a different man now. In many ways he was harder than he’d been. He’d lost his wife, his mind. Running, in a way, had been Keane’s salvation. Not slaying the beast that lived in his shadow. That wasn’t a defining moment. That was a stepping stone.
Maybe a stone across a chasm, but just a stone.
You didn’t slay him, though, did you?
No, he replied to his wife, silently. She never left him. Not even for a minute. He could always feel her there in his mind and his heart, still feel her hand in his in the attic of a house long gone.
No, he thought. He’d been sure he’d gone, but Brother Shadow had been…what? Dormant? Put to sleep?
Keane didn’t know, but dormant sounded about right.
The heat wave, baby.
Keane nodded. She was right. Of course she was right. The brightness, the long days…the short, sharp shadows. Brother Shadow was strongest then. He’d been building, held at bay, waiting.
Keane felt the truth of it. Brother Shadow, falling to pieces like shards of ice. The ice, seeping into the carpet. Of course there’d been nothing left—he was just a creature of the dark, a monster from another land, another dimension.
But his death had never felt final. Never…conclusive.
Like a stepping stone.
The chasm still waited below. The pit, the abyss. The darkness was full of him—his brother, his dark. Because Brother Shadow belonged to him, didn’t he?
Yes, honey. Yes, he does. He’s yours, and you’re his. You’re light and shade. Together a whole. You can’t kill him. He can’t kill you. You understand that, right?
Keane nodded, there on his couch in his rented flat.
He’d dragged himself back from that abyss, but of course it was there all along, and down in the dark was where Brother Shadow lived.
He couldn’t kill him.
He couldn’t win.
But Teresa was wrong, wasn’t she?
Because you can’t kill what you can’t see. But if he could see into the black? If he could see into his shadow?
Honey, what are you doing?
“Shh, baby,” he said, and walked down the short hall to the bathroom.
41
Keane stared at his reflection in the mirror above the sink. Stared into his deep-sunk eyes. Looked at the hard angles that made his face. His beard, long gone, was coming back on his tanned cheeks and chin and upper lip. His hair, short, was a long way back on his forehead now.
He was getting old. Not quite there, but old. His weathered skin was wrinkled and peppered
with sun freckles. Barely an ounce of fat on his face.
But there was nothing in his eyes. He couldn’t see into them. They weren’t windows into his soul, apertures through which he could see the beast inside.
He could feel him again. Brother Shadow.
Got to shine a light in there. Got to bring him out. Bring him out to see him, see his true form—not the shadow of him, not the wan pale shade of him, but the demon himself.
“Got to get him out,” said Keane to himself.
Teresa was silent, for a moment, until Keane opened the cupboard above the sink. His reflection was replaced with toothbrush and paste, aftershave, shaving foam, deodorant, and a razor.
Keane took the razor.
Keane…no. Don’t do this. It’s not you! Brother Shadow is not you…don’t…
“It’s all right,” he said. “It’s all right.”
Just got to get him out. Get the fucker out.
Keane put the razor on the linoleum floor and stamped down on it, hard, with the heel of his shit-stained work boots.
The plastic shattered. He pulled one of the four blades from the mess on the floor and looked and the metal glinting in the light pouring through the small bathroom window’s frosted glass.
Baby, don’t. Crying, now.
I’m not killing myself, he told her.
“Just taking a look. One way or the other…”
Keane shrugged.
“He’s been hiding long enough.”
And he began to cut.
42
The first cut was ragged because he was frowning, because it hurt. It wasn’t quite ideal. Not like the Eye of Horus, but something far simpler and purer. A line above, the ragged first cut. He quit frowning and made the smoother cut below, ignoring the blood. Finally, the blood pouring freely, the harder cuts in the middle for the iris.
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