A HAZY SHADE OF WINTER

by Simon Bestwick

  Furious instead of frightened for once, I lashed out at empty air.

  ‘Time is on my side,’ he said, and laughed again. He sang a few bars of the relevant Rolling Stones song. Then he began humming ‘Paint it Black’. Kept humming it for I don’t know how long, before finally fading away. Even then, I just stood there, fists clenched, breathing fast and shallow, unconvinced he’d gone.

  When I got back to bed, Alison turned over and smiled sleepily at me. ‘That was quick,’ she mumbled.

  I was surprised. ‘I was gone ages.’

  ‘Didn’t feel like it. Felt like you were only breathing down my neck a second ago.’

  I climbed quickly into bed and hugged her tightly. Alison twisted round to fully face me. ‘What’s up?’

  ‘Nothing,’ I whispered. ‘Just hold me.’

  The summer dawn came within the hour, but the night felt as long as midwinter.

  VII. The Shadow Man

  Getting up that morning was an awkward business; neither of us seemed very sure where we were supposed to go from here. Had it been a one-night stand, or the start of something else, a mistake, or a good idea? Neither of us seemed sure.

  Still, Alison kissed me goodbye on the way out—full on the lips, even if there was no tongue—so that was something. I was left alone in the house.

  For once, I couldn’t set off for work fast enough. But it didn’t do any good.

  It was standing room only on the train. As it rattled towards town, I heard a voice hiss into my ear. ‘I’ll have her.’

  ‘What?’ I turned. The woman standing behind me started and stared at me. I felt my face redden.

  ‘Sorry,’ I muttered. ‘Thought you said something.’

  As I turned away, I could hear him laughing into my ear.

  He kept talking all the way into Manchester. I clenched my fists and jaw and refused to speak; I was nearly weeping with sheer helpless fury. And fear. For Alison.

  Because he was describing in graphic detail exactly what he intended to do when he got his hands on her.

  I was silent and snappish at work that day. I tended not to answer people when they spoke at first, and barked at them when they kept it up. I was never sure who was talking to me; I did my best to ignore everything.

  He finally left me alone—for the time being—around lunchtime. By then, I was exhausted and shaking, feeling drained and close to tears.

  The rest of the day passed in a haze of mingled relief and apprehension. I tidied my desk and went to the station in a daze; by the time I got there, it was almost deserted.

  To reach my platform, I had to go up through a long ramped corridor. It had never seemed a very long journey before.

  Strip-lit, the corridor was cavernous and echoey. Halfway up, I heard footsteps, clicking on the stone; when I turned round, there was no one there.

  The corridor’s lights flickered suddenly, once. The darkness that engulfed it was far deeper than I thought it should be, on a summer evening with the sun far from set. Then it flickered again, for several seconds. In the moment of light between two beats of darkness, I caught a glimpse of something, moving forward.

  I only caught a glimpse of it, but it was enough. It was manlike in shape, and white—white in a way that reminded me of a grub under a stone. It was wearing something . . . tattered. And it had no face. None at all. Just a smooth white blank.

  When the lights came back up, the corridor was empty. There were no more footsteps. Instead, softly, he sang ‘Paint it Black’; it echoed eerily. I whirled, ran for the platform; ringing laughter chased me to the mouth of the concrete cave.

  I didn’t see or hear any more from him that evening, not until it was dark. I ate and thought about calling Alison; I wanted to, badly, but I was afraid for her. I couldn’t get the things he’d said to me on the train that morning out of my head.

  Speaking of which, my skull felt about to split. There was no ache as such, just a storm of words and thoughts and fears. Fears that I was going insane . . . fears that I wasn’t.

  I’ll have her.

  I put those words together with Alison’s body and the thing I’d glimpsed in the corridor and shook my head in revulsion. But it was me he was always with, not her… was she safe if we stayed apart?

  The doorbell rang. When I didn’t answer it, it rang again. I knew she wouldn’t go away, but it was still a long, unwilling while before I went. When I opened the door, Alison was standing there. She wasn’t smiling.

  ‘Come in,’ I said.

  ‘Thanks.’ This time we didn’t kiss. She didn’t flinch away from me, but carefully avoided any body contact.

  ‘Um . . . do you want a brew?’ I said, heading for the kitchen. Alison moved to the couch, as if to sit down, but didn’t. She pushed her fingers through her hair.

  ‘No. Thanks. Look, John . . . ’

  Just what I’d been afraid of. My luck could only hold out so long before the coin came tails up. ‘Yeah,’ I said quietly.

  ‘Don’t say it like that,’ she said. ‘It’s not that I don’t like you. It’s not even that I don’t want to see you.’

  ‘So what is it?’ The words came out harder than I wanted them to, but it was too late to take them back. My body refused to move towards her, locked into defence mode.

  She shook her head. ‘Oh, shit. John, I don’t know. Just—look—don’t think I make a habit of . . .’

  She still stood by the couch; I found myself hovering rather aimlessly by the kitchen door. I wanted very badly to reach out and take her hands, but at that moment, I knew, it would be the worst move possible. ‘I never thought you did. Christ, neither do I. Last night was . . . nothing like that’s ever happened before.’ Oh, that’ll reassure her, I thought. ‘I mean—it all happened so fast—us going to bed, I mean, not . . . oh, bugger.’

  ‘I know what you mean,’ she said, and smiled a little.

  ‘I’m not like that usually, is what I’m saying. Anymore than you are.’ I shifted, helplessly, from foot to foot. Christ, you try sorting your love-life out at a time like that. ‘I like you a lot. What I know of you, which I know isn’t that much, but . . .’

  ‘I like you too, John. Very much.’

  ‘But?’

  ‘But . . . oh, I don’t know.’ She sighed. I risked a smile of my own now, and she returned it. ‘I’m just still trying to decide what’s going on.’

  ‘Me too.’ I wanted to go to her but still I hesitated. ‘I don’t want to spoil things with you—whatever it is in the end. I . . . look, if you want us to just be friends, that’s cool. If you want to be more than that, that is too. If you need some time. . . .’

  I stopped there. I’d heard that familiar chuckle, seeping into my ear again, so intimate, in a way that it had no right to be. It was like being fondled without consent by a stranger’s hand. Alison looked at me through narrowed eyes. ‘Are you okay?’

  I nodded, swallowing hard. ‘I . . . I just . . .’ my voice trailed off as she moved towards me.

  ‘What? John, what is it?’

  Her back was to the front room window. Behind her stood a silhouette clad in tattered rags. For a moment it was still, like a cardboard cut-out, but then it moved, towards her. The room darkened inexplicably, as though clouds of night had covered the sun outside, and Alison started to turn. As she did, its long white hands reached out for her.

  Alison cried out, frozen; I lunged forward, grabbing her and pulling her away from him as his face—if you could call it that—thrust out of the shadows at us, white and featureless as an egg. Things were moving under it. Two tiny punctures appeared in the upper part of the blank white mask, one on each side, widening and deepening into black sockets as it advanced.

  There was a small, light table in the room; I seized it and brandished it at him. The figure halted, at bay for the moment. Eyes; it had eyes now. The sockets seemed to glare at us balefully. The rags of its clothing—unidentifiable in the sudden gloom—flapped and fluttered from its body like flags and
pennants. Its white hands clenched and unclenched. And then, it began to speak.

  There was no mistaking the movement in its face—under its face—now. But I heard his voice in my ear, as though his mouth was there, lips almost touching it. Later, Alison admitted that she’d heard the same thing.

  ‘You can’t stop me. I’ll have her. She’s mine.’

  ‘She’s bloody not!’ I shouted at him. ‘You can’t have her, you bastard! Hear me? I won’t let you!’

  He reached for me. My hands came up. And his hands—his hands closed around my wrists like bracelets of ice.

  I gasped, maybe even cried out, but it was at the sudden shock of the cold grasp, rather than anything else; he had little strength. It was easy to pull free of his grip.

  For a moment we faced each other. His long, white hands clasped and unclasped. I heard his voice hissing in my ear.

  ‘Not this time, and maybe not the next. But in the end . . . I grow stronger every day. You won’t be able to stop me forever, either of you. I’ll have you, pretty girl. I’ll have you.’

  And then, except for that fading, poisonous titter, he was gone, his substance scattering and dispersing like overlapping shadows that had flown apart, and I was left with Alison, who stared at me, white and shaking, as the room lightened.

  ‘What——’ she said, ‘what——’

  I shook my head, couldn’t speak. We were still gripping each other tightly. The day’s dam broke and I began to sob; Alison, everything catching up with her too, also broke down, and we clung, shuddering, to one another.

  It was Alison who recovered quickest. Not surprising, really; this had been a sudden attack for her, while for me it had been the culmination of a long campaign of screw-turning. She was still shaky, but picked the upended ashtray from the carpet and lit up for both of us. A few long deep drags steadied her nerves and smoked the cigarette down to the filter; that done, she stubbed it out and demanded to know what the hell that thing had been.

  At least I no longer had to worry about her suspending her disbelief; after the last few minutes’ events, it was dangling somewhere in the stratosphere. And so I simply told her all that had happened.

  You should’ve told me before.’

  ‘Couldn’t. You’d’ve . . .’

  ‘Thought you were bonkers? Now you know better.’ Alison managed a tight grin and ruffled my hair. ‘My ex,’ she said, ‘now he was away with the fairies. Thought he was being remote-controlled by Martians.’

  ‘Come off it.’

  ‘Honest to God.’

  ‘Bugger me . . .’

  ‘Haven’t got the plumbing,’ she pointed out, and I dissolved into near-hysterical laughter. Alison sat beside me on the couch and gave me a hug. ‘Better?’

  ‘A bit.’ I blew my nose, rather shamefaced. ‘Sorry.’

  ‘Don’t be.’ Alison stood up and looked around. ‘You want to get out of here? Come over to mine?’

  ‘What about . . .’

  ‘There might be something we can do. Coming?’

  I didn’t need asking twice.

  Alison lived in a small flat in Whalley Range. Usually the worst you had to worry about there was a mugger. If only.

  She paced up and down, smoking furiously. I sat on her bed and drank coffee laced with rum.

  ‘You only started seeing him today,’ she said. ‘He could only try grabbing me today. Last night, if he could have touched me like that, he’d have done it, but all he could do then was breathe down my neck.’

  I nodded. ‘He’s getting stronger,’ I agreed, taking a grateful swallow. ‘So, how?’

  ‘The book. You read the book. The book’s important. . . .’ Alison’s brow furrowed; tiny lines appeared either side of the bridge of her nose. ‘When did it vanish?’

  ‘When . . .’ I stared at her. ‘When I was about to burn it.’

  Alison sat beside me on the bed. ‘And you said yourself that was the last you saw of him until next day.’

  ‘You think if I’d destroyed the book. . . .’

  She nodded. ‘Maybe. Either way, he can’t just have made it vanish into thin air. It has to be somewhere.’

  I took some deep breaths. I felt better now there was something I could do. It was the helplessness I hated most of all.

  ‘So the question is,’ she went on, ‘where?’

  ‘Presumably, somewhere safe.’

  ‘Next question, then, is where would he consider a safe place?’

  ‘Best way to find that out,’ I said, ‘is find out who he was.’

  ‘Two places to start,’ she said promptly. ‘The book was a library sale, right?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘OK, think. Hard. Which library?’

  ‘R . . . Ribble Valley,’ I said finally.

  ‘That’s where it came from. And the bookshop’s where it ended up. So if one of us starts at the library, and the other at the shop. . . .’

  ‘You think we should split up?’ I asked.

  ‘Bloody sure of it. Look, when he appears, it’s always with you. He’s stuck himself onto you, like a leech. It’s you he’s getting stronger off, somehow.’

  I saw what she was driving at. ‘But it’s you he wants.’

  ‘So I should be safe if we’re apart.’

  ‘All right.’ I stood up. ‘I’ll ring in sick tomorrow. Sooner we start the better. If he gets stronger, maybe he won’t need me to be there.’

  Alison grimaced. ‘Point.’

  ‘I’ll see you in the morning, then.’

  She put her hands on her hips. ‘Where d’you think you’re going?’

  I stared at her. ‘Alison, if I’m with you. . . .’

  ‘I’m not leaving you on your own,’ she said adamantly. ‘Not with him, especially now you’ve cheated him. . . .’

  ‘He couldn’t do much today,’ I said. ‘And if he could, he’d do worse to you, if you’re in reach.’

  ‘I know. But he’s getting stronger off you somehow, and we don’t know how. Maybe making you suffer is what does it for him. And if he got you alone in your house, he could do a lot in that vein. So. Until tomorrow. We. Stick .Together. Two’s got to be better than one.’

  I still wasn’t convinced, but Alison shushed me with a finger to my lips. ‘Enough. We’ll stay up and keep the lights on.’

  And that was what we did. The lights burned all the way through to dawn; pints of black coffee were drunk and dozens of cigarettes smoked.

  I only came close to nodding off once, around two o’clock in the morning; it was Alison’s sudden indrawn breath that woke me up. I looked at her and saw her staring into the corner of the room.

  He was there. At first he kept to the shadows, but as I stared at him, he stepped forward into the light. The ‘mouth’ under the pallid skin worked, but there was no sound. Then the skin broke and began to split in long rents, widening and joining together until the last strands broke and there was a gulping, formless chasm of a mouth, opening and closing wetly. Now there was sound; he was breathing, hoarse and wet. He seemed more solid than before. For the first time, there was a smell too, gusting from that mouth. Aniseed.

  He didn’t say or do anything, just stood there gazing at us with those black, empty holes of eyes. I don’t know what stopped him. Perhaps he was not yet strong enough to be certain of success; perhaps he’d only come to frighten us, to show us he was still there. Alison’s hand closed around mine warmly as he took a step forward, and he stopped. She kissed me. We huddled close together and did our best to block him out.

  I didn’t look at him, trying to concentrate on Alison, not to show the slightest fear. After a while, he began humming ‘Paint it Black’ again. Alison used the remote control to turn the stereo on and up, drowning him out. When I finally looked again, he was gone.

  VIII. Mr Lloyd

  Alison drove north the next morning, dropping me off at Preston. ‘I’ll go on to the Ribble Valley Library,’ she said. ‘You head back up to the Lakes. See if you can collar
this Mr Lloyd.’

  Cars roared past, back and forth along the main road. Everyone seemed to be running late for work; the slipstream of their passing buffeted me like a storm that had lost its way. ‘Be careful,’ I told her.

  ‘My middle name,’ she said, smiling brightly, then reached out of the car and tugged my sleeve. ‘You too.’ I leant into the car and kissed her softly on the lips. Without thinking, my fingers brushed through her hair, and she flinched apart from me. We looked at each other, hesitating for a moment, then kissed again, more deeply. Finally she broke free, grinning, winked and tapped me on the nose. ‘Later,’ she said, and drove off. She waved to me once as the car rounded the corner. Then she was gone and the loneliness descended on me once more. I raised my hand to my face; it smelt of sandalwood and her. I pressed it over my nose and mouth and breathed in deeply, imagining that I was drawing something of her into me, to keep me warm and whole until we met again. Then I turned and started jogging towards the train station.

  The journey seemed hours longer than its advertised duration, but at last I reached the village where I’d stayed. There was still no sign of him, which made me more nervous than another manifestation would have.

  I headed down the High Street in the blazing sun, glimpsing my reflection in a window. I’d been a relatively normal-looking figure the last time I was here. Now I was pale, eyes bloodshot, cheeks crusted with stubble. The shop was easy enough to find. I took a deep breath and pushed open the door.

  The bell clinked once. The old man rose from behind the counter a moment later. He looked at me for a moment, frowning, then slowly, gravely, he nodded.