The Shadow People

by Margaret St. Clair

  No answer. I knocked again. No answer. The air around the little house seemed frighteningly still.

  I peered in the window. There was a chair on either side of the Franklin stove, and the pillows on the divan opposite the window were fluffed out plumply. I couldn't see whether there was dust on things or not. I went around to the back and looked in the kitchen window. With the exception of a few plates in the dish drainer on the sink, the kitchen was in order, with surfaces clear and no foodstuffs in sight. The door was locked.

  I was breathing hard. I had been so sure Carol would be here, and—but, of course, they might all three have gone into Monterey for groceries. Monterey was a sizable town. I would have been unlikely to encounter them there.

  After some hesitation, I wrote a note and pushed it under the back door. I walked up the trail to the county road and started back toward the highway.

  I'd look in Wilsons' mailbox and see if their mail had been picked up recently. And if I met any cars coming along the county road, I'd stop them and ask if they'd seen the Wilsons. The nearest house to the Wilsons' place had a "For Sale" sign on it. Not much use in asking there.

  I got back to highway number one without meeting anybody. The mailbox—one of those big RFD things—was full of mail, including three copies of The San Francisco Chronicle. The mail evidently hadn't been picked up for at least three days. But Carol hadn't been missing for more than thirty-eight or forty hours. If the Wilsons had gone somewhere on a short trip, they must have left at least two days before Carol disappeared.

  All this was conjectural. The Wilsons might have been too occupied recently to pick up their mail, and when an unexpected guest arrived, they would have had to go into Monterey for food. (As can be seen, I was reluctant to give up my idea that Carol was at Big Sur.) I'd walk down the highway to the gas pump and the Big Sur Cafe, and see what I could find out.

  I got a ride without even lifting my thumb, and in less than ten minutes I was ordering a hamburger and a cup of coffee at the lunch counter. "I have friends here," I said to the waitress when she brought my order. "Clifford and Eadie Wilson. They don't seem to be home, though. Do you know where they've gone?"

  She frowned. "The Wilsons," she said. She had a faintly Spanish accent. "Seems to me, Mr. Wilson was in here last week, Friday or so. Yes, I'm pretty sure. He said they was going down to LA for a little while."

  This was very unwelcome news. It had always been unreasonable that Carol should depart her bed after midnight for Big Sur, and I had clung to the idea only because the alternatives were both unreasonable and frightening. I was wondering what to do next when the man who had been playing the pinball machine in the corner turned and came toward me. The light fell on his face, and I recognized him.

  It was Carl Hood, one of the Coffee House regulars. Occasionally he contributed an article to the hip community newspaper. He was older than most of us—about forty, I think—and good-looking in a distinguished, thin-featured way, but Carol had never liked him. She had once remarked that, though he often warned people of coming narco busts, the people he warned got busted just the same. He was said to have been a TA in the philosophy department once. He always wore a green parka, and had a string of uncut turquoise beads around his neck.

  "Hello," he said. "Dick Aldridge himself. What are you doing here? This is not where it's at."

  "I know," I said. I hesitated. Carol's dislike of him was in my mind. But I was worried, he seemed friendly, I felt I needed advice. I decided to tell him why I was there.

  He listened attentively, rubbing his hand across his clean-shaven chin, and now and then lifting his gray eyes to mine. "It's odd, certainly," he said when I had finished. "No wonder you're worried. Have you thought that she might simply have gone across the bay, to the Haight-Ashbury? That's a likely place for her to have gone."

  "Yes," I answered. "I called up everybody we know there. They all said they hadn't seen her. But I'm going to go looking for her there when I get back. The thing that bothers me most is that she left her camera. No matter where she went, no matter how uptight she was at me, she wouldn't leave her camera. If she forgot it—and she never did forget it—she'd come back for it."

  "Um." Hood rubbed his chin for a moment longer, his head averted. Then he turned his face to mine and looked directly in my eyes. "Have you considered the possibility," he said, "that she may not be on the skin of the world at all?"

  Chapter Two

  I just missed the last northbound bus and had to sit in the waiting room at Monterey all night. I managed to doze a good deal of the time. When I wasn't nodding, I kept thinking about Carl Hood—wondering what he had meant by his remark, and why, after he had made it, he had seemed to regret what he had said, and had refused to explain. He didn't seem to me the sort of person who would ever let slip more than he had meant to say.

  Day came at last. I slept a little more on the bus. When we got to SF, I left the bus and went out to the Haight-Ashbury. I wandered around for a while, went in two or three shops whose wares Carol had admired and asked the clerks about her, and finally had a hamburger and coffee at a place where she and I had eaten once or twice. Nobody had seen her, and it seemed more and more unlikely to me that she would elect to hide from me in the Haight-Ashbury.

  She had never liked the locale, even before it got touristy, saying that stoned teenies and warmed-over mantras struck her as a bad combination. (I suspect she was basically unsympathetic to Eastern mysticism.) That she should come there for solace while she was recovering from a disastrous love affair was hard to accept. But if she wasn't there, then where—?

  Suddenly I was anxious to get back to Berkeley. There might be a message for me, either at the inn or where I worked; the atmosphere of the Haight—withdrawn exhibitionism, self-encapsulated color—was an acute irritant. As a Bohemia, it had too few bookstores. I wanted to get back to the Avenue.

  There was no messages for me at the inn. I showered, shaved, and put on fresh clothes. Carol would have been much more likely to leave a message for me at the paper, anyhow. There would surely be a notation on the pad on my desk. Or the PBX girl would have written down a number for me to call. After all, I'd been gone more than thirty-six hours. I'd hurry and get to where I worked.

  Nothing. My mouth got dry. I phoned the police, and was told, by the same polite young man to whom I'd reported Carol's disappearance, that nothing had been heard of her. He seemed surprised that she hadn't come back.

  It was a long afternoon. I would have liked to talk to Miller, but only saw him once, in rapid transit past my desk, too absorbed even to nod to me. I got more and more anxious. My fingers began to tremble. By eight o'clock—it was my night to work late—I had trouble hitting the right keys on the typewriter.

  I was done about nine. I hadn't had any dinner and hadn't wanted any. As I passed the Coffee House, Fay, the chambermaid who did my room at the beat-up Shasta Inn, hailed me.

  "Hi, Dick," she said from her chair on the terrace, "you look terrible. Get yourself something to eat inside, and come and sit down with me."

  "I'm not hungry."

  "Get a milkshake, then. You look like you need food."

  After a moment, I obeyed her. Fay was a small, brown-haired girl, about my own age, who was working as a chambermaid part time while she took courses in psychology at the university. She was not a very good chambermaid, but she was perfectly honest. There was a faint softness in her speech that made me think she might have come from the South originally. I did not find her particularly attractive, but I did not find her unattractive, either. She impressed me as being reserved.

  "Where've you been?" she asked as I was unloading my tray on her table. "That cake looks good. Your bed wasn't slept in last night."

  "You certainly keep tabs on me," I answered, a little resentfully. "Do you know when everybody in the inn sleeps out?"

  She shrugged her shoulders. "Just about. But don't tell me if you don't want to. I just thought you were looking bad."


  After all, I wanted to talk. Fay was friendly, and I didn't know her well enough to make confiding in her embarrassing. Once more I poured out my tale of Carol's disappearance, including my scrying, the expedition to Big Sur, and my hunt in the Haight-Ashbury. "She's been gone almost forty-eight hours now," I finished. "Her bed was still warm on Monday night, you know."

  "You think she's been kidnapped, don't you?" Fay said. "Eat your cake. Whatever has happened or hasn't happened, you'll need to be fed."

  "Miller said that, too," I answered, obediently swallowing the last of the cake. It occurred to me that Fay wasn't so much reserved as she was bossy. Still, the cake tasted good. "That I thought she'd been kidnapped, I mean. But why should she be kidnapped? There's been no attempt at a ransom, and if there had, I haven't any money.

  "Carol is young and good-looking, but there are a couple of thousand girls in Berkeley who're the same. Why should kidnappers pick on her, especially?"

  "The other girls weren't sleeping in basement apartments, and they weren't emotionally upset because they'd had a serious quarrel with their boy friends."

  "You mean, her being upset would have made her easier to kidnap? That she wouldn't resist much if somebody pulled a gun on her and—forced her to go with him?"

  Fay ran her hand over her dark hair. "No, that's not quite what I meant. Listen, were there any other traces of a struggle besides the broken filter?"

  "No. Her bed wasn't mussed up."

  "Nothing else odd at all?" she persisted.

  "There was a mark on the floor," I said, almost unwillingly. "A broad mark, shiny and glittering, like dried slime."

  "Oh!"

  "You know what made it?" I was excited.

  "Maybe." Fay obviously wasn't going to say anything more. She folded her arms on her chest and stared past me at the street.

  Her curtness exasperated me. "You think Carol was kidnapped," I said stiffly, "but do you know by whom? Do you know where they would have taken her? If you do, I can't understand why you don't tell me. If you're afraid to tell me, you should go to the police."

  Fay sighed. She looked at me, and then away again. She seemed to be making up her mind whether to confide in me. "I'm not quite sure who has taken her," she said at last. "There are three kinds of them, the gray—but never mind that. As to where she may have been taken, I don't know an easy way of describing it. Let's just say that—she may no longer be on the skin of the world."

  I felt a strong, unpleasant thrill.

  "The skin of the world"—it was the expression Carl Hood had used. "What do you mean by that?" I demanded. "Carol must be somewhere! Or do you mean that she—is under—I mean, she isn't alive any more?"

  "No, I think she's still alive."

  "Something supernatural, then?"

  "Not supernatural, either. Natural enough, but old and frightening. Do you love her enough to go after her?"

  "Yes. But where do I go?"

  "I can show you how to follow. The—people you are hunting leave traces."

  "Fay! What are you hinting at? You seem to know something—what is it? How do you know?"

  "At home—" she said, and stopped. "Never mind, it isn't necessary that you understand. The most important thing is not to eat or drink while you are gone. Remember that." She leaned across the table toward me, her eyes serious and intent. "You must take food and water with you. Don't be tempted to eat what you find, or what they offer you."

  A girl walked by wearing white Levis, with a black tutu over them. A few yards down the block somebody began whomping on a guitar with electric amplification. A truck parked at the curb was projecting light patterns on sheets of butcher paper. I don't know whether, in a more conventional environment than this one, Fay's remarks would have struck me as fantastic; here they seemed piercingly relevant, like the sound of an alarm clock breaking through an overlong dream. I stared at her.

  "You'll need stout shoes," she went on, "with nonskid soles. You'll have to do a lot of walking and crawling—clambering, really. I don't think"—she looked closely at my eyes, rather than into them—"that you'll need to take any light source with you. It will be rather dark, though, all the same.

  "Do you have a knife?"

  "A pocket knife, yes," I replied.

  "That may be enough. They dislike steel."

  "But—where am I going? Who is 'they'? Where do I start?"

  "A good place to start would be in the basement of the inn later tonight. I'll take you down and show you how to go. As to where you're going—you could call it Otherworld. Or Underearth."

  Fay knocked on the door of my room rather less than an hour later. I had changed to old clothes and sturdy shoes, and put chocolate bars and sandwiches in the pockets of my jacket. Water I had in an old canteen. I didn't know how long I would be gone (gone? gone where?), but the rent on my room was paid till the end of the month, and I thought that would be enough.

  She took me down the service stairs to the inn's basement. The inn was an old building; the fire department had seen to it that the basement was free of imflammable litter, but all around the edges of the big, shadowy area were glass and metallic remainders—flower pots, glass jars, bags of nails, rusty tools, fragments of a dismantled bicycle. It ought all to have been thrown out long ago.

  "Now," said Fay, pausing beside the furnace boiler, "do you feel a draft?"

  "Yes, several. This is a drafty place."

  "There is only one we are interested in. Move your head around and see if you feel a—it is really not a draft, I don't know what to call it—a current of air that is definitely colder than the others. Colder and a little moist. That will be the one."

  I moved my head obediently, half-sniffling. "I feel something, I think. It's almost a smell."

  "Yes, that's it. Notice, when you move your head, how it seems to strengthen, and not necessarily in the direction from which the current appears to come."

  "Yes. It gets stronger that way." I pointed to the wall where an extrusion of a stepladder and a sawhorse stood. "I must say I don't care for it, as a smell."

  "Of course, you don't. Try to follow it."

  I went forward, sniffing and moving my head, until I came up against the wall. "It ends here," I said.

  "No, it doesn't. Go around behind the ladder. Do you see that gap? The gradient would take you into that."

  I stood looking at the opening, feeling the chill, disagreeable current come out of it, and hesitating. "Go on," Fay said after a minute. "You must go into it."

  "Into that? I can't. It's too small."

  "No, it is not. You can make it. I'll show you."

  She got in front of me, raised her arms above her head, and with a couple of boneless wriggles, disappeared into the gap. It was almost like a conjuring trick.

  If she could, I supposed I could, too. I was taller than she, but she was considerably more billowy. I tried raising my arms, as she had done, but it seemed to add to my difficulties. Finally, I tried pulling in my buttocks sharply, throwing my head back, and forcing the air out of my lungs. This worked, and I got through the opening handily enough, though I could feel the sandwiches in my pockets grinding against the rough edges of the gap.

  I was standing in another space, a confined one from the feel of the air. When I moved my head, I could detect the cold, unpleasant gradient strengthening away from me. The space was dark, but after a moment I could make out the silhouette of my companion. The walls gave out a very pale light.

  "Where are we?" I asked in a low voice. The environment made me feel that I really ought to whisper.

  "In the next cellar," she answered. "Do you feel the gradient? Remember, it is the direction toward which it strengthens, not the direction from which it appears to be coming, that is important."

  "Yes."

  "Follow it."

  I groped my way toward the farther wall, where, rather low down, there was a not impossibly narrow horizontal opening, as if a couple of courses of brick had been left out.
>
  "You must go on by yourself," Fay said. "But remember, if you come to a place that seems absolutely impossible, look about for another way. This road is used, and by beings who, however lithe, boneless and pliable themselves, take bulky objects with them. There is always a passable way to Otherworld.

  "The way may surface for a while. They go over such spots when the nights are darkest. Don't be alarmed. The way will go down again. Use your steel knife to protect yourself, if they seem threatening. Good-bye. Good luck."

  She touched me on the wrist with one hand. Before I could say anything, she had slithered through the gap on the Shasta Inn side once more, and was gone.

  I almost started after her. The enterprise in which I was engaged, now that the persuasiveness of Fay's presence was removed, seemed abruptly preposterous. A "way to Otherworld", indeed. I was in a cellar adjacent to the basement of the Shasta Inn, that was all, and Fay was an odd girl whose oddity had taken a somewhat unconventional shape. Perhaps she was high on something unusual, an intoxicant that enabled her to construct a grotesque, plausible account of what had happened to Carol four nights before.

  But if Carol hadn't been taken to "Otherworld", what had become of her? Had she been forced, probably at the point of a gun, into somebody's car a few minutes before I got to her apartment? It was possible, and yet I didn't believe it. She would have resisted, screamed, ducked under the kidnapper's arm, struggled, fought back. She wasn't, in short, an easy girl to intimidate. Only a kidnapper who could paralyze her will could have abducted her.

  I heard a faint scurry and twittering off to my right. The noise decided me. It might be only mice (more likely rats), but it was noteworthy how often I heard such noises around me. I could feel the gradient, the increasing coldness and disgusting moisture Fay had spoken of, Carol was gone, gone somewhere. I would try to follow. If I was doing a foolish thing, it was still no more foolish than waiting anxiously in Berkeley to hear news of her.