But in Moyer, not all shadows were beholden to substance and light.
They glided along streets, hiding in deeper darkness to avoid detection. Their outlines resembled humans rather than amorphous shapes, though the edges of most of them lacked definition and had the nebulous, ill-defined quality of a faded memory. Unlike their light-cast cousins, they existed in three dimensions, taking up physical space when their will was strong enough or when agitated, but their substance was as thready as the edges of their outlines, one of several states available to them.
Some followed people taking evening walks. The cover of night gave them the courage to venture throughout the neighborhood. What was one more shadow in a world of shadows and encompassing darkness? Barking dogs were ignored or chided for a false alarm. Some sensitive people experienced the feeling of being watched, the hairs on the nape of their neck rising.
At night, the free shadows of Moyer roamed along streets and alleys, seeking hosts. Though they had substance, they were adept at slipping through cracks and crevices and keyholes, like a persistent winter wind.
For them, houses and stores with locked windows and doors posed no real barrier. State-of-the-art security systems had no defense against the sliding darkness that moved like a stain across hardwood floors and carpets, walls and stairs. And the minds of those inside the locked and secured buildings were just as permeable, just as susceptible to invasion as the structures that sheltered them.
On the west side of Moyer, fronting long-neglected farmland, stood a sprawling clapboard farmhouse generously described as a fixer-upper. And though recently purchased, the fixing process had not proceeded sufficiently for any of the townspeople to notice improvements. The neglected house attracted a significant contingent of the free shadows. Viewed from far above, the activity around the house resembled a disturbed ant hill, with free shadows circling the house, slipping in and out of its many cracks and crevices.
By this time of night, all but one of the home’s four residents were asleep. On the second floor, in the south corner bedroom, nine-year-old Ethan Yates sat cross-legged in the middle of his bed, the darkness of the room leavened only by a Scooby-Doo nightlight. Ever since Ethan woke up, Scooby’s head had flickered off and on every few seconds. He hoped he’d remember in the morning to ask his mother to change the bulb.
For now, in the fluttery darkness, he was afraid to leave his bed, the only safe place in his room. With each wink of Scooby’s light, he noticed them moving around his room. Large ink-spot ripples of blackness blotting out sections of his walls in passing, some floating to spill through gaps in the windowsill, others slipping across the ceiling, deeper than the darkness and layers of shadows that defined his bedroom at night.
He was not afraid of the dark; he was afraid of what overwhelmed the dark.
Whatever they were, they didn’t speak to him. They reminded him of the mice that lived inside the walls of the last house. They also reminded him of a movie he saw, one that gave him nightmares, about people lost on a boat in the ocean, surrounded by sharks. Their dark, menacing shapes coursed silently through the water, always ready to attack, to feed on the people.
Because the dark shapes had the outlines of people but were not human, Ethan called them boogeymen. But not aloud, not to them. Instinctively, he sensed they were dangerous. Something about the way they invaded his home, caring nothing for borders or boundaries. If strangers crept into a home, the owners called the police.
The boogeymen tolerated him but, as his father might say, they showed him no sign of respect. Yet they were aware of him. Occasionally, one would glide across the hardwood floor and come within inches of his face, studying him like he might examine a weird insect he’d trapped in an overturned jar. And each time one of them came within reach, Ethan fought the urge to squeeze his eyes shut and pray for it to leave. He made himself look back at the darkness, to try to understand it.
When they turned or circled him, he could see a thickness to them. They weren’t simply dark spots. They took up space in the world, but it almost hurt to stare at them too long. Human eyes—his eyes, anyway—had trouble understanding how these things existed in the world. The edges of most of them, especially the hands and feet, blurred or became wispy, like smoke from an ashtray. On some, the edges almost seemed to vibrate in and out of focus. It made him think that they struggled to maintain their shapes, that if they relaxed too long, they would fade away, possibly unable to return.
He wondered if they could be aliens come to Earth to examine human beings. But how could they fly a spaceship? And they didn’t look like any aliens he’d ever seen on TV or in the movies. No, they were boogeymen and they took the shape of people to hide themselves in the shadows of people. Not for the first time, Ethan wondered if only children could see their true form. Maybe adults only ever saw normal shadows where the boogeymen hid.
If Addie saw them, Ethan figured she would scream and wake their parents. And the boogeymen might hurt all of them. Ethan could be brave because he had a new friend, Barry. His friend had warned him they would come, so Ethan wouldn’t scream for help. Ethan had protested, saying he would holler not scream. Screaming was for babies and girls in scary movies. Barry prepared Ethan, but that wasn’t always enough. The boogeymen made Ethan nervous when they invaded his house. They appeared in his room, but he saw them leave through his door, slip through the gap between the bottom of the door and the floor, or flow through the keyhole. Ethan read once that rats could get through any hole, if it was big enough for their head to pass through. The widest bone in their body was their skull. The boogeymen had no bones. They could slip through the smallest crack.
So, Barry stayed close.
“Barry, you promise, right?”
He waited for Barry’s answer, a whisper he could hear—but not with his ears.
“I know, but promise again,” Ethan said. “Good. But you’re here to protect me. Nobody’s staying with Addie or Mom and Dad.”
He waited again, listening to Barry.
“Yeah, but I feel bad. They’re asleep and—”
Barry interrupted.
“I know they’re supposed to stay asleep, but if one of the boogey—if one of them decides to—”
Ethan sighed at the response.
“‘A promise is a promise,’” Ethan said, repeating what Barry had told him several times before. “But you’re here and you can’t control them. You told me so.”
Ethan listened.
“For now, but that could change, couldn’t it?”
Ethan nodded. He’d heard Barry’s assurances before, but things had changed, hadn’t they?
“What about the other people?” Ethan asked. “I saw it on the news. Mom and Dad talked about it at dinner. Is that… Is that because of them?”
Ethan waited through a long pause before Barry finally answered.
“I know you’re not like them,” Ethan said. “But they—they scare me…”
Ethan flinched as his doorknob turned.
He’d never seen the boogeymen move anything in his room. Other than Barry’s assurances, that was the one thing that had calmed him during their nightly invasions. If they couldn’t really move anything, maybe they couldn’t hurt him.
The door swung inward and he sighed in relief when he saw his mother’s face in the pale light. She wore a gauzy white nightgown and, if not for the pink ribbon decorating the neckline, she’d look like a ghost. “Ethan why are you still—?” She glanced at Scooby’s flickering face. “What’s wrong with your nightlight?”
“That’s what woke me,” Ethan said, making a show of rubbing his knuckles in the corner of his right eye. “It’s dying.”
As quick as the door had opened, the boogeymen sank back into the shadows, in the layered darkness, invisible to her. But Ethan thought he could find them. After a moment, his eyes located a few unmoving dark spots, black stains clinging to the floor, walls and ceiling.
He shuddered, as if he’d caught a chill o
r the flu. Utterly motionless, the boogeymen scared him now most of all. Somehow, he sensed how dangerous the moment was, with his mother awake, inches from some of them. Despite his earlier protests, what his mother did next almost made him scream.
She flipped up the wall light switch.
When the overhead light blazed to life, Ethan thought for sure they would kill his mother, and then him so there would be no witnesses. And then Addie and finally his dad. The police would come in a few days and find them all murdered. He squeezed his eyes shut, half to shield his eyes from the sudden burst of light, but also in fear of what would happen in the next few seconds.
Slowly, he squinted his eyes open. The darkness and the shadows were mostly gone, some clinging behind the door, on the far side of the bed, near the windows. No longer were the boogeymen evident. They’d somehow made their dark shapes disappear or blend in with the lighter shadows.
“I’ll look for a new bulb in the morning,” she said. “But you need to get to sleep, young man.”
“Okay, Mom,” he said, trying to suppress the quaver in his voice.
She started to close the door, then paused. “I thought I heard you talking to someone in here.”
He spread his hands and chuckled nervously. “I’m all alone.”
“Yes, you are.”
“Talking to myself, I guess,” he said. “Had trouble falling asleep.”
“Well, keep your eyes closed and you won’t notice the blinking light so much.”
“Okay, Mom.”
“Goodnight,” she said. “Love you.”
“Love you, Mom.” After she turned off the overhead light and pulled the door closed, he called out, “Be careful, Mom!”
He waited a moment, listening to her footfalls as she returned to his parents’ bedroom. Once he was sure she was gone, he whispered, “Barry? Are you still here?”
He listened. “Good, I thought she might have scared you off.”
Glancing around his room, he saw only normal shadows and darkness. Across the room, Scooby continued to flicker, but much less often. Ethan flopped onto his stomach and pushed himself to the edge of the bed, hanging over it far enough to lower his head and look under the box spring.
When Barry visited, he preferred to stay under the bed. Even when they talked, Barry never came out in the open. He told Ethan when they first met that he looked different and didn’t want to scare him. Under the bed, Barry had the cover of darkness. The glow from the nightlight reached only the edge of the bed, not all the way under.
Looking at Barry upside down, Ethan couldn’t see details of his face or make out too many details about his body. He was a darkness in the shadows. Ethan sometimes caught glimpses of his friend, the slope of a nose, the curl of fingers, the hump of a knee as Barry shifted around under the bed but no more than that.
“They won’t hurt Mom, will they?” Ethan asked. “It’s my fault she woke up. Promise me they won’t take it out on her?” He waited for Barry’s answer. “Good. Thanks, Barry.”
Ethan had decided Barry was related to the boogeymen in some way. He had to be familiar to them if he talked to them and asked them not to bother Ethan or his family. But unlike the boogeymen, Ethan trusted Barry and enjoyed his company. After all, dogs were a lot like wolves, but Ethan wasn’t scared of dogs. Most dogs were friendly. Wolves were dangerous.
“Okay, I guess I should go to sleep before Mom comes back.”
Ethan righted himself on the bed, laid back and rested his head on his pillow. After a moment, he closed his eyes and waited. He counted silently to ten, then opened his eyes just a bit, to get a peek.
Barry rose from beneath the bed, shaped like a normal person, but made of darkness. Definitely taller than Ethan if they stood side by side. He’d had the feeling Barry was older than him. Like an older brother. As Ethan waited, squinting into the darkness and at Barry’s deeper darkness, Barry didn’t move. Ethan thought he might say something more, but he only seemed to turn away and glide toward the window, his leg shapes flowing in a crude animation of human legs, pretending to support weight as he crossed the room. But unlike any human, Barry slipped through a gap in the windowsill and disappeared into the night.
ELEVEN
Weary from a long day investigating and witnessing the confusing and destructive behavior permeating the town, and after over an hour of questioning from one of Moyer’s finest, Dean and Sam checked into the imaginatively named Moyer Motor Lodge. Without heading back to the interstate and driving to the nearest rest stop or—God forbid—booking a bed and breakfast, there weren’t a lot of rooming options. The Delsea Lake Inn was cheaper with a much better view, but Gruber mentioned a recent bedbug infestation that management claimed to have eradicated. Nevertheless, he advised them to “proceed with caution.”
So, the Moyer Motor Lodge it was.
Dean couldn’t wait to finally ditch the Fed suit. He’d whipped off his tie, folded it and tucked it in a jacket pocket while waiting for the room key. Standing there, he’d noticed that instead of paintings, the lobby had enlarged decades-old photos of people vacationing by a scenic lake. The prints had faded, the colors almost entirely bleached away.
In a way, the framed photos mirrored the general state of the motel. Small areas of disrepair had gone untended. A quick perusal revealed marks on the walls, scuffs on the floors, worn carpet, chips in wood surfaces. If Dean had to guess, the motel had fallen on hard times a while ago and continued to teeter on the brink of insolvency. But it was, thankfully, free of bedbugs.
The brass plaques on the frames of the bigger prints mentioned Lake Delsea and the month and year of the photo. Not much after the mid-Seventies. Out of idle curiosity, Dean asked, “Nothing recent?”
“My mother took those back in the day,” the balding clerk said. “Besides, the lake’s been closed to tourism for decades.”
Dean recalled that Pangento chemical spills—or possible toxic dumping—had soured everyone on the lake. The spill may or may not have been intentional, but the chamber of commerce had been unable to salvage Moyer’s tourism reputation. Instead, Moyer became a chemical factory town.
“Reclaimed wilderness now.”
“What?” Dean asked.
“Lake Delsea,” the clerk said. “Overgrown. Main pier’s still there. And some of the summer shops and shacks. Mostly, it’s a teenager hangout.”
“Oh?”
“Yes, sir,” he said. “They go there to drink, do drugs. The cops found paraphernalia there. Busted a few kids. ’Bout a year ago, one of them got drunk, took a swim on a dare and drowned. Lot of people say the lake’s cursed.”
“Is that so?”
“If you believe that kind of thing,” the clerk said with a shrug. “Personally, I won’t swim in the lake.”
“You think it’s cursed?” Dean asked, intrigued. Could Lake Delsea have some connection to the weird behavior plaguing the town? “Haunted?”
“No,” he replied. “I think it’s polluted. And I’d rather not swim in toxic sewage, thank you very much.”
“Well, that’s understandable.”
“Oh, Pangento say they cleaned it up but I don’t trust them.”
Dean smiled. “Not a company man?”
“Hell no,” he said vehemently. “They broke this town once. And if they ever pull up stakes, Moyer would become nothing but a ghost town. That bunch! No regard for anything but their bottom line.” He shook his head for emphasis. “I’d leave sooner than work for them.”
“A man of principle.”
“You know it,” he said and slid a key fob across the counter. “Room 142. Two doubles.”
* * *
“Make a friend?” Sam asked as they carried their overnight bags down the walkway to their room. “You were in there a while.”
“Hearing lore of the haunted Lake Delsea.”
“Really?”
“Not unless pollution attracts more ghosts than juvenile delinquents.”
“You know, Dean, w
e could call Mick,” Sam suggested. “Maybe the Brits have seen something like this before.”
“No way, Sam,” Dean said. “This one’s you and me. No interference. Whatever this is, we’ll figure it out on our own.”
Dean unlocked the door, unsurprised to find the walls hung with more photos from Lake Delsea’s glory days. At least one duplicate of a lobby photo, but the colors had lasted longer in the room’s print. Less sun exposure. And yet, just as depressing. Almost felt as if the motel itself was haunted, that they had stepped back in time to a bygone Moyer when the whole world waited impatiently for the death of disco.
Lacking the energy to ditch the Fed suit, Dean picked up the TV remote and plopped onto the nearest lumpy bed, flicking through a limited selection of channels with the sound on mute. Sam filled a glass with water from the faucet, took a sip and frowned.
“No good?”
“Well water, maybe.”
“Or a Pangento cocktail.”
“Remind me to pick up some bottled water,” Sam said as he held the glass up to the lamplight.
Dean had no idea what his brother expected to see in the water, but if it was that bad, Dean planned to survive on beer, either canned or bottled.
Sam pulled out a chair from a utilitarian desk and sat with his arms crossed over the back. “So, what do we think?”
“If I hadn’t seen Orderly Red-eyes,” Dean said, “I’d put money on a toxic mutant.”
“The weird shadow movement,” Sam said. “The flicker of red in the eyes right before the orderly’s voice changed, before he changed.”
“Same as the lacrosse coach,” Dean said. “If we believe random lacrosse girl.”
“No reason not to,” Sam said. “From the beginning, people here have been acting out of character.”
“After the midnight blackouts.”
“Right,” Sam said. “My gut told me we were dealing with something that stripped away people’s inhibitions.”
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