The Shadows

by Alex North

  She bent over and rummaged around in the bag at her feet, eventually retrieving a tattered magazine. She passed it to me.

  “The Writing Life,” I said.

  “Check out the back cover.”

  I turned it over, scanning the details.

  “It’s a short story competition,” Jenny said. “Open to anybody under the age of eighteen. If you get selected, there’s going to be an anthology of the winners—an actual book. The deadline’s not far off.”

  “Okay.”

  I looked at the advertisement, not understanding.

  Finally, it clicked.

  “What—you think I should enter it?”

  “Yeah! Definitely. I thought your story was really good. You should absolutely send it in.”

  “Are you going to send yours?”

  “Of course. I mean, what’s to lose?”

  I stared down at the magazine for a few seconds, reading through the details again, more carefully this time. Crucially, there was no fee to enter. So what harm would it do? I was worried about getting rejected, of course, but Jenny thought my story was good enough.

  “I’ve not got a pen.”

  She rolled her eyes. “You don’t need to send it off now.”

  “I know that. I mean to write down the address.”

  “It’s fine—take the magazine. I’ve already got the details.”

  “You sure?”

  “Yeah, totally.” She shook her head at me, bemused. “That’s why I brought it in.”

  That’s why I brought it in.

  I remember being excited by that. It meant that, despite the small number of times we’d interacted, Jenny had been thinking about me, and that knowledge delivered a thrill that was difficult to describe. A warmth in my stomach. I hadn’t experienced anything like it before, but it was as though I’d just learned the world contained possibilities I hadn’t known about.

  I put the magazine into my bag. “Thank you.”

  “That’s okay,” Jenny said. “No big deal.”

  * * *

  The next morning, I was yawning as I walked through the town, meandering to James’s house almost on autopilot. The cold helped wake me up a little, at least—even though spring had officially come, Gritten seemed to hang on to its winters as hard as it did to its people. But in the town the grass was growing again, at least, and while the sun was little more than a shimmery coin occluded by clouds right then, I could feel it gathering strength. There was birdsong for what felt like the first time in months. A cautious sound that seemed not to want to tempt fate, but there.

  My heart sank as I arrived at James’s house.

  It was normally Carl who got him ready for school and saw him off on a morning, but that day Eileen was outside on the doorstep. She was wearing a faded dressing gown, and she was wiping at the door with an old blue rag bunched up in her fist, a look of angry concentration on her face.

  The gate hung on one old hinge. The wood scratched along the ground as I opened it. Eileen looked over at me sharply, and I kept my head down as I made my way up the path.

  “Good morning, Mrs. Dawson.”

  “Is it?”

  She resumed her activity, holding the door with one hand and pressing the cloth against it with the other, wiping with such ferocity that I half expected the flimsy wood to give. She shouted into the house.

  “Get out here, boy. It’s schooltime.”

  There was no immediate response. I stood there awkwardly for a few moments, watching her work. There was a bottle of disinfectant at her feet.

  “Anything happen at yours last night?” she said.

  The question threw me; I had no idea what she meant. After a second, perhaps taking my silence for some kind of guilt, she looked at me suspiciously.

  “Were you out last night?”

  “Mrs. Dawson?”

  “Don’t gape at me like that, boy. Were you out last night?”

  “No.”

  She stared at me, evaluating me. After what felt like an eternity, she shook her head and then turned her attention back to the door.

  “Someone was. One of you lot out playing silly fuckers.”

  Before I could say anything else, James appeared in the doorway, edging past his mother carefully, as though the woman were electric and might give him a shock if they touched.

  “See you later, Dad,” he called back into the house. “Love you.”

  Carl’s voice came from somewhere far away inside the house. “Love you too.”

  I waited until James and I had walked out of earshot.

  “Everything all right?”

  “Yeah.”

  Which was obviously a lie, but I didn’t want to press the matter. When the bus arrived, he got on first. I always led the two of us up to the back—because that felt like the place you were meant to sit at our age—but today James took us to a spare seat in the middle. When the doors shut and the bus started off, we sat there in silence for a time. But while I didn’t want to ask James outright what had happened, I was still curious about what Eileen had said.

  Anything happen at yours last night?

  “What was your mother doing?” I said.

  “Cleaning the door.”

  “Yeah, I saw that. What I mean is, why?”

  James hesitated.

  “Did you hear anything?” he said. “In the night?”

  I thought about it again. As far as I could recall I’d slept through undisturbed.

  “Not that I remember.”

  “Are you sure?”

  James looked as tired as I was. But scared too.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “What am I supposed to have heard?”

  But after a moment, James turned away and looked out of the window at the bleak landscape flashing past.

  “Nothing.”

  “Yeah. It really sounds like nothing.”

  “Someone knocking at the door. Did you hear that?”

  “Knocking? No.”

  “Right.”

  “You mean, you did?”

  “No, it’s just what my mother said. Someone was hammering at our door in the middle of the night. She was pissed off about it because it woke her up.” James shrugged, a small, timid gesture that was barely even completed. “So she woke me and Dad up too. There was nobody there, though. I thought maybe she imagined it, except there was something on the door this morning. That was what she was doing—cleaning it off.”

  “Cleaning what off?”

  Again, James didn’t reply. I wondered if he actually knew—or if there had even been anything there at all. Eileen drank a lot, and she wasn’t the type of person to admit she’d gotten something wrong. It was easy to believe she’d imagined a noise in the night, overreacted, and had just been cleaning the door this morning as a way of stubbornly pretending she was right.

  The bus turned off the main road and began making its way past the abandoned factories, run-down shops, and boarded-up houses.

  James said something under his breath that I didn’t quite catch.

  “What?” I said.

  “Blood.”

  He was still watching the dull scenery, his voice so quiet I could barely hear him.

  “She said there was blood on our door.”

  FIFTEEN

  NOW

  Officer Owen Holder squinted at my mother’s front door.

  “What do you think it is?” he said.

  “I don’t know. It looks like blood.”

  “Yeah, I guess.” He tilted his head. “Maybe.”

  I said that word too much, and it annoyed me to hear it now. There were three crimson smears on the door, each about the size of the side of a balled-up fist, and they stood out starkly against the white wood, glinting dully in the morning light. If it had been unnerving to see them by flashlight, alone in the darkness, the sight of them now made me feel sick. They were starting to congeal, and a couple of flies had already been drawn to them.

  “I think it’s definitely
blood,” I said.

  “They weren’t there before?”

  “You can’t really miss them, can you?”

  “No,” Holder said. “I suppose not.”

  Then he leaned back, stuffing his hands in his pockets, and he frowned, as though unsure exactly what he was supposed to do about this. I wasn’t sure either. I’d hesitated before calling the police, and had eventually decided it could at least wait until morning. But now, whatever the outcome, I was glad that I had. The marks on the door were clearly a message of some kind, and even if I didn’t quite understand the meaning yet, it frightened me more than I wanted to admit.

  I hadn’t attempted to get back to sleep after being woken by the knocks. Instead, I’d checked the locks on every door and window in the house, and then sat in the darkness on my mother’s bed, with the curtains parted a sliver to give me a view of the street. I had waited and watched until the silence in the air began to sing. And while there had been nobody out there, no sign of movement in the town at all, I had still had the crawling sensation of being watched.

  The feeling remained now.

  Holder took a long, slow breath and then glanced down the front path toward the street. He looked doubtful.

  “I’m not really sure what to say, Mr. Adams. It’s vandalism of a kind, I suppose. And I appreciate it must be annoying. But there’s no actual damage been done. It’s probably just a prank.”

  One of you lot out playing silly fuckers.

  Despite the warmth of the morning, the memory sent a chill through me. But Holder looked to be in his late twenties at most, and I assumed he was way too young to know what had happened here all those years ago. I could have attempted to explain, but it felt like there was too much to say to bring him up to speed. And even if I did that, to understand the real significance you would need to have lived through it in the first place.

  “I’d like a record made of it, at least,” I said.

  He sighed, then took out his phone. “Of course, sir.”

  He took photos of the front door from a couple of different angles, and I stood back with my arms folded, scanning the street and the nearby houses. Again, there was nothing to see. But if someone was watching me, at least they’d know I was taking the situation seriously. That—at least on the surface—I wasn’t going to be intimidated.

  After Holder was done and gone, I went back inside. The whole situation felt both strange and anticlimactic; something serious had happened, but the house itself looked perfectly normal, and life appeared to be going on in the same way it had over the past few days. I wasn’t sure what to do.

  Clean the door, for a start.

  Yes—that was the proactive thing to do, wasn’t it? So I took cloths, a bucket of water, and a bottle of disinfectant out onto the doorstep and set to work. But the whole time, I kept checking the street behind me. And even though there was nobody there, I was glad when I was finished and I could get back inside and lock the front door against the world.

  The house was silent.

  Who could have left those marks? It was an impossible question to answer. When I had been reading online yesterday, I had seen numerous references to the knocks on the door at James’s house. It was just one of many infamous details in the case: a piece of the puzzle known to thousands of internet obsessives. If somebody wanted to play a prank on me, there was a wealth of material for them to draw inspiration from.

  And perhaps that was all it was.

  But as I thought about those posts I’d read online, I also remembered the users who believed Charlie was still alive out there somewhere, and the ones who imagined he really had achieved the impossible. The sense of foreboding that had been gathering for days was stronger now. The feeling that the past was not gone, and that something awful was coming.

  But if so, what?

  I walked slowly up the stairs, then stood by the window, looking up at the attic. The hatch was closed, but I could almost feel the red handprints and the boxes of newspapers sealed away above me.

  It’s in the house, Paul.

  It’s in the fucking house!

  The urgency of my mother’s words came back to me now, along with the panic and fear straining her voice. I had found boxes full of reports on three different murders, separated by years but with a common thread that led back to me. As painful as it had been to learn what my mother had kept hidden from me all this time, I’d imagined that was all I had found. But now I wondered if there was something there I had missed. A detail that was important enough for someone to send me a message or a warning.

  A threat.

  The idea of that scared me.

  But I needed to take another look. And I was about to reach up to open the hatch when I saw something out of the corner of my eye. I stood very still, forcing myself to keep looking upward. The window to the side of me faced out over the backyard and the woods, and I was sure there had been a flicker of movement in the tree line there.

  I glanced out, watching the woods for a few seconds and trying to catch another sight of whatever it had been.

  There was nothing there.

  And then there was.

  I couldn’t be certain, but I had the impression of a figure crouching down in the undergrowth on the far side of the fence.

  Act naturally, I told myself.

  And then tried to keep myself calm. After a moment, I turned my back on the window and stood there a little longer, looking here and there, as though I hadn’t seen anything. As though I wasn’t sure what to do next.

  In a way, that was true. Did I want to confront whoever was out there? My heart was beating with a steady message of, No, no, no. It was the last thing I wanted to do. But then I thought about what Jenny had told me, and I remembered running through the boy on the rugby field that day long ago, and I decided that what you wanted to do wasn’t always the same as what you had to.

  I headed downstairs.

  * * *

  The backyard was long. There was about a hundred fifty feet of undergrowth between the door and the woods, and if I went out that way, whoever was there would see me and disappear into the trees before I could reach them. But there were other routes into the Shadows.

  Outside the front door, I locked it and then headed quickly off down the street. A little way along, an overgrown footpath led away from the road and toward the woods. I set off down it. Muffled by the hedges on either side, the world became so quiet that all I could hear was the bees buzzing softly in the brambles around me, and even that sound fell away as I reached the end of the path and stepped carefully between the trees.

  The unease intensified. I hadn’t been in these woods for twenty-five years, but I remembered them all too well. You only needed to go a few feet for civilization to disappear behind you and a profound and unnerving silence to settle. To feel trapped and lost even on the bare threads of path where the undergrowth had been trampled down.

  And to feel watched.

  But I wasn’t a teenager anymore.

  A little ways in, I turned to the left, making my way between the trees at an angle toward the back of my mother’s house. If I was careful, I would be able to sneak up on whoever I’d seen at the fence.

  A minute later, I judged I was nearly there. It was punishingly hot, and I stopped to wipe sweat from my face before crouching a little and beginning to move more slowly. The distant backs of the houses began to appear gradually between the branches of the trees.

  A stick clicked beneath my foot.

  I held still for a moment. Nothing by way of response.

  I continued forward, reaching the fence a few seconds later, the trees thinning out and the untidy spread of my mother’s backyard suddenly visible ahead. There was nobody here. But when I looked down, the undergrowth at my feet was clearly flattened, and I could smell something in the air.

  A sickly trace of dirt and sweat.

  The skin on the back of my neck started itching. I turned slowly to face the woods behind me. There had alw
ays been something wrong with this place—a soft thrum of energy to the land, the same as when you got too close to an electricity generator—but the sensation right now was worse.

  Somebody was out there.

  Someone hidden between the trees.

  “Hello?” I called out. “Anyone there?”

  There was no reply. But the quiet had an edge to it, like breath being held.

  “Charlie?”

  I had no idea why it was his name I called, but it got a result. After a couple of seconds of silence, I heard foliage snap gently ahead of me on the left. I stood very still, my heart pounding. The woods were so dense in that direction that I couldn’t see more than a few feet, but the sound hadn’t come from far away. Whoever was out there was still close by.

  I steeled myself, then moved tentatively, edging between the rough trunks of the trees, stepping over the coils of grass, and lifting thin spreads of branches out of the way.

  And then, as I emerged into a clearing, I froze in place.

  A man was at the far side.

  He was about thirty feet away from me, standing with his back to me and his head bowed, his body entirely still.

  “Hello?” I said.

  The man did not reply. I looked closer, and saw he was wearing what appeared to be an old army jacket, worn away at the back of the shoulders so that the fabric stuck out in feathery tufts. And as I listened, I could hear him breathing.

  No, I thought.

  No, no, no.

  Although a part of me wanted to move closer, my body wouldn’t respond. I felt as rooted in place as the trees to either side of me. I reached up and pinched my nose.

  I wasn’t dreaming.

  And then, just like that, the man moved away between the trees. I stared after him in horror, but he was out of sight almost immediately, foliage snapping as he disappeared deeper into the woods.

  Then the world fell silent.

  I stood there, my heart hammering.

  And just as Charlie’s name seemed to have come from nowhere a moment ago, a thought came to me now that was similarly unbidden. That what I had just seen hadn’t been a man at all. That it was something that had dragged itself out of the depths of the Shadows to visit me, and was now returning to its home among the trees.