The Shadow Friend

by Alex North

  But he said it too quickly, in a way that seemed to be a magic spell of its own: an incantation that, if you repeated it often enough, would become true.

  ‘How can you be sure?’ she said. ‘From what I can tell, the police searched those woods extensively.’

  Paul thought about that for a while.

  ‘I remember that,’ he said finally. ‘I remember hearing the dogs barking from my bedroom window. Every now and then, I’d spot an officer in the treeline. But the thing is, the way it reads online, Charlie vanished without a trace. And that’s just not true.’

  ‘It’s not?’

  ‘No. He and the others had been in those woods so often that there were traces of him everywhere. The dogs would find a trail that would lead them back to another, and they’d end up going round in circles. Literally chasing their tails. So yeah, the search was extensive, but unless you’ve been in there, it’s really not obvious how big those woods are. How easy it is to get lost in there.’

  All of which might be true, but she could still sense the doubt there. He wasn’t as certain as he wanted to sound. Even in the face of the evidence and the weight of probability, there was a part of him that wasn’t quite so sure. And she could tell the idea scared him.

  ‘Did you know Billy Roberts was living in Gritten?’ she said.

  ‘No.’ He blinked. ‘Fuck. I had no idea.’

  ‘He was living in his parents’ old house.’

  ‘I didn’t even know he’d been released.’

  ‘Really?’ Another truth, she thought, but this one surprised her. ‘Given what happened, I’d have thought you’d have been following the case over the years.’

  ‘The opposite. I’ve done my best not to think about it at all. After I left here, I just wanted to forget about it. Pretend it never happened.’

  Jesus, Amanda thought. Everyone has a fucking box in their head to hide things in. Apart from her, of course. She didn’t need to close her eyes right now to recall the sight of Billy Roberts on his blood-soaked settee. The image kept pressing at the edge of her mind, and it was all she could do to keep it out. There were going to be nightmares later.

  ‘Was living?’ Paul said.

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘You said Billy was living there.’

  That was sharp of him. Amanda picked up her drink and took another sip, wondering how much to tell him. But it wasn’t like the news wouldn’t spread quickly.

  ‘He was found dead today,’ she said.

  I found him dead.

  ‘How?’

  ‘I don’t want to go into that right now. And I just want to stress this: I’m not officially involved in that investigation. The Gritten police already have several suspects they want to talk to. I was visiting him on a completely unrelated matter.’

  Paul considered that.

  ‘You think he might be the person behind the online messages?’

  Sharper still.

  ‘I don’t know. It’s one line of enquiry. Do you think that’s the kind of thing he would do?’

  ‘Billy? I don’t know anything about him.’

  Present tense. Even though Paul had just been told Roberts was dead, the information hadn’t sunk in far enough yet for him to correct his speech. She had already been confident Paul wasn’t behind the CC666 account. She was sure now he hadn’t been involved in killing Billy Roberts.

  So who had been?

  An unrelated matter, she’d just told Paul, and that was likely true. While she wasn’t involved in the murder investigation itself, she had been on the scene, given a detailed statement, and talked to Detective Graham Dwyer afterwards. Dwyer already had a list of people he wanted to bring in and talk to. Billy Roberts had been a loose part of a local circle of drinkers who enjoyed an often volatile relationship: men who were borderline homeless, and who fell out and fought viciously within the space of half a bottle, all the suppressed anger and resentment exploding out of them. In advance of forensics, those connections would be the natural focus of the investigation, and Amanda figured the odds were good Dwyer would turn out to be right.

  But she couldn’t rid herself of the feeling she’d had outside Roberts’s door earlier – the sensation that someone had been standing on the other side of that flimsy wood, staring out at her. If that was the case, it suggested a killer far more in control of themselves than the working theory supported. And Amanda didn’t like to believe that whoever had done the terrible things she’d seen inside that house had been cool and collected while they did it.

  Because what kind of monster was that?

  Paul was staring off into space, looking helpless and almost overloaded by the information she’d given him.

  ‘I’m sorry for dredging up bad memories,’ she said.

  He shook his head.

  ‘Believe me, they were all already being dredged.’

  ‘Your mother … isn’t well?’

  ‘She’s dying.’

  ‘Well, I was trying to be circumspect about things.’

  ‘There’s really no need.’

  She nodded, remembering what it had been like when her father was dying. The endless visits, the smell of the hospital, the way he seemed diminished by every passing day, shrinking into a figure that didn’t fit with the size of the man who filled her memories. It had seemed impossible. But everything is okay until it isn’t. People are there, large as life and taken for granted, and then they aren’t.

  ‘Well, I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘It must be very hard for you right now.’

  ‘I think it’s probably harder for her.’

  Paul picked up his beer and downed half of it in one.

  Amanda waited.

  ‘I hadn’t seen her in a long time,’ he said. ‘Not been back here. You know how it can feel like you put something away and forget about it, and it’s like it’s gone? But then you realize it’s actually been there the whole time.’

  ‘Like a box that won’t stay shut?’ she said.

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘Believe me, I know that one every day. You’re staying at your mother’s house, right?’

  He nodded.

  ‘I’m surprised you didn’t opt for a hotel,’ she said.

  ‘Lecturers don’t get paid that much.’

  ‘Even so.’

  He didn’t answer, and she found herself trying to imagine how it must feel, returning to a childhood home with so much sour history in its walls and floorboards. Especially when, unlike Billy Roberts, Paul probably hadn’t needed to. But looking at him now, Amanda recognized that a lot of the weight he was carrying was guilt, and she wondered if, despite not wanting to think about what had happened here, a part of him had decided that maybe, deep down, he needed to.

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said eventually, speaking slowly as though he was working out the same thing for himself. ‘As difficult as it’s been, I think I owe my mother. She looked after me when I was a kid. Protected me. Raised me. Maybe it’s the least I can do. Although, obviously, it’s too late now.’

  ‘Not necessarily.’

  Her phone buzzed. She checked it and found a message from Lyons requesting an update on what the hell was going on. It was worded so politely she could tell he was furious at being kept in the dark. Well, he could wait. She scrolled back up, hoping there might be an update from Theo, but there was nothing. The mysterious user behind the CC666 account clearly hadn’t taken the bait yet. And of course, if it turned out to have been Billy Roberts, now they never would.

  A flash of the scene earlier.

  She pushed it away and drained her glass.

  ‘Okay,’ she said. ‘I need to go.’

  ‘Well, thanks for the drink.’

  ‘That’s okay. Now I know that lecturers don’t earn much, I’m relieved I stepped into the breach. I’ll probably be in touch. It might be handy to talk about what happened here, even if it’s just to give me an idea what I’m looking for.’

  ‘I don’t know how much help I can be.�
�

  ‘Me neither. But we’ll see.’ She stood up. ‘In the meantime, is there anyone else in the area it’s worth me talking to?’

  At that, Paul looked past her towards the door of the pub.

  Up until then, he’d come across as so unguarded that she hadn’t doubted a single thing he’d said. But there was something different about his manner now. He didn’t look like someone scanning his memory for a name, so much as someone who already had one in mind and was deciding whether or not to say it.

  ‘No,’ he said eventually. ‘Nobody.’

  21

  When I drove back to Gritten Wood later, I didn’t go straight to my mother’s house.

  As I turned off the dual carriageway, I could see the wall of the Shadows in the distance: a black and solid presence at the base of the sky. Soon it would be night, and I felt nervous about sleeping in my old room after everything that had happened today. With everything I’d learned churning in my head. With the house ticking and creaking around me, and the trees at the end of the garden full of darkness and ghosts.

  Of course, there were ghosts everywhere here.

  I parked up outside a different property and stared out of the car window. The garden was enormously overgrown, with brambles arching over the lawn like rolls of barbed wire. The undergrowth closest to the house rose high enough to reach the dirty black glass of the ground-floor windows. The place was little more than a shell. I had the sense that the woods behind had spread their fingers down the back garden and were slowly clenching their fist, reclaiming the building for the wilds.

  James’s old house.

  I had a dim memory of my mother telling me Carl and Eileen had moved away years ago. Perhaps they had tried to sell this place beforehand, but who was going to buy a home in Gritten Wood? The village was slowly dying, the houses, like lights, going off one by one, the old bulbs never replaced. The building beside me now had clearly been abandoned for years, and the heart had gone out of it long before.

  Billy is dead, I thought.

  The words signified something clearly, but still didn’t seem to map on to the world in a way that I could grasp. It seemed like it should be important to me – that I should be feeling something. Perhaps I should be glad. Pleased that, after what he did, the bastard had finally got what he deserved. That would be the natural reaction to have, wouldn’t it? But every time I searched inside myself for a reaction to the news, I couldn’t find it.

  The truth was that, in every way that mattered, Billy had been dead to me for twenty-five years. He was just an old photograph I had long since stopped looking at. Back then, I would have been happy to kill him myself for what he’d done, but the time since had tempered that. Looking back, I could see that Billy had always been easily manipulated. He’d had a difficult childhood, and I could only imagine his adult life had been hard too. The only emotion his death raised in me now was an odd kind of sadness. A sense of how many lives had been ruined by what happened here, and what a waste it had all been.

  And now another boy had been killed.

  Charlie’s dead.

  That was what I’d said to Amanda, but the words had come out of instinct. It was what I’d told myself over the years, because I had to. I looked past the house now, towards the woods. The most likely explanation for Charlie’s disappearance remained that he was out there in the Shadows somewhere – that after what he and Billy did, he’d woken up and wandered off, and that his bones were mouldering away somewhere deep between the trees, pulled apart by tangles of grass and lost in the undergrowth.

  And yet my skin was crawling.

  As the evening darkened around me, I thought about knocks in the night, and figures in the woods, and what my mother had said about seeing Charlie flickering in the trees.

  About someone online pretending to be him.

  Do you think it’s possible they were telling the truth?

  Right then, I wished I felt anything like as sure as I’d tried to sound in the pub, but the reality was that I could still feel him everywhere. As I started the engine again and drove away, I was frightened by the thought of it. If Charlie was still alive then what was happening here?

  Billy is dead.

  The words came again as I drove. And despite what Amanda had said about it being unrelated and suspects having already been identified, the dread rose up inside me. Because red handprints were once again being pressed on to the world, and I couldn’t escape the feeling that something awful was going to happen again. And most of all, there were my mother’s words.

  You shouldn’t be here.

  When I parked up outside the house, I took a few seconds to calm myself. I was almost scared to go inside, and that wouldn’t do. Coming back here to Gritten had scrambled me; that was all. And while there were difficult moments still to come, the important thing was this would all be over before too much longer. When my business here was done, I could go back to my life and forget about it all again. In the meantime, it was understandable that I was seeing spirits in the shadows. It didn’t mean they were really there.

  The past is the past.

  And it couldn’t hurt me now.

  The house was dark and gloomy as I unlocked the front door and turned the handle. The door jammed on something for a second, then opened more slowly than it should. There was something stuck beneath the bottom of the wood. I opened the door wide enough to squeeze my body inside, then closed it behind me. Whatever had been trapped beneath the door came loose.

  I flicked the light switch beside me.

  And then froze.

  What is that?

  Except I already knew. I forced myself to crouch down by the mat, and fought back the revulsion that came as I touched the thing that had been posted through my mother’s letter box. The fabric was dusty and old. It had come away in places, revealing gummy patches of glue beneath. And when I turned the doll around and looked into its pitch-black face, the red string fingers tickled against the back of my hand.

  What was it?

  The answer that came brought a shiver as I imagined the vast, dark expanse of the woods behind me right then.

  Incubation.

  22

  Before

  The morning after the nightmare with Red Hands, I remember feeling scared as I walked through the village to James’s house. I knew that the dream I’d had – the experience of being outside the room in the basement of the school, and what happened there with Red Hands – had only been a dream: one that might have felt lucid at the time, but which couldn’t have been really. I hadn’t been able to breathe simply because it had been a nightmare, and I had never been in control of what was happening at all. But no matter how hard I tried to rationalize it to myself, the awful residue of it had stayed with me. The knowledge that Charlie had somehow got so far into my head was frightening.

  James looked tired and apprehensive. As we walked to the bus stop together, it was obvious that whatever he’d dreamed the night before was on his mind as well. Neither of us mentioned it until the bus left the dual carriageway.

  ‘So … how did it go?’ James said.

  ‘How did what go?’

  ‘Last night. The experiment. What did you dream?’

  I forced myself to shrug, as though it was nothing. At the same time, I had dutifully written a basic account of the dream in my diary that morning, and if I was going to end up reading it out at lunchtime there didn’t seem much point in lying now about what had happened.

  ‘I did dream about the room,’ I admitted.

  ‘I did too. What happened in yours?’

  ‘Nothing happened.’

  ‘But you just said it was about the room?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  I would have been happy to leave it at that, but he was waiting for me to carry on, unwilling to let it go. He looked scared by whatever his own dream had been about. So I sighed, and told him a little bit about being outside the room and seeing him floating behind the glass. But I played down how sca
ry the whole thing had been, and I certainly didn’t mention what had happened at the end.

  ‘And nobody else was there,’ I said. ‘Honestly, I’m not even sure it was you. It was just a stupid dream.’

  James looked away, out of the window.

  ‘What about you?’ I said.

  ‘I don’t want to talk about it.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because it was horrible.’ He shook his head. ‘I’m worried about what we’ve done, Paul. I think we might have done something really bad.’

  Something ridiculous, more like it.

  And yet I didn’t say that. There was something in his tone of voice that bothered me. The day before, I hadn’t believed for one second that Charlie would dare repeat his door-knocking trick and try to do anything to Goodbold. This morning, though, I no longer felt quite so sure.

  ‘Everything will be fine,’ I said. ‘We’ll get to school, and it will just be the usual. Goodbold will be there, trust me. And he’ll be the same bastard he always is.’

  James didn’t reply.

  The bus juddered and rattled.

  ‘You’ll see,’ I said.

  But Goodbold was not in school that morning.

  After we trudged to the changing rooms to get ready for football, a different sports teacher, Mr Dewhurst, arrived to take us down to the field. Under normal circumstances, that would have been a good sign. Dewhurst ran a far tighter ship than Goodbold, and there would be less violence on the pitch as a result. But it might have been the first day since starting at Gritten that I’d have been glad to see Goodbold instead, and as we set out into the streets and I saw Charlie smiling to himself, the unease I’d felt since waking up that morning intensified.

  Something had happened.

  I’m worried about what we’ve done, Paul.

  By lunchtime, the nerves were humming inside me. James and I walked down to room C5b, our footfall echoing in the empty stairwell, and it was clear that whatever had been weighing on James first thing that morning had become heavier over the last few hours. As he pushed open the door, I felt an urge to reassure him again. To tell him not to worry. That everything was going to be all right.