The Shadow Friend

by Alex North

  When I finished reading, I sat there in silence for a few seconds. I still had no idea what to say, so I found myself reading sentences over and over again, pretending I hadn’t finished, while I tried to gather my thoughts.

  ‘Do you like it?’

  Jenny sounded anxious. Given my reaction so far, I could hardly blame her.

  ‘I think it’s brilliant,’ I said.

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yeah, really.’

  And I did. In terms of quality, it was streets ahead of anything I’d ever managed to write. Despite my unease with the subject matter, I’d found myself there with the boy while I read it – scared for him, but also intrigued by the man he was following. Jenny had added enough subtle detail throughout for the ending to seem inevitable when it arrived, and for understanding to flow backwards from it. The boy lived alone with his mother, and the man calling for him was the ghost of his father, lost to suicide years earlier. The boy needed to talk to him, to understand what had happened and why. It was a metaphor for grief and loss, and for the damage done to those left behind in the wake of tragedy.

  So, yes, I thought the story was brilliant.

  Did I like it, though?

  Not one bit.

  It was far too close to the dream Charlie had shared with us, and the fantasies he’d spun, to be a coincidence. The four of us searching the woods for something we never found. The stories of a ghost among the trees. A man with bright red hands and a face that could not be seen.

  But how was it possible for Jenny to know about any of that? As far as I knew, she had never spoken to Charlie at all, or to Billy or James. And yet this couldn’t possibly have happened by chance.

  So there had to be some explanation for it.

  ‘I think it’s amazing,’ I told her again. ‘Where did you get the idea for it?’

  But as I asked the question, I realized I already knew.

  The next day, I arrived early for work.

  Marie had given me a set of keys, so I opened up and set about my usual tasks. Early doors, there were only a handful of customers to serve, and a single delivery to sort. I worked methodically but blankly, questions whirling in my head. In my own way, I felt as desperate as the boy in Jenny’s story, but there was also a part of me that didn’t want to know. A part of me that was frightened of what I might learn.

  Marie turned up just after ten, at which point the shop was empty aside from me. I stood up, surrounded by piles of books in the sorting area behind the counter. My heart was beating fast. If I didn’t do this immediately, I might not do it at all.

  ‘I need to talk to you about something.’

  Marie stared at me curiously for a second.

  ‘Well,’ she said. ‘Good morning to you, as well.’

  ‘Sorry.’

  And then I just stood there. Marie sighed and put her bag down on the counter, then spoke more softly.

  ‘What’s the matter, Paul?’

  ‘Jenny’s story,’ I said.

  ‘What about it?’

  ‘The one she wrote for the competition. Red Hands.’

  Marie shook her head. ‘I don’t know, I haven’t read that one. Slow down a bit here. Talk me through what’s bothering you.’

  ‘The story is called Red Hands,’ I said. ‘It’s about a boy going into the woods. His father’s there – that’s who the boy is looking for – but his father is dead. He’s a ghost. He killed himself years earlier, and his hands are covered in blood.’

  The description came out in a blurt, but I saw Marie’s expression go from curious to alarmed as I spoke. She might not have read the story itself, but she knew exactly what I was talking about.

  ‘It’s based on something you told her, isn’t it?’ I said.

  ‘Oh dear.’ She closed her eyes and rubbed the skin between them. ‘Yes, I think so. I had no idea she would write about that one, though. You need to be careful when you do that. Not all stories belong to you, after all. People can get upset.’

  ‘I need to know what happened,’ I said. ‘The real story.’

  Marie opened her eyes and stared at me for a few seconds. She looked suddenly tired, and as though she was weighing me up in some way.

  ‘Please,’ I said.

  ‘Your parents, Paul.’

  ‘What about them?’

  ‘Your mum and dad. They’re both still alive?’

  ‘Yeah.’ A flash of my father’s face. ‘Unfortunately.’

  ‘You’ll miss them when they’re gone.’ But then she smiled sadly and corrected herself. ‘Of course, that’s not necessarily true. But all right. What do you want to know?’

  ‘Everything.’

  I already knew some of it, because Jenny had told me what she could remember. Several years ago, a man had come out to Gritten Wood, walked away into the trees and committed suicide there. The rumour was that he had left a child behind. That had been the jumping-off point for Jenny’s story. From there, she’d imagined how that boy might feel years later.

  Marie was silent for a moment.

  ‘The strange thing is, I only told her any of it because of you,’ she said. ‘This was a while ago. She was talking about you – she said there was a boy in her writing class that she liked. A new boy, from Gritten Wood. Don’t look so embarrassed.’

  ‘I’m not.’

  What I actually felt was a trickle of horror inside me. I only told her any of it because of you. The idea that any of this – whatever this was – might somehow be my fault was hard to accept.

  ‘I just said to be careful,’ Marie told me. ‘It was a joke, really. I said that the woods out there were supposed to be haunted because of what happened.’

  ‘I never heard anything about it.’

  ‘Yes, but you grew up there,’ Marie said. ‘When something awful happens in a place, people there have a way of closing up. They decide the best thing to do is not to talk about it and hope it all goes away. Maybe sometimes it even does.’

  ‘Someone really killed themselves in the Shadows?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘I honestly can’t remember his name, Paul. This was a long time ago.’

  ‘How long?’

  But then I realized why she’d asked if my parents were both still alive.

  ‘About sixteen years?’

  ‘Yes. Sometime in the seventies. It was in the local paper, but I can’t recall the details. It was mostly just people talking. Gossip.’

  ‘Why did he kill himself?’

  ‘All kinds of reasons, I imagine.’ Marie looked at me sadly. ‘People’s lives can be very complicated, Paul. From what I understand, the man was in the army for a while and was affected by that.’

  In the army for a while.

  Another resonance. I remembered the description Charlie had given of Red Hands, and how that had become the way the rest of us pictured him too. Living off the land; as much a part of the woods as in them; a battered old fatigue coat, the shoulders worn away like feathers.

  ‘What about the child he left behind?’

  ‘It was a little more complicated than that.’ Marie shook her head. ‘Are you sure you want to hear all this? Because think about it. Maybe there are good reasons why you’ve never heard this before now. Perhaps it’s better for everyone to forget.’

  ‘I need to know,’ I said.

  ‘All right. I don’t know if any of this is true, but it’s what I heard back then. The man was married to someone in Gritten Wood – your village – at the time, and his wife was pregnant. But he was also involved with a second woman as well. Not someone from your village. Another part of Gritten – I don’t know where. And this other woman had ended up pregnant too.’

  ‘So the man had two children?’

  ‘Yes. The second woman – she knew he was married, of course, and she wanted him to leave his wife. But he didn’t do that. He chose his wife instead. But when he confessed to her, she rejected him – threw him out. And because of that, he
went off into the woods and did what he did.’

  Marie spread her hands, looking slightly helpless.

  ‘But I don’t know any of this for a fact, Paul. It’s just rumours I heard at the time. Some of it at second, even third hand. I’m not sure if any of it’s true.’

  I nodded to myself.

  Marie might not have been certain, but I was. I thought about James. How his mother always seemed to resent him. How his biological father had disappeared before he was born. I’d always assumed James’s father had abandoned his family, and that James had been a constant reminder to Eileen of that hurt. But nobody had ever told me that was what had happened.

  And then I thought about Charlie. How similar he and James sometimes looked. The way that when we’d first arrived at the school, Charlie had seemed to seek James out, keen to bend him to his will and bring him under his control. To isolate him from me. The way he always seemed to have some plan in mind, with the rest of us in the dark, trailing a few steps behind him.

  When something awful happens, like Marie just told me, people try to forget about it. Normal people, at least. But I thought about Jenny’s story now – about the little boy desperate to find his father, to talk to him, to be accepted by him – and I wondered if damaged people did something else instead.

  If perhaps they went out searching.

  31

  You have to do something about Charlie.

  On the morning of the final day, I remember waking with a start just after dawn. The sun was streaming in through the thin curtains over the window by my desk, the room already warmed by it. But despite the heat, I was shivering. For the first time in months, I couldn’t remember the precise details of the dream I’d just woken from, only that it had involved Charlie. The dread from it was still there, seeping slowly across my thoughts like black ink spreading through tissue paper.

  I lay still for a moment, calming myself down.

  Trying to think of anything else.

  My parents had both left for work early and the house was silent. Downstairs, I knew there would be the usual list of chores waiting for me to complete. They would occupy me for a few hours this morning. And then, this afternoon, Jenny was coming round.

  It would be nice to have a bit more privacy, wouldn’t it?

  My heart leapt for a different reason at that.

  And yet the dream lingered. After a time, I went and sat down at my desk, drawing the curtains and looking out at the tangle of our back garden and the woods at the far end. The world was sunlit and rich with life: walled and carpeted in a thousand shades of yellow and green, dew still glinting on the grass. But I knew now that, sixteen years ago, a man had walked into those woods and slit his wrists, his life spilling out into the foliage.

  On a different day, I would have taken out my dream diary and written in it. Today, I decided not to. All I really remembered from last night was Charlie, and I didn’t want to put his name in my book.

  You have to do something about him.

  That same thought arriving again, this time with more force and urgency to it. After what I’d learned yesterday, I couldn’t escape the feeling that something bad was going to happen – that Charlie was dangerous in some way. But at the same time, I had no idea what I was supposed to do. Find an adult, I supposed, and talk to them. Tell them what I knew, and some of what I suspected. Start with the dreams, and then try to explain how everything had gradually become so dark. I could tell them about Goodbold’s dog, and about Red Hands, and how I no longer knew if Charlie was deluded and needed help, or if he was planning …

  Something.

  Nobody was going to listen to me.

  But still. I had to try. So I would make a plan, I decided. I would work out exactly what story I needed to tell, and who I was going to tell it to. Marie was probably the best choice. Out of all the adults I could think of, she would be the most open to listening, and she already knew some of the background.

  She could help me work out what to do.

  Making that decision gave me the freedom to put it out of my head for a while. I showered and dressed, made scrambled eggs for breakfast, and then turned to the list of tasks that had been left for me on the kitchen table. There was tidying and cleaning to be done, and my mother had written a shopping list and left me some money. I did the house stuff first, and then finally, late morning, I set out to the shop.

  The day was hot and bright, but I remember there was also an odd feel to the village. The streets were quiet, which wasn’t unusual for this time on a working day, but they seemed even more deserted than usual. On my way to the food store, I didn’t see another soul; it was as though everybody had been removed from the world, and I had been left completely alone. There was a hush to the air and a strange sepia quality to the light. The roads, the houses, the trees – they all looked like they had been soaked in an amber liquid that had yet to fully drain from the air.

  I was almost relieved when I reached the store and found actual people inside. Normality resumed. I collected together the items on my mother’s shopping list and the assistant bagged them carefully at the till. By the time I was outside again, back in that heavy silence, the plastic bag handles were already tight and digging into the creases of my fingers.

  For some reason, I didn’t want to head home straight away. There was still an hour or so before Jenny was due to come round, and I knew the only thing I’d do with that time was pace and worry. Although the atmosphere that day was unusual, it was also beautiful in its own strange way, so I decided to walk for a time, and I took a more circuitous route back to the house than normal, enjoying the warmth and the peace.

  And as I did so, I felt buoyed. I’d been avoiding a lot of the village’s streets and lanes over the past months, careful to avoid Charlie, Billy and James, and now I wondered why. This was my village, after all. My home. This afternoon, Jenny was coming to my house, and what were the other three in the light of that? A few sad boys, lost in a fantasy, while my own world was blossoming, its petals opening, the future ahead of me full of possibility. Right then, I felt more than strong enough to face them down if I had to.

  The walk took me around the edge of the village, and then up past the old playground at its heart. If I was going to see them anywhere, it would be here, and sure enough, as I approached along the dusty lane, I saw there was someone there.

  James.

  He was alone for the moment, sitting on the bottom rung of the ancient climbing frame. When I had been younger, that thing had seemed huge, the ground perilously far away when you were at the top, but in reality it was hardly taller than I was now. Even so, James looked small in comparison to it, sitting hunched over. When I’d seen him in the last weeks of term, he’d seemed diminished and drained, as though the life was slowly being sucked from him, but now he appeared almost skeletal, the shadow of his body all but indistinguishable from the ones cast by the thin metal frame around him.

  My resolve faltered a little. But I made myself continue.

  He looked up as I got nearer, his face hollow, and when he saw me he looked quickly away.

  I walked past, deliberately slowly.

  I wasn’t sure why. Perhaps it was a show of dominance – some attempt to make him realize I didn’t care – but if so, that was stupid. Because I did care. In those few moments, in fact, the events of the past couple of months fell away. My life had moved far enough on from his betrayal that, even if I didn’t entirely forgive him for what he’d done, I at least understood the reasons why, and pitied him slightly because of them.

  After I’d passed, I looked back and noticed again how fragile he seemed.

  How scared.

  And that’s the memory of James I have from that day: a lost little boy who didn’t know how to escape from the situation he’d found himself in. Sitting there waiting, a condemned prisoner anticipating punishment.

  You have to do something about Charlie.

  That thought again. It wasn’t rational, but there
are moments in life like that, I think – moments you understand, on some level, are pivotal. Where everything will change, and you’ll regret it for ever if you don’t do something you know you should.

  Perhaps it was the strangeness of the day that made me believe this was such a moment. That whatever Charlie had been planning was coming to a head, and that if I turned around and walked away now I would never shake off the guilt from it.

  You have to do something about Charlie.

  Before it’s too late.

  And so I walked slowly back to the playground. I stepped over the shin-high wooden fence that separated it from the road, and approached the climbing frame. James’s back was to me. I don’t know if he heard me, but he didn’t seem startled as I put the shopping bags down on the ground. He just turned and looked at me with those sad, haunted eyes.

  ‘Hey,’ I said. ‘There’s something I need to tell you.’

  I remember the sense of relief I had when I got back home afterwards. I packed the shopping away with a swing in my step. Perhaps I was even feeling slightly triumphant.

  You have to do something about Charlie.

  And I had.

  I’d told James everything I’d learned from Marie, which meant that any duty of mine had been fulfilled, and it was now his responsibility to act on what I’d said. I had no idea if the information I’d given him would help or change anything, but right then it didn’t feel like that mattered. The important thing was that it was now in James’s hands to deal with, not mine.

  I’d also managed to do it without giving away any ground. When I’d started talking, I’d seen a flash of something on his face. Hope, perhaps. But my own expression had quickly killed that dead. I’d made sure he understood I wasn’t there to rescue him, or to rebuild bridges. It was just that I had to warn him, and so I did. He’d shaken his head, confused, but I could tell that what I was saying chimed with him in some way, as though I’d given him a piece of a puzzle he knew fitted somewhere, even if he didn’t quite know yet where to place it.

  Be careful.

  Those were the last words I ever said to him, and I said them coldly, making sure the message behind them was clear. We weren’t friends again now, and we wouldn’t be in the future.