The Shadow Beyond

by Daniel Reiner

  The Shadow Saga

  The Shadow Beyond

  Daniel Reiner

  Copyright © Daniel Reiner 2019

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without prior written permission from the publisher.

  This novel is entirely a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any person or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. No affiliation is implied or intended to any organisation or recognisable body mentioned within.

  Published by Vulpine Press in the United Kingdom in 2019

  Cover by Claire Wood

  ISBN: 978-1-912701-53-7

  www.vulpine-press.com

  For Mom and Dad

  Forward

  I am not dead; nor am I fully alive. The intangibles of thought and memory are nearly all I have in common with the man I once was. Half consumed, I sit upon the floor, a biblical leper. I have neither mirror nor light, but I imagine my appearance—formerly somewhat pleasing—must now be repulsive. I would not want any living thing to gaze upon my ravaged visage.

  I am grateful that I still own my senses. Though there is precious little stimulation here, I can still feel the unyielding stone of the floor upon which I sit; hear the dripping water; smell the dankness of my tomb. On sight and taste I cannot comment. The darkness is total; and it has been years since I have eaten or drank.

  The passage of time and my apparent existence outside of it are the most remarkable aspects of my current condition. I cannot sense it as I once did, but I have noticed that the dripping of the water stops for a while—perhaps in winter—then resumes again some time later—in spring, presumably. In this manner I have counted eight years. In all that time, I have known no physical pain or discomfort—not thirst, hunger, heat nor cold. From time to time I have felt the occasional insect or rodent crawl over me, but they have shown no more interest in me than they might a rock or a stick. I once feared spiders and rats. After all that has happened, those reactions seem absurd and irrational now.

  Since entombing myself here, I have spent much of my time dwelling on the sins of my past. In this unique state, my memory has sharpened a thousand-fold. The smallest detail remembered, the largest anguish relived. All sounds, all smells, from even the remotest corners of my youth, are with me still. The opportunity of living in the fantasy world of my past has allowed the years to pass quickly. Several times I have gotten lost, caring just enough to will myself back to the present.

  No more. The procrastination has gone on long enough. I must not allow myself to wallow. The story of how I came to be here must be set to paper before the temptation to enter my memories and not return becomes too great.

  Before I continue, I must ask you please excuse my handwriting. I shall try my best to keep my script uniform and neat, but as I have said, it is very dark here—completely, in fact. The most insignificant bit of light would only serve to worsen my peculiar plight and cause excruciating pain. Too much would mean my utter annihilation. My aforementioned physical deformities are another obstacle to legibility. My right hand and wrist, at least, have not been affected; however, I have no control of the arm from elbow to shoulder. I believe that the flesh is yet intact, but the joints have been fused. My left arm moves freely at both the shoulder and elbow, but the hand and forearm are simply gone. Given these restrictions, my story will take some time to record. Fortunately, I have a large supply of paper and ink. And of time I have plenty, unless enough light would be allowed to penetrate the underground sanctum I now inhabit. At this point, that is all that I fear—that my effort here may be for naught. I do not regret the final action of my human life. But due to my rashness at the last, I cannot guarantee I will be able to stay here. Of all the human failings that led me to this point, that may prove to be the worst.

  Raised as I was, I never suspected the existence of that unnamable evil which I discovered. I was raised to trust. In my idyllic youth, evil was something only heard about on Sundays; or something that happened far away, in barbarous Eastern countries. In retrospect I see how foolish those beliefs were. I was the one who naïvely made the choices. I was the one too ignorant to question the decisions being made for me. My presence here is my atonement. If you are reading this story, I can only beg for your forgiveness.

  It is my supreme hope, however, that this manuscript is never read. If it is, then I have failed in my attempt to rectify my mistake. If these words are ever glimpsed by human eyes, then the horror I currently hold is once again loosed, free to roam across time and space, inflicting its terror.

  If these words are read, please heed them. Let those who have ears hear. Take up my work. Most of the knowledge to which I had access is here with me. Use this manuscript and the other accursed volumes here to undo what I have done.

  But be careful. Knowledge is dangerous! Let this be the first lesson I impart: If you know of Them, you can be sure that They know of you. You can make no mistakes.

  One

  My name is Robert Thomas Adderly. I was born in the spring of 1901 and raised in the town of Mount Haverton, Massachusetts. My mother, Theresa Anne Adderly—née Pershing—was a frail woman, not in the best of health, and was told that the stresses of another pregnancy could kill her. For that reason, I remained an only child. That is all that I was ever told, for my parents never wished to discuss things of that nature with me.

  At the time of my birth, my father, William Wescott Adderly, worked in a bank owned by the Pershings, who were themselves relatively wealthy. But the fact that my mother was a Pershing did not guarantee my father a job. The Pershings were a pragmatic people. They were certainly affluent, but not enough to afford bad business decisions. Father was a very dedicated worker, and good with numbers: an ability I inherited. In time, he proved his worth, working his way up through the ranks to become the assistant manager.

  When I was five years of age, he moved his small family into the only home I can remember. The neighborhood was pleasant, filled with two- and three-story Victorian houses with large yards, and many magnificent trees. The only drawback was that a great portion of the inhabitants was quite old. There were few children in the vicinity to begin with, and most of them—save one—were much older than myself.

  As a result of this dearth of youth in my immediate neighborhood, for the first several years that we lived in the house on Maple Street, my sole childhood companion was Vincent Marsh. Being the same age, we attended the same classes at school. He was very pale and odd, and not much liked by the other children, but we got along well, sharing an interest in outdoor activities. We were always in agreement about what to do, each of us seemingly able to read the other’s mind.

  “Visit the beaver dam?” I might suggest.

  “Yes,” would be the answer.

  “Hike up Tristam Hill?”

  “Of course.”

  Wandering through a wooded area one summer day, we found a tree that was perfect for climbing. The branches grew out from the trunk at intervals we could manage with our small arms. The lowest branch was out of reach from the ground, but it was situated right next to a large boulder that we could scramble onto: from ground to rock to tree. It was great fun, challenging ourselves to go ever higher. And we did, to the point where the thin trunk swayed with our combined weight.

  There never seemed to be a need to speak when engaged like that, the silence only punctuated by an occasional laugh of exhilaration or grunt of exertion. When we did talk, it was I who did most of it. Vincent was quiet by nature, al
most sullen. He viewed the world through some sort of sinister filter. To me, a random rustling of leaves was simply a squirrel or robin; for him, it was a hidden snake—not that he was afraid of such a thing. At times, he would eagerly root around, trying to locate it, and hoping for a big one.

  Once, I remember seeing a jumble of connected clouds that loosely resembled a man, or perhaps a bear standing on its hind legs.

  “No, not even a bear,” he told me firmly. “The teeth are certainly sharp enough, but look at the scaly flesh.”

  Even after a prodigious amount of squinting and goggling, I was just not able to see what he did. It was hard enough for me to imagine a snout on the white puff that was supposed to be the head of the bear, let alone clothe it in fur, or scales. My mind was constrained by science and numbers. His worked differently.

  I think he received his imagination from his mother. She had an artistic side, displayed in her intricate embroideries. Some of her work was on pillows scattered around their home. Flowers, small animals, and even some scenes from around the town, such as the old grist mill at the end of Hallow Road, or the covered bridge that crossed Jenner’s Creek. Despite her legs having been partially crippled by childhood polio, there was not even an ounce of darkness in that woman. She was the ray of sunshine in a household that sorely needed it.

  Vincent’s father, on the other hand, was known for his drunken fits, during which he would severely thrash both his wife and son. My own father had been mystified as to how two so very different people could have even met, let alone married. The theory that made the most sense was that it had been an arranged marriage, he of course coming from the dwindling remains of the infamous Marsh wealth of Innsmouth. Her family was from Boston, and they did what they could to protect her from her husband’s unpredictable moods—mainly in the form of vacations to the big city for her and her son, many of which seemed to be unplanned. Vincent often returned from them with healing bruises, and once with his arm in a cast. From the rumors that drifted around town, supplemented with the evidence of my own eyes, I found it amazing that Vincent survived his childhood. Some suggested that two of his unborn siblings had not.

  The other residential area of Mount Haverton was separated from ours by the Miskatonic River. As it passed through town, the river was only fifty feet wide, but the geology of the area had forced the water to cut a deep channel. My parents preferred that we boys not cross either of the bridges that spanned it unattended, but didn’t prevent us from doing so. Initially, I thought their apprehension was simply due to the swift current, but eventually I learned of another reason: several unsolved disappearances from years gone by, disappearances whispered to be the doings of the Fensters.

  Decades before I was born, the Fensters had emigrated from Germany and moved into an ancient manse across the river, already decrepit at the time of their arrival. According to the little information I was able to glean from my father, the foreigners were universally despised by the rest of the town. They dwelt there for several years until one blackly evil Halloween night, when all of the inhabitants of the house died in a particularly horrible manner. My father did not go into detail about that, merely stating that their savage deaths were atonement for the sins they had visited upon themselves. The house, being in a state of severe disrepair at the time of their death, was soon after declared uninhabitable and torn down before it could fall. Because the house abutted a hillside, however, the entire south wall and some other bits of foundation were left intact to shore up the hill. Though there was practically nothing left of the house itself, and the terrible rumors associated with it were years in the past, the property was still shunned at the time of my youth.

  Due to the reputation of the place, it was a small thrill to go onto those grounds from time to time. One day near the end of summer, while poking into a hole in the ground with sticks, we discovered that it was possible to dig rapidly through the loose debris under the thin layer of compacted soil. Naturally, we started pulling bricks out of the ground, some heavy enough to test the limits of our strength. Before long, we’d made a pit about a yard across and at least as deep. What were our plans? There were none that I knew. I just wanted to explore, curious as to what secrets might be concealed beneath that unholy ground. I wondered if we would come across a body, or at least bones, but said nothing about that. It would be years before I became familiar with the word macabre, but by that age, I had learned that there were some subjects that should not be voiced.

  We never got the chance to find anything, however; my father showed up unexpectedly and put an end to it. He stood and waited for us to fill it back in, chastising us repeatedly, That could easily have collapsed on you. We walked Vincent home first. His mother answered the door, but after only a few words from my father, she was joined by the man of the house. He grabbed Vincent and pulled him inside. The door slammed shut, and the shouting began.

  Father looked down at me, lips thin. We left without a word.

  My punishment was light on that occasion, but I was promised that there would be no further warnings. I must never again set foot there. And I obeyed that command—at least, for a while. It was easy to avoid it at first; the Fenster property was really the only reason we had to cross the river. In the weeks following, when we did venture to the other side, we only looked at the grounds and hillside from a distance.

  Vincent was absent the day after our excavation, but on the one after that, I found him. He was sitting on a large stone at the border of a lot with scattered trees and overgrown with weeds. It was our usual place for watching squirrels, though that year, a rabbit had moved in, and we had been able to spot it now and again. It was tremendously skittish. We were never able to get any closer than twenty feet or so, but we would sometimes expend the energy chasing it anyway. The thing always found a hole to dive into; there was never a chance of success.

  When I first saw Vincent, he seemed to be sitting oddly, tilted to one side. As I got closer, the bruise on the side of his face stood out. Upon reaching the rock where he sat, I could see that he was gripping something brown and fuzzy.

  “What do you have?” I said.

  Without looking up, he relaxed his arms to reveal a rabbit. The rabbit, I assumed.

  “It’s dead,” he said, the words spat out in a higher pitch, tinged with grief, or fear. It sounded as if he was on the verge of tears, but a moment later he repeated, “Dead,” and that tinge of emotion was gone.

  I knelt down and stroked the fur.

  “Still warm,” I said.

  He suddenly tensed up and jerked the rabbit away. But just as quickly, he tilted his head and relaxed again.

  “I’ve been holding it,” he explained. “For a while. I must have warmed it.”

  “I guess we should bury it.”

  “I guess.” He shook his head, looked around, focused on me for the first time. “I can’t get dirty though.”

  “Me neither.”

  We agreed that the best thing to do at that point was to place it back in its burrow; it would at least be under the ground. After locating a rabbit entrance far back in the field, he placed the limp body into the hole. We covered it up with a few heavy rocks. I said a short prayer, and we left.

  A weekend in late August of 1911 stands out singularly in my memory. On that Friday, a particularly horrifying storm lashed our neighborhood, the likes of which, I am sure, occur only once per century. The winds arrived first, just ahead of the darkness, shrieking with an inhuman frenzy. We could see the awful line of clouds coming from the west; they turned the evening sky prematurely black. My father set me to the task of closing the shutters on the lower windows, while he attempted to latch the upper. We finished just as the first large drops fell. He ushered Mother and myself into the cellar, a place I dreaded to go alone. Our only source of illumination was a few small candles, for the cellar was never wired for electric lighting. A grimy window set into the north wall, high above the floor, afforded minimal view of the outside world. At
the height of the storm, the clouds snuffed out any light cast by the setting sun. We sat for almost an hour in the near darkness, listening to the roar of the wind and the crashing of the waves of rain. I remember being frightened more of the dark cellar itself than of the power of nature unleashed. And I remember the lightning providing brief glimpses of the world. Here, now, I long for an opportunity like that again—just a glimpse.

  The dawn revealed shocking devastation. The trees that were young and supple had yielded to the maelstrom, losing only leaves and small branches. The older, nobler timber had no choice but to topple in the face of the onslaught. Our house did indeed withstand the fury, but there were others nearby not as blessed. As I cleaned the branches and leaves from the yard, Vincent came by earlier than usual. He was more agitated than I had ever seen him, stuttering with excitement.

  “A se-se-secret room! Th- there’s a secret room i-in th-the hillside!” he insisted, tugging at my arm. When I didn’t understand what he was getting at, he silently mouthed only one word.

  Fenster.

  Despite the warnings from our parents, this event was too extraordinary to ignore. I dropped my rake. He led the way and I followed, filled with the anticipation of exploring a heretofore-unknown room.

  As we approached the ruins, I could see that the deluge of the evening had eroded the hillside where it met the remaining wall. With the soil swept away, the wall had toppled, revealing a man-made space that would have been accessible from a room on the second floor.

  We stared in wonder for a moment, looked at each other, checked about to see if anyone was near, then looked for a way to climb up. The particular pattern of the rubble afforded us an easy, stair-like route from the ground up to a narrow ledge, which constituted the current top of the south wall of the Fenster estate. The debris was still saturated with water and could have easily shifted under our weight. An adult with an ounce of sense would not have scaled that slippery mass of rock and mud. But we were children, and the sun was shining brightly on a Saturday morning. It was an adventure.