The Shadow People

by Joe Clifford

  “How long has he been gone this time, Mrs. Balfour?”

  “Please, Brandon, Lori.”

  “Sorry.” She’d been insisting for years that I call her by her first name, doubling down efforts after I moved out, but I didn’t think I’d ever be able to call Mrs. Balfour anything else. Like calling former professors by their first names, it didn’t seem right.

  “I’m not sure,” she said, sounding embarrassed. “Three days?”

  That was unusual. Jacob never stayed away longer than a night here and there.

  “I’ve been taking extra shifts at the hospital. I’m pretty sure I saw him Monday morning.” Her exhale oozed shame for not having a more definite timeframe. “Jacob was doing better,” she said. “I wasn’t worrying as much.”

  “Did he stop taking his meds again?” The question was obvious but needed to be asked.

  “I don’t know. There are so many bottles in his room. I can’t keep track.” She looked at me head on, desperate to have me believe he’d really turned a corner. “He’s working construction. In Albany. In charge of people. I know. Hard to believe, right? I’m so proud of him. Remember when he was supposed to go to the Netherlands with his baseball team? Before…his troubles…in high school? How confident he was? The old Jacob. He’s like that again. He’s been saving money, going to his groups.” She paused. “He’s lost weight. He…” Mrs. Balfour trailed off, interest fixed on the window as she stared into the rainy night, no doubt imagining where her son might be.

  I didn’t ask about calling the cops because I knew the suggestion would only add to her anxiety. Jacob wasn’t a violent person, but you see enough stories on the news about how police handle the mentally ill. Standoffs, beatdowns, wrongful deaths. It would scare any mom. Jacob could be, at times, obdurate. Who knew his current state of mind?

  “When did you find out he was missing?”

  “His boss called this afternoon. Jacob hasn’t been to work all week.”

  “Have you tried any of his friends?” Jacob must’ve had other friends. Guys he talked to from his group therapy sessions. I remembered he started playing on computers more. Gaming. The weirder he got, the more into virtual realities he grew. Chatrooms and websites, forums. Maybe he’d met someone there.

  “Jacob doesn’t have friends.”

  That didn’t make me feel better.

  Even though we were several years removed from high school, I tried to recall the names of people in our graduating class, anyone Jacob might still be in touch with. I couldn’t come up with anything. At one time, he’d been popular. Not quarterback famous—he played baseball, and was pretty good—but by graduation, Jacob didn’t play any sports and had pushed away everyone.

  Since I didn’t have class tomorrow and wasn’t scheduled for a shift, it was decided I’d spend the night, help sort this out in the morning. My old room, Mrs. Balfour said, was how I’d left it.

  As worried as I was about Jacob, I had to admit it felt good to be home.

  The bright yellow sun fragmented the floral print of the sitting chair, illumining dust mites. For a moment I forgot where I was, walls foreign, ceiling alien. The displacement didn’t last long, but such moments can make you feel forever alone, an astronaut floating in space, aimless, like Major Tom or Elton John.

  Taking the stairs, I found an empty house. No Mrs. Balfour. No Chloe, who must’ve already left for school. The clock read a couple minutes before eight. There was no note waiting for me on the kitchen table, which told me Mrs. Balfour hadn’t returned from her shift. I wasn’t a kid expecting smiley faces in his lunchbox, but no way she wasn’t leaving a message.

  My stomach rumbled. I’d missed dinner last night. Come to think of it, I hadn’t eaten anything since breakfast yesterday. After poking around the cupboards and fridge, I helped myself to orange juice and a slice of toast.

  Then I headed up to Jacob’s room.

  The door was closed. I knocked. Pointless, but I did it anyway.

  Not sure what I was expecting to find, but the scene disturbed me nonetheless. Pulled window shades darkened a musty room. Tripping the light, a childhood fantasy greeted me. Posters of Harry Potter and wizards, Hunger Games, elves, fairies, and several species of small woodland creatures. There’s nothing wrong with a healthy imagination. But Jacob was the same age I was. This wasn’t Game of Thrones homage. It was more a state of suspended adolescence; a perpetual thirteen-year-old boy who’d retreated into a world of werewolves and warlocks. Comic books, RPG manuals, cereal bowls slurped clean, deserted, only the spoon remaining. The robust tang of body odor clung to the room, saturating dirty linens and bedding, like sweaty workout clothes abandoned in the trunk of a hot automobile. The rest of the Balfours’ house was kept clean. Lived in but not reckless. This felt like a separate residence, which, given Jacob’s age, made sense, I supposed. Grant autonomy, agency. I could see Mrs. Balfour trying to instill independence, respecting his privacy, perhaps at a doctor’s request. Of course, now that Jacob was missing, his mom must’ve been inside his room, searching for possible clues.

  In between purple posters of Valkyries, mermaids and other talking fish, a Lord of the Rings character guide tracing fictional lineage, Jacob had tacked up scraps of paper—magazine clippings, chicken-scratched notes, unfurled pocket maps like the kind they sell at gas stations but you don’t see much of anymore because of smart phones and GPS. On the maps, which included not just Upstate New York but parts of the Midwest as well, red lines traced routes, reinforced by multiple circles around tiny towns I’d never heard of. Unsettling. Like Russell Crowe’s office in A Beautiful Mind. Only there was nothing beautiful happening here. The space felt frantic, unfocused, dirty, a desktop with too many browsers open, spreading pop-up viruses.

  Something else added to the disquiet. It took a moment to figure out what that was. Books—hundreds of them—stacked under nightstands, piled slipshod on the carpet, teetering, toppling, multiplying across the filthy floor. I was finishing up four years of college, moving on to graduate school. I had nothing against reading. But I read for school. I read for purpose. This was helter-skelter.

  I studied the titles. All different subject matter. Architecture. Chess. Quantum mechanics. Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time. Another one, In Search of Schrödinger’s Cat. Marquis de Sade and 120 Days of Sodom. Robert Anton Wilson, The Illuminatus Trilogy. A thin cheap paperback called The Last Days of Christ the Vampire. No common thread. Jacob wasn’t in school. This wasn’t for an assignment. He was reading these for fun. Like bottling ships, collecting stamps, naming stars.

  Parts added to greater than the whole, and the muddled space belied a stable existence. The Jacob I’d grown up with was more rock-and-roll jock than he was role-playing nerd. Even the band we were going to start was pretty cool. The Hanging Chads. Who gets political at that age? Jacob’s birthday was in May. Gemini. I never went in for that astrology garbage. But I knew enough about the pseudoscience to understand that, of all the signs, Gemini was the one associated with duality, the crazy twins. Jacob was textbook, a parody of the zodiac. All I could think…

  I shouldn’t be here.

  Backing away from the lunatic fringe, I saw them.

  Pamphlets. Decks of them. Robin’s egg blue stitched like church hymnals, the kind you find scattered in pews around Christmastime. I scooped up a few. Illuminations. That was the title on each. A homemade magazine, a zine. Skinny, thirty or so pages. Not stitched. Stapled. The tagline: “The Truth Within The Lie.” Clickbait in physical form. I fanned through a copy. Every story written by…Jacob Balfour.

  I read a few articles, and soon wished I hadn’t. Simply put, Illuminations was tin foil hat, feces-on-the-walls insane. Ranting and rambling just this side of InfoWars. In between construction shifts, Jacob was moonlighting as a conspiracy wingnut.

  The subject matter was alarming enough—who really killed JFK; how the moon landing was staged; flat-earth nonsense—the Holy Tri
nity of cuckoo nesting. The deeper you dug, the more disturbing it got. Weather machines invented by the government, half of whom were alien lizards that had infiltrated the highest level of the EPA—poisoning our fluoride and melting down Japan.

  Most alarming, however, was a section dubbed “The Shadow People.”

  The Shadow People was a sinister race of doppelgängers, plants sent to spy on us from netherworlds and report back. The Shadow People were forever lurking on the peripheral, shape-shifting entities ever-present and eternally vigilant. Few saw them. Only the “enlightened” could process their existence. Then, once you saw them, you couldn’t ignore them; they were everywhere.

  What could you say to that? It was heartbreaking.

  Jacob had taken the time to format this nonsense on a computer, attempting to mirror what you’d see in a regular newspaper. Jacob had to do research, outline, prepare. This was an effort to laud, no? A little ambition? The end product reflected a crazy diamond, the head-scratching rationale you find in any internet comment section, replete with sporadic all caps, misspellings, and a dizzying misuse of semicolons.

  Instead of pride, I felt besieged by sorrow. Because Jacob had seen the project through. He had cared enough to try. For what? Did he plan to sell them? Give them away outside the Price Rite? Starbucks? So strangers could laugh at him? How had Mrs. Balfour missed this?

  I debated whether to bring a copy to his mom, present irrefutable evidence that her son had, in fact, gone off his medication. I decided it wasn’t my place. Truth was, I wanted to forget what I’d seen and get back to my life. Jacob would come home. Of course he would. Where else would he go?

  In the end, I left everything as I’d discovered it, a shrine to madness.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Mrs. Balfour still hadn’t returned from her shift at the hospital. I wrote a note. I said I was there for her and Chloe, and to let me know if there was anything she needed. I wrote that aside from finals, classes were over for the semester; I wasn’t moving up to Syracuse for another few weeks and my schedule at Ledgecrest was flexible, having tapered down with my two-week notice, so call anytime, day or night.

  Rereading the note, I couldn’t escape the cloying tone of it, overarching, needy. I ached to hear this wasn’t my fault. Of course I knew it wasn’t my fault. Intellectually. But knowing that in your head and feeling it in your heart are two separate things. I thought about crumpling up the letter and giving it another stab, but knew I’d only reword what I’d already written. Because I did shoulder guilt. I did harbor regret. And why shouldn’t I bear responsibility? The Balfours had taken me in during my time of need, and how had I repaid that generosity? I’d used Jacob’s escalating mania as an opportunity to skip off to greener pastures. Now Jacob was missing. Worse than that, judging by that stark raving reading material I’d uncovered, he couldn’t tell right from wrong anymore. Maybe they’d find him. Talking gibberish to a half-eaten hot dog in a dirty city alley or chasing shadows in a crumbling brick tenement. He might return home. But the Jacob I knew was gone for good.

  So I left the note the way I’d written it, earnestness on full display, and did my best to leave behind what I’d seen. I locked up the house, stashing remorse and storing regret, and descended the front steps to find the old man waiting.

  I worked at a convalescent home. I dealt with the elderly daily. I could pinpoint ages to within a couple years. It was a source of pride. But this man… Sixty? Seventy? Older? Younger? I couldn’t tell. Grizzled, surly, and disassociated, he projected Clint Eastwood talking to a chair. Skin like tanned leather, indicative of residence in the Deep South, slicked white hair and languid, sloe eyes. Or maybe less Eastwood and more Mike Ehrmantraut from Better Call Saul. An old-school tough guy with indefatigable stamina. A manufactured Hollywood illusion, I knew. That’s what movies do: sell us an unrealistic ideal. Little old men aren’t secret badasses getting into fistfights, even ones like this with his sturdy frame and barreled chest. People that age battle osteoporosis; they don’t bareknuckle brawl. One slip and they’re in danger of breaking a hip. Still, the man at the door wore his hardness like a badge, with a face that looked like it had stories to tell.

  “Lori home?” he said. It was less a question and more an accusation, delivered via raspy growl that testified to a two-pack-a-day habit. I, of course, wasn’t scared. But it was difficult to feel relaxed, the way he presented himself. Almost like a cop. Except there was no way this man was on that side of the law.

  I shook my head.

  “You gonna say hi, boy?” He said it meanly too, adding a snicker. And when I didn’t answer: “What are you doing here?”

  I should’ve been the one asking that. This wasn’t my home, but I had lived here, growing up inside these walls; I’d spent more time at the Balfours’ than I had my own childhood home. Yet, I felt the need to defend my presence.

  “I’m a family friend,” I said.

  “That so?” Again, he delivered the line glibly, smugly, like a truculent teenager and not a cranky septuagenarian.

  My car—a 2016 Camry—sat parked in the driveway. I pointed. “That’s my car.” Which was the only car in the driveway. I had no idea how he’d gotten here.

  He scratched the white stubble on his chin. You could hear the sandpaper scratch. Then the old man pinched his nose, cleared his throat, and spat a ball of phlegm over the railing into the bushes. Vile. “Tell her Francis stopped by.”

  I waited for more. Last name? Where he could be found? That was it. No business card. No phone number. Nothing.

  The old man skulked off, past my car, into the road where no other car waited, angling down clean streets that wound through a sleepy suburban neighborhood coming to life. I kept watching as he weaved between the rows of mid-size homes with coordinated pastel trims and morning papers nestled in plastic below the individualized mailboxes that spoke to unique personalities.

  He never looked back.

  *

  My mother was committed to the Utica Insane Asylum. That was the story anyway. Rumor, myth, family legend. The logistics failed the sniff test. Utica closed its doors in 1973 after a long history of questionable practices—earlier than my mom would’ve been admitted, unless she was locked up as a toddler. I didn’t know much about my mother’s life. She didn’t leave until my fifth birthday. I had memories. Fuzzy. Benign, innocuous. Shopping at the Save-A-Lot, eating grilled cheese at the counter of the old Woolworths diner, watching rain fall from the backseat of a parked car swallowed by a haze of blue smoke, the lingering stench of cigarettes, baking soda, and other burned objects. These were the days when parents still enjoyed that cool Laramie burn in confined spaces around small children. When I thought back to my mother, I saw a ghost, half dressed and disaffected, almost floating, ethereal.

  Did it happen? Commitment? To Utica or elsewhere? I had no way of knowing for sure. Everyone I could ask was gone. But the sound of her voice, its timbre and reflection, remained embedded in my hippocampus. When I recollected these conversations, there was no recipient, no one at the opposite side of a table or on the other end of a telephone line. The subject matter was always the same: my mother blaming all her problems on the Utica Insane Asylum. Electroshock therapy, solitary confinement, images etched by pop cinema and literature, Nurse Ratcheds in the Cuckoo Nest. As if my mother would’ve been a success had it not been for that unfortunate bout of insanity.

  After my mother abandoned us, my father was left in charge. In theory. He seldom spoke to me. He never mentioned her. I was forbidden from saying her name. The one time I brought up the subject was met with such a violent response—not against me—I never mentioned her again. My father, despite all his rage, never laid a hand on me. The windows, mirrors, and walls didn’t fare so well. Sometimes I wished my father would hit me. I longed for any contact, communication, acknowledgment. I lived in the same apartment with that man, my father, for years, and I’m not sure we exchanged more than a dozen words that
entire time.

  There was no doubt my mother was not well. Even as a young boy I sensed her behavior was not normal for a mom, wife, woman, human. What plagued her? In terms of a medical label, I couldn’t say. I recollected my father once saying she was never satisfied. I wasn’t sure if insatiability was a verifiable psychiatric condition or a lyric in a Prince song. Unlike Jacob, who at least had the diagnosis of bipolar, my mom was just…sick.

  The night she left sticks in my mind. My father sitting alone in a dingy apartment, drinking an amber liquid that smelled of mothballs and lighter fluid. I remembered seeing red, blood, like he’d hurt himself. Or was I coloring by numbers? Given her history—the staying away, the various men she met at bars—my mother’s absence shouldn’t have been anything out of the norm. But I knew nothing was ever going to be the same.

  By the time I moved out of Farewell Commons with the Balfours, my father had long been evicted. I didn’t know where he’d gone, and I hadn’t heard from my mother in years. As I got older, I often thought of going to the police. Find out what really happened to them. Then I’d ask why. I had no interest in talking to either. People die in this part of the country all the time and go unclaimed. Take a bus to New York City. Wander out on a cold winter’s night. Freeze to death on a bench, fall in the river, heart seizes up in a skid row hotel, needle dangling from a vein. No ID, no one digs too deep.

  Sometimes, when the mood struck, I’d put their names—Buck and Lisa Cossey—in a search engine. I thought maybe I’d get a hit on a domestic violence charge, read of a drug arrest. But I never found anything. Not one word. Like they never existed.

  I didn’t want to be thinking about any of this that morning. I wanted to hop on the highway, get back to Cortland, ensconced in my tiny apartment to start packing up my little world, divorced from this fractured past.