Shiftling

by Savile, Steven

  There was so much noise.

  Screaming.

  But even in that single moment I knew it wasn’t a creature coming through the door. It wasn’t a monster that survived on dead cats thrown down to it through the grille.

  It was Spider and he was fighting for his life.

  He had no more idea it was Scotty he was attacking than Scotty did that he’d just shot at Spider.

  Spider threw himself on top of Scotty and grabbed him by the throat as Scotty tried to fend him off—but fear made Spider strong and Scotty weak.

  I hit him with the metal bar I had gripped in my hand.

  The blow wasn’t hard enough to do any serious damage, but it made Spider relax the grip he had on Scotty’s throat.

  I dropped the bar as I pulled him off.

  “Stop it!” I screamed, but neither of them seemed to hear me.

  Something else was coming.

  I could hear it.

  We needed to get out of there fast.

  There wasn’t time to reload the air rifle.

  I scrabbled around on the floor. It was too dark to see. I failed about trying to find the metal bar, terrified how I was going to defend myself from the thing, but couldn’t.

  Scotty grabbed the flashlight.

  Its light did little to stave off the dark. It barely lit a small patch of wall close to the ground.

  As it danced around the room while he fought to control it, I caught sight of the bar on the ground and grabbed it.

  I expected him to point the light at Spider and realize who it was, or use it to show Spider who he was, but he did neither of those things. Instead, the light swung around the room wildly, over the disused machinery and the rusted cogs, and I saw something else emerge from the doorway.

  The real monster in our lives.

  I knew I would never be able to forget its face no matter how hard I tried.

  The light didn’t stay on his face long enough, even so it was too long. It slashed around the room, moving back and forth faster and faster until Scotty hit Spider with a sickening blow to the side of the head, breaking the flashlight and plunging the room into total blackness.

  I could sense the presence of the thing that had come through the doorway…

  I could smell its breath…

  I could feel its warmth…

  Hear its heartbeat louder than my own.

  I swung the bar hard and struck something. The impact was hard, the thing beneath the blow firm but yielding. I hit it again, so hard this time that the blow sent a shiver of pain up my arm and jarred my shoulder. I lashed out again and again, thrashing about blindly with the metal bar, each blow hammering home until the thing went down. And still I stood over it, swinging again and again despite the pain until I couldn’t hold on to the bar any longer because it was so slick with blood. It fell from my hand, echoing loudly on the ground as it hit.

  I couldn’t move.

  The thing was dead.

  The monster.

  The real monster in our lives.

  And I’d killed it.

  “Run!” Scotty cried, suddenly.

  I turned, trying to find my way out through the darkness, stumbling as I ran.

  “What about Spider?”

  “Spider? What the fuck’re you talking about, Nancy? Come on, we’ve got to get out of here!”

  Nancy. He called me that sometimes. Nancy Drew.

  Somehow we found our way out. I never thought I’d feel the air on my face again. I never thought it’d taste so good. I fell back on the grass, gasping and looking up at the moon. The music of the funfair drifted across the Batters toward us.

  “What about Spider?” I asked again. I could still see his face when I closed my eyes. I thought it would haunt me for the rest of my life.

  Scotty shook his head. “We did it,” he said. “We killed it.”

  It was a mixture of triumph and relief, but I knew there was nothing to celebrate.

  20

  Present Day

  “The hospital has been on,” said Gazza, standing on the doorstep. “It’s Scotty. He’s gone missing.” We’ve got to find him, was the implication.

  I hadn’t expected to see him again before I left, but there he was knocking on the door as I packed the last of my stuff, ready to throw it into the trunk of the car and drive and drive and never come back to this place.

  I wasn’t sure if I was going to go back to see Rachel before heading home. Maybe she’d be better off without saying good-bye to me, even if I hadn’t been sleeping next to a monster, I was beginning to believe she had.

  I didn’t want her to get drawn into the echo of what had happened back when we were all kids. I didn’t want to lie to her. I didn’t want her to look at me and ask that one question I was beginning to think I’d always known the answer to. But if I was going to avoid it, I would have to leave soon.

  Maybe it’s a male thing—almost but not quite getting involved, like Gazza when he had let Spider go into Old Man Harrison’s house on his own, or like me when I had left Scotty scouring the Batters for the key he had thrown away.

  Gazza’s arrival helped change my mind.

  “Is anyone looking for him?”

  “The police were alerted yesterday, but they haven’t found him yet.”

  “Yesterday?”

  He nodded. “Right after your visit.”

  “Shit.”

  “I’m guessing they will have been to the house, but they wouldn’t know where to look. We need to go to the house. I don’t want to go in on my own,” he said, sensing my apprehension.

  “Okay. I’ll follow in my car.”

  Mind made up. I wouldn’t be coming back this way. I locked up and put the key back under the stone. I threw my bag into the trunk and slammed it.

  A few minutes later I was following Gazza over the hill and driving alongside the Batters.

  I looked for the house. I wanted to be able to focus on those godforsaken walls whenever I took my eyes from the road rather than be tempted to look out over the stretch of land that still hid what we had done.

  Gazza led the way around to the back of the house.

  It seemed to be even more run-down and dilapidated than the front, like it was dying in stages. I had so many memories tied up with this place it was frightening. It was the monster’s house. Everything scary we kids ever imagined lived in there. In the dark places. In the shadows.

  It took him less time to find the spare key than it had taken me to get into my mother’s house.

  We stepped inside only to be greeted by the sight of piles and piles of newspapers—there must have been three or four years’ worth of broadsheets and redtops accumulated around the room—and a worktop covered with opened and unopened cartons of milk, and the all-pervading smell of cat.

  It could have been 1985.

  Catvarna.

  “It took us a long time to get rid of them all,” Gazza said, clearly able to read my mind. “And even when the last of them had been driven out, we couldn’t get rid of the smell, no matter how hard we tried. Scotty had been able to look after himself back then, but this place…” He shook his head, looking for the right words. Finally he settled on, “Changed him.”

  “Changed him.” The thought crept up on me again—the fundamentally simple idea that someone could not be what they seemed. Was this the same Gazza I had seen at his house, or was I here with another one who had lured me to its lair?

  I was really struggling.

  I didn’t know if I would be able to trust anyone again.

  But even if it wasn’t something as literal as a shape-shifting change, there were other kinds of changes.

  “Scotty?” Gazza called. “It’s only me, mate. Just called in to make sure you are okay.”

  There was no response, but, as we reached a hallway, Gazza stopped suddenly and pointed at a single abandoned slipper lying on the floor like something out of those disaster footage scenes on the news. The tragic human cost…reduced to a
slipper amid the rubble.

  “He’s here—or at least has been. He was wearing that in the hospital,” Gazza said, quietly. He looked up the stairs and called again, but there was still no response.

  I wanted to help find Scotty and make sure he was safe, but there was something really bloody creepy about this place. Even now, after all this time. I just wanted to get out of here as fast as I could. If Scotty was here, we needed to find him before I choked to death on cat-smell.

  Gazza was about to go upstairs when we heard a noise—it sounded as though it was coming from behind the door of the cupboard beneath the stairs.

  21

  Present Day

  “Okay, you see, things still aren’t adding up for me, Drew. So why don’t you walk me through it slowly. Why did you go into Scott’s house if you thought he was still in the hospital?”

  The questions had switched from that light almost conversational tone to something approaching interrogation, but now they were back again and he was pretending to be my best mate.

  Sometimes it genuinely felt as though they were trying to help me make sense of it all, but most of the time I knew they were just trying to trap me. It was all about getting me to trip up and say something that would make it easy to charge me.

  The thing is, I wanted to get it all off my chest.

  I wanted to tell them everything that had happened. I wanted them to believe everything I had to say. But the problem was, I knew they wouldn’t. They’d only want to believe certain parts.

  I didn’t want anyone else caught up in the web. If they wanted to lock someone up for the murder, then it had to be me and only me.

  I didn’t want them to know about Gazza, and there was no way I could let them foist all of the blame onto Scotty, even if he was a convenient scapegoat, being dead. There was no one to speak for him.

  “Okay,” I said at last. “What if I tell you everything?”

  “That’s what we’ve been asking for from the start, Drew.”

  “My terms. From the beginning, no more piecemeal questions. No interruptions. I don’t know if it will make any more sense to you than it has to me for all these years, but I’m going to tell you what I thought then. What I believed. In those terms.”

  The detective turned to a fresh page in his notebook, even though the interview was being recorded. It was all psychological. I took a sip from the cup of water on the table, licked my lips and began to tell my story from start to finish.

  I told them how Spider had gone to try and get paid for the work we’d done on Old Man Harrison’s house and had been caught in there by the monster. I didn’t give the monster a name, even though I knew it now. I told them about how we’d been into the tunnels because we had thought there was some kind of creature down there. I told him how we had been confronted by something in the dark and that we had been attacked when we were down there. I told them I had hit the monster with a metal bar I had taken with us. Scotty had shot at it with his brother’s air rifle. And then we’d run away screaming. I confessed my greatest sin, that we’d run and left Spider down there with it.

  There was no change in the expression on the detective’s face, but I waited in case he had anything to say. He didn’t. He nodded. “Carry on.”

  Then I told them about Spider’s fall from the Big Wheel but how I became convinced it hadn’t actually been Spider but some kind of changeling from under the earth, and that he’d never escaped the tunnels under the Batters.

  The facts fit the story I wanted to tell.

  I was happy to confess to trying to kill the creature and admit to my own cowardice in not doing more to save Spider. I was fifteen. I wasn’t a hero. And I knew they wouldn’t believe me, not using the terms I was using. They’d think I was unreliable. Like Scotty. Changed by what had happened that day.

  I know how the creature did it now.

  “It could change shape,” I said. “It could change itself to look like anyone.” I was starting to feel panic rise as I struggled to hang on to the train of logic I’d established. I needed to hold it together in my mind. “I know that now. It could be either one of you. It could even be me. Maybe that’s it. Maybe I am the monster.”

  22

  Present Day

  The door opened out into the hallway.

  I stepped aside for Gazza to open it.

  My thinking was that if Scotty was on the other side of the door, it would be best if he saw a familiar face first rather than run the risk of him being surprised at the sight of mine. There was no telling the way the mind worked.

  He nodded once.

  I stepped back.

  He opened the door.

  There was no one on the other side.

  The noises came from below. From inside the darkness. Gazza reached inside and pulled on a cord to bring a naked bulb to life. There was a flight of stairs leading down. I knew where it went.

  “This is it,” Gazza said. “The other way in. He never found the key, but once he bought this place, he had full access down there.” He seemed to know what I was thinking. “He knew there was another way in. I always figured he’d been in here alone with Old Man Harrison more times than he let on.” I looked at my friend then, lit by the harsh bare bulb, and knew what he was implying. I didn’t want to think about that. I just wanted to get him out of there. He was in the lair of the monster.

  Gazza picked up a flashlight that stood on the floor inside the door. He flicked it on, flooding the flight of stairs with light. It was a serious flashlight, not just a little Mag-Lite. “The stairs lead down into a cellar that’s the same sort of size as the front half of the house. There’s an inspection hatch that leads down into the tunnels.”

  I wanted to ask him how he knew.

  But I didn’t want to know the answer.

  He went down. Each footstep louder on the creaking wooden stairs. There was no way we’d sneak up on Scotty, at least.

  I hesitated before following Gazza down. It might have been quarter of a century since I’d been in those tunnels, but that didn’t change a thing. I wanted some kind of weapon. Back then I’d thought the iron bar had been enough to kill that thing but real monsters never died, did they?

  Hiding beneath the coats hanging on the back of the door I found a long-handled axe. I couldn’t imagine Scotty spending the summers out in the yard splitting cords of wood for the heating, but anything was possible.

  “My idea,” Gazza said, reading my thoughts. “I know I probably shouldn’t have, but I thought it might make him feel a little safer.”

  I nodded, testing the balance of the axe in my hands. It felt comfortable. It felt right. I hadn’t handled an axe in easily twenty years, but Gran had had a coal fire and Dad and I used to take turns chopping wood for her until she died on my twenty-first birthday.

  “Scotty,” Gazza called again as we reached the bottom.

  There was no answer.

  The cellar had a low whitewashed ceiling. It stank of damp and mustiness. I had to bow my head slightly to avoid cracking it on overhead pipes.

  Gazza played the light all the way around the room, lighting every inch of the space; I could see a collection of junk and old tea chests that had probably been down there since the dawn of time.

  Scotty was hunkered down in the corner, his arms wrapped around his knees. He was rocking slightly to and fro, mumbling to himself. His dressing gown hung loose, and beneath it his pajamas were grubby from the long walk home.

  He had no idea we were there.

  “Scotty, it’s me,” said Gazza, moving the light away from him. I could see from the way he shied away from it, it was blinding him.

  He didn’t acknowledge us.

  The lights were on, but Scotty wasn’t home.

  Together, Gazza and I moved toward him, slowly. I was just glad we’d managed to find him without having to go through the door and down into the tunnels.

  I looked over at the door.

  I never wanted to go back there.

>   “Come on, mate, let’s get out of here,” Gazza said, and almost too late I realized the door was unlocked, the big metal bolts had been drawn back and the padlock hung loose in the clasp.

  I grabbed hold of Gazza’s arm as he was about to reach out to Scotty.

  I pulled him back just as Scotty leapt toward him from his crouch, his hand snaking out. His fingernails were blackened, like he’d been grubbing around in the coal seams.

  I thought he was just panicked, not realizing he was safe, but then I saw he was wearing both of his slippers.

  It was such a small thing, but it was wrong. One of Scotty’s slippers lay on the floor above us where I thought it had been kicked off, but now realized it had fallen off.

  “Get back!” I yelled, yanking back on Gazza’s arm.

  He stumbled, barely out of its reach as the thing that wasn’t Scotty lashed out at him. Gazza brought the flashlight up in a panic and hit the creature with a full beam to the face.

  There was no mistake this time.

  The thing’s face flickered. I saw Spider in it. I saw Scotty in it. I saw Old Man Harrison’s death mask in it. I saw other faces I didn’t recognize. And then, I saw my own face looking back at me. It wasn’t perfect. It wouldn’t have fooled my mother, but it would have fooled most people. I froze. For just a second. It’s not easy to kill. Don’t ever think that. Not when you know that’s what you are doing. But to face something that looks like you, to stand toe-to-toe with yourself and steel yourself to swing…that’s something else. That’s hard.

  My grip tightened around the axe handle. I brought it up to hold with both hands. I was shaking like an idiot and only part of it was from fear.

  I took a single step forward to close the gap, gritting my teeth. Blood pumped furiously through my head. It pounded. It was all I could hear. “You are not me!” I screamed at it as I swung with everything I had. “You are not my friends! You never were!”

  The blade sliced through the stale air and slammed into the creature, biting deep. It cut into the meat until it hit bone beneath. I tore it free again even as the thing howled with pain.