The Shadow Arts

by Damien Love

  “Does Harry have pictures of them all?”

  With his grandfather’s guidance, Alex found images of all the stolen paintings: a landscape, a seascape, ruined buildings, figures, faces, the saved and the damned, the sky about to rain, a waffle. Eventually, he had to admit defeat. He turned to his grandfather with a helpless shrug.

  “No.” The old man sighed. “You know, I even managed to take a quick X-ray of the picture Harry saved. Broke into a dentist’s near your mother’s the other night. I was convinced there must be some other image or message hidden beneath . . . but nothing I could see. Although, it wasn’t the ideal equipment.”

  As the old man spoke, Alex flicked through the images again, snapping a picture of each on his phone.

  “Okay.” His grandfather nodded. “Now there’s something I want you to listen to.” He dug from his bag a small gray box—it took Alex a moment to identify it as an old Dictaphone-style tape recorder. “Harry left two messages on the machine I keep at my place in Paris,” the old man said. “He knows I check it. One to tell me he’d got on their trail. Then this. I recorded it over the phone.” He clicked PLAY. “Harry’s last message.”

  There was the drone of a car, then Harry’s voice, breathless and tense:

  “It’s ’Arry. An’ this’d be another good example of one of them times it would be ’andy if you’d agree to carry a bloody phone. I’m still in the forest, but getting out. Uh, road southeast of the Kandel, ’eadin’ for—”

  “What does he mean?” Alex asked. “What’s the candle?”

  “Kan-del, with a K,” his grandfather replied, pausing the tape. “A mountain in Germany. The Black Forest. That’s another worrying fact.”

  “Why?”

  “The Black Forest, Alex. Wonderful place. But it’s also a place where things have happened.” He resumed the tape.

  “Gawd. They’re comin’ after me. Listen: I followed ’em. I saw some of what they’re up to. Weird business. For a change. Looks like there are two more paintings still to go. But, ’old on to your ’at: I got one of the others back. Pinched it off ’em. I ’ave it with me. Remind me to blow me own trumpet later. Now, I know where the other two are. . . .”

  The voice fell silent. Alex opened his mouth to speak when Harry started again, more urgently.

  “Don’t like the look of this. Listen. They said something about Shadow Gate. I was ’iding back in the bushes, so I couldn’t ’ear clearly, but the girl definitely said it, more than once. Does that mean anything? Shadow Gate? And two more things: it’s not—”

  Alex frowned as the voice cut off abruptly. He had an irrational desire to reach into the tape recorder and pull Harry to safety. He strained to hear, but there was nothing except the car, moving faster. His grandfather gently clicked the machine off. The silence felt bleak. Alex exchanged a grim look with the old man.

  “Is that all there is?” he asked, as frustrated as he was anxious.

  “Ah, yes. That’s when they got him.”

  “What’s this Shadow Gate thing?”

  “A legend,” the old man said, after a moment. He sat forward, hands interlaced, tapping his top lip with his knuckles. “Or a rumor of a legend. Very obscure. I haven’t heard that phrase in a long, long time. Even then it was only once or twice. I’d forgotten all about it, dismissed it as a fairy tale. I should know better.

  “It was the story of a, well, a medieval sorcerer, Alex. A man who had lived a very long and very wicked life, and whose capacity for evil was matched only by his brilliance as a scholar of his particular dark arts. He had supposedly discovered many strange and terrible secrets, and the story went that he finally found a way to cheat death itself. Eternal life, see? All that nonsense. Supposedly, he conjured up this thing: the Shadow Gate, which would allow him to evade death’s grip.”

  “So . . . what was it?”

  The old man shrugged. “Some magical gimcrack. A . . . portal he called into being. An opening. Story went that, when death came for him, the magician opened this gate, then slipped through it and hid. Something like that. It all came at a hideously terrible cost, of course. There’s always a price to be paid in these stories, Alex. Always a cost. I’ve been dredging my memory for more details, but I never heard more than the bare outline, and I’ve forgotten most of that. I couldn’t even tell you where it was supposed to have happened. It’s not the kind of history that gets recorded in many books. And most of them were burned long ago.”

  “Where did you hear about it?”

  “Oh, just a story I was told when I was a boy.” Alex’s grandfather sat staring at the old man staring back from the mirror on the door. “One of the stories.”

  “Two more things: it’s not . . .” Alex repeated Harry’s words. “What’s not?”

  Alex’s grandfather shook his head, returning to the present. “Haven’t the foggiest. I think he was trying to tell me we’d got something wrong: we thought one thing, but it’s . . . not what we thought. Problem there is, I hadn’t thought much at all. Ha. Well. You know as much as I do now: the tall man is taking these paintings for some reason; it’s maybe got something to do with an obscure legend about eternal life; and, eh . . . something isn’t something.”

  He grinned, then darkened. “Shut the computer down, Alex. We need to get moving. We don’t have much time left to get Harry back.”

  Something about the way he said it sent another shiver over Alex. But his grandfather had already gathered up his things and left the room. Alex sent the computer to sleep, then sat for a second gazing around the mess of Harry’s ransacked library.

  Amid the books and notes scattered under his feet lay a single page from a French newspaper. A red marker had been used to circle a small article. Alex bent to retrieve it, idly curious. The headline read “Mystérieuse disparition d’un cheminot de l’Eurostar.”

  The French he had learned in school wasn’t up to the job of translating it all, but from what he could gather the story concerned a railway worker who had mysteriously vanished from the London to Paris train the day before the newspaper was published. One curious element stuck out: the missing man’s uniform and equipment had been found discarded on the train, left lying in a heap outside a vandalized toilet.

  Alex wasn’t sure he was reading it correctly. But it set an alarm bell ringing in his mind that another detail only amplified. The page’s December date meant that this disappearance had occurred the same day Alex and his grandfather had arrived in Paris on their last adventure. In fact, Alex was suddenly certain: it had happened on the train they had been on.

  He took the page and followed after his grandfather to find him in the display room, poking absently through a tray of smashed old toys on a unit beside the door out.

  The old man smiled up. “Almost forgot. Main reason I came.” He knelt to the base of the display case and pushed oddly at the wooden skirting. With a rapid clicking, the case swiveled to reveal a safe set into the floor beneath. A numbered keypad lit up as the unit moved aside.

  Alex’s grandfather keyed in a combination, opened the safe, and pulled out a rough cloth sack weighed down by something heavy inside. “Tools for the job.” He waggled his mysterious prize at Alex, stuffed the sack into his Gladstone, then bent to inspect the safe further. Alex leaned over to watch.

  “Nothing else.” The old man clicked his tongue in disappointment as he stood. “I was hoping Harry might have left some note or clue about what he’d found. I headed for Italy, y’see, to the house where the latest painting was stolen, hoping to find something. Harry stayed here in France, then somehow got on their trail. But he must’ve left in a rush.”

  “Is this anything?” Alex brandished the newspaper story. “It was in Harry’s library. I mean, it’s from earlier, when we came over last time, but—”

  The old man glanced over it and hurriedly shook his head. “No,” he said firmly. “No, tha
t’s nothing.” He gently plucked the page from Alex’s grip, dropped it into the safe at his feet, then kicked the door shut and pulled the display case back in place. “Let’s go.”

  At the door, the old man paused, considering the broken lock. “Funny,” he mused. “I thought they’d come in the same window I did. It was open when I got up there.” He frowned, dismissed it. “We’d better get on. Long drive ahead.”

  As they left the office, Alex touched a hand to the box that held Marvastro. Something his grandfather had told him previously was bothering him, an itch he needed to scratch: Once you’ve tried him, he’ll always tell you the same thing.

  Obsolete coins still lay in a metal dish attached to the fortune-telling machine. As the old man disappeared down the stairs, Alex quickly fed one into the slot, then watched the imprisoned automaton lurch through its brief, furious imitation of life, a grinding display of rolling eyes and painful-looking breathing.

  A small white card finally appeared, sliding out onto a tray as Marvastro fell lifeless. It lay blank side up. Alex felt his skin prickling as he turned it over.

  POWER

  “Alex!” The old man’s impatient voice sailed up from below. Alex stuck the card away in his wallet alongside the identical twin Marvastro had given him before, then hurried down the stairs.

  IX.

  STOP

  “I’ve had an idea,” Alex’s grandfather said. They were driving through the city, roughly following the bending bank of the Seine. “Just need to make one quick stop.”

  He turned onto a side street and pulled in.

  “Now, I need to nip round the corner. You wait here. By the way, Alex, have you had any luck trying to, ah, connect with the tablet?”

  “No.” Alex shook his head and looked out the window. The rain had picked up. Blurry people hurried by, heads bowed, umbrellas tilted to the downpour. After his experiences at Harry’s office and David’s house, his worry over not being able to use the power was now doubled by the fear of it . . . using him, without his realizing.

  His grandfather gave a sympathetic smile, as if reading his thoughts. “Look. You can only give it a go, Alex. Maybe you can do it, maybe not. But I think you can. We know the power is still there for you. That force gave life to the golem, and the golem is a thing that seeks a master for direction—the power wants to be used. It wants to be put to work, a . . . channel. And, for the moment, you’re it, whether you like it or not. Some kind of connection has been made, and you have some aptitude for using it—I saw you that night. On the bridge in Prague. You commanded enormous power, Alex, you conducted it. Do it again, and we’ll get Harry back easy as pie. It’s just a case of, you know, figuring it out.”

  “Yeah.” Alex drew a breath and tried to think about it calmly. His grandfather was right. The power was there. He’d just made himself invisible, after all. That was undeniably pretty cool. All he had to do was work out how he’d done it.

  “Easy as pie,” Alex repeated. He sat straighter and stole a glance at the old man, still troubled by the sudden look of exhaustion that had come over his grandfather in Harry’s office.

  The old man was acting as blasé as ever, but Alex knew enough to suspect some of it was just that: an act. His grandfather was worried, and he was really counting on Alex being able to use the power to help him free Harry from whatever prison he was in.

  “Okay.” Alex nodded. “I’ll try. I don’t even know what it is you want me to do with it, though.”

  “Well, I’m not really sure myself. But we can set fire to that bridge when we get to it.” The old man opened his door and climbed out, then reached into the back for his Gladstone. He dumped the big bag on the driver’s seat and rooted through it, pocketing some implements Alex couldn’t identify, before pulling out the cloth sack he’d collected from Harry’s office and swinging it over his shoulder. “Back in a jiffy.”

  Alex watched him disappear around the end of the street, then sighed and pulled out the old toy robot, steeled himself to the task, and concentrated.

  He fleetingly recalled the sensation of golem thoughts scratching his mind, the feeling of sending his word out like a living, burning, flying thing. It was like remembering scenes from a film whose title he’d forgotten. He sagged as he remembered more vivid scenes: faces crumbling in fear before him, strangers on a train, bullies in a park. The idea of connecting with that power again suddenly scared him.

  The piercing blare of an alarm going off close by pulled him out of his thoughts. Two blue-clad French police ran by, heading in the direction his grandfather had gone. Curious, Alex started to get out, then realized they had parked against a lamppost. He couldn’t open the door on his side. With difficulty, he stretched over the bulky Gladstone bag to open the driver’s door, then shoved the bag into the street so he could clamber out behind it.

  The Gladstone sprang open as it hit the pavement. A large iron crowbar slid out, followed by a hacksaw, an enormous collection of keys strung along a twisted hoop of wire, a half-eaten chocolate bar, and a scratched grappling hook trailing a coil of rope. Cursing quietly, Alex bent to begin packing it away. The alarm kept screaming. He paused, crowbar in hand, looking along the street.

  “Hey.”

  Turning, Alex found a young policeman standing over him, staring at the iron bar he held. A grating voice was issuing urgent reports over the man’s radio. One hand was moving toward the holster on his belt.

  “Wait, I can explain,” Alex said, wondering what he would say next. In response, the policeman opened his mouth, closed his eyes, then sunk to his knees, revealing Alex’s grandfather standing close behind wearing a black mask, cane held ready to hit him again. There was no need. The man lay slumped at Alex’s feet. The din of the alarm had been joined by sirens, getting closer.

  “Oh, that’s terrific,” Alex said. “That’s just great. Let’s start assaulting police officers while we’re at it. Why not.”

  “Get in the car, Alex,” the old man said. Whipping off his mask, he started scooping up the remaining contents of his bag. “Honestly. Can’t leave you on your own for two minutes.”

  As they sped away, Alex noticed a curious glittering on the old man’s coat sleeve. Raindrops caught in the wool, he thought, until he realized it was fragments of broken glass.

  “I don’t suppose,” Alex said, “that you just broke in somewhere for some reason?”

  “Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal,” his grandfather said, steering fast around a corner. “Big library back there. They don’t like to talk about it, but they have a magnificent collection of old magical and occult works. I figured, if there was anywhere I might find out more about the Shadow Gate story, it would be in a particular four-hundred-year-old volume I just happen to know is locked in their restricted section. Thing is, you have to apply in advance for access—all sorts of red tape, Alex, forms to fill, and we don’t have the time.”

  Alex closed his eyes and rubbed his forehead. “And?”

  “Not much.” The old man winced in disappointment. “But there was a passing mention of the legend. It supposedly happened around the fifteenth century, at some castle in Germany. Although that hardly narrows it down. Castles galore over there. And, as I said, there’s always a price to pay: It seems that when our sorcerer opened this gate, the sky was torn apart, the earth cracked in protest, a pit opened into the underworld, and the castle fell. Some rigmarole like that.”

  “Underworld?” Alex’s flesh crept. “What does that mean?”

  “Who knows?” His grandfather shrugged. “Doesn’t sound too peachy, though. Anyway, this sorcerer had eleven followers. When he opened the gate and the great apocalypse began, they panicked and turned on him. The account is muddy, but the basics seem clear: they sealed the gate, renounced all his works, and changed their ways.”

  “And you think the tall man wants to open the gate again?”

  �
�Well. Sounds about his style, Alex. Wouldn’t you say?”

  * * *

  • • •

  BEFORE LONG, THEY were out on a highway heading away from the city, eastward into night and rain. Still busy, the road stretched ahead dotted with moving lights. Every minute or so, the old man scrutinized the traffic behind, tension nibbling the corners of his eyes.

  Alex’s grandfather pulled out his chocolate bar, bit off a mouthful, and proffered the rest. Alex shook his head.

  “Take us most of the night to get where we’re going,” the old man mumbled. “You could take the opportunity to try the tablet again. Go gentle, but just see if you can, y’know, feel anything?”

  “Yeah.” Alex turned to his window. “I’ll try. I’m just not sure I’ll be able—”

  “Hang on,” the old man said, sounding grim. He switched lanes and accelerated, keeping his foot down almost a minute. Eventually, they moved back into slower traffic. Thirty seconds later, he suddenly repeated the operation, dodging through vehicles at speed.

  “Just a test,” Alex’s grandfather said, after they had settled into a more sedate stream again. “Thought I spotted something. A big car as we were leaving the city. But we’re okay.” He glanced repeatedly at the rearview. “I think.”

  Alex sat holding the old toy robot. He tried to push away his anxiety about not being able to do what was needed and turned over his vague theory about some of the times when he had experienced the power—moments it had come when he was practically unconscious of it. It was somewhere to start.

  “If I could really learn how to control it,” Alex began, still thinking aloud, “we could use it to protect us. And then, yeah, if we were protected like that, if we could find the tall man we could maybe even talk to him, so—”

  “Talk to him?” His grandfather shot him an incredulous look.

  “Well, yeah. I mean . . .” Alex paused, took a breath, let it go. “You told me the two of you were once friends. You must want that, too. If you could. Don’t you?”