Shadow of the Past

by Thacher Cleveland

  After several days he’d brought another boy down to the basement. Like Darren had been, he was unconscious when the Shadow Man dropped him off in the little cell. When he woke he screamed and yelled and nothing Darren or Suzie could do would quiet him down. Eric, the boy Darren had seen beaten after he first woke up, was too weak to do much of anything. After hours of screaming the Shadow Man came back downstairs and made the new boy, Oscar, “witness” for the first time. It gave him something else to scream about.

  It took Darren a moment to realize that the Shadow Man had another boy with him, unconscious and being held up by one limp arm. Darren scooted out of his way as the man ducked down and pushed his new captive into the cell with the other children.

  Darren could see the Shadow Man more clearly now. His face was narrow and his eyes were wide with dark circles under them. He scanned the crowded cell as if he was taking it in for the first time. His nose wrinkled at the smell of bodies confined in close quarters mixed with the lingering smell of the bucket he’d left for them to “do their business” in. He took away the plate he’d been piling food for them on and the canteen that he filled with water, placing them just outside of the cell’s door.

  The new arrival was lying next to Eric, who hadn’t moved at all since the Shadow Man had arrived. He’d been listless when Oscar first arrived but had barely moved or woken up since his last session in front of the furnace and his breathing had settled in a slow, uneven wheeze.

  The Shadow Man reached in, his arm going right by Darren, and shook the unconscious boy’s foot. At the far end of the cell next to Eric’s outstretched arms Suzie and Oscar pressed themselves up against the wall.

  “Wake him,” he said to them

  Oscar reached down and shook Eric’s arm, but Suzie didn’t move, just muttered “Wake up, wake up,” so softly Darren could barely hear it. Eric did nothing but twitch at the boys’ touch.

  “Useless.”

  The Shadow Man leaned into the cell and grabbed Eric by the foot, dragging his limp body out. Darren watched as Eric’s head lolled slightly to the side, the rough concrete opening one of the many cuts on his cheek and starting a bright red trail towards the door. Eric still didn’t move, but the new boy stirred as Eric brushed past him.

  “Leave him alone!” Darren yelled, grabbing one of Eric’s limp arms before they cleared the cell’s doorway and tugging as hard as he could. Eric finally stirred, moaning in pain as the jagged chain-abrasions on his wrists began to crack and bleed. Darren could feel his fingers begin to lose their grip.

  The Shadow Man reached into the cell, shoving Darren and pinning him down on the floor. Darren flailed and tried to get up, but he was lifted and then slammed down onto the concrete.

  “No!” The Shadow Man snarled. “He can’t see any more, and if he can’t see then he’s useless. Then he’s fuel.”

  Darren tried to sit up and say something, but his head flopped back onto the ground with a painful thud as the rusted metal ceiling swam above him.

  The door slammed shut and the bar clanged back into place, echoing in Darren’s shaken brain. He rolled over on his side, pulling himself up to his perch by the window so he could see what he’d failed to stop.

  Instead of hanging Eric from the chain, he’d been left on the floor in front of the furnace. The Shadow Man picked up the cane from its resting place and pulled a long, thin sword blade from it. He placed the cane sheath on the floor and then picked up one of Eric’s legs, holding it up off the ground by the boy’s heel.

  The blade wavered for a second before it came down in a great big sweep, right where Eric’s leg met his body. “No, no, no, no,” Darren muttered over and over, but he could barely hear himself over the screams of the other children in the cell as they realized what the wet, tearing sounds were.

  Eric never woke up. It was the only thing Darren had been thankful for in a long time.

  When it was finished, he picked up the various pieces that had been Eric and threw them into the open furnace mouth. When each piece hit the flames the furnace roared. Darren watched the entire gruesome spectacle, until all that was left of Eric was stains on the concrete and the roar of flames.

  The Shadow Man dropped to his knees in front of the roaring furnace, lowering his head to the ground and resuming whatever strange prayers he made to his god of iron and fire.

  Throughout the entire ordeal Darren didn’t budge. The buzz in his head was gone, replaced with the roar of the flames whispering in his ear as the fire raged in front of him.

  “I’ve missed this,” Christine said, stretching and repositioning herself on Mark’s lap.

  “Me too,” he said, absently stroking her hair. After two weeks of home incarceration and lunches hampered by a third wheel being alone together was heavenly.

  “What’s up?” she asked.

  “Nothing,” he said, faking a smile. “I’m just thinking.”

  “Anything good?”

  Go ahead, tell her: Well, my nightmares have progressed from beatings to dismemberments and I’ve been trapped in my house unable to look into what I think might be the answer. Same old, same old.

  “Just stuff.”

  “Mark,” she said, sitting up, “is there something going on? I thought you’d be a little bit more excited to be here.”

  “I am, really. I’ve just been stuck at my place without much to do but think about all this stuff that’s happened. It hasn’t exactly been thrilling.”

  “Well, if you need to talk about this--”

  “Why?” he blurted out. “Why is the answer always talking about it? Why can’t we just let it lie and maybe it’ll just go away?”

  “Because life doesn’t work like that,” she said, sitting up. “You can’t just ignore the problem and hope it’ll go away.”

  “I’m not ignoring, I’m just . . .”

  “Just what?”

  “It’s nothing.”

  “Mark, just tell me. Please.”

  “I . . . I can’t, okay. You just have to trust me, but I’m trying to take care of things.”

  “What things? Will you stop with the cryptic shit and just say something?”

  “I’m just . . . I’m just trying to figure out who could’ve killed them. I’ve been wracking my brain, trying to figure it out, but I can’t.”

  “Mark,” she smiled, no doubt relaxed and comforted by the realization that this was just him being a gigantic fucking spaz. “You can’t do this to yourself. This whole thing is probably just some kind of coincidence, and there’s nothing that you can do that the police can’t do. They even said on the news that they had some leads that they were investigating.”

  “I know, but it’s just not right. They deserved better, and I wish I could do something about it.”

  “There’s nothing you can do, Mark.” She leaned in and kissed him, and after a few seconds she pulled away. “You really don’t know anything about it, right? What’s going on, I mean.”

  You better lie, kiddo. Make her believe it.

  “No, there’s nothing to know. I’m just kind of freaked out.”

  “I can only imagine,” she said, leaning back into him. “Are you still having those dreams that Ms. Kennedy asked about?”

  He paused again, and figured he’d better try to sprinkle some truth in to make his lies come out a little easier. “Bad dreams, but I think it’s just stress and being freaked out.”

  “Well,” she said, kissing him. “That’s what we’re here for. Getting rid of stress.”

  “Lookit ‘em go,” Eric whistled.

  “Shut up,” Jack snarled.

  “Hey, I’m not the one who thought it’d be fun to play peeping tom, okay?” Eric shifted uncomfortably in the driver’s seat. “Y’know, I can understand you being pissed at this little cocksucker, but this is just kinda . . .” he trailed off when he felt Jack’s gaze on him. He cleared his throat and tried again.

  “I’m just trying to say that, as much I want to kick this loser’s a
ss, why do we have to follow him around? I mean, can’t we just wait for a day when all of us have some free time, follow him and just jump the shit out of him then?”

  Jack just kept staring at him.

  “Right. Stupid of me to ask,” he murmured. Jack turned back to watching the couple, and Eric started tapping the steering wheel impatiently.

  A few more minutes passed, and finally Eric tried again. “Look, I told Becky I’d help her with her math homework, and if we get that done fast enough she might even blow me before her parents get home, so really, unless you think they’re gonna fuck right here in the park I gotta pull rank as the driver and say we’re leaving, okay?”

  Jack just kept staring at him. “Man, will you quit that crazy eyes shit? I mean, that little fucker almost broke my nose, okay? Trust me, I will be holding him down when you go ape-shit on him, but right now, for me, it’s dick sucking time. We’re leaving.”

  Not waiting for an answer, Eric started the car.

  “I knew it,” Jack said, his voice flat.

  “What?”

  “That you’re a fucking queer.”

  “What?” Eric said, finally looking over at him. Jack’s face had lost the blank stare that had become more and more common place over the past few weeks, and there was a glimmer of the Jack that he actually wanted to be around.

  “It’s dick sucking time?” Jack said. “I knew you were a fucking queer.”

  Eric broke out into a grin of his own, more from relief than anything else. “You are so goddamn juvenile, you know that?”

  “Just drive the car, pussy,” Jack said.

  “I have to get going,” she said.

  “Really?” Mark said, not letting go.

  “I know the timing is lousy, but I’m totally swamped with work and crap.” She kissed his cheek and disengaged with practiced ease.

  He got to his feet with her. “I just was hoping we’d be able to get some more time together.”

  “I did too. It’s just that I’m still on something resembling probation, and I want to be on my best behavior so my parents forget about all this negative shit that been going on.”

  “Your folks still freaked out about the thing, huh?” Mark asked, picking his backpack with a resigned sigh.

  “Oh yeah. But don’t worry I’ve been working my charms on them. You’re not the first guy I’ve had to work to get them to like.”

  “Really? Don’t I feel special.”

  Oh, don’t be surprised. This chick is a pro. Just be happy you have her while you do, until she gets bored of your handholding and moves on to a guy that actually knows what he’s doing.

  “Don’t worry,” she said, linking her arm in his as they walked towards the edge of the park. “Once my parents are done with their overprotective freakout, I’m sure they’ll be more than happy that we’re together. They really seemed to like you at first.”

  “You think?”

  “Oh yeah,” she said. “If it wasn’t for all this stuff I’m sure my mother would have had you over for Sunday dinner by now. She loves it. I think it gives her a chance to show off the nice china or something.”

  “Oh. Well, I’ll keep my fingers crossed.”

  “Hey,” she said, tugging on his jacket. “It’s gonna work out. I’ll see what I can do, okay?”

  “Okay,” he said, faking a smile.

  After dropping Christine off with a kiss and a promise to call him that night, he drove back towards Briarcliff Avenue. He didn’t go up the seemingly harmless street, but from where he stopped the scooter he could see the top of the house peeking up to remind him that it was still there waiting for him.

  When he wasn’t trying to catch up on homework or trying to sleep he’d spent his two trying to figure what he was going to do next. It was only a matter of time before the Shadow Man came for him. Or Steve. Or Christine.

  All that he could put together was that if what he’d been dreaming about had actually happened, there’d be a record of it. If he could find out how it all ended then maybe he’d be able to point Detective Prescott at someone that had a connection to it, or at least give him a place to start looking.

  Mark turned the V back on and drove away. The computer that Clara had handed down to him could theoretically have helped him but Joe was too cheap to actually get any kind of Internet service. Any web surfing Mark did was at Steve’s house, and he wasn’t about to look this stuff up there, which meant his only choice was to go to the library.

  He parked and locked the V in front of the vaguely Communist Bloc looking building and headed inside. He picked a computer relatively out of the way so there wouldn’t be much of a chance of someone walking by and seeing what he was looking up.

  “Okay internet,” he muttered. “You’re supposed to have all the answers. Let’s see what we can find out.”

  A half hour later Mark realized he’d have had better luck talking into the mouse and telling it what he was looking for. Every search item he could think of brought up thousands of pages about current crimes and kidnappings, or ridiculous nonsense like the Jersey Devil. Not that a goat-legged jumping demon was any less plausible than what was happening in his life.

  He resigned himself to the fact that not only was he a shitty Internet detective but that this was not going to be the magic bullet that cracked the case. He closed the browser and stared at the bland institutional wallpaper they had put on the desktop. It was depressing, but it looked like if he was going to have any success he’d have to try real books.

  He brought up the library’s computerized card catalog and tried to remember how the damn thing worked. After a few false starts, he managed to figure out that there was a local history section down in the basement.

  He wandered the stacks for a while until he found the right section, a single narrow bookcase conveniently located next to Ancient Indo-China studies and the restrooms. Three great tastes that tasted great together, apparently. He leafed through some books that seemed promising but were about bootleggers and the Revolutionary War until he spotted one, jammed sideways behind a couple of others.

  He pulled it out, and the gold leaf on the plain brown cover stated “Bizarre Crimes of Northern New Jersey.” If anything was going to have it, it was going to be this. He flipped back to the index, scanning for “Cedar Ridge” and “Briarcliff.” He didn’t realize that he was holding his breath until he let out a deep exhale upon seeing “Cedar Ridge Slayings, pgs 78-99.”

  There you go, junior detective. This is the book for us. You still think 21 pages are going to be all the ammo you need?

  “It better be,” he muttered. He looked up and realized that it was almost 5. While Joe’s speedy return home wasn’t guaranteed, Mark figured it was best to at least appear as if he wasn’t trying to get into any more trouble.

  He snapped the book shut and went upstairs to check it out. All he had to do was read the book, solve the case and put the whole thing behind him. Simple, easy.

  “Bizarre Crimes” dedicated a whole chapter to what had taken place on that street in the summer of 1951, and the title of the chapter gave the Shadow Man a name: “Justin Corwin and the Cedar Ridge Slayings.”

  Justin Corwin had returned home from the Second World War and lived with his parents, working various odd jobs around town. He had apparently been through quite a bit of trauma during the war and that, coupled with an injury to his knee that had cut short his military service had made it difficult for him to hold down a steady job and move out of his parent’s house. After a couple years, Justin rarely left the house.

  The first picture of him in the book showed a tall, lanky blond boy (probably only a couple of years older than Mark) in an army uniform, smiling and waving like he was heading off to camp and not war. The next was after his return, leaning against porch steps of that house, staring at the camera as if he were trying to will the photographer to hurry up and be done with it. Corwin was slumped over, hair disheveled and sporting what at the time must have been an una
cceptable level of stubble.

  The book detailed the disappearances of the various children from Cedar Ridge and its surrounding towns, and Mark could easily recognize them from the tiny photos they reprinted. There’d been no leads in the three weeks since the first child, Eric Campbell, was taken, and it wasn’t until a group of the neighborhood children came forward and said that one of the kidnapped children had been in Corwin’s yard the day of his disappearance. One of the detectives on the case had been at the house, trying to ask the Corwins about it when he heard a disturbance from an old coal chute leading down to the basement. Once down there, he made the gruesome discovery that Justin Corwin had not only kidnapped the missing children but murdered his parents as well.

  “Justin Corwin,” the book had said, “must have experienced a psychotic break after his experiences in the War, and after killing his own parents, he began to stalk and kidnap children from the surrounding neighborhoods. His parents’ remains, as well as those of four of the children that he killed, were found dismembered and burned in the basement furnace of his home. Corwin’s mental break was so deep and complete that it led him to believe that there was a presence in the furnace that was directing him to kill. The extent of his breakdown was never fully explored, as Corwin took his own life in a prison cell two weeks after his capture.”

  In the final picture, Corwin was being led out of the police station downtown by a pair of officers. There was a crowd around them, frozen in their rage, being held back unenthusiastically by several other policemen. Corwin’s slump was gone as he pulled away from the crowd. He face was bruised and cut, and his confusion was as clear as the rage on the crowd’s faces.