The Shadow and Night

by Chris Walley

  After a few minutes of news and pleasantries, Isabella sat by the bed and said in a matter-of-fact voice, “You had a nasty time the other day I gather, Elana.”

  “Hmm, yes.”

  “Would you mind—if it doesn’t hurt too much—telling me and Merral about it? Slowly. You went for a walk, didn’t you?”

  Gradually, bit by bit, the story unfolded. Merral, sitting to one side, watched both as they talked and was impressed by Isabella’s gentleness and the slow, steady way she worked at the questions. When, as frequently happened, Elana dried up, Isabella would quietly and softly try another angle. The story that emerged, however, was little more than an elaboration of what Merral had already heard. Elana had been on her own, climbing the path to the north-northwest of Herrandown, when she saw the beetle man in the bushes. He made no noise but just stared at her. When she screamed, he vanished.

  After praising some paintings on a desk nearby, Isabella managed to get Elana to do a drawing. After some minutes, she had produced a result that, while being crude, was enough to give an impression of what she was trying to describe. The overall picture was of a vaguely manlike figure. It had a narrow face with two eyes and mouth on top of a body with a chest that appeared to be made of plates.

  “Like a suit of war armor from the early Dark Times?” Merral asked, but the concept was unknown to her. Further questions revealed a firm and unshakable view that there had only been one pair of hands and legs and that the body casing was brown and shiny, like a beetle’s.

  “Or like wood?” Merral asked, wondering whether the whole thing was a bizarre illusion based on a fallen log.

  “Oh no,” she said in firm voice. “Not like wood. Not really. I suppose the surface, the shell, looked like polished wood—dark wood.” She gestured to the varnished planks on the wall opposite. “But you see, Merral, the bits moved together, like they do on an insect.”

  Merral and Isabella shared a bemused glance.

  After a few more questions that seemed to elicit nothing new, Elana began to be restless. “Please, Merral, Isabella . . . I’d rather not talk any more. It was horrid!”

  Isabella looked at Merral, who reached over and patted Elana gently on her shoulder.

  “Thanks, young lady. You’ll soon be better. The weather is improving no end. We’ll see you before we go.” With a few general comments they slipped out, closed the door, and went back downstairs. Halfway down Merral turned to Isabella, expecting her to say something. She merely shook her head.

  “Go on,” he said.

  Isabella shrugged her shoulders. “What do you think?”

  “Me? I have no idea. If it wasn’t impossible, I would believe her. But it’s your opinion I value. What do you think?”

  “A convincing vision,” Isabella remarked gravely. “It’s no game or joke. She is certain that what she saw is real.”

  “Which is different from saying that what she saw was real.”

  “Quite so. And that is out of my area.”

  “And into mine. But well done anyway. You did better than I could do.”

  “Thanks.”

  They were talking with Zennia a few minutes later when Barrand came in from outside, his gray overalls heavily stained with reddish brown mud. He greeted them all with smiles. If Isabella’s arrival had been news to him, Merral thought that he did not show it. “Sorry, sorry. Business as usual here. Merral, here, give me a hug. I’m expecting your quarry team any day. Isabella, how lovely to see you. Let’s give you a hug too. Excuse the dirt. Thank you both for coming.” He sank into a chair heavily and breathed out loudly. “Ohh, I’m getting old. Not enough exercise this winter. How was your journey?”

  “All right: a washout at about the thirty-five kilometer post.”

  “Ah, there. A wild stream again. But a lot of mud?”

  “Of course.”

  There was a long silence that Merral felt obliged to break. “Uncle, we had a long chat with Elana.”

  There was the faintest hint of a frown on his uncle’s face. “Ah yes. So how did you find my eldest daughter?” To Merral his tone sounded strangely lacking in compassion.

  Merral looked at Isabella, who hesitated a moment before answering. “Well, Barrand Antalfer, I’m no specialist, but I would think she’ll be all right in a few days. She’s had a nasty shock.”

  “I’m glad to hear what you think.” Barrand nodded impassively and then looked at Merral. “You are both staying for lunch, I take it?”

  There was an awkward pause. Merral looked at Isabella and could see her staring at his uncle as if summoning up courage to say something. Eventually, though, it was Merral who found himself breaking the silence.

  “Uncle, Elana said she saw it about this time of day. As the issue of the lighting is critical, can we go and see where it . . . where she had the incident? Could we go and have a look? Now?”

  Barrand pursed his heavy lips. “To see the place. Well, yes. I don’t see why not.” There was a curious hesitation. “Both of you? Anyway, I suppose I’m already in outdoor clothes.”

  He’s either acting or he doesn’t care, Merral decided. And either is bizarre. What is going on here?

  Five minutes later, they were walking up the muddy track to the hill. It was still cold, but the clouds had thinned so that there was enough sunlight to cast faint shadows. Under the trees, however, the shadows remained deep. Some of the spring flowers were out. There was a fine display of little yellow daffodils in places, and along a rockier patch bright pink cyclamens glowed.

  Barrand, still apparently cheerful, led the way. “It began to rain shortly afterward. It’s been a rotten spring. The worst I can remember. The children have been indoors a lot.”

  “Elana said it had been one of the first good days.” Isabella’s voice was unobtrusive.

  “Just so. Now, it was up here.”

  They turned up a slippery path between stringy pines and old, brown, straggling brambles. The way narrowed and they fell into single file.

  “Can I go ahead?” Merral asked. “Stop me when we get there.”

  “Be my guest.”

  They made poor progress, as every so often Merral would stop to look at the ground. There were few clear impressions. Once he felt he could see a child’s footprints, and in another place, boot marks that belonged to Barrand.

  They kept on for another hundred meters. Here the trees had grown higher, and behind the shrubs and bushes flanking the path, a heavy darkness lay under the lower branches. Merral stopped, gestured for silence, and strained his ears as he listened. He soon heard the noise of scrabbling as a rabbit fled, far away a distant buzzard mewed, and somewhere nearby there was the faint hum of a power saw at another farm. Carefully, Merral breathed in, but he could only smell the new flowers, the clean aroma of the pines, and the faint odor of the new young garlic.

  Nothing he heard or smelled was wrong or unfamiliar. Objectively, there was nothing alarming, nothing untoward. And yet, he had an inescapable feeling that something was not right.

  They walked on, gradually climbing up above the hamlet. Despite being chilly, the day seemed oddly oppressive, and Merral felt keenly that he wanted the clouds to open and the sun’s rays to break through. He glanced around, noticing Isabella’s pinched and strained face, while Barrand bore an expression of unnatural unconcern.

  The trees now were hanging over them and Merral looked up at them, feeling disoriented. These woods were somehow unfriendly. The idea puzzled him. It was, he knew, intellectually a nonsense concept. There were no unfriendly woods. They were bright woods and dark, even just possibly gloomy woods, but unfriendly was not an appropriate adjective. But yet, today, in defiance of all he knew, he felt that the word seemed appropriate.

  Suddenly they turned a bend in the path and there was a gap in the trees to the right with a view overlooking Herrandown with all its patchwork of gray-roofed buildings buried to varying extents in the ground.

  “Here,”—Barrand’s voice was flat and wit
hout emotion—“in those trees. She said she saw it there.”

  Merral’s gaze followed his gesture. The bases of the trees were obscured by brambles, young grass, and some scrubby hawthorn bushes. He went up to the spot and looked carefully, feeling even more out of his depth. He could find nothing unusual. What am I looking for? Suddenly the whole expedition seemed stupid. After all, he thought, supposing there was another creature there, what would he say to it? “Oh, hello, do you realize you have frightened a girl?” And what language would he use? Communal, Farholmen, pre-Intervention English or French? He felt vaguely stupid staring at a clump of perfectly ordinary brambles. Genus Rubus, he told himself, as if finding taxonomy a safe retreat from this imponderable puzzle. And don’t ask me the species name; it’s probably another new form. We can travel to the stars, but one hundred and twenty centuries after Linnaeus first gave organisms such names, the humble bramble still mocks any attempt at a usable field classification.

  “Well, any ideas?” There seemed a hint of impatience in his uncle’s voice.

  “None worth stating, Uncle. Let me see if I can get into the woods behind this. You stay here so I know where I am.”

  Merral walked back into the trees with Isabella following silently behind him. He picked up an old branch and used it to clear a way through the fringing scrubs. Once through the marginal growth, the undergrowth thinned out. Merral paused to let his eyes adjust to the gloom, which was broken locally by patches of brightness where the light entered through the fractured pine cover.

  He sensed Isabella come close alongside. He whispered to her, “What do you think? You are very quiet.”

  “You are asking the wrong person. Woods aren’t my thing and I’ve got plenty to think about.” She frowned, her eyes half closed. “But you think there’s something wrong, don’t you?”

  Merral realized that he might have known she would have detected that. “Wrong, yes. But what sort of wrongness and where? I have no hard data. Let’s just listen.”

  So, with pauses to listen, they moved quietly through the trees. Ahead something dark moved among the trees and Merral froze instantly, his hand swinging up to make Isabella pause. A moment later he relaxed and began breathing again as the squirrel saw him and ran up the trunk. Beckoning Isabella on, he made his way slowly round toward the strip of yellow light that marked the boundary of the path. Beyond the trees he could just make out Barrand in his dark gray jacket.

  It must have been about here. There was a feeling of anticlimax. There was nothing to see, no sign of a track or trail. He looked around. The view to the path ahead was obstructed by the combination of the low branches and the brambles. She had imagined it all, she must have.

  He called out, “So, Uncle, can you see me?”

  “Not well. Go further right, though.” Merral moved obediently that way but could see nothing.

  “About here?”

  “Yes, I think so.”

  For a moment, Merral was nonplussed, finding that here there seemed to be only undisturbed branches. Then he remembered Elana had called what she had seen a “little man.” He squatted down.

  Suddenly, through a gap in the bushes, he had a clear view of Barrand’s ruddy face framed by vegetation.

  “How interesting,” he muttered, his voice sounding as if it were from a distance. He turned to Isabella. “You have a look.”

  Merral stood up and stretched his legs, trying to think clearly. He realized now that he had been assuming all along that Elana had imagined the whole thing. But the gap in the branches made that harder to believe.

  He heard a sharp intake of breath from Isabella and then her voice, low and intense, drifted back up to him. “Oh. That adds a different dimension. I hadn’t realized . . .”

  Alerted by her tone, Merral knelt beside the bush again. “What hadn’t you realized?”

  “That you can see everything.”

  As she slid out of his way, he looked beyond her. Barrand had walked away, and beyond the path, glinting in the weak sunlight, stretched the buildings of Herrandown. All of them.

  He bit his lip. “Oh my. Oh my,” he said, almost under his breath.

  The implications sank in one after another, like a succession of stones thrown into still, deep waters. There had been something here. Whatever had been here had been intelligent. It had also, it seemed, had a purpose—that of watching the hamlet. He swallowed, his throat somehow dry. An intelligent purposeful watcher: race or kind unknown.

  “Isabella, say nothing to Barrand,” he hissed, pitching his voice as softly as he could. He didn’t want to alarm his uncle and aunt further.

  He heard Isabella answer, “I won’t,” and recognized a quavering note in her voice.

  Suddenly a minute color difference just in front of his face caught his eye. He focused on it. It was the yellow cut end of a tiny branch, thinner than a rose stem. But what had it been cut with? Merral looked around on the ground and found what he was searching for. Carefully, he picked up the other part of the thin branch and stepped back.

  “What is it?”

  “Whatever . . . whoever was here . . . no, that makes no sense.” He paused in desperation. “Anyway, there is a branch here which was cut in half. Somehow.”

  He held the branch end under a shaft of sunlight and looked at it, noticing a strange, sharp, oblique cut. Aware that his hand was shaking, Merral imaged the cut as best he could on his diary.

  Isabella watched him in silence. He saw that she had moved to stand with her back against a tree trunk as if it gave her protection.

  Merral spoke to her, his voice little more than a whisper. “We’ll talk later. I’m confused.”

  She nodded sharply. “And I . . . I feel strange here.”

  He forced a smile, trying not to put his unease into words. I can understand that strangeness; I’ve been in these woods for years and I have never felt as I do today. I want to get out, and I want to be in the warmth and coziness of urban Ynysmant surrounded by people. Forcing those thoughts away, he carefully cut off the end few centimeters of the stem with his knife, put it in a sample bag, and sealed it.

  If it came here, then there will be a path to and from this place. Having worked with some of the larger mammals like deer, Merral knew a little of tracking. As he looked into the depths of the woods, he felt he could make out a possible trail between bushes running down into a depression.

  He called out to Barrand. “Uncle, we are just going for a walk into the woods. Ten minutes?”

  The deep voice boomed back. “Yes, yes. If you need to. Fine. I’ll wait here.”

  Slowly, Merral walked back into the woods, looking for any clue as to what had passed this way. Within a few paces he began to have doubts that there was a trail. Surely he was fooling himself into believing that these depressions were footprints? Might it not simply be the trail of a lynx, a fox, or even a deer?

  Yet what he felt might be the trail went west in a fairly straight manner and started to drop down toward the Lannar River. A few dozen meters on, just as he was on the point of giving up, the trail suddenly became very obvious. He found crushed grass stalks and what might have been small and rather angular footprints. But of what creature he had not the slightest idea.

  “How much farther, Merral?”

  He looked at Isabella, aware from her face as well as her tone that she was unhappy.

  “Just another minute or two!” he called out and was rewarded by a fixed, determined smile. She’s right though. We should be going back. Anyway, the going was becoming rougher, as the trail was now leading down into a steep-banked tributary that fed into the main river.

  A large fallen larch trunk partly blocked the way and Merral stooped to get under it. The branches had been snapped off in falling so that the underside of the trunk was punctuated by a series of jagged, splintered protrusions.

  “Be careful, Isabella, mind your head.”

  Merral stopped, his attention grabbed by strands of brown hair hanging on a sharp b
roken branch. He peered at it carefully in the poor light, just able to make out that the fibers were long, coarse, and wiry. Isabella came and peered at it. Merral pushed her hand away as she reached out to touch it.

  “No,” he told her, “You’ll contaminate it. I’ll take it for analysis. We’ll get the DNA out and it will tell us what we have.”

  “Of course. Can you do it?”

  “Not here, but I’ll get the main lab in Isterrane to do it. An old friend of mine, Anya Lewitz, will organize it.”

  He imaged the hair on the diary, and then carefully wrapped a sample bag around it. As he did he bent over and put his nose to the mouth of the bag. There was a faint, pungent odor, a smell of something unpleasantly rancid, as if food had been left out in warm weather.

  Isabella gestured. “Let me. . . .” Her nose wrinkled in disgust. “Ugh! That’s horrid! What creature was that from?”

  “I really don’t know. There’s nothing I can think of here that it’s from. And look at the height above the ground. Whatever it was is probably as tall as you or me. Taller, if it was stooping.”

  Isabella shuddered and looked round.

  Merral rubbed his face, as if trying to see the situation more clearly. Not only did this fit nothing in his experience or training, it fit nothing that he had ever heard of.

  “It makes no sense at all. It wasn’t from what Elana saw, but from something else.”

  Could there be two unexplained creatures? That seemed hard to believe. He wondered whether two impossibilities were more or less probable than just one.

  However a more pressing issue was the need to decide what to do next. Merral paused, weighing up all the options. Should he try and pursue the trail? Take a dog or two and follow it? There would be no problem for a dog following a creature with such a smell. But he was not equipped for a trail that could lead to a day’s walk or more, and he had to be back home today in order to be in Isterrane the day after tomorrow. Besides, something like that would raise the status of the whole affair and would inevitably make it a major crisis. And, if it was a false alarm, then harm might be done to his uncle’s family. He made his decision.