The Shadow Man

by Mark Murphy

  Amy, with her gentle soul and her loving heart, telling him she loved him.

  Mimi, never still, a whirlwind of spunk and vivacity, now on the verge of womanhood.

  He needed to see them, needed to hold them in his arms and tell them that he was there, that everything was fine and that they were safe. There was nothing on earth more important than that.

  And then the other thought came, malignant and dark, its tenta­cles worming their way back into the deepest recesses of his brain.

  What if they are already dead?

  He forced the thought back down, choking on it as he did so. It was an idea that was so terrible that it was unimaginable, a medieval horror of claws and fangs that clattered around in his subconscious, its hot breath stinking of blood.

  No, he thought, forcing the thought into submission and closing the door on it. I won't let you do that to me.

  For he knew that the Shadow Man thrived on terror. He subsisted on it, ate it up like manna from hell. And he would not give the egotistical sonofabitch the satisfaction of knowing how close he had come to letting the horror take control of him.

  For that was precisely what the Shadow Man wanted.

  The wooden walkway was slick with rain but Malcolm bounded up its length in a jog, eyes pinned to the thin strip of sand just before the surf line. Clumps of sea oats waved at him in a languid sort of way, greeting him from the dunes like sirens luring sailors to their deaths. Their thin reedy voices whispered to him seductively, saying See? It's okay. Every­thing's fine, things are just dandy, it's the same as it ever was.

  A seagull wheeled overhead, topaz eyes gleaming.

  And then Malcolm saw him.

  The Shadow Man was standing at the base of the walkway, hands jammed in his pockets. He was wearing a Marlins baseball cap and a pair of blue-tinted wraparound reflective sunglasses that made him look like an escapee from Area 51.

  Malcolm felt his heart skip a beat.

  It was him. Malcolm knew the man's build. He'd seen it before, in the emerald-eyed fake cop who came to his doorway that Sunday morning, in the ghostly figure who broke into his home, in the dark silhouette who rammed his car in the airport parking lot on a day that seemed like a thou­sand years ago.

  Joel Birkenstock, the ersatz policeman, and the Shadow Man were all indeed one and the same. No doubt about it. This wasJack, the killer of many, standing right now in front of him at last.

  Ben, you were right, Malcolm thought. You were right all along.

  The Shadow Man spat into the sand, like a cobra checking its venom, and rotated his head slowly toward Malcolm. It was if he sensed him, as though some alien intelligence had alerted him to Malcolm's pres­ence. Grinning toothily, he extended his arms, palms open, as if greeting a long-lost friend.

  For a fleeting moment, Malcolm thought he saw something else— something alien and sinister, something monstrous, a raging demonic flicker beneath the Shadow Man's thin veneer of humanity.

  I see what you are, Malcolm thought.

  "Right on time, brother," the Shadow Man said, tapping his watch. "We meet again."

  "We're not brothers," Malcolm said.

  "Oh, come on now. We're in the brotherhood of surgeons, aren't we? And do we not take others' lives into our hands each and every day? Okay, granted, my mortality rate has gone up a bit in recent years, but come on. Different? Why we're practically twins."

  He cracked his knuckles and put his lips close to Malcolm's ear.

  Malcolm closed his eyes, turned his head away. The Shadow Man moved closer still. His breath was rancid. It smelled like death.

  "Life and death. It's what we do every day. Right, brother?"

  "Where are my wife and my daughter?" Malcolm said.

  "You'll see them soon enough."

  "You promised . . ."

  The Shadow Man leaned in tight. Malcolm could feel the man's whispery breath sliding like a knife blade across against his throat, his voice a sandpaper rasp.

  "I promised I wouldn't kill them. That's all I promised. Don't put words in my mouth, sonny boy. I'll rip 'em back out with my bare hands."

  "Are they safe?" said Malcolm.

  "Well, they're not dead. Not yet, anyway."

  They stood among the sand dunes, wind whistling between them, as the emerging sun burned its way through the haze of the afternoon sky. "So what's the deal?" Malcolm said at last.

  "We've got to go run an errand together. We run that errand and we're square. Do the deed and I won't kill your family."

  "What's the errand?" Malcolm asked. "You'll see. We'll go there together."

  The Shadow Man turned. The sun played across the back of his neck, which was fish-belly white. Malcolm could see the veins gleaming beneath the skin, blue and dull, like fine bone china.

  "Your eyes aren't really green," Malcolm said.

  The Shadow Man stopped. He didn't turn around.

  "How do you know what color my eyes are?" he asked.

  I know it, Malcolm thought. I know it and I can say it but he may feel like he's losing control, which could be bad or good.

  Malcolm had made the correct diagnosis. But this man was a psychopath, as unpredictable as a viper, and if he said the wrong thing . . .

  Screw it.

  "You're not the green-eyed, brown haired man who came to my home. You're a chameleon, a masquerade artist," Malcolm said.

  The Shadow Man had stopped breathing.

  "You're an albino," Malcolm said.

  Slowly, the Shadow Man turned. His blue-tinted glasses reflected the sea. Deliberately, like a snake coiling around its prey, he removed his hat to reveal the shock of white hair beneath, running his fingers through it as he did so. His fingers curled around the rims of his sunglasses and stopped, hesitant. Waiting.

  "When the warriors gazed upon the eyes of the Gorgon, their faces were turned to stone," he said.

  Malcolm stared at him, unblinking.

  "Sure you want to see?"

  Malcolm nodded.

  The Shadow Man removed his sunglasses.

  His eyes were lidless, reptilian. They blazed red in the stray sunbeams that pierced the leaden sky. There were no eyebrows, no eyelashes. His face, though covered in makeup, was as smooth as sculpted marble.

  "You missed a spot on the back of your neck," Malcolm said.

  "Yes, I'm an albino," the Shadow Man said. "You know what that's been like? Let me tell you. Looking at naked sunlight is like jamming a hot poker in my eyes. Did you know that the lack of ocular pigment gives us profound photophobia? That it is excruciating for me to even see the light of day? It's a congenital curse, a curse that relegates me to live most of my life in the darkness. A gift from my parents, a gift I did not deserve."

  "Genetics does not sort out the deserving from the undeserving. It's a crapshoot, a roll of the dice. You know that," Malcolm said.

  "Look, I spent most of my life in an orphanage. When I went away to school, I was always the smartest kid in class. Always. But did I get respect? Oh, no. Insults and ridicule. The big kids beat me up. 'Ghost,' they called me. Then 'Freakshow,' in middle school. They tortured me because of the way I looked even though I was better than any of them. Any of them. Can you fuckin' believe that? That's what I didn't deserve. I was willing to put up with the fickle finger of genetic destiny. But I could not accept being ridiculed. I could not accept the fact that those mindless cretins had no respect for my genius."

  He spat into the sand once again. The beach sucked it dry.

  "You know what the worst part was? When my own parents stopped loving me. They gave up on me, rejecting me when I needed them, and sent me away. Do you know what that's like? Can you even imagine what that's like?"

  Malcolm shook his head.

  "I always knew my mother loved me," he said.

  The Shadow Man smirked, tight-lipped, as if he had bitten into something rotten.

  "I'm sure you did. You were a favorite son, weren't you? Mama loved her little puddykins so muc
h. You were one of those. I can see it. Well, not me. I was never anyone's favorite anything."

  The Shadow Man brushed his hair back from his eyes and squinted into the sunlight, then placed his sunglasses back across his face.

  "So, yes, I have been forced by virtue of an accident of genetic fate to live a different life. I should have been the chairman of surgery someplace by now. That was my dream. But my appearance kept people from taking me seriously. I could feel them staring at me, laughing at me. It did not matter how good I was in the OR, nor did it make any differ­ence how solid my research was. Over time, I began to realize that, despite my intellectual superiority, I was never going to reach my full professional potential. Ever."

  The Shadow Man placed his cap back upon his head.

  "Because I was afflicted with this . . . this condition, I was forced to use makeup with sunscreen to protect myself and to look more normal. Over time, I actually became quite good at it. I realized that I could look very different to people depending upon what things I used. I could change my appearance with a different shade of makeup and an alteration in my hair and eye color and my own friends might not recognize me. What started as a necessity became a game to me. I could become someone else in a matter of a few hours. Remaking my appearance allowed me to become another person. It was incredibly liberating. I adopted different personalities for different looks, like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. At first, it was just all about having a different look, each one as false as any of the disguises each of us wears in this world. We all have our facades; it's just that most of us maintain only one, hiding our truer selves beneath. Over time, I realized that I could take it even further. My albinism was actually a gift, allowing me to understand the vast potential of being someone else— and allowing me to comprehend my true mission in life."

  "And that mission was killing innocent people?"

  The Shadow Man ripped off the sunglasses and glared at Malcolm. His crimson eyes blazed with hatred.

  "Shut up until I'm done talking, asshole. For once, you are not in charge," the killer said.

  The Shadow Man gazed out over the Atlantic for a moment. The wind whistled between them. When he spoke again, his cadence was slower, his voice at a lower pitch, as though the earth's very rotation had slowed everything to a mere crawl.

  "The advent of the digital age meant that I could actually create an entirely new identity for myself. I could transform myself into a new person, an individual with a fabricated past and an unlimited future. The possibilities were limitless. I could do anything I wanted with impunity and then just disappear, moving on to the next life. Joel Birkenstock? That's me. Walter Jernigan? That was me, as well. And Kyle Andrews. And James Sheehan. There have been others—each one another masterpiece, a changeling, an artificial life."

  A smile slowly spread across the Shadow Man's face, like a sunrise.

  "But killing someone? That was a revelation."

  He gazed out again over the turbid ocean, lost in memory.

  "The first time I killed a man, I realized that I could murder and get away with it. It was nothing! So I upped the stakes, giving my creations a greater challenge. I decided that I would kill and frame other people for the murders, and then I would disappear. In essence, I was taking the life of another in order to justify the artificial life I gave myself."

  "Like you took my life from me? And Billy's brother's?" Malcolm asked.

  The albino leered at him.

  "You should be flattered. I only choose targets who have some­thing to lose. And, sometimes, everything to lose. So you're in good company. In any case, you don't deserve the life you've had, Malcolm King."

  "You don't even know me, and yet you've tried to destroy me."

  "I know you far better than you think, Malcolm. And I have destroyed you. You just don't know it yet. It is my gift, my genius. You see, by doing all of this, I transformed my curse into an advantage. I tricked God, throwing his cruel genetic trick back into his face. I am an empty slate, a tabula rasa. I am the Ghost. Or, as your Seminole friend is fond of calling me, the Shadow Man. And I am a true predator, a ravenous wolf among sheep. I have proven myself better than each and every one of you."

  Malcolm's head reeled, drunk with the insanity of it all. He thought back to the beginning of all of this, how the accident on the way back from the airport was really no accident, everything planned and orchestrated by this one man.

  One thought in particular puzzled him.

  "I have a question," Malcolm said.

  "Fire away."

  "The night you broke into my home—and I presume it was you, although I guess that's not been firmly established at this point—my bedroom blew up. Everything glass in it exploded, and you jumped out of the window to escape and just vanished. How did you do that? And what was the cause of the explosion?"

  The Shadow Man chuckled.

  "I did not jump out of the window," he said. "I never left the room."

  "What?"

  "I came into your house and placed wireless webcams throughout the house. The one in the foyer was only the first. When you and that insipid mongrel of yours began chasing me, I ran into your bedroom to leave via the window, but realized the drop was too steep. So I used plan B: a sonic grenade. It sets up a harmonic that resonates at a frequency that shatters any glass object. I used it to blow everything up. Then I hid in your closet until you went downstairs. After that, I simply left via the front door."

  He waggled his hands in front of Malcolm's face.

  "Abracadabra, hocus-pocus. Magic is all about misdirection," he said.

  The Shadow Man looked at his watch.

  "Oops! Time to go," he said.

  "Where are we going?"

  "You'll see soon enough."

  They exited the beach walkway and walked up to a red Jeep CJ-7 that was parked cockeyed at a headless parking meter.

  "No pay until high season," the Shadow Man said, his pale fingers drumming the Jeep's windshield.

  "Where's the big SUV?" Malcolm said.

  "You mean the one I hit you with?"

  "That would be the one."

  "I stole that from some asshole in Miami. Chopped the guy up for show in Fort Lauderdale. I know you heard about it."

  "I did."

  "You likee?"

  "I never saw the pictures. My friend Ben told me about it."

  "Ah, yes. Ben. The late, great detective Adams. Sad about him." The Shadow Man opened the Jeep's door. Its hinges honked like a goose.

  "Anyway, the chop job in Miami was very nicely done, if I do say so myself. And at least your friend Ben proved useful in the grand scheme of things. He served the grand purpose well. You can take some consola­tion in that," the Shadow Man said.

  "What the hell are you talking about?"

  Malcolm's palms were moist.

  The Shadow Man grinned. Another alien flicker, like a mirage.

  "Ben Adams is a pawn in the chess match. Nothing more," the Shadow Man said.

  "Whose pawn?"

  "Everyone is my pawn. I own all of the pieces on the board."

  He put the sunglasses back on.

  Malcolm was glad he could no longer see those lidless eyes staring at him.

  "Anyway, the SUV in question is now the repository of your wife's and your daughter's cell phones. I know that you guys were using the phones to try and track me, so I rigged up a nice little surprise for our bereaved Seminole colleague. When the Chief opens the door, ka-blam! A little touch of Hiroshima on Tybee Island!"

  Malcolm's mouth gaped wide open.

  "How did you know about us tracking you with the cell phones?" he said.

  Grinning, the Shadow Man slammed the door to the truck closed and placed his hands on his hips.

  "Oh, come on! You guys think that you are the only ones smart enough to know about tracking someone with their cell phone?"

  He walked up to Malcolm, looked him straight in the eye, and squeezed his cheeks between his fingers.

&
nbsp; "That day I came to your house dressed as a cop? I didn't just place that first webcam. I captured your phone, asshole, and cloned it. Ever since, I've been able to hear every conversation you have with anyone on your iPhone. And when I say everything, I mean everything."

  Malcolm felt queasy.

  Don'tfallfor it, don't let him get to you, he's doing this to try to get under your skin . . .

  "So that's how you knew about the whole funeral thing?"

  The Shadow Man nodded vigorously.

  "You want to look at who is to blame for your friend Ben being shot? Look in the mirror, my friend. I knew your plans from the get-go. And you can blame yourself when your other confidante, the Chief, blows himself to smithereens. Which should, incidentally, happen any minute now. The timer's about to go off."

  Suddenly, there was a deep wha-WHOOMP! a thudding concus­sion that Malcolm felt inside his chest. Across the island, a boiling cloud of smoke and flame belched into the sky.

  "Ah, perfect! Scratch one pesky Indian," the Shadow Man said.

  He opened the CJ-7's driver's side door again and jerked his thumb toward the passenger's side.

  "Now get in. We've got an errand to run."

  36

  Billy Littlebear's grandfather had once tracked a rogue bull gator deep into the Everglades after it had killed a little girl. He liked to tell the story at night, over a roaring campfire, when everything was so quiet that a man could hear his pulse pounding in his skull. Billy had heard it a dozen times if he'd heard it once.

  "I swam into its den with nothing but a Bowie knife," Grandpa would say. "It was as dark as the Devil's teeth in there. Couldn't see nothin' at all, but I could feel 'im. I felt his presence, like you feel it when there's a ghost in the room with ya."

  At this point, he'd usually spit into the campfire for effect, the flames digesting his spent saliva in a brittle pop!