The camera moves quickly, your view becoming a rapid smear of faces as if he was attempting to show you everything he could in the failing light.
“There! Do you see him? It’s your father! Bob! Bob! What are you doing out there? Come inside! Bob, it’s dangerous out there! Stay away from those things!”
The camera flies across warped faces, and one of them might be your father’s, but you can’t really be sure. You wish your uncle would just stop talking. You wish he would just focus a little more and point his camera where it needs to be pointed. You think no wonder he’s dead. You think that’s what happens to people who talk too much.
“Bob, what are you doing? Bob, please come inside! Come to the door! I’ll be right there!”
The trip down from the rooftop is heedless of the camera’s safety. You’re banged against walls, pulled into his shirt, jostled sickeningly with rapid steps. Again you see glimpses of his feet: that toe continuing to bleed, the dark stain spreading through the cloth. His voice is tired now, raw, struggling against silence.
“When you lose someone you love, someone you’re devoted to, a child, a wife, everything looks wrong. The colors, the weather, the everyday actions of everyday people.Even food tastes differently. You can’t put your finger on what’s different—it just happens. Everything starts going wrong, bad luck begets bad. It all seems like some terrible... conspiracy.
“I have never been able to throw away any of her clothes. I have thought about it many times, convinced that I must do some cleaning, some winnowing to rid myself of all this debris, but still, I have kept all of her things. Her toiletries still fill the bathroom and most of the bedroom we shared. Usually I sleep out on the couch. In the living room there is very little to remind me of her. We all drag around with us this enormous shadow. But now I have her shadow as well. I can’t seem to get rid of it.
“One of them out there slashed my tires, went right into my driveway and cut them. Can you imagine?”
His voice sounds increasingly frayed. Sometimes he stops in the middle of a sentence, his throat worn down to silence.
He is at the front door now. More than before, you have the sensation of being a spirit hiding inside his camera, watching. His nervous hand shakes you up and down, bringing the door in and out of focus, as if it were breathing. “I can’t do it,” he says, beginning to cry. “I can’t open the door with those things outside!”
You become aware of the scratching, the scraping. You think it has been going on for a very long time now, but it had become a background to his voice, an odd musical backdrop softly played. A faint pattern of beats, a subtle, insistent drumming. Now, inside his silence, and within the locked-in quiet of the house, you can hear it so clearly.
“You should understand that I didn’t ask your father to help me secure this house, or to spend so much time here away from you. He just came, and he stayed with me for hours, listening to my theories and concerns—it was completely his own idea. When he came over we drank together. We sang together until we lost our voices.”
When he remounts the camera onto its stand you have the strangest impression. As if he has been carrying your head around the house, and has now reattached it to your body, which has been sitting by itself in his living room during the tour. Now, your head safely back in place, he seems calmer. He seems to be trying to talk to you more sanely. But sanity seems incongruous now, what with that loud scratching, that distant tearing, that irregular beating from the other side of the door.
“Your father is a brave man, a rational man. He’ll stay away from them. He’ll find a way to get back inside.” Uncle Mark leans forward and whispers, “Just so you know, I don’t lie to myself. I know that no matter how well I hide myself here, shadow will still find me.”
That, you think, is the wisest thing he has said so far. Shadow always finds you. People think they can protect themselves. They can build enough, they can arm themselves enough, they can pay enough. They are fools.
Your uncle has left the camera running, simply filming this beautiful, ornate door your father created for him. It seems foolish now that your father would go to all that trouble to make this for your crazy uncle. But you are fascinated by this huge, distorted face, and how much it resembles your uncle, how its features mirror the characteristic features you have seen in other members of your family. How it also resembles your father. How it resembles Tommy. How it resembles you. This is your family; this is how your father saw the future of your family. This is how your father saw the future of himself. This is what he was trying to tell them. This is what he was trying to tell his children. But now it’s down to only you to hear. What would happen. How none of you were protected. How the insanity had gotten into the wood, into the grain.
When you first notice the splintering of that grand door behind your uncle, you think it’s just some deterioration, some bubbling, some flaw in the film.
“Our obsession with the past and our fear of the future murder the now. Today arrives each morning as a steaming corpse in the chill air. We are so afraid of shadow, and yet we invite him into our homes without realizing it!” Your uncle is shouting now, because it’s the only way he can be heard over the thunder at the door.
Then those dark floating faces in the door and that one huge, monstrous head come forward and out; as the door comes apart the room is filled by a multitude of shadows, dismantling, dismantling, with a cry that is one voice, yet many.
And the last face in view, before the film runs out, is so familiar. You think it’s your father, but can you be sure? And that screaming? Who is that screaming? Then you know it is your uncle dying.
You sit there in your living room, which used to be your uncle’s living room, watching as the images burn away to gray. The dusty old player stops. Static explodes into the room and you pound at the Power button until it dies. Then you sit there and stare at the empty screen, your curiosity sated.
What stares back at you is a gray-toned image of your own face, a shadow which is also a portrait, the old TV screen turned into a mirror by the lights behind you and to each side. Out of curiosity you get up and move the floor lamps to the left and right, then check your image, then adjust the lamps again, until you achieve the clearest mirror image possible. You crouch in front of the screen examining yourself. You haven’t owned a mirror in years.
Even within the gray cast of the image you can see your fevered look, the darkness under your flesh, darkest beneath the eyes like a woman laid out at her funeral, the embalmer’s makeup unable to hide the basic tones of death. You remember that these were among the symptoms your uncle mentioned, the characteristics of this cataclysmic disease, this “isolation of the soul.” But your uncle was crazy. There is an agitation in your fingers as you pull your hair back for a better look at your face. You were a pretty girl at one time, you believe, until your own shadow ate you.
You have just seen, or at least heard, your uncle die. So who could have left this tape for you? You realize now that it must have been your own father who left the tape behind. It had been his shaky ball point pen writing that final message, before he became whatever it was he became. But what did your father expect you to do with this knowledge? If he thought you would be unhappy with the person you have become he was sadly mistaken.
Would your father have been happier if you had been more like Tommy, and taken your own life rather than be this way? You loved Tommy—he was the last person you have ever loved, and yet Tommy was a fool. Survival is the only lesson here, the only knowledge worth having.
But you are hungry now, and all this speculation has annoyed you, and annoyance is an unpredictable thing. It can make you careless and put you at risk, or it can make you a dangerous woman indeed. You stand and retrieve your sharpened pole from its place in the corner. It is not the most sophisticated weapon in the world, but it is quiet, and keeps you at a safe distance from the hand weapons carried by others of your inclination, and you use it well.
You sli
p on your thick leather coat, light enough in weight while still offering some protection. You would like to have a front door like your uncle’s, but you have no idea how you might obtain one. You undo the series of locks on your own plain but sturdy door. Knowing that you are your family’s terrible future, before you step outside you slip one hand beneath your shirt and adjust the straps binding down your breasts. You don’t know if it actually helps when you have to move quickly, but you think it does, and besides, you like the way it feels.
Poe’s “Shadow-A Fable” (published in 1835, revised and re-titled to “Shadow-A Parable” in 1845), for all its impressionistic brevity, has numerous images and themes familiar to lovers of his work: a small group of well-to-dos isolated indoors as a plague rages outside (a la “Masque of the Red Death”), an obsession with mirrors and doubles, the presence of a corpse, a worry over clocks and times, and a setting wrapped in shadow where spirits are physically manifest, where the boundary between life and death is drawn. It also employs a not uncommon device of that age: the story is addressed to a future reader, a “you” of another time.
It was that last element, that mysterious audience member, that inspired me to base my own “Shadow” off Poe’s fable (or parable). I wondered who that person might be, and if they were at all receptive to this message from the past. It was also an opportunity to play with second person. You will find other elements from the original as well: a kind of mirror is employed, there certainly is a plague, time is running out, and shadow appears to have taken over the audience.
<
* * * *
Pat Cadiganhas won the Arthur C. Clarke Award twice for her novelsSynners and Fools. She lives in North London with her husband the Original Chris Fowler, her son Rob Fenner, and her minder, Miss Kitty Calgary, Queen of the Cats.
* * * *
Truth and Bone
By Pat Cadigan
In my family, we all have exceptionally long memories.
Mine starts under my Aunt Donna’s blond Heywood Wakefield dining room table after one of her traditional pre-Christmas Sunday dinners for the familial horde. My cousins had escaped into the living room to watch TV or play computer games while the adults gossiped over coffee and dessert. I wasn’t quite two and a half and neither group was as interesting to me as the space under the table. The way the wooden legs came up made arches that looked to my toddler eyes like the inside of a castle. It was my secret kingdom, which I imagined was under the sea.
That afternoon I was deep in thought as to whether I should take off my green, red, and white striped Christmas socks and put them on my stuffed dog Bluebelle. I was so preoccupied—there were only two and they didn’t go with her electric blue fur—that I had forgotten everything and everyone around me, until something my mother said caught my ear:
“The minute that boy turned sixteen, he left home and nobody begged him to stay.”
All the adults went silent. I knew my mother had been referring to my cousin Loomis. Every time his name came up in conversation, people tended to shut up or at least lower their voices. I didn’t know why. I didn’t even know what he looked like. The picture in my mind was of a teenaged boy seen from behind, shoving open a screen door as he left without looking back.
The silence stretched while I studied this mental image. Then someone asked if there was more coffee and someone else wanted more fruitcake and I almost got brained with people crossing and uncrossing their legs as the conversation resumed.
One of the relatives had seen Loomis recently in some distant city and it had not been a happy meeting. Loomis still resented the family for the way they had treated him just because (he said) of what he was, as if he’d had any choice about it. The relative had tried to argue that nobody blamed him for an accident of birth. What he did about it was another matter, though, and Loomis had made a lot of his own problems.
Easy to say, Loomis had replied, when you didn’t have to walk the walk.
The relative told him he wasn’t the first one in the family and he certainly wouldn’t be the last.
Loomis said that whether he was the first or the thousand-and-first, he was the only one right now.
And just like that it came to me:
Not any more, Loomis.
* * * *
In my family, we all have exceptionally long memories and we all... know... something. Only those of us born into the family, of course—marrying in won’t do it, we’re not contagious.
That’s not easy, marrying in. By necessity, we’re a clannish bunch and it takes a special kind of person to handle that. Our success rate for marriages is much lower than average. Some of us don’t even bother to get married. My parents, for instance. And neither of them was an outsider. My father was from one of the branches that fell off the family tree, as my Aunt Donna put it. There were a few of those, people who had the same traits but who were so far removed that there was no consanguinity to speak of.
It only took one parent to pass the traits on; the other parent never figured it out—not everything, anyway. That might sound unbelievable but plenty of people live secret lives that even those closest to them never suspect.
* * * *
In my family, we all know something, usually around twelve or thirteen. We call it ‘coming into our own.’
Only a few of us knew ahead of time what it would be. I was glad I did. I could think about how I was going to tell my mother and how we’d break it to everyone else. And what I would do if I had to leave home because no one was begging me to stay.
In the words of an older, wiser head who also may have known something: Forewarned is forearmed.
* * * *
My Mother knows machines: engines, mechanical devices, computer hardware—if it doesn’t work, she knows why. My grandfather had the same trait; he ran a repair service and my mother worked in the family business from the time she was twelve. Later she paid her way through college as a freelance car mechanic. She still runs the business from a workshop in our basement. My Aunt Donna keeps the books and even in a time when people tend to buy new things rather than get the old ones fixed, they do pretty well.
Donna told me once that my mother said all repair work bored her rigid. That gave me pause. How could she possibly be bored when her trait was so useful? But when I thought about it a little more, I understood: there’s just not a whole lot of variety to broken things.
* * * *
My Father knows where anyone has been during the previous twenty-four hours. This is kind of weird, specific, and esoteric, not as handy-dandy as my mother’s trait but still useful. If you were a detective you’d know whether a suspect’s alibi was real—well, as long as you questioned them within twenty-four hours of the crime. You’d know if your kids were skipping school or sneaking out at night, or if your spouse was cheating on you.
My father said those were things you might be better offnot knowing. I wasn’t sure I agreed with him but it was all moot anyway. My parents split up shortly after Tim was born, when I was six and Benny was three, for reasons that had more to do with where they wanted to be in the future than where either of them had been the day before.
In any case, my father wasn’t a detective.
He was a chef on a cruise ship.
This was as specific and esoteric as his trait so I suppose it fit his personality. But I couldn’t help thinking that it was also kind of a waste. I mean, on a cruise ship, everyone knows where everyone else has been during the previous twenty-four hours: i.e., on the boat. Right?
* * * *
My Aunt Donna knows when you’re lying.
Most people in the family assume that’s why she never married. It might be true but there are other people in the family with the same trait and it never stopped them. Donna was the oldest of the seven children in my mother’s family and I think she just fell into the assistant mother role so deeply that she never got around to having a family of her own. She was the family matriarch when I was growing up and I
guess being a human lie detector is kind of appropriate for someone in that position.
The thing was, unless someone’s life was literally in danger, she refused to use her trait for anyone else, family or not.
“Because knowing that someone is lying is not the same as knowing the truth,” she explained to Benny on one of several occasions when he tried to talk her into detecting my lies. I was ten at the time and I’d been teasing him with outrageous stories about getting email from movie stars. “Things get tricky if you interfere. When you interfere with the world, the world interferes with you. Besides,” she added, giving me a sly, sideways glance, “sometimes the truth is vastly overrated.”
* * * *
A few weeks after that I was out with her and my mother on the annual back-to-school safari—hours of intense shopping in deepest, darkest shopping-mall hell—and she suddenly asked me if I felt like my body was changing. We were having food-court fish and chips and the question surprised me so much I almost passed a hunk of breaded cod through my nose.
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