Shadow Over Sea And Sky

by K H Middlemass

  Shadow Over Sea and Sky

  A Novel

  By K.h Middlemass

  For my mother and father, without whom this book would not exist.

  .

  Special thanks to:

  Brooke Johnson, for your beautiful artwork

  Lucy Houlden, for your friendship, support and hard work

  My family, for being there

  Prologue

  He has not slept in a long time.

  Every day is the same. He keeps to his routine religiously. He wakes up, prays, reads, writes letters he will never send, and sleeps. He hasn’t eaten in days and the flesh is beginning to cling to his bones in desperation, but he ignores his hunger. The house, his house, is empty and far too quiet now that he is the only one left. He cannot keep the fires going by himself and he is always cold, the kind of cold that he can feel deep in his bones, but he knows that it is for the best.

  He no longer goes outside. He hasn’t left the house in weeks, perhaps even months; his understanding of time has completely collapsed in his self-enforced isolation. All he knows is that he will die there, and that he will die alone. It saddens him, sometimes, but his sadness doesn’t give him strength. He no longer feels safe, even in the prison that he has made himself. His life is consumed by fear, every single moment of it.

  But every day, without fail, he performs the ritual. He wakes up, prays, reads, writes letters he will never send, and sleeps. His prayers are hollow, but he says them anyway. He clasps his old hands together and lets the empty words fall from his lips, never daring to hope that salvation is within reach, never daring to hope that he might be saved. Once, not so long ago, he was close to his God, as close as any man can be to their God. But now he is cold and afraid in the darkness of His absence. The absence of his God has left only emptiness in His place. Now, all he can think of is the shadow growing up the wall, the shadow creeping along the ground. The shadow follows him everywhere. The shadow waits.

  He fears the thing that no one else can see.

  In the night, he hears the howling of wolves.

  Part 1

  The Shadow

  “To influence a person is to give him one's own soul. He does not think his natural thoughts, or burn with his natural passions. His virtues are not real to him. His sins, if there are such things as sins, are borrowed. He becomes an echo of someone else's music, an actor of a part that has not been written for him.”

  – Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray.

  1

  Hugo Fairbanks was dead. He died in his sleep at the grand age of ninety years old, and left behind a small fortune with no family to claim it; he was the last of his name. His wealth was to be bequeathed to Caldmar Bay, the seaside town in which he had lived his whole life, to be dealt with in whatever manner the mayor’s council chose.

  The house, or rather the manor he had lived in was one of a forgotten age, bearing a name that no longer had any real meaning. That meaning had been lost forever with the passing of Hugo Fairbanks and would soon be forgotten by the generations to come. He had belonged to a family that had given life to Caldmar Bay through the years. From their house on the hill, which overlooked the sea, they allowed money and love to flow like water from a spigot, and the town prospered from their generosity. Hugo was the last Fairbanks to inhabit the house, passed on to him following the death of his own mother and father many, many years ago. He had never married, for reasons no one ever fully understood, and in the winter of his life he shut himself away more and more, turning from the world he inhabited.

  The curtains remained drawn and the door firmly bolted, and the days passed swiftly into weeks and months, while the man himself wasted away into death largely unnoticed. For many, the news of his death was the breeze that cleared away the cobwebs of their minds. They were amazed to realise that they had not thought of the kind, softly spoken gentleman that lived up on the hill for a long, long time. Now he was dead, and they were left only with memories.

  The funeral was held in the chapel that, once a week for almost seventy years, Hugo Fairbanks had frequented. He had always been a godly man; the sort who wore his Sunday best with pride with the family bible clutched in his hand, and was admired by those whose convictions were less ingrained, less pervasive. He had kept his place, the centre of the front left pew, for the near-entirety of his life. Out of respect the seat remained empty for the duration of the service, even though Hugo had stayed away from the church during his last years. The seat, in some small way, would always be his, for despite his separation from the town Hugo Fairbanks remained a loved man, and even though the town had partly forgotten him until his death returned him to their minds, he was mourned.

  Everyone who was anyone was in attendance that day, with the Van Buren family on either side of the vacant, honorary space. The head of this family, one Christopher Van Buren, was mayor of the town, and had been so for quite some time. He was a tall and broad gentleman, slightly soft around the middle and with an open and friendly face, as he was an open and friendly sort of person. He was a good man and an even better mayor, well-liked by almost everyone that met him. His wife, Victoria, was an almost archetypal matriarch figure, aging with grace and dignity and still a beauty despite the shots of grey in her hair, the faint lines of age that formed around her hazel eyes. Some said that Victoria was the true mayor of Caldmar, and there was some truth in those words. She was a notoriously hard-working woman and had a great deal of influence over her husband, who had always been a little awed by her intelligence and forcefulness. They worked well together, with Christopher possessing the charisma and charm needed to channel Victoria’s intelligence, and were viewed by many as more of a unit than a husband and wife. They had children of course, now grown, but only one was in attendance today. Their son, Miles, lived overseas now, a successful advertising executive and doing terribly well for himself.

  Emily Van Buren, the daughter, had worn a simple black dress coupled with the embellishment: a scarlet silk scarf around her neck. She was the only person in the chapel with even a hint of colour about her, the blood-red brightness of the scarf, like a slit throat. People murmured softly amongst themselves about her to pass the time before the service began; they knew that she had been away for a while, studying, and that this was her first real public appearance since she had returned some weeks prior. Some of the older attendants clucked their tongues in disapproval at her appearance, others thought nothing of it, because she was young and the young do strange things. The few teenagers dragged to the chapel by their parents privately saw the scarf as a cool touch of rebelliousness, the kind that they would go on to emulate through their own troubled adolescences. In truth, Emily had worn the scarf for her own, personal reasons. It was not a statement of any kind, but a reminder to herself. In the time she had known Hugo, he had never once failed to comment that red was the colour she had been missing in her life. It was one of the things that she had liked best about him, his honesty and how he never failed to take notice of her, and always in such interesting ways.

  “Red is passion,” he had said, “You’re an artist, yes? Passion must be your life, Emily my dear. Love, anger, all of the vastest emotions of man, these are all red.”

  Wearing the scarf was her final tribute to him, not some selfish desire for attention. She was an adult and had no interest in making a scene, but she couldn’t escape the small-mindedness of some. It had angered her mother so much that she was only barely speaking to her now, to keep up appearances. She had said that red would clash with her hair. Emily had avoided the colour most of her life; she had avoided the damn colour just to keep her mother quiet, but she was at a funeral and didn’t see how it mattered. She was sure her mother wo
uld have plenty to say about it later, when they were away from the eyes of the townspeople. But in this moment, though, she didn’t care. She was staring at the coffin unblinkingly. She knew that he was being incinerated, something he had made very clear in his will, and she wondered what would happen to his ashes once the deed was done. All the other Fairbanks had been laid to rest for eternity in the family tomb, while Hugo would be the first and last Fairbanks to be burned, but there was no one who could claim those ashes. Emily didn’t understand why he had chosen this over the other, after all it was just a different way of being dead, but it did seem strange that he would not wish to be buried together with his family, generations of Fairbanks lined up next to each other in the tomb. What did he look like in there, she wondered, was he wearing his Sunday best? Had he chosen the suit he would wear or had some faceless man at the morgue chosen for him?

  She knew she was overthinking everything because she didn’t entirely know how these things worked, having only been to one other funeral in her life when she was a girl, to mourn a grandfather that she had only met a handful of times and could only barely remember now as an adult. She hadn’t cried then, but she had cried for Hugo. He had been more like a grandfather to her than her real grandfather, and though she’d been away for a while she had often thought of him. She knew it was the way of the young and old to drift apart from each other, but feelings take a long time to die after they’ve taken root in your heart, if they ever really die at all.

  The service was not long, but the Reverend Jonathan Abrahms spoke with eloquence and passion of the deceased, so much so that the mourners felt compelled to congratulate him once the service was done. They were thankful for his kind, respectful words, and he in turn was thankful for the gift that God had granted him. He had always had a way with words, a way that was seemingly best suited for a holy life.

  From the church, the party travelled to the wake being held in the town hall, courtesy of Christopher Van Buren. Long tables groaned under the weight of the funeral meats, the cellophane-covered sandwiches and bottles of wine and beer. A photograph of Hugo had been placed in the centre, almost like a reminder for those attending that no fun was to be had today. People talked in hushed tones, the dull buzz of it echoing around the cavernous hall. For the most part, they were speaking of Hugo, sharing fond memories and laughing cautiously behind their hands. Emily drifted aimlessly, accepting a glass of wine someone pushed into her hand. She gulped it down and immediately grimaced at the taste. It was cheap, too acidic; it had probably been bought at a bulk price. Emily stopped at Hugo’s photo and spent a time just looking at it, taking in the lines on his face, the soft fuzz of his white hair, the gentle blue eyes brightened by his generous smile. A tear slid down her cheek unexpectedly, which she quickly wiped away with the back of her hand. She didn’t want anyone to see her cry, not here. The time for tears had passed.

  The reverend appeared beside her without her even noticing. He was not a tall man, bald as an egg with a face etched with deep-set lines, but he had a way of carrying himself that made him seem bigger than every other person in the room. He placed a huge, gentle hand on Emily’s shoulder, and she smiled thinly in response.

  “I suppose my mother sent you over,” she said quietly, glancing behind her to see Victoria and Christopher in the middle of talking to Sarah Wilson. Sarah had been a maid for the Fairbanks’s for most of her working life, up until Hugo had unceremoniously relieved the manor’s staff and left thirty people hurt, confused and out of work. Emily hadn’t spoken to Sarah much and knew very little about her, but by the way she was holding a handkerchief up to her face and seeing how red-rimmed her eyes were, she doubted she held any bitter feelings.

  “He was so…different, in those last years,” she heard Sarah say, breath hitching in her throat as she held back a flood of fresh tears. “Always locking himself behind closed doors and doing God knows what all day long, none of us knew him anymore.”

  “Life is full of mysteries,” Victoria replied, unable to resist a sliver of melodrama from creeping into her words. “Hugo was a good man, and we should remember him as a good man.”

  “Of course, he was a good man, Mrs Van Buren,” Sarah protested. “Why, when my boy Derek was running a fever, Mr Fairbanks wouldn’t even let me think of coming into work. He didn’t dock my wages, didn’t ask me to make up the time or anything. I can’t even tell you…”

  Her voice cracked on the last word and fresh tears began to slip silently down her cheeks. She held the handkerchief to her eyes, shoulders shaking. Victoria made gentle cooing noises and patted her on the back like she was a child in need of soothing, not a woman in her forties with a family of her own.

  “I just couldn’t believe it when he let us go,” Sarah said hoarsely. “I’d always thought that we were like a family.”

  “Hugo wasn’t well,” Victoria’s voice was dripping with condescension. “People do strange things when they’re ill.”

  Christopher looked uncomfortable, and Emily knew why; he had always struggled with other people’s tears, even his own children’s. He had often spoken of dislike for funerals, the very nature of them too dark and drawn for his own sunny disposition, yet as mayor he had attended more than anyone should in a single lifetime. He leant over and whispered something in his wife’s ear, too quiet for Emily to hear over the sounds of Sarah’s tears. Victoria looked up at her husband with a tight smile, nodded and continued to pat Sarah’s back ineffectually. Christopher slowly eased himself away from the two of them and began to make his way around the little groups of people that had formed over the course of the evening. Victoria, meanwhile, guided Sarah away from where they stood with a firm hand, leading her to a chair where she could sit and compose herself.

  Emily turned back to Abrahms and said, almost apologetically: “I was away when all of this happened.”

  Abrahms nodded understandingly. “I spent some time with Hugo, towards the end,” he said. “He mentioned you a few times. He still spoke of you fondly.”

  Emily bit her lip, embarrassed. She didn’t feel that she deserved to be spoken of fondly, not after she had upped and left without so much as a goodbye to him, or anyone else for that matter. She hadn’t done it out of spite or maliciousness, rather that some childish part of her had assured her that Hugo would always be there, that he would never die, and she had gone along with it to make herself feel better about the choices she was making.

  “Is it true, what Sarah was saying?” Emily asked. “It seems so strange that a person could just change like that.” Especially someone like Hugo, she thought, but kept that to herself.

  Abrahms’ brow creased. “To a degree, my dear, I’m afraid so.”

  “Can you tell me?” Emily asked fervently. “Not even my parents seem to want me to know what really happened.”

  “Perhaps they thought it would upset you,” Abrahms said diplomatically. “They knew that you were close.”

  “Is it really that bad?”

  “I suppose it depends,” Abrahms said. “We all perceive things differently.”

  Emily nodded slowly; there was something in the tone of his voice that didn’t sit well with her, as if he were trying to speak to her in code. She pulled down on her scarf anxiously.

  “Reverend,” she said quietly. “Don’t I deserve to know?”

  Abrahms regarded her for a second carefully. “I can’t tell you much here,” he said, eyes flickering across the crowd of mourners. “I don’t want to give anyone cause for distress.”

  Emily felt a cold wriggling in her stomach at his words. “You make it sound so sinister.”

  “I apologise,” Abrahms said quickly. “I’m merely being cautious. People like to remember loved ones as they were rather than what they became.”

  “I know who Hugo was,” Emily replied, almost indignantly. “And I’m an adult. He was my friend, Reverend. I just want to understand what happened to him.”

  Abrahms glanced about again, stopping to give
a polite wave when he caught the eye of another mourner. “Come to the chapel sometime soon and we can discuss it properly,” he said, looking back at her. “Away from prying eyes, so to speak.”

  “All right,” Emily said. “Thank you.”

  “But I will warn you,” Abrahms interjected. “You may not like what you hear.”

  “I don’t expect to at this point,” Emily responded with a thin, uneasy laugh. “It’s funny really. Normally when anything happens around here it’s all you can do to get people to shut up about it. Suddenly all of the biggest gossips are quiet as mice.”

  “Hugo was a respected man,” Abrahms said, “and everyone has their limits.”

  Emily saw her mother coming towards her from the corner of her eye and muttered darkly under her breath: “You’re right about that.”

  “Emily, darling,” Victoria said in hushed tones, sending an apologetic look towards Abrahms in the process. She placed her hand on the small of Emily’s back, pulling her away from the reverend. If she wasn’t careful she’d be ushered off somewhere else. “Come and mingle.”

  “Mingle?” Emily hissed, mortified. “It’s a wake, mother, not a cocktail party.”

  “I know that darling,” Victoria said, putting on a wounded voice. “But there are people here asking after you. It would be terribly rude to let them down.”

  Beneath the words, there was a warning lurking dangerously. It was a warning that said, in no uncertain terms, do what I say. Emily bit her tongue, choking down something she knew she would only regret later, and gave a terse nod instead.

  “I’ll be right there,” she said, forcing a smile. “I’d like to finish my conversation with the reverend first.”

  Victoria’s smile was fixed in place, but her lips were thin and tight. “Don’t be long,” she said before sharply turning on her heel and walking away. Emily bit down on her lip in frustration, hard enough to draw blood, knowing she was in for an ugly scene later.