The Shadow Friend

by Alex North

  We stood for a while.

  And I remember feeling uneasy. There was something malevolent about the school – in its stillness, and the way it seemed to be looking back at me. Before then, I’d understood James being nervous about starting here. The school was huge – home, if you could call it that, to over a thousand students – and James had always been a natural target for bullies. He was my best friend, though. I’d always looked after him in the past, I’d told myself, and I always would. And yet there was something ominous about the school before me right then that made me doubt myself.

  The silence stretched out.

  I remember looking at my mother, and recognizing the confusion she was feeling, as though she had tried to do a good thing, a caring thing, but had somehow got it wrong.

  And I remember the look on James’s face. He was staring at the school with absolute dread. For all my mother’s good intentions, this expedition hadn’t helped him at all.

  It was more like we had brought him to see his place of execution.

  The quickest route from the hospice to the village would have taken me along that same road outside the school. I went a different way. I wanted to avoid any contact with the awful things from my past for as long as I could.

  But that became impossible as I drove into Gritten Wood itself. The village I had grown up in appeared untouched by the intervening years. Its spiderweb of quiet, desolate streets was immediately familiar, and the dark wall of the woods still dominated the landscape ahead, looming over the dilapidated two-storey houses sitting in their own separate plots of scratchy land. I had the sensation that the faint sand misting up beneath the car’s tyres was the same dust that had been here when I was a kid. Picked up and put down again in slightly different places, but never really moving.

  The foreboding I’d been experiencing all day intensified. It wasn’t just the sight of this place, but the feel of it. Memories kept threatening to surface – ripples of history beginning to blur the surface of the present – and it was all I could do to push them down. As I drove, the steering wheel beneath my hands was slick with a sweat that had little to do with the temperature.

  I was still shaken from seeing my mother at the hospice. Sally had arrived within a minute of my pressing the alarm, but by then my mother had collapsed back into sleep. Sally had checked the machines and looked a little alarmed.

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘She woke up. She spoke.’

  ‘What did she say?’

  I hadn’t answered immediately, because I didn’t know what to say. My mother had recognized me, I told her eventually, but had seemed to be somewhere else, reliving a memory she clearly found distressing. But I didn’t tell Sally what that time and place had been – or what she’d said next, and how badly it had thrown me.

  Red hands everywhere.

  Despite the heat, the words brought a shiver. I was still trying to rationalize them. My mother was confused and dying; it made sense that she was retreating into her own past, and that some of that would be upsetting for her. And yet whatever I told myself, the sick feeling inside me – the sense of foreboding – kept growing stronger.

  You shouldn’t be here.

  But I was.

  I parked up outside my mother’s house. Like almost all the buildings in the village, it was a ramshackle two-storey structure, separated from the neighbours by stretches of dirt and hedges comprised mainly of brambles. The wooden front was weathered and the windows were dark and empty. The garden was massively overgrown. The drainpipes and guttering were rusted and almost falling away in places.

  The house didn’t seem to have really changed over the years; it had just gotten old. The sight of it now brought a wave of emotions. This was the place I’d grown up in. It was the place where, twenty-five years ago, two policemen had waited with me for my mother to return home.

  I’d left it behind, and yet it had been here the whole time.

  I got out of the car. Inside the house, it was the scent that hit me first – like unsealing a trunk full of your childhood belongings, leaning over, and breathing in deeply. But other smells kicked in almost immediately. I looked at the wall by the side of the stairs and saw it was covered with fingerprints of black and grey mould. The trace of cleaning products in the air couldn’t mask the dust and dampness. I smelled ammonia. And something else too. The same sweetly sick air I’d breathed in back at the hospice.

  That last smell turned out to be stronger in the front room, where it was clear my mother had spent most of her time. Sally appeared to have tidied up a little, but the pile of soft blankets on the arm of the settee, however neat, only made it easier for me to picture it as a makeshift bed. A small table had been moved across beside it. There was nothing on it now, but I could imagine things there.

  A glass of water. My mother’s spectacles.

  The book, perhaps. The one I was holding now.

  The Nightmare People.

  Back out in the hallway, I followed the smell of ammonia to the pantry beneath the stairs. A couple of flies were buzzing against the murky green glass of the window, and the carpet had been untacked, then rolled up and bagged. It took a few seconds for me to understand. Because she had been unable to get upstairs in recent weeks, this bleak space must have served as my mother’s bathroom.

  At that, I pictured my mother – her body diminished, her faculties failing her, shuffling awkwardly about in a world that was closing in around her – and a wave of guilt hit me.

  You shouldn’t be here.

  Despite everything, I should have been.

  The stairs creaked beneath my feet, and I went up carefully, as though wary of disturbing someone. Halfway up to the landing above, I looked back down. An angle of sunlight was coming through the glass in the front door. It revealed a swathe of the floorboards there that had been cleaned and polished, and again, it took me a moment to recognize what I was seeing. It must have been where my mother had been lying after she fell.

  Upstairs, I stood outside what had once been my bedroom for what seemed like an age, and then the hinges creaked as I opened the door. The space revealed itself slowly. Nothing had changed in here. My parents obviously hadn’t used the room for anything in the years since my departure, and the only real difference now was that it seemed so much smaller than I remembered. The remains of my old bed were still by the wall – just a metal frame with a bare mattress on top – while my old wooden desk remained under the window across from it. The room had always been as spare as this. I had never had much. My clothes had been kept in piles on the floor by the radiator; my books stacked up in teetering columns against the walls.

  I might have moved out yesterday. A part of me could almost sense the ghost of a boy sitting hunched over at the desk late at night, working on the stories he liked to write back then.

  I walked across the room and opened the curtains above the desk, flooding the room with light. Below me was the tangled mess of the back garden, leading off to the fence at the far end and then the wall of trees beyond.

  The village might have been named after the woods but, like everyone else here, I knew them as the Shadows. For as long as I could remember, that was what everyone called them. Despite the sun, the spaces between the trees had always seemed full of darkness and secrets, and as I stared down at the garden, a memory fluttered out of the woods, black and unwanted.

  How Charlie used to take us in there.

  Every weekend that year, we would meet in the old playground, then head up to James’s house and go into the woods through his back garden. We walked for miles. Charlie always led the way. He claimed the Shadows were haunted – that a ghost lived there – but while I often had the sensation of being watched by something between the trees, I was usually more worried about getting lost. Those woods had always seemed alive and dangerous to me. The deeper you went, the more it began to feel as though you were actually staying still – that the illusion of movement was caused by the land rearranging itself
around you, like the squares on a chessboard shifting around the pieces.

  And yet Charlie always brought us out safely.

  But then I remembered the last time I ever went in there with them. Deep between the trees, miles away from another living soul, Charlie pointing a loaded catapult at my face.

  I closed the curtains.

  And I was about to leave the room when I noticed that it wasn’t entirely bare – that there was an old cardboard box on the floor beside the desk. At some point, the top had been sealed with layers of brown parcel tape, but it had been cut open now, and the folds pulled back. I knelt down carefully, spreading them a little wider.

  There was a scattering of my old possessions inside. The first thing I found was a yellowing magazine. The Writing Life. As with the book at the hospice, my fingertips tingled as I touched it, and I quickly put it on the floor to one side. Beneath that, there was a slim hardback book. I knew what that was, and I didn’t want to look at it right now, never mind touch it.

  And then, below, there were several of my notebooks. The ones I’d used to write down my faltering attempts at stories as a teenager.

  Among other things.

  I picked up the notebook nearest the top, then opened it and read the beginning of the first entry.

  I am in the dark market.

  A flurry of memories erupted suddenly, like birds startled from a tree.

  James, sitting on the climbing frame that day.

  The knock on the door later.

  The thought I’d had so often:

  You have to do something about Charlie.

  I put the notebook down, shivering slightly despite the heat of the day. When Sally had called me earlier that week, told me about my mother’s accident, and asked if I was able to come back here, I had not answered immediately, because the idea of returning to Gritten filled me with horror. But I had done my best to persuade myself the past was gone. That there was no need to think about what had happened here. That I would be safe after all these years.

  And I had been wrong.

  Because more memories were arriving now, dark and angry, and I realized that however much I wanted to be done with the past, what mattered was whether the past was done with me. And as I listened to the ominous thud of silence in the house behind me, the foreboding I’d had all day moved closer to the dread I remembered feeling twenty-five years ago.

  Something awful was going to happen.

  4

  Before

  It was early October, a few weeks into our first term at Gritten Park School. That day we had rugby. James and I got changed at the main building with the rest of the class, and then trooped off through the cobbled streets to the playing field. I remember the air was icy on my thighs, and the way my breath misted the air. All around us, the click of boot studs on the tarmac was harsh and sharp.

  I glanced at James, who was walking beside me with the air of a condemned man. He was watching the larger boys ahead with a wary eye. While the two of us had assimilated as quietly into the background of our new school as possible, James had been a target for bullies from day one. I did my best to protect him when we were together, but I couldn’t be with him all the time, and the rugby field felt like open season. A place where violence was not only tolerated but actively encouraged.

  The teacher – Mr Goodbold – was swaggering among the boys ahead, bantering with the favoured. The man seemed little more than an older, larger version of the school bullies. There was the same angrily shaved head and solid physicality, the same resentment at the world and barely concealed contempt for the softer, more sensitive kids. On a few occasions, I had seen him walking his bulldog around Gritten, both of them moving with the same hunched, muscular rhythm.

  We reached the road and had to wait at the traffic lights as cars hurtled dangerously round the corner. I winced at the blasts of air as they shot past. From the speed some of them went, there was no guarantee they’d stop for a red light in time anyway.

  I leaned in to whisper to James.

  ‘It’s like every part of this experience is designed to kill us.’

  He didn’t smile.

  Once we were safely across the road, Goodbold led us down to a pitch at the far end of the field, where a teaching assistant was wrestling with a tangled net of rugby balls. The sky stretching overhead seemed grey and endless.

  ‘Two groups!’

  Goodbold spread his arms, somehow managing to separate his favourite pupils from the rest of us.

  ‘You lot along this line. Organize yourselves by height.’

  He led the larger boys across the pitch, and we all looked at each other and began shuffling around. I was a good head taller than James, so ended up a distance away along the line. The assistant handed me a ball. Across the pitch, I watched as Goodbold organized the other side so that the tallest boy in that group was opposite the smallest of ours.

  ‘When I blow this,’ he bellowed, holding up a whistle, ‘you will attempt to get your ball to the other side. Your opponent will try to stop you. Simple as that. Do we all understand?’

  There were a few murmured ‘yes, sirs’ but not from me. I could see how the boys across the pitch were conspiring and rearranging themselves behind Goodbold’s back. A boy named David Hague swapped places with the one beside him so that he could be directly opposite James. Bastard, I thought. Hague was the worst of the bullies. He came from a difficult family; his elder brother was in prison, and it seemed likely he would end up the same. The first day at Gritten, Hague had shoved me for some perceived slight, and I’d thrown a punch without hesitation. The fight got broken up, and after that he had pretty much left me alone. But James was an easier victim.

  I told myself there was nothing I could do about it. James was on his own for now. Instead, I focused on my own opponent. The success of my team didn’t matter to me, but I was determined to win, if only for my own sake, and I gritted my teeth as I clutched the ball to my side and put my right foot back. My heart began to beat faster.

  The whistle sounded.

  I set off as fast as I could, only dimly aware of the boy coming at me from the opposite side. When it came, the tackle was brutal. He smacked into me around the waist, the collision knocking the breath out of me and sending the field whirling, but I kept struggling forward, twisting against him angrily, stamping down, focusing on the line in the distance. A moment later, he lost whatever grip he had and I was plunging forward again. Another second, and the ball was on the line, my hand pressing down on it.

  The whistle blew again.

  Breathing hard, I looked down the line. Only a handful of us had made it across, and the middle of the field was scattered with kids, some of them standing, some still grappling on the hard ground. It was Hague I saw first. He was standing a distance away, laughing. James was lying at his feet, curled up and crying.

  Apparently oblivious, Goodbold simply meandered along the line, counting the winners. I looked back and saw Hague, still laughing, spit on James.

  The anger overtook me.

  He looked up as I approached, but not in time to avoid the hard shove I gave him, knocking him away from James. The impact was a shock to both of us – I hadn’t known I was going to do that. Hague looked equally surprised for a second, but then his face darkened with anger. As if from nowhere, two of his friends were standing beside him.

  ‘What the fuck is wrong with you?’ I said quietly.

  Hague spread his arms.

  ‘What? So it’s my fault your friend’s a fucking gayboy?’

  I swallowed. Even if Goodbold was watching, he wasn’t going to intervene – not until it got serious, at least. But other kids would be watching us, and I knew I couldn’t afford to back down. Which meant I was going to have to take a few punches. The best I could really hope for was to give a few back in return, and so I clenched my fists at my sides and forced myself to stare back at Hague.

  ‘What the fuck is wrong with you?’ I said again.

&nbs
p; Hague took a step towards me.

  ‘Going to do something about it?’

  Talking was useless – it would be better just to swing and hope. And I was about to do just that when I became aware of a presence beside me. I looked to my right and saw that two other boys had joined us.

  Charlie Crabtree.

  Billy Roberts.

  I didn’t know them beyond their names, and barely even those. They were in the same form, and shared a few of the same classes as me and James, but neither of us had ever spoken to them. In fact, I’d never seen them speaking to anyone. As far as I knew, they’d been at Gritten Park for years, but it felt like they were as separate from the rest of the school as James and I were. At breaks and lunchtimes, they seemed to disappear.

  And yet it was obvious from their body language that they were backing me up here for some reason. Neither of them were obvious fighters: Billy was tall and gangly, too skinny to be a real threat; Charlie was only the same height as James. But there was strength in numbers, however unexpected it was to have them, and right then I was grateful.

  Or at least I was until Charlie spoke.

  ‘I dreamed about you last night, Hague,’ he said.

  He sounded so serious that it took a second for the words to sink in. Whatever I had been expecting him to come out with, it hadn’t been that. Hague was taken aback too. He shook his head.