The Shadow Man
Mark Brownless
Copyright © 2019 Mark Brownless
The Shadow Man cover photography © Mikko Karskela
The moral right of Mark Brownless to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner.
All characters and events in this publication, other than those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
www.markbrownless.com
Contents
Chapter 1 – Now – Funny Things
Chapter 2 – Now – Coming Home
Chapter 3 – Then – Ethel Grimshaw
Chapter 4 – Now – The Wheatsheaf
Chapter 5 – Then – The Lake
Chapter 6 – Now –The Idyllic Village
Chapter 7 – Then – Todd Ainsworth
Chapter 8 – Now – Janey’s Parents
Chapter 9 – Then – Incoming
Chapter 10 – Then – Royal Game Soup
Chapter 11 – Then – Trespassers
Chapter 12 – Now – Something’s Out There
Chapter 13 – Then – Something’s Out There
Chapter 14 – Now – A Sort of Homecoming
Chapter 15 – Then – Laurendon Show
Chapter 16 – Then – You Reap What You Sow
Chapter 17 – Then – Harsh Language
Chapter 18 – Then – The Big Fire
Chapter 19 – Then – In Search of the Shadow Man
Chapter 20 – X – The Circle of Fire
Chapter 21 – X – When is it Not Too Late?
Author’s Note
Acknowledgements
The Shadow Man comes out at night
The Shadow Man in plain sight
The Shadow Man is gone by dawn
Taking souls for us to mourn
The Shadow Man prowls around
Without noise, without a sound
And if he should catch your eye
Then you know you’re going to die
The Shadow Man haunts our home
You’re safe until the sun goes down
The Shadow Man will wait his turn
To hold you close and make you burn
Chapter 1 – Now – Funny Things
THEY’RE FUNNY THINGS, childhood memories.
You remember a house as huge when it’s an average size, or a long cycle ride that’s just around the corner. Maybe it’s because you were smaller when the memories were formed, and so, as a grown-up, you’re just, well, bigger. But that doesn’t explain why you always remember childhood summers as long and hot. They weren’t. They weren’t any different to now. You just edit out the rain.
I couldn’t remember anything about the summer of 1985, when I was fifteen, apart from watching Live Aid in a static caravan, and my uncle calling Sting, Stink, and me pleading to be able to stay up to watch the American bit. And watching Alien for the first time – on the telly – and how I nearly shat myself when the beast had a sudden close-up with that extendable jaw. And shielding a little kid called Scott from a ram that had escaped from a nearby field and getting butted really hard in the thighs.
That was all. Nothing else in the tank. Until last week, when I had the dream again. It was a dream I hadn’t thought about for thirty years, and then it just appeared. Like that, for no reason. The day after the email. But nothing happens without a reason, and now things are starting to come back.
Like us out on our bikes all summer long, marauding around the villages and the countryside, getting into ‘bother’ as my mum used to call it. Like skinny-dipping at the lake – our lake. Like being free – like the feeling that we could do anything, and nothing could stop us.
Except something did.
Someone.
And as I had the dream, the dream of us singing the nursery rhyme – the scariest fucking nursery rhyme that’s passed my lips – I had this thought, this image in my head, of a body. I had the idea that something had started again. Something I had no recollection of. Something that had happened before.
Another burning.
And I knew that I had to go back. To Janey.
Memories.
You just can’t trust ’em.
Chapter 2 – Now – Coming Home
I LAY IN THE darkness. Cocooned. Cushioned by my mattress, enveloped by the softness of my duvet. I tried to change position, but my arms were pinned to my sides. Panicking, I tried to sit up, but I was held in place. I opened my eyes and stared at the moon above, shining brightly in the clear night sky. I wasn’t in my bed at all but rather in a shallow grave, the hole just wide enough to fit, covered in soil to keep me in place, with just my head exposed. In my nose and throat was the acrid stench of mud and shit and decay and death, which became increasingly overpowering so that I almost gagged. And then something crawled over me. Something big, something insectoid or reptilian, yet human all the same.
I started to sing a nursery rhyme, something I knew would protect me, something we’d sung when we were afraid and thought it would come to get us. I sang it through a dry mouth and chattering teeth, stifling sobs at the end of each line.
It crawled across the bodies of the others lying beside me, then it was above me, on top of me, holding itself up on its arms like a lover. The sigh of its rotten breath was one of despair. It hung over me, eyes staring deep into my soul, scouring back through every past life, my heart hammering in my chest, threatening to break through. The sickly stench grew as its face neared mine, about to deliver whatever killing blow it would use to drag me to hell.
I sat upright in bed, stifling a cry, taking a big deep breath instead. I was drenched in sweat. I got up, dumping my soaking pyjamas in the washing basket and getting a fresh t-shirt from the airing cupboard. At least I hadn’t woken Nick or the kids.
This was the fourth night running I’d had the dream and I needed a good night’s sleep, ready for a long drive tomorrow.
Going home.
Funny how it still felt like that after all these years. But now it seemed very different, like it was a whole different place. Now the dreams were back.
∞ ∞ ∞
‘Philippa Henstridge.’ I pushed the hands-free button on the steering wheel.
‘We’ve gotta do something about the Kettering account.’
‘Morning to you too, Giles. Why isn’t your number coming up on my phone?’
‘Because I’m in the office, of course,’ replied Giles, sounding flustered. I imagined him in his round, wire-framed glasses, denim shirt and corduroy jacket.
‘Oh okay, sure.’
‘They’ve been on this morning, wanting you and only you, except you appear to be not here.’
‘Yeah. Jan knows. Family emergency.’
‘You haven’t got any family.’
‘Extended family emergency, then. Bit of a strange one, really. Will explain all when I get back. I need to take a couple of days.’
‘A couple of days – what do I tell Kettering? They’re going fucking schitz.’
‘What do you tell them, or what’d you like to tell them?’
‘Don’t be flippant.’
‘If I couldn’t be flippant, I might as well be dead. Tell them Maxine and Dave are taking a specialist pass over the file, giving the campaign a further polish above and beyond what I’ve done. We’ll get it to them midweek next. In fact, tell them this is part of a brand-new platinum service we’ve been developing the last few months and we’re piloting i
t with them at no extra charge.’
‘I can’t believe you.’
‘I’m bloody good, aren’t I?’
If only I was.
∞ ∞ ∞
Lincolnshire was flat. I mean, really flat, like twinned-with-rural-Holland-flat. But around us, around Laurendon, the village where I spent the first eighteen years of my life, it was a little more rolling. Laurendon itself had a big hill in the middle and could be seen from miles around. Like a tit, we used to say when we were kids, and as I curved around the fifty mile-an-hour left-hander and saw the village on the hill a mile away, that’s what I thought of. Of course, the village grew out from the hill, spreading out onto flatter land, which was where we’d lived. It made me smile to remember what a chore it was to go and call on friends who lived at altitude. I’m not saying we were lazy, but I was always glad most of my friends didn’t live up the hill.
Less than a week on from the first dream and the memories of that summer are lifting out of the fog like one of those 3D pictures – the music, the fashion, the weather, and the things we’d done. But there were still holes in there. Things that didn’t sit right. How could I remember something, seemingly so well, and yet have some complete holes right next to it? And worse still, they weren’t holes I knew I couldn’t remember – like what I did at a party when I was drunk. They were like a black hole, invisible, like I’d never experienced them – I just knew there was something missing. And now I thought about it, what was missing must be something glaringly obvious, as if I’d built a pink fence around it and hung it with hundreds of fairy lights.
What didn’t I know? And why had I forgotten it?
I’d bought the ‘80s Hits’ CD in a motorway services on a whim, and played it all the rest of the way back. It felt like I needed some kind of connection to the old place to make me feel at home again, but Duran Duran were currently doing a reasonable job of making me think of Rio.
The dream had created this strong atmosphere of back then, the feeling of that summer, evoking images and even smells that were familiar, but were suddenly blown out of the water by what happened at the end. One repeating dream. The dream of the lake, the foreboding, the smell of rot and fear. Then there was the Shadow Man, and the nursery rhyme. The song we’d created to keep us safe, the song that I’d not thought of in thirty years. And there was Janey. Janey, who’d emailed me after all this time, the day before the first dream.
But Janey always was the fire starter.
∞ ∞ ∞
I drove along the straight mile ‘two-lane black top’ as the Americans would call it, heading toward Laurendon. The road undulated wildly, bouncing the car around much more than I remembered, and I wondered just how badly you could lay tarmac. I went round the corner and entered the village, turning left immediately into Stow Lane. There were several cars parked outside Janey’s bungalow.
Janey’s bungalow!
She’d told me in emails that it was hers now her parents had died, but in my mind it still felt like her parents’ place, that apparently she hadn’t set foot outside of since… then. But what was ‘then’? She’d stayed at home for thirty years and not left, because of something I knew but couldn’t remember. This whole memory thing was really starting to piss me off.
The bungalow had seen better days. It didn’t look like Janey had done too much with the place after her parents had passed, but why would you, if you never went outside? The paint on the windows had long since blistered and peeled, the walls were grey when they were once brilliant white. A small greenhouse was a rotting glassless skeleton just past the side porch, and the faded, wheel-less remains of a kid’s pedal car – Janey’s pedal car – guarded the front of the garage.
I wasn’t sure what to expect when I knocked on the uPVC porch door. In some ways I expected old-Janey to appear, almost forgetting how different I looked compared with then. But then old-Janey did appear; the same straight brown hair falling awkwardly beyond her shoulders with a centre parting, the same waif-like physique and hollow posture. Closer inspection did reveal new things – wrinkles and crow’s feet, strands of grey hair in amongst the brown, the makings of an extra chin.
We were all that much older.
‘Well, well, Philippa Dover. Or rather, Mrs Henstridge I should say.’
‘Janey Pullman,’ I smiled at her and pulled her into an embrace. She stiffened as I put my arms around her, almost as if it was painful. She didn’t hug back.
Janey led me into the lounge, which was a faded version of what I remembered; the red patterned carpet, now almost threadbare, the three-piece suite of brown leather, cracked and split, and the old mahogany TV unit in the corner, with thankfully a more modern screen than the old wooden-clad black and white TV her folks had when I’d first met them. Yet it seemed just like old times, and there were the others, although between us we did seem to fill the room more than we had back then. No Sally Chen for the moment, but here were Katie Edwards, Clarabelle Walker, Janey and me. We exchanged awkward hugs and air kisses – none of us knowing how to really say hello.
‘I can’t believe we’re all here. Especially because, well, don’t take this the wrong way, but I haven’t even thought about you lot in, like, thirty years,’ I said with genuine surprise.
‘How do you not take that the wrong way?’ asked Katie with mock offence.
‘I haven’t thought about you guys either,’ added Clara.
‘Of course you haven’t,’ replied Janey, the slightest of sneers in her voice.
‘Oh?’
‘It’s because we’ve all forgotten.’
‘Well no shit, Sherlock. Course we’ve forgotten, it was a long time ago.’
‘It’s because we were made to forget,’ she added, taking the floor.
‘Hang on a minute, can’t we wait for the kettle to boil?’ Clara asked.
‘Made to? By whom?’ Katie responded.
‘It’s like Katie said, it was just a long time ago, that’s all, and it’s not like we’re getting any younger,’ Clara added.
‘But you all had a dream last week, right?’ Janey asked.
‘I probably had a few…’
‘Don’t be obtuse, Katie, you know exactly which dream I’m talking about,’ Janey said icily. Everyone went quiet. We knew.
‘Yes, the dreams have started again, just like before.’ It was a simple statement, but I needed to say it as confirmation, to get everyone on the same page. I’d intended it to start us talking but we all sat in silence. Nobody played coy. Nobody threw in a ‘what dreams, hun?’ It seemed like we were already beyond that. ‘You’ve all had them too, then? The dreams we had back then, after that summer..?’
‘I did, it was horrible – down by the lake trapped in dirt and disgusting smells and someone… terrible,’ said Clara.
‘It was back then, that summer.’ I looked at my old school friends as I spoke. ‘Riding around on our bikes, going out to the lake, but it was scary. Something was there, watching from the shadows. It tried to do something to us, and we sang that song – the nursery rhyme we made up. I hadn’t thought about it in all this time.’
‘Nobody had, right? And you all had the same dream?’ Janey smiled triumphantly.
‘I did,’ Katie answered.
‘Oh, fuck off!’ Clarabelle hadn’t changed. ‘People can’t all just have the same dream!’
‘I had it too, that’s why I emailed you.’ Janey looked at each of us in turn.
‘Hang on, I started having the dreams after your email, Janes. That means you must’ve started having the dreams before us?’ I looked at her for confirmation and she nodded. ‘For how long?’
‘A couple of weeks, maybe – I’m not sure.’
‘I had my first one after you emailed as well,’ Katie said.
‘Okay, me too,’ Clara admitted.
‘So why were you the lucky girl, Janey, why did the dreams come to you before us?’ Katie raised her eyebrows and crossed her eyes to make the early exchanges of our vis
it seem less like an interrogation.
‘I don’t know – I’ve been trying to work that out. Maybe it’s because I never left. I’m more connected to this place, perhaps. I’ve had some odd dreams down the years that kind of hinted of things that happened back then, but nothing like the ones I’ve had recently.’
‘What was your dream?’ I asked, assuming she would’ve had the same as everyone else.
‘It was in the desert, I’m flying over the dunes, going some, like a missile. And I come upon this circle of people, surrounded by fire, and there’s this dark figure in the middle.’
‘Bloody hell,’ said Katie.
‘Yes, but it doesn’t end there. The figure is darkness itself and then I’m down there in the circle of people and he surrounds us and suddenly there are flames, and they all close in, people bursting into flames. And then I wake up.’
‘So different to us then?’
‘I’m quite amazed you’ve all dreamt the same thing. . I think even if the stimulus was the same, your interpretation is always going to be different. When I first had the dream, it took me back to then, and I started to remember things. Things that were different to how I remembered. So I started tracking you down – took a little while, but I’m pretty resourceful. I needed to know if you’d had them too, to see if you were okay,’ Janey winked her one good eye at us.
‘What did you mean when you said we’d been made to forget?’ I asked, a good deal more uncomfortable than when I’d arrived. The damp, stuffy bungalow felt several degrees colder.
‘I stayed. I haven’t left this house let alone the village, so I’ve forgotten less.’
‘What does that mean?’ asked Katie.
‘It means I know more than you do, stupid. It means I wondered if you’d been having the dreams, too. It means maybe whatever was making us forget has stopped, or changed or something.’
‘You mean, like the ‘spell’ would get broken?’ said Katie, using her finger to make speech marks around spell. ‘And don’t call me stupid.’
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