‘Sorry. I didn’t say it was magic or anything, either. But something made you all totally forget what happened that summer – that whole year before we left school for that matter. And it’s only just starting to come back, isn’t it? You couldn’t remember the first time you got fingered until last week.’ Janey was pacing around the middle of the room now, holding court, limping heavily on her prosthesis, the hinged knee clicking with every step. ‘You can think I’m fucked up, that I’m a mess for being like I am, for staying here in this house and not moving, for getting in contact. But the one thing you can’t explain is why you forgot an important chunk of your life until last week.’
‘Hang on, I didn’t say I couldn’t remember parts of my life,’ I said. ‘Just that I had different memories.’
‘But you couldn’t though, right?’ I sat and stared at Janey – I had no answer for her. ‘Important parts of your growing up and all you can remember is a two-dimensional picture and that’s it.’
‘Bad stuff happened that summer, didn’t it?’ Clara asked, rhetorically.
‘Yes,’ said Janey. ‘I think so. I haven’t pieced it together yet.’
‘People died, right?’
‘Yes, I think so.’
‘Wait, I’ve just remembered something,’ Katie said, almost an air of excitement about her. ‘It’s a name: Ethel Grimshaw.’
‘Old lady Grimshaw. I remember her,’ I added for the record.
‘Anyone get what happened to her yet?’ Janey asked.
‘Hang on, didn’t she burn to death?’ said Clara.
∞ ∞ ∞
The lounge was twilight dark as the dirty blinds stayed permanently closed. It was stuffy and damp-smelling, and almost… something else. Like the smell of despair. On the table in the corner was an old chunky laptop and a pile of books – mainly horror fiction. I excused myself to go and use the bathroom.
I walked down the hallway, shocked at the memories it brought back from thirty years before, with the brown wood veneer cladding, the fake wood skirting boards and faded tatty pictures on the walls. I glanced into Janey’s parents’ room and it looked like it hadn’t been touched – as if the bed had been made by her mum on the day she died and had been left alone since. Janey hadn’t moved rooms. Her door was open, too, and I paused, looking in. I could hear the others talking in the sitting room. Janey’s bedroom was chaotic, with clothes and sheets of paper scattered around the floor, the curtains drawn creating shadows everywhere. She had a battered Star Wars mobile above her chest of drawers and a globe lamp that had clearly had an accident at one point because most of Europe was missing, the bulb shining out harshly through the Northern Hemisphere. Hundreds of overlapping newspaper cut-outs and pictures were pinned like a collage to a large noticeboard on the back wall, like some seventies police investigation. A black trilby hung on the corner of the cork board, a black scarf draped over it. The globe lamp did little to cut through the gloom, but I could see a small table in front, on it was a papier-mâché model of a landscape, which I couldn’t quite place. I glanced over my shoulder and saw no one in the hall. The others were still talking in the lounge. I walked into the room to get a closer look, stepping over Janey’s underwear and dinner dishes, the shiny disc in the centre was suddenly the lake and there were the trees around it and the grassy banks, exactly as I remembered them, exactly as they’d been in the dream. It was a poor, childish model but it hit me like a punch in the face. I was transported there, standing on the bank looking out across the water, the warm wind in my hair and the happy shouts and screams of my friends forming the soundtrack. Then the screams and shouts sounded less content, and more like they were afraid.
There were dolls in the basin of the lake.
She’s nearly fifty and she’s playing with dolls?
Janey had made a doll for each of us. There was her own of course, with her burns and her leg – that must’ve taken some adapting. There was Katie with her freckles and her wild auburn hair – the freckles looked drawn on, with eyeliner, maybe. This was too weird. Clara’s avatar was there with Sal’s and so was mine. Fuck it was creepy. I left the room quickly before I was caught snooping around, and re-joined the others after doing what I needed to do.
‘So what’s going on, Janey?’ I said. ‘Why’d you start dreaming again? Why now?’
‘Yeah, has anything happened round here?’ Katie asked.
‘Nothing ever happens around here.’ Janey smiled slightly for the first time since we’d arrived. She could almost look pretty when she did, almost lost the haunted expression she always seemed to carry. The smile lifted her face. It lifted half of her face, that is. The whorled discoloured scarring on the other side barely shifted. So her almost-pretty smile was a sneer.
‘Yeah, but does it, though?’ I knew I had to push her to get anywhere, always had to. With a delicate touch you could actually have an open conversation.
‘I don’t think so. I don’t hear anything. I… I don’t go out,’ the right side of her face flushed. ‘Or see anyone.’ She looked like a frightened little girl now.
‘But don’t you get any gossip?’
Janey shook her head. ‘The only direct interaction I have is with the Tesco delivery driver each week. And the Amazon guy, of course.’
‘Christ.’ I looked across at the table. ‘You got wi-fi?’
‘Yes of course, I’m a recluse, not Amish. There’s my laptop.’ Janey went across to her small desk in the corner of the room and opened her computer. She booted up Google and looked at me for direction. Nothing changes. I asked her to call up the local paper, The Enquirer.
‘Someone’s burned to death. There’s your answer, kiddo, right there.’ I read from the article. ‘Louise Jordan was found in her bedroom, burned beyond recognition, leaving only her foot, forearms and half her head intact, the rest burnt to ash. There was no sign of an intruder, or of arson, so initial conclusions are that Ms Jordan died accidentally. The forensic fire team concluded that there was no evidence of an accelerant, no trigger in the form of a cigarette or spark, so they have listed the cause as unknown’.’
‘Spontaneous human combustion?’ asked Katie, quietly.
‘Yes, that’s it, that’s what was going on back then! Wasn’t it? So it’s happening again. Fuck. Just like thirty years ago?’ Clara wasn’t really asking, and almost seemed excited to have remembered something.
‘But this sort of thing just doesn’t happen – scientists have disproved it –’
‘Well, they’ve disproved some aspects, but if someone goes up like this, what else could it be?’ Janey interrupted Katie before she could go any further.
‘And you think this links to whatever happened back then?’ Katie continued.
‘What else can it be? These things never happen in such a concentrated area. It’s the only explanation.’
‘And then there are the dreams. You had the dreams first. D’you think that whatever it was that made us forget everything is making us dream again and maybe…’ I indicated the screen, ‘doing this?’
‘Yeah, look, I don’t know any more than you do and I’m sorry I got you involved with this. I just sent the email to see if you’d had the dream like I had. I didn’t mean to get you to come back, but here you are. All I know is that something is wrong. Something must be very wrong if we’re having the dreams again. But to answer your question, then yes, I do think that whatever did this,’ she indicated her face and leg, ‘is on its way back.’
‘What makes you think that?’ I asked, searching my memory banks for any recollection of what actually happened to Janey.
‘I don’t know. It’s like a growing fear, or dread or something.’ Janey shrugged.
‘Do you remember the dream?’ asked Katie. ‘Do you remember how it ended?’
‘Yes, it says that you can’t tell your parents, or it’ll come true.’
‘Yes, but what was it? What was the thing?’
‘You haven’t remembered yet?’ Janey seemed almo
st pleased to have the exclusive.
‘Well, that much I do know – come on, hun, out with it.’
‘The Shadow Man. We called it – it was called – the Shadow Man.’
The Shadow Man. I remembered it from my dream too, but had no idea what it was.
‘You know that does sound familiar, now you mention it,’ said Katie.
‘More things are coming back to me, too,’ I agreed. ‘It’s like the fog is clearing.’
‘But it can’t have been true, can it?’ said Clara. ‘What happened to Janey notwithstanding, there isn’t a bogeyman! We’re forty-five years old for God’s sake. Do you still believe in monsters and demons?’
‘No, course not!’
‘So how is any of this real?’
Chapter 3 – Then – Ethel Grimshaw
ETHEL ‘OLD LADY’ Grimshaw, also lived in a bungalow at the opposite end of Stow Lane, her back garden bordering the park. She was a mean old bastard. Nasty. Acerbic. She once threatened to kill Boxey, Janey’s dog, when he got out of the garden and ended up barking at her from the street.
‘Should be poisoned, yappy little monster,’ she’d said. We were all so upset that Janey’s dad went to speak to her. He never told us what she’d said, but I doubt she apologised. The funny thing was that Boxey did die a few weeks later. Janey never spoke about it, but he wasn’t run over and he’d not been ill, so I guess I’ll never know how he died – maybe Janey won’t either, but, as The Christians once sang, when the fingers point…
Stow Lane was a long straight road, leading from Hadley Road, the main road through the village, to where it bisected Lake Road going out of the village and Coopers Lane going right by the pond. As kids it seemed like it was a mile long and we sometimes called it the straight mile – drag racing our bikes against each other along its length. When I got a milometer for my bike, we were all a bit surprised to find it was a little less than half that length. From one end to the other you could see the immaculately trimmed bushes and lawns of the homes it served – the small, sixties bungalows close to the road on the right, like Janey’s place nearer the Hadley end, and the bigger, newer houses set back from the road with their big front gardens on the other side, nearer Coopers Lane. That morning, we’d been walking down to the park from Janey’s, and had seen some vehicles outside Old Lady Grimshaw’s bungalow – which was sandwiched, uncomfortably, between two of those big new houses – two police cars, an ambulance and a van, all with blue and red flashing lights disturbing the stillness of the sunny morning. A small group of middle-aged women stood brazenly staring at the house, whispering gossip to each other, and a policeman was standing at the foot of the drive to stop them getting any closer.
‘What’s happened?’ I asked.
‘Never you mind, miss, just be on your way,’ the copper replied.
We walked past the house, craning our necks as people in blue overalls went in and out of the open front door.
‘She’s dead,’ said Janey, matter-of-factly.
‘Fuck off,’ said Clara. ‘How do you know? And if she is,’ she added, thinking she was on a roll of being right, ‘why is there an ambulance not a hearse?’
‘Those are forensics people – they don’t come into an old lady’s house if she isn’t dead. And they’d obviously have an ambulance to start with, just in case she wasn’t.’
‘Let’s go round to the park and see what we can see from there!’ Clara suggested.
‘Yeah, good idea!’ We all broke into a run, regretting that we hadn’t brought our bikes, sprinting to the end of the road and round to the park entrance. We ran up the slope, along the tarmac path that took us along the end of the football pitch, with its bare patches of soil in the goalmouths bordered by rusted, net-less posts. The pitch markings had long since lost their white paint, but remained as deep burnt trenches, vying to catch an unwary ankle.
‘Watch the crap!’ I said, dodging a pile of what a dog-walker nowadays would carry home in a poop-sack. Clara didn’t see the pile of shit until it was almost too late, reacting to avoid giving her new white Adidas trainers – fake from the market – a proper christening, she managed to land her feet either side of it, but her body carried on travelling at speed, and she went flying off the path, rolling over and over in the daisy-covered grass like a stunt man, tufts of grass and flower heads thrown up around her.
‘You bellend!’ We all laughed and carried on running, beyond the football pitch to the tennis courts – two full-sized courts of badly laid tarmac, buckled and warped in places with tufts of grass growing through. The two wooden vegetable crates we used to mark the net posts were in place as always, as if on guard. Mrs Grimshaw’s garden bordered the hedge directly behind them and we’d often had to sneak through the hole in the broken chain-link fence, and push through the gap in the prickly, dense cotoneaster hedge to retrieve a ball. Just as often we’d be greeted by the venom in her tongue as she lay in wait for us.
Today was much more straightforward, we pushed through the hedge in single file, crawling on our hands and knees until we were lined up in her rose border, with neat rows of French marigolds and begonias before us, framing the small square of lawn. The bungalow had two large windows at the back, the kitchen on the right and her bedroom on the left. We ran in single file across the grass, bent double like paras on manoeuvres, heading straight for the kitchen window, poking our heads and hands up over the sill like chads to peer inside. The room was empty, her walking stick and tartan wheeled shopping trolley standing idle by the back door. We crabbed sideways to the bedroom and did our stealth looking again. And there she was, or at least, there was what was left of someone who might once have been Ethel Grimshaw.
It appeared that four limbs were randomly scattered around a large pile of ash that had once been her body in the middle of the bed. The lower parts of her limbs were completely untouched by the fire, as was half of her white nylon nightie – the large blue flowers still clearly visible. The rest of the room seemed perfectly normal, with no sign of smoke or charring from the flames. How could such an intense fire have consumed her and done so little damage to the room?
A blue-overalled figure walked in and instantly saw us gawping at the floor show. He was followed by a man in a cheap shiny suit – the kind you could see in Top Man or Burtons in town – he had a bushy moustache and thinning auburn hair combed over to the side of his head.
‘Oi!’ he shouted, but we were off, back across the lawn, through the hedge – much more quickly than on the way in – and into the park. We made a point of walking quietly toward the exit so as not to arouse suspicion, our hearts racing with the fear of being caught, although quite what we thought would happen even if they’d caught us I don’t know – it’s not like being nosey is a crime. As we left Old Lady Grimshaw’s garden behind, I could hear the voices of police officers in the garden, looking for us, and so once again we ran, sprinting through the park as if our lives depended on it, as if the officers had abandoned their investigations and decided to give chase to us, just for the hell of it. We hurdled the faecal trainer magnets and sprinted for the exit, turning a sharp right out of the gate and heading past Sowerby’s farm, running by the pond with Coopers Lane curving around it to the right and heading straight on up the hill on Brewery Road – which always struck me as odd as there’d never been a brewery in the village as far as anyone knew. We didn’t stop until we’d cut through the back of the woods and run the mile or so to Clarabelle’s, still half expecting to hear the sound of approaching sirens. We sat on her low garden wall panting heavily, surrounded by a collection of planters and hanging baskets all lit-up with vibrant reds and blues, their heady scent making us feel queasy as we tried to get our breath back, red-faced, both exhilarated and revulsed at the same time.
‘Fuck. Did you see the state of her?’ Clarabelle was the first to say something.
‘Christ there were bits of her all over the place,’ said Katie.
‘No, there was just her on the bed.
’
‘I know what I saw, Janey, her arms and legs were just scattered on the bed.’
‘No, there was just no middle bit.’
‘What?’
‘Her body was gone – that was the pile of ash – leaving all the rest as if her body had disappeared or something.’
‘And fire did that?’ I asked.
‘Yeah, what else?’ Janey was quite dismissive.
‘I meant, why didn’t the rest of the room go up – why just the middle bit of her? How can fire be so selective?’
‘Dunno, looked pretty fucking bizarre to me.’
∞ ∞ ∞
Over the next few days we were glued to news reports about Mrs Grimshaw’s death. It didn’t become big news at first; an old lady died – stop the press. The local news aired a story saying she’d been burned to death but the fire investigators couldn’t determine the cause of the blaze, or why all of her hadn’t been consumed. Pictures from her bedroom were leaked to a newspaper, so the images we’d seen through the window were now there for all to see. With no ideas of their own, and no easy way to create some closure, the Press turned to external sources for an angle. The BBC found their own expert in forensics and he suggested a number of reasons why Mrs Grimshaw’s body might have burned like it did. Then ITV found Professor Johnny Lankham. He was described as an expert in unexplained phenomenon, and particularly in spontaneous human combustion. He was a bit of a rock star – tightly curled wiry hair, wraparound glasses with a check shirt and knitted tie, he looked like the love-child of Art Garfunkel and Bono who’d gone on to become a geography teacher. Prof Johnny loved the camera, and ITV loved him, and he became the go-to guy for all things bizarre or strange. A television magazine show had found him at the University of Manchester, where he lectured in Sociology but was fairly outspoken in his other specialty in the local press, and in various publications and speaking engagements. They interviewed him on campus, but he was so newsworthy for this story, they brought him to Laurendon. He appeared on the corner of Hadley Road and Stow Lane and did part of an interview, the rest of which was filmed outside Mrs Grimshaw’s house and by the pond.
The Shadow Man Page 2