The Shadow Man

by Mark Brownless

  ‘Did you ever find any treatment that did seem to work, or to be worthwhile sticking with?’ I was never one to avoid the difficult questions.

  ‘It was getting harder and harder for me to leave the house, and I think I got so worked up that any benefit my treatment might have had was completely eclipsed. So, no, I guess is the answer to your question. In the end I did a lot of research and looked into how people were using cannabis for pain relief. But it’s not that easy to get hold of it when you don’t leave the house.’

  ‘Amazon not sell it then?’ asked Katie, enjoying the conversation.

  ‘Not yet, but it’ll only be a matter of time. I did manage to get some in the end from some people I knew online.’ I thought later that her comment sounded a little weird. Some people I knew online. Not friends, not people that she met in a chatroom and got friendly with on Facebook, just some people she became acquainted with. As if Uber provided a drug-dealing service. ‘But it didn’t really work, and I didn’t like smoking it or putting it in food. It was weird, it just never seemed to do anything for me.’

  ‘So you can buy magic mushrooms online?’ Clara asked – too aghast this time even for an expletive.

  ‘No,’ laughed Janey. ‘Well, not quite how you think. You buy spores, and you can source them online, yes. I’m not sure how desperately legal it is, and you need to do quite a lot with those spores to produce the mushrooms. They aren’t easy buggers to grow. But yes, they are freely available on the web.’

  ‘So that’s how you source yours?’

  ‘It is now, but I didn’t start like that.’

  ‘Now you’re going to have to explain yourself. Blimey, you think you know someone!’ Katie exclaimed, echoing Clara’s earlier comment.

  ‘It was on the day of Mum and Dad’s funeral.’

  ‘Oh God, I’m sorry;’

  ‘It’s okay, Katie, really. The worst part about the day was having to go outside. I smoked some pot and then got shitfaced. People just thought it was the grief, and I didn’t really speak to anyone. I had to get out of there, and someone took me out to the lake – I don’t even remember who, a cousin I think. I sat on the bank and looked across the grass leading to the old nettle patch and the barn, and I saw mushrooms growing. The same ones we used back then.’

  ‘I remember being off my tits on more than one occasion, when it definitely wasn’t just your mum’s vodka,’ said Clara.

  ‘Yes, we did get through some ‘tea’ back then. So there they were, and I dug them up and put them in the back of my cousin’s car to bring home. I totally forgot about the wake and the rest of my family. I ordered the polytunnel and managed to get a crop from the first batch I grew. When I exhausted that culture, I had to look to the web because I’ve not been outside again since.’

  ‘And they work?’

  ‘I’m sorry, Clara?’

  ‘They help you with your pain?’

  ‘Oh yeah, definitely.’

  ‘Can I see inside your polytunnel?’ Katie asked.

  ‘Well, yeah, I s’pose. But it’s just like a dark room with some damp soil in it. There’s not even any mushrooms growing in it at the moment - I'm all out.’

  ‘So how’re you managing for pain relief?’ I asked.

  ‘Oh, I dry most of my stock then freeze them, so I’ve always got a certain amount. You don’t just take it willy-nilly, you dose it out like medication. Otherwise I would be off my tits half the time.’ There was a pause – it seemed that the subject was exhausted and nobody had any more questions for Janey. ‘Anybody dream last night?’ she asked.

  ‘Sorry, too pissed,’ I said.

  ‘I did,’ said Katie. ‘It was horrible, actually. I was in my room, in bed, asleep. Then I woke up, like, with a start. It was dark and cold, and getting colder and I just knew something was in there with me – someone. I was gonna scream when suddenly he was on top of me – this dark figure – he was just a dark weight in a cloak or something, and he put his hands round my throat and started choking me. I couldn’t make a sound, his thumbs were crushing my windpipe and his face got closer and closer to mine before I passed out. Then I woke up.’

  ‘Fuck me,’ said Clara.

  ‘Shit, that’s bloody awful, King, are you okay?’

  ‘Well I am now, Flip, no problem. But I almost shat the bed last night.’

  We all took a break to use the bathroom and help make more tea and coffee. It was wearing having to try and remember so much, and to weave these new memories in with the old – working out what to discard because it was too plastic, or linear, or poorly realised. We had to kick the B-movie out of our memories.

  ‘Janes, yesterday you mentioned the Shadow Man. I remember the name now, and some of how he scared us. Do you remember how he came about – where we conjured him from? Was he real?’

  ‘We didn’t conjure him, Flip, he’s real.’

  ‘Really?’ asked Katie, disbelievingly.

  ‘Does anyone remember me reading those magazines that summer – The Unexplained?’

  ‘Didn’t you show some of them to us?’

  ‘Yeah, they had articles about Nessie and Bigfoot and all that stuff.’

  ‘Oh yeah – they had spontaneous combustion pics – I remember now. You got out this well-thumbed magazine and showed us some dodgy pictures – it was like a nerd porno,’ said Clara.

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘I didn’t really mean about the nerd bit.’

  ‘Yeah you did – we were nerds. That’s why the dicks largely left us alone. Largely.’ I wasn’t sure but had an inkling about what Janey meant – like there was a memory about to return.

  ‘There was an article in one about spirits and bogeymen, so I went searching for books on the subject in the library. Unsurprisingly there wasn’t a lot of choice, but I found one, can’t remember the author’s name, but it was all about odd cases in the North of England – unexplained deaths and disappearances, that kind of thing. There wasn’t much on it, but there was a short article about The Shadow Man of North Lincolnshire.’

  ‘And who was he?’ I asked.

  ‘It was like, late seventeen hundreds, and Laurendon was a decent-sized village even then – mainly from wealthy landowners bringing in workers to live and work in the fields. The hill was a natural border between three estates and they couldn’t easily farm on it, so they built farm cottages and buildings on the slopes and it meant the workers were quite central. It’d been happening for hundreds of years, so the village just grew and there was a shop and an inn. Then kids started going missing, people got burned inexplicably and they decided that it was someone who lurked in the shadows before pouncing on their victims. They decided it was this one guy who’d done it.’

  ‘Did they have any evidence or proof?’

  ‘You have to remember this was way back then. There wasn’t a police force. It was like a mob that went around accusing anyone and everyone and you really had to prove you didn’t do it. They found this guy, a bit of a misfit, a loner, and the story is that they found scraps of the kids’ clothing in his house, and decided that made him guilty.’

  ‘And what happened?’

  ‘They burned him at the stake on the island in the pond.’

  ‘In the middle of the village?’

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘Shit, yes I remember now – that’s definitely not the first time I’ve heard that,’ the memory exploded in my head like a firework.

  ‘And there are recorded events – burnings, kids going missing periodically ever since. And now with this story in the paper about someone else getting burned, it feels like the whole thing is starting again.’

  ‘So how can that be – people going missing over the years and even now?’ I asked.

  ‘It’s gotta be a copycat,’ said Katie as if she were stopping any debate before it started.

  ‘What, every couple of decades someone else will fancy their chances of being The Shadow Man?’ Janey shook her head. ‘It’s not like someone else having
a go at being Bruce Wayne.’

  ‘So what then? It can’t be him, he’s dead.’

  ‘It’s this place. It gets to you. It’s like his spirit or whatever is possessing the village.’

  ‘Janey, are you aware of how fucked up and crazy that sounds?’

  ‘Acutely.’

  ‘I’m not so sure I completely disagree with Janey on this one,’ I said.

  ‘What?’ said Clara.

  ‘Thanks for the support – I think,’ Janey shrugged and sat down to take the weight off her leg.

  ‘I think the veneer of this place peeled away when I left.’

  ‘What does that mean?’ asked Sal.

  ‘I mean it isn’t how it seemed to me when I lived here, and I can now see it for what it is.’

  ‘So when you used to come back to see your folks, what did it feel like to you?’ Katie asked.

  ‘I think after uni… Well, while I was at uni it wasn’t much different – apart from being able to get served in pubs and stuff. So I’d come home and hook up with whoever was around, get pissed and not really talk about the place.’

  ‘Yet we never got together when we came home. The only people we really knew, we seemed to have forgotten,’ said Sal.

  ‘What about after, Flip?’ Katie continued.

  ‘It was like the string was cut. Like there wasn’t a link any more. I’d come home a few times a year and Mum and Dad would come down to us about the same. Spock always made a point of inviting them and welcoming them – they were good to us.’

  ‘Did you all get along?’

  ‘We did and we didn’t – it wasn’t that, we just weren’t close. It was like they were entrenched here, and the bullshit and sensibilities of here and how here thought you should be. But they helped us out a lot and we wanted to show our gratitude by making them welcome, and it kinda worked.’

  ‘Kind of?’

  ‘We were glad when they went home, right enough.’ I couldn’t stifle a smile.

  ‘And when you say the string was cut, was that with the village as well?’ Clara asked.

  ‘I think it just faded. It just became anywhere-ville. I always think of it as my home village but it’s not, it’s just a canvas on which I painted my childhood.’

  ‘Christ that’s deep,’ nodded Clara in appreciation.

  ‘So you don’t feel any affinity to the place now?’ Katie almost looked like she was hurt by what I was saying.

  ‘No. In all honesty, not at all. There were memories of that summer, particularly, that were vivid for me, snippets of us at the lake and riding round that were some of my most treasured memories. But that was before this weekend. Now we’re finding out what really happened it’s like every good memory is fading, like the lights are being switched off and the village is fading into the darkness.’

  ‘Bloody hell, Flip.’

  ‘So what do you think of the place?’ Janey pushed, wanting more from me.

  ‘Grubby. It’s like something’s going on beneath the surface and we’re scratching at it and what’s underneath is… grubby.’

  ‘This place has a dark heart,’ said Janey, nodding in agreement. ‘It sucks the life out of you. Maybe it’s the Shadow Man and he lives off it.’

  ‘You’re talking souls and all that, right?’ asked Sal, wide-eyed.

  ‘Yeah, maybe. We’ve already talked about the people that died, businesses die too, they get set up and flounder around for a couple of years then disappear–’

  ‘But it’s a little village out in the sticks, and quite a way from bigger towns. I think that’s normal, isn’t it?’

  ‘Bullshit,’ Janey spat. ‘You look at the number of executive houses that’ve been built in the last twenty years for outsiders moving in. People with money. A commute to any one of six or seven towns or cities is under an hour so you can live in the country and work in the city. Perfect. The place should be flourishing. Yet it isn’t. And people are dying. It’s like the place destroys you.’

  ‘Oh, fuck off, guys.’

  Chapter 7 – Then – Todd Ainsworth

  IF NOTHING BAD could happen at our lake, it followed that nothing bad could happen in our village. How could it? Bad things happened in other places.

  And then Mrs Grimshaw burned to death, so that was that idea out of the window. Surely that was it, right?

  But then Todd Ainsworth died.

  Todd was a few years older than us, and a bit of a loner. No, he was worse than that, he was downright odd. He’d drive past in his sky-blue Ford Capri and make all kinds of lurid and suggestive comments to us. He was creepy. Todd had been in the bottom set for everything at school and might well have been diagnosed with some form of developmental disorder these days, but back then he was just thick and weird. Not the brightest star in the sky, Todd wasn’t the prettiest either. He had a high forehead and his eyes weren’t level, one was higher than the other – like he’d had his head squeezed in a vice or something. His thin face was all goofy with teeth – like Plug from the Beano – and a lopsided mouth. He was every orthodontist’s nightmare.

  He left school with nothing and his dad had almost been forced into training him to be a mechanic in the family garage – there was nothing else for him to do other than sitting at home in his pants watching daytime TV, which was just becoming a thing. Now, it seemed, when he wasn’t playing with himself, he was playing with cars. Todd had always been a pest. He’d got a car, and so, freakish as he was, there were some girls in our year who were bizarrely drawn to him. That meant, of course, in his vice-squashed mind, that he was God’s gift to women, and every single one of us would swoon in front of him. He’d drive round the village stalking us as we rode around, passing us rather too frequently for our liking, making a nuisance of himself. He’d call us his birds, and I think he genuinely believed we’d all succumb to his masculine charms, probably in sequence.

  Like a lot of things, stalking hadn’t been invented back then, but that’s definitely what he did to us. This seemed to increase after Mrs Grimshaw died – we didn’t seem to be able to go anywhere without his car appearing and following us. Maybe he thought that the notoriety of the village made him even more irresistible, or maybe one shouldn’t read too much into the mess inside his head. Sometimes he’d follow us at a distance, coasting along, shadowing us a few hundred yards behind no matter where we went. Stopping when we did, crawling along when we set off. It was like the spooky goings on had brought the weirdos out.

  That day he caught up with us on Coopers Lane, pulling up alongside as we rode around the pond, ducks and Canada geese scattering as he sounded his ridiculous two-tone horn – it had only been cool on The Dukes of Hazzard.

  ‘Where you going, girls?’ he asked.

  ‘Nowhere exciting, Todd.’ Katie would extend the vowel sound in his name so it sounded like ‘Toad’. Despite being three or four years older than we were, he still couldn’t grow anything more than facial fuzz, no matter how hard he tried. He’d grown his hair too, but it was thin and patchy, so he looked like a middle-aged hippie trying to be cool.

  ‘Any of you fancy coming for a ride in my car?’ His crooked, toothy smile was like a leer even when he wasn’t being suggestive. ‘We can have a ride in more ways than one if you’d like.’ And then the leer widened and became quite frightening.

  ‘Oh fuck off, Todd!’ I talked too much – verbal diarrhoea, Mum called it – and I knew it pissed some people off, but I just couldn’t stop myself. I was, however, the least sweary of the group – at least I had a filter for that – closely followed by Janey and Sally, and a long way behind Clara and Katie. But not when it came to Todd, who always seemed to push my buttons.

  ‘That’s a really pretty mouth you’ve got, Flip. I could use a mouth like that.’

  ‘Oh you’re fucking gross, just fuck off and leave us alone, you creep.’ Clara had clearly had enough of him as well.

  ‘Oh okay,’ he nodded with feigned disappointment. ‘Not even for a toke on this?’ He leered ag
ain as he raised a freshly rolled joint into view from behind the door.

  ‘Not even if it would mean forgetting you existed,’ Sally tried a more pleasant tack, smiling sweetly as she dismissed him.

  ‘See, I don’t think any of you –’

  ‘That’s enough!’ I completely lost my temper, marching to the water’s edge, picking up a large, heavy stone and marched back to stand in front of the Capri. ‘We’ve asked you to leave us alone, but now if you don’t, I’ll put this stone through the bonnet of your car, or through your pig-ugly face.’

  ‘Jesus, Flip, you’ve gotta learn to relax more, darlin’, I was only having some fun.’

  ‘Leave. Now,’ Katie said, with fire in her eyes, leaning in to his driver’s side window, and Todd, looking from her to me and back again, finally got the message. The tarmac road had recently been resurfaced with a layer of loose chippings, Todd revved his engine and spun his wheels, sending small sharp stones flying in all directions before roaring off up the road, leaving a plume of grey dust in his wake.

  Katie walked up to me and put her hand on my shoulder, then gently lifted the stone from my grip. ‘It’s alright, Flip, he’s gone.’ She tossed the stone down the banking. It bounced and rolled, going slowing down as the mud reached for it, before slipping into the water, sending ripples slowly out across the surface as it disappeared. One small action sending waves out across the whole body of water.

  ‘Why did you bite?’

  ‘I dunno.’

  ‘You never bite.’

  ‘I know, and I don’t know. He just pushes my buttons.’

  ‘And not in a good way.’

  ‘Yeuch, fuck me no.’ I turned and walked away and tried to ignore the funny looks the others gave me for the rest of that day.

  Two days later, Todd Ainsworth was dead.

  ∞ ∞ ∞

  We started fairly early for us that morning, all arriving at Janey’s by nine thirty. There’d been rain the previous day when we’d planned to go to the lake, so we were raring to go this morning. Janey wasn’t quite ready – nothing new there – and she spent the next fifteen minutes going in and out of her house as she checked whether she’d got spare clothes, something to drink, something to eat and some sun cream. When we finally set off, the day was starting to warm up nicely. At the bottom of Stow Lane, our bikes almost turned left themselves onto Lake Road.