The Shadow Man

by Mark Brownless

  We finally met outside the show at midday, the sun beating down from the cloudless skies, already teasing the mercury higher. We’d all dressed for the summer in shorts and strappy tops, meaning we’d look as red as lobsters later. On entering the field, you were always presented with portable showrooms for double glazing, car dealers and agricultural manufacturers. Each had a range of sales promotional materials, like brochures, stickers and fliers. We would take a plastic bag from a place offering such goodie bags and proceed to fill them with as many brochures as possible. It wasn’t really a competition, but it was – you hadn’t ‘done’ the show properly if you hadn’t collected the brochures. The entire village was full of nerds. The first part of the show always felt sparse, and when you’d got past seeing giant brand-new green tractors or reversible ploughs, there wasn’t much left to see. All the exhibits and entertainments were gathered around the perimeter of the field, leaving a series of show rings in the centre. The largest of these was for the equestrian competition and exhibitors in the heavy horse, hunter and pony classes, with progressively smaller rings for cattle, sheep and even fancy rabbits. The main ring was demarcated by blue rope – which looked suspiciously like bailer twine – periodically tied off on a series of rusting metal posts, with an open section for competitors to access the ring. The smaller rings were essentially corrals of straw bales, arranged two or three high depending on the jumping capability of the competitors, with smaller pens off them, where animals would wait their turn to perform – like a farming equivalent of a Formula One pit lane made entirely of straw. From above, the show rings would’ve looked like an irregular cross-section of a beehive.

  Ed Grissholm, one of the oldest farmers in the village, stood inside one of these corrals, surrounded by sheep with curling horns. The Joint General Secretary of Laurendon Agricultural Society was dressed in green wellington boots, tweed trousers pulled up so high we called them chest warmers, and brown braces over a white checked shirt. He looked every inch the farmer, and even on a day like today, wearing his best clothes, he still stank of cow shit. His ancient battered trilby was pushed back on his forehead, revealing a patch of skin that was crying out for some protection in a red glowing protest, and his jowly three-day growth of beard and red countenance, made him look permanently angry.

  We walked around the top end of the show, passing another loudspeaker affixed to a freestanding pole, which itself was drowned out by the unmistakable sound – and petrol smell – of a generator powering the world’s worst bouncy castle. We’d navigated our way past the myriads of new car salesman, outdoor gear and riding tack stalls. Now from the far end, we were faced with the engine-room of the show. To our left, just beyond the bouncy castle, was a marquee full of exhibits in categories such as ‘Best jam and other preserves,’ ‘Largest onion,’ and ‘Carrot that looks most like a dick.’ It’s possible I made the last one up, but you get the idea. There were plenty of cake prizes, and bottles of homemade wine and beer, so at least some of the judges would be enjoying themselves before they moved on to the flower arranging.

  We passed Mr Grissholm, tending his sheep, and stopped to admire them, leaning over the bales to encourage the fairly tame animals to have their ears rubbed. Bo Peep he was not.

  ‘I’ve seen you lot, riding around,’ he said, his angry eyes surveying us like Mr Potato Head.

  ‘I’m sorry, Mr Gruesome – have we done something wrong?’ I asked.

  ‘You young buggers are all’us up to nah good.’

  ‘Can we pat your sheep, please?’ I asked, really quite scared by this seemingly mean old fart.

  ‘Aye go on then. But be careful of ’em. Don’t get ’em excited or they’ll never have a chance.’

  ‘Fucking old codger,’ said Janey when he turned his back again, and several of us pulled faces at him. We petted the sheep rather half-heartedly, then Sally mentioned ice cream and we all got up to leave. I immediately felt faint, and would’ve fallen if Clara hadn’t grabbed my arm. A haze started to close in on my vision and the aperture of clarity shrank rapidly, seeming to disappear in the distance.

  ‘Hey are you okay? Flip?’ Sally said, giving me a shake, holding me up by my shoulders. The dizziness receded but all I could do was nod dumbly. ‘Let’s get you a seat.’ We moved away from the show rings, not wanting to further irk the farmer by sitting on the straw bales. They led me to the vintage tractor display and I plonked myself down on the running boards of an old Fordson Major. I put my head in my hands, breathing heavily and heard someone say. ‘Let’s get her a drink.’

  ‘I’ll go,’ came the reply, from Janey who ran off to find a drinks stall.

  I don’t know if I was dehydrated, or if it was the strong smell of the animals on such a hot day, or maybe the sweet smell of hot dog stalls mixing with candy floss, but whatever it was, the sickly faint feeling gradually faded and I sat upright. In the distance I could see Janey returning carrying a small cardboard box. She grinned as she approached and handed me a red ‘cup’ drink, the ridged plastic container nestling in my hand as I plunged the straw through the foil lid and took a long drink of the horribly synthetic raspberry flavoured juice. Janey handed out various coloured drinks to the others, and then delved back into the box to bring out Fab lollies. As she looked down, pandemonium struck behind her. My head had just stopped swimming but it was still in the showers trying to pull its bathers off when I looked up. Janey was in focus, but behind her was a blurred yellow glow. I blinked several times and screams drew the attention of the others who turned to look. With a final blink my eyes cleared and I saw Ed Grissholm, standing in his straw corral, surrounded by his sheep and consumed by fire. His body and face almost unrecognisable behind the flames. He stood, arms outstretched as panicking animals tried to jump the two-layer straw barrier to escape, a relatively easy jump for calm sheep, but almost impossible in their desperation as they fought to get away from the burning farmer, who was twirling around and setting fire to more of the tinder-dry bales. Before long the whole lot was burning and the smell of roasting mutton was as strong in the air as that of roasted human. I could hear a high-pitched whine, like the propeller engine of a small plane or the sound of air escaping from a tightly-squeezed balloon neck, and I realised it was Mr Grissholm himself, keening a cry of unimaginable pain, despair and fear. Through the flames I watched his flesh seem to melt away and he ceased to be Mr Ed Grissholm – the grumpy bastard farmer who never liked us riding along the public paths across his land, but who really wasn’t such a bad person – and he became a thing, a thing whose left leg melted away and caused him to collapse down on that side, arms waving as his screams died. Numerous people from other exhibits and stalls trained fire extinguishers on the corral, but the straw was too well-alight. Ironically, a planned demonstration by the fire service had been cancelled because they were short-staffed, so there was precious little anyone could do to put him out.

  ‘Oh Jesus, how did that happen?’

  ‘You must’ve just walked past it, Janey,’ I said.

  ‘Yeah I can’t believe I didn’t see anything – he seemed okay when I went by – or maybe I didn’t take too much notice?’

  ‘A man’s dead here, you can’t just say you didn’t notice,’ snapped Clara.

  ‘Look, I’m sorry, Miss-fucking-Marple, but I wasn’t going around expecting someone to burst into flames, okay?’

  ‘Hey it’s okay, Janey, there was nothing you could’ve done even if you were right there, was there? You might’ve got horribly burned yourself,’ I said.

  ‘Christ, it’s awful and we’re just standing watching the freak show. Let’s go shall we...?’ Janey gestured with her head.

  Fab lollies and multi-coloured cup drinks in tow we wandered back to the top of the showground to make our way to the exit. The sheep corral was only now being extinguished with the hose set up to fill the animal water troughs. The pumped pressure was so poor, however, all the men might’ve stood around and pissed on it and been just as effective.
In the middle of the straw, now largely turned to ash, was a grotesque tableau of man and sheep, with an impossible arrangement of blackened bodies and limbs, all steaming under the limp water spray. Grown-ups tried to shield little kids from seeing the nightmare and for the first time that day, tannoy-man had shut-up. We moved a little quicker when we heard the approaching sirens, and left the field just as two police cars and a fire engine turned in.

  ‘Did you see his face melt?’ asked Janey.

  ‘Bloody hell and his leg just burned away and snapped.’

  ‘Fire’s gotta be bloody hot to take bone with it – look at crematoriums.’ We all looked at Janey, who was the brightest amongst us but sometimes her knowledge, as in this case, bordered on the macabre. ‘What?’ she asked, shrugging her shoulders.

  In the days to come, the fire service concluded that Mr Grissholm’s cigarette end had come into contact with fuel slowly leaking from the bouncy castle’s generator. The whole area, they reckoned, had been drenched in accelerant. An accident waiting to happen. After that the show was never really the same. It was ultimately cancelled a few years later as bigger and better regional shows took over from those in local villages. It was the beginning of the end for Laurendon in more ways than one.

  A week later, we stared into the flames of the fire we’d built down at the lake and discussed what had happened. ‘That wasn’t some leaky petrol and a cigarette.’ I said, purely to put it out there, and waited for the disagreement.

  ‘He would have to have been soaked in the stuff – he went up like a match,’ agreed Sal.

  ‘Something else is going on,’ Janey said, tossing a couple of branches on to keep the fire going. ‘I didn’t smell petrol when I walked past.’

  ‘Oh fuck off, the lot of you,’ said Clara in typical fashion. ‘What else is going on? Go on.’

  ‘We just walk past a guy, don’t smell anything, don’t see him smoking, and yet five minutes later he goes up like tinder from petrol and cigarettes,’ I said.

  ‘So why would they lie, and what really happened?’

  ‘Well, the Shadow Man is what,’ said Janey. ‘It has to be him.’

  ‘In the day? In front of all those people?’ asked Katie.

  ‘Maybe he’s escalating, maybe he’s doing it to show us how he can get at us.’

  ‘And you don’t think that the official explanation has any merit?’ asked Clara.

  ‘No. Not really. So yeah, I’m ready to believe that the more plausible story is a vengeful two-hundred-odd-year-old spirit.’

  ‘Janey –’

  ‘Fuck off?’

  ‘Well, I wasn’t going to say exactly that, but yeah, why not?’

  ‘If there was something plausible, something reasonable, even something that was someone’s fault, they’d have found it out and released it, but they haven’t. If they could come up with something else, something believable for those that were there, then they would’ve – but they haven’t. Their story’s shite. Even spontaneous human combustion would be a better story than what they’ve come up with, but they can’t use that again can they?’

  ‘I dunno, I get the historic story but I’m still not quite believing the Shadow Man as here and now,’ said Clara, her face a picture of doubt and confusion.

  ‘Give me a better scenario. None of us believe the official one. So what else is there? And what if, when you take away the most logical of explanations, you’re left with something crazy.’

  ‘That’s called something isn’t it?’ asked Sal.

  ‘Yeah, fucking scary.’

  Chapter 16 – Then – You Reap What You Sow

  FOR ALL THE days that we went to the lake, or cycled around, or visited people that summer, there were plenty of other days when I, and we as a group, were just bored. Today was like that. I knew a couple of the others were busy so we didn’t have anything planned. I called for Janey but she wasn’t around. It did nark me a bit that no one had asked me to tag along with whatever they were doing, but we weren’t each other’s keepers, and if they had things to do then it couldn’t be helped. I was mindlessly riding around, thinking of something to do – not wanting to go back home because Mum would’ve loved to have had a little slave for the day, or might perhaps have decided we should do some baking together, which would’ve been excruciating. I rode around the pond and into the new estate of bungalows, climbing up the tall kerbs and jumping off, trying to get both wheels to land simultaneously and imagining myself on some trials bike, jumping over cars or something. We did that sometimes. Not jumping over cars, of course, but building ramps and racing along seeing how far and how high we could jump. With today’s mobile video technology we would’ve no doubt been embarrassed at how poor our efforts were, but back then we jumped high and far, often being sent flying when we landed.

  I rode through the village and saw Luke Lewis and some of his mates outside the shop, which had been my planned destination, for an Ice Pop before heading slowly home. I was on the bend that swept into the car park, about to turn in, but on seeing them I immediately swerved down dogshit alley, the lane that would take me behind the housing estate opposite. I stopped and looked over the fence panel bordering the garden of the first house, standing on my pedals and pulling myself up so I could peer over the top of the panel. The unplaned timber dug into my hands and the sweet-acrid smell of new creosote stuck in my nostrils. I could see the boys outside the shop, dicking around as usual, riding their bikes at each other and making a game of pushing someone else to the floor. Luke looked up after his own mock joust. His friend, whom I didn’t know, rolled on the floor clutching his shin where Luke’s pedal had scraped him. Luke seemed to look straight at me, although I was sure I was hidden behind the fence. He seemed to stare for a long time, then looked away again. I wasn’t going to hang around and wanted to put as much distance between them and me as I could. I pedalled hard along the narrow lane, sometimes riding over tarmac, sometimes mud. When they’d been laying the road to the new estate, they’d sometimes poured leftovers onto this lane and badly flattened it down. I slalomed around the copious quantities of dog shit as I went, watching fences and brick walls flash in front of my eyes before wrenching the bike back onto the middle of the track. If I’d met anyone coming the other way I’d have been finished – at this speed there was no way to avoid a collision. After half a mile of constantly looking over my shoulder to see if I was being pursued, I burst out of the lane across the pavement and bounced down the kerb onto the road, seeing the car too late as it sped along Cooper’s Lane, bearing down on me, my pace making a quick change of direction impossible. I wrenched the handlebars and leaned down, dropping my knee as if I was riding in Moto GP. The driver slammed on the brakes, the tyres screeching and white smoke spewing from the rubber. All four wheels locked up – ABS being a luxury for the few back then rather than a standard feature. I was winning my battle with my bike, leaning over at almost a forty-five degree angle, my own tyres complaining almost as much as the car’s. Turning with almost oil-tanker slowness, the bike gradually came round, now missing the front grille, now the front wheel, but the car wasn’t stopping. With the brakes locked, it skidded along the tarmac, closing the distance, the skid causing it to drift toward me with the camber on the road. I had a split-second decision to make – brakes or power – and in that moment there was only one option, and that was power. I pedalled hard, the tyres screaming as they tried to grip the road, the angle of the bike meaning that there was so little traction and the back wheel started to slip from under me. Dropping the bike would’ve been game over – I would’ve gone straight under the car’s front wheel – but I’d committed to this and had run out of options. I eased my pressure on the pedals slightly, yet the drift continued, the wheel gliding in slow motion, but only for an instant before the tyre gripped. Finally being pushed in the right direction I started to come out of the lean and shot forward, my hand reaching up to push me clear of the passenger wing mirror as I straightened up and flew past the ski
dding car. The driver angrily sounded his horn again and again as he reached a halt in a cloud of smoke. I could hear him shouting and swearing even as I cycled away. For a second I wondered if he might turn around and come after me, and once again I was on edge as the adrenalin spiked, heart thumping high in my chest, the blood pounding in my ears.

  I headed along Cooper’s Lane, flying by the entrance to the bungalow estate and the short cut to Janey’s, gradually allowing the bike to slow until I rode lazily around the pond as my body calmed down. My thoughts were elsewhere and I found myself out on Lake Road – I’d never been out here by myself before and it felt odd to be here without the others. I had no idea what I was going to do – go to the lake I supposed – but I didn’t have a plan and was going with whatever happened.

  I’ll never know why I looked over my shoulder – I suppose you do from time to time when you’re cycling, but there was no engine noise or anything to alert me. I just did. Luke Lewis was coming up hard behind me, his face contorted with anger and hatred, sweat staining the front of his t-shirt. He was closing the fifty-yard distance between us like I was standing still and once again I had to act fast. In that moment I thought I saw another bike way behind us on the road, but I could’ve been mistaken – I hoped it wasn’t another of his friends. I stood on my pedals, pushing down and almost liking the feel of the massive strain I was suddenly putting through my thigh muscles, feeling them scream in protest, but knowing they needed to give me everything. Of all the things that my parents would save money on, would skimp on, my bike wasn’t one. Kids’ bikes back then weren’t massively expensive road or mountain bikes, but mine, which would probably be called a mountain bike or hybrid today, was light and fast. Despite my putting my foot down, Luke was still closing quickly and I looked back in time to see his powerful arm swinging at me in a big arc to try and knock me off. I ducked, my forehead almost hitting the handlebars, and veered across the road aiming for the entrance to the tiny track that led to the first lake – much smaller than ‘ours’ and far too close to the road for us to frequent, but it was the best option to get away from the open road where he was going to be quicker. I heard him swear somewhere behind me as he had to rapidly change direction to give chase, then I was enveloped by the trees, disappearing from view and gaining a few yards. I realised I’d only ridden this path a couple of times and I desperately searched my memory for any reconnaissance advice. Branches had overgrown the path as it swept down to the water, scratching and clawing at my face and arms as I flew along, my legs pumping for all they were worth. I heard him on the path behind, my advantage shrinking as he closed the distance between us on his bigger bike. The lake appeared on the left and I contemplated jumping in, backing my own strong swimming ability against his, but I realised that I would be trapped in the water, particularly if more of his friends turned up, and I’d be a goner. The bank slowly rose up above the waterline and I left the path to ride along the top of it, goading him to follow me off the path which took a wider route around. The surface was uneven and slightly muddy, my tyres struggling to maintain a grip. In front of me I saw another trail leading off at a right angle to the one circling the lake, leading away into the woods. I wrenched my handlebars hard around, once again throwing myself into a precarious lean to swing the bike over and make the turn. The back-end started to slide out, speedway-style before the tyres gripped and I shot down the side of the bank and along the path, cutting right in front of Luke who had stayed on the perimeter, going the longer way round but maintaining more speed. He was racing so fast that he missed the turn, but sadly failed to mangle himself in the bushes just beyond. I heard him curse again as he stopped to turn his bike, and now I’d put some genuine daylight between us as the path undulated up and down, turning left and right, rising to the wooden footbridge over the feeder stream to the lake, the bike almost airborne as the path dropped down again on the other side. My lead over him had only lasted a quarter of a mile and he was right behind me again. I needed to do something to shake him off and quickly as my legs tired, my muscles burning, my breathing more laboured. Like a popping cork, I burst from the trees onto a farm road, not as rutted as the one leading to the second lake, but running in a parallel direction several fields over, further out from the farmstead. My pace slowed on the uneven surface, baked hard from the sun, and I almost fell a couple of times. There were gateways to fields, some harvested, some not, and I hoped that I might find someone on a combine or pulling a baler who would provide me with a haven. Round bales stood like standing stones in the fields. I daren’t look back but I knew he must be close, and I hoped he was having more difficulty than me on the terrain. The next opening on the right was a wheat field and I turned into it, trying to do something to throw him off and gain some time. I immediately realised my mistake, as the field had yet to be cut, the wheat heads catching around my legs and slowing me almost to a halt as I tried in vain to pedal against the tide.