The Shadow Man

by Mark Brownless

  ‘That’s it, girl,’ smiled Katie, ‘Get it down yer.’ She took the bottle back from me, and, a more seasoned drinker, glugged a couple of mouthfuls down before passing to Clara. I felt all warm inside now and my heart seemed not to be racing as much. The kettle boiled and Janey carefully poured the steaming water over the mushrooms in her flask.

  ‘So are we going after him, then?’ she asked.

  ‘What?’ Clara seemed less than convinced.

  ‘We said just yesterday that what he wanted was us. So let’s go to him.’

  ‘Now? Tonight? A bit pissed and a bit stoned?’ asked Sal.

  ‘You’ve had some vodka to warm you up and some mushroom tea to mellow you after a big shock. It’s hardly like you’re staggering around or anything.’

  ‘Are you in a fit state to fight that thing?’ exclaimed Clara.

  ‘If it comes down to fighting, we’re fucked. We just need to be calm, that’s all.’

  ‘Not too strong on the mushrooms then, eh?’ I said.

  ‘No, just a couple in there. Will keep our heads clear.’ Janey passed around the little lid of her thermos flask which was doubling as a cup and we all sipped the steaming, sweet, earthy brew. Janey had now taken to adding sugar to the tea after we’d all complained about the taste.

  ‘Christ this is sweet, Janes,’ said Katie, pulling a face.

  ‘There’s no pleasing some people. First it’s too ‘mushroomy’, then it’s ‘dogshit’ – nice by the way – then it’s too sweet. You are a picky lot.’

  ‘Just wanted to have some teeth left after tonight.’

  ‘Fussy cow.’

  Just like Janey said, the heady mix of tea and vodka gave us Dutch courage and we broke camp, packing up our belongings and putting on our packs. Janey said she’d seen the figure disappear into the shadows of the copse, so we followed, knowing almost certainly where he was going. We stumbled through the brambles and gnarled tree roots, swearing more than Clara on a bad day. It seemed to take an age, but finally we started to clamber up the bank at the far end, pulling ourselves up using exposed roots and fallen branches, getting the occasional boost up the bum from behind. We reached the narrow path, emerging into stippled moonlight. In the dark, the path seemed narrower than in the day, with a bottomless drop-off on the right that a few hours earlier would’ve looked like a slide down a bank – almost fun on some days. There was a steady passing of the vodka bottle in one direction, and flask in the other. I didn’t know what it was; the drink, the mushrooms, the adrenaline or a combination, but I was starting to feel both dizzy and sleepy – waking from my stupor as I stumbled on the path. All conversation had stopped, where it had been loud and boisterous when we started on up the track. As if in a dream, we reached the top, where there was the hole in the fence to get to the upper lake. I was swaying like I was really drunk, but feeling like I might fall asleep. Clara stumbled into me and laid her head on my shoulder, sagging against me. Janey pushed through the gap and shone the torch for us, helping Katie through, who nearly fell face first into the nettles.

  ‘I don’t feel too good,’ said Sal and leaned over to puke into the bushes, Janey having to catch her from tipping all the way over. She retched a couple of times, Janey holding her hair back before she stood upright again, strings of snot and puke dangling from her mouth and nose. She wiped her face with the back of her hand. ‘I feel like shit,’ she said, and her legs buckled so Janey had to catch her to stop her falling. Katie wasn’t fairing much better, she and I helped each other along with Clara grabbing hold of us so we staggered together.

  ‘What the fuck is wrong?’ I asked, head swimming, barely able to keep a coherent thought, and vaguely aware that I was slurring my words. We managed to get as far as the gravel area in front of the workshop, to the side of the cave, and all slowly sank to our knees. The dizziness took me over and the periphery of my vision faded to grey. The last thing I remember as I slumped to my side on the ground was Janey standing over me, a strange expression on her face. Now, remembering that look for the first time in thirty years it’s obvious what it was.

  ∞ ∞ ∞

  I’d stayed at The Wheatsheaf for too long. The lumpy bed, the seventies décor, it just wasn’t like being home with Spock and the kids. No, it was time to leave. Today had to be the last day of this trip for me. After breakfast, the plan was for Katie and me to go to the community centre to try and find anything from the old records that might provide a further history for the Shadow Man. Clara and Sal were going to Janey’s to hunt around on the web to see if they could flesh out the story even more. After multiple coffees and uninspiring cereal – my arteries couldn’t cope with another cooked breakfast – I stood rinsing my toothbrush in a trickle of water, wondering if this trip had achieved anything. And then I remembered seeing the figure twirling round in the road the other night.

  Just what the hell was going on in this place?

  I answered the knock at the door. It was Clara, looking a little green about the gills.

  ‘Are you okay, love?’ I asked, ushering her into my room to sit on the bouncy castle mattress.

  ‘No. Fucking full-grease has sat right there,’ she held her hand over her upper abdomen. ‘It won’t make it’s bloody mind up whether it’s gonna go down or come back up.’

  ‘Okay, do you want a lie down or something?’

  ‘Oh no, Christ. Makes me want to spew just thinking about it. No, I reckon I could do with some air, blow the cobwebs off. The walk over to Janey’s will do me some good.’

  ‘Okay, we’ll meet you back at hers later when we’ve finished up?’

  ‘Yeah good idea. I’ll tell Sal. See you later.’ Clara got up to leave and we clasped hands affectionately for a brief second before she went downstairs. Katie and I had always been the obvious leaders and most out-going of the group, but I’d always felt closest to Clara. It seemed incredible to me that we hadn’t kept in touch. I grabbed my keys and bag and collected Katie on the way down to the car.

  Following the fire, the village hall had been rebuilt as a modern community centre, offering childcare, a full library service, multifunction rooms for aerobics classes, religious groups and meetings. Gone was the musty, damp church-hall feel of the old place. Gone was the wooden cladding and seating that had turned the old building into a death trap and had brought the roof down. For years afterwards there was debate and argument about whether the old building should be restored or not. In the end, as always, it came down to money. The community council argued that whilst the council sat around pulling its dick about historic buildings, the area was crying out for a meeting place, and of course, they could build a shiny new one that easily complied with all the fire regulations for a fraction of the cost. Hence the new centre was built and opened after I’d left Laurendon.

  I’d never been in the new building. I’d driven past it occasionally when visiting my parents, but never gone inside. I had fragments of memories of the old village hall; numerous Christmas concerts, and friends’ birthday parties. The new building looked very different, built from sandy brick with a flat zinc roof and plenty of glass, it was light and airy. We didn’t go into the main hall but went straight to the admin offices. Whilst the records section of the old building had been totally destroyed in the fire, as it was so small, it couldn’t hold all the archive material, dating back to when the records began. The older stuff had been stored in a lower level – like the undercroft of a church I suppose – a basement in modern terms, with stone walls and a vaulted ceiling. The fire hadn’t got down into it, so if the Shadow Man had started the fire to destroy the oldest records, he’d failed miserably.

  Now restored to a quiet side room, the records library contained every historic scrap of information recorded about the village and the surrounding area. Katie and I had phoned ahead and asked if we might spend some time there, and they were almost over-enthusiastic in their support. Perhaps nobody ever came in to the records room, with its cream-painted concrete block walls, i
ndustrial pipework and narrow walkways between floor-to-ceiling shelves – like the most unwelcoming library you’d ever seen. Perhaps they needed to demonstrate that each part of the building was being used and so worth its place. Whatever, we found ourselves plied with tea and coffee as we took over two large tables in the middle of the general library and spent some time ferrying large leather-bound volumes containing the history of the village from the records room to our camp. The volumes contained newspaper clippings, and then further back, notes, ledgers and records from the court or magistrate, since the first origins of the village. We’d pushed the two tables together and on one, ledgers, documents, dossiers and intriguing leather envelopes held closed by string were piled high. The other table became our workspace, each of us piling ledgers between our two open laptops. It was in one of these volumes that we found what we were looking for.

  Katie cautiously turned a cardboard page, its contents covered in cellophane. ‘It’s all very fragile,’ she said, ‘be careful.’ The ledgers still demanded care when you considered the age of the paper within. From what we could make out from the files and computer records, the village had been around since the twelfth century, when local barons – wealthy lords who owned land – brought in workers to farm the land and built a village on the hill. We found a record from 1725 noting more farms were built on the land. Two were built opposite each other on the junction of what is now Stow Lane and Lake Road, just along from the pond, which was obviously still in existence. Although back then, the lakes, created from quarrying in the 1960s and 70s, didn’t exist and were just farmland. Other people set up home; labourers, a blacksmith, shopkeepers, a tavern and ultimately a school, and self-appointed community leaders began to record the events and legal happenings within the village. Several cuttings dating back to the later 1700s noted that a number of children had gone missing. They also noted that a number of people had burned to death as well, but didn’t link the two. The records described searches of the land, of outbuildings and then dwelling places themselves. Everyone’s home was searched, apart from the gentry. They failed to record the irony that if the killer was from more noble lineage, he would’ve got away scot-free. They did record that the search had progressed over time, until they had searched the home of William Tullock, a man described as ‘strange’ and who always ‘kept himself to himself’. The next entry mentioned that clothing belonging to the missing children had been found in his house. An entry from the local magistrate noted that Tullock was detained and kept in chains in the cellar of the magistrate’s house. A meeting there concluded that he must have taken the five children and kept some of their clothing as ‘mementos.’

  ‘He was a sick bastard,’ Katie said, curling her lip in distaste.

  ‘If it was him.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Well, they’ve searched the home of a misfit guy, wouldn’t have been warrants or requirements for evidence then.’

  ‘And the clothing?’

  ‘All inadmissible by today’s standards, no forensics, no actual police force, just a hate mob and a kangaroo court.’

  ‘So, he wasn’t the killer then?’

  ‘No, he might’ve been, but we’ll never know, just that a committee decided he was.’

  ‘Hang on, there’s another entry here.’ Katie moved to another page. ‘It looks like they concluded that Tullock was also the ‘prowler’, seen periodically around the homes in the community at night. When children began to go missing, their peers began to call him the Shadow Man. They created a nursery rhyme in the belief that its recital would protect them from him.’

  ‘Nursery rhyme? Like ours?’ I said, frowning.

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘No. We created that nursery rhyme. We did.’

  ‘But it’s written here – it’s more old-fashioned, but it’s the same thing. We can’t have done.’

  ‘That’s fucked up – I know we wrote it, I remember being shit-scared one night and starting to say some lines and we all just joined in. How can we have known this rhyme in the first place to then start reciting it? Unless we’d heard it before – but I can’t remember.’

  ‘I don’t see how any of us can have known this rhyme. But it’s there in black and white.’

  ‘So frustrating that there’s still some blanks in my memory.’

  ‘They burnt him at the stake, look.’ Katie indicated an article on the next page, stating that ‘the murderer, William Tullock, was taken to the island in the middle of the village pond and tied to a stake, around which was placed firewood and other timbers, and, after reading the charges thus proven against him, the fire was lit.’

  ‘It says the whole village turned out to watch, and they cheered at his screams,’ I said, continuing to read from the report.

  ‘He was their first bogeyman.’

  ‘And they got him.’

  ‘Or they got someone.’

  ‘Hey, take a look at this.’ I pointed elsewhere on the page.

  ‘What you got?’

  ‘There’s one entry that says his son, Daniel Tullock, was taken in by another family and his name changed to Teal.’

  ‘Teal?’

  ‘Yes, the family that adopted him changed his surname to theirs, but looking at these stories in the file, I don’t think it worked out too well.’

  ‘Show me.’ Katie crowded in by my side to get a better look at the notes I was reading.

  ‘Look here – there’s an entry saying about a theft of some money and food, accusing Daniel Teal.’

  ‘Then there’s another about an attack on someone.’

  ‘Then his new family disowns him, and he disappears.’ I continued to flick through the volumes while Katie searched on the online library resources. Larger towns had extensive archives of their records, first on microfiche and latterly computer files for ease of storage. If we spent long enough, we essentially had access to the whole country.

  ‘But maybe not,’ Katie said pointing to a screengrab of a press clipping, ‘Look here. The name of Teal, comes up over in the Vale – and then years later, even as far as Sheffield.’

  ‘Yes, look, a story of a fire in some village and Daniel Teal was a suspect, but then the story dies and we see nothing more in this thread of cuttings. Anything on an internet search?’

  ‘You’ll need to give me a few minutes, Flip.’

  ‘Okay. I’m gonna take some of this stuff back to the records room, give us a bit more space.’ I piled up some of the leather volumes that we’d classed as ‘done’ and carried them carefully back to records, filing them where we’d found them. I returned and Katie had more to tell me.

  ‘There’s not enough logged from the news of that time for such a small place. As we said, there is some of Sheffield’s big news – a huge fire in a mill for example. But no link to Teal.’

  ‘You don’t think the mill fire could be him?’

  ‘Who knows, Flip. If you look at these search results here, there are stories down the years, though; interviews with a Teal at the scene of a fire, a Teal as a suspect where people have been burned to death. When you look at them and cross-reference the name, it’s synonymous with arson and people dying.’

  ‘Oh my fucking God, Jesus Christ. I’ve just thought of something.’ A thought, a memory had just coalesced out of the fog. And it was terrifying.

  ‘This is a hell of a time to get religion, sister.’

  ‘Just let me get on the computer, will you?’ We changed seats and I immediately started to type, searching on family names in the village – searching for confirmation of what I already knew. ‘Fuck me.’ I stared at the screen, my stomach turned and wretched, almost throwing its contents at the laptop.

  ‘Oh my God, you’re right.’ Katie stared at the screen, the truth undeniable. I’d kind of half remembered it as soon as Katie mentioned Tullock’s adopted name, and the memory had been gnawing away at me in the background, like the sound of a fly in your bedroom, buzzing all night until you really have to get
up to deal with the bastard.

  ‘Yep, Janey’s mum’s maiden name was Teal. Do you think she’s related to him? Rather than to his adopted family, I mean?’

  ‘Well of course she’s related to him. He was the murdering arsonist wasn’t he?’

  ‘So Janey’s descended from William Tullock. She’s the Shadow Man.’

  Chapter 20 – X – The Circle of Fire

  TRIUMPH.

  That was the look on Janey’s face as I passed out. She was standing over us as if she’d won, and then the world disappeared from around me.

  I had a dream. I dreamt I was laying on the ground, immobile, my hands tied and body sunk into a coffin-shaped hole.

  You will forget, you will forget, you will forget.

  Then I was aware of a smell, a stench, something strong and foul, like death and shit had teamed up to create a fragrance.

  You will forget, you will forget, you will forget.

  Then something was crawling over me, stinking of it, slimy and horrible, its cold body brushing against mine and I tried to flinch away, its touch so reprehensible and abhorrent. It whispered to me, chanted, like they were incantations or instructions.

  You will forget, you will forget, you will forget.

  I thought I’d gag, I thought that maybe I’d already choked on my own vomit, such was the smell and taste in my mouth.

  Slowly my awareness returned, and the first thing I remember was a sound. I could hear a crackling and popping, the sound of a fire and I could feel its heat. The resin in the wood would suddenly explode with a spitting-bang as the fire roared away. I opened my eyes, head feeling like it was full of concrete. I was still laying on my side, my head tilted downwards at a sharp angle, stretching my neck painfully. The rough stone and gravel on the floor dug into the thin skin of my forehead, adding to the discomfort. I tried to move but my wrists were tied in front of me with baler twine. I could see two of the others, Katie and Clara, on either side of the fire, they too were lying on their sides on the ground, but they looked like they were still out. Behind me I heard someone coughing and retching, and I knew it was Sally, but I couldn’t turn to look what state she was in. Still breathing would have to do for the moment. I tried to sit up, but my head was throbbing so hard, the pounding so painful, that the fog closed over me again, the sound of laughter fading away just as I passed out.