The Shadow Man

by Mark Brownless

  ∞ ∞ ∞

  ‘Let me call Clara and Sal, we’ve gotta warn them.’ I pulled out my phone. There were missed calls from both of them. A lot from Sal. ‘Shit, something’s happening. I hope we’re not too late.’ I called her number. It rang out four times before going to voicemail – I’d heard her outgoing message a few times in the last couple of weeks when organising this trip. But it had been changed, and all I heard on the message now was a scream. It was like Sal was in the same room, screaming in my ear. My blood turned to ice and my heart started to pound, the breath catching in my throat. ‘She’s got Sal,’ I said.

  As I was calling Sal, Katie called Clara to save time. She answered straightaway and Katie put her on speaker.

  ‘Where are you?’

  ‘I went for a walk. Janey asked Sal to help her sort some clothes out. Felt like three was a crowd so I’ve walked round the village. Heading back to the pub now as it goes. What’ve you found?’

  ‘Janey’s the Shadow Man,’ Katie said.

  ‘Fuck off, is she?’ Clara almost laughed at us down the phone line.

  ‘Her mother’s maiden name is Teal, and the son of the guy who was burned at the stake for being the Shadow Man changed his name to Teal.’

  ‘Shit. No way.’

  ‘There’ve been Teals around burnings across the north of England for two hundred years,’ I said.

  ‘It’s like a family business,’ Katie added.

  ‘Oh my God, Sal.’ I could hear the terror in Clara’s voice.

  ‘Get to the pub and I’ll pick you up – we’re almost at the car now.’

  I screeched to a halt beside Clara and she jumped into the Land Rover. I roared off, sending chippings and tufts of grass from the verge flying as I did so.

  ‘Where’re we going?’ Clara asked.

  ‘Janey’s. Gotta see if they’re still there.’

  ‘And if they are?’

  ‘Let’s worry about that when we get there,’ I said tearing along Stow Road, drawing some disapproving looks from local pedestrians. I pulled up outside Janey’s house, parked halfway up the pavement and we all got out at a run, sprinting to her porch door as fast as we could.

  ‘Janey. Are you there? Let us in, babe,’ Katie got there first, banging hard on the door with her palm. I checked the windows round the back but couldn’t see anyone home. The strange dark polytunnel jutted out like a witch’s nose from the back of the place. While Katie continued to bang on the door, Clara looked underneath cracked and neglected plant pots – but why would anyone who never went out hide a spare key? An old concrete block sat at the base of the garden wall. Abandoned and unused for decades it was now a home to a healthy culture of moss and a shelter for woodlice and earwigs. I bent and picked up the heavy object, grunting as I did and heaving it against my chest. Woodlice fell away and a millipede ran up my arm as I wheezed another breath. Gripping the concrete firmly I twisted my body away from the door then turned quickly to smash the heavy weight against the side of the lock and door handle. There was a breaking sound and the door flew open, a piece of PVC the length of the door splintered from the side of the lock and cartwheeled off into the kitchen.

  ‘Nice,’ said Katie poking her head round the door. ‘Let’s get in here and see if anyone’s at home. We split up and quickly checked each room – the house was empty – Janey and Sal had gone.

  ‘Okay let’s see if we can find anything.’ I nodded at the others. Clara made a start in the kitchen and ‘middle’ room while Katie went to the lounge, leaving me with Janey’s bedroom. It looked exactly the same as when I’d snooped around when we first got here a thousand years ago, but now I realised what I was seeing. I’d seen the black trilby on the corner of the noticeboard but hadn’t given it any more thought until now. It was the hat that Janey had worn as the Shadow Man. The one – or one like it – that she’d worn when she’d attacked Luke that day, and worn in the rain in my front garden. It had been hung up in her room for all to see since we arrived. She must’ve used the black scarf hung alongside it to cover her face – only Luke had seen her up close and might’ve realised that someone was underneath.

  Those days. I’d been terrified of a wraith or a spirit when really it was someone I’d called friend.

  I stood at the small table looking down at the crude model of the lake. It was like she’d been re-enacting the events of years before. I looked up at the notice-board, reading the stories and newspaper clippings. Story after story of burnings and fatal fires across the country. These clippings were all about her. Not an interest or an obsession but a legacy – a diary of murder and terror. I reached up to the cork board and pulled down a faded, grainy picture. It was hard to tell because of its age, but it looked like a newspaper snap that some local hack had taken at Janey’s parent’s funeral – God knows why they thought that was newsworthy.

  ‘That’s odd,’ I found myself saying out loud.

  ‘What is?’ called Clara.

  ‘Come and look at this picture.’ Clara hurried into the bedroom and I handed her the image.

  ‘It’s Janey dressed in black. What are you getting at?’ Clara looked at me, shaking her head.

  ‘Well, this is Janey at the graveside, right?’

  ‘It looks like that. And look at her, she’s got this calm look on her face. She almost looks happy,’ Clara held the picture between thumb and forefinger as if she might get contaminated by it.

  ‘Yeah but look again. She said she was fat, that she’d been in a mess, mentally, leading up to her parent’s death and got really fat. So she would’ve been overweight at their funeral. But here she is looking as slim as ever.’ Clara and I exchanged a glance.

  ‘What are you thinking?’ she asked.

  ‘Okay, I’ll search her parents’ room – bedside cabinets, dressing tables and all that. You do the bathroom cabinet.’

  ‘What am I looking for?’

  ‘Tablets.’

  We split up and I headed straight for the dressing table in Mr and Mrs Pullman’s room. I went through the drawers, finding his and hers underwear, socks and tights, vests, scarves and t-shirts. Janey hadn’t thrown anything away. I took the briefest of glimpses in the wardrobe and found nothing of note, although there were quite a few shoeboxes that we might need to check. On to the bedside cabinets. On one side was Arthur C Clarke, a comb, a packet of condoms – which sent all kinds of weird thoughts going through my head – and some Rennies. On the other side of the bed was Jackie Collins – much racier than my mum’s Mills and Boon – some hand cream and a hair net.

  ‘What’ve you got?’ asked Clara walking into the bedroom.

  ‘A weird sense of going back in time to see things that no one has used for twenty-five to thirty years, yet here we all are.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Things. Stuff. The things you use every day that you need like a comb or a hair net or a book. All left here, like you were going to come back into the room that evening. It’s like a museum to them. It makes me want to cry remembering all my parents’ stuff that was like this. I got rid of it all and I could’ve kept it. But it also freaks me out that she’s left it frozen in time like this.’

  ‘Did you find any pills?’

  ‘What? No,’ I said bringing myself back to reality.

  ‘Neither did I, beyond paracetamol and ibuprofen. What are you so keen on finding pills for, anyway?’

  ‘Janey said her folks were terminally ill and so they went off for their little day trip without her. But if you’re that ill, you must be on a shitload of meds. Fuck, even just a few pills – decent painkillers or stuff to stop you feeling sick or something. But there’s nothing above paracetamol here.’

  ‘Maybe she cleared them out?’

  ‘She clear out anything else?’ I thought about the Rennies and the condoms. ‘No. But that means she was lying about her parents. She’s just killed them, and –’

  ‘– she must be lying about everything else.’

  A bang and a c
lank jolted us back to reality from Keyser Söze-land and I poked my head out of the bedroom. Katie was standing by the back door with the concrete block in her hands after using it to smash the padlock off the door to Janey’s mushroom farm.

  ‘Flip, you better come and take a look at this,’ Katie’s voice shook – completely out of character for her.

  ‘What is it?’ I said, approaching along the hallway and looking through the now smashed doorway into the gloom created by the polytunnel room. ‘Oh Christ.’ At first glance it was laid out like a greenhouse – rows of shelves on the three available sides, all containing long plastic boxes full of soil. Janey’s mushroom propagation was well-organised, with each shelf containing mushrooms at a different stage of growth – the lower shelves had specimens just erupting from the soil, the middle shelves were more fully developed and the top shelves were bare soil. A complex sprinkler system was set up with small grey pipes bolted just above the boxes with spray bars to keep the soil moist. The pipes all congregated on the wall in a large manifold with a digital timer. Overhead lighting hung down above each of the rows of boxes, illuminating them at a low and precise level. This was the cutting edge of fungiculture and something that Janey had obviously gone to a lot of time and effort to research and set up.

  ‘How could she do all this if she doesn’t go out? Can you get all this online?’ asked Clara.

  ‘She doesn’t not go out though, does she?’ I said. ‘That’s all bullshit. It’s a lie to make us think of her one way and never suspect what she really is.’

  ‘Christ yes, how stupid am I?’

  ‘It’s been a long day already.’

  ‘What if more of it’s bullshit?’ asked Katie.

  ‘Like what?’ I asked turning to face her. ‘She isn’t faking her injuries, you can’t fake those scars.’

  ‘Well, you could, but I don’t think she is. We know she lost her leg, too. But what about faking the pain that she’s in? Maybe that’s a lie to add to the legend too?’

  ‘So why all this?’ I pointed toward the shelves.

  ‘But in that case, why that?’ Katie pointed at the floor. Elevated on some four-by-two timber lengths was a large wooden box half-full of soil which was quite well compacted in places. There was a small table next to it with a lamp that Janey hadn’t switched off and which was throwing a gloomy light across this end of the room. Nearest us was a pillow in a pink pillowcase that was faded from repeated trips through the washing machine, and a duvet thrown back across the lower part of the box had a matching cover. Janey slept in a box full of soil, all cosy under a blanket and comfortable on her pillow, surrounded by the damp wetness of the soil nurturing her magic mushrooms. This was Janey’s bedroom.

  My phone beeped as I received a message. The top lake. Time’s running out and the Shadow Man’s here. We were two steps behind her, unable to anticipate her next move, falling into a series of traps she’d laid for us. Right back to when she contacted us asking about the dreams. She must’ve done something to us to make us forget and then remember.

  I thought back to my dream, and the voice telling me I must forget, I must forget. I remembered then that I was stoned on mushrooms at the time. She’d used it as a form of hypnosis. I’d read somewhere that people who’d dropped acid twenty years ago could still get flashbacks to bad trips they’d had even now. And maybe that’s what was happening here. Maybe she’d set something up, to trigger us, ready for this moment.

  Janey wants us up at the top lake?

  Let’s not keep her waiting.

  ∞ ∞ ∞

  I don’t know how long I was out for, probably only a matter of seconds, but the noise of the fire seeped into my consciousness to rouse me once again. The cold gravel floor dug into head and left shoulder where I’d fallen over, and the pain served to bring me around properly. I tried to sit up, but my arms would barely work, I was groggy and my mouth tinder dry. I managed to lever myself upright, my eyes fixated on the flames, my back complaining, and my legs stiff from being twisted underneath me.

  ‘Welcome back, Flip.’ It was Janey’s voice somewhere above me, slowly drifting into my head.

  My head.

  Which weighed as much as a car slowly cranked itself upright and there she was, beside the fire. She stood alert and totally naked, her body covered in the stinking mud from the lake, smeared all over her, pulled through her hair so it stood in spikes and covering all but her eyes. ‘Always a bit behind, but nothing new there, is there?’ Her voice was different, stronger, bitter and more aggressive than she’d ever sounded.

  ‘What’s going on?’ I managed to mumble, my lips sticking together.

  ‘Well, let’s see. Luke here is very glad that I’ve let him out of the workshop – apparently being left alone there for a few days can really do your head in.’

  ‘Fucking bitch.’ It was the first notice I’d taken of the naked figure kneeling at Janey’s feet. Luke Lewis was bound with ropes running round his chest in several loops, disappearing behind him running lengthways down his body going under his crotch. He was kneeling in quite a flexed position with his hands behind his back and it looked like they must be tied back there.

  ‘Thank you darling, now shut up or I’ll cut your balls off.’ She almost spat the words into his face as she cradled his chin in her hands. ‘Now, where was I? Oh yes. Luke is about to become another victim of the Shadow Man, and I’m not quite sure what to do with you lot yet.’

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

  ‘But we’re your friends, Janey.’ I sounded whiney, like I was pleading, and I guess I was, but I was trying to sound strong, to appeal to her better nature, the side of her I knew. But maybe, you never really know anyone at all.

  ‘If I have to tolerate another minute in your company, Flip, I swear I’ll cut my own fucking arm off. The only reason I ever wanted to be around you was to give me a cover story, so nobody would suspect me.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You and your future middle-class friends, all planning to leave this place sooner or later – when you get a job or marry a nice man or go to fucking university. Not caring about the past, about history, justice, and the people you’ll leave behind – people who can’t leave.’

  ‘I’m sorry Janey, I’ve got no idea what you’re talking about,’ I said, as gently as I could, not wanting to rile her.

  ‘Of course you fucking don’t. You can barely see the nose on your face. No, hey, how about we cut that pretty nose of yours off later, hmmm?’

  I was really scared now.

  ‘You’re the Shadow Man?’ I was incredulous.

  ‘None other.’

  ‘But why?’

  ‘Two hundred years ago the people of this village framed my ancestor for crimes he never committed. They tortured him and burned him alive. They hounded him and framed him for anything bad that went on here – and a lot of bad things were going on. All of my life he’s spoken to me, been with me, been my strength, my inner voice. And now I’m giving him something back.’

  ‘So there was no Shadow Man?’

  ‘Oh yeah there was, and the kids did make up a nursery rhyme – the book I told you about was real. It didn’t only apply here in Laurendon, Will was a legend throughout the whole area. When I told you, I wanted it to be specific to here.’

  ‘Just to do this? To entice us in?’

  ‘To bring this village down. We’ll destroy this place, Will and me, brick by fucking brick.’

  ∞ ∞ ∞

  I didn’t care that Janey’s door wouldn’t shut properly. Any opportunistic burglar would be in for a bit of a surprise and at some point the police would come by and piece things together. We should probably call them, make it official.

  But what exactly would we say? Would we be able to convince a weary copper that we’d all got together over the weekend and discovered our long-lost disabled friend was pretending to be a two-hundred-year-old wraith coming back for revenge on the village and the villagers t
hat had persecuted him?

  We climbed into my car and drove off with a screech of tyres. Driving by the familiar houses it struck me that this village had been the canvas on which I’d painted my childhood. That my memories of us riding around and going to the lake and of belonging and a lack of responsibilities had been a veneer. A veneer to cover despair and failure and death.

  I looked at the buildings as we drove by – older houses that I knew, although, for the most part, I couldn’t remember who’d lived in them back then, and certainly wouldn’t know who lived in them now. Newer houses interspersed in ones and twos or as little three bungalow cul-de-sacs. It made me sad to think of how the village had changed. Not the village, my village. My hometown as Springsteen would say.

  But it belonged to other people now. It was very different to the Laurendon I’d called home, more houses, fewer farms and the industry around them, more commuters wanting to live away from Sheffield, Doncaster and Leeds amidst leafy farmland. This was theirs and I didn’t belong here anymore.

  Unless it belonged to someone else, someone who wasn’t going to up and leave after a few years, someone who had always been here, who had never left and never would, not even in death. He had always watched over the place, for good or for bad. Who had the greatest claims to this place? Me? The current residents? Or Will Tullock, the Shadow Man?

  I drove up to the gate on the farm road.

  ‘Can you get the gate open, Clara?’

  ‘Okay, I’ll take a look,’ she jumped out of the car before it stopped and ran toward the closed gate – the chain was looped through the gate catch. ‘There’s no getting through this without the key, Flip,’ she shouted back.

  ‘We’ll see. Stand back.’ I revved the engine and reversed the car back thirty yards.