‘What are you doing?’ Katie said from the back seat.
‘Taking route one.’ I replied
‘You’ve got to be fucking kidding me! Why can’t we walk?’
‘There isn’t time, not now that psycho has Sal.’ Taking one look at the middle of the large farm gate I gunned the engine again, slid her into first gear and roared forward with my foot flat to the floor. I hit the gate at thirty. Two tons of Britain’s finest engineering hit the centre of the gate, there was a huge jarring crash, the car paused for the briefest of seconds until the shockwave of momentum and inertia bent and splintered the oak, buckling it outwards as the front third of the Discovery crumpled inwards and the airbag prevented me rearranging my face on the steering wheel. Then we were through, the gate breaking in half and bursting open, and I drove on another twenty yards before skidding to a halt on the rutted track, throwing a cloud of dust up around us like a skirt.
Clara ran up to the passenger side and jumped in. ‘Go,’ she said as she reached to grab the door, looking across at me pushing the deflating remains of the airbag out of the way, slamming the door shut as the tyres span on the dirt track. The sun was sinking, a blazing ball on the horizon as I raced along the lane, bouncing in and out of the ruts, Clara and Katie thrown around in their seats. I grimly hung on to the steering wheel as it was wrenched around, threatening to pull away from my grasp and dash us against huge tree trunks or old farm buildings. The sunset illuminated the surface of our lake as we roared past, the noise sending a flock of Canada geese into a panic, taking off into the red sun like a squadron of Hueys in Platoon. Up the slope we drove, the track becoming a little easier with fewer ruts and I drew to a halt at the top by the fence. Looking across we could see a huge raging fire on the gravel beside the cave entrance. We forced ourselves through the fence once again and approached the two figures illuminated by the flames.
‘Sorry girls,’ muttered Sal, through swollen, blood-encrusted lips.
Janey, standing beside her, said nothing.
‘How the hell did you get out here?’ Katie asked.
‘She’s got a car, hasn’t she!’ said Sal, spitting blood on the floor. What the hell had Janey done to her?
‘What?’ I said.
‘What the fuck?’ added Clara, noticing the Ford Focus parked at the other end of the plateau, its boot open.
‘Oh, you think because I lied about some stuff I’d tell the truth about everything else? You really are stupid,’ sneered Janey, her good eye blinking contempt.
‘But I thought you never went out?’ I asked.
‘I usually go out at night and nobody really looks at me, nobody knows me. They might’ve heard of an odd recluse with a fucked-up face who lives on Stow Road, but that’s it. I’m totally anonymous. It’s hiding in plain sight. This really isn’t a sleepy little village any more – and I’m a stranger.
‘I remember now, I remember who you are and what you did to Luke Lewis.’
‘Congratulations,’ came the half smile.
‘What do you mean, Flip?’ asked Katie. I looked at her, my returning memory forgetting that she wouldn’t have known.
‘Yeah, just what the fuck happened?’ echoed Clara.
‘Why don’t you tell our friends what happened, Flip.’ She said my name with a pause in the middle, making it sound like fur-lip.
‘Janey’s long-lost ancestor…’
‘William Tullock. You’re welcome.’
‘Yeah him. He was the Shadow Man. He killed all those kids and burned people two hundred years ago.’
‘But that’s the point, you stupid bitch, he didn’t kill them. They framed him – set him up because he was a weird loner – and they killed him.’
‘And you know this, because...?’ I asked.
‘Because it’s obvious, Flip. He was a scapegoat. They weren’t interested in finding who did it, just on blaming someone. Besides, he told me.’
‘He told you?’
‘Not gonna get very far just repeating everything I say, Katie. Yes, he told me. He’s been with me in my head for as long as I can remember, but I didn’t really understand or know what to do until that summer, until Ethel Grimshaw.’
∞ ∞ ∞
‘How does he speak to you?’ I asked, my head slowly beginning to clear.
‘In here,’ smiled Janey pointing to her temple. ‘Now if you’d kindly shut the fuck up, I’ve gotta kill Luke here.’ She aimed a kick at the small of Luke’s back. And, like a caged lion, he roared at her in frustration, straining at his bonds. He tried to stand, leaning forward, bent double and struggled against the rope tied to the metal frame of the workshop. He managed to get both feet under him in a squatting positon and slowly started to straighten up, muscles bulging against his restraints. Janey appeared in front of him. ‘Take the weight off, there’s a love,’ and kneed him hard in the balls, her hands cradling his chest as he fell forward, his body bending and buckling, releasing the tension against the rope which jerked him back to the floor, landing on his knees and falling forward to face plant with a crunch onto the gravel. He roared again, frustrated and angry, lashing out with a leg, and trying to look up, but his face was now covered in blood and gravel and soil. Janey went to the side of the workshop and put on a pair of gardening gloves, before picking up the nozzle attached to the old red diesel tank. She pointed it at Luke and pulled the trigger, the gravity-fed pump splashing old fuel onto Luke’s face, then in a steady stream poured all over his body. When he was thoroughly doused in the fuel she released the trigger, holding the nozzle like a gun, ready and waiting to be used again.
Waiting for us.
Janey brought the diesel pump down to Luke’s tied wrists, enclosing his fingers in her gloved hands to wrap them around the handle, leaving his fingerprints. ‘No!’ he roared, straining once again against his bonds, he looked up and the diesel ran off his head into his eyes, and his cries must’ve been of stinging pain as well as fear of what was about to happen. He lunged at Janey, his wide shoulder striking her, his hand pulling the trigger of the pump behind him causing fuel to splash all down her.
‘Fuck, you’ll pay for that, you idiot,’ Janey sneered at him, making vague efforts to brush excess fuel from her body. It soaked into the drying mud and even washed some away from her leg. Peeling his hands away from the pump and dispensing with the nozzle, she picked up a heavy plumbers’ wrench and swung it at his head like a club, but Luke ducked at the last minute and she only managed to catch him a glancing blow. It was enough to leave him stunned but not incapacitated like she’d probably hoped. Janey stood over the panting, raging form of would-be rapist Luke Lewis, appearing in two minds about what to do. She noticed me out of the corner of her eye. Looking back and forth between us, she raised the wrench again and swung it backhanded to hit me on the side of the head with enough force to knock me over onto my side again. My senses were reeling from the blow, the dizziness rising again and I could feel myself starting to fall, the ground opening underneath me and I knew I had to stay awake, to stay with the scene and not let myself go, because then Janey would have me. I didn’t know whether I was passing out or if I was dying, but I fought as best I could, concentrating on the tableau before me. As I lay there struggling against unconsciousness, the last thing I saw was Luke lunge at Janey, who was standing right by his side. His skin all wet and shiny from the diesel, he’d managed to get one leg underneath him again as Janey struck me, and now he seemed to propel himself up and forwards like a jack-in-the-box, striking her in the midriff with his head and propelling them both into the fire, which, fed by the liquid fuel, rose to engulf them like an inferno.
Chapter 21 – X – When is it Not Too Late?
‘AND NOW HIS weird, loner descendant is gonna get revenge for him. Is that it?’ Katie couldn’t stop the contempt in her voice.
‘Just what the fuck has this got to do with us?’ spat Clara.
Janey reached down into her cloth holdall and pulled out a shotgun, pointing it
in our direction. ‘Anything else fucking clever to say?’ She almost screamed the words, the shotgun barrel shaking in her hands. ‘You were never my friends, you just felt sorry for me.’
‘That’s not true. We stayed friends from the village school to comp. We didn’t find other groups of people there because we didn’t quite fit in, did we? Bunch of misfits, Janes, all of us, which was why it was cool that we had each other.’
‘Oh, but didn’t you, Katie, refer to me as the freak?’ The barrel of the gun swung in Katie’s direction.
‘And didn’t I get called the tits, and sometimes the slapper?’ Katie replied bitterly. ‘They were just words, Janey, just names, nicknames, badges of honour, maybe. That’s all.’
‘Not by me. Never by me.’ Janey’s eyes were intense with anger and something else. Madness maybe. ‘I never called you any bad names.’
‘If it upset you, Janey, we’re sorry,’ Clara apologised quietly.
‘Everything has consequences, doesn’t it?’ sneered Janey.
‘Where’d you get the gun, Janey?’ I asked.
‘It was Dad’s,’ she smiled, waving the barrel round in a figure of eight motion. ‘He used to go with Stuart MacFarlane on his shoot. Kept the gun locked in the loft – knew it would come in handy.’
‘So taking care of us is closure then is it?’ I had no idea how to handle this, no idea whether she was focused, deranged or could be reasoned with or not. But I had to try.
‘Something like that.’ Janey hefted the barrel of the gun onto her shoulder, still maintaining a grip on the trigger.
‘And then what?’
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’
‘You’ve been stewing, in your parents’ house, recovering from your injuries and starting to hear the voices.’
‘Watch your mouth, Flip. I told you, I’ve always heard them. I only understood them after the accident.’
‘Wasn’t really an accident, though was it?’
‘What?’
‘An accident is not braking in time and hitting the car in front of you, or barging into someone in the pub. Kidnapping someone with the intention of burning them to death and it going tits-up isn’t really an accident, is it?’
‘I saved your arse when I took Luke Lewis. You even said thank you, you stupid cow. And of course I was the flavour of the month – in the paper and everything,’ Janey did her half sneer. ‘Brave girl that took on the bully and gets her leg burnt off. I was the hero of the hour in ‘saving’ all of you from Luke.’ Janey paced up and down on the same gravel as she had all those years before, looking taller, bolder than she had at her house. Her limp was gone. ‘And it shut his bleating parents up from going on about what a saint he was when he was missing.’
‘And did they ever recover? Wasn’t really their fault, was it?’ I said.
‘He wasn’t their fault? Then who’s was he?’
‘And that’s when I started having the dreams, after your accident. I didn’t have them that summer – they came later. They were memories of what you did.’
‘And I started having them too,’ said Clara. ‘But I reckon I was stoned out of my head at the top lake and I don’t remember anything. Maybe I passed out. Maybe I did take something in, but when I heard the story the next day, and there was you, Janey, with your leg and your face, I remember that’s when I started dreaming.’
‘The farmer called the emergency services when he saw the fire,’ said Sal, as if it was now becoming clear.
‘This is good – role reversal, because I don’t remember anything.’ Janey smiled at them.
‘First the fire brigade came then an ambulance and the police.’
‘I didn’t realise at the time, but pretty much straight away the police said it was Luke that had tried to kill Janey, and I was gonna be next,’ I said.
‘They’d heard the stories that he wanted to get back at you Flip, and decided he must’ve gone crazy or something,’ said Katie.
‘I don’t think there was a lot left of him – all the ropes he was tied with burnt away.’
‘But you were awake, Flip. Why didn’t you remember?’ asked Sal.
‘I don’t know. I kept phasing in and out. Janey must’ve said something to me.’
You will forget, you will forget, you will forget.
Janey laughed at them piecing the puzzle together. ‘Dead easy, really, the power of suggestion when someone is stoned and pissed. I kept whispering to you all when you were laying there.’
‘And that’s why I dreamed of something crawling over me smelling of that awful mud from the lake.’
‘You say the nicest things.’
‘I came to see you once in the hospital. It was weird – horrible. You were covered in bandages but you were saying really strange things – now I know, it was like you were Will and he was speaking though you. It was the same when they put you in the ambulance at the lake, but I just thought you were manic because of the pain you were in. It scared the life out of me, like something from the Exorcist, and I never visited again.’
‘You all dropped me pretty quickly, didn’t you, and yet you say you were my friends.’
‘It wasn’t like that. School re-started. It was busy. I never seemed to have time,’ said Katie.
‘Didn’t have time for me, that’s for certain.’
‘It just drifted, Janey, and you can’t say it wasn’t unusual circumstances,’ said Katie.
‘But you killed those people that summer when you didn’t understand the voice, right?’ I said.
‘Yes. It was more by accident, really.’
‘You ‘accidentally’ killed Mrs Grimshaw?’
‘I just broke into her place – it wasn’t that hard, the lock was shit and I forced it easily. And that was it. I was standing in her room, and there she was, laying on her back, snoring like a bastard. She’d threatened to kill my dog. My dog. She had sleep apnoea and slept with an oxygen supply, so I turned it off and waited until she passed out. I’d thought about putting a pillow over her head, but I’d read so much about myths and legends and come across the Shadow Man story that I just had to burn her.’
‘So you didn’t know about your ancestor then?’
‘No, I’d just found the book about him, I didn’t make a link between that and the voice until later.’
‘How did you make it look like an accident?’
‘She’d got cigarettes by the side of the bed, I lit one and used it to set light to the bottom of her nightie. It didn’t burn like I thought, it kind of reacted, like when you watch those magnesium experiments in school, or put a piece of sodium on water. The flame kind of fizzed across her nightdress like a ripple, and melted to her – you could see it tightening and wrapping round her like a tentacle or something. And it was meltingly hot – I guess it cooked the bitch like wrapping her in tin foil. Must’ve took hours.’
‘So why didn’t the rest of the room go up?’
‘I’m not sure, but because her nightie melted to her it was slow – there wasn’t really any flame. The heat must’ve been so intense underneath her that it melted her dress to the nylon sheet and it became a hard plastic shell. It must’ve protected the rest of the mattress, so only her body burned. It was pure luck the whole thing looked like some sort of supernatural human combustion thing.’
‘And Todd Ainsworth?’
‘He was easy. He was parked up in his car just off Stow Road. I used to go cycling a lot at night and I saw him. He was smoking dope in his car, the window open. So I chloroformed him.’
‘Chloroform?’ asked Clara. ‘F. O.’
‘I’d stolen a jar from school so I could use it on frogs before I dissected them – seeing their beating hearts was cool.’
‘Jesus.’
‘I used paraffin on Todd, less reactive than petrol, so I just soaked his shirt and lit him with his own joint. He had leather seats in his car and they didn’t burn, so once the shirt and his body went up, the fire kind of died.’
�
�Another unexplained fire,’ said Clara.
‘It was amazing. There’s no way you could fake that, it was just pure luck.’
‘I’m sure Mrs Grimshaw and Todd would’ve appreciated that.’
‘Oh come on – not wanting to speak ill of the dead are we? Old lady Grimshaw was an evil bastard and we all thought it. None of us were sorry when she croaked. And Todd was a creep – the world was a better place without him.’
‘Oh you’re a real public servant, you are,’ Katie fired back.
‘Easy, Katie,’ I said.
‘Why? Because if we piss her off she might want to really kill us, instead of just killing us?’
‘Ladies. I’m supposed to be the insane serial killer in the group.’
‘Every group’s got one,’ muttered Katie.
‘Why bring us back? Why us?’
‘I brought you back, Flip, because you got to leave. I didn’t. This place does eat you up, it has got something bad at its core.’
‘It’s just a village, Janey, with a village mentality and all, but that’s it.’
‘It’s like a cancer hanging over the whole place, a darkness, and it’s intertwined with Will, with me as his only family. I have to destroy this place.’
‘But you could’ve left. You could’ve done your exams, got you’re a levels and gone to university. Or just left – you don’t need fucking A levels to move away, Janey, or a degree for god’s sake.’
‘It was too late for me then. I was just starting to walk again when you fucked off.’
‘You’d got away with murder, like four times over, and with burning the village hall down. If that didn’t kick start you trying to do something with your life, I don’t know what would.’
‘I couldn’t leave. By the time you’d gone I’d found out who I was, and Will was in my head. I couldn’t leave him alone in the village.’
‘And your parents?’
‘They were just getting in the way – increasingly so. It wasn’t difficult to trick them to go for a drive as a way of getting me out of the house – they were delighted. And I chloroformed them too.’
The Shadow Man Page 19