The Shadow Man
Page 21
Maybe the one person defining all of Laurendon’s history was the Shadow Man.
The End
Mark Brownless
January 2019
Author’s Note
IN THINKING ABOUT being a kid and riding around my home village, on which Laurendon is based, but is actually a nice little village and not the despair ridden shithole that I’ve portrayed, it struck me how layered memories could be. I was trying to remember things from back in 1985 and when something would come to me, a whole load more things would unveil themselves. This became the essence of The Shadow Man – how memories are stored in the brain, and how, by peeling back one layer, more and more layers are brought to the fore – things that we’d long thought forgotten or would’ve thought we’d never remember again.
I read somewhere that, with the right training, the brain can remember every single thing it has experienced – we just aren’t very well trained in storing and cataloguing those memories.
In the 1980s there really was a weekly magazine in the UK called ‘The Unexplained.’ And for £1.99 you could feast your eyes on UFOs, Nessie, Bigfoot and a whole host of other strange subjects, one of which was spontaneous human combustion. As Clara says in the book, it really was like ‘nerd-porn’ for a teenager like me who was slap bang in the middle of their target demographic. Seeing pictures of people’s bodies completely burned to ash while their limbs remained intact seemed more bizarre and frightening than if there‘d been nothing left of them. The idea that someone could just burst into flames in the comfort of their own home was more scary than the idea of being abducted by aliens or being attacked by a mythical monster. Clearly it still resonates to some degree or another.
Researching the more modern scientific theories about this particularly rare phenomenon has demystified it to a great extent. Explainable or not, however, the idea of one’s own body consuming itself in flames is still a particularly disturbing thought.
And so developed The Shadow Man, a story that asks what is real and what isn't; such as memories that are either wrong or so incomplete as to effectively mean they are a lie, of people who’ve burned to death either because of spontaneous human combustion or more sinister means, and of terrible acts committed either by a vengeful ancient spirit or an impressionable disturbed youngster.
But what of us? How sure can we be that the memories we have are a true and accurate reflection of what has happened in our lifetime? How do we know that the life we’ve lived is the one that we remember? What if our brains are hiding something?
Memories. You can’t trust ‘em.
Acknowledgements
TALK ABOUT THE difficult second album.
The idea for The Shadow Man came to me after I’d read C J Tudor’s wonderful ‘The Chalk Man.’ And before you start getting concerned, apart from having ‘The’ and ‘Man’ in the title, they are very different stories. It was C J who got me thinking about childhood and riding round on our bikes in our village and started off the whole false memories idea, so I really must thank her for that.
The book wrote itself very very quickly, but actually stitching it together with the two timelines of 1985 and now was a different story, and I need to thank my editor, Jackie Bates, for all her help with that process and getting the finished book in your hands.
Making connections and networking is a hugely important part of the self-publishing industry, and over the last year I’ve had help, support and advice from Dave Chesson, Risa Fey, Tom Hunter-Hybert, Mo Jo Joiner, Nick Jones, Kevin Maguire, Stu Turton, Keith Wheeler and a great many others. Thank you to one and all.
Two people have been the ‘glue’ holding my self-publishing career together, and they are Sam Missingham and Dale L Roberts, who’ve both, rather foolishly, said they believed in what I do, and now they’ll never be rid of me!
I’m very proud of the cover of The Shadow Man, and the eerie blue picture that has struck a chord with so many people. The credit for the picture goes entirely to photographer Mikko Karskela who can be found on Pixabay (https://pixabay.com/users/finmiki-5724486/). He’s an incredibly talented guy and I feel so lucky to have found him and his pictures – thank you, my friend.
And finally, once more, to you dear reader. Thank you for reading, I hope you enjoyed Flip’s story, and I hope we can be having this conversation, once again, at the end of another journey.