Shadow Land

by Adam J. Wright

  “He has a skin condition,” I said.

  Campbell nodded. “Yes, I know. Ryan had a similar condition, although his was far milder. He told me it runs through the male bloodline in his family.”

  A voice from one of the tables interrupted us. “I know you.”

  I looked over to a card table where a scrawny, bearded man was rising from his chair and pointing at me. He looked confused, as if he were trying to remember something. “I’ve seen you before,” he said, coming toward me. “I’ve seen you somewhere before.”

  “It’s okay, James,” Dr. Campbell said. “You probably saw Mr. Harbinger on the TV today.”

  “No,” James said. “Not on the TV. In my dream. You were in my dream.”

  Two of the white-uniformed men had unfolded their arms and were inching closer in case there was going to be trouble.

  “You saw me,” James said. “Don’t you remember me? My name is James. James Elliot.” A look of relief crossed his face. “You can tell them that I’m telling the truth. You were there too. In the shadow place. Tell them you saw me there.” He was standing a couple of inches from me now, his dark eyes searching mine. “Tell them it’s real.”

  The two security guards had almost reached him, were about to grab him. I raised my hand to tell them there was no need. There was nothing threatening in James’s behavior, he just seemed confused.

  “I don’t remember you, James,” I told him. “Maybe you can remind me where we met.”

  “Of course you remember. You must remember,” he said, becoming anxious. “They don’t believe me about the shadow place but they might believe you. You were…” He put the heel of his hand against his forehead, trying to force the memory to reveal itself. “You were in a house. I was in the street looking up at you. In the window. You were standing in the window. You and your black friend were standing in the window.” He dropped his hand and looked questioningly at me. “Was it my house? Or was it your house? I can’t remember.”

  I suddenly knew what he was talking about. Leon and I had been in a house in the Shadow Land, a shadow version of Blackthorn House, the house where the Bloody Summer Night Massacre had taken place and Mallory had become a final girl. We had looked down at the street from the window and seen a figure standing there. A figure that we were sure was…

  “Mister Scary,” I said.

  James jumped back as if I’d swung a butcher knife at him He fell into the arms of a security guard. His eyes went wide and his face contorted in terror. “Don’t say his name,” he said. “Never say his name!” He looked at Campbell for support. “Doctor, tell him to be quiet. He has to be quiet!”

  “All right, James,” Campbell said gently. “I’m sure Mr. Harbinger won’t say that again. Maybe you’d be happier in your room?”

  James shook his head. “No, I’m fine.” Shaking off the security guard, he stalked back to the card table, casting a glance over his shoulder in my direction. “You should have told them,” he said. “You should have told them I’m not crazy.”

  “We should leave,” Campbell said. “I’m sorry your visit ended on a sour note.” He ushered us out of the day room and into the corridor. “How did you know that James has an irrational fear of Mister Scary?”

  I couldn’t exactly tell him that I’d seen James in the Shadow Land. Instead of believing that his patient was telling the truth about being there, Campbell would instead decide I was in need of therapy myself or that I was humoring James by confirming his story. I shrugged. “Just a lucky guess.”

  He didn’t seem satisfied with that answer and he watched me through narrowed eyes. “I think the real answer may be less dependent on luck. You obviously know James, which is why he recognized you, and you knew what to say to trigger a reaction from him.”

  “Why would I want to trigger the guy? He was terrified. I wouldn’t do that to him on purpose.”

  “Well, all I know is that now we’re going to have a hell of a time trying to keep him calm for the rest of the day. I’ll show you out.”

  “Oh, but you said you’d show us why the hospital is called Butterfly Heights,” Felicity said, giving Campbell a doe-eyed look. “I’d really like to know more about this place.”

  Campbell looked at her, took a moment to decide, and then sighed. “I guess I can show you quickly. It’s this way.” He turned on his heels and marched away along the corridor. I gave Felicity a clandestine thumbs-up. She’d just prevented us from being kicked out on our asses. And Butterfly Heights had suddenly become a place of interest.

  If James had seen Leon and me in the shadow version of Blackthorn House, did that mean he was Mister Scary? But why had he reacted the way he had when I’d mentioned Mister Scary’s name?

  “Doctor, is James suffering from schizophrenia?” I asked, catching up with Campbell. “Is there a dark side of his personality?”

  He looked surprised. “What? No, James’s personality doesn’t have a dark side. The man wouldn’t hurt a fly. Psychology isn’t quite as simple as you seem to think it is, Mr. Harbinger.”

  “So educate me,” I said. “Why did he react that way when I mentioned Mister Scary?”

  “James believes that every night, he visits an otherworldly realm he calls the shadow place. He also believes that Mister Scary lives in the shadow place and hunts James whenever he sees him there. As you can probably guess, these are fantasies that James’s mind has pieced together from real-life events.”

  He unlocked a door that opened onto the back of the property. A short flight of stone steps led down to a gravel path that wound through a walled garden to a rear gate. The gate was identical to the one at the front of the facility and was locked with the same type of electronic mechanism.

  “James told me about the house and the two figures in the window a couple of weeks ago and he’s been obsessing about it ever since,” Campbell said, descending the steps. The rain had stopped falling but the grass and fallen leaves were slick with water. “It’s probably a dream he had, based on a memory from his childhood, I’d guess. Maybe he was in the yard one day, looked up and saw his parents arguing near the window. Those kinds of events can have a long-lasting effect on children. In James’s mind, it has become an event that happened recently, in the shadow place.”

  Leading us to the gate, he said, “And the Mister Scary of James’s dreams is merely a personification of his troubled mental state in the guise of a real-life killer who is at large in the world.” He pointed through the gate at a meadow.

  Overgrown with wild grass and dead plants, it didn’t look like anything special.

  “It doesn’t look great at this time of the year,” Campbell said, “but in the summer, that meadow is full of wild lupine, vibrant with purple spires. The plants are the breeding ground of the silvery blue butterfly and thousands of them come here every summer. So the building is named Butterfly Heights.”

  “Interesting,” Felicity said.

  “Well, I suppose you’ll want to be on your way,” Campbell said, starting back toward the building. “It’s a long drive back to Dearmont. I’m sorry I couldn’t have been more help but I hope I’ve shown you that we deal with some very complex patients here and that Ryan Martin’s death was a result of his illness.”

  “You’re sure he’s dead?” I asked as we walked back along the patch.

  “Unfortunately, yes. There is no way a man with Ryan’s problems could survive for two years without medical help.”

  I realized Felicity wasn’t walking with us. I looked back and saw her standing at the gate, staring at the overgrown meadow. “Felicity, you coming?”

  She turned to face me and began walking along the path to catch up. “Yes, of course.” I could tell by the look in her eyes that she was thinking about something. “Dr. Campbell,” she asked as she reached us, “what was this building called before it was named Butterfly Heights?”

  He frowned at her and said, “It’s been called Butterfly Heights since the day it was built.”

&
nbsp; “I see.” She didn’t seem satisfied by his answer but didn’t pursue the matter.

  We followed the doctor back inside, through the corridors and locked doors, until we reached the reception area. Steve was sitting at his desk, watching the monitors with a bored expression on his face.

  Dr. Campbell shook our hands. “I’m sorry you didn’t get the answers you were looking for but in a case like Ryan Martin’s, sometimes there aren’t any easy answers. If his body had been found, then maybe Joanna could have had some closure but there’s probably no hope of that now. Tell her that if she feels she’s losing control, she can make an appointment to see me.” He turned and walked back into the facility.

  Felicity and I walked to the door but Steve’s voice stopped us. “Could you sign out, please, Mr. Harbinger?” He was at the hatch with the clipboard in his hand.

  I made a note of the time we were leaving in the appropriate column and signed my name.

  Steve squirrelled the clipboard away and said, “I’m sorry you didn’t find what you were looking for today.”

  “Actually,” I said, walking to the door, “we found much more.”

  9

  When we got back to the parking lot, the rain had started falling again. Felicity had been quiet during the walk back along the path and I could tell her mind was mulling something over. As we climbed into the Land Rover, I said, “What’s on your mind?”

  “Dr. Campbell is lying to us.”

  “About Ryan Martin?”

  “About the building. He said it’s always been called Butterfly Heights but that can’t be true. According to the date on the stone over the door, it was built in 1894.”

  “They didn’t have butterflies in 1894?”

  She shot me a look. “Of course they had butterflies but they didn’t have lupines. Not here, anyway. The lupine was introduced to Maine in the 1950s, so Campbell’s story about the lupine meadow attracting silvery blue butterflies and giving the building its name in 1894 is hogwash.”

  “So maybe he doesn’t know the building was called something else before it was Butterfly Heights.”

  “Perhaps not,” she admitted, “but I think there’s more to it than that.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I have some suspicions about the building but I need to do some research to confirm them.”

  “Okay, and what do you think of James Elliot? He seems to have some sort of connection to Mister Scary. Leon and I were in Shadow Land and we looked out of a window and saw a figure, just as James described. We thought we were looking at Mister Scary.”

  “Maybe you were mistaken and it was James.”

  “The guy we saw was holding an axe. I’m sure it was Mister Scary.”

  “So do you think they’re the same person?”

  I shrugged and started the engine. “I don’t know. According to what Gloria told me, some people with a mental illness have a close connection to the Shadow Land. James might know what happened there because he saw it in his dreams or something but that doesn’t necessarily mean he went there in person.”

  I backed out of the parking space and headed toward the main road. “I think we should stick around for a while until we find out more about Ryan’s disappearance and James Elliot’s connection to the Shadow Land.”

  “Sounds like a good idea,” Felicity said, “but I don’t think Dr. Campbell is going to let us into Butterfly Heights again.”

  “We’ll find a way to get the information we need. We always do, don’t we?”

  She grinned. “Yes, we do.”

  “So let’s book into that lodge for a few days and set up our base there. Then we can decide what we’re going to do next.”

  “Sounds good.”

  We drove into Greenville and followed the signs to Lake Shore Lodge. They directed us to a large rustic building by the lake with a gravel parking lot that was mostly empty. I parked the Land Rover close to the door we ran through the rain to get inside but we still got soaked.

  The foyer of the lodge was high-ceilinged with comfortable-looking chairs and low wooden coffee tables huddled by a huge stone fireplace in which a fire crackled and lent the room a pleasant woodsmoke smell.

  Behind a long reception desk stood a white-haired man in his sixties. When he saw us, he pointed at us. “Don’t tell me. You’re newlyweds who want a romantic lake shore cabin for a week.”

  “No,” Felicity said, smiling, “we’re not.”

  His eyebrows wrinkled and he donned a pair of reading glasses to consult a piece of paper in front of him. “You’re not Mr. and Mrs. Swain?”

  “No, I’m Miss Felicity Lake and this is my colleague, Alec Harbinger. I booked two rooms for tonight.”

  “Colleagues?” He shook his head slowly and muttered, “I could have sworn you were the newlyweds. I have a nose for romance.”

  “You don’t have a nose for anything, Marv,” a large white-haired woman said as she came through an open doorway and joined him behind the counter. “Especially romance.” She turned to Felicity. “Forty-two years we’ve been married and he hasn’t given me flowers since 1983. Now, what can I do for you folks?”

  “I was seeing to them just fine,” Marv said.

  “No, you were seeing romance where it doesn’t exist.” She consulted a computer. “Now then, Miss Lake, we have two rooms for you just for the one night, is that correct?”

  “Actually,” Felicity said, “we’ll probably be staying longer than that. Will that be a problem?”

  “If you’re going to stay for a week or longer, you can have one of our log cabins at a good price,” Marv said.

  His wife shot him a look. “Marv, I’m dealing with this.” Turning back to Felicity, she said, “But he’s right, if you’re staying here a while, you can have one of the cabins. We aren’t busy this time of the year, to be honest, and they’re just sitting there empty. You’ll get a nice view of the lake and more privacy than if you stay here in the lodge.”

  “That sounds perfect,” Felicity said, handing over her credit card.

  “Just like that,” Marv said, looking at me with a twinkle in his eye. “She didn’t even consult you, mister.”

  “She’s in charge of this side of the business,” I told him, wondering how the Society was going to react when it received an expense claim from Felicity for a week’s stay in a lakefront cabin.

  “Oh? And what business are you in?” he asked.

  “Preternatural investigation.”

  He cast me a knowing wink. “Tracking down ghosts, huh? Who you gonna call?”

  “That’s right,” I said.

  “Well, I don’t really believe in that kind of thing but if it makes you a buck or two, then more power to you. What are you doing in Greenville?” He looked around the foyer. “You don’t think the lodge is haunted, do you?” For someone who was a self-professed non-believer, Marv seemed pretty worried all of a sudden.

  “I don’t think so,” I said. “You heard any strange noises at night?”

  “No chance of that around here,” Edith said. She slapped Marv’s arm. “And you snap out of it. Of course the lodge isn’t haunted.” She took a set of keys from a peg and handed them to Felicity. “Follow the sign that says Cabins out of the parking lot and after a quarter mile or so down the road, you’ll see a sign that says Pine Hideaway. It’s the first cabin you’ll come to. I hope the weather clears up some for you while you’re here.”

  We left the building, got in the Land Rover, and drove along the road until we found the Pine Hideaway, a solid-looking log cabin that had two levels with large windows looking out over the lake. Wooden decking ran around the side of the cabin that faced the water and there was a little gravel beach and a wooden dock. Tall pine trees provided privacy from the lodge and the other cabins.

  “How lovely,” Felicity said, getting out of the Land Rover and running through the rain to the cabin door.

  I went around to the trunk and took out our cases. I suddenly realized how h
ungry I was. I hadn’t eaten since early this morning and that was a long time ago as far as my stomach was concerned.

  I hauled the cases into the cabin. It was spacious, neat, and basic with a sofa and two armchairs in the living area. A large fireplace and a stack of firewood dominated one wall and a wood stove sat in the corner by a dining table. The air was lightly scented with the smell of pine.

  Felicity came out of the kitchen, where I could see a four-burner stove, microwave, fridge, and coffee maker. A flight of wooden stairs led upstairs to the bedrooms.

  “The sight of the kitchen has made me hungry,” Felicity said. “I haven’t eaten since breakfast.”

  “I was just thinking the same thing.” I was going to ask her if she wanted to come to the store with me to get some food but I noticed her shivering from the cold. “I’ll head out and get some supplies.”

  “All right,” she said, smiling. “I’ll get the fire started. It’s a bit cold.”

  “Any requests?” I asked her as I dropped the cases and went back to the door.

  “No, just get what you think we’ll need. You know what I like.”

  “Tea and cakes,” I said. “Gotcha.”

  “There’s no need to get any tea,” she said. “I’ve got about a hundred tea bags in my case.”

  “I should have guessed,” I said, going back out into the rain. “See you later.”

  I drove into Greenville and found a convenience store that sold groceries, beer, wine, and gas, as well as pizzas and subs. Since I had no idea how long we’d be staying at the cabin, I got enough groceries for a couple of days. I also got two large pizzas, some beer, and a bottle of wine.

  By the time I headed back to the cabin, the smell of melted cheese and hot pepperoni drifting from the pizza boxes on the passenger seat was driving me crazy with hunger.

  My phone rang just as I reached the Lake Shore Lodge parking lot, the caller’s number unknown. I parked the Land Rover and answered it. “Harbinger.”