Shadow Land

by Adam J. Wright

“I’ll try,” I told him.

  “Thank you, I’ll call you later.” He gave us a brief nod and then stepped out into the downpour.

  I turned to Felicity. “That solves the problem of getting into Butterfly Heights.”

  “Shall I look through Ryan’s records while you’re visiting the police station?”

  “I thought you wanted to come with me, see the town?”

  “That was before we got the records. I think the connection between Ryan’s disappearance and the creature that attacked Sammy might be in these pages somewhere.”

  After what had happened in the kitchen, I hoped there wasn’t another barrier being erected between us. “Okay, no problem. I’ll go ahead and visit the police and you see what you can find in here.” I placed the papers on the coffee table and put my boots on.

  Felicity began arranging the papers into various piles on the table. As I shrugged on my jacket, I saw that she had three piles, one consisting of Dr. Campbell’s notes from Ryan’s therapy sessions, another of the drawings Ryan had made as part of his therapy, and a third pile that seemed to be made up of everything else.

  “Is that a family tree?” I asked, pointing to a sheet of paper on the miscellaneous pile.

  “Yes,” she said, looking up at me over her glasses, “and it goes all the way back to the beginning of the last century.”

  “I wonder why that’s in there.”

  “Many mental illnesses can be inherited,” she said. “I assume this was used to track the history of Ryan’s illness. A couple of the names are circled.” She placed a hand on Campbell’s notes. “The answer is probably in here.”

  “I’ll leave you to it, then. See you later.”

  She waved at me distractedly but she was already concentrating on the records again.

  I went out into the rain and climbed into the Land Rover, wondering if I should call Mrs. Martin to see how she and Sammy were doing. But I didn’t have any progress to report regarding the investigation into her husband’s disappearance so maybe I should wait until later. Felicity might find something in the records or the police might tell me something that would help.

  As I started the engine, I grimaced at that last thought. It was more likely that the police would kick me out of the station. As far as they were concerned, Ryan Martin’s disappearance was a two-year-old case that was best forgotten—just a patient from the local mental hospital getting himself killed in a storm drain.

  They didn’t want a preternatural investigator snooping around and asking questions.

  “Everybody hates P.I.s,” I told myself as I backed out onto the road and drove through the downpour toward town.

  14

  I found the police department easily. Greenville wasn’t big enough to get lost in and the building that housed the local police force was just off Moosehead Lake Road, the main road that ran through town.

  I parked outside the small building just as a deputy was coming out. He came over to the Land Rover and I wound down the window.

  “Can I help you?” he asked.

  “I was hoping to talk to someone about a disappearance that happened here a couple of years ago.”

  He looked over the Land Rover and my face with searching eyes. “You the press?”

  “No. I’ve been hired by the wife of the person who disappeared.”

  “You mean that fella from the hospital up on the hill?”

  “That’s right. Is there someone I could talk to about what happened?”

  “There’s nobody here but me and I wasn’t involved in that case.”

  “Do you know who was?”

  He nodded and as he did so, the rain poured from the brim of his hat. “The deputy on duty that night was Mike Taverner. The reason I remember that, even though it was two years ago, is because Mike left his job the day after.”

  “You mean he retired?”

  He shook his head and more water flew from it. “No, Mike was a young man. I’m not going to stand here in the rain and tell you about his business. If you want to know what happened that night, you’ll have to talk to him. But he never told any of us what made him quit so I can’t see him telling you, a total stranger.”

  “Do you know how I can contact him?”

  He looked me over again, sizing me up. “I’ll tell you what I’ll do. I’ll call him and let him know you’re looking for him and what you want to talk about. Then he can decide if he wants to talk to you or not, Mr...”

  “Harbinger,” I said, giving him my card.

  He looked at it briefly before squirreling it away inside his jacket. “Preternatural investigator, huh?”

  I nodded. “That’s right.”

  “Well, I’ll tell Mike you want to talk to him but I can’t see him talking to someone like you. He doesn’t believe in any of that stuff.”

  “Still, I’d appreciate it if you’d give him my number.”

  “I’ll do that. You have a nice day, Mr. Harbinger.” He turned away from my window and got into his car.

  I guessed that the chances of Mike Taverner contacting me were slim so I might as well head back to the cabin and help Felicity with the records. I’d probably just get in the way, though. She seemed to have a system when she was researching and I’d probably wreck it if I started picking up papers and swapping them into different piles.

  I was thinking about taking a drive along the lake road when my phone rang. It was Felicity. I answered it immediately. “Hey, what’s up?”

  “Oh, I didn’t think you’d answer, I thought you’d be talking to the police. I was going to leave a message.”

  “No, the police thing was a bust. You find anything?”

  “Yes, I think so.”

  “On my way.”

  15

  When I got back to the cabin, I discovered that Felicity had arranged the photocopied records into a new order, with some of the pages seemingly discarded beneath the coffee table while others, including the family tree, were spread over the sofa.

  She came into the living room from the kitchen, holding two steaming mugs of coffee. “I thought you might want a hot drink after being out in the rain.”

  “You must have read my mind,” I said, taking one of the mugs from her. “It looks like you’ve been busy.”

  “I’ve gone through most of the notes and I think there are some things in these documents that could explain what happened to Sammy.”

  “Great, hit me with it.”

  “I had a look at the family tree,” she said, picking it up from the sofa. “As you can see, the names at the top of the tree, the ones that date back the furthest, have the word Aberfoyle written beneath them.”

  I nodded. “The village in Scotland where Ryan’s and Joanna’s ancestors lived.”

  “That’s right. I remembered why the name was familiar to me. It’s where Reverend Robert Kirk lived in the seventeenth century.”

  “Okay, you’ve lost me.”

  She looked at me over her glasses. “You don’t know who Robert Kirk was?”

  I searched my memory but the name didn’t appear anywhere in it. “No, should I?”

  “Well, they teach about him at the Academy of Shadows but you probably didn’t pay attention that day.”

  “Probably not,” I admitted.

  She sighed. “Robert Kirk was a folklorist and a minister based in Aberfoyle, Scotland. He wrote a book called The Secret Commonwealth. Perhaps you’ve heard of that?”

  “Yeah, I’ve heard of the book. In fact, I’m pretty sure I have a copy somewhere. It’s a book about faeries, isn’t it?”

  “It’s about the folk beliefs of the people who lived in the Scottish Highlands, particularly those who had the second sight. Kirk complained that the people in the area spent more time consorting with faerie lovers than attending church. However, he apparently spent most of his time on Doon Hill, a local mound where the faeries lived. When he died, that’s where his body was discovered.”

  “Sounds like he may have been ta
ken to the faerie realm.”

  “Yes, especially when you consider he made a will the day before he died.”

  “So do you think him going to Faerie has anything to do with our case?”

  “Not directly, no. But it means there’s documented evidence that the people of Aberfoyle had a close connection to faeries. And a lot of them had the second sight, which meant they were more in tune with the unseen realms. Both Ryan’s and Joanna’s ancestors came from there so what if some kind of strong connection with the faerie realm has been passed down through each family line and manifested in Sammy?”

  I thought about that for a moment. If the people of Aberfoyle were known to have the second sight and if it could be passed down through the bloodline, then it stood to reason that both Joanna and Ryan cold have inherited it, maybe enough of it to give them hallucinations. And those hallucinations had made them seek therapy at Butterfly Heights.

  “So when Ryan and Joanna got together, it was the perfect storm for creating a gifted child,” I said. “Sammy inherited the second sight from both his parents and he’s probably been sensitive to the faerie realm all his life.”

  “Exactly,” she said.

  I nodded. “It makes sense. But it doesn’t explain why Sammy was abducted by a shellycoat or why a shellycoat was following Ryan around and probably killed him.”

  “I have a theory,” she said. “We know the Shadow Land is formed of thoughts and that certain people are more in tune with it than others. The story of the shellycoat has been passed down through the Martin family since Ryan’s great-grandfather apparently saw one in Scotland. And we’re assuming that the members of the Martin family were gifted with the second sight. What if those people, the ones who heard the story, were so in tune with the Shadow Land that their thoughts brought the creature into existence?”

  “You mean they created the shellycoat with their minds after hearing a story about it?”

  “It isn’t without precedent,” Felicity said. “Have you heard of a tulpa?”

  “A being created from mental images. Sure, it’s an old Tibetan belief.”

  “That’s right. And you said yourself that you believed Mister Scary was using the power of his mind to create shadow versions of the houses he was going to target.”

  “So the members of the Martin family unwittingly created a tulpa over the years,” I mused.

  Felicity shrugged. “It’s possible.”

  “Yeah, I guess it is. It’s a good theory.” It definitely made sense. “But why would the tulpa attack Ryan and Sammy?”

  “Did it really attack them?”

  “Ryan disappeared in a storm drain and his clothes were shredded. The shellycoat took Sammy from his yard and left him in a cave. So, yes, I’d say it attacked them.”

  She put down her coffee and picked up a number of drawings. “Look at these,” she said. “They’re Ryan’s drawings of the shellycoat. According to what he told Dr. Campbell, Ryan had been seeing this creature for as long as he could remember. He began drawing it when he was a child, after he saw it watching him from the bushes at the bottom of his yard. Why would it wait all those years before attacking him when it could have done so when Ryan was a child?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “And it took Sammy from his yard, true, but then it just left him in a cave. It seems like it didn’t mean him any harm.”

  I wasn’t so sure about that; the damned thing had almost drowned Sammy in Dearmont Lake. And he’d been terrified when it had carried him through the woods. “So what are you saying? That the creature is friendly?”

  “Not friendly, exactly, no. But we might be misunderstanding its intentions.”

  “Its intentions seemed pretty clear to me.”

  She pursed her lips, thinking, and then said, “No, I’m sure there’s more to it than that.”

  My phone rang, the number unknown. “Harbinger P.I.”

  “Mr. Harbinger, this is Mike Taverner. I got a call from an ex-colleague who said you were interested in speaking to me about an old case.”

  “Yes, that’s right. Thanks for calling me back. Could we meet somewhere?”

  “Do you know the Lakeshore Diner?”

  “No, but I can find it.”

  “I’ll see you there in half an hour.”

  “Great. How will I recognize you?”

  “I’ll recognize you, Mr. Harbinger. I checked out your website and I’ve seen your picture. Half an hour, Lakeshore Diner.” He hung up.

  “Another lead?” Felicity asked.

  “Yeah, the police thing panned out after all. Do we have a website?”

  She looked sheepish. “Yes, I thought it might bring in more clients.”

  “And there’s a picture of me on it?”

  “Research has shown that if people see a real face on a company’s website, they are more likely to buy the company’s services.”

  “It hasn’t worked so far. Maybe it’s putting off potential clients.”

  “Nonsense. You have a very friendly face. If I didn’t already know you, I’d definitely do business with that face.”

  “Uh, okay,” I said.

  Felicity flushed. “I didn’t mean—”

  “It’s okay, I know what you meant.” I put my boots on. “I’m going to meet the deputy who went out to Butterfly Heights the night Ryan disappeared. You want to come with?”

  “I think I’ll stay here and go through more of Dr. Campbell’s notes.” She picked up the papers and began arranging them into more piles.

  I left the cabin and got into the Land Rover. According to the GPS, Lakeshore Diner was fifteen minutes away. It was north of town and located, as its name suggested, on the lakeshore.

  When I got there, I parked in the busy parking lot and jogged through the rain to the door. The diner was bustling. The smell of fried onions and meat made my mouth water as I found a booth and sat down.

  “What can I get you today?” a voice said almost immediately after I’d taken my seat.

  A waitress whose name tag said Cathy stood by my table, order pad in one hand, pencil in the other.

  “What’s good here?”

  She gave me a smile. “Everything, of course.”

  “Okay, what’s especially good?”

  “Our specialty is the Lakeshore Burger. That’s a cheeseburger with everything on it and it comes with fries and a soda.”

  “Sounds great.”

  She turned to leave but then I heard her say, “Hi, Mike. The usual?”

  “You know me too well, Cathy. And this fella here is buying.” He slid into the booth and looked at me across the table. His hair was mostly gray but he couldn’t have been any older than thirty. He was dressed in a shirt, jeans, and leather jacket that seemed too big for his scrawny frame. “Mr. Harbinger, I’m Mike Taverner.” He held out a hand and I shook it. His grip was weak.

  “Thanks for meeting with me,” I said. “Your colleague didn’t seem to think you would.”

  “Ex-colleague,” he corrected me. “I don’t do that work anymore.”

  “Since the night Ryan Martin disappeared.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Why is that?”

  He looked out through the window at the lake and the rain and the dark clouds. “A lot of people have asked me that question. When I quit, they all wanted to know what had happened that would make me throw in the towel. I never told any of them, they wouldn’t understand.”

  Cathy came over to the table, set down two sodas, and filled our coffee cups. I added creamer and sugar to mine and waited for Mike to continue.

  “I couldn’t tell any of them what I saw that night,” he said after Cathy had left us, “because they’d think I was crazy. Hell, even I thought I was crazy. But two years have passed and I know that what I saw was real. I’ve come to terms with that but I still haven’t told anyone around these parts about it.”

  “But you’ll tell me?” I asked.

  He looked closely at me and sa
id, “I will but only if you promise to kill it. That’s what you do, isn’t it? You’re a monster hunter.”

  “That’s part of my job. So you’re saying you saw a monster that night?”

  “Will you kill it? I’ve been afraid for the past two years that the damn thing is out there somewhere, waiting for me. Because not only did I see it, it also saw me and there was hatred in its eyes.” He looked out through the window again. “As long as it’s out there somewhere, I can’t sleep. I barely leave the house anymore.”

  “Maybe you should tell me exactly what you saw that night.”

  Cathy returned to our table with the food. As she set the dishes down, Mike and I were silent. When she was gone, and I was eating my fries, he said, “I was the only person on duty that night. A call came in that one of the patients from the mental hospital on the hill had escaped and had climbed into a storm drain. I drove out there, cursing my luck that it had happened on my watch. It was raining, you see, about as heavy as it is now, and the last thing I wanted to be doing was searching a storm drain for a mental patient.”

  He popped a couple of fries into his mouth and ate them before continuing. “When I got to the drain, there were three people standing there on the road. Two of them worked security at the hospital and the other guy was a doctor. One of the security guys had already been in the drain and he was covered with slime and God knows what else, which made me even more reluctant to go down there.

  “Not only that, they had some scraps of the missing guy’s clothing, so I was sure he’d snagged himself on something down there and had then been washed away by the pressure of the water. What else could rip his clothes like that?”

  He sighed. “Anyway, I knew my duty so I got my flashlight and climbed into the drain. It was big enough and I got inside pretty quickly, before I had a chance to talk myself out of it. I was expecting there to be a whole lot of water in that drain but there wasn’t much at all, despite the rain. I didn’t know it at the time but the drain was blocked with debris somewhere farther along so most of the water wasn’t reaching the part I was in.”

  “So Ryan couldn’t have drowned,” I said.