Shadow Land

by Adam J. Wright

  “Ryan—that was his name,” he said as if suddenly remembering. “Ryan Martin. No, he didn’t drown, I know that for a fact. Anyway, I searched the drain for maybe a half hour before I was ready to give up on the guy. It stank like rotten leaves and dead animals down there and all I’d found was more scraps of clothing. So I was wondering whether to go back to the place I’d entered or look for a different way out. There were inlet grates every quarter mile or so and I had passed one maybe a quarter mile back so I was expecting to come upon another pretty soon. I decided that as soon as I saw it, I was out of there.”

  He shivered slightly and looked out through the window at the rain falling on the lake. “I found the grate,” he said, “and that’s when I saw it. It was hunched over and at first I didn’t know what it was. Then it was suddenly aware that I was in there with it and it kind of unfolded itself and stood as high as a man, probably higher. It had scales like a fish and big claws and these staring yellow eyes that looked at me with a look of hatred, like I already told you.”

  His hands had begun to shake at the memory and he put them beneath the table as if ashamed. “I screamed,” he said, “and I got the hell out of there. There were iron rungs leading up to the grate and I must have gone up them like a squirrel trying to escape a wolf. I slammed my shoulder against the grate and, thank God, it flew open. I scrambled out and found myself in the woods. I was sure that thing was going to come out after me and drag me back into the drain.

  “I ran faster than I’d ever run in my life. I ran so fast, I thought my heart would burst. I didn’t stop until I reached the road and collapsed from exhaustion. Next thing I knew, I was being driven to the hospital by one of those security guys. The next day, the sheriff came to see me in the hospital and I quit right there and then. I couldn’t tell him what I’d seen, all I could do was blubber like a baby. My view of the world changed that day, Mr. Harbinger. There are dark things out there, things that no man should ever face if he wants to live a normal life.”

  “You said you know for a fact that Ryan didn’t drown,” I said. “When you saw the creature, did you also see his body? Had it killed him?”

  Mike looked at me with sadness and confusion in his eyes. “No, it hadn’t killed him. I found scraps of clothing in the drain but the rest of it was hanging off the monster’s body. It was wearing a torn shirt and what was left of a pair of jeans. That monster didn’t kill Ryan Martin. It was Ryan Martin.”

  16

  Mike took a swallow of coffee, the cup shaking in his hand. “I’m not crazy,” he said. “I’m telling you, that thing had once been human. It had once been Ryan Martin.”

  I tried to absorb this new piece of information, fit it into what I already knew. Had Ryan become a shellycoat somehow? Was it possible? There were some creatures that crossed the divide between human and preternatural, like the werewolf, but I’d never heard of anyone transforming into a fish-like creature.

  And if Ryan’s transformation had been lycanthropic, like a were-creature, why hadn’t he contacted his wife and son when he’d changed back into human form?

  Unless the transformation had been one way only and he’d simply become a shellycoat forever. In that case, maybe taking his son from the yard had been his way of trying to reach out to his family. Who knew what had happened to his mind and how much of Ryan was still in there? Maybe taking Sammy had been a primal instinct the creature hadn’t even understood on a conscious level.

  “You believe me, don’t you?” Mike asked.

  “Yeah, I believe you.” It felt right. Ryan had spent his life dreaming about a shellycoat, believing he was being followed by one all the time. Maybe he was aware of something inside his own psyche, something that would emerge later, and his awareness had manifested in visions and hallucinations of an external creature which was actually within himself.

  I needed to get back to Felicity and tell her this new information. We needed to act on it. Because if the shellycoat was actually Ryan, and he had found his son after all this time, he’d probably do anything he could to take Sammy again, even if he didn’t understand why he was doing so.

  “Mike, thanks for talking with me,” I said. “You’ve been a great help. And I can assure you that the creature isn’t in Greenville any longer. You can sleep easy.”

  “You know where it is?”

  I nodded. I had no idea how long Ryan had stayed in this area after his transformation but at some point, he had wandered south, maybe not even knowing why. It had taken him two years but he’d eventually found Dearmont and his family.

  “You’re going to kill it, right?” Mike said.

  “I’m going to deal with it,” I said.

  “You mean kill it?”

  “Not necessarily.”

  “No, that isn’t good enough. You have to kill it. I’ll pay you if that’s what it takes. I’ll hire you to kill it.”

  “I’ve already been hired,” I told him. “The creature is part of a case I’m already working on. You can’t hire me to do something that would conflict with my client’s interests.”

  “It can’t be in anyone’s interests can be to keep that thing alive,” he said. “How many people do you think it’s killed? A creature like that ain’t vegetarian. You can’t just let it live.”

  He had a point. If the creature had killed anyone, then it was my duty as a P.I. to take it out. As a member of the Society of Shadows, I couldn’t do anything else, I had to kill it.

  I wondered how Sammy Martin was going to feel when he found out that his father hadn’t died two years ago at all but had changed into a preternatural creature.

  A creature that I had to kill.

  17

  I was still contemplating that when I got back to Pine Hideaway. I climbed out of the Land Rover and went into the cabin to find Felicity still poring over the papers that were now arranged into yet more piles. I wondered if she’d taken a break.

  “Hey, I have burgers,” I said, holding up a sack of food from the Lakeshore Diner.

  “They smell good,” she said, looking up from the page she was reading.

  “They are.”

  “Oh, you’ve already eaten?” She looked disappointed.

  “Just a few fries. I had them wrap up my burger to go and I got you one too.”

  She got up from the sofa and put her hands on her hips, stretching her back. “I need a break. Did you find out anything?”

  “Yeah, let me get this food sorted out and I’ll tell you all about it.” I went to the kitchen and unwrapped the food, putting the burgers and fries on two plates. “You want a beer?” I shouted to Felicity.

  “Yes, please.”

  I grabbed two cold ones from the fridge and returned to the living room with everything balanced precariously in my arms. Felicity took a plate and a beer from me and sat down on the sofa again. “So, what did you find out?”

  I told her about Mike Taverner and his version of events.

  She listened while eating her burger and when I’d finished, she said, “I’ve found out some things about the Martin family.”

  “What’s that?”

  She sorted through the pages until she found the one she was looking for, the Martin family tree. She laid it on the coffee table and pointed at one of the names near the top of the tree.

  I leaned forward and read it. JOSHUA MARTIN. 1919-1927. ABERFOYLE.

  “As you can see, he died when he was only eight years old. He suffered from the same skin condition that Sammy has: photosensitivity. He spent most of his life indoors. When he did go outside, he was wrapped in a coat, scarf, hat, and gloves, no matter the weather. What’s interesting about Joshua is that everyone considered him to be gifted with the second sight. On the few occasions that he went outside, his favorite place to visit was Doon Hill.”

  “The place where the faeries lived,” I said.

  “That’s right. Joshua said he could see and speak to the faeries at Doon Hill. He also said he spoke to them in his dreams.�
�� Felicity put the family tree on the table and held up her hands. “Now, what I’m going to say next might sound a bit weird but hear me out.”

  “Okay,” I said, intrigued.

  “I’m assuming Joshua had the second sight and an affinity with the faerie folk because faerie blood was introduced into the bloodline of the Martin family.”

  “You think someone had sex with one of those fish creatures?”

  “It could have been hundreds of years ago, even as long ago as the seventeenth century when Kirk complained about the people in the area consorting with faerie lovers, but I think it happened at some point, yes.”

  “So that could be why the second sight runs in the family,” I said.

  “Perhaps there’s a latent gene that gives certain members of the family the second sight. It also gives those people some sort of skin condition. The skin condition is the marker for people with the latent faerie gene.” She turned the family tree around on the table so it was facing me. “Look at this. Joshua’s and Ryan’s names are circled. And so is Sammy’s.”

  I considered that. “But those notes were made by Dr. Campbell. If he circled the names, wasn’t he marking the family members who had the skin condition?”

  “That’s what I thought at first but there’s something in his notes that didn’t make sense until you told me about Ryan’s transformation.”

  She searched through the paper until she found what she was looking for. “Here it is. During a therapy session, he asked Ryan if there were any relatives who had the skin condition. Ryan mentioned his son, of course, and said there was a family history of it, going back as far as anyone could remember. He mentioned Joshua and Dr. Campbell made a note in the margin that says: Joshua and Ryan may be the same as Hunsaker. I assume he’s referring to another patient. Then, at a later date, he wrote another note: Can the serum only cause a metamorphosis in certain people?”

  “Metamorphosis,” I repeated. I pointed at the records. “Is the name Hunsaker mentioned anywhere else in there?”

  “Not in these documents.”

  “How about a serum?”

  “No, and that’s something else I discovered by reading through these notes: this is not a complete set of records. There are many pages missing. Campbell refers to other notes written on specific dates and they aren’t here.”

  “You think Steve only gave us some of the pages and kept others back?”

  “I don’t see why he would. He wants us to help him so why would he try to trick us?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe there’s something going on at Butterfly Heights that’s being recorded in a different set of notes that Steve doesn’t want us to see.”

  “Or a set of notes he doesn’t even know about,” Felicity suggested. “I don’t think Steve would hold anything back from us. He seemed genuinely scared of the ghost he described. I got the impression that he really does need our help.”

  “The alternative explanation is that Dr. Campbell is up to something that nobody else knows about.”

  “There are definitely more documents somewhere,” Felicity said. “And assuming Steve gave us everything from Dr. Campbell’s files, those documents are being kept somewhere else.”

  “We can snoop around tonight,” I suggested.

  “Sounds like a plan.”

  “In the meantime, I’ll call Steve and see if he knows anything about this patient named Hunsaker.” I took his card out of my pocket and dialed his number.

  When he answered, it sounded like he was outside. I could hear the wind blowing and the rain hitting something that might be a car. “Hello?”

  “Steve, it’s Alec Harbinger.”

  “Oh, hey, give me a minute.” Half a minute later, I heard a door shut and the sounds of the wind and rain disappeared. “I was just getting my groceries into the house,” he explained. “What’s up? Did you find what you wanted in those…” He paused and then said, “Did you find what you wanted?”

  That was another reason Steve probably hadn’t held out on us where the records were concerned: he was taking a big risk giving them to us at all. Why would he try to trick us when we could simply report him and get him into a heap of trouble?

  “It was interesting,” I said. “I was wondering what you can tell me about a patient named Hunsaker.”

  “Geraldine Hunsaker?”

  “I guess. Or anyone else with that name.”

  “She’s the only Hunsaker I can recall,” he said. “She was at the Heights maybe five years ago. Same problems and same therapy as the other patients. She was with us for about three weeks, I think.”

  “There’s nothing that made her stand out from the others?”

  He thought about that for a moment and then said, “No, nothing.”

  “Did she have any sort of skin condition? Photosensitivity maybe?”

  “No, definitely not. She spent a lot of time in the gardens while she was here. She liked the butterflies, I remember that about her.”

  There was a pause and then he said, “Hey, now that I think about it, she did have some sort of a skin problem. It wasn’t photosensitivity, though. I remember she was standing in the garden one day and the butterflies were fluttering up from the lupine meadow. Geraldine raised her hands above her head, as if she could catch them, and her sleeves slid back and there were patches on her arms where the skin was, I don’t know, thicker or something. And it was cracked, like if you get hard skin on the soles of your feet. But this was on her arms.”

  “Do you know what happened to Geraldine?”

  “No, like I said, she left after three weeks. I never saw her again after that.”

  “Do you have an address for her?”

  “It’ll be on file.”

  “We may need it.”

  “Okay. Hey, what’s going on? Why the interest in Geraldine?”

  “I don’t know yet, it may be nothing. See you later.”

  “Later,” he said.

  I ended the call and told Felicity what Steve had told me.

  “I have a feeling she went missing after she left Butterfly Heights,” Felicity said. “If she had the same faerie gene that Ryan had, she might have turned into a faerie creature too.”

  She grabbed her laptop and opened it. “If she went missing, we won’t need that address. The Society database has a list of missing persons.” She tapped on the keyboard and waited a few seconds. “Yes, here she is. Geraldine Hunsaker disappeared from her home in Massachusetts four years ago. She was never found.”

  She looked up at me, the glow from the computer screen reflecting in her glasses. “Do you think I’m right? That some people have a faerie gene and they end up at Butterfly Heights before undergoing some sort of metamorphosis?”

  I took a bite of my burger and chewed it slowly, my mind going over what we’d discovered. The new information raised a question: If Campbell knew that some people had a latent gene that could transform them into faerie creatures, what was he doing with that information?

  I could think of a few possibilities but the one that concerned me the most was that he might be experimenting on these people. Without seeing his secret notes, we had no way of knowing.

  “When Steve lets us into the Heights tonight, we’ll find out exactly what’s been going on up there. I have a feeling Campbell’s interest in faerie genetics is more than just academic,” I told Felicity.

  “So do I,” she said. “In fact, I’m wondering if he’s actively seeking people like Ryan Martin and Geraldine Hunsaker. He told us Butterfly Heights takes patients from other mental health facilities all over the country. Since most people who have a close connection with the faerie realm will experience visions and hallucinations, they’ll probably end up in one of those facilities at some point in their life. It wouldn’t be difficult for Dr. Campbell to have the ones he thinks are carrying the faerie gene transferred to Butterfly Heights.”

  The implications of that were worrying. I went to the window and looked out over the rain-swept lak
e. I had an urge to go to Butterfly Heights right now and confront Campbell but I knew that would be pointless. He’d just clam up and throw us out. I had to wait until tonight to find the answers.

  Until then, I had no idea if the doctor was trying to help the people under his care or if something much more sinister was happening to the patients at Butterfly Heights.

  18

  Before Amy had a chance to knock on the door of the Blackwell sisters’ house, it opened and Victoria said, “Come in, dear.”

  Amy stepped over the threshold. “I came by to see how my dad is.” She’d spent most of the day covering for her dad; driving his thawed patrol car to his house and leaving it in the driveway, telling everyone at the station that he was sick, probably with the flu, and wouldn’t be at work for some time, and taking on his workload and appointments.

  The entire time, she’d expected a phone call from the witches, telling her that her dad was dead. That phone call, thankfully, hadn’t come but that did nothing to alleviate her worry that he wasn’t going to make it.

  “We’ve made some progress,” Victoria told her. “Come on, I’ll show you.” She took Amy to the basement and opened the door of the room where the sheriff lay on the cot among the magic symbols.

  Amy went to the cot and looked down at her dad, feeling a lump form in her throat. He was still frozen, his skin blue and covered with a sheen of ice. “He doesn’t look any better,” she told Victoria.

  Devon came into the room, looking exhausted. Her eyes were red-rimmed and Amy wondered if she’d slept at all last night. She hadn’t slept herself, of course, but Devon Blackwell looked as if she were suffering from more than just a lack of sleep; she looked as though her energy had been dragged from her body.

  “The ice completely covered the walls of this room last night after you left,” Devon said. “Now, it’s only a few feet around the cot.”

  “Did you do that?” Amy asked.

  “No,” Victoria said. “It did that all by itself.”