by Paul Taylor
By the time Ben regained strength enough to sit up, Allan was long gone. As if he'd never been. To confirm Allan's reality he had only to look at his reflection in the mirror and see the bruise blossoming on his jaw. Ben shuddered as a cold, dead finger traced the length of his spine. The warning sounded exactly like what Dwayne had been told, only they had deemed Ben important enough to deliver it to him in person. And Dwayne was dead after only receiving a phone call.
"That could have been Dwayne's fifth or sixth warning," murmured Ben to himself, deep in thought and only half aware he'd spoken out loud.
Yeah, he thought. Sure, that was it. Dwayne wasn't a real bright guy. Maybe he'd gotten five or six other phone calls before that one. Maybe a couple of visits too. Only these guys didn't seem the type to muck around, did they?
No. They did not.
Which led Ben back to why they'd chosen to pay him a personal visit. Exactly who 'they' were or how they even knew where to find Ben was another question that needed answering. But for now he was quite happy to push that particular line of inquiry to the back corner of his mind.
For now Ben felt the important question was why they had come to see him and not simply phoned their threat in. Why he felt such a burning need to answer this question, Ben wasn't sure. Just that it gnawed at him like a hunger.
Then his eye happened upon the laptop and he knew why. And on the tail of that, he also had a fair idea of how they'd found him.
If these guys really were responsible for Wungla, or at least, somehow involved in it, as Allan had intimated, chances were they kept a close eye on any rumours associated with the place. Which meant they probably monitored the group pretty closely. Which further meant they would have seen Ben's post, questioning the existence of the second survivor.
What was it Allan had called him? The Man Without a Shadow. What the hell did that mean, wondered Ben. Was it some kind of fancy nick name? A government codename perhaps?
This was all getting too overwhelming. Ben had a sense of being swept up into something bigger than he had any right being involved with. He felt like a single cockroach putting forward a request to the human race to stop killing them. This feeling was so strong that he almost quit it right there and then. He almost didn't even check back with the newsgroup to see what had happened. But curiosity got the better of him, he wanted to see what the hell this Man Without a Shadow business was all about. And besides, they wouldn't know he was there if he didn't post again.
The newsgroup had been active while he was getting the shit beat out of him, Ben thought, gently massaging his swollen jaw. Damned lucky it wasn't broken or dislocated. And a miracle that all his teeth were still in place. There were a total of 56 new messages, the first six of which dealt directly with his query before trailing further off into complete gibberish. Most of the messages confirmed what he already knew so far, that there had been only a single survivor, who had been placed in foster care and was uncontactable.
The first message seemed perfectly normal, it read, in part, "The so-called 'Wungla Survivor' has been as widely theorised as the Roswell Crash survivor. Neither that incident nor the recently released autopsy footage proved to be true. I believe the same applies to these rumours.
"When the story first broke there was no mention of any survivors."
"Bullshit," muttered Ben. "I saw it with my own fucking eyes."
He went on to the next message.
"Despite claims to the contrary by people who really should know better, there was indeed a survivor of the Wungla Incursion. The mistake lies in assuming him to be human, or even of this earth. The reason there was a survivor was because he was immune to whatever swallowed the rest of the town, because he was one of the aliens who engineered the town's disappearance."
"Uh-huh," said Ben.
The next one started out promising.
"...the survivor of the Wungla Disaster was a teenage boy around the age of 13 who later came to be known as The Man Without a Shadow. This was due to him being born with an extreme birth defect which resulted in certain forms of light passing right through him..."
And so it went.
"Crazy," said Ben, closing the group. "Utterly and completely nuts."
He sat staring at the computer, disgusted at the simple inability to get his question answered. He could probably search for any references to shadows, but he'd probably have to wade through a million sites dedicated to Star Wars or ancient time-pieces to find anything. But he did think of something. He typed it in, hit enter and waited.
A few seconds later, a results page flashed up and he skimmed through it. He found something that looked to be exactly what he was looking for and jumped to that page.
"OLD WIVES' TALES," read the title-page, and below that, "Click here to read everything your mother should have told you."
Inside he found many delightful and, most likely, highly inefficient remedies for common illnesses, unlikely advice on how to fix wayward pets and some ludicrous, but still highly pervasive, general advice. It was this page Ben went to, where, after scrolling through advice on how not to break your mother's back, why you should never pull faces during windy weather, and why you really, really shouldn't throw a hammer into a fire, he found an old, half-remembered wives' tale about shadows.
It read, in essence, that if you pound a nail into the centre of your shadow in the middle of the day, your shadow will be torn off. Ben re-read this. He shook his head, smirking at his own credulity and remembering a cousin of his. He remembered when he was a kid staying at his cousin's place they used to, like many Australian households in the eighties, burn a lot of their garbage in the backyard. One day, Ben's uncle had brought out a couple of bags of garbage that included within its mess, numerous plastic milk bottles. When his uncle had started burning them Ben's cousin warned Ben not to inhale the fumes.
"If you inhale the fumes," he'd told Ben. "The plastic will go hard in your nose and suffocate you."
So Ben had dutifully held his breath while the wind wafted the ominous, black smoke away, taking short, shallow breaths whenever he thought the air was clear.
A regular fountain of knowledge Ben's cousin had been, filling Ben's head with absolutely terrific everyday horror stories. In a way Ben missed those young days. That wide-eyed acceptance that anything and everything was possible. Except that somebody else's dad's muscles might be bigger than your dad's muscles. That was never true, no matter who said it.
Despite his assurances that what was posted on the web-site was complete garbage, Ben was unable to suppress the chill he felt at the mention of that name. The Man Without a Shadow. It sounded too good to be true, like the title of an urban legend story, which, Ben guessed, it probably was. The thought gave him the shivers though. Because there was still far more to this than he understood. And he had a feeling none of it was going to be good.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN