Shadowville: Book One of the Shadoweaters

by Paul Taylor

  The Motel loomed over them like the bad-guy's castle in any old vampire movie you cared to mention. It was like a live thing, sitting, contemplating these gnats who were intent on despoiling it. Ben crouched along behind Shade, content to let him lead the show, not sure if they should be crouching and sneaking like an old war movie, or just stride on up and blow in the front door like an Arnie flick.

  Ben supposed the first thing he had to do was get his mind off movies. This was no film, it was cold, heartless reality. Where he might, in fact, be too late to save the girl. That the good guys wouldn't necessarily beat the baddies. That everything wouldn't work out all right in the end.

  It was possible they would die in there. Shade claimed imperviousness but Ben was doubtful. If they were so invulnerable, why all the care with the strobe lights? Why not just stroll in, pick up Kath and stroll back out? The Shadoweaters couldn't hurt them. Apparently. Ben decided it was more than possible that this man, who he had known for all of three days, may possibly have led him astray in regards to their supposed invulnerability.

  They reached the corner of the Motel and stopped, standing at the edge of the twitching, whirling whorls of shadow. Ben glanced at the shadows, watched them twist and writhe, and smelled a faint scent coming from them like old and dried paper. What he saw in the shadows almost made him cry out in surprise and fear.

  "Shade," Ben tugged urgently on his sleeve. "Shade!"

  "What is it?" he said. "It looks like the coast is clear from this way. I'm going to check out the office, you cover me. What is it?"

  Ben gestured at the shadows. "There's faces in there, thousands of faces."

  Shade glanced at it and nodded his head. "All the people they've killed."

  Ben took this in and his head reeled. There were literally thousands of shadow faces in there, rippling and twirling and changing, mouths opened in silent screams. One swirled up from the blackness and seemed to recognise him, it's eyes bulging out, and Ben swore he heard it say his name. It was like seeing someone you knew but with a thin, black sheet pressed over their face.

  "Come on," hissed Shade.

  Ben tore himself away from the shadow to follow Shade's progress as he crept through the Motel doors and into the reception area beyond.

  "Wait there," he instructed. "If I'm not back in two minutes start flashing the strobe and come get me."

  He stepped into that swirling mist of shadows and was gone almost immediately, disappearing through into the blackness beyond. Ben wondered if the shadows served as some kind of alarm system that would act as a warning to their approach. Who knew.

  He turned his watch to catch the light and waited for the second hand to make two complete cycles. The surprising thing, Ben thought, was how two minutes was capable of stretching out to seem five times that long. Especially when you were squatting outside a darkened Motel populated by Shadoweaters in a blacked out town in the middle of the night. Ben wondered if this was how vampire hunters felt and wished that he had a good sized stake he could ram through these suckers' hearts.

  Ben was drifting off and the second hand was into its third sweep before he realised Shade hadn't come back.

  He stood up and walked to the door of the motel.

  "Shade," Ben hissed.

  Ben looked around, expecting his thunderous voice to attract all sorts of nasties, but there was no one about. No one at all. This was weird. They should have twigged to them by now and sent at least someone out to try and get rid of them.

  "Shade," Ben said again. A little louder this time.

  He looked around again and listened. There were no sounds, no movements, nothing to disturb the cool, fresh night. Far away down the river bank, he heard the river purring softly along its course, unperturbed at anything the human race chose to do to itself.

  Ben unhooked the strobe from the belt of his black jeans and held it up towards the door, his finger on the trigger. He hoped this would work.

  There was a noise from inside the motel and the light almost slipped from Ben's sweat-slicked hand. It was a precarious few seconds of juggling before he was sure he had it. When he looked up Shade was striding out from the cloak of shadows as calmly as if he'd just walked out of the toilet.

  "Where the hell were you?" said Ben.

  "Testing you," he said. "You failed by the way, that was three and a half minutes."

  "Gee, what are you going to do? Confiscate my secret decoder ring and sheriff's badge? What the hell took you so long?"

  "Nothing," he said. "Absolutely nothing. There's no sign of anyone in there. I just wanted to make sure. Come on, we're going to have to go all the way in. You first, you can show me the room the Shadoweaters were in."

  You go first was easy enough for him to say. The Motel was built in the shape of a U with the office on one end and the parking lot in the middle. The shadow barrier came off the office and stretched diagonally across the parking lot to meet the far corner of the rooms. They'd have to walk through the barrier to get to the rooms beyond.

  Ben swallowed hard and when Shade gave him a gentle nudge in the back, he almost decked him one.

  "Come on," Shade said. "What are you afraid of?"

  "I'm not afraid of anything!" Ben snapped. Although he was ashamed to admit he was deadly terrified of going through that black wall.

  "Do we have torches or something?" Ben asked.

  "Just the strobes," Shade said. "It's better if we don't alert them to our presence."

  "Won't this," Ben waved at the barrier, "do that?"

  "Probably," Shade agreed. "But I figure we don't need to light beacons to draw them right to us."

  "Great. Okay, then. Fine."

  Ben took a deep, slow breath and stepped towards the barrier. He took another step and reached out one hand towards it, gritted his teeth and pushed the hand into it. He'd turned his head away, and when he didn't feel anything had to look back to make sure he was actually near the barrier. He was and his hand had sunk into it with no ill effect.

  "Okay," Ben murmured. He realised he hadn't let out his breath and did so now, expelling the air in a relieved sigh. Remembering that the best way to enter cold water was to throw yourself straight into it, he applied the same principles here and, closing his eyes, took two steps straight forward into that writhing, clinging ink pool.

  There was a brief sensation like brushing through a curtain and a smell that reminded him of dusty, old libraries. All old paper and decay. A dry, yellow smell. And then he was through.

  Ben turned to call out to Shade, thinking for some reason that he would be waiting for Ben before coming through, and found himself about to yell right into his face. Ben jumped backwards and felt like he might need a change of underwear.

  "Oh," Ben said stupidly. "You're here."

  "Where did you expect me to be?" he asked.

  "Never mind. What do we do now?"

  It was noticeably darker inside the barrier, the shadows effectively blocked most of what external light there was. Ben couldn't see more than vague outlines and indistinct blurs, which could have been anything from cars to elephants.

  There was no sound and no movement to greet their entrance. No movement that Ben saw anyway.

  "Do you think they're even still here?" Ben asked his apparent guide.

  "Some of them," Shade said softly. "The shadow residue would have dissipated if there weren't a least a few of them here."

  As Shade spoke, Ben noticed the surrounding area lightening and figured his night vision must have been kicking in. Until he looked back at Shade.

  "Holy shit," he said. "You're glowing!"

  A white nimbus surrounded Shade like a saint in a church leadlight display.

  "You too," he said mildly.

  There was, indeed, a soft glow also coming from Ben, he noticed, holding out his hand and looking down at it. It was nowhere near as bright as Shade's, but there none-the-less.

  "Holy shit," Ben muttered. "What is this shit?"

  Shade s
tarted across the car park. "It's easy," he said. "The Shadoweaters are wreathed in shadows, we, the Light-Bringers, are wreathed in light. Get it?"

  "Well, yeah," Ben mumbled, hurrying after him. "Of course I get it. I wasn't expecting it, was all."

  "Now you know why I didn't bring torches. So are you going to show me where they were, or not?"

  Ben led Shade across the parking lot, determined to not to let him know that Ben wasn't as shit cool as Shade was about being in this bizarre half nightmare world. That proved hard though when Ben kept glancing behind him, thinking that the crunching of Shade's feet on the gravel was someone following them.

  "This is the place," Ben said, pointing at a Motel room door that had been left hanging wide open. It was torn half off its hinges at the top and hung drunkenly.

  Without another word, Shade slipped past him and took one step into the interior. He glanced around and made his pronouncement.

  "There's no one in here," he said.

  There was a noise from across the parking lot, somewhere behind them in the gloom, and Ben jumped and turned so quick he got whiplash. "What was that?!"

  Shade gestured for him to be quiet and slipped out past him. His feet, which had previously crunched like a fat woman eating potato crisps, now made no noise at all as he slid across the parking lot like a ghost.

  Shade was halfway across the lot when Ben heard the noise again, and this time was able to identify it. It was a woman moaning. Kath!

  "Kath!" Ben yelled out, starting to run across the car park. "Kath, it's me, Ben. Where are you?"

  Shade reached out lazily with one hand as Ben raced past and dropped it on his shoulder. The weight of Shade's hand stopped Ben as effectively as the proverbial ton of bricks. He struggled to get away and Shade's fingers pressed into his collarbone, grating against it.

  "That's not Kath," Shade said in a low whisper.

  "The fuck it isn't," Ben said, still struggling and now gritting his teeth in pain. "How the hell would you know anyway?"

  "I can tell from the sound of their voice," growled Shade. "And if you shut up and listen for a second you'll realise it's not Kath."

  Ben looked at Shade, glared at him. His fingers dug into Ben's shoulder with surprising strength, and Ben waged a brief, internal battle over whether or not to listen to him.

  "If you're wrong," he said. "If you're wrong and it is Kath and we're too late..."

  He let it trail off, knowing how stupid a threat against this man would sound. Shade had been straight with him so far, and it made sense that Kath was no longer here. If she was, the Shadoweaters certainly wouldn't have let them just stroll on in. But still, even if it wasn't her, he had to find the source of that voice.

  Almost in response to Ben's thought, the voice came again. A wavering moan that rose high and higher on the night air. That, combined with the oppressive, shadowy gloom, should have scared him, but it absolutely did not. Not that he was willing to admit anyway.

  Ben snickered. "It sounds like someone doing a bad ghost impression."

  Shade had let go of Ben's shoulder, satisfied he wasn't going to suddenly take off.

  "Come on," Shade said. "Let's take a look, it's starting to get on my nerves."

  Ben didn't like this. He was on edge and he didn't know why. His hopes were turning to despair as he realised Neil, and probably Kath with him, had slipped their grasp. Kath was doubtless back with Neil, back with him and becoming a Shadoweater herself to avoid the insane fury of his fists. Or she was dead. Killed by Neil in a fit of jealous rage.

  The moaning was coming from one of the far motel rooms. It was black on that side, deep night in a thicker conglomeration of shadows, as if they had all gathered there. Ben wondered if they were still there, lying in wait to ambush them.

  "They must have based themselves there," Shade murmured.

  Ben nodded tightly. God, how could Shade be so cool? Ben was nervous and as jumpy as a cat on a hot tin roof. His nerves were wound tight enough to snap. He glanced sideways at Shade and saw no trace of anxiety on that smooth, ageless face. Not even a tenseness around the eyes. His body continued to glow softly.

  The moaning stopped abruptly as a slap and Ben looked back at the motel room. Shade said, "We'll go in."

  Ben stood on one side of the door and Shade stood on the other. They looked like a couple of old time cops about to pull a raid. The cement render finish of the wall was cool and rough against Ben's arm, and he noticed his hand quivering as he brought the strobe light up to bear. His other hand was at his shoulder with the finger resting on the trigger of the strobe.

  The motel room was dead quiet now. Ben heard nothing moving about inside, not even a single sound. This was all so wrong. Shade thought the Shadoweaters were gone, but how could he be a hundred percent sure? Ben had visions of thirty Shadoweaters all crammed into the room beyond, waiting for them.

  Shade stuck two fingers up at Ben. Before he replied with the famous one-finger salute, Ben realised Shade was counting down.

  The first finger disappeared and when the second finger vanished magically back into his hand Shade spun around and kicked the door open. The crack of cheap timber split the night air and the door flew back against the inside wall. Before Ben had even moved Shade was leaping through the doorway in a flash of the strobe.

  Ben followed Shade through the door, his finger ready.

  In the dull gloom inside, they saw nothing that might suddenly leap forth and attack them, but Ben saw any number of light-coloured shapes that his mind was all too ready to identify as crouching figures.

  A double bed sat directly to their right, the sheets tussled as if someone had recently spent an unpleasant night in them. Ben saw that what he at first took to be dark stains across the sheets (diarrhoea perhaps?) were actually shadows. Thick strands of shadow like cobwebs.

  To their left was a television, mounted on the wall with a little video player below it, and under that a bench ran along the wall to the small bar fridge. Across the room were double bunks, leading around a corner into the bottom L of the room.

  Something moved at the corner of the room, where it bent away into the L, and Shade triggered the strobe. Whatever it was, was quick, and dived away from the flashing light before it could do any damage.

  They moved further into the room, their fingers tense now on the lights. A gentle susurration arose as they moved further in, a soughing, sighing noise like wind through high tree branches that came from all around them. It sounded to Ben like dozens of voices quietly whispering.

  Ben leaned close to Shade. "You hear that?" He asked.

  Shade nodded and gestured at the walls. "You see that?"

  The walls were moving. They rippled and writhed with lazy undulations like snakes under a sheet. The whole room was alive!

  "It's a nest," said Shade in a low voice. "My God, how long have they been here? How long?"

  Ben heard the strain in Shade's voice and felt fear cut through his own stomach, like a surfer far out in the waves who sees the blade of a shark rise out of the water only metres from his dangling legs.

  A nest? Great. Ben was swamped with all sorts of horrible images from dozens of horror movies where the heroes broke through a wall or came into a cave and found miles and miles of eggs stretching away into infinity. The film Aliens sprang immediately to mind.

  Ben glanced around and thought how much this room resembled a dark, tomb-like cave. A short, unformed tentacle reached out towards them and Ben wondered how long their glow would keep the shadows at bay. Or even if it would.

  Shade flashed the strobe at one wall of the motel, experimenting. If the flickering light affected the whispering curtain of shadows at all, Ben couldn't see it. Shade decided to turn Ben's low-level fear up a notch more.

  "I wasn't expecting this," Shade murmured.

  "Oh great," Ben moaned. "You weren't expecting this? Because usually that goes hand in hand with the phrase 'I don't know what we're going to do about this.'"

>   "Settle, petal," he said. "There's no need to get your panties all in a bunch. I just mean that I haven't seen it this advanced before. I've never encountered an actual nest."

  "Okay, look," Ben said. "As much as I like standing around in the nests of creatures that could quite possibly kill me, if there's no Shadoweaters around I'd just as soon get the hell out of here." No matter what you do, Ben had found, borderline panic always made your voice go up.

  "I think you're right," said Shade. "It's not safe to be here."

  Almost as if waiting for its cue, a shape flew out of the darkness at them. Ben screamed and staggered backwards, flinging his arms up at that enormous shape. He couldn't even make out what its exact form was, whether it was human or animal. Or both. The Shadoweater was vague and indistinct, almost as if Ben was seeing its distorted reflection through a bowl of jelly.

  Before Ben had moved to bring up his almost forgotten strobe, he saw light flicker across its surface from Shade's beam. The Shadoweater howled its pain as Ben joined his strobe to Shade's attack.

  The lights flashed across the creature from two different directions and the result was explosive.

  The first flash lined the Shadoweater in stark black and white, no more shifting inkiness, and revealed a face somewhere in the centre of the creature that Ben was sure he recognised. The Shadoweater wailed. A high, female shriek that filled the Motel room and felt like a physical force so strong that Ben felt his eardrums might burst.

  In the jerky, stop-motion of the lights the creature receded from them, now with its arms half raised, now trying to shield its face. As it dwindled away, scrabbling back towards the wall in a series of black and white photos, Shade and Ben followed. Ben tried to block his ears to its awful screams.

  In the stuttering glow of the lights, the true destructive potential of their new little weapon was revealed.

  The Shadoweater's skin ruptured and tore in half a dozen places on its body, the shadow ripping and exposing skin that pulled itself tight and shredded in a puff, as if it were dried paper. Through the wounds, Ben saw, not the glistening shine of exposed flesh, but a dry brownness, like beef jerky.

  Behind the Shadoweater, its shadow thrashed and writhed as if trying to tear itself from its host body. It was only as the lights continued to reveal their horrid show that Ben realised that was exactly what the shadow was trying to do.

  As the Shadoweater's screams died down, Ben heard more of those tearing, ripping noises, and when he looked closer, he saw tendrils of shadow waving about with dried bits of skin dangling from their ends like tiny flags.

  The Shadoweater sagged and collapsed onto the floor, still trying to claw away from them.

  The shadow itself reared up behind the eater like a creature from the tomb, a black flag stretched up in the glow of the lights. A horrible ripping, squelching noise emanated from the Shadoweater's twitching body as the shadow tried to tear itself free. The body humped and writhed, making an obscene parody of love to the floor.

  "Uh, Shade?" Ben murmured. "What happens when it gets free?"

  "Nothing," said Shade. "It won't get free, although it'll die trying."

  The shadow continued to tug at its human host. Every now and then a tentacle lashed out at the air. One flicked out at them like the lazy stretch of an octopus, and Ben had to move quick to dodge the blow.

  The shadow gave one last titanic heave, stretching its whole bulk towards them, and there was an unutterably awful slurping, squelch like the sound kids make trying to suck that last little bit of a McDonalds thick shake up the straw.

  Then it was over.

  The shadow came fully away from its host and rippled and twisted into nothingness, pulling apart like smoke in the wind, and the Shadoweater splayed out on the floor, in peace at last.

  Ben slowly eased his finger off the trigger of the strobe, it took a conscious effort.

  "Is that it?" he asked Shade. He hoped to God it was. If there was any more than that, if it got any worse, Ben didn't want any part of it. He'd had his fill of shadows tearing loose from people's bodies.

  Shade nodded. "Uh-huh." Shade walked over to the body, illuminated by his internal glow, and Ben watched with a tense coil of dread in the pit of his stomach. All he could think of was the horror movies, where you think the monster's dead and all of a sudden, it makes one last lunge and kills the guy you were rooting for through the whole movie. Shade nudged the Shadoweater with his foot to see if it was still alive. It didn't move. Ben wasn't relieved. This was all part of the game.

  Shade bent over and grabbed the Shadoweater's arm and Ben choked back an urge to yell at him to keep away. He flipped the Shadoweater over and Ben saw its face revealed in the glow of Shade's body.

  "Oh, shit," Ben murmured, feeling like someone had slugged him in the guts.

  The Shadoweater's desiccated corpse stared up at the ceiling with vacant, horribly sunken eyes, like two sinkholes in the middle of its head. The eye sockets were empty, as if the eyes had literally rolled all the way into the back of its head. The skin had a scaled, reptilian look about it and Ben saw, grimly outlined in the directed glow of Shade's body (Ben noticed, and filed it away for later thought, that Shade could direct his glow like a torch), a pack of cigarettes, dislodged in the struggle and laying on her chest. What there was left of it.

  Mavis's whole body had taken on a shrunken look, as if she'd sucked her cheeks in, only she had inhaled too hard and sucked in her whole body. She looked like she'd had her whole insides sucked out. Which, Shade informed Ben, was almost exactly what had happened. Her shadow, he said, would have reached the stage where it made up over fifty percent of her internal workings.

  "Ah, shit," Ben muttered. "Poor old Mavis. I knew her, you know? I called her a busy-body. All she was doing was trying to look out for me." Ben was babbling, he knew it. Talking for the sake of saying words, of saying anything. Anything to blot out the horror of Mavis's sucked out body, laying on the floor like a squeezed dry Poppa carton.

  "Come on," said Shade softly, taking Ben by the arm. "Let's get some fresh air."

  Ben didn't resist as Shade pulled him across the room. He didn't know why Shade was leading him. Whether Shade was afraid Ben was going to throw himself on Mavis's corpse and bemoan her death or what. Maybe because his body seemed unwilling, or incapable, of its own motion. Either way, Shade lead, Ben followed.

  The night air was like a cold shower in high summer, it was that much cooler outside. Ben hadn't realised how close and hot it was in there. But even out here he felt little relief. He glanced up at the dark dome of shadows that still covered them. Was it darker, thicker than before? It stopped the breath in his throat and made his lungs heavy. Ben felt as though it even dulled his mind.

  "You okay?" Shade asked, concerned, and his voice came filtered through a long, dark tunnel of shadows.

  The last thing Ben knew was Shade catching him as he dove for the ground. Head first.

  CHAPTER FORTY-SIX