Shadowville: Book One of the Shadoweaters

by Paul Taylor

  "Haven't we already done this once before?" asked Ben, as they drove another lap around the deserted streets of Casino. Down Barker Street, onto Walker Street, left into Canterbury Street, left onto Centre Street and back to Barker.

  Shade reclined back in the passenger seat with his eyes closed and fingers pressed lightly against his temples. He looked like a man trying to remember some vitally important piece of information. The ever-present sunglasses were, for once, not hiding his eyes. They were resting on his head.

  "Shut up," he told Ben.

  He sounded a bit pissed off, so Ben did. He figured Shade had every right to have the shits anyway. They'd been right on the cusp of finding the Shadoweaters, walked into their very lair, and the bastards had escaped from clean under their noses. Now here they were, reduced to their original tactics of driving around town and hoping something leapt out at them.

  Nothing had, yet.

  "Are we even sure they're still here?" asked Ben.

  "Mm-huh," said Shade. "They're here all right. I can smell them. Not all of them, I think the bulk of them have moved on, but the carriers are still here."

  "So if you can smell them why don't you just track them to wherever they're hiding out?"

  He didn't have a reply to that. None that he was willing to share, anyway. He just rolled his head towards Ben and gave him that dead-eyed stare of his. Ben assumed that, for one reason or another, Shade's sense of "smelling" the Shadoweaters wasn't a literal sense of smell.

  They reached the intersection of Barker and Walker Streets for the third time and on impulse Ben hung a right, pointed the car away from the middle of town and back towards the river.

  Shade looked up briefly, about to speak, and changed his mind. Instead he turned and stared out the window.

  "Stop the car," he said.

  Ben was only doing about forty k's, so he stopped quickly, but even before he'd brought the car to a complete halt, Shade was out and racing back up the street. Ben jumped out and followed him, after a brief fight with a stupid urge to neatly park the car by the kerb.

  They'd stopped with the council chambers on the left and Ben followed Shade back up to a furniture place on the right. Shade glanced around quickly before darting inside.

  The lock on the big, glass double doors had been forced at some point (Ben assumed after the occupation of the town by shadows) and the doors stood partway open.

  "Shade?" Ben called.

  There was no answer from the darkened interior of the store which, either way you looked at it, wasn't a good thing. Ben didn't have the comforting feel of the spotlight in his hand and felt himself really quite vulnerable.

  He pushed the door open a little further and slipped through, stopping inside the entrance until his eyesight adjusted.

  The place was a warehouse full of furniture, dark except for the glow of daylight filtering through the small, high windows, and what light shone in the door. It was dark, but not like the motel, and Ben's first instinct was that if Shade thought this place was home to Shadoweaters, he was definitely off the beam.

  Speaking of the devil, Ben saw him over by the far wall of the warehouse. Shade waved to him, indicating that he wanted Ben to move along this side wall towards the back of the building, where Ben saw there was a small office. Ben waved back and moved along the aisle nearest the wall, doing his best to keep sight of Shade over and through the assorted beds, chairs, tables and cupboards. Ben wanted to call across and ask Shade what was going on, but he guessed that now wasn't the best time. Ben suspected Shade had seen someone, or something, in here.

  There was a movement at the head of the aisle and Ben looked up in time to see a dark shape slink across it. He waved frantically to Shade before racing down the aisle after it. The aisle opened out into a narrow area closed in by high bookshelves and cupboards. Ben glanced left and right and saw nothing. Had he imagined it?

  Off to his right, something moved, he heard scratching against wood, and he crept in that direction. Had whoever it was hidden in one of the cupboards? Ben crept up beside a cupboard, reached across and flung open the door. Nothing happened, but from where Ben stood he couldn't see inside the cupboard. For all he knew their quarry was squatting in there, waiting for Ben to show himself before he leapt out and clobbered him. Ben took a deep breath and jumped in front of the cupboard with his fists raised. There was nothing there.

  There was a flash of movement to Ben's left and he charged in that direction. It was only Shade.

  Shade nodded towards the back of the building and Ben saw there was a door leading outside. It was on a spring return and was slowly swinging closed. Ben nodded.

  They stepped out the door and into a small back lot with a delivery bay and not much else. The delivery bay opened out onto a perpendicular laneway that was bordered on the far side by a high, off-white paling fence.

  Shade ran across to the fence and peered over the top of it at the river bank sloping away.

  "Damn it!" he said, slamming one hand against the fence. It was the first time Ben had seen him lose his cool. "The bastard got clean away."

  "Did you get a good look at him?" Ben asked.

  Shade shook his head. "Nah. Could've been anyone. I just got a glimpse of them as we drove past. Damn it!" He slammed the fence again.

  "Hey, come on, man," said Ben. "What'd the fence ever do to you?"

  It was a pitiful attempt at humour and Shade treated it as such.

  "Come on," he said. "Let's keep looking."

  They spent the rest of that day driving aimlessly from one street to the next, until it was too dark to see anything. The closest they came to finding any Shadoweaters was another two sightings the same as the first. Once, Ben saw a girl standing at the entrance to the Casino Centre plaza (all but empty save for one or two shops) glowering out at them as they snaked past in Ben's car. Shadows rippled and curled about her like Medusa hair.

  By the time Ben and Shade were out of the car and running towards her, she'd disappeared. All that remained was a ribbon of shadow that, as they watched, twisted away into thin air.

  At one point during the day, frustrated almost to the point of fury, Ben had suggested re-checking Neil and Kath's place and was thoroughly rebuked. Shade had recommended that Ben pursue more intelligent causeways of thought and try to more thoroughly apply his mind to sensible ideas. Well, not in so many words but that was how Ben chose to interpret, "Don't be an idiot". Shade told Ben the chances of all of them hiding out there were slim to none. The head Shadoweaters, the ones Ben had been staying next door to at the motel, were running the show now. Why the hell would they choose to hide out at the house of one of their soldiers?

  Ben didn't dare broach the subject with him again.

  They were about ready to call it quits for the night when a gunshot echoed across the town. Shade and Ben both snapped to attention and stared about, looking for the source of the gunfire. Of course they couldn't see it, and neither could they agree on which direction it had come from.

  Thoroughly undecided and more than a little pensive, Ben decided they should criss-cross the streets a couple more times and see if they heard or saw anything else.

  It didn't take long.

  They were cruising down Richmond Street (on the opposite side of town from Ben's house) towards the cop shop when they heard a shout.

  "There," Ben cried triumphantly. "In the police station."

  "Alright," said Shade. "Fine. Come on, grab your spotty and follow me in."

  "Actually," said Ben. "If it's who I think it is, he's got a gun and he's more than likely to shoot first and ask questions later. So it might be best if I go in first and you follow."

  Shade nodded, although he looked as though he didn't wholly approve of having his authority usurped like that.

  As Shade took a strobe light from the boot and Ben crept towards the door, there was another shout from inside, followed by a gunshot. Ben flinched and decided the direct approach wasn't the best idea.


  "Rich?" he yelled. "Richard, is that you? It's Ben Reilly."

  "Ben?" his voice was cracked and dry but still recognisable, strong and, most relieving of all, sane. "I'm in the back. In the cells. Careful, some of those bastards are in here."

  Ben turned back to Shade and nodded at him. "Okay," he said. "You can go in now if you want."

  "Thank you for making it safe for me," Shade said. Ben chose to ignore the sarcasm.

  "Rich," Ben called out when they pushed through the front doors and into the reception area. "I've got a friend with me, he's on our side. You can pick him by his goofy sunglasses that he never takes off."

  Shade, standing by the end of the counter, looked at him. Ben assumed that, had he been able to see Shade's eyes he would have been quaking in his boots.

  Shade pushed the door open, it, too, had been broken, and they walked through into the back area.

  There were no Shadoweaters about. At least, none that Ben saw, but he had the sense of darkness pressing in all around them. Of course, most of that was due to it now being near dark outside (Ben was once again thankful for their ambient glow), but inside there was a sense of "thickness" about the darkness. Almost as if it had weight and texture.

  They moved cautiously, careful not to move outside of the others' glow. Ben kept his finger ready on the strobe light.

  Shadows twitched and moved about the periphery of Ben's vision, but whether they were shadows or just the normal movements of the human eye, he couldn't tell.

  Shade directed a beam out of his glow towards the back of the office.

  "How do you do that?" asked Ben.

  "You'll learn."

  His glow fell across half a dozen office desks. One or two were all but snowed in, under vast drifts of paperwork. At one desk Ben saw the slumped form of a man, splayed out on his desk. A dark puddle stained the desk under his head and his gun lay under one hand.

  "Christ," Ben muttered.

  "That must be the door through to the holding cells," said Shade, pointing at a sturdy door with a small mesh window in the middle of it.

  "Looks like the door of my science room at school," Ben murmured.

  "I think schools and jails are designed around the same principles," said Shade.

  Whatever shadowy half-lives inhabited this place were obviously more intimidated by them than Mavis had been. For although Ben had the sense of something hovering constantly out of view behind them, he didn't see nor feel anything. They reached the door unmolested and walked through. Ben was surprised at first that it wasn't locked, until he saw the splintered door frame and realised this door, too, had been broken in. Ben stopped, for the first time in his life he found himself standing outside an honest to goodness jail cell.

  Unfortunately it didn't have the old-fashioned bars of countless movies and television shows, but was just a sealed room. Or at least, it used to be a sealed room. The door had been torn right off its hinges.

  Shadows thickened and congealed about the entrance into the holding cell.

  "Rich?" Ben said.

  "Yeah, I'm in here."

  Shade flashed the strobe at the doorway and the shadows peeled away like banana skins.

  "I'm gonna come in now," Ben said. "Try not to shoot me okay?"

  "Well, I can't promise anything," Rich's voice sounded faintly amused.

  The cell was a simple little room with absolutely no furniture except a metal bunk bed bolted to the floor. Ben supposed they figured they'd never have anyone in here long enough to need a toilet. Nonetheless, there was a distinct odour of urine in the air.

  Rich was laid up on the bunk with a shotgun pointed at the door and a pile of boxes of ammunition beside him. He grinned at Ben in the instant before his mouth dropped open in disbelief.

  "What are you, radioactive or something?" he said, staring at Ben's glowing form.

  "It's a long story," said Ben. "I'll explain it to you later. How the hell are you still alive?"

  "That's probably not as long a story as yours, but I'll save that for later, too. For now, can we get out of here? I've had my fill of being on the wrong side of the bars."

  SHADOW'S END

  CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT