The Shadows: A Novel (7 page)

The attic was almost entirely empty apart from a stack of three cardboard boxes. They were piled neatly and were clearly the focus of the whole space, like a shrine. An open pot of congealed red paint rested beside them, and there were scrunches of rolled-up paper towels dotted about, so soaked in the paint they appeared drenched with blood.

My mother, I assumed, wiping her hands after creating what was plastered around me.

I approached the boxes tentatively, the corners of my vision filled with those mad red hands. I had the uncomfortable sensation they were moving when I wasn’t looking at them—that the whole time I had been in the house the past few days, they had been up here, fluttering silently across the eaves in the darkness.

I took the first box down and sat on the floor.

It was sealed with tape, and I used one of my keys to cut it open along the seam. Inside, I saw a pile of weathered newspapers. I pulled the top one out. It was an old copy of the
Gritten Valley Times,
which had been the area’s local paper when I was a child. I laid it out on the beams now and took in the stark headline across the middle of the yellowing front page.

GRITTEN ROCKED BY TEEN SLAYING

The printed text below the headline had been smudged by thumbprints and faded by time, but the grainy photographs there were still visible. There was Billy, age fifteen, glowering sullenly at the camera. His thick brown hair was parted in the center and there was a smattering of acne on his cheeks. Below that photo was one of Charlie. He was smirking absently, his dyed black hair swept back, his eyes as empty and alien as a shark’s.

I knew both of these photographs well. They had been taken from the class portrait we’d all posed for, early on in the year of the murder, and I knew the rest of us were there somewhere, outside of the frame. These were zoomed in, which explained the low quality of the images. There had been other, better photographs of Charlie and Billy, but these were the ones the media had generally run with at the time. I hadn’t understood why back then, but I realized now they seemed to fit the story best—capturing not only the killers themselves but their roles in what unfolded.

Charlie, the leader.

Billy, the led.

I hadn’t seen a photograph of either of them in years, and the sight of them now left me numb inside. I should have been feeling something, I thought, but for a moment nothing would come. I stared down at the blurry image of Charlie for a few empty seconds. And then—finally—something snapped inside me, as though a tendon in my mind had given way beneath a sudden strain, and the emotion came tumbling out, angry and sickening.

I hate you.

I fucking
hate
you.

My hands trembled as I took more newspapers out of the box. There were other copies of the
Gritten Valley Times,
but there were national papers as well, all of the stories about the murder here in
Gritten and the subsequent investigation. There was coverage of Billy’s arrest and trial. The search for Charlie. The grief of a community in shock at the pitch-black evil that had flowered in its midst.

My mother had kept it all.

But why? I remembered she had encouraged me not to follow the media at the time, trying to protect me from it. I had ignored her, of course, and each report I scanned now brought with it a jolt of memory. Here was a photograph of the playground, sealed away behind crime scene tape, a policeman standing guard by the bushes. There, yet another lurid sidebar detailing Charlie and Billy’s obsession with lucid dreaming.

I turned one page to find a photograph of a knife, the blood on the blade dried to rusty-looking crumbs, and read the caption below.

The weapon that Charles Crabtree and William Roberts used to stab their classmate to death. A total of fifty-seven wounds were recorded on the body, leaving the victim’s head all but severed.

I put it quickly aside.

I felt hollow inside now: my whole body slightly stunned, as though the impact of seeing all this again were physical rather than mental. And the whole time, the red hands flickered at the edges of my vision.

What was in the other boxes?

There was a sudden urgency to the question. I took the second box down and opened it. There were newspapers inside this one too, but these appeared to be more recent. The first I pulled out was dated only four years ago.

And yet the headline was horribly familiar.

BOY, 14, MURDERED BY CLASSMATES

Next to that, there was a photograph of a boy. He had a mop of unruly blond hair and a scattering of freckles, and the collar of his school uniform was visible at the bottom of the frame. He was smiling sweetly for the camera. The caption told me his name had been Andrew Brook. He looked far younger than fourteen, and for a moment he reminded me so much of James at that age that it took my breath away.

As I worked my way through the newspapers, everything felt strange and off-kilter around me, as though the attic had rotated a few degrees and the world was now resting at an odd, disorientating angle. The story of what had happened to Andrew Brook emerged piecemeal through headlines.

TWO ARRESTED IN MURDER PROBE

“OUTSIDERS” CHARGED WITH BRUTAL KILLING

OCCULT CONNECTION “ONE LINE OF INQUIRY,” CLAIM POLICE

The murderers weren’t named in the reports, but it was clear from skimming the articles that Andrew Brook had been attacked by two boys from his school—boys he thought had been his friends—and that police believed they had killed him as part of some form of ritual. There was mention of diaries and other material being taken from their homes for analysis.

I pulled the third box across to me and opened it. Newspapers again. These were from only two years ago, and the reports were about another killing, this time of a fifteen-year-old boy named Ben Halsall. Two fellow students had been arrested and charged with his murder.

DREAM CULT CONNECTION IN LOCAL MURDER

As with the previous box, the reports remained vague in terms of exact detail, but if you knew what you were looking for the link was even more overt here. There were references to the two suspects being withdrawn and isolated, and obsessed with dreams and internet mythology. The influence of the murder in Gritten was obvious. I knew exactly what I was looking at.

Copycat killings.

For twenty-five years, I’d done my best not to think about what Charlie and Billy had done, or my own role in the events leading up to it. Any guilt had been parceled away, and when I left for college I’d imagined the train I boarded that day had taken me away from it. To the extent I’d ever considered it, I’d assumed the rest of the world had done the same as I had, and that Charlie had been forgotten.

But he hadn’t.

And my mother had known.

Why did you keep all this, Mom?

But of course there was no answer to that question here. I sat back on my heels and closed my eyes. The silence was ringing. And in the darkness around me, I felt a hundred blood-red hands slipping quietly over the eaves.

An hour later, I parked up outside the hospice. The surroundings were as tranquil as ever, with the day’s hot sunshine filtering through the trees, but the world felt darker than it had before. It was as though a shadow were gradually falling over everything, and my chest was tight with nerves as I made my way inside to my mother’s room.

She was sleeping. For the first time since arriving in Gritten, I wished that she wasn’t. She looked smaller than ever today, the slow
breaths her body was taking barely there. The machine that was monitoring her heart gave a soft beat every few seconds, and even that sound seemed quieter than usual.

“What are you dreaming?” I asked softly.

And then I sat in the chair beside the bed for a time, rubbing my hands together slowly. The window was open, and I could smell the trees and the cut grass out there, and hear a slight rush of breeze.

But although my body was here in the hospice, my mind kept returning to the attic and what I’d found there. And while I waited for my mother to wake up, I took out my phone and began searching online.

There were thousands of hits. It would have taken me hours to read it all, but I clicked onto a large forum devoted to the murder in Gritten, and then scanned through the hundreds of posts there. The amount of information surprised me; every aspect of the case was being discussed in detail. But what I found most fascinating were the threads devoted to Charlie’s disappearance. The speculation there went on and on.

It seemed so pointless. If the police couldn’t find Charlie a quarter of a century ago, what were a bunch of online amateurs going to achieve now? Regardless, they all had their own pet theory about how he had pulled off his vanishing act. Some thought his remains were out there in the depths of Gritten Wood, still waiting to be discovered. Others, that an accomplice had helped to spirit him away, and that he was still alive somewhere.

The thought of that made me shiver.

But even worse were the posts from people who appeared to believe the impossible. Charlie had thought a sacrifice would allow him to vanish into the dream world forever, and there were people online who genuinely believed he had managed it.

Which was ridiculous, of course. But at the same time, I remembered all too well the appeal that lucid dreams had had for me as a
teenager, and how even though I hadn’t bought into the outer reaches of Charlie’s bullshit, that central idea of
escape
had still pulled at me. If I hadn’t believed him, perhaps a part of me had wanted to. So yes, it was ridiculous. But I had seen it happen myself, hadn’t I? I’d watched a belief take hold, and then the awful repercussions of that unfolding slowly and inexorably in real time.

The killers of Andrew Brook and Ben Halsall had believed.

It sickened me. What Charlie and Billy did that day had become a story, one that had grown and twisted over the years, and now at least two other children were dead because of him. It might have been absurd to believe Charlie had disappeared into a fantasy world, but in some ways he had achieved his wish. The murder had leaked out into the lives of so many others, and Charlie lived on in their dreams and nightmares, just as he’d wanted.

And because I had played my own role in what had happened, it was impossible to shake the feeling that I was partly responsible for the murders that followed in its wake. That, whether I had known about them or not, in some way they were my fault.

After a time, my mother began stirring in her sleep. Her breathing changed, and while it was probably my imagination, the soft beep of her heart monitor beside me seemed a little louder.

She opened her eyes.

I waited as she stared at the ceiling for a few seconds. She turned her head and looked at me blankly. And then she looked as sad as I’d ever seen her. It was as though she wanted to reach out to someone—to touch them—but a window was keeping the two of them apart.

“You can do so much better, you know,” she said.

I remembered the photographs I’d seen back at the house. My mother as a young woman full of hopes and dreams, laughing with such joy that it looked as though the whole world delighted her. The contrast right now was stark.

“Mom,” I said. “It’s me. Paul.”

She stared at me. I was worried she might react the way she had on my first visit, but instead, after a moment, her expression changed, the sadness softening into something slightly happier, yet still tinged with melancholy and loss.

“You look so grown up,” she said.

“I am.”

“Oh, I know. Or at least you
think
you are. Everybody does at your age. But that doesn’t stop me from worrying about you. My son, going out by himself into the big, wide world.”

I swallowed.

She wasn’t here with me right now, but I knew where her mind was and what it was seeing. I didn’t need to close my eyes to picture that final day at the railway station as we waited for the train together. Me heading off to college, with my bags resting on the platform beside me. I remembered what she had said to me.

It will be Christmas before you know it.

My mother smiled sadly now.

“And I know you’re not coming back,” she said.

For a few seconds, I said nothing. Just as I had at the time.

Then I leaned forward.

“No, I’m not,” I said quietly. “I’m sorry.”

“You don’t need to be.”

“Are you sad about it?”

She shook her head gently, then looked up at the ceiling and smiled again, this time more to herself.

“I’ll miss you so much,” she said. “But I’m happy for you. I want you to go out and do great things. That’s all I’ve ever wanted. For you to get away from this place, and everything that happened here. I want to throw you as far as possible, so you can grow big and strong somewhere better. So you can have a good life. I don’t care if you ever think about me at all. I’ll think about you instead.”

I didn’t reply. I hadn’t known what was going through my mother’s
head that day, and I had never had a child of my own to help me understand the notion of unconditional sacrifice she was describing.

That’s all I’ve ever wanted.

For you to get away from this place, and everything that happened here.

All these years, she had known about the copycat murders. She had kept newspapers detailing crimes connected to me, and which I had been blissfully unaware of. She had let me have my escape, and then carried a weight in my absence that should have been mine.

She had protected me.

“I went up into the attic, Mom,” I said.

Her smile flickered at that. It was as though my words had interfered with her reception, interrupting the clarity of the signal she was receiving, like a burst of unpleasant static across the screen of her memories. I regretted it immediately. If she had done that for me over the years, surely it was my turn to shoulder the burden now. What mattered most was that her final days and hours were peaceful.