He had been living in the apartment many years before he noticed it. For the first four years he lived alone, then he had met the woman he would, though he didn’t know it, spend the rest of his life with and they both resided in the small one-bedroom, third-storey apartment for another three years before he saw it; and it quickly became all he could see.
It was early summer, and Jeremiah had begun working from home from a tiny laptop that sat on a wide window ledge that had been extended into a small table. Opposite the window – thirty feet or so away – was the broad expanse of red brick wall, the rear of the local cinema, and Jeremiah found the unbroken wall conducive to his concentration.
That was exactly how he put it when Carly questioned him on it, her brow furrowed in that way that always made his heartbeat just a little faster.
“It’s conducive to my concentration.” He had said, and she had sighed.
“You mean you like it?” She said a little too harshly.
The couple had been in each other’s presence now for almost three weeks without a break and Jeremiah thought she was beginning to tire with what she referred to as his “constant weirdness”; it didn’t help that when she made that face, he felt his love for her glow within him.
“I like it.” He had replied, speaking about everything.
It was later that day, as the sun set and the row of orange streetlamps lit the street between his apartment block and the cinema, that Jeremiah saw it dancing on the wall opposite him. He watched it with his fingers poised an inch over his keyboard, the world forgotten for a moment.
There was a tree that stood in a mound of misshapen concrete, roots forcing chunks of it free, and it had branches that would sometimes brush his window, while the branches on the other side almost touched the red brick wall. Its shadow moved as these branches swayed under the summer breeze, the dark patches twisting and undulating, forming shapes like shadow puppets over the red brick.
A figure formed constructed with the shadows of tree limbs and leaves, the shape of a man it seemed, he wore a hat, and he had a collar that was turned up.
Bogart, or some other of those bygone men of the silver screen. The figures swagger was full of confidence and understated menace, hands in pockets, one of them packing the heat that inevitably came with such a character. The shadow moved leaf to leaf, brick to brick, but its formed remained constant. The hat’s rim was sharp, and the shoulders were set at a muscular angle.
Jeremiah wondered if the cinema’s screen was hung on the other side of the large red brick wall on which the figure moved and thought it likely; he smiled.
The figure moved as if walking and then its head turned as if acknowledging him.
Then it was gone, and Jeremiah felt his body slump in disappointment.
That was the first time he had seen it; and later he wished it had been the last.
The next night Jeremiah saw the shadow again and he had the window open and was almost all the way out of it trying to see the cause of the shadow when Carly caught him and dragged him back inside. He tried to explain his actions but to his astonishment she couldn’t see the shadow; but then, to Carly, a cloud was just a cloud, and she could never see a unicorn in it no matter how he tried to convince her. She was an eminently practical woman, his opposite in every way and though it might be surprising that they could even stand being around each other this difference in them bred a curiosity in each other that didn’t diminish over time.
Carly’s last name was Simon, and it took a very long time before Jeremiah stopped laughing openly when he introduced her to people. Some would half recognise the name but those familiar with the American singer-songwriter would stop in their tracks and look at Carly; their response was often the same.
“You look like her.” They would say, and they were right.
Carly had a wide expressive mouth and a laugh to match. She also had a marvellous singing voice that she never used in public, thankfully she did sing in the shower and Jeremiah would often lean on the edge of the door frame as the water fell, watching and listening with eyes filled with beauty and ears filled with song.
Jeremiah knew that his life was good, it was hard to imagine a better one; so, when the global pandemic hit a few months after seeing the shadow man for the first time Jeremiah wasn’t expecting his life to change all that much.
“My life has been working up to this moment.” He would say to Carly. “Everything I need is right here.”
He found more jobs online, companies shifting to working from home to compensate for their emptying offices, and for all the suffering the virus might be causing in the wider world he had to admit, for him, it had been all positive.
For this he felt guilt; but there was nothing he could do about it. He set up home deliveries for essentials and called his friends and loved ones more regularly, but other to that his life didn’t change. Carly moved her laptop into the room near him and he managed to find her similar work to his own; if anything, Jeremiah thought life had got even better, though this was hard to express to anyone but himself, even Carly would wrinkle her nose if he approached the subject.
The next time he saw the shadow-man Carly was sat beside him trying to teach him how to use a new piece of software to which she’d become enamoured. To him it was just an email client with the obligatory calendar thrown in, but Carly could see nuances that he was blind to, and she was becoming increasingly irritated by his lack of vision regarding it; Carly did love her technology.
Jeremiah did not.
He found his attention wandering and his gaze moved over the red brick opposite. Each rough rectangle was slightly different in shade to the one beside it, ranging from a garish pink to a dark sombre maroon, and he admired the simple beauty of the sharp lines and perfect symmetry. It was amazing that something so practical and necessary could be raised to a level of art; but after all these years of looking at the wall he thought this to be true.
“Are you paying attention?” She asked and he must have grunted a response because in her reflection in the window, super-imposed over the red wall, he could see her lips purse.
“Sorry, I…” He began and something tugged at the corner of his eye, a feeling of being watched making the nape of his neck tingle. His words trailed off and his eyes focussed on the figure half hidden in the leaf shadows. It was no more substantial than the darkened patches around it and he could see the texture of the bricks as reflected light pushed the crevasses into deeper darkness; but the movement struck Jeremiah as more than an illusion. There was nonchalance in the tip of the hat, and a self-aware swagger as the figure moved.
Carly’s gaze followed Jeremiah’s, but whereas Jeremiah’s face showed amazement her just showed confusion and irritation.
‘What,’ she began slowly, ‘are you looking at?’
The shadow-man waded through the shadow-leaves, its statue growing – getting closer? Jeremiah didn’t know it, but he half rose from his seat, moving his face closer to the closed window.
He didn’t see Carly’s eyes widen but when he began to climb onto the window ledge, he felt her surprisingly strong hands grip his arm and pull him back. The altercation between them was distant to him, as distant as all the other times it had happened and just as easy for him to forget.
Jeremiah didn’t remember but this happened frequently, and Carly was beginning to tire of the fear it triggered in her, fear for her boyfriend; as well as fear of him.
Carly Jennifer Simon was an aspiring artist when she first met Jeremiah Goldsmith, though when she met him, she knew him as ‘Bullfrog’, the nickname he had been lumbered with by friends who had a simplistic sense of humour.
She had liked Bullfrog, but as she got to know him, she realised she liked Jeremiah far more.
Carly had originally majored in psychology until the art bug bit, and she understood most people wore masks; and that Bullfrog had been Jeremiah’s.
Whereas Bullfrog was loud and foolish, a person prone to silly exploits and amusing adventures, Jeremiah was imaginative and quiet; and though the two were superficially very similar the way they expressed their core attributes were very different. Bullfrog would have been the boy on the naughty-step while Jeremiah would have long since charmed his way off it.
When the virus swept the world, they had been living together for some time and neither of them saw any problems in the arrangement. There would be problems arriving from the outside of their home, which was very likely, but there was nothing to be feared from within their relationship; of that they were certain.
Now, of course, she was not so certain.
She watched as Jeremiah stared through the window to the bare brick wall thirty feet away. The tree swayed in the breeze and its shadow swung back and forth across the bricks. Over the high cinema roof top, the sky was an inky blue dotted with a sprinkling of stars. The night was peaceful and unbroken, unsullied by humankind.
Carly and Jeremiah might as well have been the last people one earth.
She felt something cold slither up her spine and nestle at the nape of her neck.
‘What,’ she began slowly, ‘are you looking at?’
For a long moment she thought he had not heard her and the cold thing at the base of her skull grew; despite the warm night, she shivered.
‘It looks so real, doesn’t it?’ Jeremiah said wistfully. The expression on his face was like when they watched a fantasy movie together and a dragon would be on-screen. She saw the child in him, wonder and awe, and utter belief. Usually the look made her smile, but today’
Her eyes moved to the wall, to the shadows. The silence was broken by a gentle rustle of leaves and a sigh of wind.
There was nothing.
‘What looks so real?’ She asked. Her voice sounded so reasonable and offhand to her own ears; it was as if they were discussing that same fantasy move and they were commenting on the effects.
Suddenly he snapped his attention from the wall opposite and glanced at her. He sighed, dejected, slouched back down into the seat in front of his computer.
‘Ah, it’s gone.’ He said with a tone of disappointment; and Carly thought this should have been a comfort to her, but it wasn’t.
‘It was impressive though wasn’t it!’ He continued as he rose to his feet. ‘Tea or coffee?’
‘Coffee.’ She said, completely automatically, but her eyes didn’t move from the red brick wall and her mind barely registered what either of them had said.
She slid into her boyfriend’s chair and watched the languid motion of leaves; the laptops screen lit the tiny desk in front of her in a pale blue that contrasted to the orange street lamps outside and for a moment she felt as though she was auditioning for the femme fatale role in a film noir; or perhaps the final girl of a horror movie.
Again, she felt a shiver run through her and almost leapt in fright when the rim of a coffee mug slid into the periphery of her vision.
‘Is it back?’ He asked and leaned over her to peer through the window.
‘I don’t know.’ She replied carefully.
‘I can’t see it” His voice trailed off as he craned his neck this way and that as if trying to catch sight of a dove in flight.
Carly watched him.
He woke to tapping, a rhythmic click, click, click that seemed as though it was coming from somewhere close to his right ear.
He was awake instantly, with no drowsiness or transition between dream and reality. It was so sudden that, for a moment, he was convinced that he was still caught in a dream. He opened his eyes and looked around the darkened room.
Across it he could see his reflection in the wardrobe mirror, an oval of white amid a mass of black bedding. Beside him the bed was empty, nothing visible there except a small mound of quilt.
He wondered what had awoken him, and then he heard the tap again; this time it seemed further away.
He slid from bed and crept from the room. The bedroom door was open, it always stood a little open of a night, and Jeremiah went through into the hallway that connected the bathroom to the living room. The noise came from his left, so he turned in that direction, towards the living room.
A wedge of orange light cut into the hallway at an angle, the shadows of the window bisecting it into misshapen squares. The small painting beside the door – the one Carly had made for his last birthday – was drenched in the colour, the oils that made up his smiling face resembling a devil mask with rictus grin.
Jeremiah passed it, averting his gaze and moved into the room in which he spent every waking hour.
It looked alien now, bathed in an unnatural glow.
Click, click’ Click, click’
The sound was loud. Overpowering’ and it was coming from the window.
The glass of one window, far down in one corner, was obscured in shadow. Here and there light cut through it, pinpoints that shifted as something moved on the other side.
Click, click’ Click, click’
Jeremiah didn’t want to move towards it, he wanted to turn away and return to the warm bed beside the soft comfort of Carly, but this wasn’t because of fear. Jeremiah didn’t feel any fear, he rarely felt it. He wouldn’t admit his life had been a comfortable one, but secretly he knew that it was he never had cause to know what fear was really like; and his carefree attitude had never caught up with him as many had predicted.
Curiosity drew him forward; sleep drew him back to bed.
Curiosity won.
The room through which he walked was a chessboard of orange and black, the shadows as deep and dark as nothingness making the poet in him thought of eternity as the child in him thought of monsters. Predictably the window was obscured by shadows, nothing more, and the tapping was that of a stray branch being tossed about by the wind.
What else could it be? Up here on the third floor?
Click, click’ click, click’
He watched the branch brush the window, the knots were like knuckles and the branch resembled a hand drawn skeletal by illness or hunger. The tree limb thickened until Jeremiah lost sight of it in the dark maw of shadow amid the tree’s leaves.
It looked like an arm, an elongated one longer than a man is tall; a very tall man at that. Leaves sprouted from it in tiny pockets, miniature leaves that would look at home on a Banzai tree, but the branch could have been carved into shape by a talented carpenter. Jeremiah could make out and elbow and the curves of forearm. There was a knobble of wrist that flattened into what could have been a palm that was tipped with five branches, the longest of which scraped his window as if asking entry.
Around him the shadows deepened as if someone was standing over him, the air vibrating with anticipation, and then something touched him and Jeremiah looked up, and stared into the void.
She wasn’t sure what the sound was, but it frightened her.
She woke alone, her hand seeking along the sheet for Jeremiah’s body and finding nothing but cold air, air that was far colder than it should have been. A rush of wind outside caused a vibration that made the bed rattle under her, a soft moan of air that sounded like nothing less than a death rattle to her half-asleep mind.
She swung her naked legs from the bed and the air raised goose-pimples across her thighs.
She heard the noise again, she paused and listened.
A laugh perhaps? An almost-giggle muted by the thick apartment walls?
She rose and considered finding a robe, discarding the idea as soon as she had thought of it. She owned one, bought by Jeremiah’s mother as a present, but she had never worn it and would not know where to find it, so instead she padded out of the bedroom with bare feet and naked legs.
A cool breeze fluttered along the hallway, it pulled at the hem of the t-shirt she wore as a nightdress and tickled her flesh. She thought of her first night in the apartment, when she had still known Jeremiah as just ‘Bullfrog’, and the feeling of his breath on her skin.
The sound was clearer now, still indistinct but louder in its mystery. She followed it, watching the orange streetlamps decorating the wall and ceiling as she approached the living room, shadows danced; one moment they looked like two people sat face to face, a moment later they looked like something hooded and hunched.
She passed the painting she had made for him, his smile broad and eyes happy; then turned into the living room.
Jeremiah sat in the middle of the room; his legs folded under him. He muttered and then laughed, his shoulders shuddering.
Carly shuddered too.
The streetlamp outside bathed the walls in complex shapes, the shadows of cables slashing across the wall as the shadows of branches plucked at them like guitar strings. Carly stopped for a moment, her mind overloaded with the thought of it, so unaccustomed was she to momentary flights of fantasy, but then Jeremiah laughed again softly, and her attention was once again drawn to him.
His face was turned to the window, the curtains moving in the breeze that swept under its open frame. The wind was not the only thing gaining entry, along with it was the gnarled branch of the tree. It swayed, teased back and forth by the breeze.
‘Jeremiah?’
Carly didn’t immediately recognise her own voice; it was the fear tingeing it that made it appear so alien. The word seemed to drop into the room from elsewhere, a particularly talented imitation of her rather than her own voice.
For a moment she was not certain it had been her at all.
She swallowed and spoke again, perhaps to convince herself it was really her who had spoken.
‘Jeremiah? Are you okay?’
She had known Jeremiah a long time, a considerable portion of her adult life and though there was a four-year difference between their ages she had never felt this difference developing into a wedge between them as people; but the person who looked up at her in that darkened living room was not a person she recognised.
He looked harmless in the way a child might seem harmless to an adult, his face blank and wide eyed as if everything was new to him. He sat with his legs crossed and he held a large leaf that was as big as the two hands that held it. He glanced down at it and then at her, then back at the leaf and then laughed.
Perhaps he was sleepwalking, she thought. He had never sleepwalked before, but the stress of the new job had taken its toll, as had the lock-down; that had taken its toll on them both.
His eyes had that faraway look, as though he was not actually seeing her, so perhaps he was in a dream state of some kind.
Carly leaned closer and reached out, her hand touched him gently.
What happened next was so fast that the world was filled with her own cries before she realised anything had happened. The man who had always looked at her with such loving eyes, with such a profound affection that she would grind her teeth at the irritation of it, the man who would wistfully tell her his life was perfect, this very same man swung a fist around and connected with the side of her head.
It was a clumsy blow from a man who was not used to hitting an opponent and the force of it didn’t hurt as much as the sheer shock of it, but that blow was not alone. Its cousins rained down on her as she dropped and threw her arms up to fend them off. Each one was weak and unfocused, and it was only her own baffled surprised that prolonged it.
She peered out from under her arm, still not afraid but crying out in surprise and mounting anger as the man she thought she loved struck out at her.
‘Jeremiah! Stop!’
He was on his feet now, ignoring her plea as he stood over her.
As Carly saw his silhouette against the shifting patterns of shadow cast across the living room wall, she thought she understood. There was a figure there, a man’s figure made by the shadows cast by the tree outside, it was sharp and recognisable, and she knew that this was the image that Jeremiah had become so enamoured with.
Something in Jeremiah had broken.
‘Jeremiah!!’
And Carly thought he would not stop.
‘Jeremiah! Please! Stop!’
So, she stopped him.
Carly Simon’s father was a gentle man, he rarely raised his voice, and he never struck another man in anger, but in sport he struck quite a few. He was a child of the 80’s and grew up on the spate of martial arts movies that dominated the movie market at the time. Like so many boys, and quite a few girls, he began taking self-defence courses, but unlike so many he continued them after the novelty had worn off for so many. Years later this proved to be a good choice when his new family needed more income and he decided to teach. Carly had been one of his earliest students, and he often said she was one of his best.
So, when Carly decided that she had put up with enough Jeremiah found himself on his butt with a very large bruise already forming on the side of his face before he even realised she’d hit him.
Not that Carly thought he realised much of anything at the moment.
Jeremiah blinked and his head moved in erratic little shudders as he peered around the room. Carly watched him but didn’t move. She was confident she could outfight him, but he was a stronger opponent, and she was taught never to underestimate a stronger opponent. Not that he currently looked like a stronger opponent. In fact, he looked weak and clueless, and she felt herself weakening at the very sight of him.
Still, she stood her ground.
‘Jeremiah?’ This time her tone was firm, and her body was poised to strike.
‘Huh?’ He mumbled, blinked, and creased his brow as if he was confused.
The rest of the night went nowhere fast. Jeremiah moved to the seat in front of the window and Carly parked herself on the small two seat sofa with the patched arm.
Communication consisted of questions and broken answers. For the next five hours neither of them moved or slept, but there were lots of words, with so many of them going nowhere. He was silent for a while, then there was ignorance of his actions – or feigned ignorance – and then there were tears and apologies.
Carly could have cried but refused to allow herself. He looked fearful and weak sat there in the glow of the orange streetlamps outside, the bruise she had given him was stark against his pale flesh, an angry purple badge that he would wear for some time to come. The sight of it made her want to hold him but the memory of his spiteful hands made her want to add to the bruise.
She kept the memory of his blows at the front of her mind as she listened, and she kept them in her mind as she spoke, but his sorrowful eyes and sunken posture warred against the memory. Slowly the memory faded, losing its definition and over the hours she softened. By morning she had moved to his side and as the dawn sun rose, they were together again in bed, curled up in each other’s arms.
When they awoke the sun was already moving past its zenith and making its way towards the horizon and neither of them knew it but the same was true of their relationship. They both felt the change, they probably thought it would be momentary, something they would get through together like they got through everything together; but this was not like anything else they had experienced.
They were damned.
What remained of the next day was uncomfortable as both danced around the other in a subconscious effort to erase the previous night, but each action, each effort just drew more attention to the fact that something between them had fundamentally changed.
He knew she didn’t believe him, but he didn’t remember it.
He assumed that the dream he had was at least partially real, perhaps he had been sleepwalking as she had suggested. He remembered the tapping that drew him to the front room and the thing at the window, the Shadow Man, trying to get in through it. Then something had touched him, and he had looked up and…
The next was a flurry and then he had been sitting on the floor. His arms were aching, and his face hurt but what he remembered most vividly was Carly’s wide-eyed expression, a combination of horror and disgust.
Slowly, drip by drip, the blanks were filled, but his memory didn’t return.
He did try.
He thought he did.
He wasn’t sure.
The aches in his arms must have been a result of hitting her, the pain in his face must have been the result of her retaliation, the pain was evidence, her testimony was evidence, but he had no memory.
He knew she didn’t believe him, but that was okay, he wasn’t sure he believed himself either.
When she climbed to his feet she stiffened, and he clearly saw her fist close in preparation. The sight sank shards of glass into his heart, and he didn’t acknowledge it but some part of him knew there-and-then that it was over for them.
He moved away from her, which was not his original intention, and sat in the seat by his computer. He tried not to look outside at the wall and the shadows on it. She asked a question, he couldn’t remember now what that question was, but he answered it. Then he began to speak. He didn’t remember, he told her, but he knew what must have happened.
It was self-evident.
It could not have been me, he said and as he said it, he knew how the words must sound. He tried to explain himself, he tried to explain how stupid he would have been to do such a thing, how easily she could overpower him, how much trouble would result from his actions, but it was all for nothing.
But he had done it, memory, or no memory.
It was then when he thought he did start remembering.
Or perhaps it was excuses conjured up by his frantic need to absolve himself of blame.
He thought he remembered The Shadow Man.
As the next day became the next night it was as if all the time between it and the incident – as she had begun to think of the previous night – had dwindled to nothing.
She had awoken to pain, nothing severe but the aches of pulled muscles and sore joints, enough to remind her every time she moved that things had changed. Beside her he was still sleeping, so she rose quietly and left the room.
The sun was almost gone when he showed his face, his eyes always lowered, and his voice never raised.
He looked cowed but she had awoken more resolute than she was when she had fallen asleep, so her tone to him was curt and she admitted her own internal approval every time she saw him flinch at her words.
She noticed his worried glances at the window and his avoidance of the seat he had spent so much time in previously. He sat himself on the sofa she had made her own the previous night and he didn’t move from the spot.
She was fine with that, if he stayed in one place, he was easier to avoid and so Carly begun doing just that, busying herself with the chores she seemed to accumulate while he sat and tried not to stare out of the window.
She ran through the incident, remembering it the way she had been taught to remember such things. She put aside the emotion and considered the steps, then considered the disjointed conversation afterwards.
She told herself that this was not a prelude to forgiveness.
She told herself that this was not a weakening of her position on the incident.
But she had to admit that he had not been himself.
She hated the words as they flowed through her mind. She had read them so many times in newspaper articles or seen them on TV in dramas she had watched. The response was always a variant of the same sentiment; he did it once he’ll do it again.
But he was sleeping, she was sure it was somnambulism, and he was reacting to something else. He wasn’t hitting her, but something else.
The aches and pains said something different though, didn’t they?
They felt personal.
She should leave.
Okay, she said to herself, and go where? And how do I get there? In case you’d forgotten we’re in the middle of a bloody pandemic!
Ah, yes’
Carly turned on a hot water tap and watched the seam begin to rise from the sink. Around the dirty plates and cutlery from the day before bubbles begun to grow into cloudy suds. She watched them, then dipped a finger into them leaving a little valley of white in its wake.
She could handle him, she decided, she wasn’t a weak person she was trained, and she could handle him.
Outside the street was no more or less silent when the night fell than it was at midday, the windows facing the red brick wall were mostly blank squares dotted here and there with a feeble light, the city skyline reflecting in the darkened glass.
Jeremiah and Carly were not the only ones living on the street, but they may as well have been. City living meant not knowing even if you had a neighbour or not, and most residents didn’t stay long even if you discovered one. In the eight years Jeremiah had lived in the apartment he had only met two, though he believed there to be more than a dozen different ones during that time.
Carly had never met any of them, and she was the more social of the couple.
The sun descended and the stars were revealed. The night, it seemed, revealed many things, or at least many things allowed themselves to be revealed. A family of foxes made their way across the main street, emerging from an alleyway between a department store and a jeweller, and making their way through to the back of a restaurant to forage while above them bats screeched across from the bell tower to a church that had been converted to a wine bar.
As the virus that swept the world had driven people into hiding it had allowed the wild world to encroach on the territory stolen from it. This was done quietly and without fanfare, the inexorable advance showing with undeniable certainty that the world did not belong to that thing called humanity. As much as they may believe such foolishness.
Jeremiah Goldsmith was not aware of any of this, at least consciously, but he did fear that something similar was happening in his own heart and mind. He had seen The Shadow Man, but he no longer knew if the thing he saw was from the outside or from within and when he looked at his hands, he saw alien things that had betrayed him, and he wondered to whom they belonged.
Jeremiah’s family were devout, and though Jeremiah himself had long since forgone any faith he still remembered the teachings.
One who betrays his fellow, it is as if he has betrayed God.
He didn’t believe in God, but the sentiment was undeniable. The words had rolled around his head since he had awoken, alone in a bed far too large for one. He didn’t have to believe; he had come to realise that he had perpetrated evil the night before and that was something else that was undeniable.
He sat on the patched sofa and listened to Carly finding chores in every room but this one. He had not moved since he had woken, he had placed his hands on his knees and had not let them leave his sight. He was not sure of them anymore; he was not sure they were really his.
Are we talking possession here Jeremiah?
The question was asked in his uncle Noam’s voice. Noam was the family black sheep who Jeremiah had always admired. Noam wore leather and played an electric guitar in a popular band that covered 70’s rock. Everyone in the family rolled their eyes when Noam was mentioned but Jeremiah’s eyes always grew large.
Are we Jerry my lad? Should we call an exorcist?
No uncle Noam, Jeremiah thought, I’m not saying the devil made me do it.
Then who did?
That voice did not sound like Uncle Noam, it did not sound like anyone Jeremiah knew, or it sounded like everyone he knew at once. He couldn’t tell but the feeling of utter worthlessness those three words passed to him was enough to hold him fast to the earth beneath him. The guilt was as strong as the Hulk and as heavy as Thor’s hammer, if he tried to move it would burst through him.
Which is why he stayed still.
His hands on his knees.
Silent.
The kitchen overlooked the same stretch of blank red brick that the living room did, and as she cleared her chores and then searched for others that would keep her secluded in this little room she half watched as the blue light of the day shifted to grey of the night.
It was the orange of the streetlights that made her pause. When they flickered on, and the tree’s shadow elongated over the brick Carly stopped what she was doing and watched.
It was just an absence of light, she told herself, a shadow was nothing more than that. It had no substance, in fact if anything it was the lack of such a thing that distinguished it from its surroundings.
Just shadows.
She shuddered.
She remembered.
It wasn’t just Jeremiah’s shadow in the room with her last night, there was another there too, she had clearly seen it.
Or she thought she had clearly seen it.
She knew that it could be a rationale of the irrational, she knew that’s what it was. Magical thinking that made the incident an act of some alien influence, rather than blame the man who deserved the blame.
The shadows crept over the wall, nothing more than the breeze shifting the tree branches, nothing more than the turning of the world.
But we are just small part of it all, she thought, we are pawns of the world.
She knew what she was trying to do, in her roundabout way. She knew she was trying to concoct a get-out clause for him. Despite her anger and hurt she wanted something else to shoulder his blame.
She wanted to believe in The Shadow Man.
She had known about him for some time, she had pieced it together from Jeremiah’s obsession with the wall, but it had all fallen together after the things he had said after the incident. She had known about The Shadow Man for a while, but she had not known his name.
She pulled the plug in the sink the listened to the water gurgle down the drain.
Had her understanding influenced what she saw? Or was it the other way around? She didn’t know but the question was crucial.
Listen to yourself!
The voice in her head was her own, but it was her rational self, or at least the part of herself that considered itself rational.
How many years of psychology did you do again? Do you need to crack open those textbooks again?
No, she replied to herself, no I don’t.
The silence was pressing down on her, the distance between her and Jeremiah opening her up to an infinite regression of re-evaluation. She knew what Lydia Carmichael, her psychology lecturer, would’ve said about the situation, and it would not have been glowing about either Carly or – especially – Jeremiah; but then she’d have had a few things to say about Jeremiah, none of them particularly flattering.
The memory of her brought an unexpected smile to Carly’s lips and she felt her mood lighten.
Jeremiah believed in The Shadow Man, Carly herself half believed in him but suspected it had more to do with the need to establish blame to him rather than any genuine belief, but – and she thought this the most important fact – she did believe that Jeremiah was asleep when he attacked her.
That thought stopped her dead in her tracks.
Yes, Jeremiah attacked her, it wasn’t just an incident, it was an attack.
But he was asleep, and whoever he was attacking wasn’t her, she searched and found that this was something she had complete confidence in.
So yes, he was responsible, but perhaps he was not to blame.
Outside the shadows shifted, drifting with the breeze.
The absence of light nothing more.
Carly felt resolution.
Without blame there was nothing to forgive. If there was nothing to forgive there was no reason for anger. If there was no reason for anger, then why was there distance between them?
Because it begins with forgiveness.
Carly dried her hands on the dishcloth and turned towards the living room.
‘Jeremiah?’
She kept her voice neutral as she walked down the short corridor, passing the door leading to their bedroom and out into the living room. She was intending to say more but her words caught in her throat when she saw him.
Jeremiah ‘Bullfrog’ Goldsmith was caught in silhouette from the light from the living room window, a pocket of darkness in the shape of him, an absence, a negative space.
It was just the absence of light, she told herself.
Was evil just an absence of good?
The question seemed to come from outside of herself, it was the kind of question Jeremiah would ask, a holdover from his upbringing, not the kind of question she would consider.
She had little time for theology.
The shadows from outside had crept into the room through the glass. The black leaves fluttered, and the black boughs bent as if real weight was being put against it. As if some shadow creature was scaling it, clutching its way along the black branches into the room.
Jeremiah was sat still, his hands pressed to his knees and his back perfectly straight. He head was inclined forward, and she could not see if his eyes were open or closed. If they were open, he was looking at a spot a few feet or so in front of his naked feet, both of which were placed together, perfectly aligned.
Automatically Carly felt herself tense.
‘Jeremiah.’
The name was posed as a statement, not a question and Carly wondered if she were trying to tell Jeremiah who he was rather than draw his attention to her.
It didn’t matter, he didn’t respond anyway.
She took another step closer.
‘Jeremiah?’
This time it was a question, her tone softer.
Her muscles were not.
‘Come on Jeremiah, am I going to have to kick your ass again?’
It was meant as humour, but it came out flat, a threat thinly veiled as humour.
He deserves it.
She ignored the voice.
He’s going to do it again’
This time the voice did not sound like anyone she knew, and she wondered if it came from somewhere within her at all. She glanced to the wall where the night shadows lived, the intertwined shadow leaves swayed there but nothing else accompanied them, no Shadow Man.
There is no Shadow Man.
Carly was not so sure, she did not believe in some magical creature conveniently shaped like a man, but she did believe that belief itself was a potent force. That belief sometimes made things real to the observer; and she knew that belief was infectious, and its communicability varied from person to person.
She might already be infected; she just didn’t know it.
Jeremiah had not moved; his head was still inclined slightly forward so keeping a distance Carly arched her back and lowered her head to see his face.
His eyes were open, very open, large orbs of glistening white in the gloom. Tears collected at their lower lid in huge pools that miraculously refused to fall down his cheeks. What she thought was stillness was alive with movement, dozens of twitches and shudders that were so tiny they could easily get lost in the darkness.
His eyes seemed to vibrate, a short circuit tumbling a motor of movement not hooked up to anything. He was trying to move his eyes but couldn’t, perhaps the muscle evolution had designed for the task had ruptured.
Carly imagined the tiny muscles flopping behind the man’s eye like worms in a fresh wet ditch, wriggling against the back of the eyeball uselessly.
‘Jeremiah?’
This time she heard pleading in her voice.
She stepped closer and he didn’t move, so she took another.
She was close enough now that he could reach out and touch her and she was aware that with every step she was giving away her advantage. At a distance she had her speed and her training, but up close his strength could overcome all that.
She didn’t see his lips move when he finally spoke, his voice was barely above a whisper but in the night-time silence it carried.
‘I can see him”
And Carly realised why his eyes were not moving, and why the tears had formed but not fell from them. He was seeing it now, staring at it, not wanting to blink for fear of it escaping his view.
The Shadow Man was here, and by the angle of his unblinking gaze she could tell that what he saw was just behind her.
She knew she shouldn’t, she was aware that it might have been a ruse to shift her attention, but she could not resist the insistent feeling of eyes on her back.
She turned.
For the briefest of moments, she saw nothing but the natural artistry of the tree’s shadows across the living room wall, the illusion of movement as the wind blew against the leaves that cast them. For a moment she wanted to laugh but she felt something clutch at her wrist, a tightening contraction that exhibited far more strength that she knew Jeremiah possessed.
Possessed’
‘Do you see it…?’
Then she saw The Shadow Man, the darkened figure was angled in through the window glass like any shadow, the walls texture clear though it, but when she reached the things chest, shoulders, face; the shadow deepened, darkened like an absence of space had formed before her.
Is evil an absence of good?
This time the words were her own.
The grip on her wrist tightened.
‘Do you see it’?’
Carly felt her head tip into a nod.
The Shadow Man grew, the void expanding to eat up the wall and pushing against the floor beneath them. The chair and computer slipped into shadow, then into darkness, then into the void, and all through this The Shadow Man did not lose his face.
‘I see it.’ She whispered, but what did she see?
Belief was infectious.
The darkness crept, the edge of it was surprisingly clear, as keen as a knife edge as it swept closer to her right foot, then under it and she felt her balance shift as if the ground had been tugged out from under her.
The void was complete around her as if she floated in an ocean, deep away from the sun in a place where monstrosities lurked. Around her the darkness was so complete she thought she had lost her ability to see until she saw her hands drifting within her field of view.
They were dim, as if seen through a black lace veil, but there were there, stark against the nothingness in which they drifted.
She felt his presence before she saw him.
He was no larger than a normal man, her height coming to his dark shoulder. His face was hidden under the rim of his hat and his hands buried unto the folds of the long coat he wore. The figure showed back over black, and she knew she should not have seen anything at all, but he was still clear to her.
Light did not work the same in this place, there was no white light, only black and it was as if her eyes had been altered to see things differently here.
The Shadow Man moved forward and though she saw no smile, she knew one was there, indicated by a change of atmosphere rather than the muscles of his face, and this seemed to provoke a change around her. Carly felt the world snap into place, a floor pressed to the bottom of her feet and the air around her begun to move.
But void remained.
There was a flash in the darkness, a glint from the end of one of The Shadow Man’s hands as he withdrew them from his coat.
A knife, Carly thought instantly, and her mind instantly returned to her father’s Dojo and the soft plastic knife he had used to train her. It had been blue and blunt while this was sharp and silver, but the techniques were the same.
She should not have seen the blade; she should not have seen anything. It did not enter her mind that she should have been paralysed with fear by the sheer alien existence of the void and riddled with terror at the sight of The Shadow Man; but she was not.
Autonomic responses took over, cell memory making her drop into a defensive stance and training forcing her eye to pick out avenues of attack.
Carly swung and caught the same area just beside his eye she had struck the night before. The skin, already swollen and distended, split and before he knew it a river of blood had splattered across his face and down onto his shirt.
He raised a hand to ward off her blows, but the ridge of her hand caught the base of his little finger, and he heard an audible crunch as the small bone cracked. The pain was not immediate, and for a grisly moment he watched as the finger flopped out at a right angle to his hand and then she struck out a second time, catching the same hand again.
This time the bone was forced through the wall of flesh, the skin peeling back from it revealing perfect white dotted with streaks of crimson.
The pain came at once, a double header from his face and hand.
Jeremiah shrieked.
Her fist slammed into his mouth and a tooth cracked.
The floor rushed up to meet his face as his legs gave way.
Jeremiah tried to speak, but already his lips had swollen to useless blobs of meat, and he could not make anything resembling a word issue through them. Not that it mattered any more She would not hear him, she was not hearing anything, or seeing anything now, other than The Shadow Man.
Jeremiah understood.
Carly had been sucked up into The Shadow Man, she was within him now, as Jeremiah had been the other night, and all she could see was the man shaped nothing getting closer, and closer still, her terror building until all she had was flight or fight; and there was nowhere to run to.
Not that Carly would run anyway.
Carly was a fighter.
As his flesh split Jeremiah grinned a grotesque smile, a smile of pride in the strong beautiful woman he knew he would be with until the end and with each blow that moment came closer. With each split in his flesh a little more of him spilled out onto the blood-soaked carpet. She would not weaken and even if he could retaliate, she would not even notice.
She had always been the strong one.