The Shadows: A Novel (17 page)

The fourth week of the summer vacation.

I was at Jenny’s house, up in her bedroom. We were kissing and fooling around. Her mother didn’t seem to mind Jenny spending time alone with a boy in her room, but the door was open and she was constantly up and down the stairs, working tirelessly. At one point, we heard her out in the upstairs hallway and quickly broke apart, Jenny standing up and moving away from the bed, where we’d been half lying. I remember her mother was singing absently to herself as she made her way along the hall, constantly moving from one task to another.

Jenny and I listened for a moment. When we heard her footsteps on the stairs again, Jenny smiled at me and sat back down on the bed.

“As nice as this is,” she whispered, “it would be better to have a bit more privacy, wouldn’t it?”

My heart did one of those surprising new tricks.

“Yes,” I said. “It really would.”

It wasn’t like I hadn’t thought about it. And, of course, with my parents both out all day, it had also occurred to me that my own house would offer exactly that. I just hadn’t had the courage to mention it before. And also, after spending time at Jenny’s, I was
painfully aware of how threadbare and run-down my house was in comparison. But it was stupid to be ashamed.

“You could come to mine one day instead.”

“Yeah?”

“My parents aren’t home much.”

She smiled. “That sounds like a good idea, then.”

“I’m at work tomorrow. Maybe Friday?”

“Yeah. That would be great.”

We stared at each other for a moment, and I realized she was just as nervous and excited as I was.

“Oh.” She stood up suddenly. “I’ve got something to show you.”

She walked over to a chest of drawers. There was a spread of papers and books beside the television there.

“Actually, I got it a few days ago, but I wasn’t sure if you’d want to see it or not.”

“What is it?”

She picked up a slim hardback book.

“It’s the anthology. From the competition? They sent me a copy.”

“Oh wow.” I was embarrassed but also touched that she had been worried about showing it to me. “It’s fine, honestly. I’d love to see it. It looks amazing.”

She smiled and brought the book over to the bed. It had no sleeve, but was beautifully produced. The cover was pale blue, with the title and the list of contributors—twelve in all. I found her name and ran my fingers over the texture of it.

“It looks so professional,” I said.

“
I know
.”

“Your first publication.”

“Actually, I had a story published when I was seven. In
Kicks
magazine.”

“Okay—
second publication,
then. First with your name on the cover, though. First of many, I reckon.”

“Thank you.” She smiled. “I am really pleased.”

“It’s awesome.”

It really was. The disappointment from my own rejection had faded a little now, but it would never have occurred to me to resent Jenny’s success. I looked at the cover and imagined seeing my own name on a book like this, and was determined to redouble my efforts. Maybe one day I’d have something of my own to show her in return.

The spine gave a quiet but satisfying
click
as I opened it, and then, holding the book carefully, I flicked through the first couple of pages until I found the contents.

“You’re meant to read it,” Jenny said. “Not preserve it.”

“I just want to be careful.”

“It’s not
that
big a deal.”

“It so totally is.”

I moved my gaze down the list of contributors. It was non-alphabetical, and I found her close to the bottom.

“Red Hands,” by Jenny Chambers.

I stared at that title for a few seconds, a chill running down my back. I almost felt the urge to pinch my nose shut, but there was no need—I could tell I wasn’t dreaming right then. The one thing I didn’t know how to do was make sense of what I was seeing.

“Paul?”

I was aware of Jenny frowning. And yet I just kept staring at those two impossible words. “Red Hands.” The rest of the text on the page began to crawl before my eyes. For over three weeks, I’d done my best to forget about Charlie and his stupid stories, and this seemed like an ambush he’d somehow managed to plan in advance. Like a trick was being played on me.

“Paul?”

“Sorry.” I shook my head, then quickly searched through the book, looking for the start of the story. “Just give me a minute.”

I found the page, and started to read.

Red Hands

By Jenny Chambers

It was nearly midnight when the man in the woods called for the boy to go to him.…

I flinched as Jenny touched my arm. She pulled her hand away as though shocked.

“Jesus—what’s the matter? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.” She attempted a smile. “And you’ve not even read it yet.”

I looked at her, feeling sick.

“Is that what this is? A ghost story?”

“Sort of. It’s the one I told you about.”

“The sad one.”

“Yeah.” She rubbed my arm. This time neither of us recoiled. “What’s wrong, Paul?”

“I don’t know. Can I read it first?”

“Yes.” She moved away from me slightly. “Of course.”

The story was about a young boy who was drawn out of his house in the dead of night by a man calling to him from the woods. The boy snuck quietly down the upstairs hallway so as not to wake his mother, whom it was clear he resented in some way. Downstairs, he unlocked the back door as silently as he could, then stepped out into the cold and the dark. His backyard was overgrown, full of wavering black grass.

The man was standing on the edge of the tree line at the bottom. The boy couldn’t see the man’s face, only that he was a large, hulking figure.

When the man turned and headed off into the woods, the boy followed him.

There were eloquent paragraphs describing the boy making his
way into a forest that became increasingly frightening and fairy-tale-like as he went. But while the boy was scared, he kept going anyway, even when the man was sometimes only a vague presence between the trees ahead. The boy brushed the foliage aside in the darkness. Vines caught his ankles. Sticks and twigs cracked beneath his feet.

And eventually he found the man.

Just as it seemed he was too tired to continue, the boy caught sight of a campfire up ahead, the flames dancing and flickering between the trees. He heard something snap and saw sparks of fire rising in the smoke. Stepping forward, he found himself in a clearing where wood gathered from the forest was burning in a pit of soft gray ash, the sticks there like bones glowing in the heat.

The man was sitting cross-legged, his face somehow in shadow, but the boy could see his hands, resting on the stained knees of his jeans, and they were bright red in the light. They were red from the blood that was still seeping out of the jagged incisions he had made across his wrists. It hurt the boy to see that. The man was still bleeding, even though those wounds were so many years old now.

The boy sat down in the undergrowth, on the far side of the fire. The man’s expression was unknowable, but the blood was still visible, the cuts there vicious and terrible. The fire was cracking and spitting between them.

And finally, the boy’s father began to speak.

When I finished reading, I sat there in silence for a few seconds. I still had no idea what to say, so I found myself reading sentences over and over again, pretending I hadn’t finished while I tried to gather my thoughts.

“Do you like it?”

Jenny sounded anxious. Given my reaction so far, I could hardly blame her.

“I think it’s brilliant,” I said.

“Really?”

“Yeah, really.”

And I did. In terms of quality, it was miles ahead of anything I’d ever managed to write. Despite my unease with the subject matter, I’d found myself there with the boy while I read it—scared for him, but also intrigued by the man he was following. Jenny had added enough subtle detail throughout for the ending to seem inevitable when it arrived, and for understanding to flow backward from it. The boy lived alone with his mother, and the man calling for him was the ghost of his father, lost to suicide years earlier. The boy needed to talk to him, to understand what had happened and why. It was a metaphor for grief and loss, and for the damage done to those left behind in the wake of tragedy.

So, yes, I thought the story was brilliant.

Did I like it, though?

Not one bit.

It was far too close to the dream Charlie had shared with us, and the fantasies he’d spun, to be a coincidence. The four of us searching the woods for something we never found. The stories of a ghost among the trees. A man with bright red hands and a face that could not be seen.

But how was it possible for Jenny to know about any of that? As far as I knew, she had never spoken to Charlie at all, or to Billy or James. And yet this couldn’t possibly have happened by chance.

So there had to be some explanation for it.

“I think it’s amazing,” I told her again. “Where did you get the idea for it?”

But as I asked the question, I realized I already knew.

The next day, I arrived early for work.

Marie had given me a set of keys, so I opened up and set about my usual tasks. There were only a handful of customers to serve, and a single delivery to sort. I worked methodically but blankly, questions whirling in my head. In my own way, I felt as desperate as the boy in Jenny’s story, but there was also a part of me that didn’t want to know. A part of me that was frightened of what I might learn.

Marie turned up just after ten, at which point the shop was empty aside from me. I stood up, surrounded by piles of books in the sorting area behind the counter. My heart was beating fast. If I didn’t do this immediately, I might not do it at all.

“I need to talk to you about something.”

Marie stared at me curiously for a second.

“Well,” she said. “Good morning to you, as well.”

“Sorry.”

And then I just stood there. Marie sighed and put her bag down on the counter, then spoke more softly.

“What’s the matter, Paul?”

“Jenny’s story,” I said.

“What about it?”

“The one she wrote for the competition. ‘Red Hands.’”

Marie shook her head. “I don’t know, I haven’t read that one. Slow down a bit here. Talk me through what’s bothering you.”

“The story is called ‘Red Hands,’” I said. “It’s about a boy going into the woods. His father’s there—that’s who the boy is looking for—but his father is dead. He’s a ghost. He killed himself years earlier, and his hands are covered in blood.”

The description came out in a blurt, but I saw Marie’s expression
go from curious to alarmed as I spoke. She might not have read the story itself, but she knew exactly what I was talking about.

“It’s based on something you told her, isn’t it?” I said.

“Oh dear.” She closed her eyes and rubbed the skin between them. “Yes, I think so. I had no idea she would write about that one, though. You need to be careful when you do that. Not all stories belong to you, after all. People can get upset.”

“I need to know what happened,” I said. “The real story.”

Marie opened her eyes and stared at me for a few seconds. She looked suddenly tired, and as though she were weighing me up in some way.

“Please,” I said.

“Your parents, Paul.”

“What about them?”

“Your mom and dad. They’re both still alive?”

“Yeah.” A flash of my father’s face. “Unfortunately.”

“You’ll miss them when they’re gone.” But then she smiled sadly and corrected herself. “Of course, that’s not necessarily true. But all right. What do you want to know?”

“Everything.”

I already knew some of it, because Jenny had told me what she could remember. Several years ago, a man had come out to Gritten Wood, walked away into the trees, and committed suicide there. The rumor was that he had left a child behind. That had been the jumping-off point for Jenny’s story. From there, she’d imagined how that boy might feel years later.

Marie was silent for a moment.

“The strange thing is, I only told her any of it because of you,” she said. “This was a while ago. She was talking about you—she said there was a boy in her writing class that she liked. A new boy, from Gritten Wood. Don’t look so embarrassed.”

“I’m not.”

What I actually felt was a trickle of horror inside me.
I only told her any of it because of you
. The idea that any of this—whatever
this
was—might somehow be my fault was hard to accept.

“I just said to be careful,” Marie told me. “It was a joke, really. I said that the woods out there were supposed to be haunted because of what happened.”

“I never heard anything about it.”

“Yes, but
you
grew up there,” Marie said. “When something awful happens in a place, people there have a way of closing up. They decide the best thing to do is not to talk about it and hope it all goes away. Maybe sometimes it even does.”

“Someone really killed themselves in the Shadows?”

“Yes.”

“Who?”

“I honestly can’t remember his name, Paul. This was a long time ago.”

“How long?”

But then I realized why she’d asked if my parents were both still alive.

“About sixteen years?”

“Yes. Sometime in the seventies. It was in the local paper, but I can’t recall the details. It was mostly just people talking. Gossip.”

“
Why
did he kill himself?”

“All kinds of reasons, I imagine.” Marie looked at me sadly. “People’s lives can be very complicated, Paul. From what I understand, the man was in the army for a while and was affected by that.”

In the army for a while
.

Another resonance. I remembered the description Charlie had given of Red Hands, and how that had become the way the rest of us pictured him too. Living off the land; as much a part of the woods as in them; a battered old fatigue coat, the shoulders worn away like feathers.

“What about the child he left behind?”