The Shadows Call Page 5

  How bloody stupid had I been?

  I’d not only allowed my imagination to get away from me, I’d allowed it to break down the gates of my scepticism and run loose like wildfire through a forest.

  I laughed, telling myself it was not in relief, but at how easy I’d fooled myself. I took a swipe at the cobwebs with the hammer. Accidentally the hammerhead struck the base of the dumbwaiter, and it was all the force required to make the support ropes unfurl. The small freight elevator disappeared into the bowels of the shaft, shrieking all the way down like a damned soul pitched into hell. Irrationality had been a feature of the past five minutes or so, and things weren’t about to change now. I made an ill-advised lunge, dropping the chisel in the process, and snapped a hand on the rope, intending to halt the dumbwaiter’s fall. The rope zipped through my palm, scouring the flesh, before I had the sense to let it go. I swore as I jerked back from the shaft, inspecting my palm. It was red hot and beaded with blood oozing from the fresh burn.

  Somewhere below me the elevator crashed to the bottom of the shaft. Displaced air and dust puffed upward. I leaned into the box structure, trying to make out the extent of the damage, but all I saw was an endless shaft of deepest black.

  There was no light bulb in the closet, and I didn’t have a flashlight to hand. But what separates man from the beasts is ingenuity. Shaking my stinging hand, I went into the bedroom and thought about dragging the lamp through to next door, but the flex wasn’t long enough. Aha! I placed down the hammer, exchanging it for my mobile phone and carried it back to the closet. Leaning over the box, I pressed a random button and the screen glowed blue.

  Using the phone’s light to illuminate the shaft, I angled it back and forward, but the glow was too weak to reach even the next level down. Undefeated, I bent over the box, reaching down as far as I could, trying to send the light directly down the shaft.

  Something moved.

  Just beyond the extent of the dim blue glow.

  ‘What the…?’

  Lower in the shaft something swirled, then blossomed. Like ink in dirty water, it grew, pushing back even the glow of the light. It gained momentum and then geysered up at me, a frigid blast of stinking air enveloping me entirely. I pedalled frantically away, hands slapping at the gritty embrace. I screamed.

  And something screamed back.

  A screeching howl of mockery that dug at my eardrums and sent white flashes through my vision.

  I collided with the doorframe of my bedroom, felt the impact deep in my shoulder joint, and my phone flew out of my hand and clattered across the hall. I didn’t bend to fetch it; I was too busy hurtling down the stairs away from whatever nightmare creature was about to erupt from the shaft like a demented jack in the box, grasp me in its rending claws and drag me into those nighted depths where it preferred to feast.

  7

  Cold Light

  Things didn’t feel much better in the cold light of day.

  My knee was killing me; my spine ached; my assaulted shoulder sent stabbing agony through my ribs; and the friction burn on my left palm stung as if I gripped a bunch of angry hornets. But they were physical pain. The mental pain of a bruised ego hurt worse. I was embarrassed that I’d allowed my imagination to get the better of me and began looking for alternative reasons for everything I’d experienced. I wasn’t infallible: I could be caught up in the moment like any other person, but I didn’t have to believe that there was a supernatural explanation for what had gone on. It was strange, but totally natural.

  Yes, the weirdness of all that had happened could be easily explained when taken in rational steps: vibrations, subsidence, temperature changes, and deterioration of the structure. They were alternatives for the strange occurrences, and now that I’d had a chance to think about it I could even offer a fair explanation of what had happened in the dumbwaiter shaft.

  Then why did I still feel shaky, even hours afterwards?

  I couldn’t come up with a rational reason for that.

  I was walking around on tiptoes. OK, that’s an exaggeration, but I was taking things slow and easy, some part of my mind listening for anything irregular, anything unnatural. I was sneaking glances over my shoulder, pausing before entering doors, and I’m not sure of what I expected to see. Actually, that’s not exactly true, either. I feared seeing that bloody shadow man dogging my steps, or that he’d be waiting to jump at me the second I entered a room if I went unguarded.

  “When I came home last night at three

  The man was waiting there for me

  But when I looked around the hall

  I couldn’t see him there at all.”

  As I moved through the house, shifting boxes of clutter from one room to another, that damn rhyme was tumbling around my brain once more.

  ‘“Go away, go away, don’t you come back anymore.”’ I quoted Antigonish out loud. ‘“Go away, go away, and please don’t slam the door!”’

  I stopped, clutching a cardboard box to my chest. Listening. Not sure if I wanted to hear a slamming door or not. At least if the door did crash shut it might signify the banishment of the shadow man and an end to all my problems. But the door didn’t bang. In fact, the house was still and silent. Somehow that made me uneasier than ever and I went to the parlour where I’d temporarily set up my TV and turned it on. I hadn’t yet organised a satellite TV provision, so could only access the free channels. I tuned to BBC 1, where a presenter was interviewing a politician. True to form the politician was couching his answers, neither agreeing or disagreeing with the presenter’s point of view, and delivering over and over again his party line. It was typical obfuscation, a layering on of pile after pile of bullshit. Perhaps the politician wasn’t so different from me in that respect.

  I couldn’t go on like that.

  I turned up the volume on the TV, enough that it would offer a background soundtrack as I worked. Then I headed for the stairs. If I was going to regain any sense of normality I was going to have to confront the problem, not bury it under layers of lame excuses. I returned to where all this began: the small hallway with its four facing doors. I could remember my bedroom door and the one on to the stairwell had been open, and the one to the second bedroom. The dumbwaiter closet door had been shut. I arranged all the doors to reflect my memory, then slowly backed into my bedroom. I got two shadows for my trouble. One that was short, fat and very faint grey in colour that leaned into my bedroom, at about forty-five degrees to my position. The second was cast by the light coming in through my bedroom windows, and was like a very faint double exposure. It was more elongated, but it was apparent from the way it extended from my feet, across the threshold and into the hall, then only partially up the closet door, that it was nothing like I’d seen before. Another thing I had to consider: when I first visited the house it was raining, the sky was overcast and grey, unlike this morning, so the sources of light weren’t as strong as they were now. Back then my shadows would have been less defined.

  I plotted where I’d seen the shadow. If it had been mine – which it had to be – then I required a bright source of light directly behind me. I moved across the bedroom and peered out the window.

  Directly opposite my house was a three-storey building that had been converted to bedsits. It was a long shot to suggest a light from one of those windows had been cast all the way across the street and into my room, but what if someone had been dicking around with a torch or something? They could have been scoping out what was happening having noticed Muir leading Sarah and I inside the house, after it had known no residents for a long time. The reason, I told myself, that the shadow had seemingly zipped out of view was that the torch beam had moved to check out the other windows. I couldn’t credit my theory with much weight, but hey, it was still possible. As weak as it sounded, it was a more credible explanation than that I was sharing my new home with a living shadow.

  Satisfied with my explanation, I went to the closet and barely paused before opening the door.

&nbs
p; OK.

  ‘This is just wrong.’

  How the fuck could I put a logical spin on this?

  The dumbwaiter platform had returned to its original position, and not by my hands.

  8

  Down the Chute

  ‘I wondered if you’d come over,’ I said into my phone. ‘I need someone to convince me I’m not going out of my mind.’

  ‘I’m having lunch with my parents, Jack.’

  ‘Yeah, I understand. It’s Sunday and all. But I hoped that maybe you could pop over after…’

  ‘We were going to go out shopping.’

  ‘Later then? Maybe this evening?’ I was trying not to sound too needy, too over-demanding, but neither did I want Sarah to turn me down. She didn’t answer, and was possibly searching for a way to let me down gently. She could be biting at times, and wasn’t afraid of doling out sarcasm when necessary, but despite all that she was my friend. I was certain that she liked me, and hoped that her feelings went further than simple friendship. The incident with her phone had rattled her, and she was weirded out by my new home, and I didn’t want any unease to form a wedge between us. ‘I could get a pizza delivered, a bottle of wine?’

  She still didn’t answer.

  I waited.

  ‘I thought you’d given up drinking,’ she said.

  ‘I have. But a little wine with dinner doesn’t count, does it?’

  Now I waited her out.

  The longer the silence the more difficult it was for her to find a plausible excuse.

  ‘I’ll come over this afternoon,’ she finally said. Her voice was a dull monotone. ‘I’m going into town with my parents, but the shops close at four. I suppose I could pop round for a while then.’

  ‘Great,’ I said.

  ‘Don’t bother with the pizza,’ she said, a little of her inherent wit returning.

  ‘Pinot Grigio?’

  ‘Ideal. Do I have to bring my Marigolds with me?’

  ‘No, you won’t need your rubber gloves this time. I’ve got the cleaning done, ready for the carpets and furniture. All you need bring is your opinion.’

  She laughed. ‘Usually I’m told to keep it to myself.’

  ‘I appreciate your forthrightness,’ I said, putting on a plummy accent.

  ‘You said you wanted me to convince you that you’re not going out of your mind. Too late for that, Jack. It’s confirmed: you’re nuts.’

  ‘You know, I’m beginning to wonder what would be worse. Part of me hopes that I am having a little mental wobble.’ I avoided adding “again”.

  ‘What has happened?’

  ‘I’ll tell you when you get here.’

  ‘Jack?’

  ‘It’s nothing…’

  ‘You want my opinion on nothing?’ Sarah scolded.

  ‘I want a second opinion. Look, don’t worry. There’s probably a good explanation for it all. It’s just that-’ I paused, wondering if I sounded too whiney ‘-well, I can’t figure this out and I’d value your opinion.’

  ‘You haven’t been seeing shadows again?’

  ‘No. No, it’s nothing like that. I figured all that stuff out. This is something different.’

  Sarah exhaled. ‘I wish you’d just tell me.’

  If I did, I’d a feeling she’d suddenly recall that she had another more pressing engagement. But then again, she was into all that Ghostbuster stuff…

  ‘All the spooky shenanigans will be explained when you arrive,’ I said in that plummy, posh accent again. She didn’t find it funny this time. She snorted.

  ‘You’re a jerk, Jack Newman.’

  ‘Uh…’

  ‘You’ve got my mind working on overtime now. I’ll make my excuses to my mum and dad. I’ll be over within the hour, OK?’

  ‘I didn’t mean to spoil your plans, Sarah.’

  ‘Forget it. But you’d better make up for dragging me away from a shopping trip. Get two bottles of Pinot on ice.’

  Once we’d made our short goodbyes I headed to a nearby Tesco Express store and grabbed the promised wine. Once home again, I parked my Volvo in the back service alley, but didn’t immediately go inside. I wasn’t putting off going in the house; there was something that I wanted to check out. I took the wine with me, in a cheap carrier bag, the bottles clinking, the handles threatening to snap under the weight at any second. I placed the bag by the back gate to the yard. From outside the gate couldn’t be opened, an added security feature, but also an inconvenience for getting back and forward from the garage. I followed the boundary of the yard to the side of the house. The windows of the living room and those at the side of the parlour were on this wall, and faced directly onto the pavement. Mid-way along I found what I was looking for. At street level were two narrow windows, but planks screwed into the frame had blocked them in. Extending horizontally from the windows was a tin-sheet cover, sunk into a bracket in the pavement. The sheet was rusty, curled at one edge where someone had prized it up at some point in the past. I crouched, feeling the strain in my sore knee and got my fingers under the sheet. It was an effort but I hauled it up.

  Directly below the windows I found an entrance to the basement Muir had spoken of. It was a coal chute, a feature of that type of building when the home was heated by solid fuel. Back in the day, the coal man would arrive with his horse and cart, and tip the coal down the chute, out of sight and hearing of the wealthy residents. A servant in the basement would then fetch coal from the hopper below the chute as and when necessary. In later days an iron grid had been fixed over the entrance to stop trespassers gaining entrance to the building, but it wasn’t totally burglar proof. Somebody had hacksawed a couple of the bars free, leaving a wide enough gap for someone to slip inside. I was confident that there was no way someone could find ingress to the house from the basement, but they could play silly buggers with the dumbwaiter mechanism from down there.

  If it were not for the fact I wanted to see Sarah, I would have called her back, told her to enjoy her shopping trip, as I’d solved the riddle. Or at the very least I’d discovered a plausible explanation for how the dumbwaiter had returned to its original position. I had a squatter living in my basement.

  As I have already mentioned, I’m not an accomplished scrapper. Therefore I didn’t feel confident about descending into the cellar alone. Discretion, they say, is the better part of valour, so I called Peter Muir.

  ‘I’m having my Sunday dinner, man,’ Muir said. It seemed as if a trend was developing.

  I told him about my suspicions regarding a trespasser.

  ‘Wouldn’t surprise me if some tramp has sneaked inside. It wouldn’t be the first time to be honest. But I thought I’d put a stop to that.’

  ‘The hatch to the basement’s insecure,’ I told him. ‘It has been prized up and you can see where someone’s damaged the bars and made their way in.’

  ‘Bloody hell.’

  ‘I wondered if you’d come over and take a look with me.’

  ‘I’m having dinner, man,’ he reminded me. ‘Just call the police. It’s their job any way.’

  I sighed, but he was probably right. Who knew who was down there, or how they’d react if they were cornered. It was better if someone trained and equipped to handle a belligerent drunk was on the scene if they required evicting.

  I hung up and searched for the number for the local nick in my contacts. The police wouldn’t appreciate a 999 call; this wasn’t exactly what you’d call an emergency. So I brought up the number I’d saved for making general enquiries and low-level complaints. There was a time when I’d frequently called them. I got through to an operator after doing the run around of menus and such, and asked if an officer could attend at their first convenience. I didn’t expect anyone to turn up soon. In the meantime I pushed the tin sheet back in place. I even thought about bringing round my car and parking over the escape hatch, but decided against it. The best scenario would be if the trespasser came out now that they knew they’d been rumbled and pissed off without
any fuss. To encourage them, I opened the hatch again and propped it against the window. I then made it obvious I was walking away, whistling as I went to fetch my bag of wine. As I returned past the hatch I took a sneaky peek down to see if anyone lurked in the dimness ready to escape once I was out of earshot. I couldn’t see a thing beyond the dim spill of light on the coal chute. But that suited me fine.

  I went inside and made sure the door was locked. Making my way to the living room, I angled myself so I could spy out of the window without being seen. The open hatch was to my right, below my line of sight, but I’d spot anyone trying to sneak out.

  There was a sharp rap from behind me.

  I jumped, before realising that it was someone at the front door. It was the first time I’d heard the old iron knocker.

  Expecting the police, I was instead greeted by Sarah. She was wearing a duffel coat over a white sweater and blue jeans. She looked really cute. She had forewarned me that she’d be there within an hour, but it hadn’t felt that long – I’d been in the supermarket a bit longer than I’d thought. I invited her in and directed her to the living room, but placed a finger to my lips. ‘I’m trying to see something,’ I whispered.

  ‘See what?’

  ‘I think there’s someone down in my basement.’

  She frowned. She was probably wondering why the hell I was spying out the window.

  ‘There’s a hatch out there that I found. I was hoping they’d just come out and leave before there’s any bother.’

  As she shucked out of her coat, Sarah craned for a look. I urged her to keep back.

  ‘Don’t let them see you.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘They might get angry and cause a fuss.’

  ‘It’s probably some old tramp. You should go and shout down the hole at him to come out.’