The Shadows Call Read online

  ‘You want to come over?’

  ‘Is it inconvenient?’

  ‘No. It’s just I expected you to be hitting the town. TGIF and all that.’

  ‘When I was at yours on Sunday, there was something I wanted to show you. I forgot because of all the excitement. I think you need to see it…’

  I recalled her delving in her handbag just before I’d gone at the wall with my hammer. I too had forgotten until now.

  ‘Want me to pick you up?’

  ‘No, it’s OK. My dad will drop me off.’

  ‘See you soon then.’

  ‘Yeah, I’ll pick up some nibbles on the way there.’

  As soon as she hung up, I made a quick scout around the room, tidying as I went, moving my dirty dinner plate to the kitchen, hiding my discarded work shoes in the next room. I hit the bathroom, washed, shaved and brushed my teeth. Gave myself a squirt of aftershave endorsed by a world famous footballer.

  As I exited the bathroom I sensed eyes on me, and I juddered to a halt. That prickling sensation was back, but now centred on the back of my head. The small hairs crept on my neck.

  It was early evening, but not dark enough that I’d turned on the lights. There was still enough to see by coming in through the stained glass window above the bathroom door. Because of the dominance of red glass in the pattern the landing above was bathed in dim pink. I stared at it, tracing the pattern the reflected light made on the wall, and was again sure I could make out a familiar face in it. The face was watching me.

  ‘No,’ I snapped. ‘You’re not real. If you are, then why didn’t you come when I begged you to?’

  The face stared, unmoved by my demand.

  I screwed my eyelids tight, rubbed my hands over my face. When I opened my lids spots of colour danced across my vision. The image of the face was broken and I used the chance to turn away, discount it as a figment of an over-active imagination, telling myself that I was only seeing that face because of that hellish nightmare I’d experienced.

  As I went down to the ground floor, I was sure those glaring eyes observed me the entire way, but I stubbornly refused to check.

  EMF, I convinced myself. The wiring in the old house was ancient. It was probably unshielded and was leaking energy into the halls. Maybe I suffered that hypersensitivity-thingee that Sarah told me about and, fuelled by the recent nightmare, I’d conjured a hallucination. Maybe, I concluded with a disparaging laugh, I was simply going nuts.

  The knocker sounded.

  Sarah had arrived.

  It was the distraction I needed.

  My walk along the hall was rushed. I pulled open the front door, opened my mouth in greeting.

  It wasn’t Sarah.

  There was nobody there.

  First there were the visual hallucinations and now auditory ones? I genuinely was going squirrel shit.

  There was another knock, but this time I caught its source. Bloody TV. A quick glance showed me some character called Zack knocking in fence posts with a hammer, while a pretty Scots woman in a boiler suit jabbered in his ear.

  There were more noises, but now that I was thinking clearer, I understood they were coming from next door. Someone was finishing late at the insurance office. I poked my head out the front door and saw a woman locking the front door. She was dressed in a tabard and was carrying cleaning products in a bucket. She noticed me watching and raised her chin in greeting. I gave her a wave, and a smile. She walked away without reciprocation: that’s all the attention from her I could expect. I thought about calling her back and asking if she’d ever experienced anything unusual in the adjacent building. But I didn’t want her to think I was crazy, so didn’t.

  While I was at the front door, a car pulled to the kerb. It was a late model Citroën Xsara Picasso, pale blue. The kind of car an older man drives. Sarah was sitting in the front passenger seat, but I couldn’t make much out of her father, but for his thick-fingered hands on the steering wheel. Sarah turned to speak to him, and then opened the door. ‘Thanks, Dad. See you later,’ she said by way of goodbye. I expected him to lean down and check me out, but he didn’t. Probably because Sarah hadn’t told him I was her boyfriend. Sadly I was just a workmate, and an underling at that. Her father waited for a gap in the traffic and pulled out. I waved, being sociable, in case he did take a glimpse back in his mirrors.

  ‘You’re keen,’ Sarah said as she walked up the short path.

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘Meeting me at the door like this.’

  ‘I just wanted to check what nibbles you’d brought,’ I assured her. “you only get in if they’re to my satisfaction.’

  She held up a carrier bag. ‘Hope you like chocolate? Three bars for a pound at the petrol station. I got six.’

  ‘Great.’

  ‘Don’t worry, I’ve got other stuff too.’

  ‘Then you may enter,’ I said, in a plumby way and sweep of my arm.

  She was carrying a laptop computer under her other arm. She was dressed in black jeans, boots and a grey sweater. Her hair was pulled into a ponytail and she wore only a touch of makeup. I got a waft of warm air as she stepped close and handed off the bag; it had that same aroma of soap from before. There was something about the simplicity of her dress, make-up and perfume that worked for me.

  Ushering her in, I closed the door and followed her to the parlour. Emmerdale had finished and Coronation Street was just coming on. I turned down the volume. Placed down the bag of goodies, then held up a hand. ‘Before we get started, there’s something I’d like to show you.’

  ‘It isn’t down in the basement again?’

  ‘No. Here, I’ll show you.’

  She put down her laptop, then followed along the hall to the stairs.

  ‘This isn’t some devious ploy to get me to your bedroom I hope?’ Sarah said the words like she meant them, but the cock of her hip hinted otherwise. ‘Want to show me your etchings?’

  ‘No. Of course not.’ I too flavoured my tone with the suggestion that I would take her up on the offer if she wanted to.

  Sarah laughed and it broke the moment. ‘My mum always warned me about guys like you.’

  I forced out a chuckle. ‘I thought women liked their men to be bad boys?’

  ‘Not all of us: I prefer dorky geeks. Go on you silly beggar. What do you want to show me?’ She pushed me up the stairs ahead of her.

  Now that I was heading for the half-landing I suddenly felt stupid. What the hell had I been thinking bringing this up? It wasn’t as if the face would be familiar to Sarah. Working hard I tried to come up with a feasible excuse for turning back. But by then it was too late. Stopping outside the bathroom, I checked the wall on the landing to the first floor. While I’d been distracted by the noises and Sarah’s arrival, the night had settled further in, and the pink glow wasn’t as evident now. I searched but I could no longer distinguish a face in the faded pattern on the wall. ‘Hmmm,’ I said.

  ‘What?’ Sarah had stopped alongside me, obviously wondering why I’d paused.

  ‘It was just something I noticed before. But it isn’t visible now. Here…turn round. Did you notice the stained glass window when last you were here.’

  ‘Yeah. Nice.’

  ‘The coloured glass: is it just a random pattern to you, or is it meant to signify something?’

  Sarah peered up at it. ‘Looks vaguely geometric.’

  ‘You don’t see any faces in it?’

  ‘Faces? No. Can you?’

  When I studied it now, my answer had to be no.

  ‘Maybe it just depends on how the light is shining through it,’ I suggested. ‘I thought that I saw a face earlier.’

  ‘In the window?’

  ‘In the light it cast on the wall over there.’ I thumbed towards the upper landing. ‘Aah, it’s nothing. Probably just matrixing.’

  ‘Ooh, matrixing? Get you, Jack Newman: Paranormal Investigator. You do know some of the terminology we use.’ Sarah looked pleased. Maybe she thought I�
��d been studying, but it was a term I’d already been familiar with. She gestured at the window. ‘We also call it pareidolia, but that’s a catchall phrase. It’s where a vague or random stimulus is perceived as significant, but includes both images and sounds. Actually, both terms are slightly misused, because the actual term is apophenia.’

  I held up a hand. ‘You’re losing me now, Professor Van Helsing.’

  She hip-bumped me.

  ‘Stick to matrixing, numbskull,’ she said.

  We went downstairs, and part way down I hip-bumped her in return. Not enough to send her sprawling, but enough that she grabbed at my hand to steady herself. We laughed together, and didn’t let go until we were at the bottom of the stairs, and only then reluctantly. At least, for me it was.

  ‘Come on.’ Sarah sped for the parlour. ‘It’s my turn to show you something interesting. And you might want to keep the subject of matrixing in mind, and try to tell me that’s what you’re experiencing then.’

  She set up her laptop, and fiddled in a dongle device so she could access the internet. It was slow to load but she brought up a video-sharing site. She tapped the legend “SHADOW PEOPLE” into the search bar and hit the return key.

  Hands fisted on my hips, I peered at the screen as it loaded. ‘You do realise that half the crap on there is faked?’

  ‘More than half, nearer ninety-five per cent,’ Sarah said. ‘But not all of it. I know where to look, and which uploads are from a reputable source. You can usually tell when the tag line says something like “genuine”, “one hundred per cent”, or “real”. Generally they aren’t. But I know this name here, it belongs to a reputable parapsychologist who’s been conducting a study of the phenomenon, and this is what I wanted to show you.’

  She clicked on a link in the sidebar and the screen shifted so that the video was now centred at the top.

  The video buffered slowly, but within ten seconds it began to play.

  ‘The connection’s a bit crappy,’ Sarah scowled, ‘but it should do for now. This is a compendium of some of the shadow people that have been caught on tape.’

  I viewed various snatches of recordings. Some of them were hard to make out, having been filmed on infrared cameras in the dark. Others had been caught on mobile phones and were grainy. Having my sceptical head firmly screwed on I could dismiss most of the images as misidentification, shadows from exterior sources, and even matrixing. But then there were others.

  ‘Jesus!’

  ‘Impressed?’

  ‘Unless that’s a fake it’s pretty undeniable,’ I said.

  I’d just viewed a scene where some paranormal investigators were standing in a tunnel, filmed by a locked-off camera on a tripod. The investigators, two men and a woman, were in clear shot, and easily definable down to their individual clothing and hairstyles. The IR light cast their shadows beyond them, and they too were obvious. What happened next was dramatic, but only because whatever had cast the shadow that moved between them and the camera must also have been between them. But nothing tangible did move into that space. Yet a full human figure walked from right to left, pitch black and solid, blocking each investigator out as it moved past them. The figure looked male, and I could make out the sharp delineation of its silhouette, but that was all. Details should have been crystal clear if it had been a living person. It also moved in a way that was in contravention to the norm. It was as if it stuttered at a very fast rate. In and of itself, the scene – a few seconds at most – was unusual to say the least. And then it turned stranger. Before the figure moved out of left frame it halted and turned to peer at the trio of humans beyond it. And in that instant of turning it blinked out of existence. Just as the shadow figure in my parlour had that time.

  ‘Play that again.’

  Sarah held up a cautioning hand. ‘Hang on, there are more. I’ll go back through them all in a minute, but you should see the next ones. If you were impressed by that one…’

  The next scene was shot by a CCTV security system. It was filmed in broad daylight, in colour this time. The camera was positioned on a residential street, attached to the front wall of a house so that the owner could view those approaching the front door and the car parked on their drive. But the shot was wide enough that it also encompassed part of the roadway outside, the opposite pavement and a grassy meadow. To the extreme left there was a cross street on which traffic moved. A young couple walked arm in arm on the opposite side, heading for the busier road.

  ‘There!’ Sarah became animated, pointing at the screen. ‘Did you see it?’

  I thought I’d caught a flash of grey, but that was all – I was too busy watching the young couple amble by.

  ‘Don’t worry. The scene is repeated in slow motion,’ Sarah said. I hunkered closer to the screen. As she’d promised the same clip came on again, slowed by about five times. And this time I did see it.

  A single shadow figure moved along the pavement behind the couple, as if following them, its head cocking to and fro as if enthralled by them. At one point it moved off the pavement and part way across the street, before it zigzagged after them. It flickered in and out, solid one instant then vaporous the next.

  ‘Watch here.’ Sarah indicated the bottom of the shot, where the car was parked on the drive. Another vague shadow figure materialised as if out of the very atmosphere, and came up the path. It stood for a moment directly below the camera, its head tilted up at the lens as if aware of the camera’s scrutiny, then it turned and was gone. A few seconds later it reappeared, standing at the rear of the parked car, before it too moved off, crossing the street and following in the path of the first.

  ‘And you’re positive this isn’t CGI, Sarah?’

  ‘I can’t attest to its authenticity, but it looks real to me. But if it were computer graphics, it would be evident. The parapsychologist has had the film checked by experts who confirm that the film is original and hasn’t been tampered with.’

  I just hunkered there, fuddled.

  ‘Let me see those last few clips again.’

  Sarah worked the computer and I watched in silence this time.

  After the second run through Sarah paused the movie clip. ‘Well?’

  ‘I don’t know what to say. The problem is they could be fakes.’

  ‘Spoken like a true sceptic,’ she said.

  ‘You know what I’m getting at. All those “found-footage” movies are so popular now. “The Blair Witch Project”, “Paranormal Activity”. People watch them and then decide to make their own videos for the fun of it.’

  ‘I just told you, the last one was verified by specialists.’

  ‘But how do we know that? We have to take the word of this parapsychologist?’

  ‘She’s renowned in her field,’ Sarah iterated. ‘She isn’t going to put her name to anything that can’t be verified. She’d be ridiculed by her peers if she did. I’m not talking about someone who has done a correspondence course here, Jack. Doctor Kiera Ross is from the Consciousness and Transpersonal Psychology Research Unit based at Liverpool John Moores University. She first began studying the shadow people phenomenon as part of a wider study into the effects of sleep deprivation and sleep paralysis, and has written a thesis on both. But then she grew aware that there was more to the subject than she could easily explain away: especially when she began receiving video and photographic evidence. Dreams don’t cast shadows in the real world.’

  ‘If I hadn’t seen them with my own eyes…’

  I caught myself.

  ‘So they are the same as what you’ve witnessed?’ Sarah stood up, peered down at me.

  ‘The second video was different,’ I explained. ‘Those figures were mistier. The shadows I saw were more like that one in the tunnel in the first vid.’

  ‘Don’t forget that the street view was filmed in daylight. They would appear less sharp, fainter in colour. The first was shot in darkness with a special camera. There might even be some possibility of artefacts adding to the depth
of shade in the first.’

  ‘The ones I’ve seen have been full black, in daytime, too.’

  ‘It was dark in the basement,’ Sarah began. ‘The one you saw here in the parlour was in daylight.’

  ‘So was the first one.’ I stood up and eyed her. Trying not to blink.

  ‘You saw another? You didn’t tell me.’

  ‘It was the first time we came here. Upstairs, near my bedroom.’

  ‘You saw a shadow figure when we came to view the property? Why didn’t you say anything?’

  ‘You’d have tried to talk me out of taking the place if I had.’

  ‘Not necessarily, I’m interested, remember.’

  Sadly she meant she was interested in paranormal stuff, not in me per se.

  Gesturing at the now idle computer, I said, ‘You thought those shadows I witnessed in the basement were…what did you call it, a residual haunt? But you said that it was just like a moment in time replayed over and over, the ghosts were just projected images not real. Those shadow people on the video looked as if they were aware of the living people. They were watching them, following them. They looked real enough.’

  ‘That’s an entirely different subject.’ Sarah went to the bag of nibbles and hauled out some Dairy Milk. She was shivering and I didn’t think it was from low blood sugar. ‘Let’s sit down and talk about it. I think this calls for chocolate, don’t you?’

  We sat. I’d only the one settee for now, so it meant we were side-by-side, but we turned so that we could converse without getting stiff necks. Our knees were almost touching. Sarah handed me a bar of chocolate, and I broke chunks off, allowing them to melt slowly in my mouth. She chewed hers, thinking hard as she ordered in her mind what she knew on the subject. Finally, she gestured at the laptop.

  ‘Dr Ross hasn’t published her findings on the shadow people phenomenon yet, but there are plenty of others who have. Some of them are a bit “out there” but hey! Who’s to say they’re wrong?’

  Not me. I’d seen them. But I still hadn’t a clue what the hell I’d borne witness to.

  ‘Some people call them ghosts,’ Sarah went on. ‘But I’ve already established that there are different types of ghost, the most common being residuals. There are spirits, and there are other types too: poltergeists, crisis apparitions, and harbingers. Although they share similarities the term “ghost” isn’t an adequate description of what the shadow people are.’