Lanterns And Shades - Part 1: Witches Path

"Devils surround me, anger astounds me, tearing apart my soul. About to go outside, but it was then I seemed to have lost control."

It's now almost exactly two years since I first began to post the eleven part NFADR-exclusive novella Lanterns And Shades. I've decided to repost it now for several reasons.

1. It didn't survive the transition from the old NFADR to the new, and it seems wasteful to pass up an opportunity to post it again.

2. I'm working myself up into a writing frenzy, and one of the ways I like to prepare for an extended trip into creativity is by revisiting and even editing older pieces of work. So this repost will also be a remix.

3. I'm about to embark on another blog-only novella using the same episodic format. As with Lanterns And Shades, I plan on keeping the details to myself until the first part is actually up, but I can tell you that it's very much a traditional sci-fi tale in the same way that L&S was a traditional horror tale.

Anyway, I hope those that didn't catch this on the first pass will enjoy it. Those that did, well, I hope you liked it enough to enjoy it again. And remember, new fiction is coming your way, and this is the only place you'll be able to read it.


“It never used to be this way,” Shelley says.

“What didn’t?” I ask.

I’ve just rung the bell. In ten minutes, the Lanterns will be switched off. Hardly the time for listening to a landlady reminisce, but Shelley talks to me so rarely that these occasions have acquired a certain sombre gravity, and not just in the sense that they seem pregnant with meaning. I am drawn to her little speeches.

“We used to ring the bell twice; once for last orders and once to close the bar. These old fuckers, they noticed the first one right enough, but the second…” She shakes her head. “We could have rung Big Ben and they’d have been just as deaf.”

“Before,” I say.

She nods, then steps up to the bar and begins to clean it with what seems like an agonising lack of urgency. To my eyes, everything Shelley does is in slow-motion.

“Ken.”

I turn and see JD crouched in the entrance to the staff room, pulling the laces of her trainers tight with quick, aggressive motions. “Sleeping here tonight?” she asks, smiling.

“Fuck you,” I reply, with a little grin of my own. I’m already undoing my tie.

JD and me, we wear our Witches Path clothes under our uniforms. It’s quicker that way. Every shift at the Curfew Bar ends with the bell and the strip and the stuffing of shirts and trousers and smart shoes into light backpacks long since adjusted to fit our shoulders as snugly as possible. A weight on your back will always slow you down, but a bouncing, slipping weight could be the difference between making it home and getting Shaded. That’s one of many lessons we’ve picked up over the last six months or so, and the only one I had to learn the hard way. The rest of it’s just experience. You live and you learn.

“How long?” JD asks.

We’re out in the car park now, standing in the safety of Lantern-glare. My eyes are searching the darkness beyond. Butterflies flap and twist in my stomach. I glance at my watch.

“Seven minutes.”

“You feeling limber?”

I look at her sideways and she laughs, slim and tensed and ready in tracksuit bottoms and a black tank-top. If JD worries about Witches Path, she does a good job of hiding it. If I’m honest, I don’t think it bothers her anywhere near as much as it does me. JD is Shelley’s opposite, young and svelte and attractive and fast, so fucking fast that it still catches me by surprise. On Witches Path, that speed makes her a goddess.

“We’ll make it, Ken,” she says, knowing I’m worried, easing a little of that good humour out of her voice. “We always do.”

“Five minutes,” I say. It’s November and I’m sweating.

“Let’s do it.”

This is the part I hate most, walking carefully up to the very edge of the Lantern’s influence, feeling my muscles tremble with tension. Five nights a week for a little over six months, and it never gets any easier. For JD, it’s a competition, a test we always pass. Me, I read too much, see too much, spend all my spare time trying to talk to people who were around before all this happened. I know things she doesn’t, and I’m sure that there will come a time when quick feet and quick wits are no longer enough.

I think about the night when I was too slow, remember the icy fingers that brushed the small of my back where my pumping arms had pulled my T-shirt free of my trousers. My skin, the blood beneath, my spine, everything froze and was numb. Then a ripple, an echo of that feeling spreading through my body, dimpling my skin and making me shiver, stealing my strength so that I stumbled and almost fell. My breath came in harsh, ragged gasps, and even in the depths of terror, I noticed a horrifying thing: Though the night was cold, I could see no condensation as I exhaled; the breath from my body was no longer warm.

What saved me that night was looking back. Convinced I had already been terminally Shaded, I wanted to see the apparitions that had claimed my life. I wanted an understanding that had evaded the experts, an understanding that belonged only to the dead. There were five or six of them, coming hard like predators swooping on wounded prey. They had definition – two arms, two legs, one head – but no features. They were shadows, faceless and without identity, without emotion. They were killers without reason.

It was that blankness that terrified me more than anything else. I grew up in a world of emotions and motives, of victims and villains. To die so senselessly, for reasons that would probably never be understood, it just seemed so wrong. I felt a kind of hysterical outrage, and the sudden anger that rushed through me was enough to get my legs moving again, to centre my dimming vision on JD’s screaming, jumping figure. Behind her, glowing the way you imagine heaven might, was the Lantern Truck, Old Dennis leaning out of the window, adding a tenor accompaniment to JD’s falsetto cries.

I made it that night, I really did. But I’ve never felt the same since.

JD claps her hands, startling me. “How long?” she asks.

I make a show of looking at my watch, as if calculating. In my peripheral vision, I see her relax a little. I rock back on my heels and launch straight into a run that quickly becomes a sprint, accelerating into the darkness.

“Bastard,” I hear her say, then laughter and her quick, light footfalls behind me.

You live and you learn, and survival has taught me a lot about Witches Path. It leaves the main road as a thin strip of fractured tarmac, enclosed on one side by a chain-link fence and on the other by a brick wall. You need to be fast here, but you also need to be quiet. At the end of that first stretch, the path divides and splits, twin forks encircling densely packed trees and foliage. Most nights, this is where they come from, and if you’re quick and quiet, you can be well into the long downhill stretch before they even know you’re there. That part of the journey is relatively safe, as a couple of the old council Lanterns are still in operation. Dim, flickering, occasionally dying altogether, but there. The Shades have dared those Lanterns in the past, but only tentatively.

I usually conserve my energy on the downhill run. I let momentum carry me and relax my muscles. I gather my breath and check my surroundings, preparing for the last leg, where it’s all uphill and there is nothing but the path winding between the trees. It was at the crest of this hill I was Shaded, mere metres from breaking what JD and I think of as the tape, that place where the trees fall away and it’s a straight run to the main road, where Old Dennis and the Lantern Truck will be waiting. That final uphill sprint is the fabric of my nightmares. If they get you before you reach the top, you’re dead. Five nights a week, this is where I take myself to the absolute extremes of my physical capability, feet flying, arms pistoning, heart racing. It’s no-man’s land. It’s the road that leads out of hell, and the demons that inhabit the surrounding blackness will do anything to stop you escaping.

JD knows better than to yell at me once we’re on Witches Path. She also knows better than to overtake me and risk one or both of us stumbling or even falling. She’s up behind me by the time I’m three-quarters of the way towards the fork in the path, and I hear her footsteps slow, hanging back until I veer to the right and she goes straight on, planning on outrunning me down the hill, which she will. As usual, I slow a little, taking in the last remnants of light from the Lanterns above, seeing no sign of the Shades and beginning to relax a little, safe in the knowledge that I have breath and energy to spare, and that tonight is looking like a safe night.

My heart almost stops when I hear her trainers scrape on the gravel. Silence for a split-second, and then the impact of her feet on the path, the sound of her accelerating to an all-out sprint.

“Come on!” she yells. “Is that the best you can do?”

No. Please, no. Why doesn’t she think? If they’re hot on JD’s heels, encouraged by her screaming, and if her victory in this downhill race is inevitable, then there’s a chance I’m going to come out behind them or even amongst them. Stupid bitch. Stupid fucking idiot.

I run faster than I’ve ever run down the hill, my eyes on the point where the two paths meet again. JD goes past so quickly that I barely see her, but I’m close enough behind that I have to stagger a step to avoid treading on her heels. In my peripheral vision, I momentarily see the pack that was pursuing her, the pack that’s now pursuing me. There are more than there’s ever been before, as many as fifteen or twenty, their shapes disfigured by the way they’re crowded together, united in their silent, blank pursuit.

“Move!” I yell, still checking my steps to stop myself tripping over her.

She glances back and I see her eyes widen. She hadn’t realised how many, how many and how close. Even in the midst of this frantic, insane run, I’m amazed at how casual she can be. Now, aware of the danger, she ups her pace, those slim but powerful legs pushing hard, widening the gap between us so that I can concentrate on beating the hill, my head down and my mouth open, gulping at precious oxygen and doing everything I can not to think about what’s behind me.

The worst thing is the silence. They don’t growl or howl or even breathe. Their footsteps make no sound. In the wild, disconnected thoughts that rush through my head, I see them closing in, those misshapen hands reaching out for my bare skin as the pack rises over me like a wave, hanging in the air for the briefest of moments before they crash down and Shade me from existence.

In terror I am fleet, and when we crest the hill and leave the trees behind, I pull alongside JD, the path widening to accommodate us both. She looks so astonished to see me there that laughter tries to bubble up from my lungs. We can see the road now. We can see Old Dennis and the Lantern Truck. He’s leaning out of the window, and I see quite clearly the look of fear that crosses his face just before he disappears back into the cab, just before the truck starts moving slowly away.

“Home free,” JD mutters between breaths.

We catch the accelerating Lantern Truck and I grab JD around the waist, throwing her bodily into the back. I grab onto the side with what feels like the last of my strength and punch the back of the cab, three solid blows that have been the signal in situations like this since day one. The engine roars and I scramble over the side as we pull away from the kerb, stealing one last backward glance at the pack of Shades that flirt with the edges of the Lanternlight like animals at an electric fence. I let myself fall onto my back and sigh, staring up at the sky and wondering how it all came to this.

“You almost killed me,” I say, when I have the breath. “You almost fucking killed me.”

“I’m sorry, Ken,” JD says, in a small voice. “I wasn’t thinking.”

I squeeze my eyes closed. Suddenly I feel like crying.

“What happened?”

“There was one on the path,” she says, “It just…it just came out of the trees. I almost ran straight into it.”

“And?”

“I jumped it.” She laughs, but there’s no spirit in it. “I couldn’t stop, so I jumped it. Then…I don’t know…I just lost it. For a second, I guess I thought they’d got me. I’m sorry.”

I turn my head and she’s looking at me, eyes glistening in the glow from the Lanterns.

“Scary, isn’t it?” I say.

She nods.

“You two okay back there?” Old Dennis is leaning out of the window.

“Five-by-five,” I say.

“More of them tonight,” JD says.

“More all the time,” Dennis replies, and then pulls his head back inside.

“It’s getting worse, isn’t it?” she says, fixing me with those eyes again, eyes wet with the realisation that we’ve just cheated death.

“Yeah, JD,” I say, looking away. “It’s getting worse.”