Lanterns And Shades - Part 10: The Beginning Of The End

"This is the end, beautiful friend. This is the end, my only friend. The end of our elaborate plans, the end of everything that stands, the end. No safety or surprise, the end. I'll never look into your eyes again."

My mother and father were in love. That might sound like an odd and rather obvious statement to make, but then I’ve come to realise that there isn’t an awful lot of room for love in the Daylight World. Marriage, children, and a lifetime of tasks to be carried out before it gets dark, sure. But not much love. It’s been nearly thirteen years since she died, and if I’m honest with myself, I don’t really miss her. There is an ache, an absence, a sense that there was pain here once, but it isn’t grief and it isn’t mourning. I barely knew my mother, and trying to recall her features gives me that same feeling of distance. I can see her as a photograph, but not as a living, breathing person.

A few months ago, I came home from work to find my father sat on the sofa with a glass of brandy in one hand and her photo in the other. Of course, that was before all this, before the Daylight World began to show cracks and this sense of tension and finality became so all-encompassing. He’d looked up at me, eyes glazed and lips trembling.

“She was my little firecracker,” he’d said.

I’d remembered then. Not her features, not the way I’d felt when I was six years old and at my own mother’s funeral. Those things were gone forever. But I could smell her perfume and I could hear the angry yet somehow amused tone of her voice when they argued or when I did something wrong. Blue eyes, she had. Faded blue, like well-worn denim. Blue eyes and a soft voice that could harden so fast it scared me. My mother the firecracker.

Lanterns protect us from Shades, but not from each other. Laura Trent was stabbed in the throat for a purse containing only seven pounds and her house keys. The struggle that preceded the robbery was heard by several residents of the nearby houses, but by the time an ambulance arrived, she was already dead. By the time the police arrived, whoever did it was long gone.

Maybe that’s a part of it. My memories tell me my parents loved each other. When my mother was taken from us, it wasn’t such a literal thing as it is with those who get Shaded from our existence. She was dead, but there was a body, and we were able to bury it with all the ridiculous ceremony we attach to such things. Twelve times since then, once for every year that has passed, we have gone to her grave and laid flowers. We remember the woman we loved, and because of that, her absence from our lives is not a source of fear and insecurity.

Those clothes in the wood. I can’t stop thinking about them.

I’m standing at the front door, watching that weak winter sun come up over the rooftops, its light falling slowly over Abbot Street, Quarter B, and what once was a town called Oakfield. The birds are singing the dawn chorus, and from behind the house, I can hear a lone hammer thumping steadily at nails that will hold together a trap I’m hoping can cage a Shade. Henry works alone now, tireless in his rage and grief, perhaps the most determined of us all. Dennis and my father retired a few hours ago, JD long before that, as soon as her work was done. I haven’t been able to stop thinking and planning and speculating, and it seems foolish to even entertain the idea of sleep.

“Are you actually coming to bed anytime today?”

JD is standing at the foot of the stairs, wrapped in my blanket. Again it strikes me that she seems to have this knack for knowing where I am and what I’m thinking.

“Can’t sleep,” I say.

“Who said anything about sleep?”

And I can’t help but smile, can’t help but go to her. She opens the blanket to include me in its embrace. She’s naked beneath, and all of a sudden the thoughts in my head have nothing to do with Shades or Lanternmen. We kiss slowly, thoroughly, still exploring and adjusting to this change in our relationship.

“You should sleep,” she says, pulling away just enough to free her mouth. “You and Henry both. You said yourself you can still be Shaded. You need to be alert.”

“I don’t think I can, I really don’t. As for Henry…he’s like a convert to a new religion. He’s running on something a little stronger than the rest of us.”

“And that’s dangerous,” she says.

“You’re dangerous,” I reply.

“Me? How am I dangerous?” She frowns.

I pull her body closer to mine, bend my head to kiss her neck, inhaling the scents of sleep and yesterday’s soap. “You’re a distraction,” I tell her. “Why the hell would I want to go out there when you’re in here?”

“You need distracting, and you need sleep. Come upstairs.”

And she does distract me. And - after she has dressed and gone out with a bagful of leaflets for the residents of communities A and B - I do sleep.

The voices from the living room drag me back to consciousness. It’s still daytime, but the quality of the light is fading, and it’s time we were moving. I take the briefest of showers, more to wake myself up than anything else, then dress and head downstairs.

“Welcome back to the land of the living,” my father says.

“Right,” I say, suppressing a smile.

Here they are, the people I’m relying on to carry off a plan that seems more ridiculous every time I think about it. My father sits in his usual seat, tall and stocky and looking somehow younger then he did just a few short days ago. His eyes are bright and alert, and he is clearly both tense and excited. He is not, as far as I know, a fighter, but he’s big enough to be physically intimidating, and smart enough to know what he needs to say to the Lanternmen. Sitting beside him is Dennis. An old drunk, they say, but a wily one. He’s been around the community for a long, long time. He will back up my father’s words. The combination, I hope, will have enough credibility to make them think, to make them argue. I don’t think it’s an argument we can win, not if Nolan and his supporters mean to have their way, but it should buy us enough time.

Us. Henry Nicholls and I. Henry sits in the armchair opposite the other two. Like my father, he seems tense. Like my father, his eyes are wide and bright. Something like hysteria in Henry, though. He is already dressed for Witches Path, gloved hands clutching each other, one heel bouncing almost frantically up and down, like he can’t stay still. JD was right; he’s dangerous. But there’s no way I’m going to catch a Shade by myself, and no time to find and convince other sufferers of our rare affliction.

Perhaps surprisingly, it is JD that seems the most relaxed. She’s worried, of that I have no doubt, but compared to the terrified girl I had to force to flee the Curfew Bar, the woman perched on the edge of the coffee table is a picture of confidence and calm.

“I’m not going to have a lot to do with this once those leaflets are posted,” she’d told me this morning. We’d been lying in bed, the sweat still drying on our bodies.

“You’d be surprised,” I’d replied. “You’re a reason to do this, a reason to pull it off. Maybe even the reason, for me anyway.”

“I’m not a damsel in distress, Ken. The Lanternmen are mostly a boy’s club, and they look at a girl, especially a girl my age, as an inferior. There would be no point in going with Dennis and your dad. As for going with you and Henry, that’d be suicide. Unless you need bait.”

I’d laughed at that. I’d pecked her on the lips and it had turned into another of those long, slow kisses that set butterflies loose in my stomach, butterflies that had kicked it up a notch when she’d slid her lips away from mine and her warm breath had tickled my ear as she’d said the three words that meant we had to make it through tonight. Somehow, we had to.

Now, standing in the living room and staring at her in a silence that’s dragged out for long enough to embarrass everybody, I offer her a smile and ignore the heat in my face. I take a deep breath.

“Everybody ready?” I ask.

Dennis and my father nod. Henry looks up at me with his disconcerting green eyes.

“I’m gonna go crazy just waiting here,” JD mutters.

“Why don’t you go home, see your family?”

“And tell them what?” she asks.

I shrug. I don’t know.

“Better than being alone here,” Dennis says.

It’s that very thought that makes her nod. Lanterns or not, doors and windows and walls or not, there is nothing comforting in being by yourself after dark.

We go outside in silence. My father closes and locks the front door and we stand in a loose circle on the driveway, shivering with cold. The Lanternmen meet only two streets away, and Henry and I have a burden to carry. It is for that reason that we will take the Lantern Truck while Dennis and my father will walk.

“Take care with her, Henry,” Dennis says, handing over the keys.

Henry nods. He has spoken only three or four times since he arrived.

“And you take care of yourself, Ken,” my father says to me. “Please…be careful out there.”

“You too, dad,” I say, sparing a glance for Dennis. “Both of you.”

He hugs me a little clumsily, kisses the side of my face. When he steps back, he is blinking rapidly.

“What he said,” JD says.

“If anything happens…” I say.

“Shut up. No speeches. You’re going to be okay. We all are.”

She wraps her arms around my neck and holds me tight for a few seconds, a few seconds that make me feel the first surges of panic. I don’t want to go to Witches Path and catch a Shade. I don’t want my father and Old Dennis to be anywhere near Daniel Nolan. Most of all, I don’t want to be so far from JD.

She draws away and turns her back, probably because she doesn’t want to cry in front of all these men. I watch her walk up the drive to the pavement, turn and head towards her house.

“Janey?”

She turns back, and even from a distance I can see the Lanternlight catching the tears on her face.

“I love you.”

It doesn’t feel stupid or awkward. It feels right. It feels true. JD walks backwards a few steps, blows me a kiss, and then turns away again. My father is looking down at his feet. I’m pretty sure he’s grinning. Even Dennis, that drunkard and one-time scourge of Quarter B’s womenfolk, is looking at me with raised eyebrows and just a hint of a smile. For Henry, it barely registers.

“Come on, Dennis. If we leave it much longer, they’ll be drunk,” my father says.

Dennis nods. The four of us look at each other a moment longer, and then they break away, moving quickly and purposefully up Abbot Street, two men with their heads down and their hands in their pockets, looking for an argument and perhaps even a fight.

“Ready, Henry?”

“As I’ll ever be,” he says.

“Then let’s go hunting.”

A few minutes later, the Lantern Truck is coasting slowly down the main road. In the back, where JD and I always sat when Dennis picked us up after work, a tarpaulin covers our trap, an amateurish construction of wood and nails that is, essentially, a box with one removable side. The plan is to lure a Shade into the three-sided cul-de-sac and then close the box. That simple. Despite all that has happened, I am still sure that a lone Shade is not strong enough to break anything that a man cannot, and though we had tried our hardest to damage the oak panels that Dennis had suggested we use, they had resisted. A weaker creature in a confined space, I reasoned, couldn’t possibly get out.

Henry slows the truck and steers it to the side of the road. Again I’m reminded of JD and I running Witches Path. This was safety and sanctuary, and never more so than the night I was Touched.

“Henry?”

He’s clutching the steering wheel, staring straight ahead. He’s shaking.

“Henry. Get it together.”

“I’m together,” he says, his voice barely a whisper. “I’m just scared, Ken. They killed my daughter here.”

“I’m scared, too. But we’re the only ones. You know that, right? They don’t see us.”

He closes his eyes and nods, swallowing. I reach into my coat pocket and pull out my gloves. They’re leather, the insides lined with a thick layer of soft cotton. In order to get the Shade into the box, one of us may have to touch it. I know it won’t be Henry.

“If anything goes wrong, run if you have to. I will. Whatever happens, remember that they can still touch you. We’re looking for one, and I’m prepared to wait a while if the opportunity doesn’t immediately present itself. We can’t risk a pack of them.”

“How long do we have, do you think?”

“I don’t know. Dennis and dad will be there by now. Let’s say no more than half an hour.”

I get out of the truck and Henry follows suit. Together, we pull back the tarpaulin to reveal our trap. It looks flimsy and ridiculous out here in the dark, and we both know it. Henry actually manages a smile.

“That film,” he says slowly. “With the shark.”

“Jaws,” I reply, looking across at him, knowing exactly what he means. “Except neither of us is going in this thing.”

“Still…” he says.

“I…” I freeze, staring back up the road.

“Ken?”

I’m not breathing. My heart is thudding hard in my chest. I’m realising that for all my thinking and planning, I have forgotten a detail, and it is not a minor one.

“Cartwright,” I manage, in a strangled voice. “Cartwright. He…he never came back.”

I raise my arm and Henry turns, his gaze following my trembling finger to the streets of Quarter B, where everything looks somehow different. He doesn’t immediately realise what it is, just as I hadn’t, but then the sheer enormity of what we’re looking at strikes him and he lets out a low moan of horror.

“Fuck,” he whispers. “Oh, fuck me.”

In Quarter B, the Lanterns have gone out. In Quarter B, all is darkness.

Lanterns And Shades - Part 9: The Last Lanternman

"There was never any place for someone like me to be totally happy. I'm running out of clock and that ain't a shock, some things never do change."

By the time I arrive home, the day is losing what little light it had. Voices from the living room take me straight there, and I find JD sitting with my father and Dennis.

“Where have you been?” she asks me. “I was worried.”

Dennis and dad exchange an amused glance.

“I’m okay. I went to Quarter A. I was with Henry Nicholls.”

I sit down beside her and touch the small of her back. She closes her eyes for a moment, smiles.

“Henry’s a little…” Dennis touches the side of his forehead with his index finger. “Had a run in with our friends a few years back.”

“I know,” I say. “Like I did.”

“I get it,” my father says. He looks more awake than he has in a long while, and I have a sudden and painful memory of him dancing my mother around the living room, the pair of them laughing loudly. How old was I then? Four? Five?

“The Touch,” JD says. “He’s like you.”

“Bingo. What did you guys find up at the Curfew Bar?”

JD turns to Dennis.

“There was nothing wrong with that Lantern, but some of the piping that comes from the generator up there had been tampered with,” he says. “It’s not really my field, so I couldn’t say for sure. But there’s a possibility somebody was playing silly buggers the other night.”

“You know Lanterns, though, right?” I ask him. “I mean, anybody could cut into the pipes.”

“Absolutely. But those generators aren’t obvious or easy to get into. The one up that way wasn’t vandalised or damaged. Somebody knew what they were doing.”

“A Lanternman, in other words.”

“You realise what you’re saying here, don’t you, Ken?” my father says.

I nod. “Dennis, do you know any of the guys in this union?”

“Sure, some of them. You’d have to ask Cartwright if you wanted the whole story. To them, I’m just an old drunk who drives a truck. I’ve never been invited to their little get-togethers.”

“Hey, I know the Lantermen are supposedly the bad guys here,” JD interrupts. “But you’re talking about them trying to kill us. I mean, what’s the motive?”

“The motive might not have been you two at all. Shelley was a pillar between two communities. A lot of the old folk really respected her. She wouldn’t have given a Lantern Tax the time of day,” my father says. “If there was a terrible accident and it resulted in both her and a couple of local kids dying, especially so hard on the heels of the Judy Nicholls thing, what greater argument would you need for the presence of Lanterns?”

“New Lanterns,” says Dennis.

“What?” my father and I say, almost simultaneously.

“I mentioned it to you the other night, Ken. Pat Cartwright says he’s been working on something, says he has a working prototype of a new Lantern.”

“But it’ll cost us,” I say, glancing at JD.

“He’s been our Lanternman forever,” she says, frowning. “I can’t accept that, Ken.”

“I second that,” says my father.

“Actually, I agree. Cartwright and I had an interesting chat this afternoon. That’s why I was asking you if you knew anything about the union,” I say to Dennis. “I’m thinking that maybe there’s a core of Lanternmen from the Dead Quarters who might be looking for a repeat performance of what happened there. Cartwright and his new Lantern might even be their opposition.”

“Now wait a minute,” my father says. “Pat might be greedy, but he’s not a murderer.”

“I’m not sure those Lanternmen are either. My theory is that they switched off the Lanterns to give the people of C and D a jolt, make them more receptive to the idea of a tax. It went wrong and they were pretty much the only ones that got out. If our theory about the Curfew Bar is right, then that same tactic has already raised its head here. Only this time, whoever it was had no desire to switch that Lantern back on. Rather than put the whole community at risk, they chose to sacrifice three people with the same goal in mind.”

“Daniel Nolan,” Dennis says, and we all turn to look at him. “He’s a big Irish fella. Hell of a temper. Came out of Quarter C, if memory serves.”

“I know him. Well, not personally, but I know who he is,” my father adds.

“I’ve never heard of him,” I say, and JD nods in agreement.

“You wouldn’t have done. Nolan’s a Lanternman, but Carrie Lewis does the maintenance up Northwood Gardens. That’s where he lives. Keeps himself in the background, does Daniel. But he’s very vocal in the union.” Dennis lights a cigarette and offers my father the packet.

“Very vocal how?” JD asks.

“I wouldn’t know. I only hear what others tell me, and even then only down the pub when tongues are loosened.”

“We…” I begin, and then there is a light tapping at the front door. “That’ll be Henry,” I say.

“Henry Nicholls?” my father says.

“You know any others? We need him.”

But when I go into the hallway and open the front door, the man on the doorstep is not Henry Nicholls. It’s Cartwright.

“We need to talk,” he says.

I nod and say nothing, turning away from him and going back to the living room doorway.

“It’s Cartwright,” I tell them. “I’m going out for a bit. What I want to do,” I say, mostly to Dennis, “is catch a Shade. Why don’t you guys think on that until I get back?”

My father’s mouth falls open. Dennis blinks. JD actually laughs.

“If Henry comes, include him. I don’t think I can do it by myself, and so far as I know, he’s the only one that could possibly come with me. That would leave the other issue to you three.”

“You’ve gone insane. You’ve really lost it this time,” JD says. Her eyes are alive, though, and she’s smiling.

“I’ll try not to be too long,” I tell her.

I grab my coat and join Cartwright outside. We walk in silence for a while, along Abbot Street and then through the alleyway towards Oak Park. Neither of us leads the way, it just seems like a natural destination, an open space where there are Lanterns but no people after dark. I feel like I’m in some kind of spy movie, meeting an agent from the other side to talk where no-one will see or hear us.

Even in my lifetime, we’ve played football and rugby in the park until well after dark during the summer. It has always been a centre of my community, and while that spirit may be dark and somewhat lost these days, this is a place of sunlit memories and triumphs that would mean nothing to a tourist. As long as there are Lanterns, we will always spare a few for Oak Park.

“You’ve been doing a lot of prying,” he says. We’re off the path and walking the grass now, hunched in our coats and keeping our heads down.

“I’ve been looking out for my own. I gather that’s a concept you’re pretty familiar with.”

“Maybe so,” he says, and there is something of a smile in his voice. “Maybe so.”

“Things are getting pretty fucked up around here, aren’t they?”

“I don’t know. I have my suspicions. I’ve seen some odd things. It’s been a strange day.”

“Up at the Curfew Bar?”

“You’re full of surprises, Mr. Trent,” he says.

“You can still call me Ken, Mr. Cartwright. Reason being, I don’t think you’re a murderer or even a con artist. I think you’re the guy that has always looked after the Lanterns round our way. We need you. I’m sorry if I came off too hostile this afternoon. I’ve had a hard few days.”

“If I’m calling you Ken, you’d best call me Pat. You were up there, at the bar.”

“I saw Shelley die. I thought I was next.”

“I don’t…” he sighs heavily and stops, looking up at the sky. “I don’t think that was an accident. But then you seem to know that already. There is a union, and we do want a tax, Ken. I was a little dishonest about that this afternoon, just as you were a little hostile. But there isn’t any blood on my hands. I promise you that, God as my witness.”

“Then who does, Pat? Nolan?”

We start walking again.

“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” he mutters. “What don’t you know?”

“I’m guessing, mostly. Looks like I’m scoring plenty of points, though.”

He nods. “It was Nolan wanted the union in the first place. We’ve always had drinks together, played cards, talked about the work. That’s only natural. But it wasn’t until Nolan came up from C that the idea of a union came about. He’s got a lot of influence, you know? They respect him and they’re a little afraid of him. He’s a big guy, smart, has a reputation as a brawler and a short temper.”

“And you?”

“I’m the only qualified Lanterman in these parts. I got my certificate through the council. Used to work for them, back in the day. The others taught themselves. That’s a respect thing, as far as they’re concerned. We can all do basic maintenance, and there are a few that can fix a truly broken Lantern. But I’m the only one with that qualification and the only one that can build from nothing. I’m the last real Lanternman around here.”

“Dennis told me you were working on a new one.”

“It’s done. Finished it back in the summer. I’ve been keeping it to myself.”

“You want to introduce it, like at a meeting or something. Give people hope so you’ll get what you want.”

He looks at me, and in Lanternlight he is drawn and white.

“I’ve thought the same thing,” I say. “If I had a weapon, something to fight them with. All I have is ideas.”

“Like?”

“The Touch makes you immune.”

“What?”

“I walked down Witches Path last night, around ten o’clock. I went right up to a Shade. I spoke to it. I’m still here.”

“That’s…”

“Impossible? There’s been no reason to notice it before. They all went crazy, didn’t they? I only know two people that got Shaded and are still walking around and talking sense. The others are all messed up.”

Cartwright says nothing. We complete a lap of the park and set off on our second.

“If I can be immune, so can anybody. If you’ve been Touched and survived, they can’t see you anymore. You could still be Touched, sure, but not if you were careful. All you’d have to do is keep your eyes open around the dark places. Of course, we’d still need Lanterns, to keep from being overrun. But if we were safer, maybe we could get back to thinking about how to destroy them instead of just holding them at bay.”

“The tax would…”

“This isn’t about the tax. If you want to talk about that afterwards, then fine. I’m more concerned about Nolan. There is justification for saying he killed Shelley, and also that he had a hand in what happened in the Dead Quarters. He doesn’t believe your idea will work, does he?”

“No.”

“That makes him dangerous. If he doesn’t have the support of the union, or if the union’s divided, he could be off planning to do exactly what they did in C and D right now. What happened at the Curfew Bar proves that he, or someone, is capable of it.”

“I can’t oppose him, Ken. When it comes right down to it, he has more authority.”

“Maybe not alone you can’t.”

“Who’s going to stand with me? Dennis? They couldn’t care less about that old sot.”

“My father, too. He’s known around here. Everyone knows the story about my mother.”

“And you?”

I shake my head. “I’ll be up at Witches Path.”

“What?”

“I want you and my father to confront them, but not with a view to winning an argument. I’m thinking more in terms of a distraction so that we can catch a Shade.”

“Do what now?”

“Tomorrow,” I say, and I’m thinking it through even as I’m speaking, “we go around Quarters A and B, posting leaflets through every door calling a meeting the day after. You let me know where all the Lanternmen live, and we don’t post there…”

“They’ll find out anyway. Gossip.”

“That may be, but we can delay it as much as we can, cut them out of the loop. That night, you, my dad, Dennis, and your people meet up with Nolan and his. While that’s happening, Henry and I will be up at Witches Path catching a Shade. Maybe you’ll turn the tide in the union, but to be honest, I doubt it. That’s okay, though. Only tomorrow night is crucial. We hold the meeting the next morning, and my dad tells the whole story. Getting the whole community to actually touch a Shade is another proposition entirely, but we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it. I think enough will to set the wheels in motion. When word gets around about this immunity thing, Nolan’s idea will be obsolete and he’ll be powerless. If and when that happens, we can debate the rest the way we should.”

“Why is the distraction so important? They don’t know what you’re planning or how much you know, Ken. I can tell you that for fact. And that’s just my first question. I have no idea how much of this madness is true. How do I know you’re not just another one gone crazy with The Touch?”

“As to the distraction, I’m not sure how important it is. But if nobody knows a thing, why did they turn out the lights at the Curfew Bar while I was there? And why are we out here talking instead of at my house or yours? As for my theory, I will walk you, right now, to the edge of the community, and you can watch me take a stroll up Witches Path all by myself. How does that sound?”

“Insane.”

“You want to do it?”

“No. I think I believe you. I don’t know why, but I do. Probably because I think you’d really do it, too.”

“I have and I would. They don’t see me, and they don’t see Henry.”

Cartwright closes his eyes and turns his face downward. Minutes pass. Finally, he looks up.

“I need to think, Ken. Let me go away and think. I’ll stop by your house tomorrow morning.”

“Promise me something. Promise me that even if you decide I’m a nut you won’t tell anyone in the union about this. You owe us that much.”

He nods. “Okay. I promise. I won’t breathe a word.”

“You should get home. Any longer out here and folks might wonder what you’re up to,” I say. I’m smiling, but it’s just a facial expression. I don’t really feel it. “I’ll see you in the morning.”

“You will,” he says, and walks away, leaving me standing alone in Oak Park.

My mind is racing, planning. Me and my father and Dennis and maybe Henry working on some kind of trap, JD doing leaflets. We could do it, I think. One frantic night with no sleep. We could put this plan into action so fast that nobody would see it coming. Speed is of the essence now, I know that much. The Shades are gathering, the Lanternmen are planning, and there are only so many hours between now and tomorrow night. That’s when everything will happen.

For better or for worse, this will be the end.

Lanterns And Shades - Part 8: The Ghost Of Cavanaugh Close

"Through early morning fog, I see visions of the things to be, the pains that are withheld for me."

Morning barely reaches Abbot Street. It is after ten when I reluctantly leave JD’s arms and open the curtains to find a world that looks listless and dull. The day has been postponed until further notice, and the sun will not be crossing the picket line of thick grey cloud that blots out the sky. The Daylight World is still and quiet, windows and doors closed and locked, trees undisturbed by all but the faintest of breezes.

“What time is it?” JD murmurs.

“You don’t have to get up for work,” I reply.

“No…” she says.

“I know. Everything feels different”

I turn to see her struggling up from the blankets. She is pale and tired in this colourless light, her lips an angry red, her eyes a startling green flecked with slivers of brown. She rubs the sleep out of her face, then catches me looking at her breasts and pulls the covers up to her chin with a shy smile I’ve never seen before. For the first time, I find myself thinking of the line we’ve crossed and what it means.

“You okay?” she asks.

“Yeah. Still a little stiff.”

“You look terrible. Come back to bed.”

“There’s a lot to do today.”

“You’re not doing anything until I get the explanations you owe me.”

It hurts the side of my face to laugh, but she looks so stern that I can’t help myself. A more calculating person might decide that there really isn’t time for the kind of talk I know will be punctuated with kisses and maybe more, but then a more calculating person probably wouldn’t have a naked girl pouting theatrically at him from a warm bed. I go to her, and we waste some precious time reminding ourselves of how our mouths fit together and how we taste.

“They don’t see you because you were Shaded,” she says, a little while later. I am lying flat on my back with her head on my chest and one leg draped across mine.

“Right. Like the papers used to say it was a disease. I have it. I mean, it’s in me.”

“But you’re not sick and you’re not crazy,” she says, tickling my stomach with her nails. “Not as crazy as some, anyway.”

“I know. But then, how many people do you know that have been Shaded and lived to tell the tale? Maybe a handful, and most of them went a little loopy afterward.”

“From the disease, you think?”

“Maybe, maybe not. I felt…different after I got Shaded. I looked at the world a different way. I guess it stays with you.”

“But you didn’t lose your mind.”

“No. I don’t think that part is sickness. I think that’s just being afraid.”

“Understatement.”

“But you know what I mean.”

She nods. “So what now? You have a plan?”

“I have ideas, but I’m not sure about a lot of things. I’m going to talk to Cartwright today.”

“Can I come with you?”

“There’s something else I want you to do for me. It involves going back to the bar.”

JD looks at me. “What’s on your mind?” she asks.

“Something I want you to check out. You’ll need help, though, so you’re gonna have to wake up Dennis. That works because you need to talk to him anyway.”

“You guys went to the Dead Quarters before.”

“Yeah. I think he can tell you the rest, maybe help you understand why I’m going to see Cartwright.”

A pause, and then: “Are we going now?”

“The bed’ll still be here later, JD.”

She smirks and then kisses me hard on the mouth, sliding on top of me just the way she had last night. For a moment, we’re both getting carried away, and then I remember all that I need to remember and hold her face away from mine. She pouts and wriggles a little, laughing at my reaction. Finally, her face becomes serious.

“Listening?”

“I’m listening.”

“Good. Here’s what I need you to do…”

On Abbot Street, I check my watch and see that there are perhaps seven hours before dusk. The grey stillness I observed from my bedroom window is everything. In fact, the only member of our community out at all is Mr. Cartwright, who is propping his ladder against the side of JD’s house and preparing to climb to the Lantern. He is too absorbed in his work to register my presence, and I decide that there is time to keep another promise. I want to talk to Cartwright at home, not out here. I walk on in silence.

Witches Path yet again, but it barely registers. My mind is on my destination, and on the bulky weight in my back pocket. Where a right turn would take me to the Curfew Bar, a left leads along an old and disused road where weeds force their way between the paving stones and Lanterns are nowhere to be found. This represents something of a no-man’s land between the two Quarters of Oakfield that are still inhabited, and a route few people walk, even on the sunniest of days. The solitude doesn’t bother me. Quite the opposite. I’m tired of the Daylight World and I’m tired of bearing witness to the quiet desperation of my neighbours. I can talk to JD, and after the last couple of days, maybe I can talk to my father. The rest seem faceless. I’m almost glad for this grey day and this lonely street. Abbot Street and Quarter B seem like a fantasy or some strange dream.

Cavanaugh Close is only just inside Quarter A, far enough from its heart to have more in common with the wilderness I have just left than the more populous streets beyond. It has the look of a private estate, though any cameras or gates that may have once adorned its walls are long since gone. There is only one Lantern, and I know without closer scrutiny that the bungalow it guards is the residence of Henry Nicholls. Nobody lives in a home with no Lanterns.

It is a long time before he answers my knock, long enough for me to have taken his daughter’s shoe from my pocket and pushed my hand into it, wriggling my fingers to give shape back to its flattened form. I remember the graveyard of discarded clothing, and something of the enormous grief that filled me that morning finds its way up into my throat, making me squeeze my eyes closed on the threat of tears. When I open them, I see a vague shape moving beyond the frosted glass.

“Can I help you?” Henry Nicholls asks. He has opened the door only a fraction, and he peers through the gap like a frightened child. His face is small and white, and the semi-circles of bruised skin beneath his eyes indicate a stressed and sleepless man.

I can’t find the words. I take the shoe in both hands and hold it up between us like an offering.

“You…where did you find that?” he asks. He lets the door fall open and stands before me in a dressing gown that hangs loosely from his tall, skinny frame. His eyes are fixed on the shoe, yet he makes no move to take it from me.

“On Witches Path. It’s…Judy’s?”

He nods. Finally, he lifts the shoe from my hands.

“My girl,” he says. His voice is hollow. “Now we’ve all been Touched.”

“I’m sorry. I found it a few days ago. A lot’s been going on and this is the first chance I’ve had…”

“No…it’s…it’s okay. How did you find me?” He’s crying and I don’t think he even realises it. The tears simply spill from his eyes and down the sides of his face.

“My father is John Trent. I think you might know him. Or at least, you might have known him five or six years ago. I looked in the old phonebook to get your address.”

“Kennedy, isn’t it?” he asks the shoe.

“Ken,” I reply. “Just Ken.”

“Thank you, Ken,” he says. “I think…I think I’m going to go back inside now.”

“I’m sorry, Mr. Nicholls.”

“Yes. We’re all sorry, I think. Thank you,” he says, and closes the door without once looking up at me.

Deep in thought, I walk back up Cavanaugh Close and along the disused road to Witches Path. We cannot go on like this. I have a plan, but right now it feels as frail and fragile as the look on Henry’s face when he’d taken his daughter’s shoe from my hand. There is no way of stopping the Shades, of destroying them the way I’d like to. I think I can make a difference, but nothing I have is even close to the weapon these people need. If I could stand before them, show them something huge and powerful and awe-inspiring, then maybe they’d believe, and maybe then they’d stop walking around like they’re already dead. As things stand, I have nothing but theories, and the only one I think truly believes in those theories is JD.

I cut into the woods without really thinking about what I’m doing until I find myself standing before the pile of damp, discoloured clothing once more. This is the one mystery I cannot seem to solve, the one contrary piece of evidence in my carefully constructed theory of the Shades. Why would they do this? What does it mean? It just doesn’t fit with everything else I’ve learned and I can’t shake the feeling that it’s somehow important.

“Ken?”

I jump and spin around, my lungs squeezed empty by shock, my heart accelerating to a staccato rhythm. Cartwright stands a few feet behind me. He’s holding a large wrench in his hand.

“You scared the shit out of me,” I say, and my voice is loud and unsteady.

“You look like hell, Ken. I thought you were hurt…Touched. What are you doing out here?” he asks. He is looking around me, at the graveyard.

“I might ask you the same question.”

“Mining the old Lanterns. No-one’s going to be using this path anymore and they barely work anyway. Some parts degrade faster than others.” He shrugs. “What’s that you’re looking at?”

“Clothes. I think the Shades left them here.”

“The Shades,” he says, and that’s all.

We stand in silence for a few moments and I find myself sizing him up, gauging my youth and size against his labourer’s strength and the fact that he’s holding the wrench. I have known Mr. Cartwright all my life, yet he is a Lanterman, and in my mind, that word is more loaded with possibility than it used to be. I think I could take him, if only because he wouldn’t be expecting it and because he doesn’t strike me as the fighting type. He is not yet as old as Dennis, but he has several years on my father, and he is losing what was probably once an impressive physique. If I moved first, I’m pretty sure I’d come out on top.

“Actually,” I say, “I’m glad I bumped into you. I was on my way to your house. There were some things I wanted to ask you.”

“I’m pretty busy. I need to get these parts and then get on up to the Curfew Bar. Maybe you could pop round later.”

I’m almost sure that JD and Dennis will have been and gone by now. Almost sure.

“Important things,” I say, and my voice contains a cool insistence I didn’t know I was capable of. It’s a voice that suspects it might be being fucked with and doesn’t like the idea one little bit.

Cartwright frowns and scratches his head with his free hand. Maybe he sees my eyes flicker to the wrench, because he relaxes his grip and lets it hang limply from his fingers.

“What’s going on here, Ken?”

“I hear you guys are forming a union.”

“A union?” He laughs a little. “Maybe a social club.”

“I also hear the words ‘Lantern Tax’ pretty often.”

“That’s just gossip. There’s…”

“Like the gossip in the Dead Quarters before the lights went out?”

“Now hold on just a minute. That’s specu…”

“No, you hold on just a minute.” My voice has risen again, but this time it is firm and clear. “Some of the gossip around here is so much bullshit, I know that. But I also know that pretty much everybody in C and D got Shaded except for maybe a few lucky Lanternmen. You want to talk about speculation? Fine, let’s speculate. Let’s speculate that there were rumours of a Lantern Tax in C and D, and that maybe those rumours were getting close to a reality. Let’s speculate that some bright spark had the idea of throwing a scare into the citizens by maybe turning out the lights for a few minutes. While we’re at it, let’s also speculate that they underestimated the Shades in the same way that have and things got a little out of control. That’s a lot of dead people, Cartwright, and I have to say that the thought of similar ideas being tossed around the Quarter I live in doesn’t exactly fill me with joy. Are you beginning to see where I’m coming from?”

“I would never…” he says, and then trails off. His face has gone white. “I mean, we’ve been talking about getting paid for what we do, but that’s only fair. It’s a hard job, and not too many can do it.”

“No-one’s going to go for that idea, and you know it. People around here are beginning to wonder when the next lot of bills are coming, and after a while they’re going to start getting used to the idea that maybe they’re not. I’ve been getting paid cash in hand since June, and I know my dad hasn’t paid for electricity or gas since around about the same time…”

“Neither has anyone else around here, Ken. The reality is that the council has broken up and the government doesn’t seem to be keeping an eye on things anymore.”

“Backed into a corner,” I say. “A country and then cities and then towns and then Quarters and then streets. And nobody really notices and nobody really cares. The old ways are going out of style, Cartwright, and nobody’s going to be too pleased if you start trying to bring them back. Sure, we need the Lanterns. But then what happens when we need electricity and water and gas, too?”

“People will supply them. And those people will need to be paid. That’s how it works.”

“And the Shades?”

“What about them?”

“Like I said, we’re backed into a corner. There are thousands of them, man, maybe millions. Don’t you think that might be just a little more important than getting paid?”

“No-one’s going to switch off the Lanterns,” he says, but his eyes slide away from mine, and for the first time, he looks unsure. “A and B won’t be Dead Quarters.”

“Your profession has blood on its hands,” I say.

He looks startled. “What did you say?”

“You heard me.”

“You’re wrong, Ken,” he says. “You’re wrong.”

And then he turns and strides away up the path, stooping to pick up his toolkit from beneath one of the old council Lanterns. I watch his retreat, knowing for the first time that there’s something in the story Old Dennis told me, something that Cartwright knows. I scared him, I think, but not with my arguments or my hints at physical threat. He’s either a very good actor or a man only just realising what’s going on around him. Cartwright, I think, isn’t one of the bad guys. But if he’s in some sort of union, and if he’s familiar with the idea of turning out the Lanterns, then he’s the key to finding the Lanternmen from the Dead Quarters. I’ll be talking to him again, but it seems wise to let him think about it first.

For the good guys, for me and JD and my father and Old Dennis and whomever else, there is now a certain clarity to the questions of both Shades and Lanternmen. I think I have something of an answer to the former, but the latter requires the community. I cannot go against a ghost of an idea by myself. Their influence touches all of us.

“We’ve all been Touched,” I murmur. Henry Nicholls’s words. He was referring to his family; to Judy and Judy’s mother. To himself. Henry Nicholls has been Touched.

“Touched,” I say, into the silence of Witches Path. “Like me.”

Instead of going home, I turn and head back towards Cavanaugh Close.

Lanterns And Shades - Part 7: Healing

"Shell smashed, juices flowing. Wings twitch, legs are going. Don't get sentimental, it always ends up drivel. One day, I am gonna grow wings, a chemical reaction. Hysterical and useless."

My dad was waiting up for me when I got home. Or maybe he was waiting up for news of the Curfew Bar and my fate. He ran into the hallway when he heard me coming through the door. He looked old and tired. He wore a mask of relief that failed to cover the belief I could see melting in his eyes and beginning to run down his cheeks. He’d been sure I was gone.

My exhaustion was beyond anything I’d ever experienced. His babble was just that, and I didn’t understand a word. I held up a weary hand and he fell into silence.

“JD…” I said.

“She got back,” he replied. “She told us what happened.”

And as if my desire for that knowledge had been the only thing holding me up, my knees buckled and I fell forward into my father’s embrace. He lifted me like the child I had once been. He murmured in my ear. He kissed my forehead and the side of my face as he carried me to my room and laid me down on my bed. I fell into a dreamless sleep as soon as my head touched the pillow.

Later, I was aware of further kisses, all over my face. These were from lips far softer than my dad’s, lips that were surrounded by smooth, warm skin. Through half-lidded eyes I watched JD straighten and strip to her underwear. She pulled back the covers and slipped into bed beside me. I lifted my head only to let it fall on her chest. She wrapped her arms around me.

“I love you,” she whispered, and I did not know whether those words came from memory or reality or the sleep that was dragging me down into healing oblivion.

I dreamed that The Daylight World went on without me. I was rumour and speculation. Mine was a name on the tip of every tongue. The Chinese Whispers went around, and by the time dark fell once again, I was a non-person. To mention my plight was to mention what had happened to us at the Curfew Bar, to mention the beings that had visited such devastation upon us, to mention things we do not talk about.

Darkness in my room. Silence broken only by the breaths of the girl lying spooned in my embrace. The fading tastes of whiskey and adrenaline are coppery and sour in my mouth. My entire body aches like a rotting tooth, various injuries competing for my attention while my muscles complain of the exertion I have put them through. One arm rests on the naked curve of JD’s hip, my hand flat on her belly, her fingers laced through mine.

“JD,” I whisper.

“Ken,” she says.

My eyelids feel glued together. It is an effort to force them apart, to see her face in extreme close-up when she turns toward me. In hope she is truly beautiful; hazel eyes and creamy skin and a full-lipped mouth waiting for a reason to smile.

“We made it,” I say.

“Shelley?”

I shake my head.

“I thought you were dead,” she says, touching my cheek, tracing the line of my jaw.

“I am. We all are.”

“How did you…?”

“Later,” I say. “Please. Talk later.”

We kiss, we touch, we undress. We make clumsy, delicate love. She sits astride me and holds my hands, moulds her mouth and her body to mine. For however long we are together like this, in the timeless darkness of my room, I think only of what she’s doing to me, what I’m doing to her, how she tastes and feels and smells. At the moment of her orgasm, I devour her mouth and her sigh rushes down my throat and into my lungs, making me feel resuscitated and finally alive. Consumed by the heat of my excitement, I lift my hips and say her name and then gasp as I am tensed and then released by my own climax.

We hold each other in wordless relief. I stare at the cracks in my ceiling and consider our reality as it all comes flooding back. When I am sure she is asleep, I gently disengage myself from her arms and walk stiffly to the bathroom.

My father looks up with a curiously childlike expression when I enter the living room. I feel clean and strong where he is dirtied and exhausted by grief and lack of sleep. For perhaps the first time in my nineteen years, I feel like a man.

“What happened out there?” he asks. “Tell me everything.”

And I do, starting with the moment Shelley told us the Lanterns were out and ending with my discovery of the mountain of clothing in the woods. He listens and does not interrupt, even when I pause to think or attempt to clarify those moments where I wasn’t in my right mind. He nods at my untidy narrative, looks puzzled and thoughtful at the moments of revelation, pins me with careful, sceptical scrutiny when I move from the events of last night to the theories and beliefs they have instilled in me.

“You look like hell,” he says, when he’s sure I’m done.

I touch my face and wince. “It was a table or a chair. Something fell on me. When I ran through the woods, I guess I wasn’t too worried about the branches. I guess I fell a few times.”

“I didn’t think you were coming home. I really didn’t. I’m…sorry for that.”

He lowers his head. He won’t meet my eyes.

“I know you didn’t, dad. It’s okay. It doesn’t matter. Last night is…it’s over. It happened, but it’s over. Nobody wanted to go to the Curfew Bar, did they? No Lanterns, no safety. I get it. I wouldn’t have gone either.”

It takes him a long time to look up. When he does, I see in his eyes what is almost an acknowledgement of the experience I have had and the change I have gone through. What he sees, I think, is that I am no longer afraid, and that I am quite prepared to go out there and walk amongst the Shades to prove it.

“So what now?” he asks me. “I believe what you’ve told me, but I’m not sure how it helps us.”

“To be honest, neither am I. I have an idea, but there are a lot of holes in it.”

“You want to share it with me?”

“Not yet. I need to talk to Mr. Cartwright. I also need to go back up to Witches Path.”

“Christ, why?”

“An experiment. I need to know that last night had nothing to do with those specific circumstances. That’s the most important part of my idea.”

“Ken…please,” he says, staring at me.

“If it doesn’t work out, I can always run. I’m not afraid.”

“That what worries me. I don’t know how it was for you last night, not really. But don’t get carried away, okay? I don’t want to lose you.”

“I don’t want to lose me,” I say.

“Janey still upstairs?” he asks, relaxing a little.

“Sleeping.”

He nods. “She’s a good kid. I’ve always liked her.”

“Is that your blessing?” I feel my face colouring, even after all this.

“You need my blessing?” he asks, and a genuine smile finally cracks the mask of his face.

“Need’s a…funny word. It means a lot that you approve of me.”

He takes his cigarettes from his breast pocket, pulls one of those slim, white sticks free with a trembling hand. As he lights it and the room is filled with a smell that will always remind me of my childhood, I take enough of my uncomfortable pigeon-steps that I can fall down onto the sofa beside him. He sighs and a thick cloud of smoke forms before us, hanging in the air like words unspoken.

“Since your mother…since then…I’ve tried hard. I think you’re turning into quite a…into quite a man. I don’t know how much of that was me, but I’m proud. I’m really proud of you.”

Tears standing in his eyes, his stare fixed on the wall opposite, somewhere just above the photo of my mother that’s been gathering dust on the mantelpiece for as long as I can remember.

“I’ve never resented you,” I say. “I love you. I can say that and not have to worry that it might not be true, dad.”

He nods, smiles a little, closes his eyes and takes another huge drag on his cigarette. He turns to look at me.

“Do what you have to,” he says. “You’re not a child anymore.”

“I know. It would take forever for me to tell you everything. And maybe…maybe I don’t really have the words. It’s so hard to explain. I know what I think, but it’s so fucking hard to explain.”

“Go on,” he says. “But mind her. She’s fragile.”

I get up and leave the room, go straight out the front door before how it is to be in the same place as my father and JD overwhelms me and all the things I must do become too much to bear.

Abbot Street is darkness and silence. The Lanterns glow and bring a warmth that is all metaphorical. Winter is coming hard now. Every surface glitters with frost and the warm vapour of my breath parts the night and is dragged away into a purple sky. I watch my feet and concentrate on walking, feeling trepidation overcome with the relief of using these muscles again, of warm blood flowing into my tired limbs. It is another healing, and while it is nothing so satisfying as finding my place with those I love, it signals what is almost a defeat of the ghosts I now seek to confront. I have been amongst them. I have seen them in a way no-one else alive can claim. Yet still I walk, still I have substance. I am not afraid.

I walk Abbot Street and the fringes of Quarter B. I stray beyond the comforting blanket of Lanternlight and out onto the main road. My feet find Witches Path and stop only when I reach that spot where I was Shaded, where terror made me quick enough that they could not finish what they started, where this story began. I remember that icy touch, but it feels distant now. In my body, I am sure, that cold has spread and numbed me in ways my senses cannot comprehend. In my mind, it has faded and become a memory. I will never really forget it, I know that, but it has receded far enough that terror seems a distant, powerless emotion.

Witches Path, then. A winter’s night. The moon is full and powerful, casting its ghostly light through the trees and down onto the glistening asphalt. As I walk down the hill, I wonder if this is the sight Judy Nicholls saw before she died, if she had time to appreciate the desolate beauty of this place before its shadows stole away her young life. Even now I see them floating between the scattered spotlights of that stark luminescence, lifeless bodies constantly struggling against old definitions as though trapped in the memory of what they once were. Witnessing them like this, I feel something akin to sympathy, almost an understanding of what it is to be dead. I remember Shelley’s words and wonder if she had something, if her definition of these spectres wasn’t closer to the truth than any I have heard. I do not believe that there is a God in any scripture that could turn his back on these tormented souls. Such cruelty could surely never be. But the Shades are dead, of that I have no doubt, and I sense that if there is anything at all that they want, it is to finally be at rest.

I stop at the edge of this small wood, standing close to a tree I’ve come to think of as my own, its branches offering the same shelter they’d given when I was alone and wounded. I watch a Shade drift silently out onto the path less than ten feet in front of me. My heartbeat accelerates, empathising with memory, recalling all the times I ran and all the fear I have experienced.

“I’m here,” I say, and my voice is loud in this place of silence.

The Shade, of course, does not respond. It is facing me, drifting towards me. Perhaps it senses the light against my clothes and my hair. I really have no understanding of these things. Perhaps it is curious of motion. Perhaps it is knows that there is a solid object where previously there was nothing. But it does not see me in the way they could see me before. If it could, I feel sure it would already be too late.

“See me,” I say. “I’m right here.” My voice rises to a shout. “I’m right in front of you!”

The Shade moves closer and a shiver runs up my spine, as though I can sense the proximity of it, of its absence. At this distance, it doesn’t seem so much a thing as a hole. It is almost as though a human shape has been cut from reality, leaving a dark vacuum that exerts its own cold gravity. I remember my fascination at the Curfew Bar, how it had seemed like I was in shock. I feel drawn. I feel I could walk forward and just step into that shape, disappear into a world where all is lifeless shadow.

I blink. I take a clumsy backward step. This is the glamour. This is the pull they exert over us, the fascination that gives rise to The Daylight World. Beneath sunlight, we dream of their dark mystery and conduct our daily business in a sort of hysterical daze. We kiss our loved ones, we talk about the weather, we hang out our washing and go about our chores. All the while, they haunt us and taunt us as though they were an ambition and not a fear. Their great power is not their speed or their touch. It is the fear we have of what we are, and a feeling that perhaps the only reality is the darkness of this embrace.

Now I take a sideways step. The illusion that the Shade was somehow watching me is dispelled. It passes over the spot where I was standing without pause or curiosity. It simply drifts with that same blankness, that same absence. I turn and see so many more hanging between and behind the trees. I see them, but they do not see me.

I can still be Touched, though. That they are blind to me does not change what they can do. I am careful to give the Shade a wide berth when I rejoin the path and head for home.

The house is in darkness. In my bedroom, JD is an untidy shape beneath the covers.

“Where’d you go?” she murmurs, as I undress.

“Witches Path,” I reply.

“What?”

“They can’t see me,” I say. “The Touch. They don’t see me anymore. They were chasing you.”

Silence, and then: “You went out to…what…test this out?”

“I had to know.”

“You’re insane. What…I mean…I don’t know where to start. You haven’t told me anything…I’m…I don’t know.”

“In the morning. I’ll tell you everything in the morning, I promise.”

“You’d better.”

I laugh, and it feels natural and good.

“Ken,” she says.

“Nothing. Really, it’s nothing.”

I slide beneath the covers, wriggle into her arms where it's warm and safe and wonderful. She kisses my forehead and my cheeks and my lips. I touch her naked skin and she wraps her legs around my waist.

“Promise me you won’t do things without telling me anymore,” she says.

“I promise,” I say. “I want you with me.”

“You’d better,” she says, and then: “I want you in me.”

And then all is kisses and sighs and the delirious warmth of her embrace. For now, at least, I am home.

Lanterns And Shades - Part 6: The Long Walk Home

"Sinner - I have never learned. Beginner - I cannot return. Forever I must walk this earth, like some forgotten soldier."

I sit with my back resting against the trunk of a gnarled old oak tree, staring up through its twisted branches at a small and impossibly distant sun that bathes Witches Path in weak, watery light. I see it, but I cannot feel it. My skin is wet and cold, my limbs numb. The only thing that seems real is Judy Nicholls’s shoe. I have been turning it over in my hands for some time now, feeling the light, furry texture of suede and the barely perceptible lashings of frayed and broken laces where they fall over and between my trembling fingers. The left side of my face throbs without obvious rhythm. It feels swollen and bruised. When I close my right eye, I see that the vision from its twin is narrowed and distorted. My shirt is torn and dirtied, the skin beneath scraped and penetrated in too many places to count.

Everything is different now. I have seen the Shades in all their capering glory. I have seen how they flock to light and warmth, how they smother it and make it their own, how they steal away what they can no longer have. Any naïvety I once possessed is gone, dragged to the ground and claimed as Shelley was, buried beneath those warped and reaching forms until no trace remained. At least Judy left a shoe. It is a ridiculous memento, incongruous and meaningless without its partner, but it’s something. It is a memory of a girl that once walked here. Perhaps not a statue or a diary or some grand memorial to recall a life taken well before time, but something her parents might hold or keep and know where and how their daughter was claimed. With that knowledge, they might at least begin to come to terms with tragedy. If I can ever find the strength to pick myself up, I will take it to them. This much I promise.

I am no longer afraid of the dark or the ghosts that call it home. On the floor of the Curfew Bar, beneath the death-dance of the Shades, I lay screaming and weeping, curled into the tightest of foetal balls. Even then, their glamour was such that I could not bring myself to close my eyes. It wasn’t that we were wrong about their insubstantial nature or their comparative lack of strength. We were mathematically fooled, stupid enough to never really understand that every missing person was likely a new Shade, and that their numbers had swelled beyond our worst nightmares. The doors were broken and the windows shattered not by some surprising and hidden power, but by the sheer weight of the crowds that had been drawn by the light to gather at every entrance. There were hundreds. Outside, perhaps thousands. Beyond the Lanternmen, nobody has ever mentioned anybody being a refugee from the Dead Quarters, and if that is the case then perhaps the entire population of those doomed communities now drifts in shadow, irresistibly pulled to those places where there is still light and life.

Yet I was not Touched. With Shelley gone, her murderers span and flew in the light like dervishes, ricocheting from the walls and the ceiling and each other. They turned over tables and sent chairs spinning across the room. They raced in and out through the windows, sometimes catching on the broken, jagged glass and leaving streaks of themselves behind like material caught on barbed wire where – separated from whatever force gave it motion and life – it was reduced to liquid that streamed to the floor and melted away into vapour. Whatever sense they use to ‘see’, though, was useless when it came to the cowering boy who lay terrified and paralysed beneath them.

I do not know for certain, but the memory that comes is of the Shades I saw when Dennis and I drove into the town centre. They were gathered as I often see them gathered, an image that has always made me think of them as creatures that roamed and hunted in packs. But they seemed blind to each other, callously colliding as though unaware that their own kind were so close at hand. If what they see is light and warmth, then perhaps darkness and cold don’t register at all, except as a respite from the Lanterns, the one thing they seem to avoid. I have been thinking about this ever since the reality of dawn made the lights of the bar impotent and the Shades began to thin in number as individuals and then groups slipped back out into the growing day. They come to light, but that which emanates from the Lanterns is too much. It leaves them confused and disoriented, drunk on that which they crave. Beneath the sun, I think, they go to places of relative darkness, hiding perhaps in abandoned buildings or woods like this one. That would explain why Witches Path is so haunted, and why the day is so safe.

They do not have eyes or ears or noses. They do not react to the same things we do. Whatever senses they have strike me as very black and white and restricted. Light and dark, hot and cold; these are the extremes by which they are guided. Somehow, I am now sure, the fact that I have been Touched either dulls those senses or eliminates them altogether. In the Curfew Bar, I was invisible. Had I not been, my fate would have been as assured as Shelley’s. Mine is not a unique affliction, but it is rare. As far as I am aware, though, I am the only one who knows of this potential immunity. I have that knowledge, I have a shoe, and I have a prayer that JD was fast enough last night. Everything else seems vague and distant.

I draw my legs up beneath me, and the scrape of my shoes on the gravel seems too loud. I rest one hand on the tree and haul myself unsteadily to my feet. My body feels cramped and stiff, and it is only now that I think about the time and realise how many hours have passed since I fled the Curfew Bar and plunged headlong into the woods. The bare branches whipped and wounded me, but at the time I was propelled by the adrenaline of terror, and I barely noticed. Now those cuts feel dirty and sore, and I want nothing more than to settle into a hot bath and then sleep. The thought of nightmares no longer bothers me. I have seen worse now. I have felt and heard worse. The fears and insecurities that live in my head have been challenged and surpassed.

It is when I move to set off that I realise there is something wrapped around my ankle. I look down and see red, shiny material. I bend to retrieve it and find myself holding a satin bra. Frowning, I step away from the tree and turn to look back at the broken branches and trampled grass that mark the path of destruction I have wrought. A few feet along it lie a pair of faded jeans. Further away, a striped shirt. Beyond that, what looks like an old brown sandal.

I do not have to follow this bizarre trail very far to discover its source. Away from Witches Path, hidden deep in the trees, there is a small clearing. Piled in its centre are clothes of every style and description. For my tired mind, it is a moment both of understanding and incomprehension. I must have run straight through the huge mound of clothing, kicking the sandal and dragging the other items with me. I had noticed this no more than I had noticed the injuries I was inflicting on myself. But the very presence of this bizarre sight goes against every belief I have come to hold about the Shades. They have no intelligence, and they've certainly never bothered with ritualistic behaviour like this before. What is the pile of clothes if not a graveyard of a sort? These are the jumbled remains of all those Shaded on Witches Path. If you had the time and were of a suitably macabre leaning, you could sort them by size and taste and get some idea of just how many had died to create this mountain of damp and faded colours.

So many dead. This is clothing no longer required because the former owners now live in darkness. I feel breathless and dizzy. I let myself fall back against a tree and rest there a while, almost grateful for the release of tears. I will remember this, but I will not think of it now. I haven’t the energy. All I want is to fall into blissful oblivion. Summoning what little strength I have left, I turn away from the graveyard and pick my way back to the path.

I walk slowly up the hill feeling leaden and exhausted. I will never run here again. On the far side, I pause to stare at the main road, to remember all those frantic nights when the last leg of our frantic sprint took us to the safety of the Lantern Truck. In hindsight it seems a foolish and hollow activity, something we did because our lives had no real meaning and because we needed to feel alive and afraid. At the time, though, it all made sense. There is no handheld equivalent of a Lantern that we could have carried through the woods, and there is no way that Dennis’s truck could ever have traversed the disused and broken road that passes the front of the Curfew Bar. We could have run the roads, but in the end, there was just as strong a likelihood of being attacked by Shades there as on Witches Path. The Path was more dangerous, but it was also the fastest route to a place where we could be picked up. If I look hard enough, then maybe there are holes in the logic that led us to take those jobs at the Curfew Bar. But in the end, we needed the money and we needed something that removed us from the Daylight World. It may be that all close friends think themselves different from the rest, special in some indefinable way. JD and I have always felt that way, I think. It’s unspoken, but it’s there. There is us, and then there is everyone else.

Shelley’s God is a cruel one. If he was to exist, then his past record indicates that there is a price I would have to pay for gaining knowledge that may help us in what are starting to feel like our final days, for holding onto my life while so many others are losing theirs. In a biblical tale, I would lead the victims of the Daylight World against the Shades, but the price God would exact would be terrible. In a biblical tale, JD’s revelation that a world filled only with Shades was inevitable could lead only to her own death. Those are the rules when every story has a moral and every action must be answered for. I refuse to believe that. In a way, Witches Path belongs to JD. It is here that she shines the brightest, drawing the ire and pursuit of shadowy enemies that just never seem to be fast enough. She can’t be gone. If she is, then I suppose I will deliver the shoe and the information and then walk away. Being close to Lanterns isn’t the necessity it once was.

The eyes of Community B are wide and stunned. They watch me as they might watch a Shade drifting aimlessly through the neighbourhood in broad daylight. It’s funny, but not so as you’d laugh. I am aware of the way they freeze, of the way their heads turn, whispered conversations carrying on the soft breeze. I am aware of the picture I must present; a young man they have seen around before, battered and bedraggled and walking with the slow, awkward shuffle of a Romero zombie; face bruised and misshapen, shirt torn and bloody, a girl’s shoe dangling limply from his right hand.

I turn the corner of Abbot Street and begin what seems like an endless walk home. Curtains twitch, activity ceases, sound falls away. My neighbours watch me like the scattered audience to some nightmare parade.

“My God,” someone says. “Are you…are you okay?”

The voice is not familiar, but something in the part of my memory that now seems so dislocated and far away makes me stop and turn. I am standing outside number thirty-eight, and a brunette from a boy’s fantasies is staring at me, concern creasing her brow and glistening in her bright blue eyes.

“I’m…alive,” I hear a thin, harsh voice reply. I have screamed my vocal chords raw.

“What happened to you? It’s Ken, isn’t it? You live up the road.”

A derisive little snort of amusement comes from my nostrils. I feel my lungs hitch, and for a moment, I am absolutely sure I am going to fall into hysterical laughter that I will be powerless to prevent.

“You know my name,” I say. “I used to watch you sunbathing. I used to dream about you all the time.”

She colours and stares at me, her mouth moving as though trying on different words and finding nothing appropriate. You could imagine kissing her, tasting her lipstick and feeling her soft warmth. She’s beautiful in a way JD can only dream about, but she isn’t real. This is the DW, The Daylight World, Disneyland. It is populated by dolls and puppets and bad actors. If the Shades are the drifting dead of the night, then we are the sunlit equivalent.

“I’m alive,” I tell her, and walk on.

Lanterns And Shades - Part 5: After Curfew

"You're just looking for a boy bathed in infrared and sunlight. I'm all polish and reward. When I'm confident, I'm hopeless, just like everybody else right before they fall apart."

“Lanterns are out,” Shelley says.

The Curfew Bar is empty. It never gets particularly busy, but Sunday nights are the quietest of all, and for there to be nobody here at ten-to-midnight but Shelley, JD, and I is hardly unusual.

“What?” says JD. There is a faint smile on her face. “They can’t be.”

“They’re out,” Shelley says. She is standing at the window with her back to us, and because I can clearly see her reflection in the glass, I know there is no light in the car park.

JD is still smiling that little smile, like it’s ridiculous to even suggest such a thing. She is wide-eyed and breathing hard. The glance she gives me is fearful, almost accusing, and she moves quickly around the bar to join Shelley at the window.

“Just ours?” I ask, trying to keep the hope out of my voice.

Shelley shakes her head, but it is JD who answers me. “No,” she says. “It’s dark out there. I can see the old ones on Witches Path, but that’s it.”

“They’re on a different circuit,” I say, remembering a conversation with my father. “There must be a…”

And then JD screams and jumps away from the window, losing her balance and falling back. I see a Shade pressed against the glass, drifting in that slow and apathetic way of theirs, whatever substance it has making soft whispering sounds of contact and friction that carry in the silence of the bar.

“Kennedy,” Shelley says, utterly calm, “you’d best close the doors and check the windows. All of them. Janey, I need you to switch on the lights. I’ll close the drapes.”

JD hasn’t moved since she fell. Her mouth opens and closes, but no sound emerges. She’s starting to cry.

“Janey Dolores, I asked you to switch on the main lights, not sit there blubbing,” Shelley says. Her voice is raised, and there is something in the way she is so calm and still that makes her seem larger, more commanding.

JD gets slowly to her feet. Without looking at Shelley or I, without looking back at the window, she walks stiffly behind the bar and through the door to the staff room. Though something in me wants nothing more than to watch the languorous progress of the Shade at the window, I force myself to look away, to move. I take the keys from the bar, pass Shelley’s motionless figure, then lock and bolt the main doors. The night is cold, and I’m fairly sure all of the windows are closed. Nonetheless, I do a circuit of the bar, methodically checking each and every one. It is as I complete this task that the room is suddenly flooded with powerful light from the strips above us. I have never actually seen them switched on before, and it makes the place look dirty and unfamiliar.

“All secure, I think,” I tell Shelley.

“Check the trapdoor in the cellar and the fire exit in the staff room,” she replies. “Then you’d both best come back in here.”

I nod. I am trying to think, but my mind keeps catching on the image of the Shade pressed up against the window. There is something almost soothing in the way it moved, the sigh of its body against the glass like the tide pushing slowly up a beach. Its darkness makes me think of sunlight, its coldness warmth. I wonder, distantly, if I am in shock.

The trapdoor hasn’t been opened in years, and though it is secured only by a bolt that is more rust than metal, I am sure that it would take three or four powerful men to pull it open from the outside. The Shades are many things, but strong is not one of them. Satisfied that the cellar is secure, I go up to the staff room, where I find the fire exit closed and JD standing motionless against the wall.

“JD?” I say.

Silence. She stares straight ahead, breathing deeply and slowly.

“Janey?”

A flicker of recognition in her face. Her eyes move to mine, and my stomach turns over at the unhappiness and fear I see there. She blinks rapidly and the tears finally come. Her mouth trembles and she comes to me, anxious to bury her face in my chest, perhaps to feel small and helpless in my embrace. She presses herself against me and grabs at my arms when I wrap them around her, as though willing me to hug her more tightly.

“Hey,” I say, barely whispering. “Hey, it’s okay. They can’t get in here, JD. We’re locked up tight. We’re safe.”

She mutters something into the front of my shirt. I feel her chest hitching. She draws her head back and her eyes are red-rimmed and without focus.

“It’s okay,” I repeat, and it sounds as pointless as it feels.

“It’s not okay.” Her words are thick and slurred with grief. “It’s not ever gonna be okay. It’s just time. They’ll get everyone.”

“They won’t…it doesn’t…fuck, JD. It’s not written.”

She kisses me. I don’t expect it and don’t respond. I am aware of her open mouth against mine and her tongue pushing between my slack, surprised lips. I am aware of the way her breasts are squashed into my chest and of the way she seems to lift her hips, almost grinding herself against me. She tastes like chewing gum and smells like shampoo. There is a feverish desperation about her, and in those fleeting moments when her mouth is on mine, I know that in another time and another more private place, this could and would have been a precursor to everything else.

She breaks the kiss and steps backward out of my embrace. She stares at me for a few seconds. I stare back. I can’t think of anything I could possibly say. She brings her hands to her face and wipes quickly and aggressively at the tear-tracks. She offers an embarrassed grin, though whether it’s for her fear or her sadness or the kiss I have no idea. She turns and walks out of the room.

“Too fast,” I say, into the vacuum she leaves behind. “Slow down. Think.”

It’s an effort of will to push it all down, to clear my head of everything but the situation at hand. My mouth wants only to think of how she tasted and how her tongue pushed at mine. My ears hear only the sound of the Shade sliding along the window. I find myself staring at the panel of switches JD’s hand was resting on when I entered the room. Light, Lanterns, Old Dennis staring through the windscreen of the truck and telling me about the Dead Quarters. Strikes, Lanternmen, Shades, screaming. Where were the back-ups? Where are the back-ups?

Back in the bar, JD is sitting at a table and Shelley is pouring three glasses of whiskey. The drapes are closed now, and all is silent.

“Where are the back-ups?” I ask.

Shelley looks up and smiles. It’s not an expression I’ve often seen and I feel favoured and almost happy, like a boy in class asking the right question.

“There are only so many working generators,” she says. “Residential areas have priority. I doubt we’ll get the Lanterns back tonight, but the people at home are almost certainly safe.”

“Are we?” JD asks.

“Honey, everything’s locked. Shades don’t smash windows or charge through walls. If they can't get in, we don’t need to worry about Lanterns for now. We’ll just hang on for sunrise. No doubt your parents’ll be up here as soon as it’s light.”

“You’re so calm,” I say. I can’t help but smile.

“Lanterns don’t last forever and our friends out there can’t get to us. That old Lantern was bound to go sooner or later. They’re only lightbulbs in the end. Sit down, Kennedy,” she waves a hand at the glasses, “get that down you.”

I take a whiskey and she nods approval. We sit at JD’s table in silence, the three of us concentrating mainly on our drinks. JD glances up only once, and that’s to show me the expression of disgust on her face when she takes a sip. Neither of us are drinkers, and the whiskey is strong and sour in the mouth and throat, making me want to gag. Drinking it is an effort, but once it’s down in my belly, I understand why people do. It makes me feel warm and pleasantly dizzy, suddenly comfortable and safe sitting here in the bar with JD and Shelley, even though they are probably the two people in the world I’d least wanted to be close to tonight.

JD had barely spoken to me all day. By the time we’d met to take our afternoon walk up Witches Path to the Curfew Bar, we’d both heard that Judy Nicholls was missing. News, especially bad news, travels fast between the various tiny communities that make up Quarter B, and the disappearance of a local was always cause for concern and gossip. JD was waiting for me when I came out of the house, but she refused to meet my gaze and spoke only in monosyllabic answers to direct questions. On Witches Path, I stopped and picked up the shoe I was sure belonged to the unfortunate girl while JD walked on without looking back. The atmosphere between us had continued in the same vein right up to the point where she’d suddenly wanted to be held and kissed. Now everything was up in the air, and I had no idea what I could say to her, especially with Shelley sat at the third point of such an awkward triangle.

As for our employer, she had emptied her glass before JD and I had even tasted the contents of ours, showing no sign of enjoying or even being affected by the heat and flavour of the whiskey. She then refilled her glass at the bar and brought the bottle back to the table.

Shelley is the only person I can think of who could actually run an establishment like the Curfew Bar. She is old, yes, but that age shows itself in a kind of weary experience much more powerful than any apparent frailty. She is a large woman, though not in the sense of being fat. Shelley is both tall and wide, with a face that is unfeminine yet handsome. Her hair is a steely grey, forever tied back in a tight bun. Her hands are huge. The locals speak of her with awe and respect, though never within her earshot. I have never seen any of the customers, all of whom she knows by name, either argue with or question anything she says. I am not so much scared of Shelley as simply overwhelmed. Her very presence makes me feel young and stupid.

“So,” she says, lifting the bottle to refill her glass and top up ours. “What’s all this then?”

JD’s face goes an alarming shade of crimson and I feel my own face burning, even though I can’t help but laugh. Shelley is like the grandmother I never had. She is the only person who ever calls me by a full name even my father is ashamed to use. She always calls JD Janey. When angry, she calls her Janey Dolores, which JD absolutely hates. The only time I have failed to laugh at this was tonight.

“All what?” I say, looking straight at her and realising that I am a little drunk and that this is making me bold.

“You two,” she says.

I shrug. “It’s nothing, really. It’s been a strange few days.”

She smiles again. “We have a long night ahead of us, and I shouldn’t think we’ll be sleeping much.”

I take another sip of the whiskey, gulping down a cough and letting it slide down my throat and into my stomach before I speak.

“I went to the Dead Quarters last night, with Dennis McCluskey.”

JD looks up, startled.

“And what did you see?” Shelley asks.

“Shades. Just Shades, really. Dennis was talking about the Lanternmen.”

“Never had much truck with them, myself,” Shelley says. She drains her second glass. “Though I’ll need that Lantern fixed.”

“They’re thinking of charging for it,” JD says. “For repairs and maintenance, I mean. My dad says it’ll be a Lantern Tax.”

“No different from what the council used to do,” Shelley replies. “We need the Lanterns. Anything people need has a price.”

“Was it always that way?” I ask.

She nods. “One way or another. You don’t remember the times before the Lanterns, but there were always taxes. If the government didn’t tax for it, you could be damn sure you wouldn’t get it free. It’s always about money.”

“But I thought money didn’t really matter anymore,” I say. “I thought people were happy with the communal way of living. I don’t really know that much about it, but things were different when the towns had names, right?”

“Some things never change, Kennedy. Some are written in stone. Some will be passed down forever. If it wasn’t Lanterns, it’d be something else.”

That slow and somehow peaceful whispering at the window again. We all look up.

“They come to the light,” Shelley says.

“What for?” JD says. She sounds both terrified and curious. “Why?”

Shelley looks at her for a long moment before replying. “Nobody knows, pet. Back in the day, they tried to figure out why. I think they even caught a few for experiments. But they never could say why or how they do what they do.”

“What do you think?” I ask her. I can feel my heart beating hard and fast.

“You’ve talked to that old drunk McCluskey, Kennedy. He’s seen more than anyone, though no doubt he pissed most of what he knows up the wall. They’re not alive, are they? Not like us. They just float around out there until they sense light and warmth.”

“But why?” JD suddenly blurts. Her voice is rising, bordering on hysteria. Beneath the table, I slide my foot between hers, hook it around her calf and pull gently at her leg.

“I believe in a creator,” Shelley says. “I believe in heaven and I believe in an afterlife. Always have. These days, not so many have those faiths, and those that do have them as a retreat and an excuse. If you want to know what I think, then I’ll tell you. We’ve been abandoned, and the Shades are a symbol of that abandonment. In the past, God took in our dead with willing abandon. He understood that we were lost and alone and waiting only for His love. He understood that we did such terrible things because we were lonely and sad and frustrated. Somewhere alone the line, that changed. God has closed the gates of heaven because we are no longer worthy. We have gone too far. When we pass on now, we become shadows of our former selves, Shades if you like. We drift in the night and when we see light, any light, we rush toward it just as fast as we can, hoping – in our tired, dead way – that this time it will be the light that means we can finally come home.”

Sometime during the course of this speech, JD’s ankles had come together to hold my foot with the same desperation as she had hugged and kissed me. We’re both staring at Shelley.

I take another drink of the whiskey, a bolder drink. I let it offend my tongue and burn my throat and explode in my belly. I stare at Shelley and she stares right back, our eyes locked in what suddenly feels like a battle of faith. I feel somehow betrayed. I hear my glass slam down on the table, though I’m barely aware of the angry movement I have made to cause such a sound. My anger is hotter than the alcohol in my stomach, pushing adrenaline into my system until I feel as though I might stand and throw the table over, bend down to scream my rebuke in Shelley’s face.

“Bullshit,” I say. My voice is quiet, trembling with the sheer size of my anger. “Your God was Shaded a long time ago, Shelley, if He ever existed at all. Fuck, even if He did, it’s not like it matters now. According to you, we’re on our own, right? So fuck it. No point looking up for inspiration. No point at all.”

JD looks horrified, but Shelley’s face is as infuriatingly placid as it has been all along.

“That may well be,” she says. “But there is nowhere else to look anymore.”

I have a reply. The thoughts and words are building inside me, all the arguments that have been dancing inside my head since the day I was Touched finally falling into wonderful coherence. I’m actually smiling. I open my mouth to speak, and then something hits the main doors with such violence that the breath rushes out of my body in a gasp of shock. JD and Shelley both stand so suddenly that either the bottle or one of the glasses falls and shatters on the floor. The doors creak as though a great weight is being forced against them, and that sibilant sigh of insubstantial flesh against glass is suddenly all around us, filling the air and making me want to clap my hands over my ears.

“They can’t,” Shelley mutters. She is shaking her head, denying the evidence of her eyes and her ears.

“Ken?” JD gasps. “Ken?”

“The back door,” I say. I feel hollow and strangely calm. “Run, JD.”

“It’s dark,” she says. “Please…”

I turn and see that her face is a mask of utter terror, eyes and mouth open, all colour drained from her skin. I grab her shoulders and kiss her fiercely. Then I push her away. Behind me, I can hear Shelley muttering incoherently, hear the thuds and cracks of the doors giving way. JD stumbles but doesn’t fall, still staring helplessly back at me.

“Run!” I scream.

JD blinks at me. She reaches out and I wave her away with such anger that she finally relents, turning on her heels and doing what she does better than any of us. In the blink of an eye, she is through the door to the staff room and gone. I turn back to Shelley, and in the split-second before the doors finally give way, she plants those huge hands on my shoulders and shoves me to the floor.

I hear wood splintering and glass breaking. Stunned and breathless, I look up and see Shelley standing stoic and still beneath the harsh lighting. I see glittering slivers of flying glass. I hear the crash of a door hitting the floor. I see dark shapes dancing and twisting and blacking out the world. I scream.

Lanterns And Shades - Part 4: The Dead Quarters

"We're not begging for too much, I don't think. Just need a goodbye kiss before we sink."

“I hate this,” I say. “I’ve never liked it, you know? But now I hate it. I can’t stand to do this.”

JD nods. She’s not really listening. Her face is blank, and she stares straight ahead into the darkness, bouncing nervously on the balls of her feet.

“Thirty seconds,” I say.

She assumes the position like a sprinter waiting for the starting pistol, right leg bent before her, left stretched out behind. I can see her trembling.

“Five, four, three, two…”

And she is gone, racing into the darkness. In seconds, I can no longer see her. I take off at a jog. With JD so far ahead of me, the risk is much lower than it could be. As long as I don’t arrive at the hill to find the path crowded with Shades, I am comparatively safe. Even if that situation did arise, I would have the option of returning to the Curfew Bar.

Along the path at the same leisurely pace, turning right and taking it easy down the hill, feeling my muscles loosen and the tension rising up through my belly and making my heart beat faster. The second right turn is in the dip that marks the halfway point, and this is where I am slowest, more than prepared to stop in my tracks and turn back. The hill is clear though, the moon shining like a beacon. No Shades, No JD, no nothing. I could be out for an evening run.

Nonetheless, I accelerate. I put my head down and release the energy that’s been building inside me, relax and let it flow, let it carry me up the steep gradient to safety. The fear is there, but in extremity it recedes. Unless a Shade were actually waiting for me with its arms open, I am going to make it. They are quick, but as yet there is no sign of them. With a running start like this one, the chances of my being caught tonight are getting lower all the time.

It’s an easy night, the kind of peaceful run you dream about. The kind of peaceful run I needed. It is as I am silently thanking JD and the Gods of chance and fate that I spot the shoe by the side of the path. I don’t stop. I don’t even slow down. But above my burning lungs, my heart is ice. There are probably a million reasons why a lone shoe would be lying there, but the only one I think of is the one that makes me find the strength to accelerate still further as I crest the hill and sprint down to the Lantern Truck that awaits, JD and Old Dennis waving and cheering me on.

“See? Nothing to worry about. Last night was a blip.” JD is smiling at me, her words barely carrying over the growl of the engine as we pull away.

I let her statement hang a few moments, getting my breath back.

“There was a shoe. A girl’s shoe,” I say.

“So?”

“It wasn’t there last night and it wasn’t there on our way to work.”

“How do you know?”

“You’d notice. Where it was, you’d notice. I’d notice. I know I would.”

“Ken…”

“I’m not shitting you, JD. I think they got someone.”

She stares at me, smile fading, and I feel like the worst kind of bastard. I am forever the cynic and the pessimist, forever the bearer of bad news.

“Well it wasn’t us,” she says, with surprising vehemence. “There isn’t anyone else that has any business being out there after dark.”

I shake my head, let it fall back against the cab, feeling the sweat drying on my skin, my lungs shrinking, my heart slowing. We pass the rest of the journey in silence.

On Abbot street, JD hops out of the truck and says goodbye only by throwing an angry wave over her shoulder. I watch her disappear into her house and climb slowly out myself, feeling old and tired. Every night seems like a drama now.

“I’ll see you tomorrow, Ken,” Old Dennis calls.

“No doubt,” I reply, my thoughts elsewhere.

I walk down the driveway and hear the sound of the Lantern Truck’s engine expressing its enthusiasm for a run at wherever Old Dennis goes after he drops us off. I turn and call his name, and he leans out of the window, that roar dropping to a low growl. Aware of the late hour and the fact that my father and the rest of Abbot street are probably sleeping, I walk back to the Truck.

“Did you speak to my dad?”

“For a minute or two,” he replies. “He’s worried about you, that’s all.”

I nod, trying to find the words to frame the ideas and questions in my head. Dennis watches me expectantly, wearing a smile that conveys a kind of weary amusement. I’d guess he’s a little younger than Shelley, but that’s based on the timeframes of stories I’ve heard. If you were to take it on appearance, you would say Dennis was ten or even fifteen years the elder. His face is lined and damaged, and though he was probably once a large and powerful man, a manual labourer with an education that was all physical, he is now a bent and broken specimen. I rarely see him walk, and even sat in the cab of his Lantern Truck, he seems withered and ancient, a shadow of the man you can see behind his eyes if you look hard enough.

“It’s getting really dangerous,” I say, looking for a way to start a conversation. “I’m worried about JD.”

“Don’t need to worry about that one, son. She could outrun this truck if she was of a mind.”

“It doesn’t always matter how fast you are.”

Now he really does smile. It takes years off him. I know that’s a cliché, but it really does. Suddenly I understand why my dad says that he always kept my mum away from Old Dennis, who wasn’t so old back then, and was known mostly for his incredible feats of drinking and for the amount of times he was rumoured to have crept out of some young lady’s window in the dead of night.

“Your dad’s always telling me you’re the curious type. Waiting up for you, is he?”

“No. He goes to bed early. Doesn’t like the dark, you know?”

“Then hop in, I won’t keep you too long.”

This is one of the opportunities I’ve been waiting for, and I can’t believe it was as simple as mentioning my concerns about Witches Path. As I make my way around the truck and jump into the passenger seat, I’m wondering if talking to Shelley would ever be so easy.

“Where are we going?” I ask him.

“Town centre,” he says. “Then I’ll take you to the outskirts of the Dead Quarters. Won’t take you in, mind, even with the Lanterns.”

I look at him. “It’s that bad?”

“It’s that bad. If we had the newer Lanterns, the ones old Cartwright goes on about, then maybe. With these old things, not a chance. There’s a lot of ‘em down that way.”

“Shades?”

“Shades.”

Dennis drives to the end of Abbot Street and takes a left, down onto a different main road and past the library, the furthest I have been from my house since I was a child. The scenery after that is only vaguely familiar, like a landscape I might have once dreamed. There are no houses here, and therefore no Lanterns. Only once do I see a Shade, hanging in the moonlight in such a way that I’m reminded of a black dress my brunette sometimes hangs on her washing line. It seems to turn and follow our progress, but it makes no move to follow.

“They tend not to chase you if you’re moving fast enough,” he says, as if reading my mind.

“Why?”

He glances across at me, amused. “I’m no expert, Ken. I only know what I see. That’s why your friend back there is safer than you are. Back in the day, I reckon she’d have made a fine runner.”

“It must seem like a big difference to you. You were around before this happened, right?”

“I was.”

Frustrating silence in the truck as we come up onto a roundabout and head right, past a sign that tells me we’re heading for the town centre. Several abandoned cars sit by the side of the road, and a lone Lantern spits out a quick burst of light before dying again.

“So…what was it like?”

“It’s useless to ask, son. Especially me. We’ll not be going back to that, and I don’t remember much of it anyway.”

“You drank a lot,” I say, a statement, not a question.

“I drank a lot,” he agrees.

As in most places, the town centre’s Lanterns seem to work periodically and without much spirit. Some are on, some are dead, and some flicker in the last throes of life. It is not the apocalyptic scene I sometimes paint it as in my mind. It is deserted and silent, but most of the cars have been left parked neatly, and most of the shops have shutters pulled down, as if they’d simply closed one night and then never re-opened.

“What happened, Dennis? Why did we retreat? I don’t know anyone that even comes here in the daytime anymore.”

“They come here sometimes, for supplies and what-not. The Lanternmen take parts.”

“But it’s safe in the day.”

“So are the Dead Quarters. People aren’t sure, though. There are always rumours and no facts. Night may be the problem, but that doesn’t mean people don’t try to stay where it’s brightest. Even on cloudy days, we don’t go out. Sometimes people just disappear, and sometimes it was light when those people went out.”

We pass the cinema and I can’t help but shudder, remembering the screams of my recurring nightmare.

“Have you ever seen one in the day?”

“I sleep in the day. I’m up when they’re up.”

Dennis nods at one of the dead Lanterns and I see a group of Shades beneath it. Again, they seem curiously lifeless, drifting aimlessly, occasionally bumping into one another. I am used to seeing them in flight, in pursuit, and the contrast is stark. Still, I shiver to look at them. I hate them.

“What do you think they are?” I ask him.

“Our dead. That’s why there are always more. Every time someone gets The Touch, they turn into one, don’t they?”

“I had The Touch.”

“But not the way it is when you don’t get away. Nobody dies if they get away. After a few days or a few weeks, it goes. Where it stays is in your head. That’s why your dad worries, Ken. He’s seen what’s happened to others.”

“So if you get Shaded, terminally Shaded, you become a Shade?”

“If you don’t, then what happens to you? They’re ghosts.”

We’re leaving the town centre behind now, negotiating another roundabout and heading south towards the Dead Quarters. I’m thinking about what he’s just said. It isn’t a controversial opinion, though it’s not exactly popular. The theory that has been in vogue for as long as I can remember is that the Shades are living creatures of some kind, a new species that we will eventually find the weapons to confront. Still, I remember the books I’ve read and the films I’ve seen, horror tales about zombies and ghosts and the various other kinds of creeping undead that are so prevalent in fiction. I remember watching Dawn Of The Dead with JD one night, remember how the phrase, “when there’s no more room in hell, the dead will walk the earth” had left me frightened and thoughtful. Maybe the Shades are our shambling, mindless zombies, the remnants of our dead come to drag us into the forever sleep that is our destiny.

The Lantern truck stops, jerking me out of my reverie. I look up and see that we have pulled over in front of a sign that proclaims this place Quarter D.

“See them?” asks Dennis.

How could I not? They are at the edge of the truck’s Lanternlight, almost motionless in the same way as their brethren in the town centre. There are hundreds of them, maybe thousands. You can only see so far in the dark.

“God,” I whisper. “I’ve never seen so many.”

We are both breathing hard, both staring.

“The Lanterns went out,” Dennis says, in a low voice. “All at once. There was a failure in one of the generators. It was only just dark.”

“They didn’t have back-ups?” I ask. I know we have back-ups. I’m trying not to think of hundreds of people running screaming through the dark streets or cowering in their homes, unsure as to whether every window is tightly closed, every door secured.

“There was a dispute. The Lanternmen had threatened a strike. It almost always seems to happen when the government fails an area. There’s community, alright, but someone always wants to be in charge. The Lanternmen have skills that would have been worth a hell of a lot of money in the right climate. A hell of a lot of money.”

“You’re saying it was deliberate?”

“I’m saying there’s no obvious reason for all the Lanterns to fail at the same time. I’m saying that there are only so many Lanterns, and nobody’s manufacturing those parts anymore, so far as I know. I’m saying that after the Dead Quarters went down, there were a lot of Lanternmen in our neck of the woods that hadn’t been there before.”

We watch a Shade dare the Lanterns. It suddenly charges at the truck with the speed and intent I am familiar with, getting maybe a quarter of the way into the Lanternlight before it seems to become confused and directionless. It veers off course and misses the truck by twenty or thirty feet, disappearing into the tangled limbs of its kin beyond the far edge of the luminescence that protects us. For a moment or two, I had stopped breathing. I know the Lanterns protect us, but the way they rush at you is just a horror. It's awful.

“Dennis, that would be murder,” I say.

He nods and starts the engine, throws us into reverse gear and turns around to head back up the road and away from the Dead Quarters.

“Those things have no motive, Ken. They’re just things. They’re not smart like you or I.”

“Or the Lanternmen,” I say. It’s cold in the truck.

“No,” Dennis says.

Conversation turns away from Shades and Lanternmen and the Dead Quarters on the way back to Abbot Street. Dennis asks me about the Curfew Bar and about my father and my friends. I ask him about his work driving the Lantern Truck. We’re just filling the silence, really. He drops me at home with a customary goodbye and heads off up the street before I can offer anything more in return than a wave.

I let myself back into the house and sit down in the kitchen. I’m hungry, but too preoccupied to concentrate. At the centre, JD and me and the Curfew Bar and Witches Path. Beyond that, our families and friends and community. Inside and outside and twisting through all of those things, the Lanternmen and the mystery of what happened in the Dead Quarters, a mystery that may well contain the answers to all of my questions.

I have to talk to Shelley now, to explore the knowledge that she has. I have to talk to Cartwright and understand a little more about the Lanternmen. I have questions that demand answers, possible conspiracies that make my head hurt, and an intense feeling of loneliness that makes me wonder if anybody else ever thinks about these things at all.

I know my dad would turn me away. He is a part of the Daylight World. Only people like JD and Dennis and I really understand the night. We might not talk about it too often, and we might find it terrifying, but we are the only ones that ever confront it. I must also talk to JD. I need to tell her all that I am thinking and all that I have discovered. I need to make her listen and understand. She is, in the end, perhaps my only partner in this, and she needs to know.

These thoughts, they’re haunted by those dark spectres. I see the Shade we passed on the main road, the group in the town centre, the army of twisted shapes that surrounded the Lantern Truck outside Quarter D. There are more of them than I had ever really believed, more than I thought possible. If Dennis is right, then every shoe I see lying by the side of Witches Path, every mysterious disappearance and unexplained absence means one more. How long before the situation becomes impossible? How long before we are caught between the blank, silent inevitability of the Shades, and the power-hungry conspiracies of our own kind?

I go to my room and pick up a book, hoping to lose myself in some other story. I know I won’t be sleeping tonight.