The Shadower

By Christopher Paul Halliday

ã Christopher Paul Halliday 1997

You want a story? Okay, I'll give you a story.

It was late in the summer of '95. The rest of my team were taking a well-earned break, resting up in a little villa on the French Rivera. We'd just burned out a nest of bloodsuckers in Dublin (spitting distance from the old HQ) with minimal casualties, and we were feeling pretty cool. I've never been one for sunbathing and I had a little business to attend to of my own, so I stayed behind, promising to join the group after a few days. It as a lie and they knew it, but they respected me enough not to push.

A few days beforehand, I'd gotten a call from an old colleague of mine from the days when I was on the force. Let's call her Barbie. She'd left about the same time I had, only for different reasons. I left to kill monsters; she'd got married. Anyway, she'd heard that I did a little private work now and then, and she needed some help. God knows I needed the money. Since headquarters bit the big one, we'd been financing missions out of our own pockets, and my account was so far in the red it looked like a fang-job's lunch box. She asked for a meeting, so I agreed.

The house was a little slice of the suburban dream, so perfect in it's normalcy I had to check I hadn't walked into a soap powder commercial. When I saw Barbie, she was pretty upset and looked like she'd been crying for days. The tale she told was interesting, and something inside told me it might be worth a look. And besides, she and I had history together, a long way back.

She told me that her husband (another cop, let's call him Ken) had started acting strangely a couple of weeks ago. He'd begun sleepwalking, and his temper had got pretty bad. I could tell there was more, but I had to push pretty hard before she told me. She said that there were times when he almost looked like someone else, but of course when she checked, he hadn't changed at all. Barbie also showed me his coat, a fairly ordinary mackintosh, indistinguishable from every other mackintosh except for what looked like a few layers of skin gummed to the inside with a kind of slimy residue. He had gone out for cigarettes about four days ago, and he hadn't come back.

I promised her I'd find him.

Don't ask me why I didn't call the team together. I don't know. I like to think I wanted them to enjoy their break, but inside I know it had something to do with trying to prove I could still track someone down in my home town, that I still had what it takes to be a good cop.

I don't know.

Disappointingly, it didn't take me long to find Ken. Experience has shown me that a lot of men, when they've been married for a while, start to haunt strip joints and the rougher sort of bar, trying to recapture the thrills of their wilder, single days. Ken proved to be no exception.

I'd been cruising the flesh parlours for about three days when I spotted him, crammed into a corner booth next to what was either an ageing drag queen or a really ugly hooker. I nearly didn't recognise him, as he'd lost about twenty pounds and looked maybe ten years younger than his picture. He and his friend were just drinking, not speaking. I watched them for a while, then he got up to leave. He looked a mess, but then he fit right in. It was a shitty bar.

I nearly approached him then, but that old cold feeling came over me and I suddenly knew that something was seriously wrong. So I followed him instead. To my surprise, he went to the nicer side of town. I saw him pause by the entrance to Jangles, an up-scale club for rich kids. I almost laughed. He was ten years too old and about one million too poor.

Then he changed. His clothes, his face, everything. The change took about a minute, spreading over his body like the colour changes of a chameleon. It was subtle too. If you weren't looking right at him, you'd never see it happening. When it stopped he looked another ten years younger and a whole lot richer.

I was dressed for the sleazy side of town, there was no way I could follow him in. So I followed a hunch and waited around the back. Sure enough, fifteen minutes later, there he was. He'd acquired a "friend", one of the rentboys who frequented the club trying to find a wealthy lift home. The two of them got cosy down the alley, about five feet from where I was hiding. There was a wet sound, and I suddenly knew the kid was dead. Don't ask me how. I rolled out from where I was hiding and pulled the gun I'm not supposed to have. Ken looked up without surprise, and dropped the kid. The corpse looked almost desiccated, as though the fluids had been sucked right out of him, and there was a hole the size of my fist in his stomach.

I saw something slick and pink retract under Ken's coat. Ken knew I'd seen it, but didn't seem to mind. He just stared at me. As I approached him, he tensed his muscles and jumped. His first leap took him to the third floor of the building, and he proceeded to scramble up the wall like the Human Fly. I got a shot off before he cleared the roof, and the inhuman shriek I heard told me my aim hadn't got any worse.

I made it to the roof about eight minutes later, but he was gone by then. The blood trail made it easy to track him though, if that was what it was. It stank of dead fish and fluoresced under the neon glow of the club's sign. From the amount of blood he was losing, I'd obviously punctured something serious.

I followed the trail for a mile or more, into one of the city's more rundown areas, ending up in a road full of squats and condemned housing. The blood spots had been getting smaller for a while, so I figured he was healing pretty fast. However, there was still enough blood to lead me to a boarded-up two storey terraced house that looked like it had been empty since before the last war.

I found a loose board and went in, my heart in my mouth. I realised that I was in what probably used to be a lounge or dining room, dimly lit by the glow from a mobile gas heater. I could faintly make out the gleam of moisture on the walls and what was left of the carpet squished gently beneath my feet.

I was about halfway across the room when I suddenly realised I wasn't alone. As my eyes adjusted to the darkness, I could see twenty or thirty figures standing huddled close to the walls. Slowly, my heart pounding loud enough to be heard in the next county, I dug in my pocket and fished out my penlight. I switched it on, and played it around the room.

Surrounding me on all sides I could see men, women, even kids, just standing there, rocking slowly backwards and forwards. The air was full of a soft vibration, like the muffled purring of a contented cat.

Eventually I found Ken. He was in a corner, seemingly as asleep as the rest. Cautiously, I slid over to him and checked him out. He looked exactly like his photo, the way he always had, with the exception of the blood splash around the exit wound on his shoulder. I looked closer, and realised that the coat had no hole. It had healed shut. It was part of him.

I was quietly mulling this new information over when they all woke up. Screaming.

To be honest, I'm not sure how I survived. One moment the room was silent, and I was getting the beginnings of a Very Bad Feeling, the next it was full of shrieking people with tentacles coming out of their stomachs, trying to tear me apart.

My awareness narrowed into a single second.

Thank God for automatic pistols and dum-dum bullets. Ken bought it first as I shot him through the eye, his head blooming like a liquid rose. The others didn't even slow down. I took down another three with headshots and was desperately fumbling for my extra clip, when one of them stumbled against the heater and I had my big idea. I shot two more, then took off running for the window, a human missile propelled by sheer desperate terror.

Using the heater as a launch pad I hurled myself over the heads of the crowd and dived through the old boards across the window, punching through them like they were cardboard. My leap took me over the handkerchief sized front garden and I landed hard in the street outside. My left knee cracked against the concrete and pain ran up my leg like lightning. Ignoring it as best I could I rolled to my feet, in time to see the whole wailing horde turn and charge me. With hands that suddenly seemed two sizes too big, I dropped the empty clip from my pistol and slammed in the new one. I steadied my arm, and pumped five shots into the crowd.

I didn't hit one of those things, but then I wasn't aiming for them.

When the gas canister for the heater blew, it incinerated almost everything in the room. The wave of heat and sound knocked me into the middle of the road, despite the fact I had ducked behind an abandoned car. The creatures that weren't instantly turned into crisp bread I dealt with easily, walking amongst the smouldering bodies and delivering single shots to the head while they mewled and bubbled like drowning cats. The corpses in the house sizzled like frying bacon, and there was the smell of cooked mushrooms in the air.

It didn't take long for the Fire Brigade to turn up, but by that time I was gone. I was pissed off that I hadn't managed to get a body away with me for study, but then, I'm no scientist. And besides, the bodies on the street had already started to decompose. Even if I had managed to drag one away, by the time I'd have got it to a lab there would have been nothing left but a big stain and a nasty smell.

After a few hours sleep and several large drinks, I got in touch with Barbie. The expectation in her voice was almost too much. How do you tell someone her husband was a monster? In the end I told her that I'd been unsuccessful, that Ken had vanished like so many men do every year. I advised her to get on with her life and move on.

She cried. I made a mental note to talk to a few of the guys on the force who would still talk to me, and see if we couldn't label the next faceless body that turned up in the river as Ken. She'd get some closure and maybe his insurance would pay up. It was the least I could do.

I don't know what really happened to Ken. Did that thing kill him? Consume his fluids, rape his mind and assume his identity? Or was Ken always a monster, hiding amongst humanity until his mission was complete and he was ready or mature enough to join his own kind? I guess I'll never know for sure.

But for the sake of his kids, I hope my nightmares are wrong.