Jonathan Stroud - The Creeping Shadow

The churchyard was unlit. Lamps burned at three of its gates, with the black space between them suspended like a hammock. There were lit windows, too, high up in the buildings, which cast scattered squares of brightness across the lawns. I entered from the Sekforde Street gate, which was farthest from the central bench, and swiftly found a dark spot near the wall, where my eyes could adjust to the complex patterns of the half-light.

Was he here?

The path beside me curved faint and pale across the grass like a shining rib bone, and by following it, I saw where it crossed the other one. Close by, I could just see the low black bench and, by frowning, squinting—yes—make out someone sitting there.

So he had come. Good. But was he alone?

I took my time surveying the churchyard, letting my eyes roam the featureless ground. Everything was silent, everything fine. I could see no one else between the bench and the surrounding walls.

Keeping off the path, avoiding the illuminated squares of spotlighted grass, I began walking slowly toward the bench. I kept my eyes fixed on the figure sitting there. It was Harold Mailer, all right; I recognized his raincoat and his narrow, spindly frame. He was sitting quietly, just waiting, staring at the ground.

My boots brushed through dark grass; soundlessly I moved toward him.

When still a ways off, I adjusted my approach so that I angled around behind him. Even from the back I could see how relaxed he was, his arms stretched out along the top of the bench, head slightly tilted, like a man taking a gentle doze.

My feet slowed. I came to a gradual halt.

He was as twitchy as they came, Harold. Nervy at the best of times, let alone at dusk, in a churchyard, on an illicit rendezvous, with his career—and life—hanging in the balance.

All at once his utter relaxation bothered me.

I stared at him. Why was he so chill?

Come to think of it, why was his head at such an angle?

Why didn’t he move?

My hand stole to my sword. I was a statue planted in the grass.

My scalp prickled; I heard a cold voice drifting on the wind.

“Lucy…”

Out of the corner of my left eye, I sensed a shape forming in the air. It was soft, hesitant, knitted from yarns of shadow. It gathered blackness around it as if clumsily clothing itself. It hung in the dark beside me, close enough to touch. Cold radiated from it, sharp as knives. My lips drew back in fear; my teeth grinned in ghastly welcome. I kept hot eyes fixed straight ahead, still staring at the bench and its lifeless occupant with the twisted, broken neck. I did not dare look at the drab thing at my side, and particularly not at the half-formed face I sensed so close to mine.

My voice was barely a rasp. “Harold?”

“Lucy…”

“What have they done to you?”

A tiny cracking noise was the only answer; looking down, I saw flecks of ice spreading across the wrinkles in my sleeve, pincers of frost encircling my boot. The left side of my face burned with supernatural chill; my breath plumed white. The shape was very near.

“Who did this, Harold? Who killed you?”

A mumbled flood of words, splashing against my brain. So full of anguish and confusion…I could not make them out.

How thick my tongue felt, how dry and swollen. It was as if it were glued inside my mouth. “Tell me. If you tell me I can…I can help you….” But I couldn’t get the Lucy Carlyle Formula™ out. Not this time.

“You did this, Lucy….”

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a nebulous hand of cloud reach toward my face.

“No, Harold, no, that’s not true….”

“You did this.” Its fingers stroked the air close to my skin. I flinched away. Ice blistered across my cheek. I could feel it building across the hollow of my eye. My mind hurt; my grip closed on the hilt of my rapier.

“No, Harold. Please don’t—”

“It is at the place of blood.”

“What?”

The shape was gone.

With a shudder, with bile rising in my throat, I lurched back and to the side, rubbing at my face, my boot tearing free of the frozen ground.

As I did so, three men rose up from the grass.

For a second I thought they were phantoms, too; the impossibility of their appearance numbed my brain. But I’d forgotten about the humps and ridges, the hollows left long ago, when the churchyard had been emptied of its graves. Some were deep enough to conceal a crouching man; they’d been hiding there while I’d merrily walked toward the body of Harold Mailer at the center of their trap. They were large men, dressed in black; large, but moving fast to encircle me. One was over to the left, back toward the gate where I’d come from; the others blocked the way to other exits. If I’d gotten as far as the bench, I would have had no chance of escape. They would have surrounded me with ease.

But I’d halted. The space behind me was clear.

I turned and ran.

Not toward one of the churchyard gates, where the lamps burned so faintly, but to the black mass of high wall midway between them. In the coffee-colored dusk, it seemed a solid and impenetrable slab. But I’d done my homework, and I knew otherwise.

Up a gentle slope, leaping over hollows, almost twisting my ankle on fragments of old stone, I reached the wall. Behind me, the three figures arrowed inward, converging on me where I stood.

There was an old door there: locked, but usefully designed, with protruding hardware and crossbeams that I could get a foothold on. I launched myself up, grabbed the top of the door, where it was loosely set in a crumbling arch, and began scrabbling higher. One toe on a beam, one on the lock; I straightened my legs, reached up—my fingers connected with the top of the wall. That was all I needed. A kick, an unbecoming wriggle, and I’d pulled myself up and over. I hung there for a moment before dropping lightly down into foliage on the other side. As I did so, something impacted hard against the door.

I was in the yard of an abandoned building, perhaps once the vicarage of the church. Stacks of bricks and piles of rusted scaffolding poles suggested that someone, at some stage, hoped to carry out renovations—but now it was deserted, as I’d noticed earlier that day. A first floor window gaped ahead of me, empty of glass, and I vaulted through it into a black space. I snatched a glance behind, saw figures hauling themselves over the wall, silhouetted for an instant against the stars.

The interior of the place was a mess, full of debris. I flicked on my flashlight; I jumped, dodged, went slaloming from room to room. To my dismay, the windows on the other side had been securely sealed and boarded. I could not get out that way.

Sounds behind me. They were already in the house.

A broad, dilapidated staircase opened before me. I sprang up it, three steps at a time.

There, at the top of the stairs, a window—glazed, but tempting. I pressed my face against it and saw a flat roof below, then a garden stretching away.

Was that window a nice modern one, easy to open? No, of course not. It was a sash affair, old and rotten and warped; it was all I could do to lift it high enough to admit my head and shoulders. It squeaked, juddered in the grooves, then froze altogether. I was going to have to wriggle through.

I looked behind me, and my heart nearly stopped. The three figures were halfway up the stairs. The leader had something silvery in his hand.

No time for wriggling. Stepping back from the window, I launched myself forward through the gap, shunting myself out into the moonlight. As I fell out and down, a hand caught my boot and gripped it tight. For an instant I hung there; then I thrashed upward with my other foot, connecting sharply with something very soft. The hand let go and I tumbled onto the flat roof below.