Jonathan Stroud - The Creeping Shadow

On the other side of the green, the road forked outside the door of the one surviving pub—the Old Sun Inn, which our client, Danny Skinner, called home. All the other main buildings of Aldbury Castle were visible from here, too—the village stores, The Run (a row of terrace houses), and the church of St. Nestor, on a rise above the rest of the village. Outside the church, an ancient ghost-lamp, rusty and broken, stood on a low mound. A lane beyond the church led off through the woods to fields and hills.

Those hills were bathed in sunshine when we walked over the bridge and entered the village for the first time, but the green was wet and frosted with cobwebs. Shadows of the eastern woods stretched like fingers across the grass. There was a smell of smoke in the air. It was a beautiful spring day.

“Seems much too pretty to be a hot spot for ghosts,” Holly said.

“You say that.” I pointed to a great circle of blackened ground in a prominent spot by the road. “They’ve been busy setting fire to something.”

“Or some one ,” Kipps said.

Holly wrinkled her nose. “Oh, yuck.”

“Well, I don’t see any charred legs sticking out of it,” George said. “More likely to be objects that they think might be Sources. They’re panic burning. But first things first. That cross is the one the kid mentioned. I want to have a look at its sinister carving.”

He led the way through the long wet grass, which whispered and spattered against our legs. When we got near the trees, we flung down the bags of salt and iron; we were hot despite the cool air.

The base of the cross was stepped, and had been repaired, not very well, with modern bricks. The rest was ancient, weathered by the wind and frost of countless years. The stone had a grainy softness to it; pale green lichen extended over it in patches, like the map of an unknown world. You could see that the whole thing had once been intricately decorated—patterns of interlocking vines wound their way up the sides of the cross, with obscure objects cradled in their fronds.

George seemed to know precisely where to look. Halfway up one face, the lichen had been picked away, revealing the traces of an image. In its bottom left-hand corner, a set of tiny figures clustered. They were no more than stick people, lined up like bowling pins ready to be felled. To the right was a pile of skulls and bones. Towering over the lot, crammed into the center of the available space, rose a huge misshapen figure with sturdy legs and arms and a squat, almost squared body. The head was indistinct. Whatever the creature was, it dominated the scene.

“There he is,” Lockwood said. “The dreaded Creeping Shadow. The kid told me on the phone that it had been seen again the other night.”

George grunted skeptically; he was tracing its shape with a chubby finger.

“What do you think it is, George?” I asked.

He adjusted his glasses. “At the Archives yesterday,” he said, “I found a mention of the cross in an old Hampshire guidebook. They describe this as a fairly common depiction of the Last Judgment, when the dead rise up from their graves at the end of time. Here are the bones, look; and here are the saved souls rising.”

“And the chunky guy in the middle?” Lockwood said.

“An angel, presiding over it all.” George pointed. “Yeah, see these marks here? I reckon he once had wings.” He shook his head. “It’s no graveyard ghoul, no matter what Danny Skinner says. Whatever’s hanging around the village is something else.”

“So maybe he is making most of it up…” I said. “Speak of the devil—there he is.” A figure had come out of the Old Sun Inn and was waving to us across the road.

“He was right about the battle, though,” George said, as we walked toward the inn. “There was a ninth-century dustup between the Saxons and the Vikings in the fields east of the modern village. At one time, before the Problem, it was a popular spot for antiquaries to go digging—a couple of centuries ago they turned up quite a few shields, swords, and skeletons. Farmers would find bones caught in their plows, that sort of thing. Must have been quite a skirmish. But like you said, Lockwood, it’s not a massive battle by national standards—there are other, more recent sites that haven’t caused nearly as much trouble as this one appears to be doing.”

“Our job is to find out why,” Lockwood said. “Assuming we don’t end up strangling our client first, which is a distinct possibility.”

The Old Sun Inn was a timber-framed building, half swaddled with marauding ivy. Much of it seemed to be in a state of disrepair. The main entrance, in what appeared to be the oldest part of the house, faced toward the church; another door led to the pub garden and the green. On a post hung a dilapidated painted sign showing a massive bloodred sun, hovering like a beating heart above a darkened landscape. Our client was swinging on the garden gate below this, waving as we approached. In broad daylight his protruding ears had a pinkly see-through quality. He was grinning at us with a kind of fierce pleasure that contained both delight and anger.

“At last! You took your sweet time. The Shadow was back last night, and the dead walked in Aldbury Castle, while the living cowered in our beds. And you all missed it again! You want lemonades? Pops will get you some.”

“Lemonade sounds good,” Lockwood said. “Maybe after we see our rooms.”

The kid swung manically back and forth. “Oh, you want rooms? But you’ll be out fighting Visitors all night, won’t you?”

“Only some of the time.” Lockwood put out a hand and stilled the movement of the gate. “And you definitely promised us somewhere to stay. Rooms now , please.”

“Ooh, I don’t know….I’ll ask Pops. Hold on.” He slouched away into the bar.

“Is it just me,” Kipps said, “or does that boy need punching?”

“It’s not just you.”

Presently our client re-emerged, as perky as a ferret up a trouser leg. “Okay, I got you rooms.”

“Excellent…Why are there only two keys?”

“The inn has two guest rooms. One key for each.”

We gazed at him, certain horrific permutations drifting through our minds. Lockwood spoke carefully. “Yes, but there are five of us, with a variety of needs, habits, and private regions that we don’t want shared. There must be other rooms.”

“There are. They’re inhabited by me, my dad, and my mad old grandpa; I can tell you, his private needs and habits are well worth avoiding. There’s also a storage closet in the kitchen, but that’s damp, rat-infested, and haunted by the ghost. Cheer up—you’ve got five beds! Well, four , to be fair. One’s a double. Here’s the key for the double room; it’s also got a cot. The other’s a twin. I hope you have a lovely stay. I’ll leave it to you to settle in, and see you in the bar later.” With that, he departed.

There was a heavy silence. I scanned the others, taking in Holly’s neat traveling bag, doubtless crammed with body lotions and skin cleansers; George’s ominously light backpack, which lacked room for any conceivable change of clothes; Kipps’s angular and palely ginger frame, the horrors of which were just hinted at beneath his turtleneck; and Lockwood. To share a room with any of them presented problems.

The others were making similar swift calculations.

“Lucy—?” Holly began.

“You beat me to it. Don’t mind if I do.”

“In that case,” Holly said, plucking a key from Lockwood’s hand, “we’ll take the twin room and leave you boys to it. Good luck deciding who gets the cot.”

We left them standing in the hall and went up to our room.