Jonathan Stroud - The Creeping Shadow

“Power cut,” Lockwood said. “Maybe that’s what distracted them.”

The outside of Lockwood’s cape was thick with ice; I could feel the weight of mine hanging on me, too. The insulating qualities of the feathers still worked well, though—I sensed, rather than felt, the grueling cold all around. White threads swirled around us.

“Where’d all this mist come from?” I said. “All this frost? It wasn’t here before.”

“Some effect of their experiments?” Lockwood suggested. “I don’t know.”

“It’s a strange light. Everything’s so flat.”

“Moonlight does odd things,” Lockwood was looking toward the trees.

“Where is the moon?”

“Behind the clouds.”

But there were no clouds.

“We’d better get going,” Lockwood said. “The others should be halfway back to the village by now. They’ll be getting help. We should join them, reassure them we’re okay.”

“I don’t understand it.” I was still looking up at the sky.

“We need to catch up with them, Luce.”

Of course we did.

We started walking. Frost cracked underfoot, and our breath hung in the air so that we plunged through it with each step.

“It’s so cold ,” I said.

“We were lucky they didn’t come after us,” Lockwood said again. He glanced over his shoulder. “Odd, though…I’d have thought somebody might come.”

But we were the only moving things in that wide, wide field.

By unspoken agreement we took the lane through the forest. The light was different there, too. The gray haze seemed to penetrate everything. The lane was white as bone. Thin lariats of mist wound in and out of the trees.

“This is weird,” I whispered. “There’s nobody anywhere.”

I’d thought we might see the others ahead of us, but the road was empty, and we could see a good distance in the soft, flat light. We hurried on, following the gradient downhill. We passed the side track to the open quarry, with its little memorial cairn of stones. The flowers that had decorated it were gone, and the photograph at its top was frosted with ice. There was no sound in the gray forest, and no wind. Shimmering crystal flecks fell from the surface of our capes, and our breaths came in brief and painful bursts. Soon we would reach the village. Our friends would be there.

“Maybe there are some people about,” Lockwood said softly. Neither of us had spoken for a while. When we did, neither of us wanted to raise our voices; I don’t know why. “I thought I saw someone walking down that side track from the quarry. You know, just beyond the cairn.”

“You want to go back, see who it was?”

“No. No, I think we should just keep going.”

We walked more quickly after that, our boots clicking on the frost-hard road. We crossed the silent forest and came to the wooden footbridge over the little stream.

The stream was gone. The bridge spanned a dark, dry channel of black earth that wound off among the trees. Lockwood shone his flashlight beam on it, the light frail and flickering.

“Lockwood,” I said, “where’s the water?”

He leaned against the railing, as if weary. He shook his head, said nothing.

I could hear my voice cracking with panic. “How can it have just…disappeared? I don’t understand. Have they dammed it suddenly?”

“No. Look at the ground. Bone-dry. There’s never been any water here.”

“But that makes no—”

He pushed himself upright, his hand rasping as it pulled free of the rail. Ice particles glistered on the fingers of his glove. “We’re almost at the village,” he said. “Perhaps there’ll be answers there. Come on.”

But when we came down from the lane, the village had changed, too. Never exactly well-lit, the cottages around the green were now entirely dark. Their shapes merged in the half-light and could scarcely be seen. The green itself was filled with shifting coils of mist. Above us, the church tower blended with the pewter-black sky.

“Why are all the lights off here, too?” I said.

“Not just off,” Lockwood whispered. He pointed. “Look by the church. The ghost-light’s gone.”

It was true. True, and it made no sense. On the little mound beside the church, there was an empty space. The rusty, disused ghost-lamp wasn’t just gone—there was no trace of it ever having been there at all.

I didn’t say anything. Nothing made any sense, not since we’d come out of the institute. A creeping, pervading wrongness hung over everything; in the cold, the silence, the soft, pale light, and the terrible, sapping solitude of it all. But it numbed you, too; it was hard to think.

“Where is everybody?” I murmured. “ Someone should be around, surely.”

“It’s after dark—they’re all at home. And George and the others will be safe inside the inn.” Lockwood’s voice didn’t carry any conviction. “We know half the village is deserted, anyway. We shouldn’t expect to see anyone.”

“So we go to the inn?”

“We go to the inn.”

But the inn, when we reached it, was as dark as all the rest. Its sign was blistered with frost. The door swung open to the touch, and a faint stale smell came from the black interior. Neither of us wanted to go inside.

We walked back out onto the green and stood there, wondering what to do. When I looked down, I saw that where my boots protruded beyond frozen drapes of the spirit-cape, the leather and steel caps were white with ice. Our capes were almost solid; they creaked whenever we moved. Then I noticed something else. A thin gray plume of smoke was rising from Lockwood’s cape, drifting away into the dark air. The surface flickered, as if with heatless flames.

“Lockwood, your cape—”

“I know. Yours is doing it, too.”

“It’s like…like when we saw the Shadow. You remember how it left a trail of…”

“We need to think about this.” Lockwood’s face was drawn, but his eyes blazed defiantly. “What have we done that might have made things different? There’s only one thing. Up at the institute, what did we do?”

“We went into the circle.”

“Yes, and…”

“And we came out again.” I looked at him, suddenly aware. “We left the circle on the other side….We followed the iron chain and left on the other side.”

“You’re right. Maybe that’s important. I don’t know why it should be, but if it is…”

“All this…” I said.

“All this isn’t what it looks like.” Lockwood stared at me. “What if we haven’t actually come out, Lucy? What if we’re somehow still inside?”

How dark the green was, how thick the rising mists, how unyielding the silence.

“We have to get back to the circle,” Lockwood said.

“No, look,” I said, my voice rising in my relief. “We’re talking nonsense. There they are.”

I pointed across the green. On the far side, within the mist, three figures were limping slowly up the road toward us.

Lockwood frowned. “You think that’s them?”

“Who else would it be?”

He squinted out from under his steaming hood. “It’s not them….No, look—they’re adults. They’re all too tall. Plus, I thought those cottages were abandoned. Didn’t Skinner say—?”

“Well, anyway, maybe they can tell us what’s going on,” I said. “And look, here’s somebody else coming.”

It was a little girl, stepping out of a garden in front of a house. She opened the gate and shut it carefully behind her, before starting toward us. She had a pretty blue dress on.

“I don’t recognize her ,” I said. “Do you?”

“No, Lucy…” Lockwood was turning on his heels, looking all around. The mists were pretty thick over by the duck pond, but we could just see someone walking along the opposite bank, between the barren willows—a lady with long pale hair. “Nor her…” Lockwood said, “Nor any of them. But we’ve heard about them all.”