Shadow Games Read online

  “Then don’t have one here, you dumb fuck. You’ll only get your head kicked in,” Greg said as he busied himself dismantling what little equipment they had.

  “Sorry, mate, I really can’t,” Kevin said. “It’s Sunday tomorrow, I promised the wife we’d go to Margate for the day and that means leaving at the crack of dawn.”

  “Who said rock and roll was dead? Fuck you both, I’m fucking gasping. Bar’s gotta be open for another ten minutes.”

  Leaving his two bandmates to finish up on the small, raised platform at the edge of the squalid club, Sean made a beeline for the bar, weaving his way through the handful of drunken thugs headbanging to ‘Cradle of Filth’ on the dancefloor.

  “Thank you, thank you,” he said loudly. “Glad you liked the music. No, please don’t mob me, yes, I’d love a pint.”

  Perhaps luckily for Sean, no one appeared to hear him.

  At the bar, he ordered a pint of bitter off the barmaid that looked fifty but was probably only thirty, and perched dismally on the barstool. His bandmates were right; this place was hanging. Drunks laughed loudly in clusters of twos or threes, and the few women left in this dive swayed on too-high heels in too-short skirts, their eye-make-up running down their cheeks, giving them the appearance of Alice Cooper rather than Brigitte Bardot.

  Sean took a large slug of his beer, downing a third of it one go. He glanced to his left and saw Greg and Kevin over by the exit, laden down with equipment. Kevin turned briefly to raise his hand before the crowd swallowed them.

  And in that one, short second, Sean watched his life slip away – the sum of his responsibilities amounting to two other men who owned a keyboard and a guitar. That was his life.

  I am one pathetic cunt.

  All he did was write the songs on his knackered old piano and ancient guitar in his crummy, one-bedroom rental. He didn’t have any stuff; all the stuff belonged to Kev and Greg.

  Fuck ‘em, he thought, downing the next third of his pint.

  But the sorry state of his life was not their fault, and he knew it. It wasn’t their fault that he was thirty-nine with his dreams fading faster than a sprinting cheetah. It wasn’t their fault that he had been in love with the same woman for over fifteen years, and after one measly month of finally being ‘together’ after years of friendship, she had dumped his sorry arse for the father of her two children. That same, cunt of a drunk who had walked out on her when she was pregnant with their second child, now a six-year-old-girl that Sean loved like she was his own flesh and blood.

  Yeah, his life was a fucking joke.

  “Are you going to buy a lady a pint?”

  “Lady? I don’t see a lady.”

  As soon as the words had left his mouth, he regretted them. Sean was a lot of things; including ex-drug-addict and petty thief – the emphasis being very much on ‘ex’ – but despite his flaws, he believed wholeheartedly in equality. Women were people, even if they did choose to dress like prostitutes. Who the hell was he to judge, anyway? He wasn’t exactly ‘Mr Normal’ himself. He glanced down at his t-shirt – a faded, skin-tight relic from the late 90s that he’d worn for three days straight – and down at his ripped Levis. They weren’t ripped out of choice, he just couldn’t afford a new pair.

  Yeah, I’m a fucking state alright.

  “Sorry love, didn’t mean to be rude. I’m a bit busy right now, feeling sorry for myself, and that,” he said, pushing his dyed-black hair out of his eyes that hung in straggly layers to his chin.

  “What’s a good-looking boy like you drinking all alone for?” she slurred, staggering slightly on her heels.

  His gaze swept over her, assessing her. She was way too young for him, probably mid-twenties, or so. Not bad-looking though, if you were into that ‘obvious’ look. Which Sean wasn’t. He liked his women over thirty-five and a little more subtle.

  Well, woman, that was, seeing as he only had eyes for one, and said woman was probably boning her kids’ father as they spoke. A fresh wave of despair washed over him at the thought.

  “Good-looking boy? Christ, you must be pissed.”

  “Nah, I love your look,” she said. “You’re different.”

  “Different? Yeah, I guess so. Sort of like a combination of Marilyn Manson, Sid Vicious, and a concentration camp victim. You know, I try to put on weight,” he said, patting his flat stomach, “but I think it must be genetically impossible. If I was drowning, all you’d have to do is throw me a cheerio.”

  “You’re funny, too.”

  “Yeah, that’s me. Funny boy,” he said sadly. “You want that drink, then?” he asked, even though he was down to his last tenner and had no intention of shagging her.

  “I’ll have a double rum and coke.”

  Course you will, he thought as he ordered his final pint and her drink.

  “Excuse me,” he said as he handed her the drink.

  “Where you going?”

  “Out for a fag.”

  He prayed she wouldn’t follow and shook his head sadly. Pretty girl like that, she should be more careful. There were a lot of nutters about.

  So maybe you should just shag her. You know, save her from a potential nut-job. You’d be doing her a favour, really…

  Out in the beer-garden that the overlooked busy main road, the crowds were beginning to thin out. He leaned against the brick wall of the ‘The Golden Lion’ and lit up, staring absently over at the pavement on the other side of the road. A long line of tall trees poked up above the high brick-wall that ran for a mile, sectioning off the big, inner-city park.

  His attention was suddenly on high-alert when a movement in the shadow of a tree to the right of a lamppost caught his eye.

  His heart stopped beating, then resumed at twice normal speed.

  It’s just some bloke, standing in the shadow of the tree...

  Except it wasn’t, and he knew it. Because the occasional other person walking parallel with the brick-wall wasn’t obscured by shadows and could be seen perfectly clearly from where he stood.

  This guy wasn’t obscured by shadows, he was the shadows…

  His fag slipped from his trembling fingers, and he stared in horror at the man that wasn’t. At the face obscured by shadows. Impossibly obscured by shadows, like the darkness was radiating from within him…

  At The Undertaker.

  He blinked, and the apparition almost faded completely before re-gaining substance once more. The Undertaker’s seven-foot-plus, lanky frame undulated slightly, as if seen through water, his top-hat distorting, seeming to stretch and bend with the shadows. His impossibly long, thin arms stretched out towards him… And then a long, bony finger pointed right at him…

  “It ain’t real, it is not real.”

  When he opened his eyes again, the man was gone. The shadow cast by the tree was just that; a shadow. A shadow with trembling edges due to the early summer breeze that shimmied the leaves on the branches.

  Sean found that he was trembling violently, and when he looked down at his forearms, they were covered in a rash of goose-bumps, despite the warmth of the June night.

  Amber.

  The name popped into his head, unbidden. For the past fifteen years, his heart had belonged to Casey. It still did.

  Why the fuck would I think of Amber Hyde? That’s fucked up.

  But her image blazed in his mind in all her twelve-year-old glory. The golden hair the colour of honey in sunshine, or sun-flecked wheat. The rash of freckles across the cute, little snub nose. The perfect, cupid’s bow arch of her top lip. The blue eyes, much like his own. But where the pale-blue of his eyes more closely resembled that of an Afghan wolfhound’s, hers were the rich, dazzling blue of a Maldivian sky.

  Then he thought of Him. Of The Undertaker.

  He’s come back.

  The thought was sure and true and utterly terrifying. As much as he had blanked the past from his mind, deep down, he had been expecting him to come back. He had not thought about The Undertaker for nigh on twenty
-seven years. Neither had he thought about Amber, or the others.

  And he’d certainly never thought about what they had done to summon him in the first place…

  That was a memory that had been buried for twenty-seven years.

  Yeah. Until now.

  When he and Mum had moved away from his childhood town at the tender age of twelve, he had left behind everything. The girl he loved, his innocence, his very history. He had wiped the lot from his memory banks.

  He closed his eyes, suddenly dizzy with the rush of emotions and memories that assaulted him. He never let himself think of his life prior to the age of twelve. When his mother had landed that better paying factory job in London just before his thirteenth birthday, it was like only then that his life had properly begun.

  But this ‘new life’ had turned out to be a lie anyway because what little benefits they received from the state got cut in half because of her increase in wage, and then she got sacked anyway. She never did find a higher paying job again, which coincided nicely with the sudden astronomical hike in property prices in Greater London, effectively leaving them high and dry. Then she got cancer and died On Sean’s eighteenth birthday….

  Yes, he thought sadly. Happy times.

  But it was not those life events at the forefront of his mind, he was thinking about before.

  And specifically, to when they played ‘the game’.

  Seeing ‘The Undertaker’ again, real or imagined, had dislodged the memories as effectively as a plunger on a clogged sink.

  With trembling fingers, he fumbled for a fresh fag, unable to stop his tumbling thoughts. In his head, he could hear the cawing of the seagulls, could smell the briny ocean on the breeze. He was back in the Cornish, seaside village of Treave. He and Brett were standing on Brett’s doorstep, staring at the infernal thing.

  At The Game Of Shadows…

  CHAPTER FOUR

  1990

  “The Game of Shadows? What the fuck is that when it’s at home?” Sean asked, wet through from the rain.

  He turned the box of the board-game over in his hands, examining it. It shared its dimensions with any other board-game that could be bought from Woolworths or some toy store. Perfectly innocuous, yet somehow – inexplicably – disturbing. Maybe it was just because the box was so old. The picture on the front – a painting of a high, wrought iron gate, of all things – was faded to the point of non-existence. The box itself was fraying at the corners. It smelt funny too; musty, like a junk shop or a forgotten drawer in an old person’s wardrobe.

  But it was more than that. Just touching the box made him feel inexplicably queasy, the smell, of it, no matter how faint, made his nostrils flare like a frightened animal.

  It smells like mothballs and death.

  He resisted the urge to throw it to the ground because he didn’t want to look like a baby in front of Brett.

  “I dunno what it is,” Brett said. “That’s why I asked you. Thought you might’ve left it here, or something.”

  “Me? Why would I do that?”

  Brett shrugged. “I dunno. Just thought, that’s all.”

  The two boys lapsed into silence, staring at the offending box. Brett lived with his dad in a surprisingly large cottage just around the corner from the harbour. He lived alone with his dad – a fisherman who was drunk down the pub when he wasn’t at sea. Today – a Sunday – was a pub day. It was three pm, and Brett could reasonably expect to be alone until ten. As a result of this parental neglect, Amber, Malcom and Jane were due to arrive any minute. And because it was raining today, they didn’t much fancy hanging out at their usual haunts on the clifftop or on the beach.

  “Maybe it was one of the others,” Sean said.

  There was no need to elaborate on who he meant by ‘others’. The five of them were a rock-solid group, and Sean couldn’t imagine life without a single one of them.

  “Don’t think so. It doesn’t feel like one of them, you know? I mean, they would knock, right? They wouldn’t just leave this on the doorstep and go again.”

  “Yeah.”

  Sean shook the water out of his short, brown hair, it was raining cats and dogs out there and he had run all the way to Brett’s. He was still panting from the exertion and his heart was slamming hard in his chest.

  And that, of course, had nothing to do with the fact that he was holding the game. Gently, he set it down on the wooden floorboards between them.

  “Have you opened it?”

  “No,” Brett said. “Only found it a second before you got here.”

  “We should play it when the others get here.”

  Sean said the words, but he didn’t mean them. He didn’t want Brett to know that he was scared of a stupid board-game.

  “Yeah,” Brett said, with little conviction.

  Sean jumped when the front-door to the cottage that opened straight into the living-room creaked open.

  “It’s pissing down,” Amber said, not bothering with the niceties of knocking, and Sean’s heart gave its customary little lurch at the sight of her.

  She looked glorious. Her slim figure with the burgeoning breasts never ceased to excite him. And her little, turned-up nose with the rash of freckles over the bridge always, for some inexplicable reason, tugged at his heart-strings.

  It was safe to say that despite only being twelve, he was beginning to get what this whole ‘girl thing’ was about. Recently, he’d either been waking up as stiff as a board, or not quite so stiff and very wet… This new phenomenon was always accompanied with images of Amber where she wasn’t wearing too many clothes.

  “Hi,” he said, then cleared his throat when it came out as a squeak.

  She threw him one of her special smiles that was like a hand squeezing his balls, and then went straight over to Brett. Sean’s stomach twisted into a jealous knot when she laid a hand gently on his shoulder.

  “Your dad down the pub, then?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Thank God for that. I am so sick of parents, and I really don’t want to spend all day in the rain. It’s so cool we can spend the day at your place.”

  Except it wasn’t quite as ‘cool’ as Amber was making out, and they all knew it. Brett didn’t speak much about it, but they all knew his dad beat him when he was pissed. Sean knew how difficult it was being brought up by a single parent – his dad had walked out on them when he was a baby – and he couldn’t even begin to imagine how hard it must be for Brett. Brett’s mum had died during childbirth and was apparently the love of his father’s life, and this house and everything in it hadn’t altered at all since her death. It was kind of creepy.

  “Yeah,” Brett said, the colour rising in his cheeks. “It’s good we can hang out here.”

  Luckily for him, his dark red hair and sunburnt skin made it look like he was constantly blushing, so perhaps Amber didn’t notice.

  Sean only noticed because after all, it took one to know one; it was painfully obvious to him that he was in love with her, too.

  “What’s that on the floor?” Amber said, collapsing into the chintzy floral, two-seater. “Have you guys been playing board games?”

  She said it disdainfully, like they were way too mature to engage in such childish activity, even though Sean knew for a fact that she still played with Barbies.

  “No,” Brett said, his voice suddenly much deeper than usual. “I found it on the doorstep just now.”

  Her eyebrows shot up in her head. “You did? Can I see?”

  Obviously, it was a rhetorical question, because she was already kneeling on the floor between them and scooping it up to take a closer look.

  Sean was momentarily mesmerised by the way the kneeling position caused the fabric of her short shorts to strain against her tawny skin, still slick with rain. Droplets of rain glistened like a thousand precious jewels in her dark-honey hair, which was swept up in a ponytail. She was a sight to behold, and when he glanced at Brett, he saw that he was staring at her, too.

  Amb
er acted oblivious, staring intently at the game.

  “The Game of Shadows. What the hell’s that when it’s at home?”

  “Dunno,” they said in unison.

  She wasted no time in opening the box. Sean flinched as she did so, inexplicably on edge.

  “Maybe you shouldn’t do that…” he began, then stopped himself.

  It was just some stupid board-game; nothing to get so uptight about. Brett said nothing, but then, that was the norm for him.

  Sean loved his friend, but he got that he was damaged, that inside, part of him was broken. He guessed they all were, in their own way, but Brett more so than the rest of them. Sometimes, Sean got the impression that he was brewing, like an impending storm. But brewing for what, he didn’t know. It made him feel sad because sometimes he thought his friend was lost and there was nothing he could do to help him.

  Amber gingerly placed the opened box on the floor in front of her like it was the most precious object in the world and peered inside. From where Sean stood, he couldn’t see so he crouched down next to her. Brett did the same.

  “Is this a Ouija board?” she said, pulling out a folded-over board and flattening it out. She laid it flat on the floor between them.

  Sean’s blood turned to ice-water in his veins. “Yeah. Looks like it.”

  Put it back in the box, he wanted to scream at her, but didn’t.

  Printed on the mottled ochre board was the alphabet, which was spread across two curved lines, from ‘A’ to ‘M’ on the top line, and ‘N’ to ‘Z’ on the bottom. Above and below these two curved lines were the words ‘hello’ and ‘goodbye’ written in small case.

  “These look like the instructions,” Amber said, pulling out a sheet of paper which lined the bottom of the box.

  A banging on the door made him jump and his heart hammer. Jane and Malcom burst into the small front-room, bringing the rain in with them.

  Their faces were flushed, and Sean wondered what they had been up to. He was envious of their bond; if they weren’t yet ‘together’ together, then he was sure that one day they would be.

  Maybe, one day me and Amber will be, too…