Only Shadows Move
By David Martin
Copyright David Martin 2015
For Al and Evie
Cover image by Louis Emmett
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Contents
Relic
Returning
Spiders
Sunday Morning
This Is A Warning
Erased
An Ending
Acknowledgements
Relic
NO ONE saw him fall from the sky the night of the strange lights. The lights themselves were only seen by the sleepless, the drunk, the late shift workers raising gritty eyes from their screens for a moment’s break. And they caused only a flurry of filler in the local news, and a brief effusion of conspiracy theories gibbering to themselves in the digital dark. But he lay undiscovered for days, weeks, embedded in the soft ground by the shattering impact of his fall, in the heart of the wood in a bare and clodded field on the edge of town.
No one was watching at the frozen hour when the lights streaked low overhead, or in their wake heard the crashing of branches and the outraged eruption of birds.
Close up you could see the marks of his descent through the canopy of trees, their broken limbs charting his passage, letting new shafts of light fall into the shadowed space where he lay, close by a silent pond. From outside the wood was undisturbed, keeping its secret. But secrets find their way out, too good to keep, but good enough to keep close.
We never saw what was inside the suit, it was still intact, but burned and battered, its identifying markings lost, the visor black and impenetrable. We liked to scare ourselves daft by imagining the broken and rotting form within. Because it was definitely occupied. You could tell by the heft and shape of it, even before one of us dared to poke it with a stick and then ran like hell after feeling something’s inert bulk shift within, a sound and movement we never forgot.
Someone said he’d probably been dead for decades, a remnant from the black and white days of moonwalks and spacewalks and Sputniks, some failed long-denied Cold War mission. Maybe there was only ever a dried-out skeleton inside, empty eye sockets still haunted by the years of staring into a greater void, while the Earth in all its blue-white beauty revolved forever out of reach.
No-one was quite sure who found it first, and it was a story that seemed to choose its own initiates. Somehow each of us knew the kind of person we should confide in. We weren’t all friends, came from all over town, had little else in common, yet somehow we knew to keep it secret from everyone else, even siblings, even our obvious best friends. Looking back, it was as though it could see something in each of us that we couldn’t. But soon a few of us were coming down regularly, clandestinely but never alone, always with increasingly elaborate cover stories. We would cling to the grassy path at the margin of the field, scouring the horizons for any sign of the farmer, or any bigger, older, harder kids, before half-running, half-hobbling across the cold, sucking, trainer-ruining clods to the wood, to the gap in the barbed wire fencing and the path to the stagnant central pond.
Kids before us had been coming here for generations to smoke, drink, snog, screw and scare the shit out of each other with tales of the ghosts and serial killers who had of course haunted this place. They’d recorded their visits for posterity with carved and penned initials on tree trunks and fenceposts, some already fading with age. But it looked as though this spot had fallen out of favour for a good few years, ever since the new barbed wire fence went up, the gaping hole in it had been made fairly recently.
I can’t remember what we did or talked about for the most part. All I can really recall is the quiet of that hidden space, the giant helmeted and booted figure prostrate in the gloom, holding all the gazes of all those people whose faces I’ve long forgotten. There was talk of telling, of fame and rewards, but the longer we delayed, the less convincing it became that we ever would. Soon we were talking instead about ways of keeping the secret, whether anyone suspected, and what we’d do to anyone who told. Soon it became clear that we were missing the point anyway. However secret the dead presence at the heart of the wood was, it was quietly changing us, and the world around us.
Gradually moss began to grow in the joints of the suit and cover the visor, the Earth beginning to reclaim the astronaut. And at night our dreams became filled first with the image of that inscrutable faceplate, but then the blackness behind it drew us in, opening out on to great abysses of stars. Utter silences, which once you learned to listen to them filled with the hissing of radiation from impossibly distant suns, the shiver of strange particles, the loneliness of the void.
It soon began to spill into the waking hours. Sometimes an ordinary street would seem transfigured, warped by a glimpse of some other geometry that lay beyond it, planes and spaces that defied human description. A single moment of time would open up into an infinite present, becoming a pool you could plunge into and be lost, sinking through the fine grain of the universe towards whatever final truth might lie at the heart of things.
While space and time opened up for us, the ground accelerated its attempts to devour the astronaut. Grasses grew up around his edges. Seeds propagated in the folds of his suit, tendrils found their way into the mysterious holes for the missing hoses that once kept him alive. More than once we saw a worm emerge from a boot or gauntlet. The ditches and streams that radiated out from the wood became his nervous system, spreading whatever he’d brought back from the cosmos into the ground, the water, the air. And at the same time feeding something back to him.
It wasn’t just us. We started noticing people lost in reverie, and houses with open doors, drawn curtains and abandoned cars, where the everyday routine of work and family had been replaced by far deeper, stranger rhythms. Some people never came home. We heard a rumour the minister at the Congregationalist church had started speaking in hexadecimal numbers in the middle of his lesson.
Our classes began dwindling but none of the teachers seemed that concerned, their own ranks were becoming increasingly chaotic. I don’t know now if I witnessed it myself or if it was just another story, but one became stuck in a loop, intoning a stream of seeming nonsense before heading for the doorway, only to flicker instantly back to the spot she’d started from, to repeat it all over and over.
We noticed the planes gradually stopped their regular groaning overhead, diverting their flightpaths away almost unconsciously from the airspace above our town. TVs began interjecting bursts of white noise and shifting fractal patterns in between the gameshows and weather bulletins, and nobody really commented on it.
Our dreams became darker, our visits to the wood uneasier.
We began to share a dream where we saw the astronaut not lying prostrate and dead but standing upright and waiting for us with silent command. We only saw him in silhouette, a figure cut from utter blackness. In these new dreams there was something profoundly wrong about that shape, that form, it seemed an absence, not a presence, a hole punched through reality.
Every time we visited the wood now, we knew that one day we would find him standing there for real, ready to issue some unimaginable instruction.
But as we headed to the field one morning we knew it was over. Something had changed. A passenger jet droned overhead.
As we crossed the clods we saw figures moving between the trees; bigger, older, harder kids. We heard a motorbike engine and a burst of laughter as we skulked on the periphery of bushes and barbed wire, shut out from our no longer secret kingdom. Moving like shadows, worming through the trees towards the centre, we got a glimpse of someone’s much-feared older b
rother bent over the suit, levering the faceplate off with a stick. A girl was calling out to him, half egging him on, half horrified. A twig broke. We scattered in all directions before anyone saw us, working our way back to our separate homes by our separate routes, dodging any imaginable pursuit through the town’s hidden arteries of tracks and alleys.
It was hushed up what was actually found in the wood, the papers said it was a fragment of a decommissioned satellite, there were hints about classified military hardware, and that was it. Who the astronaut was and what became of him I still don’t know. Decades on I couldn’t tell you what became of everyone else. Like I said, we didn’t have a lot else in common. And I struggle to remember anything of those glimpses into the unimaginable that the astronaut brought back.
Sometimes on a clear, quiet night, I still watch the stars. But all that’s up there is a belt of dead junk, babbling satellites dumbly bouncing our own distorted reflections back at us, with entropy gnawing at every image.
It’s past midnight and everyone is sleeping. A meteor slides down through Orion. Something snuffles in the field hidden behind hedges, but otherwise the night is still. I think about the darkness lying heavy across half the world, pressed up against the flimsy slats of my back fence, seeping through its gaps and cracks.
Returning
YOU cross the park as the evening gathers, the playground is deserted, streetlights spark up orange beyond the trees that veil the main road. You feel your journey pushing at your back, the last scraps of the energy of a train hammering north.
At the far edge of the open ground the last passers-by empty out into the shadows, called home by evening. A few cars pass, defying the descending quiet, but you barely register them.
The street is a long, slowly curving avenue of grand but neglected townhouses, subdivided into flats and bedsits, hedged in by darkly overgrown patches of garden and yards buried in drifts of junk. A cat glares from the wreck of a bin bag, ageing cars and white vans form an outer defensive wall at the kerbside. Traffic lights in the distance signal the way to the city’s invisible heart and what life may still beat there. And there is the house, second to last in the terrace.
Your feet guide you through the gate, that rusting shriek instantly familiar, as is the comfortable fit of those few paces to the door. But something jars.
You take out your keys and for a moment stand puzzled. The lock looks wrong. It is not the one you remember. The door itself seems different. You try your key anyway, it scrapes, won’t even go in, never mind turn. But the lock is not new, like the door itself it is weathered and discoloured.
You reach for the bell and find not the panel of six for the shabby bedsits, one of which you still call home and every shadow and smell of which you can instantly summon to mind, but only a single bell push, and no mark on the whitewashed wall where the panel should have been. You step back. This is the house, unmistakeably. This is the street, the number. But there’s no sign of life behind the curtains of the front room.
You push the bell firmly and then snatch your hand away, as an unfamiliar summons shatters the silence. A pause that lasts, then you hear movement. For a moment you feel relief.
You have never seen the man who emerges. An expensively-dressed but tough-looking 40-something, the hallway beyond him is brightly-lit and cleanly painted, there’s no trace of that musty twilight of junk mail and old bikes. You realise he has asked you who you are several times and looks unimpressed. “Who are you?” you blurt back, panicked. “I live here. What’s going on?”
It is not only the brutal fact of his presence, but the assurance which radiates from him of his right to be there, which makes your words wilt in your mouth. You don’t even convince yourself.
“I’ve never seen you before in my life. I’ve lived here for eight years. Now leave. Please.” The word “please” has never sounded so much like a warning.
“What’s happened? I’ve only been away for...”
You scrabble for concrete facts to fight back with, to put this imposter, this joker in his place, but find yourself grabbing only at images, as though a false floor has suddenly given way beneath you.
Light through aged curtains filtering into a room. That rented smell of gas and damp.
A woman’s voice, her silhouette in the half light of early morning, the smell of her hair falling down on your face, her bones hard against yours in a single bed. And then an echo of a feeling, like the sensation that sometimes lingers after awakening of that primal, childhood sense of loss which we only fully reencounter in dreams.
The feeling of a railway station on a winter Sunday, the tannoy’s ghostly litany echoing in its empty spaces like the names of the dead, the rails telegraphing messages of distance and absence. The need that drew you back here. But you can’t remember her name. How can you not remember her name?
The door shuts firmly in your face.
Who lived here? You saw the old house beneath the new in that brief glimpse of the hallway. An incomprehensible time has passed since you last stood here.
You stand for a moment and then shuffle away. But a few yards down the street (and where would you go?) a new, determination takes hold of you. This is a wind-up, a joke. You probably deserve it, but it’s cruel. You grasp for fragments of that purpose that drove you here.
The yawning mouth of the alleyway offers you a chance, to catch whoever’s pulled this stunt red-handed. You duck into it and find your way to the house’s back gate. It too is unfamiliar and heavily padlocked, but you heave yourself up enough to look over the parapet of the wall. The back extension looms shiplike in the blue dusk above you, upstairs windows bright with welcome.
There’s a yard, oddly small like you remember for such a substantial house, and a brightly-lit ground floor window gives onto a brand-new kitchen. A middle-aged woman with expensive hair is chopping something up, while a teenage girl sits at a table pretending to do homework. The girl looks out into the dark, she looks right at you without seeing you. And something about that look finishes it.
You walk away, dazed and purposeless, a breath of wind brushes along the brick walls. You gradually become aware of the alleys around you, a penumbral maze of secret connections, the grooves on the cerebellum of some vast stone brain. Unfamiliar side snickets open up, offering glimpses of the streets beyond: ancient tracks running unseen through the everyday life of the parallel terraces. You imagine or half sense someone shadowing your walk a few streets away, glimpsed in the moments when you both pass the same opening. When you look, there is of course no-one there.
Further in now, there should be an exit ahead but the alley keeps curving, the way obscure. The side openings grow darker and smaller, no longer gateways to new places but negative spaces, hungry voids. Rusted phone wires carve up the sky.
You panic now as you plunge on, walls and firmly shut gates flicker past, the alley is winding in on itself, you must have gone round in several full circles. There are no glimpses of the streets beyond any more.
You briefly remember this city, its long history piled up in confusion, where the shouts of drunks echo through the tread of ghostly legions, and the distant chanting of monks filters into the gloom of rented rooms where laden ashtrays and empty cans bear witness to the other ghosts, the lives that never properly began.
Airless summer nights when the city shares your bed, whispering to you, and the long winter of rains that labours to wash the dark ooze of life clean and bury all secrets in the murk and bones of the riverbed.
And for a moment, there is again her face, and again the echo of that loss, but clearer now, as everything else becomes obscure. For a moment she cries out and gives you a look of loathing, summoning a memory of a terrible rage welling up blood-red. Then even the face slips away from you as you lurch onwards, winding towards the centre of the maze. And then ahead a wall.
Once again you stand in front of the door to the house you are shut out from but cannot leave. A dead end. All possibi
lities finally swallowed by shadow, all options closed, streets, towns, railways and alleyways have all faded out. The world shrunk to a crumbling singularity, the point where it all began.
Above the wind rattles the old wires. The outlines of the wall and the door itself start to fade into the deepening night. All around you, the alley silts up gently with the debris of lives, a slow landslide of lost time, the knowledge that something vital was once lost, a turning missed.
Unfamiliar constellations wheel above in a ragged, moonwashed sky. You remember nothing.
Spiders
Ten am, and the piledriver behind Rhys’s eyes shows no sign of mercy. Beyond the safety glass, caverns of empty air tumble down and out to where the edge of the city is lost in the murk. The figures on the screen pulse and phase with the hideous internal rhythm of his stinking hangover. Bollocks to it, he thinks. He removes his headphones and looks around the vast open-plan.
“Mate, you look like shit.”
Rhys can only manage a grunt in response to Rich Walker. He may have initiated yesterday’s ritual of post-work beers and grim speculation about who was next for the chop, but the horribly chipper Walker seems immune to hangovers. Rhys, however, had to get off the train two stops early this morning to barf in a bin, and only two espressos and a bottle of water have kept him upright through this first endless hour in the office. Calling in sick would have been a bad move. Only just scraping in for nine was risky enough with the axe swinging freely. Walker, mercifully, is distracted by something outside the window. “Now that’s a bad sign”. “What is?” “Looks like the window cleaners have got the boot as well. Look at that big bugger”.
Rhys has no idea what he’s on about until he sees the thread stretched outside the window at the end of their row of desks, twenty-three floors up. A dark blob is crawling outside the pane, articulated legs shuttling along the filament which sways heavily under its weight. He notices two more spiders static and observant at the top of the glass. And he sees more of the web now, the larder of flies stuck and trussed in it.