Jeff had dozed off, but he awoke now with a start; something was moving about in the lobby.
Holding his breath, he put his ear to the door and listened. There it was again: a dragging, scratching sound rather than distinct footsteps.
It was back!
The time had come: the thing, Emma’s Shadowman, was back inside the hotel.
It had perhaps returned to the broken down shack in the forest, as Emma said it had threatened to do. If so, Jeff could imagine its fury at finding Dave gone. He hoped that Dave and Lou had kept moving away from that terrible place and that they, and all the others were safe, but now Jeff had to concentrate; the Shadowman was here and it was hunting. With that thought, Jeff suddenly panicked: he hadn’t arranged any way of alerting the others, asleep down in the basement, without also alerting whoever or whatever was out in the lobby. He would have to leave the door and go down to the kitchen himself. With the most careful of movements, Jeff sidled past the filing cabinets and down the stairs to the kitchen.
He went first to Spielman, still asleep in the corner and gently shook him by the shoulder. With unexpected speed, the old man opened his eyes and had the gun ready in his hand in an instant. Jeff put a finger to his lips and then pointed up to the lobby door. Spielman nodded. Next, Jeff looked for Rita. Finding her in the storeroom with Emma, he very gently shook her awake. The anxious look in his eyes alerted her immediately and she got to her feet, her heart already racing. She retrieved her knife and began mentally to prepare herself to use it.
“It’s definitely not one of the others come back?” she whispered, without much hope.
“No way. I don’t know what it is. It’s big and it makes a weird scuttling sound when it moves. I don’t think it’s an animal, but I don’t think it’s a...a person,” Jeff replied, shocked to hear himself saying such a thing.
Rita paled but touched his arm, to reassure him.
“We can do this, Babe.”
Jeff nodded, but wished he felt more certain.
He crouched next to his daughter. He hated having to wake her. It would be wonderful if he could let his little girl sleep through whatever might follow, but she needed to be awake: she might need to run, to escape while he held her Shadowman at bay. Looking down at her beautiful, sleeping face, Jeff hoped against hope that, somehow, they would all come out of this alive, but the memory of Neil’s mutilated body wouldn’t altogether clear from his mind. With his hand resting gently over her mouth, Jeff whispered to Emma. She woke without any noise and was almost immediately on her feet and ready. Ready for what? Jeff wondered. None of them knew what the next few hours held and they were all very afraid. But, looking into his daughter’s eyes, Jeff saw a centred calm and a maturity there. Emma had probably been through hell in the last twelve hours and, of all those down here in the basement, she had the closest experience of the thing upstairs yet, in spite of this, or perhaps because of it, she was showing the least sign of panic. Jeff just hoped that her calm was born of confident determination rather than of resignation.
There was a sudden, very loud crash upstairs.
“Sounds like the reception desk,” Rita whispered.
“Jeez!” Jeff looked anxious, “How big is that thing?”
Emma took her dad’s hand. It was a gesture intended to encourage him rather than to reassure herself.
“Don’t let it scare you, Dad. It’s trying to frighten us. It likes to play sick games, and terrifying people is a big part of the game.”
Jeff looked down at his daughter and, not for the first time, wondered what she had seen and endured at the hands of this Shadowman. Jeff would have given anything for her to have been spared all contact with the monster, but he couldn’t make it so, no matter how dearly he wished it. He knew he had to channel his hatred of that thing. He had to stop it.
Spielman readied his gun and crept slowly towards the bottom of the stairs. He made barely any sound, but the noises from the top of the stairs which had died away, now suddenly redoubled.
“Get back!” Jeff hissed, “It can hear you.”
Spielman replied in a hoarse whisper:
“I’m ready. Y’all get back there. If it gets past the door, I’ll let the sonofabitch have it,” he paused a moment, before apologising automatically, and somewhat incongruously, given their desperate and extraordinary situation, “Pard’n ma french, ma’am.”
Rita couldn’t help but smile.
Jeff was not so amused.
“Hell, Spielman, will you shut up?” he begged.
As if in answer, all the noises suddenly stopped. The four in the basement looked from one to another in the silence. Only Emma seemed to expect what happened next.
With a splintering scream, the Shadowman slammed into the door, smashing it and rocking it from its hinges. Jeff and Rita, both taken by surprise, jumped at the violence of the noise and Spielman gasped, working hard to re-steady his gun hand. Emma, her face still fixed and unemotional, began slowly to back away. Rita went with her and put her arm around her shoulders. In her free hand, Rita gripped her knife with fierce resolve: she knew now that she would use it. If she had to. If this thing, this Shadowman, threatened the people she loved, Rita now knew that she would do everything in her power to kill it. Her heart rate steadied. She felt absolutely no fear.
Light from the lobby flooded into the dark well of the stairs. Then suddenly the light was gone, eclipsed by the tall, creeping body of the Shadowman.
In the sudden darkness, Spielman fired his gun blindly. But undeterred, and with deadly speed, the Shadowman lashed out and threw the old man across the room. Spielman skidded across the tiled floor and hit the metal cabinets with a crash. He lay there dazed, but alive.
Jeff could see that the old man was still holding the gun in a wavering aim at the creature.
Another shot rang out. The bullet missed its target and smacked into the wall. The Shadowman’s face snapped about, the malevolent sunken eyes fixing on Spielman. The creature began to emit an eerie, hugh-pitched shriek but, as it crouched to launch itself at the old man, a large pan hit it squarely on the head.
Jeff looked triumphant.
“Over here, you bastard. Over here!” He turned to Rita, “Get back! If I can distract him, get her out of here.”
The awful screech rose to an overwhelming scream as the Shadowman turned on Jeff. It was in front of him in seconds, moving with incredible speed and terrible grace. It lifted Jeff off the floor until he was looking, eye to eye, into the baleful, death mask face. He was mesmerised, held in the terrifying depths of the Shadowman’s glittering eyes.
Jeff was dimly conscious of the smile forming on the Shadowman’s face and of the long, thin arm unfolding and extending upwards. Bone white fingers opened wide, their cruel nails razor sharp. There was a moment, as the Shadowman waited to strike, in which Jeff knew that he was about to die, but he had only two concerns: he wanted to give Emma and Rita enough time to escape, and he didn’t want Emma to see him die.
“Go!” he gasped, “Run!”
“Hey, you sick fuck. Leave him alone! If you want me. I’m here!”
It was Emma.
Jeff was appalled and cried out in an incoherent moan: a mixture of disbelief, fury and despair. What the hell did Emma think she was doing?
The Shadowman released him, dropping him to the floor, discarding him as a child might a broken toy. Jeff landed heavily on his arm and he lay there in agony, wincing up at the Shadowman standing over him. Emma had hidden herself and the Shadowman now stood, slowly moving its head from side to side, sweeping across the room, trying to find her.
It moved away from Jeff, to the base of the stairs where, with apparently little effort, it began to push the heavy free-standing metal cupboard across the tiled floor. The cupboard rocked into place, completely blocking access to the stairs.
“Don’t want you running away again, do we Doll?”
With the Shadowman occupied, Emma crept from her hiding place. Keeping low, behind the cabinets, she began to pull her father clear. She pulled him into one of the store rooms.
“Get in here!” she whispered.
“Where’s Rita?”
“She knows what she’s doing,” Em spoke brusquely: she had no time to waste on explanations, “Dad, please, get in here!”
Jeff couldn’t make sense of what was happening.
He heard Rita’s voice. She was calling out to the Shadowman.
“She’s here. The girl’s in here!”
What the hell was going on?
Suddenly, there was a roar behind him in the kitchen and Jeff looked back, just in time to see Rita darting out of the utility room and slamming the door behind her. She locked the door then helped Spielman to his feet. As she dragged the old man across the room towards him, Jeff rushed to help. Glancing back over his shoulder, he saw the door of the utility room begin to vibrate: the Shadowman was preparing to smash his way back into the kitchen.
“Get back in here!” Rita ordered, “Shut the door!”
Jeff pulled the door shut behind them and watched as Rita and Emma started moving boxes away from the walls.
“Jeff, help us look for it,”
“Look for what?”
“The dumb waiter. It’s our only way out. Come on, it’s somewhere in here.”
With that, Rita moved a stack of empty boxes and saw the wooden door of the dumb waiter.
“How did you know it was here?”
“Laura told me. Somehow.”
“Somehow?”
“Yeah. I don’t know. It wasn’t spoken words exactly. I don’t know. Look, there’s no time for his now. Come on Em, you first.”
Emma clambered into the tiny box of the dumb waiter and Rita pulled on the rope to winch her up. Once at the top, Emma tugged on the rope to let them know she’d arrived. As she began to lower the box again, there was a sudden, shattering crash out in the kitchen: the Shadowman had broken out of the utility room.
“Quick, Spielman. You next.”
“No ma’am. Ain’t no way I’d get into that there tiny box. I’ll keep the creature busy while yuh get away.”
“But -”
“Go on, get! Yuh wastin’ time we ain’t got.”
“Rita,” Jeff urged, “You have to go. Get in.”
“No. You have to go next. You’re bigger than me. It’ll take both of us to get you up there.”
Jeff could see that Rita was right and, with no time to argue, he squeezed into the dumb waiter. Spielman and Rita pulled hard on the rope and managed to get Jeff to the top. They felt his signalling tug on the rope just as the door handle behind them squeaked a turn. They held their breath. Silence: perhaps the Shadowman didn’t know where they were. Rita began to lower the box of the dumb waiter as quickly and quietly as possible. It arrived just as the door handle turned again. This was not the squeak of a speculative half turn, but a full blown, angry rattle of the handle: the Shadowman had found them.
“You sure about this?” Rita asked the old man.
It was his last chance.
“I said get!”
As Spielman unceremoniously bundled Rita into the box, she leant forward and kissed him quickly on the cheek. With a look of surprised embarrassment on his face, he pulled down on the rope and sent Rita up to Jeff and Emma. His job done Spielman then turned, aimed his gun at the door and prepared himself.
Jon and Dave had arrived at the hotel.
On seeing the ravaged front doors, Jon signalled for Dave to go round to the hotel’s back door. He would go in the front. Dave nodded and moved around towards the back of the building.
With great caution, Jon eased over the broken doors and surveyed the lobby. He had few memories of domestic interiors and certainly life in his grandmother’s farm had not exposed him to luxuries such as the sofas and shiny, polished tables of the hotel. For a few moments he stood and stared about him, awestruck by the glamour of the place.
A sudden noise sent him diving for cover. He peered out from behind one of the comfortable armchairs and saw three people hurrying away up the stairs. Jon jumped up. He had recognised one of them. Seeing them disappear up onto a second flight of stairs, he called out.
“Rita!”
Hearing her name, Rita turned. Jeff and Emma had gone on ahead, up into the attic, but she hung back. Had she imagined someone calling her? She scanned the lobby and saw Jon as he rose from behind an armchair. He began to wave up to her, a crooked smile lighting his face, but there was a sudden, deafening crash and Jon froze in mid-wave, his attention taken by something out of Rita’s view, his face suddenly deadly serious.
Rita was frightened: she could guess what had happened. She crept forward to the bannisters from where she could overlook the lobby. She didn’t try to catch Jon’s eye: he was studiously avoiding looking towards her and she guessed he must have good reason for doing so. For a few seconds everything seemed normal then, with a rasping, scratching sound, the Shadowman moved slowly out from behind the wreckage of reception desk, directly below where Rita was standing.
Even from this viewpoint, the Shadowman was frightening. It moved towards Jon with steady, focused intent, its thin body stooping forward and its brittle arms rising for the attack. Dreading what she was about to witness, Rita gasped involuntarily and that barely audible sound was enough to distract the Shadowman. Its brittle body twisted, the skull white face fixing on her. It held Rita in its terrible gaze as it began slowly to move towards the foot of the stairs.
“Leave her!” Jon shouted, “I kill you.”
But the Shadowman did not react. Jon had to think quickly. He wanted to say something more, something that would goad the Shadowman into following him out of the hotel, but he couldn’t pull the words he needed from his forgotten past.
Then all at once, when he was on the verge of despair, his brain somehow unlocked a stream of lost words and Jon found them flowing from him as they had not done for years.
“Hey, remember me?” he yelled, “I smash your head with shovel. Remember? Remember?”
The Shadowman stopped. It tilted its head to one side, listening. Rita couldn’t believe Jon’s sudden fluency.
“Yes. That was me. And you should stay dead in earth, where you belong.”
Rita could see the Shadowman’s vicious nails begin to dig into the soft wood of the bannister.
“I will kill you!” Jon yelled.
The Shadowman growled, but did not move.
“Scared?” Jon’s tone was mocking, “Well, I know where Laura is. I have the girl!”
That was the trigger. Jon had the creature’s attention. Looking down, Rita noticed the slightest of movements, as the Shadowman turned back down towards Jon. It was tensing its muscles, getting ready to pounce.
“Run Jon! Get out!”
Her shouted warning came just as the Shadowman leapt back and down, landing only feet from where Jon had been standing. Jon was already racing away towards the trees but Rita knew she had to get him more time. Thinking quickly, she grabbed a vase from a table and hurled it down towards the Shadowman, before ducking down behind the table. As the vase smashed onto the floor, the Shadowman span around. Its death-mask face flicked down towards the floor and the glittering eyes took in the shards of pottery rocking to and fro on the polished wood. It raised its terrible gaze and began to look around the room, searching for the perpetrator. Rita stayed absolutely still, although her heart was again thumping in her chest. She held her breath.
Just then, the final remnant of the front doors suddenly collapsed and fell to the floor with a crash. Seeing this, the Shadowman appeared to lose all interest in the vase. With a monstrous scream it leapt out through the doorway and hurled itself out into the clearing.
Rita let out a sigh, then gathered herself and ran on up to the attic, to check on Jeff and Emma. Jeff was waiting for her at the top of the attic stairs.
“Ree, where have you been? I thought you must have hidden in one of the rooms down there. You had me so worried.”
“Dad!” Emma called, “The Shadowman’s outside.”
Jeff ran over to the window.
“Look,” Emma was pointing, “I think it’s chasing after the man who ran into the trees over there.”
“That was Jon,” said Rita quietly, “and he just saved our lives.”
Jon ran across the clearing, knowing that he had only a few seconds’ advantage on the killer; running for his life.
Not daring to look back, he threw himself down the track and hurtled along it as it swept away to the right. Many years living in the forest had honed his muscles and kept him lean and fit, but Jon wasn’t a young man and he wasn’t sure how long he’d be able to keep running at this rate. He also had no idea where he should run to, but the directions seemed almost to have been chosen for him. After several hundred yards he darted to the right onto a path leading him away from the track into the trees.
Jon was pounding through the snow, head down, racing along the path. He looked up. There was something strange coming towards him, some way up ahead: not an animal, but a man, wrapped, Jon could now see, in rugs. At that moment Phil looked up, saw Jon and panicked. He turned to run back to the safety of the trailer, but Jon was gaining on him fast. Phil rounded a corner and Jon was upon him. Jon hit him with such force that he lifted him clear off the ground and together, they flew away from the path, landing heavily a couple of yards into the trees. Jon recovered immediately and threw himself on top of Phil, clamping a hand tightly over his mouth.
Phil was horrified. His first thought was that he was about to die at the hands of this madman. But, looking up into Jon’s disfigured face, he saw that Jon had little interest in him. Jon’s eyes were frantically scanning back and forth along the path, on the lookout for something, something that clearly terrified him.
For a moment Phil looked away from his captor, towards the nearby clearing. He could actually see the trailer from here. Could he escape this lunatic and get back there? Phil was in the process of carefully flexing his muscles, checking that he hadn’t been injured in the collision, when he felt the hand at his mouth press down harder. He looked up and followed Jon’s gaze.
A tall, gaunt figure was moving smoothly over the snow-covered path. As it moved, it made a dry, rustling sound and Phil noticed then that there was absolutely no other sound around them; this strange creature was moving through an eerily still and absolutely silent world. Phil couldn’t look away from it. It was following the path and seemed to pass the point at which he and Jon had collided, without a pause but just a few yards further on, it stopped and began to turn its head from side to side, searching. When it turned to look in their direction, Phil felt the blood drain from his face. He froze and felt Jon duck down lower next to him. The skull-white face moved slowly, the sunken eyes, shiny black and diamond hard, seeming to cut right through him. It had seen them: Phil was sure of it. He closed his eyes; he had seen enough.
“Come here!” Phil was startled to hear a girl’s voice, “Come play with me!”
The voice was very soft, not more than a breath, but in the weird silence of the forest, they all heard it clearly.
Phil opened his eyes again and saw Jon looking even more startled than himself. Jon was gazing, open-mouthed towards the trailer. Phil strained to see what was going on. The figure was still facing them but, to Phil’s intense relief, the hushed invitation seemed to have distracted the dark terror from pursuing its interest in them.
“Come play,” the girl urged again, her voice drifting to them like a gentle breeze, “Come on, I wanna play.”
The strange creature tilted its head, as if in thought. Moments later, apparently decided, it began to turn away and Phil saw the bone dry skin pull back to reveal the awful smile, the rows of tiny, dagger teeth, glistening in the pale light. It was so dreadful a sight that, if Jon’s hand had not still been over his mouth, Phil would have cried out then and given their position away.
Jon was still staring at the trailer. Phil sensed his agitation; Jon was tensing for a fight, or preparing to move. Suddenly Phil realised that Jon was preparing himself to attack the thing on the path. No! Phil could not let that happen. If this ugly critter gave their position away, they would both end up dead, no question. Phil readied himself as the whisper came again.
“Come on. I wanna play. I’m here. Come find me.”
Next to him, Jon began to mutter.
“Where she? Where she?”
Jon was about to move, Phil thought. When the time came, Phil would have to act very quickly to stop him.
Suddenly, Jon gasped.
“She there,” he whispered, “She in there.”
Now everything happened at once.
The dark creature began to move, with terrifying speed, towards the trailer. Seeing it, Jon jumped to his feet and was about to give chase, but Phil tackled him and brought him crashing to the ground. The two men struggled, until they heard the click of a door handle: the Shadowman was climbing up into the trailer.
Time then seemed to slow to an imperceptible crawl.
Jon opened his mouth in a desperate, silent scream, his eyes huge and filled with tears. Phil turned and saw the fire beside the trailer flare up, its flames licking around the trailer door. In a frozen instant, the entire trailer was engulfed in a huge, broiling mass of fire, the explosion lifting the roof clean off, releasing a ball of dark smoke to slowly churn upwards into the sky.
Time quickened once more as a deafening wall of noise and rushing wind blasted over the two men, and the trailer roof crashed back to earth with a splintering thud. The main body of the trailer was now a roaring inferno, flames jetting out of every opening and shooting high into the air.
Phil was delirious.
Jon was distraught.
Jon looked across at the man who was lying next to him, laughing ecstatically, and Jon punched him, very hard, in the stomach. Phil stopped laughing.
From the attic windows of the hotel, Jeff, Rita and Emma had witnessed the explosion. They could hear the continuing roar of the flames even from this distance and the dark cloud now hung low over the trees. Jeff and Rita exchanged glances. They had no idea what had happened and knew they would have to investigate.
Rita turned away from the window.
“Downstairs?”
Jeff nodded.
“Ready?”
“Yeah, let’s get it over with.”
“But we stay together, OK?”
Jeff nodded. He couldn’t stand even the thought of being separated from these two again. He called Emma over and, together, they made their way downstairs.