two

Estelle cowered in the hallway. Sandor was just inches from her. They were separated only by the thickness of a wooden door. Yet his whispered words were like messages from the far side of a dark, fathomless abyss. Whatever was out there, attacking him – killing him! – was beyond her imagining, and the dread of confronting it had immobilised her as surely as if a physical weight had pinned her to the spot.

“Sandor,” she whimpered, not even sure he could hear, “I’m so sorry.”

From outside there came a deep guttural groan, followed by a squelching sound, and a horrid image entered her mind of the creature feeding on her friend.

Sandor – her best mate since childhood. She couldn’t bear it!

She had to do something. Hadn’t he come to rescue her from her attic prison all those years ago when she’d given up hope that anyone ever would? Tonight, he’d done the same again, rushing out to confront the thing at the door with no thought to his own safety.

She had to be like him. She had to find some of that inner steel.

But what if he was already dead?

Well, even so – even if it was too late – she had to try. She owed it to him.

Estelle wiped the sweat from the palm of her right hand and took a firmer grip of the knife. She placed her left hand on the iron knob that raised the latch on the door. Her breath came out like a sob as she watched the latch slowly rise.

No, I can’t do this!

Do it, Estelle! Push open the door.

She began to push, but something was obstructing it.

Sandor’s body?

She swallowed, then leaned her full weight against the door. There was a soft thump and it swung fully open.

She struggled to make sense of the scene before her, or the parts at least that were illuminated by light from the hallway. It was not what she had expected.

Opposite her, on the path, was Sandor. He was crouching, looking down at another figure lying in a hunched posture at his feet. Slowly Sandor raised his head and looked at her. She saw the blackness spreading through his eyes and the slow drawing back of his lips into a grotesque smile. The sight sent needles of ice into her blood. It looked like Sandor, but it was not Sandor!

She backed away, but the figure was immediately on its feet, whipping its arm at her. The arm seemed to bend as it moved, as if made of something more flexible than bone. She felt a staggering blow to her elbow and the knife flew out of her hand. It arced glintingly through the air to land in some thick bushes to her right, lost from view and out of reach. The thing’s arm flailed again and suddenly she was on her knees, cheek pressed against the gravel of the path, reeling from a detonation of pain in the back of her head. Flashing circles radiated outwards from her stupefied consciousness like earthquake aftershocks.

And there, lying in the dead centre of the circles, like a dart in a bullseye, was Sandor’s gun.

Something rough brushed against her back, then tightened around her throat.

The gun was so close, she could almost reach out and…

She felt a powerful upward yank that almost cut off her air supply. The thing lifted her up so that her feet rose clear of the ground. She hung helpless, suspended like a rag doll. A string of drool dribbled from her lower lip. She could sense the creature examining her. She almost gagged as its breath wafted across her face like a warm gust from a putrid swamp.

What she had seen just now, when the thing had raised its head and looked at her, had scared and sickened her half to death. Its face was an obscene perversion of her friend’s, his strong, handsome features distorted to a freakish degree. At first it had looked just like Sandor, but then the smile had expanded into a gigantic grinning rictus of long, sharp, gumless teeth. His dark irises had swollen into huge, shiny black hemispheres entirely obscuring the whites of his eyes. As his eyes and mouth had grown, the skin of his cheeks had cracked to form black fissures. The creature had killed her dear friend, copied his beauty and made it hideous. Now it would surely do the same to her.

Her throat was tight in the thing’s grip and every breath was a struggle. She couldn’t move her head, but with her eyes, she sought out the crumpled figure lying on the path – the real Sandor. She would spend her remaining seconds thinking of him. To her surprise, she noticed that Sandor was moving, trying sluggishly to raise himself up on his arms. He wasn’t dead! There was still hope. More surprising still, she saw something dangling from her fingers. The gun! She must have grabbed it as the creature had hauled her up.

Enfeebled by the blow to her head and the difficulty she was having breathing, it took Estelle a second or two to seat the gun properly in her hand and locate the trigger. But before she could raise it to shoot, she felt herself being lifted higher, hot breath and needle-like points pressing down on the skin of her neck. Pain flared as the teeth began to penetrate. She felt the warm wetness of her blood on her skin and the rough lick of the creature’s tongue.

She could see the thing’s legs below her. Her gun hand was swaying drunkenly. If she could only steady herself for long enough to aim. Realising she couldn’t and she’d run out of time, she closed her eyes and squeezed hard on the trigger.

The bang came sooner and louder than she had anticipated.

It was almost exceeded in volume by the screeching howl that followed. The pressure on her throat suddenly ceased and she fell hard onto the gravel. She coughed and noisily gulped down air. When she looked up, seconds later, the gate was open, the creature was gone and it was Sandor – the original version – smiling down at her.

He was in a bad way. The smile was doing a poor job of masking his evident pain. The red mark on his throat would soon grow into a nasty bruise, but the real damage was to his left leg. She saw the dark hole in his thigh, the blood stain on his trousers and more blood on the path where he had been lying.

She raised herself up onto her knees and embraced him. After the stench of that monster, Sandor’s sweat was like perfume, his breath in her ear a lullaby. She clung to him for a while without moving, just relishing the fact that he was still alive.

“Nice shooting,” he whispered.

“Has it really gone?”

“I think so. I watched it stagger away in the direction of that wood. What the hell do you think it was?”

“Nothing human… or animal,” she murmured. “It looked like – at first, it looked like –”

“I know,” he interrupted, as if not wanting her to complete the sentence.

The pain in the back of her neck and throat was subsiding, but her head still felt very tender and sore. She must have groaned a little, because Sandor suddenly broke away and looked at her. “Are you OK?”

“I’m fine,” she reassured him. “But you’re not.”

Estelle stood up. An attack of giddiness made her stagger a little, but she tried to rebalance herself before he noticed. “We have to get you to a hospital right now,” she said, eyeing the gash in his leg. “You’ve lost a lot of blood.”

“Not sure I can drive,” grimaced Sandor, letting the smile-mask slip for the first time.

“I’ll drive,” said Estelle. Aunt Lucy had given her a few lessons last year. She was sure she’d be able to remember.

Sandor tried to get up, and failed. With Estelle’s help, he made it the second time. She supported him as they hobbled down the path, through the gate and over to Sandor’s silver SUV.

As she helped him into the passenger seat, she noticed, further up the road, heading towards Delhaven village, the receding tail lights of a car. She wondered briefly why she hadn’t seen it pass by the cottage – and why the driver hadn’t stopped to help them. Then her attention was drawn to a dent in the SUV’s left-side front fender. It looked quite serious – touching or close-to-touching the wheel. She wondered if it had been inflicted by that passing car, and prayed the damage wouldn’t prevent them from driving.

“Where’d you get that?” she asked Sandor, as she climbed into the driver’s seat.

“Happened on the way over here,” Sandor grunted, handing her the key. “It’s fine, don’t worry.” Breathing a small sigh of relief, she inserted the key into the slot and twisted.

Nothing.

The engine didn’t even turn over.

She tried again, and again nothing. Sandor leaned across her and tried turning the key himself.

Estelle was starting to feel panicky again. First the phones, now this. What was going on?

Sandor was already out of the car and limping over to the bonnet. He opened it, and then stared. His shocked face scared her even more.

“Battery’s gone,” he said.

“Gone?” she cried, getting out of the car. “How could it be gone?”

“Someone’s stolen it. The cables that were attached to the terminals have all been cut.”

She stared at the mess of severed cables and the empty space where the battery should have been.

“But who –?” she began. Then she remembered. “I saw a car heading towards Delhaven just now. And before I came out of the cottage, I saw a pair of headlights in the kitchen window. Whoever was in that car must have done this while we were fighting off that thing.” She clutched the back of her head, which was throbbing again. “Oh, Sandor! What’s happening? Is someone trying to stop us leaving here?”

Before he could reply, they both heard a sound. It was like a distant sighing howl, and it came from across the meadow.

“Come on,” said Sandor. “Let’s get back indoors.”

Estelle found a first aid kit in one of the kitchen cupboards. Sandor examined the bottles and then told her what to do. After boiling some water in the kettle, she poured it into a shallow glass salad bowl and then added a few splashes from a bottle labelled “Povidone-iodine”. She poured about half of this solution into another, smaller bowl, into which she placed a pair of tweezers. Then, with great care, she helped Sandor take off his trousers. All around the bite mark on his leg, the flesh was becoming swollen and shiny red with infection. Bits of fabric had embedded themselves in the wound.

When the iodine-water mixture had cooled, she used the sterilised tweezers to remove the pieces of cloth. Then she dipped cotton swabs into the water and used these to soak the wound. Sandor’s breath jerked inwards as she applied the first of these. After ten minutes or so, when the skin around the wound had softened, Sandor instructed her to use the tweezers to peel open the edges of the wound.

She glanced up at him, concerned.

“We have to get rid of all the infection,” he told her through gritted teeth. “I don’t want to think about what kind of germs that thing might have been carrying.”

“Can I give you some sort of anaesthetic?”

“I’ve checked,” he said. “There’s nothing in the box. I’ll be OK. Just do it.”

Trying hard to keep her hands steady, Estelle used the tweezers to grasp one of the tender flaps of flesh at the edge of the wound, then slowly peeled it back. Whitish-yellow pus dribbled out.

Her stomach heaved at the sight. Sandor emitted a strangled groan. The muscles in his leg tensed.

She wiped away the pus with a cotton swab, before continuing her way around the wound’s edge, repeating the process.

“Deeper,” he hissed. So she probed the deeper parts of the wound to see if any pus was hidden there. His body had become rigid, but she could tell he was observing everything she was doing.

A sudden loud whine from outside the window made her jump. The tweezers jerked in her hand, making Sandor gasp in pain.

She stared at the window, terrified that she might see the creature’s face out there.

“It’s the wind,” Sandor reassured her in a strained whisper.

Nervously, Estelle returned her attention to the wound. When she was sure no more pus remained, she soaked it with more of the iodine-water mixture.

“You’d make a fine nurse, Es,” Sandor murmured after a while. “Not to mention a pretty sharp shooter. We could use you in the army.”

She was pleased to see the pain in his eyes had lessened.

“I’d fail all the psychological tests,” she smiled.

“You’ve been pretty solid in the head department so far.”

“I’m trying to hold it together,” she said. Actually, she was surprisingly calm. She put it down to Sandor’s presence.

“What was that thing out there, do you think?” he wondered.

“I don’t know. But it seemed sort of… flexible, like nothing human or animal.” She frowned. “While I was watching, its face changed completely from normal to… horrible. And it had these very strong, whippy arms.”

“Yeah, I noticed,” he grinned, feeling the bruise on his throat. Then his face became serious. “Something happened on my way over here,” he said. “I think it may have something to do with the thing that attacked us. I was about halfway between the village and the cottage, where the road winds through part of Delhaven Wood. I nodded off for a second, and woke up with a bump, front wheel in a ditch, the fender parked in a tree. I got out of the car to inspect the damage. I was groggy, I admit, and probably not thinking too clearly. But I swear that as I stood there, looking at the front of my car, this truly crazy thing happened. There was a strange sort of yellow light in the forest – not moonlight, something else. It was coming from a source much closer to the ground, casting these big shadows everywhere. Anyway, as I was standing there, my own shadow seemed to… move.” He looked sharply at Estelle, as if willing her to laugh – but she was too intrigued.

“Why didn’t you tell me this before?”

“Hey, you were freaked out enough as it was.” He shrugged. “It’s mad, I know. But I swear it’s true. The ground sort of swelled up, as if something was coming out from underneath it, or as if the shadow itself was forming into something – something solid.”

“What did you do?”

Sandor smiled ruefully. “What do you think I did? Stick around to take pictures? I dived back into my car, reversed out of the ditch and drove full pelt out of there.”

“So you think that thing that attacked us might have been your shadow? Is that it?” She couldn’t help frowning in disbelief. This was the maddest thing she’d ever heard of.

Sandor looked annoyed. “It was you who started all this stuff about shadows,” he reminded her.

“Sure, I saw an odd shadow on the meadow, but it never got up to introduce itself…” She sighed. “Look, after what happened tonight, I’m prepared to believe almost anything – aliens, genetically modified superbeings, you name it – but homicidal shadows, Sandor! Think about it. A shadow is just an absence of light. It’s not a thing, it’s the very opposite.”

“That’s enough with the swabs,” said Sandor stiffly. “Now dry it with some of that sterile gauze.”

She could see she’d irritated him, so she said no more, simply followed his instructions. When the wound was dry, she smeared antibiotic ointment on some more sterile gauze and placed this inside the wound, before dressing and bandaging it.

By now, the cold, grey light of dawn was illuminating the kitchen. Estelle had never been more glad to see it. She couldn’t be sure they were any safer, but somehow the madness they had faced seemed to recede in daylight. She yawned, suddenly feeling immensely tired.

“Get yourself to bed,” Sandor ordered her.

“But we should go,” she mumbled. “Start walking to Delhaven.”

“There’s no rush,” he said. “Get some kip. I’ll wake you up in a few hours.”

“What about you?”

“I spotted a comfy-looking sofa in the front room, which’ll do me fine,” he said, hoisting himself to his feet.

The bedside clock read 10.54 when Estelle awoke to an eyeful of bright sunlight – she’d forgotten to close the bedroom curtains – and the smell of frying bacon. She’d taken some pain killers before going to bed and her head was feeling a lot better for them. The bacon made her nostalgic for those brief weeks she’d spent living with Sandor in his caravan. Aunt Lucy was a vegetarian, and these days her breakfasts never got more exciting than muesli or toast with her aunt’s home-made rhubarb jam. As for hospital food, everything, including the bacon, tasted as if it had been boiled for five hours.

She checked her phone in the faint hope that normal service had been restored. It remained resolutely dead. After dressing, she went downstairs. Sandor was standing by the stove, cooking. His gun nestled in a shoulder holster, which he wore over his faded red T-shirt. His left hand was resting on a knobbly old walking stick while his right tossed the fried eggs.

“Hello!” he said cheerfully. “Found this stick in the hallway. I’m sure your good friend the doctor wouldn’t mind if I borrowed it.”

“Suits you,” she said admiringly. “You look like a true war vet... By the way, that smells delicious.”

Sandor handed her a plate of bacon, eggs and toast, then set his own down on the table opposite her. She noticed he was moving with more ease than earlier.

“Feeling better, then?” she enquired.

“I feel great! You?”

“Better than I was a few hours ago, certainly,” she said between mouthfuls. “Better for knowing we’re heading back to civilisation.”

“Yeah, I was going to talk to you about that,” said Sandor. “I’m just going to slow you down, Es. Why don’t you go on ahead and wait for me at the village? There’s sure to be a pub or a café where I can meet you.”

“No way,” she replied emphatically. “We’re walking every step of the way together, side by side.”

At just after twelve o’clock, they stepped out of the cottage into a warm, hazy blue day. Sandor paused at the front gate and stared for several seconds. The brooding shadow now seemed to hang over almost half of the meadow. “You were right about that shadow,” he frowned. “The sun is right above us, and there are no clouds.” He shook his head. “Come on. Let’s get the hell out of here.”

Delhaven village was three kilometres away, on the other side of the forest. The first part of the journey took them through fields of crops that barely moved in the still air. The world was silent, but for the squeak of their shoes and the scrape of Sandor’s stick on the road. It was like walking through a picture. “I don’t like this quiet,” remarked Sandor at one point. “It’s like being on patrol when you’re expecting an ambush at any moment.”

They had been walking for about fifteen minutes, and had managed perhaps a kilometre, when Sandor suddenly broke into loud song.

Oh, the Grand Old Duke of York,

He had ten thousand men,

He marched them up to the top of the hill,

And he marched them down again!

His voice was even worse than hers. It was raucous, and somehow managed to miss just about every single note. Cacophonous and rowdy, his singing nevertheless did a very necessary thing: it shattered the awful density of silence that had accumulated around them, and cheered them both up immensely. She joined in for the rest of the song, and for several more rounds, singing louder and more stridently than she’d ever dared to before, confident that however dreadful she sounded, Sandor was worse.

By the time the duke had been marched up and down the hill for a fourth time, Sandor and Estelle had reached the part of the road that wound through the forest.

“That’s where I crashed my car,” said Sandor, pointing to a tree by the side of the road, with a deep scar in its bark.

The cooler air prickled the bare skin of her arms with goosebumps. Estelle found herself instinctively moving faster, leaving Sandor trailing in her wake.

“I’m sorry,” she said, slowing down again.

She had noticed that Sandor was now wincing at every step. “You go on ahead if you want,” he assured her. “I’ll be fine. Buy me a pint at the Dead Dog, or whatever the local here is called.”

She smiled tightly, appreciating his effort to cheer her up. “No, I’m staying with you,” she vowed – but she couldn’t help wishing he’d speed up just a little, at least while they were in the forest. Peering ahead, she tried to discern sunlight at the end of the long tunnel of trees, but the road wound and twisted incessantly, and she could never see more than fifty metres in front.

All around them was that strange light again. It reminded her of her first sight of the meadow two days ago. It shone greasily on the bark and leaves and on Sandor’s face, coating everything with a silvery, waxen residue. She glimpsed black pockets of deepest shadow between the trees, and the odd bright flash that almost hurt her eyes. Dark shapes, real or imaginary, seemed to dart into the corners of her vision, then vanish before she could see what they were. She noticed her own shadow trailing faintly to her right, and was reminded of Sandor’s ridiculous story.

“The shadows,” he murmured, as if reading her thoughts. “They were similar to this last night.”

He pointed leftwards where a silvery-yellow gleam was faintly visible through the trees. “That’s not sunlight,” he said. “The sun is much higher. That’s something else.”

“Please, can we go just a bit quicker,” said Estelle, hating it that her panic was starting to show.

“Don’t think I can, Es,” panted Sandor. “But you go on, love. Seriously. Here.” He took the gun from his belt and presented it to her.

It was a tempting offer. If she ran, she could be out of this awful forest and in the village in twenty minutes. Then hopefully she could persuade someone there to drive back up the road and pick up Sandor.

“I’ll be back here with wheels as soon as I can,” she said, taking the gun. “You sure you’ll be OK?”

“Just dandy. I’ll whack anything that moves with this stick!”

“If you tried that, you’d fall over.”

“Nonsense,” he said, lifting his walking stick and swiping the air with it.

“Sandor!”

He lost his balance, then regained it, then lost it again, toppling heavily onto his wound.

He groaned.

“Oh, you idiot!” cried Estelle, and she ran to help him up.

Then she stopped. Sandor was lying still, but his shadow had definitely just moved.

Now, come on, Estelle. That didn’t happen. You must have seen your own shadow and thought it was his.

Hesitantly, she returned to him and bent to help him up. This time she almost fell over in shock. His shadow wasn’t just moving, the entire portion of road on which it lay was rising. The tarmac surface bulged upwards by at least a metre, as if transformed into something soft and pulpy, like clay.

Sandor was as transfixed as she. They both stared as the rolling, undulating tarmac began to form itself into the rough shape of a human being. Estelle recognised the crude contours of a head, torso, arms and legs. Then more details materialised on the seething black surface: a nose, ears, eyes, the first hints of hair and clothing. All of it was still the uniformly dark colour of the road, but as they watched in horrified fascination, colours began to emerge: flesh tones for the face and arms, pale red for the T-shirt, blue for the jeans. The thing began to move. With disturbing agility, it rose up out of the trench-shaped pothole it had created. The creature had Sandor’s face, his physique, even his walking stick, but it moved with a writhing suppleness that reminded Estelle of a snake. Its torso twisted and its limbs seemed to warp as if boneless. Sickeningly, the thing turned its head 360 degrees, while its body remained facing them. When its eyes lit on Sandor, they widened enormously and were flooded with black. The mouth grew monstrously big, revealing long razor teeth. With frightening speed, it snaked towards him.

Sandor, anticipating this, was already backing away. With Estelle’s help, he regained his feet, and they started to make their escape along the road as fast as his hobbled state would allow. But before they had ventured three paces, Sandor pulled up sharply.

Estelle, who’d been focusing on the creature to their rear, turned to face ahead. The sight that greeted her very nearly stopped her heart.

The thing standing in the road before them wore a face she’d seen a thousand times – she encountered it every time she looked in the mirror.

“Estelle.” The word, perfectly pronounced, dropped from the doppelgänger’s mouth. It spoke her name like a wish, almost like a prayer.

Estelle opened her mouth to scream, and the girl-thing seemed to copy her, except that its mouth went on growing and growing, like a distortion in a nauseating hall of mirrors. Its shiny beetle-black eyes gazed hungrily back at her. Saliva dripped from needle-like teeth, as fresh soil from the forest floor began to show between the cracks in its cheeks.

The creature lunged towards Estelle. Before it could grab her, she raised the gun and fired. It staggered backwards, groaning, its clownish grin turning into an even uglier scowl – Estelle could see that the bullet had passed clean through its abdomen. A cascade of loose soil poured from the bullet hole. She fired three more shots into her double, sending it spinning into the ditch.

“Come on then, you slimeball!” she heard Sandor cry. “I’m ready for you.”

Estelle turned to see him leaning against a tree, jabbing his stick at his own double, just about managing to keep it at bay.

“Get out of here, Es!” shouted Sandor.

“I’m not leaving you!” she cried, and, hoisting up a heavy fallen branch from the side of the road, she swung it hard into the back of the creature’s head.

The branch partly embedded itself in the thing’s cranium. It fell backwards, unbalanced by the weight.

“Come on,” she cried, tugging Sandor’s arm. But he shrugged her away and began limping into the forest.

“Where are you going?”

“We’ll be safer off the road,” he gasped. “More places to hide.”

But these things came from the wood, didn’t they? This is where they live!

“No, Sandor, I don’t want to go in there!”

He didn’t hesitate or slow down. Meanwhile, in the ditch to her left, her double was starting to recover. Two of the bullet holes had already closed up and disappeared. To her right, Sandor’s look-alike was struggling to free itself from the branch.

She began to run along the road, but images of Sandor dying alone in the forest kept flashing through her mind. Unable to stomach the thought of leaving him, she veered off the road, leaped the ditch and plunged into the wood after her friend.

The trees grew so thickly in this part, it was hard to see more than a few metres ahead. There was also less sunlight. Instead, everything gleamed with a sickly yellow glow.

“Sandor! Where are you?”

“Estelle!” came a faint call from somewhere off to her right.

She began running in that direction. Twigs caught in her hair and clothes and scratched at her face. She stumbled over roots. There was no clear path, just a haphazard zigzag between the trees – sometimes she was forced left, sometimes right, until she was no longer sure where she was going, or how to get back to the road.

She heard the snap of some twigs to her rear, and stopped, heart hammering in her chest.

“Sandor?”

A scraping sound.

A footstep? It sounded close. Any second now, one of those things would be on her again. Maybe both of them. She had to hide, but where?

In front of her was an enormous old oak with sturdy branches close to the ground. It seemed to invite her to climb it. Estelle had climbed a lot of trees in her younger days. She placed her hands on the lowest branch and heaved herself up onto it. From there it was easy enough to reach hold of the next branch up. Soon she was sitting astride a smaller branch, her back resting against the trunk, a good five or six metres from the ground.

From this vantage she could see a fair distance across the forest. She could see where the road wound through the trees, and beyond to the village of Delhaven, nestling in the valley below. It seemed not too far. If she ran – really ran… But she might get lost again down on the ground. And those things moved very fast...

Then her eye fell on something else. In a clearing some fifty metres away to her left, she glimpsed a structure of some kind: a white-walled building behind a wire fence. She could get there easily: just a short sprint. Even if it was an abandoned ruin, it could offer her a place to hide out. But her deepest hope was that there would be people there – normal, sane, friendly people, with phones and computers…

“Estelle!” came Sandor’s voice. She assumed it was his voice, and was about to call back, but then she stopped herself.

These things can talk, remember?

She peered through the branches to her left, and there stood her friend, by a tree stump, about halfway between herself and the white building. He was scanning the forest, searching for her. He looked and moved just like Sandor, so he probably was Sandor. Yet there did seem to be something different about him – she couldn’t exactly say what. Perhaps it was nothing – just her fear making her imagine things. Of course it was Sandor.

Wasn’t it?

If only she could be sure…