The Shadows: A Novel Read Online Free PDF Page A

seconds for me to understand. Because she had been unable to get upstairs in recent weeks, this bleak space must have served as my mother’s bathroom.
    At that, I pictured my mother—her body diminished, her faculties failing her, shuffling awkwardly about in a world that was closing in around her—and a wave of guilt hit me.
    You shouldn’t be here .
    Despite everything, I should have been.
    The stairs creaked beneath my feet, and I went up carefully, as though wary of disturbing someone. Halfway up to the landing above, I looked back down. An angle of sunlight was coming through the glass in the front door. It revealed a swath of the floorboards there that had been cleaned and polished, and again, it took me a moment to recognize what I was seeing. It must have been where my mother had been lying after she fell.
    Upstairs, I stood for what seemed like an age outside what had once been my bedroom, and then the hinges creaked as I opened thedoor. The space revealed itself slowly. Nothing had changed in here. My parents obviously hadn’t used the room for anything in the years since, and the only real difference now was that it seemed so much smaller than I remembered. The remains of my old bed were still by the wall—just a metal frame with a bare mattress on top—while my old wooden desk remained under the window across from it. The room had always been as spare as this. I had never had much. My clothes had been kept in piles on the floor by the radiator; my books stacked up in teetering columns against the walls.
    I might have moved out yesterday. A part of me could almost sense the ghost of a boy sitting hunched over at the desk late at night, working on the stories he liked to write back then.
    I walked across the room and opened the curtains above the desk, flooding the room with light. Below me was the tangled mess of the backyard, leading off to the fence at the far end and then the wall of trees beyond.
    The town might have been named after the woods, but like everyone else here I knew them as the Shadows. For as long as I could remember, that was what everyone called them. Despite the sun, the spaces between the trees had always seemed full of darkness and secrets, and as I stared at them now, a memory fluttered out of them, black and unwanted.
    How Charlie used to take us in there.
    Every weekend that year, we would meet in the old playground, then head up to James’s house and go into the woods through his backyard. We walked for miles. Charlie always led the way. He claimed the Shadows were haunted—that a ghost lived there—but, while I often had the sensation of being watched by something between the trees, I was usually more worried about getting lost. Those woods had always seemed alive and dangerous to me. The deeper you went, the more it began to feel as though you were actually staying still—that the illusion of movement was caused by theland rearranging itself around you, like the squares on a chessboard shifting around the pieces.
    And yet Charlie always brought us out safely.
    But then I remembered the last time I ever went in there with them. Deep between the trees, miles away from another living soul, Charlie pointing a loaded slingshot at my face.
    I closed the curtains.
    And I was about to leave the room when I noticed that it wasn’t entirely bare—that there was an old cardboard box on the floor beside the desk. At some point, the top had been sealed with layers of brown packing tape, but it had been cut open now, and the folds had been pulled back. I knelt down carefully, spreading them a little wider.
    There was a scattering of my old possessions inside. The first thing I found was a yellowing magazine. The Writing Life . As with the book at the hospice, my fingertips tingled as I touched it, and I quickly put it on the floor to one side. Beneath that, there was a slim hardback book. I knew what that was, and I didn’t want to look at it right now, never mind touch it.
    And then,