Shadows (17 page)

Still, he slammed on the brakes and shouted to the fireman. “Jesus Christ! Looks like some idiot dumped a bag of garbage on the track!”

The train began to slow, the brakes screaming as the engineer pulled hard on the lever.

Then, as the brilliance of the headlight caught the object in the full glare of its beam, he realized that the object wasn’t a bag of garbage at all.

It was a person, crouched down between the tracks, hunched over, his back to the train.

The engineer hit the horn, and a blast of noise tore the night, rousing a flock of sparrows from their roosts in the trees along the track. They burst into flight, disappearing instantly into the night.

The person on the railroad tracks didn’t move.

The engineer felt a sheen of sweat break out over his whole body as he realized what was about to happen, and that there was no way on earth he could avoid it. The inertia of the big diesel engine was enough that even if he managed to lock the brakes completely, the machine would lunge on, steel skidding against steel, sparks flying.

But it would not be enough.

The train bore down on the object, losing speed with every second. For just a split second the engineer prayed for a miracle.

It didn’t come.

The engine struck the person on the tracks, and as the body flew into the air, the engineer realized it was a boy.

A young boy, dressed only in worn jeans and a red shirt.

Oddly, he found himself wondering if the boy had worn the red shirt on purpose, so the blood wouldn’t show as much when the train struck him.

Not that it mattered, the engineer reflected as the train finally ground to a stop two hundred yards farther on. Red shirt or not, the force of the blow when the train hit him would have turned the boy into little more than an unrecognizable mass of torn flesh and broken bones.

Instinctively, the engineer looked at his watch. It was almost half past four in the morning.

A miserable time to die.

   Though the room was dark, so dark he couldn’t see anything at all, Jeff Aldrich knew he wasn’t alone. And the room was big, too. So big he couldn’t sense either the walls or the ceiling, though he was certain they were there.

He could, however, sense the other person in the room with him.

Adam.

It was Adam who was there, lost in the dark somewhere, looking for him.

Jeff called out to his brother, but there was no answer.

He took a tentative step forward, feeling his way in the dark, but touched nothing, felt nothing.

He called out again. “Adam? Hey, Adam, where are you?”

Though he’d shouted at the top of his lungs, his voice seemed tiny, constricting in his throat, the words barely audible, even to himself.

Now the fear began to close around him, reaching out of the darkness, touching him, its slender tentacles wrapping around him, seeming to draw him into the darkness itself.

“No,” he moaned. “I’ll find him. I’ve got to find him.”

He struggled against the fear, tried to run away from it, but now his feet seemed mired, as if he were caught in a thick, wet mud, or quicksand.

He struggled harder, screaming out again. “Adam? Adam, I didn’t mean it. I’m sorry, Adam!”

He began pulling himself free from the mud, and then he was running, running through the darkness as fast as he could. And around him the darkness changed.

He wasn’t in the room anymore. He was outside now, and though everything looked the same as it had before, it was still different.

And he was getting closer to Adam—he could feel it!

Finally, ahead, he saw a point of light.

The last of the fear drained out of him as he ran toward the light, his heart pounding, his legs aching from the effort. But he couldn’t slow down, for the light was Adam. If he could get to it—

It began to take shape then. No longer a point, it was a beam now, and it was shining down from overhead, though when he looked up, he couldn’t see the light’s source.

But in the beam, seeming almost to be suspended in midair, he could finally see Adam.

Adam was looking at him, his eyes accusing him.

Jeff stopped. “Adam?” He uttered the word uncertainly, for there was something different about his brother, something he didn’t understand.

He reached out, thrusting his hand into the beam of light, trying to touch his brother. But as his hand entered the beam, it disappeared, and Adam, still staring at him, began to laugh.

“You thought I wouldn’t do it, didn’t you?” Adam asked. “You thought I’d chicken out. You
always
thought I’d chicken out.”

Jeff felt a terrible wave of remorse wash over him. “N-No,” he stammered. “I didn’t think that I—”

But it was too late. Even as he spoke, the beam of light began to fade away and his brother’s image began to shimmer, then slowly disappear. As the last of the light died away, Jeff screamed out his brother’s name once more.

“Adam!”

•  •  •

In his room on the third floor Josh MacCallum lay wide awake. He’d been lying there for what seemed like an eternity, listening in the darkness.

Sometime earlier—he didn’t know how much earlier—he’d awakened, hearing a sound.

It hadn’t taken him more than a moment to realize what it was.

The elevator, its gears grinding, its cage rattling in its frame.

Instantly, Jeff Aldrich’s tale of the ghost of Eustace Barrington had popped back into his mind, and his first instinct had been to hide his head under the covers and try to blot the sound out of his ears. But then he’d realized what was happening.

It was Jeff himself, riding the elevator in the darkened house, and no doubt laughing silently at the scare he was giving him.

So Josh had gotten up, pulled on his bathrobe, then gone out into the hall, creeping down the dark corridor until he came to the elevator shaft.

He could still hear the sound of the machinery.

But the elevator wasn’t moving. In fact, when he peered down the shaft, he could just make out the top of the cage barely illuminated by the chandelier in the foyer.

The sound had suddenly stopped. Josh had held his breath, afraid even to move.

Nothing had happened.

He’d waited for several seemingly endless minutes, half expecting the ghost of Eustace Barrington to appear on the stairs, floating toward him in the darkness. But at last, when nothing more occurred, he went back to bed.

And lay awake, listening.

Once more he heard the sound of the elevator, and once more he went to look.

The cage remained at the bottom of the shaft, exactly where it had been earlier.

Now, though, there was a new noise. Josh jerked upright, bolting into a sitting position. What had it been?

Then, coming in through his open window, he heard an anguished voice calling out.

“Adam, comeback!”

Jeff! It was Jeff’s voice.

Jumping out of bed, clad in his pajamas. Josh ran out of his room and raced down the hall to the stairs. Taking them three at a time, he arrived at the second floor in time to see sleepy faces peering out at him.

“What’s wrong?” someone asked. “What’s going on?”

Josh didn’t reply. He continued racing down the hall to Jeff’s room, where he pushed the door open and flipped on the light in one motion. And then he stopped, staring.

Sitting up in bed, his face pale, his whole body trembling, was Jeff.

Except for the curtains fluttering gently at the open window, the room was still and quiet.

“Jeff?” Josh breathed. “What’s wrong? You okay?”

Jeff Aldrich said nothing for a second, then managed to nod. “I—I had a nightmare. It was about Adam. He—He was gone. It was like he was dead or something, and it was my fault.”

“Jeez,” Josh breathed.

Jeff shuddered. “It was so real.” He was awake now, his whole body covered with an icy sweat, the terrible feeling that had come over him as he’d called out to his brother one last time still gripping him.

“What’s going on?” Brad Hinshaw asked, coming into the room. Then he saw Jeff. “Jeez, man, you look like you saw a ghost or something.”

“H—He did,” Josh stammered. “He dreamed that Adam was dead, and that it was his fault.”

“Shit,” Brad breathed. But before he could say anything else, someone else came into the room.

“Is Adam in here?”

A deathly silence fell over the room as the three boys stared at one another. Then Jeff got slowly out of bed and made his way toward the door, Josh and Brad instinctively backing away to let him pass. He walked to the room next to his own, hesitated a moment, then went inside.

The bed was empty, though it looked as if it had been slept in.

All Adam’s things were in their usual places.

“M—Maybe he just went to the can,” Brad Hinshaw suggested, but then a new voice spoke. “I

just looked. It’s empty.”

Jeff stared at the empty bed for another moment, and then his eyes shifted to the computer on Adam’s desk. Moving slowly, almost as if he were being drawn to it against his will, Jeff approached the desk and pressed the power button on the bottom of the monitor. A green light flashed on, and then the monitor began to glow. A second or two after that, the last words that Adam had typed appeared next to the prompt. Jeff, along with Josh and Brad, stared silently at the words:

Josh, gazing at the message, felt his stomach tighten as he realized what it meant. In his mind he was suddenly back at the beginning of last week, when he’d sat on the bed in his own room back home in Eden, the hunting knife in his hands.

Unconsciously, the fingers of his left hand touched the scabs on his right wrist, all that was left to remind him of what he’d done.

Suddenly he understood why Adam had been acting weird the last few days. Josh knew he’d thought about dying for only a few minutes when he was angry. Unlike him, Adam must have been thinking about it for days.

Thinking about it, and making up his mind.

But what had he done? Where was he?

“Wh—Whatcha going to do?” he asked, his voice barely audible.

But Jeff merely turned and walked away.

Just as Jeff Aldrich emerged from his brother’s room, Hildie Kramer appeared at the top of the stairs.

She seemed puzzled when she saw him, but spoke to
him in a soft, steady voice. “Jeff? Could you come downstairs with me, please? There’s something I have to talk to you about.”

A minute later, sitting in his pajamas on the sofa next to Hildie, Jeff listened in silence as she told him that Adam’s body had just been found.

“It was on the railroad tracks,” she said. “I—I suppose it might have been an accident …” Her voice trailed off, and she slipped an arm around Jeff.

The boy stiffened in her embrace.

“No,” he said. “It wasn’t an accident. He left a note on his computer.”

For a long moment Hildie said nothing. Then, after discharging a deep breath from her lungs, she said, “I think I’d better get you to your parents.”

Jeff said nothing, letting her lead him back to his room so he could dress. But even as he began pulling his clothes on, the dream kept coming back to him.

So what Adam had said in the dream was right: he hadn’t chickened out at all.

Oddly, Jeff Aldrich felt proud of his brother.

And even as he felt that wave of pride, he knew it was something he would never tell anyone about.

Not ever.

C
het Aldrich awakened slowly, his eyes automatically seeking out the blue digits of the clock radio on his nightstand: 5:47.

The alarm wasn’t due to go off until six-thirty.

Chet scowled in annoyance. He never wakened so long before the alarm went off; indeed, he invariably woke up a minute before the alarm sounded, squelching it before its irritating beep even had a chance to begin.

But something had disturbed his sleep. He glanced out the window to see the sky, already brightening. Thunder? He dismissed that idea from his mind when he noticed the moon still hanging above the horizon. Then, as he was about to roll over and bury his head in the pillows once more, he heard the ringing of the doorbell, the sound muffled through the closed bedroom door.

Instantly, the last vestiges of sleep left him. He slid out of bed, reaching for the robe he always left draped over the back of the chair in the corner. Pulling it on, he glanced at Jeanette, who was still sound asleep, lying on her left side, her hair spread out on the pillow around her head.

As the doorbell sounded again, Chet hurried downstairs, a growing sense of foreboding looming within him. Someone at the door this early could only mean bad news.

Very bad, his mind corrected, fully awake now. As he reached for the doorknob, and the bell rang yet again, an
idea of what must have happened took shape in his head. His heart had begun to race even before he opened the door and saw Jeff, pale and wide-eyed, trembling on the front porch. Behind him stood Hildie Kramer, flanked by two police officers.

For a moment he had a fleeting feeling of hope—he’d been wrong, and all that had happened was that Jeff had sneaked out in the middle of the night and gotten himself into some kind of trouble. But even as the idea formed, he dismissed it, for he could read Hildie Kramer’s eyes clearly. They weren’t reflecting anger, or even disappointment.

What he saw in them was grief.

Grief, and sympathy.

“What is it?” he asked, opening the door wide so the four people on the porch could come inside the house. When no one said anything, as if each of them was waiting for someone else to pronounce the news they had come to tell him, he knew.

“It’s Adam, isn’t it?” he breathed. “Something’s happened to him.”

It was Hildie Kramer who finally broke the silence of the group. Stepping forward, she gripped his arm, almost as if to steady him. “I’m sorry, Chet,” she told him. “He’s—I’m afraid he’s dead.”

“Dear God,” Chet muttered, the words catching in his throat as he felt himself begin to sink down onto his knees. Only Hildie’s strong hold kept him upright. “No. There’s a mistake.… There has to be—”