Read Online The Shadows: A Novel by Alex North - Free Book Online

had found me sitting at the desk. That was always my favorite part of the day. Chores and homework done; the house silent; my parents asleep. I would sneak out of bed, click on the lamp, and work on my stories. I had so many notebooks back then. I kept them hidden away in the desk drawer, because my father wouldn’t have hesitated to read them if he found them, and I could easily imagine the sneer on his face if he did.
    But that night, the notebook before me had been new.
    Events that lunchtime had panned out exactly the way I’d expected them to. Charlie had decided we were all going to do something, and so eventually we had agreed to go along with it. Even the process had been predictable. James had been interested, which meant that Billy—keen not to be replaced in Charlie’s affections—had joined in too. That left me on my own, and eventually I’d given in.
    Lucid dreams.
    As much as I’d disparaged it at the time, the thought of it had intrigued me. Looking around my dusty, threadbare bedroom, and thinking about the misery of my home life and the flat, gray, beaten-down world around me, the idea of being able to escape it all and experience whatever I wanted was appealing. It had felt like it might be the only way I ever would.
    Charlie had told us the first thing we needed to do was keep a dream diary. After a week, we should read through the entries andlook for patterns. That way we would be more likely to recognize them in future, at which point we would realize we were dreaming and be able to take control.
    Lying in bed that night, I had stared up at the bland ceiling for a while, then switched off the light with the cord that hung down by the headboard. Charlie had explained we needed to tell ourselves something before we went to sleep each night. It was incubation —a signal to the subconscious—and while it might feel as though the words were going nowhere, something deep inside us would hear them and respond.
    I will remember my dreams, I had told myself.
    And it had worked. When I’d woken up the next morning, I’d remembered far more than usual. When I sat at my desk with the notebook first thing, images came tumbling out, each one leading to an earlier one, as though I were pulling myself back along the rope of the night.
    In the dream I remembered most vividly, I had been in a strange outdoor market. It was night there, and I was running down narrow aisles, past stalls that were too dark to see properly. There were people bustling around me, as gray and indistinct as ghosts, and I knew that I needed to get out—that there was something else in there with me. I could hear it stampeding angrily and randomly along pathways close by, hunting me like a minotaur in a labyrinth. And yet every passage looked the same, and whatever turns I took there seemed to be no way out.
    And I knew I couldn’t escape from this place by myself.
    I was in the dark market.
    But it wasn’t just twenty-five-year-old memories that filled the house now. There was also the silence hanging in every room, which seemed heavier and more judgmental by the day. What had my mother meant by what she’d said? What was in the house?
    I tried to tell myself it didn’t matter—that the past was somethingthat could be left alone—but there were moments when it seemed like the house and I were engaged in a war of attrition, and I couldn’t help but feel that on some level it was winning. And that something bad was going to happen when I found out what.
    Red hands everywhere.
    It was on the fourth day that I saw her.
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    I was sitting in the pub at the time, a half-finished beer on the table in front of me. I reached out to pick up the bottle, running my finger over the cool condensation on the glass, and I saw the door across from me open.
    A woman walked in, framed by a wedge of warm afternoon sunshine. I only caught a sideways glimpse of her face, and the half jolt of recognition was left unfulfilled when she immediately turned