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Shadow Casting. Paul Kane
Читать онлайн.Название Shadow Casting
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9781909640870
Автор произведения Paul Kane
Жанр Ужасы и Мистика
Издательство Ingram
Not a war, not a bomb exploded by people too blind to see the consequences of their actions, nor a deadly disease genetically engineered or originating from birds. Just a kiss: that most simple expression of emotion. But, as many have discovered in the past, it is often the simplest of things that can cause the most devastation.
And whole empires have been known to crumble because of a “simple” thing called love.
Stanley Bennett never listened.
He’d never listened as a kid, when his parents had told him not to hang around with Darren Walters and his crowd—who smoked like exhaust pipes, drank like long-distance swimmers, and eventually weaned him on to a hundred a day and multiple cans of lager a night. Never listened when his mates told him not to touch Rita Hepworth with a bargepole, and had regretted that night of fumbling around in the back of his dad’s Ford when Rita announced she was pregnant and they were bloody well getting married or she’d tell her brothers about it (who’d rearrange his limbs and break his face—or vice versa, whichever he preferred). Never listened to Rita when she told him to cut down on the fried foods, all those burgers and chips and kebabs that were bloating him up to almost twenty stone. “You work all day at a desk and don’t get any exercise,” she moaned at him, but he was usually too busy tucking into a curry and watching the match on TV—that was when he could hear a thing over the bawling of their three-year-old. He never listened when she told him they needed a smoke detector in the house, and then one weekend he dropped to sleep on the couch with a lit cigarette in his hand and set fire to the living room. Rita and little Michael barely escaped with their lives and left him not long afterwards, once her brothers had given Stanley a good kicking.
He took no notice, either, when he’d collapsed at work and the doctors had told him that if he didn’t stop drinking he’d almost certainly be looking at liver failure and then ... well, who knows? The sick leave just gave him more time to eat, drink and watch TV. Stanley never listened when his son, now eighteen, visited to announce that Rita had been diagnosed with breast cancer and was asking to see him. Never listened when Michael returned to let him know she had passed away and that he never wanted to see Stanley again as long as he lived.
Never listened ever in his entire life: except once.
Only once, in the urinals of the George and Dragon, did Stanley listen. He’d just finished his fourth pint of the evening and felt the sudden urge to empty his forty-five-year-old bladder. That urge turned into a desperate need, and as he was at the urinal pissing as many toxins out of his system as his body could eject in one go, the need became a sharp pain that spread throughout the whole of his body, sending him rigid.
It was at that point Stanley felt a hand on his shoulder. He was about to turn and say something like, “Can’t a fella get a bit of privacy around here?” when he realised the hand didn’t belong to anyone even remotely human. It wasn’t the hand of Death, of that he was certain: for one thing he wouldn’t listen to Death even if it walked up to him sharpening its scythe and beckoning a bony finger. Stanley Bennett would tell the Grim Reaper to just fuck off because he was going to live for a long, long while yet. For another, it wasn’t cold like Death’s hand should be—it was warm, and it squeezed tightly.
But Stanley Bennett did listen: he listened as the figure just behind him leaned in close to his ear and said these words in a deep, rich voice: “It is your time.”
And Stanley nodded his head sagely as if it made all the sense in the world to him.
It was dark in that place. Dark and wet and ... safe.
Though Jenny had seen nothing of the outside world yet, she knew much. Somehow she knew that her mother and father loved her and wanted her, more than anything in the entire world. They had been waiting so long, trying so hard. They had even been visiting the hospital so that the doctors could help them. Years and years, and then finally, at long last, the news they had been hoping for. Jenny knew how happy this made them: how proud her father Terry was, how complete her mother Helen now felt. She knew she would be cared for and given as much love and attention as anyone could ever want ... So why was she hesitating?
Why, after months of hearing them talk to her, play music to her, having the proper scans and tests, and Helen eating just the right foods that should make Jenny healthy and strong—apart from when her mum had gone through that early phase of scoffing Marmite and Salad Cream sandwiches—should she now want to remain exactly where she was? Perhaps it was because, along with the knowledge that these two people would give her the best home she could possibly wish for, came another awareness: that there were things out there beyond her parents’ control. In spite of the many times they would promise never to let anything bad happen to her, they wouldn’t be able to stop it. Because along with the good things she was about to experience would come so many bad things too. It was inevitable, and Jenny knew this also. That was the way things were, the way they always had been.
So she dug her heels in, steadfastly refused to come out—ignoring the struggle that was going on not far away, the clamour of voices, the quakes that shook the small space where she was curled up with her eyes closed tight. She was being evicted from her temporary home and there wasn’t a thing she could do about it. But more than anything she was frightened, of what was out there awaiting her. Of the unknown.
Then the voice spoke to her, soft and low. It told her not to worry, that everything would be all right. “It is your time,” whispered the voice.
Jenny let go, allowed herself to be dragged unceremoniously out of Helen’s womb, accompanied by the amniotic fluid she’d been breathing for nine months. It was then Jenny realised that she would forget all of this, forget everything she knew, and start over from scratch. She would not simply know things anymore, she would have to learn them, as she grew, as she lived ... and wasn’t there something a bit exciting about that? More exciting than scary? For her the adventure was just beginning. It was her time, it—
Jenny was struck on the back; hard. It forced the last of the fluid out of her lungs and she took her first breath, screaming loudly. As she opened her eyes—her vision blurred, hardly able to see at all—she thought she caught a glimpse of the figure that had been in the room standing beside her mother, on the opposite side to her father (who was now crying tears of pure joy).
But then the figure was gone and Jenny had other things on her mind, like the sensory overload of being wrapped in a blanket and passed over to Helen.
“There we are,” she heard one of the nurses say, “a gorgeous baby girl. Any idea what you’re going to call her?”
“We were thinking of Jennifer,” said Helen.
“Why, that’s a lovely name,” replied the nurse.
She found him on the hillside, overlooking the graveyard.
He sat on the back of a peeling green bench, looking down on the small group gathered around one particular grave: a handful of figures dressed in mourning black. She knew all of them instantly. One in particular, a young man in his twenties, with his hands clasped in front of him, head bowed solemnly. His name was Michael.
Yang was staring at them intently, his single black eye set deep into his bleached face like a nugget of coal on a snowman. The light breeze was blowing his creamy fringe and the loose alabaster robes he wore, his silken belt flapping as he leaned forward, one hand rubbing his chin.
“Hello Yin,” he said on her approach, without ever taking his eye off the scene.
“I thought I would find you here,” she said, walking towards him and sitting down on the lower part of the bench. Yin straightened out her own dark robes, pushing a rogue strand of ebony hair back over one