Welcome to my first effort serialising my work. I’ve been working on this sci-fi/magical realism story one way or another for over half my life. It was the first large writing project I really committed to, when I was ten and between schools, and I have my father to thank for inspiring and supporting me with that. The chapters were very short, with no memorable aim in my mind, but I was experimenting with imagery and ideas that appealed to me at the time. The story grew and evolved when I returned to it at 14, updating the written work to my sensibilities at the time as I converted it to a playscript - when I first conceived the ending to this story in its first form. Thanks to my classmates that helped with putting on the first scene, which the opening to this chapter describes.
After leaving school, I began working on this final novella form, taking sentences and themes from both versions whilst adding new twists and concepts. Then I adapted that into a screenplay. It seems every four years I come back to this story and it continues to serve my current creative drive. Now I’ve written a short story and two novel-length works in the same universe, and I’m currently working on two stand-alone sequels. It’s time to share this beginning, in this form. Oh, there is one more thing to add…
Last year, I returned to the sites that somehow were fated to be the setting of the opening few sections of the story - the areas nearby the village where I went to primary school. Since I was ten, I suppose, those places just stuck in my mind as the imagery associated with the story. And they fit perfectly with what I wanted to do at age eighteen, adapting, and keeping, some of my ten-year-old words, and side characters from the playscript version. Anyway, I recorded the journey the characters take at the opening of each of the first three chapters, and in an attempt to make some spooky, experimental art, I added a robotic voice narrating the text. I’ll put the whole chapter below if you don’t want to sit through that video, but if you do, skip to the divider to pick up from where the video ends. Hope you enjoy!
One
They came towards him.
As he shivered in the morbid cold of the field, he felt a chilling breeze creep down his back.
He scanned around the field, squinting in the moonlight. He looked at the full moon then saw a faint figure in the distance, then another and another. They were coming towards him. Staggering, moving, coming downhill.
Across the midnight field, their bare feet cracking the frozen grass and the moonlight reflecting from their eyes and they came, arms outstretched as if sleepwalking, and their grey ragged gowns shifted to and fro with the rhythm of their reaching strides.
Closer, they came, swaying in the wind.
“Hello. Who are you?” he called. But there was no reply.
His heart started to beat faster as he started to sweat with fear.
He saw their skin. It was as white as the shining moon above him.
Their shadows entombed in a blue-black trance. Their faces of bitter porcelain stained with starlight.
He saw their featureless fortunes.
And he could hear the grass as it shattered.
They came closer and their eyes did not move and the air about their bodies was held in coldness and did not stir. He didn’t know their purpose.
And the moonlight struck their skin.
As they neared him, one at the back froze, motionless, and gaped at him and then… cracked and shattered like glass. The shards of broken dreams hit the ground embedding themselves in the mud. He gazed, shocked with what had happened in front of him as others advanced.
Then one more stumbled and fell and then another and as their arms touched the ground they shattered into sharp fragments and their bodies exploded like detonated mannequins and this made others fall and explode as their limbs flew into them and their gowns fell to the ground like hunted birds.
One survived.
There was one that didn’t shatter, one that didn’t break, one that did not splinter. It just stared into his eyes.
As she neared, whilst others cracked and fell in shattered pieces, barely turning to face her, he noticed her translucent skin. She had no visible organs or muscles inside and instead of blood, ribbons of blindingly bright luminous yellow light wound up and down her unseen bones like vines climbing up tree trunks.
The fear left him.
The coldness retreated.
She glowed, her body, inside, and it became more powerful as she neared him.
He reached out. So did she.
Her body glowing like a lamp scaring away the darkest dark, the night, they touched and something incredible happened to him.
The moon lifted.
Inside his clouds were swept away.
Scattered tops of cold rises stood frozen and were moving in a warm trance. The filaments of white and frosty crystal danced.
An explosion of vibrant light beamed from their inner souls; sparks of light danced around them.
And then he saw.
He looked at his finger; light shone from the end like a torch. Then his hand started glowing then his arm, his chest. Light crept down his other arm like waves filtering onto a beach then ran down his legs. His head lit up like a beacon.
Now they both glowed with the same amazing light that had entwined her soul before.
Inside, he felt different, like there was something new within him.
They separated. Gently, he let go. He was astonished with the light that shone from him.
There was a force, a bond.
The moon sped by.
She held his hand again and started to walk. She led him. He had no other choice. He could feel her light within him. And then, he stopped, abruptly letting go. He felt he was being pulled against his will as if by an invisible ribbon.
He didn’t know what to do, only for a short moment, then he followed. He was certain that he had made the right decision.
There was no other choice.
The man slowly blinks awake, like a wounded, malnourished bear awakening from hibernation. He sits up, raising the driver’s seat of a mint-green Chevrolet Tacuma he had assumed was his. His memories of last night are foggy, and before that there is only a void in his mind. But that dream—of a boy, and then a girl, in a field of ghostly children—is as clear as a blue summer’s day in his mind.
It feels like more than a dream, some sense within him like the migrating patterns of birds telling him he needs to find that glowing boy. There is no other choice. Some might think that that had been a younger him in that dream, but although he had shared in the experience, like some divine miracle event, it had felt like he was removed, like a seer through the crystal ball that was his mind. Maybe it was all just imagery of a troubled unconscious. He’s gone mad, with no memory of the decades of his life. It is as if he had been awoken from a long coma last night, but at the same time, only just born into this world, appearing in his car with no bindings, no ties to a life before.
He had known then, sitting behind the wheel, that the car should have worked, but nothing had seemed to function, and his basic instinct had told him to lower back his seat and go to sleep, to then dream that strange real-unreal dream. With no memories to trouble him, and a warm jacket he could take off and lay over himself, it had been easy to drift off in the silence of night.
Now the sun is trying to shine through the clouds and the windscreen, but it is still silent. No sound of birds in the surrounding trees or rows of hedges of the country lane. No wildlife is visible at all. Nothing.
Trying now through fresh eyes, none of the car’s buttons work at all. He gets out of the car, popping open the bonnet, realising this must be some action he’s worked before. As he checks all the parts he can recall, his mind tells him everything’s dead. He just knows it’s dead, like the silence around him. He slams shut the bonnet. And that word sticks with him. Dead.
He’ll have to find another way to reach the one in his dream.
Donning his jacket, he checks the wide brown thing’s pockets for some other clues. And the only thing he can find is a photograph—half a photo, looking as if it’s been ripped down the middle. He rubs his eyes.
The man casts his hand through short, slightly ragged dark-grey hair, before bringing it to his sharp stubbled chin. The face of a young boy looks back at him, with a long fringe, a freckled face, leaning slightly, trees behind him. He’s smiling. Happy, so happy and young. And the man can’t help but smile too, almost scoffing at himself.
Can this boy be his son? Or is he the all-important one in his dream? Seen only in a strange mix of third person behind and within his head, that could only exist in a mind’s conjured dreaming experience…
Lingering in the silence with the photo for minutes before the rustling wind down the lane blows away his frozen-bodied thoughts, he pockets the torn rectangle, its slight shine catching the slight light offered more as an omnipresent glow through the greying white masses shifting over him. But the face is now etched into his mind.
He checks the back seats. In the little drinks’ holder there’s half a green packet of softmints, but most of the space, the seat in front of him, is taken up by a featureless cardboard box. He feels a little like the light brown box—a shell held only together by its design, contents uncertain. Swinging open the back door, he checks inside, as if finding something there will confirm he is less empty than he thinks, more than a structure, with only a drive to find the one in his dream. And the boy in that photo.
In the box, his eyes are first drawn to a stuffed animal, a little pink bear, dirtied and darkened from years of use, with black eyes, a small, almost-flat, heart-shaped sewn nose, and a red top. Strange. It lies on a woman’s silky flowing blue and green patterned scarf, as does another photo, this one of a distant figure on a white sand beach, a woman. Of course, he doesn’t recognise her, especially with the distance the picture was taken from. And there’s a silver cross on a chain. Was he religious? Or did all of these belong to a wife? A partner? But why the bear? Unless it was someone’s in their youth? Maybe it had been the boy in the photo’s, but it seems unlikely.
Deciding they are all important ties to a life before yesterday evening, he manages to pack them all within his pockets to take on his journey to find the one. It has to be underway soon, as soon as possible. But the man takes the time to strip the car of its loose change, sweets and little green first aid kit from underneath a picnic blanket in the boot, stuffing his jacket and khaki trousers.
Somehow, he knows which way to head down the thin, cracked lane—the opposite way he had been driving the night before. The winding route between fields takes him onwards. The only sound is the wind and the steps of his boots; the only life he passes is the bracken and the brambles.
He marches with a purpose, not so much a cognitive direction but more a spiritual pilgrimage, a weary walk full of sighs, the last of those mints powering his movements for now. But water—he needs water.
The first sign of any manmade structure appears as a wooden fence, and then a gate to a farm complex on his left. He slows to look upon the scene. The wreckage. A red tractor has been driven into the side of the closest barn, the wooden wall shattered and the corrugated metal slid off. But, behind that, the farmhouse still smoulders, smoking signals no one understands. Flames have licked the stone walls, and the timber frame has collapsed inwards. No entry.
There are still no signs of life.
But perhaps the people fled.
He walks on, the ruins shocking but not a distraction he can afford. He knows the world should not be lifeless, that the destruction is terrible, not a normal occurrence, but so far it is all this world has to offer. If he can just find the one…
Repeating that dream, hoping that those soulless pale children were only some representation of another struggle, he soon enters a small village. The brick houses lay like empty coffins, some with doors open, windows a patchwork of opened and closed curtains. Flowers in beds by lawns or in hanging baskets remain bright, but there are no lights on.
Another abandoned settlement, it seems. Maybe he is the only creature left in this barren world. But a few dark patches spot the pavement and road ahead beside cars or by the doors as he gets closer and trudges past.
He stops, turning to bend down and look at the ash. The man sifts a pinch of the flaky powder through his fingers. The ash doesn’t smell burnt, or of anything at all. He lifts his head to properly take in all the piles. Some of the dark patches are larger, as if made by a larger quantity of… people?
The substance he holds in his hands is human remains.
The man rapidly stands, dropping the ash and staggering back a few steps, whisking his head all around while violently ridding the clinging substance from his hands as if it is a swarm of baby spiders burrowing into his skin, wiping off the last few cursed flecks on his trousers.
What the hell has happened? Because that’s what this is like—hell. All that is left of this village’s inhabitants, and maybe all the animals too, is dark remnants, like ashy shadows after a nuclear blast, left on the ground with no owner.
He jogs over to an open car on a driveway, stepping over a pile of ash by its open driver’s door. Frantically, he twists the key again and again, breathing heavily, turning more and more vigorously, like a man possessed. Nothing. Dead.
The man trudges up to the open front door.
“Hello? Anyone there?” he calls inside.
Only the soft echoes of his desperate voice reply weakly.
He walks and peers through the laced curtains of their front window. Through that glass and white veil, all he can see is a patch of ash on the sofa, specks of grey death filling the gaps between cushions.
Soon, he is through that village, and another, as the sun sets on an empty land. All the houses are empty. All the cars are dead or locked. There is nothing but quiet. He has eaten food, a nice meal deal from a petrol station’s shop, where he had first washed his hands of rotten guilt in a dark cramped toilet, and has guzzled down water. It doesn’t feel like stealing when he stuffs his pockets with snacks and small bottles.
At that station, he had had to cover his nose with his jacket sleeve as he passed a hose-formed pool of spilled petrol. Ash had mixed with the sickly fluid. And further down the road had been an ash-coated dog collar…
Now he takes a right, coming up to a T-junction where there is a brick and timber bus shelter. It could be his resting place for tonight—it just seems wrong to sleep in a disappeared person’s home, or take from them, like wearing a dead man’s clothes. He doesn’t want to glimpse a lost life inside a home.
The shelter is filled with books on wooden shelving units to take and give back, and notices. Posters tell of clubs, local schemes and a lost border collie. Now it seems everyone is lost. Everyone but him. Why? He asks himself over and over, whilst his eyes scan but don’t take in the various spines of fiction and non-fiction, and his hands empty a large metre-square cardboard box of more donated contents. Perhaps the double-layered box will provide a slight flicker of warmth for the cold night ahead.
After preparing a bed on the floor there with the large box and his jacket, he chomps down on another digestive and swallows all the crumbs down with bottled water. The drive is still within him, but he needs to rest, to be strong and ready when he finally finds this glowing boy. Curling up, he clutches the bear and scarf to himself for warmth. He stares at the photos in the darkness.
Maybe he’ll see their faces tonight.
Thank you for reading this chapter of Children of Shadows! If you can think of someone who’d enjoy this story, please consider sharing it. And feel free to leave a comment letting me and others know what you think of this chapter.
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Cheers,
Harvey
I can already see the silences (nameless) and the emptiness in the fears, the retreating ... all connected to nothingness. It makes a mysterious atmosphere to get us started. Thanks for sharing your work!
This is awesome harvey!