Shadow of the Past (17 page)

It was a familiar voice, and Mark felt
his stomach turn. Not this, not again.

Ms. Kennedy came around the corner of
the building, walking under the security light and up the driveway
that ran along the building and out the street. It was perfect,
Mark realized. Isolated and dark, just the way he would like
it.

She was talking on her phone and trying
to put her coat on, not doing either one particularly well. “Yeah,
I know. I know. Look, I’m gonna get off now, but I’ll call you when
I get home okay? Yes, I’m just leaving now, but I was getting some
good stuff down for my book and I wanted to look over some stuff.
For one of my students. He just . . . look, it’s complicated. Can I
tell you about it later? Okay, call you soon.”

She’d gotten her coat on, dropped the
phone in her purse and started digging in it for her keys. The
security light on the building behind her flickered and then went
out. She didn’t notice at first, still walking towards her car and
looking down in her purse for the keys. She pulled them out just as
the light she was passing under went out.

“Seriously?” she said, looking up in
irritation. There were two more lights between her and her car, the
last positioned directly above it.

Her stride remained steady until she
got under the next light and it went out as well. She stopped for a
second, turning and looking around, keys dangling from her hand.
They began to jingle as her hand began to twitch.

She started walking faster, humming to
herself. Her shoes clicking on the pavement echoed off the sides of
the darkened building, she kept looking around to every very dark
corner of the lot. “Amazing grace . . . how sweet the sound . . .”
Her voice was trembling.

She made it around the car to the
driver’s side and was looking all over the lot and not down at the
lock the she tried to find with her key. “That saved a wretch like
me . . . was blind but now I se--” The note jumped up to an ear
piercing shriek as a spear of silver flew from the trees and pinned
her hand into the car door.

He came out from the trees, sprinting
towards her noiselessly and surrounded by a fog of complete
darkness. When he reached her, she was thrashing about and
frantically slapping at the long blade protruding from her hand. He
grabbed a handful of her hair and slammed the side of her head into
the car window.

Her head bounced off the splintered
glass and she stopped moving. She stood still for a moment as he
placed a boot on her wrist and yanked the blade from car and hand
with a swift tug. Her arm fell limply to her side and she staggered
backwards, eyes glassy from the sudden blow and shock running riot
through her brain.

Her eyes went from the blood-pouring
hole in her trembling hand to the man covered in swirling smoke and
flame-filled eyes. She drew in a breath to scream, but he smashed
the cane sheath into her jaw.

She fell backwards, turning just enough
so that she didn’t land on her wounded hand. She rolled over and
pushed herself feebly along the pavement. She didn’t make it more
than a foot before he plunged the blade down into her shoulder,
pinning her to the ground. She screamed, and the Shadow Man clamped
a hand over her mouth to silence her. Her body twitched and flailed
and her eyes grew wide as he twisted the blade ever so slightly in
her shoulder.

“Shhhhh,” he said in the same rumbling
voice Mark had heard under the staircase in his dreams.

She kept trying to pull away, but the
blade in her shoulder and the hand clamped tight on her jaw held
her still. He pulled her closer to his face, dragging her shoulder
further up the blade.

“Who did you tell?”

Her eyes grew wide, and Mark couldn’t
tell if it was from the panic of staring into a face made of
swirling smoke or confusion at the question.

“The boy. Watson. Who did you tell
about him? What have you said?”

She shook her head again and he let her
go, pulling the sword from her shoulder with a practiced flourish.
She shrieked in pain and rolled onto her side.

“I . . . I don’t know what you’re
talking about! Please! Someone help me!”

She tried to push herself away from
him, but with a hand run through on one side and a shoulder
similarly impaled on the other all she could do was inch herself
along the ground.

“I want to know who you talked to about
him. What you said. Who you told it to. What . . . suspicions you
shared with some other nosy little maggot.”

She just shook her head wildly, inching
along the ground. “Help me! Someone help me!” Her feet finally
found purchase on the ground and she began to push herself up to
stand. The Shadow Man rolled his head in annoyed impatience and
drove the blade into the back of her knee, forcing her back to the
ground.

“Who did you tell? What did you
say?”

He swung blade again, cutting her
across the small of her back. He swung again, catching her ear and
sending it flying in Mark’s direction. She flailed again and he
stepped around to stand in front of her. He pressed a foot down on
her wounded hand, focusing her attention back on him.

“I just want to know, and then I’ll
disappear into the night like a bad dream. Just tell me what I want
to know.”

She tugged at her trapped hand, but
Mark could see she was fading. Shock and blood loss may well kill
her before the Shadow Man did. “I don’t . . . I don’t know what you
mean.”

He squatted down, and she winced as he
put more pressure on her hand. “You talked to the boy. You watched
him squirm and lie and you knew he was lying. You suspected and
maybe you said something to someone. Maybe you said ‘That Mark
Watson boy is trouble, and we should take care of that
trouble.’”

She shook her head. “No. No, I don’t
know what you’re talking about.”

He slammed his fist down
onto the earless side of her head, causing her head to bounce
sickeningly off the pavement. “Yes you do. I can see it, see right
through you and I know when you’re lying to me. You knew that there
was a problem with him, and you were going to tell someone about
it. About your
concerns
. Who?”

She stopped shaking her head. From the
looks of her she had stopped most things altogether. “No . . . no
one. I was . . . but there was a meet. A meeting. I was going to,
but . . . I won’t. I think I was miss. Miss . . . taken. Good kid.
Good boy.”

The Shadow Man threw his head back and
howled. It took Mark a moment but he realized the Shadow Man was
laughing. He stood up and swung his blade across her trapped wrist
and severed it.

She didn’t even react this time. She
just lay there and watched more of her blood pump weakly onto the
already soaked pavement.

“Oh, he’s a good boy. Yes, a very good
boy, right you are. Hopefully now he’s a boy that knows when to
keep his mouth shut.” The Shadow Man turned and was looking right
at him. Or right where Mark would be if he was real.

He was bigger than he was when Mark had
seen him at Clara’s. The flames of his eyes were brighter and the
curls of smoke on his body darker and stronger than they were
before. He placed the blade down into the pool of blood forming at
her severed wrist. Just like at Clara’s, the blood made its way up
the blade until it was completely covered.

The Shadow Man turned and walked around
to her car. He smashed the driver’s side window with his cane, and
then slid the blade back into place. There was a rumbling, retching
sound, and then he spat a small glob of fire onto the seat. It
sizzled and hissed before catching the seat on fire.

The Shadow Man turned and walked back
into the clutch of trees, leaving Mark to watch as Carrie Kennedy
bled to death by the light of her burning car.

Chapter
Seventeen

“Mr. Watson?” Ms. Olivio
called

Mark turned away from the window, but
before he could respond he saw past her and out the doorway of the
classroom. It was Detective Prescott, standing in the hallway and
doing a poor job of nonchalance. Mark had been waiting for this
since showing up at school, trembling with the pitiful hope that
what he’d seen last night hadn’t been real.

Of course it was, and even though it
looked like most of the emergency vehicles had moved along before
school had started, the back parking lot was still closed off and
there were plenty of teachers and staff with red-ringed eyes and
far-off stares. The most that anyone else knew was that there had
been an accident and Ms. Kennedy had died. Few people thought it
had anything to do with what was going on in the back lot, and no
one had said anything about murder.

Remember that, stupid.
Nobody here knows anything about murder. Let’s keep it between us,
the cops, and the shadow demons.

“They need to see you down in the
office,” Ms. Olivio said.

“Sure,” Mark said, picking up his
backpack and jacket as he headed towards the door. There were a few
low “oohs” and “ahhs,” but probably less than there would’ve been
since the now classic Bike Helmet Episode.

“Hey,” Mark said when Ms. Olivio closed
the classroom door behind him. “What’re you doing here?”

“I need to talk to you, is that okay?”
He took his badge out from the chest pocket of his jacket and let
it hang from there.

“I guess. What’s going on?”

“I think it’d be best if we did this
downstairs in the office. I don’t think we want to talk about this
out in the hallway.”

“What’s going on?” Mark asked again,
his voice trembling.

“Let’s talk about it downstairs,
okay?”

“Sure,” Mark said, and they were silent
until they got down to the basement office. A couple of the
secretaries looked away when he made eye contact and Mr. Lafayette
glared at Mark intently as they walked into his office. Detective
Prescott nodded at him and then closed the door behind
them.

“Have a seat,” the detective said,
taking one of the ones in front of Mr. Lafayette’s desk.

“Mark, I’m sure you’ve heard that
something happened here last night. Do you know what that
was?”

“No. I mean, I heard some kids talking
in homeroom. They said there was some sort of accident and
something happened to Ms. Kennedy?”

The detective sighed and reached into
his pocket, bringing out a small notebook. “Well, something
happened to Ms. Kennedy, but it was no accident. She was
murdered.”

“Oh my God,” Mark said, struggling with
the balance of sounding surprised and not sounding too surprised.
“How?”

“The details aren’t important, except
for the fact that there are some similarities between her death and
Clara’s. I wanted to talk to you about it, not just because of
that, but because they said that the two of you had a pretty loud
confrontation in here yesterday and then you ran off. Is that
true?”

“Well, I met with her and everything
like she asked me too but I don’t think it was a confrontation. And
I didn’t run off, I just left.” Unlike last time they spoke,
Detective Prescott seemed totally closed off. The nice “I’m your
buddy McGruff the crime dog, here are some tissues” cop was
gone.

“Mark, I’m going to level with you. I’d
like to think this is just a coincidence, but there are two things
that connect this killing and Clara’s. One of them is you, and
you’re my only lead here. If you’re in some kind of trouble, or if
you’re scared of something or someone, I want you to tell me about
it. Before someone else gets hurt.”

“Shouldn’t I have a lawyer or
something? I mean, I don’t even know what’s going on here.” He was
getting hot, and the stupid chair was making him slide
everywhere.

“Mark, if I you want to I can take you
down to the station and we can wait for a lawyer there, but I don’t
think we have to do that. I just want to talk. I can tell you’re
real scared, and--”

“Of course I’m scared!” Mark yelled,
perhaps a little too loudly. He flinched, but the detective was
stoic. “I mean, one minute I’m in English and the next minute I’m
down here in the Assistant Principal’s office talking about murder!
I mean, this is pretty crazy! What you want me to say?”

The detective just looked at him, and
before he could say anything, there was a bellow from out in the
office. A very familiar bellow.

“Where is he?”

The detective turned to look out the
window, and Mark answered the unasked question. “My Uncle Joe. I
think he’s here to pick me up. Or kill me.”

Detective Prescott sighed and opened
the door, just in time to see Joe practically steamroll over Mr.
Lafayette, who’d been trying to keep him out. Joe wasn’t having any
of it and was in mid finger-wagging bellow as the two of them got
out of the office. As soon as Joe saw Mark he dodged around Mr.
Lafayette with surprising agility.

“Will someone tell me what the fuck is
going on here?” Mark had to resist the urge to crawl under a table,
no matter how lucky his arrival had been.

“Mr. Nelson,” the detective said,
getting Joe’s attention. “I’m Detective David Prescott from the
Cedar Ridge Police Department. We met when I came to talk to Mark
about his friend’s death. I just wanted a moment to talk to your
nephew about an incident that happened here last night.”