The Shadow Friend

by Alex North

I’ve been here before, I thought. I recognize this.

Ditto And the spidey web would like me to say that dreams do mull over your thoughts while your asleep, checking them for validation, attaching them to walls, filing away others, so running away down a long dark corridor could be seen as your running away from things in your life instead if dealing with then head on. And what’s he been doing? Exactly that.

She sighed and stood up. ‘I have to go.’

Way to make a girl run away!

I found myself resentful of the way the experiment began taking over our lives.

At that age it’s the kind of thing that will, they’ve discovered something that to them is very special and the want to dive deeper, investigate it, if you will.

but they did – or at least, they claimed to.

Now THAT is copy catting, they just follow on from each other making it all fit.\

They never showed each other their dream diaries after the first time.

Exactly

we were all building towards something.

The spidey web wants to know if there was anything BEFORE them? Because who says it started with them, could/would be a good plot twist, even the little red fishies are nodding their gills ;)

‘I’ll catch you up,’ I said. ‘Why?’ ‘I just need to talk to someone.’ ‘Okay.’

That would never EVER work with female characters, there would be yelling, sniffling, tears & “But whys?” all over the show! With males it seems so much simpler, Mars & Venus, that author definitely played the right cards!

Do you want to sit down, or are you planning to stand?’

And she said that HE was the decisive one!?

‘Anything happen at yours last night?’ she said.

The spidey web feels something just underneath making it float lightly in the air, and it doesn’t like it, not one single bit.

When the bus arrived, he got on first. I always led the two of us up to the back of the top deck – because that felt like the place you were meant to sit at our age

Heh, so that’s obviously a global thing, it was done here too, sometimes you’d get there first, until the ‘cool crowd’ arrived and basically pushed you off the seats. Oh school days. I’m so FN happy that your so far away.

‘Did you hear anything?’ he said. ‘In the night?’

Not in the present world, however…

cleaning the door this morning as a way of stubbornly pretending she was right.

However… Setting a scene? Putting all the pieces into play so on opening night everything would be ready for his starring role? CC?

even if I didn’t quite understand the meaning yet,

Umm the little red fishies are wondering how you could not know, red hands in the attic, blood on the other door, and he’s “maybe”?? Maybe, pun absolutely intended. He needs to shake himself up a little, get some of those loose screws out

But if someone was watching me,

Maybe it’s HER?…

ones who imagined he really had achieved the impossible.

Horses & Zebras, I think the author is very VERY good at blurring that line slightly. Kudos.

The idea of that scared me.

Should of been The idea of that scared the shit out of me. Swearing is allowed now and then and this is one of those times

and was now returning to its home

Figuratively I guess

Jesus, Amanda thought as she arrived in Gritten. The world around her seemed to have completely changed in the space of twenty minutes. Not long ago, she had been driving along tranquil country lanes, surrounded by sunny idyllic fields, thinking: this isn’t such a bad place. Whereas now there were just empty industrial estates and shabby houses and shops on all sides, and what she was thinking was: this is a fucking shithole.

I’ve thought before too here in ‘tranquil’ New Zealand, you don’t have to drive all that far to hit the countryside anymore and the car yards, factory’s & McDonald’s seem to get closer and closer, if I could a dream would be to live far far FAR away from anyone, but my now decidedly rocky health has meant that in the past it was close to the hospital & I could walk there in 5 or so minutes, now the ambulances are close! I sadly kid not, but life’s too short to hold too many pity parties. Oh a footnote regarding the encroachment of humanity in my local area, I can remember as a kid we would drive out a little way into the country to go strawberry picking. I’d imagine that’s something that a lot of others could remember too, and not even just here. It was the best thing, going out under the hot sun, take your own bowls or buckets and filling them as high as you could, your fingers sticky & dyed red. You’d be all red and scratched but you wouldn’t care and everyone and everything smelt like strawberries. Sadly where once these beautiful & idyllic farms were, there’s now mega malls, 3 of them and the only ‘fun’ way some kids get berries is buy from a roadside stand some farms have, but that’s fading away too, otherwise it’s ludicrously overpriced berries from the supermarket which are not the best, many already have mould or are green. Such a shame that generations of kids will never have that experience, I don’t think even an iPod could equal that. And yes as I write this it’s just occurred to me that the above regarding red hands is a deliciously apt term.

peeling so badly it looked like something

I don’t highlight full sentences sometimes so I don’t potentially ruin anything for another reader and I err on the cautious side. But as for this, not bad at all for the author finding a sneaky way to tail something on to the others, I noticed at least!

Keep calm.

Yes, calm is good & then get the F out of there, I’m totally in with female cops, but she shouldn’t be alone in there, regardless of male/female, but she’s smaller and any knife wielding psycho could over power her too easily.

slipped her phone into her jacket pocket and took out her keys, bunching them between her knuckles.

Really? Is this all cops have over in the UK? How about a baton? Pepper spray? Taser? To name but a few?

You can do this, she imagined her father saying. I raised you better.

No he wouldn’t of, any father would say “what in the hell are you thinking?”

strange sensation you have when it feels like you’re being watched.

Part of our dna, it used to be a bit wilder in the good old days, our evolution was still under construction and being aware of sounds around you didn’t mean just checking you’d locked the back door, more like checking the sabre toothed tiger wasn’t looking for it’s dinner.

I had a sudden realization of how alone I was out here, and how far the four of us were from another living soul.

I would act just good enough that I could get out of there, and then either/or stay the hell away from them and/or tell an adult I trusted, this is a warm up act in slow motion…

holding the thing Charlie had given me in the woods that afternoon.

The webs been thinking… Charlie is just a sad little boy underneath all of this, one whose found a little group of friends that will believe him which empowers him to keep pushing & pushing, with every lie believed he gets bolder and before long he’s believing them himself. Everything will be made up, planned, set in motion so it folds out as perfect as a perfectionist could perfect it. Yes 3 words, but all 3 have slightly different perspectives and connotations and hey I landed in another P word to perfect it, make that two ;)

I still had no idea what

I think when your young, the idea of death, is something far away that happens to old people, not you or people you know, love. So the concept is just alien, no matter what someone says, until something happens, then the curtains pulled back & Sigourney Weavers standing there with the most baddass machine gun you’ve ever seen!

alien

Don’t you love it when this sort of thing strikes? Just 1 word, from 2 people, but the oddity is compelling, interesting & just coincidental? Who knows..

My mother was resolutely old-school and was still getting paper copies of everything.

Mine too, although saying that, I’ve ticked everything for digital, bank, council, groceries etc and yet they still send paper ones too, so I don’t know what’s the point sometimes!

ago. What had we talked about? I realized I couldn’t remember. Nothing, probably – just a standard catch-up, which I’d doubtless hurried to the end of without thinking. It had always been my mother who phoned me, and time seemed to pass between those infrequent calls without me ever feeling a need to make contact myself.

Is the author channeling me or something? As that’s my Mum & mine relationship to a T, minus any stupid arguments that blow up then blow over with me usually saying sorry as I know she won’t! My Mum lives a little way away and gets free phone calls to me and I get charged by the minute, so that’s an excuse fair & square (what that even means I have no clue) Also my mother has a life, with lots of friends and different things to do at her retirement village, she’s always doing something so even if I try she’s usually out, on her way out, or cooking, baking etc etc, she’s one busy woman! Me, well it’s me, my blackbirds and that’s it, so nothing happens that’d even be worthwhile even dialing her let alone talking. Maybe I should ask if she minds rather than assuming it. Thanks to the author for a good idea, and hope my massively TMI notes don’t freak anyone out!

‘That’s okay, Mum.’

I would of thought and done the exact same, she was looking for a window in, she knew the unhappiness of their lives, and while she shouldn’t have, she definitely should have too, maybe if parents of kids who take a gun to school, had looked for just a similar reason, well, maybe everyone would still be alive.

‘I’m so proud of you.’

I never had that with my Dad, maybe the fact he was unconscious when I got there and he never woke up, why? No one told me a damn thing until it was too late :| I’ll never get it from Mum, I can say that, bet my house on it As for the love comment just below, my Mum wouldn’t say it if her life depended on it, can say that with absolute clarity too, she doesn’t even like it being said to her, but every time I get off the phone from her I say it just after hanging up

‘I love you,’ I said.

Everyone has a fucking box in their head to hide things in.

Suitcases … and I have a fully matching set, the spidey web has the smallest one, she likes to be in dark small places where no one can see her, but she can see them, coming. The little red fishies have the biggest, lots of room to swim around, bouncing invisible balls they call ideas & when they have a good one, they contact the web, see what she thinks before I get told. Btw I’m really NOT as crazy as the above looks! Just a bit of fun ;)

Sharper still.

Actually I’d say he’d be stupid if he didn’t

A sense of how many lives had been ruined by what happened here, and what a waste it had all been.

I think there are lots of people who can look back and think something along these lines. If your lucky, you’ve learnt from it, grown alongside it so, when time is running out, you’ve already made a stuttering step into the next phase of your life. However, if your not lucky and parts of this follow you through, like tendrils of some strange plant, wrapped around you & refusing to fully let you go, well, all bets are off.

that his bones were mouldering away somewhere

No, he was too savvy for that, everything he did had a purpose, his purposes had purposely set things in motion way before he brought them out to the group. He is one scary ….

If Charlie was still alive then what was happening here?

Well, sit down boys & girls, the webs about to tell a story… “Ahem, I’ll keep this as quick as I can. Charlie has socio and pathological traits, made worse with an abusive & poor financial home & social life. “Unfortunately for everyone else, he found a way to enrich all of the above by finding, and joining together some others like himself, many people would be happy with that and just follow life’s road, but not Charlie…” “This wasn’t enough for him, he discovered he could be a leader, not just someone who hugged the walls and hoped to not be noticed, he had friends, and even better he had friends who looked up to him, and that, that small flicker of power, started to spread, and he discovered he liked that feeling even more than anything else.”

The past is the past. And it couldn’t hurt me now.

Heh, want to bet?

Incubation.

Incubating fear

Charlie stage-managed everything so carefully.

Agreed

I felt sorry for him.

It’s an old old saying, but ‘walk a mile in another man’s shoes’ springs to mind. No one can ever fully understand another’s life, sadness or happiness? Loved or not? Rich or poor? It’s a long list of possibilities.

I couldn’t escape the feeling that Charlie was behind it.

The little red fishies would like to say that perhaps it was all planned, he wanted to leave so he moved all of the pieces around like some macabre board game and left the pieces on the table, knowing what people would think, and also knowing he could restart the game whenever he wanted to.

a faded Iron Maiden T-shirt that looked a couple of sizes too big for her, and an open, black-and-white checked shirt.

Kind of like a uniform for rock/grunge/metal I guess, people wear the same thing in Aussie & NZ

Walk with me?’ ‘Sure.’ I fell into step beside her. As we walked, I remembered how the two of us had done this so often that summer: meandering through the streets, side by side, talking shit and sharing our aspirations for the future.

I did that with what I felt was my sister (from another mother so to speak) she’d go stay at her grandparents every so often and I can’t remember why, but now & then I went with her. We’d get bored of sitting around there so we went ‘walking’ and we did do a fair bit of that, but included a bottle of whatever we could afford/get our hands on, and then yes, talk a lot of crap where we wanted to go in life and the whys, about boys, about anything really, after 2 to 3 hours we’d wander in back, but we always went past this boys house that she really had the hots for, she’d tell me all about him and quite often that walk past could be more like 2 or 3 times! I ended up meeting him through other friends, had no idea it was the same guy until we pulled into his driveway and she was right, he was definitely hot and a good kisser! Could of killed my parents for saying I had to come home or they’d call the police, I was underage. I think my friend just about blew a gasket when I told her years later. What a fuss about one boy who’s name I can’t even remember! Oh and I’m sure her grandparents are passed away now, but I can still remember the roast chicken her Nana made for Sunday lunch, I think we devoured it. Great memories, now tarnished beyond redemption.

Who did this to you, Billy? she thought.

The spidey web is muttering about ‘loose lips’. With the little red fishies chiming in about ‘sinking ships’ and they’re fine with that, new toys and all The above isn’t as loony as it sounds, read between the lines ;)

sometimes a cigar was just a cigar.

And a horse is just a horse…

‘Tradition is important, isn’t it? You’ve got to have lineage. Places are like people. They have to know where they came from – and where they are now – or else they’ll never know where they’re going.’

I could teeter totter both sides of this, in one way, yes that makes perfect sense, we all want to know what makes us tick, and going back to the bare beginning where the Doctor gave us a little tap, a quick check, and congratulated our Mothers for a bouncing boy or girl. On the other hand, maybe not having all of that information could free people up, you don’t know who your parents are? Dream them up, give good reasons for them to of given you up. You don’t know what their dreams for a baby might of been, expectations, etc etc, no pressure, be whoever you want to be and that’s more than good enough Teeter totter side to side …

Seeing someone in their sauce, as my mother would say.

Did a Google and de nada for this

The books were all second-hand, and I assumed they had been bought from here. As I watched Marie checking the pencilled prices on the inside covers, and making a list of figures on a sheet of paper, I guessed that, for at least some of her customers, this place effectively functioned as a library as much as a bookshop.

Oh boy do I remember doing this, it always felt like a hunt to find the best books, even book fairs, which I doubt is done now that much. We’ve come forward so much with technology and are losing, it seems at times, just as much of other things.

I remembered the photograph I’d seen of my mother as a child, lying in the sunlit grass with a book open before her. And I found it easy to picture her, freed from my father’s disapproval, finally pursuing a suppressed passion for reading. It might have been a comforting image, but instead I thought of a lonely woman, desperate for contact, searching for solace and connection in the only places she could find them,

Makes me think of one of my Aunties, she always lived with & when needed took care of my Nana, except for a short overseas adventure to the UK for a while where she lived for a bit. I’d always wondered about her, no partner, no nothing, even no job for long stretches. My guesses came right a little while after my Nana passed away. She was gay, and she was too, scared? Embarrassed? To come out beforehand. Both I guess, to me it’s just so terribly sad, all those wasted years, I don’t for a second believe my Nana would of really thought it that bad, after the initial chat. Instead, its … :|