In the Shadows

Jonathan

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To light a candle is to cast a shadow.
Ursula K. Le Guin

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“The ambush” sketch by Michael B. Morgan

Previously on The Space Between:

With Annabelle’s situation at home pushing her to extremes, Jonathan continues his quest to find this elusive woman who has consumed his every thought.

And though Danny has agreed to help him, he becomes increasingly concerned about this growing obsession. And what it might mean for his friend…

Chapter Ten

We were somewhere on the outskirts of London.
It was a purple night, and it stank of rain. The moon was ice, and it pierced the dark with a spectral light. A tired moon. I could almost hear it sighing in the dark. And in truth all around us was a restless rustling of branches, and they creaked in the wind. And with the strange fancy that lay on us, I swear I could have believed those creaks were the groans of unquiet spirits.
I was still watching the moon, when a black carriage, with no heraldry and no crest, came to fetch us, and two men climbed down from it, dressed in dark hunting clothes, their faces mostly hidden beneath peaked caps, pulled almost to their noses.
“You’re the ones taking us?” I asked.
“If you’re the ones who paid... yes.”
“We’re in good hands, I hope,” Danny stepped in.
“We are all in God’s hands, messieurs,” the other man said, and there I heard the French in his voice. “But, remember, we’ll take you there and wait in the woods. We won’t go near the estate.”
“You mean... We walk from there?”
“As little as possible.”
“Cautious.”
“Joe, we’ll do as they ask...”
“For what we paid, they could carry us in their arms.”
“And still, we’ll do as they ask.”
I drew a nervous breath. I felt at the edge of the firelight, with wolf shadows only a step beyond it. I trusted that Danny had some idea of what we were doing. I did not. I had none.
But... I needed to meet her.
“Annabelle.”
Her name escaped my lips before I even realized I was saying it. I wanted to meet her. I needed to know she was real. I hadn’t dreamed of her in three nights. I felt I was going mad, and the more I turned it over in my mind, the deeper I sank into the belief that I had invented all of it: her, us, those damned dreams in that borderland place. A nowhere land, a place you could call neither real nor imaginary. Was it inside my own mind or was it somewhere outside me? That was exactly the kind of reasoning a madman would use.
Then Danny’s voice reached me, “Easy, boy.”
“I’m so sorry. It’s only that...”
“I know. We’ll do it, don’t worry.” He smiled. “Come.”
The carriage was not a large one, and it was drawn by a pair of heavy Norman horses that blew and shifted and would not settle in the weak light of a lantern set on the ground. The driver was the third man moving around us.
“All’s ready messieurs.”
Danny and I looked at each other, and it seemed to me that he was suddenly unsure what to do. Even so we went to the carriage, which rocked beneath our weight as we climbed the step. For a few moments nobody spoke, nobody so much as seemed to move. Then, the driver clicked his tongue and cracked the whip. The horses whinnied and started off slowly. The carriage turned away from the dirt track and headed toward the trees.

***

London was nothing like this, with its traffic of carriages and men on foot thickening wherever the city beat hardest. Out here all I could see were trees to the right and left of the crooked track we were following. The Frenchman and his partner rode one on either side of the carriage. They were armed, and there was something about them that set them apart from everything around us, and yet they had a knack for looking perfectly fitted to the work they’d been given.
I turned to Danny. His heavy body jolted with the roll of the carriage. The sound of the wheels over stones and branches was near enough the grinding of his teeth, for how hard he was holding them shut.
“What are you keeping from me, Danny?”
“Haven’t you got enough mysteries to unravel, Joe?”
“The man sitting next to you is the biggest mystery of all. The one it falls to you to unravel.”
“Scripture?”
“No. Mine.”
Danny’s eyes fixed on me at once.
“What’s on your mind, Joe?”
“How did you come by this carriage and these men?”
“I’ve told you about my friends in the police, haven’t I?”
“You’d have me believe your friends in the police found you an escort of fugitives and a drunk on the box? I need to know.”
“You need to trust me.”
“I can’t trust you if you won’t tell me the truth.”
“The truth!” He hollered loud enough that one of our escort put his head in at the window.
“Everything all right, messieurs?”
“It is, thank you,” said Danny.
“We are trying to be prudent.”
“And right you are. A man can never have enough of it.”
The Frenchman inclined his head, barely. For a moment I caught his eyes under the brim of the cap. Very pale.
“What is the truth?” Danny went on, in a low voice. “Oh, I know you’ve asked yourself, you’re just the type for it, but I wonder, and maybe that’s the whole of it, are you able to carry it, the truth?”
“You’ve got something to hide from me too. Like my father before you.”
“Your father... Go on, keep judging him without knowing.”
The carriage took something in the road and we both got it in the knees. He pulled his coat straight across his chest, though it did not need pulling.
“He and your mother were lovers when London would not have let them be together. This city is a whore in silk, but a whore all the same. It can make even the purest feeling unacceptable, and trade it off against the spoiled goods of politics and respectability. Rot inside rot, all of it sold like it was worth something. And she knew it. Beatrice knew it better than he ever did.”
He stopped. I leaned in toward him.
“You knew my father, didn’t you.”
“I did.”
“Good God. You knew who I was before I ever met you.”
“A fine paradox, isn’t it.”
“It is, and I’m waiting for an explanation.”
“Then make yourself comfortable, Jonathan, for I haven’t one to give you.”
The carriage planted itself in the road and near threw us onto the seat opposite.
“You all right, boy?” Danny asked.
My right hand hurt.
“Yes,” I said, and helped him sit himself straight.
Then I put my head out the little window and caught the far-off sound of a man shouting words I couldn’t make out, and that voice came up over all the others, over our escort passing orders back and forth, arming themselves.
“Danny, something’s happening. There’s somebody past the trees.”
We both leaned out.
“Wolves?” he offered.
I got down first and he followed. I drove my eyes into the dark ahead of us and out of it came that voice again, with a plain contempt vibrating in it, like a master to his dog. Around the first of them to come out of the mist, a shadow that seemed to me distorted and enormous in that moment, others came, maybe ten of them.
“Those aren’t wolves,” I said.
Our escort had put their hands to their weapons.

To be continued…

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Chapter One, Chapter Two, Chapter Three, Chapter Four, Chapter Five, Chapter Six, Chapter Seven, Chapter Eight, Chapter Nine

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Chapter Eleven

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