Winter's Shadow (11 page)

Winter frowned as she held up the last photograph for closer scrutiny. It was the shot she’d taken of Blake standing by the graves – the shot that had nearly cost Winter her life. Something was wrong with it, though.

The background was fine, albeit a little blurry. There were the tombstones poking their mossy heads up out of the weeds and grass, there were the dark woods behind the cemetery – but the subject of the picture, Blake, was obscured by what looked like a strange black smudge. Winter showed the photograph to Mitch. ‘What happened with this one?’

Mitch looked at the picture and nodded. ‘Oh yeah, I saw that . . . beats me. I figured the film must have been damaged when the camera got killed.’

Winter stared at the image with a puckered brow. ‘But why only this picture? The others turned out fine.’

Mitch shrugged. ‘Sometimes weird things happen when you work with film. Maybe it’s time to go digital?’

Not satisfied with that explanation, Winter slid the image back in with the others. After querying the price – it seemed awfully low and she hated feeling like a charity case – she paid Mitch for the prints and left the store.

During the early days of her photography experiments, she’d caused all manner of strange effects in the developing process, either on purpose or accidentally. Not one of those looked like the odd effect that now marred Blake’s image. For some reason Winter thought about that weird optical illusion she’d glimpsed in her side mirror when she pulled over after the near-miss. Those three dark figures standing on the road, watching her.

Still feeling oddly troubled, Winter nearly missed the poster in Howl’s Music Jamboree as she wandered from Mitch’s towards her scooter. The garish artwork dominated the window and featured three men dressed in Japanese kimonos, wearing heavy black eye makeup and carrying swords. Below them inscribed in flowing script was the legend: ‘The Urban Ninjas: The Warrior’s Way.’ There was a sticker at the bottom of the window advertising ‘Tickets On Sale Now’.

Tickets
. All her thoughts of the photograph, her ruined camera, the near-accident, were pushed aside as Winter
remembered what she had to do. In fifteen minutes or so she’d be at the old Velasco place, knocking on Blake’s front door to return his jacket. She hadn’t been looking for any omens to help make her decision about following Jasmine’s plan, but there it was, right in front of her. The Urban Ninjas concert. Thursday night. It seemed fate was conspiring with Jasmine, urging her to take a chance. Swallowing nervously, Winter continued past Howl’s towards where she’d parked Jessie. She could feel the tickets lying at the bottom of her bag weighing her down, growing heavier with every step.

Approaching Holloway Road, the persistent click of Jessie’s odometer sounded to Winter’s anxious ears like the ticking of a time bomb. She tried to rationalise that what she was doing was perfectly acceptable – he’d left his jacket with her when he dropped her off, she was doing him a favour by riding out here to return it – but it was almost as though she’d contracted some kind of virus. The idea of seeing Blake again made her feel hot and sick and worried. Surely once she was actually standing in front of him, these symptoms would abate. She’d see Blake wasn’t the fantasy figure she was building up in her mind. He was just another guy.

The sign pointing to her turn-off loomed and Winter fought the urge to keep driving right past it. She barely won the battle, forcing herself to turn Jessie onto the
thickly sheltered woodland passage. Though still a few hours off nightfall, the sun had sunk behind Owl Mountain and brought an early twilight to this section of the woods. The shadows of tree branches, thrown by the eerie half-light, stretched across the road like clawed hands. The only sound Winter could hear was Jessie’s engine as it reverberated through the blue-green stillness.

Nervously she scanned the tree line for the infamous home’s driveway. Where was it? Surely she should have come across the house by now? She was about to turn Jessie around, thinking she must have missed the turn-off, when she saw a break in the trees ahead: a dirt driveway leading down into the deeper woods.

The Velasco place.

Nervously, Winter braked and turned in to the driveway. She rolled Jessie slowly towards the house, dead leaves crunching beneath the tyres.

It had been two Halloweens ago that she had last come here, but the house at the end of the track looked just as foreboding as she remembered. On that dark night, creeping towards the front door with Jasmine to test their nerves with the knocking game, Winter had involuntarily recalled Poe’s ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’. Something about the way the narrator had felt an ‘insufferable gloom’ descend upon his soul as he approached the titular house seemed particularly apt in relation to the Velasco place. Just as she had on that night, Winter wondered absently if old Edgar Allan had ever visited
Hagan’s Bluff, and ventured down this particular muddy track. The similarities were startling.

The two-storey mansion might have been beautiful once, but it had long ago fallen into disrepair. Ropes of ivy clung to it like diseased veins, and most of its white paint had peeled off, exposing grey boards. Three of the ground-floor windows were cracked, the rest caked in grime and dust. Even more eerie than the house itself was the hulking magnolia tree lurking on the edge of the front yard. Twisted and dark, the tree was infected by the same corrupted atmosphere marring the house, and looked like it might uproot itself at any moment and come shambling towards her.

Winter slowed Jessie to a standstill and hopped off, eyeing the house with apprehension. There was no sign of Blake’s truck in the front yard, giving her the faint hope that he might not be home. She wouldn’t know for sure until she marched up to the front door and knocked. Slinging her bag over one shoulder, Winter started towards the house.

The steps creaked beneath her as she gingerly ascended to the shadowy porch. She had to duck beneath the ivy spilling from the eaves before she could reach the door. The smell of rising damp making her cough, Winter tried to understand why Blake, the very embodiment of aesthetic beauty, would choose to live in a place utterly bereft of it. Why not buy one of the bungalows down on Lighthouse Beach? They couldn’t have been much more expensive. Asking a guy out on a date was
one thing, but having to brave a haunted house to do it was more than a girl should have to deal with.

Winter raised her hand to knock on the bare wood of the door. Her fist hovered there for a moment, as she mentally ran through the script she’d prepared.

‘
Hi, Blake, hope I’m not interrupting. You left your jacket with me yesterday, so I thought I’d bring it back. How are you settling in?
’ Then she would have to find a way to artfully slot in some sort of reference to the concert ticket, something along the lines of, ‘
You’ll never guess what happened but I won two tickets in a raffle to see the Urban Ninjas on Thursday night, and thought you might like one. It’s the least I can do after you saved my life.
’ In Winter’s head it sounded a little dorky; she really hoped it wouldn’t sound so bad coming out of her mouth.

Winter rapped her knuckles on the door quickly, matching the staccato rhythm of her thudding heartbeat. She waited for a few seconds and knocked again. Nobody answered the door and she couldn’t hear any footsteps on the other side. Feeling guiltily relieved, Winter unzipped her bag and pulled out Blake’s jacket. Should she just leave it here and squander the only opportunity she had for seeing him again? Weighing up her options, Winter was suddenly distracted by the loud snapping of a branch in the woods next to the house.

Somebody was moving out there.

Frowning, she stepped down off the porch and looked in the direction of the noise. It was too dark now to see very clearly, but Winter thought she could just make out
a tall black shape moving between the trees bordering the front yard. She followed its progress for a moment before it vanished into the deeper shadows.

‘Hello?’ she called, her voice betraying a trace of her steadily mounting fear. If it was Blake out there, why didn’t he respond?

There was a rustling noise in the woods right behind her. Winter whirled around, fearfully squinting through the purple half-light. She couldn’t see anyone, but it sounded as if people were stalking through the undergrowth on both sides of the yard, circling her. Watching her. A cool wind began to blow, hurling the dead leaves beneath the magnolia tree towards Winter.

When she was a child, Winter had experienced night terrors, often leaving her room in the early hours of the morning to climb into her parents’ bed. She always ran the short distance between her room and her parents’ with her eyes closed, convinced there was something horrible chasing her through the darkness. That same irrational fear gripped her now. There was something in those woods, something that wanted to hurt her! Winter turned and ran back up the steps to the porch. She knocked on the front door again, more frantically this time.

‘Blake? Please let me in!’ There was no answer.

Behind her, she now heard another sound: a low but distinct clicking, like a giant insect gnashing its mandibles together. The noise was more terrifying than the branches being trodden on, because of how alien, how
inhuman, it sounded. Panicking now, Winter gave up on knocking and tried the doorknob.

Locked!

With no other option, Winter tried it again, this time desperately willing it to open beneath her touch. Though she had no visual reference to support it, an image of the inner workings of the lock, specifically the tumbler sliding back to release the bolt, materialised in her mind. At the same time, miraculously, she felt the handle turn. She pushed the door open, ran inside and slammed it shut behind her.

Braced with her back against the door, heart pounding, Winter waited to see what would happen next. As the seconds passed without incident, she began to feel foolish. What had come over her? There was nothing out there in the woods – no malevolent presence coming to get her. The cracking sounds had probably just been a possum or some other harmless woodland creature moving around in the undergrowth. That blind panic which gripped her must have been some kind of delayed post-traumatic stress from the near-accident this afternoon, or perhaps from the church escape yesterday. Just her body processing leftover adrenaline, manufacturing the illusion of danger. There had been no dark figures stalking her. There was no reason to be afraid.