The Legend of Bush Man: Ch. 48–49: The Shadows Go First

Chapter 48: The Shadows Go First — The Tilt

Marcus’s feet slid one inch backward.

He had not stepped. That was the first obscenity of it, and he clung to it the way he had clung to every rule that had kept them alive: he had not stepped. The invitation is the going. He was not going. The sidewalk was going for him.

Under the corner streetlight — the one honest orange light left on the street, or so they had told themselves, which in Oakhaven now counted as a prayer — all four of their shadows had turned around. Not drifted. Not swung the way shadows swing when a light moves. Turned. Heads first, the way people turn. And now, in perfect unison, flat and black as turned soil on the pavement, they were walking home toward the wide-open door.

The warm light laid itself down the walk like a path. Like a tongue, Marcus thought, and wished he hadn’t.

“Don’t step,” Chloe said. Her voice was a thread. “Nobody step. If we step back that’s a—”

“We’re not stepping,” Marcus said. “The street is.”

He could feel it through the soles of his shoes: a slope that had not been there when they arrived at the corner, patient and courteous, tilting the whole corner of Oakhaven a fraction at a time toward his own front door. A host does not drag guests back inside. A host simply makes the floor agree with him. Somewhere under the concrete, very faintly, something gave off the smell of turned soil and crushed green stems — through pavement now, through a street the town had paid for, and Marcus understood that the garden had never needed their lawns at all. Lawns were just where it had been polite enough to start.

His mother’s shadow was in front. Of course it was. It had raised the welcoming hand. It had mouthed the thank-you the real woman had clamped her hands over her own mouth to stop. Now it walked up its own light-path with the easy, practised stride of a woman who had walked guests in and out of that door for forty years, and the other three shadows followed it like family coming home in the rain.

“They’re not us,” Chloe’s mother said, very quietly. She was leaning, Marcus realised, forward — all of her weight thrown toward the corner, toward away, a woman bracing against a hill only their feet could feel. “Say it. They’re not us.”

“They’re not us,” Chloe said.

On the pavement, her shadow glanced back at the sound of her voice. Eyeless. Interested.

“Don’t say it again,” Marcus whispered.

From the AOP3D Forum — Page 79: “The First Arrivals”

Posted by rootcellar, Hollow Creek. Timestamp: now. No one had asked a question.

“You are asking the wrong thing again. You are asking how to get your shadows back.

“A shadow is not a possession, friend. It is a record. It is proof, laid out on the ground in your shape, that something saw you. That is why it was always a witness. That is why the tether never needed your eyes alone.

“If a shadow arrives at a house before its person, the house does not know the difference. A house is just a wooden box built on top of the earth. It knows shapes at the door. It knows a guest-shape, welcomed, thanked, turned homeward.

“It seats the shape.

“Do not comfort yourself that the seat is only a shadow’s. A host keeps a seat the way a garden keeps a hole where a plant was. The shape of the missing thing is still in the earth.”

Chapter 48 — Being Held, Again

“Hold me,” Marcus said.

Chloe stared at him. Her feet had slid a second inch while the forum page burned itself into his pocket through a phone that was dead and should not have been warm. “What?”

“Page seventy-four. Being held is not a going. It’s the opposite of a going. When it tried to seat me, you held my jacket and it starved. So hold. Everybody hold everybody. Make us furniture.”

“We are a very haunted coat rack,” Chloe said, and locked both fists into his jacket again, and then, after a moment, his mother took Chloe’s arm, and Chloe’s mother took his mother’s, and the four of them stood in a crooked, shivering line at the corner of Elm Avenue, leaning away from a house none of them was looking at, holding each other up against a street that wanted them home.

It worked. That was the terrible, gallows-funny thing: it worked the way a sandbag works. The tilt went on tilting. Their shoes scraped, a fraction, a fraction — and then scraped less. A slope can move a person. It has a harder time with a family.

And on the pavement, unheld, unweighted, free as rumour, their shadows reached the porch.

Marcus did not watch. He swears, in every version he will ever tell of this night, that he did not watch. But a shadow climbing steps does something to the light, and a man can see a light change without feeding it eyes, and so he knew — in his skin, in the soles of his sliding shoes — when the first shadow went up the steps it had climbed ten thousand times in the shape of his mother, and crossed the threshold without pausing, the way a person crosses a threshold in a house that is theirs.

The warm light thinned. One shade.

The second shadow went in. Chloe’s. It did not hesitate either.

The light thinned again.

“It’s seating them,” his mother whispered. Her hands were over her mouth again — she had learned that much, his brave, unlearning mother — and the words came muffled and horrified. “Baby. It’s seating them instead of us.”

“Let it,” Marcus said, through his teeth. “Let it seat the wrong guests. It’s done it before. Decoys are its trick. Maybe—”

The fourth shadow — his, long and thin and unmistakable, the shadow that had stood in that doorway every day of his life — paused on the threshold.

It turned its head.

It looked, if a flat black shape on a lit porch can be said to look, straight down the light-path, straight down the tilting street, at the original it had left standing at the corner.

Then it went inside, and the front door — which had opened six inches for a host, and wide for a guest who had said thank you — closed, very softly, on the last of them.

The light-path snapped off like a switched lamp.

The sidewalk, under their feet, gave a small, disappointed lurch and was level.

Four people stumbled forward at a corner in Oakhaven, in ordinary darkness, holding each other to keep from falling, alive, unseated, escaped.

A moment. Only ever a moment.

“Look at the ground,” Chloe said, in a voice he had never heard from her. “Marcus. Look at the ground under the streetlight.”

He looked. The honest orange light burned above them. The pavement glowed, clean and empty, all around their shoes.

None of them cast a shadow at all.

Chapter 49: A Seat Kept Warm — Shadowless

They walked.

There was a meeting about it, later, in the sense that four exhausted people standing shadowless under a streetlight at an hour no clock in Oakhaven was still willing to name can be said to hold a meeting. The car was its address. The house was its address. The garden, by then, was arguably most addresses. But standing still had been tried, and standing still was only a slower kind of seating, so they walked — away from Elm Avenue, toward the main road, toward traffic and sodium lights and the thin, sane hope of other people.

Block after block, the streetlights received them and gave nothing back.

That is a hard thing to describe to anyone who has not lost one: a shadow is not company, exactly, but its absence is a loneliness with a shape. Every pool of light they crossed lay flat and unbroken around their feet. Cars, far off, had shadows. Fences had shadows. A cat that watched them from a wall — wisely, from a wall — had a shadow, small and perfect, with ears.

“We look wrong,” Chloe’s mother said.

“We look unseated,” Chloe said. “Say it the forum way. Maybe the forum way is safer.”

“The forum way is never safer,” Marcus said. “It’s just earlier.”

His dead phone buzzed in his pocket. In the rhythm. He had stopped flinching at it hours ago, the way you stop flinching at a dripping tap, and that frightened him more than the buzzing: the night was teaching his body to treat it as weather.

He took the phone out. Nobody told him not to. That frightened him too.

From: Marcus.

A photograph, taken from the head of his own kitchen table.

Four chairs. Four place settings restored, his mother’s good plates with the blue rim, every fork lying at its correct, courteous angle. And in the four chairs, upright, patient, heads bowed slightly over the empty plates as if grace were being said by someone just out of frame — four flat, black, familiar shapes, seated at the height of the people they belonged to, thin as a coat of paint on the air.

At the head of the table, the fifth chair stood empty, pulled out six inches.

Under the photograph, in his own finished voice, spelled in text the way a voice looks when it has learned to type:

they’re not hungry either. i’ll keep their seats warm.

“Put it away,” his mother said. She was not looking at the screen. She was looking at her own hands, held out slightly in front of her in the streetlight, turning them over, as if checking whether they still ended where she remembered. “Baby, put it away. It’s showing us the table so we’ll think about the table.”

“Reading is a kind of answering,” Chloe murmured. “Thinking is probably a kind of chewing.”

Marcus put the phone away. The photograph, he knew, would not stay in the phone. Photographs from that number never did. They stayed in the person who had seen them, which was, he was beginning to understand, the entire postal system the garden used.

From the AOP3D Forum — Page 80: “The Advance Party”

rootcellar, Hollow Creek, replying to page 79, timestamp: now:

“Last thing tonight, and I am sorry for it.

“A shadow that has been seated once knows the way to a table. It does not need its person to show it the road again. Roads are carried in feet, and a shadow is all feet, in a manner of speaking. It is the part of you that has touched every floor you have ever stood on.

“So understand what has changed, friend. Before tonight, it had to invite you, and wait, and be patient, and patience — whatever else it is — is slow.

“Now it has an advance party. Now something wearing your exact shape, that has stood in every doorway you have ever stood in, can arrive at the next house before you do.

“And knock.”

Chapter 49 — Headlights

The car came around the corner by the closed hardware store doing the ordinary, blessed things cars are supposed to do: engine, tyres, a radio leaking somebody else’s music. Its headlights swept the street in a long white arc, caught the four of them mid-stride, and threw —

“Oh,” Chloe said. “Oh, no. Oh, I don’t want them back if they’re like that.”

Their shadows were on the pavement again.

Seated.

Four black shapes in the headlights’ glare, bent at the waist and knee in the exact geometry of people sitting in chairs that were not there, hands resting at the height of a table that was not there, heads bowed over plates that were not there. The four of them stood in the road, upright, walking, alive — and at their feet their own witnesses sat at dinner, patient as sculpture, in the middle of a street two blocks from any house that wanted them.

The car slowed. Of course it slowed. A driver in Oakhaven, at that hour, seeing four people standing in his headlights with seated shadows — Marcus raised one hand, slowly, not in welcome, never in welcome again, just in the universal signal of go around, please, we are the emergency, go around.

The car went around. The headlights moved on.

The shadows went out like candles.

Nobody spoke for a full block. The dark felt, for whole seconds at a time, almost ordinary. Somebody’s sprinkler ticked. A dog, behind a fence, decided against barking, and Marcus silently thanked a dog he would never meet, and then remembered that gratitude was a kind of beginning, and stopped, mid-thank-you, in the privacy of his own head, which no longer felt private.

“We can’t go to my house,” Chloe’s mother said at last. “Or yours. Or the Hendersons’. We need a house it doesn’t know. A house none of us has ever—”

She stopped walking.

Ahead of them, at the next corner, where the main road began and the last residential street of the night stood quiet in a row of dark porches, a single porch light flickered on. Warm. Welcoming. Her warm — or someone’s. In Oakhaven, at that hour, all warm light belonged to it until proven otherwise.

And on the pavement in front of that house, impossibly long in the new light, stretched thin as thread across two blocks of dark street, Marcus saw a shadow detach itself from his own feet — a shadow he had not been casting a moment before — and flow, upright and unhurried, toward the lit porch.

It arrived before they did.

It climbed the steps.

It raised one long, flat, familiar hand — his hand, the shape of every door he had ever knocked on — and, courteously, three times, in a rhythm nobody in Oakhaven would ever mistake for anything else, it knocked.

Crunch… swoosh… crunch would have been mercy. This was worse. This was knuckles.

From inside the stranger’s house, muffled, warm, half-asleep and entirely human, a voice Marcus had never heard in his life called out:

“Who is it?”

And his shadow, wearing his shape, standing in a doorway it had arrived at first, turned its eyeless head toward the sound — and opened its mouth to answer in his name.