Author Archive
Jack Shadow
. This story based on Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Shadow.”
The shadow slipped through the night, hid from the sun, stretched out every morning and evening. Through towns and along roads that stretched for miles, the shadow slid.
You might not think that a shadow would have a name, but this one did, unpronounceable though it certainly was. It sounded a little like a snake slithering over moss, a little like fairy tears hitting the surface of a river.
But we…we shall call him Jack, just for now, because it is easier than snake-slithers and fairy tears, and this story is quite difficult enough to tell.
Jack was hunting. He had been for many years, and hoped it would not take much longer. A shadow, you see, needs a person, and this was the one thing he did not currently have.
Over his time, there had been many, tried on as one might test a new suit for a good fit. The last one, well, he had been nearly right, nearly perfect, but in the end that had made him very wrong.
A city loomed ahead; surely he would find what he was looking for in there, with so many people to choose from. Glass towers stood tall among small houses, reminding him of palaces. Of the days of dragons and kings.
Yes, my friends, our Jack the Shadow is that old, and then some.
I do suppose that now, as Jack edges into the city, mingling with all the normal shadows of sunset, is a good time to warn you that if Jack ever comes seeking to become your shadow, you must run. Run far and fast and do not look back. I only wish I had been able to warn the others, but I, unlike our Jack, am capable of regret.
Then again, you might well never know if Jack, or one like him, has begun to follow, a dark, sharp-edged blade of a thing.
He moved along the bustling streets, alert, careful, almost disappearing behind buildings as the sun dropped lower and lower in the sky. Turning a corner, he entered a quiet neighborhood full of tall, snow-white houses and old trees that spread leafy branches overhead.
This was promising. And you of course will know that when I say promising I mean dreadful, but to Jack, it was very promising indeed.
Up ahead, on the lawn of a large house on the next corner, a young boy kicked a ball, always reaching it just a second before his shadow—a real shadow—did. Jack crept up toward the house.
“Sam!” came a voice from within. “Time to wash up for dinner!”
“Coming!” he called back. Sam’s real shadow made to trail him into the house, but Jack caught it and held it back.
“We won’t be needing you anymore,” he said as the front door closed. Sam’s shadow turned around. It trembled in the breeze.
“No,” it said. “He’s a perfectly good boy and I won’t let you hurt him!”
“Hmmm,” said Jack the Shadow. “Why would you think I would hurt him?”
“I’ve heard of you,” it answered, shaking harder as the wind blew. “I heard what you did to that poor man, following him around for years and years, sucking the very life out of him until he was more of a shadow than you were!”
Jack laughed. It frightened the birds from the trees. He had been particularly proud of that one, but in the end, the man had not been the perfect fit. He had not wanted to become Jack’s shadow, and so there was only one thing that could be done.
“You killed him, and I won’t let you do it to Sam.”
“I do not think,” Jack said, “that you have a choice.” Swiftly, he plucked a strand of cobweb from a nearby bush and with it he slit the other shadow’s throat.
Now, you and I know that you could not ordinarily do such a thing with a cobweb, but shadows are not ordinary, and Jack was extraordinary, in the strictest sense of that word. Shadows do not play by the rules, and so the dead shadow shattered into a thousand tiny, black-winged moths and flew away.
The other shadow had been right about one thing. In fact, he had been right about everything, including what Jack did to the last one, but it was certainly right that Sam was a perfectly nice boy. Jack sat at the table while Sam ate, hid in a corner while he did every last bit of his schoolwork, and listened from the closet as his father read to him each night. He followed Sam to school and kicked a ball around the grass with him before dinner.
Jack was sure it was a perfect fit, that it was simply a matter of time.
Sam grew older, always a good boy, but taller, thinner, paler, his veins blue beneath his skin. His mother took him to the doctor, who said Sam was perfectly healthy, but perhaps a growing boy needed more sleep.
Jack hid under the chair in the doctor’s office and laughed. Goosebumps broke out over Sam’s skin.
“Sam,” Jack said that night, when the lights were out, the house quiet as a tomb.
“Who said that?” Sam asked, sitting bolt upright in bed.
“I’m your shadow.” Jack slid from the bed, over to the patch of moonlight on the floor. He stretched high as the ceiling, leaning over the boy in the bed. “You’ve been very good, but now it is time.”
“T-time for what?” Sam blinked, as if he was unsure whether he was truly awake.
“You are not dreaming,” said Jack. “It is time. I have followed you since you were young, Sam. I have done everything you asked of me, and now you must do what I ask of you. It is your turn to become my shadow.”
“I am dreaming,” Sam replied. “You aren’t real.” He lay back down and closed his eyes, turning his face into the pillow. Jack shook with rage, his whole thin, flat body shivering like the beat of a thousand moth wings. He slipped from the room, down the stairs, to the kitchen drawer where all the sharp knives were kept. Cobwebs did not work on people, and people follow the rules.
I cannot bear what happened next, just cannot bear it. You can imagine, you can close your eyes and picture it, if you so choose, though I wouldn’t choose to. Please forgive me if I don’t tell you every word, describe every drop of blood as it bloomed on the pillow.
I told you already that I wish I could have warned the others, and I only hope this has been enough of a warning for you. And so, rather than go through every last, horrible detail, I will instead ask you to do something for me. Go outside, stand in the sun. Close your eyes and feel it warm your face.
Open them again. Look around.
Is that truly your shadow?
Are you sure?
Spidersong
Deep in the forest, where there was only enough light to make shadows, where the air tasted of moss and rain, the spiders sang.
The forest was on the edge of a great city of glass towers and brick houses, of long roads filled with cars, and people. So very many people. They went about their lives, to school and work and home again, occasionally shooing small, scuttling things from kitchens and pillows.
“We wait,” the spiders hissed to each other. “We wait until the time is right.”
Not even a single leaf rustled overhead, the day entirely still. Above the treetops, far on the horizon, clouds moved across the sky.
The city people did not know about the spiders. Not the big ones, at least, in their enormous webs strung so thick they were like clouds, fallen to hang among the trunks and stroke the bark with wispy fingertips. There was no reason for the city people to know, no reason for them to venture so far into the forest.
“Tomorrow,” said the spiders. “Hungry.”
And they began to spin new webs.
~*~
Claudia Davenport hated her little brother, who had chased the dog away, over the fence and into the fields on the other side. She wasn’t supposed to go into the fields alone, and she definitely wasn’t supposed to go into the forest on the other side alone.
But she wasn’t supposed to lose the dog, either, and blaming it on Jamie would only get her sent to bed without dinner, because tattling wasn’t nice, according to her mother. Claudia held different opinions on that, but curiously, nobody seemed very interested in hearing them.
“Max!” she called. A warm breeze rippled the long grass in the field and it was nice, after so many long, hot days when there hadn’t been so much as a breath through the open windows of her house to cool her while she practiced the piano. The grass slapped against her bare, scabbed knees and whipped up dust from dry patches where it was completely worn away. “Max!”
She thought, perhaps, she could hear an answering bark, just inside the trees. On she trudged, feeling the air cool against her shoulders the instant she stepped into the shadows. It was quieter here, all sounds of the city muffled, and darker, though there was still plenty of light.
“Crazy dog, where are you?” Claudia’s voice bounced back and forth, set birds free from their branches. “No treats for you later.”
Footsteps padded along the moss nearby, but they didn’t sound like paws. That didn’t bother Claudia a bit. Jamie would be frightened, because he was a wimp and scared of everything, but Claudia liked all kinds of animals, and they liked her, too.
~*~
Spider legs danced along gossamer strings, spinning and weaving. “We are ready,” they agreed, and they crawled along their webs to sit, poised and waiting, all their many eyes staring in the same direction.
Down, down the strange avenue created by two lines of thick, gnarled trees, old as the ground to which they clung with their twisted roots.
Down the long path that led all the way to the fields and then the city.
Down the tunnel created by earth below and leaves above, through which–when the weather was just exactly right, the wind blew.
~*~
Claudia had never heard music like it before. Like violins, except not. Lower, richer, more like a cello, except not that, either. The melody was unearthly, nothing she recognized, and yet she knew it was music, intentional sound, not simply noise.
“Oh. Hi, Max,” she whispered, quietly enough that it didn’t interrupt the music playing everywhere, but especially inside her head. The dog had licked a large, slobbery patch on her shin. “When did you get here?”
Max whined, and shook a little at her feet. “Come on.”
The dog shook harder. Claudia had to clip his leash to his collar and pull to get him to follow, reluctantly, as she moved toward the music.
Louder, it grew. Louder and louder with every step.
It was weird, the way the trees grew this deep in the forest. As if someone had planted two neat rows and then stopped caring what happened on either side, so they were all jumbled up except for these two straight lines, a dozen feet apart. The toes of Claudia’s sneakers caught on rocks and snapped twigs, and she didn’t stop walking. Behind her, Max dug his little brown paws into the soft earth. She tugged him along.
Was it a harp? She’d seen someone play a harp, once, but it hadn’t made her feel like this, warm and sleepy. Almost floating.
The wind rushed at her back, past her, tossing her hair into her face, hardly broken by a little girl. She followed it, chased it, and stopped, peering through the dimness.
“Welcome,” said a voice. A voice that hissed, a voice with beady eyes and too many legs. The word wove itself into the music, adding another layer to the song. “She is a bit thin.”
“She is enough,” said another voice.
“She is plenty,” said a third.
And the wind blew harder through the spiderwebs. The music swelled. Max whined again. Claudia stepped closer.
“Plenty for what?” she asked, and her voice did not sound quite like her own. Somewhere, deep inside, a flicker of fear grew and was blown out by the wind. She should be scared, but the music was so pretty. Enormous webs spread out in front of her, stretched between the trees, spun in patterns she had never seen before. Nothing like the normal spiders in the basement. She reached out to touch a strand, vaguely surprised when it didn’t snap. Instead, a single clear note joined the melody, ringing through the forest.
“Hungry.”
Max whined again, pawing at her leg, and Claudia squinted. A spider as large as a football hovered just ahead, grinning.
There was another just there. And there. And over there. All around.
“You want…to eat me?”
“There is always one who hears the song when the winds come. Today, we feast.”
~*~
Occasionally, they got away. The little girl’s dog had yelped and snapped and chased her back down the avenue of trees. The spiders waited, sullen and starving, in their musical webs. So close, so very close. But not to be.
“Maybe she came this way,” said a voice, coming closer. “What a strange noise the wind makes in the trees here.”
Yes, oh yes.
“Mommy? Where’s Claudia? I didn’t mean to chase Max out of the yard.”
Two. The spiders grinned again, and bared their fangs.
Clickety-Clack
Lush green leaves with saw-toothed edges brush the top of the skeleton train.
It comes from nowhere, and goes there, too, speeding by in the night, billows of steam rising to join the clouds.
And the tracks go clickety-clack.
Little Stevie March waits in the shadow of a bend, just past the old stone bridge that is slowly crumbling into the rushing water below. He’s heard the stories, but that’s never the same as seeing for yourself. So he sits, scarf tied against the cold, nibbling the cheese he filched from the kitchen on his way out, closing the door so quietly no one else in the house so much as rolled over in their beds.
His ears perk, but it’s only the wanderings of a rabbit–hopefully a rabbit–through the bushes. A yawn nearly splits his face in two, and his eyelids grow heavy.
But there…there it is.
Clickety-clack. Clickety-clack.
Quickly, he scrambles to the edge of the tracks, the wind whistling down a tunnel of trees to make him shiver. Muddy shoes dug into the ground, little Stevie March prepares to jump.
Black as soot, dusty, rusty, the skeleton train rounds the bend. The windows of every carriage glow, the light flickering across the trees, and beneath the roar of the engine, Stevie can just make out the sound of the tracks, thumping like his own heartbeat. For a single breath, he thinks of turning away, it’s coming so awfully fast, a blur, and one mistake will leave him a smear on the grass that will rot away with the end of summer.
But he does jump, fingers closing around metal bars, cold and rough with age. Gasping, thrashing, kicking, he hoists himself to the platform between two carriages, standing still as the world rushes past.
And he opens the door.
The skeletons are dancing to violins played with bony hands. Goblets of wine–hopefully wine–slosh with the rocking of the train. All of them are grinning.
“A flesh-child!” cries one, pointing. It has no fingernails. “Welcome, flesh-child! Join the dance!”
“Yes, join us!” the rest cry.
And when they talk, their jaws go clickety-clack.
The train is like no train Stevie has ever been on, not to the city or to visit the aunt his mother doesn’t like, but won’t say so. Real crystal chandeliers swing from the ceiling, plush purple velvet covers the seats, but no one is sitting.
“Tell us your name, flesh-child,” says one, wrapping bleached-bone fingers around his wrist, pulling him into the throng of ribs and elbows. A single long, blonde lock of hair clings to her skull, just behind her forehead. The ragged remains of what was surely once a pretty dress drip from her shoulders.
“Stevie,” he says, laughing because the stories were true. Really true! “Stevie March, ma’am.”
“No need for manners here, Stevie-child, but you must dance, for we are the stuff of night and dreams, and the moment is gone all too soon!”
They spin and whirl, smiling toothlessly, snapping their fingers to the beat. Clickety-clack.
Beyond the windows, mountains and oceans and the square shadows of towns whizz past, sleeping, undisturbed by the passage of the skeleton train. Word must spread to the other carriages, for soon this one is packed so full Stevie can hear the bones scraping against each other, and he has to repeat his name over and over for the newcomers.
Stevie slips, quick as a fish, through a gap between bones and winds his way along the train, through now-empty carriages, past tables full of empty goblets and plates of strawberry tarts and paté. The soles of his shoes squash food into the lovely rug, fallen there because of course the skeletons can’t really eat it. Perhaps they can’t even taste it.
“A flesh-child!” comes the familiar cry when he steps into the compartment at the very front of the train. A navy blue coat with brass buttons is fastened tightly over this one’s ribs, a smart cap with a peaked brim perched jauntily atop a skull round and smooth and thin as an eggshell. “To what do we owe the honor of a visit?”
“I’m Stevie. I heard the stories and wanted to see for myself.”
“Aaaah. Pleasure to make your acquaintance. And do we live up to the tales?”
“It’s even better. No one told me about the dancing or the violins or the food.”
The skeleton grins. Well, he was grinning anyway, but it seems to Stevie that the smile widens, just a bit. “We know how to enjoy ourselves here on the skeleton train, for what is the point, if not joy and revelry?”
“I’m…I’m not sure.”
Ahead, the sky is pink with the first flush of dawn. In that fancy coat, the skeleton’s shoulders fall ever so slightly. “But morning always comes,” he says, the words hissing through the spaces once filled by teeth.
“Why does morning matter?” Stevie asks. The compartment is quiet. Under the floor, the tracks go clickety-clack.
“You’ll see. Go back to the party, little Stevie.”
The party is still a chaos of strings and bones, of rattling laughter and merry jokes. Squeezed by a window, Stevie watches the sun rise over a lake edged with weeping willows in their heaviest throes of sadness. The woman with the lock of blonde hair sits beside him, her cold, smooth hand on top of Stevie’s warm one.
“My daughter wakes up early,” she says, staring at him through empty eye sockets.
“Oh?” It’s an odd thing to tell him, but they’ve all been so welcoming, it’s best to be polite. “Do you miss her?”
The woman doesn’t answer.
She simply fades away.
Rays of light stream in through the windows, plates and forks and goblets drop to the floor, and Stevie is alone. He’s never heard this part of the story, but they are all gone. Up and down the train he looks in vain for any skeletons left on the skeleton train.
The chandeliers blow out, the violins are silent. Outside, there are no towns or mountains or rivers by which to chart, only a blank whiteness, as if the clouds have fallen to smother the train.
Which is just as well, for there are no maps. In fact, the only thing that tells Stevie the train is still moving at all is the sound.
Clickety-clack. Clickety-clack. Clckety-clack as the train chugs on, rocking gently back and forth. It’s cold on the skeleton train without the music and the laughter. It’s lonely without the dancing. It’s empty without the land rushing past the windows.
But the seats are still very plush and soft, and Stevie curls up in the corner of one, hugging knees to chest and trying not to wonder what happens next, or think about his parents waking up from their warm bed to find him gone.
He does not dream, and even if he did, he has no one to dream about, no way to bring back even one of the skeletons.
“Flesh-child. Flesh-child.” Thin fingers curl around Stevie’s arm to shake him awake. “It’s about time you went home, isn’t it?”
Stevie blinks. The train is clean, tables crammed with goblets freshly filled. The sky is dark. The violins await. “Can I go back?”
The chandelier’s light bounces off brass buttons thick and round as coins. “Of course you may, now that you know the truth of the skeleton train. Go back, and do not forget to dream of us. Stand between the carriages, I’ll slow it down, unless you want to become one of us before your time.”
“Thank you.”
In the tiny space between compartments, the wind howls, the tracks are loud. The train slows to a crawl, and as Stevie prepares to jump, the music begins to play.
He lands heavily on a bank of grass and rolls down, down, into the river with a splash. The skeleton train is already out of sight, but just ahead is the old bridge, its stones crumbling into the water.
Soaking wet, shaking from the chill, Stevie drags himself out and up toward the road. What a sight he’ll be to his parents when he gets home, though perhaps that doesn’t matter now. He wraps his arms about himself for warmth, but his teeth still chatter.
Clickety-clack.
An Uncharted Journey Through June
Mischievous ones,
There is a certain wicked thrill to venturing off to lands unknown, uncertain as to what you might see there, or to stepping aboard the mode of transport that will take you there. More than at any other time, perhaps, there is a sense in that moment that anything can happen.
Your Curators here in the Cabinet are a worldly and adventurous bunch, and we need to be, for how else would we go forth and collect the objects displayed here? On ghost ships and clackety trains that whisk through the night, we search far and wide for interesting tales.
It is fitting, then, that we dedicate a month – this month – to the theme of TRAVEL in all its many forms. Will it be to a land of faery magic behind that mysterious door in the basement or to discover the story of a naughty child beyond an ocean and just a smidge to the left?
Come on the journey with us and see.
A big announcement and a giveaway from your Curators!
Dear curious and lovely readers,
We, the Curators, thank you for exploring the Cabinet with us, reading about cake and tricks and not worrying when the tables sprout legs and run away. The tour through our collection of Curiosities is by no means over; in fact, it is just beginning.
We’re delighted to announce that the objects you’ve found here will soon be collected into a very different object–that is, a book–which you’ll be able to hold yourselves. An anthology of these short fictions for the young and mischievous is coming from Greenwillow Books in Summer 2014. Between its covers you will not only find the stories that have been, and will continue to be, placed here, but also brand new ones, plus observations and all manner of wickedness from the four of us.
Fret not, this ethereal Cabinet remains open for business, though we will soon be moving to a new and bigger home, with no interruption to our regular weekly offerings. Indeed, we are more determined than ever to bring you a wide variety of tales unearthed and rooms thrust into the light of day.
And if you’ll permit us a personal note, we would also like to profess our limitless gratitude to the honorary, silent Curators who stand behind us, ghostly and determined. Our agents, Sara Megibow, David Dunton, Diana Fox, and Brooks Sherman, and most particularly the brilliant Virginia Duncan, our new collective editor, for wanting to throw open the Cabinet doors even wider.
We’ll see you for the next story–truly, we will see you, the walls have eyes–and thank you, again, for your patronage.
The Curators (Stefan Bachmann, Katherine Catmull, Claire Legrand, and Emma Trevayne)
To celebrate this fantabulous news, we are having a giveaway–our first, but unlikely to be the last. Up for collection are four pairs of books, one from each Curator. One book shall be the Curator’s own, the other…who may know? An old, spooky favorite? A much-sought-after advance copy of something new? Only time will tell and this is, after all, a place of mysteries. Enter via the Rafflecopter link in the next seven days, and four winners will be chosen at random. (Giveaway is international, please enter from wherever you are!)
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