And With the Shadow People Be by Dan Newman

And With the Shadow People Be by Dan Newman

Author:Dan Newman [Newman, Dan]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9781626819511
Publisher: Diversion Books
Published: 2017-06-06T00:00:00+00:00


8

Jessie, 1974

The girl in the rain was a pixie of a thing, and her simple blue dress clung to her body like a badly rushed wallpaper job.

“What did you say?” asked Jack. The word she had used—dead—injected vigor into his question. Perhaps more than he intended.

In front of them, the little girl turned onto the track and began to walk. She stopped after a few feet, the Tanya leaf still shedding water in a perfect arc. “Come,” she said plainly. Then she turned and began walking along the muddy track in the direction of the estate house. The darkness seemed entirely unimportant to her.

“Hey, wait a minute,” called Jack.

“Dad, stop it. You’re going to scare her.” Jessie tugged at her father’s arm. “Come on—let’s go.”

Jessie walked beside the girl, sneaking looks at her it the darkness. “What’s your name?” she asked.

“Constance,” she replied.

“I’m Jessie and this is my father, Jack.”

The little girl walked on, seemingly preoccupied. Beneath the Tanya leaf, her head swivelled slowly back and forth, watching the bush line at either side, keeping a slow and regular rhythm, like a lighthouse without a beam.

“What are you looking for?” asked Jessie, following the girl’s gaze.

“Nuthin,” said Constance.

The three walked on in silence while the rain lightened; it remained steady and consistent, but the ferocity of the earlier downpour was gone. The forest still murmured with the raindrops, and where the track’s edges met the green mass, small rivers were beginning to carve a thousand tiny ruts into the exposed soil.

Ahead of them, the oval of light cast by Jack’s torch bobbed to and fro. He occasionally flicked it at the bush, at the dark shapes and shadows that wobbled there. They assumed and dissolved forms of every kind—people, animals, monsters.

They began to climb a rise in the track, and Jack knew that at the top, the dense jungle would open into ordered fields of nutmeg trees. He found himself eager to get there.

“Constance,” said Jessie. “What did you mean back there—what you said about being touched—and being dead?”

The little girl broke her pace and stopped. She looked at Jessie as if she had asked a question to which the answer was obvious. “Tonight be a walkin’ night,” she said. “Tonight dem come.”

“I don’t understand,” said Jess, mildly alarmed. “Who is…”

“Jess, come here,” said her father, barging into the conversation and pulling Jessie to one side. “Constance, is it?”

The little girl looked up at him, nodded, and began walking again. They all followed suit.

“Constance, is there a phone up there at the village?” he asked, pointing up the grade toward the top of the rise.

“No phone.”

“What about at the big house? At the Master’s house?”

“No phone.”

Jack muttered words under his breath that would never be heard. “What about a radio?”

“Sure, sure. Der be a radio.”

“I mean a radio that you can use to talk to another person, you know, a CB radio.”

“You mean, like a phone?”

“Yeah, I guess. Like a phone.”

“No phone,” said the girl.

Beside him, Jessie laughed once before the blackness gobbled that up, too.



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