Skinned Read online

  THE

  SHADOWING

  SKINNED

  THE

  SHADOWING

  SKINNED

  ADAM SLATER

  The Shadowing: Skinned

  First published 2011

  by Egmont UK Limited

  239 Kensington High Street

  London W8 6SA

  Text copyright © 2011 Hothouse Fiction

  Produced by Hothouse Fiction – www.hothousefiction.com

  ISBN 978 1 4052 5364 2

  eISBN 978 1 7803 1067 1

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  www.egmont.co.uk

  www.theshadowing.co.uk

  A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library

  Typeset by Avon DataSet Ltd, Bidford on Avon, Warwickshire Printed and bound in Great Britain by the CPI Group

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher and copyright owner.

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  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Epilogue

  With special thanks to Elizabeth Wein

  Prologue

  There aren’t any trees in the little circular cul-de-sac where the boy lives, but there is a tall, wooden telephone pole, sprouting a wire into each house in the street. Every night before bed, the boy checks to see if there are any birds perched on the wire that ties the pole to his own house. Sometimes on winter nights there are stars framed between them. Tonight there is a full moon. The boy leans his elbows on the windowsill and stares, imagining flying off in a spaceship.

  Then, suddenly, the night twists.

  It is the oddest thing the boy has ever seen. The view from his window warps for a moment, as though reflected in a wobbly mirror at a funfair. The air between the cable and the ground seems to break and reform, the way still water ripples and then settles when you touch it.

  The boy rubs his eyes. He shakes his head before he looks again to see if the ripple is still there.

  It isn’t. Instead, there is a woman standing on the pavement.

  In the pale light of the full moon, the woman’s skin is faintly blue, as though she has been nearly frozen to death. Around her shoulders is a tattered shawl, too full of holes to protect against the winter air. Her ragged leather skirt doesn’t look very warm either.

  Where did she come from?

  The boy at the window is fascinated. He can’t look away.

  *

  Black Annis lifts her head, swivels her eyes first one way and then the other. Above her stands a wooden mast with thick, black ropes stretching out to the strange houses around it. Beneath her feet, the ground is as hard as rock.

  The world has changed.

  When she last crossed over and walked this land, it was field and forest. Now all that is gone. No trees anywhere – only this bare wooden pole. Gone, too, the entrance to the cave Black Annis scratched from the sandstone of Dane’s Hill with her own nails. Gone, the oak that grew at its mouth, where she hung out the flayed skins of her victims to dry so that later she might sew them for her skirts.

  And what is that smell – thick and acrid? It surrounds her, dulling the cold, fresh scent of night and the aroma of warm, living things. All changed, all gone – nothing remains of what Black Annis knew in this world. It is buried beneath this grey layer of grit and tar, and row upon row of smoky human dwellings. For a moment, in the cavity where her shrivelled, inhuman heart beats, Black Annis knows something like despair.

  Then her eyes follow one of the black ropes overhead. It stretches from the top of the tall, wooden pole to the bottom of a window. And in the window, moonlight shining on his white face, there is a child.

  Black Annis smiles. Her pointed teeth do not gleam; they are black with age and the bloodstains of her countless victims. But they are still strong, still primed for their purpose. She looks up at the human child – surely meant to be in bed and asleep at this time of night.

  Some things never change.

  *

  The boy watches as the cold woman turns her head, looking up at the telephone pole, and finally looking at him. Straight at him. Her eyes seem alight, glinting brightly. Her lips pull back over teeth that make a dark stain in the middle of her pale, bluish face.

  It is a smile. She sees him.

  Now he notices something else. Her arms seem too long for her body, and her fingers – no one can have fingers that long! Unless . . . Were they her fingernails?

  The boy snaps out of his trance, all fascination instantly turned to fear. He backs away from the window.

  *

  Black Annis walks towards the house. Inside the gate, separating the building from the hard grey ground beyond, there is a tiny patch of grass and earth. The soil here has not changed. The sandy loam is soft and familiar. It is good to feel the earth beneath her feet again.

  Black Annis reaches the house and looks up. It is bigger than the human dwelling places she remembers. The windows are higher.

  But her nails are as sharp as ever they were. She is good at climbing.

  *

  Cowering away from the window, the boy can see nothing. But he can hear an odd noise outside – a scratching beneath the window, growing steadily louder. The boy doesn’t want to look, but he has to know what it is.

  He forces himself back to the window. He grips the sill and peers out across the street. The strange woman is gone.

  But the noise is still growing louder. The boy looks down at the window ledge outside the house. Long, sharp claws are hooked into the wood. As the boy watches, the dark claws flex and grip. Behind them rise long, pale arms, blue in the night’s half-light. The arms haul up the rest of the grotesque body. Black teeth and silver eyes rise into view, filling the window.

  *

  Black Annis is face to face with her victim. Her grin widens. The human child dashes across the room, throws himself into his bed and dives under the covers. Black
Annis can see the heap of human helplessness trembling beneath the flimsy cloth and down.

  The boy’s terror is delicious.

  *

  Under his duvet, the boy hides, his nerves a snarled tangle of despair and hope. Surely he is safe here. The blue woman can’t see him any more, and the window is shut tight –

  Click.

  The sound is soft and sudden. A cold draught of night air reaches under the covers and stings the boy’s trembling ankles. The window is open.

  The child waits, his heart pounding with fear, as he listens to the quiet, slow footfalls padding across his bedroom floor. Then they stop, and the boy holds his breath, waiting . . . Perhaps she’s gone? Perhaps it was all his imagination, perhaps –

  There is no more warning. The covers are ripped from his body in one lightning sweep. It is too late for him to scream for help.

  He screams anyway.

  Chapter One

  Evening had well and truly settled in Nether Marlock, and Callum stared out of his bedroom window at the night sky. He knew he should be concentrating on his English homework, but these days it didn’t take much to distract him. He could hear Gran downstairs cleaning their small cottage vigorously. At least she’d found something to occupy her mind, he thought. Sighing, Callum rubbed his eyes. He cracked open his bedroom window a little to get some fresh air, and then looked back down at his textbook.

  A moment later, he heard a noise. At first he thought it was a branch of the rowan tree that grew next to the ramshackle alms cottage, scratching at the top of the window. But when he looked up, Callum saw bones not branches. Fluttering at the glass was a bird, the size of a crow, but not like any he had ever seen.

  It was a skeleton.

  The bird’s bony wings rattled and battered insistently against the window pane. Callum held his breath. He had always been able to see ghosts – they were such an ordinary part of his life that when he’d been younger he had sometimes confused them with the living. There was no confusing this thing, though – whether it was a ghost or not, it was certainly no ordinary bird. And it was obviously determined to get his attention.

  Before Callum could even react, the skeletal creature suddenly swooped downwards and hurtled through the open window into the room. The clattering bones landed on his desk in a jumbled heap. Shock strangled Callum’s voice in his throat as the bone crow reformed itself in a swirl of icy wind. It opened its beak in a long, silent caw. Its breath smelled like mould. The crow flicked its bare skull back towards the window as though it was beckoning Callum, and with a flourish of featherless wings it swooped back to the windowsill, daring him to follow it outside.

  ‘What the . . .?’ Callum began in a shaky whisper, but then stopped. He’d learned by now not to ignore supernatural commands, however strange or disturbing they might be. He knew that he had a role to play in the bizarre events that had become a part of his daily life.

  Callum quickly made his way down the narrow spiral stairs to the little sitting room, pulling on a hooded sweatshirt and then his jacket. ‘I’m going for a walk,’ he called quickly to his grandmother, who was still doing the washing up in the kitchen.

  ‘It’s freezing out there. What on earth would you want to do that for?’ she replied.

  Callum grimaced. He’d been hoping for a quick getaway, but lately Gran had been watching him like a hawk.

  ‘You ought to be careful now, Callum,’ she continued, drying off her hands and then folding her arms in concern.

  ‘I just need to get some fresh air, that’s all,’ he said. Gran raised her eyebrows, but before she could say anything more, Callum had slipped through the front door and out into the icy evening.

  He scanned the dark sky, and saw the skeleton crow circling overhead. Glancing back briefly at the cottage, through the open curtains of the sitting room window he could see the new set of sliding glass doors that led to the back garden. He shivered, and not just from the aching cold.

  Callum still couldn’t look at the glass without remembering the awful battle with the Fetch. He could still picture the horrendous skinless ‘face’ of the evil demon that had hunted him so recently. Those doors had been shattered during the struggle, but Gran had got them fixed as soon as she possibly could, smoothing things over as if nothing had ever happened. All part of her disguise, Callum thought. Her plan to make sure everything seemed normal.

  But she’s a witch, Callum reminded himself. And she always has been.

  Anger briefly warmed him, and his face flushed as he remembered the secrets that had unravelled only weeks ago: all the protective spells Gran had been weaving to conceal Callum’s true nature not only from himself, but from the Netherworld and its terrible demons. His grandmother had been hiding the truth from him for years, and Callum had had no idea.

  There was no avoiding it now, though. He was a chime child.

  ‘Child,’ he muttered to himself wryly, his breath pluming into the air. It seemed like there was an awful lot of expectation on someone referred to as a kid. Chime children were those born under a full moon between midnight on Friday and cockcrow on Saturday morning; the chime hours. They were destined to guard the Boundary between the mortal world and the Netherworld until they turned eighteen. Seeing ghosts and other weird stuff, like the bone crow, was just one of the ‘gifts’ that was meant to help in this task. But after the Fetch’s spree of gory assassinations, Callum was the only chime child left alive.

  The crow’s bones clattered as it dived down in front of him and Callum jerked away from it as its thin, white wings passed in front of his face.

  ‘All right, I’m coming,’ Callum whispered, his voice shaking in spite of himself. He wasn’t sure he really wanted to follow. Part of him would have rather pretended that none of this was happening, that he could just go back to his room in the cottage, with Gran fussing and bustling around him.

  But she lied to me, he thought fiercely. If it hadn’t been for the Fetch turning up, Callum might still not know he was a chime child. And he certainly wouldn’t know about his father, who’d vanished mysteriously before Callum was born. He had been a chime child too. Callum found it strangely comforting that his dad had been through some of what he was about to face.

  He shivered as the wind picked up, moving his hands from his pockets and tucking them up into his armpits. He’d left in such a hurry he hadn’t bothered with gloves. Winter seemed to be coming even earlier this year. At least he could be sure that Gran would have the cottage warm when he finally got back home. He sighed. She was Callum’s whole family now – she had been for the past three years since his mum had died. Deep down, he knew that by keeping him in the dark she had only been trying to protect him from what he must now face.

  The Shadowing.

  Callum felt uncomfortable even thinking the phrase. All he really knew was that it happened once every hundred years, and that during the thirteen moons of the Shadowing, the Boundary between worlds would grow weaker, allowing an untold number of nightmarish beasts to cross over into the mortal world. Callum wasn’t sure if he was ready for what was to come. After all, the Fetch was only the beginning.

  His eyes darted up to the sky once more as the skeleton crow swooped down and opened its beak for its strange, silent caw. An enormous full moon sailed high in the sky, casting crystalline light over Nether Marlock Road. As Callum reached the woods, he saw that the trees were white with frost, standing in quiet ranks like an army of dead soldiers. Their peculiar glow lit his way. The sound of his trudging through the frozen silence was making him increasingly tense, but stealth was impossible. Each step made the hard frost crackle like a fire.

  Callum stopped suddenly. Was that a twig snapping behind him? He whirled round, his heart racing, his eyes darting left and right. He stood still for a long while but, hearing nothing else, he decided it must have been an echo of his own footsteps. Callum’s jaw clenched, but he didn’t allow himself another shiver. Now was not the time to be nervous. He buried his hands fur
ther into his pockets as he walked. Callum had a suspicion now that he knew where they were going, and who may have sent the sinister messenger to summon him . . .

  Sure enough, a few moments later, Callum finally reached the lane that led to the ruins of Nether Marlock Church. There, by the iron gate that led into the old churchyard – one of the most haunted places in Marlock – a silhouette made a dark shape against the vivid light of the huge, round moon. Callum’s muscles tensed, and he held his breath as he peered through the gloom, trying to make out the stranger’s face . . .

  He exhaled in relief. ‘What the hell are you doing here?’

  ‘Nice to see you too,’ came Melissa’s reply.

  ‘Sorry,’ Callum answered, taking another deep, calming breath before he spoke to his friend. ‘You just weren’t who I was expecting.’

  ‘I know,’ Melissa said softly. ‘But look.’

  She held up her hand.

  Perched on her wrist was a little skeleton bird, a bit like the crow that had come banging against Callum’s window, but this one was the size of a sparrow.

  ‘It’s creepy, but it seems to like me,’ Melissa said. ‘I have to keep pushing it off because it makes my arm so cold after a couple of minutes.’

  ‘Melissa, seriously, what are you doing here?’

  ‘This thing wanted me to follow it, so I did. Just like you, it seems . . .’ She pointed to the crow skeleton. ‘Wow, that thing’s big. I’d have died of fright if Jacob had sent me one of those.’

  Callum smiled a little. If there was anyone who would be willing to get involved in all the crazy supernatural stuff going on in his life, it was Melissa. He was amazed at how she just took all these things in her stride – even Jacob. Any normal person who encountered a Born Dead ghost would have run a million miles. But not her. Spooky might as well be Melissa’s middle name.

  She shook her arm to get the skeleton sparrow off her wrist. ‘Shoo.’ The creature flew off, but the two strange birds paid no attention to each other – just fluttered in mid-air above Callum and Melissa’s heads, the white bones of their wings clattering noisily. Callum’s crow gave another silent, mould-scented scream and flapped away into the darkness towards the entrance to the ruined church.