The Shadow People Read online

  The Shadow People

  (1969)**

  Margaret St, Clair

  Chapter One

  Thoughts draw them. They are sensitive, they pick up something from us, they can track us by our thoughts as dogs can track by scent. Angry or disturbed or painful thoughts attract them most. That is why, in the old stories, somebody who had been "ill-sained" was particularly liable to capture by Otherworld denizens. And yet, for all their sensitivity, there could scarcely exist beings more primitive, rude, nearer to the archaic clay. They are not all alike.

  There are three kinds of them, the gray, the black and the green. Green is the worst, but I have seen some white ones, too. I think that was underneath Merced. I wandered for a long time before I came out.

  They dwell in a strange world, one of roaring waters, bitter cold, ice-coated rocks and fox fires glowing in the dark. They call our world the Bright World, the Clear World, or Middle-Earth. Their material culture is of the rudest. They have almost no artifacts except the ones they steal from us. Yet their place is home to them: I suppose that is what Kirk meant, in his Secret Commonwealth, when he spoke of their "happy polity". Their atter-corn is their one great luxury—that, and human flesh.

  I did not learn all these things at once, of course. They were all things that I learned from personal experience.

  I was living on Telegraph Avenue then, in the Shasta Inn, and my girl, Carol, was living in a "basement apartment" a couple of blocks from me. We did not consider ourselves members of the hip community, though I suppose an outsider would have—I worked on the staff of the local hip newspaper and had a luxuriant moustache, and Carol was ambitious in noncommercial film making. We rarely turned on with anything.

  I was somewhat older than she—not enough to be a serious barrier, but enough to give "Come Up the Years", which had been a popular rock tune when we met, a particular poignancy and point. The basement apartment consisted of a toilet, a shower, and one room, fenced off from the rest of the basement with sheets of Japanese bamboo matting. There was no hot water in the shower, but Carol was a hardy girl; she even washed her long light hair in the shower, using Woolite for soap.

  The basement room was warm and dry. Carol slept on the floor, in a double sleeping bag, with her still camera, an SLR Miranda, near her right hand. The camera was her most valued possession. When I wanted to give her a present, I got her an accessory for it.

  The sheets of bamboo matting gave the exiguous room a close, intimate, almost luxurious feeling. When I stayed with her, we used to hear faint chirps and squeakings on the other side of the makeshift partition. The noise never bothered us. We thought it was mice.

  The quality of our first eight or ten months together would be hard to convey. It was more than happiness, though we certainly were happy, and more than youth, though we knew we were young. I have said that we did not consider ourselves hippies; and yet the Avenue, Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley, was our right, our appointed place. It was ours, as the sea belongs to the dolphin and the air to a bird. It was a place where anything delightful could happen, a place where a Shetland pony could be sheltered in a station wagon, or soap bubbles drift in a glittering shower along the street. We felt a passionate loyalty to the Avenue. I expect an Athenian in his city's great years would have been able to understand.

  Eight months, ten months, I've forgotten which it was. It must have rained sometimes during those days, but when I think of them, the sun always seems to be shining. Then we had a quarrel.

  We had had quarrels before, of course, but never so bitter and destructive as this. The immediate cause was trivial: Carol, who wasn't old enough herself to vote, objected to the candidate for whom I had cast my ballot in a recent Berkeley city election. But as the argument continued, we found heavier and heavier weapons against each other, until at last things were said by both of us that I do not, even now, particularly enjoy thinking about.

  Neither of us cared enough about who was elected mayor of Berkeley to account for the fury of our quarrel. I suppose the real cause was repressed jealousy on both sides, an aching, desperate jealousy our code forbade us to recognize.

  The quarrel ended with my throwing open the door of my room in the Shasta Inn and telling Carol to get out.

  "Very well, you –––––" she said. Even her lips were white.

  Two days passed. Every time the phone on my desk rang, I hoped it would be Carol. It never was. Finally, about twelve o'clock on the third evening, I got out of bed, put on my clothes, and started to walk over to Carol's place.

  It was a coolish night. The Coffee House was just closing. I passed a man and a girl walking with their arms around each other and the girl's head on the man's shoulder. They weren't anybody I knew.

  A light was on in Carol's room. I knocked. No answer. I tried the door. It was unlocked—a bad habit of Carol's I was always scolding her about. After hesitating for an instant, I went in.

  The little tensor light, standing on the floor beside her sleeping bag, was burning, but she wasn't in the room.

  I looked in the bathroom; she wasn't there, either. I went back and stood irresolutely beside her sleeping bag.

  On impulse, I put my hand between the layers of the sleeping bag. There was still warmth in the bed; Carol had left it not many minutes before.

  I was beginning to be alarmed. I looked around, hunting some clue. The camera was on the floor. Under the right edge of the sleeping bag, close to the lamp, I found one of the filters for her camera. It looked as if it had been stepped on. The yellow glass was cracked.

  She might have stepped on it herself. For a moment common sense warred with alarm in my mind, and common sense won. Carol had probably decided that she was hungry, and gone out to get something to eat. I hadn't met her on the street, but she might have decided to take the shortcut through Mrs. Anderson's back yard. The Doggy Diner was open until two.

  I'd wait for her. I took off my jacket and shoes, and got into the sleeping bag. The bed was warm, though the pillow felt damp. (Had she been crying? I felt a small pleasure at the thought.) At any rate, I was in Carol's bed again. She ought to be back in fifteen or twenty minutes. I yawned.

  The bag was warm and comfortable, and I was tired. I dozed off, still expecting to hear the door open and my girl come in.

  I woke a good many hours later. Gray light was coming through the room's high windows. As soon as I knew where I was, I felt beside me in the bed for Carol. She wasn't there. She hadn't come home all night.

  I looked at my watch. It was just after six. Carol hadn't come home all night.

  I went in the bathroom. She wasn't there, of course. Was it possible that she'd come back, seen me sleeping in her bed, and, still unwilling to end our quarrel, gone away again? For a moment this idea comforted me. Then—the light was better now than it had been the night before—I saw something odd on the floor. I bent and examined it. It was a shiny mark on the concrete, about four inches wide, and it went from the far side of the bed toward the matting, where it stopped.

  For some reason the mark, though I didn't know what might have caused it, greatly increased my alarm. My heart was beating hard.

  I put on my shoes and jacket, and washed my face in the bathroom. Carol might be annoyed with me, if nothing was the matter and her absence had a normal explanation. But I was too alarmed to wait any longer. I was going to the police.

  The officer I spoke to was a pleasant young man about my own age, and he listened to me attentively. "Her bed was warm when you got there," he said, summing up when I had finished. "Her door was unlocked, and you found signs of a struggle. That's what you meant about the broken filter, isn't it?"

  "Yes. Somebody must have stepped on it
."

  "You found signs of a struggle. She never did come back, though you waited for her all night. You're afraid something may have happened to her."

  "I—yes."

  "Excuse me, but this is off the record. Did your girl smoke pot or use acid?"

  I shook my head. "Not since I've known her. We'd both tried pot and liked it. But we hadn't had any for a long time."

  "I asked because sometimes—with acid, anyhow—people get a little confused. They don't quite know where they are, wander off, get lost, and so on. That would be the simplest explanation, you know."

  "She didn't like acid. She didn't like the way it made her feel. Nobody that sounds like her was hurt in an accident last night, or anything of that sort?"

  "No. We get reports from the hospitals. Well, I'll get her description from you, and we'll let you know if we hear anything."

  He took down what I told him—Carol Jennings, age nineteen, height five feet seven inches, long light hair, brown eyes. "Any scars, marks, physical peculiarities?" he asked, looking up from the paper.

  "No. She's small-boned. Her wrists are unusually thin."

  "Weight?"

  "About a hundred and fifteen."

  "Well, that's about it. We'll let you know if we hear anything. And be sure to let us know if she pops up safe and sound in a few days." He smiled, and I realized he wasn't taking me too seriously.

  All the same, I felt better for having enlisted the fuzz on Carol's behalf. It wasn't until I was a couple of blocks from the city hall that I realized I hadn't mentioned the shiny mark on the floor to him.

  It was still early. I walked back to the Shasta Inn, bathed, had breakfast at the Coffee House, and got to my desk at the Barb in plenty of time.

  Miller, in charge of layout, came by about noon. "What's the matter, man?" he asked. "You've looked down all week; today you look terrible. Punk trip?"

  "It's Carol," I answered. "She's"—I boggled at the word "disappeared"—"gone."

  "Gone? Gone where?"

  "That's just the point. I don't know." I told him what had happened the night before, once more omitting the shiny mark on the concrete.

  "You think she was kidnapped, don't you?" he said when I had finished.

  "I didn't say that."

  "Yes, but you implied it. She's probably staying with some friend."

  "I called everybody I could think of this morning. They all say they haven't seen her."

  "Um." Miller played absently with the crux ansata hanging around his neck. "Why don't you scry to find out where she is? You can scry: I've seen you do it. I think you're a natural sensitive."

  I shrugged. "To me, it's a form of self-hypnosis. I have no confidence in it."

  "Very probably it is. It's still a way of finding out what you don't know consciously. You remember what D. H. Lawrence said about classical augury?"

  I'd heard Miller quote Lawrence on the subject of augury several times already. "Yeah, I remember," I said.

  "Lawrence said that the augur watched the flight of birds so he could find out what direction the birds in his heart were flying," Miller said relentlessly. "He meant by that that the practice of divination is designed to bring subconscious knowledge into consciousness. In the subliminal parts of your mind, you know where Carol is."

  "Do I?"

  "Yes, I think so. Scrying would tell you what is already in your mind."

  I didn't say anything. I wished he would go away. Miller stood by my desk a little longer. Then he patted me on the shoulder and turned away.

  I kept hoping the police would call, but of course they didn't. By quitting time, I was even more worried about Carol than I had been at six that morning. I still thought scrying was an unlikely way to find out what had happened to her.

  I walked over to the basement apartment. Everything was exactly as I had left it, including the glittering mark on the concrete. She hadn't been back.

  It was the time of day when she and I used to sit on the terrace of the Coffee House, sipping soft drinks and watching the kaleidoscopic crowd move along the sidewalk. She had been talking—before we had our quarrel—about getting a place where she could cook for us and even entertain friends. But we had both been sentimentally attached to the room with the walls of bamboo matting.

  I stood irresolutely on the corner of Haste and Telegraph. I was much too worried to be hungry, and while everyone I told about Carol's absence had been sympathetic, they had soon changed the subject. She was all I could think about, though. Finally I decided to go up to my room and have a glass of sherry. It would help to pass some of the long, worried evening that lay in front of me.

  The bottle of Spanish sherry was in my bottom drawer. (Fay, the chambermaid, was a teetotaler.) I half-filled a tumbler with the gold liquid and sat on the edge of the bed drinking it. It tasted good. I was tired and tense, and the sherry felt friendly and comforting. I poured more into the glass.

  The ring pattern on the bottom of the tumbler looked portentous and significant, seen through the clear liquid. A light show, in my own bedroom. What was it somebody had said about scrying? That the one essential was a "clear depth" into which the scryer could look? The time I had tried it, at a party at which Miller had been present, I had used the regulation crystal ball. But I could think of no real reason that a glass of sherry would not do.

  The light, as I remembered, ought to be coming from behind me. I switched on the table lamp and turned my back to it. I looked down into the glass.

  The liquid seemed to grow slightly cloudy. I kept on looking. Small darting sparks shot—very pretty—through me cloudiness. Then a great welling-up, a dark expansion, of the cloudiness.

  I knew what that meant. In a minute I was going to see something.

  The clouds did not disappear, as they had done during my other scrying. Slowly they transformed themselves, until I saw, instead of billowy storm clouds, a length of angry water. Waves roaring toward a rocky shore? Cross currents in a rock-vexed, foaming river? It could have been either one. There was nothing to give a clue.

  I watched with straining eyes until the picture faded.

  Nothing took its place. I was looking down into a glass tumbler half-full of sherry.

  I sighed. I finished the sherry. Miller's theory—that I knew, on an unconscious level, where Carol had gone—didn't seem to apply to my vision. It might have a symbolic meaning, but I didn't know what the meaning was. Perhaps it would come to me later.

  I reached for the telephone and called a couple of people Carol had been on nodding terms with. They hadn't seen her and were surprised to learn she was missing.

  I drank some more sherry. I took off my shoes and lay down on the bed.

  I woke about twelve-thirty. I had a slight headache, but my sleep had done me good: I was sure I knew where Carol was.

  The angry water I had seen in my scrying had been the representation of an actual scene along the California coast—the rough surf near Big Sur. Carol had friends there, a couple called Clifford and Eadie Wilson. She must be with them. I wondered that I had not thought of them before.

  The Wilsons had no telephone, and they lived too far from town for a telegram to be delivered to them. A letter would take too long. I'd have to go to Big Sur.

  I found a bus timetable in the upper drawer of the dresser. The earliest bus down the coast left at eight-thirty a.m., and got to Monterey about four hours later. From there on, I'd have to hitchhike.

  I undressed and got into bed properly. I was feeling—ought to have been feeling—much better, since I had the prospect of finding my girl soon. There was a good deal of noise in the wall near the head of my bed, and it bothered me. I supposed the room next to mine had finally been rented, and the new tenant appeared to be a noisy one.

  My idea about Carol seemed 'as reasonable next morning as it had during the dark hours. She must be with the Wilsons. I left a note for my boss with the switchboard operator—employment on a hip newspaper has an elastic quality—and cau
ght the Monterey bus in plenty of time. By one in the afternoon I was standing beside the highway, trying to hitch a ride.

  Big Sur—actually it is the Big Sur country, since the town of Big Sur hardly exists—is about twenty-five miles from Monterey, with highway number one on one side of it and the Santa Lucia hills on the other. It is beautiful country, wild with rocks and noisy with surf. The highway is a famous scenic drive. I have never much cared for the locale, despite its beauty. There is an unwholesome feel to it.

  There was very little traffic. The day was cloudy and cool. Two cars passed me without stopping. I began to walk along the highway, looking back hopefully now and then.

  I had walked for about an hour—nobody stopped for me—when, on the hill side of the road, I saw a man come out from behind a rock and stand looking at me. His head was slightly bent, his hair long and dark, his clothing nondescript. He was about a hundred feet away from me.

  He startled me, where had he come from? He remained motionless looking at me, his hands clasped behind his back, until I drew abreast of him. Then he took two steps backward, without turning, and was behind the rock once more.

  Fifty feet down the road, I turned and looked back at the rock. I could see behind it now, and there seemed no place from which he could have come or to which he could have gone.

  Not long after the encounter with the motionless watcher, I got a lift on a vegetable truck. He took me as far as the country road up which, as I remembered, Clifford and Eadie lived. Their name was on one of the mailboxes at the edge of the highway.

  I thanked the vegetable truck man and got out. The road was first uphill, and then level, with a series of impressive views on the coastal side. After I had been walking for a while, a deer dashed across the road in front of me and into a thicket of poison oak.

  The Wilsons' house was on the seaward side, sheltered by two magnificent madrones, with a steep, narrow trail leading down to the back door. There was a weather-beaten redwood chaise on a level spot beside the house.

  I plunged down the trail, knocked on the front door, and waited. I was already planning what I would say to Carol if she came to the door. But it would probably be Eadie or Clifford. I hoped they would remember me.