The Shadows: A Novel by Alex North

Gritten Valley Times, which had been the area’s local paper when I was a child. I laid it out on the beams now and took in the stark headline across the middle of the yellowing front page.
GRITTEN ROCKED BY TEEN SLAYING
    The printed text below the headline had been smudged by thumbprints and faded by time, but the grainy photographs there were still visible. There was Billy, age fifteen, glowering sullenly at the camera. His thick brown hair was parted in the center and there was a smattering of acne on his cheeks. Below that photo was one of Charlie. He was smirking absently, his dyed black hair swept back, his eyes as empty and alien as a shark’s.
    I knew both of these photographs well. They had been taken from the class portrait we’d all posed for, early on in the year of the murder, and I knew the rest of us were there somewhere, outside of the frame. These were zoomed in, which explained the low quality of the images. There had been other, better photographs of Charlie and Billy, but these were the ones the media had generally run with at the time. I hadn’t understood why back then, but I realized now they seemed to fit the story best—capturing not only the killers themselves but their roles in what unfolded.
    Charlie, the leader.
    Billy, the led.
    I hadn’t seen a photograph of either of them in years, and the sight of them now left me numb inside. I should have been feeling something, I thought, but for a moment nothing would come. I stared down at the blurry image of Charlie for a few empty seconds. And then—finally—something snapped inside me, as though a tendon in my mind had given way beneath a sudden strain, and the emotion came tumbling out, angry and sickening.
    I hate you.
    I fucking hate you.
    My hands trembled as I took more newspapers out of the box. There were other copies of the Gritten Valley Times, but there were national papers as well, all of the stories about the murder here inGritten and the subsequent investigation. There was coverage of Billy’s arrest and trial. The search for Charlie. The grief of a community in shock at the pitch-black evil that had flowered in its midst.
    My mother had kept it all.
    But why? I remembered she had encouraged me not to follow the media at the time, trying to protect me from it. I had ignored her, of course, and each report I scanned now brought with it a jolt of memory. Here was a photograph of the playground, sealed away behind crime scene tape, a policeman standing guard by the bushes. There, yet another lurid sidebar detailing Charlie and Billy’s obsession with lucid dreaming.
    I turned one page to find a photograph of a knife, the blood on the blade dried to rusty-looking crumbs, and read the caption below.
The weapon that Charles Crabtree and William Roberts used to stab their classmate to death. A total of fifty-seven wounds were recorded on the body, leaving the victim’s head all but severed.
    I put it quickly aside.
    I felt hollow inside now: my whole body slightly stunned, as though the impact of seeing all this again were physical rather than mental. And the whole time, the red hands flickered at the edges of my vision.
    What was in the other boxes?
    There was a sudden urgency to the question. I took the second box down and opened it. There were newspapers inside this one too, but these appeared to be more recent. The first I pulled out was dated only four years ago.
    And yet the headline was horribly familiar.
BOY, 14, MURDERED BY CLASSMATES
    Next to that, there was a photograph of a boy. He had a mop of unruly blond hair and a scattering of freckles, and the collar of his school uniform was visible at the bottom of the frame. He was smiling sweetly for the camera. The caption told me his name had been Andrew Brook. He looked far younger than fourteen, and for a moment he reminded me so much of James at that age that it took my breath away.
    As I worked my way through the newspapers, everything felt strange and off-kilter around me,