The Shadow Doctor

by Adrian Plass

Genres: Christian Fiction

Synopsis

The Shadow Doctor isn't your usual kind of doctor. Sure, you can bring him your problems - but the chances are his solutions will blow your mind. This man can see into your soul, and the cures he prescribes don't come from the pharmacy. If you have fears you just cannot face, wounds you can't even bear to remember - if you've been abused, ignored, damaged by all life throws at you - the Shadow Doctor is here to help. But the Shadow Doctor has shades of his own, and the work of helping others may be the only thing keeping him afloat. Can he stay ahead of the demons that torment him long enough to help those who need him?

Release date: February 9, 2017

Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton

Print pages: 221

Sample

Prologue

At two o’clock in the morning the man stepped out of his cottage, locking the door carefully behind him. A couple of strides away from the house, he stopped, pushed his gloved hands into his pockets and leaned the top part of his body back to stare up at the clear night sky. Clusters of tiny, exploding pinpoints filled the heavens. Endless stands of trees closely guarding the little dwelling remained watchful and dark, apparently unimpressed by starlight.

Shivering a little, the man set off briskly down the little sloping garden, across the patchy lawn, past the abandoned chicken run and the vegetable patch towards a gap in the trees where a narrow path gave access to the hidden heart of the forest. No hesitation. He knew every inch of the way. No fear of being lost.

That was not his fear.

Fifteen minutes later he stopped at a place where the path had no choice but to take a wide loop around a massive, toad-shaped chunk of limestone. Patting the face of the rock once with the palm of his hand, he turned away from the outside edge of the loop, ducking and weaving his way expertly through a confusion of more or less horizontal branches before emerging onto something that was more of an animal trail than a path. After a little careful negotiation he entered a clearing that was roughly circular in shape.

Standing in the centre of the small open space, the man wrapped his arms around his chest and lifted his eyes to stare at the natural planetarium above his head.

A minute passed. Something stirred and built in him. His whole body began to tremble. The shout of agony, when it came, crashed into the soullessly resistant trunks of the surrounding trees, ricocheting back towards the solitary figure.

‘I’m frightened! It’s too much – I don’t think I can do it any more!’

There was no response to his desperate cry. Many sounds, but none that were directed at him. The man knew the voices of the forest well. The whispering, groaning language of the trees. Small creatures screaming in their own little worlds of agony or ecstasy. He knew the muffled thump of an owl’s flight, the serrated edges of its wings allowing almost silent movement as it hunted small animals and birds on the forest floor. He recognised the loud, ventriloquial churr of the nightjar, to him the most mystically intriguing inhabitant of this crepuscular world. He was familiar with all of these voices. He was not afraid of them, and he was not afraid of the darkness.

That was not his fear.

So keenly attuned was he to the common noises of the night that the sound of a twig cracking on the edge of the clearing caused him to whip his head round in surprise. No conjecture. No need to guess the weight required to produce that particular noise. But it was an interference. It was a shock.

Only one person could have followed him into the forest.

1

Flame

After a long drive from the south and a failed appointment, Jack Merton found himself stranded one damp morning in the pocket-sized Yorkshire city of Ripon. At the end of an unevenly paved alley threading itself away from the tiny city centre he was abruptly confronted by the cathedral church of St Peter’s. Crossing Minster Road, he ducked through the west door to escape the annoyingly persistent drizzle. Peace fell upon him as he stepped into the nave. Something of a benevolent shock. It was much more than the simple difference between being damp and being dry. The seam between one state and the other was impossible to detect. It was like magic. Magical.

‘Wickedly magical,’ he whispered to himself with delicious indulgence.

Jack’s father had taught his young son to love English cathedrals. He always said that they revealed inadequacy through excess. Being in this one now was like standing inside a vast bell, filled with soft, friendly light and a host of shadows in every shade of grey, blending effortlessly from shy through to bold. No longer stranded, but simply present, Jack circled the building in a dream until he came across a mini Swiss alp of wrought-iron candle racks at the foot of a pillar opposite the south wall.

The very sight of candles disturbed him a little. Since becoming a believer at the age of sixteen, Jack had been trying not to allow such crudely visible symbols to add a dimension of reality to his prayers, however seductively hypnotic the sight and concept of a melting flame might seem. There was a general consensus in his circles that spirituality could only be truly authentic if it existed outside the world of ‘things’. Recently, though, he had become vaguely aware of the contradictions in this notion. The church he had been attending for some years, for instance, had reverted to cherryade instead of wine when it came to Communion, but as far as Jack could see, the Holy Elements remained healthily solid and visible.

Now, in a spasm of independence, he dropped a pound into the slot below the racks, took one of the unused tea-lights from a nearby cardboard box and carefully lit it from a burning candle, releasing a sob of misery, quickly disguised as a little hack of a cough, as the wick caught.

In some inexplicable way the sob felt like a prayer. Outrageously, it was for himself. It was probably the most inchoate but profound supplication he had ever made. He watched the candle burn for a few seconds, enjoying it as if it were a personal achievement. Perhaps, he wondered, the almost undetectable but unarguably random movement of the tiny flame might prove to be a symbol of liberation, a possibility of something new, if he had the courage or the will to grasp it. But what on earth could that mean? At this moment, and in this place, he had no idea.

A fortnight later he would open and read his grandmother’s letter. It was to change his life.

2

Alice

Jack’s grandmother had died three months earlier, days before her ninetieth birthday. The Golden Hands carer, Barbara, who helped Alice to get up every weekday morning, had discovered the elderly lady, face pillowed on her hands, looking as rosy cheeked and peaceful as ever. Barbara wept a little. She had grown very fond of funny, feisty Alice. Difficult to accept that she would never wake again in this world.

Jack had always loved and appreciated his gran. She adored him, and much enjoyed telling people that her grandson was a good-looking young man with a charming smile and a schoolboy-shaped head who might easily be mistaken for the actor Matt Damon. She was a bright, unfading light in the darker tunnels of Jack’s life, especially since the death of his father had left him alone in the world. She was always rapturously pleased to see him, always kind, always giving. She was good to talk with as well. Actually, more than good. There was a wit and an edge to Alice Merton’s conversation that encouraged her inwardly uncertain grandson to explore tentatively some of the truths about himself that were definitely not for general release.

Jack hardly remembered William, his grandfather. There were photographs on the bureau in the sitting room of the ground-floor Eastbourne flat that Gran had moved to when stairs became too much for her. They showed a tall, tweedy, smart man with incongruously untidy hair, a confident smile and, in almost every image, a protective arm placed firmly around his wife’s shoulders. It had amused Jack that, in every picture, Gran’s wide-eyed, beaming, oval portrait of a face seemed to be saying breathlessly, ‘I can hardly believe my luck!’ One day, over tea and homemade Battenberg cake, infused oddly and slightly alarmingly with rum, he shared this thought with her.

Tears glittered and swam in the old lady’s eyes. She leaned across to pick up one of the silver-framed photographs and stared at it for a little while, head on one side. Placing it face down on her lap, she dabbed away the tears with a hanky taken from her sleeve.

‘Sorry, Gran,’ said Jack, his own voice breaking a little. ‘I didn’t mean to upset you.’

‘Oh, good gracious, you didn’t upset me, sweetheart,’ she replied, leaning forward to pat his knee gently. ‘He’s the one who upset me, bless his selfish old heart, dying and going off like that.’

‘You still miss him?’

Alice sipped a little of her tea. Now there was a twinkle in her eye. Young people did ask such extraordinarily silly questions sometimes.

‘He was very good in bed.’

Jack stared helplessly at the cake. Battenberg, infused or plain, had never been so interesting. So colourful. So fascinatingly geometric.

She took pity on him.

‘I’m sorry, Jack. I didn’t just mean sex, although I do miss, you know, intimate closeness. No, I meant that he was literally good – a good person, even in bed.’

Her voice softened.

‘They were the . . . the bookends in my life.’

‘What were?’

‘Kisses. Little kisses. He kissed me every morning just after we woke up, and he kissed me every night just before we went to sleep. Bookends. Keeping things safe and in their place. Every morning. Every night.’ She leaned back in her chair. ‘Can I tell you something about my husband, Jack?

The young man stirred uneasily. Alice chuckled, patting the photograph on her lap as though it might understand the joke.

‘No, don’t worry. I’ll keep it clean, I promise. It’s about something your grandad once said. It was about three months before he died, when he was already very ill. There was a nice man called Steve who was our neighbour when we lived in Nutley, just over the hill past the Indian restaurant. You wouldn’t remember, but I think you might have actually met him once or twice. We still exchange Christmas cards. He was one of those wonderful paramedic people, like on the telly. Very kindly, when his shifts worked out right, he used to come in and chat with William after tea sometimes. One evening he was telling us that a checkout man had been rude to his wife in the supermarket that day.

‘ “I felt very cross, but I wasn’t sure what I ought to do about it,” he said. “Then I thought, William would know. So, suppose someone gave your Alice a hard time. How would you deal with it?”

‘My poor dear husband was confined to a bed downstairs by then, and he could scarcely move, but – well, what can I say? It was a mini-resurrection. He grabbed the side-rails of the bed with both hands, sat himself up straight, hair all spiked out wilder than ever like one of those wind farm things, and barked, “What would I do? I’d find out where he lived, then I’d go round there, call him out to the pavement and punch him on the chin!”

‘And I swear to you, Jack, he would have dragged himself out of that bed to do it. He was an old-fashioned man. A trusty knight. William was everything to me. Do I still miss him?’ She gazed into the distance for a moment, hugging the photo against her chest beneath crossed arms. ‘I ran out of luck, Jack – I ran out of luck.’

The only uneasiness between Jack and Alice had arisen from discussion, or rather lack of discussion, about his beliefs. It was unsettling and upsetting for Jack. He had never been very clear about Gran’s views on such matters, but she was a supporting wall in his life. Her approval and encouragement had never failed to strengthen him. Added to this was a fear that she would miss out on an eternity of joy if she failed to grasp the truths that had become so much a part of him. He scratched the edges of this evangelistic eczema until it was sore.

It wasn’t even that she argued against the things he said. She didn’t. Nor did she laugh at any of his ideas and enthusiasms. In fact, it was her lack of response that he found most frustrating and bewildering. She just sat and looked at him with knitted brows. Puzzled concern. That was her expression on these occasions. One day he asked her to tell him honestly why she showed such scant reaction to the things he said about something that was so important to him. Alice shook her head and blinked apologetically, reminding Jack of Daphne from the Eggheads when an errant fact eluded her. She did give him an answer of sorts, though.

‘You must forgive me, Jack, you really must. It’s just that – well, when you talk about all those things, I promise I do listen very carefully to the words, but however hard I try, I can’t seem to hear you saying anything . . .’

Jack was silenced by an inner breathlessness of hurt and bafflement. This was a frightening departure from the Jack-and-Gran norm. From that moment conversation on the subject languished and died. This unique failure in their relationship hung around the room whenever they met from that day onwards, manifesting itself in a mutual shifting or evasion of eyes from time to time. It made little difference to their affection for each other, but it was definitely there. Alice and Jack never spoke about faith again. After the death of his grandmother, that unresolved issue was a stone in the shoe of Jack’s recovery from the first moment of aching grief.

Alice left quite a lot of money to her only grandson. It would be helpful, a pillow perhaps on which to lay his head when nothing else worked. He wrote a cheque for a five-figure sum – ten per cent of the total amount – made out to his church, and dropped the envelope into the postbox round the corner from his house, dusting his hands dismissively on hearing it fall with a faint flapping noise into the darkness. ‘That’s got that done,’ he muttered to himself as he turned and trudged away.

Alice also left her grandson a letter.

Jack took a week off from his job at the Church Centre in Bromley to organise the emptying of his grandmother’s flat. It was his second experience of sorting through the possessions of someone he had loved very much. It was as distressing and hateful as the first. It was as though any reason for existence had departed from Gran’s possessions in the same way that the soul had disappeared from her body. Ornaments, pictures and furniture hung or stood around looking blank and abandoned and horribly tidy. Like inhabitants of some inaccessible other world, Alice and her precious William peered out at him from the photographs on the bureau. Hopefully. They were together now, on the other side of that glass.

By the end of a dark and sweaty week, Jack’s work was very nearly complete. Emotionally exhausted, he locked Alice’s front door for the last time and laboured slowly back along the seafront and up the hill to his hotel just as darkness was beginning to fall. Way down below on his left the sea drove and sucked and drove agai. . .