Kamil Ali

At midnight on the night before Halloween, Jamie, Noel, and Charlie snuck out of bed and met at their treehouse hideaway in a bushy park. They set off for the village’s graveyard.
Jamie led the trio over the fence surrounding the cemetery. He used a small flashlight to guide them to the cemetery’s toolshed and stole three pitchforks, three shovels, and three wheelbarrows. The three teens picked their way among the burial plots to select three smaller tombstones of dead relatives belonging to three boys who had snitched on them when they had egged, and toilet rolled homes the previous Halloween.
They lifted the headstones together and placed them in individual wheelbarrows, which they rolled to the large cemetery gates. Jamie slid open two bolts on the gate and they left with their loads.
Upon arrival at each location, they minimized sounds when they planted the headstones on the front lawns of their victims. The three boys used the pitchforks to dig up the grass, before using the shovels to make a hump of the dug-up dirt look like a recent burial.
Instead of returning the equipment to the cemetery, they left one of each stolen item at every location to depict a fresh burial. They took photos of their handiwork on their cell phones and chuckled.
After washing up in the schoolyard, they parted company to go home. Charlie reached his home first and disappeared through an open back door into his house. Noel climbed through an open window when he reached his home.
Jamie continued to his house in the chilly night under dark rain clouds. The hairs on the back of his neck stood on end when he had the sensation of someone following him. He spun around to see if one of the other boys had snuck up behind him to play a scary prank. He saw no one.
“Stop it, you guys!” He stared into the dark shadowy locations behind him. “You’re not scaring me, you know!” While he gazed backward, a puff of wind blew the hair on the back of his head. He whirled his head around. A flash of lightning blinded him. While he tried to recover his vision, a clap of thunder made him jump. His quickened steps turned into a full sprint with cold sweat, and a sudden downpour of heavy rain chilled him to the bone.
When Jamie reached his home, he searched for his key to open the front door and duck into the house. Panic paralyzed him. He had lost his bunch of keys!
The pouring rain and danger of a lightning strike made him shiver. He tapped every pocket in search of his cell phone and swore under his breath. Like the keys, the cell phone had gone missing.
Jamie stood rooted to the spot to assess his predicament. If he awakened his parents, he’d get into trouble for coming home after midnight. With no cell phone to call his friends and ask them if they had seen his missing items, he had the daunting task of backtracking his route to search for them under cover of night before someone else found them when the sun came up.
On the verge of tears, Jamie fished his flashlight from his pocket and flipped it on. He began the unnerving quest to retrace of his steps, faced with the peril of a lightning strike. The heaviness of someone or something at his back pushed him into a trotting flashlight scan of the ground.
On his way to the sites of mischief, he passed the homes of Noel and Charlie. When gravel pelted at their bedroom windows failed to rouse his friends, frustration bordered on anger for their refusal to acknowledge his presence made him throw larger stones.
A crack on Noel’s glass window-pane and a hole in Charlie’s added to Jamie's misery. Dripping wet from the pouring rain, he trudged through the lightning and thunder to the first lawn they had vandalized.
He gasped upon arrival! The headstone had vanished! Noel’s phone stood in its place.
A quick dash a few blocks away to the second lawn made Jamie sick to his stomach. Charlie’s cell phone had replaced the headstone. Jamie swallowed hard in fear of what he might discover at the third front-lawn grave.
On a hunch, he used the shovel to remove layers of the make-shift grave. When the digging tool hit a solid object, he dropped it and got on his knees to clear the earth away. His fingernails scraping the wet manure-smelling mound revealed Charlie’s blackened face with his wide-open eyes staring in death. Jamsie vomited.
Prompted by his gruesome discovery, Jamie summoned enough energy to slog back to the first site. He ignored the shovel and started digging with his hands. Noel’s charcoal-colored face showed the same death-mask as Charlie. Jamie fell backward. He had to visit the third grave to get his keys and cell phone.
At the third gravesite, Jamie spotted his cell phone and keys lying on the grave with the headstone in place. He picked up the shovel to scoop the two objects without touching them. The rain, thunder, and lightning intensified when he picked up the keys and cell phone with the shovel. A bolt of lightning struck the shovel and shot through Jamie's body.
After a blinding flash, Jamie's phone replaced the headstone, and his hand protruded from the grave clutching his keys.
Errol and Jack explained to the police that they had followed Jamie to use their likeness in a prank to scare him when they witnessed the supernatural event.s

By Romeo Kaseram

Winston Bailey (Mighty Shadow) was born on October 4, 1941 in Belmont, just outside Port-of-Spain, in Trinidad and Tobago. He moved to the village of Les Coteaux, Tobago as a young boy, and grew up with his grandparents Evlan and Elly Bailey; mother, Eldris Bailey, also figured prominently in his life. Shadow’s musical education is traceable to the input from his grandfather, who worked during the day as a small-time farmer. However, Evlan was also a choirmaster, and it was from this influence that the young Shadow was taught the rudiments of singing.
As Wikipedia reports, as a young man, Shadow started singing calypsoes when he was eight years old. Imbued with his love for song, his incipient musicality, and an emergent love for calypsos, Shadow began learning to play the guitar at 15. A year later he left Les Coteaux, armed with the lessons in singing from his grandfather, the ability to strum the guitar, and perhaps with a few calypsoes obsessing inside his head. He made the crossing from the small island Tobago to the big-city, big-tent island-world of Trinidad, where he was hoping to establish himself as a calypsonian.
Wikipedia tells us Shadow actually stumbled onto his sobriquet, noting, “He chose the stage name ‘Shadow’ …after coming across some workmen digging a road while he was walking. One of the workmen was in a hole below the road surface and the others were calling him ‘Shadow’, and Bailey said: ‘I felt like they was calling me.’
In his early years he performed wearing all black, with a large hat covering part of his face.” It is difficult to not miss how such an epiphanic call from the underground in the birthing of Shadow’s sobriquet could have led to the formation, enhancement and embellishment, and even his embrace of the chthonic, with its associations of the dark, the underworld, and corollary tropes of madness being contributary, dominant, and atmospheric chords in his successful career.
As Mason notes in The Guardian, Shadow “stood out as an eccentric counterpoint to the colourful norm”. He adds: “On stage, typically clad in dark cape and wide-brimmed black hat, he would perform with a slight frown while either standing still or moving in jumpy, jerky movements as his deep, tremulous voice conveyed a vulnerability that was matched by songs of personal frailty and wild imaginings… It was a persona and outlook that stood in dramatic contrast to the classic bravura of the typical calypsonian, one that might have been expected to generate either bemusement or scorn in his native Trinidad and Tobago. But in fact it proved so original, so eerily amusing and so engaging that Shadow quickly came to be hailed as one of the greats.”
But there were hard days for the young Shadow before the best of times arrived. Life away from Les Coteaux, and in the big city of Port-of-Spain was difficult. Shadow lived in the poorest neighbourhoods of Port-of-Spain, getting by with occasional work as a carpenter. Where his heart was for his music and calypso was not where his talent could find footing, with Shadow discovering it easier to sell his songs to other calypsonians. Caught in the loop where talented young people starting out in life find themselves in the circularity of ability and promise chasing the tail of inexperience, Shadow found himself in the shadows of the stage, unable to convince promoters to give him a break. But this reluctance by promoters was not all due to Shadow’s performativity of the dark, strange, and weird – it appears, as Mason indicates, the young man lacked confidence, and suffered from stage fright.
At his recent funeral Shadow’s son Sharlan shared insights into those formative, early, and difficult days, revealing his father encountered questions such as, “Whey you come from? Just so, you want to tackle Sparrow and Kitchener?” Then, Sparrow and Kitchener were prominent calypsonians dominating both the stage and air. Sharlan relates his father produced the 1973 calypso, ‘Saltfish’, which failed to titillate the public’s appetite. When a dark shadow fell on his ambition to become a calypsonian, Shadow retreated to known rusticity, returning to the comforting nucleus of the Bailey household at Les Coteaux. There he found comforting words from mother Eldris, Sharlan tells us.
Sharlan adds: “Shadow got frustrated. He went down by his mother, and …she was looking out for her son. She gave him a bowl of peas soup. While eating his soup, she said: 'Boy, you see that [calypso] thing in Trinidad.' She love her son. 'Come back and plant peas.' Shadow thought about peas. He didn't backtrack, he didn't put the pen down.” Instead, he returned with ‘Bassman’, and with its lyrics of the confessional capturing his compulsive obsession to overcome, along with its infectious bass-line, Shadow lit up the calypso world with a self-therapeutic hit.
Mason tells us ‘Bassman’ was “about his helpless possession by a hideously catchy steel pan bass-line”. He adds: “Having planned to ‘forget calypso and go plant peas in Tobago’, Shadow finds that ‘Every night I lay down in me bed/I hearing a bassman in me head’. He visits a brain surgeon for help (‘A man in me head/I want him to dead’), but is sent away and has no option but to return to a life of music, revealing to the world the tune that has bugged him so much… It was a strange construction for a calypso, yet it chimed beautifully with listeners – after all, everyone has had some form of bassman in their head – and its dark, if lighthearted, edges of madness and inner turmoil gave an insight into Shadow’s restless, real-life obsession with music. Crucially, and naturally, it also had an irresistible bass-line – one that henceforth encouraged a much greater focus in calypso and soca on what Shadow called the ‘bottom of the music’.”
Shadow was awarded Trinidad and Tobago’s Silver Hummingbird medal in 2003 for his contribution to culture. He passed away last month, October 23, shortly before receiving a Degree of Doctor of Letters Honoris Causa from the University of the West Indies for his contributions as a musical composer, which son Sharlan received in Shadow’s honour.

Sources for this exploration: Trinidad Express; Wikipedia, and The Guardian: theguardian.com/music/2018/oct/30/mighty-shadow-obituary.

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