Shadow Walkers

by Brent Hartinger

  My grandfather was washing dishes in the kitchen. I told him where I was going, then looked around for Gilbert. I didn’t see him, so I assumed that Billy must be back and they’d run off together.

  I rowed around on the water for a couple of hours. When I finally got back to shore, I felt just as trapped by the island as ever, but now my arms hurt.

  ———

  I was almost back to my grandparents’ house when I saw the silent pulse of flashing blue and red lights from the road up ahead.

  The police car was parked on my grandparents’ side of the street. The siren was off, but I could hear the clicks of its flashing lights even from 100 yards away. There was a sheriff’s car parked just beyond it.

  I felt a vague, but familiar, chill.

  I started walking faster. There are no sidewalks on most of the island, and suddenly I was aware of all the gravel and tree debris that had collected on the shoulder of the road.

  Up ahead, I could hear the low rumble of male voices and an old woman’s whimper.

  Was something wrong with Grandpa? But there wasn’t an ambulance. Besides, they would’ve called me. Then I remembered I’d been out on the water where there wasn’t any cell phone service.

  I started running. My feet kicked at the gravel and tree branches. One of the neighbors had just cut their lawn, and the smell of cut grass filled my nostrils.

  As I got closer, I noticed something I’d missed in the flashing of the police car lights: a little cluster of people—neighbors—standing along the side of the road. We only had a handful of neighbors to begin with—what had happened to bring them all out onto the street? They spoke quietly among themselves, almost whispering, but suddenly one voice was clear: “It’s just not right,” it said. “What kind of world is it where things like this happen?”

  Sensing my approach, the neighbors stepped apart, reminding me of scattering bowling pins. Part of me wanted to stop and ask, “What’s not right? Things like what?” But by now, I could see my grandparents.

  They were standing on their front lawn with one of the island sheriffs and two police officers. The three public officials were all talking on cell phones, and the two police officers were rifling through notepads. At least my grandfather was all right—but then what was all the commotion about?

  No one was talking, but the police officers and the sheriff seemed incredibly busy, talking and rifling. My grandparents, by contrast, looked completely motionless, helpless, frozen in a block of ice.

  Even as close as I was, as fast as I was moving, no one had noticed me yet.

  “Grandma?” I said.

  She immediately came to life, looking over at me, her face brightening.

  “Zach!” my grandma said. “Where have you been? And—”

  “—where’s your brother?” my grandpa finished.

  Everyone in the front yard immediately stopped talking and turned to look at me. All their eyes demanded a response.

  Where’s your brother?

  For a moment, the question made no sense. It was a summer afternoon in July. Gilbert had to be around somewhere—with his friend Billy, maybe in their backyard, or down in my grandparents’ cellar.

  Wherever he was, he was somewhere.

  Wasn’t he?

  “Grandma?” I said helplessly.

  At this, my grandma’s face looked like the sun during an eclipse as the moon slipped over the last slice of light. A second later, she and my grandpa froze solid again.

  The police officers and the sheriff all converged on me. There were only three of them, but they suddenly seemed like news reporters at a press conference with the president, asking me a thousand questions.

  “When did you last see him?”

  “Do you have any idea where he might have gone?”

  “Did he tell you this morning where he was planning on going today?”

  I ignored them. “Grandma?” I said. “Grandpa? Where’s Gilbert?”

  But it was dumb question, because I knew my grandparents didn’t know. It was obvious that Gilbert had disappeared, and no one, not my grandparents and not the police officers or sheriff, had any idea where he had gone.

  ———

  Hours later, Gilbert still hadn’t turned up.

  All afternoon my grandparents had assumed that Gilbert was playing over at Billy’s, just like I’d thought. But when they finally checked, they realized that Billy had been off-island with his mom for most of the day. I was kicking myself for being so quick to jump to the conclusion that Billy and his mother were back already. This was the problem with everyone assuming the island was so incredibly safe. If no one ever imagined that anyone could do anything bad—if no one ever locked their doors or kept their kids trapped behind chain-link fences—that made it that much easier when someone finally did.

  Before they called the police, my grandparents had phoned the parents of all of Gilbert’s other friends and checked every other house in the neighborhood. They checked the beach, the woods, the closest playground, and any other place they thought he might be.

  The sheriff had arrived right away, but it had taken more than an hour for the police to arrive from the mainland on the ferry.

  No one had seen Gilbert all day. I hadn’t been the last person to talk to him—that had been my grandfather, who had made him lunch. Gilbert could’ve been missing since right after then.

  I’d done my part, telling the police any place I could think of where he might be—even those big rocks on the beach out at Trumble Point, though I was sure he wouldn’t go there by himself. But they wouldn’t let me go and look for him—cell phone coverage was notoriously bad all over the island, and they said it was really, really important that we all be available to immediately answer any questions.

  So all we could do was wait.

  I’d never felt so completely helpless in my whole life. Pacing back and forth in our kitchen, I felt like a wild animal caged without tranquilizers, fearful and angry at the same time.

  So after a while, I did what I always do when I feel helpless: I went upstairs to get online.

  My brother is missing! I posted. I think he’s been kidnapped!

  When it became clear to my friends that I wasn’t kidding, people started making suggestions.

  You live on an island, MiniMimi wrote. He has to be there somewhere!

  That’s what the police believed too. They’d checked the security cameras at the ferry terminal and they hadn’t seen him get on the boat. But if Gilbert had been kidnapped, it’s not like they would’ve had him sitting with them in the front seat. They would have drugged him, or bound and gagged him, and put him in the back of a van.

  And even now, the police still weren’t searching the cars leaving the island. They said there were legal issues, that there was still no evidence that he’d actually been abducted.

  This was all too complicated to post online. That’s when I realized that while my friends could support me, they couldn’t help me.

  So I started searching for answers. I checked out the traffic cameras at the ferry terminals, available online, but they just had a bird’s-eye view, not close enough to see inside any of the cars, and they were only showing the current shot anyway. There was no way for me to go back through the records and see what cars may have gotten on the ferry earlier in the day.

  I searched in real time, looking for tweets or postings from anyone who might’ve seen my brother, or anyone looking like him, on the island or on the mainland. But I didn’t find anything there, either.

  So I started looking for more general information about child abductions, but that also wasn’t any help. Most of what I found just repeated what the police had already told us.

  Before long, I realized the Internet couldn’t help me find my brother.

  Ninety percent of
all missing kids turn up before their bedtime on the day they go missing, it had said on one website.

  I looked at the clock. It was eight-thirty. Gilbert’s bedtime was eight o’clock. It was already past his bedtime. If ninety percent of kids turned up before their bedtime, what happened to the other ten percent? Were they the ones who never turned up?

  “No!” I said. I pushed myself away from my computer in frustration and spun around to face my room.

  That’s when I remembered the “special” incense in the drawer on my nightstand, the stuff I’d been given by that strange woman in the New Age shop.

  Astral projection to find my missing little brother—now that was a stupid idea. It would really never work.

  I glanced over at the shelf under my nightstand. That book, Voyage Beyond the Rainbow, the one I’d read the week when my grandparents had taken away my computer, was still there. What had Celestia Moonglow written—something about there being two planes of existence, with the astral plane looking into the material one? If that was true, I could look for Gilbert from the astral dimension. I could also leave the island.

  Yeah, this was a stupid idea, and it probably wouldn’t work. But what if it did? At this point, I had absolutely nothing to lose. I opened the drawer of my nightstand, and sure enough, the three sticks of incense were still there.

  I found an incense stand in one of the drawers in my desk, then headed downstairs to make sure there hadn’t been any new news about Gilbert. When there wasn’t, I went back upstairs, lit the incense, and immediately settled back on the bed. I didn’t bother with the candle or music this time.

  The incense smoldered. Curious, I looked over at it. It burned differently than most incense, with the smoke almost dripping from the stick as if it was heavier than the air. But little by little, the smell of it filled the room.

  Once again, it smelled good—at first. But after it burned for a minute or so, I detected that strange undercurrent, definitely something foul.

  It smelled as thick as it looked, settling heavily inside my lungs, almost like a liquid.

  I tried my best to ignore it. I started my breathing, inhaling, holding it, then letting it go. I didn’t bother with the whole relaxation process that I’d done before: the breathing in and out, the exhaling the cares of the world. There was no way I’d be able to exhale the fact that my brother was missing.

  Right away, something felt different. For one thing, I wasn’t nearly so self-conscious. Suddenly, it didn’t feel like I was play-acting at something, with everything forced and calculated. This time it felt real.

  And weirdly, in spite of everything that had happened with Gilbert, I also felt … relaxed. I felt calmer than I had in ages—definitely more than the first time I’d tried this astral projection thing. But it was more than just being relaxed. It was like I was now very aware of everything I was feeling and experiencing. At the same time, I had some distance—like the emotions were outside me somehow, and I could sit back and examine them, like white lace, intricate and fascinating.

  Before I knew it, I was ready to begin the astral separation.

  Eyes closed, I once again imagined a single point of light floating on my forehead. Even though the point was outside of me, I knew that it was part of myself, too, and that I had control over it.

  The point of energy started to move, slowly drifting up, directly away from my head. I didn’t remember consciously choosing to make the point move.

  Six feet or so above me, the point stopped, floating effortlessly.

  I knew it was now time for my mind and soul—every bit of me except for my physical body—to join that small, shimmering part of me.

  I concentrated, even as the smoke from the incense kept dribbling down my throat into my lungs. I imagined my glowing spectral self levitating up off the bed and rising up to the point of light. In my mind’s eye, it was happening. Now it was just a matter of making it happen for real.

  I tried imagining it again, from start to finish.

  But even as I was thinking this, I knew that I was still lying on the bed. Everything that was happening was only happening in my imagination.

  It wasn’t working. I wasn’t going to be able to help Gilbert, not this way anyway. Oh, well, I thought. I’d known it wasn’t real.

  Maybe the incense was too thick, too overpowering. I decided to put the stick out, let the room clear for a bit, and then try it again.

  I opened my eyes and sat upright in bed.

  I looked down. My body was still lying back immobile on the bed. My physical body hadn’t moved at all. It was my spirit that had sat upright.

  It had worked.

  It had worked!

  The first thing I noticed was that my arms no longer hurt from rowing around all afternoon in that boat. I stared at myself lying down on the saggy bed. I could see my body, eyes closed, stretched out and peaceful, but it was nothing at all like looking in a mirror. This was no flat reflection—this was the real me: the ropy forearms, the mess of brown hair, the too-plump lips. I’d never seen my body from outside myself—never known the exact shape of my head or angle of my jaw—but even now, I didn’t panic. My mind was still relaxed and focused. The whole experience felt alien, but also somehow familiar. It felt like I had done this before, maybe when dreaming.

  A dream. That’s what this had to be. I’d fallen asleep, or maybe I’d voluntarily entered some kind of dream state just like Voyage Beyond the Rainbow said. Except it didn’t feel like any dream I’d had before. For one thing, I felt like I was awake—fully conscious, fully aware of myself, fully in control. That said, I felt somehow outside myself too, observing everything that was happening as if from the side.

  The woman in the New Age store, the one who’d given me the incense, was right: this was no dream.

  Only now did I notice that my mind—the part of me that had sat upright in bed—had a “body,” too, sort of. It looked the same as the body down on the bed, with the same clothes. But it was translucent, glowing softly, like a ghost, or like the cheesy picture on the cover of Voyage Beyond the Rainbow. I still had a body, but I couldn’t feel it—not my T-shirt clinging to my chest, or the waistband of my underwear, or the itchiness of my athlete’s foot.

  For the first time in my life, I was outside myself. I wasn’t stuck in that sweaty, itchy, achy body.

  It was disorienting, but it was also weirdly liberating. It actually felt like I was in two places at once. Except it was much more than that. I was suddenly aware that the boundaries that separate us, the feeling that our bodies stop where the rest of the world starts, are artificial—that we’re all part of the greater world and there really is no boundary. The world is me, and I am it.

  Mostly, I just felt free for the first time since my parents died.

  I looked around the bedroom. The surroundings were the same—I was still in my dad’s old bedroom at my grandparents’ farmhouse on Hinder Island, with its creaky single bed and the faded Poltergeist movie poster on the wall. But things were different, too. For one thing, the room was darker, like there’d been a power outage and the lights had gone out.

  I take that back. The lamp on the nightstand still glowed—it just burned as if through clouded glass. Celestia Moonglow said that the astral realm was a “shadow” dimension. I guess she’d meant that literally.

  The sound was different, too. The sleepy silence of the island had been replaced by some kind of distant, steady roar, a cross between a moan and a hiss. The book hadn’t said anything about this.

  I looked back down at the me-on-the-bed. My body was completely motionless. Unconscious.

  But was I unconscious? Everything that I’d ever been taught said that people’s souls didn’t just leave their bodies.

  Not if they were still alive.

  It was like I suddenly remembered to panic. Now that I
’d gotten my astral body out of my physical body, how did I get it back inside again?

  I tried to inhale, to fight the panic that had filled me like a chest full of frozen water, but I couldn’t get a breath. To hell with being one with the universe—there was no air in this place! I was going to suffocate.

  I jerked back.

  And suddenly I was lying in bed, back in the real world, body and soul reunited, dizzy and disoriented with aching biceps.

  ———

  I had to try it again. Now that I was awake, I was immediately embarrassed that I’d panicked. Why had I wanted to breathe, anyway? I didn’t need to breathe in a dimension where the physical didn’t exist. Besides, Gilbert’s life was at stake.

  That incense had been quick-burning, or maybe I’d lost track of time. Either way, it had already burned its way down to the nub. So I lit a second stick and inhaled deeply, feeling it calm me. Then I worked my way through the visualizations, still breathing in and out. Finally, I imagined the point of light levitating in front of me.

  And once again, I sat upright in bed. Once again, my spirit had detached from my physical body. It felt completely effortless.

  My astral form climbed off the bed—or tried to anyway. There was no gravity in this astral dimension. Weirder still, my “body” seemed to have no real weight. It was like the bed was greased and I slid right off. I found myself flailing even as I hung in the air next to the bed, floating unsteadily, drifting slowly to the right.

  Instinctively, I reached for the nightstand, but my hand passed right through it. If there’d been any doubt before about where I was, and that this really was a non-physical dimension, there wasn’t now.

  The astral dimension. I was really there—wherever or whatever “there” was. It was still dark and a little disorienting. But now I was getting used to the idea of it all.

  And just as I’d suspected, I didn’t need to breathe in this other place. The fact is, I couldn’t breathe—there was no air to inhale. After a lifetime of doing that without thinking, this was the strangest thing of all. The first few times I tried to inhale and couldn’t, I felt a flash of panic again. But when I didn’t feel the effects of not breathing—no tightness in my neck and chest, no pounding blood racing to my head—it was surprising how quickly I got used to the idea.