It was right then that Emory swooped down next to me. He’d returned to the astral dimension.
“Are you okay?” he asked.
I nodded even as I kept staring at what was happening to Simon. Emory didn’t say a word, just watched the ongoing transformation with me. I knew he’d figure out what was happening fast enough.
“We need to help him,” Emory said, immediately floating forward.
I held out a hand to stop him. “No. Wait.” It was horrible what was happening, but some part of me told me to let it happen. Was it the petty, vengeful part of me?
In seconds, the shadow creature was gone. Simon had been completely unprepared for the attack so it had poured right down into his soul—or maybe he’d just been even weaker than me.
But the creature hadn’t disappeared completely. Two very familiar eyes peered out at me, just as greedy, just as horrible when peering out from a human face. Simon’s feeble soul had been conquered, pushed aside into his own dank little island in his mind. The shadow creature, meanwhile, had found a fresh new host.
Simon’s astral form, now totally in the creature’s control, smiled at me with the self-satisfied grin of a snake. He began to speak, but not in Simon’s voice. It was an unsettling rasp.
“Ahhhhh,” it said. “This soul will do just fine.”
With that, he began to relax, and Simon’s silver cord buckled, preparing to pull his now-possessed spiritual body back to his physical body.
At first I thought I’d made a mistake, that my desire for revenge meant something really bad was about to happen.
Then I had an idea.
I shot forward, my arms stretched out in front of me. I grabbed Simon’s astral projection around the waist. Then with all the mental strength I could muster, I carried us all toward the closest vortex, a dark one slowly spinning at the edge of the parking lot.
Simon’s astral projection squealed, not like the man he had once been, but like the shadow creature he had become. I was too late: I slammed the shadow-possessed Simon directly into the center of the slow-motion cyclone. The creature was too surprised to struggle, to even fight back. It had all happened too fast.
Simon was immediately sucked away, like human waste down a vacuum toilet.
I rolled to one side, desperate to avoid the suction of the vortex. But it turned out to be unnecessary. With Simon sucked into its gullet, the vortex quickly whirled in on itself, disappearing without a trace. Since no part of me had been inside the gate, it hadn’t tried to take me with it. Meanwhile, the silver cord that had connected Simon’s soul to his body was cut in half, and now it was winding through the air, slowly fading like the moon at dawn.
I immediately turned to my little brother, still stretched out, crying, on the gravel.
“Gilbert!” I said, crouching near him, trying to caress him in a spectral hug. “Are you all right? Everything’s okay. I’ll be right here until help comes.”
Gilbert’s tears began slow. He sat upright.
Emory levitated next to me. “He’ll be fine now,” he said. Sure enough, as if specifically to reassure me, the faint sound of sirens rose in the distance.
That’s when I turned to Emory and smiled.
“For the record,” I said, “I think I love you, too.”
Two mornings later, I knocked on my little brother’s bedroom door.
“Yeah?” he said from inside.
I entered. “Good morning!” I said.
“Hi.” He was still in bed in his pajamas, but it looked like he was wide awake, like he’d been staring out the open window.
“How are you doing?” I asked. “Are you feeling okay?” I’d talked to him the day before when the police had finally brought him home, but it had been in front of my grandparents. He’d gone to bed after that and slept for almost sixteen hours. I hadn’t yet had a chance to talk to him alone.
“There’s a green ladybug,” he said quietly. He wasn’t looking out the window after all, but down at the windowsill. “I’ve never seen a green ladybug. I didn’t even know they came green.”
“Yeah?” I said. “Me neither.”
“It’s bad luck to kill a ladybug, but I wonder if that’s true of green ladybugs.”
“I think it’s bad luck to kill most things. Now come on, let’s go get some breakfast.”
I expected him to say something else about green ladybugs. But instead he said, completely seriously, “You were there.”
“What? Where?” I pulled out the chair from his desk and took a seat across from the bed.
“With me,” he said. “That night in the cemetery. You were with me.”
How could he have known this? Before coming in here, I’d reminded myself not to mention anything about the cabin out on Silver Lake, or even what had happened at the cemetery—stuff that I would’ve had no way of knowing about if I hadn’t been there. Had he sensed me somehow?
I watched him watching the ladybug. “That’s impossible,” I said. “How could I have been with you?”
“I dunno.” His bright eyes met mine at last. “But you were.”
I smiled. “Maybe I was.” I couldn’t lie to him, not after everything that had happened. And when I thought about it, it figured that Gilbert had some idea. After all, he’d heard me. Maybe somehow the whole thing made sense to his seven-year-old mind.
“You think I was going to let anything happen to my brother?” I said. “Never.”
There were bad people and bad things in the world. I knew that now. My grandparents had been right about evil—even if they’d also been wrong to think it didn’t exist on Hinder Island. It was everywhere, all around us at any moment, maybe even part of us in a way. And that was the kind of thing that, once you knew it, you couldn’t ever forget.
But evil wasn’t the only force in the world. There was good too, even if it didn’t fly around the astral dimension in the form of unicorns and golden dragons, which seemed like it’d only be fair. Even if the only place it existed was inside our hearts.
“You know what?” I went on. “I’m not sure other people would understand what happened that night in the cemetery. So let’s not tell Grandpa and Grandma about it, okay?”
Gilbert gently petted the shell of ladybug. “You killed that man.”
“Sort of,” I said. “I had to make it so he couldn’t hurt you.”
“How?”
I thought about how I wanted to answer this. “It’s complicated. And everything I did was dangerous. I took a shortcut I shouldn’t have taken, went somewhere I shouldn’t have gone. I wouldn’t have done it, except to help you.”
“Are you ever going to do it again?”
At that moment, the ladybug fluttered out the window and away.
And I just smiled.
———
The sunlight poured down on me as if from a bucket. Seagulls circled overhead as the ferry approached the mainland dock.
It was a week and a half later, in late July. Emory and I had IM’d and emailed a few times—he’d used the computer at the library—but I hadn’t seen him since that night in the cemetery. We were dying to meet again, but we weren’t about to go back into the astral realm just yet, so we’d brainstormed this plan for how we might actually get together. He’d told his mom he needed to take some pictures of the Hinder Island ferry terminal for a summer school project. She’d agreed to drive him there and drop him off while she ran some errands. The plan was for us to accidentally meet and become friends, and then later Emory could invite me over to his house for future visits.
The ferry pulled up to the pier. The main road headed from the landing up the hill, then off to the freeway and beyond. Meanwhile, a paved walking trail headed north along the water—all the way to Canada, for all I knew.
But I didn’t see Emory.
> As the operators tied up the boat, I looked back at Hinder Island. It was closer to the mainland than I remembered, but smaller, too. I could see the whole island from here, an emerald dome against the blue summer sky.
Since I was a foot passenger, I disembarked ahead of the cars. I stepped off the boat onto the dock, then off the dock onto the sidewalk.
Emory was waiting to one side.
I’d expected him to look different, and he did. But it wasn’t because of the wheelchair. I’d anticipated that, so it didn’t count. No, it was because I was seeing him in the real world, not the astral dimension. So he looked a little darker than I expected, definitely drabber, and maybe a little more frazzled. But at the same time, he looked more focused and more solid, set in place, like the sidewalk that we stood on compared to the rocking ferry behind me.
I stepped closer.
“Hi,” I said.
“Hi,” he said. There was just no way around this first awkward exchange.
“Wow,” I said, gesturing down. “Talk about your phantom limbs.”
He rolled his eyes. “That’s amputees, you idiot, not paraplegics.”
“Hey, give me a break,” I said. “I’ve been working on that line all afternoon.”
“I bet you were.” But he was smiling when he said this.
I bent down to hug him. His body felt different than it had in the astral dimension—just as solid, but stiffer, and warmer too, toasted by the sun. And he had hard muscles that clenched in his upper body, something I definitely didn’t expect, and he had a scent that I wasn’t prepared for either—a fresh lemony musk.
Then my arm brushed the skin of his neck, and I instantly felt the same connection I’d felt in the astral dimension, the feeling that the spot where we touched was the only place I existed. It might have been even stronger in the real world than it had been in the astral one.
I gasped, feeling him deep in my soul.
Emory felt it too. His face lit up, even in the bright sun.
I hugged him again, a real hug this time, and kissed him too, suddenly not caring what anyone seeing us might think. Out on the water, the sunlight broke into pieces, a thousand golden needles spread out across the bay.
“You’re really real,” he whispered into my shoulder. “You’re not just a figment of my imagination.”
He was crying. I felt like crying, too, but I didn’t, and I wondered if this was the way it worked in relationships: taking turns feeling the intense or negative emotions.
I pulled back at last. “How much time do we have?”
“Not long,” he said. “The ferry was running late, so we only have thirty minutes or so until my mom gets back. Where should we go?”
“This way,” I said, my hand on his shoulder, starting up the trail along the water with him alongside me. “Let’s see just how far we can get.”
About the Author
Brent Hartinger is the author of a number of novels for teenagers, including Geography Club and The Last Chance Texaco. His many writing honors include being named the winner of the Scandiuzzi Children’s Book Award, a GLAAD Media Award, a Lambda Award, and a Book Sense Pick (four times). In addition to writing novels, he teaches creative writing at Vermont College, founded and edits the fantasy website TheTorchOnline.com, writes for AfterElton.com, and laments the fact that he has virtually no free time. Visit him online at www.brenthartinger.com
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